The Ark premieres: a dog's-eye view

"What a couple of sly old dogs" someone commented, when this photo turned up on facebook yesterday. I'm not sure if that remark was intended as a compliment, but it could have been worse. It is better, I suppose, to be called a sly old dog than a gullible old dog.

The photo shows the hirsute Brett Cross and the less-than-hirsute author of this blog manning a bookstand in the bowels of that monstrous temple to philistinism, the Sky City Centre, last Saturday night. As fruit machines clanged and buzzed and punters howled and barked with glee or disappointment in the distance, we were busy selling On Tongan Poetry, a collection of five essays by the late Futa Helu which Atuanui Press, an offshoot of Brett's Titus Books imprint, has just published with the help of Creative New Zealand. On Tongan Poetry was supposed to arrive in late October, but we brought the release date forward after Tongan Ark, Paul Janman's celluloid portrait of Helu, was accepted for the Auckland International Film Festival. The afterword to On Tongan Ark is a revised version of a post I made to this blog near the end of 2010. We sold On Tongan Poetry alongside two books Helu published near the end of his life - a study of the pre-Socratic philosopher and father of dialectics Heraclitus and a set of short essays in Tongan about the poetry of Salote Tupou III.

I'd like to believe it was a sort of righteous mischievousness which motivated Bill Gosden, the boss of Auckland's International Film Festival, to arrange for Tongan Ark to screen in the Sky City Theatre last Saturday night. Helu was an inveterate critic of the hyper-commercialism and mindless consumerism which are part and parcel of late capitalism, and 'Atenisi, the university he established in a swamp on the edge of Nuku'alofa, has always preferred to teach its students philosophy and poetry rather than business studies. Perhaps, then, Gosden intended the denunciations of 'banal corporate culture' and 'corrupt financial systems' which pepper Tongan Ark to seep through the beige walls of the Sky City Theatre into the cavernous casino nearby, and to inspire the punters there to spend some of their money on books of philosophy and poetry rather than on pokies?

On the other hand, Gosden might simply have been looking for a movie theatre large enough to cope with the appeal of Janman's film. Tongan Ark was watched by a capacity audience of seven hundred; when dancers from the 'Atenisi Foundation for the Performing Arts stormed onstage at the end of the movie, and the crowd rose, clapping, roaring, and stamping its feet, I thought I was at a rock concert rather than a movie.

Tongan Ark has been one of the undisputed hits of this year's Film Festival. While movies by veteran, high-profile directors like Paolo and Vittorio Taviani failed to pack out theatres, Paul Janman's low-budget, unapologetically intellectual film became one of the hottest tickets in town. Part of the Ark's popularity has been due to the heavy media coverage given to Janman and to the 'Atenisi staff and performers who flew in for Nuku'alofa in preparation for the film's premiere. Tongan Ark has been the subject of no fewer than four extended discussions on TV One, as well as profiles on Radio New Zealand and in the Sunday Star-Times.

But the selling of Tongan Ark hasn't only been achieved by exposure in the big media. Enthusiasm for the film has been building amongst Auckland's huge Tongan community for weeks, with volunteers going door to door selling tickets in areas like Otahuhu and Mangere. Pasifika websites and social media have spread the word, and demands to see the movie have flowed in from Sydney, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and other colonies of the Tongan diaspora.

Brett Cross and I were sly indeed, then, to hitch our rickety literary wagon to Janman's speeding train. As copies of On Tongan Poetry sailed off our table I was impressed by the diversity of the crowd which had come to see Tongan Ark. There were former staff members and students of 'Atenisi, with their anecdotes about the role of the school as a sort of liberated zone in the tense, autocratic Tonga of the 1980s and '90s; there were young Tongans who had been born in New Zealand and had grown up learning little about their homeland, but who were now proud to learn that Tonga was a land of distinguished intellectuals and poets as well as rugby players and clergymen; there were palangi Kiwis, who had heard about the film through the media, and who wanted to know what Futa Helu could teach them about alternatives to commercialised education or to Western-style capitalism; there were palangi writers who had had their appetites for Tongan literature whetted by the special Oceania issue of brief which appeared earlier this year; and there were veteran scholars of the Pacific like Wendy Pond, the legendary ethnographer and translator who back in the '70s took up residence in the Niuas, the fearsomely isolated island group colonised by Tonga centuries ago but never quite pacified, and who set about translating the work of the dissident local poets she found there.

After the screening of Tongan Ark and the dance by the 'Atenisians, movie-goers reconvened in the Wintergarden lounge of the Civic Theatre. The Civic was built in the late '20s, at a time when the newly-discovered death-mask of Tutankhamun was exciting architects and interior designers around the world, and the lapis lazuli sky and golden walls of the Wintergarden are supposed to evoke the splendours and mysteries of a romantically imagined Orient.

When an 'Atenisi concert party armed with guitars, log drums, and a huge bowl of kava occupied one end of the Wintergarden, though, the room's deep blue desert sky suddenly became the deep blue sky of a tranquil evening in the tropical Pacific. As the guitars played and the voices rose, I forgot about the cold rain blowing outside down the concrete and glass canyon of Queen Street. I could feel a soft humid breeze on my face, and hear the waters of the Fanga'uta Lagoon, the inland sea of Tongatapu, lapping in the distance. When I left the Civic, at the end of the evening, the wind seemed a little milder, and the glass facades of Queen Street a little less oppressive. Tongan Ark and 'Atenisi had brought something important to Auckland.

Wellingtonians should get their tickets, and get ready to party.

Footnote: I've pinched three of the photos in this post from the splendidly monikered Karen Abplanalp, who works for the Pacific Media Centre.
[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Tonga's mental athletes

Update: Paul Janman will be appearing on TV One's Good Morning programme at half-past ten today (that's Wednesday) to talk about Tongan Ark. Check it out!

Tongan Ark is getting plenty of publicity ahead of its premiere on August the 4th. Paul has been interviewed on Australian public radio on Radio New Zealand, and on Triangle TV, and both the Pacific Media Centre and the TV 3 website have given his film a plug. TVNZ's Tagata Pasifika programme will profile the movie next weekend.

What's less well-known is that August the 4th will see the launch of a book, as well as the premiere of Tongan Ark. Here's a press release which is going out today.

A new film and book celebrate Tonga's mental athletes

 A joint press release by Public Films and Atuanui Press

 July the 23rd, 2012

Last year Tonga's rugby players impressed World Cup audiences with their skills and flair. Tonga is famous for its athletes, but few New Zealanders know that their closest neighbour also produces many distinguished intellectuals. Saturday the 4th of August will see the launch of a film and a book honouring the late Futa Helu, Tonga's most important modern thinker and a man with a message very relevant to twenty-first century New Zealand.

Paul Janman's film Tongan Ark is a portrait of 'Atenisi, the private university Helu created in a swamp on the edge of Tonga's capital city Nuku'alofa in the 1960s. Helu believed that European and Polynesian cultures needed to learn and borrow from one another, and the staff of 'Atenisi put his ideas into practice by offering courses in grand opera and English literature as well as traditional Tongan music and dance. 'Atenisi is the Tongan word for Athens, and Helu wanted to emulate ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates by promoting reasoned and open debate, even when such debate touched on controversial political issues.

