Raiders of the lost Thompson

When I read about the discovery of long-lost manuscripts I feel the same tremor of excitement I got watching Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in the Papakura Movie Theatre back in 1982. The History Workshop Journal has marked the twentieth anniversary of EP Thompson's death by publishing a hitherto obscure essay by the great man, and they've done me the honour of quoting my book on Thompson in their introduction to this taonga. I'm just sorry that I didn't discover the essay in 2005, when I was a barbarous PhD student ransacking the monkish libraries of Albion in search of Thompsoniana...

Why Tevita Latu is the new Lou Reed

In a morose and provocative column for the Guardian, Suzanne Moore has argued that the recent death of Lou Reed, the revered frontman and wildman of the Velvet Underground, symbolises the end of avant-garde art. Moore was one of a generation inspired, in the 1960 and ‘70s, by Reed’s droning, gorgeous songs about heroin addiction, gender bending, mental illness, and other subjects considered taboo by postwar Western societies. For Moore, the Velvet Underground was a link to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the other great avant-garde art movements of the early twentieth century. Like Tristan Tzara and the young Picasso before him, Lou Reed rejected the values of the society around him, and made art which celebrated an alternative set of values.

Suzanne Moore can find few twenty-first century artists with Lou Reed’s subversive qualities. Instead of wanting to shock and change the world, today’s artists are content, she thinks, to entertain the masses and make money. Moore regards the success of Lady Gaga, who commercialises old Velvet Underground themes like sexual strangeness and drug use by attaching them to a disco beat and a slick stage show, as proof that avant-garde art is dead.

Suzanne Moore’s column prompted more than four hundred comments on the Guardian website. Many readers complained that Moore had failed to acknowledge the musicians, painters, and writers who are producing innovative work in the twenty-first century, instead of following Lady Gaga’s lead and focusing on money-making. Such complaints are reasonable, but they do not necessarily invalidate Moore’s argument. 

Although there are many twenty-first century artists trying to extend the avant-garde tradition, their work does not have the impact on our culture that the paintings of Picasso had in the 1920s and the songs of Lou Reed had in the 1970s. The truth is that, in the Western world, at least, the avant-garde has lost its ability to shock and excite.

Innovative art no longer moves us because art in general no longer occupies a truly important place in our culture. It is hard, now, to remember the days when avant-garde artists were courted by politicians – when the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky signed a joint manifesto with Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, and the poet Pablo Neruda was invited to run for the presidency of Chile by one of the country’s largest parties. In the early 1970s, when Lou Reed was in his decadent prime, the novelist Norman Mailer was running for the mayoralty of New York City, relying largely on his prestige as a writer to win votes. Where artists were once considered the critics and consciences of Western society, they are now treated simply as workers in a sub-branch of the entertainment industry.

But avant-garde art is not dead everywhere, because not every society has followed the path of the West by trivialising and depoliticising high culture. If Suzanne Moore wants to meet some young artists who are following the same sort of exhilarating and precarious path as Lou Reed, then she should come to Tonga and drink a few cups of kava at the Seleka Club.

Located in an outer suburb of the Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa, beside a particularly polluted stretch of lagoon, the Seleka Club consists of a couple of fale built with coconut fronds and salvaged timber. Almost every night of the week dozens of young painters, sculptors, and musicians gather in the club to drink cup after cup of kava and make art on a long, paint-flecked table.

Inside the Seleka Club all of the conventions of Tongan culture and society are turned upside down. Kava, the sacred traditional drink of chiefs and priests, is consumed from a toilet bowl; female and fakaleiti (transgender) Tongans drink beside men; a Tongan flag vandalised with a satirical swastika hangs in the tropical air; guests are given secret ‘Selekarian names’, based on bizarre and sometimes blasphemous puns; and the sentimentally patriotic songs performed in more conventional kava clubs are replaced with recordings of dubstep and death metal tracks made by Seleka members.

When they are not holed up in their fale, the Selekarians rumble around Tonga in a truck covered in the same psychedelic paintings and half-silly, half-dangerous slogans – ‘GOD DIED OF DARWIN NOT DEATH ITSELF’ is a typical Seleka phrase - as the bus driven across America in the 1960s by Ken Kesey’s Band of Merry Pranksters.

The Seleka Club is led by Tevita Latu, a young man from one of Tonga’s most respected families. Latu’s father was the first Tongan to receive a degree in science and a close friend of King Tupou IV, the autocratic ruler of Tonga for thirty-eight years. In 2005, during the senile last year of Tupou IV’s reign, a general strike shut down Tonga for five weeks, fifteen thousand people marched through Nuku’alofa, and a protest camp was established beside the royal palace.

It was in this febrile atmosphere that Tevita Latu exhibited some of his first art. Giving himself the tag Ezekiel, he covered Nuku’alofa’s walls with graffiti criticising his old family friend and calling for radical change.

