Reading the Maps

Travelling the Pacific by Tardis

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:22:00 +0000

[It's exam time at 'Atenisi, so I've prepared this summary of my rather chaotic Modern Pacific History paper for students. I'll post about the visit from Murray Edmond last week as soon as I can track down the photographs I took of his ebullient public performances.]

Modern Pacific History – a summary

What’s in a name?

In our first lecture I argued that names like the Pacific are much more than simple and permanent labels placed on pieces of the world. A name reflects the outlook and interests of the person or people who created it, and over centuries and millennia many different names have been given to the region we today call the Pacific.

In a number of ancient Polynesian cultures, ‘Moana’ was used as a name for the waters we now call the Pacific. In the sixteenth century Spaniards journeyed from Cape Horn at the bottom of South America to Southeast Asia, and gave the name Pacific, which meant peaceful, to the great ocean they had crossed. The Spaniards may have picked a different name if they had run into a cyclone, or had called at an island like Tongatapu, whose inhabitants were very familiar with the martial arts.

Nineteenth century palangi writers like Robert Louis Stevenson made the South Seas into a popular and rather romantic term for the southern and central Pacific. In the decades after World War Two the term South Pacific began to be used by international bodies like the United Nations. Today politicians like New Zealand’s John Key often talk about an Asia-Pacific region, and by doing so lump small island societies like Tonga together with much more populous continental nations like South Korea and Thailand.

The great Tongan-born intellectual Epeli Hau’ofa used an essay called ‘Our Sea of Islands’ to argue that European colonists had thought of the Pacific Ocean as a barrier between island peoples, when it really been, in precolonial times, a highway. Hau’ofa disliked the term Pacific because it made him think of barren water, and proposed using the word Oceania instead. More recently, the ‘Atenisi graduate ‘Okusitino Mahina has proposed once again using the ancient and beautiful word Moana to describe the waters around the nations of Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji.

I asked class members to think about which word or words they would like to use to describe the region where they live. Ilaisa said that he believed that a pan-Pacific identity existed, but did not identify with the term Asia-Pacific. Salise argued that the Pacific should be renamed Moana-a-Tonga, to remember the empire that Tonga’s mariners and warriors established in the late medieval era.

I also used our first lecture to explain the structure, or rather lack of structure, of the paper. I explained that our class would imitate the great Doctor Who’s Tardis, and jump from one time and place to another in lecture after lecture. Where the Doctor explored the whole universe, we would confine ourselves to the Pacific since the late eighteenth century.

A blind date

I argued that the first encounters between Europeans and Pacific peoples could be compared to a blind date, because each people lacked information about the other, and in place of information relied on preconceptions. These preconceptions were very different, and reflected the different historical experiences of European and Pacific peoples.

To understand the preconceptions that European and Pacific peoples brought to their first meetings, we had to examine the different histories of these societies.

The European background

We looked first at Europe, which was experiencing rapid and fateful changes when mariners like Bougainville and Cook set sail for the Pacific. The intellectual movement we now call the Enlightenment was challenging the power of religion, by insisting that the world must be understood through observation and reason, rather than on the basis of theological dogma.

The economic system we now call capitalism was emerging in Europe, as agriculture became increasingly large-scale and profit-oriented, peasants were cleared off their lands, towns began to grow, and gold and other commodities flowed in from colonies in other continents. Many scholars have used the term modernity for the world that the Enlightenment and capitalism brought into existence.

I argued that early European responses to the Pacific were dictated largely by preconceptions, rather than by reality. The Pacific was, for Europeans, a mirror in which they saw aspects of their own troubled societies. Many Europeans unhappy with the greed, hierarchy, snobbery, sexual repression, and poverty of their society saw, in early descriptions of Tahiti, the island Bougainville ‘discovered’ in 1767, an alternative and better way of life. Influenced in many cases by the social critic Rousseau, who praised the life of the ‘natural man’ living outside European society, these Europeans saw the Tahitians as a people who existed close to the soil, abhorred authority and violence, and saw sex as something sacred rather than abominable. The Tahitians were, to use a famous phrase coined by the English poet John Dryden, ‘noble savages’.

But not all Europeans were enthusiastic about the Pacific. The same apparent sexual and social freedom which appealed to devotees of Rousseau upset defenders of Christianity and European imperialism. For Europeans who believed that Christianity and commerce were gifts that had to be shared, societies like Tahiti and Tonga were the ‘dark places of the earth’, where sloth and hedonism reigned. The inhabitants of these dark places were not noble but ignoble savages. In 1796 a ship called the Duff left England for Tahiti and Tonga, full of missionaries determined to Europeanise the peoples of those lands.

I noted Kerry Howe’s argument that certain common assumptions lie behind both the stereotype of the noble savage and the stereotype of the ignoble savage. Both the noble and ignoble savage are supposed to be the product of a timeless, static society; both are supposed to be incompatible with a modern, European-made world. Howe notes that, for much of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, many Europeans assumed that the inhabitants of the Pacific would die out, as a result of contact with Christianity, commerce, and colonisation.

Neither the noble nor the ignoble savage ever existed. Tahiti, Tonga and other Pacific societies were far more complex than either stereotype suggested.

The Pacific Background

The Pacific is an extremely diverse part of the world, and different societies brought different preconceptions to their early encounters with Europeans. To illustrate something of the Pacific’s diversity, I discussed the chart Patrick Vinton Kirch designed to show how hierarchical various Polynesian societies were in the centuries before contact with Europe.

At one end of Kirch’s chart is Rekohu, the society that the Moriori people established in the subantarctic Chatham Islands. The Moriori, who were the descendants of fourteenth century Maori mariners, survived by hunting and gathering and had an egalitarian, decentralised society. At the other end of Kirch’s chart is Tonga, a highly centralised agricultural society where a class of serfs were separated by wealth and culture from a leisured aristocracy. Tonga had developed rudimentary state structures and an empire by the late medieval period.

It is not surprising that the people of Rekohu and Tonga reacted differently to European incursions on their rohe. When a European vessel landed on Chatham Island in 1791, the Moriori were startled. Because they had imagined that they were the only people in the world, they decided that the ship and its crew must have come from the sun. By contrast, the chiefs of Tongatapu were relatively indifferent to Cook when he first called here. Shortly after landing Cook had associated himself with a low-ranking chief, and this suggested, to more senior leaders, that he must be a visitor of little importance.

Ungodly trouble

I devoted a lecture to a couple of the early attempts to turn Polynesians from ignoble savages into industrious Christians. Using an essay by Paul Van Der Grijp, I discussed the fate of the first missionaries to land in Tonga, who were brought by the Duff in 1797. Because of their refusal to study Tongan society with any seriousness and the arrogance they showed towards both Tongans and the small but influential number of rough and ready palangi ‘beachcombers’ who had already settled in Tonga, the missionaries became the victims of both theft and violent attacks, and eventually fled from the nation they had hoped to convert. A missionary named George Vason ‘went native’, married a series of local women, took part in a civil war, acquired serfs, and had his body tattooed.

Vason’s rejection of European for Tongan civilisation foreshadowed the story of Thomas Kendall, an English missionary who became, in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a lackey of the notorious Maori warlord Hongi Hika. Kendall had intended to convert Hika, but ended up supplying him directly and indirectly with the guns that would help him ravage much of Te Ika a Maui. The fates of Vason and Kendall were not unusual in the early nineteenth century.

A digression and a debate: North Sentinel Island

A handful of ‘uncontacted peoples’ unfamiliar with the world of modernity still exist today. I suggested to the class that we could understand the situation of the Moriori people in 1791 by considering the plight of the uncontacted people of North Sentinel Island.

I described how the inhabitants of North Sentinel, which is part of the Andamans archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, had resisted repeated attempted incursions by the British colonisers of the Andamans and then by the Indian government. Boats and choppers that got too near North Sentinel Island attracted swarms of arrows. Today the Indian government refrains from trying to contact the North Sentinelese, and bars private vessels from going near their island. Class members disagreed vehemently over whether the North Sentinelese ought to be visited again by emissaries of the modern world. At one extreme, Ilaisa argued that the islanders should subdued by force and introduced to the Bible; at the other extreme, Miko argued for their indefinite isolation, suggesting they were better off apart from the modern world.

Two-sidedness and countermodernity

Shortly after World War Two the Australian scholar Alan Moorehead published a book called The Fatal Impact, which became famous for its argument that the peoples of the Pacific had been devastated and doomed by the impact of contact with European missionaries, capitalists, and colonists. Moorehead’s book was popular because it reflected a common palangi view, but in the 1960s a group of scholars based at the Australian National University began to develop a new ‘island-centred’ vision of Pacific history, in which Pacific peoples were not passive victims of history, but instead adapted creatively to the changes Europeans brought to their societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The ANU scholars’ picture of Pacific history as a two-sided process has become dominant in the academy, but Moorehead’s viewpoint still has its advocates. In New Zealand the charismatic Maori politician Hone Harawira often argues that Maori lived in a peaceful paradise before being losing their power and agency to European invaders. The Tongan academic Linita Manu’atu sees her country as a victim of cultural colonisation, and wants to restore its pre-contact culture.

I argued against the ‘fatal impact’ view of Pacific history, and suggested that it had echoes of the old notion of a noble savage doomed to destruction if his timeless paradise is disturbed by outsiders. I invited class members to consider the earlier contacts between Europeans and Pacific Islanders, and the stories of men like George Vason and Thomas Kendall, and decide for themselves whether Pacific cultures were as brittle as Moorehead and Manu’atu believe.

I argued that, rather than succumb tamely to the palangi newcomers, Pacific peoples constructed a series of ‘countermodernities’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by appropriating and adapting the modern ideas, institutions, and economic practices that had emerged in Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These countermodernities soon came into conflict with European missionaries and colonists.

Countermodernity and resistance: Aotearoa, Samoa, and Tonga

I used a series of lectures to discuss the countermodern societies that various Polynesian peoples constructed, and the ways that these societies came into conflict with European imperialists.

I described the life and work of Wiremu Tamihana, the Waikato chief who created the Kingitanga, or King movement, in an attempt to unite Maori against European settlers in the middle of the nineteenth century. I discussed the village called Peria which Tamihana established as a model for the Maori assimilation of European technology, ideas, and forms of organisation. Peria had a flour mill which was owned and operated collectively, a school which taught lessons in Maori, and a church which offered a version of Christianity that reflected Maori experiences. The Waikato Kingdom which grew around Tamihana in the 1850s and early ‘60s was a prosperous and independent nation which exported huge amounts of food to the impoverished colonial city of Auckland. It was invaded and conquered by colonists in 1863 and 1864.

We used another lecture to examine the life and work of Rua Kenana, a Maori prophet who tried to establish an independent state in the Urewera mountains of central Te Ika a Maui. I described Rua’s courage in facing up to persecution from the settler government of New Zealand, but also noted his claims to divine status, and his use of this claimed status to intimidate or deceive his followers. We watched some of Vincent Ward’s feature-length documentary film Rain of the Children, which shows the terrible poverty of Maori who had been robbed of their land by settlers, and the desperation which led them to Rua’s movement. When we discussed Rua Kenana’s place in history, several class members argued against judging him too harshly. Tevita argued that Rua “was a man who did what he had to do in his time.”

We used the work of the distinguished Samoan writer Albert Wendt as a route into the history of Samoa’s anti-colonial Mau movement, which brought New Zealand rule of the island of Upolu to a standstill in the late 1920s and early ‘30s with roadblocks and tax boycotts. The Mau established its own government in a village on the edge of Apia, and proclaimed the slogan Samoa mo Samoa (Samoa for the Samoans).

At the end of 1929 New Zealand police opened fire on a Mau protest march, and the movement’s leader was killed. This bloody act was followed by a de facto counterinsurgency campaign, during which Kiwi troops and police pursued Mau activists through the jungles of Upolu, and burned pro-Mau villages to the ground. Wendt’s parents were involved in the Mau, and some of his writings deal with the movement. We watched Shirley Horrocks’ documentary A New Oceania, which discusses Wendt’s life and work, and shows images from the Mau era.

I argued that Tonga’s first modern king, Tupou I, created a countermodern society in Tonga, by creating a modern state, complete with a constitution and a set of ministries, and abolishing the quasi-feudal system which had existed in his country for centuries, but at the same time turning down the demands of palangi capitalists for the opening of Tonga to foreign ownership. Tupou was successful in preserving Tonga from colonisation, and I argued that he succeeded partly because Tonga, unlike Aotearoa or Samoa, had a long tradition of centralised government and a national identity.

Modernity and confusion: cargo cults considered

We devoted a lesson to cargo cults, which I defined as movements that aim to give their members material rewards associated with modernity through the use of magical rituals.

We discussed the most famous of all cargo cults, the John Frum movement from Tanna Island in Vanuatu, whose members believe that certain rituals – the raising of an American flag, for instance – will encourage an American soldier who served on Tanna during World War Two to return with a vast ‘cargo’ of modern goods and cash. We also considered a much more obscure cult which existed on Atiu Island in the Cooks shortly after World War Two, where a group of followers of a self-proclaimed prophetess cleared forest so that a ‘ghost ship’ could arrive carrying goods.

After giving a quick account of some of the main trends in the plentiful scholarly literature on cargo cults, I asked class members to consider how they felt about the phenomenon. One class member dismissed cargo cultists as fools. Tevita argued that cargo cults could be construed as countermodernities; I disagreed with this, because I think that cult leaders lacked the sort of understanding of how to appropriate and manipulate modernity that leaders like Wiremu Tamihana and Tupou I clearly showed.

Antimodernity: the case of the Kwaio

For a century and a half, the Kwaio people of Malaita in the Solomon Islands have resisted modernity in almost all its forms. Today the Kwaio continue to live in semi-nomadic groups, shun most modern goods, and practice their traditional religion. Kwaio have forged a reputation as ferocious defenders of their autonomy. In the nineteenth century they frequently attacked the European boats which came to Malaita in search of sandalwood and slave labour, and in the 1920s they killed many of the members of a party of tax collectors sent by the British administration of the Solomon Islands.

The Kwaio were an important part of the Maasina Rule movement which challenged British control of the Solomons in the years after World War Two, and more recently they have been opponents of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands, an Australian-led intervention in the Solomons. I talked about the work of the Marxist anthropologist Roger Keesing, who wrote extensively about the struggle of the Kwaio to preserve their traditional way of life. Keesing became so influential amongst the Kwaio that the Solomon Islands government banned him from visiting Malaita, on the grounds that he was stirring up protest there.

I asked class members to consider their attitudes to the Kwaio. Salise argued that the Kwaio ought to be allowed to live autonomously from the Solomon Islands state, though he considered their hostility to modernity “a little extreme”.

A field trip to ‘Eua

Four days on the verdant and rugged island of ‘Eua gave us a chance to put some of the ideas we had been discussing in the classroom into practice. During our time on ‘Eua we talked with Richard Lauaki, a member of Tonga’s Niuan minority and an authority on the history of both Niuafo’ou and his adopted home. Richard’s two hour talk, which mixed historical insights with improbable claims, and included talk of divine intervention in human affairs, helped us to think about the problems that scholars like Roger Keesing must have faced when they collected oral history. We read Sione Latukefu’s essay ‘Oral Tradition and Tonga’ to help us with these problems.

We encountered more problems when we tramped to the highest point on ‘Eua, following a trail used by Cook, and found the grave of the New Zealand soldier Shorty Yealands there. ‘Euans told us five different stories about how Yealands died; each of these stories contradicted the official version of his death.

When we returned from ‘Eua we looked at Tonga's experiences in World War Two. Drawing on essays by George Weeks and Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, I described the influx of Americans and New Zealanders to Tonga, and the clashes which broke out due to the brutal racism of some Americans and the Tongan habit of ‘borrowing’ goods like tobacco and torches from American warehouses. The lecture was an attempt to put into context the killing of Shorty Yealands by a Tongan soldier placed on a demoralising punishment drill for theft. I argued that the Second World War marked the first great challenge to the system Tupou I had established in the nineteenth century. Tupou I and later Queen Salote had wanted to limit the influence of capitalism on Tonga, but the presence of twenty thousand free-spending Americans lured many Tongans off their plantations and into the cash economy.

Papua New Guinea: a primitive exception, or a glimpse of the future?

We began our lesson on Papua New Guinea by examining a magazine article on the recent killings of women suspected of sorcery in the country’s highlands. The killings, which have prompted international condemnation and anguished debates in Papua New Guinea’s parliament, have been seen by some observers as confirmation of the inherent violence and backwardness of New Guinean society. Class members seemed to share this dim view of New Guinea. I argued that they were succumbing to the old stereotype of the ignoble savage, and suggested that sorcery killings might in some ways be an expression of the failings of capitalism in Papua New Guinea.

Drawing on an essay by Michael A Rynkiewich, I discussed the ‘big man’ system which emerged in ancient New Guinea. Because they lacked central authority, the fragmented societies of New Guinea relied on ‘big men’, who had proved themselves by oratory or bravery in warfare, to knit them together temporarily. The big man specialised in attracting prestige and resources to his corner of New Guinea.

