Embarrassing Time, Performing Disunity

Rugby, the haka, and Aotearoa-New Zealand in the

United Kingdom
        

As autumn sweeps over the northern hemisphere, the game, following the performance of national
some creatures prepare to hibernate, and others anthems. As the team faces the opposition, a
emerge from slumber. Blinking and wide- senior Māori player leads the team in roughly
eyed, these are the belligerent sports-writers forty seconds of chant and stylized gesture,
colloquially known as Wind-Up Merchants. Their where the players slap their hands against their
deliberate attempt to ‘wind-up’ those who do thighs in rhythm with the stamping of their feet.
not agree with them relies upon the provocative As authorities on haka such as Timoti Kāretu
stance they adopt in their writings.1 Even by and Wira Gardiner observe, the performance 1 The term ‘wind-up’
entered usage as
these standards, former chief sports-writer Frank is disciplined but emotional, and ‘Ka Mate’ is a indicating trickery and
Keating set especially hostile pen to paper with haka ngeri, a haka to wake, to energize and to provocation as early as
1984, according to the
his 18 November 2008 column in The Guardian, attest to the importance of the occasion (Kāretu Oxford English Dictionary.
in which he anticipated the arrival of the All 1993: 25, 41; Gardiner 2007 [2001]: 30). The latter usage of WUM to
refer to public figures is
Blacks rugby team of Aotearoa-New Zealand2 Gardiner suggests that ‘Ka Mate’ is often less clear in origin but
with a sneering nursery-rhyme headline: ‘It’s misread as purely aggressive rather than as widespread in the online
time the haka posture was put out to pasture’. a performance of vigour. This clearly spurs comments sections of
newspapers. See, for
The All Blacks’ pre-match performance of the Frank Keating’s rebuke in The Guardian, where example, the community of
haka is virtually synonymous with the team and, he declares that the haka has ‘long passed its online posters in the rugby
section of the Guardian,
for many, with rugby as a sport. The word haka sell-by date’ and is now a ‘charmless, eye-rolling, www.guardian.co.uk/sport.
is a generic term for a range of performances tongue-squirming dance’. Further, he laments, 2 The bicultural name for
involving movement and chanting or song within ‘there is not a jot of fun in it anymore’, and it the country, with the
Māori culture, used for a range of ceremonial should be greeted with ‘a look of seriously adult forename in Te Reo Māori.
purposes including encounter, performing disdain’. Finally, he concludes that this ‘pre- 3 This glosses over a more
narrative and celebrating victory (Gardiner 2007 match native rumba’ should be consigned to nuanced account of ‘Ka
Mate’, which would require
[2001]: 23–33). The haka most readily identified the past, affirming, ‘All those who agree, stick a fuller addressing of its
with the All Blacks team is ‘Ka Mate’, a haka out your tongues in grotesque mime’. Keating’s imbrication with colonial
appropriation. These are
composed in the early nineteenth century by self-portrayal as embarrassed arbiter of civilized beyond the scope of this
Te Rauparaha, rangatira (leader) of the Ngāti etiquette is an exemplary ‘wind-up’ indeed. article. Further, ‘Ka Mate’
was not the haka
Toa tribe, as he successfully evaded capture.3 Keating’s summoning of an imagined public performed by the 1888
It commemorates his escape and his exhilaration in supportive agreement resonates with Michael team (Mulholland 2009:
17).
at facing his fear (Gardiner 2007 [2001]: 46–52, Warner’s theorization of textual performativity.
Kāretu 1993: 63–8). Warner proposes a reflexive system of interplay
In the context of the rugby match, the haka between texts and public, where textual
involves the All Black team assembling at declarations generate publics that in turn impact
halfway on the playing field immediately prior to upon texts. His example of the visceral force

37
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unleashed upon those who transgress against
the norms of the public (Warner 2002: 26) is
apparent in Keating’s condemnations. They
demonstrate not only the parsing of publicly
acceptable behaviour but the disciplining of
transgressive colonial bodies. Keating draws
upon a recurrent sentiment in the British press,
whether in paternal admonishments that the
performance of the haka is overly sensitive
and ‘precious’, or contentions that it should be
retired altogether on the basis that it constitutes
‘arrogance’ and is ‘just short of an exhortation to
murder’ (Cleary 2006, Jones 2010).
