Performing the Politics of Kindness in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern’s stated politics of kindess. From her response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks to her communicative approach to Covid 19, this rhetoric has been central to Ardern’s government’s political identity. Such an emphasis on kindness allows us to consider how the affectivities associated with it are deployed as a basis for the instrumentalization of care, and this article examines the relationship between a politics of kindness and the practices of care. From a performance point of view, I examine the distinctions between policies of kindness as either happily (felicitous) performative a practice of meaningful transformation or unhappily performative in the sense meant by Sara Ahmed when she describes the unhappy performativity of statements of anti-racism that fail to enact what they declare (2004). To work through such distinctions, I consider examples of performances of care in Aotearoa that span protest and performance practice. Through these examples, I ask how policies of care might become truly caring in practice and consider how the domains of government, civil society and artistic practice might inform one another in this endeavour. Aotearoa’s orientation towards an often-fraught politics of kindness provides an opportunity to reflect on not just the necessary scrutiny of such political language, but also on the openings it provides to think about the performativity of what Donna Haraway calls kin-making in the 21st century.

INTRODUCTION

Jacinda Ardern, leader of the New Zealand Labour Party, became Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand (hereafter Aotearoa) in 2017.¹ While she had not been in the leadership role for long before her election, she quickly began to scaffold her political identity around notions of care and kindness:

If I could distil it down into one concept that we are pursuing in New Zealand it is simple and it is this. Kindness. In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism – the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves, of kindness and collectivism, might just be as good a starting point as any. (Ardern 2018)

This emphasis on kindness – perhaps what Martha Nussbaum refers to as liberalism characterized by moral content (what she calls ‘political love’) (2013: 16) – has been central to Ardern’s government’s policies and their communication, from rebranding the annual government budget a ‘wellbeing budget’, to her messaging in the first wave of response to COVID-19 in 2020, which was framed around kindness, care and collectivity. While Ardern’s popularity has been dented by the economic and social challenges provoked by the Pandemic, Jennifer Curtin and Lara Greaves’s description of Ardern’s political style as a form of ‘gentle populism’ indicates the wide purchase that Ardern’s emphasis on kindness has had with the electorate (2018: 205–6). Indeed, the Labour Party was re-elected in 2020, gaining a substantial enough proportion of the vote to be capable of governing alone. But what does a politics and indeed Ardern’s performances of kindness mean in practice? How can government and its instruments enact kindness through policy? Is Ardern’s language merely rhetorical flourish intended to capture the ‘hearts and minds’ of the electorate or to serve as a moral example? As Curtin and Greaves write, there are ‘claims that the use of the term “kindness” represents a “wishy-washy” politics with little substance and a new form of virtue signaling’ (2018: 185). In this article, I consider Ardern’s emphasis on kindness from a performative perspective in order to unpack what it does and does not do.

KINDNESS, CARE, MANAAKITANGA

Given the focus of this issue on care, it is important to clarify the distinction between kindness and care. Whereas care is, as Amanda Stuart Fisher writes, ‘a live encounter and within a specific juncture of time and space’ that ‘involves forms of embodied knowledge’ (2020: 7), kindness may inform action, but is perhaps better understood as a disposition – a feeling or attitude. Indeed, unlike care, kindness is not a verb. Etymologically, the word comes from the word ‘kin’, denoting a kinship or sameness (Phillips and Taylor 2009: 6), or, as Stephen Rowland (2009) suggests, a natural mode of relating between members of the same family, group or species. The reliance of kindness on identification is indeed one of its problems. As Donna Haraway suggests, what the contemporary moment demands is our ability to make-kin with those unlike ourselves, what she calls ‘making kin as odd-kin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin’ (2016: 2). In this sense, a politics of kindness risks coalescing around established lines of familiarity and, as Dylan Asafo suggests, excluding those whose experiences are not easily identified with (2021: 43). Indeed, not far from Aotearoa, research into kindness by the 2011 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes found that while more than 98 per cent of respondents strongly agreed or agreed that it was important to be kind to one another, only 68 per cent of respondents thought that all people were equally deserving of kindness (Habibis et al. 2016: 403).