Tupou IV finally died in the middle of 2006; a few months later a pro-democracy rally turned into a riot, and half of downtown Nuku’alofa burned to the ground. Martial law was declared, and New Zealand and Australian troops and police flew in to help Tongan security forces detain and torture hundreds of their enemies. Tevita Latu played no part in the riot, but the day after the event he noticed the chauffeured Rolls Royce of Tonga’s new king passing his family home with a military escort. Rushing outside, Latu held his fist in the air and shouted ‘Reformasi!’ He was seized, taken to Nuku’alofa’s central police station, beaten, and charged with treason. After nine days of torture Latu was released on bail; the charge of treason was eventually dropped.

Today Tevita Latu remains an enemy of Tonga’s sclerotic ruling class. While Western artists are either ignored or patronised by their society’s elite, Latu’s paintings both fascinate and anger Tonga’s nobility, its clergy, and its business class. The artist’s exhibition launches are crowded, disputatious affairs, where conservative Tongans demand explanations for his vividly recondite symbols, and ask him about his religious and political affiliations. Sometimes locals buy Latu’s works simply for the pleasure of vandalising them.

The outraged response to Latu reflects the seriousness with which Tongans view art. The Tongan intellectual and educator Futa Helu once said that in his country art had traditionally been considered a means to ‘the perfection of reality’. Whether they were poets, dancers, painters, or carvers, artists turned away from the flux and discord of the world, and made things of harmonious beauty. Art played, and continues to play, a crucial role in almost every Tongan social occasion. Tongan kings and queens have always kept poets, singers, and dancers in their courts. At weddings and funerals poems and dances express gladness or sadness, and mourners or partiers literally wrap themselves in art, by donning mats of beaten barkcloth that are often covered in intricate paintings.

Like the ritual and symbolism of the Seleka Club, Tevita Latu’s art both acknowledges and revolutionises conventional Tongan culture. Latu’s social method of work – his paintings and drawings are made in the midst of the crowd at his club – recalls the collectivism of barkcloth makers, carvers, and dancers, but the smoky, noisy, mixed gender environment of Seleka mocks the taboos which have traditionally surrounded art-making in Tonga. Latu’s works often seem designed to rescue some memorable event – a protest, or a party, or a swim in the lagoon – from the chaos and forgetfulness of the world, but they eschew the traditional Tongan search for harmony and clarity in favour of expressionist brushstrokes and fragmented perspectives. Latu often paints on barkcloth, but he prefers idiosyncratic images to the rigorously public symbolism used by most barkcloth artists. His works are full of Pacific imagery, but they offend cultural nationalists by putting Melanesian sailors in Tongan vaka, and by giving Tongan men and women an eerie, halo-like head dress borrowed from the gwion gwion style of Aboriginal painting.

Recently I bought an untitled painting on barkcloth by Tevita Latu. The work shows two men in pre-Christian dress standing on either side of a naked woman. Phrases of Tongan swirl around them. With their talk of family quarrels and sleeping with pigs most of the phrases made little sense to me, even when I knew their English translations. When I showed Latu’s painting to one of my Tongan students, though, he immediately recognised its allusions to the story of the Prodigal Son from the Gospel of Luke.

The Prodigal Son is a popular topic for Tonga’s preachers, and one of the most-sung hymns in the repertoire of the Free Wesleyan Church, the country’s dominant denomination, retells his story. But not all of Tongans view the Prodigal Son in the same way.

In his extended study of the role of the Free Wesleyans in Tongan society, Heneli Niumeitolu argues that the church has distorted the story of the Prodigal Son and many other passages in the Bible for political purposes. Niumeitolu points that the Free Wesleyan hymn about the Prodigal Son scolds him for ‘Oe ne foki ki ‘api kuo mole kotoa’ (‘Returning home with nothing’), and urges children to emulate his obedient, hardworking older brother. Most Christians regard the story of the Prodigal Son as a lesson in the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation, but Wesleyans keen to ensure support for Tonga’s monarchy have turned it into a lecture about the evils of rebellion and the wisdom of obeying authority.

Latu’s painting can be seen as an attack on the conservative wing of Tongan Christianity.  By depicting the son and his father in ‘pagan’ traditional dress, Latu mocks the nineteenth century Wesleyan missionaries who insisted that Christianity and ‘decent’ Western-style dress are inextricably linked, as well as the Tongan faithful who still swelter through summer services in dark suits and dresses. Latu’s Holy Land is tropical, and his Jews are Tongans.

The appearance of the Prodigal Son’s mother in Latu’s painting may seem strange, because she does not feature in the story told by the Bible. Along with others in the Seleka Club, though, Tevita Latu is critical of the patriarchal nature of Tongan society. Recently a group of Selekarians protested against the absence of women from Tonga’s parliament by producing a poster which showed a strange dragonwoman emerging from the ocean and throwing her shadow over the country’s largest island.

The female figure in Latu’s painting can be seen, then, as a feminist statement. Her nakedness may allude to the fate of the carved females who presided over shamanic ceremonies in the godhouses of pre-Christian Tonga. When the ancestor of today’s king Wesleyanised Tonga in a series of wars in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, he systematically and gleefully desecrated the godhouses of captured villages. Pigs were loosed in the sacred enclosures around the houses, and the carved goddesses were stripped of their barkcloth covering and hung by their necks from the rafters of their homes.