Criticizing these writers at face value is a
tempting reaction. Similarly enticing is an
aggressive recuperative counter-reading,
responding to inaccurate characterizations
by formally analysing the haka for meaning.
However, these strategies are refused here, as
they succumb insidiously to the fetishistic logic
of Keating and his ilk and earnestly sidestep
the contestations that drive the haka’s violent
rejection. This discussion is also grounded in
a keen awareness of speaking alongside and
with, but not in place of, those vested with the
authority of speaking for Māori culture. Instead,
it is an examination of the discursive shifts
that underpin the sports-writers’ statements,
attempting to understand their embarrassment
as they defend what they see as the norms of
their reading public.
This approach adopts the strategy proposed
by John Fletcher for the critique of stances with
which the author does not agree: understanding
the stance as a meaningful one, even as it is
argued against (Fletcher 2010: 110–11). Keating’s
sentiment of discomfort is not a disconnected
contemporary emergence but one with historical
precedents. The portrayal of the pre-match
performance of the haka as an aggressively
uncivilized act appears in the writings of
nineteenth-century journalists covering the
tour of the United Kingdom by the 1888 New
Zealand Natives team. Rather than simply noting
the similarities between the accounts of tours
in 1888 and 2008, I aim to examine 1888 and
2008 as twin moments temporally connected by
Hartigan
the performance of the haka. This examination
offers an affective vector for considering the
ongoing tensions in colonial discourses of
assimilation even as the common public thread
of rugby seems to suture them.
The ongoing interaction between bodies of
writing already forms a temporal connection
between these two rugby tours. More explicitly,
these conjoined moments of 1888 and 2008
enact what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘ambivalent
temporalities of the nation-space’ (Bhabha 1994:
142). If, as he contends, it is essential to examine
the representation of the nation as a temporal
process, then tracking the formation of publics
requires a temporal operation to understand
the disjunctures and liminalities within the
nation that undermine claims to representing
a homogenous public (148). Warner’s term for
those who are marked as different and in tension
with a larger public is a ‘counterpublic’ (Warner
2002: 56), which Bhabha’s argument positions
with an additional temporal dimension.
Elizabeth Freeman comments that the
colonial state intervened early into indigenous
temporality, a norm of the nation inscribed on
bodies through the colonial calendar and the
working week (Freeman 2005: 57). Concomitant
with this is the representation of colonial
civilization as progressive, figured against the
portrayal of precolonial models of time and
history as backward. In the case of the haka, a
neocolonialist historiography presents Māori
culture as that which must give way to the
modern. The haka is historicized as a precolonial
performance in order to be dismissed as outdated
while also rendered ahistorical and unchanging.
Freeman refers to this fusion of temporality and
political power as chronopolitics, which I deploy
here as an analytic. As cracks and disunities are
revealed in the modality of time that haunts the
postcolonial model, they can serve to dismantle
the successionist chronopolitics that underpin
it. Crucially, this reveals the haka as a temporally
troubling pre-colonial relic that embarrassingly
refuses to disappear.
38
 Nicholas Ridout observes that the word
Embarrassing Time, Performing Disunity
‘embarrass’ in its original noun form is an
obstacle. The verb derived from it, with which
he generates an affective poetics of audience
embarrassment in performance (2006: 70),
means to encumber, to impede, to perplex or
throw into doubt or difficulty. While queer
theorists have taken up the transformative
powers of shame (Hemmings 2005: 549), I
ask: what if the haka does not act to shame,
but to embarrass? This operates on two
levels of affective temporality. The first is its
kinetic histories acting to ‘embarrass’ any
foreclosure of colonial linear narratives. The
second, as revealed by Frank Keating’s stance
of embarrassment, is the haka’s refusal of the
norms of its viewing public. It does not simply
import and reenact the bloody legacy of colonial
histories but activates and enacts that history
in the present. As a cultural encounter, the haka
is a space that tears open time, evoking Gloria
Anzaldúa’s memorable refiguring of a border
as a wound. An enquiry that does not look away
from the wound sees the historical moments that
remain open, bleeding, refusing the colonial logic
of successionism and linear time.
