Unidad de análisis

In view of the lessons of the boy in the flaxbush, which led him to bond with those on 'the outer margin' it is perhaps predictable that Mason should develop a fascination with Maori. There had been Maori characters on the stage since the pioneer days, but they were all created by Pakeha playwrights who often placed Maori on the periphery of the plot.

19

Even plays such as of the Birds and Land of the Moa, which have central characters who are ostensibly 'Maori,' display sparse authentic knowledge of Maori people or their culture. This is hardly surprising, since the playwrights who wrote them had encountered few Maori when they wrote the plays.20 City dwellers in New Zealand had little first-hand knowledge of Maori because there were no urban Maori communities (Kiernander 3 8).

This pattern of population distribution had not changed very much by the time Mason was born. As a child he had scant knowledge of Maori people and knew none at school (Mason, New Zealand Drama: A Parade 55). His first contact with them did not take place until he was thirteen and his family 'took a house in Rotorua for two weeks of the summer holidays' Kind of Weather 264). The sight that met the young teenager's eyes there was a culture shock:

19 _{The frontispiece of Peter Harcourt's history of New Zealand theatre is an illustration of the first}

image of New Zealand to be shown on the world stage. Described as 'a man of New Zealand, tall' it is a costume design for a Maori male, prepared for the pantomime Omai, which was performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in London in December 1 785 (2).

The pantomime is named after the first Polynesian to visit Britain, who was picked up by one of Cook's captains and who, under the patronage of Lord Sandwich and Joseph Banks, became a curiosity in aristocratic circles. After two years Omai was taken back to the Pacific by Cook and left on the island of Huahine. The pantomime Omai was based on the account of Cook's last voyage (the official account of which had been published the year before) for which Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg designed the costumes (McCormick 3 14), one of which Harcourt refers to in his frontispiece.

20

George Leitch, who wrote The Land of the Moa, arrived in Australia from England in 1 883 (Kiemander 1 1 ) and by 1 885 had begun to make a name for himself in New Zealand. He moved backwards and forwards across the Tasman, but worked mainly in Australia until 1 894 ( 1 3), when he leased the Theatre Royal in Napier ( 1 6). Mounting debts prompted him to devise and stage The Land of the Moa (19), which opened at the Opera House in Wellington on 29 July 1 895 (27). After taking the show on tour to Dunedin, Christchurch (50) and Auckland (52), however, Leitch left for Sydney in the same year (54), never to return to New Zealand again (60).

[E]verywhere, the Maori people: old women dressed in black, wide­ hatted, ravaged by incommunicable loss and grief, old men with faces tattooed like Paisley shawls, orating intenninably and incomprehensively outside public houses; [ . . . ] I was still a tourist, gaping at them not merely as foreigners, but as aliens: they might have been in a zoo (264-5).

Already the compassion of the boy is in evidence, in his instinctive registering of the mood of the older generation of Maori. At the same time, however, he also recognizes that his view of the indigenous culture has been prej udiced by his education:

The Maori people, by the time I came to write, formed only 6 per cent of the population. [ . . . ] My knowledge of the race whose patrimony I had unwittingly helped to destroy and with whom I shared the land was confined, as a boy, to a detestably dull and grossly imperialist history (264).

In these passages Mason identifies a basic contradiction in his attitude toward Maori. On the one hand, from an early age he displayed an empathy with those operating on 'the outer margin' of his own society. On the other, his childhood perspective of the indigenous people as being 'aliens' who are other than human, animals who 'might have been in a zoo,' reiterates the Eurocentre's view of the indigene as Caliban.

The Maori people, as representatives of 'the outer margin' in relation to 'the inner margin' correspond to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's representation of the doubly marginalized within Indian society. To re-iterate Spivak's metaphor, the fundamental question for the doubly marginalized indigene in the context of a Eurocentred society is 'can the subaltern speak? ' (25).

