A world apart
TWO books published recently in New Zealand stunningly contrast life in our part of the world. One depicts the South Pacific as we like to think of it one of the last unspoiled areas on earth, populated by colourful, complex but mainly happy people. The other tells a story most of us would rather not hear - of a deprived and divided race,
increasingly struggling to cling to its
place in the Pacific sun.
Both are eminently readable and are worth considering together for the total picture they provide of life in the region.
One reminds us of what we have and why we should take pains to preserve it.
The other warns of what can happen to a proud people if they don’t strive to retain their heritage in the face of so called progress and don’t learn to adapt to the changing world.
Passages Journeys in Polynesia by
Auckland writer Graeme Lay is a delightful account of his travels throughout the region. It is undemanding and does not pretend to be either a guide book or a warts-and-all critique of what he calls “indisputably one of the most beautiful regions on earth” and “its melange of peoples”.
Maori The Crisis and the Challenge, by Alan Duff, is, on the other hand, very demanding and has already increased the author’s reputation acquired on the strength of his two previous books, both fictitious accounts of Maori life in Aotearoa as one of this country’s most controversial writers.
While Lay exudes charm and tolerance, Duff eschews both.
Lay can smile at the antics of even the grossiest palagi and papa’a visitors he comes across in his leisurely peregrinations.
Duff, who is a very angry man, can only rail at the state of what he describes as “the woe-begotten Maori nation”.
For Lay there is laughter, hospitality and an endless string of kindnesses he encounters on his travels through Tonga, Niue, the Cook Islands, Samoa, the Society Islands and the Tuamotus.
He paints a delicate, water-colour, picture of a region and its peoples winning the struggle to retain their identities, culture and vivacity in a rapidly changing world that is threatening to swamp a leisured lifestyle; a world of technological advances that is impatient to drag every society up (or down) to its level; a world that decrees undeveloped is synonymous with unhappy; where “progress” is deemed an essential ingredient of human life.
Lay reminds us that it is possible to feel “undeniably benevolent and reposeful” after attending a Sunday morning church service in the village of Avatele, Niue, where “people shuffle and scratch... a dog strolls in the pastor’s door and up the aisle without admonishment”.
He takes a party of 35 students from Auckland Girls’
Grammar School to the Cook Islands, where many of them find their roots. One 15-year-old finds two brothers she had not seen since she was tiny. A Samoan teenager, who confessed she never had any feeling for her Polynesian culture, finds the trip an “experience and an awakening”.
After visiting Aitutaki, a 17-year-old wrote, “There was pain
and sorrow on the last day, nobody wanted to leave, we were all so close to the island...”
Lay sees his own teenage sons, creatures of a modern society’s TV and video age, discover the delights of plunging into cool water down the sliding rocks near Apia as Samoans have done for about 3000 years.
For Duff, who is half Maori, there are no winners among his people.
He sees little laughter or kindness but plenty of racism, sexism and what he calls “the curse of welfarism” which he warns amounts to government “funding the ultimate destruction of a so
ciety”.
His is a book of rage and it has
predictably produced rage among
Maori leaders, who he singles out
for special attack as a cause of the problems of Maori, who he says bluntly are “losers”.
He dubs his elders “mediocrities... dogmatic... completely unread and therefore uninformed...smug...self-satisfied and more and more nowadays in a paid position”. He advocates little less than a revolution. “We desperately need positive, strong, educated, worldly, articulate leaders who’ll tell the present lose regime where to get off. We need leadership that tells Maoridom how to start becoming winners, instead of a thousand ‘reasons’ and excuses for why so many of us are losers.”
Duffs theme is that Maori must stop blaming the pakeha for all their ills and start improving themselves. He berates Maori for lacking the pakeha work ethic, for drinking and smoking too much, for refusing to budget and look after their health. He criticises parents for not making their children read books and do their homework, pointing out that they have the same opportunities as pakeha to become educated.
Maori, he says bluntly, prefers to whinge about pakeha injustices which he acknowledges rather than move to put its own house in order. He rejects criticism that he is “a brown-skinned pakeha and says, “They don’t want to hear what I’m saying.”
It is a book, one Maori critic wrote, that is “a loathsome tale of excruciating cruel insults and the defiling of Maori people in a way that no Maori media basher can ever possibly match”.
That sets the tone for a debate that, like it or not, Maoridom is going to have if it is to improve its lot.
It’s much more comfortable for us all to read Lay’s depiction of life in the South Pacific, but there are some realities we cannot ignore. Even if Duff s version is harsh and lacking in scholarship, it would be wrong to sweep the issues he raises under the carpet and pretend that all is sweetness and light in this part of the world. □ Passages Journeys in Polynesia by Graeme Lay.
Tandem Press. $NZ24.95.
Maori The Crisis and the Challenge by Alan Duff.
Harper Collins. SNZ 19.95.