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The new marriage equality law, which goes into effect in August 2013, also allows same-sex couples to adopt children. Their marriages are also recognized in other countries. With the passing of the legislation, New Zealand becomes the 13th country in the world where same-sex marriage is legal. | The new marriage equality law, which goes into effect in August 2013, also allows same-sex couples to adopt children. Their marriages are also recognized in other countries. With the passing of the legislation, New Zealand becomes the 13th country in the world where same-sex marriage is legal. | ||
==Literature of New Zealand== | |||
'''Maori narrative: the oral tradition''' | |||
Like all Polynesian peoples, the Maori, who began to occupy the islands now called New Zealand about 1,000 years ago, composed, memorized, and performed laments, love poems, war chants, and prayers. They also developed a mythology to explain and record their own past and the legends of their gods and tribal heroes. As settlement developed through the 19th century, Europeans collected many of these poems and stories and copied them in the Maori language. The most picturesque myths and legends, translated into English and published in collections with titles like Maori Fairy Tales (1908; by Johannes Carl Andersen), were read to, or by, Pakeha (European) children, so that some—such as the legend of the lovers Hinemoa and Tutanekai or the exploits of the man-god Maui, who fished up the North Island from the sea and tamed the sun—became widely known among the population at large. | |||
Oratory on the marae (tribal meeting place), involving voice, facial expression, and gesture, was, and continues to be, an important part of Maori culture; it is difficult to make a clear distinction, such as exists in written literatures, between text and performance. Nor was authorship always attributable. And the Maori sense of time was such that legend did not take the hearer back into the past but rather brought the past forward into the present, making the events described contemporary. | |||
Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the Maori people, disastrously affected by European “minor” diseases to which they had only weak resistance, appeared to be in decline, and European scholars recorded as much Maori legend as they could, believing that the Maori would die out and that their oral culture, highly figurative and often of rare poetic beauty, deserved preservation. Some of this material was published; a great deal more was stored in libraries and is studied today, not least by Maori students and scholars intent on recovering their own cultural past. | |||
Although Maori individuals and groups have become notable performers of various kinds of European music, their traditional music also survives. To the 19th-century European ear, the words of Maori poetry were impressive and beautiful, but the music was “tuneless and monotonous” and tended to be ignored. It is, however, inseparable from the words, and the scholars Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell were the first to publish text and music together. McLean and Orbell distinguished three kinds of waiata (songs): waiata tangi (laments—for the dead, but also for other kinds of loss or misfortune), waiata aroha (songs about the nature of love—not only sexual love but also love of place or kin), and waiata whaiaaipo (songs of courtship or praise of the beloved). In addition, there are pao (gossip songs), poi (songs accompanying a dance performed with balls attached to flax strings, swung rhythmically), oriori (songs composed for young children of chiefly or warrior descent, to help them learn their heritage), and karanga (somewhere between song and chant, performed by women welcoming or farewelling visitors on the marae). Some chants are recited rather than sung. These include karakia (forms of incantation invoking a power to protect or to assist the chanter), paatere (chants by women in rebuttal of gossip or slander, asserting the performer’s high lineage and threatening her detractors), kaioraora (expressions of hatred and abuse of an enemy, promising terrible revenge), and the haka (a chant accompanied by rhythmic movements, stamping, and fierce gestures, the most famous of these being war dances that incorporate stylized violence). In every aspect of this tradition, the texts, which in pre-European times survived through memorization, were inseparable from gestures and sometimes music. The most widely used modern development of these traditional forms is the waiata-a-ringa (action song), which fits graceful movements to popular European melodies. | |||
'''Modern Maori literature''' | |||
Until the 1970s there was almost no connection between the classical Maori tradition, preserved largely as a historical record, and the development of a postcolonial English-language literature of New Zealand. When Maori writers began to appear after World War II, they wrote in English, and the most notable of them knew little or nothing of the Maori language. In 1966 Jacqueline Sturm, wife of the poet James K. Baxter, became the first Maori writer to appear in a major anthology of New Zealand short stories. By that time, Hone Tuwhare, the first Maori poet to make a strong impression in English, had published his first book, No Ordinary Sun (1964). Witi Ihimaera’s short stories, collected in Pounamu, Pounamu (1972; “Greenstone, Greenstone”), and his novel Tangi (1973) seemed finally to establish Maori writers as part of modern New Zealand writing. The Whale Rider (1987; film 2002) gained Ihimaera an international readership. Patricia Grace’s narratives of Maori life—Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), The Dream Sleepers, and Other Stories (1980), Potiki (1986)—were very widely read, especially in schools as part of a broad effort in New Zealand to encourage the study of Maori writing. And Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983), winner of Britain’s Booker Prize in 1985, probably outsold, both at home and abroad, any other book written during the postwar period. In the work of these writers, the language is English, the forms (particularly in fiction) are European, and “Maoriness” is partly a matter of subject, partly of sensibility, and partly (as in the case of Hulme, who has only one Maori great-grandparent and who changed her given name from Kerry to Keri) sympathetic identification. | |||
