Avatar. Oh, and Butter Chicken.

Last night I watched James Cameron's Avatar for the first time. Yes, I know. Talk about otherworldly powers of procrastination! I managed to put that one off for even longer than I'd dared imagine. My friend Daniel had to re-watch it for a piece of writing he's doing about the film, and knew he could count on me to be glass-half-empty and grumpy about it. Little did he know I hadn't seen the film before, so it wasn't remnant or vestigial but First Encounter grumpiness! The Real McCoy!

We watched it, and I have to say it: I was bored. It was yaaawny. Boooring.  Sure, there were pretty scenes and cool special effects, but the film itself was snooze-inducing. Yaaaaaaawn, stretch, yaawn. I nearly died when the DVD stopped at one point and a helpful note came up to invite us to watch the rest on the second DVD. The second DVD!? This was cruel and unual punishment!

Oh, but it wasn't. It was cruel, yes, but not unusual. Not unusual at all. Actually one of the main sources of boooooredom was that this wasn't unusual in the slightest. Other people have already written many deep and clever and witty things about the horrendousness of Avatar, paying special attention to its not-even-veiled imperial structures (human vs 'indigenous', 'aboriginal,' 'savage'; a white man 'going native' and falling in love with a local woman; militaristic technology vs spiritual eco-connection; yadda yadda)... so I won't even bother to go there. This, to be honest, is why I hadn't ever watched the film: I never found the hours (hours!) of my life or and dollars in the bank that I wanted to kill off by seeing a movie that I already knew was going to make me grumpy.

Enter: Daniel and his DVD and a quiet night with tasks to avoid. The scene was set.

So, what's this got to do with butter chicken?

Well, Daniel and I ate delish Indian food before watching the movie, and when I woke up this morning I walked to the fridge and pulled out one of my favourite leftover meals in the world: leftover curry and rice, heated in the microwave. YUM. As I ate my bizarre but scrumptious breakfast snack, I allowed myself to fixate for a little while about just how much I love leftover butter chicken. It's second only to leftover chicken tikka masala. Yum. So there I sat, enjoying my food and thinking about leftovers. Leftovers. Leftovers. Avatar, Leftovers. Mmmm... I started to think about how Avatar had mobilised the cliche of the imperial story (which rendered the entire movie a total waste of time, narratively speaking, which meant the flash effects had to do a job that was ulimtately beyond them - keep someone's attention for hours on end - because from the very first moment when Jake opened his eyes he was destined to open them in the final scene as 'an indigenous' - yeah, don't even get me started on the grammar!)... and I started to think about how reusing an old story isn't itself the kiss of death for a film; many films rework old storylines much like the reheating of butter chicken. It's richer for having tasted it before, and it's a treat one gets to enjoy beyond the first intended experience. Yum!

But no, Avatar is not reheated rice and butter chicken. It's more like leftover rice when it has spent the night in the fridge and hasn't got any sauce: bland, dry, and - it's true - painful.  

home again

Someone told me today that he's sad I'm leaving Canada soon. Someone else emailed to start arrangements for a farewell. Sure, I'm not leaving Toronto until mid-June - but the tide seems to be shifting direction again. I can feel the first tugs of the undertow, cheeky and fleeting but definitely there. The pull will only get stronger from now I suppose.

My body is home in Toronto... but I've been thinking about Aotearoa and Hawai'i today as well. As Lesley drove me to the airport, we talked more about Pacific literature, and as I flew to LGA and finally YYZ I made more lists of tasks to complete here, at home and in Hawai'i. I remember an early blog post, in the first delicate weeks of sabbatical, when I was in Sydney and was thinking about tasks I needed to do in Sydney, at home and in Toronto.

I suppose that time shifts regardless for all of us; for me, it seems places do too.

A strange Polynesian triangle I'm living in: Toronto the farthest point, across to Hawai'i and down to Aotearoa. A lopsided three-sided shape which approximates the feel of my heart.

Words Live Here

I'm in a house of writers. Poetry lives here, as does fiction. Books are everywhere. Writing is a normal family activity and point for discussion. I like it.

While I've been here in Virginia I've been staying with Lesley and Chris and their two kids, and it has been great in many ways... one of the things I have treasured about my time here has been the place of words here: in this house, and also in my trip. Today I visited one of Lesley's classes and we talked about poetry... then we had a lunch at Women's Studies where I talked about the 'Ghost Writers' book I'm working on... then tonite I was the 'feature poet' in a poetry reading at a gallery in town.

I forget some days just how much I love words, love poetry, love fiction, love writing, love editing, love talking about it all...

This has been a great reminder.

I'm inspired to find ways to keep poetry and words and books nearer the middle of my life; not somehting I get to after other things, but something which is integral to the way I function.  want to seek out conversations about literature, and I want to find time to read and write and read and write and read and write...

Thanks, Virginia: here I fell in love with fried chicken, and here I fell in love with words all over again.

