Pica Pica

According to an article syndicated, amongst other places, in the Sydney Morning Herald , Everton has hired Maori dancers to perform a dance based on the “haka” (as used by the New Zealand rugby team) as Everton and Arsenal run onto the park at Liverpool on Saturday.

The club has now, it seems, received “written threats from a leading Maori lawyer”, claiming that “the dance trespasses on Maori rights and disrespects their cultural heritage”. The club management, it appears, intends to go ahead, as indeed they should.

There are legal issues here, and there are also issues about modern culture. As to the legal issues, I am of course not an expert, but if the original “haka” is indeed traditional, then by definition it was not composed by those represented by the lawyer. Their claim is presumably based on genetic and cultural descent from those who first developed the dance. As an Englishman, do I have a right to prevent Maoris from performing (possibly bad) versions of Shakespeare? I think not, even though I do believe there is a Shakespeare way, way back in my ancestry. The dance has been used as part of the pre-match entertainment by Maoris for many years now. The idea that someone in New Zealand has some kind of intellectual right by means of which they can prevent someone doing a modified version of that dance in Liverpool, England, seems to be stretching the law a bit far. The club has indeed hired people of Maori appearance to do this dance, so in any case shouldn’t they be the target of the lawyer’s action? Those Maoris are the ones who are selling the dance to the club, after all. Here it is:

The whole question of the extent to which we have “rights” over the culture that was developed by earlier generations is one that interests me. (The meaning of “aboriginal painting” is an example of these muddy waters to which I hope to return one day.)

And then there is the question of culture. According to the article:

Intellectual property lawyer Maui Solomon told the Herald on Sunday he thought the haka, which starts “Everton! Everton! He, ha, he, ha!”, was “totally disrespectful”

As the Germans might say – “Na und?” And so? I have, of course, no knowledge of the hearts of the Everton management, and cannot comment on whether or not they respect Maori culture. In an ideal world we would all respect each other’s differences, although I certainly hope that would still allow us to make fun of them. Let us, for the moment, assume (perhaps unfairly) that they really are being disrespectful. Frankly, I do not want to live in a world where the appearance of respect is enforced by the law. Too many people have fought too long and too hard to win us the moderate freedom that we now have to speak our minds to have that thrown away for the sake of every group that feels threatened by the way it is represented elsewhere. We can make comical drawings and jokes about Muhammad, we can say that the Queen of England is a frosty old bat, we can satirise Christian priests, the Pope, Nelson Mandela, our Prime Ministers and other political leaders, not to forget the Dalai Lama or, indeed, “Western Buddhists” like myself. And we can giggle at Maoris sticking their tongues out, stamping the floor and going “Ha Ha”. I am not sure whether blasphemy is still on the statute book, but it has become, thankfully, a pretty irrelevant law. I would, let me repeat, hope that we have respect for each other in our hearts, and that we would therefore refrain from doing things like the above under certain circumstances, especially those where they are particularly likely to cause hurt or offence. But it would be a grim, grey, oppressive and oppressed world in which the law was used to impose the personal taste of the few on the general taste of the many.