COLONIALISM IN LITERATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 9

COLONIALISM IN LITERATURE

New Winter Course Series From IYA

for Thursday evening, June 5, is the first of a series of talks by W. A. Sewell, Professor of English at Auckland University College. Listeners who remember Professor Sewell’s previous talks on literature from the Auckland station will appreciate that the new series will be worth sampling, and interest in it should be quickened .by the subject selected this time-"Colonialism in Literature." Whether colonial, and especially New Zealand, literature, has a chance of success, whether it has within it the germs of greatness, is a question which has recurred with some persistence since the $tocktaking of the Centennial year. Interviewed by a representative of The Listener, Professor Sewell said that he proposed to deal with this question. "In all colonial countries," he said, touching on the problems involved in the creation of a body of New Zealand literature, "the problem of the writer is a very special one. His integrity is bound up with the land and the skies and the people of the land of his birththe colony. The tradition of his technique and of the language in which he tes in 1YA’s programme

writes belongs to the country of his ancestry. The writer, therefore, whether in London or in his own country, must be a divided or unhappy spirit. In London he is homesick for the reality of the earth he knows; away from London his mind is starved for lack of the intercourse he can understand.

"The history of colonial literatureand we have seen one reach full maturity in the United States-is the history of a gradual secession of a national spirit in literature from the continual stream of European letters, while maintaining the traditional community with the ancestry of European culture." "But," he was asked, "Don’t New Zealand writers, for instance, who talk about objects peculiar to New Zealand lose something in universality of appeal?" "Yes, because New Zealand literature still suffers, and necessarily so, from this division of attention between subject matter and technique, One result of this is that in an attempt to forge a general New Zealand literature, writers abstract from the New Zealand setting tuis and kiwis, rimu and teatree, and hope thereby to ‘express’ New Zealand. Genuineness of national expression has nothing to do with accidents in the natural setting. It is something much more subtle and secret. The more tuis that sing in New Zealand poetry, the less likelihood is there of New Zealand poetry being poetry. The more New Zealand poetry smacks of the uniqueness of life on this soil and under these skies, the more universal will it be. The resolution of this quaint paradox will be the topic of these talks."