A questionable kind of culture

BECK ELEVEN

I've got a questionable corner in my home.

It's tucked at the back of the hallway, above the bookshelf. Whenever I look at it, I feel a bit racist. Or cultural. Or just sad.

It's complicated.

It started with a lamp I nicked from Grandma. The lamp is heavy and I think made of some kind of resin. The carving features an old Maori warrior wearing a cloak, waiting for someone to switch the light on, I suppose.

He looked pretty lonely, standing there in the corner, so one day I found a sort of tiki thing in an op shop.

It's made of MDF board and it's got some scrawly writing on the back of it that reads "Daniel Weishoven", or something. I think young Danny made it in woodwork class, grew up and biffed it out.

Years later, the project made its way into a second-hand shop under the guise of the words "retro" or "vintage". I paid $30 for the privilege. Still, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I hung it above the Maori lamp and stood back to admire my view.

I felt very white.

What to do?

So I went to another retro store and found a couple of old Aborigine faces and hammered them up too.

Then it was like, yeah, check out my native section. I'm colonising.

But it seemed a bit silly to have one Maori waiting for a light bulb, a school project tiki and two rip-off Aborigine heads.

So I bought an African face. This was problematic because it was hanging near the ceiling of another retro shop and I couldn't quite see the price tag.

I'm pretty sure I need glasses -my sudden obsession with native heads prevents me from affording them - so I asked my mate Ruby to read the price on the label.

She said it was $35. By now, I was accustomed to paying this type of price for a "cultural item", so I asked the shop owner to fetch it for me.

At the till it turned out to be $75, but I was too embarrassed to decline, (which may have been white guilt) so I just felt a bit sick, paid the man and left with Ruby and the nice African lady in tow.

Cultural corner had no new residents for a long time after that.

But two weeks ago I became obsessed with auction website Trade Me. I found wall-hanging faces from across the globe but settled on a Spanish dude, a carved wooden hanging of a matador and bull.

My friend Hayley drove with me to New Brighton to pick it up. I think I saw her physically draw away and wince when I put the matador in the car.

The matador has its pros and cons.

It's pretty ugly, so it brings down the class of the corner. But adding a bit of Spanish into my corner makes me feel more cultural and less racist. And it almost cured my brief Trade Me addiction.

Just when I thought that might have been my most ridiculous purchase, I became the proud owner of a gas hob. Yes, a gas hob.

Which is a bit on the stupid side, because I have bought a house, but I don't move into it for another two months and I have no idea if this gas hob will fit.

And by the rate I'm going I won't be able to afford to install it because I will have spent all my money on 1970s views of other cultures.

In the meantime, I'm storing the gas hob in the boot of my car.

I'm thinking of etching the face of an old Latvian woman into the stainless steel and hanging it in cultural corner.

- © Fairfax NZ News