Although it has always struggled for funding and resources, 'Atenisi has had a huge influence on Tonga and on the wider Pacific region. Because of its emphasis on freedom of thought, 'Atenisi was the cradle of the pro-democracy movement which swept Tonga in the nineties and noughties. Many of the school's graduates have enjoyed distinguished careers inside and outside Tonga.

Tongan Ark shows the joys and tribulations of 'Atenisi's staff and students, as they celebrate learning and battle against poverty and political persecution. The film ends by showing Helu's funeral in 2010, and by noting the determination of his colleagues to keep 'Atenisi open.

August the 4th will also see the launch of On Tongan Poetry, a collection of essays Futa Helu wrote in the 1980s. In these texts, which have been published by Atuanui Press with the help of Creative New Zealand, Helu not only describes the style and function of traditional Tongan poetry but takes readers on a series of fascinating detours, as he discusses the ancient history of the Pacific, compares the work of English literary giants like Milton, Wordsworth, and Blake to that of their Tongan counterparts, and comments wittily on the politics and morality of the modern world.

The new film and book reflect Futa Helu's widening influence in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

One of the central characters of Tongan Ark is Michael Horowitz, an American sociologist who left behind the fat salaries and creature comforts of First World academia to teach at Helu's poverty-stricken school. "Futa Helu has something to teach the West" says Horowitz. "Our education systems are in danger of becoming cogs in the machine of commerce, but Futa criticised commercially-focused schooling, and insisted that students should be taught to criticise rather than conform to their societies. He believed in the free play of the mind, and that's why so many Western scholars like myself travelled to Tonga to work with him, despite all the sacrifices involved."

This year education has become the subject of intense political debate in New Zealand, as unions, parents and the government argue over ideas like national standards, school league tables, and school zoning. By showing us Futa Helu's bold experiment in schooling, Tongan Ark can help broaden and enrich discussions about the New Zealand education system.

The Kiwi scholar and poet Scott Hamilton has written an introduction and afterword to Futa Helu's essays about Tongan poetry. Hamilton admits that, until a few years ago, he didn't think much about Tonga, and had never heard of Helu. Hamilton's attitude changed, he explains, when he realised that "Tonga, with its history of successfully resisting colonisation in the nineteenth century and remaining independent, and 'Atenisi, with its empahsis on the fusion of the best of European and Polynesian cultures, had a lot to offer New Zealanders. In New Zealand we talk a lot about biculturalism, about reconciling Maori and Pakeha cultures, but Futa Helu made biculturalism a reality" Hamilton says. "He is able to say fascinating things not only about Tongan but about palangi poets, because he understands both traditions, and because his double understanding gives him an unusual perspective."

Tongan Ark will play at the Sky City Theatre at a quarter past four on August the 4th. After the film has finished, a function will be held in the Wintergarden lounge of the nearby Civic Theatre, where Tongan dancers and singers will perform, a discussion of Futa Helu and his ideas will take place, and copies of On Tongan Poetry will go on sale.

Public Films http://www.publicfilms.co.nz/
Atuanui Press/Titus Books http://titus.co.nz/

Visit the Tongan Ark facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tongan-Ark/121780031235309
to follow discussions about the film.

The perils of blurbing

A couple of months ago I got an e mail from a frustrated Paul Janman, who was preparing his feature length documentary film Tongan Ark for DVD release. Paul had been working hard, and he had almost everything - subtitles, special features, cover design - ready for the manufacturers. But he couldn't, despite hours of effort, come up with a short blurb to slap on the back of his DVD case.

Paul had spent years making Tongan Ark, had talked about the film repeatedly on television and on the radio, and had travelled with it to festivals around the Pacific. He was bewildered that now, at the final stage of his project, he couldn't find a handful of sentences to sum up his masterpiece.

I volunteered to draft a blurb, thinking that I could finish the task in the time it takes me to write a short e mail, but quickly became as flummoxed as Paul. I filled a couple of pages with words, then realised that I had written far too much, and hadn't described more than the opening scenes of Paul's film. I started again, determined to summarise rather than describe, and soon found myself using the sort of cliches - 'dazzling images', 'piercing insights' and so on - that infest the book and film review sections of Time magazine.

I shouldn't have been surprised that it was so difficult to write a blurb for Tongan Ark.

Anecdotes I've heard from Masters and Doctoral students, as well as my own painful experiences, suggest to me that the most difficult part of a thesis is the abstract that must precede the text. Thesis writers seem invariably to leave their abstract until last, when the torments of the chapter on theory and the survey of previous literature and the straggling bibliography are out of the way. By then, though, their very familiarity with their subject makes a quick summary of that same subject remarkably difficult.

An abstract or blurb should be like an aerial photograph of a landscape, showing outlines and especially important details - the shape of a coast, the dark sprawl of a town, the bend of a river - and avoiding the cluttered views of the earthbound. By the time they finish their labours, though, writers and film makers too often feel like they are sinking in a swamp of detail, rather than soaring above their subjects.

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I was often involved in promoting Tongan Ark, and often contributed to the discussions that the film began. I wrote a rambling review of the rough cut of the movie, hosted a test screening and discussion in my living room, and sat on a panel organised for the premiere of the final cut at the 2012 Auckland film festival. Like Paul, I was probably far too familiar with the film.

The normal difficulty created by familiarity was perhaps compounded by the complexity of Tongan Ark. Like Tongan society, the film is beset by paradoxes, and prone to swift changes of mood. Its hero is an opera fan as well as a connoisseur of traditional Tongan dance, a monarchist and a republican, and an otherworldy aesthete as much as a political activist.

Here is the text that I produced for the back of Tongan Ark after a good deal of scratching. Paul has coupled my blurb with short quotes from the New Zealand Herald film critic Peter Calder, and from some bloke named Giovanni Tiso.

Tongan Ark is a film about tiny islands and big ideas. It takes us to 'Atenisi, a poor but vibrant university in the Kingdom of Tonga, where the veteran philosopher and opera buff Futa Helu and his talented but eccentric staff teach Greek philosophy alongside Polynesian dance, and advocate both freedom of thought and a concern for tradition. 

Helu founded his school to help reform Tongan society, and his work as a social critic has earned him the nickname 'the Socrates of Tonga'. But when a riot erupts outside the school gates, the crises of contemporary Tongan society become the crises of 'Atenisi. State repression, poverty, and violence all threaten the future of Futa Helu's school. 

Tongan Ark is a film for the senses, as well as the mind. Director Paul Janman introduces Western audiences to the lush and troubled landscapes of the Kingdom of Tonga, and also to the richness of Tongan intellectual life. 

