From Rushdie to Catton

After condemning New Zealand's National government at the recent Jaipur Literary Festival, Eleanor Catton has been called a 'traitor' by talkback radio host Sean Plunkett, and has been the target of a creepily avuncular open letter from National Party psephologist David Farrar.

Like Plunkett, Farrar thinks that Catton ought not to have brought her politics to Jaipur:

We don’t tend to mind criticism at home, but we do get worked up, when people knock their country overseas...Your choice of forum to talk politics is perhaps not the best. A campaign launch is an excellent choice to talk politics. A global literary festival seems rather inappropriate for you to rage against the so called neo-liberal agenda in New Zealand...

If an All Black in 2008 had got up at an international test match and devoted his after match comments to how much he hated the nanny state policies of the then Labour Government, well they would have been criticised greatly also.

Catton became widely known in New Zealand when her novel The Luminaries was awarded the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is perhaps the most famous of all the novels to win the Booker, and there’s an interesting similarity between the responses that the young Rushdie got in the aftermath of his victory in 1981 and the criticism that Catton is copping now.

Midnight’s Children led readers through the modern history of India, and as soon as it took out the Booker Prize Rushdie was being asked for his opinion about the political situation of his homeland. Then as now, Rushdie was not afraid of offering opinions. In an impromptu speech at the dinner where the Booker was awarded, he mocked the Congress Party regime of Indira Gandhi and suggested that she and her diplomatic representatives in London should not try to associate themselves with his success.

Long before he upset Islamic fundamentalists with The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had become a hate figure for the Congress Party and the Indian political establishment. Like Catton, he was condemned as a traitor, because he criticised his country's government in front of foreign audiences.

But Rushdie kept expressing his opinions, whenever he turned up to a book festival or gave an interview, for the same reason that Catton will surely keep expressing her opinions. Despite what Farrar implicitly claims, literature is not some some sort of harmless and meaningless game, like rugby or chess or marbles, that can be pursued and discussed in isolation from the rest of the world. Ever since Aristophanes attacked the political establishment of Athens and Petronious satirised Rome’s ruling class, literature has been a place where the world is examined and judged, and where ideas, including political ideas, contend and quarrel.

Eleanor Catton was invited to the Jaipur festival to discuss the long and ambitious novel she wrote about New Zealand. It is hardly surprising that the festival's organisers and audiences were interested in her opinions about New Zealand society. When he suggests that Catton should have avoided any discussion of her homeland's political and economic situation, and instead offered up some of the cliches and platitudes that dominate speeches at sports awards dinners, David Farrar shows how little he knows about literature and the men and women who produce and read literature. 

New Zealand’s writers have long been critical of their society and its various governments. James K Baxter called New Zealand a ‘sick society’, and Auckland a ‘great arsehole'; RAK Mason denounced this country as a ‘far-pitched place’ where poets had a ‘perilous existence'; Frank Sargeson compared his studies of Kiwi life to reports composed for a sewage board. When they scrutinise and criticise their own society, our writers show loyalty to the critical values nurtured thousands of years ago by scribblers like Aristophanes, and their disloyalty to political elites and their shibboleths.

In 2012 Salman Rushdie was forced to cancel an appearance at the Jaipur festival after his Indian enemies once again denounced him, and eventually threatened violence if he were allowed to take the stage. It is sad that the aftermath of this year's festival has seen prominent and powerful New Zealanders aiming denunciations at one of their own writers.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Folly

Josiah Firth made an estate in the conquered Waikato; his folly has the narrow paranoid eyes of a watchtower.

Road works

The machines at Rangiriri are as neutral as well-trained beasts. Herds of bulldozers have been ordered to expand the road through King Tawhiao's old fortress, and the site of the Waikato War's decisive battle, into a four-lane expressway, and so they work through the afternoon heat, uprooting daisies and fenceposts, burying ancient musketballs and infant snails. An asphalting machine follows them, grunting and oozing a thick black liquid; my son perhaps mistook it for a wounded dinosaur.

