Poetry Friday

This poem I’ve taken from the pages of a Maori cultural magazine that was published in New Zealand, after a talk by Chadwick Allen about this and some other poems. As its web page puts it:

“Te Ao Hou was published from 1952 to 1976 by the Māori Affairs Department in New Zealand Aotearoa. According to its first editorial, Te Ao Hou aimed “to provide interesting and informative reading for Maori homes … like a marae on paper, where all questions of interest to the Maori can be discussed.”

 The government publishers wanted it to be a version of a journal put out by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the states, which as their memos reveal, would pretend to be a cultural magazine but actually be a way of assimilating Maori into white New Zealand society. Apparently it didn’t work out very well; the Maori found ways of making it into an expression of Maori identity and resistance to assimilation.  Professor Allen made the argument that this poem is an example.

One of the things that’s interesting about a poem like this one is the way that tropes like the knife and fork (the classic items of civilization) get transmuted into Maori symbols; left and right have great significance in Maori symbology and what seems to be about table manners could actually be referencing that (and note, by the way, how schematically divided the various images are, with clear lines dividing left from right). Also, the image at the top resembles a marae (a maori meeting house) and the maori word for bone (”Iwi”) is the same as the word for family, so that top image is a wonderful kind of figure both for the fish that has been eaten and the bones of the ancestors, which a marae meeting house is a carven representation of: the rafters actually are the bones of the ancestors, maybe like the way communion wafers actually are the blood and body of christ.  Which is not an innappropriate comparison, perhaps, given the importance of christianity itself to the “civilizing the native” paradigm…  What kind of communion is this? 

from:

http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/teaohou/image/Mao40TeA/Mao40TeA004.html