You can buy a DVD copy of Tongan Ark here. You can watch a trailer for the film here.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Boarding the Ark

The high-ceilinged white rooms of Artspace are inhospitable at the best of times, but they seemed particularly vast and bleak last week, because some fastidious cleaner or ferociously minimalist curator had emptied the Karangahape Road gallery of the dour installations it normally holds. The New Zealand Film Archive lodges in the same building as Artspace, and seems to share its neighbour's frosty way with design. After turning up to the Archive to watch a preview of Paul Janman's feature-length documentary Tongan Ark, I was ushered into a room with walls so pale they seemed to glow, even after lights had been dimmed and Paul's film had begun to play. The images in the opening frames of Tongan Ark - a wave sloshing on a reef, coconut trees leaning into a tropical wind, schoolkids chasing pigs through a plot of taro - were so warm and sensuous that they seemed in danger of melting the room that held them.

Made for a mere thirty thousand dollars, half of which was provided by Creative New Zealand, Janman's film is a study of Futa Helu, Tonga's most famous intellectual, and the 'Atenisi Institute, the penurious but profoundly influential private university Helu founded in 1966. As a student at the University of Auckland in the early noughties Janman met 'Okusi Mahina, a Tongan anthropologist with a patriarch's beard, a villager orator's deep voice, and a passion for the nose flute. Mahina had begun his serious education at 'Atenisi, and he told Janman and his other students the story of the institution and its founder.

Mahina explained that Futa Helu had been a brilliant young man from the island of Foa, in Tonga's Ha'apai archipelago, when he was sent to the University of Sydney in the 1950s. In Sydney Helu soon formed a bond with John Anderson, a maverick ex-Trotskyist philosopher with a liking for controversy and a love of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus.

After returning to Tonga in the early '60s Helu disappointed the country's elite by refusing to take a prestigious government job. Instead, he founded a kava circle in the capital Nuku'alofa, where he discoursed with curious locals about Greek philosophy and Tongan politics. Away from the kava bowl Helu tutored young Tongans in subjects as different as mathematics and English, and it was with the help of these students that he raised a set of classrooms on the swampy western outskirts of Nuku'alofa.

After hearing about Helu's dream of fusing Polynesian and European cultures, and learning about the idealistic young men and women who had left well-funded Western universities to earn subsistence wages teaching and studying with the great man, Paul Janman knew that he had to make his own journey to 'Atenisi.

When he arrived in Nuku'alofa to begin a stint at 'Atenisi, though, Janman was puzzled and disappointed. There was no committee to greet him at the gates of the school, and no obvious curriculum for him to teach.

Over the coming weeks and months, as he submitted to the rhythms and rituals of 'Atenisi life, drinking kava with other staff members, discussing Heraclitus and the problems of Tongan society with Futa Helu under a banyan tree, and reading and rereading the small selection of books in the university's humid library, Janman began to understand the way 'Atenisi worked, and the role it had come to play in Tongan life. Like his Greek heroes, Futa Helu was a thinker nourished by a pre-industrial society, a society which lacked the modern distinctions between work and leisure, public and private life, and the arts and the sciences. Like Socrates or Plato, Helu had turned his life into a series of relaxed yet earnest dialogues. He saw disagreement and critique as an essential route to human progress. New employees, eager students, journalists, pro-democracy activists, trade unionists, and Tongan royals all came to the door of his shabby office, or sat down at his kava circle, but anyone who asked him easy questions or sought from him soundbite-sized quotes was invariably disappointed.

As a devotee of Heraclitus, the philosopher of change and bewilderment, Helu had little enthusiasm for definitive answers and snappy slogans. As an advocate of dialogue between Western and Tongan cultures and pre-modern and modern ideas, he had a vested interest in upsetting, or at least complicating, the presuppositions of pushy palangi journalists and smug Tongan nobles.

Under Helu's watch, 'Atenisi became an island within an island, a zone of freedom for both palangi intellectuals tired of the commercialisation and instrumentalisation of Western universities and for young Tongans - dropouts, artists, enemies of the monarchy, petty criminals - unable to accept unquestioningly the hierarchies and regulations of their society. Paul Janman's years at 'Atenisi changed both his thinking and his teaching. The highly structured, meticulously argued essays he had written at the University of Auckland gave way to freer, more meditative texts, which were sometimes written in verse as well as prose. Janman grew accustomed to teaching outside as well as inside the classroom, so that he might find himself helping his students hang out their washing or feed their pigs at the same time that he helped them analyse Don Quixote or Moby Dick.

In Tongan Ark, Janman tries to share with us the bewilderment he felt during his first weeks and months at 'Atenisi, as well as the appreciation he gradually developed for the place. The opening twenty minutes of the film offer us a jumble of impressions, as we arrive at 'Atenisi and are given a brusque tour of the institution. We see staff members giggling around a table in a run-down room, as they discuss some aspect of an impenetrable curriculum. We watch students gathering outside a classroom, and try to decipher their strange patois, which mixes African-American slang with Tongan phrases and pieces of the old-fashioned version of English still taught in Tongan primary and secondary schools. We see skinny dogs patrolling the rutted road that leads to 'Atenisi, a pig roasting over a fire in the school grounds, and staff sipping kava. We see an elderly Futa Helu, wedged between a Greek vase and what looks like a polystyrene copy of one of the pillars of the Parthenon, explaining that as he "gets older" he "goes back more and more to the old Greeks" for inspiration. We wonder how the film is going to bring these fragments together. In the short talk he gave to introduce Tongan Ark, Janman explained that he had tried to organise his movie not with a linear narrative or a logical argument but "around a series of paradoxes". Such a structure is, Janman suggested, appropriate to the dialogic practice of Futa Helu and his Greek progenitors.

And, sure enough, after its chaotic first twenty minutes, Tongan Ark presents us with a series of contradictions. We see Helu proclaiming, in the midst of the dilapidated campus he built, that philosophy is "a search for permanence", and then observe him quoting Heraclitus' dictum that nothing is constant except change. We hear Helu calling for the fusion of Greek and Polynesian cultures, and then observe him presiding over one of 'Atenisi's ebullient graduation ceremonies, where he warns his audience not to begin a Tongan dance until a performance of Western classical music has finished. "Let's do European things the European way, then Tongan things the Tongan way", snaps the irritated prophet of cross-cultural exchange, as the graduands sitting behind him giggle. We see Helu gravely describing Dutch culture, with its penchant for order and efficiency, as "problematic", before praising the contribution that Kek, a bearded, long-haired Dutch mathematician with a taste for extravagant earrings and bright dresses, has made as a teacher at 'Atenisi. We asked not to resolve but to ponder these paradoxes.

The structure of Tongan Ark may owe as much to Polynesian culture as to Heraclitean paradox. Despite his passion for Greece, Futa Helu was a deeply Polynesian thinker, whose knowledge of Tongan dance, music, poetry and tapa saw him act as an advisor to everyone from ethnologists doing research in the villages of Tongatapu to state administrators planning the elaborate dances and feasts which accompany the coronations of Tongan Kings.

As Helu himself notes more than once in his essays and talks, there is a non-linear quality to much Polynesian literature and art. Polynesian oral traditions feature culture heroes and recurring symbolic deeds, not historical characters and discrete events. Polynesian religions emphasised the circular nature of time, not the inevitable end of time beloved of Abrahamic faiths. 'Okusi Mahina tried to sum up Tongan ways of seeing the world and its history when he said that his people "walk forward into the past and backwards into the future at the same time".