One hundred and fifty-one years ago, in the aftermath of the battle for Rangiriri, work gangs pushed through the gaps that artillery and infantry charges had made in Tawhiao's earth walls, flattened the earth, and emptied bags of gravel. The Great South Road moved further south. Only a few metres of the Maori fort were preserved, close to the Waikato River. On the other side of the new road, beside the hotel that had opened for travellers, a cemetery holding the remains of Maori and Pakeha killed in the battle - the Pakeha got individual headstones, while Maori were put into a mass grave topped by a grassy mound - was tolerated.

In New Zealand, the destruction and preservation of history often occur simultaneously. The construction of roads and large buildings adds to our knowledge of the past, because surveyors and builders are obligated to call in archaeologists before they begin their depredations. The interesting thing is carefully recorded, and then efficiently destroyed.

A team of archaeologists excavated the land where the new freeway will flow, and discovered a pa built long before the battle of Rangiriri; another layer has been added to the history of the site. The small reserve around the remnant fragment of earthworks has also been tidied up, and given a new set of signboards and a ceremonial arch.

Despite all these enlightened activities, I can't help but feel there's something barbarous about the way our nation's most important road runs right over the fortifications built to stop the roadbuilders and landgrabbers who started the Waikato War. It is as though the men who pushed the road through Rangiriri wanted the invasion of the Waikato to be repeated endlessly, by generations of bullock wagons and Morris Minors and Sunny Datsuns.

The bulldozers, though, are neutral. If their orders only changed, they would contentedly plough up the expressway, and gouge new rifle and kumara pits in the riverside soil, and dig new trenches in which a new army of invaders could stumble and bleed.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Crossing a border

On the edge of the Maungakawa Hills a secret border can be crossed. To the west of the border are the dairy and horse farms of the central Waikato, and the oak-lined streets and picket fences of the meticulously fabricated town of Cambridge. To the east of the border are plantations of ragwort and sickly radiata, scrubcutters' huts shedding weatherboard panels, unvisited parks filled with convalescing forests, and small quarries, with their rows of empty graves and piles of lime and shingle.

On one side of the border is the flat land that was confiscated after the conquest of King Tawhiao's realm a century and a half ago; on the other side is the rougher country where Tawhiao's supporters repaired to build a parliament, which was almost powerless outside the Maungakawas, and to print their own money, which went unacknowledged by Pakeha stores and banks. 

To cross this border is to exchange one sort of geometry for another. The conquerors of the Waikato made the straight line into a tool and symbol of their rule. Ancient paths that curved cautiously up hills and around swamps were replaced by relentlessly straight roads, just as the scruffy stone walls that had demarcated and heated fields of kumara were replaced by hedges of hawthorn and blackberry so straight and neat that they might have been rows of soldiers standing at attention. Even water was made to march in straight lines, as creeks and rivers were demoted to drains and canals, and given the same routes as roads. Theodolites were set up like canons on the ruins of captured pa; forests fell and swamps retreated before their fire. The panoptic geometry of Descartes, with its windswept horizontal lines and its escape-proof rectangular ceilings, was raised over the empire's new conquest. 

Beyond the confiscation line, though, roads and fencelines that had been stubbornly straight become kinked and curved. Bands of kanuka and karaka sneak into paddocks, reconnoitring for the forests that have their strongholds on the summits of the Maungakawas. Creeks that had been as still as goldfish ponds on the plains suddenly roar like unmuffled motorbikes.

We were travelling in a two car convoy. I was sitting in the navigator's seat of the lead vehicle, brushing potato crisps into the margins of my father-in-law's road atlas and arguing with him about the best road - the slowest, most elaborately curved, least travelled road - to take over the Maungakawas, when we were beeped by my wife and mother-in-law, who were following sceptically with the kids. The youngest member of our party needed breastfeeding, so we all parked near a bridge at the bottom of one of the first sizeable hills in the range. Kanuka and karaka scrambled halfway down the slope towards us, then seemed to lose their nerve. A homemade sign at the end of a gravel drive offered access to a maze-garden for a price that must have been designed to maintain the owner's privacy.