Fried chicken and General Lee

After a lovely lazy morning at home, Lesley and her daughter Madeline and I went for a walk through the drizzle to lunch, after which Lesley and I went for a walk through her university campus on the way home. Now, Washington and Lee University is named after two men: the Washington you'll already know about (or guess - yep, the first American president; the Lee is General Lee, an important man who led the Southerners during the American Civil War in the 1860s. Although the South technically lost the war, (a) don't tell that to some people in the South who still believe in what their side fought for, and continue to wave confederate flags at any and every possible opportunity, and (b) General Lee came home to the South a hero, and upon his return was offered many opportunities to continue to extend his leadership. He decided in the end to come to Washington here in Lexington, Virginia, where he served as president for five years (during which the student enrolments rose from 40 to 400) and brought the school back to its feet after the decimation of the civil war. After his death, the school was renamed Washington and Lee University in order to recognise him and his role: both here at the school and in the South.

We went to the university chapel, which doubles as a crypt for the Lee whanau, and they have a fullsize marble statue of Robert Lee on his sickbed (which sits directly above the place he is actually buried) and a small museum in which various parts of the school's (and Lee's) history are presented. History is a tricky kind of thing, and when one tells a story for a mixed audience is can sonud even more awkward. The signage in the museum was minimalist, quietly offering whispered context and carefully avoiding taking sides. Taking sides? Well, taking sides means a lot here in Virginia, and people may well come through a museum such as this with strong feelings (either for or against; the strength is more important than the direction) and it is difficult to produce an account of things which will satisfy everyone. American Indians were not mentioned at all, and Black history was delicately skirted around.

As I walked around, I was struck by the dates of the civil war - the first years of the 1860s - which of course is the same as the wars at home. The Land Wars, as they used to be called, are now known as the New Zealand Wars and were between Maori and the Crown. The result of the wars was, at least from the point of the view of the Crown and History and the Ownership (more correctly, the confiscation) of Land and Law, that Maori lost the 1860s wars and there is an extent to which this is true. And yet, surely our continued claim of separation from the Crown - evidenced by our ability and desire to engage with the Crown according to the terms set down in the Treaty - takes for granted that the wars were one important moment of interaction between Maori and the Crown but not a definitive moment or endpoint. As long as we continue to exercise our ability to imagine our sovereignty, surely we are contradicting the most bald and simplistic accounting for the outcome of the New Zealand Wars? I'm not saying that sovereignty is imaginary as in not real but imaginary as in a fiction which we all choose to believe and which belief compells people to act in specific ways. After all, Maori sovereignty is no more or less imaginary than New Zealand (or indeed American) sovereignty.

In this way, I found myself in the awkward situation of realising there is a link between my commitments to Maori sovereignty and the Confederacy movement here in the South. Ouch! But seriously, consider the links between them: both espouse a series of specific values and perspectives which are central to what they are; both suffered historical (specifically 1860s!) military defeats (after attempting to demonstrate their own desire to conduct their own affairs without far-away and inappropriate government intervention) which on the surface removed power and self-determination but which continue to provide nostalgic and aspirational symbolism; and both have produced a situation in which people are capable of strongly holding two loyalties at once - to the nation, and to the specific group. Oh, and both are represented in media and other 'public' spaces as backward, stuck in the past, anti-progressive and - well - embarassing.

This is not a realisation that has made me any more sympathetic to Confederate (or Republican, for that matter) ideals or aspirations, but it has helped me think through the meaning of the Confederacy for some people in the South. What I mean by this is that I had not really been able to understand how people who were so clearly militarily defeated in the past are still interested in, well, literally, flying the flag? Why bother with a failed identity? Isn't it a bit embarassing? Pointless? I mean, really, it's not like the South is ever going to actually get to secede again - and if it tried, there are too many people who live here who don't hold the same ideas for it to succeed in any way. I am appalled by Confederate political and social ideals; I abhor their underpinnings of racism, imperialism, sexism and homophobia; and the sight of a Confederate flag flying (or stuck on a car or work on a tshirt) always makes me feel a bit sick. But, in terms of the structure of feeling - the way some people here remain committed to something despite everything - I am able to understand things just a little more.

Dinner tonight was a shared meal here at Lesley and Chris's place with a whole lot of cool people from W&L University, and one of the dishes was fried chicken. Yep, Southern fried chicken. Now anyone who has eaten takeaways with me knows that KFC is among my least favourites: it's greasy on the outside, dry on the inside, and leaves me feeling gross at the end. I'd never been able to understand why Southerners (or anyone else) got so excited about fried chicken, and although friends of mine from down this way have told me it's better down here, I wasn't sure how something like KFC chicken could get so much better that I'd actually like it. But! I tried the chicken tonite and it was amazing: delicious light crispy batter and fluffy moist dense chicken. An absolute joy to eat, and - seeing as I always thought I didn't like fried chicken - truly a revelation.

My ideas about fried chicken have been shifted, but so have my ideas about the ways in which some people in the South make sense of their world. This insight into the Confederate scene here in the South is not - it's not - in any way a support of the values or claims of that scene, but it has enabled me to find a way to understand how people tell specific stories about themselves regardless of what those stories are. Surely, this is the point of education: the "practice of freedom," says bell hooks; the production of empathy.

seasons

It's night-time and thundery in rural Virginia. Well, not rural rural, but in the small town of Lexington where my friend Lesley teaches at Washington & Lee University. I'm staying with Lesley and her family between now and Tuesday, and will be visiting her class and giving a talk/ poetry reading on Monday.

