Blunty Biblical

Warning: strong language that may offend.

When I read Tusiata Avia was the recipient of over 300 complaints for hate-speech, racism and inciting violence, my attention was caught. The fact that David Seymour from the ACT party accused her of being racist only confirmed to me I needed to read The Savage Coloniser Book. Coupled with Alice Te Punga Somerville's Always Italicise: how to write while colonised, one gets a rather unified perception of reality and life in Aotearoa.

The reaction, in some cases, comes from people merely jumping on the bandwagon. They even attribute the content to the wrong poem, showing they have not even bothered to read Avia's work.

So, let me quote the most furious stanza of “The 250th Anniversary of James Cook's Arrival in New Zealand”, the correct poem.

Hey, James, It's us, These days we're driving around in SUV's looking for ya or white men like you who might be thieves or rapists or kidnappers or murders yeah, or any one of your descendants or incarnations coz, you know ay, bitch? We're gonna FUCK YOU UP. [Emphasis Avia's]

Parihaka. Appin. Myall Creek. Mount Dispersion. Rangiaowhai. If these names mean nothing to you, it is not a surprise. They are places where massacres of indigenous people were carried out, sometimes in especially brutal fashion. Mount Dispersion was even named in pride of the massacre that saw the dispersion of the First Nation people from that place. James Cook also had blood on his hands for the murder of nine Māori people, for which Britain expressed regret in 2019. It is these events and many more on both sides of the Tasman which complainants prefer to ignore. It is events like these that make the dominant, colonising cultures feel uncomfortable.

It has been suggested that Māori should “just move on”. After all, these events happened a long time ago. I would like to see the average pākehā move on when they still reside in a land that was mostly stolen from them. I would like to see them move on when their own language is still only beginning to recover after the Crown attempted to wipe it out as part of a deliberate policy. I would like to see these pākehā move on when they are still living isolated from their iwi and whenua as a result of “pepper-potting”, the policy of housing Māori in cities separated from other Māori. The government would love to think of Aotearoa as a post-colonial nation. Every Māori person I have spoken to still lives with the results of colonisation and it is very much part of their lives today.

Colonisation is, by nature, a violent activity in which the Other is scrubbed from the landscape. Aotearoa was renamed. Tāmaki Makaurau was renamed. Te Ika-a-Māui was renamed (to the laughable North Island). Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwi was renamed. The British even had the gall to label Australian land as Terra Nullis. Couple this with systematic genocides, and what possible good has colonisation done for indigenous peoples? Given the same situation, would you feel any different about the wonderful, racist who thought the British owned everything in sight called Captain James Cook? I do not think so.

It is well past time that the Māori and Pasifika voice was heard in relaying their own histories and realities as people colonised. If that makes a small number of over-privileged pākehā who have utterly no understanding of their lived realities beyond media-driven stereotypes, that says more about the privileged than it does about the kaikōrero.

As to the violence in the poem of Tusiata Avia, one would need to be grouped in with the rapists, murders and kidnappers to really have a worry. Descendants of Cook refers to those white people who consider everything they see as theirs, no matter who happened to belong to the whenua before them. Tusiata Avia is not pointing out every pākehā as a target for a knife in the ribs. Even if she was, the last I checked, freedom of speech was upheld in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (key word, “universal”, which means she does not need to care if we are offended by it or not).

As a final appeal, Tāngata Whenua, Mana Whenua, raise your voices. Raise your fists. We pākehā need to see your reality and to understand who you are as First Nations people. Aotearoa needs her first daughters and sons.

Postscript – The only criticism I have of Tusiata Avia's poem is that it uses Aotearoa's colonial name.