AWF18: Michael King Memorial Lecture – Ready or Not – Damon Salesa

AWF18: Michael King Memorial Lecture – Ready or Not – Damon Salesa

There was standing room only to hear Associate Professor of Pacific Studies Damon Salesa deliver the 2018 Michael King Memorial Lecture, which he did with aplomb to an appreciative audience.

Salesa started with an acknowledgement of King’s achievements. He was important for explaining Māori to Pākehā, ‘and then his second career was essentially the reverse’. King was born into a deeply colonial world, but by the time he died Auckland was a Pacific city.

Photo courtesy Auckland Writers Festival

The theme of Salesa’s lecture was le ūa na fua mai manu’a – the rain came from Manu’a (metaphorically, you should have seen it coming). ‘Have our leaders seen the rain coming? Because it’s pouring.’ Salesa used a combination of statistics (‘numbers tell us certain kinds of truth’) and stories to illustrate the reality of 21st-century Auckland.

We are heading towards a population of old white people and young brown people: the fastest growing group of babies are Māori and Pasifika, and the caregivers for elderly Pākehā will be Pasifika, Māori, and Asian. Aucklanders tell themselves they are super diverse, but they live in very segregated ways. For example, two thirds of Pacific people don’t have a Pākehā person living in their neighbourhood. ‘I found a school with no Pacific students 16km away from a school with 99% Māori and Pacific students.’

Auckland is often called the world’s largest Polynesian city, but really, Salesa says, most Aucklanders live next door to the world’s largest Polynesian city. He compared the ethnic makeup of the members of the Auckland Blues with the members of the team’s board – ‘and the board of the Ministry of Social Development is even whiter’. But on the other hand ‘the NZ public knows something that our organisations have yet to learn’: there are 13 Polynesians in the NZ cabinet and four Pacific ministers (including of course Salesa’s wife, the Hon Jenny Latu Salesa, who was in the audience).

Photo by Elizabeth Heritage

Salesa noted that Pacific people are often at the sharp end of statistics around poverty and incarceration, but outperform other demographics in wellbeing and happiness. ‘Life is tough but for Pacific people but life is also good’: Pacific people are least likely to be lonely, and most likely to be good neighbours to religious minorities and migrants. Salesa stressed Pacific people’s agency and creativity, giving examples such as Three Wise Cousins (the tenth most successful film of all time in NZ) and the building of the Lesieli Tonga hall in Māngere.

Salesa challenged us to think what it would be like if New Zealand truly became a Pacific nation by embracing Pacific values: compassion, respect, family, speaking the languages of others as well as your own. ‘Pacific people are the future: Pacific people know your future before you do.’ He noted that what we call innovation in NZ is often just adopting what’s happening in the US: ‘most NZers make lousy Americans’ but we are the best in the world at being Pākehā, Māori, and Pasifika. ‘I’m really inspired by this Pacific future.’

 

To round off his lecture, Salesa had invited some Pasifika students to perform a song they had written. They introduced themselves as The Black Friars and proudly sang: ‘Make a change, make a choice, raise your hands and raise your voice’. It was an inspiring and energising session, and a great tribute to the legacy of King.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage

 

 

AWF18: Festival Gala Night – True Stories Told Live: Under Cover

AWF18 Festival Gala Night- True Stories Told Live: Under Cover 

The authors in this session were Susie Boyt (England), Lisa Dwan (Ireland); Gigi Fenster (South Africa/NZ); Alex Ross (US); Damon Salesa (Samoa/NZ); Tom Scott (NZ); Shashi Tharoor (India); and Jenny Zhang (US). Each of them have sessions later on in the Auckland Writers Festival programme. 

Tara Black illustrates, and Briar Lawry gives us her take on the session. 

Illustrated notes copyright Tara Black

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Briar Lawry words 

The ‘True Stories Told Live’-themed Gala Night is by now a core part of the Auckland Writers Festival to look forward to each time May rolls around. This year’s theme, Under Cover, made for some riveting listening that would prove, as Festival Director Anne O’Brien said in summary: ‘some of them make you laugh, all of them make you think’.

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. In front of a packed ASB Theatre, O’Brien gave a world of welcome, and acknowledged the contribution of both the ‘generous and highly discerning funding partners’ and the support of individual patrons. She shared a few stories, the ‘profound moments’ provided by the festival so far – often relating to the great lengths taken by many of the festival guests to get here, to our far flung corner of the world.

She made one particularly significant comment: ‘We cannot change the privilege that we are born with – but we can change what we do with the privilege.’ This felt particularly relevant, given the predominantly Pākehā make up of the audience, especially when contrasted against the relative diversity of the writers of the night’s line-up. With the likes of Chinese-American writer Jenny Zhang, Indian writer and politician Shashi Tharoor and Samoan Kiwi Damon Salesa on stage, the stories being told frequently uncovered experiences unknown to the audience at large. (To be clear, I count myself among that ‘audience at large’ – while I am perhaps on the younger side of those in attendance, I am still a Pākehā woman.)