Unseasonal. The weather here in unseasonably warm: thunderstorms are not due until later, and plants can't work out if it's time to bloom or not. Like inexperienced dancers in the wings of a stage, excited and dressed to perform but knowing the cue hasn't yet been given, a couple of people being pushed out and being seen by the audience even though another scene is theoretically in play. It hasn't snowed much in Toronto this year, and a man on the flight from Charlotte NC told me that scientists are worried about what the warm temperatures might mean for bugs whose population and spread is usually kept in control by freezing each year during winter time.

Seasonal. Today is the 24th of March, and Matiu is now seven years old. Seven! Amazing! I skyped in last nite (which was, of course, the 24th at home) and sang with the others and watched him blow out his candles. Hard to be away from my dear chicken for his birthday, but great to get to see him and hear from him too! Birthdays are such seasonal affairs too... a quiet cycling through the year: Aunty Martha, Megan, Matiu, Amy. And so on, through the family until we're back in January and it starts all over again.

Seasons give our lives rhythm, either by following the pattern we have come to expect or, by deviating from the pattern, confirming our expectations.

court

Court I

Words which came to me while looking at the photos of the 'Urewera Four' after the verdict was returned in their trial yesterday: relief, support, consolidation, depth. Browsing the photos on the stuff.co.nz website, I was distracted by the 'Maori photos' which some website's algorithm decided might also be of interest. A black and white photo of the face of a kuia with moko kauwae, a vibrant shot of a young man during the powhiri at Te Matatini in Gisborne, some tourist snap of 'Maori culture.'

Of course, this is how it always is: ourselves, the Crown, dominant media representation. It is impossible to understand the vigour and paranoia displayed by the Crown throughout this circus since the raids and arrests in October 2007 without taking a step back and noticing the long, slow shaping of non-Maori views of Maori people as noble, savage or comical - and nothing else. As the crown has bumbled violently around, like a bull in a rodeo, enraged by the deep pain of its own violent underpinnings, bucking and stomping in a way which would be hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that this is real: there are real victims here; real lives, real people.

The courtroom has long been a place of theatre, drama, performance; it's a stage in its purest form. The court has, despite rare moments of proximity to justice, frequently been an industrious worker bee in the hive of imperialism. Who could disprove of the high ideals of truth and justice? And yet, who could look at the role of the courts in the theft of our land and not wonder whether the courts are too saturated in blood to ever produce a clean decision?

This case brings to mind a line I wrote about Parihaka in another poem - 'The day the Crown morally defeated itself' - and yet moral self-defeat of the perpetrators of violence does not magically remove the burden of the victims. This outcome isn't a victory for truth: it's justice with a migraine, wincing and squeezing the temples to dull the pain.

Court II

Today my sister attended the Maori Land Court in Wellington on behalf of our Mum and Auntie, in order to complete the process of legal succession for Grandad's Maori land. We buried him last year, singing 'Au e Ihu,' crying, holding onto one another, watching him go down back into the earth beside Nana. And yet, his connection to earth - to specific ground - was legal as well as physical. Although Grandad was born in a house on land which had been ours through inheritance in the depest sense of the word, by 2012 his shares in several blocks of land are now the only link we have to the literal dirt of home. Sure, emotional and relational links are important too, but whenua is whenua is whenua and that's why my sister was there this morning representing all of us. It's not quite a burial, but it feels like today was another important stage in the process of saying goodbye to Grandad.

She txted from outside the court, saying she wished she was a poet so she could convey the feeling of being there. Later, she sent through an email that described the event, and I have decided she's a poet after all. These are all her words - I hope she doesn't mind - which I have gently pushed and shaped into quiet rows.

Everyone sitting outside
clutching their bits of paper,
as if they had people with them

Whispered snippets:
‘trusts’ ‘whānau’ ‘iwi’

Mostly old nannies and koro
with a young thing holding the paperwork

Court started late:
ushered in;
stood for the judge,
karakia,
mihi.

We were the first case called.    


Court III

The court giveth and the court taketh away.

a chance to have time, energy and focus...

3 o'clock in the morning...

I flew home on the 'red eye' (night time) flight last nite from Vancouver. Since then I've talked about 'school' stuff with quite a few people: an Aboriginal Studies class and my Saami colleague Rauna K during the day (in 'real life'), this evening with Daniel J over dinner and then during and after a documentary we watched here at my place, and finally with Niigaanwewidom S over facebook tonite. All of these conversations and exchanges have been about scholarship, ethics, community relationships, sovereignty, race... and all of them have been intense but also invigorating.

Te tau okioki is a chance to have the time and energy and focus to read widely, and to seek out like minds, and to talk...

Oh, and to write.  

the right to bear arms

A young man was shot by a neighbour in Florida for walking home from the shops.

Dramatic police intervention in NZ on the basis of anti-terror legislation has quietly shed weight over a few years until four people are charged for possession of certain firearms.

In one case, a gun has brought about the worst possible outcome: cold blooded murder for the crime of being black. In another case, guns provide a faint pathetic last-word whimper of a violent yet flaccid state.

In both cases, it's really about race.

Aue Tonga.

The passing of a King.

