DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Contemporary Indigenous Women's Fiction from the Pacific: Discourses of Resistance and the (Re)Writing of Spaces of Violence and Desire
Ana Cristina Gomes da Rocha
2021 International Mention Ana Cristina Gomes da Rocha
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION
Contemporary Indigenous Women's Fiction from the Pacific:
Discourses of Resistance and the (Re)Writing of Spaces of Violence and Desire
Supervised by Dr. Belén Martín Lucas 2021
International Mention
International Doctoral School
Belén Martín Lucas DECLARES that the present work, entitled “Contemporary Indigenous Women's Fiction from the Pacific: Discourses of Resistance and the (Re)Writing of Spaces of Violence and Desire”, submitted by Ana Cristina Gomes da Rocha to obtain the title of Doctor, was carried out under her supervision in the PhD programme “Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in Advanced English Studies.” This is a joint PhD programme integrating the Universities of Santiago de Compostela (USC), A Coruña (UDC), and Vigo (UVigo). Vigo, January 21, 2020. The supervisor,
Dr. Belén Martín Lucas
Acknowledgments
Gratitude. I am grateful. Those are the expressions that best describe my state of mind when looking at this Dissertation. I am grateful that I have been always surrounded by those who never cease(d) to believe in me, by people whose love and support made this journey easier. I would like to say thanks:
To my supervisor, Dr. Belén Martín Lucas, whose kindness, wise advice, patience, and unconditional belief in me, and in this project were fundamental along the process. Thank you for holding my hand until I finally believed that I could do this. Thank you for finding meaning in my tangential ideas. Thank you for being an amazing woman whose words are always full of respect and empathy. Thank you for teaching me so much. I am grateful that our paths crossed.
To my parents, Rosa and António, and to my sister, Rita, for their unconditional love and support. Thank you for care enough not to ask when this project would be finished, but who trusted it would be finished. You are my safe harbor.
To my niece, Laura, and my goddaughter, Iara, who are too young to understand any of this but whose bright smiles and sharp curiosity make me believe that there is hope. Always hope in the future.
To my beloved friend, Sofia, my travel companion in this and in many other journeys! Thank you for your friendship, the long conversations and advice. Your encouragement meant so much. Thank you for being such a good human being and a good friend.
To Pedro Santos who embarked on this journey without questioning its destination. With you by my side, this journey has been lighter, easier and, definitely, happier. I thank you for your love, your support, and your exquisite sense of humour. I owe you my sanity, my health, and my heart. I love you.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………….. 5 Table of Contents …………………………………………………………. 7 Resumen ………………………………………………………………………… 9
Introduction: A Paradise on Earth ………………………………………. 19 0.1. Objectives ……………………………………………………. 29 0.2. Methodologies ………………………………………………… 32 0.3. Structure ……………………………………………………… 36
Chapter I: Departing, Journeying, Returning: Indigenous Cultures and Globalisation in the South Pacific Rim …………………………………… 43 1.1. Departing: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Globalisation in the South Pacific Rim …………………………………………………….. 44 1.1.1. South Pacific Narratives by Indigenous Writers: Celéstine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport, and Sia Figiel …………………. 69 1.2. Journeying across Islands: Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa……….. 72 1.2.1. Tahiti ………………………………………………….. 72 1.2.2. Hawai’i ………………………………………………... 78 1.2.3. Samoa …………………………………………………. 85 1.3. Returning to the Unsettling Ocean……………………………… 90
Chapter II: Beyond the Postcard: Célestine Hitiura Vaite and the Deconstruction of Tahitian Exotic Images ………………………………… 95 2.1. Breadfruit: Belonging, Dissidence and Joyful Resistance ……... 104 2.2. Frangipani: Empowered Motherhood ………………………… 123 2.3. Tiare: Toxic Masculinities and “Unknow Fathers” …………… 139 2.4. Chapter’s Conclusions ………………………………………… 148
Chapter III: Understanding Aloha ‘āina: Kiana Davenport and Native Hawaiian Culture ………………………………………………………….. 159 3.1. Shark Dialogues: Biocolonialism, Indigenous Ethics of Care and Cultural Survival ………………………………………………………….. 166 3.2. Song of the Exile: Militarism, Gender Violence and Healing…… 199 3.3. Chapter’s Conclusions …………………………………………. 216
Chapter IV: Searching for Light(ness): Knowledge and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Novels ……………………………………………………… 221 4.1. Where We Once Belonged: Coming of Age in a Glocalised Samoa ……………………………………………………………………... 228 4.2. Freelove: Decolonial Love, Sex, and Care ……………………... 256 4.3. Chapter’s Conclusions …………………………………………. 284
Conclusion: Hope at Sea ………………………………………………….. 289
Works Cited ……………………………………………………………… 303
Resumen
El arte, en general, y la literatura producida por autoras y autores indígenas, en particular, se han utilizado como elemento de denuncia contra la ocupación y apropiación de territorios y culturas indígenas, siendo este uno de los temas más representados en la literatura indígena del Pacífico. Las literaturas indígenas contemporáneas en el Pacífico están indisolublemente ligadas a los movimientos sociales, por lo que las narrativas incluidas para el análisis en esta Tesis Doctoral sitúan las prácticas socioculturales indígenas en un primer plano y contribuyen al debate en curso sobre los derechos de las mujeres indígenas, la ocupación de la tierra y la degradación ecológica. Se puede argumentar que la escritura indígena es una poderosa herramienta en la lucha contra el colonialismo y en los esfuerzos posteriores por deshacerse del legado del imperio y revertir la expropiación. Calificada por Albert Wendt como la literatura más joven del mundo, las narrativas producidas por las autoras estudiadas en esta tesis emergen como importantes referentes culturales, voces que ofrecen representaciones desde las que es posible calibrar el impacto de movimientos como la colonización, la hegemonía e imperialismo euroamericano, la globalización y su mercantilización de bienes y culturas. En este contexto de apropiación y sometimiento cultural, las autoras seleccionadas en este estudio no solo denuncian múltiples formas de violencia contra sus culturas y ecosistemas, sino que también contribuyen en gran medida a la comprensión de los procesos de descolonización y lucha permanente contra la violencia de género a la que muchas veces las mujeres indígenas están sujetas. Podría decirse que la literatura indígena es una parte integral de una práctica de descolonización que tiene como objetivo cuestionar y deconstruir las imágenes estereotipadas de los pueblos indígenas del Pacífico, particularmente en cuanto a los roles de género. Después de la colonización y la invasión, los misioneros y colonizadores institucionalizaron el ideal eurocristiano de la familia nuclear con construcciones binarias de género, masculino y femenino, basado en una ideología heteronormativa. Esta construcción de género comenzó a reflejar dominios y poderes masculinos y femeninos polarizados, contribuyendo a marginar, silenciar y estigmatizar la diversidad y riqueza de las distintas expresiones de género, así como a redefinir el rol de las mujeres indígenas dentro de sus sociedades. En este contexto de apropiación y sometimiento cultural, las autoras seleccionadas en este estudio, Celéstine Hitura Vaite (Tahiti), Kiana Davenport (Hawai'i) y Sia Figiel (Samoa) no solo denuncian múltiples formas de violencia contra sus culturas y ecosistemas, sino que también contribuyen en gran medida a una mayor comprensión de los procesos de descolonización y la lucha permanente contra la violencia de género a la que suelen ser sometidas las mujeres indígenas. Las tres escritoras seleccionadas para el estudio en esta tesis abordan temas sociales contemporáneos que participan en la denuncia de importantes pérdidas culturales, desigualdades de género y degradación ambiental. Además, parece claro que sus voces dentro del panorama literario de la llamada literatura del Pacífico subrayan la importancia de romper los silencios enraizados socialmente, un desafío que no solo interviene en los procesos de recuperación cultural, sino que también posibilita el empoderamiento de los sujetos femeninos. De hecho, a través de este gesto de desafío y su poder regenerativo las novelas elegidas y analizadas en los siguientes capítulos forman parte de un conjunto de prácticas de descolonización desde las que se empodera a las mujeres indígenas. Estas novelas son: Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004) y Tiare (2006) de Celéstine Hitiura Vaite; Shark Dialogues (1995) y Song of the Exile (1999) de Kiana Davenport; y Where Once We Belonged (1996) y Freelove (2016) de Sia Figiel, que se analizan en los capítulos 2, 3 y 4 respectivamente. El espacio geopolítico denominado como Polinesia (Tahiti, Hawai’i y Samoa) se representa y reconfigura desde puntos axiales que ponen énfasis en las epistemologías y cosmologías indígenas como base de procesos permanentes de descolonización cultural, territorial e identitaria. De esta manera, los textos estudiados a lo largo de esta tesis denuncian los problemas derivados del contacto entre colonizadores/as y pueblos indígenas, incluida la destrucción ecológica al tiempo que evocan formas de pertenencia cultural y transmiten el orgullo de esa misma pertenencia. Existe, por tanto, una clara apreciación de los saberes y cosmologías indígenas en los que la tradición y los saberes ancestrales se valoran de manera diametralmente opuesta a los valores del capitalismo y la globalización impuestos en las sociedades contemporáneas.
10 Durante siglos se forjaron alianzas coloniales, se trazaron nuevos mapas y el mundo cambiaba constantemente, con divisiones geográficas y económicas que cumplían los deseos de las naciones consideradas como las más poderosas. Europa y los Estados Unidos de América han expandido su poder territorial al competir por lugares estratégicos ubicados en el Océano Pacífico, tanto para asegurarse ventajosas transacciones económicas, como para expandir y desarrollar su poder militar, abrogándose la supremacía necesaria para gobernar el mundo. En consecuencia, las prácticas persistentes de acumulación de capital etiquetadas como “el patriarcado blanco-capitalista-supremacista” funcionan como una forma de coerción sobre el pueblo e, inevitablemente, también para explotar al máximo los territorios colonizados. El poder colonial se basa y depende de la subyugación / dominación de las mujeres, los pueblos indígenas, sus tierras y ecosistemas. Como resultado, el imperialismo global promovido durante el período colonial no llegó a su fin después de la descolonización de ciertas regiones, sino que experimentó cambios relevantes, convirtiéndose en algo más complejo, la globalización, que constituye un enfoque más sofisticado e influyente en las culturas y promueve la inversión, el comercio y la explotación educativa, cultural y/o económica. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths y Helen Tiffin en The Empire Writes Back (1989) explican que más de las tres cuartas partes de la población mundial viven en el mundo contemporáneo en contextos sociales, económicos y culturales moldeados por el colonialismo. Así que esta es una experiencia fundamental que también ha determinado en gran medida la forma en que las culturas de hoy se perciben e interactúan entre sí. La experiencia del colonialismo contribuyó a la (re)configuración del mundo, modificado en gran medida por la miríada de relaciones de poder que se establecieron desde el momento en que las diferentes culturas se encontraron. Tanto las sociedades colonizadoras como las colonizadas han visto transformadas sus identidades y culturas, alteradas por relaciones de poder que, aunque establecidas hace siglos, aún se perciben en las sociedades contemporáneas. Las culturas indígenas fueron objeto de proyectos coloniales que las transformaron inmediatamente en objetos de consumo, por lo que la adquisición de tierras significó también poder sobre otras naciones. Como tal, los territorios de ultramar fueron ampliamente utilizados por los imperios europeos como una
11 demostración de supremacía y pronto se emplearon como campo de pruebas para todo tipo de experimentos. La retórica colonial y neocolonial que caracterizó a las fuerzas dominantes en Europa y América se tradujo rápidamente en la colonialidad del ser (Maldonado- Torres 2008), con un gran impacto en la forma en que los pueblos indígenas perciben y viven sus culturas. Si pensamos en cómo las culturas indígenas fueron (y siguen siendo) moldeadas por el colonialismo, llegaremos inevitablemente a una construcción de género con enfoques ontológicos occidentales que refuerzan la introducción de categorizaciones binarias de las personas en sociedades que nunca antes habían pensado en estos términos. El colonialismo se tradujo, luego, en un estado permanente de colonialidad al introducir y perpetuar la clasificación social de la población mundial en términos categóricos e ideas de género, raza y clase (Lugones 2007) que tenía como objetivo destruir a los pueblos, cosmologías y comunidades indígenas. Es fundamental examinar de cerca estas formas de destrucción basadas en construcciones binarias. Los modos coloniales y globales de organización socioeconómica deben ser reexaminados en un intento por desmantelar los elementos opresores en la vida de las poblaciones indígenas. Las luchas por la integridad comunitaria son, por tanto, parte de la agenda de las escritoras seleccionadas en este estudio, ya que demuestran una preocupación absoluta por representar la vida y los valores multifacéticos de los pueblos indígenas. Si, por un lado, hablamos de imperialismo, colonialismo y militarización de determinadas islas del Pacífico (Tahiti, Hawai'i y Samoa), por otro lado, a través de sus textos literarios, las autoras estudiadas a en esta tesis buscan presentar narrativas en las que se desafían las formas hegemónicas de poder y se recuperan los conocimientos ancestrales indígenas. El imperialismo, tal como lo define Edward Said (1994), es un acto de violencia geográfica. La violencia colectiva que surge de la ocupación de territorios, el imperialismo ecológico y las guerras por los recursos naturales son parte de esa violencia geográfica a la que se refiere Said, formas de una violencia lenta e insidiosa (Nixon 2011). Los efectos del imperialismo (y, en consecuencia, de la globalización) son ampliamente abordados por estas escritoras, que intervienen en el proceso de descolonización de las mentes (Thiong'o 1981) utilizando la literatura
12 y el arte como herramientas de intervención para generar conciencia, proporcionando así perspectivas sobre la dinámica de sus culturas indígenas. Las escritoras indígenas del Pacífico, como Celéstine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport y Sia Figiel, prestan especial atención al potencial restaurador de las narrativas que a menudo escapan del ámbito de la ficción para convertirse en el medio por el cual los pueblos indígenas expresan sus preocupaciones y demandas. Funcionando como un tropo, el Pacífico puede abordarse como una construcción cultural, social y económica que ha sido relevante en el imaginario europeo desde el siglo XVI cuando los navegantes europeos iniciaron sus exploraciones marítimas (Hoskins & Nguyen 2014), siendo este momento histórico un punto de inflexión en la historia de la humanidad, vivida y percibida de manera diferente según las múltiples esferas de poder. Es, por tanto, la interseccionalidad entre género, clase y raza lo que subyace en las relaciones de poder que se establecen entre colonizadoras/es y pueblos colonizados. Teresia Teaiwa (2008) elabora extensamente sobre el impacto del colonialismo y el militarismo en la región del Pacífico y explica que el colonialismo operó de manera paradójica. Si, por un lado, los pueblos y culturas indígenas del Pacífico se han dado a conocer en el mundo occidental, por otro lado, este conocimiento ha conducido inequívocamente al sometimiento cultural, social y económico de los pueblos indígenas. Teniendo en cuenta que estas sociedades fueron sometidas a estructuras de poder distintas a las suyas, también se fueron convirtiendo progresivamente a una religión global (el cristianismo) y a procesos educativos en los que se privilegian las lenguas europeas del colonialismo. Fue, por tanto, la conjunción de poder económico, agresión militar, religión y educación lo que empujó a los pueblos del Pacífico a participar en la economía global (Teaiwa 2008). La interacción entre estos elementos puede verse, por ejemplo, en las construcciones de género y cómo las mujeres indígenas se vieron afectadas en gran medida por la heterosexualidad y los sistemas coloniales que marcan a la población en términos binarios de género (Lugones, 2007). La construcción de género fue un principio central en el proyecto colonial y los pueblos indígenas del Pacífico se vieron gravemente afectados por sistemas patriarcales heterocéntricos. En consecuencia, la mujer indígena fue considerada un obstáculo al poder imperial que
13 tuvo (y sigue teniendo) en su génesis la figura masculina dominante. Además de ser despojadas del poder, las mujeres indígenas se vieron transformadas en sujetos subordinados, o incluso en meros elementos sexuales en las nuevas sociedades donde prevalecían las formas occidentales de poder y conocimiento. Sin embargo, en el proceso de descolonización, las voces de las mujeres indígenas han demostrado tener una gran influencia en la recuperación de los conocimientos ancestrales y en la lucha contra las viejas y nuevas formas de ocupación y colonialismo. Aunque expresados de diferentes maneras, las escritoras indígenas seleccionadas para el análisis en esta tesis a menudo comparten la descripción de historias de violencia contra los pueblos indígenas y, a través de narrativas de ficción, estas escritoras denuncian los efectos persistentes del colonialismo y el imperialismo en sus sociedades y en sus ecosistemas. En consecuencia, la violencia puede ser reconocida de diferentes formas, a saber, a través de prácticas discriminatorias, como la eliminación generalizada (es decir, el genocidio) de personas y culturas, el abuso sexual, la violencia de género y también a través de representaciones hiper-sexualizadas de cuerpos que sirven como combustible para la industria turística. Las narrativas de estas tres escritoras indígenas, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport y Sia Figiel, buscan un equilibrio entre el conocimiento ancestral, las cosmologías indígenas y la construcción de sociedades contemporáneas involucradas en los asuntos planetarios a partir de la simbiosis entre estas diversas formas de conocimiento. De esta manera, elaboran un discurso crítico sobre la medida en que los pueblos indígenas participaron deliberadamente en la transformación de sus sociedades, a menudo aceptando las imposiciones occidentales. Además, estas autoras combinan estrategias de autorrepresentación que deconstruyen la imagen persistente de un estereotipo hipersexualizado, conocido como “la musa del Pacífico”, que aún está muy enraizado en los retratos contemporáneos de mujeres del Pacífico y que ha contribuido en gran medida a su silenciamiento. Para los pueblos indígenas, su pasado, presente y futuro implican vivir y participar en relaciones recíprocas, consensuadas y sostenibles con el mundo natural, lo que incluye las relaciones humanas entre sí, así como con la tierra, el
14 aire, las aguas, los paisajes y ecosistemas. En una época que actualmente se enfrenta a varios desafíos y dificultades en lo que respecta a los derechos humanos en general, y los derechos de los pueblos indígenas en particular, y que debe abordar las cuestiones de género en relación con todo tipo de violencia contra los ecosistemas (definida como ecoviolencia), parece aún más significativo contribuir a un debate que tiene como objetivo discutir todos los temas antes mencionados. En este sentido, esta Tesis Doctoral intenta participar en dicha problematización más amplia, revelando también una profunda preocupación por la situación sociocultural de los pueblos indígenas en un mundo cada vez más globalizado. Las poblaciones indígenas están en riesgo, enfrentándose a varios problemas que van desde altas tasas de desempleo; vivir por debajo del umbral de la pobreza como consecuencia de ello; enfermedades; violencia externa e interna; altas tasas de suicidio y mortalidad infantil (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua 2014; Teaiwa 2008). Además de la violencia “real” y efectiva contra los pueblos indígenas en general (Mihesuah 2003), también hay violencia epistémica perpetrada a través de representaciones estereotipadas de los pueblos indígenas retratados en películas, libros o anuncios que siguen teniendo gran impacto en las vidas de las naciones indígenas del Pacífico (Desmond 1998; Trask 1999; Kahn 2011). Además, los colectivos indígenas del Pacífico también luchan hoy contra la degradación y pérdida de sus tierras, que están sobre-explotadas y contaminadas sin mucha regulación ni preocupación por parte de gobiernos y autoridades. En consecuencia, y en una era definida como “Antropoceno”, estamos asistiendo a un ecogenocidio sin precedentes en el que los ecosistemas y las poblaciones indígenas se van eliminando progresivamente en nombre del progreso económico globalizado, que se centra, sobre todo, en el consumo excesivo de bienes y recursos naturales. Por tanto, la insistencia en despertar la conciencia de todos los seres humanos sigue siendo preponderante y, en este sentido, las obras literarias y artísticas producidas por autoras y autores indígenas muestran una gran preocupación por retratar y denunciar abusos, ya sea contra los ecosistemas o contra los pueblos indígenas que (sobre)viven en ellos. En este escenario, los temas relacionados con los derechos indígenas, las desigualdades de género o incluso las nociones de precariedad humana parecen reformularse como temas clave para las tres autoras aquí examinadas.
15 A pesar de los puntos de convergencia, la agenda feminista indígena compartida en los textos no puede ser considerada como una entidad unitaria y, en cierta medida, las novelas aquí estudiadas escapan a la noción universalista de que todas las mujeres luchan por los mismos objetivos. Sin embargo, es importante señalar que, en conjunto, estas novelas ejemplifican, entre otros aspectos, los niveles de violencia a los que son sometidas las mujeres indígenas; la exotización de sus cuerpos y sus islas; la mercantilización de sus culturas nativas; y los efectos persistentes del colonialismo que prevalecen en una era globalizada. Fundamentalmente, estas novelas juegan un importante papel en la descolonización de la mente, presuponiendo el cuestionamiento de las bases raciales y evolutivas del poder colonial, y en qué medida estas fundamentaron la construcción del conocimiento. En consecuencia, cuando las tres autoras estudiadas en esta Tesis Doctoral se leen juntas, defienden postulados similares sobre el impacto pernicioso del colonialismo, enfatizando que los efectos de las políticas imperiales llevaron a la desintegración de cosmologías, saberes y culturas indígenas. Sin embargo, estas autoras también proponen líneas de resistencia desde un punto de vista pacifista, contra la globalización y el capitalismo, a través de la revitalización de sus culturas indígenas con un enfoque particular en los sujetos marginados, y así, proponen un cierto enfoque autorreflexivo relevante para la comprensión de las sociedades contemporáneas del Pacífico. La pérdida de la diversidad cultural y la creciente imposición de la hegemonía cultural occidental promovida por la expansión del capitalismo parece ser una secuela de la retórica derivada de la “carga del hombre blanco” en la que los “nuevos colonizadores” (corporaciones transnacionales) continúan imponiendo sus instituciones, modos de vida y formas culturales para los pueblos "no civilizados". Aquí no se pretende defender ninguna forma de cristalización / osificación de las culturas indígenas, algo que inmediatamente puede inducir al falaz argumento del primitivismo o del nativismo esencialista, sino que lo importante es, de hecho, evaluar cómo las culturas indígenas fueron y continúan siendo afectadas por diversas formas de globalización como consecuencia del imperialismo / colonialismo. Se trata, fundamentalmente, de analizar cómo estos pueblos indígenas resisten la hegemonía social y cultural externa, ya que la
16 resistencia a estos modelos occidentales es fundamental en los procesos de transición política y social de los pueblos indígenas. La revitalización de las culturas indígenas y la inclusión de las voces feministas como elementos preponderantes en las dinámicas culturales aparecen como parte de un proyecto que apunta a la importancia de la descolonización y como una conciencia de oposición a través de la cual cobran relevancia los relatos previamente silenciados de las experiencias de las mujeres indígenas. Así, estructuralmente, estas narrativas pueden generar espacios en los que sujetos subyugados reinventan la realidad y, al mismo tiempo, contribuyen a la posibilidad de reimaginar el futuro desde una perspectiva descolonizadora. En consecuencia, es posible rastrear los vínculos entre el cambio socio-económico y cultural en Tahiti, Hawai'i y Samoa motivado por el colonialismo y la posterior globalización, y el desarrollo de una conciencia indígena basada en la recuperación de cosmologías y epistemologías que reclaman reconocimiento cultural y autodeterminación. En definitiva, este estudio tiene como objetivo analizar las diferentes formas de empoderamiento de las mujeres indígenas dentro de sus comunidades y exponer la necesidad de tener en cuenta la interseccionalidad de raza, género y clase social al abordar temas de ocupación territorial. En este sentido, sigue siendo relevante examinar críticamente los relatos de la llamada periferia para que se puedan observar las múltiples conexiones entre pueblos colonizados; la complejidad de las relaciones que se establecen entre el militarismo y la masificación del turismo, y la degradación ecológica que ha venido afectando progresivamente a las poblaciones indígenas de formas tan complejas que giran en torno, por ejemplo, a la formación de la identidad, siendo la naturaleza un aspecto fundamental de las identidades indígenas. En consecuencia, sigue siendo relevante pensar en las culturas indígenas y la importancia de descolonizar las metodologías indígenas desde el pasado; sus historias, el presente, sus comunidades, culturas, lenguas y prácticas sociales pueden ser espacios de marginación, efectivamente, pero también pueden convertirse en espacios de resistencia y esperanza. Teniendo en cuenta la importancia de las cosmologías y epistemologías indígenas que, a lo largo de este estudio, ofrezco una lectura comparada de los siete textos seleccionados examinando en qué medida estas narrativas ayudan a reforzar el significado de las
17 perspectivas indígenas como espacios de reafirmación de ideas, basándome en teorías decoloniales y feministas. La desmilitarización y descolonización de las islas del Pacífico puede requerir estrategias colaborativas de producción de conocimiento que aborden simultáneamente los efectos políticos de la ocupación y la deconstrucción de una cierta domesticación de pueblos llevada a cabo por la masificación de culturas. Por estos motivos, los movimientos de autodeterminación y soberanía en el Pacífico han puesto hasta ahora en primer plano una llamada dirigida a priorizar el conocimiento producido por los pueblos indígenas, los pueblos olvidados de la Historia a los que se les da ahora voz para enfrentarse a las duras realidades de la perenne pobreza y la expropiación cultural y territorial.
18
Introduction
A Paradise on Earth...
Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
You are here to breath over ice on the lake. you are the one the grandmothers sing to through the rapids. you are the saved seed of allies. you are the space between embraces […] for every one of your questions there is a story hidden in the skin of the forest. use them as a flint, fodder, love songs, medicine. you are from a place of unflinching power, the holder of your stories, the one who speaks up. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love
tories have the power to trigger our imagination, to make us travel to far places that can be real or not, to make us see the world from other S perspectives. Since I was a child, I was always eager to listen to stories, and then when I learnt how to read, I plunged into a never-ending world of stories that I could only reach through books. Soon I realised that to cope with the harshness of life I could always rely on books to find comfort, and eventually answers to my unuttered questions. A great amount of the things I have so far learnt, I have learnt them from reading, which is such a quiet and solitary activity but, nonetheless, one that allows me look at the world from a more critical perspective. Stories, fictional or not, have largely contributed to my sense of the world, overall to my knowledge of it. I still remember my awe with Magical Realism and the Latin American authors whose novels so beautifully written transported me to other realms, the joy I felt while reading my first poetry book when I was only 11 years old, or the first time I read a book whose stories were about women and written by a woman, thus effectively contributing to my interest in feminism. The ability to create multiple worlds and realities through words still fascinates me today as it did when I was a child. In fact, I believe that the power of words will never cease to amaze me, and that is, indeed, the magic spell that nourishes my mind. I came to realise that I better understand the world I live in because I have always established a very intimate relation with books whether fictional and non-fictional ones. To read is to
20 Introduction
acknowledge diversity, is an act of crossing bridges and whose journey through the unknow has always enriched me. Being surrounded by books and curious enough to explore them gave me the tools to decide my academic path. Soon I knew what I wanted to do, and when I finished my MA almost 10 years ago, I drew (an imperfect) project that later and with several improvements became my Ph.D. Dissertation. While studying for my MA, in one of the lectures I had, I was introduced to Indigenous cultures from Australia and New Zealand, and that largely contributed to the path I decided to walk years later when I started the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Advanced English Studies at University of Vigo. I decided to study Indigenous cultures from a feminist and postcolonial standpoint. To set the groundwork of this Dissertation was not complicated, and because I was already interested in literature from the Pacific, I wanted to study more about Indigenous women writers. The literary production of contemporary Indigenous women from the Pacific has been my research interest for the past decade allowing me to understand the dynamics of colonialism, imperialism, globalisation, and militarisation with greater impact on the livelihood of Indigenous communities and their ecosystems. This Ph.D. Dissertation offers a comparative analysis of the literary work of three contemporary Indigenous writers from the South Pacific region, Célestine Hitiura Vaite from Tahiti, Kiana Davenport from Hawai’i, and Sia Figiel from Samoa focusing on the multiple ways in which these writers examine and negotiate a fundamental preoccupation in some Pacific Indigenous literature written in English: violence against Indigenous peoples and their territories and environmental destruction; women’s empowerment within their communities; form of resistance against colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation; and how Indigenous peoples recover ancestral knowledge and cosmologies as decolonial frameworks. Throughout this Dissertation I will be analysing seven novels: Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004) and Tiare (2006) written by Celéstine Hitiura Vaite; Shark Dialogues (1995) and Song of the Exile (1999) by Kiana Davenport, and finally Where Once We Belonged (1996) and Freelove (2016) by Sia Figiel. According to Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffths and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back “more than three-quarters of people living in the world today have had
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism” (1989:1). Therefore, that is the experience that has also shaped the way cultures currently perceive and interact with each other. The experience of colonialism contributed to the (re)configuration of the world, largely modified by myriad of power relations established from the moment that dissimilar cultures met. Identities as well as cultures and societies were and continue to be overtly transformed and altered by those power relations that, though established centuries ago, are still perceived in contemporary societies. Indigenous cultures were the target of colonial endeavours, being immediately translated into commodities, thus land acquisition meant power over other nations. Because of this, overseas territories were largely used by European empires as a demonstration of supremacy, and soon used as testing grounds for all kinds of experiments. The colonial and neocolonial rhetoric that has characterised the ruling forces of Europe and America was soon translated into a coloniality of being (Maldonado- Torres 2008) with high impact on how Indigenous peoples perceive themselves and their cultures. If we trace back how Indigenous cultures were (and still are) shaped by colonialism, we will inevitably arrive at the confluence of gender with Western ontological approaches that reinforce the introduction of binary categorisations of peoples in societies that had not previously thought of themselves in those terms. Colonialism was, then, translated into a permanent state of coloniality by introducing and perpetuating the social classification of the world’s population in categoric terms and ideas of gender, race, and class (Lugones 2007) that aimed at destroying Indigenous peoples, cosmologies, and communities. It is crucial to look closely into those forms of destruction based upon binary constructions. Colonial, and global modes of socio-economic organisation need to be re-examined, in order to dismantle oppressive organisations of life. Struggles toward communal integrity are, therefore, part of the agenda of the writers selected for this study given that they demonstrate a sheer preoccupation in depicting the multifaceted lives and values of Indigenous peoples. Edward Said brilliantly asserted that imperialism is grounded in “an act of geographical violence” (1994: 271), the collective violence that emerges out of land occupation, ecological imperialism and wars over natural resources are part of the
22 Introduction
geographical violence referred to by Said, and insidious forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that have been part of the decolonising agenda of Indigenous peoples. The effects of imperialism (and, consequently globalisation) are largely dealt with by novelists who intervene in the process of decolonisation of minds (Thiong’o 1981) using literature and art alike as interventive tools in raising awareness, providing vital perspectives on the multi-layered dynamics of Indigenous cultures. Through creative imaginings and the blending of cultural storytelling techniques, Indigenous writers of the Pacific such as Vaite, Davenport and Figiel pay close attention to the restorative potential of narratives that often escape the scope of fictionality to become the means through which Indigenous people voice their stories, concerns and revindications. Functioning as a trope, the Pacific can be approached as a cultural, social and economic construct that has been relevant in the imagination of peoples of Europe and America since the 16th century when European navigators began their maritime explorations (Hoskins & Nguyen 2014), being this historical momentum a turning point in the history of humankind, lived and perceived differently according to multiple spheres of power that have categorised people all around the globe. Teresia Teaiwa extensively elaborates on the impact of colonialism and militarism in the Pacific region, and posits that colonialism operated in paradoxical ways, since “while it introduced Pacific people (sometimes unceremoniously) to a wider world of places, peoples, and ideas, it also caused a tremendous belittlement” (2008: 321). Given that those societies became subjected to foreign power structures, they were progressively converted into a “global religion (Christianity, and through the process of colonial education Pacific students learned more about the geography and history of foreign lands than they did about their own” (Teaiwa 2008:321). It was, then, the conjunction between economic power, military aggressions, religion, and education that propelled Pacific peoples into global economies (Teaiwa 2008). The interplay between those elements can be perceived, for instance, in gender constructions and how Indigenous women were largely affected by heterosexuality and colonial modern gender systems (Lugones 2007). Gender was a central tenet in the colonial endeavour, and Indigenous peoples from the Pacific
23
Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
were severely impacted by heterocentric patriarchal systems. Accordingly, Patricia O’Brien explains that despite being a global phenomenon, colonialism coalesced with Indigenous cultures in and around the Pacific forming “new societies or layered existing ones with altered ideas about gender” (2014: 282). It is relevant to bear in mind that despite variations in status and authority, Indigenous women in the Pacific held considerable power in terms of title inheritance and / or land acquisition (Trask 1999; Armitage & Bashford 2014; O’Brien 2014). Consequently, Indigenous women were seen as an obstacle to the imperial power which had (and continues to have) on its genesis the male ruling figure. Aside from being deprived of power, Indigenous women were turned into subaltern subjects, or even merely sexual elements in those new societies where Western forms of power and knowledge prevailed. However, in the process of decolonisation the voices of Indigenous women turned out to be strongly influential in recuperating ancestral knowledge and fighting back old and new forms of occupation and colonialism. Although expressed in different ways, the Indigenous women writers selected for analysis in this Dissertation often share the depiction of histories of violence against Indigenous peoples, and through fictional narratives these writers denounce the lingering effects of colonialism and imperialism on societies and ecosystems. Therefore, violence can be acknowledged overly through dissimilar ways, namely via exclusionary practices such as the pervasive elimination and silencing from official records of national History, sexual abuses, gender violence, and also through hyper-sexualised representations of bodies. The narratives from these three Polynesian Indigenous women writers, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel, to be analysed in the following chapters, seek the balance between ancient knowledge / Indigenous cosmologies and pre-contact history, and the construction of modern societies inasmuch as they critically elaborate on the extent to which Indigenous peoples have wittingly participated in the transformation of their societies sometimes by accepting Western impositions. Moreover, they conflate strategies of self-representation which deconstruct the persistent image of a hyper-sexualised stereotype labelled as “the Pacific muse” that is still ingrained in contemporary portrayals of Pacific women and which has largely contributed to their silencing.
24 Introduction
The exoticisation of the region simultaneously transformed the places into tourist locations and the site for several military experiments. According to Teresia Teaiwa (2010), who discusses the connection between tourism and militarism in the Pacific, the ongoing feminization and sexualisation of the Pacific region is promoted by forms of nuclear imperialism, showing how empires have worked on the gendering of Pacific Indigenous bodies by means of deformation and violation of those bodies, whose collective and cultural memory is rarely listened to (Teaiwa 2010). In fact, the authors included in this Dissertation explore strategic approaches of self-empowerment and resistance against socio-cultural impositions and discrimination that appropriately explore women’s visibility, agency, and identity. Thus this problematisation is the first step in recognising the importance of questioning imperialism in its multi-layered systems. In general, literature from the Pacific, and more specifically the texts produced by these women writers foster a wider political project about contesting histories of colonialism and the subsequent commodification of Indigenous cultures. Their works are worth looking at as they present how Indigenous women discuss strategies of resistance to the onslaught of colonialism from a discursive point that focuses on the experiences of Indigenous women. Consequently, the articulation between gender and race in the coloniality of power is fundamental to the understanding of “racialized patriarchal control over production, including knowledge production, and over collective authority” (Lugones 2007: 206). My approach does not seek for any sort of resolution but rather the reframing of socio-cultural issues related with how Indigenous cultures are represented/objectified to serve the purposes of predatory global economies. By doing so, I aim at creating a dialogue between the three Pacific Indigenous writers mentioned above that can be productive and allow new perspectives from the so- called margins to be included in a supposedly wider narrative of contemporary societies. Subsequently, the fictional narration and portrayal of Native histories and cultures from the Pacific (Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa) may foster the rethinking of ethical and conceptual frameworks that may contribute to a better knowledge and understanding of Polynesian societies. Hence, it can be argued that forms of resistance against cultural effacement within the political or the artistic arena occurs
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
through the dismantling of pre-established assumptions and stereotypes and are ultimately the validation of herstory1 in opposition to a male-oriented approach, amply contributing to the production of island-centred narratives. The three writers selected for study in this Dissertation are currently addressing contemporary social issues that partake in the denouncing of cultural losses, gender inequalities and environmental degradation. Furthermore, it seems clear that their voices within the literary panorama of Pacific literature reiterate that “moving from silence into speech is a powerful act for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible” (hooks 1989: 9). In fact, it is through this gesture of defiance with its regenerative power that the novels I am analysing in the following chapters are part of these decolonial practices in which Indigenous women are empowered Hence, generally literature is one of the many vehicles used by women (and men alike) to dismantle “the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). However, given the existing hierarchies of power and privilege, the stories through which women narrate their subjectivity, like the diverse groups and communities through which they may seek to wield power, are characterised by such iconoclastic, heterogeneous identification – moulded, too, by where the women situate themselves along the axes of differentiation of race, religion, region, sexuality, class and nation (Boehmer 2005: 209). On the face of that, the voices of these women writers can be acknowledged both as integral parts of national resistance and as elements that partake on processes of
1 The term will be used here in italics to emphasise its relevance. It will also be used as opposed to “history” which is a male dominated approach to the world. Herstory reiterates a female perspective and a different way of perceiving the world in the sense that women’s voices are included and validated. The word is pun and it is part of the feminist critique of conventional historiography that has always obscured the role of women in the official records. Despite being a term emerging from Western feminist flanks, the concept has been widely extended within the Third World Feminism context and may be applied to describe the way Pacific women writers such as Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel retell history from a gynocentric perspective in which the private realms of their narratives become as politicised as the official narration of their island- nations.
26 Introduction
decolonisation of the mind (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1981) by using literature as a fundamental tool in raising awareness. Ideologically, their narratives not only assume a decolonising approach but also present and validate the importance of preserving ancestral knowledge as a form of resisting the erasure of their heritage that started centuries ago with the replacement of civilizational paradigms during the colonial era and culminated with the massification and Americanisation of several cultural practices. To a certain extent, the novels written by the selected authors form a sort of collaborative and dialogic narration through which “feminism must be viewed both as respect for the specificity of historical differences between women, and even if aspirationally, as a relational, global process, that permits intersubjective exchange and cross-category comparatism” (Boehmer 2005: 13). It is within this space of contestation that I locate the texts I am examining as they create a sort of “Oceanic imaginary” (Subramani 2001) in which the writers simultaneously chart the links between colonial experience and emancipatory ideals, and an extended critique to oppressive socio-cultural systems involving knowledge, cosmologies, languages, and genealogies. Although the seven novels selected for analysis here present a myriad of differences, they validate a certain dynamic engendered by an approach that simultaneously reiterates a feminist political solidarity and local manifestations of socio-cultural constructions of femininity within cultural contexts that diverge in specific traditions, while converging in shared experiences of colonialism and globalisation. They offer, then, an innovative perspective to examine certain cultural and political transformations that are the inheritance of their colonial history, and they do this in clear dialogue with the postcolonial art of resistance produced by gendered discourses that, ultimately, refute any form of cultural appropriation as well as the exoticisation of their cartographies.2 Chandra Talpade Mohanty asserts in the anthology she co-edited, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, that women of colour (including Indigenous women) all have a “common context of struggle” (1991: 7), and although they indeed share, in a
2 The construction of exotic femininity is embedded in the representation of the colonial Pacific (Teaiwa 2001; O’Brien 2006), and has largely marginalised women, also contributing to a certain Euro-American easiness in occupying Indigenous lands under the banner of “a paradise on Earth” often used in tourism campaigns.
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
broader sense, the same struggles against racism, colonialism or stereotypes, we need to take into account that all those issues are nuanced according to dissimilar factors that are connected with each specific context, namely social, cultural, economic, religious and political realities. It is, then, this diversity that appears to be celebrated in the novels without prejudice of eroding the similar argumentative lines that are commonly shared. In an era that is currently facing several challenges and difficulties when it comes to human rights in general, and Indigenous rights in particular, gender issues together with all sorts of violence against ecosystems (defined as eco-violence), it seems even more significant to engage in a debate that aims at discussing all those afore-mentioned issues. In the vein of that, this Dissertation attempts to be part of that wider problematisation, and it also reveals a profound concern about the socio- cultural location of Indigenous people in a growingly globalised world. Indigenous people are at risk, facing numerous problems that span from high rates of unemployment; living below the poverty line as a consequence of it; diseases; violence against them and among themselves; high rates of suicide and infant mortality (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua 2014; Teaiwa 2008). Additionally, aside from the “real” and effective violence against Indigenous people in general (Mihesuah 2003), there is the epistemic violence perpetrated through stereotypical representations of Native people depicted either in films, books, or advertisements that have impacted on the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific (Desmond 1998; Trask 1999; Kahn 2011). Moreover, Indigenous people in the Pacific are also currently fighting the degradation and loss of their lands, which are overused and polluted without much regulation and concern of governments and authorities. And as the years go by in an era defined as “the Anthropocene” we are (passively) assisting to an eco-genocide without precedents which seems to be nearly impossible to reverse.3 It, therefore, remains preponderant to insist on raising
3 The Anthropocene or the human turn is a geologic chronological term used to define the epoch that began when human activities started to have a significant impact on Earth’s ecosystems. Therefore, “the Anthropocene is thus marked, according to Crutzen, by ‘greenhouse gases’ reaching their highest levels for 400,000 years; the increasing power of humans to regulate and control the flow of water through dam-building and sluice constructions; global industries releasing some 160 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere each year; increasing levels of oceanic exploitation by the fisheries industry; rising rates of artificial fertilizer application to soils; and the increasingly
28 Introduction
awareness among all human beings, and for that purpose Indigenous literary and artistic works demonstrate a great deal of concern by portraying and denouncing abuses, either against ecosystems or the Indigenous people within them. Within this landscape, issues concerning indigenous rights, gender inequalities or even notions of human precariousness appear rephrased and re-accentuated as decisive challenging questions for the three authors examined here. In sum, some postcolonial literature deals with the cultural identity of the subaltern in colonised societies and also with the dilemma of developing a national identity after the colonial endeavour. The narratives dealt with in this Dissertation do this, and in this way, they can be understood as “writing back” from the periphery. However, Boehmer (2005) brilliantly warns us that the obscurities and silences of the past will always exist no matter how much study is dedicated to expose what is dim or to give voice to what has been silenced. Essentially, as is possible to understand from the novels assembled here, the gaps in the past are filled with, which are not simply interesting stories about the lives and experiences of women or even the simple dissemination of cultural and historical facts; they are mainly cultural portrayals upon which lies the survival of Indigenous peoples. Whereas the marginalised were often not given a voice or relevance in colonial texts, postcolonial literatures refer insistently to and problematise the agenda of the “colonised other” who has been constantly “othered” and exoticised by imperial discourses, in the case to be studied here, Indigenous girls and women from the Pacific.
0.1. Objectives One of the main premises of this Dissertation is that literature – and within literature, more prominently narrative – constitutes a powerful form of resistance against Western – Euro-American – hegemony. By focusing on contemporary fiction produced by three Indigenous women from the Pacific as an expression of deeply engaged cultural and political beliefs, I am suggesting that writing is a powerful form of political intervention and resistance as well as a powerful tool in
high extraction of minerals and aggregates from the Earth’s crust through mining” (Whitehead, 2014:16)
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
decolonial processes. Adapting a perspective that is attentive to the combination of Indigenous and colonial influences at play in Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa, it elucidates the nuanced way that Indigenous peoples, societies, and cultures are impacted by colonial discourses, imperial and global policies translated through the growing power of tourism and the militarisation of territories as if they – peoples and lands – were mere commodities. The primary goal of this Dissertation consists in analysing the literary production of three Indigenous women writers from the Pacific as well as their modes of representing Indigenous cultures and histories. In my attempt at doing so, I consider relevant to provide a cultural and historical background of Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa from a perspective that focuses on the colonial, imperial, and global dynamics that have been part of those afore- mentioned cartographies. Therefore, another of my objectives is to investigate the impact of colonialism and globalisation on Indigenous societies, and how Indigenous peoples negotiate these socio-cultural dynamics. It is my intention with this Ph.D. Dissertation to at one and the same time draw attention to the dynamics of places, societies, and cultures, and to contribute to the already existing debate about how Indigenous peoples are represented, stereotyped, and ultimately commodified in globalised contexts. I want to produce a comparative analysis of the selected corpus in order to demonstrate the extent to which colonialism, imperialism and globalisation intersect with gender, class and race largely contributing to violence against Indigenous peoples in general, and Indigenous girls and women in particular, fabricating places that are simultaneously perceived through the lenses of desire, and through spheres of power that tend to deprive people of their culture. This Dissertation, therefore, attempts to give responses to the following questions: how does fiction – more specifically novels – written in English by Indigenous authors may contribute to the transmission of Indigenous cultural and political ideals? How do Indigenous women navigate through deep waters of imperialism and globalisation? Are they empowered within their communities? How do literary texts such as the ones selected in this study give visibility to the struggles of Indigenous peoples in the Pacific? How does a non-Indigenous woman like myself engage with methodologies such as Indigenous Feminism for analysing
30 Introduction
texts that are to a certain extent cultural and political depictions of globalised societies? In seeking answers to these questions, I came to realise that it was necessary to refer to works in history, philosophy, and politics to enable a better understanding of how experiences of activism against land occupation, or against the militarisation of entire territories affected the writers’ engagement with and opposition to colonising ideologies that have been disrupting Indigenous cultures and societies. Throughout this Dissertation, I aim at demonstrating that the novels selected here partake on the contemporary debate regarding Indigenous rights and cultural appropriation, gender issues, eco-violence, and sustainability as well as the impact of the militarisation of the islands not only on Native peoples’ lives but also on ecosystems that tend to be assumed as commodities and literally consumed and destroyed. Thus, an analysis that elucidates and problematises the repressive effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism in its various discursive practices seems to be (still) necessary for building (or at least trying to build) a world that fosters equality as well as social justice. Nonetheless, that sort of analysis comes hand in hand with the examination of relevant forms of sovereignty and decolonisation that occur within U.S.A and European colonised lands beyond their continental borders. According to this view, culture and artistic creation are forms of political resistance used to fight back the erosion of Native peoples’ heritage or even the attack on what Haunani-Kay Trask, the Native Hawaiian writer and activist, has defined as “people’s self-respect through a colonization of the mind” (1999b: 19). Indeed, culture and art are political, “writing, music, painting, dance, and voyaging are profoundly political, just as land ownership, medical care, universities, hazard- waste sitting, and cultural hegemony are political” (Trask 1999b: 18). It is, thus, my goal to contribute to an effective and open ongoing conversation between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people. By doing so I believe that this approach may be another (if modest) contribution to a wider understanding of how cultures operate and process each other as well as of how Indigenous peoples negotiate and preserve their cultural identity within a globalised world.4 By
4 Globalisation has become one of the cornerstones of the twenty-first century, articulating new forms of socio-cultural organisation. If, on the one hand, these flows of money, goods and people have generated “interconnectedness” (Appadurai 1991), on the other hand it remains relevant to
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
focusing on these three island-nations one of the major goals of this project is to establish a comparison that will consider the following aspects in the oeuvre of Vaite, Davenport and Figiel: the similarities and the divergences in portraying Indigenous women; their imposed erasure from official narratives; the violence (both epistemic and physical) they were (and continue to be) exposed to. Therefore, histories of exclusion, dispossession, pervasive violence, expropriation but also projects for self-determination and sovereignty are pivotal in this study of Polynesian literatures and cultures. I have learnt by reading María Lugones that there are worlds that we enter at our own risk, worlds that can bring an infinite number of experiences, worlds that we travel lovingly and by doing so we are taking part on loving others. The act of crossing over or travelling through is, certainly, a way of knowing ourselves, perhaps, it is when travelling to each other’s worlds that we can fully comprehend their struggles (Lugones 1987). This has been so far one of the greatest lessons also learnt when reading Indigenous literature, that we need to cross over, travel to someone’s else world, knowing that when reading Indigenous Pacific fictional narratives, we are entering a realm that is symbiotically connected with cosmologies and ways of knowing that have been silenced. In sum, my primary objectives in the following chapters are to identity how these three Indigenous women writers contribute to a wider understanding of Indigenous cosmologies, and epistemologies in a globalised era.
0.2. Methodologies
As a non-Indigenous woman, I am aware that I must not pretend to speak for Indigenous women, and of the risk of appropriating their voices and reiterating the colonial practices I have formerly criticised above. For this reason, I have chosen to take part in the knowledge that informs those struggles aiming at being
problematise the complexity and scale of those interconnected flows, and consequently how the forces of globalised policies, for instance, are experienced and have shaped people in culturally diverse regions. Although it is commonly described by many as being a recent phenomenon, globalisation has in its foundations the economic and political processes that had served the Western imperialist expansion embraced during the colonial era. To a certain extent, globalisation became an extended version of the imperial project that has shaped the world during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Steger’s Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (2017), for instance, dedicates Chapter 2 to the long history of globalisation.
32 Introduction
more conscientiously aware of the diversity that characterises political and social struggles for a more egalitarian world. In Pacific Indigenous traditions and cosmologies I found a point of common understanding in which nature was an integral element in the formation of identity, and a profound respect towards all beings, human and non-human ones. When addressing the notion of empowerment, most Indigenous traditions navigate worlds that are physical and spiritual, meaning that there are not categories that involve the binarism inferior / superior, clearly different from Western epistemologies. I, therefore, propose a critical analysis of the texts produced by these three Indigenous women that considers Indigenous cosmologies, stories, and ways of knowing. It is important to clarify at this point some of the terminology related with Indigenous peoples from the Pacific that I will be using throughout this Dissertation. Given that I am not fluent on any of the Indigenous languages used by the writers I selected for this analysis, or had any previous training on learning those languages, I had to rely on dictionaries to clarify some terms, and on appropriate research about the topic. Therefore, the Indigenous words used will appear in italics, and a translation will be provided. When referring to the authors’ identity I will use the terms Indigenous and Native to denote their genealogical background. Besides, the terms “Pacific” and “Polynesia” also require clarification here. The first is used in a broad sense to refer to the whole of the Pacific Region, which comprises a multitude of island-nations categorically divided into three cartographies – Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia. The denomination of Polynesia, then, refers to a group of islands, in which Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa, the three spaces to examined here, are included. Equally relevant for this study is the fact from the three afore-mentioned cartographies, Hawai’i is the only one that remains politically and governmentally occupied being the archipelago the 50th state of the USA. Native Hawaiian people either refer to the islands as “Kingdom of Hawai’i” alluding to its history before the annexation by the USA, or as an occupied nation (Trask 1999a; Kauanui 2018). Tahiti is a governmentally independent territory, though France still exerts some economic power over the islands, and Tahiti is legally considered an overseas collectivity of France such as the islands of Wallis and Futuna, and New Caledonia (Newbury 1980; Campbell 1996). Samoa, also
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
designated as Western Samoa, is the independent territory that constitutes the entire archipelago while American Samoa is considered an unincorporated territory of the USA but not considered a state as Hawai’i (Campbell 1996). For the elaboration of this Dissertation I relied on a variety of resources, from published studies on the topic to online articles, paintings, and literary works. As a result, the research presented here is the reflex of my interpretation and combination of the afore-mentioned materials. Given the abundance of scholarly work produced about the Pacific, it was fairly uncomplicated to find the academic tools to support my ideas and arguments. The abundance of materials that I am referring to is of critical and theoretical nature, though it contrasts with the scarcity of research published so far about two of the authors I selected for this study, Celéstine Hitiura Vaite and Kiana Davenport, being Sia Figiel’s oeuvre more extensively analysed from diverse perspectives. I started this journey by reading a selection of specialised literature on Indigenous Feminisms, and decolonial theories on which I had little knowledge about. Perhaps, at this point my biggest challenge was how to deal with the vastness of available critical and theoretical bibliography, published and online, concerning the multiple approaches to Indigenous literatures and cultures from the Pacific. Initially and to overcome my insufficient knowledge about Pacific histories and cultures, it was fundamental to read studies such as A History of Pacific Islands by Steven Fisher (2002), Pacific Worlds by Matt Matsuda (2012), The Cambridge History of Pacific Islanders by Donald Denoon et al. (1997), Globalization and Culture Change in the Pacific Islands (2004) edited by Victoria S. Lockwood, Native Studies: Keywords (2015) by Stephanie Nohelani Teves et. al., and Decolonization and the Pacific (2016) by Tracey Banivanua Mar, just to name a few, whose research gave me cultural and historical background about Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa. Hence, that proved to be crucial to my own understanding of Pacific cultures, and an indispensable help to understand the novels I had previously selected to be part of this Dissertation. The present work uses Indigenous Feminism and Third-World Feminism as critical and theoretical frameworks for the interrogation and analysis of the selected literary texts, which is carried out through close-reading practices. I have also made use of cultural studies and decolonial theories in order to better comprehend
34 Introduction
Indigenous cosmologies as integral elements of a wider worldview, and how those cosmologies have been disrupted by ever-present and ever-increasing global polices as corollary of imperialism. Linda Tuwihai Smith elaborates on the importance of decolonising Indigenous methodologies, and explains that “the past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices – all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope” (2012:4). It is, then, bearing in mind the importance of Indigenous cosmologies, and epistemologies that I offer a comparative reading of the seven selected texts that constitute the corpus of the present Dissertation, examining to which extent they help reinforce the significance of Indigenous perspectives as fertile ground in decolonial theories. In order to restrict my corpus of study to a feasible limit, I have decided to examine the South Pacific region, and more distinctively to focus on a group of Pacific Island women writers that are situated within the geographical and conceptual category of Polynesia. In fact, this conceptual categorisation did not exist before the first visits of European explorers such as Captain James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. It is therefore a colonial denomination. While the focus is certainly on literature produced by Indigenous women writers, my methodology is discursive, thus the inclusion of historical and cultural references that open up interpretation to consider that contemporary Indigenous fiction is implicated within an intersectional discourse that revolves around the representation of Indigenous women and Indigenous cosmologies. It may be, then, possible to understand Indigenous knowledge from a standpoint that differs from a Western-centred perspective. Through the lens of Indigenous Feminism (with recourse to the works of Haunani-Kay Trask, Teresia Teaiwa, Noenoe K. Silva, Tusitala Marsh and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui) and decolonial theories (especially drawing on the works of María Lugones and Chela Sandoval), my analysis of the literary texts focuses on the changing situations of Indigenous peoples from Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa. From this point, my major interest is on women’s empowerment within their specific communities, and how questions of race, gender and class intersect along the lines of land occupation. The texts thus cohere around interrelated questions and themes: the significance of telling the stories from the so-
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
called periphery as a mode of observing the webs of connections that exist(ed) between colonised peoples; the complex webs established between militarism and the massification of tourism; and the ecological degradation that has been affecting Indigenous peoples in ways that revolve around identity formation, being Nature a fundamental aspect of Indigenous identities. Throughout this Dissertation, I have chosen to put emphasis on a methodology of feminist love and hope but without a naïve look, I believe. In doing so, the theorical approaches of Lugones and Chela Sandoval have been fundamental to navigate the complex worlds of Indigenous authors, however, I have found the journey quite valuable in understanding the importance of constructing a “new feminist geopolitics” (Lugones 2010: 756).
