Lit Review #3

“Imagining Decolonisation” by Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Rebecca Kiddle, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton, and Amanda Thomas.

The contributing authors to “Imagining Decolonisation” explore the ways that embracing decolonisation can be beneficial for both Māori and Pākehā in Aotearoa New Zealand. They explain how the process of colonisation has been brutal for Māori through loss of life, land, language, and community. It has left a legacy of inequities, hurt, grief, and guilt that continue to impact Māori and Pākehā today. The term ‘decolonisation’ can be divisive and confronting for those who haven’t fully understood the ways in which it can be a process of restoration and redress, with the potential to create a fairer system for everyone who shares this land.

Using the example of Indonesia (previously the Dutch East Indies), Ocean Ripeka Mercier (Ngāti Porou) points out that those who were once colonised can become colonisers themselves.[1] This idea particularly resonates with me. My great-grandfather, James Griffin, was from a farming family in Galway, Ireland. Ireland was the first place to be colonised by the British. It was the testing ground for techniques used to subjugate the Indigenous population by outlawing their religion, language, and preventing them from owning land.[2] Their culture and way of life was crushed, resulting in famine, poverty, and hopelessness. Out of desperation, James escaped Ireland, first to Australia, then to New Zealand, where he met my great-grandmother who was born here. They married and acquired a tract of remote farmland by ballot – land that would almost certainly have been taken from Māori. For the first time since the introduction of the Penal Laws in Ireland in 1692 banning Catholics “from owning land, educating and raising their children as Catholic … or holding public office”,[3] my family had a chance to build a home free from tyranny, but at the expense of the Indigenous people of this land. The colonised had become the coloniser.

In her chapter “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone”, Rebecca Kiddle (Ngāti Porou, Ngāpuhi) recognises the intergenerational trauma affecting many Pākehā whose ancestors had been marginalised and forced from their homelands and loved ones.[4] She argues that many Pākehā who sought better lives here rarely “turned back to acknowledge their roots,”[5] resulting in a weakening of their ethnic identity. This was not the case in my family. James Griffin, having had his family, religion, language, and land taken from him in Ireland created his own isolated version of Ireland in the King Country. He kept to himself and his family, and never allowed his photograph to be taken. With the British running the show here in New Zealand I wonder if he always feared that they would take it all away from him again. He and his wife worked the farm, raised ten children in the Catholic faith, and passed on to them his distrust of authority and all things English. They no longer spoke Gaelic but held on to story telling and humour. The farm was sold off many years ago. What little remains of Irish identity in my family is tied to a respect for the land of this country, cultural Catholicism, stories, humour, and skin cancer. Immigration is faster than evolution, and our genetically Irish complexions don’t fare well in the Aotearoa sun.

Kiddle states that “Pākehā typically report weaker ethnic identity than minorities, and often define themselves in terms of the superordinate national identity,”[6] which brings to mind Cultural Day at my kids’ primary school. One day a year all the kids get to come to school dressed in their cultural costume. It’s a beautiful day of piupiu, tupenu, puletasi, saris and cheongsams and then there’s the Pākehā kids. Most wear mufti and there’s the occasional All Blacks, English, or Irish rugby jersey.  My two non-sporty sons just wanted to wear all black. They are the fifth generation of my family to be born here, neither Irish nor Māori, not comfortable with claiming the ethnic identity of either. They looked like chalk boards waiting to be drawn on.

The idea of decolonisation can feel threatening to Pākehā because we sit in this cultural limbo with our “precarious identity”[7], born in a land we love but uncomfortable in the knowledge that it came to us at the expense of the Indigenous people here. In the final chapters of this book, Amanda Thomas (Pākehā) and Moana Jackson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rongamaiwahine, Ngāti Porou) discuss ways that we can work to move forward by embracing this discomfort. We need to be open to dismantling, untangling, and stripping away in order to re-assemble, restore and re-honour. It will require learning and listening on both sides, with Pākehā always being mindful of who will benefit most from the actions we take. Engaging in this process, Thomas suggests will “help Pākehā better understand who we are,”[8] and perhaps by being more secure in our sense of identity and belonging we will be less threatened and defensive about decolonisation.

Dismantling can be a messy process but perhaps less so when at the core of the mess is a robust treaty that should have been honoured in the first place. The problem wasn’t with Te Tiriti but with the Crown’s refusal to honour it, so it’s as good a place to start as any. In 2010, the Matike Mai Group on Constitutional Transformation was formed, with Moana Jackson as Convenor. Their brief was to “develop new constitutional models based on tikanga, He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti.”[9] At the heart of the models discussed at the various hui were relationships - Māori making decisions for Māori, the Crown making decisions for its people, and a relational space of interdependence where Māori and Pākehā will work together as equals.[10] Jackson advises that if this constitutional transformation is anchored in valuing place, tikanga, community, balance, and conciliation, it could be “one way in which the ethic of restoration may be achieved.” [11]

[1] Ocean Ripeka Mercier, “What is Decolonisation?” in Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 48.

[2] Aziz Rahman, Mary Anne Clarke, and Sean Byrne, “The Art of Breaking People Down: The British Colonial Model in Ireland and Canada,” Peace Research, vol. 49, No. 2 (2017): 16, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44779905, accessed 13 March 2024.

