Vol. 8 No. 22 · 18 December 1986
pages 20-22 | 3440 words
War Book
C.K. Stead
- The Matriarch by Witi Ihimaera
Heinemann, 456 pp, £10.95, July 1986, ISBN 0 434 36504 1
My grandmother, who was born about 1880, was proud of the fact that both her parents were born in New Zealand. It made her, she used to say, ‘a real Pig Islander’. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in 1834, to a Select Committee of the House of Lords looking into ‘the State of the Islands of New Zealand’. I found that he had defended the acquisition of land by missionaries, saying – a familiar argument later on – that they had no other way, in that remote place, of providing a future for their children.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 9 No. 5 · 5 March 1987
From Lawrence Hogben
SIR: There are only three million of us New Zealanders. So our writers presumably wish their communications to reach a wider audience than their home country. But why do they persist in writing English which requires you to supply a glossary to enable it to be understood by your readers? Anyone appreciates new words which introduce a new idea, or a new way of looking at an old idea, or a new organisation of ideas, but why use incomprehensible Maori for existing English words? For example, C.K. Stead, in his excellent review of The Matriarch, quotes an extract in which the word whanau occurs twice without explanation (LRB, 18 December 1986). I challenge any reader not born, schooled and universitied among Maoris as I was to explain that by ‘the whanau’ Ihimaera is saying ‘the social group’. He has obscured the meaning of a moving and important passage; and Stead himself repeatedly dims the force of his interesting argument by the use of Maori instead of English. Are we New Zealand writers, European and Maori, trying to prove superiority over the Pom who can’t understand Maori? Or are we obscurely expressing our guilty conscience about the Maori land taken over in past years? Certainly our linguistic affectation is hiding the merit of what we have to say and getting on the wick of our readers.
Lawrence Hogben
Crest, France
