Leaves and critiques

[A week or so ago I praised The Gold Leaves, Ted Jenner's new book about the death-poems of ancient Greece. As this poster, which was sent to me by Brett Cross, the proprietor of Titus Books and Atuanui Press, shows, The Gold Leaves will be launched next month alongside Murray Edmond's Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writings, a book that excavates the cultural artefacts of a much more recent historical era. 

I wrote the introduction to Then It Was Now Again, and I'll be MCing the launch on October the 9th. I promise not to tell any 'knock knock' jokes.

Brett Cross doesn't like pre-launch leaks, but here are a couple of excerpts from the introduction to Then It Was Now Again that hopefully gives an idea of the book's historical importance and contemporary relevance.]

To read this selection from Murray Edmond’s essays, reviews, interviews, and letters is to take a ride through forty years of New Zealand’s cultural, social, and political history. 

Discussions of esoteric art theories, polemical interventions in literary spats, eyewitness accounts of political tumult, and anecdotes from the author’s private life are equally at home in this book, as Edmond carries us from the revolutionary era of his youth through the crises and conflicts of the eighties into the twenty-first century...

Murray Edmond’s career as a poet, critic, teacher, and activist for theatre has been made in the shadow of the failure of the utopian project of the sixties and early seventies. But Then It Was Now Again is a book full of optimism, as well as disappointment, because it shows Edmond holding on to the best parts of the radicalism of his youth as he engages with a changing world. 

Edmond’s apprenticeship as a revolutionary gives a critical edge to all of his texts. Whether he is explicating a poem, reviewing a play, or examining a government policy, Edmond always has one eye on an alternative, better world, where poets do not have to write in their spare time, Kiwi plays attract the same crowds as the latest product from Hollywood, and governments are concerned with more than the interests of business. 

Edmond’s sense of dissatisfaction is balanced by a constant curiosity. As the reviews in this book show, he has a prodigious appetite for new books, plays, films, and music. He finds evidence, in these works, of the continued vitality of New Zealand culture...

And Edmond is curious about much more than art. Because he is loyal to Freed’s claim that life and art are inextricably linked, he finds it difficult to write about the literature of New Zealand without also discussing this country’s sociology and history. He can’t write a short review of Kendrick Smithyman’s book of poems Dwarf with a Billiard Cue, for instance, without recalling the invasion and conquest of the Waikato Kingdom by British imperialists in the 1860s, reflecting on the cycles of boom and bust inherent in capitalism, and applauding the ballooning feats of Leila Adair, fin de siecle New Zealand’s ‘queen of the air’. His essay on the plays of Hone Kouka becomes a meditation on the consequences of Maori urbanisation in the twentieth century. Edmond’s wide-ranging curiosity gives Then It Was Now Again a richness unusual amongst volumes of literary criticism... 


[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Going underground

Last month I blogged about the South Auckland cave that served as a printery for New Zealand's harried communist movement in 1940, before being discovered by adventurous kids and raided by cops. Yesterday Paul Janman, Ian Powell and I finally visited the place, as we scouted locations for our documentary and book about the Great South Road.

Richard Taylor, that veteran and inspired explorer of the more unglamorous parts of Auckland, was taken into the cave in the early '80s, and remembers that it was easy to enter and to explore. Richard is forgetful.

Here are some stills from the footage Paul shot by the dim light of his lamp. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

From the left's to Filipe's lashing

He may have died in 2008, but the great Finnish poet Paavo Haavikko sums up my feelings New Zealand's 2014 general election very well with his line:

I vote for Spring, Autumn wins, Winter forms the Cabinet. 

The International Socialist Organisation, which is one of several small Marxist outfits affiliated to the Mana Party, has made a calm, lucid, yet merciless analysis of the election and its lessons for the left.

If you'd like some imaginative escape - and, as Herbert Marcuse reminded us, escapism is a necessity for even the most committed political activist - from the wintry spring weather and wintrier politics of Niu Sila, then you might want to visit the online arts journal EyeContact, where I've continued my series on Tongan artists by writing about Filipe Tohi. Filipe discovered a secret and ancient language, full of references to genealogy and ocean currents and archipelagos, in the rafters of a Tongan church at the end of the 1980s, and has been turning it into austere and hypnotic sculptures ever since.

I've argued that Tohi's art can be considered a type of countermodernism, because of the way it appropriates offshore technological and aesthetic innovations and puts them at the service of Tongan preoccupations and traditions. As such, it has much in common with the hybrid society in which Tohi grew up, and to which he frequently returns.