39
In comparing the accounts of 1888 and 2008, a
striking element is the burden of embarrassment
assumed by the viewer as they watch the
poor uncivilized colonials. These moments
are explicitly connected by Frank Keating’s
accusations. He compares the 2008 performers
with the 1888 team, suggesting that the
historical performance could only be tolerated
on the basis that it was an all-Māori team. On
the other hand, because the contemporary team
contains Pākehā4 players performing the haka 4 Briefly, New Zealanders
alongside Māori players, Keating is mystified and of European ancestry.
personally affronted, asking ‘why should they
want to perform a war-dance of the conquered?’
This sentiment is echoed by Stephen Jones
in The Times, who affirms that the haka is
clearly a call to war, an undignified turn in a
‘tradition [that] has been hijacked’ (Jones 2010).
Revealingly, Jones also quotes an anonymous
fellow critic whom he believes represents the
general public’s perspective. Invoking the cry
of the disaffected, Jones says that most people
regard the haka as ‘a politically correct lunacy’.
These statements reveal the ambivalence of
invoking the value of tradition, where Jones
finds acceptable the performance of national
• Sydney Morning Herald
political editor Peter
Hartcher describes Tony
Abbott, Australian
Opposition Leader, as
performing a political haka,
which he characterizes as a
'pre-game pantomime of
chest-pufing, thigh-
slapping, tongue-poking,
eye-rolling intimidation.
© artist Rocco Fazzari.
originally published in the
Sydney Morning Herald of
March 20, 2010
 anthems in international sporting fixtures but
fails to note their imbrication with sung Welsh
responses to the haka in 1905, which arguably
5 Anthems were initiated the tradition.5 The presence of the haka
uncommon in sporting
fixtures until after World
once more embarrasses, as it exhausts its invited
War 2, and they were not presence as pre-match colonial spoil.
used even in the Olympic These attitudes expose key fissures in naïve
Games until 1924.
constructions of cosmopolitics, replicating
Stanley Fish’s parodic ‘boutique multiculturalist’.
Such a figure, ‘characterized by its superficial
or cosmetic relationship to the objects of
its affection’, is steadfastly committed to
‘multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, [and]
weekend festivals’. However, they will ‘always
stop short of approving other cultures at a point
where some value at their centre … offends the
canons of civilized decency as they have been
either declared or assumed’ (1997: 378). When
Keating notes that he could enjoy a haka when
it was a ‘once diverting wheeze’, and Jones
affirms that the haka was once a ‘theatrical
affair’ enjoyed by ‘children and armchair fans’,
the limits of their tolerance immediately become
apparent.
Redressing these attitudes carries high stakes.
Christopher Balme describes the process of
‘performance as a metonymy of culture’, where
haka as a specific performance form stands in
as representative of Māori culture as a whole
(Balme 2007: 97, 115). The haka's prominence in
popular culture also allows it to lead a separate,
decontextualized existence as a symbol of
strength and integrity – so much so, that it is
a centerpiece in the recent US coming-of-age
sports film Forever Strong (2008), a stirring tale
of a white teenager from Utah who turns aside
from a misspent adolescence by learning the
haka and playing rugby, both of which seem to
have been miraculously invented somewhere in
Utah.
More recently still, Clint Eastwood’s 2009 film
Invictus uses the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South
Africa as a backdrop for a narrative of cultural
reconciliation. Eastwood simplifies the complex
racial dynamics of the relationship between
Aotearoa-New Zealand and South Africa, treating
the performance of the haka in the context of a
Hartigan
historically charged rivalry in an Afrikaans-led
sport as a moment of spectacle. This has the
effect of unwittingly rendering the All Blacks
rugby team a cipher for racialized fears in the
emergent South Africa. Although in the narrative
arc of sporting confrontation the All Blacks
are necessarily the antagonists, this becomes
increasingly problematic. As the only identifiable
adversary in the film, the team becomes
demonized with strange political effect. This is
especially evident in the film’s climax, where the
hulking, racially mixed All Blacks team faces off
against a Springbok team all-white but for one
player. While the character of Francois Pienaar
(portrayed by Matt Damon) stands mid-field
to accept the haka, the foregrounded reaction
shot of his anxiously creased brow is strikingly
backed by the stadium screen, where the looming
hands of the All Blacks’ player Jonah Lomu seem
to reach out towards the white Springboks team
and its captain.
