Affective Temporalities: The Haka, Rugby, and Aotearoa-New Zealand in the UK

            In the United Kingdom, Shakespearean bear-baiters long ago gave way to the verbally baiting newspaper journalists envisaged by his contemporary, Ben Jonson, in The Staple of News. These take the form of belligerent “Wind Up Merchants,” writers whose main and perhaps sole purpose is to stir opinion. Even by these standards, the sports writer Frank Keating set especially hostile pen to paper in his November 18, 2008 article in the The Guardian. Writing on the subject of the pre-match performance of the haka[1] by the All Blacks rugby team of Aotearoa-New Zealand, Keating declared in a headline of sneering nursery-rhyme, “It’s time the haka posture was put out to pasture.”^[2]

Keating went on to pronounce of the haka, a pre-match ritual of encounter virtually synonymous with the sport of rugby, “New Zealand’s rugby haka has had its day...an occasional and once diverting wheeze^[3] has long passed its sell-by date...”, lamenting “there is not a jot of fun in it anymore.” He then characterized the haka as a “charmless eye-rolling, tongue-squirming dance,” a “pre-match native rumba,” which he recommended greeting with “a look of seriously adult disdain,” concluding, “All those who agree, stick out your tongues in grotesque mime.”

This polemic restates a recurring sentiment in the UK press during each All Blacks tour, where the haka has always been greeted with unease. The latterday performance is generally the famous haka, “Ka Mate,” the most common choice since 1907. It is performed as a precursor to the game, following the national anthems. The players assemble at half way, face the opposing team, and a senior Maori player leads the team in roughly forty seconds of rhythmic chanting of words and stylized gestures which in combination tell a story, and frame this moment of encounter between parties. In response, Keating's complaint echoes the discomfort of nineteenth-century voices from the archive, as they spoke of the forerunners of the All Blacks, the 1888 New Zealand Native team who toured Great Britain. Remarkably, 120 years following that tour, his 2008 diatribe ventriloquizes the old Victorian colonialists. He offers a condescending description of a cultural performance at best a joke to be tolerated by its cultural betters, at worst a grotesque and savage display exceeding the beatific indulgence of Gilbert and Sullivan’s enlightened model of a modern Major-General. Some displays of “grotesque mime” after all, overflow the indulgence of an educated, civilized attitude. They are beyond the pale – with colonial pun fully intended, given that Frank Keating is, in fact, Irish.

Particularly striking in these twinned moments of 1888 and 2008 is the burden of embarrassment assumed by the viewer of the performance watching the poor colonials. This is intensified by Keating's accusations. On the one hand, the savage behavior of the 1888 team could apparently be tolerated as it was, at least, all-Maori. On the other hand, Keating somehow feels personally affronted because Pakeha[4] and Maori players perform the contemporary haka alongside each other. He wonders, exasperated, “why should they want to perform a war-dance of the conquered?” Keating's embarrassment is echoed by Stephen Jones (of The Times), who affirmed as recently as December 31 2009 that one of the many problems with the performance of the haka was its overuse, which had in his opinion led to the ritual being altogether “discredited.” Ironically, responses to the haka initiated the use of national anthems in international sporting fixtures,[5] but the right of repetition is, of course, a privilege. The haka's overexposure, however, exhausts its invited presence as pre-match colonial spoil, and its presence acts as an eerie invocation of the excess of colonialism.

These attitudes expose key fissures in naive constructions of cosmopolitics, displaying the characteristics of Stanley Fish’s caricature of the “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,”^[6] but “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.”^[7]

Critiquing writers such as Jones and Keating at face value is a tempting proposition. Similarly attractive is an aggressive counter-reading, driven by a formal aesthetic analysis, framed by attractive media footage and drawn together in the smooth surfaces of a powerpoint-derived patina. Perhaps disconcertingly, this article utterly refuses either of these strategies, as both insidiously succumb to the fetishistic logic of Keating and Jones. Without these visual markers, this is an invitation to engage without the pretense of a retooled “objective” gaze, and moreover, reflects my awareness of whom and for whom I speak, and those conversations that are not mine to lead.

This paper is a moment of possibility. It is a moment to meaningfully treat these outraged journalists, perhaps especially if they are playing the stance of outrage for provocative ends. This involves tracing the discursive shifts that underpin Keating and Jones’ anxieties. Is it possible that by connecting the temporal moments of 1888 and 2008, the haka could be seen as an embodied practice that sets in motion an ongoing affective circus? And furthermore, what is troubled by the presence of Maori and Pakeha alongside each other as performers, where a seamless move from past to present is undone by the embarrassing reappearance of this “native rumba”? Keating’s desire for the colonial past to recede into memory, for successionist histories to swallow up the bodies performing before his horrified gaze, is deeply imbricated with the imposition of colonial time and space. Yet his yearning is undone by the temporal porousness of that present, as this apparent relic from the past, the haka, embarrasses.