0.3. Structure
The structure of this thesis is quite simple as it is divided in four chapters, together with the Introduction, Conclusion and Bibliography. Most of the chapters – II, III and IV – are dedicated to the analysis of the selected literary corpus, presenting a close reading of each of the novels with special focus on how they contribute to a critique of colonialism, and how they present possible approaches to decolonisation from Indigenous standpoints. Before focusing on each of the three territories and authors, the first chapter introduces the historical and cultural background of Polynesia and, within it, Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa. Each of the selected authors are analysed separately, though pointing out the points of convergence and divergence when pertinent. Finally, in the Conclusion I will bring them together to validate and reinforce my initial arguments. Chapter I presents a brief overview of the major events related with the three Pacific islands studied in this thesis. Furthermore, it is a necessary contextualisation to better comprehend the cultural dynamics that transverse Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa. In this first chapter, it will be briefly summarised the long history of precolonial Polynesia and the impact of the colonial endeavour during the 18th and 19th centuries. Although there are already numerous academic works in which this same topic is clarified, and my approach relies on most of them, I find it convenient to offer an overview of the historical background here that may provide a more
36 Introduction
comprehensive contextualisation for the following chapters. It will be useful also because to a certain extent Native cultures are still processing the impact of those European exploratory voyages, being literature a form of writing back to Western narratives about Indigenous peoples that have incited and fed the curiosity of Europeans during centuries.5 However, it is also important to note that this Dissertation is not about the European colonial endeavour, its primary focus is on Indigenous cultures from the South Pacific region though it cannot go without being said that there is a strict and obvious relation between both histories, and it would be also impossible not to mention the consequences / effects of the colonial encounter. This first chapter, then, settles the bases for the decolonial critique to be developed in the close reading of the literary works in the following chapters. Chapter II is the first analytical incursion through the selected novels. It is the chapter devoted to the Tahitian author Célestine Hitiura Vaite’s oeuvre, three novels, Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004) and Tiare (2006) that form a trilogy about the life events of Materena and her family living in Tahiti. Célestine Hitiura Vaite’s representation of Tahiti confronts the exotic portrayals that have informed the European’s imaginary. Moreover, Vaite situates her characters within the local Tahitian milieu by narrating their everyday life experiences and challenges tinged with a strong sense of humour. Despite the comic tone, her narratives assume a critical character when depicting the everyday life of unprivileged characters struggling to make the best out of the circumstances they live in. To a certain extent, those circumstances are dictated by external forces, policies, cultural and social norms validated through colonial epistemologies. The three novels by Vaite portray quotidian aspects of the life in Tahiti, the role of women in that society and the harshness of being poor and living in an overseas territory of France. Throughout the chapter, I focus on how Tahitian society and culture have been shaped by French imperialist practices, how Tahitians perceive the place they live in rather differently than the exotic portrayals common in the European imaginary. Moreover, the chapter illustrates the alliances established between women across generations
5 The word fed (to feed) is here used intentionally to emphasize the predatory approach to Native cultures. Euro-American colonialism literally fed on Native cultures to carve its appetite for the exotic. Henceforth, this predatory attitude seems not to have changed over the subsequent years based on how corporations either from the private or the public sector currently exploit Native lands and entire ecosystems.
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
considering their relevant roles within the community. From a theoretical perspective, these three novels are read through the lens of Third-World Feminism, and Indigenous Feminism which allow me to analyse the strategies presented by Vaite for women’s empowerment and the acts of resistance against imperial and global systems that her characters perform. Chapter III continues on this analytical path to investigate two novels, Shark Dialogues (1995) and Song of the Exile (1999), written by the Native Hawaiian author Kiana Davenport. Davenport has extensively written on multiple subjects and she has published so far six novels and a collection of short stories that cover a wide range of themes and are set in many different locations. My choice of these two novels among her oeuvre has to do with the pertinence of the themes developed by the author in both narratives, which depict Native Hawaiian history and culture from a standpoint that empowers Native Hawaiian people. Despite the differences that separate the novels, the two together reinforce the argument that colonialism, followed by globalisation, and the extensive militarisation of the archipelago have disrupted Indigenous livelihoods with great impact on ecosystems. The major themes developed in the texts by Davenport examined in this chapter revolve around the ongoing debate about land occupation and Indigenous peoples’ cultural dispossession that has been caused by the massification of tourism, and the militarisation of the archipelago. Davenport exposes the wrong doings of (neo)colonialism as well as she also demonstrates the ability of Indigenous people in claiming self-determination and sovereignty by means of revitalising Native Hawaiian ancestral knowledge. Hers is a representation primarily centred on women’s voices and stories, validating the perilous ground walked by Indigenous women whose voices are empowered within their communities, whose activism has been crucial in Hawai’i. Davenport proves to be a fascinating voice within the literary milieu of the Pacific as she presents in both novels a detailed historical construction of Hawaiian annexation by the USA with clear references to Native Hawaiian cosmology, myths, and pre-contact culture. Framed by those axial aspects, both literary texts depict how women resist the sort of vulnerability that they are exposed to, and how their voices are sources of empowering knowledge.
38 Introduction
Chapter IV is the last one dedicated to the analysis of literary works and focuses on two novels by the Samoan writer Sia Figiel. Where We Once Belong (1996) and Freelove (2016) present a revealing journey through Figiel’s oeuvre as they were written in vastly different moments of the author’s life. The two novels I have selected to be studied along with the ones from Vaite and Davenport are especially relevant in understanding the socio-cultural dynamic of Indigenous societies. Figiel’s texts reimagine Samoa by exploring new social and cultural paths negotiated through a myriad of tensions and contradictions. The protagonists of Figiel’s narratives – two young girls – challenge and question the roles imposed on them by societal norms. Moreover, I have chosen these two novels also for their focus on the lives of young girls in particular given that their voices were largely absent from previous literary works from Indigenous writers from the Pacific. There is an imagined national boundary that is transcended, and through defiant action these girls culturally juxtapose the global to the local. Ironically, Figiel introduces the complexity of living in a globalised era in which the modern is simultaneously repressive and emancipatory. In fact, Figiel’s oeuvre proves to be rather complex as the author fosters a discussion around Samoan culture hooked up to global socio- economic systems that operate simultaneously in empowering and disempowering ways. With my analysis of these two texts I propose a reading that focuses on knowledge seeking and love as decolonial practices, attempting at comprehending the communal dynamics that Figiel both criticises and praises. Samoan culture as depicted in Figiel’s narratives combines Indigenous cultural elements, and they critically expose the abuses suffered by young girls and women as consequence of Samoan ancestral practices combined with (and exacerbated by) the introduction of Western social and religious ideologies. Ultimately, Figiel presents how complicated the construction of community in Samoan culture may be by demonstrating that “community, this complex relationality, would be sensitive, as a spider’s web is sensitive to communicative moves in different spatialities, tonalities, and expressive means” (Lugones 2002: 63). Being the Conclusion the last section of this Dissertation, it draws together the most relevant ideas developed across the previous chapters. It is, therefore, an attempt to demonstrate simultaneously the convergences shared by the texts
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
analysed here, and the divergences, which ultimately form a sort of dialogic narrative in which multiple perspectives are given about gender roles, the effects of colonialism and the resistance forces that each geopolitical space offers within its socio-cultural dynamics in order to dismantle pre-conceived images of Polynesian people. Despite their points of convergence, the Indigenous feminist agenda shared in the texts cannot be considered a unitary entity, and to a certain extent the novels escape the universalist notion that all women fight the same struggles. Nevertheless, I want to demonstrate that, all together, these novels exemplify, among other aspects, the levels of violence that women are subjected to; the exoticisation of their bodies and of their islands; the commodification of their Native cultures; and the lingering effects of colonialism that persist in a globalised era. Fundamentally, these novels assume their part on the decolonisation of the mind that presupposes “the questioning of the racial and evolutionary bases of colonial power, and how these have tended to underlie the construction of knowledge” (Mallon 2012: 2). Furthermore, taken together the three authors studied in this Dissertation stake similar claims on the degenerative impact of colonialism, advocating that the effects of its imperial policies led to the disintegration of Indigenous cosmologies, knowledges, and cultures. However, the authors also propose lines of resistance from pacifist standpoints against globalisation and capitalism, by revitalising Indigenous cultures, by focusing on marginalised subjects, and through that there is a certain self-reflexive approach relevant in the understanding of contemporary societies of the Pacific. I finally argue that the oeuvre of these Pacific writers incorporates Indigenous women’s stories from a perspective that assumes a decolonial praxis for Indigenous peoples based on Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies. Herstory comes in as part of this decolonial project, and as an oppositional consciousness through which previously silenced histories of Indigenous women’s experiences are given relevance. Thus, structurally, these narratives “provide repositories within which subjugated citizens can either occupy or throw off subjectivities in a process that at once both enacts and yet decolonizes various relations to their real conditions of existence” (Sandoval 2010: 85). At the same time, from a decolonial perspective, I am suggesting that it is possible to trace the links between the socio-economic and cultural evolution of Tahiti, Hawai’i and
40 Introduction
Samoa, and the development of a Pacific-based Indigenous consciousness that reclaims cultural recognition, resources, and self-determination.
41
Chapter I
Departing, Journeying, Returning: Indigenous Cultures and Globalisation in the South Pacific Rim Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
1.1. Departing: Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Globalisation in the South Pacific Rim
How is it now you are gone, our ali’i dismembered their mana lost,
we are left with broken bodies, blinded children, infected winds from across the sea.
How is it, our bones cry out in their infinite dying, the haole and their ways
have come to stay.
“Nā ‘Oiwi”, Haunani-Kay Trask. Night is a Sharkskin Drum, 28
ollowing the circular structure that appears in the title of this chapter – Departing, Journeying and Returning – I present her a summarised F contextualisation of historical and cultural moments referring to the South Pacific region, specifically Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa usually described as Polynesian islands. As mentioned in the title of this section – Departing – this is the first step in this intellectual journey, where I will be contextualising the South Pacific region from three axial frameworks: colonial, postcolonial, and globalisation contexts. By doing so, I will start by briefly dealing with the colonial past of the South Pacific region, to then move forward in the direction of a postcolonial context and globalisation as intertwined elements in the contemporary socio-cultural construction of Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa. The last subsection comprises a brief introduction to the literature produced by three women writers from Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa respectively whose novels will be analysed in the succeeding chapters. The subsequent section – Journeying – is divided in three parts, each of them referring to the specificity of the previously mentioned island- nations. The last section of the chapter – Returning – is a summary of the formerly discussed themes and ideas and introduces the subsequent chapters by creating a
44 Chapter I Departing, Journeying, Returning
bridge between the subjects already discussed and the literary production of Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel. If one looks to the astonishing images of Planet Earth taken from outer space, one is immediately confronted with the geographic vastness of the Pacific Ocean, which covers a considerable part of the planet’s surface. Inevitably in the face of such vastness, there is also a certain sense of cosmic loneliness engulfed by waves, tides and the fluidity that is always entangled with water’s imagery. Considered the largest geographical feature on Planet Earth, the Pacific Ocean occupies one-third of the planet’s surface. There is also in that vastness a “sea of islands” that have prompted the imagination of many people for centuries. The Pacific continent is composed by more than 20.000 islands which is nearly 80 percent of the world’s total. Moreover, it is also commonly described as “the water continent” due to this characteristic. Focusing on the dimension of the geographic area, Rod Edmond describes the Pacific as follows: The most banal yet awesome fact about the Pacific is its size. This vast ocean with its scattered pinprick islands has raised questions of scale, proportion and relation whenever it has been contemplated. From an outside perspective the islands of Oceania are almost submerged in the immensity of their surroundings (indeed Pacific islands have come and gone), their sea-locked inhabitants marooned on coral or volcanic tips of land (1997: 1).
It was, nonetheless, this particular feature of dimension that seems to have compelled European nations both to fight over its control and divide it, when Pacific became a “white possession”. During centuries, it was called by Europeans the “South Sea” reaching from “the Artic to the Antarctic, and [it] straddles the 180th meridian, or what has come to be seen as the eastern and western hemispheres” (Armitage & Bashford 2014: 5). Spread across one third of the planet Earth, this so-called “water continent” encompasses one of the most heterogenous cultural groups in the world with a remarkable number of native languages that were displaced. They did not completely disappear, but they were, indeed, displaced in institutional spaces such
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
as schools, those languages lost their visibility and were substituted by English, French or Spanish (Trask 1999, Keown 2013). In response to vicissitudes brought by several global politico-economic alliances, the geographic and conceptual limits of the Pacific have shifted at different historical moments, and with the increasing of European and American voyaging from 1760 onwards, there were significant alterations of the Pacific region as a geographical and social space. Following the Tongan scholar, Epeli Hau’ofa, it remains fundamental to focus on the forgotten people of history, and how they have resisted and held together (2000:458) by realigning their positionality within a worldwide and global panorama that has been marginalising their voices. Even before Europeans voyaged towards the Pacific, therefore prior to the European imperial invasion, Islanders all over the region had already established among themselves multiple networks of trade and oceanic travelling – mastering skills on the construction of canoes and developing navigating systems (Matsuda 2012, Fisher 2013) – crossing the sea and connecting the islands via economic and marriage settlements, forging alliances with near and far neighbours (Fisher 2013; Keown 2013). Those coalitions were forged during centuries of voyaging, thus contributing to define and reinforce the nature of both Pacific islands’ cultural identities and their sociological development/interaction with each other. Additionally, Paloma Fresno-Calleja reinforces this idea by describing the history of the Pacific as it “has been determined by multiple trans/locations and diverse patterns of mobility and exchange: from precolonial inter-islands voyages and colonial encounters on the beach to postcolonial negotiations in urban diasporic centres” (2013: 203). However, it is relevant to note that despite the unequal power relations established from the moment of the first European contact (inaugurated by Portugal and Spain in the 16th century and forged ahead by Britain, France, Germany, and the US in the subsequent centuries), and the consequent displacement and silencing of Native culture(s), Indigenous people have been fighting back the imposition of new forms of livelihood introduced by settlers, navigators, and missionaries. Nonetheless, it cannot go without saying that on the behalf of Indigenous communities there is the story of an accelerated marginalisation and loss of power
46 Chapter I Departing, Journeying, Returning
over their lands as well as their own culture(s) or as Epeli Hau’ofa posits when refereeing to the consequences of the European expansionist project towards the Pacific region, “nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Islands states and territories that we know today” (1999:33). There was, then, a clear desire on the part of white settlers to reproduce an extension of their nations, hence the importance of dividing, renaming, and mapping the territories in the Pacific region. As Michelle Keown indicates, from the late eighteenth century, however – when advances in maritime technology expedited European exploration and settlement in the region – European forms of geographical and conceptual mapping compartmentalized the Pacific into various racial categories and colonial spheres of influence” (2013: 609). Those new “lords of the Pacific” presented themselves as the bearers of higher cultures and demonstrated little or no respect towards the lands they were invading. The foreign trespassers, who first became settlers then the new lords of the Pacific, had usurped the right to create, for themselves and their own kind, the type of societies with which they wished to replace those traditional Pacific ones that had no value to them. (Fisher 2013: 175) The Enlightenment period fuelled the mind of people with curiosity and a passionate desire to apprehend the world, there was a sort of “hunger for the world” that was translated into European global expeditions, and on board of the exploratory ships there was an array of intellectuals, physicians, chemists, botanists, writers or artists eager to “discover”, study and scientifically classify the far islands of the South Seas. Based on those assumptions of finding the unknow, they departed always assuming their supposedly sheer supremacy, and ready to put a flag or cross in those far terrae nullius claiming them for their monarch. Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land” that was widely used to describe Australia, and later applied by extension to many other colonised nations. It was commonly used in international law to justify the appropriation and occupation of territories.
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
Here it is applied as a conceptual framework that has dictated not only how the Pacific region was viewed during colonial times, but mainly how the pervasive meaning of “emptiness” implied in the expression is still currently a form of dealing with the region being a relevant example of that, the nuclearization / militarisation of some islands across the Pacific without prior consent. On the basis of that form of occupation it is implied what Judith Butler has termed as an “undemocratic process” to the extent that “if a form of power is imposed upon a people who do not choose that form of power, then that is, by definition, an undemocratic process” (2009:37), and consequently the sort of violence enacted by some nations against others remains a form of “justified violence”, a means to achieve a goal. The profound transformations in Pacific societies had terrible effects on how populations interacted with each other and with ecosystems. Consequently, the colonial encounters in their several stages introduced new forms of governing, new social and cultural forms that by no means took into consideration the pre-existing ones, hence it was inevitable the disruption of Native cultures. Local forms of governance were replaced by Western models which did not include (or respect) local chiefs or even took into consideration native forms of ruling. Power was then established based on Western beliefs either social or religious. For most of Pacific societies the colonial endeavour not only brought a new human landscape, new ideals and ideas, new technologies and goods but it mainly conveyed an alteration of islanders’ socio-cultural systems and livelihoods which has proven to be profound and complete, and its consequences continue to be felt today. European exploration was followed by several waves of missionaries, traders, whalers, sealers, and miners. By the end of nineteenth century, the Pacific region had been parcelled, transferred, and ultimately traded/commodified by the European and the American powers. They had in their agenda the complete incorporation of Pacific peoples into the already globalised dynamics of empires and nation-making, considering those overseas territories an extension of those same Euro-American powers. Accordingly, Tracey Mar asserts that “in the aftermath of sometimes catastrophic collapses of populations, the Pacific was left divided into sometimes arbitrary and always expediently defined colonies of possessions” (2016:24). It is noteworthy that for centuries European countries such
48 Chapter I Departing, Journeying, Returning
as Portugal, Spain, Great Britain and France battled over territories overseas, signing treaties and exchanging territories as if those territories/peoples were mere pieces on a chessboard, making alliances that were exclusionary, and which only had in mind the imperial expansion and the growing power of some European countries. Within those frameworks of power, maps were drawn, new territories were created out of greed and of the desire to consume “the other”. Interesting enough, those maps remain real in the sense that Europe has shaped the way the world has been apprehended lacking a sense of recognition (Butler 2009).1 Despite the changes operated within centuries alliances forged between European nations and the USA on the behalf of progress, globalisation or even glocalisation, the world’s leaders fail to recognise (among other things) the rights of Indigenous Peoples. A quite contemporary example of how history must or must not be written, is that in 2019 Portugal and Spain battled over the nationality of Fernão de Magalhães, the navigator who served the Spanish king Carlos V, and who endeavoured the first circumnavigation of the Earth (1519-1522). In this quarrel, Portugal was accused of whitewashing Spain from history in its national commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Magalhães’ expedition (1519-2019). The question, though, remains the same – what history is being told? – the answer seems somehow obvious, Indigenous Peoples’ records may as well be left aside in order not to demystify the grandeur of the occasion, and the heroism of those men who crossed oceans in pursue of the newness that “the old continent” was in need for, the quest for what Europeans in the 16th century had designated as the Isles of Gold and Silver, commonly referred in classic texts as Chryse and Argyre.2 However, that utopian newness motivated by curiosity and mythical representations
1 In Frames of War, Judith Butler differentiates these two concepts “apprehension” and “recognition”, being the last one a stronger term in contrast with apprehending that implies “acknowledging without cognition” (2009:5). It is, therefore, borrowing Butler’s theorisation that I have established the first premise of the relation between coloniser and colonised. Assuming that acknowledging without cognition may invalidate the possibility of empathy and affectiveness between the two elements given the nature of the relation established, it posits another question of how grievable were (are) the lives of those who have been consequently subjugated and marginalised.
2 Chryse and Argyre were two legendary islands possibly located in the Indian Ocean and said to be made of gold and silver (chrysos and argyros in Greek). During centuries, their possible existence triggered the curiosity of navigators and kings who commanded expeditions to find them.
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
was effortlessly translated into greed, death, and ecological devastation. The “catastrophic collapses of populations” as described by Tracey Mar in the quote above are unlikely to be part of the scenario created for the national commemorations of Magalhães’ endeavour around the world, perhaps because in the 21st century it is assumed that conflicts between those who were once colonised, and their colonisers have already been solved under the naïve banner of a globalised-friendly world. Those histories of the past should not, then, have an echo running the risk of disturbing the implemented policies of equality among peoples. But, once again it all depends on who are those telling the stories, the different implied narrators will eventually create their own nuances according to their positionality within the global narrative. Several assumptions and beliefs were at the basis of the exploratory journeys of the Pacific during the 16th and 17th centuries. Those assumptions, though, were for the most part prompted by the speculation about the existence of a fourth continent, Terra Australis Incognita.3 The imagination of Europeans was triggered by classical, biblical and cartographic literature that had produced the notion of “the South Seas”. It is, therefore, the intertextuality between literary texts and travel/exploratory literature that culminated in “the invention, construction, performance and production of the Pacific in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Camino 2005:15). Largely described as a cross-cultural space, the Pacific has been one of those places in which several narratives either real or imagined coexisted. Accordingly, Mercedes Maroto Camino in her brilliant study, Producing the Pacific: Maps and Narratives of Spanish Expansion (2005),
3 Terra Australis Incognita was the name attributed to the unknow southern continent by classical Greek geographers who already had knowledge regarding the shape of the Earth, knowing it was spherical. During the Middle Ages period, the Church insisted on the flat shape of the planet leading to the eradication of the belief in the existence of a southern continent. However, the exploratory endeavours by sea during the 15th and early 16th centuries confirmed that the Earth was, indeed, spherical. Based on that “maps of that period showed Terra Australis as a vast continent centred on the South Pole, and extending as far north as approximately latitude 60°S., and in the Pacific Ocean almost up to the equator” (Kemp 1976:861). The voyages endeavoured by Bartolomeu Días in 1478 (the rounding of Cape of Good Hope), and the ones by Fernão de Magalhães in 1520 stimulated other navigators in the search for this continent, such as James Cook, and gradually the “unknown land” (Terra Incognita) was divided and reduced to smaller continents, Antarctica and Australia (Kemp 1976).