Despite the overtly theatrical staging of
many sports, including rugby, inquiries that
explore the historiographies of sport through
performance are still relatively rare. Given
the colonial histories that define sports, their
cultural space acts as ‘a lustrous site for
enactments of national imaginings’ (Falcous
2007: 376), but performance theory tends
to operate as a productive metaphor rather
than as an analytic. In this context, the haka’s
invitation as encounter models the productive
dialogue between scholarly approaches that
enables sports theory to contribute alongside
the embodied knowledge of performance in
examining the histories that lie behind this
moment on the rugby field.
This is especially pivotal given that haka
constitute and are themselves constitutive of
history, acting as a wananga – a storehouse
of learning, retaining memories, debates and
individuals as ‘alive in the tribal memory’
(Gardiner 2007 [2001]: 13–4). Haka are
continuously responsive to shifts in their
performance, making them a rich site for a
40
 complex dynamic of cultural borrowings and
Embarrassing Time, Performing Disunity
redefinitions, as revealed by the agency of
Māori in reworking haka even in the context
of nineteenth-century versions staged for
the Crown. In Dwight Conquergood's terms,
the haka defies stabilization, operating as a
force of productive contradictions that resists
closure as it troubles binaries of ‘traditional
and ‘inauthentic’ performance (Balme 2007: 121,
Conquergood 1995: 138).
Reframing Margaret Werry’s writings on
theatre and spectacle in the Pacific, the haka's
performance within the cultural space of sport is
deeply entangled in the politics of postcolonial
representation (Werry 2005: 355), with a history
reaching back far earlier than the contemporary
Hollywood film. The introduction of sports such
as rugby was a marker of colonial power – Lord
Harris commented in the 1870s that sport had
‘done more to draw the Mother Country and
the colonies together than years of beneficial
legislation’, and sports’ economic imperatives
continue to be a major conduit of cultural capital.
Especially because of its circulatory momentum,
sport is not just a representational practice but is
materially constitutive of the worlds it imagines
(Falcous 2007: 374–5, Werry 2005: 356). Simon
During comments that this is particularly true
of rugby, where an upper-class English game was
erected in Aotearoa-New Zealand as a symbol
of collapsing class distinctions and colonizer-
colonized reconciliation. New Zealand rugby
writer Spiros Zavos accepts this critical reading
without question, contending that the haka is ‘a
sign of the integration of rugby and New Zealand
society, its people and its history’ (Falcous 2007:
379, Zavos 1998: 68).
Zavos’s attempt to offer the haka as a sign of
cultural unity returns the enquiry to its earlier
historical moment: the formation of the 1888
New Zealand Natives Rugby Team to tour the
United Kingdom. Keating’s 2008 diatribe claims
that this team was all-Māori. However, two thirds
of the team had Pākehā ancestry, and five players
identified themselves as Pākehā. Furthermore,
the team was renamed the ‘Natives’ only after
41
the addition of Pākehā players selected by team • Newspaper depiction of
founder and leading Māori player Joe Warbrick. the touring 1888 Natives
team took great delight in
If Frank Keating’s 2008 writings purport to playing on the British
imagination. Illustrated
hermetically seal the colonial period and advance London News 13 October 1888
to a fictive point of postcolonial unity, then the
formation of the 1888 Natives team reflected a
desire to expunge the violence and bloodshed of
the colonial period and display the colony newly
unified under the banner of rugby.
However, these apparent unities were fragile,
and the awareness that Māori had almost
defeated the mighty British Army in the bloody
New Zealand Wars of the 1860s was still very
much in public consciousness well into the early
1900s (Balme 2007: 115). This was a legacy of
which Joe Warbrick was well aware, and eager
to exploit, when he provocatively instituted
the practice of performing a haka before each
game. Considerable unease was soon revealed in
press reports from the Natives tour. Journalists
from Sporting Life attempted to minimize the
performance by pouring scorn on the haka as
a mere ‘pantomime a whoop in the vernacular’
(Ryan 1993: 52). The visiting Australian press
warned that the haka might provoke their
Antipodean cousins to forget altogether the
rules of the game, let alone of civilization, and
‘dash out the brains of some of the players on the
slightest sign of a dispute’ (Ryan 1993: 53). The
sight of non-Māori team members, who joined
in the haka and played alongside the Māori
players, was a considerable source of confusion
for the British press. Team co-founder Thomas
Eyton contended that the press had expected
a team composed entirely of uncivilized ‘black
fellows’, and were not only disappointed by the
appearance of the team, but especially surprised
to see them play so well. (Eyton 1896: 72)
Of course, the physical prowess of the team did
not confound the colonial narrative so much as
confirm it. Even if beaten on the pitch, the United
Kingdom could still win discursively. The Times
accommodated the praise of the Natives team by
considering it
a tribute to our colonising faculty. The colonising
race that can imbue the aboriginal inhabitants of
the colonised countries with a love for its national
games, would seem to have solved the problem of
social amalgamation in those countries.