The Prodigal Son’s stolid older brother, who sulked outside the family home while his talented but erratic sibling was welcomed back with a feast, might be a hero to the Free Wesleyan Church, but he has no role in Latu’s painting.

It is not only the Prodigal Son’s brother, though, who is marginalised by Latu. The painting’s text includes ‘Alua’, a word Tongans use to say goodbye when someone is leaving them, and the Prodigal Son’s mother and father might be waving at him. The Prodigal Son has, it seems, returned from his time with the Pharisees, where he slept in a pig sty, but he has not been willing or able to remain permanently in his family home. The painting shows him going out on the road again. The conservative conclusion of the Biblical story as well as the authoritarian propaganda of the Free Wesleyan Church are rejected, and the Prodigal Son is shown as a free agent, neither estranged from nor entrapped by his parents and their culture. He is as proud and as courageous as the young man who raised a fist at Tonga’s king on the day after Nuku’alofa burned.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Who owns history? and other annoying questions

[As the school year nears an end I’m continuing my harassment of my research students. Here are a couple of questions I’ve just hit them with…]

John Thomas’ legacy

A decade ago a young scholar named Andy Mills arrived at ‘Atenisi to research a PhD thesis on Tongan war clubs. Mills soon discovered, though, that akau tau, along with other artefacts from the era before Christianity, were in short supply in the Friendly Islands. Many of them had been destroyed or exiled during Tauafa’ahau’s violently successful campaign to Christianise Tonga in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

The founder of modern Tonga used fire or blasphemy to destroy the enclosures and houses where heathen gods had been revered and summouned. Pigs and bananas were allowed to flourish in the grounds of  godhouses. The carved deities which had presided over heathen ceremonies wearing robes of intricate tapa were stripped naked, hung by their necks from ceilings, and mockingly challenged to revenge their sufferings. War clubs were considered sacred, sentient objects – some of them, stories hold, could move of their own volition, and choose their own victims during a battle – and were often kept in godhouses. Taufa’ahau did not spare them.

Those artefacts which survived the destruction of godhouses and pagan forts were often given to Wesleyan missionaries as symbols of the victory of Christianity. Some of these treasures have found homes in the chilly storerooms and display cases of European and Australasian museums. The Auckland War Memorial Museum has a fine collection of ‘akau tau on permanent display; these objects helped Andy Mills finish his thesis, and have also inspired Auckland-based Tongan artists like Benjamin Work.   

The Reverend John Thomas was Taufa’ahau’s early spiritual advisor, and his sanctimonious yet bloodthirsty sermons helped inspire and legitimate the young king’s crusade to unify and Christianise Tonga. It is perhaps not surprising that Thomas, who had a hateful fascination with pre-Christian Tongan religion and culture, built up a collection of artefacts during his thirty years of missionary work in the Friendly Islands. Recently Thomas’ descendants offered these objects for sale at a London auction house. The decision of the Thomas family to part with the artefacts was reported in the Tongan media, where the Tongan government was reported as saying that it did not have the money to purchase them.

How do you feel about the sale of Tongan artefacts by the descendants of John Thomas? Does the fact that the artefacts were gifted to Thomas by sympathetic Tongans like Taufa’ahau mean that he had a legal and moral right to them, and that by extension his descendants have a right to sell them? Should the Tongan government prioritise buying the artefacts and returning them to Tonga, or are they not worth that effort? If not, why not?

Petroglyphs, and questions of appropriation

You read David Burley and Shane Egan’s essay ‘Triangular Men on One Very Long Voyage’, which examined carvings in a stretch of beach rock on the island of Foa. These petroglyphs were discovered by Foans after a storm shifted tonnes of sand off their shores.

You have seen how Burley and Egan conclude that the carvings were made many hundreds of years ago by Hawaiians, or by people very familiar with Hawaiian culture. Burley and Egan suggest that the Hawaiian influence on Tonga probably came via Tahiti, because of the difficulty involved in a direct journey between Tonga and Hawaii, and they speculate that the influence was relatively light, because of the lack of traces of ancient Hawaiian culture elsewhere in Tonga.

‘Triangular Men on One Very Long Voyage’ created considerable interest in the scholarly community, because it offered rare evidence of a connection between the Eastern Polynesian society of Hawaii and the much older Western Polynesian society of Tonga.

David Burley is a senior archaeologist who has done a lot of research in Tonga; he is particularly well-known for his work at Nukuleka village, across the lagoon from Nuku’alofa, which he believes is the site of the oldest settlement in all of Polynesia. Shane Egan, by contrast, is an amateur archaeologist, who worked as an assistant to Burley in Foa. Egan makes his living running the Blue Banana guest house on the northern Hihifo coast, and operating a shop in Nuku’alofa which offers Tongan-themed gifts to tourists.

Since he visited Foa with Burley, Egan has begun to make money from the patterns he found in the rock of the island. Visitors to his gift shop can buy T shirts, for instance, printed with patterns taken from Foa. Some of the patterns are reproduced as Burley found them, but others have been altered for commercial purposes. One of the T shirts, for instance, shows the outline of a human figure found on the Foa rock, but places a surf board and a wave underneath the figure. Hawaiians, of course, invented surfing, and their beaches are today home to some of the sport’s most prestigious competitions. 

