Tēnā koutou/As-Salaam-Alaikum:
A wave of violence and hatred reached our shores on Friday March 15. We hope such extreme manifestation of ignorance never touches our home, Aotearoa, again. The lives of our immigrant brothers and sisters have been cruelly extinguished. As the immediate shock from the assault on our emotions eases, it is time to pause and try to understand what has happened. In her speech, our Prime Minister reflected; “[they] are not us”, their fear and hatred of the ‘other’ robs them of their humanity. It is not only geographers who understand that the world is a complex, multi-faceted place, where cultures interact across vast spaces, ideally enriching each other. We know that all communities, clusters of people wonderfully distinguished by language or cultural distinctness, are a unique aspect of the human legacy and its promise.
The anthropologist Wade Davis writes “Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before … [we] are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7000 different voices, and these answers collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species as we continue this never-ending journey.” We should choose to celebrate our differences, not be afraid of them. He goes on to say that the “legacy of humanity is a single continuum. Race is a fiction. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all descendants of a relatively small number of individuals who walked out of Africa some 60,000 years ago and then, on a journey that lasted 40,000 years, some 2,500 generations carried the human spirit to every corner of the habitable world.” We have now made our home in this corner of the world. Our corner of the world understands this message, this is why I live here.
Peyman Zawar-Reza