Grief : Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora
The strength of emotion that welled in my chest as I watched the New Zealand rugby team perform the Ka Mate haka before their test match against the South African team surprised me this morning.
The haka is a Māori spiritual practice. It aligns wairua (spirit) and mauri (life force) before important collective events such as rugby matches, battles, or weddings. The coordinated gestures, hisses, facial expressions, and voices synchronise the collective mind.
It is also a display to the opposition: a naked exhibition of group strength towards the “not us.”
It is dramatic, visceral, and virile.
I realised the emotion that deepened my breath as I watched was grief.
I started comparing the religious provenance of this ritual with the religious language that American leadership is using to respond to the murder of Charlie Kirk. He has been declared a martyr who will sit at the right hand of Jesus for eternity. His widow, who watched her husband die in front of their children, has said that his death is a war cry to all Christians to amplify her husband’s message. She has said that his wisdom must continue to be spread, that it will live forever. The president of the United States has said that he is a martyr who will sit at the right hand of their saviour, Jesus Christ, for eternity.
Here are some samples of Mr Kirk’s “wisdom” (courtesy of The Guardian):
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States Marine?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder: is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023
I think it is the contrast between the grotesque nature of declaring this individual a martyr who will sit at the right hand of Jesus for eternity, and its rallying cry to unite huge swathes of people under the flag of racial hatred—delivered with solemnity, in suits and ties and formal wear—and the grotesque tongue-shaking, genital-pointing, limb-trembling invocation of the haka, performed to align spirit with the life force and to coordinate the actions of a group of people towards a common goal, that moved me so.
No one who has ever performed a haka has access to a nuclear bomb. The haka has been saved from extinction at the hands of the kind of racial hatred that Kirk propagated. Its naked honesty and harmless violence give expression to these facets of human nature in a way that honours them. It brings them to the surface. It honours them as natural expressions of the life force.
The modern rallying call of religion denies its brutality. It professes piety and moral superiority, suppressing its aggression with the result that nightmare violence is unleashed upon the world.
My grief swells and opens the space between these contrasts.
In a statement worthy of proponents of Sharia law, Kirk also advocated for public executions. It lends his claim that Islam is the knife a group of people called “the radical left” is using to slit the throat of Western civilisation, an irony worthy of his apotheosis to martyrdom.
I’ll quote Jesus, the man Mr Kirk is supposed to be sitting next to for eternity.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.
— Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 3–9
That’s a big part of my grief too. This sentiment is rarely expressed. The venal and corrupt who lead us make deals about rivieras after genocides. They talk about making themselves great. They discuss immortality, not in awe of the mystery of death but in terms of organ transplants that will allow them to live forever in front of hot mics that broadcast their thoughts to every mind on the planet.
It’s all very Old Testament. Mind you, here’s something from the Old Testament that might be worth amplifying:
“He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
— Isaiah
That’s not very sexy. We don’t make Netflix series about ploughshares.
A similar verse is also in the Hebrew Bible, although the book of Micah doesn’t crack the Talmud:
“…they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Someone should tell Netanyahu. Just wear a bulletproof yarmulke when you do it.
My grief stretches this theme of paradox wider. Even as the worst facets of the human animal play themselves out in murder, genocide, warfare, and greed, from where I sit in my pyjamas I have access to the best we have produced. The highest ideas, most beautifully expressed in literature, philosophy, and music, are at our fingertips whenever we feel moved to engage with them. We all of us have all that we know, all that we have thought in our pockets and at our disposal, all the time.
Yet we are flooded with news of how these huge cultural achievements are disintegrating. For example, democracy is failing and placing the worst among us into the most powerful positions. The freedom to speak freely, wrested over generations from despots and popes, is being co-opted as rationale for multi-billion-dollar tech empires to propagate pornography, divisive rhetoric, and expedient misinformation. The miracle that is empirical scientific inquiry, which eliminated deadly diseases, has been commandeered by multinationals for enormous profit. Now those achievements are being abandoned in service of “individual freedom”, itself a perversion of another of our great cultural achievements, the primacy of the individual.
My grief floods the valley between the peaks of this contrast.
Here’s Arthur Conan Doyle:
“What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.”
And everywhere it seems the beast within us is rampant. And all the while, those behaving in beastly ways declare themselves angelic. To wit, I read with incredulity several news articles that take seriously the possibility that Donald Trump may win the Nobel Peace Prize.
And this is why I like the haka: it owns its violence. The dancers deliberately conjure the atavism and ferocity of the beast side of our nature and display it to the participants and the observers. They seek to align it with the life force and with the spirit world. And this is what makes it so moving.
Here’s something from the pocket library of good and evil that got beamed into the palm of my hand. A charismatic professor of astrophysics told me about the Hubble Deep Field image.
To make this image, astronomers pointed the Hubble telescope at a tiny piece of the night sky. How tiny is this piece? Imagine standing on a flat desert plane at midnight. Imagine the stars you will see. Now imagine a 50 cent coin held 25 meters above you. That’s how tiny the piece of sky we are talking about here is.
This Deep Field Image revealed more than 10 000 points of light filling that dot of sky. Each one of those 10 000 galaxies contains a minimum of one hundred thousand million stars like our sun. The light from the most distant of those 10 000 galaxies with its 100 000 million stars, travelling at 300 000 kilometers per second took 13 billion years to reach the telescope.
I’ll say it again because it is impossible to understand the scale of this. In a piece of sky the size of a coin held 25 meters away there are ten billion stars at a range of 1 230 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kilometers.
Imagine that.
What a chalice for grief to fill, the chasm dividing the immediate, urgent agony of these moments we are living and their simultaneous irrelevance.
Here’s Te Rauparaha from two centuries ago.
Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!
Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!
Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru
Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā
Ā, upane! ka upane!
Ā, upane, ka upane, whiti te rā!
It is death, it is death, it is life, it is life
It is death, it is death, it is life, it is life
Or do I see a hairy man
who brought back the Sun so it can shine on me once more?
Then I will put one foot in front of the other—
One foot, then the other—until the Sun shines on me!
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