May I echo the inimitable Queen of Thorns, and say how great it is that MÄori Language Week is being so well observed. Labour MPs on Red Alert are posting in te reo; Nickelodeon has done Spongebob Squarepants in MÄori; Lockwood Smith is reading the Parliamentary prayer in MÄori and Te Ururoa Flavell on Tuesday raised a point of order during Question Time (in MÄori, no less!) to insist that the Minister of Transport pronounce “Kamo” as “Kamo” rather then “Carmow”. Even David Farrar has a post in MÄori, and on that count he beats me at least. Well done.
Such usage is the thin edge of a wedge of linguistic diversity becoming normalised in Aotearoa. The wedge was first driven long ago, but one of the more memorable blows was struck by the venerable Naida Glavish who (working as a tolls operator) got in trouble for answering the phone ‘kia ora’ and generated great and unexpected support. When returning sick and exhausted, with no money and a broken shoulder from a long and abortive road trip across Asia (more on which another time), I could have hugged the (PÄkehÄ) Air NZ cabin steward who greeted me with ‘Kia ora, bro, welcome home’. The NZ Herald has redesigned their masthead in MÄori (though I can’t find a copy of it on the website just now). MÄori introductions on National Radio and other media are commonplace these days and everyone knows what they mean. I recall the MÄori Language Week last year, or the year before, when they were formally instituted and then – the horror! – their usage continued after the end of the week. There was apparently a bit of a backlash against it, and Geoff Robinson read some messages calling for a return to English-only introductions. Robinson, bless his English heart, had one word for the complainers: “tough”.
And that’s all they deserve. My high school German teacher had a banner above her blackboard which read “Monolingualism can be cured”, and it can be. Other languages must be used to be known, and normalisation is the first part of usage. Raymond Huo, also on Red Alert, is posting in ZhÅng Wén; it is wonderful.
It goes beyond language, as well. Cultures, norms and ways of doing, approaches and modes of understanding are not monopolised by English-speaking WASP culture. I wrote earlier this year about a book by John Newton about James K Baxter and the Jerusalem commune – it is called “The Double Rainbow” and has been published. The title is Baxter’s, and Newton explains it in the introduction:
The double rainbow is Baxter’s symbol for a mutually regenerative bicultural relationship. He recognised that the PÄkehÄ majority ignored MÄori culture, not just to the cost of MÄori – though few PÄkehÄ have seen this more clearly or objected more trenchantly – but also to its own detriment. PÄkehÄ, he wrote in 1969, a few months before he first moved to Jerusalem, ‘have lived alongside a psychologically rich and varied minority culture for a hundred years and have taken nothing from it but a few place names and a great deal of plunder.’
Diversity is both a means and an end. It is a means by which people may understand one another and live in harmony and all such wishy-washiness; but more importantly, it is an end in itself because two heads are better than one, every culture has its own irrationalities and blind spots and deleterious foibles. Humankind has achieved its primacy as a species through the constant adaptation of cultural and biological systems which spread risk rather than concentrating it. Monocultures are vulnerable; they may be unified and may even be strong against certain threats, but against uncertainty, or against threats or challenges of an unknown or unpredictable nature, homogeneity a weakness rather than a strength. Diversity is resilience. If you won’t believe me, take it from Robert A Heinlein:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Who wants a society of insects?
L
I will be scarce around these parts for the next few weeks because I am trading my beloved south coast for the one to the north-west, having bought a house in the ‘burbs. Three bedrooms and a garage, a character doer-upper with good bones which we got for a good price, our own half-gallon quarter-acre pavlova paradise. On Friday I suppose I will officially be middle-class, as if I wasn’t already. Before I know it I’ll be caring about things like whipper-snappers tagging my fence and rates and tree-pruning restrictions. Before then, I have to figure out how to move house with an increasingly mobile and ingenious nine-month-old.