Peter Gutteridge in the Ureweras

Peter Gutteridge died yesterday morning. When I read the news, I remembered listening to this track bleed out of the tiny speakers of a cheap bopblaster in a cheap car sliding and skidding through the gravel roads of the Ureweras.

Our car's stereo had long since lost its voice, so we'd bought the bopblaster in Wairoa, and loaded it with the first EP by Snapper, the obsessively noisy band Gutteridge formed after tiring of the overly decorous music that had become associated with his native Dunedin.

As the journey through the mountains to Rotorua went on, I became convinced that Snapper's layers of corrugated feedback had become as essential to our progress as the engine and wheels of our little car. I played their cassette over and over.

In this fascinating article Aussie Wes Holland describes a journey to Dunedin in search of Gutteridge.

Seven Tongan words

Tongan Language Week ran from the first until the seventh of this month and was marked by several interesting events, including the opening of a retrospective exhibition by Filipe Tohi, retrofuturist sculptor and tireless kava bowl raconteur, at the Mangere Arts Centre, and the singing of a Tongan version of Niu Sila's national anthem,

I missed all of the week's events, and that is perhaps appropriate, because I am the world's worst student of Tongan.

Instead of using the year I recently spent in the Friendly Islands to nail the grammar and syntax of the language, I relied upon the superb English skills of Nuku'alofans, including my students at the 'Atenisi Institute. When I made visits to villages distant from Tonga's bilingual capital city, I abused the pity of colleagues and friends like Taniela Vao, 'Opeti Taliai, and Lose Helu, by letting them translate for me. (Sorry, folks: if I make it back to the kingdom in 2015 then I pledge to do a lot better.)

Although I can't put together a Tongan sentence, I love to learn, pronounce, and listen to individual words, in the same way that a child loves to peel pretty shells off a beach and hold them to an ear. These are my seven favourite Tongan words.

Kisikisi, meaning helicopter

I learned this word after my son became preoccupied with a small plastic chopper he had bought from one of the two pa'anga shops Chinese immigrants have opened in Nuku'alofa. Until I discovered that 'kisikisi' also meant 'dragonfly' I wondered whether the word was onomatopoetic.

Peka, meaning fruit bat or flying fox

A short word that is somehow able to contain the long, slow dive of a pair of outstretched black wings from an ironwood tree through a dusk sky.

Vaka Va, meaning spaceship

A couple of six year-olds taught me this word - I'm going to count it as a single word - as we took time out from a late night game of touch rugby, stood on the swampy edge of the 'Atenisi campus, looked up, and tried to differentiate the breathless twinkling of stars, the slow red pulse of Mars, and the stolid glow of satellites. I hope this really is the Tongan word of spaceship, and those kids weren't fooling me. It wouldn't have been the first time.

Mongamonga, meaning cockroach

The enormous, almost fearless roaches of the Friendly Islands make their Kiwi relations look like feeble, underfed things that deserve nurturing rather than crushing. I was fascinated by the contrast between the soft, gorgeous sound 'mongmonga' makes and the awful creature it denotes.

Fakapikopiko, meaning idleness

Another contradiction between sound and sense. Despite the word's meaning it feels, to me at least, violently busy. When I pronounce it, I feel plosives popping in my mouth, and send those short vowels flying like watermelon pips.

Heliaki, meaning double or hidden meaning

Heliaki is a word used to describe, or perhaps merely gesture towards, the ambiguities that inhabit many Tongan songs, poems, and orations. A metaphor or slogan that might seem straightforward can become, under the terms of heliaki, mysterious or unstable. In her great essay 'Wry Comment from the Outback: songs of protest from the Niua Islands', Wendy Pond showed how the apparently reverential songs and poems that greeted Tonga's king when he visited the distant northern part of his domain concealed, thanks to the magic of heliaki, satire and invective.

'Alu! meaning go away!

This invaluable word was a refrain during my many conversations with Nuku'alofa's dogs.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Olaf Nelson, Kim Dotcom, and other tricky comparisons

In his superbly grumpy essay 'The Peculiarities of the English' EP Thompson complained about historians who judged events in Albion according to how closely they resembled events in other, more fashionable countries, like France and the Soviet Union. 

Thompson's essay was prompted by a couple of young and cheeky Marxists, who had pointed out that England had never experienced the sort of revolutions that upended French society in 1788 and Russian society in 1917, and had argued that it was therefore a backward place more or less devoid of a tradition of radical thought and action. 

