Tapu Misa: Honesty and respect key to shared culture

When I was a teenager, my father's mother came to live with us in Wellington. It didn't work out; after a few months she returned to Samoa.

My abiding memory of her stay is the day I arrived home on the bus to see our washing, worn undergarments and all, spread over the bushes on our front lawn for all to see. That's how she'd always dried the clothes back home, but being a self-conscious teenager, I was embarrassed and ashamed.

It wasn't just my grandmother's inability to cope with the everyday demands of living in the strange new country, or the cold and isolation that drove her back home. It was probably as much the shock of finding that, after only a decade in New Zealand, her grandchildren had become so Kiwi in their ways that they may as well have been aliens. We couldn't bridge the gap that stretched between us; we didn't even speak the same language anymore.

I look back on that time with some sadness. When we left Samoa, we left behind a lot of the things that defined us as Samoan. I regret to this day the loss of fluency in my first language.

The up-side to having a foot in each camp is that it freed us to redefine what it means to be both Kiwi and Samoan.

If this meant that we often felt like outsiders, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. We might have struggled with our identity, but there were some advantages to being neither one nor the other.

For one thing, we weren't tied to the old ways, or uncritically in love with the new ones. We were free to cherry-pick the values we liked, challenging and discarding those cultural norms we no longer saw as being relevant or useful.

In my case, though I've been accused of being "an indefatigable multiculturalist" (I prefer realist or even humanist, as one of my readers put it), it meant being much less inclined to see culture as some immutable sacred cow that had to be preserved intact at all cost.

That's why Zain Ali's Perspectives piece published in the Herald earlier this week resonated with me, and Ashraf Choudhary's equivocation on the stoning of homosexuals on last week's 60 Minutes programme on TV3 did not.

Ali, a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Auckland, did not try, as the Labour MP did, to defend the indefensible. Muslims, Ali wrote, tend to sugar-coat Islam. Although "islam" does mean "peace", there's no escaping that "Muslims are not necessarily a peaceful people", or that "Islamic law is caught up in the imitation of medieval norms, which have trumped legal and social innovation".

For all the efforts of "everyday", law-abiding Muslims - the silent majority, says Ali - they remain saddled by the beliefs and actions of Muslims who will go to any lengths to ensure their culture and religion is locked in a medieval time-warp.

I don't blame the controversial theologian Lloyd Geering for seeing parallels between the fundamentalists of Islam and Christianity. You'd be suspicious, too, if you'd been tried for heresy by the Presbyterian Church, as Geering was in 1967 for daring to suggest that not everything in the Bible was the literal word of God.

As Geering pointed out in a Sunday newspaper, both groups of fundamentalists regard the secular world as evil and see a return to the religious beliefs of the middle-ages as the salvation of modern society. And both are as misguided as the people who vented their fear and anger on mosques in the weekend after last week's outrage in London.

Others will see this as a failure of multiculturalism; evidence that we're really too different to co-exist peacefully. Two-thirds of those who answered one online poll I checked this week seemed to think that we're becoming a far less tolerant society. I'm not sure that's true; we might just be more blatant about our intolerance than we used to be.

When it comes to dealing with the influences of religion and culture, we need to put honesty and respect for free speech and truth above sacred cows.

I know, for example, the important role that religion plays in the lives of many Pacific Island people but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the excesses and shortcomings of ministers who take advantage of their position to feather their own nests.

There's been much public muttering, too, about powhiri, the backseat role of Maori women, the predominance of a warrior mentality, and the haka. If these are becoming part of our shared culture as New Zealanders, and they are; if they're traditions worth preserving, and I think many are, they ought to be able to withstand 21st-century scrutiny. That's the hallmark of a living, thriving culture.

Culture may be a moveable feast, but truth is not. As one of my heroes, the leading Tongan academic and philosopher, Futa Helu, has been wont to mutter, truth is that which is left standing after you've thrown every conceivable challenge at it.

Helu is an iconoclastic figure in Tonga, where blind belief in God and King is often blamed (justifiably) for blighting the country's progress. He's been much influenced by Western culture and thinking, yet he is still a proud Tongan, a keeper of the best traditions of Tongan culture.

For him, the continuing debate about whether or not multiculturalism is a good or bad thing is probably irrelevant. As it should be for us. The more important question is figuring out how to make it work.