Here’s a thought experiment: imagine that David Burley and Shane Egan examined and wrote about a petroglyph showing Hawaiian figures which was uncovered near your village, and that Egan then began to market these figures on T shirts.

How would you feel about Egan’s use of the past? Would Egan be guilty of appropriating and commercialising the history of your village, or would the fact that the petroglyphs were probably created by a group of transient members of a non-Tongan culture mean that Egan could use them?

 [Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The dialectics of Tongan churching

[I blogged a few months ago about Tevita Manu'atu, an 'Atenisi Institute student who has been finishing his Bachelors degree by undertaking a detailed study of Kala'au, a village on the isolated southwest coast of Tongatapu. Tevita produced an outline history of Kala'au last semester, using as his raw material a series of interviews with his village's elderly people. Tevita's history noted the religious diversity of Kala'au. Despite its tiny size, the village is today home to members of many different denominations of Christianity.

This semester I've been asking Tevita to test the material he has gathered against the academic literature on Tonga and similar societies. I've thrown him a series of texts and references, and asked him whether they illuminate or contradict the facts he has gathered in his village. Here are some notes I gave Tevita this week.]

Hi T,

You have stated that you would like to analyse Kala’au society using the methods of FutaHelu and Futa Helu’s great inspiration, the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesos. I want to discuss a study of religious life in another Tongan village, because I think this study features the sort of method you want to deploy.  

First, though, let's talk quickly about the method Futa Helu got from Heraclitus. Heraclitus is often seen as the father of dialectics, because he emphasised what is sometimes called the contradictory unity of the world. According to Heraclitus, or at least Futa Helu's interpretation of Heraclitus, the world is made up of an almost infinite number of interconnecting parts and processes. Everything affects everything else, at one time and in one way or another.

Despite all this interconnection, the world does not, according to Helu and Heraclitus, exist in any sort of harmony. Different parts and processes of reality clash with one another, and these clashes create perpetual change.

 

A quick example of contradictory unity: class and capitalism

Let us concretise the vision of the world as a contradictory unity by considering the composition of a typical Western capitalist society. Such a society is broken into classes, whose members are defined by the way they make their living. A small class of people possess and live off capital goods, like factories and businesses, and invested money. Members of a much larger group of people known as the working class make their living by working for the businesses owned by the capitalist class. A ‘middle class’ made up of ‘professionals’ like lawyers and doctors and small business owners sits between the two most important classes in society.

Historically, the capitalist class and the working class have often been in conflict. The working class has formed trade unions and political parties to demand better wages and salaries and better social services from the capitalist class, which has run its own competing business associations and political parties. Election campaigns generally see a party supported by the workers clashing with a party favoured primarily by the capitalist class. In extreme situations conflict between workers and capitalists has exploded into strikes, riots, and even revolutions. The middle class has tended to vacillate between the two more important classes, siding at one time with the capitalist class and at another time with the working class.

Western societies are unified by the fact that all of their social components – all of their classes – are related to and dependent on one another. Capitalists need workers to operate their businesses; workers need capitalists to pay their wages and salaries. But, as dialecticians like to remind us, unity does not mean harmony. Capitalists and workers are constantly in conflict. It is this continual conflict which generates change.

The Beagleholes and the mystery of Tongan churching

Now that we’ve gotten a clear notion of what contradictory unity means, let us leave the West and return to Tonga. I want to suggest that some of the most interesting studies of Tonga have a dialectical quality, because they treat Tongan society as a contradictory unity.

I think that Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole’s discussion of the role of religion in the life of the Vava’uan village of Pangai has a dialectical quality which might have pleased Futa Helu. You have read an excerpt from the Beagleholes' short book Pangai: Village in Tonga, which was based on a few months of field work done in 1938 and 1939.

As you have seen, the Beagleholes analyse a feature of Tongan village society which has puzzled many palangi visitors, and which frustrates some Tongans. They try to explain the way that even the smallest Tongan village is home to outposts of a variety of churches. In Pangai, which was a very modestly sized village when the Beagleholes came visiting, four churches – the Free Wesleyans, the Church of Tonga, the Free Church of Tonga, and the Catholics – had buildings of their own where they held regular services, and a number of other religious organisations, like the Mormons, had followers, but hadn’t yet established places of worship.

I remember you telling me that, as a curious teenager, you decided to do a 'church tour' of Tongatapu, and experience a service by every denomination active on the island. That adventure took a long time to complete! Many palangi tourists are astonished by the number and size of the churches that rise from even the smallest and remote villages on Tongatapu.

It is important for us to remember that not every South Pacific society features the sort of religious diversity found in Tonga. Although Samoa is home to a number of different Christian denominations, many Samoan villages boast only a single church. It is normal for every member of a village to attend the same church, and in some villages residents who do not attend church regularly can be fined. There have been cases, even in recent years, of Samoans who have converted to a religious denomination not represented in their village being forced to leave that village.