The big men were co-opted by the Australian colonisers of New Guinea, and after independence in 1975 they became MPs and local government officials, intent on winning state resources for their part of the country. These political big men lack any ideological vision or national consciousness, and are prepared to see one region deprived of funding so that they can reward their followers. They pillage the state and jump from one party and coalition to another in search of short-term advantage.

Citing the remarkable journal published by a senior Papuan military intelligence officer, I described how big man politics saw Papua New Guinea lose its war against the secessionist province of Bougainville, despite a massive advantage in troops and materiel. I suggested that today big man politics makes a reasoned response to the sorcery killings difficult. I argued that the sorcery killings might be compared to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, in the sense that they are motivated more by impoverished people’s desire to steal land from their victims than by some primordial savagery. I suggested that, with its huge population and mineral-rich economy, Papua New Guinea would be crucial to the future of the Pacific, and thus needed careful study.

Andy Leleisi’uao and Pacific identity

We finished the course by returning to the question of Pacific identity. I described the career of Andy Leleisi’uao, an artist born in the Auckland suburb of Mangere to Samoan parents.

Leleisi’uao is a self-taught artist, and many of his early paintings dealt with controversial issues in Samoan society. He condemned the influence of greedy churches on Samoans, and lamented the effects of alcohol on Samoan men. In his later works Leleisi’uao has constructed an elaborate fantasy world, where UFOs sit on tropical Polynesian islands and hybrid creatures wander landscapes covered in glowing ruins.

Several years ago Leleisi’uao became involved in a dispute with some members of Mangere’s Pacific community, after he had painted a mural full of strange horned creatures for the Mangere community centre. Conservative Pacific Islanders, including influential religious leaders, campaigned successfully against the mural. Leleisi’uao was infuriated by their claims that he had lost touch with his culture.

Perhaps partly in response to criticism of his work from within the Samoan community, Leleisi’uao created a manifesto in which he defines himself as Kamoan – the word is a mixture of ‘Kiwi’ and ‘Samoan’ - and invited anyone to share this new identity. We discussed Leleisi’uao’s dispute with the Mangere community, and his bold attempt to create a new identity for himself. Class members were strongly supportive of Leleisi’uao in his struggle with the Mangere community, feeling that nobody should be allowed to make a definitive judgment about what is and isn’t part of a Pacific culture.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

From Fakatava to Swingman

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 02:45:00 +0000

In his 1924 book Tongan Society the scholar EW Gifford described a duel between two poets, or punake, from the island of Tongatapu. Tupou II, the profligate, pleasure-loving king of early twentieth century Tonga, had been so delighted by the composition of a punake named Fakatava that he gifted the young man Kalau, an islet that sits just south of 'Eua, Tonga's southernmost inhabited island.

Excited by this reward, Fakatava wrote a boastful challenge to Malukava, a much older and more famous poet. Fakatava's poem dismissed the ancient capital of Mu'a, where Malukava and many other punake lived and worked, as passé, and announced that tiny, rocky Kalau was about to become 'the performing ground for all things traditional' in Tonga. Malukava replied with his poem, which mocked Fakatava's pretensions. Fakatava failed to make Kalau the new hub of Tongan culture, but his descendants still own the island today.

The confrontation between Fakatava and Malukava was not an unusual event. Tongan poets liked lobbing challenges at each other, challenges which were given extra piquancy by the fact that their poems were always performed in public by dancers and singers, rather than distributed between the covers of books or magazines.

Futa Helu, the legendary founder of the 'Atenisi Institute, frowned at hip hop, and indeed all forms of contemporary popular music. It is hard, though, to read accounts of the duels between traditional Tongan poets without thinking of modern-day rappers, with their spicy put-downs and confrontational live performances.

Twenty-first century Tongatapu teems with talented rappers, the most prominent of whom is probably Jimmy the Great. Jimmy's track 'Pacific Conqueror' has been played repeatedly on state television over recent weeks, and can be heard shaking the walls of tattoo parlours and fried chicken diners in Nuku'alofa.

The sound of 'Island Conqueror' is generic, but the lyrics, with their celebration of the maritime empire Tonga built in the western and central Pacific five hundred or so years ago, are more original, and potentially more controversial. My students insist that Jimmy is not some Tongan ultra-nationalist, bent on reconquering renegade imperial provinces like 'Uvea, Niue, and Samoa, but an opportunist trading on the vague but fierce affection Tongans feel for their country's glorious past. 'Pacific Conqueror', they say, is the aural equivalent of the Tongan Empire clothing label established recently in Auckland.

Two of my students are beginning work on a documentary film about another Tongan rapper, Siua Ongosia, who often records under the name Swingman. Siua's tracks (you can find one here) are a strange mixture of twitchy electronics, spaced-out rapping and soaring choruses.

Ongosia always had a reputation as an eccentric - during one notorious performance in a hall somewhere in the Tongatapu bush he decided against either singing or rapping, and instead made a series of enigmatic hand signals as his DJ laid down beats. In recent years his eccentricity has been exacerbated by heavy drug use, and he now often makes the streets of central Nuku'alofa his home. I hope that Miko and Ulu's film project will be a catalyst for a new and happier chapter in the career of this talented artist. One Syd Barrett is enough.

The new battle for the Pacific

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 21:17:00 +0000

A lot of Westerners see the Pacific as a region isolated and insulated from the major dramas of our era. It can be argued, though, that the Pacific is a frontline in one of the most important conflicts of the twenty-first century. The Pacific lies midway between the United States and China, the world’s increasingly antagonistic superpowers. Pacific nations like Papua New Guinea and Kanaky sit on huge reserves of coveted minerals, and isolated islands like Guam, Wake, and Tuitila are home to airports and naval bases that allow armed forces to move between the Americas and Asia.

In the decades since World War Two the United States has dominated the Pacific. The Americans have been so confident of their hegemony in the region that they have often been content to let their close but subordinate partners Australia and New Zealand take responsibility for imposing their will there. In Tonga and a number of other South Pacific nations, the United States does not even bother to operate an embassy, and the Aussies and Kiwis are responsible for organising joint exercises with local armies and pressuring local governments into adopting the sort of neo-liberal economic policies that will benefit big Western corporations.

Over the past decade, though, China has mounted a challenge to the influence the US and its allies exert over the Pacific. China has made huge loans to a series of impoverished Pacific nations, befriended Fiji after its government was scorned by Australia and New Zealand, encouraged its citizens to set up businesses in places like Vanuatu, the Solomons and Tonga, and sent warships to visit a number of Pacific ports. Chinese warships are welcome in Tonga, much to the discomfort of the Western powers. Tonga’s debt to China now stands at one hundred and twenty million dollars, and nobody is quite sure how such a sum can ever be repaid.

In the past, many small Pacific states had to accept the economic and military policies laid down in Washington, Canberra, and Wellington, or face losing access to aid funds and security; now they can scorn the West and turn to China for help, or attempt to play the superpowers against each other. Pacific capitals teem with diplomats, advisors and aid workers, as China and the West compete for influence. Here in Nuku’alofa, the capital of the little Kingdom of Tonga, convoys of white SUVs with diplomatic numberplates chase chickens and pigs off the roads, and Chinese and Australian money men sit talking with corpulent nobles over stacks of documents and money in air-conditioned cafes.

Aware of the need to present a united front against the new superpower, Australia and New Zealand have drawn much closer to France over the past several years. In the 1980s, Australasian governments regularly denounced France for clinging to its colonies in the Pacific; today Kiwi and Aussies diplomats bloc with the French imperialists to try to keep the issue off the agenda of the United Nations. Last week a French naval vessel docked at Nuku’alofa; its crew were welcomed by Australian naval officers who have based themselves in the city. Uniformed Aussie, Kiwi, American and French troops are a common sight in Nuku’alofa’s bars and cafes.

The US-led bloc and China are competing for the Pacific using cultural as well as economic and diplomatic weapons. China has gone to some trouble to make sure that CCTV, its international English-language television news channel, is broadcast free to air in Tonga. An English-language Chinese radio station also broadcasts continually. Chinese educationalists have flown to Tonga and lobbied for the inclusion of Mandarin in the curricula of primary and secondary schools. Scholarships make sure that some of Tonga’s best young students head overseas to Chinese universities.

The US-led bloc of Pacific powers isn’t taking China’s push for cultural hegemony lying down. Residents of Nuku’alofa and the rest of Tongatapu can now listen to the ABC, Australia's public radio station.

It is instructive to compare the emphases and lacunae of the missionary arms of the Chinese and Australian media.

The Chinese report conscientiously on the Middle East, and are happy to note the messes that America and its allies have made in Afghanistan and Iraq. CCTV’s talking heads become very defensive, though, when they turn their attention to Xinjiang, where most of China’s oppressed Muslim population lives, and Tibet, where state-sponsored migration is making the indigenous population a minority. The riots and assassinations which periodically disturb Xinjiang are, we are told, the work of a handful of crazed terrorists, who have no support amongst the general population. Tibetans are a jolly rustic people, who like nothing better than serving ox meat soup to wealthy Han Chinese customers at newly-established five star resorts on the moonscape plateaux which surround Lhasa.

Australia’s national radio station has its own enthusiasms and oversights. In an essay published in the New Zealand Journal of History back in 2000, Kerry Howe argued that Australians had a cliché-ridden and contradictory view of the Pacific. For Aussies the word ‘Pacific’ conjured up images of friendly Polynesians strumming guitars under coconut trees, but also of the ‘dark malarial jungles' of Melanesia, where savages with spears, Japanese with rifles, and pythons with poisoned fangs waited to strike. If the ‘brown’ Pacific of Polynesian was a paradise populated by noble savages, then the ‘black’ Pacific of Melanesia was a violent labyrinth. Howe’s essay affirms the durability of the sort of stereotypes that came to the Pacific with the likes of Bougainville and Bligh more than two centuries ago.

Far too much of the material on ABC’s regular Pacific Beat news programme is distorted by myths about noble brown savages and ignoble black savages. Geraldine Coutts, a host of the Pacific Beat, often makes these prejudices alarmingly clear.

Recently Coutts called Oscar Temaru, the long-serving and widely respected leader of ‘French’ Polynesia’s pro-independence movement, to get his response to the United Nation’s historic decision to place his homeland on its list of territories due for decolonisation. When Temaru tried to explain the background to the decision, by describing France’s history of exploding bombs in the Pacific and locking up or ‘disappearing’ nationalist journalists, Coutts cut him short by insisting that "we already know" this history. Coutts ridiculed the UN’s decision, suggesting that it was merely a matter of symbolism, and asked, in an appallingly patronising voice, whether Temaru thought that the Pacific people under French rule understood what decolonisation might mean for them. What, after all, could a simple-minded brown chap smiling and strumming his guitar under a coconut tree possibly now about politics?

If Coutts treats Polynesians as noble savages, then she sometimes gives Melanesians the role of black barbarians. In recent months ABC radio has repeatedly reported on the high crime rate in Papua New Guinea, and in particular on the mob killings of suspected sorcerers in the country's highlands. Too often, the ABC’s coverage of this important issue has been contaminated by an unexamined belief in the inherent savagery of traditional New Guinean society.

Several scholars have put forward complex, historically grounded, materialist explanations of Papua New Guinea’s epidemic of violence. These scholars link tragedies like the sorcery slayings to shortages of land in the Papua New Guinea hill districts and the failure of the capitalist sector of the country’s economy to absorb a generation of young men. Such subtlety seems lost on Coutts, who last week ran a story on the growth of Islam in Papua New Guinea since 9/11.

Scott Flower, an Australian academic who has recorded a five hundred percent rise in Papuan converts to Islam since the attacks on the Twin Towers, told Coutts that before 9/11 many of the people living in remote parts of Papua New Guinea had not known there was any foreign religious alternative to Christianity. The publicity Islam received after 9/11 made them curious, and led them to the mosques that have existed in their country since the 1980s. For Coutts, though, such an explanation seemed inadequate. Explaining that “Papua New Guinea is a very violent country”, she asked whether its people might have become Muslims because they were impressed by Osama bin Laden’s attacks on America. What else could you expect, Coutts seemed to imply, from a bunch of savages? Flower hurriedly dismissed Coutts' enquiries.

Australia may be a combatant in a new battle for the Pacific, but some of its footsoldiers are using very old clichés.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Kiwi legend heads for Tonga

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 04:44:00 +0000

I'm typing this on a laptop in the open air, because the 'Atenisi Institute library, where I often lurk at this time of day, has been appropriated by an Aussie cameraman making an TV clip to advertise Murray Edmond's upcoming visit to Tonga. As this press release shows, Murray's stay at the 'Atenisi Institute should be plenty of fun. Murray seems to be looking forward to his jaunt into the tropics as much as us: the last e mail he sent me was full of complaints about New Zealand's winter. We're saving you a seat at the kava bowl, Murray.

Press Release by the ‘Atenisi Institute

Issued on 06/06/13

Kiwi theatre legend to make ‘Atenisi his stage in June

The acclaimed New Zealand writer, actor, theatre director and academic Murray Edmond will visit Tonga during the second week of June.

Edmond, who is a senior member of The University of Auckland’s English Department, will be the guest of the ‘Atenisi Institute. He will give a public lecture and run a theatre workshop.

“We’re very excited to be hosting Murray Edmond,” says Dr ‘Opeti Taliai, Dean of ‘Atenisi. “For the last forty years he has been one of the movers and shakers of New Zealand culture. He has published many books, but he is also passionate about live performance.”

Edmond has been a part of some of New Zealand’s most famous plays, and has helped stage numerous works by Shakespeare.

“Last year he even directed an opera!” says Dr Taliai. “Tongan culture is rooted in live performance, and Murray can help young Tongans who want to be better dancers or actors or singers to express themselves on stage.”

‘Atenisi’s Associate Dean Dr Scott Hamilton is a friend of Murray Edmond and helped organise his visit to Tonga. “Murray has always been very interested in the Pacific,” Hamilton says. “Over the years he has worked with many Auckland-based Pacific Island theatre students, and has followed the work of Tongan intellectuals like Epeli Hau’ofa and Futa Helu, the founder of ‘Atenisi.”

Hamilton explains that Murray Edmond is coming to Tonga to share his knowledge, but also to learn more about local culture. “We look forward to introducing Murray to the members of ‘Atenisi’s performing arts group,” say Hamilton, “and to taking him to see some of the ancient cultural treasures of Tongatapu, like the langi of Mu’a”.

Murray Edmond is the first of a series of distinguished visitors that the ‘Atenisi Institute will host this year. In the third week of July a group of Auckland-based artists, including the internationally famous sculptor Filipe Tohi and the painter Dagmar Dyck, will be staging an exhibition of their work at ‘Atenisi. And at the beginning of October the writer, actor and movie-maker Richard Von Sturmer will be visiting ‘Atenisi to give a guest lecture and run a workshop.

“Atenisi has always believed in the importance of bringing different cultures together – of introducing Tonga to the world and the world to Tonga,” says Dr Taliai. “We have a tradition of bringing important overseas intellectuals to our campus, and sending our graduates abroad to do advanced study. We’re carrying on that tradition in 2013.”

Murray Edmond will deliver his public lecture at 7pm, on the 10^th of June, and will hold his theatre workshop at 1pm on Tuesday the 11^th of June.

Celebrating freedom of speech at 'Atenisi

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 01:10:00 +0000

Along with other staff and students from the 'Atenisi Institute, I spent a very enjoyable Friday night drinking kava with teachers from the Ocean of Light, a primary and high school run on a secular and pro-science basis by members of the Tonga's burgeoning Baha'i movement. Between knocking back the kava and singing, members of the 'Atenisi and Ocean of Light communities swapped stories about encounters with Tonga's powerful brigade of religious fundamentalists. As 'Atenisians listened and sighed, Bahai educators described visits from demented Free Wesleyan Ministers convinced that the theory of evolution and sex education classes are both claws of Satan.

It is not only Tonga's religious conservatives who have sometimes posed a threat to the Baha'i movement: in the 1950s and '60s, when the religion was establishing itself in the Pacific, colonial administrators often persecuted its members for their belief in racial equality. On the New Guinea island of Rabaul, which had the misfortune to be governed by emissaries of Australia, that ferociously racist nation, a white Baha'i teacher was first assaulted and then arrested by a drunken mob of colonists. After being found guilty of living in what was supposed to be an 'all-black village, she was deported from the country she'd made home.

In the following press release, which has been doing the rounds in Tongatapu over the last week, 'Atenisi makes clear that it support the right of the Baha'i movement and every other religion to freedom of expression, and looks forward to a discussion with one of Tonga's leading Baha'i thinkers.

'Atenisi to welcome Baha'i educationalist, and celebrate freedom of speech

The 'Atenisi Institute will host a public lecture by Nadia Fifita, the director of Tongatapu's popular Ocean of Light school, on Monday the 3rd of June from seven o'clock. Fifita will use her lecture, which will be followed by an open discussion, to explain both the Baha'i faith and the work of her school.

"We are delighted to include Nadia Fifita in our programme of public lectures for 2013," says Dr Scott Hamilton, the Associate Dean of 'Atenisi.