[3] Aziz, Clarke, and Byrne, “The Art of Breaking People Down,” 16.

[4] Rebecca Kiddle, “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone,” in Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 87.

[5] Kiddle, “Colonisation Sucks for Everyone,” 87.

[6] Ibid., 84.

[7] Ibid., 93.

[8] Amanda Thomas, “Pākehā and Doing the Work of Decolonisation,” in Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020),109.

[9] Moana Jackson, “Where to Next? Decolonisation and Stories in the Land,” in Imagining Decolonisation, ed. Anna Hodge (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2020), 151.

[10] “About,” Matike Mai Aotearoa, https://matikemai.maori.nz/matike-mai-aotearoa/, accessed 7 May, 2024.

[11] Moana Jackson, “Where to Next?,” 152-153.

Lit Review #4

dOCUMENTA (13) The Book of Books, Catalog 1/3

Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, “The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time.” pp 30-46.

“The Book of Books” is the first of three publications accompanying dOCUMENTA (13), held in Kassel, Alexandria/Cairo, Banff, and Kabul in 2012. The massive 768-page tome contains 101 notebooks from the participants of the exhibition, which were part of the 100 Notes-100 Thoughts editorial project published in many small editions over the two years leading up to the main event in 2012. This essay, written by the curator of the exhibition, Artistic Director Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, established the ideas and conditions that formed the foundation of dOCUMENTA (13).  It functioned as a press-release of sorts, providing background information for the public, viewers, and reviewers alike, enabling a deeper understanding of what it was to witness the many layers, art or not, of this exhibition.

Christov-Bakargiev described dOCUMENTA (13) primarily as a “state of mind.”[1] It required participants and viewers to attempt to step away from anthropocentric thinking and try instead to consider knowledge from the non-human world. To do this entailed humility and a shift in mindset.[2] A willingness to become more porous and allow ourselves to accept an unfamiliar perspective. One that necessitates a levelling out of the traditional hierarchies of existence that we have created, so that rather than looking down we stand alongside. To cultivate the non-anthropocentric perspective, consideration was given to moments of trauma or turning points in the world, “moments when relations intersect(ed) with things.”[3] For Christov-Bakargiev, there is greater potential for us and the planet if we operate on a basis of mutual trust and respect with all things that share the world.

The exhibition included a broad range of participants and territories. Rather than only artists, contributors included scientists, philosophers, economic and political theorists, anthropologists, writers, poets, and literary theorists. They represented a wide scope of human and non-human agents brought together in various times and places creating what Christov-Bakargiev referred to as an “un-harmonic and frenetic”[4] choreography that relied on dis-placedness to make a simultaneous experience for the viewer impossible. Allowing these different disciplines to flow and collide with one another through time and space, shifted the emphasis from finding answers and reaching end points to engaging in research and opening up an array of discourses. Doubt and a healthy scepticism were encouraged as “the suspension of judgement is not a closure – it opens the space of the propositional.”[5]

Throughout this essay Christov-Bakargiev often refers to the negative impacts brought upon us by computer technology and the internet. Her curatorial approach actively worked against the expectations of “speed and simultaneity and short attention spans”[6] provided by the digital age, making experience “increasingly indirect.”[7] She proposed four conditions through which the exhibition could be expressed; conditions relating to the way that participants operated in the world. These conditions were, under siege, on retreat, in a state of hope or optimism, and on stage. They each related to the four separate locations for dOCUMENTA (13) and also related to time. Under siege was a compression of time, retreat a suspension, hope a sense of future time, and on stage a present state of time.[8]

Time was able to expand and contract throughout the four year schedule of events and locations of the exhibition as well as the choice of exhibits, which included the “Bactrian Princesses (2500-1500B.C.).”[9] These ancient artifacts carved from stone, are made up of separate parts that are held precariously together by slots and notches. For Christov-Bakargiev “they define for us not the digital but the grounded nature of embodied life, as well as the precariousness of all bodies, including bodies of culture.”[10] In one artefact they represent the state of simultaneous collapse and recovery in which the world finds itself - an ancient representation of a current situation.

Christov-Bakargiev’s reveals in this essay that her approach for dOCUMENTA (13) was to shake things up. She wanted to pick at things that are problematic, difficult, and bumpy rather than smooth them over with a seamless display of spectacle and linear narratives. With thematic threads of time and place weaving through her ideas, she embraced rupture, discomfort, and dislocation, setting up conditions of dissonance to search for harmony, and in doing so demonstrated that art has the potential to initiate social change.

[1] Caroline Christov-Bakargiev, “The dance was very frenetic, lively, rattling, clanging, rolling, contorted, and lasted for a long time,” in The Book of Books, ed. Katrin Sauerländer (Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2012), 31.

[2] Christov-Bakargiev, “The dance,” 31.

[3] Ibid., 31.

[4] Ibid., 31.

[5] Ibid., 37.

[6] Ibid., 31.

[7] Ibid., 35.

[8] Ibid., 35.

[9] Ibid., 35.

[10] Ibid., 36.