Horowitz's gambit: Tonga as Texas

Some scholars have ascribed the religious diversity of Tonga to the supposed history of the country. Maikolo Horowitz, for instance, has called Tonga ‘the Texas of the South Pacific’, because of what he regards as the extreme individualism of its people.

Horowitz thinks that, because Tonga is made up of a large number of relatively small islands, Tongans were historically able to solve social conflicts through emigration. A group of Tongans who found themselves in conflict with authority could ‘up sticks’, sail across a lagoon or a relatively short stretch of open ocean, and found a new village on a new island. Horowitz thinks that the supposed fluidity of ancient Tongan society has left its mark on contemporary Tongans, by making them respond to social conflict by seceding from one organisation and starting another. It is not surprise, for Horowitz, that Tongan boasts so many churches, and that these churches are so prone to splits.

It seems to me that there are a couple of problems with Maikolo Horowitz’s explanation for religious diversity in Tonga. As Patrick Vinton Kirch, Sione Latukefu, ‘Opeti Taliai, and numerous other scholars have shown, ancient Tongan society was highly centralised, and featured a large class of tu’a who had very few rights and little mobility. Ancient Tongan society was also relatively densely populated - Kirch estimates that Tongatapu was filled to capacity a thousand years ago –  and so the opportunity to ‘up sticks’ and settle somewhere new would have been limited, even if the would-be settlers had managed to evade the control of central authority.

Horowitz’s talk about the fluidity and disunity of Tongan society also fails to explain the stability which has marked much of modern Tongan history. Between 1852, when Tupou I captured and burnt Pea, the last stronghold of his heathen enemies, and 2006, when the enemies of Tupou’s descendants burnt downtown Nuku’alofa to the ground, Tonga saw little or no violent social conflict. How could this be, if Tongans are as relentlessly fractious as Horowitz claims? It seems to me that Horowitz’s claims about Tongan society over-emphasise contradiction, at the expense of unity.

The dialectics of religious diversity

As you have seen, Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole explain the religious diversity of Pangai by arguing that the competing churches allow for competing personalities in the village to at once express and solve their conflicts.

The Beagleholes discuss a Catholic who falls out with other Catholics over their alleged theft of melons from his fields, and expresses his disgust with them by leaving the church and becoming a Wesleyan. They cite the case of the very argumentative amateur theologian, whose idiosyncratic interpretations of the Bible cause conflicts with his fellow worshippers, conflicts which are solved, albeit temporarily, whenever he shifts church. And the Beagleholes mention those men from Wesleyan families who, wanting to differentiate themselves from their peers and to acquire what seems like them esoteric knowledge, shift their allegiance to the Catholic church.

In a small village set in a relatively remote part of what was, in the late 1930s, a profoundly undemocratic society, competing churches provide malcontents and dissenters with a way of expressing their sense of difference and dissatisfaction.

But the churches of Pangai are not only a means to rebellion – they also, according to Beagleholes, allow for the regulation of conflict. By shifting church, the person angry with his or her former social circle can acquire a new circle of friends, and leave behind old conflicts. By leaving the church of their family, the young and dissatisfied man or women can rebel without - usually - seriously disturbing the social order or attempting to enter the restricted realm of politics. For Beaglehole, then, the religious diversity of Pangai, and by extension Tonga in general, has a dialectical quality. It both expresses and - at least sometimes - manages social conflict, and divides as well as unites Tongan society. It offers a lesson in contradictory unity.

Of course, the Beaglehole’s' study was made more than seven decades ago, and it needs to be examined in the light of more recent research, including texts like Niel Gunson’s examinations of Tonga's Christian present and shamanic past, ‘Opeti Taliai's PhD thesis, which argues that Christianity has been, in Tonga, a ‘totalitarian’ religion, Nico Besnier’s discussion of the rise of ‘charismatic’ churches like the Tokaikolo Fellowship in Tonga, Giovanni Bennardo’s recent and very detailed neuroscientific studies of the worldviews of Tongan villagers, and your own research in Kala’au.

Some questions to consider:

Does the Beagleholes' account of religious life in Pangai have relevance in Kala’au today? Do the churches in your village express and regulate social conflict in the way the Beagleholes describe? 

Are the Beagleholes exponents of dialectical analysis?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

 

An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in Nuku'alofa

[This poem is part of a series.]

An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in Nuku’alofa (for Visesio Siasau) 

Watch those ceiling fans

on either side of the chandeliers: 

they are the rotors

of an elephant-sized engine

the missionaries installed in 1886,

the year before Tupou I sent them home.

 

Watch the rotors turn faster 

and faster, hear them hum louder 

and louder, and know that the engine is working 

in concert with your prayers,

is straining to lift this rocket-shaped

godhouse, to send it north, all the way 

to heaven, or some other

imperialist nation.

Christ will not let us go.

Christ is a Tongan.

Christ is a pagan.

Christ is made of banyan

and suffers on a banyan cross.