The Baha'i religion is one of the fastest growing in the world, but its members are persecuted in many countries.

The Baha'i faith was founded in Iran, but today that country's Islamic fundamentalist government bans Baha'is from practicing their faith, and imprisons or kills their leaders.

"Atenisi has always stood for freedom of speech and freedom of religion. By hosting Nadia Fifita we are staying true to those values", says Dr Hamilton.

'Atenisi Dean Dr 'Opeti Taliai says that his institution and the Ocean of Light school have some important things in common.

"Atenisi and Ocean of Light share a commitment to internationalism. We are both eager to expose young Tongans to the richness of overseas cultures, as well as to the richness of their own traditional culture", says Dr Taliai.

Dr Taliai explained that he wasn't a Bahai and didn't expect to agree with everything that Nadia Fifita said in her lecture, but added that disagreement was normal at 'Atenisi. "Our school is founded on debate" he said. "I hope members of the public come along, hear Nadia, and join the debate".

Linguistics, imperialism, and religious mania: an interview with Lose Miller-Helu

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Mon, 27 May 2013 22:31:00 +0000

This is the second of my series of interviews with scholars at the ‘Atenisi Institute.

Lose Miller-Helu: I study Tonga’s past, but I am also very concerned with its present. The Tonga of the twenty-first century troubles me. When I left the country for the first time back in 1968 I had the sense that it was moving forward both economically and intellectually. Tongans were being sent abroad for education and coming back to get jobs in an expanding public service, Nuku’alofa was growing, and in the countryside the copra industry was doing well. Futa Helu and the school he had established at ‘Atenisi were part of that momentum – they were educating Tongans in critical thinking and free discussion, stripping away some of the myths that had attached themselves to the Tongan past, and laying the foundations for a challenge to the hegemony of the monarchy and the nobles. ‘Remittances’ was an unknown word.

Now things are different. An air of lethargy has settled over Tonga. The old dream of economic prosperity, which seemed within reach in the 1960s, is gone, and Tongans seem to have the option of either going abroad in search of better lives or living modestly on money sent home by relatives abroad. The country’s outer islands are becoming more and more remote, as ferry services drop off and young people head to Nuku’alofa, which has become a sort of staging post for emigration abroad. Whole islands may be abandoned to weeds and wild pigs in the near future.

Even the countryside outside Nuku’alofa, on the main island of Tongatapu, is being neglected – drive around the potholed roads and you will see allotment after allotment overgrown with weeds. Nuku’alofa is now home to more than a third of the population of the country, and has become a little nation of its own. You can live here comfortably without ever venturing into the countryside of Tongatapu, let alone visiting the outer islands. Some of the better-off Tongans only ever see Nuku’alofa, with its new cafes and restaurants, and the smooth road running out to the international airport at Fua’amotu.

The only dynamic sector of the Tongan economy is religion. New churches are being built everywhere, while schools decay. Tonga has always been a religious society, but when I returned home a few years ago I was shocked by how pervasive God had become. It seems impossible to stage any public event, or hold even the most modest meeting, without running through some long-winded prayer. Perhaps it is more comforting for Tongans to pray than to think. Church is a place where they can forget the stagnation of the economy, and the fact that far more of their young people live abroad than at home. It’s an escape.

Are you looking at the past of Tonga and Western Polynesia because you want to get insights into how the problems of the present might be solved?

As you know, my PhD is about the influence of ‘Uvea on ancient Tonga. This influence was profound and positive, but it has in some ways been forgotten. That is a great pity.

What made you want to devote years of study to a small and - outside of Western Polynesia - little-known society like ‘Uvea?

‘Uvea came to my attention when I was doing an undergraduate degree in linguistics. I had to study proto-Polynesian, which is a sort of speculative language created by academics interested in the origins of Polynesian words, and I had to examine a tree-like diagram which showed the supposed relationships between the various Polynesian languages. I noticed that Tongan and ‘Uvean had more words in common than any other two Polynesian languages – 86% of the words Tongans use are also used by ‘Uveans.

Despite this apparent affinity, though, the two languages had been consigned to separate subgroups – ‘Uvean was classed as a Samoic Outlier language, while Tongan was lumped together with Niuean as a Tongic tongue. I was curious, and am still curious, about why ‘Uvean and Tongan are separated, when their vocabularies are so similar.

I was aware, even as an undergraduate, that linguistics is a partly political enterprise, in the sense that the work of linguists has been made possible and at times influenced by political events outside the academy. The study of Pacific languages has historically been connected in numerous ways with the colonisation and Christianisation of the region. The earliest vocabulary lists for many Pacific languages were compiled by Western mariners, missionaries, and colonial administrators. These people had to make decisions about matters like orthography, spelling, and punctuation, because the vast majority of Pacific peoples lacked an indigenous system of writing. And the decisions they made were sometimes determined by political interests, or incompetence, or ignorance. In many cases, though, we seem to be stuck with their decisions.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. At various times I have seen the separation of Tongan and ‘Uvean justified by the supposed fact that ‘Uveans, unlike Tongans, do not use glottal stops when they speak. But when I examine ‘Uvean speech patterns closely I can see that the glottal stop is a part of their language. ‘Uvean manuscripts do not traditionally feature glottal stops, but that is simply a matter of transcription – it has nothing to do with the way ‘Uveans speak.

Part of the trouble with the separation of the ‘Uvean and the Tongan languages is that it creates a certain attitude amongst those who study the past. We now know, thanks to the achievements of historical linguistics and the use of linguistics by archaeologists and other scholars of ancient history, that the diffusion of languages can be linked to the diffusion of cultures. If two peoples have a very similar language, then it is likely they have, at some point in the past, had very close economic, social, and political relations. The similar vocabularies of Tongan and ‘Uvean point to close contact between the societies in the past. But linguistics has obscured this relationship by consigning the languages to separate groups. As a result, there is a paucity of research into the influence of ‘Uvean culture on Tonga. And I would argue that it’s impossible to understand Tonga’s history and culture without understanding ‘Uvea.

Conversely, there seems to have been relatively little contact between Tonga and Niue in the pre-Cook era. One of my students is doing a major research project on his village of Kala’au, whose people claim to be partly descended from an ancient Niuean immigrant. Despite this connection, Tevita has been unable to find much evidence, either in the academic literature or in local oral tradition, of ongoing contact between Niue and Tonga –

Relatively few Tongans talk of family connections with Niue, whereas many have links with ‘Uvea. And of course Tongan oral history overflows with references to ‘Uvea – there is the famous story, for example, about the great langi stones which sit on the graves of the Tongan kings in the ancient capital of Mu’a being brought hundreds of miles across the ocean from ‘Uvea. On ‘Uvea itself locals point out various stone monuments and attribute them to Tongan invaders. Some of Tonga’s most famous dances, like the me’etupaki, or paddle dance, have been linked to ‘Uvea by scholars like my uncle Futa Helu.

Tonga is famous for having built an empire hundreds of years ago in this part of the Pacific. Many Tongans are proud of their imperial history –

I was watching telly the other night and saw Jimmy Da Great, a Nuku’alofa rapper, performing a song called ‘Island Conqueror’, a song which seemed – I couldn’t make out all the words – to celebrate the ancient empire using the language of gangsta rap. And there’s a popular clothing label in Auckland called Tongan Empire…

But imperial power does not equal cultural power. I am convinced that ‘Uvea was a major cultural power in the Pacific, even if it was colonised by its larger Tongan neighbour. Tonga imported more than stones from ‘Uvea – we took dances, songs, ideas –

Is there an analogy with ancient Rome, which borrowed extensively from the culture of Greece even as it conquered much of Europe? The Roman elite may have had the greatest empire the world had ever known, but they made sure their kids had Greek tutors…

Another analogy is America in the twentieth century. Even though they usurped Britain as the world’s superpower, the Americans – the rich and powerful Americans especially - still regarded the British as culturally superior, and aped them…

What made ‘Uvea so special?

I think it was a very advanced society. The ‘Uveans cultivated their lands skilfully, ran their affairs wisely, traded with very distant peoples, like the Hawaiians, and created beautiful dances like the me’etupaki. Even their weapons were advanced.

‘Uvea had a relatively decentralised and meritocratic political system. Although genealogy played an important role in who became a leader, competence was also required. A chief who had the bloodline but not the skills to lead would not last long in power. And a chief who usurped a rival using illegitimate means, like treachery or unjustified violence, would also often face popular opposition. I believe that the influence of ‘Uvea’s relatively egalitarian and meritocratic society helped keep imperial Tonga politically stable in the fifteenth century. But this aspect of our history has been forgotten. Today Tongans - conservative Tongans, anyway - assume that anyone with the proper bloodline is fit to be king. And they think that their views are traditional. They have forgotten the test of competence which once applied. But a society which relies blindly on bloodlines, and which does not respect merit, is a society headed for disaster.

‘Opeti Taliai, Phyliss Herda, and Niel Gunson have warned about the dangers of assuming there is only one narrative of Tongan history. ‘Opeti accuses Queen Salote of constructing a version of Tongan history which justifies the rule of the present Tu’i Kanokupolu dynasty, Herda thinks Tongan culture has probably meant very different things at different times, and that Tongan ‘traditional’ history is actually an artefact of modernity, and in his fascinating essay ‘Understanding Polynesian Traditional History’ Gunson claims to have discovered a radically different version of the Tongan past in unpublished esoteric texts. Do you feel an affinity with these scholars, with their heretical views of the Tongan past?

Well, ‘Opeti is helping me with my PhD, which as you know is a study of the Talanoa ki ‘Uvea, a prose narrative of ‘Uvean history written down by a Catholic priest near the beginning of the twentieth century. I am trying to glean what I can about the ancient connections between ‘Uvea and Tonga from a close examination of the language of the Talanoa ki ‘Uvea. I want to trace the movement of words and phrases and images and stories between the two societies. I have published a dual Tongan-‘Uvean language edition of the Talanoa ki Uvea, and have also made, with the help of New Zealand scholars, an unpublished English-language translation of the text.

As an old-fashioned historical materialist, who thinks that culture and ideas tend to be related, even if in complex ways, to the economic base of a society, I have to wonder how a small society like ‘Uvea could be the site of such cultural efflorescence. How did the ‘Uveans, who presumably produced an economic surplus much smaller than that of their cousins in Tonga, find the time and resources to create new dances and invent new tools?

I think ‘Uvea’s smallness and vulnerability to foreign attackers forced its people to innovate. They didn’t have the luxury of cultural conservatism. If they wanted to survive they had to embrace trade, adopt and improve technology from other societies, and eliminate leaders who were incompetent.

Perhaps there’s a lesson in that for present-day Tonga, which is as small in terms of the twenty-first century world as ‘Uvea was in relation to the fifteenth century Pacific!

There certainly is a lesson. The view that Tongan tradition is identical with blind respect for bloodlines and authority is dangerous.

We haven’t talked about the modern influence of France on ‘Uvea, and the consequences of this for interpretations of the Tongan past…

Of course the French colonisation of ‘Uvea is part of the reason for the divide which has opened between our societies...

Last year the Kiwi scholar Rhys Richards published a book which documented the ancient artefacts of the Austral Islands. Richards made the point that the Austral Islands were very closely connected with the societies like Rarotonga and Atiu in pre-colonial times, but that they became isolated from the islands to their north and west after falling under French control. And whereas the Cook Islands have now gotten rid of their New Zealand colonisers, the people of the Australs still live under the tricolour.

The French have little interest in encouraging pan-Pacific feelings amongst their colonial subjects by creating cheap transport links to places like the Cooks and Tonga. They want their subjects to speak French, spend Francs or Euros on French goods, and gravitate, when they need work or education, to Papeete or Noumea or Paris. It is very expensive for the average New Zealander, let alone the average Tongan, to visit ‘Uvea, or an Austral Islands society like Rapa Iti.

In that famous essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’ Epeli Hau’ofa talks about how colonial powers limited the mobility of the Pacific peoples they (mis)governed, and celebrates the mobility of islanders in the post-colonial era. But peoples like the ‘Uveans are still being quarantined by the French. And it disgusted me to see New Zealand and Australia recently trying to perpetuate this quarantine, by blocing with France and urging the United Nations not to put French Polynesia on its list of countries due for decolonisation. I was delighted when the UN General Assembly voted against the colonialists.

I have not been able to afford to visit ‘Uvea.

‘Opeti Taliai was telling me that he has never visited either Fiji or Samoa, despite writing a PhD on the ancient links between those societies and Tonga!

I’d love to go to ‘Uvea, of course, but it’s expensive, and there are bureaucratic hurdles – visitors from Tonga have to register with special representatives of the island who have a little office in downtown Nuku’alofa.

The Australian writer Gerald Murnane has lived almost his whole life in a corner of the state of Victoria, but he has taught himself to speak and read Hungarian, and has set part of one of his novels in Hungary. Murnane told an interviewer that he had no desire to visit Hungary, despite his obvious fascination with the country. To do so, he explained, would ruin the version of Hungary he has constructed in his head. Is there a sense in which your inability to travel to ‘Uvea has made the place especially vivid in your imagination?

I’m not sure! I am travelling in time as well as space, of course, when I do my research, so even if I visited present-day ‘Uvea I might see all of what I am reading about…

You lived for some years in New Zealand, where you worked at various universities and ran an art gallery that sold tapa cloth –

The gallery in Lower Hutt was something of a diversion. I opened it in 2000 because I wanted to create an outlet for a few of the many women who make tapa in Tonga. I wanted to get away from the usual way of marketing tapa – to get away from selling it at flea markets or to tourists – and present it as something complex, something artistic. I wanted it to be appreciated properly.

Most of the tapa I was selling were made in the 1960s and ‘70s, and had both aesthetic appeal and a lot of content – they told stories. Traditionally, tapa have been the way women in Tonga tell stories. When I look at a tapa my mother gave me I can see references to her life – an olive leaf, which symbolises the influence of missionaries on Tonga, Norfolk pines, which used to grow along the waterfront in Nuku’alofa, and so on. Unfortunately much of the depth of reference has disappeared from Tonga tapa today. Tapa are made to sell to tourists. Quality is out, quantity is in.

Did you experience racism in New Zealand?

I noticed it in universities. I saw many Pacific students who were lost at New Zealand universities. The institutions that they had entered were huge, and were indifferent to their needs. The methods of teaching and assessment were alien. Staff and their fellow students knew little about the Pacific Islands, and were unaware that the culture that they considered natural and universal – a white Western culture – was, to Pacific Islanders, unnatural and intimidating.

I think that the culture you’re describing can feel pretty unnatural and intimidating to a lot of palangi! Since I got to Tonga I’ve realised how isolating and emotionally chilly life in Auckland can be…

For me New Zealand universities could be a lonely place…

I recently showed The New Oceania, film maker Shirley Horrocks’ portrait of Albert Wendt, to my Creative Writing students at ‘Atenisi. During one of the interviews shown in the film Wendt reveals that when he arrived at the University of Auckland’s English Department in 1990 the only other Pacific Islander on the staff was the secretary…

I’d search in vain for other brown faces in the white crowds.

Efeso Collins, who was President of the Auckland University Students Association in the late ‘90s, said that a lot of young Pacific Islanders enrolled at universities, ran up big student debts by taking loans to pay their obscene tuition fees and living costs, and eventually dropped out without graduating, because of the sort of experiences you mention. They’d end up with a pile of debt and no degree. I found that terribly sad.

When I became chairperson of the Association of Pacific Staff in 1998 I made sure we addressed the alienation of Pacific students. We lobbied the Tertiary Education Minister of the day, and investigated the ways that universities looked after their students. We found that many institutions didn’t even bother to count the number of Pacific Island and Maori students they had enrolled. Without basic data like this, it was impossible for them to examine the academic performance of Maori and Pacific Island students, and to plan ways to improve this performance.

We were able to force some improvements to the way Pacific Island students were treated. Today data is kept on the number and performance of those students, and far more Pacific Islanders are employed by universities. I take some satisfaction from this. And I don’t mean to criticise the whole of the New Zealand university system – there are some wonderful people working there, including people who have helped me in my research into ‘Uvean and Tongan history.

Why did you return to Tonga?

I wanted to work on a documentary film about Futa Helu and the Helu family, and I couldn’t do this in New Zealand. I did a lot of filming, both at ‘Atenisi and in places like Foa, Futa’s home island in the Ha’apai group, where there is an ancient langi stone and legend I wanted to document. My film will be different to Paul Janman’s Tongan Ark – it’ll be in Tongan, for instance.

It is a measure of Futa Helu’s versatility and complexity that two quite different films can be made about his life!

There were other reasons for me to resettle in Tonga. I like the climate here. I like the compactness of Nuku’alofa – I sometimes found the distances of New Zealand oppressive.

I’ve found that living in Tonga, with its one and seventy or so islands that together would not quite fill Lake Taupo, has altered my perception of New Zealand geography. Suddenly my homeland, which is only the size of the United Kingdom, seems almost continental. When I was back in New Zealand I took a drive with my wife from Auckland down to Hamilton. The modest dairy flats of the central Waikato seemed like some Canadian prairie…

I find it incredible that some people are able to drive from Auckland to Wellington. Even the distances within New Zealand cities seem very large to me. The journey from Lower Hutt to central Wellington was wearying.

