The Particularity and the Dream

THE PARTICULARITY AND THE DREAM

 

The impressively monikered Karl du Fresne

Has just given ‘social scientist’ Camille Nakhid

A good wigging for expressing the view

That immigrants should be given longer shrift.

 

Karl grew up in a small Hawkes Bay town

And he walks across his lawn every day

In the Wairarapa to write in his shed

For the Pakeha Establishment in Wellington.

 

Actually, I’m amazed at how tolerant

Our new immigrants are about how stuck

Up and up themselves the Old Chums

Are about their tightly-held corners.

 

And I think Karl is missing something

When he snides that we can safely assume

That people immigrate to New Zealand

Because it’s infinitely better than the place they left.

 

...

 

And I get pissed off when the Oxford Companion

Makes a big point of the fact that Allen Curnow

Was a fourth generation New Zealander

Who lived in a succession of Anglican vicarages in Canterbury.

 

And that the keepers of New Zealand literature

Quibble about whether Greville Texidor or Eve Langley

Exhibited a sufficiently restrictive desideratum

In articulating a New Zealand particularity or ‘common problem’.

 

And that Kendrick Smithyman slags

Tanned, earnest Slavic Polynesian faces

Or that David McKee Wright assumes that

The native who is a brother is a Pakeha.

 

Or that my beloved Iris Wilkinson

Talks so casually - so disparagingly about Nigger Jack ...

Or that Tariana Turia cites an enormous public ignorance

That is starting to become actual hostility towards Maori.

 

...

 

 

Time to give some ground, time to move on

Time to open things up and make some space.

Let’s face it, a quarter of us were born abroad

And then there are the more and more mixed.

 

Maybe the New Chums from Cambodia, Tonga

China, India, Iraq, Somalia, Nepal and Kingdom Come

Really need a bit more slack so that we can all pull together

 

To bring up the future with a golden tether.

 

The young, the best, the intelligent, brave and beautiful,

Have made a long migration under compulsions they hardly understand -

New generations are homing from distant shores

Imprinted with this destination by their dreams.

 

And an extraordinary thing may be happening.

From the edge of the universe, New Zealand

May become not only the site of our own dreams

But a place where the world wakes refreshed.