An artist’s duty to challenge
David Slack hopes we’ll always be the kind of place where someone like Taika Waititi can speak his mind.
There are people who have opinions for money, every morning, on television. Some of them are, as we like to say here in The Best Country In The World, pretty average.
Maybe it’s hard to think clearly when you have to get up two hours before sunrise. The dairy farmers get up then too, and manage to get all the cups on the teats, but perhaps they do better because they’re standing up and walking around and that makes their brains move.
On TV, it’s almost as though beneath the makeup they haven’t actually woken up yet. So when they told me this week that it was ‘‘sabotage’’ for Taika Waititi to badmouth his country on ‘‘the world stage’’ I thought to myself: this is the bit where the cow raises its tail and you have to get out of the way.
The ‘‘world stage’’! Man, right there you’ve got some last-century thinking smeared in cultural cringe like a chip in onion dip.
When, in this modern life, are we not on the world stage, any of us? You can read Kiwi blogs and Kiwi newspapers and Kiwi idiots and traitors on your iPad in Frankfurt and San Francisco whenever you feel like it. Mark Zuckerberg and Cambridge Analytica can tell you how racist each of us is in The Best Country In The World just by checking the data.
You can even read a column by a proud New Zealander about how New Zealand should be planning carefully because projections show that by 2038 ‘‘there’ll be more Asians than Maori’’. How does that make us look on the Asian stage, I wonder?
What is the objection exactly, to speaking your mind about the country you live in? That you shouldn’t tell inconvenient truths? Or that what Waititi said was an untruth? If that’s the proposition, then grab the shovel because the tail’s coming up again.
If someone says New Zealand is great, but racist as f..., that seems easy enough to understand and undeniable: great place, but a hell of a lot of racism. Both wittingly and unwittingly people cause harm and hurt with bigotry and bias, conscious or unconscious. Even if you can’t believe an ungrateful Maori who doesn’t appreciate the opportunities he’s been ‘‘given’’, how can you not believe all the people this week who described their actual experiences?
All those outraged people – taking a break from telling us to not be so sensitive – who took his meaning to be: ‘‘New Zealand, you’re all racists’’ were surely mistaken.
But even if they weren’t, so what? Is there such a thing as speaking for New Zealand on the world stage? Taika Waititi never said he was. Neither did Eleanor Catton, speaking at a literary festival in India and finding fault with the country she lives in and writes about.
Imagine that! Writers, examining things and sharing their thoughts. What kind of weird system do we have going on in New Zealand that could be turning out artists with ideas and observations?
Why are we paying grants to people to become saboteurs and traitors? Why can’t they be more like John Steinbeck, and his Nobel Prizewinning novel The Grapes I Love about people moving to California and prospering. Why can’t our ones do more of that sort of thing?
Who represents us, really? I’m told that anyone wearing a black singlet represents me, but I don’t feel it. Their success shows their athleticism, their guts, their magic, but this idea that they embody my country makes me uneasy.
‘‘They’’, not ‘‘us’’ win the Rugby World Cup and the America’s Cup. ‘‘They’’ are the ones who have to live with being one point away from winning and still losing nine times in a row. I don’t need to belong.
Anything that has the noise of a crowd saying ‘‘hooray for us’’ also has the thud of a drumbeat and marching boots.
Someone else, expressing an opinion this week, said about the Afghanistan inquiry: ‘‘I’m going to take the word of our military that their conduct was right every time. And you know what? It sounds brutal, but I’d rather it was one of them – even a civilian – than one of ours.’’
Some people might admire that sort of blind devotion. I call it scary as f ....
@DavidSlack
What kind of weird system do we have going on in New Zealand that could be turning out artists with ideas and observations?