Those nails through his hands and feet

hold his cross to the wall

and the wall to the floor

and the floor to the earth

of Tongatapu,
the prone body of Hikule'o,
her seven bellies stuffed full
of midden-shells and pot-shards
and skeletons.

As the rotors strain

he holds us here.
Under the chandeliers
our saviour shines with sweat.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

.

Dangers of the crossover

When I attended Rosehill College, the pride of Papakura's educational system, back in the late 1980s and early '90s, the school had two official uniforms.

The first uniform, which was worn grudgingly and scruffily, consisted of the sort of grey shirt and blue jersey with which so many institutions, from schools to prisons to mental hospitals, homogenise their inmates.

The second, unofficial uniform, which was worn underneath those colourless shirts, and which burst proudly out of its hiding place on the school's rare and coveted mufti days, showed the letters AC and DC on either side of a lightning bolt and featured either a nihilistically black or garishly purple background.

By the end of the '80s the Aussie metal band was fifteen or so years old, and its members had acquired stock options and golf club memberships. At Rosehill, though, AC/DC's deadhead lyrics and two chord drones were still seen as a symbol of rebellion. The band was so popular that anyone who spurned it was seen as a cultural traitor. I got teased for months after I wore a T shirt that honoured The Smiths rather than the Aussie metallers on mufti day.

I felt like I was entering familiar territory, then, when I turned up at the waterlogged campus of the 'Atenisi Institute this year and heard AC/DC blasting from a stereo. I soon realised, though, that loud guitars are not as popular in Tonga as they are in South Auckland.

After one of my first days teaching at the Institute, I accepted a car ride home with Salise and Hai, two of the school's biggest metalheads. As our vehicle skidded and roared through the crumbling backstreets of Nuku'alofa, launching chickens into the air and pigs into puddles, Hai put an old AC/DC cassette onto the stereo, cranked up the volume, and hooted with a strange anticipatory delight. Soon 'Highway to Hell', the title track to AC/DC's most famous album, was bringing Tongans onto their doorsteps and verandahs. An old man stepped out of a Free Wesleyan Church and frowned meaningfully at the din. A couple of boys sprinted down the drive of their 'api and stared at us, wondering if we were the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Men and women in passing cars gave us thumbs down signs and shouted curses from which I was magically protected by my ignorance of Tongan.

"Tongans don't like loud music" Salise explained when we got back to my place. "They don't even like rock. Kava songs, love songs, reggae - anything mellow, island style, that's what they like. Not AC/DC." In Nuku'alofa, fans of bands like AC/DC are not snotty-nosed bogans but avant-garde provocateurs.

I soon learned that Salise doesn't need a stereo to play music. He's an extraordinarily talented musician, who can knock out a classical piece for Spanish guitar as easily as the riff to 'Highway to Hell' or 'Smoke on the Water'. I've been working on winning Salise over to my tastes in guitar music, by lending him CDs by Nick Drake and John Fahey, but he remains a devotee of the heavy stuff. Together with a couple of mates, he has formed a band called One in Blood, which is battling against the Tongan distaste for rock music.

This semester Salise is doing a research project - autoethnography is the fancy term I'm using for it - in which he reflects on the difficulties of making loud guitar music in Tonga. I've been giving him music and texts which relate the struggles of path-breaking musicians in other countries, and asking him to relate them to his own experiences. I'm not so much interested in discussing the technical aspects of music, which are beyond me, as in hearing Salise talk about the sociology and politics of rocking out.

Here are some of the notes I've given to Salise. Some of the musos who frequent this blog, and in particular the great Bill Direen, might have their own responses to the questions I ask.

The art and politics of crossover music: Miles Davis and Death considered

You have been listening to Miles Davis, and reading Nick Kent’s classic portrait of the trumpeter. As Kent notes, Davis was a compulsive innovator who repeatedly crossed from one genre of music to another during his career, as he sought out new sounds and new bandmates.

You have heard Kind of Blue, which Davis released in 1959, and Bitches Brew, a double album which appeared in 1970. While Kind of Blue is considered a jazz classic, Bitches Brew upset some jazz fans, and helped create a new genre of music, which is usually called ‘fusion’ or ‘jazz-rock’. As his use of electrified guitars and pianos and the wah wah and other effects pedals shows, Davis had become a fan of Jimi Hendrix by the time he recorded Bitches Brew. The sound of the album also owes something to James Brown, whose funk sound was very popular amongst black audiences in the late ‘60s.

Miles Davis hoped that by bringing Hendrix and Brown into his sound he could attract a younger and blacker audience. After the release of Bitches Brew he began to leave behind the relatively small clubs where jazz musicians usually play and instead perform on the same bill as rock bands in stadiums. He went on tour with the Stevie Miller Band, an outfit which played middle of the road rock, and appeared alongside bands like The Who and The Doors at the Isle of Wight festival, which was Britain’s answer to the massive outdoors concert at Woodstock.

Davis’ desire for a blacker audience was connected to his anger about the racism that he and millions of other black Americans faced in the decades after World War Two. As a young man, Davis was attacked by a policeman outside a jazz club. The musician loved to drive fast sports cars, but often got pulled over by cops who were convinced that a black man in an expensive vehicle must be a thief.