Both palangi and indigenous film makers have struggled to find ways of representing the special quality of much Polynesian art and thought. In the fascinating notebook he kept during the making of Tangata Whenua, the 1977 series that brought Maori history and tradition to New Zealand television screens for the first time, a young Michael King explained that he had learned to 'discard notions of time and relevance', and instead approach his subject matter in 'slow concentric circles'. Janman's abandonment of conventional narrative and argument means that Tongan Ark arguably operates in a similar manner, returning repeatedly to the same people and the same topics, so that they gradually become more comprehensible.

The first time we watch Futa Helu laud the ancient Greeks his enthusiasm seems peculiar to us, given his position as the head of a struggling school on a small island in Western Polynesia; by the time he returns to the subject much later in the movie, we have come to appreciate the similarities between ancient Greece and agrarian Tonga, and the parallels between Helu's love of dialogue and the practice of garrulous Greek controversialists like Socrates and Diogenes. We learn not treat Helu's sometimes gnomic, sometimes outrageous statements not as isolated propositions, but as moments in an ongoing meditation.

Our understanding of 'Atenisi's students also grows as Tongan Ark unfolds. As Janman's camera moves through the plantations of Tongatapu and the suburbs of Nuku'alofa, panning disconsolately from the shacks of the poor to the vast residences of royals and church ministers, we come to appreciate the complex, overlapping worlds which young Tongans are expected to navigate in the twenty-first century. We realise that their eclectic vocabularies and varied mannerisms are a response to the demands of living in a society where different moral codes and modes of production contend.

Despite its meandering pace and sometimes abstruse digressions, Tongan Ark relays an urgent message. The film shows how Futa Helu repeatedly contrasted the 'critical education' offered at 'Atenisi with the 'education for submissiveness' which he perceived in many Pacific schools and universities. Helu was an inveterate critic of both the church-run high schools of Tonga, which he regarded as little more than indoctrination centres, and the University of the South Pacific, which he considered far too interested in the economic outcomes of learning.

American sociologist Michael Horowitz, who was the Director of 'Atenisi from 2008 until 2010, expands on Helu's points when he condemns the 'commercial' mindset of Western societies and the business-driven curricula of many Western universities. Horowitz, who studied with Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and was involved in the left-wing counterculture of that era, sees 'Atenisi as an oasis of critical thinking and anti-materialism. He thinks that the problems which have beset Helu's university - discrimination from both Tongan governments and Western universities, criticism from Tongan royals and church leaders, the indifference of the increasing numbers of young middle class Tongans who see education only as a route to wealth - are the inevitable consequences of "swimming against a strong stream".

The eeriest of the paradoxes in Tongan Ark occurs near the middle of the film, where Heraclitus' vision of fire as the essential element of the universe, and therefore as a force for creation as well as destruction, is juxtaposed with Janman's footage of the blazes which destroyed most of downtown Nuku'alofa on the
16th of November 2006, when a pro-democracy protest by young Tongans turned into a deadly riot. Tongans talk about '16/11' in the same fearful, bewildered tones that Americans use to discuss the events of the September the 11th, 2001. In Tongan Ark, a number of 'Atenisians cite the torching of central Nuku'alofa as evidence that a mixture of capitalist globalisation and authoritarian tradition have created a profound political and social crisis in Tonga. The thought of Futa Helu, with its critique of both unrestrained capitalism and unreasoning tradition, and its attempt to find a balance between Western and Polynesian ways of life, is offered as an antidote to Tonga's problems. But Janman never makes his attitude to the riot of 16/11 explicit, and it is possible to interpret his film's references to Heraclitean fire as suggestions that the events of that day were somehow necessary and regenerative. After his film had ended, Janman was joined by 'Okusi Mahina and Michael Horowitz, and the three men invited questions from the audience, which included many 'Atenisi graduates as well as a number of palangi artists and intellectuals. After several former students of Futa Helu had paid tribute to the man, Mahina made a long statement which included both praise and criticism of his old mentor. Noting the title of Paul Janman's movie, Mahina called Helu the "Noah of Tonga". Like Noah, Helu had constructed, in the face of widespread mockery, a vessel which was capable of rescuing his compatriots from the "high waters" of chaos and irrationality. Mahina noted with a chuckle that the analogy with Noah was especially appropriate, because of Helu's role in helping raise and maintain the buildings on 'Atenisi's campus. More than once Professor Helu had taken advantage of a break between lectures to climb a ladder and hammer a few nails into a creaking roof!

But Mahina went on to argue that Helu and some of his proteges - the anthropologist Opeti Taliai, for example, who appears several times in Tongan Ark - have at times been too uncritical of the Western intellectual tradition, and insufficiently attentive to Tongan ways of interpreting the world. Mahina was sceptical about the claim, made several times in Janman's movie, that Tongan notions of tapu were designed to protect the power of the country's religious and political elites. Mahina suggested that this interpretation of tapu reflects the crude functionalism of Eurocentric anthropology, rather than a real understanding of Tongan society. He argued that the distinctions tapu makes - between clean and unclean objects, sacred and profane places, and so on - were ways in which Tongans "constituted their reality". Tapu offered, in other words, a way of making sense of the natural and human worlds, by dividing and regulating their manifold details. It had not been not, Mahina insisted, a mere political ploy. Mahina's criticisms of Helu reflect the sustained effort he has made to differentiate his thought from that of his old teacher. Over the last decade or so Mahina has gradually developed what he calls the 'ta va theory of space and time', which aims to fuse concepts drawn from traditional Tongan culture with elements of Western philosophical tradition. A dozen or so PhD students have been busying themselves deploying the ta va theory in their research, and some of them accompanied Mahina to the preview of Tongan Ark. Opeti Taliai, who is reportedly holed up in the countryside north of Auckland writing a huge book about Tongan history, dissents from some of the key tenets of the ta va theory. Taliai had agreed to come to the preview of Janman's film, but was forced to withdraw from the event at the last minute.

The Kiwi classicist Ted Jenner has suggested that the fragmentation of the 'Atenisians school of thought parallels the diffusion of ancient Greek intellectual movements - of the Pythagoreans, for instance - in the aftermath of their founders' deaths. Perhaps the fragmentation of an intellectual movement is a sign not of weakness but of dynamism, and of a healthy hostility to dogma.

In a typically long-winded contribution to the discussion that followed the showing of Tongan Ark, I argued that, whatever the ultimate fate of 'Atenisi University, thinkers like Helu, Mahina, and Taliai deserve to be studied outside as well as inside Tongan society. Just as intellectuals like Marcuse and Benjamin transcended their connection to the bricks and mortar of the Frankfurt Institute, so the 'Atenisians have an importance which transcends the institution Helu founded. With their dream of fusing Polynesian and European cultures, their opposition to both hidebound tradition and globalised capitalism, and their rejection of commercially driven education, the 'Atenisi thinkers have much to teach us in the twenty-first century.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

'Atenisi looks ahead

[The forward march of Paul Janman's Tongan Ark, which tells the story of Futa Helu and the university he founded in the swamps of Nuku'alofa, has continued lately, with screenings before appreciative audiences in Mangere, Christchurch, and Hamilton, and a rave review from Peter Calder in the New Zealand Herald. 

