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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Maori Motif

The Maori Motif

Sirs: I was surprised by the cantankerous attack made by Mr Noel Hilliard in your November issue upon Curnow’s anthology. He is no doubt moved by most laudable indignation against racial discrimination; but like an enraged bull is prepared to charge anyone and anything. Since I am one of the poets whom he chastises for ignoring the benefits of Maori culture, I would like to make a few points evident about Maori-pakeha relationships and their bearing on New Zealand literature.

Mr Hilliard contends that the poets in Curnow’s anthology are gravely to blame because they do not write about Maoris. This is an absurd accusation. How many New Zealand poets have lived in pas, or in close contact with groups of Maoris? I know that until I was in my late teens, living in the Deep South, I had never met a Maori. For my sins he quotes a poem which I wrote at the age of sixteen, and which derives its Maori content from the usual history- book guff. Probably Mr Hilliard means rather that the pakeha poets should draw upon Maori mythological sources. They could; but they would find (as I have found) the myth of Odysseus just as applicable to New Zealand as the myth of Maui, and more familiar to an English-speaking audience. Perhaps Mr Hilliard has not considered the possibility that some New Zealand poets would feel it an impertinence to take over the intellectual chattels of a tribal civilisation with which they have no personal link and which their ancestors helped to destroy. The Kowhai Gold school of New Zealand poets have had no such compunction: their verse is liberally sprinkled with brown-eyed Rotorua wahines and pohutukawa blossom. I remember trying to write a poem about poi dancers whom I had seen at the Wellington Town Hall. I tried to evoke the shades of the marae; realised that my attitude was necessarily that of rootless sentimentality and fortunately gave up the struggle. If Mr Hilliard so wishes, I will post him the pencil draft.

A second point. Mr Hilliard compares Curnow’s choice to that of Matthiessen in America, whose anthology ‘contains not one line by a Negro poet’. So what. The Negro poets were writing in a dialect of English, and certainly should have been represented. But does he think that Curnow should have included canoe chants in ancient Maori? Or does he think that Andersen’s or Ngata’s translations, considered strictly on their merits, should have been included? Or does he think that there are some fine poetspage 116 of Maori blood writing about life in the pa or in terms of Maori mythology whom Curnow has inexcusably omitted? Let him consider the situation in Scotland. Much good Gaelic poetry was transmitted orally. It derived its significance and life from its relation to the clan community and to clan history and mythology. It died when the clans were deliberately destroyed by the Hanoverian Government. But was Burns gravely to blame because he did not use the mythology and cultural assets of a race to which he did not belong, albeit the Highland clans were suffering their death-pains a few days’ journey from where he lived? To him the Highlander was the man he saw in a pub or at a cattle market – ‘with his philibeg and his tartan plaid and many a tattered rag hanging over his bum’ – not the representative of tribal culture.

I think that Mr Hilliard would do well to study Beaglehole’s Some Modern Maoris or Finlayson’s Sweet Beulah Land, or simply to look around him, rather than to tilt at windmills – however good his intention. The matters which hit one in the eye concerning Maori-pakeha relationships are sociological ones; and our novelists have not neglected these. With all respect to those persons of integrity who have recently died, Sir Apirana Ngata, Sir Peter Buck, and Princess Te Puea, it is folly and blindness to rhapsodise about Maori culture at the end of a process which began when the first whaler met the first Maori; to praise the remnants of a tribal unity which our own deadpan civilisation has torn to shreds; in brief to cry over spilt milk when you know it will keep on spilling. We are not likely to take more from the Maoris than we have already taken – a number of museum artifacts, their land and their dignity. I speak with feeling because my wife and two children have their adequate share of Maori blood. But that does not make me an inheritor of Maori culture. If I ever write another poem about Maori matters I am sure Mr Hilliard will like it a good deal less than the one from which he quoted.

1952 (60)