            Nicholas Ridout notes that an “embarrass,” originally a noun, was an obstacle.[8] The verb derived from it, from which he generates an affective politics of audience embarrassment in performance, means to encumber, to impede, to perplex or throw into doubt or difficulty. To rework Ridout's ideas in quite a different context, the haka embarrasses: its kinetic histories are an obstacle to foreclosed narratives of assimilation. It does not simply import the bloody legacy of colonial history: it activates history in the present. The space torn open by the performance of the haka in a touring rugby match in the United Kingdom becomes not only a contested intercultural border, but to utilize Michal Kobialka's reformulation of the border,[9] a wound. An enquiry that dwells in this wound sees the historical moments that remain open, bleeding, refusing the colonial logic of successionism and linear time. Rather than a trajectory from pre to postcolonial periods, with a souçon of decolonization, the haka pivots the “post” of postcolonial. To reference Lyotard, this “post” is not a movement of flashback, feedback, or succession, but an operation, a procedure in working upon and elaborating upon an “initial forgetting” (80).[10]

            This act of “initial forgetting” presents the performance as a simple “war dance,” detached from its wider genealogies. Although war haka forms such as peruperu are a small subset of a diverse range of bodily practices collectively referred to as haka, these are erased by a neocolonialist historiography that presents Maori culture as a violently savage, hypermasculinized space that must give way to the modern. Moreover, in the case of the specific haka performed by the All Blacks, this neglects its own complex narrative of gendered ambiguities. The haka becomes historicized, located as a precolonial performance in order to be dismissed as outdated. Yet it is also rendered an ahistorical, unchanging, savage tradition, rather than a reflexive bodily practice framed as encounter.

            Interrogating this totalizing colonial historiography carries high stakes. Christopher Balme describes the haka as becoming synonymous with Maori, which he calls performance as a metonymy of culture, frequently extended to standing in for the culture of Aotearoa-New Zealand as a whole. The haka's prominence in popular culture also allows it to lead a separate, but connected 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,[11] a stirring tale of a white American 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 treats the complex racial dynamics of the relationship between Aotearoa-New Zealand and South Africa, and the performance of the haka in the context of a historically charged rivalry in an Afrikaans-led sport as mere set-pieces in his Hollywood narrative.

Surprisingly, and all the more so given such epistemic violences, inquiries that explore the performance historiographies of sport are still relatively rare. Sports theorist Mark Falcous rightfully notes that compared with literature and drama, sport has been marginalized in postcolonial studies, posing a considerable gap in critical discourse given that the “cultural space of mediated sport is a lustrous site for enactments of national imaginings.”^[12] Further, and crucially, while Falcous references performance theory, speaking of “mass happenings made 'real' through performance,”[13] the idea of “performance” is only a metaphor, rather than a mode of engagement. In this context, the haka offers not simply an object of study but indeed a methodology that emerges from an embodied practice. The haka's invitation as encounter suggests the dialogue between fields that must take place to understand its layered histories.

This is especially pivotal given that the performance of haka, Wira Gardiner argues, 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.”^[14] Haka continuously respond to shifts in their performance, making them a rich site for a complex dynamic of cultural borrowings and redefinitions.^[15] As Christopher Balme notes, the agency of Maori in reworking haka even in the context of their most staged versions in the nineteenth century troubles binaries of “traditional” and “inauthentic” performance. In Dwight Conquergood's terms, the haka defies stabilization, operating as a force of productive contradictions resisting closure.^[16]

Grounded in and rearticulating 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 representation.^[17] The introduction of sports such as rugby was a marker of colonial power – Lord Harris commented in the 1870's 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 visibility and the circulatory momentum of international touring, sport is not just a representational practice, but is materially constitutive of the worlds it imagines.^[18] Simon During comments that this is especially true of rugby, where an upper-class English game was erected in Aotearoa-New Zealand as a symbol of collapsing class distinctions, the value of mateship, and colonizer-colonized reconciliation.^[19] In unwitting support of the viewpoint that During critiques, the rugby writer Spiros Zavos chides English scribes, writing that the haka is “a sign of the integration of rugby and New Zealand society, its people and its history.”[20]   