Thompson insisted that England had its own, distinctive revolutionary history, which can't be understood through the prism of Russian or French reality. After rubbing his rivals' noses in events like the English Civil War and movements like Chartism, though, the great historian suddenly pulled up and acknowledged, near the end of his essay, that it wouldn't do to imagine that the history of every society was unique. Comparisons between different societies, events, and people were, Thompson hurriedly admitted, essential: the trick was to find a balance between acknowledging the individuality of a society or event or person and finding illuminating parallels for them. 

If the mighty EP Thompson struggled with the art of comparisons, then I probably have little hope of placating the anonymous reader of this blog who complained about the link I made a couple of months ago between Olaf Nelson and Kim Dotcom. 

Olaf Nelson was a part-European businessman who grew rich under the protection of the administrators of the German colony of Western Samoa. After 1914, though, when New Zealand invaded and annexed Western Samoa and began to crack down on the Nelson family business, Olaf became a sincere, relentless, and crafty activist for Samoan independence, and a critic of colonialism in general. 

My blog post suggested that Dotcom had undergone the same sort of radicalisation as Nelson, after being persecuted by the New Zealand state. By mating up with Hone Harawira and Annette Sykes Dotcom had become, like Nelson before him, an ally of an indigenous people calling for the decolonisation of their country. 

Here's the dialogue I had with my critic, after he or she showed up at the end of last month. 

Anon

Your article lacks fact regarding OF Nelson. His father was Swedish not Scandinavian. Secondly, Nelson considered himself a samoan and was motivated by his love for his country as well. Our people were fighting for independence from assholes who thought they were better than us. To liken him to Dot Com is an insult. Errors in your information on Nelson illustrates your lack of knowledge

SH

Sweden is part of Scandinavia, so I don't think I'm being inaccurate when I use the term. I agree that Nelson considered himself Samoan, and that Samoans were fighting for independence from racist assholes.

I don't mean to make an exact parallel between the lives and qualities of Nelson and Dotcom. I think Dotcom is a buffoon with deplorable taste in all sorts of things, so it wouldn't take much to convince me that Olaf Nelson was a much more admirable person than him. 

But I think that Nelson, like Dotcom, was a very successful businessman who was politicised and radicalised when New Zealand authorities began to persecute him. Like Dotcom, he turned his wealth and his business acumen against the government that tormented him. To that extent, I think there's a parallel between the two men. 

Anon

Most Swedes don't consider themselves Scandinavian. Anyway my main issue is your comparison of the man. The fact that there are similarities in their wealth and the avenues used to get their point across by no means warrants a "parallel" as you have done. There are 1 or 2 similarities in their situation (finance, physical size) and that's about it. A country was fighting for Independence and he was a member of a movement that played a key role in it. He was not alone in his plight. What is Dotcom fighting for? I think you should look more at the differences. How do you think Nelson's family feel about this comparison. I think you have taken a few things out of context and done a very lazy piece of work.

SH

Surely Dotcom, like Nelson before him, has thrown his weight behind an indigenous anti-colonial movement? He's allied himself with the Mana Party in the same way that Nelson joined himself to the Mau. 

I know many members of Mana, and while they obviously wouldn't make a direct parallel with Samoa, they consider New Zealand a colonial nation and Maori a still-colonised people. Hone Harawira's calls for the decolonisation of government and the legal system recall some of the demands of the Mau. 

It's also notable that Mana and its alliance with the Internet Party has won some high-profile support within New Zealand's Pasifika communities. King Kapisi has been happy to introduce and praise Kim Dotcom at Internet-Mana rallies in Auckland. I don't think he'd be offended by comparisons between Mana and the Mau, and comparisons between Dotcom and Nelson. I don't think the descendants of Nelson need to be either, because as I said earlier I'm not implying that Nelson had Dotcom's buffoonish personal qualities - I'm talking about his political career.

Are you sure that Swedes don't consider themselves Scandinavian? The Scandinavian peninsula is the bit of Europe occupied by Norway and Sweden. When people talk about a wider Scandinavian region they seem to throw Denmark, Iceland and sometimes Finland into the mix as well. 

Anon

Now you are an idiot. Dotcom is not a Maori and Nelson considered himself a Samoan. Nelson had the ways and means to assist in fighting for the freedom of his country and did so. What role does King Kapisi play in history and in the Mau? As far as I'm concerned you are now just grasping for ammunition and finding as much as you can from people who you think will agree with you to solidify your rubbish ideas. Stick to the point at hand. Say what you will about the motives of Nelson in order to color your document.

