“Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language.”
De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P15-18
De Certeau investigates the ways in which people navigate their way through every day at an unconscious level. In this chapter he studies the “subtle, stubborn, resistant activity of groups”[1] to enforced assimilation and the ways that resistance is articulated.
He described two levels of discourse, one being the acknowledgement of actual power relationships where by use of force and mendacity, the powerful retain a place of unjust victory and those whom they oppress are always “fucked over”[2].
The other level is the everyday enunciation of that power relationship through lucid discourse amongst the people and the way that articulation serves to undermine, disrupt and subvert the dominant order.
I couldn’t help but connect these instances of oppression and uplifting stories of resistance locally. The enunciation of historical injustices to Maori in the 1970’s was responded to by other everyday New Zealanders as they would to some alien monster bursting out of a green sleepy hollow. The nations’ smug confidence in previous claims to world-class race relations was under attack. As a consequence, “the powerful” response was denial, further mendacious distortions and increased defensive power strategies.
One of the truths that emerged concerned the Ngati Whatua hapu who attempted to reclaim their land, stolen from them by the Crown, by physical occupation in the 1970’s.
Ngati Whatua, like the Pernambuco peasants describing their situation in 1974, recognized the everyday injustice of an order that seemed immutable, but this did not make it any more acceptable. “The fact was not accepted as a law”.[3]
In 1978 the Crown responded with force, arresting 222 people occupying Takaparawhau and charging them with trespass.
Just as de Certeau discovered that “the Indians often used the (enforced Spanish) laws, practices and representations that were imposed on them by force…to ends other than those of their conquerors: they subverted them from within…” [4],
The Bastion Point Defense Committee was set up and employed tactics to subvert the court in the same way.
It was decided that all who were charged would defend themselves thus employing the full use of the imposed Westminster judiciary system. The defendants called on Crown witnesses from the highest echelons of the State along with innumerable experts and other witnesses and prepared lengthy interrogations of them.
One defendant insisted on speaking in te reo, the court provided her with a translator and in the manner of the trickster and she and the translator embarked on long, rambling and humorous conversations, some lasting up to an hour after each question was put to her. Of course the Judge and court officials did not understand a word that they said and although they interjected with barely controlled frustration, each interjection only encouraged an even longer, more circuitous response.
This play, this brave stubbornness, this refusal to fully comply exemplifies to me someone making do with what she had. By applying her knowledge, that of which Lyotard says ”also includes notions of ‘know-how’, ‘knowing how to live’ “[5], she found a way of foiling the Crown’s game in what de Certeau describes as “the certain art of placing one’s blows” whilst perhaps enjoying “a pleasure in getting around the rules of a constraining space.”[6]
These tactics resulted in the first forty cases taking months to finalise and huge costs to the Crown. Eventually they decided to drop the remaining 180 charges.[7]
[1] De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. P.18
[2] Ibid. P.16
[3] Ibid.P.16
[4] Ibid. P32.
[5] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.1988. P.19
[6]. De Certeau, Michel. “The Practice of Everyday Life”. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 P.18.
[7] Takaparawhau, The People’s Story-1998 Bastion Point 20 year Commemoration Book, Sharon Hawke, Ed. (unpublished), 1998. Pp.24/63.
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