Whakaaro, karakia and, as the the tangata whenua say in this part of the world, condolences are with you.

a big day in vancouver!

A long walk alongside the harbour on the sea walk (reminds me a bit of the Napier one), listening to very interesting podcasts... my idea of fun!
A little water taxi to Granville Island to check out the market there
Amazing munchies at the market ('Delhi wrap' at Indian takeaways place was a m a z i n g !)
Walk to Vancouver Art Gallery (still listening to great podcasts)
A curator's talk about Emily Carr (major artist here in BC)
An incredible exhibition called 'Beat Nation' featuring Aboriginal artists who work with urban/ youth culture
Walk back to hotel via some cool shops, then back along sea walk
Taxi to meet David Geary (mate/ cousin from home!) at movies
Watch 'Pina' - a 3D dance movie! (well, more a doc about dance than Step Up hehehe)
Walk back over a bridge to Vancouver downtown, walk through city streets talking
Beer with DG at pub in Maritime House - dregs of St Patrick's Day and a white guy with a guitar performing 'Billy Jean' in a slightly (but not really) Irish way
Taxi home to hotel
Walk to pick up a late nite snack
And home... to check email, facebook, blog... and bed.

So many new experiences. And, according to my pedometer I walked 12000 steps today (and that's before the walking tonite!).

Holidays are tiring! Oh, but fantastic :)

Hawai'i calling

I'm in Vancouver, watching the live streaming of the Kamehameha Schools 'Song Contest,' a major annual event in Hawai'i. While I watch, I'm facebook chatting with my friend Ka'imi - we're making comments about the various choirs (the different year groups compete against each other) and the students introducing the various songs. In the year I lived in Hawai'i in 2004 I attended the Song Contest with Ka'imi and Walter - this was a very big honour and an evening I will always remember. I loved my time in Hawai'i - I had no idea what I was letting myself in for when I moved there to speand a year writing my PhD, or just how much that place would get under my skin.

Each year at Song Contest, the songs performed by the choirs (and also the hula and theatrical dimensions of the evening's programme) ties in to a specific theme, and this year the theme "Ho‘ōla Lāhui, Ho‘oulu Pae ‘Āina — Vibrant People, Thriving Lands" focuses on the significance of specific places in Hawai'i. These mass choirs entirely made up of Hawaiian high school students are impressive, and Ka'imi and I agree that there's something profound that happens when people have the opportunity to connect to the specific places of their own land: all of these Hawaiian youth, speaking the names of places, some of which are well known and used today, and some of which are lesser known and spend more time at the edges of collective memory.

Land, geography, place: these are everything.

As the students present hula about the decision their Princess Pauahi made to leave a will in which her share of the kingdom would become Kamehameha Schools, I found myself crying. Partly for the collective pride, as a fellow Polynesian, of these strong young people who have had the opportunity to be clear about who they are and where they are from. Partly for the sense of humility, the awareness of what a privilege I have to be able to see this performance tonight and also to have seen it live all those years ago. Partly, though, I cried because I know that while I know that Aotearoa is everything - everything - in late July this year I will be moving to Hawai'i again.

Matiu, who knows I cry at both ends of the emotion spectrum, asks when he sees tears: "Auntie Lala, happy tears or sad tears?" These tears were both.

There has been a lapse in blogging this week because on Tuesday I accepted a new position as Associate Professor of Pacific Literatures in the English Dept at the University of Hawai'i -Manoa, and resigned from my position at Victoria University of Wellington. A tricky, complicated, heartbreaking but also exciting move. In Hawai'i I will be given opportunity to extend and consolidate the work I have been doing until now; all the signs - yes, including tohu - point to this being the right decision. I realise the price for this move is not only paid for by me, but I am also deeply and enthusiastically confident that the benefit will not only be mine either.

Land, geography, place: these are everything. But the ocean is everything too. Always the ocean too.

It's a move away from Aotearoa, but it's also a move into the Pacific. Our histories are tied up with the Pacific region, but so are our futures. In mid-June I will move home to Aoteaora, then pack things up over the course of six weeks and fly to Honolulu in late July. It goes without saying (or I hope it does) that the decision to leave home again was hard and is tied in with a range of complex reasons and possibilities. I had no idea when I was leaving for sabbatical that I wouldn't be coming home, but I guess Hawai'i is calling...


... and yes, I'm going to answer.

On Joseph Kony and Raurangi Marino.

Joseph Kony has done some awful things. So has Raurangi Marino. The difference in scale is clearly significant, as is the difference in crimes they've committed. There are resonances, though. Both men overstepped a line which most of us assume is uncrossable, and the violence they have inflicted is even more horrific for being committed against vulnerable children. Likewise, both of them have received quite a bit of  press recently: Joseph Kony through the 'Kony 2012' campaign launched via social media by 'Invisible Children' this week, and Raurangi Marino through the Michael Laws 'opinion' piece in the Sunday Star-Times last weekend.*

An odd pair? An inappropriate comparison? A red herring? Perhaps. But hear me out. The inital link between Kony and Marino - that they both received media attention this week - is not an insignificant basis for discussion.