Zavos’ failed attempt to foreclose a narrative of unity finds its beginnings in a return to the earlier twinned historical moments: 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-Maori. However, two thirds of the team had Pakeha ancestry, and five players identified themselves as Pakeha. Furthermore, the team was renamed the “Natives” only after the addition of Pakeha players selected by team founder and the leading Maori player of his generation, Joe Warbrick. If Frank Keating's 2008 movement is an explicit attempt to hermetically seal the colonial period and advance to a fictive point of 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 Maori had almost defeated the mighty British Army in the bloody New Zealand Wars of the 1860's was still very much in public consciousness well into the early 1900's.^[21] This was a legacy that Joe Warbrick was well aware of, and exploited, and was unafraid to display when he provocatively instituted the practice of performing a haka before each game. Press reports from the Natives tour soon revealed the considerable unease of the onlookers, unconvinced that the colonials had been sufficiently tamed. Some journalists attempt to minimize the performance by pouring scorn on the haka as a mere “pantomime...a whoop in the vernacular.”^[22] Others worry that the haka might provoke the players to forget the rules of the game altogether, let alone of civilization, and “dash out the brains of some of the players on the slightest sign of a dispute.”^[23] The sight of non-Maori team members, who joined in the haka and played alongside the Maori players, was a considerable source of confusion for the British press. Team co-founder Thomas Eyton was under no illusion that they had expected a team of, as he pithily observed, “black fellows,”^[24] who they were especially surprised to see play so well.

Of course, this praise of the physical prowess of the team does 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,”^[25] while a Scottish reporter extended the sentiment by describing the players, somewhat erotically, “as fine a body of stalwart, muscular, athletic men as anyone might wish to meet,” venturing hopefully “They are not unlike Europeans...”^[26] Brendan Hokowhitu comments that this tour confirmed the creation of the Maori sportsman as disciplined brute, with his aggression now confined to the sporting arena, providing evidence that the colonial system had enlightened and assimilated its savages.^[27] It should be added that historically, Pakeha players are also consistently presented as tamed animals, of unthinking “natural” ability, 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. In his characterization, the paradox of colonial mimicry is founded where even the most sincere mimicking of colonial manners accomplishes the flawed mimetic attempt of the mimic that cannot truly resemble. In doing so, this discloses the ambivalence of colonial discourse, revealing its construction, and disrupting its authority. In this instance, the praise of the players on the field reveals 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 show themselves emphatically not to be English.^[28]

The sheer stature and ubiquity of a postcolonial theorist such as Bhabha also carries its own danger: that of considering his theoretical approach to be definitive in examining the particularities of this corporeal event. Notwithstanding the elegance of Bhabha’s perspective, Rey Chow suggests that he remains susceptible to a binarized reading of mimicry in an oscillation of colonizer and colonized.[29] In doing so, he cannot easily account for the presence of non-Maori players alongside Maori, 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 show the inability to simply suture over the colonial wound and have the team serve as an emblem of unity. To refigure Joseph Roach's thoughts on racialized identities in Cities of the Dead,[30] the haka rips apart surrogation, where colonial discourses attempt to construct the myth of the community's unified core identity, but here, fall awkwardly between affirming or refuting the proximity of the performers in order to construct that myth. In particular, the mere presence of Pakeha performers sabotages the folklorizing possibility of fixing the haka as a prepositional moment in a precolonial past.

Such cracks and disunities refigure the modality of time that haunts the postcolonial model, and dismantle the successionist chronopolitics that underpin embarrassment by the haka. This in turn twins 1888 and 2008, unpicking the temporal structures that see them as separate sites. The haka of 1888 exerts a gravitational pull, a temporal drag, upon the haka of 2008. In Carolyn Dinshaw's terms,[31] past bodies palpably connect with present ones, and relations with the past are not only operative upon the present, not even reenactment, but are material touchings upon contemporary bodies. The haka as corporealized, historiographical practice is not one where later figures stand in for earlier ones, but a defiance of progressive temporalities, where ancestors, performers and those yet to perform are all present.

Furthermore, if, as Margaret Werry contends, imagination is the crucial term in the turn from representation to performativity, and Benedict Anderson’s oft-cited theorization of nation as “imagined community” gives way to the interrogation of the social imaginary by its coterminous performative act,^[32] the haka displays not unity, but productive, problematic, and challenging disunity. The gap between racial harmony and Maori material advances is not just visible, but hyper-visible.^[33] The performance of the haka by Pakeha players alongside Maori players, semicircled on a rugby field in a gleaming “modern” stadium in the United Kingdom, is, indeed an obstacle to simple stabilizations of national identity and the apparently multicultural moment. Its contradictions, problematics and challenges are a productive encumbrance, a demand to recognize the temporal operations of the colonial past upon the porous present and future, and a performance that embarrasses.