Abstract:
Ani Mikaere in ‘Are we all New Zealanders Now’ claims Pākehā are afflicted with a kind of cultural insecurity born from our attempts at denying our uncomfortable history. Utilising examples from all sides of the political spectrum Mikaere extracts an undercurrent of desperate avoidance and unresolved guilt which pervades Pākehā identity. New Zealand’s Coordinating minister of race relations, Trevor Mallard, stated in a speech entitled “We are all New Zealanders now” that “New Zealand has to get its British imperial past behind it. Māori and Pākehā are both indigenous people to New Zealand now. I regard myself as an indigenous New Zealander…”. Moving on from historical grievances for a fresh start is effectively a call to forget the wrongs imposed upon Māori. It is a call for Māori to give up any meaningful power as tangata whenua in exchange for acceptance into European thought’s singular autarchy. ‘The Union Jack and the Southern Cross ’ by Miri Davidson in The New Inquiry expands upon Mikaere's text in an attempt to delve deeper into this Pākehā desire to become indigenous. Analysing Prime Minister John Key’s attempts to put New Zealand’s colonial history behind us. Key campaigned on a promise to achieve “full and final” settlements between the Crown and all iwi in New Zealand. ““Full and final” is a legal term used in debt settlement cases, generally when it’s a case of settling for less.” Davidson argues the Pākehā desire to ‘become-indigenous’ effectively denies the enclosure created by our role as colonisers, instead hoping to be seen as a group of new arrivals inhabiting a space in which we were invited to inhabit as opposed to the forceful occupation by which we came. This denial of the enclosure Pākehā maintain as colonisers maintains a “blindness to the fortifications which keep it sealed; the school, the office, the prison. For Key, it is as though the walls guarding privilege might simply be liquified beneath the blazing silver fern.” “No longer indebted to his place of settlement, nor to its indigenous inhabitants, he is no longer a settler at all, simply a citizen. A happy zero. “We are impatient to stop looking in the rear-view mirror at grievances past,” Key said, “and to instead shift our eyes to the challenges of our shared future as New Zealanders.”” The question I pose within this essay relates to this insecurity. I hope to extract methodologies for counteracting the paralysis of Pākehā culture by drawing from ideas shared by post-colonial theorists, philosophers, writers who search for new ‘succulencies of relation’4 through a thinking around opacity and a poetics of relation. How may we utilise strategies of opacity, silence, withdrawal and the renunciation of authority in order to find a space in which we may exist as disseminated beings, dispersed seamlessly into a cultural milieu which no longer allows for the domination of one over another. One which accounts for the human need for movement, action and an inclination towards methods of domination and control in order to achieve this. How may we implore people to find means of sustained movement and progress which are based upon being and remaining lost, misunderstood, ungraspable and yet full of a kind of richness which transcends and negates any inclination to appropriate and dominate.