I walked with my older son to the bridge, so that we could throw stones into its creek, which had found its voice as it poured excitedly over boulders. Aneirin was most interested, though, in the vehicles that were curving their ways out of the plain and into the hills. A tour bus, empty except for its grinning driver. Two late model SUVs, so pedantically clean that they must belong to daytrippers from Hamilton. A vintage Chevrolet, whose new engine and shiny purple paint job seemed, like the lycra-clad septegeneurian cyclists who clog Auckland's waterfront roads, like vulgar denials of the passage of time. "Cars are brooming like the water" Aneirin said, as he added a stone to the creek. We had crossed a border. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Charlie Hebdo in ancient Greece

In the aftermath of the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a number of right-wing commentators in the West have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, these commentators hate Charlie Hebdo for the cartoons it publishes poking fun at nuns and priests and Christianity; on the other hand, they also hate Muslims, and can see that the massacre offers a good opportunity for a bit of anti-Muslim propaganda.

It's always fascinating to see one prejudice battling another, contrary prejudice in the mind of a bigot.

In an online magazine (mis)named American Thinker, Selwyn Duke has tried to reconcile his distaste for the godless liberals who publish Charlie Hebdo with his contempt for Muslims. According to Duke, the attack on Charlie Hebdo showed the true nature of Islam, and should be condemned. But we shouldn't, Duke insists, forget that Charlie Hebdo 'was an enemy of Western civilisation'.

Duke's words might be true, if we equate Western civilisation with religious authority. But if we understand Western civilisation in terms of reason and argument and art and freedom of speech, then we need only look to the ancient Greeks to find parallels with the provocations of Charlie Hebdo.

In their different ways, philosophers like Diogenes and Socrates and writers like Aristophanes ridiculed the gods of their own society as relentlessly as Charlie Hebdo has attacked the religions of the twenty-first century. At a festival in the fifth century BC, Aristophanes presented his play The Frogs, which made audiences laugh by putting the god Dionysus onstage in a costume of buskin boots, a saffron cloak, and a lion skin, and sending him on a bumbling adventure through the underworld.

Aristophanes would surely be amazed that, nearly two and a half thousand years after he staged The Frogs, so many human beings spend so much time worrying about the proclamations of religious fundamentalists.

When he founded a school called ‘Atenisi, or Athens, on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa fifty years ago, the Tongan philosopher Futa Helu argued that his society needed to learn from the free thinking of the ancient Greeks. Today, I would argue, the whole world needs the spirit of Aristophanes.

A quick non-contribution to a constitutional debate

Over at his Kiwiblog, National Party psephologist David Farrar recently tried to provoke a constitutional debate, by asking his readers whether they are looking forward to having the eccentric and allegedly meddlesome Prince Charles as the head of the New Zealand state. A number of monarchists responded to Farrar's challenge. Presenting themselves as conservative defenders of tradition, they have offered a series of arguments in favour of keeping a member of the Windsor family as the head of the New Zealand state. 

Ideas and political positions that are portrayed as ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ by their proponents – and by their detractors, for that matter – often turn out to be, on careful inspection, decidedly contemporary. When a subject like New Zealand's relationship with Britain is debated, there’s a tendency to create a dichotomy between republicans and monarchists, and to present the monarchists as the upholders of some straightforwardly traditional relationship between New Zealand and Britain.

But the arguments that contemporary Kiwi monarchists make would seem strange indeed to their nineteenth and early twentieth century ancestors. The two arguments for the monarchy used repeatedly in the thread at Kiwiblog – the claim that a faraway British monarch would be less likely to interfere in New Zealand politics than some local elected leader, and the claim that the British monarchy is a symbolic reminder of the role Britain played in New Zealand’s early history – both rely on the assumption that New Zealand and Britain are separate nations, and that New Zealand’s interests must be considered separately from those of Britain. Such assumptions are, of course, almost universal in New Zealand today, but they would have seemed culpably radical a century ago.

As I've swum through nineteenth century newspapers for the past few months, I've become used to finding my ancestors using terms like ‘South Britain’ and ‘the Britain of the South Seas’ as synonyms for New Zealand. Until at least the middle of the twentieth century, and probably later, a large majority of Pakeha would have answered the question ‘Why should the British monarch reign over New Zealanders?’ with an answer as simple as ‘Because New Zealanders are British’.