How did you respond to the hills and mountains of New Zealand, after living for so long on an island as flat as Tongatapu?

I’d actually lived abroad before I came to New Zealand – but I’d lived in Holland, a place almost as flat as Tongatapu! The mountains of New Zealand are something I now miss.

In his great book Uruora: the groves of life, the late Kiwi environmentalist Geoff Park describes living in Fiji, and taking a somewhat reluctant Tongan co-worker on a drive away from the coast of Vanua Levu into that island’s mountainous central district. Park’s friend, who was used to the flat farmland of Tongatapu, was overpowered by the experience. “Today”, he told Park, “we feed the eyes”. When I heard that the members of the ‘Atenisi Institute’s performing arts group had, without quite getting permission, jumped in a van and gone on a wild road trip during their tour of New Zealand last year, I thought of Park’s story about his drive through the wilds of Fiji. A lot of the ‘Atenisians had never left flat little Tongatapu before – for them, the vast distances and impossibly high mountains of New Zealand must have been as intoxicating as hopi. They were feeding the eyes!

They may have just gotten lost looking for a McDonalds…

You run a couple of very popular courses in the Tongan language here at the ‘Atenisi Institute. Many of your students are prominent members of the palangi expatriate community. Is the Tongan language in good shape in its ancient homeland?

Yes and no. Increasingly in Nuku’alofa you can observe locals speaking a sort of hybrid language – they’ll switch from Tongan to English in the middle of a sentence. English is fashionable. Outside of Nuku’alofa, in the villages of Tongatapu and on the outer islands, the sort of hybrid I’m talking about would be much less common.

Few outsiders realise that Tonga has a second language, Niuafo’ouan, which is spoken in the northernmost and southernmost inhabited islands of the country, but which seems to be in decline –

The language of Niuafo’ou is of great interest to me, because the island of Niuafo’ou sits in the extreme north of Tonga, and is far closer to ‘Uvea than to Tongatapu. The language was brought south after World War Two, when Niuafo’ou’s volcano exploded and some of its people were resettled on ‘Eua Island, at the other end of Tonga. But the Niuan people are a small and marginalised minority in Tonga, and their language is often ridiculed down here in the south. Sadly, many of the Niuans who live down here are too ashamed to speak their language.

There has been too little academic work done on Niuafo’ou. The distinguished Japanese scholar Akilisa Tsukamoto wrote a PhD on the language of Niuafo’ou for the Australian National University – but his thesis was written in his native Japanese! I have tried without success to get someone to translate Tsukamoto’s work.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Arguing about 'Eua

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:18:00 +0000

The 'Atenisi expedition to 'Eua has returned safely to the bright lights of Nuku'alofa, which seem bright indeed after our sojourn in caves and rain forest holloways. Here are a couple of photos (click to enlarge them) from 'Eua, as well as some notes I'm asking the students to debate.

Questions for discussion

Cook and contact

We have read Vaughan Rapatahana’s angry poem about Cook, which laments his coming to the Pacific, and earlier in the course we made an analogy between the situation of the relatively isolated islands Cook visited in the 1770s and the uncontacted peoples of regions like Brazil and the Andamans in the twentieth century. We had a long argument about whether or not the inhabitants of the Andamans’ North Sentinel Island, one of the world’s last truly isolated groups of humans, ought to be contacted or left alone.

After reading Cook and Anderson’s accounts of their visit to ‘Eua, hearing from scholars of Cook like Anne Salmond, and talking to contemporary ‘Euans about their view of Cook, do you think, like Vaughan Rapatahana, that ‘Euans would have been better off without contact from Cook and the Europeans who followed him? Can an analogy be made between ‘Eua in 1777 and the North Sentinelese today?

‘Eua and the centre

Both Cook and Anderson noticed the connections between ‘Eua and Tongatapu. Despite the occasional difficulty of crossing the Tongatapu Strait, the chiefs of the larger island held land on ‘Eua and despatched relatives there to exercise authority. Tongan oral history confirms the domination of ‘Eua by Tongatapu. The island was an integral part of the Tongan Maritime Empire, and remained subordinate to the old imperial capital of Mu’a even after the decline of the empire.

We have seen how the traditional relative centralisation of Tongan society helped Tupou I to build a modern state and maintain Tongan independence in the second half of the nineteenth century. By contrast Aotearoa had never been politically unified in the pre-contact era, and the efforts of Wiremu Tamihana to unite Maori under one king ultimately failed.

What signs of the ancient Tongan kingdom and empire did you find on the ‘Euan landscape, and in the island’s placenames?

Noble ‘Euan savages?

Near the beginning of this course we examined early European visions of the Pacific, and noted that these visions had more to do with the anxieties of Europeans than with the realities of the Pacific. We saw how the ideas of Rousseau and the ecstatic reports of some early visitors to Tahiti encouraged a vision of Pacific Islanders as ‘noble savages’, who lived simply but happily in a pleasant landscape and climate. We saw how today’s tourism industry continues to promote this patronising view of Pacific peoples, in its effort to sell air tickets and rooms at resorts. Do you think that William Anderson’s account of the ‘Euans is influenced by the notion of the noble savage, or do you think his enthusiasm for the people he observed has a different quality? Do you think ‘Eua’s small tourism sector promotes the noble savage myth today, or does it use other ways to sell the island?

‘Eua and Oceania

In the first lecture of this course we noted that the Pacific has been given different names by different people from different cultures, and that the various names for the region reflect different intellectual perspectives and different political agendas. We saw how European romantics called parts of the Pacific the ‘South Seas’; how today some Western nations and corporations are using the term ‘Asia-Pacific’, and thereby conflating distant and apparently very different countries like Tonga and China; how the late Epeli Hau’ofa used the term Oceania, because he believed that, except when colonialists intervened, the sea has linked rather than isolated the various islands of this region; and how ‘Okusitino Mahina has suggested giving the waters of Western Polynesia back their ancient name of Moana.

James Cook and William Anderson’s accounts of their visit to ‘Eua have shown us that, in 1777, ‘Eua was a relatively inaccessible island for other Tongans, and had a far smaller population than Tongatapu. Today ‘Eua remains somewhat isolated from Tongatapu due to the expense and discomfort of ferry services. More than a few adult Tongatapuans have visited Australia or New Zealand or America, yet never set foot on ‘Eua.

On the other hand, many Tongans have relatives on ‘Eua, many ‘Euans send their children to high school on Tongatapu, and Tongan newspapers and radio and television programmes are widely consumed on ‘Eua.

We have seen how the population of ‘Eua is today composed of three main groups: the ‘indigenous’ ‘Euans, whose ancestors arrived on the island long ago from Tongatapu and other parts of Tonga; the descendants of the people of ‘Ata, who were evacuated after their homeland in the far south of Tonga was raided by Australasian slavers in 1863; and the Niuan community, which arrived on ‘Eua in 1958, as refugees from a volcanic eruption on their island in the far north of Tonga. Today the descendants of the people of ‘Ata still cheish the memory of their abandoned homeland, and many Niuafo’ouans practice a distinct culture and continue to speak a Samoic language of their own, in addition to Tongan. The ‘Atan settlement of Kolomaile and Niuan villages like Mu’a and Angaha reflect the efforts of both communities to retain a separate identity from ‘indigenous’ ‘Euans.

Does ‘Eua, with its complicated population and mixture of connections to and isolation from Tongatapu, provide evidence for or against Epeli Hau’ofa’s famous notion of Oceania? Does Hau’ofa’s vision of the people of Oceania as interconnected and mobile fit with or contradict the reality of ‘Eua’s modern history?

‘Eua and the problems of oral history

During our stay on ‘Eua we talked with Richard Lauaki, one of the oldest men on the island and a custodian of its oral history. Richard gave us his sometimes controversial opinions on subjects like the eruption of Niuafo’ou in 1946 and the subsequent movement of many Niua people to ‘Eua, the place of Niuans and their language in contemporary ‘Euan society, the raid on ‘Ata by Australasian slavers, and the failings of young Tongans. We also visited the grave of AE Yealands, the New Zealander who served as a coastwatcher on ‘Eua in 1942, and learned that the story many ‘Euans tell about Yealands’ death differs greatly from the way the soldier actually died.

You were given a copy of an essay about oral tradition by Sione Latukefu during your stay on ‘Eua. Latukefu talks about how careful attention to verbal accounts of the past helped him in his studies of Tonga, but notes that some other scholars have been led astray when they have tried to use oral history. We laughed about the way that Roger McKern, author of the first attempt at an archaeological survey of Tonga, was misled by mischevious locals into giving obscene names to some of the ancient sacred sites he tried to record.

Did your experiences on ‘Eua make you reflect on the value of oral traditions to the study of the past? Do you think that stories passed verbally down the generations can be relied upon to tell us about the past? If some stories about the past are false, does this make them useless, or can they still provide certain types of insights to a scholar? Does Richard Lauaki have qualities which might make him a more reliable source on ‘Euan history than Roger McKern?

A different perspective

Sometimes the experience of travel can help us to reflect on the home we have left behind. The final lectures for our paper will deal with some of the opportunities and problems that late twentieth century globalisation has brought to the Pacific. Did your time on ‘Eua make you think in new or sharper ways about the impact of globalisation on Nuku’alofa?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Making maps

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:04:00 +0000

Yesterday, as my students first guffawed and then sighed, I laboured with a fading marker pen over a dirty whiteboard in an effort to draw a map of 'Eua, the diamond-shaped, Manhattan-sized island which is the southernmost inhabited piece of Tonga, and almost the closest inhabited island to New Zealand.

Along with 'Iliasa Helu, I am leading an 'Atenisi expedition to 'Eua this weekend, and my drawing, with its childish lines and smudged names, was the only detailed map of the place most of the students had ever seen. 'Eua is notorious for its limestone sinkholes and caves, out of which huge banyan trees often grow, and into which reckless visitors occasionally vanish. "I think we need a local guide" one of the students said, after frowning at the vague details I had drawn on the board. "And we need a map that makes sense."

If only I had known yesterday that I am part of an exhibition dedicated to mapmaking being held at an art gallery on Auckland's fashionable Karangahape Road. I could have tried to impress my truculent students by telling them that curators Rachel Watson and James Wylie had taken an interest in the psychogeographic film I've been making about the Great South Road with Paul Janman, and had decided to show maps and footage from the half-finished project in the RM gallery.

Unfortunately, I hadn't been able to check my e mail yesterday, and so didn't get Paul's report about the exhibition Wylie and Wilson have called Exanded Map. I'm chuffed, nevertheless, that I've managed to get my name, however briefly, onto the wall of a gallery, despite never being able to the master the art of the stick person portrait at Drury Primary School art class.

My students are no strangers to map-making. A month or so ago I decided to enliven my Creative Writing paper by summouning a taxivan to the 'Atenisi campus and piling them into it. As the driver steered randomly through the mid-morning Nuku'alofa streets, scattering packs of pigs with his horn and cursing at a fat noble in an SUV, I gave an improvised lecture on Iain Sinclair, JG Ballard, and the practice of psychogeography, which I summed up in the maxin 'Get lost'. I got the bewildered taxi driver to leave us beside Nuku'alofa's quarry, a place where strapping young palm trees rise through the smashed windscreens of classic American and British cars. "This is the end of the line" I told my charges. "This is the graveyard of modernity. Forget about those war films you see, where tanks and jeeps and the bodies of marines lie ruined on a tropical beach: these are today's casualties of war." "It's not the end" Tevita Manu'atu, 2012 dux at 'Atenisi, replied, in an indulgent voice. "It's a new beginning". Perhaps he was right: recyclers were busy amidst the ruins, pulling healthy organs - unrusted carburretors, intact radiators - from the diseased bodies of Valiants and Fords.

After we had found our way through the ruins of modernity to the Nuku'alofa waterfront, where we drank Fanta and hailed another taxi, I asked my Creative Writing students to create 'psychogeographic maps' of our journey, and of Nuku'alofa in general. Forget spurious notions of accuracy and objectivity, I told them, as I handed out the felt pens and crayons. Draw with your subconscious and your pineal glands. Think about Sinclair's epic walk along the M 25, that ring road that isolates London more surely than any wall, think about the semi-secret military installations he spotted through air that made his eyes water, the lungfuls of truck exhaust that almost saw him resort, like a climber in the Himalayas, to bottled oxygen.

Tevita was the first to finish his map. He had drawn, with a firm, unfailingly accurate hand, the allotments, plantations, churches, and roads of his home village on the weathercoast of Tongatapu.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Whitsunday in Halano

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Mon, 13 May 2013 23:55:00 +0000

Last weekend we moved from Halano, a suburb on the western edge of Nuku'alofa, to Fasi, an area just east of the city's centre. Located inland from Sopu, or Soap, a suburb that got its name because Taufa'ahau, Tonga's first modern king, liked to bathe beside its now-vanished beach, Halano was an uninhabited swamp until Nuku'alofa's population began to grow in the decades after World War Two. Unable to secure plots of dry land, new arrivals from the countryside poured millions of pieces of crushed coral onto the reeds and stagnant water, and created a series of precarious islands, which they covered with small houses and pig and chicken pens, and connected with rough paths that eventually swelled into roads.

Water and earth still compete for hegemony in Halano, and when we arrived last February days of rain had drowned the roads and arked the iron-roved houses and huts. As pigs wallowed delightedly in vast black pools where food scraps floated like rotten lilies, many Halanoans were holing up in the Wesleyan and Catholic churches which rise, fort-like, in the heart of their community.

Even when the rainy season ends, and the sagging motorbikes and windowscreenless utes that go up and down Halano's roads stir up dust rather than dirty water, there are reminders of the suburb's past. Over the past few months my wife has covered Aneirin with litres of foul-smelling insect repellent, laid wire grilles across our downstairs windows, so that they look like pages in a child's maths exercise book, and kept a silk net hanging like a great soft spider from the ceiling of our bedroom. Despite all these efforts, mosquito swarms as thickly dark as coal smoke have periodically invaded our house, tormenting her and also covering our cheerfully oblivious son with bites. Our neighbours, who seem to have acquired immunity to the beasts, have sometimes asked whether Aneirin has chicken pox, because of the red raised spots on his arms, legs, and - if the invaders have been particularly successful - face. It was the mosquito menace as well as a cheaper rent which lured us east to the upstairs section of 'Opeti Taliai's home in an older and reliably dry part of Nuku'alofa.

We will miss Halano. The place seemed more like a village than the suburb of a capital city, and we were quickly absorbed into the intricate and ornate system of ritual exchanges that is the bedrock of Tongan traditional life. Neighbours would introduce themselves with baskets of breadfruit and plates of corned beef wrapped in taro leaves and soaked with coconut juice, and all the children of the suburb soon learned our child's strange Celtic name.

A couple of weeks ago Louisa, who lived across the road from us in Halano, invited us to Whitsunday, an old English festival which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ's disciples in the aftermath of his ascent to heaven. Whitsunday is largely obsolete in Britain, but in Tonga it sees thousands of Free Wesleyan children donning white tupenu and white jackets, tying little ta'ovala to their waists, and heading down to their local church, where they gather near the pulpit and read passages from the Bible. The photos at the top of this post shows Aneirin dressed up in the tupenu, jacket and ta'ovala that Louisa made for him, and wandering, confusedly but fearlessly, towards the pulpit of Halano's Free Wesleyan Church. The first photo shows Aneirin in the grip of another of our neighbours, an 'Atenisi graduate and Anglican Minister with the typically Tongan name of Sekatoa, or Sector. Sekatoa's daughter Miriam got in on the act.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Low-flying UFO spotted in Suva

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Fri, 10 May 2013 07:22:00 +0000

While I have been hiding out on 'Eua Island, Paul Janman has taken his cheesecutter hat, which increasingly resembles a flying saucer, to Fiji, where the World of Islands film festival has provided the opportunity for a gathering of some of the Pacific's most important and outspoken artists and intellectuals, in defiance of the strictures of Commodore Bainimarama's philistine regime.

I hope soon to interview Paul by phone about his experiences in Suva, but in the meantime keep an eye on that unidentified low-flying object...

Zen and seasickness

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Mon, 06 May 2013 00:05:00 +0000

Last week I introduced my Creative Writing students to haiku, and to something of Zen Buddhism, the religion which has been closely associated with the writing of haiku. I explained that I’d had a somewhat troubled relationship with both Zen and the haiku artform.

Intrigued by the writing of Richard Von Sturmer, and by his earlier contributions to New Zealand film and music, I enrolled, a few years ago, in a short course in meditation at the Auckland Zen Centre, which Richard and his wife manage. I found myself sitting with my legs uncomfortably folded facing a brick wall, a few inches from the tattooed biceps of a young man who explained that he had decided to learn to meditate because he was “tired of getting so angry all the time”. As soon as we began our first exercise in meditation the angry man fell asleep and began to wheeze and snore loudly. When our instructor tapped the man firmly on the shoulder he jumped off the floor, shrieked, and looked about confusedly. After we resumed the exercise, I found myself taking nervous half-glances at my colleague, and wondering whether it might be better to let him sleep.