Given this context, I want to offer an alternate way of approaching the discourse of kindness in Aotearoa through engaging the Maori concept of manaakitanga. Indeed, in a recent interview I conducted with Maori educator and historian Hirini Kaa he stated that he didn’t know what kindness really meant in the context of education, but that he did understand manaakitanga (Kaa and Willis 2021: 163). Kaa’s remark points to the gap between broad cultural concepts like kindness and specific forms of Indigenous knowledge – ways of knowing, being and doing. Theatre-maker and arts facilitator Boni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho explains that manaakitanga is derived from the Maori word manaaki, meaning ‘to support, take care of, give hospitality to, protect, look out for – show respect, generosity and care for others’, and that manaakitanga itself means ‘the process of showing respect, generosity and care for others’ (Mullen and Tukiwaho 2020: 47). He further clarifies that in his own work, ‘mana’ (of manaaki) is framed as personal power, and ‘aki’ meaning to uplift or encourage, explaining, ‘Our function, in all our mahi (work), is to uplift people’s personal power’ (48). Performance artist and scholar Mark Harvey similarly explains that manaakitanga ‘involves the uplifting of mana or reaffirming the mana of others through actions of generosity that include kindness … a dynamic exchange of generosity and expected reciprocity in matauranga Maori spaces’ (2021: 143). In the context of Aotearoa, the concept of manaakitanga offers a nuanced approach to ‘kindness’, which is underpinned by actions that uphold the mana and tapu (sanctity) of individuals and that recognize the interdependence of individual and community well-being. As I shall discuss, this concept is not only more culturally specific than kindness, but because of its cultural specificity, entails more specific demands for action than the broad concept of kindness. This type of action-based approach to care provides a way forward from the discourse of a politics of kindness to thinking about- and enacting- a more properly performative politics of ‘uplifting people’s personal power’.

THE PERFORMATIVITY OF KINDNESS

In order to understand the problems of assigning performative agency to kindness, it is helpful to start by turning to what J. L. Austin called ‘infelicitous’ performances, where declarations don’t enact what they state (1975: 14). Sara Ahmed provides a highly relevant parsing of this concept in relation to discourses of anti-racism that I would like to draw from here. Written in 2004, Ahmed’s arguments were responsive to the emergence of the field of critical white (or whiteness) studies. In discussing the ‘unhappy’ performativity of some of these anti-racist discourses, she writes:

My concern with the non-perlormativity of anti-racism has hence been to examine how sayings are not always doings, or to put it more strongly, to show how the investment in saying as if saying was doing can actually extend rather than challenge racism.(Ahmed 2004)

Certainly, the populist deployment of kindness can ‘unhappily’ mask the degree to which kindness is shaped and limited by existing social mores, as suggested in the section above. For example, Asafo argues that a politics of kindness is incapable of achieving justice for either Maori or other marginalized groups.

Firstly, the settler-colonial state of New Zealand has misappropriated the rhetoric of ‘kindness’ to perpetuate violence against not only Maori but also Muslims and other marginalised groups. Secondly, such a ‘politics ofkindness’ individualises systemic problems in New Zealand and thus obscures the settler-colonial state’s fundamentally violent and illegitimate nature. (Asafo 2021: 41)

Core to this unhappy performativity is the reliance of a discourse of political kindness on asymmetries of power. As Asafo further argues:

The problem here is that a ‘politics of kindness’ can lead people to ask how wealthy, powerful white people in government and wider society can be encouraged to be ‘kind’ to Maori and marginalised peoples, rather than how conditions can be transformed so that the ability of Maori and marginalised peoples to lead lives with dignity does not depend on whether these people are ‘kind’ or not.(Asafo 2021: 43)

Asafo’s identification of kindness as something that ‘powerful white people’ possess and distribute at their discretion is important here. What both Ahmed and Asafo point to are the ways in which the power of language can be deployed to oppressive effects even as it purports to do otherwise. It is therefore evident that the language of change and change itself are not at all the same thing, and that who gets to speak the language of change matters.