50 Chapter I Departing, Journeying, Returning
describes the historical trajectory of exploring and producing the Pacific between 1567 and 1606. Thus, she points out that The early modern Spanish, English and Dutch forays into the Pacific followed and created an imaginary design that presented this ocean as an area of geographical, economic, missionary or colonial importance. Imagining the Pacific is, in fact, the first part of a complex process that entails not just image and invention but also performance and production. In other words, conceptualising the Pacific is a step of a process that is dependent on facts or fictions as well as on presentation, representation, performance, practice and production. (2005: 15) Hence, it is still currently by means of production, performance, and imaginative constructions that the Pacific region is envisioned, and ultimately made real to audiences. In a globalised world in which consumerism remains as the pivotal approach to other cultures, tourism has relied on those representations to sell a product. The exploratory navigations around the Pacific generated a plethora of representations of Native populations either in written texts (such as the Journals of Captain James Cook) which were produced by men who had accompanied the navigators, or visual art that have enticed the curiosity of Europeans for centuries. Those representations are, generally, monolithic portrayals of the cultural diversity of the Pacific but they have remained central in certain historiographic narratives written by Europeans about the Pacific islands. Their typical characteristics were clearly introduced and developed “since the late 1760s, when explorers first brought reports from Tahiti and other Pacific Islands back to metropolitan centres” (Keown 2005:2). European travellers and writers developed a particular allure for Polynesia, thus their writings/reports, and later the painting by Paul Gauguin or Henri Matisse’s drawings triggered the curiosity of others which had also contributed to the fabrication of myriad of representations that persisted into the contemporary era and have been vastly used, as previously mentioned, by present-day tourism corporations. As those representations have prevailed within the imaginary of
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
Europeans, they have also helped in the construction of a narrative about the history of the Pacific islands, and to a certain extent in the mythification of the region. Nevertheless, contrary to certain pre-conceived ideas of homogeneous representations of the Pacific as a cartography of tiny islands dispersed/isolated across a vast ocean, Indigenous people have resisted that categorisation by “preferring to stress the continuities across the water that are firmly located in local cosmologies and oral narratives” (Keown 2013:608). In fact, “metropolitan imaginaries and Oceanic experiences were surely always in dialectical relations of mutual influence, and the borders of European fictional fantasies and factual accounts were permeable” (Jolly et al. 2009:8). It is, therefore, these dialectical relations that have shaped Indigenous people’s identities as well as they also contributed to the exoticisation and commodification of Indigenous cultures, and ultimately, they have constructed a geopolitical chain of territorial and economic interests. The proliferation of images and goods/objects of mass consumption available to the most diverse audience, therefore, depend(ed) simultaneously on facts and fictions that have been plagued with stereotypical representations of Indigenous people. It is, thus, relevant to problematise the connections between those globalised images and their socio-cultural implications in the Pacific. In this way, globalisation articulates new forms of socio-cultural organisation, a supposedly borderless world, and the increasing flow of capital and new technologies, leading to a new perception of knowledge. However, the subsequent interconnectedness generated through flows of peoples, capital and technology often precludes an aggressive expansion of capitalism and neoliberal policies that rarely consider the effective rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide. Accordingly, Victoria S. Lockwood when comparing the relation between “developed” (labelled as core nations, i.e., America, Japan, and Europe) and “developing” nations asserts that the later are often dependent on imports of manufactured and consumer items. Because of their peripheral and dependent economic position, they find it difficult to shape the terms
52 Chapter I Departing, Journeying, Returning
on which they participate in the global political economy, and they often struggle to find a niche in it at all (2004: 5). Although it has been argued that globalisation may promote economic growth in poor countries while also contributing to global equity, it somehow seems to be rather the opposite when it tends to aggravate the already existing inequalities between rich and poor nations. Ultimately, critics of globalisation explain that “it inexorably leads to the concentration of wealth and economic power in the hands of a small group, enriching the powerful capitalist nations and impoverishing the developing world” (Friedman 1994: 88). Over the last few decades, the debate around globalisation has been prolific but not consensual. Hence, and trying to avoid dangerous generalisations about the topic or even an anti-globalisation approach, my claims are diametrically opposed to the glorification of globalised political practices mainly because they have proved to be quite exclusionary practices in which there is a certain degree of systemic and structural violence against Indigenous people. My arguments are rooted in two premises: the loss of cultural diversity and the subjugation/marginalisation of Indigenous cultures at the hands of capitalist and neoliberal economies. Problematic as it may seem, it will be taken into consideration the impact of global policies interconnected with the militarisation of certain regions in the Pacific (Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa) together with the environmental damage caused by the lack of implemented policies to protect ecosystems in tandem with policies that have long been protecting transnational tourism enterprises. Bearing in mind the impossibility of reversing or even stopping the side effects of globalisation, it seems convenient to examine the changes operated within certain locations, and the way cultural groups have participated and are affected by that global interconnectedness while dialogically examining how Indigenous groups use identity politics to claim cultural restitution against dominant groups, as is the case of sovereignty groups in Hawai’i. Impelled by its own logic, globalisation happens to be the continuance of several historical processes of Western expansion in which capital and territorial dominance were the main aspects of the colonial encounter. Yet, since the second half of the twentieth century (from the 40s onwards), some distinct forms of
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Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
imperialism – military, political, cultural and/or economic – have been enforced by the U.S. which entail a politics of (un)veiled violence against Indigenous peoples across the Pacific region. There is, then, an intrinsic connection between colonial expansion and globalisation, hence that link remains vivid and the core of contemporary forms of dealing with Indigenous cultures/peoples. Ultimately, the militarisation of the Pacific remains intrinsically connected with global forms of expansionism promoted thorough economic alliances. The bounds established are not always impartial or embedded in equalitarian tactics, and for the most part these connections strongly encapsulate relations of power in which it is possible to assemble the inequalities so-long established between coloniser and colonised peoples. Such unequal global policies perpetuate the disruption of the lives of Indigenous peoples. The permanent search for needs/goods and markets remains as one of the many legacies of the industrial revolution, since “propelled by the industrial revolution and the need for raw materials and markets, Europeans first dominated and integrated distant peoples and cultures into global-scale political economic relations during the colonial era” (Lockwood 2004: 3). It is possible to state that the militarisation of the Pacific can be traced back to when European explorers anchored off in the shores of the islands and with them they brought artillery that was used as “gifts”, offered to the locals in exchange of goods, maritime knowledge and territorial alliances. Thus, new forms of battling and securing the islands were introduced and developed. Since then, the Pacific region became simultaneously the playground of the Western imaginary in which there was given the discursive space to enact fantasies through tourism and cultural appropriation, and the site often referred to as “empty” and “virgin” were military performances are played. Currently, the connecting roles of militarism and the economy and the increase in technologies of surveillance and control have become key elements of a new form of biopower and the exercise of global domination. In this regard, the reemergence of the ‘just war’ doctrine and the racialized rhetoric of global terrorism have become dominating
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metaphors for a postmodern imperialism (Steward- Harawira 2005: 27). As a form of response to those new forms of biopower and the militarisation of territories, whether former colonies or unincorporated territories, Indigenous communities are gathering across the Pacific to demonstrate their discontent by calling the attention of world’s leaders to problems related with climate change, poverty and precarity among Indigenous populations. These forms of raising awareness not only apply to Indigenous peoples’ rights that the United Nations had elaborated on in specific legal documents (such as United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) but mainly to their knowledge base, their material and symbolic cultural heritage as well as the right to protect ecosystems as part of their cultural identity.4 In examining the processes of imperial expansionism, we can see how globalisation became the vehicle that opened up the opportunity for the US to annex territories and make use of them as nuclear testing grounds. Thus, “US interventionism in the Third World was based on capital’s need for accumulation and expansion, twin processes which have since been subsumed under the constructs of globalization” (Stewart-Harawira 2005:6). Despite the considerable number of Pacific islands that have achieved independency, they seem to be resolutely attached in neo-colonial relationships which proves that it remains quite problematic to talk about a “colonial aftermath” in the Pacific. In broad terms, perhaps the geographic position of the islands, and the permanent search for global military/strategic presence by Western powerful nations are the main factors that help in determining the political statuses of Pacific islands in general.5 It can be argued that “the projection of strategic power continued to be the central impetus behind U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific after World War II” (Bello 2010:316). Besides the strategic (military) power that is central in U.S. and French policies and which has been substantially justified by the 21st century “war
4 The document is available online through the following link: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp- content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf
5 Despite any socio-cultural and historical specificities, the broad use of the term Pacific islands is justified by the fact that the region and its multiple islands (Guam, Marshall Islands, Hawai’i, Papua New Guinea, among others) have been permanently under the pervasive influence of Western nations – economic and military – which does not facilitate the flourishing of independence.
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on terror”, the perpetuation of exoticised representations of Indigenous peoples justifies the “militourist complex” (Teaiwa 1999) in which those fetishized depictions go hand in hand with the consolidation of nuclear imperialism in the Pacific. The Pacific region has long been a relevant cartography between competing powers seeking for economic and political dominance. The agenda of those competing powers (USA, Europe, China and Japan) remains one in which territorial dominance prevails as the cornerstone of effective control and supremacy. Further, based on multiple alliances forged during centuries, the Pacific has been the playground for nuclear experiments, and the islands’ ecosystems have been highly damaged due to poisoning by chemical weapons or military toxic waste. Currently, the Pacific hosts an outstanding array of military bases, combat-training areas, nuclear testing sites, naval bases, and as a consequence of that nuclear debris is being dumped into the ocean. Therefore, the interrelation between globalisation, imperialism and militarisation is integral to understand firstly the activist movement in the Pacific, and secondly contemporary environmental issues. Since World War II the Pacific region became a theatre of war used by European countries and the US as a battlefield and a testing ground. However, in 1975 the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP) was created and it represented the culmination of solidarity between Pacific islanders who firmly objected nuclear testing and the ongoing colonial domination. The United Nations have not yet been capable of dismantling the fallacious discourse that is being widely promoted by the so-called super-powerful nations. Hence, Tilman Ruff, a nuclear weapons expert, demonstrates that Between 1945 and 2015, 2,055 nuclear explosions are known to have been undertaken globally. Apart from the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 150 explosions which were ostensibly “peaceful”, the rest have been for the purpose of developing new nuclear weapons (making them more destructive, more compact and more deliverable), understanding their effects and developing plans for their use (2015: 776).
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Wherein the Pacific is still the laboratory for nuclear experiment, behind the policies that protect and promote the occupation and the militarisation of the region there is a racialised approach that involves discrimination and racism against Pacific Indigenous people. The vastness and (supposedly) “emptiness” of those locations were since the Cold War (and until recently) suitable simultaneously for testing atomic bombs and thermonuclear weapons, and for medical experiments in which people affected by the radioactivity emanated from bombs were viewed and treated as guinea pigs in a lab demonstrating a profound racist attitude towards Indigenous people. Within these discursive practices on racializing and othering there is a common colonial binarism – civilised versus primitive – that seems to be perversely inscribed in the long-established Western perceptions which embody differentiation and (pre-established) hierarchies of power. The militarised currents established and maintained by Western nations simultaneously promote(d) ecological and nuclear racism against Indigenous peoples that have been denied environmental self- determination and have been constantly forced into dislocation. Nonetheless, central in this nuclearized era has been the debate over colonialism, ethnic identity, racism, and illegal land occupation performed in response to nuclear imperialism. Furthermore, “the Pacific decolonization era, which began with the independence of (Western) Samoa in 1962, gave rise to various political and literary movements designed to counter the isolationalist colonial strategies that had expedited nuclear testing in the region” (Keown 2018: 587). The post-World War II and, subsequently, the post-cold war periods revealed a time in which global policies went hand in hand with the militarisation of certain regions, namely the Pacific. The post-cold war signalled a turning point for many nations that were competing for power and expanding their territories, and thus the United States became one of those in the front line to regain control over other nations either economically or geographically. The flows of capital, goods, and people, as well as the enactment of global policies were driven by the increase of transnational linkages and commercial international agreements that were initiated after 1945. Alongside with capitalism, democratic policies, human rights, and the decolonisation of nations worldwide that followed World War II, there was a crescent clash between “developed nations” and “under-developed nations”. Yet,
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there is an imperialistic logic always present in permanent interventions “in the systematic use of violence of various forms of violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation” (Krishnaswamy 2008:13). However, a global rhetoric had been extensively used by worldwide politicians to justify the economic and social political stances of their governments as well as it has been used to justify military approaches and the nuclearization of far-reachable places such as Guam or the Marshall Islands. The remoteness of the Pacific Islands has been an interested justification for all sorts of nuclear experiments since the 1960s. Teresia Teaiwa (1999) brilliantly elaborates on the several networks between militarisation, global policies and the proliferation of tourism corporations asserting that those networks were promoted by nuclear-imperialist powers that benefited from pervasive and institutionalised mythic representations of the Pacific. Moreover, Indigenous peoples were forced into a position of subjugation in their own lands, ripped apart from their cultural identity, and the ongoing imperialism in their post/neo colonial world culminated in the nuclearization of the Pacific region without any regard for ecological consequences or the impact of radiation on populations’ health. Along with these premises, the nuclearization of the Pacific region remains as one the greatest examples of the failure in acknowledging the lives of Indigenous populations as worth of recognition (Butler 2006), meaning that the Pacific has been used as a testing ground with no regard of the consequences of those actions either for ecosystems and people alike. Hence, under the banner of open markets and global policies, the militarization of Pacific islands proves to be an extension of colonialism informed by (neo)imperialist imperatives. The US financial power in conjunction with huge multinational corporations are dictating the flows of capital, media information, and consumer goods around the world, which all together have proven to employ a coercive control as boundless as any colonial gunboat. Subsequently, “people across Asia and the Pacific Islands have variously been impacted and mobilized by the forces of militarization” (Camacho & Shigematsu 2010: xv), thus, “demilitarization constitutes a crucial part of larger decolonization movements” (Camacho & Shigematsu 2010: xvi). The importance of reclaiming land as a constitutive part of Indigenous identity remains until today a cornerstone
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in the wide debate about Indigenous Rights, though it also remains highly problematic due to the nature of global policies and transnational agreements that had been established. Tracey B. Mar asserts that “if colonised peoples, whose territories were testing grounds for all sorts of external militaries, had the independent capacity to say ‘no’ to what was done on their lands, nuclear testing might be stopped” (2016: 1). As proved in Mar’s examination of the decolonising processes around the Pacific, though there was (still is) an impediment to making their own decisions, and lack of freedom, “by the end of 1970s, Indigenous peoples around the world were self-empowered, mobile and confident in ways that could not have been envisioned even a decade earlier” (2016: 214). One of the many challenges in enabling self-determination for most Indigenous communities across the Pacific stems from the cumulative influence of capitalism and neoliberal policies implemented in the Pacific nations which ultimately have also been the source of vulnerability and structural violence against Indigenous people and their ecosystems. Guam and Hawai’i, for instance, remain as two of the oversea territories that are directly controlled by the United States and also as locations where coal stations, communication lines, and naval harbours were established (Shigematsu & Camacho 2010). As the United States, Japan or any European country establish multinational military alliances, thus there is an interworking of (neo)colonial conditions of the global present and heteronormative relations of power that have been displacing and marginalising people within their own island-nations, constricting Indigenous cultures and ways of life, destroying and polluting entire areas (water and land) that, ultimately, will affect the lives of generations to come. The loss of land or its appropriation either to construct hotels, resorts or plantations, resonates in the manner in which these places are constituted within the frameworks of colonial/settler dominance. Structural oppression and increasing inequalities became tangled up with processes of world’s free trade and globalisation affecting the continuity of Indigenous cultural practices. In the meantime, Indigenous cultures were appropriated and commodified within transnational tourist industries. These two realities seem to be interrelated being this dialectic nature the basis of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the
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world’s political order in which American unilateralism is the predominant feature. Nonetheless, there is an urgent need to address the relevance of decolonising the lives and the lands of Indigenous peoples as well as problematising the failure of state agencies in each of the nations in acknowledging the challenges of cultural diversity. Despite the ever-increasing demand of goods and “national territorial accumulation” (Hoogvelt 2001: 3) mainly required by industrialised nations, there is a pressing need to look closely to the consequences of that for non-industrialised nations, as they face the most severe climate changes and have to cope with both environmental degradation and the loss of their cultural heritage.6 The unevenness of globalisation and the precarious position of Indigenous peoples’ rights between the responsibility of local governments and their global policies are quite evident in places such as Hawai’i, Samoa, or Tahiti. In relation to this perspective, there is an evident connection between the exploitation and degradation of ecosystems and the subordination of women, and the identification of patriarchy “as the main source of global ecological destruction” (Mellor 1997: 5). Hence Western ontologies seem to have failed to respect the ecological limits of Indigenous cultures contributing to the present environmental crisis in the sense that “ecological impacts and consequences are experienced through human bodies, in ill health, early death, congenital damage and impeded childhood development” (Mellor 1997:2). Bearing in mind the theorisations of ecofeminism, the lack of respect towards ecosystems can also be translated into the degradation of the livelihood of Indigenous women in the sense that “women disproportionately bear the consequences of those impacts within their own bodies (dioxin residues in breast milk, failed pregnancies)” (Mellor 1997:2). Ecofeminist theories assert that the subordination of women and the degradation of ecosystems are linked. The objectification of the body of Polynesian women that appears in promotional tourist campaigns and the personification of the Pacific islands as island-women create the
6 Accordingly, Hoogvelt, points out that “national territorial accumulation is a process of continuous self-expansion of capital within the territorial boundedness of the nation-state” (2001:3). Bearing in mind the mercantilist approach that has characterised the colonial period, currently nation-states such as the USA, Japan, China or some European countries still maintain with their former colonised territories a commercial/militarised relation under the banner of “friendly” global policies in which scarcely anything has been done to mitigate the wrong-doings of the past or improve the life conditions of Indigenous peoples.
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sort of interconnectedness that is central to ecofeminism. Through its lens, it is examined the social context within which the changes have occurred, and in which women have been marginalised. Hence, the situatedness of subjects and their interaction with the bounding conditions that have been causing the present ecological crisis are relevant to understand the multiple forms of silencing women and how those subjects resist erasure and violence. The division of societies into hierarchical gender dualism established mainly by Western patriarchy has been referred to as the main source of ecological destruction (Mellor 1997). Polynesian societies were forced into that dualist system and there was a clear collapse of the way Indigenous peoples interact with their lands. Women and ecosystems are bounded as demonstrated by Polynesian epistemologies, and that connection was disrupted when new socio-cultural forms were introduced. What is both politically and theoretically fundamental to understand is the connection between socially constructed relationships and the embodiment of physical realities by means of connecting the biological and ecological processes surrounding the oppression and subordination of women. These spatial constructions which oppose the exotic and the real-ness of Indigenous people’s livelihoods have revolved around the interaction between gender and ethnicity affecting socio-ecological systems in the sense that lands have been occupied to promote the effective existence of a “paradise” to be consumed. Anne McClintock points out that in colonial discourse there is a pervasive feminisation of the “conquered spaces” in which “the feminizing of the land represents a ritualistic moment in imperial discourse, as male intruders ward off fears of a narcissistic disorder by reinscribing, as natural, an excess of gender hierarchy” (1995: 24). Further, there is a gendering process of those explorations and fantasies, as pointed out by McClintock: “Enlightenment metaphysics presented knowledge as a relation of power between two gendered spaces, articulated by a journey and a technological conversion: the male penetration and exposure of a veiled, female interior; and the aggressive conversion of its “secrets” into a visible, male science surface” (1995: 23). Women’s bodies in their corporeality are exposed to the vulnerability entailed in socially and culturally articulated forces that tend to objectify them, and thereby commodify their image
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rendering their subjectivity/individuality in the public arena to a mere fallacious representation. The pervasiveness of those representations finds major utterance, for instance, in the way hula dancers continue to be commercialised, and in the naming of the Bikini atoll (Teaiwa 2010). Teresia Teaiwa brilliantly demonstrates the intersection between the name given to the atoll and its feminisation, and the sheer attempt to erase the consequences of several nuclear tests performed there by pointing out that “the bikini bathing suit is a testament of the recruiting tourist trivialization of Pacific Islanders’ experience and existence. By drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name” (2010: 15). This form of masquerading history has been recurrent in the rhetoric of colonialism, where places and peoples are rendered invisible by means of also using specific language that reinforce the sexualised nature of the colonial encounter. This affirmation of the male-colonial gaze negates agency to the female body by over-using and exposing it, and ultimately conceals the sort of objectification that “visually embodies and denies both sexual and nuclear chaos” (Teaiwa 2010: 21). Hence the Pacific body emerges “as a site for comprehending specific social and physical environments and for comprehending generic colonial technologies of marginalization and erasure” (Teaiwa 2010: 23). Subsequently, this feminization of the space which was largely portrayed in the narratives about the unexplored territories culminated in the way Pacific islands such as Hawai’i, Tahiti or Samoa were perceived by foreigners, and that has also generated a strong desire that motivated Europeans to cross the thresholds of their “known world”. Thus, these representations have simultaneously informed the interests of massive imperial power and have validated colonial impositions. Considering, though, the process of feminisation of the Pacific islands in general that entails the trivialisation of those places operated by tourism transnational corporations when making use of women’s bodies to advertise and sell a “product”, there is a clear depoliticization of those same bodies rendering them to nothing else but their empty materiality. In fact, the personification of the exotic has been a process controlled and targeted to the persistent desires and fantasies for the consumption of female bodies, and ultimately “the Pacific tourism industry rests
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opportunistically on exotic (female) beauty, reflected in the image of the ‘orientalised’ sensual other” (Suaalli, 2000: 97). Consequently, there is a semiotics of the “South Pacific” landscape with its exuberant nature and the eros of (female) bodily allure that is often used as tourist-flow attraction. Today those images endure as a substratum of the Pacific islands’ tourism industry, the largest private enterprise and the foremost source of economic development in some of those islands. Tourism not only relies on the exoticism of the images produced to advertise those places and their people – such as hula dancers displayed in leaflets and billboards – but also its discursive practices are often embedded in a profound sense of codifying “difference”. Subsequently, that has also been used to structure identity categories in which the materiality of bodies whether male or female ones is commodified and used to generate profit (Desmond 1999). Yet there is a sort of mimicry as formulated by Bhabha in those representations, there is an ambivalent desire for a “reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference which is almost the same, but not quite” (1984: 126, italics in the original). To a certain extent, the ambivalence of that mimicry can only be effective as long as it engenders “its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Bhabha 1984: 126). However, this construction of otherness simultaneously entails the appropriation of Indigenous cultures and negates their subjectivity inasmuch as it proclaims the fetishization of colonial desire. The militarised currents established between the so-called super-powerful nations – such as the USA, China, Japan and some European countries – have also relied on a series of fetishized images in which the Pacific remains as a secluded paradise insofar as it also conveys stereotypical representations of bodies used by tourist transnational corporations. Whereas widely institutionalised and commodified, the Polynesian body – real or imagined – as defined by Teresia Teaiwa appears “as a dominant figure that has been appropriated into militourist discourses” (1999:250). While new forms of hegemony were forged and ensured by the crescent militarisation of the Pacific Islands, neo-expansionist policies promoted and protected the development of transnational tourism corporations that profoundly rely on the exoticisation of places in order to sell them as mere products. Consequently, the integral myth of the paradise of the “South Seas” promoted by
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military forces in tandem with belying paradisiacal advertisements for tourism industries discursively erases, firstly, Indigenous rights struggles by projecting (and selling) a unrealistic image of the lives of Indigenous communities, and secondly generates complex processes of displacement and dispossession. I take the liberty of quoting Teresia Teaiwa at length here because her definition of militourism quite cogently takes into account the complexity of the power relations established in the Pacific from early contact but that persist until today: Militourism is a phenomenon by which military and paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same industry masks the military force behind it. The roots of militourism in the Pacific go as far as Ferdinand Magellan’s first (and last) encounter with the natives of Guam in 1521. […T]he militarization of the Pacific by imperialist powers has often had less to do with islands natives than with the Pacific as a strategic and commercial space where European, American, and Asian desires are played out. Nonetheless, inasmuch as the military violence Magellan’s crew wreaked upon Guam is paradigmatic of imperialist relations in the Pacific, so is the initial desire for “R&R”. The opportunity for rest and recreation that the Pacific Islands have afforded foreign sailors, whalers, and traders over the last five hundred years has been sophisticatedly commodified for tourists in the late twentieth century (1999: 251). Contentious as it may seem, the balance between those external forces of militarism and tourism, and Indigenous rights is never achieved given the powerful nature of the relations that dictate, for example, land ownership. Hence, despite providing employment and social mobility which is undeniably true, both military forces and tourism industries drain and pollute natural resources, occupy, and destroy sacred sites. One of the best examples of this unhinged situation, though this is also the case in other islands, including Tahiti and Samoa, is the example of Hawai’i. While many Native Hawaiians are landless and homeless because they cannot cope the
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land prices, U.S military bases and resorts or hotels owned by tourist-dependent enterprises are constructed on a regular basis and occupy large land masses as well as they overuse natural resources (Teaiwa 1999; Trask 1999; Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, 2014). Nonetheless, inasmuch as the military violence against Indigenous peoples in the Pacific is paradigmatic so is the desire to consume the place by effective occupation that dispossesses people from their lands, and their commodification. The demilitarisation and the decolonisation of the Pacific islands may require collaborative strategies of knowledge production that simultaneously address the political effects of occupation, and the deconstruction of a certain domestication of people endorsed by the massification of cultures. For these reasons, self- determination and sovereignty movements across the Pacific have foregrounded hitherto a heightened call to engage in knowledge produced by Indigenous people, following Epeli Hau’ofa’s focus on “how people, ordinary people, the forgotten people of history, have coped and are coping with their harsh realities, their resistance and struggles to be themselves and hold together” (2000: 458). The loss of cultural diversity and the increasing imposition of Western cultural hegemony promoted by the expansion of capitalism seems to be a sequel of the rhetoric of the “white’s man burden” in which the “new colonisers” (transnational corporations) keep forcing their institutions, ways of life and cultural forms on the “uncivilised” other. It is by no means being advocated here any form of crystallisation of Indigenous cultures which immediately falls into the fallacious argument of primitivism or essentialist nativism, though the point is, in fact, much more about on how Indigenous cultures were, and are affected by all forms of globalisation as succedaneum of imperialism/colonialism. Also, about how those same groups resist external hegemony, being resistance a cornerstone of Indigenous peoples’ political and social transition. Subsequently, it is rather relevant to note that within the political configurations of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for sovereignty, they have moved from the language of “equal rights” to begin to argue in the discourse of self-determination and land rights in which they refuse, to a certain extent, to negotiate on the conditions of the dominant state. The processes of decolonisation in general and in the Pacific in particular are vested with discourses that attempt at dismantling the colonial and neo-colonial legacies, and
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whose history can be traced back to the nineteenth century when the first movements emerged, and to a certain extent proved that the Pacific region might be acknowledged as an inter-connected whole (Mar 2016). Colonial alliances had been forged, new maps drawn, and the world saw itself changing with geographic and economic divisions that suited the desires of the so- called nations in power. During centuries, Europe and the United States of America were expanding their territorial power overseas competing for the best located places in the Pacific either to assure unsurpassed economic trades or to progress into military development giving them the necessary supremacy to rule the world. Hence, long-lasting relations of capital accumulation labelled by bell hooks as “the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” coerce people and loot the Earth. This arrangement depends on the subjugation/domination of women, Indigenous people, their lands, and ecosystems. Global imperialism promoted during the colonial period did not come to an end after the decolonisation of certain regions but rather it suffered relevant changes into something more complex – globalisation – turning itself in a more sophisticated and influential approach to Indigenous cultures that promotes investment, trade, education, cultural or economic exploitation. It is, therefore, relevant to clarify two points here. Firstly, it is obvious that Pacific Islands (generally speaking) are commonly considered to be mesmerizing places due to their landscapes but insisting uniquely on that aspect will flatten the reality by “othering” both people and landscapes. However, those depictions based on exquisite beauty are not untrue, they are incomplete, and fall under the banner of “the danger of a single story” (Adichie 2009) which has proven to be one of the major constitutive features in creating stereotypes, and consequently depriving people from their cultural identity.7 Secondly, tourism has been simultaneously singled out as one of the most lucrative sources of income for certain Pacific Islands, namely Hawai’i and Tahiti, and the most destructive industry for fragile ecosystems when over-consuming and polluting natural resources. Rob Wilson points out that those stereotypes that have triggered the imagination of Europeans
7 Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s speech titled “The Danger of a Single Story” is available online and it can be accessed through the following link: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
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for centuries, and were then used by the media and the tourism industry, thus the New Pacific threatens to remain a strategic and commercial space where European, American, and Asian desire to use tourist sites for pleasure zones, for journeys of regression and redemption, for phallocratic bodily bliss, for temporary release into excess and leisure, for landscapes of Edenic wilderness and ecological purity – are still being played out at the expense of a globally worked-over and trooped-upon native culture. (1999: 10) Commonly described as a paradise, their widely spread stereotypical representations have been resisted by Pacific Islanders either through art and/or by actively positioning themselves at the centre of sovereignty movements. Accordingly, questions of self-determination, hegemony, land occupation and violence within the Pacific region have been articulated by Indigenous peoples not only among themselves but also within a wider international panorama, consequently challenging and bestowing a radical alternative to those issues previously assumed, for instance, in the United Nations programme of decolonisation (Mar 20016).8 Still, it has been a recurrent trope in Pacific Literature the destabilisation of those myths of isolation and dependency, and Pacific writers employ a transoceanic imaginary that emphasises myriad kinship networks, and their relevance among Pacific peoples as, indeed, being the first Indigenous settlers of the region. This conceptual notion of precolonial voyaging is overtly suggested by Epeli Hau’ofa (1999) who elaborates on the importance of these historical migrations as tropes that facilitate a more “holistic” understanding of a gradually diasporic fluidity and
8 Tracey Mar posits that several studies locate the history of decolonisation before 1945, being M.J. Bonn (1938) acknowledged as the first theorist to coin the term, influencing the works of R.F. Holland, Rudolf Albertini, Henri Grimal and John Darwin. However, these scholars were more interested in the decline of empires, and they have only “explored the colonial territories perceived to have had the greatest impact on metropolitan centres and world affairs – principally Asia and Africa. The Pacific was largely ignored” (2016:6). Only decades later was the Pacific region included in academic studies but even then “these accompany a modest scholarship that has focused on individual island nations, often without broader reference to the regional or global context” (2016: 6).