Despite the urgings of our teacher and the positive examples of Richard’s books, which describe him navigating various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness in the same languorously graceful way that an albatross cruises a summer sky, I was unable to meditate properly. We had been instructed to throw all random and quotidian thoughts – thoughts about money, or sex, or dinner – away; freed from these dead weights our minds would rise to new heights, in the same way that hot air balloons rise higher into the sky after sandbags or superfluous passengers have been tossed overboard. Alas, I found trivial thoughts a hard pleasure to abandon. I tried to imagine my mind as a room, and my thoughts as furniture. I opened a window and hurled out televisions and sofas, in the manner of the young and stoned Keith Richards. Every time I turned around and searched my room, though, a new object – a scruffy bookcase or blown stereo or luxuriant potplant – had made itself comfortable in one corner or another.

My inability to meditate is perhaps linked with my inability to write haiku. Zen Buddhism holds that the gap between the individual human consciousness and the world is artificial, and the haiku, along with meditation, is considered a way in which the distinction can be defeated. Through its concreteness and brevity, a haiku is supposed to take us out of the prisons of our minds into the ‘real’ world. A haiku about an oak tree should make us an oak tree; a haiku about the sea should immerse us in the sea. Similies and metaphors are, traditionally, barred from haiku, because they draw attention away from the unique objects and scenes that haiku are supposed to focus upon. A reader can’t merge with oak or leap into the sea if she’s busy comparing and contrasting an oak with a power pole, or making the sea into a symbol of flux.

Unfortunately, as I confessed to my students last week, I’m addicted to metaphors and similies. I can’t think about one thing without almost immediately thinking about something else. Perhaps it is this associative mania which gives my conversation, as well as some of my writing, a rambling quality.

I call many of the short poems I produce ‘anti-haiku’, because they seem to consist mostly of metaphors and similies. I wrote this latest set of anti-haiku after taking the ferry back from ‘Eua Island at the beginning of last week. We rode the ferry out to ‘Eua through blue, well-behaved water, but on our journey home the Tongatapu Channel turned a metallic shade of grey, and threw twelve foot swells in our direction. The old, miniscule, wooden ferry would have been battling to stay afloat, but on the handsome new steel vessel we worried about losing our lunches, rather than our lives. I’m heading back to ‘Eua at the end of the month with my students, who will be – I hope – writing haiku and pursuing research assignments involving ancient forts and contemporary land disputes. If anyone feels like joining us on the island of exiles then they’re most welcome.

Ferry from ‘Eua: thirteen anti-haiku

bird, sikota, on our prow

instead of a carved atua

on the receding coast of ‘Eua

caves make the cliffs yawn

plop!

did someone push that old bastard Basho

overboard?

these clouds know Tongan -

their raindrops are shaped

like glottal stops

on the open deck

where the farmers left their fruit

the wind picks a green banana

a wave like an upturned metal dinghy

smashes against the prow

the sea spills drink

after drink

until the deck

is as wet as the boards of Black Pete’s Bar

swaying

belching

I feel like a cheap drunk

upstairs

the sea rocks our infant son

awake

lifejackets stacked

beneath the stairs

dream of disaster

and heroic deeds:

dream

of dragging strangers

through the surf,

their chests puffed up with pride

a launch full of snapping tourists

circles ‘Eueiki

as if the island were a surfacing whale

chipped pillars

of brown and black

between gaps

where the tide runs

like a tongue:

this reef needs a dentist

on the asphalt acre by Salote’s wharf

rellies hug

car doors applaud

Footnote/apology: Anyone who read the recent entries on this blog could be forgiven for assuming that I have been spending all of my time in Tonga talking and writing about literature, movies, dreams, and other subjects that hard-bitten sociologists and political economists tend to consider ‘soft’. In fact, I’ve been doing some fair dinkum sociological research over here, and the seminar I gave at ‘Atenisi the other week was full of unpoetic terms like modes of production and proletarianisation.

I’ve blogged at some length about the peculiar and fascinating sociology of Tonga in the past, but now that I’m actually exploring the subject systematically, with the help of the linguists and genealogists at ‘Atenisi, I realise how much I have to learn, and how dangerous hasty generalisations can be.

The distinctive thing about literature, of course, is that it doesn’t rely on systematic studies of reality, but on subjective impressions. As I keep telling my Creative Writing students, we don’t assess the generalisations of a poet or a novelist by looking at a stack of statistics. Epeli Hau’ofa published his classic book of short stories Tales of the Tikongs a few years after penning his treatise Corned Beef and Tapioca: a report on the food distribution systems in Tonga. Both books tell us much about Tonga, but they communicate in very different ways. That’s my excuse, anyway, for putting so much dodgy poetry on this blog…

Footnote (2): In search of a reliable internet connection, I just stepped out of the twenty-eight degree heat of Nuku’alofa into the permanently temperate climate of Escape Café, where expats, diplomats, conmen, agents of the International Monetary Fund, shirtless beachcombers, and other flotsam and jetsam of the Pacific gather to plot over watery flat whites. (There’s a table near the back of the café, within a few yards of a door, which is more or less reserved for a couple of grizzled and permatanned German-Tongans. Unlike other members of their tribe, who are busy running businesses, these gentlemen spend almost all their time idling in cafes and bars around Nuku’alofa. One of them grimly counts and recounts a pile of tattered notes; the other sits with a succession of unlit cigarettes in his mouth. Rumour insists that the pair are bitter and unrepentant exiles from Nazi Germany).

I’m sitting at a low table a few feet from the dapper Japanese ambassador to Tonga, who visited ‘Atenisi a couple of weeks ago in his black shiny SUV to thank us for hosting an exchange student from Okinawa. The ambassador is a learned man who was fascinated by the works of Japanese literature in our library, but I dare not show him my anti-haiku, for fear of sparking a diplomatic incident…

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Cruising with Paul Theroux

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 09:07:00 +0000

I’ve often lamented, on this blog and elsewhere, the influence of Paul Theroux on Western conceptions of the modern Pacific. Theroux is a bad-tempered man at the best of times, and when he researched and wrote his bestselling book The Happy Isles of Oceania twenty or so years ago the implosion of his marriage and a cancer scare had left him particularly dyspeptic, so that he could take sadistic pleasure in characterising Tongans, Samoans, and other inhabitants of the Pacific as comically stupid, chronically dishonest, and disgustingly gluttonous.

The Happy Isles spends hundreds of pages reviving or inventing racist stereotypes, but it does have a few enjoyable passages, thanks to its author’s love of the natural world. Theroux the misanthrope is happiest when he turns his back on the contemptible mass of humanity, and walks into a forest, or paddles out to sea. In the chapter on his visit to the Trobriand Islands Theroux describes kayaking across a flat stretch of water at night, under a sky teeming with stars. As he paddles towards a horizon that is the same colour as the sea, the author makes an analogy between the thousands of islands flung across the Pacific Ocean and the uncounted solar systems strewn through the Milky Way. He looks up at the stars, and imagines that he is guiding his little craft through Outer Space, from one archipelago of planets to another.

Yesterday Skyler, Aneirin and I caught the new and improved ferry which motors between Tongatapu and ‘Eua Islands on every day of the week except the Sabbath. When I travelled on the old, small, unstable boatto ‘Eua a couple of years ago, my face turned as green as a gangrenous limb, and I donated my lunch to the fleets of sharks that cut the deep water of the Tongatapu Channel. On the new, three-storey ferry, though, I confidently ate first one and then another ham and cheese sandwich, and only leaned over a handrail to take photographs.

The journey to ‘Eua begins with a ride through Nuku’alofa harbour, which is home to a series of small islands, each protected by its own reef. Tonga was one of the seedbeds of Polynesian culture, and these islands gave their names – ‘Ata, Motutapu, ‘Eueiki, Hihifo, Hahake, Onevao - to forests and beaches and marae thousands of kilometres away, in Tahiti and Aotearoa and Ontong Java. Wooden dinghies lay beached on the islands, like the landing craft of an invading army, an army which had disappeared amongst groves of coconut trees and giant taro.

By noon, when the ferry pushed past the V-shaped island of Fukave, the sky had turned the same very dark shade of blue as the sea. Nuku, the round green island just beyond Fukave, seemed to float like a little planet in this universe of blue.

After the ferry had left Nuku’alofa harbour and entered the Tongatapu channel I went downstairs, to a room with linoleum floors and tinted windows, and found a space between its sprawled snoring bodies. I fell asleep quickly in the gently rocking semi-darkness, and began to dream that I was back in Auckland, in the darkness of the Civic Theatre’s little basement cinema, where avant-garde dramas and overly serious documentaries are shown to clusters of graduate students during the city’s yearly film festival. I knew, thanks to the background knowledge which is mysteriously granted to dreamers, that I was about to watch a recently discovered extended cut of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I leaned forward in my seat, peered at the man seated beside me, discovered that he was Paul Theroux, and began at once to complain to him that the very notion of an extended version of a film as long as 2001was absurd. “Dreams are defined by their absurdity”, Theroux replied solemnly, without bothering to turn his head in my direction.

Slowly, with the soft roar of a distant but unstoppable tidal wave, seven long, bone-white spacecraft cruised onto the movie screen’s black sky. Untwinkling stars appeared one at a time in the distance: I wondered whether they might be the lights of a fleet of outpaced pursuers.

In the last science fiction movie I had watched all the spacecraft resembled Stealth bombers and had little American flags painted on their wings, so that they looked like stamped envelopes. The ships on the Civic’s screen lacked flags, but had koru patterns carved into their sides. A carved atua perched like a wart on the nose of the closest ship, just above a cockpit filled with orange light and brown tattooed faces. “A thousand years ago seven waka set out across interstellar space, from the constellation of Tropical Polynesia to the outlier planet known as Aotearoa”, a voice announced through the theatre’s speakers. “This is the story of the Imperial Starships Tainui, Aotea, Mataatua – “

Theroux was looking at me grumpily. “Foolish!” he shouted. “How foolish – and how implausible!”

I was suddenly impressed by the distinguished travel writer’s knowledge of New Zealand history, and by his awareness of the blunders of amateur Victorian ethnographers like Percy Smith and Elsdon Best. “Yes, well, the Great Fleet story about seven founding waka was pretty much discredited in the ‘70s” I began. “We know that Smith and Best simplified the stories they collected, and settled on a number of mythic significance – “

Theroux’s face had hardened. “Foolish boring man! I’m not interested in your tinpot country’s oral history – I’m talking about the mechanics of space travel. Those ships are impossibly cumbersome – they’d sink into the depths of space before they made it a mile to Aotearoa. The only way to travel through space is with a small kayak – the paddle is more efficient than the fission engine. An explorer has to travel alone, not with a herd of engineers and ethnographers.”

As Theroux spoke the screen began to turn the same dark shade of blue as the sky and the sea that enclosed the ferry to ‘Eua.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The sociologist as DJ

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:37:00 +0000

Last year I blogged about the great historian EP Thompson's brief but entertaining stint as a BBC DJ. Here in Tonga, where the population is small, resources are in short supply, and multitasking is a way of life, the sociologist Dr Michael Horowitz has been moonlighting as a prime time radio DJ. Horowitz has spent decades teaching at Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute and at various North America institutions, and spent last summer in Wellington, as a Visiting Fellow of Victoria University.

Now that he's back on Tongatapu, though, the man locals call Maikolo is spending Wednesday evenings as a DJ on the state-owned FM broadcaster Tonga One, where he presents a classical music show sponsored by the Vava'u Academy, a thinktank he co-founded with the 'Atenisi graduate Dr 'Okusi Mahina.

When Maikolo came over for dinner the other night, I lobbied hard for the inclusion of my favourite pieces of music in his show. He repeatedly refused, though, to promise to play John Adams or Steve Reich or any other of the minimalist composers I favour. "It was hard enough for me to get this show" he said. "And if I play that stuff there'll be outrage. I'm sticking to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto". I tried to explain to Maikolo that I'm no classical music snob, and that I enjoy the trance-like music of Reich and Adams and other minimalists because it is intended as a populist reaction against the elitism and hyper-intellectualism of avant-garde atonal mid-century composers. Maikolo was not interested in my protestations. "I might let you guest DJ one night" he said, "and then it'll be on your head".

Even if you live outside the Friendly Islands, you can listen to DJ Horowitz tonight on Tonga One by going to this page and following the link.

Maikolo is no stranger to the radio industry. During a sojourn in native America in the mid-noughties, he worked for the liberal radio network KBOO, presenting well-researched programmes on everything from America's neo-fascist Christian Reconstructionist movement to political affairs in the Pacific. As one would expect, Tonga was a recurring subject of Horowitz's work for HBOO. Here's a link to a programme the sociologist made in the aftermath of the riots that destroyed a third of central Nuku'alofa in November 2006. You can use the search engine on HBOO's homepage to find more of Horowitz's programmes.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

See you in Nuku'alofa next Monday night

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:18:00 +0000

Riots, Idleness and Land Reform: the ideas of EP Thompson, and what they might mean in Tonga

A seminar by Dr Scott Hamilton, to be held on the 7 pm, 22^nd of April, at the ‘Atenisi Institute’s Lalo Masi Building, and followed by refreshments.

Edward Palmer Thompson was one of the most versatile and passionate intellectuals of the twentieth century. Thompson became famous in 1963, at the age of thirty-nine, when he published his massive and meticulous book The Making of the English Class, which tried to tell the story of the world’s first Industrial Revolution from the point of view of artisans, factory workers, and peasants, rather than the statesmen and industrialists who dominated the work of more conventional historians. Thompson showed the human cost of the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of capitalism in England. He sympathised with the peasants who were driven off their lands, and forced into the cities to toil for a pittance in factories. He cheered the men and women who organised trade unions and similar associations to fight for a better deal from factory owners.

Thompson’s approach to history can be explained partly by his politics. A lifelong socialist, he was as happy marching against nuclear weapons or standing on the picket line with a group of striking workers as he was working in academic archives or delivering a seminar. As well as academic books and essays, Thompson produced hundreds of articles about important political issues.

EP Thompson’s academic writing focuses mostly on England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but its themes of social conflict and modernisation give it a relevance that extends far beyond his homeland. His books have for decades been popular in nations like India and Korea, and this month a conference in Australia marked the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Making of the English Working Class.

Thompson was always interested in comparing the histories of different nations. During a visit to Auckland to deliver several lectures in 1987, he announced that he was keen to learn about the history of the South Pacific, and about the ways both Polynesian and local palangi peoples organised their societies and used land. Sadly, Thompson’s declining health and early death in 1993 prevented him from realising this ambition.

If EP Thompson were able to visit the Kingdom of Tonga in 2013, what would he make of the place? What lessons might he have to offer Tonga, and what might Tonga be able to teach him? In this seminar Scott Hamilton will suggest a couple of possible answers to these questions.

Hamilton will argue that Thompson would have been fascinated by Tonga, because of the unusual historical path the country has taken. In the nineteenth century Taufa’ahau managed to unify and modernise Tonga without embracing capitalism. Even today the basis of the domestic Tongan economy remains small, semi-subsistence farming, and non-capitalist practices involving gift-giving and the distribution of wealth through family networks remain extremely important.

Hamilton will suggest that EP Thompson’s great essay ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ can help Tongans to understand the clash between their traditional ways of life and the demands of the capitalist sector of their economy. Thompson’s essay describes how factory owners and other employers regulate the time of their workers, so that they labour for a certain number of hours a day, and a certain number of days a week, and how workers in the West have gradually internalised this regulation, and come to regard it as natural. In nations like Tonga, where the people can still live off the land, and thus do not have to sell their labour to survive, capitalism struggles to force workers into its patterns. Frustrated employers and foreign ‘experts’ on economic ‘development’ complain about the ‘idleness’ of the native people, and call for them to be disciplined, or separated from their land. But Thompson shows that rejection of the nine to five rhythms of the capitalist economy does not equal laziness. For thousands of years, humans laboured according to different, looser rhythms, as they brought in harvests or hunted game. Their work was guided by the seasons, not by the clock.

Thompson grew up in a strongly Methodist family – his father was famous for his work as a Methodist missionary in India – but was sometimes critical of the faith. In a famous and controversial passage in The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson rails against John Wesley for turning the poor of England away from a political solution to their problems. Thompson complains that, instead of encouraging the poor to campaign for better wages and the vote, Wesley convinced them to blame their own supposed sinfulness for their miserable state. Instead of marching for justice and confronting England’s rich and powerful, the Methodist poor congregated in chapels. Tongan’s Free Wesleyan Church has sometimes been criticised for its links with the state, and for its alleged political conservatism. Are EP Thompson’s complaints against the English Methodists relevant to Tonga?

One of EP Thompson’s best-known essays discussed the riots which occasionally disturbed eighteenth century England. In ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd’ Thompson argues that a riot can tell us much about the fundamental beliefs of a society. In eighteenth century England an unspoken contract between the poor and the powerful usually ensured social stability. When this contract was broken, though, the poor could loot and burn with a ferocity that shocked the powerful. Can we use Thompson’s celebrated study of civil disorder to understand the causes of the riot which hit Nuku’alofa nearly seven years ago?

