The Human Whānau: Unity Outside Christchurch’s Masjid Al Noor Mosque

On Sunday afternoon, under a ceiling of grey cloud, the police tape flapped noisily in the cool easterly as people gathered to cry, pray, huddle together. The pile of flowers on Deans Ave and its satellites, concentrated around tree trunks, continue to grow, bouquet by bouquet. The number of dead, we learned earlier in the day, had also grown once more: 50 is now the official toll of Friday’s massacre, after another victim was discovered as bodies were removed from inside Masjid Al Noor mosque. Elsewhere in the city, graves are being dug to bury the dead.

Humans are drawn to the scene of tragedy. To get close, just to be near. Hundreds—thousands, maybe—passed by to linger, reflect under the looming trees that shadow Deans Ave. The lights on a parked police car blinked silently, and the crowd occasionally atomised around grief-overcome mourners, or TV interviews. One middle-aged British TV presenter—thinning hair and blue jeans—settled himself for a piece to cam. He motioned at the mourning men’s and women’s soccer teams—Canterbury United Dragons, Canterbury United Pride—arm in arm, there to honour a slain teammate, behind him.

People were moved to speak. “What is going through your head?” asked Sirwan Mohamadi, clad in dark glasses and a black leather jacket as he stood up in front of the crowd, “Now that 50 and more could be dead.” His poem finished with the lines: “Stand with me to give all we have / To Linwood and Dean’s Ave.” He handed out reams of printouts of his poem to the crowd, who pushed eagerly forward to get their hands on a copy. As Sirwan walked away down Deans Ave, he was trailed by media, asking for an interview.

A Māori man, a Muslim, tottered in front of the crowd, a line of cops protecting the cordon behind him. “I’m tangata whenua. Welcome my family, you’re my whānau. You’re all my whanau. The human whānau.”

He motioned at the automatic weapon cradled in the arms of one of the officers. “I saw that… shooting my brothers. And we can’t even go and pay our respects in there, have to come here… Time is up, time is up. Time we all come together as one,” he said.

“We need to come under… our creator, God Allah, the creator of the universe who put our earth here, under peace, mercy and aroha. These are my brothers. I stand in line in prayer every Friday… That man came to pop us all off while I’m praying at my house. ‘Cos I slept in. I would’ve been here with my bros.”

A faint trail of mascara trickled from the inside corner of Nida Alizadah’s right eye. Originally from Afghanistan, Nida, 25, has lived in Christchurch for 10 years. She came to the cordon today, she said, in a voice on edge, filtered through those recent tears, to pray and thank the people that had turned out to be there. “Everyone’s gathered here for one cause. An incident like this has brought everybody together, and I’m very touched by that.”

A friend of her family was shot dead on Friday. “Devastated, everyone is devastated. Something like this has happened here in New Zealand, and the majority of them are actually refugees. So they have escaped war in order to find safety and we never knew that this would actually happen here. It just shows that no matter where you go… you never know…”

Christchurch will never be the same, she said. “The community here is pretty small and that’s why an incident like this… has impacted everybody in the community because it’s just such a small community. Everybody knows each other.”

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“I know it doesn’t make much difference, but when you got him did you give him a good pummelling?” asked a middle-aged Pākehā man. The cop, wearing a big fluoro jacket with an automatic gun at his chest, standing on the other side of the police tape, shrugged. “It wasn’t us that got him.”

We were allowed under that tape to collect some possessions from a friend’s house. As we waited to be ushered across Deans Ave, we overheard one side of a police telephone conversation about making the driveway—the property shares a fence with Masjid Al Noor—“more presentable”; there were uttered references to whether or not something had yet been washed away by the rain. We waited while another policeman, across the road, checked the driveway. Our policeman was on the phone. “I don’t want to walk you down the drive and you experience…” He trailed off.

Police, notebooks open, milled around a black SUV, where police investigation markers—looking like the rugby tees you use as a kid—demarcated areas of interest. A shovel lay propped up against the entrance of her driveway. Two orange road cones blocked its entrance. A piece of black plastic, weighted down with pieces of concrete, lay on the pavement. A limp length of police tape was strung across the drive near her house. We stepped over police tape, and into the house.

We watered the plants, and picked up clothes. One of the upstairs bedrooms looks over the grounds of the mosque. There were perhaps 20 cars parked on the gravel and scruffy grass, left where worshippers had parked them on Friday. Many of those owners, of course, will never return to drive those cars home.

It’ll take weeks, a policeman said, until the forensic examination of Masjid Al Noor has been completed. Until then, this little part of Christchurch will continue to do its dual duty: a place for mourners to gather on one side of the cordon, a place where, on the other, police continue the sombre and painstaking work of deciphering exactly what happened on that awful Friday.