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globalised Pacific. Rather than a simple vast land mass in which boundaries, frontiers and limits were erected during the 19th century, “Oceania denotes a sea of islands” (Hau’ofa 1999: 32), and Theirs was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers. From one island to another they sailed to trade and to marry, thereby expanding social networks for greater flows of wealth (Hau’ofa 1999: 32) Unsurprisingly, Indigenous movements for self-determination and sovereignty all over the Pacific have concurrently highlighted the history of land occupation (a symbolic representation of roots), and the prevailing revival of transoceanic migrations (routes) that revitalise the ancient voyages of Pacific people. Haunani-Kay Trask describes this dualism (native – roots versus diaspora – routes) in a beautiful way: “the light of our dawns, like the color of our skin, tells us who we are, and where we belong. We know our genealogy descends from the great voyagers of the far Pacific. And we cherish our inheritance” (1999: xv). By emphasising the importance of belonging, Trask’s assertion conveys the dismantling of any possible tensions between local and diasporic identities which are not as polarised as it may seem given the fact that they recuperate the notion that current migrant/diasporic trajectories are frequently a metaphoric representation of precolonial voyaging. Epeli Hau’ofa symbolic expression of “the ocean in us” (1999) revitalises that holistic connection between the people and the ocean, and the fluidity of traversing it appears as an ancestral cultural feature of Pacific Islanders. Accordingly, the representational parameters as described by Epeli Hau’ofa were (and continue to be) always movement, entanglement and connectivity rather than isolation, remoteness and limitation, hence these representational parameters ultimately promote the deconstruction of stereotypical representations. Thus, those diasporic waves might as well be defined based on “indigenous cosmopolitanism” (Clifford 2013: 72) in the sense that they come to demonstrate – depending on the context – the identification of individuals’ cultural identity within local, national, regional and/or global contexts in which exclusions
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and multiplicities of belonging are profoundly entangled with relations of power (Kempf et al. 2014: 2). Movement is literally and metaphorically assumed here as a conceptual framework that comprises, on the one hand, mobility, migration (forced or voluntary) and diaspora, and on the other hand, tourism, displacement, and globalisation. While acknowledging the intricate entanglement of these factors, the multiple and varied encounters between Pacific Islanders and Westerners culturally shaped both groups, ultimately by means of perpetuating power relations that are (still) problematic to dismantle which also prove the opacity of Western historical reconstructions.9 Hence, those historical reconstructions or even the lingering perpetuation of images related with the luxuriant beauty of Pacific islands, often preclude the passiveness of islanders, the obscurity of their knowledge in sheer contrast with the bravery and technological development of Europeans.
1.1.1. South Pacific Narratives by Indigenous Women: Célestine Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel
Among the corpus to be analysed in this thesis, novels such as Shark Dialogues (1995) by Kiana Davenport and Freelove (2016) by Sia Figiel most clearly expose the way Indigenous people have been violently marginalised at the hands of predatory policies employed by the United States as well as it is also problematised that there are heteronormative and racialised relations of power that unquestionably encompass the militarisation of women’s lives. Their critical approach within the frameworks of literary texts foster the relevance of “writing back to the empire” (to use Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s concept), deconstructing assumptions that validate neo-imperial methods of homogenising Indigenous cultures. The novels’ polyvocality may, accordingly, designate a potential resistance to oppressive conventions settled by the imposition of new
9 I am alluding here to the records of European voyages throughout the Pacific which have an almost mythical status, and in which the role of Polynesians was overtly subalternised. The historical narrativization of those voyages remains a powerful source of anthropological knowledge, some narratives being more romanticised than others, as is the example of Louis-Antoine Bougainville’s records in which the tone is almost literary, full of poetic allusions, in contrast with the scientific descriptions of James Cook’s journals.
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cultural forms that have been since inception disrupting the livelihood of Indigenous population widely across the Pacific. The Indigenous women writers of the Pacific – including Célestine Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel – also partake in the (re)construction of their nations within the globalised panorama, promoting the importance of recovering Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies to educate younger generations while denouncing the way those nations remain as sites of permanent violence and fetishization. For the refashioning of global modernity remains similarly challenging to these women writers, who experience diverse depths of self- interrogation when their socio-cultural contexts are simultaneously described as both peripherical and modern. Arguably, the exoticisation of the Pacific remains still a problematic issue as well as a complex one to dismantle. Nonetheless, it continues to be relevant to “break with that symbolic and political positioning of marginality, exotica and the other” (Chambers 1996:55) in which Euro-Americans with their displaced desires have located Indigenous cultures. Partly as result of these misrepresentations, there is a prolific literary production in the Pacific that revitalises Indigenous languages and modes of telling stories in which there is a clear articulation of ancestry and modern times. Thus, the literary works produced by Davenport, Figiel and Vaite can be perceived as counternarratives that move beyond an anti-colonial perspective towards a decolonial one by focusing on a certain sense of communal liberation and healing through the restoration of the past while looking towards the future. These three women writers have become involved in current political struggles that have been central for Pacific Islanders, and through their novels they also reframe and redefine what is relevant and valuable both for Indigenous people. Much of the fiction produced by these authors shares particular concerns both with the future of the specific island-nations each one depicts, and a structural relationship between the present and the past. It remains vital for these women writers to emphasise the relevance of Indigenous cultures, whereby much of their aesthetics skills reside in the incorporation of politicised messages, comprehensible only through the decoding of culture and history. Taken together, the voices of these women writers engage in a resistant and decolonial project aiming at giving visibility to
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marginalised subjects. Equally important is that their texts highlight shifting cultural practices and social relations within the Indigenous communities portrayed in the narratives. Moreover, they also demonstrate a preoccupation in reclaiming intellectual sovereignty and in reasserting cultural autonomy by focusing on Indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies. It is, then, through multiple frameworks – political, administrative, educational and/or creative – that most of these themes are put into the picture. By recovering the past as a cultural framework, these women writers are simultaneously calling for the liberation of the mind in which there is a new form of representing Native cultures (Epeli Hau’ofa 1993) and reclaiming the richness of Oceania in which Indigenous people are given agency. The wounds of colonialism are not easily erased within these narratives insofar as they became a constitutive feature of these colonised nations, to the point that these wounds “cut back through the heritage of the past into the now of the present and reach over the horizon of the future” (Sina Va’ai 1998:208). The nefarious consequences of the legacies of empires were critically described by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o as forces that annihilate “people’s beliefs in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves” (1986:3). It is, however, this process of depriving people from their dignity that constitutes the intricate rhetoric of colonialism. Concurrently, Epeli Hau’ofa posits that “in Oceania, derogatory and belittling views of indigenous cultures are traceable to the early years of interaction with Europeans. The wholesale condemnation by Christian missionaries of Oceanic cultures as savage, lascivious, and barbaric has had a lasting and negative effect on people’s views of their histories and traditions” (1999:28). By writing from the inside out to use Hereniko and Wilson (1999) expression, Vaite, Davenport and Figiel propose a committed and critical engagement with their Indigenous cultures. By doing so they explicitly outline the political process of writing, and the importance of looking at Indigenous cosmologies as forms of producing knowledge as well as agentive forces in decolonial practices and epistemologies. The following subchapter is divided in three sections referring to the island- nations from where the women writers studied in this thesis are originally from –
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Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa – thus, placing them in a specific cartography that alludes to their Indigenous identity. The first section revolves around the history and culture of Tahiti, the next one refers to Hawai’i, and the last one to Samoa. These sections do not aim at presenting an exhaustive historiographic analysis, rather they summarise key aspects that revolve around colonial and postcolonial moments, serving as contextualisation of the cultural background in the novels by Célestine Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel to be examined in the following chapters.
1.2. Journeying across Islands: Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa.
1.2.1. Tahiti
Among the origin myths of Tahiti there is an ancient legend about a god, Ta’aro, and how he gave birth to the island by creating the skies, the ocean, the land, the stars. His feathered body divided itself into thousand parts, yet before his creative process was initiated, Ta’aro was alone in the abyss (Salmond 2009). His loneliness resonates in the imagery of Tahiti that “appears as a speck of land, set in the midst of the world’s largest ocean” (Salmond 2009:21). From all the things he created, Ta’aro gave birth to other gods and goddesses who are part of the mythopoetic narrative of Tahiti in which the sacredness between land and the ocean is revered, and navigation is praised as an ancestral feature of Tahitian people. For many generations, the people of the island and its chiefs were devoted to this pantheon of divinities created by Ta’aro, they paid them tribute and worshiped them, honouring the sacredness of places/land which were treated with utmost reverence. There was in their cosmology, a profound bound between all human and non-human entities. Considered the largest island in the so-called French Polynesia group, Tahiti was in 1880 annexed by France. Currently, it is considered an overseas country/collectivity (pays d’outre mer or POM), independent from France with independent economy and government, though France remains highly influential in questions related with education, national security, and monetary aid. Tahitian is the word commonly used to refer to Indigenous people in Tahiti, Ma’ohi is also
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used to designate Indigenous ancestry but in most of the studies consulted while researching for this Dissertation, the most used designation to refer to Indigenous people is Tahitian (Tepari’’, 1994; Salmond 2011; Fisher, 2013; Armitage and Bashford 2014). Based on that I will use Tahitian to refer to Indigenous people. As in Hawai’i and Samoa, before the arrival and the European settlement, the governing of the island was divided in chiefdoms in which territorial demarcations were dominated by each group/clan (Collingridge 1903, Newell 2010, Kahn 2011). The remoteness that characterised Tahiti was shattered when a sequence of caravels from France, Britain and Spain began to anchor off the shores of the island. During the 17th century, Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Portuguese navigator under the command of the Spanish Crown (King Philip III), led an expedition to Terra Australis, and claimed to have sighted an island that could be Tahiti. However, it remains difficult to tell if it was effectively the Tahitian shores that were seen by those navigators, mainly because there are other chronicles that attest that it was the Spanish explorer, Juan Fernández, during his expedition (1576-1577) who first arrived to Tahiti (Collingridge 1903). Contentious as it is, what is at stake in those recollections is (once again) European narratives about the Pacific and the maritime skills of explorers who were serving different monarchs but who overtly shared the same imperialist interest in expanding their domains overseas. Nearly two centuries after those first records, and while there was an intense Anglo-French rivalry, the British lieutenant Samuel Wallis harboured in Matavai Bay in 1767. In fact, when “discovering” Tahiti, Wallis introduced Tahiti to European history, though it is equally right that when Tahitians “discovered” Wallis and his crew aboard the Dolphin, they also let Europeans enter the records of Tahitian history. There was an ancient prophecy among Tahitians predicting the arrival of “strangers”, and based on that cosmological approach, Europeans were welcomed and treated as important entities, “at first, they were not certain whether the Europeans were people like themselves, ancestors or some new kind of being” (Salmond 2005: 171).10 Brilliantly and extensively documented, Anne Salmond
10 For further knowledge on this topic, see Anne Salmond’s works on which she extensively elaborates on the specificities of the first contact between Tahitians and Europeans also by giving accurate details about Tahitian pre-colonial history (Salmond 2005, 2009, 2011).
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retells the story and explains the motifs behind the misunderstandings between the navigators and Indigenous Tahitian people, In the beginning, however, the strangers were not welcomed but greeted with deep suspicion. The islanders had been forewarned about their arrival, and the prophecy was ominous. In about 1760, when marauding warriors had attacked Taputapuatea, the sacred temple of the war god ‘Oro, a priest named Vaita went into a trance and pro- claimed that a new kind of people, coming on “a canoe without an outrigger,” would take over the land and change their lives forever. Thus when the Dolphin, a “canoe without an outrigger” appeared above the horizon, the Tahitian men approached the vessel fearfully and in a ritual fashion. A hundred or so canoes surrounded the ship, and a priest made a long speech before throwing a plantain branch in the ocean (2011: 94) The rituals performed by Tahitians were largely misinterpreted principally those that involved the presence of women, and that contributed to divergent assumptions about sexuality in the sense that what was considered a natural and welcoming practice based on Tahitian ancestry, was envisioned as sexual licentiousness by Europeans. Navigators when seen for the first time were acknowledged as “important visitors”. Salmond elaborates on those aspects by positing that “in welcoming an important visitor to a district, a young female ‘arioi with a large quantity of bark cloth wound around her body walked towards the guest and slowly twirled around, unwinding the bark cloth until she stood there nude” (2009: 27). During these encounters, sailors found the exposure of women’s genitalia a malicious provocation, which not only generated a series of confrontations but also promoted the idea of a sexual paradise for navigators accustomed as they were to “chaster” behaviours. And so, the stereotype persisted in the following narratives of the island. Following the steps of Wallis, in April 1768 the French ships, Boudeuse and Etoile, commanded by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a diplomat and soldier,
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arrived at the shores of Tahiti. Bougainville’s journals contain detailed descriptions of that first moment where it is possible to find evidence of how Europeans, in this specific case French sailors, were once more received with hospitality by Tahitians and how those welcoming performances were once more mistaken for sexual enticement. Bougainville’s recounting goes as follows: the girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as a Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. Both sailors and soldiers endeavoured to come to the hatch-way; and the capstern was never hove with more alacrity than on this occasion. At last our cares succeeded in keeping these bewitched fellows in order, though it was no less difficult to keep the command of ourselves (2000: 219). Likewise, Bougainville referred to the beauty of the islands in poetic terms, and he clearly drew upon his vast knowledge of the Classic literature when he named the island, the New Cythera, creating a parallelism between Tahiti and the mythological island where the Greek goddess of Love, Aphrodite emerged from the sea. Immersed in his own considerations, Bougainville failed to acknowledge the less idyllic consequences of his arrival, and “by the end of their ten-day stay, more than thirty French sailors were showing symptoms of the venereal diseases left by the British” (Salmond 2011:99) that had been unwittingly transmitted to the local women. Others followed Wallis and Bougainville, such as the well-known Captain James Cook, who visited Tahiti for the first time in 1768 and returned in several other occasions. Those numerous encounters between Tahitians and Westerners were often characterised by material exchanges. When approaching the Native population, navigators offered iron, weapons and alcohol in exchange for any sort of favours, either territorial alliances or detailed navigational and geographic knowledge. When introducing those new military tools, Europeans were already altering the livelihood of Indigenous peoples. Above all, when islanders learnt how to use that sort of military artillery and the power it entailed, they initiated trade
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with European explorers, and often women were used in the trade as they were desired by the European navigators. The social stratification of pre-colonial Tahiti is rather complex; however, it can be described as a society without the same gender and binary demarcation – men and women – that characterised Western societies (O’Brien 2014). It cannot be advocated that Tahiti was a matrilineal society following the definition used to describe Native American societies (Allen 1982), for example, but it was the sort of society in which women held power, and succession or land ownership was inherited from the mother (Salmond 2011; Armitage & Bashford 2014). Men and women occupied distinct spaces within private and public realms. Contrary to naturalised understandings of gender in Western societies, Tahitian people were not necessarily distinguished based on categories that imply the existence of inferior and superior subjects. I would like to digress here to convoke María Lugones’ theory on the coloniality of gender to elaborate on the implications of introducing a gender system that did not comply with the pre-existing one. Following Lugones (2007), I argue that colonialism established its power on binary classifications with awfully specific features ascribed to colonised subjects. Gender was not necessarily a colonial imposition on Tahitian society as men and women already occupied certain specific spaces within their socio-cultural milieus, however, the colonial impositions in terms of power relations largely disrupted the Tahitian social dynamics. It, however, introduced modes of organisation and different arrangements for the colonised, altering and destroying cosmologies, and the sense of community. My parallelism between Lugones’ theory and precolonial Tahiti is precisely based upon this new social organisation that relegated women to a marginal position depriving them from agency. That paradigmatic shift, inevitably, culminated in the violent treatment of Indigenous Tahitian women often regarded as commodities in commercial transactions as previously mentioned. And so, the livelihood of Tahitian people changed after the colonial encounter, new ways of perceiving sexuality were introduced, their socio-cultural practices were altered, and eventually they became part of Western imagery as a “the paradise of pleasure” (O’Brien 2006). Of all the Pacific islands, Tahiti is largely one of the most exoticised spaces perpetuated in the work of artists such as Paul Gauguin or Henri Matisse in which
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that imagery has sustained the dreams of the West about a pristine and alluring destination, and still “the image endures as the bedrock of Tahiti’s tourism industry, the largest private enterprise and leading source of foreign exchange in Tahiti” (Kahn 2011: 5).11 But those images do not tell the entire story, they mask the colonial impositions led by France with its nuclearization of the island that lasted thirty years (1966-1996), they silence the sovereign movements that took place in the 1960s and 70s in which Indigenous voices claimed for sovereignty and the right to protect their lands. From the Tahitian context of struggles for self-determination, Henri Hiro (1944-1990), poet, filmmaker and political activist, was perhaps the best-known figure of Tahitian resistance. After returning from France where he spent some time studying, in the late 1960s Hiro founded the political party Ia Mana te Nuna’a which means Power to the People (Kahn 2011). The revindications in Tahiti were similar to the ones that characterised sovereignty movements in Hawai’i and Samoa and which have emerged around the same decades. There was a strong preoccupation with values related with land, ancestry and Indigenous culture, and the immediate demilitarisation of territories occupied by France (Tepari’i 1994; Kahn 2000). International efforts have been made, though the military occupation of French Polynesia, which includes Tahiti remained problematic until the late 1990s. Similar to what has occurred in Hawai’i, for example, the economic growth in Tahiti is intrinsically connected with the militarisation of the region and the massification of tourism (Kahn 2000). Subsequently, there is a double construction of Tahiti – the imagined and the experienced – and, somehow, they entail oppositional approaches to the place itself though “places are not inert containers. They are politicized, culturally relative, historically specific, local and multiple constructions” (Rodman 1992: 641). Here I am referring to the contrast between the romanticised portrayals that infused literature, cinema and the tourist industry for centuries now, and the effective life /
11 For complete information on Paul Gauguin’s artwork see the link: https://www.paul-gauguin.net/. To find Henri Matisse’s painting see the link: https://www.henrimatisse.org/. The following link leads to a newspaper article recently published (2020) in which its author writes about the relation between the French painter, Gauguin, and Tahiti, reiterating this idea of Tahiti as a paradise of pleasures. https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/junior-report/20190702/463200806286/tahiti-paraiso-perdido- gauguin.html
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the daily life of Tahitian / Ma’ohi people that have to cope with the harshness of being imposed foreign policies and seeing their land used as a nuclear testing ground, and a place where nuclear debris is dumped. Currently, this is one the most debated question when approaching Pacific studies (see Keown 2018), and several artists, and activists alike are discussing the legacy of nuclear testing in the Pacific region.
1.2.2. Hawai’i
The first group of Europeans arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778, and navigators were mesmerised by the natural beauty of the islands. However, the arrival of explorers and later missionaries began a disastrous chain of events that nearly destroyed Hawaiian culture, as colonial exploitation forced Native Hawaiian people to radically alter their spiritual and societal relationships. It defied their traditional customs, beliefs, and practices, and led to the dispossession and the dislocation of the people from the land that had sustained their ancestors from the time of their arrival in the archipelago, and aside from the cultural degradation, diseases were brought by the sailors and spread among the native people decimating part of the population. The relations that Native Hawaiians had established as the basis of their social and cultural integrity were disrupted by the British and American colonial power, thus in the aftermath of colonial conflicts and the American annexation they were left with diseases, dispossession and a decimated population. In her acclaimed and controversial book From a Native Daughter (1999), Haunani-Kay Trask introduces the chapter about Hawaiian history as follows, Before there existed an England, an English language, or an Anglo-Saxon people, our Native culture was forming. And it was as antithetical to the European developments of Christianity, capitalism and predatory individualism as any society could have been. But in several respects, Hawaiian society had remarkably much in common with indigenous societies throughout the world (1999a: 4).
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Contentious as it may seem, the point to retain is always the impact of colonialism on Indigenous peoples. Haunani-Kay Trask has always been profoundly critical (and controversial) about the USA annexation of Hawai’i, and the lingering Americanisation/militarisation of the islands. Her insights are continuously of great value when debating about Hawaiian history and the rights of Native Hawaiian people because they present an unswerving denounce of the abuses committed against Native Hawaiians and the impoverishment of the islands’ ecosystems at the hands of transnational tourist corporations. As Trask points out, the Native Hawaiian culture was primarily based upon a non-individualist society that depended on the balance between land and sea, there was no money, no idea or practice of surplus appropriation, value storing, or payment deferral because there was no idea of financial profit from exchange […] thus establishing an independence founded upon the availability of forest land, taro and sweet potato areas, and fishing grounds (1999: 4). Clearly, the subsequent centuries after the colonial encounter have altered that, and Native Hawaiian people are currently still struggling with the consequences of those societal and economic changes which have also shaped contemporary Hawaiian society. The history of Hawai’i has been written, erased, obliterated, and rewritten according to the actors intervening on it. In 1778, the course of Hawaiian history was about to change when Captain James Cook set foot on the archipelago opening the door for the entrance of missionaries, traders, whalers and settlers. Henceforth, that changed the course of Hawaiian history, and Hawai’i became another spot on the map of European “discoveries”. Noenoe K. Silva starts her book Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism by stating that: “one of the most persistent and pernicious myths of Hawaiian history is that the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) passively accepted the erosion of their culture and the loss of their nation” (2004: 1). Curiously enough, this seems to be a pervasive idea when talking about colonised peoples, the peaceful acceptation and assimilation of a new socio-cultural order that failed to comprehend and recognise
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the difference entailed in the livelihood of Indigenous people around the globe. Moreover, when reflecting upon the identity construction of Native Hawaiian people, Haunani-Kay Trask goes even further by stating that “despite American political and territorial control of Hawai’i since 1898, Hawaiians are not Americans” (1999a: 1), and that fierce statement remains the motto for sovereignty movements until today. The acceptance of imposed sociocultural and political norms is never a peaceful act as it has been shown through centuries of struggles between the ones that are colonised and those who colonise, and the case of Hawai’i is not an exception. It is, nonetheless, a clear example of subjugation and obliteration of native culture and history by the imposition of new forms of living, and the exclusion of the right of sovereignty which took its initial form during the voyages of European navigators and culminated in the official annexation by the USA in 1898. Even so, after the illegal overthrown of Queen Liliʻuokalani by American and European capitalists and landholders in 1893, Native Hawaiian people “faced with the conditions of imperial encroachment, fashioned their own national governance to protect Hawaiian sovereignty, but they did so in colonial biopolitical modes. These affected many aspects of daily life for the common Kanaka, including access to land, gender status, and sexual practices” (Kauanui 2018: 194)12. In the mid- nineteenth century, the Native Hawaiian language was considered inadequate to the task of progress, being in due time totally replaced by English. Consequently, Hawaiian historiography was written and documented in English, it was a translated version of their own history and their anticolonial struggle which conveyed the fact that “Hawai’i was no longer regarded as a separate nation with its own people having their own history and language” (Silva 2004: 3). Therefore, colonised people witnessed the ongoing appropriation of their native culture that was been overlapped and deliberately erased by the Western hegemonic power. The nineteenth century marked the moment when Native Hawaiian people saw themselves deprived from the right to own and protect their land; it also marked the beginning of organised protests against the forceful annexation of Hawai’i (Trask
12 Kanaka or Kanaka Maoli are used to refer to Native Hawaiian people with Indigenous ancestry. Throughout this Dissertation I will be using the most common expression that is Native Hawaiians / Native Hawaiian people.