As Tony Ballantyne has repeatedly reminded us, New Zealand was part of a complex and worldwide ‘web of empire’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Britain was always a corporate nation, and British identity has always belonged to multiple populations. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the British empire expanded, New Zealanders, Australians, and Canadians joined the English, Scots, Welsh, and Ulstermen as holders of the identity. We became ‘South Britain’, just as Scotland had become ‘North Britain’. 

There were, of course, some Pakeha who refused a British identity. Many Irish emigrants hated the empire that had occupied their nation for centuries, and a few, like the band of Fenian gold miners who supplied Te Kooti's army with ammunition, supported Maori resistance to the colonisation. For a big majority of Pakeha, though, New Zealand was no less a part of Britain than Cornwall or Yorkshire. 

Although colonial New Zealand and the imperial homeland often found themselves in disagreement – they had very different attitudes, for example, to the wars that were fought in the Waikato and in Taranaki for Maori land – the colonists tended to deal with these disagreements by asserting that they, and not the administrators and politicians in London, represented the true spirit of the Britain. It is significant that, when New Zealand leaders lobbied for British support for the annexation of the islands of the tropical Pacific in the late nineteenth century, they presented themselves as the vanguard of the British Empire. The mandarins of London had lost some of the vigour and courage that had made the empire great; the colonial boys in Wellington could help them recover it. 

And it wasn’t only on the right of the political spectrum that the identity of Britain and New Zealand was assumed – when early advocates of a welfare state and other left-wing reforms made their case, they often justified these measures by talking about New Zealand as a ‘better Britain’, where Anglo-Saxon civilisation could be rid of its injustices and thus perfected.

The notion of the British monarch as a distant and powerless figure, who is preferable to a local head of state mainly because he or she will do less damage than a local, would have horrified conservative New Zealanders of earlier generations. The idea that Britain enjoyed an important relationship with New Zealand, but that New Zealand had nevertheless evolved into a separate nation, would also have seemed heretical.

If we take a long view of New Zealand history, then, we can see that the Republicans and monarchists of the twenty-first century agree about a lot more than they differ. Both accept that New Zealanders are no longer Britons. Britain and British identity were extraordinarily effective inventions, but in the twenty-first century they are losing their meaning, even in the old imperial homeland. Britain's slow, century-long decline as a world power has forced its former affiliates to find new allies and new identities.

The only genuine supporters of the traditional relationship between New Zealand and Britain are individuals like Aidan Work, who advocates the reintegration of this country into a revived British Empire, and organisations like the British Israelites, whose members believe that the British Empire was blessed and directed by Jehovah, and will be revived in the eschatological future. Ninety years ago the British Israelites could count New Zealand’s Prime Minister as a member; today they are obscure eccentrics.

Instead of trying to associate themselves with a tradition that no longer exists, monarchists should acknowledge that their worldview and arguments are as contemporary as those of republicans. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Caching in the sunshine

Who needs to lie on the beach this summer, when there's geocaching to be done beside the roads and on the bridges of our largest city? Here's Paul Janman giving my oldest lad a lecture about the occult science known as GPS, during a recent geocaching mission down Auckland's Great South Road. Paul and I were replenishing the treasure boxes we stashed along the road as part of last year's A Sense of Place exhibition.

As well as filling ice cream containers with goodies and hiding them under convenient bricks and bridges, Paul showed Aneirin how to locate other people's geocaches. Under his avuncular gaze, Aneirin pulled a small box from a hollow tree on Pukekawa, the green and pleasant volcano in Auckland's Domain. The box contained a tiny replica of Mercury; its distance from Auckland's central business district was supposed to simulate the distance of that planet from the sun. At Mutukaroa, the vast traffic island just north of Otahuhu, Paul and Echo's kids Cosmo and Linton helped stash a cache; you can find coordinates for the treasure, and the comments of a few treasure
hunters, on this page.

Further down the Great South Road, Paul and I stopped to check on the geocache we left at Southdown Park, a rat-ridden maze of overgrown shrubs that sits between half-demolished slaughterhouses and the mud of the upper Manukau harbour. The park's entrances had been sealed, after asbestos was detected amidst its greenery. The ruins of the future have turned toxic. We've had to abandon our Southdown box, but the cache that we left on Mangere Bridge as part of the recent Other Waters festival seems to be doing good business.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]