Paul is taking his film to Auckland's Central Art Gallery and to the Wellington Film Archive later this month, and Briar March, the creator of a remarkable documentary about the tiny and endangered Polynesian atoll of Takuu, is rumoured to be organising a showing in a perilous location on Auckland's wild west coast. Next month Paul will be taking Tongan Ark home, by holding an open air screening of the film in Nuku'alofa. That should be a night to remember. 

Tongan Ark ends in 2010, when Futa Helu's death placed the future of 'Atenisi in jeopardy. It is good to be able to record that 'Atenisi has weathered the crisis of Helu's passing, and is now looking forward to the future with confidence. This press release, which is being distributed to audiences of Tongan Ark, describes 'Atenisi's plans for 2013. Who else feels like a little study and some kava drinking in the winterless north?]

Tonga's unique 'Atenisi Institute looks forward to 2013

Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute is preparing for a busy and productive 2013, as it benefits from a wave of positive publicity.

Founded by the philosopher Futa Helu in 1963, 'Atenisi, whose name is Tongan for Athens, is the only tertiary institution in the Pacific which is independent of both state and religious authority. 'Atenisi has trained some of Tonga's most distinguished intellectuals, and been at the heart of the country's pro-democracy movement.

Because of its unusual, relaxed ambience, its involvement in important political and social struggles, and its emphasis on creating a dialogue between Polynesian and European traditions, 'Atenisi has over the years also attracted many important palangi intellectuals and artists as teachers and supporters.

Thousands of Kiwis have learned about the existence of the 'Atenisi Institute for the first time this year, thanks to Paul Janman's acclaimed documentary film Tongan Ark, which tells the story of Futa Helu and the school he founded. Tongan Ark played to capacity audiences at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and is now in demand at academic conferences and community festivals around the country. In a review published recently in the New Zealand Herald, Peter Calder called Janman's film 'absorbing', and described Futa Helu's ideas as 'thrillingly fresh'.

The Atenisi Foundation for Performing Arts has capitalised on the success of Tongan Ark by touring New Zealand and giving shows which blend European and Tongan music and dance.

This year has also seen the publication in New Zealand of a selection of Futa Helu's essays about poetry, and an extended discussion of his life and thought in a special issue of one of New Zealand's leading literary journals.

The new interest in 'Atenisi and Futa Helu reflects their relevance in the twenty-first century. Paul Janman argues that 'Atenisi's interest in blending Polynesian and European thinking and culture "appeals to people looking for a model of healthy biculturalism".

The sociologist and novelist Dr Michael Horowitz, who has taught for years at 'Atenisi, says that the institution contrasts pleasantly with some of the large-scale, business-focused universities in his native America. 'Atenisi is a small university in a poor country, but I feel free here, because I can teach free from commercial imperatives" Horowitz says. "The small classes and dialogues with students around the kava bowl make me feel I'm back in ancient Greece, in the school of Socrates or Plato. 'Atenisi is a cultural as well as intellectual experience."

In 2013 Dr 'Opeti Taliai will take up the post of Dean of 'Atenisi. After getting an undergraduate degree from 'Atenisi, Taliai went on to earn a PhD in anthropology from Massey University and to teach at both Massey. "Futa Helu was my first and greatest teacher" 'Opeti says. "He cracked open the shell of my mind and taught me to think critically. I want to carry on that tradition."

Under the leadership of Dr Taliai, 'Atenisi will be offering courses in the history and sociology of the Pacific, Tongan language, dance, and literature, Greek and European philosophy, and other subjects. "I believe 'Atenisi has an unusual combination of qualities" Dr Taliai says. "We are positioned in the heart of Polynesia, but we are open to the intellectual traditions of Europe. We are passionate about both Polynesian culture and the sort of critical thinking that the ancient Greeks practiced."

Dr Taliai has recruited a number of new teachers, including the sociologist and cultural and political commentator Dr Scott Hamilton. Hamilton did his PhD at the University of Auckland, and his thesis, which considered the work of the English thinker EP Thompson, was issued last year by Manchester University Press. Hamilton will combine his duties at 'Atenisi with research into Tonga's rich intellectual heritage.

"'Atenisi appeals to me in a way that larger, much better-funded universities don't" Hamilton says. "The huge role the institution has played in changing Tongan society is an inspiring example of the effect intellectuals can have in the real world. Tonga is right next door to New Zealand, yet a lot of palangi Kiwi intellectuals haven't been aware of what it has to offer. That should change."

'Atenisi's academic year begins in February, with enrolment and orientation. Lectures begin on February the 25th, and the first semester ends in mid-June. Enrolment for second semester classes is scheduled for the 15th to the 19th of July, and the second semester runs from the 22nd of July until the 28th of November.

For information on enrolling at 'Atenisi contact Sisi'uno Langi-Helu at sisiunohelu@gmail.com

To watch parts of Tongan Ark and see where the film is showing, visit http://www.tonganark.net and facebook

From my lounge to the big time

There's a long road from my lounge, with its piles of half-read books and its artfully stained couches and its dinky pre-digital television, to the Sky City and Civic theatres, with their plush seats and vast screens and intricate sound systems. It has only taken six or so months, though, for Paul Janman and his movie Tongan Ark to make the journey from a shabby suburban room to the film temples of central Auckland.

Last January Paul hung a white bedsheet on the wall of my lounge and aimed an early version of Tongan Ark at it, while half a dozen or so of my dodgy mates nibbled sausages and pork chops and sipped beers.

Now Tongan Ark has been accepted for this year's Auckland International Film Festival, and will screen on August the 4th at the seven-hundred-seat Sky City Theatre. Paul plans to hold a post-screening function featuring opera singers, dancers, anthropologists, and poets in the Civic Theatre's lustrous Wintergarden lounge (check out that poster for more details). Paul's film has also been selected for Wellington's International Film Festival, which is held a little later in August.

After deciding to tell the story of the 'Atenisi Institute, a private university built in Tonga by the visionary intellectual and pro-democracy campaigner Futa Helu, Paul shot hundreds of hours of film. He managed to get hours of interviews of Helu in the can before the great man died in 2010, he talked to other staff and to students at 'Atenisi, and he shot a whole hour of electrifying footage after being caught up in the riot that levelled much of downtown Nuku'alofa in November 2006.

And Paul didn't only have his own footage to draw on: while working at 'Atenisi he discovered piles of VHS cassettes mouldering in a cupboard there. After taking these ancient artefacts home and cleansing them of cockroaches and dust he discovered music, poetry, and dance by the 'Atenisi Foundation for Performing Arts, as well as old graduation ceremonies full of oratory and laughter.

Although Paul had held a successful preview of Tongan Ark at the Auckland Film Archive near the end of 2011, he was still spending hours in the cutting room at the beginning of 2012, and he wasn't ready to accept all of the praise that was offered to his film after its lounge room debut. Paul was worried about the length of Tongan Ark.

