Book review - 'Dear Neil Roberts' by Airini Beautrais

Maintaining a memory

Dear Neil Roberts by Airini
Beautrais

VUP Press, 2014, ISBN 9780864739735

Reviewed
by Ann R Key - review originally published in AARGH! issue 3



I’M NOT from New Zealand, and I'm also not
much of a sophisticate when it comes to poetry. I read what I like,
skim, or ignore the rest, I can’t really tell you why I like what I
do or what is good about it, just that for whatever reason a
particular line or idea, mood or thought spoke to me and that was
enough. But don’t ask me about structure or form, or poetic
traditions because I don’t know. So I might not be the best person
to review Airini Beautrais’ new book of poetry, Dear Neil
Roberts (Victoria Press, 2014). But I am an anarchist and I have
been here in New Zealand long enough that I had been told the story
of Neil Roberts before.



In case you haven’t, the short
version is that on 18 November 1982 anarchist and punk Neil Roberts
blew himself up with a bomb he exploded outside the Wanganui Computer
Centre. The Computer Centre held a large computer which held the
National Law Enforcement Data Base. That database and the computer’s
ability to record, store, and analyse personal information was seen
as dangerous to civil libertarians. Sound familiar? Maybe this was
the beginning of New Zealand’s obsession with surveillance? Anyway,
Neil Roberts was 22 at the time and shortly before he exploded the
bomb he left spray-­painted “We have maintained a silence
closely resembling stupidity” on the wall of a public toilet near
the computer centre.



Dear Neil Roberts is a
collection of interconnected poems that seeks to makes sense of not
just who Neil Roberts was and why he did what he did, but what that
time period was; just after the 1981 Springbok tour, Muldoon still in
power, and that feeling of alienation and disenfranchisement strong.
The poems try to understand of all this. The author is searching for
what it means for her, what it means for New Zealand, for her
children, and for young anarchists who might not be so young nor so
militant anymore.



I’m not a Kiwi, and I’m not a poet,
but like I said I am an anarchist and I do know about history. I
think a lot about anarchist history, how important or not important
it is to other anarchists and what that means; to me and more
importantly for anarchism. I think a lot about history in general,
about what Neil Roberts history means for the present, about how we
create and consume history, and how, sometimes no matter how hard we
try, we get it wrong when we try to write about history, when we try
to create a historical narrative to make sense of the past.
Anarchists and anarchist history are as guilty of this as anyone
else. We have our martyrs, our heroes and heroines, and all too often
people are more interested in the slogans and the easily digestible
and self re­affirming stories, then they are in the more
complicated realities and contradictory facts.



Maybe we
need poetry to help us understand history. To help us understand that
my three ­sentence summary of who Neil Roberts was and what he
did will never be enough, not enough to understand all the multiple
and contradictory ideas and thoughts he may have had in his head at
the time, nor is it enough to read the news headlines to understand
what kind of impact his words and his actions had on the people of
New Zealand, from the police, to the anarchists, to a poet and young
mother in

Whanganui 32 years later trying to understand how it
all fits together.



Dear Neil Roberts did that for
me. The poems give the reader a fuller and broader understanding of
Neil Roberts and what happened, and what it may have meant, than my
paragraph or paragraphs could. And they reminded me of Emma Goldman’s
essay The Tragedy at Buffalo written following the 1901 assasination
of US President William McKinley by Leon Czolgozs, a self­described
anarchist. In the essay Goldman tries to make sense of what kind of
sensitive person would be so outraged by the world around him, by its
inequalities, injustices, lies, and uglinesses, that he would lash
out, strike a blow against that world, even if it meant destroying
oneself in the process. This history, these people, they are as much
a part of our anarchist history, of our movement, as marches against
war and fights against police surveillance and it behooves us and our
movement to try to understand that a little bit better.



Airini
Beautrais has done this with Dear Neil Roberts and it’s
worth all our time to read these poems.

Dear Neil Roberts is available for sale in the Freedom Shop. 

Price - $18.00