The Right to Look by Nicholas Mirzoeff

Author:Nicholas Mirzoeff [Mirzoeff, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822393726
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2011-11-17T18:30:00+00:00

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the Maori chose to identify with Jews because they knew exactly how much it would annoy the Pakeha. “Carlyle,” wrote Froude, “detested Jews,” and his description of Disraeli (cited in Froude's novel The Earl of Beaconsfield) as a “superlative Hebrew conjuror,” echoes the missionary William Woon's puzzled description of “Papaurihia [sic] who has fallen in with some Jews and learned juggling etc. and on this account he is regarded as a wonderful man.”16 Unable to credit that he might have created this movement, the British believed that Papahurihia had been corrupted by a “Hebrew traveler…. [H]e was a sea captain, and he had some skill as a juggler and a ventriloquist.”17 It was not altogether impossible, for there were a number of Jewish settler-traders in the Hokianga region.18 Certainly, many writers believed that tohunga used ventriloquism. What was meant by juggling is less clear. At the same period, Darwin used “jugglery” to refer to his use of technology in South America, so Papahurihia may have had some knowledge of Western technology.19 He was both a vernacular and a national hero, intent on the creation of an imagined community. His movement was literally based on an “against the grain” reading of Protestant doctrine translated into the vernacular, while his political goal was to forge something that might be called a Maori “nation.” His appropriation of the double negative connotation of both indigeneity and Jewishness thus marks an instance of what Stephen Turner has called “native irony,” meaning “the anamorphic distortion of an ‘official’ reality, that which is already known, expected, and elaborated in conventionalized form, through the interference of the affective consciousness of the native or local.”20 Papahurihia's movement, replete with appropriations, aporia, and performative display seems always already postmodern, a fitting subject for Kendrick Smithyman's remarkable deconstructive poem cycle Atua Wera (1997). Papahurihia's claim to be Jewish was repeated by later renewal movements led by figures such as Te Ua Haumene (ca. 1820–66) and Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (ca. 1814–91), which continue to have adherents today.21 Te Ua claimed descent from the twelve sons of Jacob, while Te Kooti framed his dramatic escape from the prison of the Chatham Islands and his march into the interior, in 1868, as an exodus to the Promised Land of Moses. This nationalism was prophetic, contradictory, imaginative, and visualized.

If he claimed ancient authority as a “Jew,” Papahurihia was modern in his synthesis of tradition and current circumstances. He conjured the spirits of the dead to speak and advise the people in their new circumstances, as the tohunga had always done, but now he spoke of Te Nakahi, the serpent, who was a syncretic combination of the serpent in Genesis, the fiery serpent on the rod used by Moses, and the long-standing Maori lizard spirit.22 He raised a flag on his Jewish Sabbath, just as the British would do on the Christian Sunday. The missionaries used a variety of flags to mark their missions, often decorated with a text in Maori.

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