Mason was to strive throughout his writing career to represent accurately the ' voice' of this facet of 'the outer margin.' His Maori plays constitute a key category in his oeuvre. They cover a time span ranging from the early days of British settlement to the time at which Mason was writing, and they all place

Maori characters centre stage. There are five maj or works in this category: The Pohutukawa Tree (1957), 'Awatea' (1965), 'The Hand on the Rail' (1967), 'Swan Song' ( 1 967) and 'Hongi' (1968).21

Mason's intention was to understand Maori cUlture22 and to depict it sympathetically on the stage, but in order to do so he had to overcome daunting obstacles. He was, after all, a Pakeha born and bred. His formal education, like that of most New Zealanders at that time, was based on the English system and referred almost exclusively to models derived from Britain.

"The Made Man" makes a telling comment on the education of the boy in the flaxbush. All the time he is learning a lesson in life through his association with Firpo, his formal education consists of imported English subject matter which bears no relevance to his New Zealand experience. Whilst trying to cope with the implications of the letter that challenges Firpo to the race, the boy is being expected (by a teacher from London who considers that he is now in the 'colonies') to learn by heart William Wordsworth's poem about daffodils 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (216). Unable to concentrate, the boy draws a sketch of Firpo, the subject that is really on his mind. When he finds it, the teacher 'screws The Made Man into a ball, [and] throws it on the floor' (Bruce Mason Solo 42). He then gives the class a lecture on how they should really be British, but are 'savages' underneath (43).

2 1

The dates given above all refer to the fIrst year in which these plays were performed. The last four were fIrst performed as radio plays. The Pohutukawa Tree was fIrst published in 1 960. ' Awatea' was fIrst published in 1 969. All fIve plays were published in _{a collection with the overall} title The Arch: Five on Maori Themes in 1 987, fIve years after Mason's death in

1 982.

Three of Mason's Maori p lays, 'Awatea,' ' Hongi' and 'Swan Song,' were written for lnia Te Wiata, the world famous New Zealand Maori baritone, though he only performed the fIrst two of these. Attending lnia's funeral on the Ngati Raukawa marae, Mason recalled how their association had begun. He writes that when Te Wiata returned to New Zealand in 1 965 to play Porgy in George Gershwin's and William Austin commissioned Mason to write a radio play for him. The result was ' Awatea,' but Te Wiata was disappointed with the script. In response, Mason records that he wrote two more scripts within a week, which Te Wiata liked 'even less' though he does not give details of the reasons for Te Wiata' s disapproval ('Inia' 4). All three plays were eventually recorded by NZBC.

22 _{Mason had been a linguist since his early academic years and during the course of his career he} studied Latin, Spanish, German, Italian and Chinese. He was fluent in French as well as Russian. Part of his commitment to the understanding of Maori culture was to become familiar with the language. In 1 969 he was awarded an A pass in Maori 1 at Victoria University of Wellington (Dowling, Bruce Mason 6).

This incident can be interpreted as a metaphor for the position of the young Mason within his own culture. Just as Firpo is marginalized, the 'settler colony,' despite its attempts to mimic the Eurocentre, is marginalized by the later generation co Ionizer. When the teacher, the representative of the colonizing power, ' screws' up the image of Firpo and ' throws it on the floor' he is rubbishing the young Mason ' s national identity. In the teacher's lecture New Zealanders become Caliban in relation to his Prospero and 'the Beast' to his Beauty. Already the boy in the flaxbush has identified himself with 'the outer margin' of his own country and begun to challenge the values of the Eurocentre.

David Dowling comments perceptively about Mason allying himself to 'the outer margin' of Maori people within his own society: ' [W]hen he turned to the Maori, he found both values he could embrace and a standpoint from which he could examine his own culture' Bruce Mason 5). This 'standpoint' is not unlike the young Mason's flaxbush. From this ' standpoint,' Mason the mature writer was able to see that the culture of his ancestors, when removed to 'the margin' of New Zealand, had lost something essential in translation. He commented many times on the lack of ritual in Pakeha culture. In a lecture given in 1 966, he identified what was for him a central 'problem' as a New Zealand artist, that 'of working in a country which will admit only games as viable rituals, [ . . . ] a country which has several purely masculine athletic rituals collectively amounting to a national religion, which alone is taken seriously' Kind of Weather 1 3 5).