Davis often referred to the battles of African peoples against colonialism in his music. In the early 1970s he composed a half-hour track called ‘Calypso Frelimo’, which paid tribute to the Mozambican guerrillas fighting to throw Portugal colonialists out of their homeland; in the ‘80s he released an album named Tutu, after the anti-apartheid leader the Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Davis was perplexed that so many of his fans were well-off white people, and that it was much easier for him to find an audience in a prestigious American college or a fashionable Parisian music hall than in Africa or one of America’s black ghettoes.

 Despite the changes he made to his sound, Davis found it hard to attract large new audiences. In the years after Bitches Brew he achieved, instead, what one critic called a ‘negative crossover’. Davis’ use of rock instruments and funk rhythms alienated traditionalist jazz fans, but his long, intricate, turbulent songs – as you may have realised, the title track of Bitches Brew ran for a whole side of vinyl! – were too much for many fans of rock and funk to absorb.

Between 1975 and 1980 Davis retired from music. When he returned, he played in a much more accessible style, and began to incorporate ‘80s pop into his repertoire. He made a cover version of Cyndi Lauper’s hit single ‘Time After Time’ and worked with several rappers before his death in 1992.

You have read about the black Detroit band Death, whose members created a punk-like sound years before supposed pioneers of punk like Britain’s The Sex Pistols and New York’s The Ramones. Like Miles Davis, Death wanted to reach a black audience, but struggled to get a hearing for their fast, loud sound. They were working in a city famous as the base of Motown Records, and their community wanted to hear the soul and funk of Marvin Gaye and George Clinton. Death only reached an audience decades after disbanding, when their music was discovered by record collectors and historians.  

Some questions to consider:

What is your response to the differences between Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew? Which album sounds more accessible to you today? Which album did you enjoy more?

Is it difficult to cross musical genres in Tonga today? How would a band like Death, or an album like Bitches Brew, be treated in Tonga?

Can you relate to the difficulties that Miles Davis and Death had in making music that audiences were unfamiliar with and hostile toward?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The noble savage and the Toilet Club

Sometime in the late nineties I went to a seminar given by the University of Auckland art historian Dr Rangihiroa Panoho. I remember Panoho turning off the lights in the seminar room and flicking through a series of slides. One of the slides showed a tribesman from the highlands of New Guinea dressed up for some sort of ritual. The man had painted his face and torso, but what interested Panoho’s audience was the empty packet of Kellog’s Corn Flakes that he had fastened to his forehead. The tribesman wore his unconventional headdress solemnly, but some members of the audience began to titter, and others winced.

“I think this next image is just as funny” Panoho told us. He punched a button, and a carved wooden face mask, painted in an intricate pattern of reds, blacks, and greys, appeared on the screen. “This mask was made for a particular ceremony in the highlands, and then thrown away. An anthropologist salvaged the mask, and a museum acquired it. Now the shield is on public display in the West.” The audience was silent. “Why aren’t you laughing?” Panoho asked, in a low voice.

Panoho’s audience had found it amusing and pitiable that a New Guinea tribesman would salvage and revere an empty corn flake packet. When a Western scholar did the same thing with an item New Guineans considered disposable, though, nobody regarded his action as peculiar. As Panoho went on to explain, this double standard says a great deal about the way that Westerners still see the indigenous peoples of ‘remote’ regions like the New Guinea highlands.

In the West we are accustomed to consuming a continuous stream of cultural artefacts imported from near and distant parts of the world. We watch movies from Hollywood or Bollywood, wear jeans made in China, sit on furniture assembled in Scandinavia, and collect masks from New Guinea, without feeling that our eclecticism is strange or dangerous. But when a New Guinean or Amazonian or Tahitian shows a similar eclecticism, by donning blue jeans or acquiring a cellphone, we lament the way that modernity and globalisation are corrupting indigenous cultures. Like oil and water, modernity and indigenity cannot, we assume, mix.

As Rangihiroa Panoho pointed out in that now-distant seminar, our patronising attitude towards indigenous peoples was born in the eighteenth century, when Rousseau and other European intellectuals concocted the notion of the noble savage. Newly ‘discovered’ indigenous peoples like the Polynesians and the native Americans were considered child-like in their innocence, ignorance, and capacity for corruption. Untroubled by abstract thought or a sense of time, the noble savages lived happily and in harmony with nature in the forests and glades of Virginia and Tahiti. Once they were introduced to curses of the West like Christianity, cash, alcohol, and politics, though, the savages were doomed to decline and extinction.

In the nineteenth century Pacific, the noble savage myth was a useful excuse for colonisers. Because they were incapable of dealing with the modern world, the noble savages required Europeans and North Americans to administer their affairs. The fanatically imperialist leader of fin de siècle New Zealand, ‘King Dick’ Seddon, compared the Urewera mountains, homeland of the ‘primitive’ Tuhoe tribe, to a wildlife preserve. Wilhelm Solf, the chief administrator of German Samoa, used similar metaphors to characterise his domain.