Commentary such as Asafo’s is critical to any analysis of kindness and must be considered alongside any aspirations that we have for a political discourse that eschews division and fear, and for the compassionate action that is so sorely needed in our contemporary world. A critical perspective on the language of political kindness reminds us that for it to have any performative potential, such performativity must be rooted in actions taken to achieve justice and equality. In what follows I therefore want to reflect on three performance examples, one political and two theatrical, that return us to the concept of manaakitanga. Underpinning my discussion of these particular performances is the fact that there can be no political kindness without addressing the injustice of racism. I must acknowledge my own positionality here as a Pakeha scholar (of European origin); my expertise in this discussion is in the areas of kindness and performance and not matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge). I am also mindful of Ahmed’s arguments and the potential non-performativity of my own scholarship. However, it is my intention that the article contributes to the project of anti-racism, and the writing is grounded in the spirit of critical ‘withness’ that Lisa Samuels evokes when she writes of a form of critical engagement that ‘turns away from potential power and distance stances of exegetical criticality and towards an attention with the engaged art event, an attention that does not seek to be somewhere other than in relation’ (2021: 60). Samuels further describes this stance as a mode of being ‘in kind’ (61)- an echo of Haraway’s urging that we make kin with those unlike us- that is attentive to its own ‘embodied interpretation’ (62), and I hope that this type of self-reflexive criticality holds the discussion that follows.

PARTNERSHIP AND PERFORMANCE

Before discussing any of the case studies that comprise the rest of the article, I want to explain the importance of the concept of partnership in the Aotearoa context. In a broad sense, partnership requires reciprocity, an interplay of speaking and listening, and the kind of improvisational flexibility that Maurice Hamington describes when he talks about care that is responsive rather than directive (2019: 21). Certainly, it is a great challenge for the state to care in the relational and active sense that Stuart Fisher describes in ways that might constitute such a partnership. However, in the case of Aotearoa, partnership is constitutionally foundational, stemming from the New Zealand government’s obligations to uphold the commitments of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), the agreement signed between the British Crown and Iwi (local Maori tribes) in 1840. While from an outside perspective such a treaty may itself be viewed as an instrument of colonization, it in fact underpins Maori political agency. For example, in outlining their kaupapa (mission), Te Pati Maori (The Maori Party) writes: ‘We envision an Aotearoa Hou where Tanga ta Whenua [people of the land-Indigenous Maori], Tangata Moana [Pacific peoples] and Tangata Tiriti [people of the treaty -the ancestors of Crown representative and other settlers and migrants] together will realise the true intent of Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ (Te Pati Maori 2022). The phrase true intent is important here, for there are two different versions of Te Tiriti, the text in English and the text in Maori, and there are significant interpretive variations between them. While there is not space to unpack those differences here, the Maori treaty text expresses the core entitlement of Maori to self-governance. Rectification of the breaches of Te Tiriti are therefore central to the project of decolonization in Aotearoa, and the notion of partnership with the Crown implies a relationship that upholds mana motuhake in perpetuity. Such de colonization does indeed require partnership (or as is now frequently discussed, ‘co governance’), which realizes Te Tiriti’s assurances of mana motuhake. And, as Ocean Ripeka Mercier writes, ‘To see a truly decolonized Aotearoa … decolonizing actions will … have to transform the European systems and frameworks that are the deep institutions of colonization’ (Mercier 2020: 64). As Asafo points, out, the political rhetoric of kindness is implicitly bound to these ‘deep institutions’.

Centrally, therefore, the principle of partnership both invites us to rethink how power is performed and points to a language of performance -partner work, improvisation, responsivity, listening, holding, yielding- that helps clarify the conditions required to ensure any mobilization that derives from a rhetoric of kindness might begin to unpick what Stuart Fisher calls “’care-less” state processes … structured around the concept of care as quantifiable economy’ (2020: 3). Indeed, this is where both performance practices and performance studies may offer insights to the broader political field. Helena Grehan’s writing on the concept of ‘slow listening’ provides one such example. Writing particularly from the perspective of the audience, Grehan explores a deeply attentive form of listening grounded in being fully attuned to both what is being said and ‘the way that saying is performed’ (2019: 53). Grehan’s proposition becomes particularly interesting when it is applied in a political context, for what is required in the context of this discussion is for the government to assume the position of the spectat or- to be the slow listener who is ‘open to hearing what is being said, to listening out for what is left unsaid and to have the generosity to absorb this rnaterial without ego so that it can enrich conversations of all kinds’ (58).