In both cases, specific people who are not journalists use their resources and media savvy to publicly draw attention to the limitations they perceive in a system of justice which is unable to appropriately respond to - let alone prevent - people (such as Kony and Marino) who are guilty of hideous crimes. Furthermore, both Kony and Marino are described as tips of evil icebergs: Kony is just the first in a long list of criminals who are wanted for their crimes against humanity; Marino is but one of a much larger number too ("There are more Raurangis out there..." "there are thousands of feral kids currently in New Zealand").

Another similarity, and one I find particularly disturbing: in both the film and the opinion piece a lone white man (but with thousands - even millions - of implied supporters on whose behalf he speaks) issues a rallying cry against a specific non-white man, assuming the position of confidently speaking for what is transparently and singularly 'right.' Kony2012 makes the point, indeed, that the US military intervention in the situation was "not for self-defense, but because it was right."

Analysis is tricky in both of these cases: one is on very thin ice when trying to find a balance between contextualising both the crimes and their media representations on the one hand, and not 'excusing' the violence inflicted on the other. 

And yet, while it's awfully tiring to keep having to point this kind of thing out - and despite the Kony2012 film claiming "we are not just studying history, we are shaping it" - neither media statement actually engages history - including, yes, colonial history and its ongoing consequences - in order to understand the present predicament.  'Invisible Children' rewinds only as far as the American frontman's first connection with a Ugandan man a few year ago, and Laws goes back as far as the immediate family in which Marino was raised.

Instead, Kony and Marino are framed as singularly bad, and are understood through a consideration of (selectively described) present circumstances rather than through an engaged treatment of how things came to be this way. Because the little matter of colonialism is excised from the history of each case, it can parade around in new garb as a solution instead: Kony is to be identified and captured through US military presence; 'ferals' like Marino "are coming our way" and, it is implied, need to be controlled. Actions which are clearly imperialistic in the abstract are posed as reasonable solutions, and because the backstory has been amputated it is less easy to spot the continuities between past colonial acts and present ones, insight which could plausibly raise a question about the value of repetition.

People are susceptible to these kinds of media stunts because they are hungry for explanations of how the world runs. They have a hunch they need an analysis which explains why things are the way they are, and neither mainstream education nor mainstream media are presently scratching that itch. If it did, perhaps people would be informed enough to make these kind of media products unmarketable. Sure, there are always alternative perspectives which draw the dots differently but these are necessarily complex (the complexity of the recent Occupy movement, which was framed and perhaps at times operated as disorganisation, is a case in point) and would run the risk of revealing, for example, the depth of violence and poverty tied up with corporate greed. An analysis which offers an easy narrative - Kony is evil, Maori are animals - is, ultimately, at the service of the media consumer rather than justice. (I wonder if the target audience watching a clip on youtube or reading an opinion piece in a newspaper seeks to understand these men are unlike them in order to be sure they are not themselves capable of such horrific actions.)

The media-ness of the film and opinion piece are key here, especially when we try to consider what is so compelling about them. Both pieces are tightly focussed on their ideal audience and, thereby, have selected their ideal media platforms. The film is slick like a music video, densely layered, self-consciously 'meta' as - for example - the viewer of the film on youtube watches someone watching something on youtube. Kony2012 knows its genre inside out and references films, social media, music and celebrity while drawing on the same old comfortable narratives that make it feel intuitive. (I will be haunted for a while by the image of the five year old blond boy in Kony2012 being taught that Africa is where the bad people are; he points at a photo of Kony, identifying him as the bad man and announcing later that when he grows up he wants to go to Africa too. Exploitation of children, anyone?)

Ultimately, history and race are central to both of these stories and to how they're told. The 'merchandise' viewers are urged to purchase to 'make Kony famous' chillingly echoes the famous colour scheme and style of Obama's famous election campaign poster. One blogger has commented that the Kony2012 would make Nazi propagandists proud, and I would add that it's worth noticing Laws's repetition of 'feral' and 'breeding' - Jewish people were compared to multiplying rats too. 

Public media lynchings by white men of black men are less easy to notice when the victim is not an innocent; they might even feel a bit like justice. But. Neither Kony nor Marino can be understood outside of the long sweep of circumstances that produce and enable these specific moments of crossing the line; and the information, analysis and justice we seek - including the limits of the present institutions which purport to deliver it - can't be either.





* In case you have had your head in the sand (or don't have internet access) here's a quick background...
Kony 2012 is a carefully produced and very widely distributed half hour film made by an American group keen to draw attention to the figure of Jospeh Kony, leader of the LRA (Lord's Liberation Army), and calling on young people around the world (by which they mostly mean the US) to 'make him famous' this year with the purpose of applying pressure on the US government to (continue to) intervene in the situation and, ultimately, to bring Kony to justice.
Last Sunday ex-MP and ex-Mayor and inflammatory radio host Michael Laws published an 'opinion' piece in a major NZ weekend paper in which he described Raurangi Marino, recently convicted for violent crimes against a 5 year old girl, as 'feral' and extended this term (and his eugenicist vitriole) to the Maori community more broadly, warning readers that these "ferals" are "breeding;" "And they are coming our way."
The Kony2012 film has already been roundly and robustly critiqued in many venues; the Laws piece doesn't seem to have raised any response at all. 

international women's day

Today the Indigenous Studies Program at McMaster University celebrated International Women's Day by having a couple of Indigenous women speakers and presenting scholarships to two fantastic Indigenous women graduate students.

