Cousins [2021] by Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner

 Entwines the very different lives of three Maori girls, cousins, through tumultuous decades, after one of them is taken from her family and raised in an orphanage.

A very moving and cinematic adaptation of Patricia Grace's novel, very effectively condensed into movie length while maintaining the scope and complexity of the multiple threads. The lives of these three women, though particular and intimate, effectively represents a larger story of a culture interrupted by colonialism but regaining its strength and groundedness. The interaction between the personal and the cultural, memory and the moment, are woven together with various events, spanning decades, creating a complex portrait revealing how the past, the present and the future interact with each other, how members of a family interact through space and time, in life and in death.  Though the performances were sometimes uneven, the editing and Terence Malick-like cinematography very skillfully conveyed a specific yet expansive spiritual and cultural journey through the entire lives of three compelling and tangible characters.

The Maori Jesus, by James K. Baxter (1966)

I saw the Maori Jesus
Walking on Wellington Harbour.
He wore blue dungarees.
His beard and hair were long.
His breath smelt of mussels and paraoa.
When he smiled it looked like the dawn.
When he broke wind the little fishes trembled.
When he frowned the ground shook.
When he laughed everybody got drunk.

The Maori Jesus came on shore
And picked out his twelve disciples.
One cleaned toilets in the Railway Station;
His hands were scrubbed red to get the shit out of the pores.
One was a call-girl who turned it up for nothing.
One was a housewife who'd forgotten the Pill
And stuck her TV in the rubbish can.
One was a little office clerk
Who'd tried to set fire to the Government Buildings.
Yes, and there were several others;
One was an old sad quean;
One was an alcoholic priest
Going slowly mad in a respectable parish.

The Maori Jesus said, "Man,
From now on the sun will shine."

He did no miracles;
He played the guitar sitting on the ground.

The first day he was arrested
For having no lawful means of support.
The second day he was beaten up by the cops
For telling a dee his house was not in order.
The third day he was charged with being a Maori
And given a month in Mount Crawford.
The fourth day he was sent to Porirua
For telling a screw the sun would stop rising.
The fifth day lasted seven years
While he worked in the asylum laundry
Never out of the steam.
The sixth day he told the head doctor,
"I am the Light in the Void;
I am who I am."
The seventh day he was lobotomized;
The brain of God was cut in half.

On the eighth day the sun did not rise.
It didn't rise the day after.
God was neither alive nor dead.
The darkness of the Void,
Mountainous, mile-deep, civilized darkness
Sat on the earth from then till now.

I feel uncomfortable sharing my freedom with people who are incorrect

We live under the illusion of control of a state who, if they do not like you, will forcibly and, if necessary, violently take possession of your body until you are judged to be sufficiently submissive to their authority and law. For the duration of this period in which possession of your life has passed from yourself and God to the state, you will likely be contained in a small room within what is known as a “correctional facility”. You are not allowed to leave, in fact you are forced to stay.

The name "correctional facility" is entirely political because almost everyone calls these institutions prisons or jails. This name does not imply that these institutions are in any way correct; the name suggests that their purpose is to correct people who are deemed by the state to be incorrect.

A correct person, I presume, is one who accepts the authority of the state despite the fact that its authority is not natural or legitimate and has no history of success. A correct person submits to the authority of Police, not only to enforce the state's laws but also to arbitrarily intimidate, waste time and seek justification for your behaviour. A correct person does what they are told. A correct person lives in fear of being caught. A correct person obeys. A correct person is economically productive, producing consumable items to increase the tax revenue of the state. A correct person behaves in a way that correlates with the official culture and does not express ideas that contradict this culture. A correct person does not expose their genitals.

Naming prisons correctional facilities suggests that the people in them are incorrect. There are a number of ways a person can be deemed incorrect. In New Zealand, 14% of people are Maori, whereas 50% of the officially incorrect are Maori. In Australia 2.5% of people are original Australians, whereas 24% of incorrect people are original.

This suggests to me that if you are a Pacific person whose home was infiltrated by the illegal authority of Europe you are far more likely to find yourself to be incorrect, presumably because your natural behaviour correlates less with the behaviour the state finds acceptable, perhaps because you have had fewer generations of experience with this type of submission to authority. This behaviour is so unnatural that it takes many generations of reinforcement before submission is sufficiently normalised and the state is able to retain control of the minds and bodies of its subjects.

While hitchhiking I met a man who has worked at a prison in New Zealand for many years. He estimates that 60% of the prison population are mentally ill. He suggests that the best solution to drastically reducing the number of incorrect people in our society who need to be imprisoned is to test young children for minor sight and hearing difficulties such as glue ear or long-sightedness. In this way they won't fall behind at the beginning of their school career and they will be able to participate and flourish in the schooling environment. He claims lack of this type of simple testing and assistance for our children is the primary cause of incorrectness.

He does not use the term "correctional facility" but like almost everyone else uses the term prison. He tells me that the notion of rehabilitation has no basis in reality. He tells me that nobody benefits from being in prison and in fact people are severely damaged by being forced against their will to stay in prison until they are deemed sufficiently acceptable to participate again in the natural processes of life.

Like you I did not question the idea that some people in our society are simply too incorrect to retain control over their own lives and bodies; they hurt people and property. However, through a serious of synchronistic events in my life, such as the meeting of the above person and the possibility that a gentle friend of mine might be imprisoned for a demonstration against violence, I realised that I felt deep within my person a strong revulsion at the idea that any human being would lock any other human being in a room against their will and keep them there for many years. Any type of moral justification or unfounded suggestions of practicality do not justify the naturally abhorrent nature of this act that we all feel as empathetic beings.

One method, of course, of suppressing this natural empathy is to make distinct those people we imprison with the use of language. When we define them as "criminals" suddenly it is acceptable to imprison them.

I am a sensitive person and I find the idea that anyone I love may be imprisoned at the whim of what is known as the "justice system" sickening. I have a tendency, however irrational, to trust my own responses over the official belief systems of the state and I am therefore uncomfortable with imprisonment as a method for producing a healthy society. Nobody has convinced me that this method is in any way effective.

So why do we have prisons? Some people I have spoken to, in order to justify a reality they do not necessarily agree with but would rather not acknowledge, have suggested that some people are simply not able to function within society because they hurt others, therefore they should be imprisoned. This is not the "you will be corrected" concept suggested by the state in renaming their prisons "correctional facilities" but an entirely separate concept in which these people are inherently incorrect and can not be assisted in any way. Some people are simply incorrect and instead of finding out why we will imprison them perpetually.

If anybody can suggest an alternative to my empathetic belief system regarding imprisonment that they truly feel or believe, rather than simply repeating the official doctrines of the state, I would very much like to hear it. Now is the time to engage in a dialogue regarding the legitimacy and effectiveness of our behaviour as a society.