The presentation of petitions to government on parliamentary grounds provides an example of when such listening is called for. In 1975 Dame Whina Cooper and a collective of Maori interests called Te Roopu o te Matakite (’those with foresight’) led a protest hikoi (march) that travelled the length of the North Island, ending on the grounds. There, the marchers presented to the government of the day a Memorial of Rights that demanded that ‘all statutes that could alienate, designate or confiscate Maori land be repealed, and that the control of the last remaining tribal lands be vested in Maori in perpetuity ‘ (Harris 2004: 72), and a petition signed by some 60,000 signatories. A group of the protestors, members of Nga Tamatoa, remained on the Parliament grounds for some weeks afterwards, installing a tent embassy in protest. The embassy followed the installation of a ‘Maori Embassy’ on the parliamentary grounds in 1972 by Tame Iti and others as ‘an assertion of tino rangatiratanga’ (43). The Land March and embassies highlight the significance of partnership in Maori-Crown relations and the sense in which the struggle to achieve such partnership is both embodied and requires/ calls for a reciprocal response grounded slow listening. In this sense, the open relationality that characterizes what Hamington calls ‘skilful improvisation [as] a moral methodology’ becomes important as ‘a way of creatively interacting and responding with openness, enquiry and imagination, such that the right thing to do emerges from engagement with others’ (2020: 27). Protestors hoped that in the improvisational exchange with government, which demanded its ‘slow listening’, ‘the right thing to do’ would become apparent and indeed, the performative articulations of tino rangatiratanga in 1975 and the years leading up to this point achieved significant outcomes. In 1975 the Treaty of Waitangi Act was passed by the government, which led to the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal whose mandate is to investigate Crown breaches of Te Tiriti.

Hamington suggests that in the improvisational exchange, what is most important is not ‘the authority of the socially constructed moral rules’ but rather the very moment of ‘confronting the other’ (ibid.). The assembly of Maori on the parliamentary grounds in 1975 was a collective embodiment of the declarative force of the petition, and, through its temporary occupation of the grounds, the hikoi had the effect of both powerfully rnaterializing the legitimacy of its claim and, in Maori terms, presenting a wero (challenge), that was given effect through the anticipatory and declarative presence of those who delivered the signatures. In her Notes toward a Peiformative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler attempts to theorize such presence. She writes: ‘Showing up, standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech and silence are all aspects of a sudden assembly, an unforeseen form of political performativity that puts livable life at the forefront of politics’ (Butler 2015: 18). The force of presence of the Land Marchers came from their assertion of tina rangatiratanga - self-determination -through bodily presence. The legislative changes that issued from Maori political actions of the 1970s were not motivated by or expressions of kindness, but rather the execution of actions that recognized wrongs in need of reparation. Underpinning these wrongs was the failure of the government to recognize the self-determination agreed upon in Te Tiriti, and the consequential undermining of the mana of Maori society generally that flowed from this failure.

GETTING IN THE WAKA

I therefore wish to return to the concept of manaakitanga as a performative counterpart to the unhappy performativity of a politics of kindness through briefly discussing two socially engaged performances: one an explicitly theatrical articulation of manaakitanga, and the other an invitation to a shared kōrero (discussion) about racism and Te Tiriti-based notions of partnership. Both were the work of Maori theatre company, Te Pou, who are based in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland. The company describes its kaupapa (purpose), as ‘to provide mana uplifting experiences and storytelling through tikanga Maori led, collective approaches to performing arts’, and lists manaakitanga as one if its key guiding values (Te Pou Theatre 2021).

