Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  Perhaps more than any other episode in our life together, this incident forced me to acknowledge the issue of class. Of course, I had always known it was there between us, but I never paid it much attention, perhaps because it was easier for me to think dispassionately about the differences between Pakeha and Maori than about those between the privileged and the poor. But there were moments—days when I would come home from the university to find Seven and Kura stretched out on the floor watching monster trucks on TV—when I would look at them and think, you people. Then I’d do a double take and think, what, do I want them to be just like me? Of course I didn’t. But the reality was that I was never going to be just like them either.

  The place I really struggled with this was with Seven’s sister, who was almost ten years younger than I and whom, I felt, I was in a position to influence. On the one hand, it was perfectly clear to me that if she didn’t get an education, she was doomed—at the very least to a lifetime of poverty, but also, in my mind, to something more serious. Without a foundation of skills and knowledge, she would have no chance of discovering what she was good at or experiencing the satisfaction of making choices for herself. Being a girl, her prospects were even more limited than those of her brothers. She would remain within the narrowly circumscribed world of her family and there would be this great big universe around her that she would never know. And yet it was also clear to me that by encouraging her to become independent, I was, in effect, indoctrinating her with my own white, middle-class values.

  It is a “basic Pakeha misunderstanding,” writes the philosopher John Patterson, “that deep down, Maori and Pakeha are very similar.” In fact, he argues, deep down, Maoris have very different ways of understanding the world. Some of these ways may look familiar—Maori respect for the natural world may look, for example, like environmentalism—but they stem from quite different systems of understanding. The basis of Pakeha concern for the environment is essentially utilitarian—we value the earth for what it can give us—while the Maori view is, at least originally, genealogical. They value the earth because it is effectively their kin.

  In the old days, everything was genealogical for Maoris. The idea of family was so essential, joked the anthropologist J. Prytz Johansen, that if Kant had lived among them, he would have added kinship to his fundamental categories of knowledge, time, and space. In the classical view, the whole Maori cosmos unfolds itself as a great web of ancestral relations “in which heaven and earth are first parents of all beings and things, such as the sea, the sand on the beach, the wood, the birds, and man.” In theory, any Maori can trace his descent back through a chain of historical figures like Tareha or Hongi Hika to the legendary navigators who arrived in canoes from Hawaiki and beyond them to the gods of sea and forest and wind, to the first parents, Ranginui and Papatuanuku, Sky Father and Earth Mother, and beyond them to the great night, the nothingness, Nui te Po.

  Admittedly, this conceptual framework may feel less than pressingly real to many contemporary Maoris, but it still permeates their lives in subtle ways—just as the Judeo-Christian ethos affects even atheists like me who have grown up within its ambit. Maori values are tribal values: what is good for the group is good for the individual, whereas the reverse does not necessarily hold true. In the ideal Maori community, there is a sharing of both resources and obligations. Sacrifice is often demanded; loyalty is highly prized. Competitiveness—unless in sports—is generally discouraged, while greed and selfishness are openly despised. The result is a society in which everyone is cared for, but also one in which individual achievement is the exception rather than the norm. One consequence of this is that, from the Pakeha point of view, Maoris often look unambitious, while Pakehas, seen from the Maori perspective, look ruthless, isolated, and cold.

  I had seen, firsthand, how this worked in Boston, where Seven’s lack of ambition struck my family as, well, odd.

  “What does he want to do?” my father would ask me, meaning, what future did he envision, what plans did he have, what ladder did he see himself ascending?

  “I don’t really know, Dad. I’m not sure he wants to do anything at all.”

  I supposed this dynamic must have played itself out in reverse when it came to Seven’s family, and I sometimes wondered if they saw me as hopelessly self-absorbed and striving, dragging my family around the world in the pursuit of some crackpot career. But it didn’t help me one little bit to see both sides of the problem. When it came to Kura—or any of my own children, for that matter—I could never resist the imperatives of my own upbringing. They could lie on the floor and watch monster trucks all they liked, but as long as she was living with me, I was going to make sure she went to school.

  At some point during that year I met an Aboriginal writer and activist named Sam Watson. I had scheduled an interview with him to discuss his novel, The Kadaitcha Sung, but as we were wrapping it up he said something to me that went home—whump!—like an arrow into a bale of hay. It was hard, he said, for people who had not experienced sustained, persistent discrimination to understand what it was like to be suspected every single day, by someone, somewhere, of having done something wrong or underhanded, of having nicked something, or lied, or broken the law. It was exhausting, he said, having to defend yourself against this barrage of suspicion. “It just wears you down after a while.”

  I think that, like a lot of white people, I had envisioned racism as a series of distinct, objectionable, even violent acts—the scary end of the spectrum—and had not really grasped that it was also, perhaps primarily, a relentless, wearying drone of negativity from which there was no escape. Of course, the reason I had not understood this was that, until then, I had never experienced it firsthand.