Hamilton will suggest that Thompson could learn from Tonga, as well as offer the country lessons. Despite his sympathy for the often illiterate peasants and workers of eighteenth and nineteenth century England, Thompson seldom used oral history in his work. He considered old texts much more reliable than oral traditions about old events, because stories can change so easily as they pass from one tongue to another. Hamilton will suggest that Thompson might change his mind about oral history, if he could consider the work of scholars like Sione Latukefu, Niel Gunson, and Wendy Pond, who have discovered important truths in the songs and oral traditions of Tonga.

Scott Hamilton is the author of The Crisis of Theory: EP Thompson and the British New Left, which was published by Manchester University Press in hardback in 2011 and in a paperback edition last year.

Bathing and sweating

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 01:07:00 +0000

I got back to Tonga on Monday, and was driven almost directly from Fua'amotu airport to the campus of the 'Atenisi Institute, where 'Opeti Taliai, subject of a recent interview on this blog, was giving a seminar on 'Thinking as the Art of Unwrapping'.

After a week of Auckland's autumnal weather I sat at one end of the Lolo Masi building, sweating and scratching in the tropical humidity, and feeling like a diver decompressing after a long dip in cool waters, as 'Opeti moved from philosophy to linguistics to Tongan oral history without raising a sweat or misplacing a syllable. In an alliterative burst near the end of his address, the Dean of 'Atenisi brought the names Heidegger, Hegel and Helu together. Karl Marx made a cameo appearance, and the problems of German idealist philosophy were made to foreshadow the problems of Tongan social reformers.

In one of the more meditative sections of his talk, 'Opeti mulled over the differences between the word fakakaukau, which is nowadays often used by Tongans to describe the act of thinking, and the semi-obsolete word faka'au'au. Kaukau means to take a bath; 'au'au can describe the acts of scraping or unwrapping. 'Opeti suggested that both words were descendants of mafaufau, which Samoans use to denote thinking. Why, he wondered, had Polynesians chosen, unknown centuries ago, to use bathing and unwrapping as metaphors for thought?

During the discussion which followed 'Opeti's talk, I told him how gentle both the traditional Tongan metaphors for thought seemed to me. By contrast, modern Western societies often choose cold, brutal metaphors for thinking. We talk of conducting autopsies for ideologies which we perceive have failed; we say that a thinker has cut to the bone, when we consider that he or she has excelled; we try to make penetrating analyses of this or that subject.

Where we treat thinking as a violent, invasive activity, Tongan metaphors suggest it is something altogether gentler - a washing, and hence purification, of the brain, or the unwrapping of a gift. 'Opeti drew a parallel between the Tongan sense of knowledge as something already inherent in our minds and environment, and simply waiting to be revealed, and ancient Greek ideas about intellectual inquiry. He pointed out that Plato believed that teaching involved the recovery of knowledge students had gained in previous lives, and stored deep in their brains.

'Opeti also reported that, during some of the thousands of lectures he gave at the school he founded, Futa Helu linked the act of thinking to the deflowering of a huge idol which apparently once enjoyed pride of place in a godhouse on a Tongan island. The idol, which was wrapped up in tapa cloth, had been consulted, during solemn and visionary ceremonies, for decades or centuries, by a fearful and reverent populace. When traditional religion began to collapse in the early decades of the nineteenth century, though, a group of Tongans entered the godhouse and unceremoniously removed the idol's tapa cover. After stripping off layer after layer after layer of tapa, the startled defilers discovered that the idol they had worshipped for so long was nothing more than a small seashell. By unwrapping the idol, Tongans had exposed an important truth.

Kik Velt, the science teacher and IT entrepreneur whose penchant for bright flowing dresses and enormous earrings and noserings has been made famous by Tongan Ark, Paul Janman's documentary feature film about life at 'Atenisi, was less than impressed by the waffling of humanities graduates like 'Opeti and me. "You guys talk and talk and never reach any definite conclusion" he complained. "I prefer physics - physics is exact." I told Kik that many sociologists have desperately jealous of the precision that the natural sciences can attain - my old PhD supervisor Ian Carter complained about 'physics envy' amongst his colleagues - but that it wasn't clear whether it was possible, nor even desirable, to formulate precise laws that could describe and predict the behaviour of millions of humans, given the enormous number of variables involved in human behaviour. "In physics there are only four or five variables" Kik replied. "And that is very good".

The day after 'Opeti's seminar I devoted a Creative Writing class to the literary technique known as stream of consciousness, and to James Joyce's epic and chaotic attempt to record the variable inner lives of a handful of Dubliners on a July day in 1904. I tried to ease into the subject of stream of consciousness by playing Bob Dylan's 'Visions of Johanna', which I consider a fine example of the genre, but I got a much better response when I read a passage from the sixty-one page monologue Molly Bloom offers up at the end of Ulysses. I'm not sure whether it was the smuttiness of Molly's thoughts or the daring of Joyce's technique which had the students laughing loudly and asking for a copy of Ulysses - a book which, I had to confess, I had never managed to finish.

After discussing Joyce the class had a go at stream of consciousness writing. Here's the attempt I made to write down the thoughts crawling through my head at a quarter past ten last Tuesday morning. My students guffawed.

...

Sweat. Why am I sweating so much this morning? Or do I only think I am sweating more than I usually do in Tonga because I have spent a week in Auckland, where the cool air kept my brow dry? Sweat: isn't this what all humans have in common? Socialists use a red flag, to symbolise the oneness of humanity, our common blood, the disgusting mess of tube-shaped organs and bulging veins and pussy ulcers that we all carry under the thin disguise we call skin. But aren't humans divided by different blood groups, different lines of descent, whakapapa? 'Opeti says Tongans are obsessed by genealogy, the narrative in their blood. Genealogy is a type of coagulation. Black slick of blood on the floor of an abandoned hospital in the overgrown centre of Tongatapu, vines reaching through the corners of the windows with spindly fingers, like the zombie survivors of a made-for-cable apocalypse, coconuts falling through the ceiling like shells, or severed heads. If a Tongan has a blood transfusion, does he have to add new branches, spindly and low-hanging, to his family tree, to indicate new cousins, new half-brothers? Or are his new blood-relatives epiphytes, strangely separate from him even as they link themselves with him? Sweat, not blood, is truly democratic: there are no sweat-groups, no discrete Tongan or palangi or Chinese varieties of sweat - there is only the same persistent fluid, everywhere. Why don't socialists fly a sweat-coloured flag? My sweat drips onto the page: rain falls onto the soil, onto the gardens of Tongatapu, Tonga Lahi, the great island. Could sweat nourish the earth, swell the boils of tomato plants, excite the banana trees until they produce erections?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

A vexillological mystery in Nuku'alofa

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:17:00 +0000

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am a flag geek. My love for abstract painting and my weakness for political sloganeering are both indulged by vexillology, which is an art that values brusque communication as much as elegant design.

Back in February I criticised antipodean liberals for their convoluted flag designs, and suggested that a simple banner was a good banner. But a mysterious flag I recently discovered attached to the rundown Maseia (that is, Messiah) Plaza in downtown Nuku'alofa makes me wonder whether simplicity is always such a good thing. The flag in question, which was one of four obscure ensigns being muscled by a humid wind on a late Saturday afternoon, consists of a single green stripe on a plain white background (click on the photo to enlarge it).

There are a number of very stylish flags dominated by lone horizontal lines - on another weekend walk through Nuku'alofa I spotted a woman wearing a T shirt emblazoned with the words Proud to be Nauruan, and dominated by the beautiful flag of that betrayed and damaged nation - but I can't, offhand, think of a banner where the line sits on a background so drained of colour.

I wandered around the back of the Maseia building, which was opened by King Tupou IV in 1980 and is decorated with verses from the Bible, but nowadays seems empty apart from a pizza joint, and found myself in the grounds of Nuku'alofa's Catholic Basilica, where the flag of the world's smallest nation flew three huge silver bells stamped with Latinate phrases. (As I photographed the flag, I began to wonder why the world's two smallest nations both have flags which are dominated by yellow. Apart from the Vatican City and Niue, is there another country which has made yellow the main colour on its banner?)

I was about to leave the basilica behind when a voice called from the little garden at its rear. The bishop of Nuku'alofa wanted me to join him and a dozen or so of his parishioners around the kava bowl. "We're getting ready for the service tomorrow" he explained, as he sat in front of a cup of kava and a tall glass of beer. After we'd talked about the new pope, and wondered whether his southern hemisphere heritage might make him sensitive to the prolems of South Pacific nations like Tonga, I asked the bishop about the meaning of the strange banner flying on the Maseia Plaza. "I think it means...approximately...bullshit" he replied, as his congregation laughed.

Can anyone do better than the good bishop, and explain what odd piece of the globe the flag flying over Maseia Plaza might represent?

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Building libraries

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 10:06:00 +0000

I arrived back in New Zealand yesterday for the Easter break, which keeps the 'Atenisi Institute closed for a full week, charged with a series of tasks, including the recruitment of a maths teacher for our second semester (anyone interested?), the preparation of a course on the history, sociology and etiquette of the noble sport of rugby (my Dad, who is still playing the game in his seventies, is giving me tips) and the creation of an electronic database of academic articles about the Pacific, so that students and staff currently stymied by the glacial speed of Tonga's internet connection can enjoy the goodies of publications like the Journal of the Polynesian Society and the Journal of Pacific History.

I wanted to use my sudden and wondrous high-speed net access to post a photo which shows that the eight hundred or so books donated to 'Atenisi by Kiwis have actually arrived in the Friendly Isles. For most of February the crate we'd filled with books, along with 'Opeti Taliai's cool white Toyota and boxes of nappies, sat miserably on the Nuku'alofa waterfront, waiting for the rain to stop falling and puddles to shrink. We were finally able to move the crate to a vacant allotment across the road from 'Opeti's house, and with a help of a few 'Atenisi students the books were unloaded. This photo shows Miko, Ulu, and Salisi hard at work in the midday sun (they got a meal of corned beef drenched in coconut milk and wrapped in taro leaves as recompense for their toil).

The books will be part of a new, relocated 'Atenisi library, but in the meantime they're being put to good use. For instance, I've got one of my Modern Pacific History students reading Ian Cross' The God Boy, as a way of learning about the emotional austerity of postwar Pakeha society.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the 'Atenisi book drive. I'm now trying to complement our physical library with the beginnings of what I hope will become a formidable elctronic archive.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Dreaming of Epeli Hau'ofa

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 04:19:00 +0000

I'm getting over a flu-like malady which I blame on the air conditioning system in our house. Confused by the sudden transitions between our lounge room, which has the aggressively cool air found on the balcony of an alpine sanatorium, and the street outside, which is hot and humid even when its potholes are brimming with kava-coloured stormwater, my body has been treating me to a strange mixture of flushes and chills.

I wandered down to the 'Atenisi Institute yesterday to apologise to the Dean for my recent lack of productivity. "I was sleeping all weekend", I told 'Opeti Taliai, "trying to get rid of this flu". 'Opeti was bemused by my confession. "I was sleeping most of the weekend too", he said, "but there's nothing wrong with me".

In New Zealand and in most other Western countries sleep is a state citizens are taught to resent and resist. We work overtime at the office, without expecting to sleep in the next morning; we stay late at a bar or party, yet rise early for a coffee date or a shopping trip. We limit the reach of sleep with alarm clocks, and regard the hours we lose to it as a wasted resource, like an overgrown section or unused air points. Kiwi families scatter into separate rooms before they go to bed, as though they are ashamed of what they are about to do. Many palangi associate unconsciousness with a particular pillow and lampshade, and are afraid of nodding off in public, for fear or being thought lazy, or drunk, or both.

In Tonga, though, sleep is considered a purposeful and honourable activity, rather than a state of frivolous non-being. Tongan families typically sleep together, on floor-mats or on mattresses pulled together. Tongans are also happy to loaf in the open air. Anyone who walks through the suburbs of Nuku'alofa on a warm day will notice people of all ages dozing on the verandahs and front porches of their homes, so that the wind which blows up from the city's harbour can cool their foreheads. Some of the daytime dozers are men who have stayed up late at the kava circles which convene almost every night all over Nuku'alofa. Like other narcotics kava can, when taken in sufficient quantities, induce a craving for sleep. Even suited and respectable Tongans can be found napping in the public gardens beside the Royal Palace, or on benches in the central business district. Tongans are so fond of public napping that every time I step into one of Nuku'alofa's banks I expect to see citizens taking a quick kip on the floor as they queue for service.

Tongan Sundays are dedicated to sleep as well as worship. The law forbids shopping, drinking, gardening, games, and travel on the Sabbath, so that there is little to do except attend church in the morning, eat a large and soporific meal of taro and corned beef for lunch, and sleep the rest of the day.

Despite or because of the efforts of Sigmund Freud and his successors, dreaming has become, for many Westerners, a disreputable activity. Dreams are considered either embarrassingly trivial or embarrassingly revealing, and anyone who relates the details of a dream at a dinner party or office lunch is likely to prompt groans or sniggers, rather than the earnest interpretation Freud championed. A politician who admitted taking guidance from her dreams would be voted out of office; a sociologist who footnoted a dream rather than a more ordinary text would be sacked for shoddy research practices.

In Tonga, though, dreams are the subject of continual serious discussion. Dreams are the places where the voices of distant ancestors and the recently deceased can whisper and scream, and where flickering trailers for the future run. In dreams and in waking trances, like the trances which the shamans of ancient Tonga induced by ingesting green kava and fungi, contact may be made with Pulotu, the land across the seas where the spirits of the departed dwell.

I discovered the seriousness with which Tongans regard the unconscious part of the mind a few weeks ago, when I ran a 'mental exercise' I learned from Jack Ross in my Creative Writing class at 'Atenisi. I asked my students to close their eyes, relax their postures and minds, and imagine themselves wandering beyond the ramshackle outer suburbs of Nuku'alofa into that region of dense plantations, relict rain forest, and isolated villages known on Tongatapu as 'uta, or the bush. I sent the students on a path across an unweeded field, through a grove of old banyans, and up a hill (by putting this detail into their waking dream I broke the rules of literal geography: Tongatapu's only hill sits close to the centre of Nuku'alofa. Despite the fact that it only rises sixty metres above sea level, this ancient fort is often called Mount Zion).

Eventually I asked the dreamers to imagine a clearing with a building in its centre, look through a window in the building, and open their eyes and write about what they had seen. I had worried that the whole exercise might seem contrived and ridiculous, but the class entered into it with an intensity I hadn't observed in New Zealand. Eyes opened slowly and unwillingly, and whole pages were hurriedly covered with writing.

During another Creative Writing class I read students one of the most famous passages from Epeli Hau'ofa's satirical novel Kisses in the Nederends. Hau'ofa's protagonist wakes one morning with a bad pain in his anus, and consults, over the weeks and months which follow, a series of faith healers, gurus, physicians, and psychiatrists in search of a cure for his problem. In the passage I read aloud, the long-suffering hero is told about a dream which supposedly points to the nature of his pain. According to this dream, the human body is filled with tuktuks, tiny greedy creatures divided into two antagonistic tribes, whose occasional wars cause discomfort to their hosts. The upper tuktuks, or uppertuks for short, live in the brain, and both despise and colonise the lowertuks, who dwell in the body's bowels and erogenous zones:

It was the brain tribes who invented the ranking system, claiming that since they were the only ones who could see, smell and hear things outside their body-world because of their commanding proximity to its major apertures, and since that they lived in the loftiest territories, far above the muck in the abdomen and the filth in the anal region, they were the best and cleanest tuktuks of all. Uppertuks said that the worst, nastiest, dirtiest, smelliest, vilest and generally the most beastly tuktuks were those who occupied the largely swampy territories of the arse. The most degenerate, horny, porno-brained, disgustingly obscene, perverted and generally most licentiously abandoned and loathsome were tuktuks who lived in the genital region...

Kisses in the Nederends is a determinedly symbolic work, and it is not too hard to interpret the conflict between the tuktuks of the north and south in historical and political terms.

When I told her that my reading from Nederends had gotten only a muted response from the students, my wife explained that Hau'ofa wasn't really as funny as I thought, and suggested that the students probably saw me, in spite of my bald head and pedagogical pretensions, as a sniggering, dirty-minded schoolboy. That night Epeli Hau'ofa appeared in one of my dreams. When I woke up I wrote a poem to record what I imagined he had to say. Now I can't remember the dream except through the poem.

I Dreamed I Saw Epeli Hau'ofa Last Night

Don't tell me that literature isn't popular,
when every arsehole composes
on toilet paper. Keep a diary,
that's my advice. A diary is a tunnel
forwards through time, a slowly exploding star
whose light will wash over windshields
in six decades' time, when it is too late
to escape. I write what I like

about what I hate: potholed roads,
ministers in limousines, the cork-lined minds
of diplomats, the lead-lined minds
of economists, Rabuka playing golf
in his best khaki and boots.
Satire is slow unreliable revenge.