Things kicked off with someone a little closer to home and attendee demographic, with Tom Scott regaling the crowd with the story of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s summitting of Everest. He leaped between the hilarious, the meaningful, and the charmingly lewd. From Hillary’s blokiness to Norgay’s prayers of forgiveness as they continued the climb up this sacred peak, it was a rollicking start to the storytelling.

Jenny Zhang was next up, with an easy-going speaking style and a tale of life as a ‘latchkey kid’ and new arrival to New York City as a primary-school-aged child. ‘The curious case of the abandoned underwear’, she described it, going into the detail of an incident of a pair of knickers tripped over in the classroom. This small moment was skillfully connected back to Zhang’s arrival from Shanghai a couple of years earlier, with beautiful moments of remembering laid out for us to enjoy – looking up at the sky while crossing the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn and thinking oh my god, the moon has followed me here – I’m so special.

Her story wove into days of being shut away at home for her lonesome safety, while creating elaborate potential futures, on which she mused ‘I was so delusional. I was so happy in my delusions.’

Taking ‘under cover’ to mean assuming a persona or acting, critic and author Alex Ross assured us that acting is ‘something for which I have no talent whatsoever’. But, as he pointed out, there was ‘the sense of assuming an identity before coming out’.

Ross led us through the story of his return to his secondary school to speak to the Gay/Straight Alliance club – something that he, a closeted child of the 80s could never have dreamed of existing at his ‘conservative, Episcopalian, all-boys’ school. His era was one when ‘the word gay wasn’t as common as the word fag’, he said, so to have this opportunity to be invited with open arms – to a talk in the school chapel, no less – was something else.

Susie Boyt had a more practised delivery than those who came before – each word feeling a little more rehearsed, but not at the detriment to her story. She spoke of the oddities of life as a writer and the gaps betwen writing, reckoning that ‘the life you’re living when you’re not writing becomes so far-fetched’. She also made the quite fair point that the phrase ‘you’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ is ‘actually quite comforting when taken literally. How’s that for under cover(s)?

Damon Salesa’s story of his preteen pilgrimage with his father to Manuʻa in American Samoa hit the balance of humour and gut punches, as he spoke about the experience of being in the direct line of the devastating Cyclone Tusi in 1987. The candid Kiwi kid matter-of-fact humour – ‘when you grow up in Glen Innes, and you hear American Samoa, all you hear is America’, with a touch of his Pasifika roots ‘I had a very Samoan problem – my jandal got caught’.

Salesa’s poignant reference to a woman from the village covering him and his young cousins with a shower curtain as limited protection from the elements brought home the ‘under cover’ intentions of the night – while his description of flying the US flag upside down to indicate distress brought a dose of haunting reality to his piece.

South African-born and now Aotearoa-based lawyer and writer Gigi Fenster had the audience in stitches as she waxed lyrical about her daughters’ tattoo planning – and how low her bar could or should be for tolerance of these specific ways of taking ownership of newly adult bodies. She was unafraid to poke fun at herself: ‘when it comes to bellybutton and tongue piercings, I am a bougie snob’, and played up the under cover aspect in her contemplating her own double life of lawyer-ing and writing.

Lisa Dwan was a bright and delightful presence on stage as she explained her curious instances of the universe knocking her and Alec Baldwin (and his wife, Hilaria) together. ‘No one knows’, she intoned at the start of her story, ‘what fecking path life is going to put you on’. Certainly the lightest and fluffiest in tone of the stories being shared, Dwan’s inherent performative talent meant it didn’t feel that it was out of place – just a shift from what had come before.

The final guest to take to the stage was Shashi Tharoor, an Indian politician and writer. His story was, he said from the outset, not a personal story, but one with a personal connection. It was certainly the heaviest of the stories, in his describing of the ways in which First World War-era India was made hollow promises by the British. The specific instance referred to was the horrific Amritsar massacre, where over 1000 were gunned down due to being in a gathering of Indians together – while all they were there to do was celebrate Baisakhi, a Sikh spring festival.

While he gave the atrocities their due emotional resonance, he did manage to add pops of levity before getting to the really awful stuff – the comment ‘The sun never set on the British Empire, because even God couldn’t trust the English in the dark’ elicited laughter from the audience – and it wasn’t until he told the full story that it became clear just how true that comment was in connection with this tragic event.

As is always the way with these gala nights, it was the perfect way to kick off the festival proper. The emotional ups and downs are a certain precursor of the events to come – and it provided a chance to catch a glimpse of some writers perhaps previously unknown.

Reviewed by Tara Black in pictures, and Briar Lawry in words.

Each person named above is linked to their bios, which will in turn take you to the sessions at which you can catch these eminent writers.