I thought about Rangihiroa Panoho’s slide show when I read an advertisement for a hefty new book by the photographer Jimmy Nelson. In Before They Pass Away, Nelson has collected images of a series of indigenous peoples who are supposedly on the brink of extinction. Nelson doesn’t seem to register the fact that many of these peoples have large and growing populations, and that some of them, like the Kazakhs, have their own nation states. For Nelson, ‘tribes’ like the Maori, the Kazakhs, and the New Guineans are doomed because their members are increasingly wearing jeans and chatting on cellphones.

When he talks about tribal cultures succumbing to the onslaught of modernity, Nelson repeats for the umpteenth time the view that indigenous peoples are noble savages whose way of life is both static and incompatible with modernity.

Any New Zealander who looks at one of the portraits of Maori included in Nelson’s book will immediately recognise the absurdity of the photographer’s project. Like a Victorian-era painter, Nelson has dressed Maori up in 'traditional costumes' and portrayed them in front of a pristine piece of forest. Looking at Nelson’s photograph, we would never guess that Maori drive cars, earn cash, run political parties, record hip hop albums in their native language, and generally inhabit the world of the twenty-first century.

The unmistakable implication of Nelson’s photograph is that the only authentic Maori culture is a 'primeval' pre-contact culture. It has been half a century now since New Zealand artists and museologists realised that Maori culture, like virtually all indigenous cultures, is dynamic and flexible, and capable of adapting to assimilating aspects of Western modernity without losing its essence. Maori culture is in no danger of vanishing, and I suspect the same is true is for the other cultures (mis)represented by Nelson. 

For scholars of history and sociology, the noble savage myth recycled by Nelson is an annoyance; for indigenous artists, though, it is a serious threat.  

I have mentioned the Selaka Club, or the Toilet Club, as it is often nicknamed, before on this blog. Led by Tevita Latu, a talented artist and indefatigable cultural activist who was jailed, beaten and briefly charged with treason after peacefully protesting against the Tongan monarchy in 2006, the club’s kava-fuelled members work at night on drawings, paintings, posters, and music in a fale beside Nuku’alofa’s lagoon. Determined to reject stereotypes of Tongan culture, the Selakarians, as they call themselves, drink their kava from a toilet bowl, fly a Tongan flag adorned with a satirical swastika, and antagonise neighbouring and more conventional kava clubs by playing their favourite dubstep, techno, and death metal tracks through their PA system late into the night.  

With its fearless assimilation of influences from diverse parts of the globe and its rejection of insulting notions of a static, unchanging indigenous culture, the Selaka Club regularly collides with the expectations that palangi visitors bring to Tonga. All too often, tourists turn up to Nuku’alofa’s arts and crafts gallery wanting to buy cute carvings of turtles or dolphins, and are horrified when they see the Selakarians’ Cubist-influenced portraits of fast cars and parties and street protests. Tevita Latu and co are condemned as un-Tongan by palangi who have been fed a myth of the indigenous person as a noble savage.

Last week Sally Richardson, a Fulbright scholar from Alabama who has been living and making art in Tonga for most of the year, opened an exhibition of her work at an old house in central Nuku’alofa run by On the Spot, a collective of young Tongan painters, dancers, and actors. Richardson’s opening was an opportunity for Nuku’alofa’s thriving arts community to party. As the sun set and Nuku’alofa’s growing population of flying foxes began to shake themselves awake in their banyan and mango trees, the Selakarians rolled up in their club truck, which is painted with the same psychedelic colours and surreal slogans as the famous ‘Magic Bus’ Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters drove across America in the sixties. The Selakarians were armed with guitars, plates of watermelons, and their notorious kava bowl.

While kava songs floated out of the doorless house into the dark street, Sally Richardson and her close friend Tevita Latu held court, talking of tapa cloth and Picasso, photoshopping and traditional tattooing.

Richardson’s works, many of which were composed on her laptop between cups of kava at the Toilet Club, brought together the disposable and sacred objects of Tongan and non-Tongan cultures. One vast collage, which was made with a standard photoshopping programme, introduced a plastic salt shaker to a wooden tapa beater, and a dairy cow to a Polynesian chicken. The exhibition’s most extraordinary work blended scores of tiny photographs of schoolkids parading through downtown Nuku’alofa; when viewed from a distance, the lines of uniformed boys and girls resembled the sort of colourful Chinese-made mat popular in contemporary Tongan homes.

In a small, shadowy room to the side of the house, Sally and her On the Spot comrades had made an art installation by stretching woven patterns along the walls, strewing fragrant Tongan flowers on the floor, and lighting quaint-looking glass lanterns. Creeping into this mysterious space, I might have been entering a recusant priesthole in Elizabethan England, or one of the hermetic godhouses where shamans stoned on green kava summouned the spirits of Tangaloa and Hikule’o in pre-Wesleyan Tonga.

Like so much of the art that is being made in Nuku’alofa today, Sally Richardson’s works joyously mock the notion that indigenous and non-indigenous cultures cannot commune and converse with another. She and the Toilet Club could teach Jimmy Nelson a few lessons.  

(Photos pinched from On The Spot and Sally Richardson.)

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]