Tapu, pigs, and power: talking about Tongan Ark

[When Paul Janman previewed his Tongan Ark in the Auckland Film Archive's cramped theatre before Christmas, the audience consisted mostly of Tongan intellectuals and members of the New Zealand film industry. I was keen to show the Ark to a few of my literary mates, so I coaxed Paul around to my place, where he rigged up a giant screen on the lounge room wall. After the last reel I caught a few members of the audience on tape, as they reached for beers and steaks and discussed some of the ideas in Paul's film. Here's a transcript...]

Ted Jenner: Could you tell me more, Paul, about the background to the scenes of rioting and streetfighting in your film? The burning and the looting...

Paul Janman: I shot that footage on the 16th of November 2006, during the riot which destroyed much of downtown Nuku'alofa. The riot began as a peaceful demonstration for greater democracy in Tonga. Commoners, who make up almost all of the population of the country, were tired of seeing nobles dominating parliament, and the king choosing the country's Prime Minister. Pro-democracy politicians like 'Akilisi Pohiva were demanding the reform of the constitution, so that commoners elected the majority of seats in parliament, and so that the king became a merely symbolic leader...

The Tongan monarchy, rather like the Thai monarchy, has traditionally been a symbol of independence from the West. It was created, in its modern form, partly because Tongans realised, in the middle of the nineteenth century, that if they did not have a strong central government then they would be colonised. Many Tongans consider that the monarchy saved them from losing their land and their culture to Europeans. But the institution has now, in the eyes of many, become a problem. The royal family and the nobles are often accused of corruption - they are particularly notorious for using their control of the state to get rich running monopolistic and inefficient businesses.

The 2006 protest may have begun peacefully, but it turned into a sort of violent party. The protesters stole all the liquor from the duty free shops and expatriates' clubs around Nukua'lofa. And once some of the liquor had been drunk, someone had the bright idea of burning the town down... Scott: But the destruction wasn't indiscriminate, was it? Certain businesses were targeted - those associated with the royal family, and also those owned by Chinese...

Paul: And then, funnily enough, the Chinese government stepped in and funded the reconstruction of central Nuku'alofa! There are building sites full of Chinese workmen. China is making a big effort to strengthen economic ties with South Pacific nations, and I notice that the rebuilding programme isn't an act of charity - it's actually a sort of loan to the Tongan government...how Tonga will be able to repay the debt I don't know -

Jack Ross: In a sense you can't win, can you? You topple a traditional oligarchy, a homegrown oligarchy, and then you get an international oligarchy, and what chance do you have of influencing them, when you're a small country so far from head office? Once you've got the Coca Cola company or its equivalent calling the shots, it's very hard to influence them.

Scott: I do think that the system which has existed in Tonga for the last century and a half - the system centred on the modern monarchy - has survived for so long because it has some positive qualities. The constitution created by the first modern Tongan king prevented the sale of land to foreigners and guaranteed each male citizen a livelihood. King Tupou the first was trying to find a way to balance Western modernity and Tongan tradition. He had travelled to Australia and seen the poverty of the working class there, and he knew about the dispossession of the Waikato people in New Zealand. And I think that Futa Helu, in a way, tried to perform the same balancing act when he built up 'Atenisi University. He wanted to fuse Western and Polynesian ideas. He wanted a marriage of equals.

Paul: Futa was often referred to as the alternative king of Tonga. That gives you an idea of the mana he had in Tongan society. He was in some ways more respected than the real king. He was penniless for most of his life, like Socrates, but he had a subterranean influence on Tongans. People would attack him in public but seek his advice in private. The royal family sometimes sought his advice when it was planning public events like weddings or coronations, because he had such a profound knowledge of Tongan culture, Tongan genealogy, Tongan etiquette. 'Atenisi was at times persecuted by the government, but it was never shut down, because the king knew that it had a level of public support - he knew that a thousand people would descend on the campus and protest... The present king of Tonga is a very educated man, an even more educated man than his father - he went to exclusive schools, he knows several European languages, he's very cosmopolitan - and he gets bored in Tonga. He used to send a black London taxicab down to Futa's house -the king likes those big black cabs because you can wear a sword and travel comfortably in them - and the car would bring Futa up to one of the royal residences. The king and Futa would drink all night, then the big black cab would head back to 'Atenisi, and Futa would roll out...
Scott: Futa was quite a carpenter, wasn't he? The title of your film alludes to the fact that he quite literally built 'Atenisi himself, after travelling to 'Eua and harvesting some trees -

Echo Zena-Janman: Not only did Futa build the school - he built the ground the school stands on. In the early '60s it was swamp, and so Futa and his followers had to lay shells and gravel, before they could build...the ground around the school is still swampy, and certain buildings - the library, for instance - seem almost encircled by water. That's not good for the books, of course...

Richard Taylor: I liked how laidback Futa and the other educators at 'Atenisi seemed in the film. They seemed able to laugh at anything...

