A long time back in Samoa, there were legendary stories of people leaving for New Zealand. Everyone knew the merits of moving off to a new land, indisputably colder than Samoa and a good deal younger, filled by palagi, or white people, with little culture but insufferably arrogant.
Leaving was such a wrench, accompanied with many tears and much grief at Faleolo airport. Go there now, and you would swear it was just an extension of the Auckland bus service. People now come and go between Auckland and Apia as a matter of weekly routine.
“Tofa,” some one calls, “see you next week…“Or the week after and who knows where, but, hey man, whatever.”
Samoans, occupied by Germans and New Zealanders in the colonial era, are now busy colonising New Zealand. I’ll concede it hasn’t been a painless process. For all that though, it is striking that New Zealand is a nation where we give all races, in the end, a go.
No, it is not perfect. I’ve seen at close quarters the aching, ridiculous discrimination against Indians when it comes to seeking employment. Each time I see an Indian taxi driver, or an Indian security guard I curse the stupidity of the nation of my birth for the wasted opportunity that each represents. We never quite seem to learn not to repeat the wastage with each new migrant.
Isolation, the central dominating reality of life here, blinds many to the opportunities that the latest band of migrants brings to New Zealand. In other words, I know why Indians have such a hard time getting jobs. So did others before them; it is the result of a stupid, blind, irritating feature of the secret superiority of the soul of white New Zealanders.
I admire people like Prayas, the Auckland Indian theatre group trying to reach and change that insular heart of New Zealand. It is a hard slog, but far from an impossible one if you were to reflect on the way in which the Samoa relationship with this country has so radically changed.
Prayas’ ideological head, Amit Ohdedar, wrote an interesting play last year, Khoj, which managed to discuss the Indian New Zealand experience in terms of how a chap approaches the toilet.
While the general topic gives me pause to smile (on a train to Delhi, I photographed that amusing sign “Gentleman will lift the seat” in Indian Rail toilet), I was uneasy over Khoj.
Not from an Indian perspective, but knowing that the white New Zealander, might see in it a justification of their own superiority.
A good review in The Listener – the indisputable White Man’s cultural totem – suggests my fears were wrong.
Others in Prayas bring a passion for the culture of Mother India, a kind of missionary zeal trying to overcome the poor New Zealander lost in a set of beliefs which says this is god’s own country.
I am mostly left in awe at the power of the belief in culture and art that those in Prayas hold close to them. No, its not a patronising admiration, rather it’s a recognition, born in part of a long experience of the New Zealand way, that Indians in the longer run, will be as important to this country as anybody else – and certainly as important and perhaps greater than my Irish/English forebears.
It is hard to understand Indians who complain about New Zealand and its attitudes toward them. In the short term, I can see the point; the job discrimination infuriates me and the occasional outbursts of crude racism are outrageous.
Yet, there is another side. This country, perhaps the planet’s last, is the classic tabula rasa. Indians can make of this country whatever they want.
We make of it what we can; no matter the origin or the race. No, the Southern Alps will never overshadow the Himalayas yet I know a Blockhouse Bay intermediate school Mumbai born kid who I would swear is set some day to be a prime minister of New Zealand, or a Nobel Prize scientist. Maybe both, she has that kind of talent.
And she’ll bring a millennium or two of Bharat culture with her, and she will be as Kiwi as Jonah Lomu.
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Michael Field is a senior journalist with Fairfax Media. A long time India lover, he has been visiting the country frequently indulging in his passion of travelling in trains and writing and photographing his travels. His latest book, Swimming with Sharks, an account of covering the South Pacific, will be published by Penguin in August.