  Right next door to us lived an old lady who regularly regaled Seven with stories about the Aborigines who used to live across the street. “Dirty buggers,” she’d say to him, leaning across the fence, while he pushed the lawnmower back and forth. I was astonished by her behavior, not just that she would say such things, but that she would say them to Seven, who, as a Maori—Maoris being to New Zealand precisely what Aborigines are to Australia—could not possibly fail to be offended by her remarks. But she clearly had some way of parsing reality so that he was included with her on her side of the divide, while the lazy, shiftless, thieving Aborigines remained securely on the other. Seven, to my further astonishment, ignored her comments. He said he felt sorry for her, living all alone in her little house, and he helped her with things that needed fixing and continued, for as long as we lived there, to mow her lawn.

  But suburban Brisbane had its share of people like our next-door neighbor and you never knew when one of them would cross your path. There was one Saturday morning when we all piled into the car and set off to investigate the garage sales in our neighborhood. We owned almost nothing in the way of furniture or appliances, just a few beds, a kitchen table and some chairs, and we had no money to buy anything new, so we often went looking for what we needed at the weekend garage sales.

  The first house we came to had a long side yard with a gate at the sidewalk and a garage at the back. We wandered around for a while looking at things and Seven bought a two-dollar sprinkler from a woman in the garage. As we were leaving—he was walking ahead with Kura, carrying Aperahama on his shoulders, I was coming along behind—a man in a lawn chair at the gate suddenly accosted him.

  “D’you pay for that?” he demanded.

  Seven just looked at him. “No,” he said, and walked on through the gate.

  This time, I could see that he was angry. “Bloody old bastard,” he muttered, as we got back in the car.

  I asked him later if he’d experienced that sort of thing much in New Zealand.

  “No,” he said. “Not really. The rednecks over there are too scared to say anything.”

  But when I pressed him on the subject, it became clear that he shared with many New Zealanders the view that their society was actually less racist than many, including both Austr
alia and the United States. This may, in fact, be true, but no matter how well integrated New Zealand is comparatively speaking, statistically it is still a country with a clear racial divide.

  Life expectancy at birth for Maoris is about eight years less than for other New Zealanders. Two out of five adult Maoris have no educational qualifications; nearly half live on an income of less than twenty thousand dollars a year. Maoris are twice as likely as non-Maoris to be unemployed. They are more likely to receive public assistance, to live in a house that is overcrowded, to rent rather than own. They are more likely to smoke, to be classed as “hazardous drinkers,” to develop asthma, high blood pressure, and diabetes, to live without access to a telephone or car. Maoris are more likely than other New Zealanders to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated, and, while they make up only 15 percent of the general population, they account for fully half of those in jail.

  There is an argument, just under the surface of polite discourse, that would explain these figures in terms of Maori characteristics. Maoris, it goes, are just like that: they fight and get into trouble, they’re lazy and don’t go to school. Obviously, this is a racist argument, but because it dovetails with a pair of long-standing clichés—warlike Maoris on the one hand, languid Polynesians on the other—it is difficult to explode. What is equally obvious, however, is that the underlying issue is economic. What, after all, does the cluster of social indicators that includes low life expectancy, poor health, high unemployment, and low levels of educational attainment suggest, if not poverty? And what is the root cause of Maori poverty, if not colonization?

  It would be hard to dispute that what these numbers, taken as a whole, reflect is the demoralizing effect on an indigenous people of having been colonized—which is to say, sidelined and impoverished in a country where they were once both sovereign and strong. This is, in fact, precisely what one sees over the course of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in New Zealand: increasing white settlement and prosperity matched by corresponding Maori decline. “It was what we lost,” says a character in Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors, “when you, the white audience out there, defeated us. Conquered us. Took our land, our mana, left us with nothing.”

  I met Duff that same year in Queensland, not long after I’d met Sam Watson. Duff was by then the author of at least two novels and a collection of essays, but the one that interested me most was his first. A bestselling novel in New Zealand, which was also made into an internationally successful film, Once Were Warriors was the first book to address the reality of what it was like to belong to the most alienated and dysfunctional segment of New Zealand society—unemployed, undereducated, landless Maoris. It was the same slice of society as that depicted in the article my father’s cousin had sent him, which was, not accidentally, titled, “One Night Out Stealing” in a direct reference to another of Duff’s books.

  Once Were Warriors is an ugly tale of deprivation, brutality, and abuse, and New Zealanders of all stripes reacted strongly to it when it first appeared, some saying they were shocked, they’d had no idea, while others accused Duff of hanging out their dirty laundry. The central character in the novel is a tough guy named Jake Heke who beats his wife and bullies his kids and sees everyone “in terms of their fighting potential first, before he saw anything.” Here is Jake, in the pub, feeling his power:

  And he stood there, waiting while the jugs were filled, aware of people’s awareness of him; he felt like a chief, a Maori warrior chief—no, not a Maori chief … an Indian chief, a real Injun … Jake pouted his lips ever so slightly and pulled the corners of his mouth down by the use of the cheek or jaw muscles … he flared his nostrils like a, you know, a bull—I know! Like Sitting Bull. Chief Sitting Bull. And he part lidded his eyes … so he stood there swelled with pride and vanity and this sense of feeling kingly and inside a voice was going: Look at me. Look at me, ya fuckers. I’m Jake Heke. Jake the Muss Heke. LOOK AT ME (and feel humble, you dogs).