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1999a; Silva, 2004), it also marked. The onset of long-lasting U.S. occupation that began in 1898 encapsulated abrupt halts to the development of Hawaiian national life (Trask, 1999a; Silva, 2004). In Hawai’i, land means more than just an area of space to build upon, it symbolises a sacred connection to the past, present, future and Native Hawaiian people’s empowerment, thus ancestry is paramount in Native Hawaiian culture. The relationship between cultural and spiritual traditions that are forged through processes of remembering and caring for places escapes the Western epistemologies, and thus the way Native Hawaiian people interact with human and natural realms is the core of their cultural identity; preserving the land is a fundamental component in sustaining Native Hawaiian life. Land, place, and nature are entangled with the cultural identity and self-determination of Native Hawaiian people; hence the preservation of those elements remains crucial to the survival of their indigenous heritage. Haunani-Kay Trask suggests that a project of decolonisation should overtly “unscrew the power of the colonizing force by creating a new consciousness very critical of foreign terms, foreign definitions, and foreign solutions” (1999a:90). Nonetheless, this project of decolonisation as suggested by Trask is, perhaps, a more complex affirmation of cultural identity, mostly because as Edward Said explains the “struggle over geography is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (1993:7). Currently, many Native Hawaiians are suffering the late consequences of the Great Mahele (1848) which is commonly known as a transformation from the traditional land system to private property that began in the nineteenth century, and it initiated a process that altered how land tenure is run, as well as it also contributed to the increasing wealth of white haole (meaning foreign people; Americans and Europeans) who were able to obtain vast extensions of land.13 In other words, the
13 The Native Hawaiian word, haole, is specially used to designate white foreign people. Land acquisition and ownership was ruled by the economic power of white Euro-American settlers, and that largely unbalanced social relations in Hawai’i, generating inequalities among the Indigenous population but also among minority groups (Chinese, Filipinxs, Latinxs, Japanese, and Micronesians) that were mainly the labourers in plantations. For that reason, some activist groups included in their revindication the struggles faced by those minorities. Camilla Fojas, Rudy Guevarra and Tamar Sharma edited a ground-breaking work, Beyond Ethnicity: New Politics of Race in
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presence and power of white settlers increased on the islands throughout the nineteenth century. American and British businessmen were given the possibility of acquiring vast tracts of land for derisory sums while Native Hawaiian people were almost completely dispossessed of their own land (Trask, 1999. Native Hawaiians saw themselves deprived from the right to protect their land, and all the sacred areas were, from that moment onwards, easy targets to be dismantled and used to build resorts or military facilities. Therefore, “land tenure was the central feature of this system [ali’i] of political and social relationships based on obligations as well as bonds of affect” (Silva, 2004: 40). Thus, it is the love and respect towards the land that remains central in the construction of Native Hawaiian cultural identity, being, for this same reason, the motive behind any form of protest against the U.S. occupation. (Silva, 2004; Trask, 1999a). Consequently, the alteration of land tenure from communal to private ownership is still regarded as the most relevant injury done to the Hawaiian people by white haole, and regaining control over land remains the most significant purpose for the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement until today.14 Despite the fact that the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement comprises different groups with their own and very specific agendas, yet all the movements for Hawaiian sovereignty have been fighting for justice, against the assimilation and elimination of Native Hawaiian culture, claiming the right for Native Hawaiians to live on, access, and cultivate their lands. Consequently, due to land dispossession and appropriation of entire areas across the archipelago either by governmental institutions or private entities, land which had always been (and continues to be) part of Native Hawaiian identity and perceived as home became a metaphor for
Hawai’i (2018) in which those questions are extensively addressed from a perspective that focus on the experiences and representations of marginalised groups.
14 The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement comprises some of the following groups: A.L.O.H.A. (Aboriginal Lands of Hawaiian Ancestry), to seek out reparations from the USA; Hui Alaloa (Long Road Organization), to keep public access to pathways, watercourses and beaches; the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (P.K.O.), to bring to an end the Naval bombing of Kahoʻolawe island; SOS (Save Our Surf); P.A.C.E. (People against Chinatown Evictions); ‘Ohana O Hawai‘i (Family of Hawai‘i); Ka Pākaukau (The Table), an alliance of groups that aim at working towards Hawaiian independence; Hui Naʻauao (Enlightened/ Learned Club) which is an union of 47 education groups; the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation; Nation of Hawaiʻi, a republican group led by Bumpy Kanahele; Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, a monarchist group, guided by the King Edmund Keliʻi Silva Jr; and Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi, an organisation for self-government.
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homelessness as suggested by Anne Keala Kelly (2018) when referring to the increasing number of Native Hawaiians living in extreme poor conditions because they cannot afford buying land or paying a rent, they are “homeless at home” (Kelly 2018: 37). Therefore, the agenda of movements for Hawaiian sovereignty comprises the decolonisation of the islands, their deoccupation and demilitarisation. Although there is a non-violent philosophy behind those movements, there have been losses, Native Hawaiians have been subjected to forms of epistemic and political violence such as the eviction of people from their homelands, the construction of resorts, highways, and U.S military facilities over burial grounds, and religious temples, the sort of violence that is not acknowledged by transnational corporations. Buying land, building hotels and resorts or military facilities are commonly described as economic growth and progress. Little has been done to acknowledge the problems they create from an Indigenous standpoint. Nevertheless, this lack of social aggressive turmoil has historically been depicted as compliance to colonial authority and control over the Hawaiian territory. By assuming a non-violent approach acknowledged as a form of submission, a rich heritage of narrative of Native resistance has also been obfuscated, and therefore there is a plethora of American historical narratives that were fabricated to reiterate the idea that there was a mutual consent of merging the United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom. Whilst the contemporary Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement is still characterised by its non-violent approach, there is an interesting convergence of poetic expression and political commitment that clearly demonstrates how Native Hawaiians are engaged in the fight against US imperialism. Therefore, the unilaterally imposed annexation of Hawai’i and the consequent appropriation of native lands is a story with nefarious consequences for Native Hawaiians which has not yet seen an ending. The resistance against the U.S occupation became more visible from the 70s onwards when in 1971 a powerful and important landowner tried to evict a small community to expand his own business in the Kalama Valley on Oʻahu. Subsequently, the protests in Kālama Valley served to motivate other collective movements for Native Hawaiian sovereignty that aim at protecting people and land from abusive development, the uncontrolled U.S. military expansion, and the
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exploitation of natural resources (Trask, 1999a). In the following decades, this growing awareness of Hawai’i’s legal status and the sovereignty movements shifted the focus from solely land struggles and discourses of reparation that dominated the political interventions in the 70s to discourses that included the right to Indigenous identity and the protection of ecosystems. By the 90s those discourses were marked by their focus on the rights of Hawaiians as Indigenous people, and lately after the turning of the 21st century there is a new generation of activists and scholars – among them Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, Jamaica Osorio, Kekuni Blaisdell or Micky Huihui – who are both denouncing legal status of Hawai’i under the U.S. occupation, and the pernicious effects of tourism to ecosystems. As it has been previously noted, those discursive practices entail cultural politics of sovereignty in order to revitalise Native Hawaiian cultural identity by gathering local communities and asking them to recover their sense of kuleana (which refers to a set of responsibilities and rights). It is then, this sense of responsibility and the right to protect land and entire ecosystems that have been the core of Native Hawaiian cultural identity and have intensified the most recent struggles against ecological degradation. Moreover, the most recent protests against the militarisation of the islands, for instance, illustrate the persistence and resilience of Native Hawaiians who remain firm against dominant forces of cultural erasure and land dispossession. In short, it also seems clear that “Hawaiian culture has a lot important lessons to teach to the rest of the world about how to get along with nature so as not to destroy the natural surrounding for the future, how to have a different attitude about land that is not about making it a commodity, making money by exploiting it” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, 2014: 27). Perhaps, the most recent example of the ongoing struggles in Hawai’i is the struggle to protect Mauna Kea, a sacred mountain, that has been used by NASA to locate there their astronomical observatories. Given the geographic location and altitude of the mountain, NASA has built several massive observatories. The construction of the most advanced one, The Thirty Meter Telescope, has been highly contested, and in June 2020 its construction was postponed which gave the protesters a reason to celebrate. Currently, the activism around climate change in conjunction with struggles against land occupation in Hawai’i has been carried out
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using social media such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, to mobilise as many supporters as possible. Those physical and virtual demonstrations are not exclusive from Hawaiian groups, rather they expand and connect with other movements across the globe proving the relevance of forming coalitions to combat inadequate global policies and capitalism.
1.2.3. Samoa
Polynesian peoples were skilled voyagers and explorers, and the Samoan islands were probably settled 3000 years ago which suggests that it is unlikely that Samoa or any other island in the Pacific had been isolated from other groups of islands and peoples (Campbell 1996, Matsuda 2012, Fisher 2013) as often implied in Western narratives about the colonial encounter. Sāmoa is the native denomination of the volcanic archipelago that was also known as “Navigators’ Islands” an allusion to the skills of its inhabitants. Accordingly, Michelle Keown explains that it is widely held that Polynesian culture originated in the central Pacific islands of Tonga, Samoa, Uvea and Futuna, and that during the last two millennia there were a series of migrations eastwards to the Cook, Society and Marquesas Islands, followed by a second wave of migrations to Hawai‘i in the north, Easter Island in the east, and New Zealand in the south-west (2005: 6). The first contact between Europeans and Samoan islanders might have been in 1722 when a Dutch explorer, Jacob Roggeven, sailed past but by recording the islands’ location incorrectly, Samoa remained isolated until 1789 when the French navigator Louis-Antoine Bougainville came upon and mapped the exact location of the islands. The Samoan Islands soon became an attractive destination for Europeans since they “occupied a key geographical spot in the Central Pacific and were graced with large and accommodating natural harbors at Apia and Pago Pago” (Matsuda 2012: 228). From that moment onwards there was a flux of trading and whaling ships coming from diverse places, and with Hawai’i or Tahiti, Samoa
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became a constitutive element in European imagination and another overseas territory that largely contributed to the expansionist project of Europe. Unsurprisingly, the colonial encounter proved to be as destructive as any other, and “with papālagis [white foreigners] flocking to the shores of Sāmoa in the 1800s for wealth, land, political and religious advancement, and as a stopover for ship provisions, the influence of foreigners indelibly changed Sāmoa and its people” (Kruse 2018: 19). Soon after the incursion of navigators, in 1830 the London Missionary Society (LMS) arrived, bringing ideas, conceptual formulations that had little or nothing to do with the life of Samoans, but it was their high intention to convert the Indigenous population.15 The religious conversion of Samoa was not a simple process though, it implied, on the one hand, the alteration of Indigenous socio-cultural practices, and on the other hand it opened up room for a series of misinterpretations regarding the livelihood and culture of Samoan people. Profoundly regarded by missionaries as sexual and erotic, pōula, a traditional Samoan dance, was one of the cultural expressions forbidden by missionaries (Mageo 2010) as it corrupted the morality of Samoan people (and of white settlers). Framed by Western religion, behaviours, and morals, Samoan culture was mostly acknowledged as licentious rather than a complex conjunction of socio-cultural rituals (Campbell 2005; Mageo 2010). Nevertheless, the transition to new religious practices was peaceful, and soon after the LMS established itself on the islands, Samoan people had assimilated into those practices, combining them with their own religious ancestry. Henceforth, Matsuda explains that “as the religious experience of the charismatic, millenarian preacher Siovili and of the missionary John Williams had shown in the early nineteenth century, kin networks and alliances were strong, but central authority had never been the tradition” (2012:228). The history of Samoa’s colonisation is complex and troubled, as the island’s territory was initially divided between Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand, and the USA. Economic interests were at the base of this division. Particularly, Germany, around the beginning of the twentieth-century, began to express great
15 Founded in 1795, The London Missionary Society (LMS) was a protestant missionary society that aimed at spreading the knowledge and faith of Christ among “unenlightened” nations. Moreover, it had religious missions in several location, such as the South Seas, China and Madagascar, South and South East Asia, Southern and Central Africa and, to a lesser extent in North America and the West Indies. Its civilizing mission lasted centuries with great impact on Indigenous societies.
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commercial interest on the island of ‘Upolu, where they finally established (c.1900) trading companies, and monopolised copra and cocoa bean processing while establishing alliances with local chiefs (Kennedy 1974, Meleisea 1987, Campbell 2005). The rhetoric of colonialism in Samoa obeyed to the same frameworks applied elsewhere, and “Papālagi foreigners were busy themselves trying to plunder all the land of Sāmoa completely” (Kruse 2018: 19). In the face of Germany’s expansionist approach to the Pacific region during the second half the 19th century, international rivalry over the domain of the islands escalated, and in order to diffuse hostility, Germany, Great Britain and the United States signed a treaty (The Final Act of the Berlin Conference on Samoan Affairs, 1889) establishing the partition of the islands in which each nation would regulate and govern its part. Strategically though, when the treaty was been negotiated, Great Britain withdrew its interest in Samoa, and was compensated with the end of German rights in Tonga and Solomon Islands (Kruse 2018).16 In the attempt to plunder all the land, Samoa was divided in two parts, American Samoa which remains as an unincorporated territory of the United States, and Western Samoa or the Independent State of Samoa that became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The German occupation did not last long, and soon after the First World War broke out, New Zealand expelled Germany from Samoa, being from that moment onwards the coloniser of the islands until 1962, when Western Samoa regained independence. Needless to say, from the very onset of New Zealand’s occupation, Samoans opposed to it and fought back. Despite the economic growth while Germany was ruling Samoa, the cultural disruption caused by impositions and new forms of governing were aspects of discontent, as there was a profound disregard for Native rights as well as disputes regarding the acquisition of vast tracts of land under dubious circumstances (Kennedy 1974). When New Zealand assumed its position in 1920 and took over Germany’s administration of the islands, under the premise of protection and continuity of socio-economic development, it was difficult to predict the haphazard outcome of that move, though Samoans were fiercely against the new colonising
16 Tonga and the Solomon Islands were governed by the United Kingdom until 1970 and 1978 respectively when the islands regained sovereignty.
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system employed by New Zealand civil administration. The discontent was largely caused by the inefficacy of New Zealand to prevent the lethal influenza epidemics in 1918 (curiously enough, American Samoa escaped the devastation caused by the disease thanks to a hasty and rigorous quarantine which, as history demonstrates, is the most effective way to contain and stop a pandemic); damaging economic measures; the neglection of Samoan language in schools; and overall discriminatory attitudes on the part of New Zealander officials toward Samoans. During World War Two, both Samoan territories saw their shores invaded by US militaries, and that aggravated the social changes that were already in motion. All that put together generated waves of protests and eventually led to the conception of the Samoan resistance movement, Mau, which was created in 1926, rapidly gathered support and gained political maturity. Mau is a Samoan word that means opinion, testimony (denoting a firm conviction). Moreover, the Mau movement surged as a response to the colonial ruling of Samoa by New Zealand had as its motto “Samoa mo Samoa”, which means Samoa to Samoans (Campbell 2005; Matsuda 2012; Fisher 2013). Their struggles were fundamentally related with occupation and economic subjugation, and they culminated with the independence of Western Samoa in 1962, the first Polynesian sovereign state in modern times. The occupation and dispossession of Native lands in Samoa remains as one the key examples of settler colonialism, a methodological process that aimed at alienating Indigenous people from their homelands. Moreover, Malama Meleisea (1987) explains that “land was intricately associated with tittles and therefore any interference associated with it had direct implications for the very core of the Samoan traditionally-based system of power and authority” (Meleisea 1987: 21). Land was not sold or bought, rather it was transmitted from person to person by the chiefs of the villages (Meleisea 1987). Therefore, at the heart of Samoan struggles, land and tittles were the major claims against colonial occupation. Furthermore, land in Samoa is not understood as a commodifiable resource, rather it is a sacred entity, symbiotically connected with people. Fairbairn-Dunlop (2000) describes land as follows in which all elements – people, village, community, and land – are interconnected:
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Samoa is like a fish that has been divided – every piece of land has been allocated and every person knows his or her place for all time. The fa’aSamoa is the matai; the matai is the family is the land. The land is the village; the village is the family, is the matai, is the fa’aSamoa. (2000: 63) The introduction of economic transactions regarding land acquisition largely contributed to the disruption of Samoan society with consequences felt until today. Subsequently, social and cultural collisions between Western models and Samoan ones deeply challenged Samoan society, mostly felt in questions related with gender as women were relegated to a peripheral position after the colonial encounter (Mageo 1999). Bearing in mind the notion that within Pacific cosmologies land is life, any contest for its de-occupation and demilitarisation is, ultimately, a quest for life. Patrick Wolfe, in reference to the structures of racial discrimination and processes of settler colonialism, argues that “land acquisition as well as the wealth and opportunities it brought were the principal factors that motivated settlement and imposed the interminable process of Indigenous dispossession, elimination by various means, and the legitimation of settler sovereignty over both land and people” (2006: 388). It is suggested by Wolfe that there is a logic of elimination, that is, genocide implied in the process of dispossessing people from their lands, which seeks to tear apart any Indigenous society in order to create a colonial society on stolen lands, promoting the notion of a double colonisation in the sense that people and land are being ripped apart which incrementally causes a profound sense of alienation, and ultimately these people become exiled in their own homelands. Additionally, by eliminating Indigenous people’s rights over their lands, settler colonialism sets in motion other forms of cultural subjugation, religious impositions/conversion, and it frames resocialisation, for instance, by imposing English, French, Spanish or Portuguese as the main languages to be spoken and taught in schools. Ultimately, this last aspect may have contributed the most over others to generate a gap between old and young generations by breaking down the possibility of transference of oral traditions/history, cultural heritage, and the Indigenous systems of values. The Samoan case is yet another example of how
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manipulative the colonial encounter was in which Indigenous people were coerced to give up on their lands whereby any subsequent form of subjugation became discursively consolidated.
1.3. Returning to the Unsettling Ocean: Pacific Literature as a Decolonising Practice From all that has been exposed so far it seems relevant to consider the following questions: how do Indigenous people living day by day in places that have been referred to by others as “paradises” cope with that, and how do they experience those places? Further, in which way does the global circulation of mediated and stereotypical imagery affect the relation that Indigenous people establish with the place they effectively call and feel as home? And finally, how do these perspectives – Indigenous peoples’ sense of place versus foreign visions and constructions of the Pacific islands – intersect, disrupt, and eventually influence each other? As it has been demonstrated the history of Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa has been written, re-written and manipulated according to the situatedness of the intervenient “actors”. Historical records and archives contain a profoundly biased narration of the events, a Eurocentric perspective described by Western navigators, Western merchants or Western missionaries (Borofsky 2000). Although the proliferation of goods, global trade, commercial alliances, and technological development became meaningful for the sake of (global) progress, it also came with drawbacks. Arguments span from the praising of globalisation and global policies, advocating the myriad profits achieved out of junctures between the local and the global, and those others situated on the opposite side that present a critical appraisal of negative consequences of this new imperial order brought by globalisation, and how it has reshaped and undermined the livelihoods of Indigenous populations. Rather than being simply withered away, the vestiges of colonialism have been reformed and repackaged in some other forms, being the complicit relation between global policies and the militarisation of Pacific islands one of the most pernicious ones. Consequently, “the increasingly perilous life of many Pacific peoples is
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directly linked to their increasing incorporation into a global system which reinforces stratification based on economy and political power” (Vltchek 2016: xv). When talking about the Pacific, we inevitably talk about an occupied and domesticated space, one that has firstly been exoticised and turned into a Western fetish – being that exoticisation a profoundly gendered approach to the islands’ cultures as will be discussed in detail in the following chapters – and secondly a place highly militarised, a prolonged process that has always occurred without the consent of Indigenous people. Thereafter, perhaps the unsurpassed way to grasp the inescapable presence of the U.S in the Pacific region is “to describe it as a transnational garrison state that spans seven sovereign states and the vast expanse of Micronesia” (Bello 2010: 311). If the earliest forms of colonialism involved exploitative economic practices, military force, and socio-cultural impositions, the neo-colonial present of places such as Hawai’i, Samoa and Tahiti is perhaps categorised primarily by the continuing exploitation of lands/ecosystems and the construction of images that have been used to further promote the exotism of those places. Besides, it also remains encroached in these discursive practices of representing Indigenous cultures the derogatory dichotomy – civilised versus primitive – in the sense that “the distorted imaginative geographies of the colonial present work to secure the health and the purity of the contemporary settler nations” (Smith & Turner 2013: 276). While being consumed and deprived from self-determination, Indigenous peoples are relegated to the margins. Therefore, those margins or peripheral spaces far from being fixed are subjected to domestication and assumed as inherently untidy (Douglas 1984). It is, then, through processes of domestication that the rhetoric of colonialism rehearses the common patterns of perilous marginality, segregation, and later public reintegration by means of erasing cultural identity and imposing new socio-cultural forms. Consequently, “margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (Douglas 2002: 122). Paradoxically, the configuration of danger or the fear of the unknown of unexplored territories goes hand in hand with white heterosexual male desire, which is too often translated into sexual fantasies projected on the “emptiness” of women’s bodies – the
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territorialisation of women’s bodies – that conveys heteronormative and racialised relations of power.17 Those stereotypical constructions have been widely contested by Indigenous women, in particular, whose struggles also incorporate the dismantling of hypersexualised portrayals of their cultures via cultural projects that are concerned with accessing and assessing knowledge about identities, gender roles, and kinship that are part of Indigenous traditions (Mihesuah 2003; Kauanui 2008; Mallon 2012). Indigenous women have been central and in the vanguard of several Pacific Islands’ sovereignty movements. Most scholarly research has been focusing on the degradation of Indigenous peoples in general, but given the nature of Pacific cosmologies, great attention has also been paid to the role of women within those contexts emphasising, on the one hand the connection between women and ecosystems and, on the other hand, their positionally within sovereignty movements across the Pacific. Henceforth, Indigenous women standpoints are informed by sociocultural realities imbued with meaning grounded in knowledges that include a strong connection to land, a legacy of dispossession, sexism and racism, resistance, and the constant attempt at replacing disparaging images of themselves – the exotic and erotic stereotypes highly endorsed in cinema, media or tourism – as well as the permanent need to negotiate sexual politics across and within cultures. Despite the danger of homogenising the diversity of Indigenous women’s experiences, such standpoint does not deny the multiplicity of experiences, rather it hopes at a confluence that allows a wider and better understanding of how Indigenous women have been subjugated but also how they publicly fight back commonly shared issues of violence, land encroachments, and environmental disasters by means of mobilisation and gathering in the public realm calling attention to the problems and demanding justice and restoration.18 Recently, one of
17 I am drawing on the parallelism established between the assumption that all colonised territories were previously empty and the notion that women were predominantly rendered passive and subordinated to male power. The point I want to make, however, is that firstly there was a clear fetishization of the colonised territories, female representations either as mermaids or goddesses were commonly used by navigators and explorers, and secondly, from the outset there was a feminisation of terra incognita which encapsulated a form of male paranoia/anxiety.
18 The reference to environmental disasters is of great significance here because even in the most precarious situations women have been exposed to violence and forced into schemes of sexual
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the major debates, and a common thread among Indigenous peoples’ activism and struggles, is ecological degradation and climate change, being their islands still affected by external actions, and global policies that are unable to protect their ecosystems and/or penalise the infringements of developed and (hyper) industrialised nations. Violence against the environment or eco-violence is, to a certain extent, assumed as “slow violence”, a term coined by Rob Nixon, which he describes as the violence that “occurs gradually out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2011: 2). Although it is no longer possible to assume that environmental degradation occurs at a slow pace, given the state of some islands in the Pacific that run the risk of disappearing within the next decade – Kiribati being one of the most elucidative examples of that – what is at stake in Nixon’s analysis is the fact that most natural catastrophes occur out of the geographic domains of Western nations. The supposedly remoteness (from a Western perspective) of islands such as Kiribati is overtly an impediment to make the problem more visible, globally speaking, in international forums. Moreover, and despite the enormous change in mentalities, nature is still apprehended on the basis of its non-human features, which clearly implies the lack of practices that step out from the obvious and perilous binarism human versus non- human. In contrast, the epistemological position that characterises Indigenous peoples overtly encapsulates the fact that nature is an entity worth protection and respect, so that their struggles will always remain connected with environmental protection. Nonetheless, in order to move forward, societies in general should be able to acknowledge the still visible consequences of ongoing colonial practices that have affected Indigenous people, and those include the loss of lands, environmental self-determination and the right to protect their sacred sites from being used either to build resorts, golf camps or military facilities/infrastructures. Bearing in mind the relevance of women within sovereignty movements, it can be argued that the women writers selected for study in this Dissertation partake
abuses not rarely promoted within humanitarian organisations and by governmental militarised personnel, being the OXFAM scandal in Haiti the most recent one.
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on the struggle to dismantle (neo)imperialist ideologies in the sense that their oeuvre is, to a certain extent, informed by “the deconstruction of the opposition between the private and the public” (Spivak 2012: 210), which signifies that they also revitalise the importance of education and telling stories as means used to restore the history of Pacific islands, while moving away from the encroached exotism that has been commonly used to refer to Pacific islands and their people. Their multivocal narration of the islands from inside, reinforces a shared commitment to the decolonising fight for justice, the importance of transnational dialogue, and respect for lands and people alike. Called by Albert Wendt “the youngest literature in the world”, Pacific writers resist Pacific Orientalism (Hereniko & Wilson 1999) while working on creative projects of rehabilitation and affirmation in which “the Pacific is being reimagined and reconfigured in ways that enhance the dignity of Pacific peoples” (Heneriko & Schwarz 1999: 60). Edward Said in his pivotal text Culture and Imperialism reminds us that “the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by loss of locality to the outsider; its geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored” (1994:225). The restoration of these lands, places (and even perhaps identities) happens or through symbolic acts of imagination, including those within the frameworks of literary. Eventually, they weave together a sense of place and belonging long disrupted by foreign cultural fabrications, touristic fantasies and apparatus. Following Edward Said (1994), it can be argued that imaginative futurities are fundamental in decolonising the mind because they serve as the locus where “the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination (1994: 225). The significance of geography, belonging and the sense of place are crucial in the construction of narratives about the Pacific in which there is a clear anti-imperialist perspective in a tourist-globalised-driven era. Ultimately, literature functions as a decolonialising practice in which multiple meanings are accommodated validating a powerful form of political expression, and “in a world permeated by insidious yet unseen and imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear” (Nixon 2011: 15).