Now and then a very long film makes a splash. Last year, for instance, a group of Helsinki artists won plaudits after their movie Modern Times Forever, which runs for ten full days, was played at a local film festival. Paul, though, doubts that Kiwis have the patience of Finns, who after all are used to waiting out weeks of midwinter darkness and symphonies by Sibelius, and has worked hard to reduce his film to what he considers a watchable length. The version of Tongan Ark he showed on my lounge room wall was shorter than the version which had played at the Film Archive; the version which has been accepted for the Auckland Film Festival is tighter still.

I must admit to having mixed feelings about Paul's success in breaking into Auckland's film fest. The generous part of me is delighted for him, but my selfish side is annoyed at the extra work he's causing me.

Early this year I helped Titus Books get funding from Creative New Zealand to publish a volume of Futa Helu's essays about Tongan poetry. I'd spotted Helu's essays in an old magazine called Fai Kava, and had thought they'd make an excellent introduction not just to traditional Tongan verse but to Helu's ideas about the necessity of culture-crossing and the superiority of the 'play of the mind' over dogmatic thinking. I loved the way that the essays leaped without warning from Polynesia to Europe, as Helu invoked one of his beloved Greek philosophers, or compared an ancient Tongan poet to Milton or Blake.

After Creative New Zealand had given On Tongan Poetry the thumbs up, Titus boss Brett Cross had planned to bring the book out near the end of the year. Once Paul's film cracked the festival, though,  Sisi'uno Helu, Futa's daughter and literary executor, felt that it would be nice to have the book in August. Brett agreed with her, and for the last week or so I've been scrambling to help him prepare Helu's texts for publication by hunting down typos, commissioning forewords and a cover, and tidying up my 2010 essay about 'Atenisi so that it can act as a sort of afterword.

With Brett cracking the whip, On Tongan Poetry will be available at that Wintergarden function on the evening of August the fourth. We hope that it will complement Tongan Ark, and help to introduce more Kiwis to Futa Helu. We'll see you at that Wintergarden kava bowl...

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Taking the Ark home

Over the past year or so this blog has documented the career of Paul Janman's movie Tongan Ark, from its first, experimental showing at the Auckland office of the New Zealand Film Archive through its screening in my lounge before a garrulous audience of palangi writers to its official premiere in front of a full house at the Auckland International Film Festival.

Late last month Paul Janman took the Ark home, to the campus of  'Atenisi Institute on the scruffy western fringes of Nuku'alofa. Paul's movie tells the story of the triumphs and travails of 'Atenisi and its visionary, disputatious founder Futa Helu, and many of the school's old boys and girls turned up to screenings in Niu Sila. For the 'Atenisians who remain in Tonga, though, the film had only existed as a series of reviews and a couple of clips on Vimeo.

Paul had intended to take Ark on a tour of several of Tonga's many islands in November, but logistical problems, including the apparent absence of a single movie screen in the Kingdom, forced him to postpone that venture. Determined to show his film at least in Tonga's capital city, Paul packed a movie projector and an old rolled-up advertising hoarding in his luggage, flew north, and, with the help of some students, hung his improvised screen off one of 'Atenisi's larger buildings.

For five nights in a row, Tongan Ark played under the stars on the 'Atenisi campus. Audiences unfolded deckchairs, or sprawled on the grass, or sat in their cars. One night Paul noticed a shiny vehicle with the number plate PM2, and observed Lord Tu'ivakano, Tonga's leader since the stolen election of 2010, sitting inside with a cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Paul sent me this message, along with some photos (click to expand them) from the Nuku'alofa screenings of Tongan Ark:

Here is a selection of images from the screening. There is one which shows me talking on screen because I showed a clip of the Auckland premiere performance and Q and A. Part way through someone turned on the lights behind and we could see the monster truck billboard on the back of the screen. There is another one which is quite extraordinary where some trees pop up over the arched walls behind the viewing audience - it almost looks like an island in a turquoise sea. Notice also the Prime Minister's gold Toyota Highlander in another shot.

Early next year Tongan Ark will island-hop from Tongatapu to Tahiti, and compete in the Pacific International Film Festival.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

A Heraclitean lesson for Te Radar's team

TV One's Good Morning show had never seen anything quite like it. Good Morning screens on weekdays between nine o'clock and noon, and tends to be dominated by infomercials for skin and hair products, earnest panel discussions about the latest career moves of cultural icons like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton, and carefully rehearsed 'jam sessions' by light jazz bands that look like they earn their living noodling in the bars and restaurants of cruise ships.

Yesterday, though, Good Morning's pair of schmaltzy hosts found the time to interview Paul Janman about Tongan Ark, the profile of the Tongan intellectual and pro-democracy activist Futa Helu which will premiere on Saturday week at Auckland's International Film Festival. Like the salesmen for shampoos and face lotions who appear so often on Good Morning, Janman was supposed to smile, tell an inane joke or two, and plug his product with a couple of cliched soundbites.

Instead, though, Paul launched into a discussion of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, whose ideas were one of the inspirations for Helu and his colleagues at Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute. After a few seconds of Paul's discussion, one of the hosts of Good Morning leaned back on his heavily cushioned couch with an expression of bewilderment and pain. You could almost feel his brain hurting, as it tried to deal with the unaccustomed demands of thought.

Heraclitus is hardly a marginal figure in the history of philosophy. Although his writing survives only as a set of tantalising fragments, it has excited scores of important thinkers besides Futa Helu. Heraclitus' view of the universe as a place of constant, uncontrollable change - a perspective summed up in his claim that 'we do not step into the same river twice' - alarmed Aristotle, who wanted to tidy reality into categories and laws, but appealed to revolutionary thinkers like Hegel and Marx. Lenin turned to Heraclitus to try to understand the chaos of the First World War. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought that the Greek's fragments expressed the wildness and grandeur of God. Bob Dylan put Heraclitus' line 'The way up is the way down' into one of his most famous songs. For the Good Morning show, though, which normally associates philosophy with tacky self-help books and the psychobabble of celebrities like Justin Bieber, Heraclitus was strong and strange stuff.

Even after he'd been steered onto other aspects of his film by his panicked hosts, Paul Janman refused to play the normal game of Good Morning interviewees. He talked about Tonga's dramatic recent political history and its place in his film, but declined to offer any pat explanation for events like the 2006 riot which destroyed half of downtown Nuku'alofa. Perhaps hoping for anecdotes from the set of Shortland Street, which has been a refuge for many Kiwi auteurs in need of a fast buck, one of the presenters of Good Morning asked Janman about his experiences "in front of the camera". In reply, Janman explained that he had studied the tradition of street clowning with a Brazilian master of the art, and that he and his teacher had wandered the streets of Auckland disguised as vagrants, putting on shows for the public. Once again, the hosts of Good Morning appeared bewildered.

It is hard not to compare Paul Janman's performance on national television yesterday with some comments left on this blog last week by Peter Bell, the boss of the New Zealand Directors' Guild, a scriptwriter for Shortland Street, and the producer of the just-concluded television series Radar Across the Pacific.