Paul: Futa was very laidback. He got Harvard-trained classicists to work for a bag of taro a week. He had a laidback charm. He wasn't interested, for a long time, in keeping records or having curricula. He could be a fatalist. Sometimes he seemed to accept that the school he had established would die. He had a long view of history - he knew, like his hero Heraclitus, that nothing was eternal -

Ted: But Heraclitus isn't necessarily a fatalist. Heraclitus emphasised renewal as well as destruction -

Paul: In a sense 'Atenisi has perpetuated itself, has renewed itself, by sending its graduates into universities and other institutions around the world. In New Zealand graduates like 'Okusi Mahina and Opeti Taliai - and I could mention many other names - have made their mark. Even though the institution is struggling, to say the least, in Tonga, it is renewing itself as part of the Tongan diaspora...

Ted: I've spent my life teaching and translating the Greeks, so you won't be surprised that I find it extraordinary and inspiring to learn that 'Atenisi was teaching Greek for decades - from the late 1970s, in fact, until recently. In the same period New Zealand schools stopped offering Greek to their students. What an achievement, for a poor school in a tiny nation to be teaching Heraclitus and other Greek thinkers in ancient Greek!

Scott: And yet there seem to be some Tongans who consider that Futa took too reverential an attitude towards the Western intellectual tradition, and too critical an attitude towards Tongan culture and thought. The poet Konai Helu Thaman, for instance, seems to consider that Futa was too dismissive of Tongan tradition, and in the discussion that followed the first preview of Paul's film Okusi Mahina criticised Futa Helu's interpretation of tapu.

'Okusi argued that Helu and some of his followers - I think he was referring to Opeti Taliai and Michael Horowitz - treated tapu, treated the system of prohibitions and distinctions we refer to using the word tapu, as nothing but a means for chiefs to control commoners in traditional Tongan society. But 'Okusi argued, if I understood him rightly, that tapu was much more than this - that it was a way of dividing up the world, and that it was rooted in the very language Tongans use. It was a foundation of the Tongan world.

'Okusi seemed to think that the critics of tapu - those who would condemn it as irredeemably irrational - had their own, unacknowledged ways of arbitrarily dividing the world up - their own tapu, in other words. They were pretending to sit on a mountaintop, above all irrationality, but were missing the biases that the European intellectual tradition gave them -

Jack: But it's like the argument about Christianity in general, or about religion in general. People used to criticise Gibbon for his depiction of the early Christians, the Christians of the Roman Empire, as a bunch of ignorant hairy fanatics destroying everything in their path - they said you've just missed the whole point, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the fact that God was guiding them. Gibbon said "I don't see any God - I just see a bunch of hairy fanatics: what do you expect me to write?"

So finally when you're describing a system which clearly works in favour of the ruling class, which benefits the powerful, who cares how aesthetically beautiful some of the expressions of that system are, or how spiritualised they are? Who cares how wonderful church music or architecture are? At the end of the day power systems tend to legitimise themselves in aesthetic forms, and to gradually entrench themselves in people's hearts and souls, and then they become very difficult to dislodge. But you've got to combat them. I think it's good if the film's offended some people - you don't want to try to please everyone.

Paul: I was worried about my position as a palangi observer of a Tongan institution. I tried not to make a black and white film - I wanted to present what I saw as a series of paradoxes in 'Atenisi life, and in Tongan life. The film isn't supposed to proceed in a linear manner. Themes are touched on, put aside, then picked up later.

Richard: There seem to be points where an argument is introduced overtly - when it comes straight out of someone's mouth - and then is carried on covertly, through images. I noticed somebody talking about Heraclitus, and his notion of flux, before the focus of discussion moved to another subject. Even as the overt subject of the film shifted, though, a series of images of the sea swelling and breaking were shown. I saw these images as allusions to, or illustrations of, Heraclitus' notion of flux and flow. The film seemed to be working on multiple levels.

And the film gave me an overwhelming feeling of strangeness, especially in its early stages. I felt the alieness of Tonga -

Paul: It exists in a different time and space. The very fact that people find it possible, in Tonga, to sit back and think about Heraclitus for days on end, to sit around the kava bowl and philosophise at such length - this is something that impressed me when I spent two years teaching at 'Atenisi. The methods of teaching there were partly determined by the plentiful supply of time, and by the porous nature of the boundaries between work and leisure.

Ted: What were you teaching at 'Atenisi?

Paul: I gave a course in world literature. I'd begin with the Greeks, with Aristophanes and other dramatists, then work through Don Quixote, and Moby Dick, I did the Romantic poets, Tagore, a lot of Joyce -

Scott: What was Futa Helu's teaching style like?

Paul: He never read lectures. He improvised. He did often have lists of dates - lists that began in pre-Socratic times, and went through to the present. He had a very informal way of teaching, and an informal, sometimes eccentric way of mentoring his staff. I remember when one teacher arrived at the school, from the United States - Futa left a note for her that said 'Welcome -we here in Tonga think that blacks are too black, and whites are too white, whereas we are a mellow shade of brown. Tell that to the American racists!' That was Futa's idea of course notes...

Richard: I liked the pigs in the film! They're everywhere!

Scott: Tongan pigs roam down roads and through backyards, but everyone seems to know who owns which pig...

Paul: In a way, that could be a metaphor for Tongan society. On the surface it appears casual, even chaotic, but there is a pattern, there are rules, rules which are at first hidden to outsiders...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]