Under Heartbeat City's golden sun: Māori and the margins of performing the ultimate urban (original) (raw)

When the vestiges of vacant anthills empty mouths of mother-tongues, and the porous paupers of potbellied princesses parade facades of ferocity on TV screens, how do our broken hearts continue to beat? Bash and crash our lives onto concrete, metal tensions tire as our home-hearth fires dwindle like deadened sunsets. And yet, a golden-skinned hue of hope hearkens. If our genealogies are our bodies, they bare themselves to witness the warmth of bitumen and tar, far removed from the wharetangata, or womb, of our browned and ancient wisdoms. In trekking the mass urbanisation of Māori people from traditional village nations, into warring global cities of cultural cataclysm, this research identifies the visage of neo post-colony brethren. It seeks to stir the coals of the cityscape; the escape from Absalom’s promised promenades, to describe potential futures for people pushed to the margins of mediocrity. Academic modes require degrees of distance and assume an impartial stance as a lens toward unhindered logic and cold objectivity. However, this chapter presents creative practice research as a means to empower multiple liquid realities within frozen concrete spaces. Māori scholar Carl Mika, explains how discussions of Indigenous theory amidst those that birth from the West, both veil and bring into being latent spaces of potential (Mika, 2013, p.24). To awaken that which might appear dormant, this chaper locates the writer viscous within sites of seeming marginality; theory can both ensnare and unshackle the observer who is also subject. Creativity is a marginalised form of embodied academic inquiry, but one that can liberate covert forms of knowledge. This chapter makes an assertive stand for the logic embedded in emotion. Within, I shift between subjective and objective positions, and emphasise words as abstract machines that close and open space (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p.62). A shifting vantage gives voice to marginalised knowledge unique to the oppressed. Initially, ways that Māori are ostracised from mainstream Aotearoa New Zealand culture is described. Contemporary lines of flight are narrated as strategies toward tino rangatiratanga, or self-determination but sovereignty is no simple strategy; liberatory outcomes can evade discovery until a critical mass of change tips the balance of power. In this chapter I offer creative knowledge as equipoise, a means to stabilise transcultural insecurity. Here, focus is given to friendship, partnership and connective ways of being. Finally, both the process of raranga and the concept of whakapapa are detailed as praxis. Raranga, the practice of traditional Māori weaving, is described as a research methodology grounded through its own knowledge matrix. Likewise, whakapapa, the Māori concept of relating, is discussed as Indigenous assemblage thinking. Māori scholar Leonie Pihama asserts; ‘[w]hakapapa is regarded as an analytic tool that has been employed by our people as a means to understand our world and relationships’ (2010, p.5). Whakapapa relates Māori to every aspect of our reality and can reimage marginalised positions in globalised contexts. By assembling multiple forms of interpretation, this chapter explores the margins as providing agency for those who are bound within.