Bell had been drawn to this blog by the posts I'd made describing the factual errors, oversights, and racist cliches which were a part of every episode of Radar Across the Pacific. But Bell wasn't interested in rebutting any of my charges against the show and its presenter, the comedian Te Radar. Instead of denying the faults of the series he produced, he argued that they were all that could be expected, given the severe demands which television imposes upon documentary makers. It was simply not possible, Bell insisted, for Radar Across the Pacific to tell the true story of New Zealand's interference in societies like Samoa and Kiribati in any detail, or to avoid cliches about happy-go-lucky Islanders:

Yes it would be great to do an in-depth programme looking at the issue of colonialism in the pacific. But could you get someone to fund it? Would you get it on at 7:30 pm? I doubt it. 

A few hours after Bell made his comments the Cook Islands instalment of Radar Across the Pacific was broadcast. As he pottered about the islands of Rarotonga and Atiu, Te Radar didn't make a single reference to the sixty-four years the Cooks spent as a colony of New Zealand. He didn't mention the attempts by Kiwi administrators to break up customary land titles on the Cooks, to destroy the traditional role of chiefs, and to turn the country into a plantation for palangi capitalists, and he didn't, of course, mention the campaign of resistance that the Cook Islanders waged - a campaign that Dick Scott decribes in his book Years of the Poo-bah.

Te Radar did, however, find time to complain about the 'appalling' corruption of the Cooks' post-independence governments, and to suggest that the country is not capable of looking after all of its own affairs. Te Radar and Pter Bell might as well have made a documentary about the problems of contemporary South Africa which avoided all references to the apartheid era.

Paul Janman was one of several commenters who were unimpressed by the self-defence Peter Bell made on this blog. Replying to Bell, Janman complained that:

  The worrying thing though is as President of the Screen Director’s Guild, Bell nonetheless seems to be quite unaware of the tropes that he has been wielding in the Radar series. Not only were there omissions but there were also damaging stereotypes. You only need to see the TV Guide front page of Radar in a lei and pretending to play the ukulele in front of a Pacific beach to realise that there is very little serious reflection on the complexities of the contemporary Pacific...The best thing for Bell to do at this point is to acknowledge the errors and damage done, learn and move on... 

Janman's refusal to dumb down his act on Good Morning was clearly consistent with his criticisms of Peter Bell last week. But an artist's talk is only as good as their walk, and we have to turn to Tongan Ark to discover Janman's alternative to Bell's sort of documentary.

It seems to me that Tongan Ark's non-linear narrative, uncompromising focus on difficult ideas, and commitment to biculturalism make it a very different beast from Radar Across the Pacific. Peter Bell and Te Radar spent a few days in each of the Pacific islands their series discussed; Janman spent years in Tonga working on his movie. As 'Okusitino Mahina noted when Tongan Ark was previewed late last year, the film's radical use of space and time shows the influence of both Heraclitus and traditional Tongan culture. Where Te Radar steered away from Pacific Islanders who used their own languages instead of English, Janman's film is saturated in Polynesian speech and song.

According to Peter Bell's logic, Tongan Ark should be unpalatable to New Zealand audiences. But Paul Janman's constant appearances in the media suggest that a mood of excitement is building ahead of the film's premiere. By contrast, Radar Across the Pacific has had a tepid reception, despite the prime time slot Peter Bell won for it on TV One. The few reviews that the series has won have tended to focus on Te Radar's crop of ginger hair, rather than the places he visited.

We should not be surprised if Tongan Ark does win a large audience in New Zealand. Despite Peter Bell's claims, Kiwis have a history of tuning in to documentaries which treat them like thinking adults. Back in the mid-'70s Barry Barclay and Michael King introduced huge numbers of New Zealanders to Maori culture and history for the first time with the television series Tangata Whenua. Barclay's later masterpiece The Feathers of Peace, a feature-length docudrama that told the tragic story of the Moriori people, also won an enthusiastic audience. James Belich's 1999 television series The New Zealand Wars became a hit despite its host's liking for military detail and his refusal to simplify nineteenth century race relations.

One of Heraclitus' most famous fragments says that 'those who seek gold dig up much earth and find little'. Peter Bell could worse than consider Heraclitus' words. By seeking commercial gold at the expense of historical truth and artistic merit he is wasting his time, and doing a disservice to New Zealand television and film audiences.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]

Futa Helu on Tongan poetry

[I'm off to Tongatapu, the sacred south, today, along with some friends. I'll be dropping in to the 'Atenisi Institute tomorrow afternoon to talk with Michael Horowitz's sociology students about Marx's late, heretical works, and then giving an informal talk tomorrow evening about what the ideas of Futa Helu and Epeli Hau'ofa can mean in a New Zealand context. During my talk I'll read from the Oceania issue of the Kiwi literary journal of brief, which appeared a few months ago, and pass around some copies of On Tongan Poetry, the book of Futa Helu's writing which Atuanui Press recently published down here.

On Tongan Poetry won't be launched officially in Tonga until November, when Tongan Ark, Paul Janman's cinematic tribute to Futa Helu, has its Nuku'alofa premiere, but I want to get some copies of the book into the hands of Helu's old collaborators at 'Atenisi. I hope that they won't complain too much about a monolingual palangi, who can't even pronounce the names of well-known Tongan islands and villages without blundering, helping to present their old teacher's lapidarian study of Tongan traditional art to the world.

Here's the introduction to On Tongan Poetry, in which I apologise for my unsuitability as editor, along with a few photos I took during my last visit to Tonga. The blog post which became the afterword to the book can be seen here. - Scott Hamilton]

This book collects six of the late Futa Helu’s essays about Tongan poetry. The piece on ‘Laumatanga, Pride of Locality, in Tongan Poetry’ was delivered at an academic conference in 1986 and included in Critical Essays: Cultural Perspectives on the South Seas, the selection of Helu’s writings published by the Journal of Pacific History in 1999. The other essays first saw the light of day in Faikava, the little literary journal that flourished in Nuku’alofa in the late 1970s and early 1980s. None of these texts has ever been published before in New Zealand, and they appear here with the assistance of Futa’s daughter Sisi’uno Langi-Helu, who has taken responsibility for his literary estate since his death in February 2010.

I might seem like a peculiar person to write an introduction and an afterword to a book about traditional
Tongan poetry. I am a palangi New Zealander who had not visited Tonga or heard about Futa Helu until 2009. Although I’ve done my best to make up for lost time over the past three years, by reading through Helu’s oeuvre, visiting the ’Atenisi Institute, the legendary university Helu founded in Nuku’alofa, and talking with many Tongan writers, I am far from being an expert on things Tongan, and my knowledge of the country’s language might politely be described as embryonic.

Over the past three years, though, I have become convinced that palangi New Zealanders need to understand both the thought of Futa Helu and the history and culture of his society. I have campaigned for the publication of these essays because I think they are a door through which palangi like myself can enter the world of Futa Helu and the world of Tonga.

As a scholar and poet, I have spent much of my time writing about New Zealand history and society, and about the history of Britain, the country that has cast such a shadow over New Zealand. Like so many Kiwi writers, I have often been preoccupied with the difficult relationship that Pakeha and Maori have had over the past couple of centuries. I’ve wondered whether the indigenous and colonising peoples of this country can ever transcend the conflicts of the past, and create a genuinely bicultural society. When I discovered Futa Helu and his ’Atenisi Institute, and Tongan society as a whole, I realised that I had found an example, on New Zealand’s very doorstep, of healthy biculturalism.