Stop trying to be an intellectual. You lack an in-depth understanding of what really happened in Samoa and with O.F Nelson. Find someone else to compare Dotcom to. Hint. Find someone who wasn't born in that country for a start and who didn't actually consider themselves part of it.. ppff.

Scott

Surely it's possible for someone to disagree with your interpretation of history, anon, without being an idiot? I've pointed out a series of similarities that I perceived between Olaf Nelson and Kim Dotcom. Both were wealthy men with deep roots in European cultures who enjoyed prosperity in the South Pacific before being persecuted by New Zealand authorities, who were acting at the behest of a faraway imperial power. 

Both men responded to that persecution by becoming politicised and identifying themselves with local movements against New Zealand colonialism. Both used their wealth and acumen to support those movements and create trouble for the New Zealand authorities. 

You've pointed out some differences between Nelson and Dotcom. Nelson was born in Samoa, whereas Dotcom was not born in Aotearoa; Nelson was an afakasi who identified as Samoan, whereas Dotcom is a Pakeha. Those are good points. But I don't see how they invalidate the comparison I made. 

To make a comparison isn't to claim an exact equivalence.

You're obviously offended by the Nelson-Dotcom comparison, but I'm not sure exactly why. Is it because you thought I was downplaying the fact that Nelson had Samoan blood, by comparing him to a palangi? Or is it because you think Dotcom is too cynical and venal and buffoonish to compare with Nelson? 

Perhaps you should write something about the qualities that you think Nelson has, and which Dotcom lacks. I'd be happy to put that up as a guest post. 

I mentioned King Kapisi because he's someone who is very aware of Samoan history and is strongly supportive of Dotcom. I'm not saying that you have to agree with him; I just mention him because he demonstrates that not everybody agrees with your view that Dotcom and the cause he has embraced are the antithesis of the Mau.

I guess one key difference between us relates to Nelson's attitudes to the German administrators of Samoa in the years before 1914. I suggested that he had good relations with Solf's colonial regime, and profited from these good relations, and that he only became a strong nationalist after being disadvantaged by the new Kiwi regime. 

You seem to be suggesting that he was a lifelong nationalist, because of his birth in Samoa and his identification as a Samoan. 

What was Nelson's attitude toward the Mau movement when it first emerged in 1909? Did he support it as ardently as he supported the later Mau opposition to New Zealand rule? 

If Nelson was a strong supporter of the Mau in 1909, then my claim that he was a hitherto apolitical businessman who was radicalised by New Zealand persecution would look very shaky. But I'm not sure whether Nelson was a supporter of the Mau in 1909. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Owl and mountain and little mole

The trumpeter addressed in my previous post stepped onstage last Sunday night. Since then, he and his older brother have been making the sort of din that reminds me not of Miles Davis' earlier, self-consciously subdued albums but of noisy, electric 1970s epics like Live Evil and Pangaea.

My wife has been preoccupied with caring for our new son, so I've taken over the task of accompanying the older lad to Play Centre, an institution whose earnest, self-deprecating office-holders and painful attempts at consensus-based decision-making remind me of some of some of the left-wing organisations to which I've belonged over the years. The prosaic meetings of the Centre's elders contrast with the anarchic play of its children.

As I search for my son in the lunar depths of the Play Centre sandpit, or try to find an acceptable interpretation - is it a fish, or a bear, or a dinosaur? - for a grotesquely shaped lump of play dough in his hands, I sometimes wonder how strange I must appear to him. I think about this poem, by the underrated Anglo-surrealist Christopher Middleton, which my wife and I included in the private anthology of verses about birth and childhood we made a couple of years ago.

Thanks, by the way, to all the facebook well-wishers. I'll be posting something more prosaic here just as soon as Play Centre duties allow...

For a Junior School Poetry Book

The mothers are waiting in the yard.
Here come the children, fresh from school.
The mothers are wearing rumpled skirts.
What prim mouths, what wrinkly cheeks.
The children swirl through the air to them,
trailing satchels and a smell of chalk.

The children are waiting in the yard.
The mothers come stumbling out of school.
The children stare primly at them,
lace their shoes, pat their heads.
The mothers swirl through the air to cars.
The children crossly drive them home.

The mothers are coming.
The children are waiting.
The mothers had eyes that see
boiled eggs, wool, dung and bed.
The children have eyes that saw
owl and mountain and little mole.