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Chapter II
Beyond the Postcard: Célestine Hitiura Vaite and the Deconstruction of Tahitian Exotic Images Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
steady us mother your eye lights the way your heart moves our blood your hand steers our boat and plants us like seeds in the new land sing for us Tina¯. Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard, Alchemies of Distance
n Native Tahitian culture, when a child is born, the placenta called pūfenua which means “core of land” is buried in the ground.1 The Tahitian word is I composed of two other words, pū meaning heat, centre, innermost, and fenua signifying land, country. The symbolism of the placenta burial represents the osmosis between people, land, islands, and plants. The metaphysical attachment to the land is legendary all over the Pacific, and this particular tradition represents simultaneously the nourishment of the new-born and of the land where the placenta is buried. In that exact place, a tree is planted to signal the moment, and above all to signal the sacred connection between the person and the land/earth. As the life of the child unfolds, the tree grows always mirroring that life. In sickness and in health, the bound is for life. If the child gets sick, the tree slowly languishes, showing the signs that that human being needs urgent help. In Native Tahitian tradition, when trees are dying it means it is time for the family to gather and intervene on the behalf of the person in-need. All human and non-human elements are connected. Indigenous cosmologies teach each of us to look closely to what surrounds us, to establish a rooted bond with land and oceans, to protect every being because of their sacredness and relevance to the continuity of Planet Earth. It elicits an intimate and important relationship between bodies and landscapes; hence those
1 The ritual of burying the placenta is not exclusively performed in Tahitian culture. Many other Indigenous cultures, including Native Hawaiians, Navajo people, Maori, and even African tribal groups practice this ritual to symbolise the connection between the newly born child and the earth (Gonzales 2012; Williams 2020).
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tropes are intricately linked to the formation of Ma’ohi identity, Native Tahitian.2 Moreover, Tahitians acknowledge land as a mother figure given its nurturing features, land is the source of food providing what is necessary for survival, so that it resembles a mother who nourishes her children. As demonstrated in Chapter I, Indigenous people’s sense of belonging has much to do with the relation established between people and land, in fact, the connection derives exactly from the notion that the land, or ecosystems are entities, not commodities, which contrasts with Western ontological approaches. I have decided to allude to this cultural practice both as a way to emphasise the nature of Tahitian cosmologies in which human and non-human elements are symbiotically connected, and as a way to root Célestine Hitiura Vaite’s oeuvre that reinforces the importance cultural belonging in identity formation, the relevance of familial connections and kinship. This chapter offers, then, an analysis of the fiction produced by this Tahitian writer, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, and in what follows, I will be examining Vaite’s novels, Breadfruit (2000), Frangipani (2004) and Tiare (2006) from a standpoint that privileges the de-exoticisation of Tahitian cultural identity. The chapter will be structured based on the sequential analysis of each novel presented in subchapters whose themes span from pre-colonial Tahitian culture; French occupation, land dispossession and tourism; colonial structures – education and religion – whose practices have altered Tahitian society and culture; the generational gap, more specifically in the mother and daughter’s relation; and gender roles. I will defend the idea that the selected novels dealt with here function as a counternarrative, a contemporary response to the exoticisation of Tahiti previously presented in the colourful canvas produced by Paul Gauguin, for example. Miriam Kahn points out that “the particular challenge Tahiti presents, however, is that the powerful place it occupies in the imagination (the place of blue lagoons, sunny skies, white sandy beaches, coconut palms, virile men and seductive women) overshadows and crowds out the reality” (2003: 308). This imagined place is highly contested in Célestine Hitiura Vaite’s novels, which elaborate rather on the ways Tahitians live their daily lives in places that others too often refer to as “paradises”. How those mediated
2 Ma’ohi refers to Indigenous identity in Tahiti, however, most scholarly work consulted when researching about Tahitian culture uses the word Tahitian to refer to Indigenous people. Throughout this dissertation I will use the terms Ma’ohi, Tahitian and Native Tahitian interchangeably.
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images circulate globally, and how these two perspectives – Tahitians’ relation to their land/place, and foreigners’ perceptions of Tahiti – intersect are crucial points developed throughout the novels. To this end, I suggest that the narrativization of everyday life frequently occurs by re-telling stories that reinforce Indigenous ways of knowing, and that characters contribute to the process of educating younger generations from a less Western and elitist standpoint. The novels present an approach based on reclaiming, rereading and rearticulating ideas and practices framed by Indigenous epistemologies (Hilden & Lee 2010; Smith 2012). Moreover, the act of telling stories as a form of perpetuating knowledge can be perceived as a form of identity’s construction based on the interaction between self and other, i.e., the individuality entailed in each subject and the common shared features that are part of collective identity. Vaite’s narratives highlight the importance of insider work, commonality, the relevance of belonging and the dismantling of “stereotyped patriarchy-driven (and validated) images of Native women” (Hilden & Lee 2010: 74). Beyond the postcard of blue sky, palm trees and tantalising beauty, there are other images less promoted, and those are the ones that Vaite explores in her novels; she seeks to question exotic representations rather than to conform with them. In fact, Vaite’s novels as a whole frequently dismantle those portrayals of paradise by highlighting more realistic experiences in which there is a clear project that aims at achieving the social recognition of women’s domestic work and their independence within the milieu in which the discourses of socio-cultural globalised systems circulate. The power over colonised spaces, and consequently over bodies too, is enacted through the establishment of socio-cultural norms, through boundaries (physical and/or imagined) in which colonised cartographies are claimed, regulated, renamed, and mapped. Subsequently, it is my argument that the novels analysed here portray everyday spaces of resistance vis-à-vis characters who transgress and reinvent the boundaries and behaviours established by colonial power relations. It is, then, by creating agentive subjects (characters in the novels) that Indigenous writers in general, and the selected one in this chapter in particular, play an important role in the process of decolonising the mind as those characters mirror the struggles of ordinary people.
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Consequently, it can be argued that “everyday acts of resistance tend to be those that are more subtle, habitual, and ambiguous” (Kahn 2011: 183). Célestine Hitiura Vaite is a Tahitian-born writer whose first novel, Breadfruit, was published in 2000 in Australia where Vaite currently lives with her family. She was awarded twice with the Prix littéraire des étudiants, first in 2004 for Breadfruit and then in 2006 for Frangipani.3 Having lived a childhood infused with stories, Célestine Hitiura Vaite transported that to her novels in which she depicts the life of common people in Tahiti, sharing the local point of view on everyday life. It is my interest to locate her within the wider scope of Contemporary Pacific Literature as her oeuvre demonstrates an acute reflexion of shared concerns regarding the life of Indigenous people from the Pacific. Célestine Hitiura Vaite has not appeared so far in any anthology about Tahitian literature, but perhaps that is due to how recent her work is to be included, or the fact she writes in English and not in French.4 Perhaps, her choice of English may reside in the idea that the novels will possibly reach a wider audience; nonetheless, the narrative is tinged with occasional words and phrases either in French or Reo Ma’ohi, her Native Tahitian language. In an interview given by the author and published alongside with the novel Breadfruit, when asked about her choice to write in English, Vaite explains that she always acts out her dialogues as it helps her see the characters as if they were standing right in front of her and she does that in French. However, when describing the writing process that happens in English, she adds: “as for the narrative voice, it comes out directly in English but with the French/Tahitian voice in my head, as if my mother or auntie were telling me the story” (Vaite 2000: 4). The author does not provide any direct translation to the Native Tahitian words that appear throughout the texts, which may trigger the
3 The Prix litteraire des étudiants is attributed by l’Université de la Polynésie française, and it was first given to a Native writer in 2004, to Célestine Hitiura Vaite. In 2005, Frangipani was short- listed for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and later in 2006 long-listed for the Orange Prize in the United Kingdom.
4 Even though her background is Tahitian, Vaite writes in English rather than in French as one might think given the fact that most of the literature produced in Tahiti is written in French, the official language in the island, being examples of that authors such as Louise Peltzer, Chantal Spitz, and Nathalie Heirani Salmon-Hudry. Most scholarly work about Tahitian literature is done under the theme of Francophone Oceanian Literature, which excludes Vaite’s novels as they are originally written in English.
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curiosity of unfamiliarised readers in finding out the meanings. I would argue that Vaite’s approach can be seen as an attempt at revitalising the Native Tahitian language which has been used within the private realm of families and communities as means of storytelling, but forbidden to be used in public and in the education system of Tahiti. Miriam Kahn (2011) traces the revitalisation of Tahitian language back to the 1940s, when it was used to promote nationalist feelings by the supporters of Pouvanaa Oopa, a politician, and leader of a Tahitian separatist movement against French colonialism. In the 1950s the Native language gained a new meaning when it was adopted in debates about the French nuclear programme. The revivalist cultural mood of the 1970s contributed to a new revitalisation of the language, particularly with the activist Henri Hiro, the voice of the Ma’ohi independence movement. Moreover, it maintained its political identity in the 1980s, and continued to be used in debates that rejected French colonialism. Nowadays, the language is widely spoken by all islanders and taught at schools (Kahn 2012; Layton 2015). The theme of the use of Indigenous languages is pervasive in the oeuvre of the three writers analysed in this dissertation, and it is a political statement, as previously mentioned on Chapter I. In fact, the code-switching between Indigenous and colonial languages functions as the disruption of the authority of colonial languages (English and French) that are forced to be learnt in schools, being this a major topic of Sia Figiel’s oeuvre. Thereby, it can be perceived as a dissident technique that aims at promoting cultural revival by focusing on the importance of languages as part of Indigenous identities. When referring to the decolonisation of Indigenous practices and the relevance of languages in the process, Marcus Briggs- Cloud points out that “[o]rigin stories as told in Indigenous languages provide access to foundational teachings, such as how relationships are understood between people and other living elements of the earth” (2015: 247). Throughout Vaite’s texts there are multiple references, for example, to mythological elements that are part of Tahitian cosmology, and those elements are introduced in Reo Mao’hi, the Native Tahitian language. Vaite’s novels, Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare, form a trilogy in which the main character, Materena, is for the most part the active narrator who recounts
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the story of her family – Pito, her husband; Tamatoa, Moana and Leilani, their children, Loana, her mother – and her friends. The novels’ chronology is dictated by Materena’s recountings and memory recollections revolving around the life events of Materena and her extensive family and friends. Although Vaite does not provide specific time markers, it is possible to locate the narrative in the late 1990s based on the situations described and on particular details related with Tahitian society. Materena is one of a kind (as described by her mother, Loana, her aunties or even her three children); she displays the lives of those around her always with kindness, avoiding at any costs unnecessary gossip that may harm her loved ones. Infused with high doses of humour, the harshness of contemporary life in Tahiti is described by Materena, a “professional cleaner” who happens to love movies and love songs: “movies about love move Materena and sometimes she imagines she’s the heroine” (Vaite 2000: 3). She may not be the heroine of the movies she watches alone, but she will prove to be the heroine in the life of her loved ones as she will grow to become an influential voice within the society she is part of. Materena is a proud woman, an empowered vahine,5 not afraid of speaking her mind out and a hard-working one who keeps the family well-fed. The adventures of ordinary citizens are told in a humorous way, the tragedies and family issues are spread through the community via “the coconut radio”. Everything that is of interest (the gossip) is on “coconut radio” to be evaluated by wise members of the community. No member should be excluded from the tight scrutiny of public opinion. Marriages, births, betrayals, love affairs, shopping lists, the comes and goes to the Chinese shop are some of the motives to visit a relative and sit in the living room, sipping cold water while commenting on the matter of interest. Humour is the key to narrate those episodes, and parody the device used by Materena to deconstruct stereotypes, to describe the harshness of everyday life of those who get underpaid jobs (or no jobs at all), who live in cities transformed into places to accommodate tourists.
5 The Indigenous language from Tahiti, Hawai’i and Samoa share some similarities, for instance, woman is vahine, wahine and fafine respectively. I will be using them according to the context.
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For centuries, representations of Tahiti lingered in the imagination of Europeans, and the exotic primitivism that was embedded in those stereotypes has largely contributed to the fracturing of Indigenous people’s identity. The plethora of personal stories in the colourful canvas of Vaite’s narratives are utterly a deconstruction of the exotic otherness promoted in imperial propaganda, however, despite the light nuanced tone of the narratives, Vaite writes back to Western ideologies when depicting the life in Tahiti without the exotic twist that had been imposed on Indigenous people. Henceforth, it is through the voice and everyday stories of Materena, the narrator in the three novels, that, to a certain extent, “Pacific people are answering back and reclaiming their cultural heritage in the face of an increased visibility of the archetype [the Pacific muse] in the twenty-first century” (O’Brien 2006: 16). As demonstrated in Chapter I, the construction of “the Pacific Muse” revolves around representations of Indigenous women’s bodies primarily disseminated through art in the late 19th century both by Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse, and subsequently its usage in promoting Polynesian islands as tourist destinations. This archetype is rather complex as is informed by Roman and Greek myths of beauty whose constructions were part of the European imaginary and were projected on Indigenous women and landscapes (O’Brien 2006) after the colonial encounter. Patty O’Brien (2006) refers to the construction of the Pacific muse as a colonial stereotype whose languishing exotic, trivial, and sexualised existence of Indigenous women largely contributed to their marginalisation. Moreover, this archetype of the Pacific muse as defined by Patty O’Brien was firstly introduced to European audiences in the late 18th century when Tahiti was visited by European navigators, and Oberea, the Queen of Tahiti, “came to represent a genus of womankind ““immersed in sensuality”” symbolizing both her island of Tahiti and the concupiscent South Seas itself” (O’Brien 2006: 61).6 Race and gender were determining factors in the subjugation of Indigenous women, in determining their disposability in sexual relationships (O’Brien 2006). Bearing in mind Lugones’ theorisation on the coloniality of gender (2007 and 2010) in which she proposes an understanding of gender as a colonial imposition in terms
6 The story of Queen Oberea and her friendship with Captain Wallis is extensively documented in Patty O’Brien’s (2006) and Anne Salmond’s (2009) studies on Tahiti.
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of multiple relations of power, it is also my point that to dismantle the exoticisation of Indigenous women’s bodies it is crucial to focus on how gender divisions were imposed on colonised peoples. Moreover, the exoticisation of Indigenous bodies goes hand in hand with the presupposition that human beings from a colonial context were reduced to a non-human category, thus there is a certain dehumanisation of people, as explained by Lugones (2010). Accordingly, Lugones asserts that “gender is a colonial imposition” because “it imposes itself on life as lived in tune with cosmologies incompatible with the modern logic of dichotomies” (2010:748). Furthermore, those divisions were mostly felt in the clear demarcation of socio-cultural performances involving men and women, i.e., the space – positionality – occupied by these subjects within their communities suffered multiple alterations. As explained in Chapter I, Indigenous societies from the Pacific were not patriarchal systems, though their social structures were highly coded and women and men occupied specific positions that complemented each other (Ishtar 1994; Matsuda 2012; O’Brien 2014). Heide Goettner-Abendroth posits that The matrilineal social order in Polynesia – as elsewhere – not only led to worship of female ancestors by the women, who received “mana wahine,” or wisdom and power, from them; it also dictated the rank and title of every person through the bloodlines of their mother, and their father’s mother (2012: 194). Indigenous women were no subdued to a secondary position, not subalternised inside of their own territories. Zohl Dé Ishtar asserts that within this context, Ma’ohi women – Native Tahitian women – were free, “they did not belong to any man. Their world was a long way from the disempowerment experienced by European women” [...] “But the arrival of colonialists shattered women’s power. Making it very clear that the limitation of women’s power is a product of the French colonial culture” (1992: 196). It is my argument that the dismantling of processes of subalternisation of Indigenous peoples occurs from the inside when storytelling and passing on the knowledge of ancestors to young generations – tasks attributed to women within
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their communities – are acknowledged as forms of resisting globalised policies, and cultural appropriation. In support of that, Vaite’s trilogy represents an interesting reading of Tahitian culture from a standpoint that values Indigenous knowledge and denounces the lingering effects of French colonialism.
2.1. Breadfruit: Belonging, Dissidence, and Joyful Resistance
Breadfruit (2000) is the first novel of the trilogy, and it is the longest one from the three as it introduces all the characters that will appear on the next novels. The forty-eight chapters of Breadfruit are labelled with themes that set the tone of those micro-narratives in which common topics of everyday life mingle with the description of several socio-cultural aspects of Tahiti. Although using a refreshingly simple and direct language, the narrator allows the complexity of social problems enter the narrative without changing or weighting the tone of the novel. In general, the narrative moves from a wider historical background to a more personal context in which Vaite evokes a web of experiences of living in contemporary Tahiti. The palimpsestic nature of the stories forms an interesting reading of how subjects interact and perceive the place they live in, being that place doubly colonised by effective socio-cultural norms imposed on people altering their daily life, and through the beautification of those places that to certain extent hide and silence the reality experienced by Indigenous people. The narrative of Breadfruit is a joyful description of life in Tahiti, a joyful deconstruction of the exotic, a joyful feminist perspective on the life of women in a specific socio-cultural context. Characters perform through acts of joy which does not mean that joyful behaviours exclude powerful acts of resistance. On the contrary, they entail a profound sense of commitment to their social locations, and communities, and dissidence occurs via the capacity to perpetuate knowledge through storytelling. As described by Deleuze, this influence of joy over actions is “what opens the capacity for being affected to the greatest number of things” (1988: 71). In fact, it is my point here that being affected by the greatest number of things implies and leads to the construction of “imagined communities of women with divergent histories and social locations, woven together by the political threads of
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opposition to forms of domination that are not only pervasive but also systemic” (Mohanty 2003: 46-7). Moreover, the plot of Breadfruit revolves around the story of Materena and Pito, and a marriage proposal. This may look slightly simplistic though, but there is much more to be uncovered in the forty-eight chapters populated by an array of characters – predominantly women, from all ages – through which the narrator introduces the challenges, obstacles, and frustrations that characterise the daily life of those characters. Materena and her extended family are the subjects of a vibrant narrative framed by humour, and their personal stories are intertwined with Tahitian history, as in the example of recurrent references to political figures such as Oscar Temaru, who opposed the French nuclear programme in the region. Even though life is harsh and poverty a well-known reality, these women find their way out, they are able to tell their stories, raise their children in a newly globalised society. Mothers and daughters, the old and the new, tradition and contemporaneity go hand in hand in a complex dialogue that refuses obliteration, and rather promotes inclusion. Against the ingrained ongoing French colonialism, the narration of Tahiti through the lens of these characters promotes the engagement in ethical and caring dialogues in which there is a convergence of diverse dimensions and directions involving reciprocity, kinship relations and cultural identity. For instance, Materena and Loana’s conversation about Materena’s father on the chapter titled “Who is going to walk Materena down the aisle?” describes how Loana and Tom Delors, the French “militarie popa’a”, met and how they separated after a disagreement about food. The chapter presents a view on how Tahitian women, “local women who messed around with militarie popa’a had a bad reputation” (Vaite 2000: 27), while it reinforces the nature of Loana’s love and how she made peace with the separation, she stresses that her daughter is loved, and cherished. Throughout the novel, it is possible to acknowledge that Vaite presents an approach that highlights the importance of love and acceptance to strengthen the links between the characters. In other chapters, Materena narrates the daily encounters with cousins and aunties, and those moments reinforce the importance of sharing problems, and how important it is to be part of a community. To specify further, those dialogues
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are, ultimately, forms of resistance against “structures of psychic and social domination” (Mohanty 2003: 7) because they reinforce the importance of love and care. The stories narrated by Materena about her family cast some light on the practicality of opposing structures of psychic and social domination often imposed on Tahitians with the circulation of stereotypical representations by presenting a counter-discourse based on the humorous narration of everyday life. The exoticisation of people and landscapes is deconstructed by literally selling another version of the postcard promoted in globalised images. This other version of the postcard that I am referring to is reinforced by Materena’s portrayals of her own difficulties: “later, waiting for the truck to get moving, with her Cash & Carry bags at her feet, Materena realizes that all of her relatives (well, 99 percent of them, anyway) are, like herself, struggling with their finances” (Vaite 2000: 106). The lives of these characters are far from the images used in postcards and tourist brochures that aim at selling a product. My argument here is not one that advocates the fossilisation of Tahitian culture and society, rather what I am suggesting is that the exoticisation of places such as Tahiti largely contributes to maintaining social structures of domination with great impact on the livelihood of Native Tahitian people. Vaite’s women characters are representative of a working-class group struggling to live with dignity in a globalised and capitalist society. The title of the novel is highly symbolic in its allusion to the tree, the breadfruit, that is planted in most of the gardens in Tahitian houses providing food in times of need; it is part of Tahitians’ dietary habits and culture: “you can always rely on the breadfruit tree when money is a bit low” (Vaite 2000: 101).7 The breadfruit as a tree will give Materena and her family nourishment but it will also give them a certain sense of belonging to a place, of being rooted. As referred to in Chapter I, “land provides Tahitians with a sense of place and identity” (Kahn 2011: 69), and nature is acknowledged as a nurturing mother because it provides its
7 Curiously, the Penguin edition of this novel published in the UK altered the book’s title, and it was published instead as The Marriage Proposal. While the Australian edition vindicates the indigeneity of the breadfruit and its relevance in the Tahitian culture, the British edition erodes that by using a title that focuses on a particular event narrated in the novel, and sells it as a romantic story, in the “Chick Lit” category (see link: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/1042731/celestine-hitiura- vaite.html).
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inhabitants with food such as yams or breadfruit. Subsequently, Mirian Kahn explains that, the land embodies such deep meaning (spirituality, ancestral connections, family history, and cultural identity) as well as providing nourishment, medicine, and shelter, Tahitians are known to respond passionately when their land is threatened (2011: 68). It is, then, based on this sense of belonging that the characters in Vaite’s novels create dissident spaces, and “these spaces weave themselves seamlessly and subversively through geographies of power, creating spaces outside the dominant realm” (Kahn 2011: 183). In spite of the contextual differences between Tahiti and Afro-American culture, I would like to establish here a parallelism with what bell hooks theorised when writing about her personal life in Kentucky in her book Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009). bell hooks elaborates on the ideas of resistance and revolution, self-reliance and self-determination to emphasise the importance of community as well as the importance of individuality within communities as a form of resisting psychic and social domination that are relevant in examining the way Vaite depicts Tahitian culture through the life experiences of characters. The interconnectedness of commonality and individuality is overtly relevant here as it acknowledges that every subject within a community is worth respect and dignity, each person is responsible and accountable for her/his actions (hook 2009: 20). Within the extent of Vaite’s novel, Breadfruit, the core of a dissident attitude implies the insistence on the idea that every element is worth of respect, being an integral part of a structure that only works when its elements are recognised and taken into consideration. Throughout the novel, Vaite presents multiple characters and each brings into the narrative the importance of being valued in their difference both in terms of gender – when raerae, transgender people are mentioned – and in terms of class depicted by working women and men in diverse jobs. Hence, borrowing Mohanty’s theorisation on Third World Feminism, I argue that within the scope of Vaite’s novel, women characters are diverse, and their differences are central “to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliance”
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(2003: 7). Overall, Vaite’s text develops a notion of “reflexive solidarity” (Mohanty 2003: 7) which I find particularly useful. Mohanty addresses this reflexive solidarity in terms of “mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities” (2003: 7). Moreover, this notion of solidarity embodies “the result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis of particulars/differences” (Mohanty 2003: 7). Rather than the Manichean opposition “us vs them”, alliances between people/characters are forged based on solidarity which is inclusive, and based on the plurality of particulars/differences (Mohanty 2003) that are acknowledged, and respected contributing to the practice of a serious critique both to globalised policies and imperialist practices in contexts such as Tahiti. Hence, it is the concept of diversity within commonality that is central and of great relevance here. The embodiment of active dissidence occurs through behaviours, bodies and their relationship with (the occupied) space, and consequently exotic stereotypes are deconstructed generating new spaces where Indigenous people are agentive producers of knowledge (Smith 1999 and 2019; Hilden & Lee 2010; Andersen & O’Brien 2017). Much of Tahitian history and knowledge is included in traditions of genealogy, dance, and oral narratives that have been barred from being taught in schools. The “academic imperialism” described by Vilsoni Hereniko (1999) contributed to a certain alienation from Indigenous traditions. Besides, in Heneriko’s perspective of the marginalisation by school and church of Indigenous ways of knowing is primary and intentional in processes of colonialism. By revitalising cultural traditions through storytelling, dances, and performative arts Native Tahitian people seek to regenerate Indigenous ways of knowing, and craft space for young generations to learn more about their culture. Hence, this form of producing knowledge recognises Indigenous practices, and life experiences underlining the idea that Indigenous knowledge matters. Striving to live with dignity, Materena relies on the lessons learnt by heart, the ones that she gets from her mother and her elder relatives (aunties) within a close net of relationships that seem to be based upon processes of belonging. This sense of belonging is fundamental in her own understanding and positionality both within the Tahitian culture, and her self-construction of identity as a working
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woman who happens to be also a mother, a daughter, a friend, and a wife. The multiplicity entailed in those several approaches to her self contribute to a richer understanding of notions of belonging, being part of, contributing to the development of other subjects within a certain context without annihilating any forms of subjectivity. Indeed, the importance of community construction via kinship is widely represented in Polynesian societies in general, and that is also profoundly connected to the understanding of identity (collective and individual). Through the eyes of an all-perceiving narrator, the story of Materena is not a simple one, it is rather full of nuanced aspects that have simultaneously contributed to the formation of her identity, and to decode the pervasive influence of France over Tahiti. She and Pito have three children, they have lived thirteen years together without him putting a ring on her finger, however the situation is about to change in due course as one night after going out with friends, Pito asks Materena to marry him. The marriage proposal will set the tune for the entire novel. However, Materena (after being proposed) utterly explains that “she isn’t going to take his marriage proposal seriously. […] A ring on her finger is not an obsession. In her opinion they are a married couple, anyway – they share a bed and they share the kitchen table. […] and it’s not different from being husband and wife” (Vaite 200: 8). Despite her pragmatic approach to the subject, Materena enters a state of happiness that contradicts her words and that will make her navigate through the controversial waters of her own personal history. Amorous relationships between people in general, and marriage in particular are described in detail. Even though women are not schooled to seek marriage or a husband, Materena dreamt of being married with Pito out of profound love. Loana, Materena’s mother, being herself a single mother, never imposed marriage on her daughter despite their Christian background. It is relevant to note that from a cultural and social perspective institutionalised marriage in those terms was introduced after the conversion of Tahiti by missionaries. According to Salmond (2009) and Layton (2015) one of the main areas of conflict between Tahitians and Europeans (French Catholic missionaries) was a strong opposition of values related with sexual practices:
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premarital sex vs chastity; polygamy, and trial marriage vs monogamy.8 The novel presents an acute critique to those imposed norms by portraying monoparental families, single parents, women who love other women, men who love other men. The figure of a “single father” will appear on Vaite’s third novel, Tiare. Nonetheless, the categorisation of “single” might be contentious here as kinship functions as a set of bonds established between several elements of the community – aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbours, friend – and this designation seems to be rooted in westernised frameworks of labelling family structures. Thereby, in practical terms there is no singleness in the process of having and raising a child, as the process is (for the most part) a combination of different forces and the inter- work of several members of the community. In between daydreaming, Materena will be planning the big day (though keeping the marriage proposal a secret from curious relatives), she will also be inquiring her mother about their genealogy and ancestry, and then she will gently transmit that to her children. The narrativization of those moments coalesces with the coming of age of Leilani, Materena’s second child, as she will be challenging her mother by questioning her ancestors while demonstrating a profound enthusiasm to explore the world which she will eventually do when deciding to leave Tahiti to pursue her studies in France. The point about transmitting knowledge is brilliantly convened by Materena as she is a curious woman, and enormously proud about her personal history. When meeting with her mother, she records every conversation. The act of recording conversations as a form of preservation of the content of those moments otherwise lost resembles the artistic work of Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian artist, in Measures of Distance (1988), a work based on the recordings of conversations that Hatoum had with her mother about the everyday life in Lebanon, discussions about women’s sexuality, emancipation and resistance.9 Interestingly enough, Célestine Hitiura Vaite employs a similar
8 Trial marriage is an arrangement between people / couples by which they agree to live together during a period of time without getting legally married so they can see if they are compatible for marriage. It was a common practice in Tahiti and disrupted by the introduction of Western morality and religious conceptions of unions between people (Salmond 2009; Layton 2015).
