Tapu Misa: Cultural tensions need putting in international context

COMMENT

It has not required a great deal of perspicacity to deduce that the climate has changed. I'd felt it even as I boarded a plane for warmer, friendlier climes more than a week ago, feeling uneasy about what was happening at home.

This had nothing to do with the gathering storm clouds that went on to lash the North Island last week, though that seemed oddly symptomatic of the national mood.

I'd felt the change in recent weeks, as my email inbox exploded with hate mail of increasing intensity and virulence, some so wacko I'm still not sure if they were serious. Could the North Shore schoolteacher who wrote me what was otherwise a polite letter really mean it when he described Maori as "an awful, scum race", or did I miss the satirical disclaimer?

I'd felt it as I listened to Canon Hone Kaa telling Carol Archie on Mana News that many Maori were hurt and angered by the way they'd been highlighted as a political football, a plaything for politicians.

How was it possible not to be disheartened by the declaration at Orewa that there is no homogenous, distinct Maori population - we have been a melting pot since the 19th century? Or not to see it as another example of the chasm that exists between the views of those who know in their bones what it means to be Maori and the Pakeha one espoused by Brash.

He gives us the idea, says Hone Kaa, that he wants us to disappear.

It's not just Brash's dismissive tone which made us queasy, but the avalanche of support for him. A Pakeha friend rang, depressed, the day after a Holmes poll registered a record number of Brash supporters. Another reported her dismay that a ZM text poll of what was supposedly a younger, more liberal audience came up with the same results.

And I, well, I'd started to look at people a little differently over the past few weeks, wondering just how far that chasm between us stretched.

Imagine then how difficult it has been for some Maori, many of whom, says Hone Kaa, are now finding their relationships with their Pakeha neighbours and workmates coming under increasing strain.

It has raised suspicion between two people - it's always been there but ... for many Maori its having to work through the negative aspects of that.

The tensions haven't just been between Pakeha and Maori. I know of at least one office where the debates have been fierce; of one husband and wife barely talking after taking opposite positions. A friend of mine says it's not something she can even begin to talk to her father and father-in-law about, so entrenched are they in their views.

So it seemed almost a relief to escape all this in Fiji.

Fiji, of course, is one of those culturally divided societies that some commentators like to frighten us with. Like Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and other hotspots of racial tension, it's where we are said to be headed if we continue on our supposedly separatist route.

Frankly, I've never thought that the comparisons held much water, given our very different histories and circumstances. In Fiji, for example, there has been no melting pot, and little common ground. As our Fijian tour host explained, Hindus marry Hindus, and Muslims Muslims. The Fijians, he said, we marry anybody.

There was, though, evidence of more Fijian men marrying Indian girls, he said. So we have hope.

Which is not to say we don't have some similarities.

At last week's get-together of Commonwealth broadcasters from more than 45 countries, I began to see the connective tissue, the commonalities that link a widely disparate bunch of African, Asian, Pacific, European and other countries in an association that, remarkably, still has meaning today.

Never mind that it's a relationship based, ironically enough, on our shared histories as former colonies of the British Empire, and that many of us are still emerging from that legacy.

After a week of communing with people so distant that their journeys to this part of the world had taken three days, of listening to the English language spoken in 45 different accents, of hearing the struggles of each to forge national identities, to unite diverse and sometimes deeply divided communities - I couldn't help but think that anything which could bring so many different people together, to share knowledge and ideas, was worth preserving, no matter the chequered history that gave birth to it.

It seemed to me also that when it comes to the challenges posed by diversity, we in New Zealand don't know the half of it.

Our problems seem entirely surmountable compared to those of, for example, the Solomon Islands, which have 80 distinct languages and many dialects besides - a veritable Tower of Babel. Johnson Honimae, general manager of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, told us his father spoke one language, his mother another, and that even within his mother's own village, there had been a second language spoken. And as with languages, so with customs and traditions.

The challenge, as one speaker opined, was to embrace rather than just tolerate differences.

For me, a young Indo Fijian man epitomised that ideal. James Bhagwan, a budding film-maker, is a first generation Fiji citizen, born three years after Fiji became independent of Britain.

It was the fact that he wore the traditional Fijian sulu, a formal lavalava, that caught my eye. He told me later that it was a political statement that he decided to make after the first coup.

He was just a teenager, still at school, but even then he could see that the way forward was not to retreat to a position of cultural isolation, but to reach across the divide. For him, wearing the sulu is a public declaration of his identification with his Fijian neighbours and his birthplace; of his pride in his identity as a Pacific Islander. It's the same kind of declaration that some Pakeha make when they choose to learn the Maori language.

James admits that he's a relatively rare breed, that among many of his Indian peers there's not the same sense of connection. But he's optimistic. More importantly, he's prepared to do something about it, by making films that offer hope and solutions.