Futa Helu often proclaimed that he wanted to bring together Polynesian and European culture, and he put
his rhetoric into practice by becoming an expert on Western traditions like classical philosophy, grand opera,
and English literature, as well as Polynesian taonga like Tongan poetry, music and dance. ’Atenisi put Helu’s
words into practice by teaching Shakespeare, Plato and opera alongside Tongan history, literature, and dance.

In his splendid new movie Tongan Ark Paul Janman shows how Helu inspired many intellectuals to chuck in their well-paid jobs at First World universities and come to work for a pittance at an impoverished school on the swampy outskirts of Nuku’alofa. In an era when corporatised universities emphasise financial outcomes over scholarly values and reactionary politicians build walls around cultures, Helu’s intellectual adventure has been inspiring.

Because of his passion for free thought and free speech, Futa Helu often offended Tonga’s rulers. After Helu’s school became the headquarters of Tonga’s pro-democracy movement in the 1990s, the government banned ’Atenisi graduates from working in Tonga’s public sector. Helu’s insistence on questioning the dogmas of Tonga’s powerful churches sometimes prompted clergymen to denounce him from their pulpits.

It seems to me, though, that Futa Helu was in many ways a distinctively Tongan thinker, and that the school
he founded could only have thrived in Tonga. Tonga was the only Pacific society to avoid colonisation in the nineteenth century. Although the country suffered a long civil war in the early decades of that century, it eventually united under the leadership of King Tupou I, who created, with the help of the Wesleyan missionary turned anti-imperialist Shirley Baker, a modern state and a constitution that guaranteed Tongans liberty and land. Tupou I was able to import Western social and technological innovations into Tonga without giving up his country’s sovereignty.

Tonga’s unbroken history of independence has given its people an extraordinary confidence in their culture,
and this confidence is reflected in the scholastic success of young Tongans. Despite the very limited resources of its schools, Tonga has a literacy rate of almost one hundred percent, and produces more PhD holders per capita than any other nation in the world. Futa Helu’s love of learning, confidence in the strength of his own culture, and curiosity about the wider world were all distinctively Tongan. If Tupou I fused the best of Tongan and Western institutions, then Helu spent his long career bringing together the best of European and Polynesian art and thought. In their different ways, both men were exponents of and advocates for biculturalism.

*

The essays in this book make a good introduction to traditional Tongan poetry, and an equally fine introduction to Futa Helu’s intellectual methods. Helu guides us through the different periods and genres of Tongan verse, showing how closely the art has been connected with dance and music, and what an important role bards play in traditional Tongan society. Nobody who reads these essays can doubt the antiquity, intricacy, and seriousness of Tongan poetry.

But Helu’s texts also include numerous entertaining detours, as he discusses the ancient history of the Pacific and the literature and ideas of distant societies. I love the way that Helu leaps without warning from Polynesia to Europe, as he alludes to one of his beloved Greek philosophers, or compares an ancient Tongan poet to Milton or Blake. Helu’s biculturalism gives him rare insights into both Tongan and European literature, and his essays send me back, again and again, to writers in the English-language canon, and make me read the famous poems of that canon with new eyes.

Tonga’s traditional poetry ought to help New Zealanders think in new ways about our national literature.

The Tongan tradition of laumatanga should resonate with Kiwi poets, who have so often been preoccupied and perplexed by the challenges of putting the landscapes of their own country into verse. The Tongan tendency to bring poetry, music and dance together, and to ask dancers and musicians to improvise interpretations of the words of poets, might make New Zealand bards think in new ways about the possibilities of live performance.

*

In the decades since Futa Helu wrote the essays collected in this book Tongan poetry has continued to thrive.

Some poets, like the ’Atenisi graduate and distinguished anthropologist ’Okusitino Mahina, have continued
to work in traditional forms, and to compose for public occasions; others, including many brought up in Australasia and America as part of the Tongan diaspora, have written in English, and have aimed their work at the page as much as the stage. Karlo Mila, whose first book Dream Fish Floating was published in New Zealand to critical acclaim in 2005, is perhaps the most prominent member of this new generation. Futa Helu might be puzzled by the colloquial language, loose forms, and pop cultural references of younger Tongan poets like Mila, but he would surely recognise and applaud their adventurousness.

Youtubing Futa

Futa Helu, who died in 2010, was Tonga's most influential modern intellectual. He founded the 'Atenisi Institute, Tonga's first university, called for the melding of Polynesian and European intellectual traditions, wrote essays on topics as different as psychology and ancient Greek philosophy, and was a key figure in the pro-democracy movement which became strong in his country in the last decades of the twentieth century.

Helu may be famous in Tonga and a continuing inspiration to the many graduates of 'Atenisi who have made careers for themselves overseas, but he is little-known in New Zealand outside the Tongan community. The neglect of Helu reflects a wider indifference to Tongan culture amongst New Zealanders. Tonga is our closest neighbour and, as the only Polynesian nation to avoid colonisation, it has a unique and important history, yet it seldoms registers on our cultural radar. We are far more acquainted with literary and artistic developments in London and New York than we are with the thoughts and deeds of Tonga's creative community.

Futa Helu was an authority on aspects of European culture like ancient Greek philosophy and Italian opera, but he also maintained a continuous interest in the culture of his own country. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he published a series of essays about the history and features of Tongan poetry in the little Nuku'alofa-based magazine Fai Kava. These essays, which were complemented by a long text on the same subject delivered at a conference in the late '80s, offer English-language readers an entertaining and illuminating introduction to an ancient and still very vital Tongan artform. As he explains the origins and development of Tongan poetry, Helu supplies English-language translations and explications of numerous verses, and also offers up fascinating asides about the geography, sociology, and politics of his country. I recently helped Titus Books prepare an application to Creative New Zealand for funding to publish some of Helu's essays about Tongan poetry.

But Helu wasn't only interested in literature. He was so knowledgable about Tongan genealogy, etiquette, song, and dance that his country's leaders would often forget their opposition to his politics and call on his advice when they were planning a major public event, like the wedding of a royal or a state funeral.

While he was making Tongan Ark, the feature-length documentary about Futa Helu and 'Atenisi which has been reviewed and debated on this blog, Paul Janman collected many hours of footage of Helu working with and talking about dancers and singers. Using that magical device known as the internet, Janman is now sharing some of the remarkable footage he could not incorporate into Tongan Ark with us. Paul has established a Youtube channel to show off the work of the 'Atenisi performing arts troupe Futa created and oversaw. This film clip shows Helu introducing a performance by the 'Atenisi troupe in Wellington in 1997. With a typical lack of regard for the boundaries between intellectual discourses, Helu uses some of the terminology of physics to describe the movements of Tongan dancers. Drawing on his neo-classical philosophy of art, which equates beauty with harmony and immutability, Helu goes on to argue that the goal of Tongan dance is "to make human beings divine".

Just as the essays Helu wrote for Fai Kava make a fine introduction to Tongan poetry, so the clips Paul Janman has uploaded to Youtube expose us to Tongan dance and song in all their strangeness and splendour.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]