Landfall

Gujurat, the Punjab and Bollywood on Location

March 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Dieter Riemenschneider

India in New Zealand: Local Identities, Global Relations, edited by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Otago University Press, 2010) 226 pp., $49.95

Maintaining that ‘Indians are now a visible minority in New Zealand’s public life’ and commenting upon the comparative scarcity of thorough and comprehensive studies on their presence in the country, Bandhopadhyay and his contributors set out to have a fresh look at the three aspects of ‘migration and settlement’, ‘local identities’ and ‘global relations’: temporal as well as spatial dimensions relevant to our understanding of the present Indian New Zealand community. Subdivided accordingly into three parts, essays written from various perspectives by historians, anthropologists and scholars in religious, cultural, media and health studies draw attention to these issues. We encounter Jacqueline Leckie, Ruth D’Souza, Arvind Zodgekar and Henry Johnson, who have done research on Indian migration and settlement dating back three decades to when Zodgekar published an essay in Indians in New Zealand: Studies in a Sub-Culture (1980) – a collection of essays edited by Kapil N. Tiwari – and to when Leckie presented her Ph.D. thesis at Otago University in 1981. Indeed, the university and Otago University Press have promoted studies of India in New Zealand not only with the present publication but also with Jacqueline Leckie’s magisterial book Indian Settlers: The Story of a New Zealand South Asian Community, released in 2007.

The dozen chapters that together make up the three sections of India in New Zealand focus respectively on historical and demographic characteristics of the diasporan community as a whole, on its heterogeneity — which results in problematic perceptions of a single cultural identity — and on the community’s international political, economic and cultural links. The reader thus is guided along a historical trajectory from the nineteenth century to the immediate present and thence to the possible future of Indian people in New Zealand. Tony Ballantyne, professor of history at Otago University, critically analyses ‘the important role that India played in the development in New Zealand between the 1870s and 1920s’.

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Diasporic Problems

March 1, 2012 1 Comment

Areezou Zalipour

Localizing Asia in Aotearoa, edited by Paola Voci & Jacqueline Leckie (Auckland: Dunmore Publishing, 2011) 248 pp., $44.99.

Localizing Asia in Aotearoa takes a multi-disciplinary approach to exploring the contemporary experience of New Zealand in relation to Asia and Asians. The book mainly investigates and examines the ways that Asia and Asians have been and can be ‘localized’ in the New Zealand context. That is, its combination of essays and personal narratives seeks to document the cultural and social presence of Asia in New Zealand as registered from various perspectives and analytical standpoints. The diversity of the book’s approaches reflects its ambitious scope in relating Asia to New Zealand and, more importantly, its goal of making the multicultural dimensions of contemporary New Zealand society more widely sensed, acknowledged and recognised.

The gradually accumulating presence of Asian immigrants who have settled in New Zealand — mainly Chinese, Indians, and Koreans — has now created a relatively large Asian diaspora in what is after all a relatively small nation. Some of the chapters of the book focus acutely on aspects of Asian diaspora in New Zealand so as to emphasise its particular cultural expressions. However, overall the book does not make a clear theoretical distinction between the relevance of Asia and Asians who live outside New Zealand (under discussion in Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight), and the Asians who have left Asia and settled in New Zealand: the most obvious difference being that this latter group of Asians have New Zealand permanent residence, and therefore a sense of belonging. They, like any other diaspora, generally conceive of themselves as active members of the social and political construction that is ‘New Zealand’. On the other hand, those Asians who do not live here do not — obviously — have that sense of belonging. The gap that exists between these two groups of Asians and their issues, though, is highly significant to discussions on localising Asia in New Zealand. One may ask what ‘Asia’ is being referred to, and who are Asians within the context of this book? This lacuna has not been highlighted by the introduction, nor by the book’s structure, with the lucid exactness that it demands.

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Holding up a Mirror to Empire

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Michael O’Leary

The Parihaka Woman, by Witi Ihimaera (Vintage Books, Auckland, 2011) 318 pp., $39.00

Discussing ‘Romance Fiction’ in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Professor Terry Sturm writes of the novelist Edith Lyttleton [aka G.B. Lancaster] that: ‘In the second phase of her career [she] turned more directly to one of the major forms of romance – the historical romance – organizing her epic treatments of colonial history in New Zealand, Australia and Canada around the perspectives of a series of highly intelligent, independent and rebellious female protagonists. The image of Empire which emerges, despite the colouring of romance, is distinctly critical’.

To refer to Ihimaera’s latest novel, The Parihaka Woman as ‘historical romance’ is not meant to be disparaging, for while it is definitely a ‘page turner’, it is by no means a ‘bodice ripper’ — if anything it is discreet, almost coy, in its dealing with sexual matters. Yet Sturm’s description of Edith Lyttleton’s writing does serve as an apt summary of The Parihaka Woman, the significant difference being that in Ihimaera’s tale of colonial history the ‘highly intelligent, independent and rebellious female protagonist’ is a Māori woman, Erenora, and the ‘image of Empire’ comes from the Māori mirror held up to that of the Pākehā settlers and Government so as to reflect from another angle the land greed and the murderous behaviour which took place in Taranaki in the 1860s to the 1880s.