But, increasingly through the 1980s, there was a tendency to politicize Maori issues in literature, something seen clearly in Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986) and in some of the later fictions of Grace, where the misfortunes of the Maori are laid, sometimes angrily, at the Pakeha door. A reaction against this came from Maori novelist Alan Duff—author of Once Were Warriors (1990; film 1994)—who argued that the Maori must take responsibility for their own failures and find the means to correct them and who spoke somewhat scornfully of his fellow Maori writers, saying that they sentimentalize Maori life. This polarization within the Maori literary community continued with the publication of Grace’s Cousins (1992) and Ihimaera’s Bulibasha (1994) on the one hand, both of which present positive images of a people who were damaged by colonialism and racism but who are fighting back, and with Duff’s What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? (1996) on the other hand, in which salvation for the Maori is again seen as lying within integration, education, and acceptance of individual responsibility. Duff’s controversial view was taken further in his autobiographical Out of the Mist and Steam (1999), in which his abusive Maori mother seems intended to be seen as typical while his bookish, intellectual Pakeha father represents a path of escape from the cycle of violence, failure, and despair. In the 1990s, after more than two decades of marriage and as the father of two daughters, Ihimaera publicly acknowledged his homosexuality; this added a further dimension not so much to his work itself but to the way it is read and the kind of interest taken in it. | |||
A different form of politicization has come from Maori poets, some of whom rediscovered, partly through academic study, the classic forms of Maori poetry and returned to them in the Maori language. Since there are only a few thousand fluent speakers of the language (government statistics from 2001 said something over 10,000 adult Maori claimed to speak the language “well” or “very well”), this has been seen by some as an exercise in self-limitation, while to others it appears to be a brave assertion of identity; anthologies of New Zealand poetry now include examples of these new poets’ work in Maori with translations into English. Of the Maori poets writing in English, Robert Sullivan is the one whose work attracted the most attention at the turn of the 21st century. | |||
Maori character and tradition have also found expression in the theatre, in plays written predominantly in English but with injections of Maori. Among the best of these works are Hone Kouka’s Nga tangata toa (published 1994; “The Warrior People”) and Waiora (published 1997; “Health”). | |||
'''Pakeha (European) literature'''' | |||
Modern discussions of New Zealand literature have not given much attention to the 19th century. Immigrant writers were Britishers abroad. Only those born in the “new” land could see it as New Zealanders; and even they, for most of the first 100 years of settlement (1820–1920), had to make conscious efforts to relocate the imagination and adapt the literary tradition to its new home. It is not surprising, then, that the most notable 19th-century writing is found not in poetry and fiction but rather in letters, journals, and factual accounts, such as Lady Mary Anne Barker’s Station Life in New Zealand (1870), Samuel Butler’s A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863), and, perhaps most notably, Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863). | |||
The best of the 19th-century poets include Alfred Domett, whose Ranolf and Amohia (1872) was a brave if premature attempt to discover epic material in the new land; John Barr, a Scottish dialect poet in the tradition of Robert Burns; David McKee Wright, who echoed the Australian bush ballad tradition; and William Pember Reeves, born in New Zealand, who rose to be a government minister and then retired to Britain, where he wrote nostalgic poems in the voice of a colonist. They were competent versifiers and rhymers, interesting for what they record. But none of the poets stands out until the 20th century, the first being Blanche Edith Baughan (Reuben, and Other Poems [1903]), followed by R.A.K. Mason (In the Manner of Men [1923] and Collected Poems [1962]) and Mary Ursula Bethell (From a Garden in the Antipodes [1929] and Collected Poems [1950]). | |||
New Zealand literature, it might be said, was making a slow and seemly appearance, but already the whole historical process had been preempted by one brief life—that of Katherine Mansfield (born Kathleen Beauchamp), who died in 1923 at age 34, having laid the foundations for a reputation that has gone on to grow and influence the development of New Zealand literature ever since. Impatient at the limitations of colonial life, she relocated to London in 1908, published her first book of short stories (In a German Pension [1911]) at age 22, and, for the 12 years remaining to her, lived a life whose complicated threads have, since her death, seen her reappearing in the biographies, letters, and journals of writers as famous as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and D.H. Lawrence. More important, she “altered for good and all” (in the words of the British writer Elizabeth Bowen) “our idea of what goes to make a story.” Two additional books published in her lifetime (Bliss and Other Stories [1920] and The Garden Party, and Other Stories [1922]) were followed by posthumously published stories, collections of poems, literary criticism, letters, and journals. She became for a time a major figure, faded for two decades, and was rediscovered in the 1970s by feminists and by scholars examining the Bloomsbury group. It seemed, from any perspective, that Mansfield remained a New Zealand writer whose best work was that in which she had re-created the country and family she had grown up in. | |||
Mansfield once wrote, “I want to make my own country leap in the eyes of the Old World”—and she did it. She also made the short story respectable, established it as a form sufficient in itself for a writer’s reputation to rest on, and made it a staple of New Zealand writing. But she never completed a novel. | |||
The first important New Zealand novels came from two writers whose scene was northern New Zealand: William Satchell (The Land of the Lost [1902], The Toll of the Bush [1905], and The Greenstone Door [1914]) and Jane Mander (The Story of a New Zealand River [1920]). They were followed by John A. Lee, whose Children of the Poor (1934), mixing fiction and oratory, was drawn from his own experience of childhood poverty in the South Island; Robin Hyde, who in The Godwits Fly (1938) still wrestled with the sense of colonial isolation; and John Mulgan, whose Man Alone (1939) held in balance both the colonial romanticism of the solitary figure in the empty landscape and the leftist romanticism of “men moving together” to change the world. In the 1930s Ngaio Marsh began publishing the detective novels for which she became internationally known. | |||
'''[[New Zealand Post-World War II]]''' | |||