When my friend Rick asked if I'd speak at the event, I agreed - but also went into a (quiet) panic. I do a lot of things in my research, but are any of them explicitly feminist? Are they focussed specifically on women? And if I'm not focussing on women, does my work not really 'fit' this theme? Or this day? (Do I?)

I did end up writing something after all, and I enjoyed it. It was good to tease out a few thoughts and draw on the amazing mana wahine scholarship produced by Maori women. I got to think a bit about projects I've been involved in, and projects to which I feel really committed. I wrote 6000 words, so won't share the whole thing here, but I will give you a little taste... you know, something to think about for International Women's Day 2012.

On September 11 2001, the NZ govt announced the first feature film which would be supported by a new pool of money which hoped to support some really great NZ features to be finished. Whale Rider the film was released in mid-2003 and became a bit of a smash hit worldwide. I first watched it in New York City with my Tuscarora friend & grad school buddy Alyssa Mt Pleasant, the night before I flew to Hawaii to spend a year writing my PhD thesis. The film is a screen adaptation of the Witi Ihimaera novel The Whale Rider, and the transition from book to film involved more than losing the ‘The’ at the beginning of the title… it also kind of lost the point.

I started to like the film even less when I talked with people who’d seen it often loved it! And while there’s a lot to love, I began to be disturbed by the bits that struck a chord with many of these audience members. I found myself being the stink grumpy person, raining on one of the only Maori feature film parades ever. Why?

I recall talking with one white American man at a campus event and he bluntly disagreed with me about gender in Maori society. “No, you come from a patriarchal culture,” he insisted, apparently unable to read the single-eyebrow-raise which was an early warning sign that something was going to take place. I asked him how much experience he had with Maori people – “I saw Whale Rider,” he said.

“But that’s a movie.”

“But it represented the culture accurately.”

“How do you know?”   

“Because I saw the movie.”

“So I’ve been Maori all my life, and you’ve spent less than two hours watching a movie, and you’re telling me that I come from a sexist culture?”

“Yes, you do – you know, you should really watch the movie.”

Not a great conversation… and I’ll admit that I couldn’t help but inform him that yes it’s probably true that films are truth and that I’d seen American Beauty and his culture is the one with the strange ideas.

Of course, the reason the man felt that this representation of us was ‘true’ (to the extent that he knew more about myself than I do) is that the film absolutely maps perfectly onto the ideas about Indigenous women he’s been receiving his whole life. Indigenous people prefer sons over daughters, Indigenous women are like white 50s housewives (the line “you may be boss out there but I’m the boss of this kitchen” was memorable), leadership is passed down from fathers to sons. Niki Caro, the white director of the film pointed out in an interview “This young girl is fighting over 1000 years of patriarchal tradition.”

The film rings true for this white American guy because, within his deeply held assumptions about the world that sit so deep they are impossible to fully consciously know, he already knew about me before he knew I existed.

Brendan Hokowhitu has written about the film, and talks about the problem of indigenous films that tell the story other people want to hear:

WR satisfied the global audience, not because of its depiction of an alternative indigenous culture, but rather because it bastardised Maori culture to resemble the universal language of a transnational third culture.

Not long after Whale Rider came out, I read a review of the film in a glossy American magazine. The reviewer had loved it. “Finally,” he wrote, “a film that shows that feminism doesn’t have to be screechy.”

I didn’t know whether to be outraged as a feminist or be outraged as a Maori, so I just laughed. Laughing, you now, that thing you do when someone says something awful.

There are a number of things to do with the reviewer’s claim: argue that feminism isn’t always screechy. Argue that characterizing feminism as ‘screechy’ is sexist and actually therefore gestures towards the need for feminism and the value of feminist critique. Argue that women – let alone feminism - are so rarely portrayed in any film in any meaningful way that it’s a stretch to use the word ‘finally’ as if feminism is something that’s been screechily accosting him every time he goes to the movies.

To me, the really dangerous argument the reviewer is making here is that this is a feminist film. There’s no question in his mind that it’s feminist – he’s just interested in how it’s feminist. For him, it’s not a Maori film, not an East Coast film, not a film about Whangara. Because, well, it shows a girl (and perhaps her grandmother) triumphing over patriarchy. That it’s a film about Maori is lost on him – it’s irrelevant. Maori are brown (and sometimes beige) cardboard cutouts, performing a new kind of feminism for an old kind of world. And no, I’m not talking about the Maori world. 

Does it matter if he doesn’t think it’s a Maori film? Is being a cardboard cutout better than nothing? When invited to talk to some literary people in the US, Patricia Grace decided to argue that ‘Books Are Dangerous’ – drawing attention to the extent to which visibility is not necessarily any better than invisibility. 'Books are dangerous,' according to her: when they do not reinforce our values, actions, custom, culture and identity; when they tell us only about others and so are saying that we do not exist; when they write about us they say negative things which are untrue; and when they write about us but say negative and insensitive things which tell us that we are no good. For Hokowhitu and Grace, ‘invisibility at any cost’ is too expensive. This past weekend in New Zealand, visibility commanded a very high price indeed.