Nothing changes in Oceania.
The Americans land their fleet of mosquitoes
on one scummed pond after another.
In Tonga the nobles still point with their fists
at whatever they want. It becomes theirs.
On nights when the surf is loud
beyond my mosquito net, here on the eastern shore of Pulotu,
I dream of the Ashika, its deck passengers thrashing
in a slick of moonlight, its hull swelling and splitting
like a rotten paw paw.
This is still the time for revenge.

Hau'ofa died in 2009, but my dream suggests that he has kept abreast of news from his beloved Oceania. He referred contemptuously to the way that America, under the supposedly progressive presidency of Barack Obama, has reopened many old military bases in the Pacific, as it prepares for a possible confrontation with its new rival China.

In Tonga China is now widely considered the world's number one superpower, and it is Chinese money which is underwriting the latest folly of the local ruling class. After being promised a twenty-five million pa'anga loan from China, the Tongan government recently announced that it was creating a new national domestic airline called Real Tonga.

The fledgling company decided to promote itself by staging a curious show on the streets of Nuku'alofa. Like hundreds of other bemused residents of the city, I watched from the front of my house as a group of young women dressed in red danced to loud pop music on a trailer pulled slowly past by a golf cart. Lumps of what looked like paper mache stuck to the doors of the cart; after a few moments I realised that they were supposed to be wings. Another, more rounded lump had been attached to the front of the golfcart; apparently it represented the front of an airplane. Like a casual litterbug, the pilot of the plane tossed leaflets promoting Real Tonga out of his open-air cockpit.

The strange contraption that laboured through Nuku'alofa's backstreets a few weeks ago is so far the only airplane that Real Tonga has launched. After hearing rumours of the advent of a state-controlled rival, the Kiwi-owned Air Chathams quit operations in Tonga, complaining that the country could only support a single domestic air service. When the Chinese-made planes it had talked of importing failed to show up, Real Tonga was forced to lease the vehicles of Air Chathams and hire the old airline's pilots.

This latest business venture from the elite that controls the Tongan state has brought back memories of the Princess Ashika disaster of 2009. After noticing that a businessman linked to Tonga's pro-democracy movement had established a successful inter-island ferry service, Tonga's ruling class bought a rusty old boat and put it to work. The Ashika wound up on the bottom of the ocean, along with most of its passengers. Although the ferry was replaced by a new and robust ship donated by Japan, many Tongans remain nervous about travelling by sea. Now the shambles that is Real Tonga is making them worry about taking to the air.

I hope Epeli visits me again, and brings happier news.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

'Opeti Taliai and the art of unwrapping

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:40:00 +0000

I've whinged about some of the discomforts that Tonga can present to a palangi accustomed to a middle class lifestyle in a temperate nation like New Zealand - discomforts like heat, humidity, roads that turn to scummed lakes after a night's rain, the shortage of books, a super-slow internet 'connection', and huge tough cockroaches that are so relentlessly energetic that after I swat them I'm tempted to roll them over and check whether they run on batteries. I haven't talked enough, though, about the charms of this place - about the super-friendly people, the endless supplies of paw paw and watermelon, the art films and new releases one can buy on DVD for a couple of dollars, the thousand kava circles that convene almost every night, and, most importantly, the gentle tempo of life.

The languid quality of Tongan time allows for a feast of talk. In Auckland conversation is something that happens over a coffee or beer, in fragments of time found between work commitments; in Tonga work takes place in the gaps between conversation. In Auckland I tend to see friends only once every few weeks or months, for an hour or so, and fire questions I have been saving up at them; in Tonga I am able to talk for hours every day and night with my colleagues at the 'Atenisi Institute and other interesting people, over a bowl of kava or a meal of barbequed meat. I'm learning as much here by talking as I learned from reading in Auckland.

This is the first of a series of interviews I plan to do with people associated with the 'Atenisi Institute. 'Opeti Taliai is the Institute's Dean.

'Opeti: I grew up in Folaha, an ancient village on the shore of Tongatapu's Fanga'uta lagoon. Folaha is divided between Wesleyans and Catholics; I grew up in the Catholic side of the village, where houses look east towards Lapaha, the ancient capital of Tonga and the spiritual centre of our Catholic minority. When I paddled my canoe on the lagoon I could look down and see massive blocks of dressed stone, which had fallen centuries ago off barges heading for Lapaha, where elaborate stone monuments were raised on the tombs of kings. Most of the young people of Folaha do not receive an extensive education, but I was sent to Futa Helu's 'Atenisi Institute, where I lived mostly on foraged coconuts and slept in a dormitory. I remember staying up late at night with the other boys, debating the ideas we had been taught during the day by Futa and his colleagues. I taught at 'Atenisi in the late 1970s, before emigrating to New Zealand, where I raised a family, got a PhD, and taught at a couple of universities. Now I'm back, as we rebuild 'Atenisi in the wake of the tragic death of Futa Helu.

Scott: Your scholarly work involves the close examination of ancient words and phrases -

'Opeti: When you study human beings you encounter them through language. I study language to understand people. I don't see a difference between linguistics and certain other academic disciplines, like anthropology and history. Language and culture are so close that they can't be separated. I was introduced to the structural, ahistorical study of language in the University of Auckland's linguistics department, but I was never interested in that sort of restricted examination - never interested in the analysis of the structure of sentences removed from their cultural and historical contexts. When linguistics was established as an independent discipline by De Saussure it parted company with the older field of philology, which was and is preoccupied with the history of words, and has a method that is very influenced by philosophy. I regret the separation of linguistics from philology, and in some ways consider myself a philologist. I had a very difficult time in that linguistics department, but then I met the social anthropologist Max Rimoldi. He was very comfortable with my approach to language, and mentored me. My PhD, which was finished in the anthropology department of Massey University, looks at the history of Tonga and its neighbours using a method I call the unwrapping of language. I unwrap words and stories and look at what has been hidden inside. To do this unwrapping you must understand something of the culture of Tonga, and also the histories and cultures of nations like Fiji and Samoa. In the first appendix of my PhD I provided translations of some of the ancient myths of Tonga, which are often expressed in verse. I unwrap those myths in the main body of the thesis.

Scott: How does your work relate to that of other scholars of the Tongan past?

'Opeti: I am in some ways criticising the approach of Queen Salote to Tongan history. She talked to the scholar Elizabeth Bott about Tonga's traditional stories, and Bott wrote up those conversations in the book Tongan Society. But Salote focused her attention on the Tu'i Kanokupolu, which is only one of Tonga's three dynasties - and is of course the dynasty which has been in power for more than a century and a half. Salote rejected some of Tonga's oldest myths, on the grounds that they were really Samoan. But my argument is that it is impossible to make a wall between early Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian history. Salote's privileging of Tu'i Kanokupolu and her nationalist approach to history were both motivated by her desire to legitimate her family's rule. She misrepresented the past for political purposes.

Scott: I'm very interested in your criticism of nationalism in Tongan historiography, because it seems to me to resonate with a trend in New Zealand. I've been reading Tony Ballantyne's book Webs of Empire, and I notice that it argues against treating the nineteenth century history of my country as a conflict between two isolated peoples, Maori and Pakeha. In recent decades many influential people have begun to talk about New Zealand as a bicultural nation, founded by an agreement of Maori with Pakeha, but Ballantyne warns about turning this fashion into an assumption about past beliefs. He notes that, in the nineteenth century, most Pakeha thought of themselves as citizens of a global empire, and drew parallels between their experiences and those of white settlers in places like India. Ballantyne wants to break out of what he sees as an insular approach to New Zealand history and place the country's past in a global context. I think a number of other scholars are trying to do the same thing. A young historian named Felicity Barnes, for example, recently published a book which considered nineteenth and twentieth century London as a New Zealand city...

'Opeti: I am trying to put aside Salote's nationalism and unwrap some of the oldest Tongan stories.

Scott: Can you me an example of this unwrapping?

'Opeti: Let me use the story of Ahoeitu, the first king of the Tu'i Tonga dynasty. Ahoeitu grew up without a father, until he asked his mother about his ancestry. She told him that his father was the god Tangaloa, and showed him a causarina tree he could climb to reach Tangaloa's realm in the sky. He climbed the tree and met his father, who was delighted to see him, and his half-brothers, who became angry after he beat them in a game of sika, or darts. Ahoeitu's brothers were so angry that they killed him, cut off his head and dumped it in some bushes, and ate the rest of his body. When he found out about this murder Tangaloa was outraged. He made his sons vomit up Ahoeitu's body and retrieve his head, then reconstructed the boy and sent him back down to earth to rule as the first Tu'i Tonga. Ahoeitu's half-brothers were made to serve him. I believe that the Ahoeitu myth represents the beginning of the notions of guilt and duty in Tongan society. Fatonia is our word for duty, and whenever we have a funeral or wedding, or another important social event, people do their duty - they provide food and other goods as gifts to relatives and to people of superior rank, and so on. Ahoeitu's brothers pioneered fatonia.

Scott: There seem to be parallels between the story of Ahoeitu, and its legacy of guilt, and the Christian notion of original sin -

'Opeti: There are parallels. I have argued that duty has a dual purpose - it forces submission, but also binds society and allows for a certain amount of material progress. Tonga is the most contradictory society in the world. Everything here has a double aspect. That's why the literary device of heliaki - the saying of one thing and meaning of another - is so important.

Scott: Niel Gunson has argued that the traditional Tongan sense of time is cyclical and shamanic, rather than linear. I notice a strong emphasis on the cyclical nature of history in your work. Do you get this idea from the Tongan past, or from Western thinkers with a cyclical view of the world?

'Opeti: When I read Vico I immediately saw parallels with Tonga. And it may be that this is a sign of the universality of Vico's ideas. They are true in Tonga and in Italy...I use Western thinkers to help me understand Tonga. I like Heraclitus' sense of flux, his notion of the world as continually changing, and I see Hegel's dialectic as similar, in practice, to heliaki. I admire Zizek and his use of Hegel. The 'Atenisi aproach is about blending ideas from different traditions. I like the Greeks - but I don't think that they can do it on their own. Nor can the Tongans. Let us synthesise what is best.

Scott: It's interesting that some scholars committed to developing an anti-elitist, 'bottom-up' view of the past have nevertheless rejected oral history. EP Thompson distrusted stories transmitted by tongue because of their endlessly mutable nature. He was troubled by the way that a story purporting to tell us about a century-old event could have been revised five minutes before a scholar recorded it. He preferred to use old texts. And Henry Reynolds has relied on texts rather than Aboriginal oral tradition while researching his histories of the conquest of Australia. Does the mutability of oral tradition trouble you?

'Opeti: I see history and myth as the same thing. History becomes myth. What was history in the days of Heraclitus is today myth. Our world will become myth.

Scott: What is the relationship between the sort of work you're doing and archaeology? Patrick Vinton Kirch argues, on the basis of the excavations he and his colleagues have done across the Pacific, that the old distinction between prehistory and history - between the past recorded by non-written means, like campfire stories and songs, and the past recorded in text - is no longer tenable. Kirch claims that he can read a ruin in the jungle or a buried fishing village as precisely as he would an old document. Do contemporary archaeological findings potentially make oral history redundant, by providing more reliable and copious information about the past?

'Opeti: I don't find Kirch demoralising! In my PhD don't reject all his work but do challenge him on some points involving old words.

Scott: Could you explain what you mean by the name Samoa'a-toa, which makes regular appearances in your PhD?

'Opeti: I see Samoa-a-toa as an ancient society that existed in Tonga, Samoa and several other parts of the Pacific. It was egalitarian, and was eventually usurped by something hierarchical - the ancestor of today's very stratified Tongan society. The myth of Ahoeitu may record a moment in this usurpation. In Samoa-a-toa the fish was the iconic animal, and the coast was the focus of habitation. Later, in Tonga, the pig usurped the fish, and people moved inland.

Scott: I detect a sort of melancholy in your discussions of the demise of Samoa-a-toa, and the rise of a hierarchical, martial society - it's almost as though you are lamenting the fall of man from an ideal to a corrupt state -

'Opeti: Not really. I'm doing history. I believe in the importance of objectivity.

Scott: As you know, this is a point where we disagree. I don't like the word 'objectivity', because I think that all research, even the most rigorous research, must have a partly subjective quality. I agree with Gadamer that we cannot avoid bringing our own preoccupations and presuppositions to the study of any subject: that we need these things, in fact, to give the subject a background against which is it comprehensible.

'Opeti: It is always hard to limit the interpretations of your findings. 'Atenisi traditionally encourages its students to answer the question 'What is the case?' rather than the question 'What is to be done?' The instrumentalisation of thought is rejected. But I would add that a scholar can assist progressive forces in his or her society by seeking objectivity. By providing a true picture of reality, he or she can allow for the formulation of correct strategies and tactics. Futa Helu was able to assist in the founding of Tonga's pro-democracy movement because he had an accurate understanding of Tongan society. Let me give another example. We are entering an era of globalisation. We may seek to protect vulnerable nations like Tonga from the negative aspects of globalisation, but to do that we must avoid nationalist myth-making, and the illusion of invulnerability it can give, and have an accurate picture of the world.

Scott: What pieces of scholarship are you working on this year?

'Opeti: I want to revise my PhD for publication, and I want to write an essay for the literary journal brief about 'Pieta', a poem by Queen Salote. Pieta is the Tongan word for piety, and Salote's poem explores the rivalry between Tonga's Catholic majority, which is associated with the ancient Tu'i Tonga dynastic line and the ancient capital at Lapaha, and its Wesleyan majority, which includes the present ruling class...

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

A message from Venus

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 02:24:00 +0000

When I was a kid one of my favourite books was an illustrated novel called Kings of Space, in which WE Johns, the incorrigibly jingoistic but occasionally visionary creator of that arch-imperialist schoolboy Biggles, sends a team of doughty Britons to Venus and Mars in a flying saucer cobbled together by an eccentric inventor.

Johns depicts Mars as a desert world of empty cities and red winds, but his Venus is a realm of steaming swamps, endless rain, and very muddy dinosaurs. When the Brits emerge from their saucer onto this febrile world, they are almost knocked down by the size and force of the raindrops that strike every inch of their bodies. The rain is so heavy and so relentless that Johns' characters fear they will drown if they spend too long on the green planet.

I've been thinking about WE Johns' Venus for the last couple of weeks, as rain has fallen, morning, noon and night, on Nuku'alofa, and on the rest of the soggy island of Tongatapu. At first the rain, which is amplified very effectively by Nuku'alofa's corrugated architecture, was an exotic novelty, a reminder that we had left the dry summer of temperate New Zealand behind and arrived on an accredited tropical island. After three or four days, though, the rain had become oppressive, like a melancholy but talkative friend who insisted on hanging about.

After five or six days, the rain had become a normal, predictable feature of life in this city, like the utes that speed up from the docks in the early evening full of fresh fish and salesmen blowing whistles, or the evening prayers on public television. After fourteen days, I am disinclined to believe in the finitude of the storm falling on us. The notion that the rain will stop falling and the sky lighten to blue seems theoretical, at best.

If this storm were falling on a New Zealand city, then a state of emergency would long ago have been declared. The puddles the size of Olympic swimming pools that cover roads and yards would have been drained like wounds; the houses where dirty water waits at the door, like a sinister and persistent salesman, would be defended by sandbags. In Nuku'alofa, though, people adapt to the weather, rather than resist it. I'm sitting at my dining table, while 'Opeti Taliai delivers a lecture on Karl Marx's theory of history to a group of 'Atenisi students who have sloshed down deluged streets to get to our lounge. This morning I offered lectures on Creative Writing and Modern Pacific History in the same cosy space. The campus of the 'Atenisi Institute is underwater, and closed until further notice. Sisi'uno and Atolomake Helu, who live between lily-covered ponds on the outskirts of the campus, have decamped with their five lovely kids to the upstairs section of our house. Other refugees are settling into a church hall down the road. 'Aikilisi Pohiva, the long-time leader of Tonga's pro-democracy movement, has been spotted driving his modest car through the drainless flooded streets of Nuku'alofa's low-lying suburbs, and newspapers have begun to criticise the government for allowing so much of its capital to turn into a lake.

Humans may be suffering from the storm, but hogs are prospering. Tonga's hogs have always been arrogant and intractable. In the Vava'u Code of 1839, the country's first written set of laws, Taufa'ahau, who was soon to be the first king of the modern unified state of Tonga, insisted that hogs be kept in pens, and thus prevented from blocking thoroughfares and rampaging through plantations. Fines were prescribed for Tongans who failed to restrain their pigs. One hundred and seventy-four years later, hogs still roam unhindered through Tonga's towns, villages and countryside. The current storm has emboldened the beasts, so that they slosh impudently into the path of vehicles, rub their tusks against church fences, and grunt lasciviously at passing humans. I fear open insurrection.

Here's a sort of rain-journal I've been keeping:

Notes in a Rainy Season

you're trying to teach me Tongan, Lose,
but all I've heard, for a fortnight,
is the iron
dialect
of rain
on Kolomotu'an rooves

*

"all this bad weather see
it comes from
Samoa, along with a
fleet
a fleet
of
mosquitoes"

*

when the rain changes gear
the taxis change gear

*

rain filling potholes
the government wouldn't mend

*

potholes like
silver
platters
licked clean
by Kolomotu'a's
coddled
hogs

*

sweating
at three o'clock
rolling
onto the wrong side
of the mosquito net,
hearing the wind land its waves
on our bedroom wall
I wonder:

what happens
to the floodwater
in old newspaper photos,
to the mint-green oceans
on a wall-chart
in a derilect school:

do they ever drain?

