This is the text of the poem depicted:
Brown Optimism
With dust of labour on a summer’s day
They slouched with careless stride of people come
From nowhere, going nowhere, smiling, tired,
And cursing with a laugh the pakeha
Veneer. For them life is a childish farce
To paint in white the brown which stains their lives.
Their ancient world is gone, and in the pa
The death of past traditions of a once
Proud race is mourned by age with mumbling gums
In soft tones of despised melodious tongue.
You seek your future in the white man’s joy;
You sing your songs to ape his foolish tune;
You change your rhythm to the jazz band’s beat;
And slave and sweat for coin so easily spent;
You play a losing game with loaded dice
And know no rules to help you win a chance;
While pakeha stands quietly waiting with
A smile, to move you at his will across
The draughtboard of his policy and faith.
A child went past; neglected, poorly clothed
In imitation of the white man’s dress.
Hard feet on hard road running in the heat
To spend the white man’s money in the white
Man’s store. And what is there for you, oh child
Of Maori pride? Will you be swallowed in
The rising tide, and mingle blood till all
Your heritage is gone?
This shall not be.
For brown must learn from white, the rules to make
Him equal partner in the game they play;
And white must cease to trample underfoot
These dark leaves of the Polynesian tree.
When this is done, and each the other’s worth
Has found, from union will spring a new
Race keen, with courage strong to face the world
And find at last its place and aim in life.
J.C. Sturm 1947
Born Te Kare Papuni 17 May, 1927
Taranaki & Te Whakatohea iwi
Returning home, I looked up the poem, read it through multiple times and learned about the author - "one of New Zealand’s first Māori woman graduates" - who was raised in a European family then later reunited with her paternal Maori relatives.
What is your reaction?
For me it insults Maori and Pakeha alike. When it was written, Maori and European had long worked, lived, prayed and played together. But it was written by a young person, kicking against perceived injustice and naively believing in happily-ever-after endings.
I don't think I am ever going to behold this 'monument' with any sense of sympathy or warmth. The history of European and Maori melding is far more nuanced and reciprocal than a casual reader of this poem would appreciate.
Lindsay Mitchell is a welfare commentator who blogs HERE
12 comments:
Idiotic to put a long tedious poem on a building on a public wall, I don't care who the author is. And the poem says nothing about thirst for knowledge--oh yeah, libraries are no longer places to read or acquire universal knowledge. How much did it cost?
Wokington
Misguided
Misinformed
Mush for brains
It’s time for the adults to take charge again or we will end up becoming a communist state under mahutas rule
Jacqui is a very highly regarded New Zealand poet and fiction writer, Lindsay. We have two of her collections. She was also a senior librarian at Wellington Public Library, presumably why her poem was chosen for the wall there. As an aside, she was married to J K Baxter from her early 20s till his death, which makes her a saint in my view.
If you think the poem was rubbish, did you go inside and see all the heavy emphasis on things maori; written language, books, anti-seismic engineering etc.? It amazed me that a stone-age immigrant people could have achieved so much in only about 200 years of contact with immigrants from other, obviously under-developed cultures who brought little or nothing to this country. Sarcasm aside, the library is an embarrassment and an insult to the founders of democracy, law and literature in and of New Zealand.
We must have an anti white poem so pathetic
The poem begs a send up. Sadly i do not have the time or ability. And most others who could lead lives terrified of cancellation.
There are forces at work in NZ to take us all down to the lowest common denominator! ... and there are woke idiots fully intent on letting it happen!
I was surprised that the National party amalgamated with the Maori party to lead the Government relatively recently (like mixing oil with water), but I won't too surprised to see National amalgamate with Labour soon, led by a bunch of Chris's!
Yes Ms Sturm was married to JK Baxter. Baxter could write , Baxter became a brilliant innovative poet whose poetry connected right across the larger population of NZ. He was revered in Dunedin where I grew up. Pity Ms Sturm couldn't write even half as well as her husband. This poem is sooo bad it deserves to be sprayed with graffiti.
To Mr McLoughlin I say, it is irrelevant who or what the author of this piece is. The concern is about what it says. This is not a literary work. It's a political statement and should not be tolerated on a public building. It's an insult to the people who use the library, and an insult to the rate-payers of Wellington who unwittingly paid for it. Given the lack of action against the defacers of The Treaty of Waitangi exhibit in Te Papa it seems the door is now open to something similar occurring to "Brown Optimism".
I would have thought the judgement of anyone who married the like of Baxter and stayed married as to be so defective that anything they produced should be ignored.
At least it is not in te reo.
Does the new library still have the absurd irrelevant bronze tropical palm trees?
David, As I wrote, I took the time to learn about the author. The rest of my brief post describes my response to the poem after several readings. That is the point of poetry isn't it? To make us think. What is your response to it?
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