As per my personal mission statement, to uncover and give away as much information as humanly possible, I was seeking to try and bring you a series of interviews with relatively famous New Zealanders about what they thought it meant to 'be a New Zealander'.
I failed.
It seems that despite R.Brown's effort to paint me as some kind of minor celebrity, I don't carry enough weight to talk anyone famous into anything. Although, now that the cat is well and truly out of the bag, I will blog at some point about the perils of working in the Public Service and blogging. The good news is that it's all good. Maybe I'll just run a few interviews with 'real' New Zealanders in the meantime.
In the meantime though, let's turn to something a little more boring. Nation-building yay!
I love talking about this stuff. And I'm not sure why. Maybe there's something about being a member of such a young country? Something that means we all get a chance to chip in our five cents and make the most of trying to herd this great mass of lumbering cotton and wool-clad people into that great corral of national unity.
Ah well. Even better news is that plenty of other people do too. Hat Tip to Just Left who pointed out this speech by Colin James. I'd recently approached James about an interview for the identity project, and he kind of knocked me back with an indication that the Bruce Jesson speech would be his last word on the matter for awhile. Which is a pity, his take seems to be a relatively non-partisan version of the more liberal wing of the National Party, to which I've directed another blog.
Putting aside my disagreement that the Treaty is reaching the end of its use-by date, and the issue of the new New Zealander being as indigenous as the tangata whenua, both of which are destined for another time and place, I'd like to address the idea of belonging. Not belonging in the way I've been discussing it for the past few months in the Metics meanderings, but belonging as a mythology in and of itself.
As I see it, the thing that transcends all this to and fro about who is, and who is not, is the conversation itself. Once you get over the preoccupation with race or distinct language the essence remaining is the content of a national conversation. A ramshackle conversation, a bundle of memes and familiar phrases we repeat to one another every day. A long-winded diatribe we share with family, workmates and strangers about who we think we are, why we think it, and how they share our point of view.
In turn, people repeat our ideas back to us, reinforcing what we think we already know, and so a little circuit starts, turns, repeats.
All the myths James indicates as means by which people stake their claim to belonging are well-known, and shared by a number of individuals who utilise them to tie themselves to the greater whole. A statement like "I belong because [insert relevant clause]" is something you can't say in a vacuum. But there is another way to see this talking.
And that is to see the talking as a song. People don't just speak their identity to one another, they feel it in the way you do your favourite song. Identity-speak rises up out of some primeval fount, a deeper place where we keep those feelings of belonging. The fount gives rise to all kinds of other emotions, but the song that feeds them is the one constant.
The song that is our identity floats around us on a daily basis, uttered through the words of newsreaders, chirped by crappy jingles, blasted out of radio stations playing favoured hits that only a New Zealander loves. The song is the one thing that ties us to one another through the generations. It's there writ large in the words on a McCahon, it's hidden in the pages of a Ihimaera, and splashed in that characteristic washed out colour of a Sleeping Dogs or Came a Hot Friday.
Whether you want to or not, you're part of that song. Whether you're bitching about the 'bloody Māoris' or grasping your tenuous Māori roots like a fat man on a bacon sandwich, you're singing rhyme and verse of a colossal song we each carry.
Each of those statements of belonging James includes are single lines in that great song, small lines spoken by the small people who voices make up a great cacophony, a white noise of opinions, questions, demands, beliefs, answers and knowings.
So listen carefully to what those around you say, and sing it back the way you want it heard, for better, or worse.