*

ten
eleven
days! on
and
on,
like that drunken
Wesleyan deacon
chanting
Deuteronomy -

*

Folaha's church fights back,
fires pigeons
from its cannon-spire
into an enemy cloud

*

lying on our porch
looking out at the rain
the 'Atenisi boys play AC/DC
Nirvana
Van Halen
in the lamplit distance
coconut trees shake their heads
like metallers in a mosh pit

*

half-asleep, kept
half-awake
by mosquitoes,
I dream
that the creatures
are not malevolent,
not even neutral,
but allies,
buzzing from one wound
to the next,
transfusing
as well as looting,
mixing the blood of men
and women
of brown
yellow
black
and
white,
affirming the oneness
of humanity:

*

later, fully asleep,
I dream
I am awake,
swinging a stone
axe, esiki,
at the insects,
who swarm
and disperse
impudently
in my study,
briefly shaping
the characters
of an unknown language

*

this church is like a sick man
trying endlessly to clear his throat:
water goes noisily through its gutters,
then falls six feet
onto consecrated ground -

*

falls
into a mudpool
where hogs rear
like rampant lions

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The Jumping Boy

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 23:01:00 +0000

Our son Aneirin (Aneirin Henry Wagstaff Hamilton, if you must know) is one year old today, but he has already proved himself something of a party animal.

Back in January Skyler and I travelled to an old-fashioned, slightly decrepit beach resort on an obscure part of the Northland coast, along with a dozen other young couples we met on our antenatal course and have since befriended. We all had babies all nearing one, so we decided to throw a collective birthday bash for them at the little seaside colony. It was the loudest party I'd been to since I was an eighteen year-old living in Papakura, where Ozzy Osborne and Led Zep are regarded as cultural monuments.

We held another shindig for Aneirin in the Auckland Domain, that bucolic legacy of imperialist war, a few days before leaving for Tonga. Family members and friends keen to give the little lad a kiss and give us a few parting words - to warn us about the food that is sold in Nuku'alofa's main market, or ask us curiously whether the 'Tongese' still included any 'uncontacted tribes' protected by 'impenetrable jungle', or to enquire about whether an archaeologist/psychologist/poet/linguist would be welcome to drop by 'Atenisi campus and give a lecture or two (our answer, of course, was always 'yes', and we're looking forward to distinguished writer-scholars Murray Edmond and Richard Von Sturmer dropping anchor at 'Atenisi later this semester).

Now we've decided to mark Aneirin's official birthday by hiring a car and heading for one of the shelves of sand on Tongatapu's coast. Thanks to everybody who gave him presents at the Domain, or sent gifts through the post to Nuku'alofa.

I remember asking Brett Cross, whose daughter is eight months or so older than Aneirin, whether the first year of parenthood went fast or slow. "It passes very quickly - and, sometimes, very, very, slowly" Brett replied. I know what he meant. Anybody who doubts the claims of philosophers like Bergson and Heidegger that time is a partly subjective thing, and can flow hot or cold depending on the exhaustion or exhilaration of the individual human consciousness, simply hasn't experienced parenthood.

Here's Geoffrey Hill, my favourite living English-language poet, saluting childhood from the distance of old age:

The Jumping Boy

1

Here is the jumping boy, the boy
who jumps as I speak.

He is at home on the king's highway,
in call of the tall house, its blind
gable end, the trees - I know this place...

2

He leaps because he has serious
joy in leaping. The girl's

eyes no way allowed for, or else
she is close in convert and we
are to know that, not knowing how.

I'll bet she worships his plebeian
bullet head, Hermes' winged
plimsolls, the cracked toy tin hat

held on by elastic. His is winning
a momentous and just war
with gravity.

3.

This may be levitation. I
could do that. Give my remembrance
to his new body. These episodes occur.

4

Jump away, jumping boy; the boy I was
shouts go.

Coming soon on Tongan telly

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:49:00 +0000

If you happen to live in the Friendly Islands, or live elsewhere but got a satellite dish installed on your roof because you need a regular fix of Tongan Television, then you can turn your set on today at five o'clock and see 'Opeti Talia, Sisi'uno Langi-Helu and me discussing the 'Atenisi Institute and the intellectual and cultural tradition it represents.

In the course of our talk, which was recorded yesterday while we sat on handsome wooden chairs with royal red padding in the cramped green-walled studio of the state broadcaster, names like Tongan Ark, Paul Janman, Heraclitus, Ted Jenner, 'Jackson' Ross, Dave Bedggood, and David Howard were brandished. I sat quietly and tried to look knowing whenever 'Opeti and Sisi'uno spoke in their native Tongan, and chimed in occasionally in Kiwi English. Our broadcast lasts three quarters of an hour, and was made to let the Tongan public know that 'Atenisi is up and running this year. We're hopeful that a minute or two of it might be featured on the national news, which is broadcast in Tongan at seven o'clok and in English at eight o'clock.

Tonga has only three television channels and a relatively small number of radio stations, so the chances of the masses catching a broadcast are higher than they would be in a nation like New Zealand, where there are often scores of channels on offer. When I talked to Brett Cross, the boss of Titus Books, last night, he got excited by the idea that our broadcast might help him to sell titles by the likes of Jack Ross and Ted Jenner in Nuku'alofa's Friendly Islands Bookshops. Little did he know that FIB, which exploits its monopoly on the book trade here, was flogging Titus volumes for eighty-three pa'anga a pop...

Escape

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 23:50:00 +0000

Generalisations can be dangerous. We made our first visit to Tongatapu at the beginning of 2010, and enjoyed a week of temperatures in the low twenties, thanks to cooling breezes that came off Nuku'alofa harbour. Our subsequent visits to Tonga all occurred during the winter, when conditions were similar, and I rashly concluded that temperatures here did not very vary significantly through the year. The summer of 2013 would be, I thought, no sweat.

As soon as we stepped onto the melting tarmac of Fua'amotu airport last Saturday I realised that my confidence had been misplaced. The heat and humidity were so bad that by the time I reached the little airport terminal fifty or so metres away I felt like ducking into the toilets and exchanging one of my recently purchased Hawaiian T shirts for another.

Tongatapu has been suffering through a hot and sticky summer, so that even locals are going about under umbrellas, and dabbing their faces with bright sweat rags. I've been helping my bosses at the 'Atenisi Institute meet the demands of the recently established Tongan qualifications authority, which has an unrelenting appetite for policy documents and other pieces of paperwork, and when I sit typing on our Financial Controller Mele's laptop I feel myself melting like a candle. As I typed an amendment to one particularly long document the other night I began to fear that all the liquid I was producing would shortcircuit my boss's computer.

Because it can only be ensured by air conditioning units, and air conditioning costs serious pa'anga, coolness if a prized commodity in Nuku'alofa. The smartest shops are also the coolest. Digicel, the Carribean-based phone company that has billboards up all over Tonga, keeps its central Nuku'alofa shop so cool that some staff are forced to go about in long sleeved shirts and pants. Molisi, a new apparently Tongan-owned supermarket chain, offers its customers the delights of a walk-in fridge. Yesterday I found myself milling in the fridge with half a dozen other punters; all of us were pretending to agonise over the half-dozen varieties of watery lager available for purchase.

The most glamorous eating places, like the aptly named Escape Cafe, offer chilled air as well as sodas and sandwiches at ambitious prices. I retreated to Escape Cafe yesterday, and discovered cliques of palangi businessmen in suits and ties lunching with Tongan civil servants in dark heavy shirts and thick ta'ovala. Observing their faces, which were miraculously free of the rivulets of sweat which ran down my forehead and chin, I wondered whether the Escape had a special room where distinguished guests could change from shorts and T shirts into suitably formal attire before they began negotiations over trade tariffs and aid packages. Surely no one could survive the humidity outside in a pinstripe suit?

I sat sipping my Diet Coke and tried to eavesdrop on the wheelers and dealers sitting all around me, but I was frustrated by the cafe's sleek air conditioning units, which purred as loudly and smoothly as the engines of a cruising jumbo jet.

I'd better sign off for now, before I shortcircuit Sisi'uno Helu's laptop, but I'll give another weather report soon.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

The expanding world

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 22:16:00 +0000

We're off to Tonga today. Back in the nineteenth century, travel across the Pacific involved the packing of a schooner, careful examination of half-finished charts, so that reefs and sudden volcanic islets could be avoided, battles with winds and tides, which saw sails being raised and lowered and raised again, and the danger of encounters with pirates. Travellers arrived exhausted in Apia or Papeetee or Nuku'alofa, and recovered by drinking rum and gambling away their money on a hotel verandah that looked out on a winedark sea.

Today travellers to the tropical Pacific are still liable to exhaust themselves. Instead of packing a ship, they must unpack their houses, junking or boxing the innumerable useless items which attach themselves to us in this age of consumer capitalism. Instead of callousing their hands hoisting and lowering sails on the high seas, and being made to wait for hours or days on a still, windless sea, they are forced to cover scores of forms in the inscrutable language of bureaucratese, and stand in listless queues for hours on end, as they seek a Visa or a new passport.

We like to imagine that new forms of communication and faster methods of travel are connecting the various regions of the world, and making places like the tropical Pacific more accessible. But looking at a super-fast train or a billionaire's private jet and talking about the shrinking of the world is a little like pointing at Usain Bolt or some other elite athlete and calling them proof of the physical fitness of the world's citizens.

The truth is that, whilst certain parts of the Pacific have become more easily accessible, thanks to cheap flights and the rise of a tourist industry, much of the region has become, for anyone short of a superyacht or private jet, more rather than less remote. The rarity of travel through the Pacific by ship, and the tendency of airlines to descend only upon one or two destinations, and ignore other centres, means that many of the region's islands go unvisited for long periods. Where once schooners and steamers would call regularly, disgorging trade goods and sightseers, now 747s pass heedlessly overhead, somewhere above the clouds. In the major Pacific nations, from Fiji to Tonga to French Polynesia, more remote islands are being depopulated, as young people, especially, emigrate to the main island, where the capital city and most of the jobs and excitement are located.

We had considerable trouble finding a company that could send a crate to Tonga, because Reef Shipping, which was for years the best-known of the diminished number of shipping companies plying the Pacific, recently went into receivership. We'll be based in Nuku'alofa, on Tonga's capital island of Tongatapu, but we were planning on revisiting nearby 'Eua Island, and visiting Tonga's northern archipelagos for the first time. That may be difficult, because the air links between Tonga's forty-odd inhabited islands are once again in jeopardy, after Chathams Pacific, which had been operating domestic flights in the Kingdom for the last few years, decided abruptly last month to pull the plug.

I recently read Gregory O'Brien's account of the journey he made to the Kermadec Islands in the company of a number of other distinguished Kiwi artists and writers. O'Brien and co got a lift on a New Zealand navy vessel, which was heading on beyond the Kermadecs to Tonga.

As they watched Auckland disappear over the horizon of warm gray waves, and watched the northern horizon, imagining the rocky peaks and coast of Raoul Island, the largest of the Kermadec archipelago, the hitchikers seem to have become immoderately excited. Used to jumping on planes and travelling passively over vast abstract reaches of the Pacific toward Sydney or Los Angeles or Tokyo, they had suddenly been confronted and delighted by the watery reality of the space which surrounds New Zealand. As their vessel churned the six hundred or so nautical miles to Raoul, they felt like explorers, entering a dimension of reality which is closed to almost all twenty-first century travellers. Like Epeli Hau'ofa famous essay 'Our Sea of Islands', O'Brien's account of his voyage insists on the fact that the Pacific connects its various peoples, rather than isolating them from one another. He attempts, in language that is self-consciously poetic, to turn the Pacific from the set of distances and calculated arrival times familiar to air travellers into something sensuously real.

I'll look out the window of my plane today, and try to imagine waves building and breaking somewhere far below the tundra of tropical clouds.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Ten years later

noreply@blogger.com (Skyler) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:38:00 +0000

The tenth anniversary of the million-strong march through London against the invasion of Iraq has been marked dutifully by a number of newspapers and blogs. Despite the impressive size of the anti-war protests in London, and in many other cities besides, Bush and Blair went ahead with their plans to depose Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq in March 2003. After the fall of Baghdad in April, the anti-war movement dwindled. The tragic shambles that Bush and Blair presided over for years in Iraq did not prompt the sort of mass protests the world saw in March 2003.

In the 2006 British movie Children of Men, which is set in a dystopian future, a man recalls that he met his wife on the great London demonstration of March the 15th 2003. He refers to the event with the sort of wistful awe old hippies use when they talk about the protests in the 1960s against the Vietnam War or for Civil Rights. By the 1980s, at the latest, these protests had been made, by historians and by the entertainment industry, into historical landmarks and symbols of human progress. Only the most reactionary or contrarian individuals have been prepared to defend segregation, or the bombing of North Vietnam, and face accusations of standing on 'the wrong side of history'.

But the Iraq war has not yet become a safe subject for sentimentalists and generalisers. The failure of both the anti-war movement and the Anglo-American occupation has, for many Westerners, left the war's place in history and moral status unclear. Anti-war protesters certainly did not succeed in defeating American imperialism, nor even in discrediting the notion of Western military intervention in the Third World. On the other hand, the neoconservative promise that Iraq would be the shining model for a democratic, secular, prosperous Middle East, and the harbinger of a 'new American century', seems as absurd today as David Lloyd George's claim that the defeat of the German Kaiser would put an end to all wars.

Against the firm advice of my PhD supervisor, the great Ian Carter, who seemed more interested in model railways than in left-wing politics, I spent much of late 2002 and early 2003 writing leaflets for the Auckland-based protest coalition Direct Anti-War Action. Reproduced below is a text I wrote in the middle of the night, with a typically excited Roger Fox standing over my shoulder. Roger, who was a vital and vocal part of Auckland's left-wing scene until his sudden death in 2007, had persuaded some members of the Seafarers' Union to distribute anti-war leaflets on ships they were working.

In the aftermath of the great demonstrations of March 2003, DAWA and many similar groups believed that momentum would continue to build against Bush, and that an historic defeat for imperialism was possible. We were disappointed, and it now takes an effort of historical imagination to understand the energy and optimism of the text Roger and I so hurriedly prepared.

ONLY WORKERS CAN STOP THIS WAR

Direct Anti-War Action (DAWA) is a United Front of various groups and individuals formed to organise direct action to stop the New Zealand government's involvement in the war on Iraq. We support the building of a broad anti-war movement in New Zealand, and think the big marches recently seen around the country were brilliant. But, let’s face it, we can't rely on pressuring Helen Clark and the UN to act as forces for peace - we need to take things into our own hands and revive the proud tradition of direct action which made the anti-Vietnam War and anti-Springbok Tour protests such a powerful force in this country.

Workers around the world are showing the way to stop the war with their own direct action - in Britain, train drivers have refused to move ammunition bound for the war, and their union, which has an anti-war resolution on its books, has backed them up. In Western Australia, 75,000 workers from nine unions have pledged to go on strike the minute any attack on Iraq begins, whether or not it is sanctioned by the UN. In Ireland, mass pickets have forced the US government to stop using the Shannon Air Base to move troops and supplies to the Middle East. Unions representing 130 million workers, from Australia to the Philippines to Togo, have now signed an anti-war resolution drafted by the US group Labour Against War. In Auckland, the Council of Trade Unions has moved from opposition to unilateral war to opposition to a war rubberstamped by the UN.

Many workers recognise that Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ is a war on workers in the West, as well as a war on the peoples of the Middle East. The warmongers want to boost their flagging profits by making Western labour as well as Middle Eastern oil cheaper. Bush used the war as an excuse to attack the West Coast longshoremen when they tried to strike last year, and is trying to use his post-S 11 ‘Patriot Act’ to strip hundreds of thousands of state employees of their right to union membership. In Britain, Bush’s best friend Tony Blair has used the war as an excuse to threaten to ban the right of firefighters to go on strike for higher wages. Helen Clark will pull the same ‘national security’ card out of the pack the moment she is threatened by major industrial action. The Seafarers’ Union has a proud history of opposing unjust wars: it opposed the Vietnam War, and it was one of the few New Zealand unions to take a stand against the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

It’s up to staunch unions like the Seafarers to take the lead in turning anti-war resolutions into anti-war action, by supporting calls for strike action and blockades of military facilities linked to Bush’s war drive. On March the 2nd at 12noon DAWA plans to picket the Whenuapai Air Base, in protest at the sending of Orion planes to the Gulf as part of the Clark government's commitment to George Bush's War of Terror. On the same day, Christchurch activists will be picketing the US air base at Harewood. We call on the anti-war movement in other centres to stage similar actions as part of a national day of direct anti-war action.

A planning meeting for the Whenuapai action will be held this Wednesday 26th of February, 7.30pm at Trades Hall, 147 Great North Road.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]