In the Maori people, Mason recognized he had discovered an alternative culture, where ritual was not only deeply entrenched, but embedded in a rich oral tradition which had been handed down through the generations. This tradition, first observed by the young boy outside the pubs in Rotorua (264), seemed to the mature artist to lead naturally to an expression of deep emotion that was avoided by the Pakeha. Mason commented further on the divide between the two cultures:

For the Maori deep emotion flows like a river [ . . .]. Compare, for example, a pakeha-style funeral with a Maori tangi. The grief is neither less nor more. But for pakehas it must be stifled and buried

[ . . . ]. To the Maori, grief is urgent and eloquent, expressed In a soaring passion (238).

It seemed to Mason that the oral tradition of the Milori not only endowed them with a means of tapping into emotion on a grand scale, but also enabled them to naturally elevate the quality of expression. ' I have done some research into the modes of Maori speech' he remarked, in preparation for writing The Pohutukawa Tree, 'and 1 find that strong emotion, even in conversation, was expressed by the Maori as poetry' in 100).

These three foundations of Milori culture - the oral tradition, the expression of deep emotion and the poetic form - were much more in keeping with Mason's values as an artist than the cultural traditions of Pakeha society into which he was born. The mature Mason discovered in Milori, to use Dowling' s phraseology, 'values he could embrace. ,23

At the same time, however, Mason's lack of grounding in that culture begs the question of whether he was capable of creating an authentic portrayal of the indigene. To use Edward Said's terminology in Oriental how much is Mason's portrait of Milori a construct, the creation of 'the Orient' by ' the Westerner'? Mason himself remained well aware of the limitations that his background placed upon him when he attempted to tackle Milori issues as his subject matter. Writing in Act in 1979 he admitted, 'I had no possible brief to speak for the Maori people, and 1 would never make so ludicrous a presumption' (' An Open Letter' 66)?4

23 Bill Pearson has commented that Roderick Finlayson, to use Dowling' s phraseology, also found

in Maori 'values' that he 'could embrace' :

Roderick Finlayson was the ftrst New Zealand writer (apart from Katherine Mansfteld in one brief story) to see in Maori life a preferable alternative to some objectionable features of Pakeha life; to write lyrically of Maori warmth, courtesy, generosity, and especially the freedom from the Pakeha obsessions of time and money. It was an important advance in our thinking about ourselves ('The Maori and Literature 1 938-65 ' 1 00).

Finlayson's sympathetic portraits of Maori began with his volume of short stories Brown Man's Burden ( 1 938).

Spivak's fundamental question, 'can the subaltern speak?', therefore, now leads to another equally important question: whether, once a white writer does 'speak' on behalf of ' the subaltern' it can be with an authentic ' voice'? This question will be kept in mind as I undertake a literary analysis of Mason's Maori plays.25

Just as the portrayal of Firpo, my first illustration of Mason's focus on the doubly marginalized, appeared first in prose form, so the germ for the characters in The Pohutukawa Tree began in 'Genesis,' a short story published in Landfall III

1 952?6

' Genesis' sparked off a lengthy correspondence between Mason and John Pocock, occasional theatre critic and then Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. These letters were published in book form, entitled Theatre in in 1 957. Among the many theatrical issues discussed in this volume, one of the most fundamental for Mason's approach to writing is the Yeatsian concept of 'the wild.' He illustrates this in relation to 'Genesis' :

I think I can claim that in my published stories, I have sought 'the wild'; [ . . . ] you have sufficiently expressed to me your approval of a story like 'Genesis' which I think contains symbols and characters of a kind which Yeats might have approved (48).