Figure 1. Front Yard Festival,Te Pou Theatre, lamaki Makaurau Auckland, 2020. Photo Julie Zhu

The first example is the company’s Front Yard Festival project, which was staged during the first period of national lockdown in 2020 and took the form of a short ten-minute outdoor performance for koroua and kuia (elderly community members) around the city. One particular performance was widely reported. Shortly before lockdown, a story emerged in the media of a Maori woman named Rose Greaves, a long-term Kainga Ora (state agency for public housing) tenant in the affluent inner-city suburb of Ponsonby. The story concerned anonymous racist hate-mail she received from a neighbour, which demanded that she leave the neighbourhood, and Greaves related that this was just the most recent incident of years of racist harassment. In response, Te Pou gathered in front of Greaves’s house and performed for her. Footage of the performance shows Greaves seated, flanked by whanau (family) and supporting neighbours as the theatre company members called, sang and clowned (Haimona-Riki 2020). The performance aimed precisely to uplift Greaves’s mana in response to its attempted diminishment by neighbours, training its attention on remedying that pain, on celebration, community and solidarity.

Manaakitanga here challenged the pain that came from a failure of partnership- that is, from racism generally and from government agency Kainga Ora’s own failure to act specifically. To perform kindness in this instance is not simply amelioration or consolation. The work ofTe Pou and its coverage in the media amplified Greaves’s experience in such a way that expressed both kotahitanga (solidarity) and manaakitanga, demanding that her experiences be heard, while at the same time reclaiming her home - her street- as sovereign site. Manaakitanga read in relation to kindness therefore illustrates that for a politics of kindness is to have any value, it must be grounded in a commitment to justice. As Sarah Burton and Vikki Turbine write: [C]are and kindness is not simply a particular attitude of geniality or occasionally ‘brightening

someone’s day.’ Instead, we need to comprehend it as both radical dispositions and radical acts: speaking truth to power, refusing damaging hierarchies, rejecting restrictive and exclusionary interpretations of ‘professionalism.’ (Burton and Turbine 2019)

Similarly, Alys Longley suggests that ‘radical kindness might occur when our care begins to take the form of a “no” rather than a “yes”. Such kindness refuses to tolerate and stabilise systems that ride on oppression and extraction from the many for the few’ (2021: 201). The responsiveness of Te Pou’s performance for Greaves served as a refusal of racism and expressed a commitment to justice and equity, a determination to uphold the mana of others, and social leadership that walks alongside. For the government to transition from the non-performative rhetoric of kindness to meaningful actions of care requires both the kinds of partnership-based movements of power from centre to community that Ocean Mercier suggests, and a willingness on the part of government to be an advocate for those who most need advocacy and to have the courage to refuse - to say no - to those who least require its support but command most of its attention. Front Yard Festival offered manaakitanga to its own community and at the same time, through doing so, cast into sharp relief the ‘unheard’ unkindnesses that demand slow listening.

The second Te Pou performance I want to briefly discuss is Racists Anonymous, originally performed in Tamaki Makaurau in 2021 as part of a city-wide comedy festival. The interactive performance, staged in a large black studio space with the audience seated in a circle and a facilitator at the front, parodied the structure of an anonymous meeting, beginning with the mantra, ‘I’m a racist but that’s okay because I keep changing every day.’ It quickly became apparent that a small number of actors were seated in the circle, and the performance alternated between pre-scripted exchanges between these actors and interactions with the audience. Much of this interaction was highly substantive. For example, near the beginning of the performance, the audience was asked to provide examples of racism reported in the media in the past week, which then formed the basis for an extended collective discussion. Near the end of the performance, the facilitator stepped back entirely and allocated ten minutes for the audience to lead the discussion. While the work was programmed as a comedy, and indeed the scripted elements satirized racial anxieties and stereotypes were very funny, the overall affect of the performance was sincere, personal and indeed serious about its subject matter. The company, Te Pou, had invited us to enter into their whare, their house, to talk about racism not just as they had experienced it but as something concerning every single audience member, with a particular responsibility for reflection and action asked ofPakeha who attended. Elsewhere I have written of the performance:

Paku’s [facilitator’s] plea in the end was for Pakeha to ‘get in the waka (canoe),’ to embrace the rich potential of truly embedding Maori values into the Pakeha way of life … From a theatrical point of view, the performance in its dramaturgical design functioned as such a waka; indeed, it relied upon the audience ‘getting in’ in order to undertake its journey. (Willis 2021: 205)

