World, get to know wahine toa

A haka, whoever performs it, can be a confronting thing.

After their triumphs and losses, the Sevens Sisters always have something to say. The haka after their second successive World Cup sevens victory, a feat later matched by the men’s team, has been called spinetingling and so it was.

Let’s not deny a sizeable number of people watching, for the first time or not, are likely to have found it unsettling. Maybe even repellent.

A haka, whoever performs it, can be a confronting thing.

That’s not the point of it, but nowhere is it written that a haka performance carries with it some sort of shaming requirement of all who might encounter it that ‘‘This is culturally sanctified so you have to honour it or at least shut up and endure it, or else we all know what that makes you . . .’’

No need for that malarky. Because when it’s performed right – and that’s not easy – a haka is the very opposite of something repellent or exclusionary. It commands attention for what it evokes from within individuals and what they then communicate. So, sure, some onlookers see mere belligerence, perhaps even savagery.

Or maybe they’re struck by the sheer passion they see, but nothing much more than that.

Or, we’d like to think, some might appreciate that there’s a deep connectivity, drawing on something more profound than just an intensity of emotion, going on here.

Honest reactions must be accepted as such and, even if we may find them uneducated, we kid ourselves if we think that people should, let alone could, be successfully scolded into looking deeper.

So it matters, it really does, that haka communicate well and draw people in. And in that respect the sevens women – and the Black Ferns – deliver well.

International crowds have become increasingly familiar with haka from New Zealand’s male teams. Women, not so much.

Stylistically it is no doubt unsettling for many to be seeing something they may associate with rampant masculinity being summonsed and given voice by strong women – wahine toa.

‘‘Must be banned,’’ one person tweeted. ‘‘It’s against rugby spirit.’’

‘‘The US guy next to (us) teared up to see this for the first time,’’ said another.

And it’s not just about victory. Fine though the Sevens Sisters’ one was in itself, does it really stand more memorably than the one which followed the utter disappointment of Rio in 2016 , performed by players whose cheeks were wet with tears?

We don’t need to look far afield to see examples haka communicating something other than bellicose aggression. Like this time last year when, after the infamy of rape-based boasting from some boys at Wellington College, students from that school and Wellington Girls’ College combined at kapa haka competitions a haka intended to recognise the anger that many young men feel, acknowledge the ugliness and cruelty that results, and offer ways to overcome it.

Kapa haka events are invaluable within our own society, and the further afield they can travel the better. (Just as we do well to be given the chance to see performances from other cultures in an up-close-and-personal way.)

For the most part, though, it’s our sporting men and women whose feats are likely to introduce increasing numbers of people worldwide to the haka. And if they do it as well as the Sevens Sisters, so much the better.