‘Kaupapa’ Commits Kamikaze

The anthology ‘Kaupapa’ (2007) is introduced through a written conversation between co-editors Maria McMillan and Hinemoana Baker, highlighting their purpose in embarking on the poetry project: to spark debate and discourse around global issues of conflict, globalisation, environmentalism and universal human experience. Sounds like just the kind of material senior NCEA English classes need in the first term of 2009! As McMillan goes on to suggest, ‘poetry can reach people and move them in a way that a list of facts or even a great documentary can't’ and yet there was little in this haphazard compilation that stirred me to activism, let alone brought a deeper consciousness of the world’s politically pressing issues. If anything, I would add Lowe’s ‘Shh!’ and ‘Hi Ya Tim’ by Roma Potiki to McMillan’s own admission that she is ‘still not quite sure what Brenda Burke’s ‘Feature Battle’, ‘is all about.’! Even Jenny Bornholt’s supposedly ‘quiet rather than strident’ swipe at the issue of girl infanticide and genital mutilation falls limp and bemused at its closing line.

However, my senior English classes are not to be completely disappointed because tossed in amongst a frustrating maze of disconnected abstractions are ‘Oh Dirty River’ by Helen Lehndorf and Olivia Macassey’s ‘They Say In a Healthy Economy There Should Be 5% Unemployment, Or, What has Social Welfare Ever Given You’. These gritty commentaries on environmental pollution and the ironies of being both sustained and shamed through the social welfare system are smart, engaging and contentious. Unlike much of the anthology, that unconvincingly lobs criticism across the world stage in largely unsignposted constructs, Macassey and Lehndorf succeed because theirs are home-grown voices around the realities of New Zealand experience. They are accessible and stimulating reading. Out of the entire anthology, I would probably only bring these two (as part of only a handful) into the senior secondary classroom - and be aware in recommending it, there is also a smattering of superlatives, phallic references and men smearing themselves with food during sex :)