  Duff’s point about Jake and those like him is that they are but vain, weak, ignominious echoes of what Maoris used to be. “We used to be a race of warriors,” says a character in the novel, but that was a long time ago and all that’s left now of the warriors thing is a brutal sort of stoicism that Duff calls “toughness.” “Us Maoris might be every bad thing in this world, but you can’t take away from us our toughness.”

  According to Duff, Maoris have allowed themselves to sink into a morass of dissipation and self-pity, and while the root cause of this decline may, in fact, be colonization, it does them little good to lay the blame for their plight at the foot of the Pakeha. That is the sort of thinking, he argues, that “has turned us into a race of people that says it’s okay to be a loser, it’s okay to beat my wife, it’s okay to go and get drunk three or four times a week with the last of my money … because the whites have colonized and dispirited me.” He doesn’t deny that racism and bigotry are out there, he just thinks it’s something you have to factor in. “I know it’s harder for me to get a job, so I’ve got to try twice as hard,” he says. “Don’t cry about it. Someone’s got to be in the minority.”

  When it was first published, the novelist Witi Ihimaera (author of The Whale Rider) called Once Were Warriors “the haka, the rage” of the Maori people. A haka is an action song performed by men as a prelude to battle, or, these days, at the opening of a rugby match. The term is usually translated as “war dance,” though Cook perceptively referred to it as “a show of courage by insult.” This is precisely what Duff’s work is: a challenge, an insult, and a goad. It is calculated to bring the wrath of almost everyone down upon his head—Maori activists who see him as an apologist for the Pakeha; Pakeha liberals who think he’s a right-wing crank; traditionalists who view him as an embarrassment. But it’s easy to get so distracted by Duff’s aggressive posturing that you forget what his message really is.

  Duff has an almost evangelical faith in the transformative power of education, discipline, and hard work. But his exhortations to Maoris to read, to go back to school, to get off the dole and start working have often been interpreted as a call for assimilation to mainstream Pakeha society—a charge that fills Duff with rage. “I have never ever said assimilate to a Pakeha!” he said in an interview with Vilsoni Hereniko. And, anyway, he argued, “It’s not a Pakeha world. It’s a universal world. In fact, it’s Asian now.” Still, one would have to be blind not to see that Duff himself is a kind of cultural hybrid. The peculiar mix of attitudes and aspirations he embodies, of Maori means and Pakeha ends, represents not exactly the fusion of two sets of values but a sort of furious oscillation between two points of view.

  Duff comes from what he himself describes as a “starkly contrasting background”—“Maori mother, European father. Father educated, mother uneducated. Father rational, mother … volatile,” as he put it to me—and is known for writing out of his own experience of stints in borstal, or juvenile detention, and a generally disordered youth. Duff’s father, a scientist and the brother, incidentally, of the well-known anthropologist Roger Duff, had what he describes as “a profound influence” on him. “But it took a little while to undo the damage that was done in my childhood,” he said. “My mother and her brothers simply got enraged at something and the table went up and everybody fought and it was considered normal. And then everyone kissed and everyone got drunk and the next day or the next week they were doing the same. That’s why I had that sort of theme in Warriors.”

  If Once Were Warriors was a haka, it was also clearly a lament, both culturally for the “fierce pride” of a warrior people and personally for a childhood sacrificed to “unthinkingness” and neglect. It was powerful precisely because it combined these different kinds of sadness, which were related, though not in any simple way, and because, in so doing, it encapsulated what is perhaps the most painful and difficult aspect of colonization: that more has been lost than has been gained and, yet, what is there to do but soldier on?

  I shared Duff’s vie
w about the fundamental value of education, and for years I talked to Seven about going back to school. I didn’t want to push him—I think it’s pointless to try to change the people you love—but I did want to encourage him if he showed any interest at all.

  Academically speaking, he had a lot of catching up to do: algebra, geometry, expository writing. He had been steered into trade school at the age of fifteen, which meant that he didn’t even have what I considered a complete high school education. It made me furious when I thought about it: all those Maori kids shunted into the labor pool as teenagers when they should have been studying chemistry and French.

  Eventually—this was some years later—he enrolled in a community college. He took some math and technology classes and a class in painting and one in composition, in which they read short stories, poetry, and plays. The drama text that semester was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The assignment was to write about Oedipus’s fatal flaw and I was trying to get him to find different ways of talking about the king, without writing the paper for him.

  “You need to find some other ways to describe him,” I told him. “What are some other words for ‘anger’? His irrational hostility, his intemperate aggression …”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “I’d say ‘violent,’ maybe.”

  “Think of your uncle, your cousin—they’re angry men. Think about them, the way they yell and throw things, the way they bully people. You’ve got some firsthand experience of this sort of thing.”

  Seven seemed to find this funny. “Once were warriors,” he said.

  14

  Gu, Choki, Pa

  Long before he was born, I knew our second child was going to be a boy. He was always kicking, squirming, elbowing me in the ribs. We could see his knees and elbows, or maybe those were his fists, pushing out against the walls. He’s a fish, I thought, a fast-swimming, deep-diving, fighting fish, a marlin, a kingfish, a tuna.