Figure 2. Racists Anonymous. Te Pou Theatre, Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021. PhotoAmarbir Singh

In addition to the manaakitanga of Te Pou to the audience, which was striking in both the invitation to dialogue and its warm accommodation of the audience, including providing kai (food) and inviting audience members to stay after the performance, the performance also provided a model of partnership in action, using performance as a framework for dialogue aimed towards justice, for a sharing of perspectives and for the opportunity of marking shared commitment. In her introduction to Performing Care, Stuart Fisher writes of ‘socially engaged performance that moves beyond social utility and positions performance as a mode of care that emerges somewhere in-between art and social practice’ (2020: 7). Racists Anonymous very much embodied this mode. In fact, Pakeha audience members were recipients of kindness- of manakitanga- but in being positioned as such were called to account for themselves- to see themselves from another perspective. Indeed, before the performance began, a government pamphlet from the 1980s was circulated intended to explain to recent immigrants the particularities and peculiarities of Pakeha society. As the cast pointed out, such an official exposition of Pakeha culture is rare, taken so often as it is to be a broad form of ‘New Zealandness’, or ‘Kiwiness’ in and of itself- that is as a form of universalism (or what Fred Moten calls ‘the terrible interplay of universalism and force’ (2018: 4)). As Amanda Thomas writes in ‘Pakeha and doing the work of decolonization’, ‘Listening and trusting’ are central to any acts of caring and therefore ‘a fundamental aspect of de colonizing work is listening to Maori and trusting what they tell us about their experiences of society- and particularly of racism’ (2020: 114). For Pakeha, flexibility, responsivity and the willingness to let the sovereignty, affectivity and intentions of the other change our own course of direction- to get in the waka- is required.

Figure 3. Racists Anonymous. Te Pou Theatre, Tamaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021. PhotoAmarbir Singh

CONCLUSION

This article has used a critique of the unhappy performativity of a politics of kindness to think about how the demands for justice that challenge such a politics might be both recognized and acted upon. I have looked to examples from Te Pou Theatre to consider how instead of kindness, we might take the concept of manaakitanga as a starting point for reflecting on a mode of political and social engagement grounded in meaningful partnership. The weakness of a politics of kindness, as Asafo points out, is that it often relies on those who already have power deciding to be kind to those who don’t. It is possible to theorize a radical version of kindness (as Burton and Turbine, Longely and others have done), and there is value in this work (which I have myself been involved in). However, there is also a limit to what we can make kindness do given that in and of itself it is not a doing, an action, and Ahmed reminds us of the danger of language that only pretends performativity. I return to my definition at the beginning, where I described kindness as a disposition, a feeling. To feel and express kindness to one another is important. However, a discourse of kindness can also serve to obscure the stickier, more difficult problems and affects that need to be addressed in order to bring into being the ‘kinder world’ that a politics of kindness proposes to us. Racism is one of these problems, and kindness is not sufficient to meet its demands. Rather, what is required are the kinds of disruptions that both Te Pou performances demonstrate. The company’s works, of course, are not directly responsiveness to Ardern’s rhetoric, belonging to their own tradition of activist performance and dramaturgy. Nonetheless, they allow us another perspective on such a politics. The value of this perspective is twofold. In one sense it illustrates the particular performative qualities of care in action, and I have drawn attention in particular to listening, improvisation and reciprocity as examples and reminds us of the greater value of the specific cultural lens that manaakitanga provides in the Aotearoa context. In another sense, it makes clear the responsibilities of Pakeha for repairing the ‘systems and frameworks’ that have perpetuated inequality, which itself involves recognizing the roles that Pakeha have had and continue to play in such perpetuation. The key question, therefore, is not how kindness might be made properly performative, as how might a legacy of unkindnesses- of failures to listen and failures to act- be performatively repaired.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to offer my thanks to the editors and reviewer whose critical questions helped guide me in the development of the work, and toTe Pou Theatre for kindly supplying images of the works discussed.

Notes

1 This article was written before Ardern resigned as Prime Minister in early 2023. She was replaced as Labour Party Leader by MP Chris Hipkins.