(Ryan 1993: 50)
A Scottish reporter from the Hawick Press
extended the sentiment by describing the
players, somewhat erotically, ‘as fine a body of
stalwart, muscular, athletic men as anyone might
wish to meet … They are not unlike Europeans’
(Eyton 1896: 27). Discussing the colonial
genealogy of savagery and sport, sports theorist
Brendan Hokowhitu comments that this tour
confirmed the creation of the Māori sportsman
as disciplined brute. Because his aggression
was now confined to the sporting arena, it
provided evidence that the colonial system
had enlightened and assimilated its savages
(Hokowhitu 2004: 270). This colonial move has
also historically incorporated Pākehā players in
the discourse, revelling in the taming of their
colonial energies, presenting them as wild men,
raw farmers and in the case of the legendary
All Black Colin ‘Pinetree’ Meads, a completely
inanimate plank.
In Homi Bhabha's terms, the rugby fluency
of the Natives team reveals the problem of
mimicry, where even the most sincere mimicking
of colonial manners accomplishes an act of
flawed mimesis: the imitator can never become
the imitated. However, this chain of mimesis
discloses the ambivalence of colonial discourse,
revealing its construction and disrupting its
Hartigan
authority. In this instance, the praise of the
players on the field revealed the failed colonial
mimesis of the Natives team: in their thorough
Anglicization as rugby players, playing up and
playing the game, but playing it with ferocity,
they showed themselves emphatically not to be
English (Bhabha 1994: 125). Notwithstanding
the elegance of Bhabha’s perspective, Rey Chow
suggests that he remains susceptible to a binary
reading of mimicry between colonizer and
colonized (Chow 2006). In doing so, he cannot
easily account for the presence of non-Māori
players alongside Māori, complexly entangled
with this act of flawed mimesis. To extend
Bhabha's shift from failed mimicry to the
encroachment of menace, the performance drives
a wedge into the concept of the unified colony.
These productive contradictions signal the
tensions in colonial discourses of assimilation
even as the common thread of rugby seems to
rehearse them. Pivotally, they demonstrate the
impossibility of suturing the colonial wound
and presenting the team as an emblem of
postcolonial national unity. To refigure Joseph
Roach's thoughts on racialized identities in Cities
of the Dead, the haka rips apart surrogation
(Roach 1996: 3-6). While surrogation relies on
colonial discourses constructing the myth of
the community's unified core identity, fulfilling
‘a desire for the telos of perfect closure’ (Roach
1996: 33), the haka falls awkwardly between the
options of affirming or refuting the proximity
of the performers in order to construct the myth
of unity. In particular, the mere presence of
Pākehā performers sabotages the folklorizing
possibility of fixing the haka as a prepositional
moment in a precolonial past. In these terms,
the haka displays not unity but productive,
problematic and challenging disunity. Displaying
the disjunctures and liminalities at the heart
of cultural formations undermines not only
claims to a unified public but the contested
temporalities that seek to foreclose colonial
history.
While the haka of the All Blacks team could
42
 be presented as the non-normative actions of a
Embarrassing Time, Performing Disunity
counterpublic, attempting to stand outside and
in opposition to a general public, its performance
exceeds this model. By interweaving affect in the
social structures of the public, the haka of 1888
exerts a gravitational pull, a temporal drag upon
the haka of 2008. In Carolyn Dinshaw’s terms,
past bodies palpably connect with present ones,
and relations with the past become material
touchings upon contemporary bodies (Dinshaw
1999, Freeman 2005: 60). As a result, the present
is rendered temporally porous. The past of
1888, percolating in the shape of Pākehā players
performing the haka alongside Māori players,
acts as an obstacle to simple stabilizations
of national identity. Subsequently, the haka’s
contradictions, problematics and challenges
become a productive encumbrance. They
serve as a demand to recognize the temporal
operations of the colonial past upon the present
and future, and as a performance, above all, that
embarrasses.
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