In another letter Mason explains in more detail his understanding of this concept: I submit that the forces at work in civilisation can be represented as a pair of reciprocating opposites, and if one be called the wild, I would call the other the garden. We are born in the wild, but to observe the many taboos which are the distinctive sign of a culture, we have to live in the garden, since its cultivation represents civilisation, and

25 Although there had been Maori characters on the New Zealand stage since the pioneer days, they were all created by Pakeha writers and few displayed any authentic 'voice.' Douglas Stewart's 'The Golden Lover,' for example, first performed on Australian radio in 1 943, was written by a New Zealander and is ostensibly about Maori. Nevertheless, as the theatre historian John Thomson points out, ' this is a story which assumes that humans are always and everywhere the same. The easy verse makes no attempt to incorporate Maori linguistic usage, and traditional Maori imagery is remarkably absent' Zealand Drama

26 'Genesis' is set in Te Parenga, which also forms the backdrop to The Pohutukawa Tree. There is a passing reference in this story to Aroha, a Maori woman (277), and to Athol Sedgwick ' the curate' (279).

provides the framework for our lives. But the garden cannot grow without the wild. Exclude the fructifying dung which the wild represents, and the garden becomes arid and will finally nourish none (9 1).27

Mason elaborated this point In a subsequent interview: 'I have a theory that English drama is fertilised from the periphery - in fact, you could say that world drama has been fertilised from the periphery' (Paske 1 5). If we put the two statements together, we find that 'the fructifying dung' represented by 'the wild' is synonymous with the fertilization of post-colonial drama in English from the 'periphery.' An amalgamation of the two theories then suggests that the portrayal of 'the margin' will lead to the re-fertilization of post-colonial drama in English.

In Mason's Maori plays the indigenous people represent 'the outer margin' in relation to the New Zealand 'settler colony. '28 Accordingly, they are also a manifestation of 'the wild. ' In placing Maori centre stage Mason is attempting to re-vitalise New Zealand drama in English. I take the 'reciprocating opposites' referred to in his theory of 'the wild' and 'the garden' to represent the Maori and Pakeha cultures respectively. Mason implies as much in a letter to Pocock in which he outlines the basic structural idea for The Pohutukawa Tree: ' Everywhere

27 Yeats' early poems refer to the concept of 'the wild' as a place associated with the natural world in which there is an awareness of the spiritual dimension. This stanza, for example, is from 'The Stolen Child' in his first book of poems ( 1 889):

Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams.

Come away, 0 _{human child!} To the waters and the wild With afaery, hand in hand,

For the world 's morefull of weeping than you

Can understand Poems 2 1 )

2 8 Pearson notes that Pakeha New Zealand writers have traditionally viewed Maori as representatives of the marginalized. In his article 'The Maori and Literature 1 938-65 ' he comments on the frequency of this definition: 'All of this writing [Pakeha writing of Maori] is concerned with the Maori as an outsider or debutant in New Zealand society, individually or communally' (99).

I could, I brought two opposing sets of images, beliefs and myths face to face' (Theatre in Danger 93).

The Pakeha culture, according to their lights, constitutes 'the garden' of 'civilisation; ' in other words it seeks to replicate the Eurocentre. The Maori culture, on the contrary, represents 'the wild. ' Many Pakeha of the 1 950s regarded Maori as 'savages' who had been only superficially touched by the Eurocentre's ideas of what constituted so-called 'civilisation. ' In The Pohutukawa Tree Sergeant Robinson represents the Eurocentric view of authority: 'Law and order; not so easy for them [Maori people] with their background. Not used to it. They see things a bit different. [ . . . ] Scratch them, you'll find savages underneath, ready to break out into violence at the drop of a hat' (The Pohutukawa Tree 79).

The entire text of The Pohutukawa Tree is designed to discredit Sergeant Robinson's view. Mason turns the tables on the hegemony of the Eurocentre by advocating older Maori as the true representatives of authority. In an interview the playwright expanded further on his point of view: 'I'm interested in the older