The Ockham Novel of the Year and Why Soulless Pakeha Must Not Be Allowed Control of Water.
Writer Catherine Chidgey won New Zealand’s Ockham book prize of the year this week with her novel The Axeman’s Carnival. Congratulations to Ms Chidgey, getting a novel to publishing stage is a Herculean task, let alone then be published and taking out New Zealand’s premiere literary prize. As I read the Ockham winner every year it goes onto the buy list.
But that is not what this post is about. The morning after the awards, Ockham themselves posted of Chidgey’s success with a link to this review of her book by Jane Stafford, Professor of English at Victoria University. The opening sentence of that review is this:
“It is difficult for Pākehā writers to do the spiritual, although they have often felt the need to.”
It’s sad the academic framing and dare I say, critical evaluation, of our literature has come down to politicised de-constructed polemic rot like this, given how important a literature is to society. Albeit one of literature’s heavy loads is to show ourselves who we are, and I guess it does that.
Follow the narrative of this myth making: only Maori have spirituality while pakeha, apparently, are soulless vampire squids.
Ergo, only Maori have a spiritual and somehow mystical link to the land and the water, and so only they can possibly have conservation values.
Ergo Three Waters.
Ergo Maori-governance.
Ergo end of a free society and a long fought for civilised Westminster democracy and rule of law, to give way to a chaos of warring tribes - figuratively and possibly literally - graft and corruption.
See how the Theybies do it?