Last Sunday at home, a white politician and radio commentator who has a high profile in NZ for being ‘outspoken’ published an opinion piece in The Sunday Star Times. Michael Laws’s ‘opinion’ is titled “The inevitable result of a boy born bad” and ostensibly responds to the recent prosecution and imprisonment of a young Maori man, Raurangi Marino, who at 17 years of age committed violent acts which do not bear repeating on the 5 year old daughter of visiting tourists staying in a holiday park near his family home. This is the kind of crime that makes anyone stop and feel a bit sick, and feel very sad, but the deep and confident hatred in Laws’s published piece goes well beyond the beyond. It's still a little shocking. 

It is important to conduct an analysis of Laws’s racist eugenicist discourse and the mainstream media in a white patriarchal heterosexist colonising settler state. That’s important work, but it’s not the whole picture. We do we talk about abuse and crime, talking not only about the reasons we have ended up this way but also the things we need to do in order to sort this stuff out. How can we think about what led to Raurangi Marino's decisions that night without forgetting to ask other questions... We need to talk about how incredibly hard it is to be a Maori man in 2012, why gangs provide more tangible social structures than tribes for many of our whanau, and what all of this might have to do with how things turned out. We need to have an opportunity to mourn the shape of Raurangi’s life as much as his victim’s, and I’m going to go right out on a limb here and say that spending our time deliberating whether or not we are feral isn’t going to be a priority in those conversations. 

I've put off writing about the Laws piece all week, and tonite I've only really made a little gesture towards it. There's so much more to say. 

Why don’t I want to talk about my opinion of Michael Laws’s opinion?

Because I'm *sick* of talking about colonial representations of Indigenous men and Indigenous communities.

Why have I never published on The Whale Rider even though it’s been all written up in part of a chapter of my PhD which I finished a few years ago?

Because I’m *sick* of talking about colonial representations of Indigenous women.

We could spend our lives talking about this stuff. And that (if you’ll pardon the non-scholarly phrase) kind of sucks. Who wants to spend the rest of their lives talking about this stuff, when there’s so much more to say?

There's So Much More To Say.

Let's get onto that for the other 364 days aye?

:)

(fingers in ears) STILL CAN'T HEAR YOU!! LALALALALALALALALALA!!!!

I'm still refusing to engage directly with the Michael Laws 'opinion' piece in the Sunday Star Times last week. Yes, I will deal with it tomorrow, when I'm finishing off a talk I'm giving at another university on Thursday, at which I've decided to talk about it a little...

But for today...

I read a book, Removable Type: a History of the Book in Indian Country, then went to a discussion group with five other Indig Lit Studies academics, and - as we ate pizza and cupcakes, and drank yummy drinks - we discussed the it.

It's a great book: full to the brim of detail and research and arguments... It looks at the ways Indigenous people have engaged with books in the US, from early days of first contacts, first presses, first translations, first readers, first writers, first copies, until 1880. Each line of the book affirms that Indigenous people have engaged with reading and writing for our own purposes, and across the book an impressive range of examples are provided to back up this claim...

It's a book about books, but it also quietly undermines the assumptions that some people make about Indigenous people and books... as we talked about the book, we all started to bring in other examples and contexts we know about... we added some of our own contributions to the range of topics the book raised, and talked about how the book itself had produced the space for us to have these discussions.

It's a book about books, but also a book about people.

People: Writing. Printing. Communicating. Publishing. Participating. Reading. Being sovereign. Being themselves. Being ourselves.

Being, you know, People. (Not feral. No, not feral.)

someone called me feral today

Don't argue with a fool, Grandad always used to say, or people won't be able to tell the difference.

Someone called me feral today. Well, actually it was a couple of days ago, in the Sunday Star Times, but the effect - the namecalling, the dehumanisation - happens every day. Including, yes, today. And, yes, tomorrow.





I've thought long and hard about how to respond to being called feral. To being told that sexual abuse is part of Maori culture. That we're animals.





And right now, I'm not ready to respond. Sorry Michael Laws, but I've got bigger and more interesting fish to fry. Things to write, you see, and things to read.





So I'll be doing that, and planning how I will respond publicly. But in the meantime, I'm doing what I apparently do best. I'm writing. Oh, and yes... the sound outside tells me that this is the third day in a row that I've written until the streetcars start to announce it's morning time again.

timezone II

Monday, is that you?
Hello?
Monday, can you hear me Monday? Monday, is that you?

Yes, it's Monday.

I sat down at this desk on Sunday evening and now the streetcars and sun are about to arrive and usher in Monday in Toronto. I've written through the night for the second night in a row. I've written a lot, if words can be counted even when they're not snaking towards the end of the page. If working and reworking lines of type counts as much as the sheer filling of paper with ink. If, like gently stretching and smoothing an excess of pastry over the sides and base of a pie dish, turning 6906 words into 4438 words is a creditable achievement. Two nights of sitting up while the world around me sleeps, performing spells: the alchemy of editing. Taking rocks and attempting to turn them into gold. The impossibly hopeful process of trying to pinpoint the magic that will create something new and better by adding something and, by adding, will take something - baseness, profanity, ordinariness, mortality - away.