It is against the story of late nineteenth-century holocaust and hardship that the main conceit of this novel is set. And just to make sure we understand that there is no mistake in the use of the word holocaust, Ihimaera quotes from a contemporary newspaper the feelings being expressed immediately preceding the attack on the Parihaka township: ‘The time has come, in our minds, when New Zealand must strike for freedom, and this means the death-blow to the Maori race!’ Also quoted is ex-premier Harry Atkinson who was reported as saying at a public meeting that he hoped: ‘if war did come, the natives would be exterminated.’ Following the aftermath of the racist rhetoric through, Ihimaera quotes from the 1996 Waitangi Tribunal Taranaki Report: ‘The graphic muru of most of Taranaki and the raupatu without ending describe the holocaust of Taranaki history and the denigration of the founding peoples in a continuum from 1840 to the present’.
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Threading the Labyrinth

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton

Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, by Martin Edmond (Auckland University Press, 2011) 198 pp. $37.95

To be an essay writer is to be an eclectic: one who gathers together curious observations and out-of-the-way facts, and then conjures with them so as to offer another interpretation of some aspect of the world. At least, this is what the series of book-length essays that Martin Edmond has produced over the past two decades seem to do. He’s a memoirist, whose ‘memoirs’ are quest books, rehearsing investigations, making enquiries, retailing anecdotes and philosophical ruminations in pursuit of some invariably elusive subject — as in Dark Night: Walking with McCahon, which is a circuitous examination of the visionary painter Colin McCahon — or perhaps ‘Colin McCahon’, because Edmond, as he tells it, only ever ‘met’ McCahon twice, and both times briefly without McCahon really knowing who he was or even exchanging words. So the person Edmond pursues in his book, as if shadowing him even as he elegises him, is partly a creature of his imagination, vivified from second-hand reports, scrutiny of the artistic legacy, and guesswork: the artist bodied forth as a sort of Scotch mist, an atmosphere, whose very presence depends on the darkness of the ‘dark night’.

Edmond’s chief narrational pathway into the McCahon myth is the artist’s famous disappearance in Sydney, when McCahon, over from Auckland with his wife Anne to attend the opening of an exhibition of his paintings, seems to have wandered off in a fugue state one morning while visiting the Royal Botanic Gardens. He became a missing person for nearly 24 hours, before the police identified him as someone they’d picked up as a nameless, homeless vagrant in Sydney’s Centennial park and taken to the near-by Caritas Centre of St Vincent’s Hospital.

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You Can’t Tinker with Human Beings

February 1, 2012 Leave a Comment

Azure Rissetto

Dark Jelly, by Alice Tawhai (Huia Books, Wellington, 2011) 237 pp., $30.00

With an epigraph by the French existentialist Albert Camus, Dark Jelly by Alice Tawhai promises to challenge readers from the very first page, as she introduces us to a world of nocturnal lives and daytime dreams, paranoia and superstition, skewed enemies and chemical friends, and the stains of ink and time.

Across the stories we meet people incarcerated through crime, bad luck, or choice; although the reasons vary, names are always significant. In the opening tale, ‘Big Y, little y’, Yolanda sits in a sanatorium battling a trio of voices, Once, Twoce and Threece, which emanate from electrical sockets; but even their abuse is easier for her to deal with than her husband, Ty, and the painful history of which his presence speaks. Meanwhile, the jail narrative ‘Roses are Red’ hinges on the disparity between the prisoner’s perception of himself as ‘Caesar’ and the wardens’ view of him as ‘Johns’. He invites danger by carelessly conflating the red-headed female ‘screw’ in his thoughts with his girlfriend, Rose. In ‘Ice’, a woman’s husband briefly returns home from jail with an all-white dog, Ice, and a declaration of alcoholism. Although the only time the wife spent in prison was visiting her husband, we can see that she was just as incapacitated as he was during his time inside: her life froze. Since neither characters are identified for readers beyond the prosaic ‘he’ and ‘she’, we are given to understand that their shared history with ‘Ice’ is all that links them, now.

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Strange Juxtapositions

February 1, 2012 1 Comment

Raewyn Alexander

Rangatira,by Paula Morris (Penguin, Auckland, 2011) 296 pp., $30.00

The title of Rangatira, or Chief, has such grand connotations that I expected a magnificent tale, and in many ways this novel satisfied that expectation. Ngati Wai Rangatira Paratene Te Manu mulls his past over while he sits for the painting of his portrait by the artist, Lindauer. The painter’s planned trip to England has jogged the chief’s prodigious memory. Elderly Paratene appears calm, but twenty years before, with fourteen northern rangatira he travelled to England, and their trials were many. We learn Paratene prefers quiet reflection to excessive socialising, or to arguments at the Native Land Court where proceedings have dragged on.

Difficult events pile up against each other; strange juxtapositions occur. I empathised, wanted to somehow make things easier. The ridiculous get-up Paratene describes having to put on when a studio photographer prepares to take the Maori chief’s photograph serves to illustrate general misunderstandings between cultures. Then dubious agreements and arguments intrude in other ways: events go awry or are badly played out. The trials and tribulations experienced in England made me gasp: so many grubby and devious situations upset matters and offend against good manners and decency, let alone diplomacy and protocol, while these Maori are supposed to be honoured guests.

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