Yes, it's Monday and I've had a weekend of writing.

I've sent something off, I've got more to write. Books are propped all around me like small clusters of fruit at an outdoor market; photocopied and printed articles are slathered across my desk in an almost complete suffocation of its wooden surface. Pens are scattered with pot-it notes, bulldog clips, a phone and paper clips. If the paper that fills this small room could be fingerprinted, I'd be everywhere. I've thumbed through books and checked online. I've sat here over and over again, quietly tapping my head and biting my lip, the thing my body does when it's trying to find the right word. My shoulders ache, and my back feels like it did when I drove the 9 hours from St Louis to Fort Wayne last November. So much more to write, so many things to write, and... (someone called us feral today)... so big the reasons to write.

The first streetcar just rolled by as I typed. It's Monday.

Dishes are piled in the sink, I've been wearing lavalava or jeans all weekend, the bed can't remember the last time it was made, and words are rushing around and around in my head like coins around the yellow plastic fundraising funnels in shopping malls. I'm entranced, watching them circle, and I have no time for worldy things like kitchens, bathrooms and washing machines. These things will all wait, while I write. And write. And write.

Te tau okioki. The chance to write.

timezone

My body is in Toronto.
My heart is in Aotearoa (well, except for the bit that's in PNG).
My mind is catching up with me, full of memories from Aotearoa and Sydney and here.
My dreams are in Hawaii, when they're not in Waiwhetu.  

I'm wide awake and sleepy at all the wrong times, and I keep dressing for the wrong season. Yesterday I dressed for a coolish summer day and opened the blinds to see snow falling gently but insistently to the ground. My email inbox is helplessly swollen but every time I go near it I sit and stare, waiting for it to slowly evaporate rather than wading in to find the blockage in a drain and let the water soak back into the ground. I watched something rubbishy on TV tonite while I ate my dinner, tears running down my cheeks for people I didn't know, a victim of tired nerves too close to the flimsy surface.

It's 1.30am and I'm going to lie on my bed, to convince my wide-awake self to go to sleep. In the morning I'll wake up with a thick head, dry throat and puffy eyes, quietly stomping through to the kitchen to switch on the kettle and make toast.

It's the day after the day after arriving; by tomorrow nite all will be fine again. This is how it always goes. This too shall pass. This, as Oprah would say, is what I know for sure.

meta: a blog about a blog

In my early 20s, I found a diary I'd kept faithfully through my year of being sweet 16. It included reflections on the day's events, plans, lists of people to pray for (I was quite a devout wee 16 yr old!), boys I was in love with, and the like. As I read it, I felt strangely like I was an outsider, reading about someone I used to know, being reminded of things and people I'd forgotten for so long that I wasn't even sure I'd known them in the first place. The 16 year old writer was me, but not me, but me. It was time travel of sorts, a chance to create a small loop in the thin linear stretch of my years and connect again with an earlier Alice.

This evening, before going to talk to a group of English PhD students here at U of T about teaching literary studies, I went to a blog I kept my first couple of years on the job as an academic. The blog is personal and specific and so it is, of course, written under a nom de plume and I will not, of course, supply a link to it here. But I'll write about it.

Quietly I read, sad for the girl who'd written her way through a difficult time, and also a little proud of her as she made discoveries and small steps. As she wrote about teaching tricks and finding time for research and connections she had (and hadn't) made around the university. As she figured things out and as she was ground down; as she got excited and as she was wracked with despair. It was a rollercoaster ride for this girl who was me, and not me, and me. I want to be clear that it wasn't all bad... but on the other hand I'd forgotten until reading the blog again tonite how openly I wore my heart on my sleeve, like bare nerves around the gumlines of sensitive teeth. I recalled, as I read, that over these first two years on the job I (she) also buried a loved grandmother, buried a dear friend, helped to raise a newborn. No wonder I piled on the weight during my first two years. No wonder a cherished relationship didn't stand a chance and fell apart halfway through my first year. I look back at her, at me, from the end  of seven years on the job, and wish I could go back to let her (me) know that things would be alright and that these things do add up to something, even if  it's not the thing we thought we'd set out to build.

On Sunday 30 April 2006 I made a list on the blog to note the accomplishments and learning of my first year. I thought I'd share that (indulgently, refelctively, a little sadly) tonite.

10 ways the 2nd year is better than the 1st

1
you know the 'life cycle' of a year (when things are due/ when you'll be busy/ when research can happen/ when to order books etc)
2
you have ex-students (graduations where you see your babies walk across the stage, students coming back for their 2nd class with you, students taking your classes because of friend's recommendations, students who've finished and come back to tell you what they're up to)
3
you don't get lost on campus
4
there's time for research, during the times last year you just sat there panicking!
5
you know your enemies and allies
6
you have a complete set of teaching-worthy clothes for every season
7
personal finances are a little less scary, the further you get away from the years of being a phd student
8
more people around campus know you're there
9
teaching my own course has changed my experience of teaching - and i had a good chance to plan book ordering etc properly :)
10
you get new (newer even than you!) colleagues - you start to realise your colleagues aren't always/ only going to be the ones who were here on your first day - there's something reassuring about the shifting-ness of the sands