9 Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian born in Lebanon who currently lives in London, and she is one of the most celebrated and controversial contemporary female Arab artists. Her work examines the intricate connections between displacement, gender, memory, public history vs personal history,
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approach in her novel reinforcing the intimate connection between mother and daughter. The first of many recordings is the recollection of the life of Materena’s grandmother: “Materena labels the tape Kika, My Grandmother. Then, she puts the tape in her box of things that are very important – like her children’s birth certificates” (Vaite 2000: 35). Tapes are compared to birth certificates as they become the material proof of someone’s existence, and a form of continuation of those lives even after death. In this specific example, the life of Kika is recalled by Loana, and the entire chapter is devoted to those memories. Their mother and daughter relationship (Kika and Loana’s) is defined by Kika’s trauma of being abandoned by her husband and left alone with her daughters, which has imprinted on her self a profound sense of non-belonging that she could not escape. The recuperation of this narrative seems to function as a cautionary tale in which Loana reflects upon the alterations in Tahitian life imposed by missionaries, and the consequences of that: “when my father left my mama for another woman, my mama’s confirmation wreath was taken down from the wall of the church. It was like condemnation” (Vaite 2000: 35). Kika’s personal story thus emphasises the impact that colonial practices such as the imposition of institutionalised marriage, the catholic construction of sin, sinful people, and impurity had (and continue to have) on Indigenous cultures. All those forms of controlling people generated social and individual inequalities. Due to such colonial values, prohibitions, and shame for transgressing them were part of this woman’s life, causing great havoc in her own way of interacting with her daughter.
exile and the complex interaction of all those themes within the construction of identity. Measures of Distance, which is a video artwork produced in 1988 is a clear example of those notions, and how they are transmuted and reproduced in artistic terms. In a 15 minutes video we are confronted with the recounting of the civil conflicts between Palestine and Israel and the war in Lebanon as representations of the public realm intertwined with the readings of private letters exchanged between Mona Hatoum and her mother. The representation of the public realm is never explicit though it appears as a subtext for the viewers to decode. However, the two spheres (public and private) are overtly linked by the sequence of images that portrays a personal reading of the war, the sense of displacement that is surprisingly intimate revealing the discrepancy between official history and private memory. In 2019, the video installation was displayed at Southampton City Art Gallery, and I had the opportunity to watch it. The recorded letters/conversations between Mona Hatoum and her mother made me think of Vaite’s novel and Materena’s recorded conversations with her mother as both depict a strong and intimate relation between mother and daughter, and they are a way telling stories.
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Paradoxically enough, even when narrating such events the relaxed tone of the novel is not detracted. Rather than expressing anger, and frustration, it is through joy, and a certain playfulness that these women resist. What may seem contradictory – joy and resistance – is, in fact, and to a certain extent, complementary here. The idiosyncrasies that connect the two words lead me to a possible ethics of joyful resistance following Sara Ahmed’s theorisation (2010), and how happiness disrupts pre-established norms, and how it may make room for possibility. The affirmation of powerful alternatives (Braidotti 2014) is often affected by actions that question norms and pre-established behaviours. Moreover, Libe García Zarranz (2016) asserts that joyful insurrection emerges when dissent behaviours occur, the moments that momentarily disrupt the system, “becoming an obstacle or an interruption to episodes of sexist exchange, racial discrimination, and compulsory heteronormativity” (2016: 18). It is my argument in line with Ahmed (2010), Braidotti (2014) and García Zarranz (2016) that when choosing happiness as a form of (joyful) dissidence, the characters in Vaite’s novels explore the possibility of reinventing spaces in a familiar and comfortable way. Those are the exact same spaces (within the private and the public realm) that were once colonised, bounded, and denied to Indigenous people. Moreover, while recovering these stories Vaite is politicising her writing which may as well be perceived both as a form of healing from the colonial past, and a form of dissidence that revolves around joy. Happy and joyful resistance does not occur as a lightly and disenfranchised approach to difficulties faced by subjects, rather it gives them room to select how to embrace and fight those challenges. Most of the stories told by Materana are the recounting of situations that focus on a certain precarity experienced by her relatives, however, the tone is always of joy, and their resistance goes hand in hand with that state of mind. As an example, we may consider the entire chapter in Breadfruit devoted to Materena’s cousin, Tapeta. She is described as a hard- working woman, who struggles to cope with her daughter Rose’s demands. Rose is a young teenager attending a prestige school, who has decided that she wants to play the piano. Despite Materena’s surprise on the choice of the music instrument, she listens to the story carefully without judgmental comments, but inevitably her
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initial surprise, to a certain extent, demonstrates her implied criticism to the introduction of Western elitist forms of education: “we don’t listen to that kind of music and there are certainly no piano people in our family, and that’s going back one hundred years. We sing; we play the guitar and the ukulele” (Vaite 2000: 98). It happens that piano lessons are expensive, and “they’re for the rich” (Vaite 2000: 100) but Tapeta is the kind of mother who would do everything for her children. As the conversation between the two – Materena and Tapeta – unfolds we are confronted with the precarious life of this family and the sacrifices that are necessary for Rose’s lessons to be paid. The family relies on their breadfruit tree as the money earned is not enough to buy food and pay the lessons: “we ate lot of breadfruit for Rose to play the piano” (Vaite 2000: 102). Throughout this chapter there are several topics that are tackled, and problematised through the story of Tapeta and her daughter Rose. The importance of education seems to be at stake here and that goes along with the sacrifices endured in order to cope with social demands that are translated into attending expensive schools and having piano lessons. It is, indeed, through institutionalised education that these girls, Rose and Leilani, will eventually achieve a better future as their mothers expect them to do. Education is in the spotlight as academic and traditional knowledge go hand in hand and the two reinforce the development of younger generations. However, Vaite reinforces the sort of pedagogy that it also is grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that emphasises belonging. If, on the one hand the story of Tapeta proves both the pitfalls and benefits of a certain westernised form of education, on the other hand the relevance of stories and genealogies is demonstrated when Pito tells his children about his totem, and he explains how “Polynesian people, all have a totem, but not many of us know what our totem is, because when the white people arrived, totem talk was forbidden” (Vaite 2000: 166). In doing so, it can be argued that “after years of oppression, the task at hand remains the practice of decolonization, which first requires recognition of who we are today and recognition of the heart and intellectual core of our people before colonization” (Hilden and Lee 2010: 75). Incorporating traditional elements into a modern way of life is, indeed, a form of resistance, and they became part of a political discourse that is related to decolonial practices and the rebuilding of cultural identity.
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The imperial power yielded against Indigenous people took full force in the way educational practices were initially implemented, as previously discussed in the first chapter of this Dissertation. Depriving people of their language was a form of extreme epistemic violence, and it is one of the aspects most debated and depicted in Indigenous literatures. Vaite also addresses this issue in Breadfruit in a different chapter titled “Teacher”. Loana’s memory is triggered by the sight of an old teacher when running errands, and the chapter revolves around her education, and how Tahitian language had been forbidden. Loana tells Materena not only how Tahitian language was forbidden in her school days but also the measures implemented by the teacher to prevent the use of Native language within the school yard. As a form of controlling the students, he gave them a porcelain shell that should be passed on between those who failed to follow the teacher’s command. Not only was he alienating students from their own language, but he was also dividing them by policing the playground where students were supposed to play along with each other. Loana explains how that procedure impacted on the way children interact: The porcelain shell transformed you into a person with a contagious skin disease. Everybody would run away from you, tell you to go to another direction, call you tiho tiho, the informer. Only the tough ones continued to play, and speak the native language, without fear of getting the porcelain shell. Their warning: ‘You give me that shell and you’re going to get it after school’. (Vaite 2000: 205) Loana expounds that she tried to change her teacher’s mind by telling him that “it’s much easier to play in miri-roa. The French language, it’s for inside the class” (Breadfruit 205). Native languages as described by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning” (1981: 10), the vast system used to name the world is the primordial relationship between communities and their environment, economic activities, socio-political relations, and the view of themselves in the world (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1981).
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The domination of territories means more than land occupation, thus the colonial endeavour would have remained precarious and incomplete without the entire control over value systems. The oppressing system could not have been solely based upon territorial, economic and political supremacy; for that to be complete and entirely implemented it had to reach the cultural control, the imperative influence over people’s minds only achieved through the implementation of new and Western education programs. By obliterating Indigenous languages, oppression and control was fully achieved. Education remains one of the crucial topics debated when dealing with Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty, and after Loana’s story about how Reo Ma’ohi, the Tahitian language, was forbidden, there is an ultimate glimpse of hope in her words when acknowledging that “things have changed now, and the Tahitian language is being taught at school” (Vaite 2000: 206). Changes within communities occur when people, particularly the younger generation as they represent the future, are presented with multiple perspectives about knowledge producing and ways of living. Resistance against the onslaught erasure of cultural practices happens through the revitalisation of Indigenous languages, through the shift of mental frameworks and the production of culture that equally prioritise the integrity of people as elements engaged with their surroundings (land, sea, nature). The disruption of Indigenous social and cultural practices took place during and after the colonial encounter. Centuries have passed since Tahiti was firstly visited by European navigators, though the effects suffered by Indigenous people are visible until today. Over time, France transformed its power over Tahitian lands according to its political and military interests as discussed in Chapter I of this Dissertation. There are, in fact, two specific moments that signalled the turning point in French imperial power, the nuclearization of the region in the 1960s, when France moved its military bases from Algeria to French Polynesia, and the intensification of mass tourism. Miriam Kahn defines those two paradoxical events as follows: Neither of these – exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere above and in the bedrock of an island, or altering the environment to create artificial “paradises”
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for tourists – was a way in which Tahitians would behave toward the land (2011: 61). The history of occupation and the subsequent militarisation of Tahitian lands is not different from any other place in the Pacific. The framework of power was based on controlling and exploiting resources, and military authority was achieved by the policing of places and the nuclear endeavours. For Polynesian peoples, in general, the relationship between people and land is of symbiotic nature as proved by the traditional act of burying the placentas quoted above. Rather than a detached attitude towards land, Polynesian people believe that “land figures as the equivalent to one’s own body and family rather than as an inanimate object” (Teaiwa 2006: 74). Struggles over land are determined by this understanding of place as an entity rather than an object. Vaite is not indifferent to the challenges faced by Tahitians when it comes to land occupation and, consequently, its militarisation, and thus Breadfruit presents a cogent critique to those forms of imperialism experienced by local people. “Mussels” is the title of the chapter devoted to the discussion of land occupation. If the title seems to lead to a trivial issue – “it’s a beautiful morning, after all, a perfect day to take the kids to that beach that used to belong to the Mahi people, dig mussels” (Vaite 2000:189) – the content proves the opposite. The narration of land dispossession is provided in an ironic tone, also alluding to the introduction of liquor as an asset used in commercial exchanges between Indigenous people and white settlers: Behind the airport there’s some land next to the sea. That land behind the airport used to belong to the Mahi tribe, but an ancestor exchanged it for a few quarts of red wine. The exchange was carried out under private seal, so nobody knows the name of the popa’a who got the land for cheap. It’s not for certain that he was a popa’a, but back then (when the Mahi people lost the land behind the airport) the popa’a people did a lot of exchanging with the Polynesian people – under private seal. (Vaite 2000: 191)
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Although reasonable doubt is provided when it comes to the exact identity of the popa’a (white person) who bought the land, the content of this passage is a clear allusion to the time when Mahi (Indigenous people from Tahiti) were dispossessed from their lands under the secrecy of treaties. The reference to this modus operandi is of great importance as it was pervasive across colonised territories. The appropriation of lands is still being denounced on the part of sovereignty movements, and it remains as one of the many unsolved issues for Indigenous populations. The metaphoric image of digging the mussels leads to a meaningful subject, it is a sort of excavating the past in which the protagonists are reminded of the injustices perpetrated against their ancestors. As for most Pacific Islanders, for Tahitians their cultural identity is highly rooted in their connection with the land. Materena loves mussels and this specific place, as it reminds her of her ancestry: “she feels the presence of the people who used to dig mussels there, the people way before here time – her ancestors and their friends” (Vaite 2000: 191). However, the status of the land in currently designated as “private property” which will cause her trouble: “Materena is going to court because the gendarme caught her on private property” (Vaite 2000: 190), though she intrinsically knows that she has done nothing wrong. Later, when asked about what she was doing wrong Leilani intervenes to explain that “we weren’t doing anything against the law. […] The sea doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to everybody” (Vaite 2000: 194). Land and sea are constitutive elements of Tahitian identity, the two natural elements are complimentary which is proved by Tahitian practices when pieces of coral are used in the construction of sacred places, like the marae.10 Furthermore, “in precolonial times, everyone had access to land, which was jointly owned by extended families” (Kahn 2000: 10), and the disruption of that with forced occupation and dispossession is still felt by local people. The conversation with the gendarme is quite revelatory of a certain supremacy as he keeps inquiring Materena without looking at her or even showing any signs of sympathy, asking direct
10 Marae is a sacred place in Tahitian culture. Before the arrival of European navigators and the processes of colonisation, the marae was the place for social, political, and religious gatherings (Salmond 2009; Matsuda 2012; Layton 2015). The word and its meaning are also coincident with other Indigenous cultures from the Pacific, namely the Maori culture.
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questions, and admonishing her when she tries to explain herself.11 At the end, Materena gets a notification for trespassing private property which opens up room to bringing into the debate the struggles faced by Indigenous people about land dispossession. The story of Maeva, Loana’s cousin is another example of this: she “took the government to court over Crown land in Rangiroa, […] and won the case” (Vaite 2000: 195). Maeva embodies the activist figure proud of her heritage as she presents herself in court “barefoot and carrying her pandanus bag” (Vaite 2000: 195), defending the rights of Indigenous people over their lands. Following the Hawaiian conceptualisation of aloha ‘aina (love for the land) as an interventive praxis, it is my point that the ecological articulations implied in this approach seem to create a connection between places – Hawai’i, Tahiti and Samoa – in which the colonial and imperial rhetoric of Western nations – the USA and France respectively – are dismantled. It is well-known that the militarisation, nuclearization and touristification of these places have caused (and are still causing) great levels of violence (psychological, material, and political) against Indigenous peoples, as discussed in Chapter I. A counter-narrative to the way land has been appropriated and depleted from its natural resources surges when Materena is chatting with her eldest son, Tamatoa, about a school excursion to a marae, and she evokes the importance of sacred places in the formation of cultural identity. Materena explains to her son that marae are part of their history, and her primary concern is “how is Tamatoa going to act at the marae?” (Vaite 2000: 259). The act of performing in sacred public places is relevant as it deals with exploring “the relationships and tensions between Ma‘ohi understandings of place and predominantly Western mass-mediated representations of Tahiti” which inevitably “reveals a lived space that is simultaneously real and imagined, immediate and mediated” (Kahn 2011: 211). Whether schoolbooks are full of information about those sacred places or not, it is not an impediment to Materena’s endeavour to tell Tamatoa more about the subject. She starts her lecture by asking Tamatoa about the typology of the place, and he reads from the schoolbook that: “Marae are sacred sites, and there are six types of marae” (Vaite 2000: 260). After a long explanation
11 Gendarme refers to police officers.
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read from the book, Materena is not yet satisfied, and she decides to add a bit more of information which clearly is not part of the knowledge that students get from school material: “Open your ears. […] Even if the marae isn’t used nowadays, the spirits who guard the marae, they’re still in action. They circle the marae and make sure all the people that visit the marae show respect” (Vaite 2000: 261). What follows is a series of cautionary tales about people who disrespected the sacredness of the place and where vehemently punished. Tamatoa widens his eyes in a mixture of fear, curiosity, and surprise. The stories span from a man who lost his penis because he pissed on the marae; a boy who suffocated with a swollen tongue as he spat on the ground; and a tourist haunted by a spirit because he stole a stone from the marae, leaving Tahiti and never returning. Interestingly enough, this last example of people disrespecting sacred places is described by Materena as follows: “this story is common knowledge” (Vaite 2000: 262), and she wisely concludes by stating that “it’s best we leave the sacred places alone” (Vaite 2000: 262). Miriam Kahn asserts that “with the nuclear testing program firmly under way, and all of its accompanying ramifications and transformations, another new project began – the French Polynesian government’s investment in tourism” (2011: 75). The allusion to tourists in Materena’s story as disrespecting figures resonates the concerns of Indigenous people in protecting their land, and those storied places, it also assumes a critical approach to the way Tahiti has been commodified.12 In the portrayal of the tourist stealing a stone as a souvenir, a story of common knowledge, there is the implication that “the commodity object which is, at once, an image and material thing, enables subjects to have a close encounter with a distant other” (Ahmed 2000: 114). The exoticization of objects (and Islanders) along with the desire to consume them have been part of the struggle of Indigenous people against mass tourism. However, the act of consuming objects,
12 When using the expression “storied places” to describe Tahitian landscape, I am drawing on Cristina Bacchilega’s studies on Native Hawaiian culture and the politics of places (2007). Bacchilega explains that storied place refers to the definition of places as “an emotionally, narratively, and historically layered experience” (2007: 35). Hence, place also translated as land is sensed, lived, experienced, contested and struggled over based on Indigenous cosmologies and the symbiotic relation between human and non-human elements. It is, therefore, based on this definition that I have acknowledged Tahitian landscape as an occupied placed by the tourism industry, and a storied place in the sense that it is emotionally and historically perceived by Native Tahitian people as part of their identity rather than a commodity.
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and cultures might be described as a global process of commodification in which the exotic functions as a symbolic system that aims at domesticating Indigenous people through layered processes of violence often concealed beneath layers of mystification and the alluring images of attractive places, thus “the exotic splendour of newly colonised may disguise the brutal circumstances of their gain” (Huggan 2001: 14). Within this context, and following bell hooks brilliant analogy between the consumption of exotic commodities and the act of ingesting food in her essay “Eating the Other” (1992), it can be argued that the exoticization of bodies fixes difference, and marginalises ethnic groups. Hence, “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks 1992: 21). It is worth noting that based on the analogy of eating the other, Indigenous cultures are perceived as “something” that can be simultaneously consumed and assimilated to validate the fantasies of those who consume them. The discourses of the exotic seem to be part of the cultural commodities that move across oceans within (globalised) economies largely regulated by Euro-American demands. Vaite’s allusion to the figure of the tourist operates to some extent as a form of scrutinising the questionable assumptions behind any anthropological descriptions of Tahitian culture and its sacred places. Clearly, there is an implicit critique of the way “strangers” behave and of the permanent desire to consume Tahitian culture by taking something back home. The tourist’s gaze and desire are triggered “because there is an anticipation, especially through day-dreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures […] involving different senses from those customarily encountered” (Urry 1995: 132). The promotion of Tahiti emphasises exoticness and the inescapable beauty that only exists in dreams (Kahn 2011), therefore, “keeping these dreams alive is a constant challenge that relies on ever more premeditated and mediated – and government orchestrated – manipulations” (Kahn 2011: 97). Moreover, the inescapability of dream-like images not only presents a biased depiction of Tahiti but also a patronising perspective that has been informing problematic versions of socio-cultural otherness. It is through the vivid and passionate interventions of Ati, who is Materena and Pito’s friend, in the chapter “Brooming”, that we are confronted with another
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perspective about the escalating discomfort regarding French imperialism in Tahiti. Ati has discovered politics and joined Oscar Temaru’s independent party,13 and he seems to be devoted to enlisting his friends too. The fierce interventions of Ati when discussing the political environment in Tahiti are full of historical nuances about occupation and the deviancy of colonial treaties that were forged to use and abuse Tahitian people. The figure of Oscar Temaru is thus evoked, as well as the street demonstrations organised by his political independent party: “they’re [the pro- independence demonstrators] all going to grab their brooms and go sweep the road. The sweeping is supposed to symbolize getting rid of those French popa’a, those invaders, those wicked people” (Vaite 2000: 174). Ati represents the political stance of his generation in opposing nuclear testing and French colonial practices that have corrupted Tahitians: “And these bastards exploded bombs in our country. […] France gave us money to shut our big mouths… and to many of us accepted, and since then we’re all foutue. The whole lot of us. Foutue” (Vaite 2000: 176). However, this conversation between friends changes its tone when Ati has an altercation with Loana who refuses to go along with his viewpoint on the current political state as she was once helped by Gaston Flosse, the president of the territorial government. Paradoxically, Loana is not engaged with this specific approach to independence, as it seems she is one of those Tahitians who are foutue after having received some sort of help from the government, and she ends up dismissing Ati’s argumentation by asking him very personal questions with a slightly matronising tone: “Ati, your mother, she still cooks for you and she’s still cleaning up after you, oui?” (Vaite 2000: 177). Surprised by the questions, Ati acquiesced that, indeed, her mother does all those chores for him, a grown-up human being, and reluctantly, as Loana is older, he asks “What does my mamma have to do with independence?” (Vaite 2000: 177), falling to understand what Loana implied by those questions. She then furiously answers him back, “Independence my arse” (Vaite 2000: 177), leaving him without words. The
13 Oscar Temaru was the head of the independent party, Polynesian Liberation Front, and he had in his political agenda the independence of Tahiti, and the de-nuclearization of the region. Temaru was the main political opponent to Gaston Flosse (then president of the French Polynesia) from the mid- 1980s to the early 1990s. Temaru has been the mayor of Faa’a (a commune in the outskirts of Papeete, Tahiti) since 1983, and he was elected as President of French Polynesia in five occasions (in 2004, from 2005 to 2006, 2007 to 2008, in 2009, and then from 2011 to 2013).
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analogy about individual and collective independence is clear here, and Loana is conveying the notion that partly the work of self-determination and political independence is more complex than sweeping streets, as valid as this is. Her point goes further as a critique to the way Ati lives as not coincident with his political views. To a certain extent, Loana’s response to Ati’s political beliefs is grounded in the notion that independence starts from within, one cannot claim a certain approach if one’s actions in the private sphere demonstrate the opposite. It is my point that Loana’s intervention here is not really against independence, it is clearly more about the importance of personal, individual and private actions as politicised expressions of self-determination. It can be argued that Loana’s viewpoint emphasises the interweaving of the personal and the political by situating private experiences in relation to others and to social structures. Thus, “all politics is collapsed into the personal, and questions of individual behaviors, attitudes, and lifestyles stand in for the political analysis of the social” (Mohanty 2003: 214). This chapter is particularly interesting in the way it is written; its title “Brooming” bears a double meaning as it alludes both to the act of cleaning the house and the act of politely showing guests that it is time to leave: “Materena would like Ati to go home, so she grabs the broom and begins to sweep underneath the table. That is the polite way to let people know they should make a disappearance” (Vaite 2000: 177). Moreover, it also alludes to the political act of “cleaning” the country from French influence. The juxtaposition of private and public realms is effectively conveyed through potential collusions that depict how voices and agencies are constituted. The final chapter of Breadfruit is a burst of hope, a sort of gargantuan laugh of life. It is full of hope not because Materena (finally) gets married after a series of unexpected events but because the entire chapter is about life: a newborn is about to enter the world. Giselle (another of Materena’s cousins) is having her second child, and Materena must leave her own wedding party to take Giselle to the hospital and be there for her. The focus of the narrative is no longer about Materena’s big day (as nothing is going as planned with the wedding). The last scene is quite melodramatic, with four women – Materena, Rita, Mama Teta and Giselle – speeding up to the hospital as Giselle cries her eyes out and screams in between contractions. Breadfruit is, after all, about life, companionship, and love.
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Materena is a strong vahine capable of putting others first, capable of being the heroine of her own narrative. Feelings of love, responsibility, and altruism inform Materena’s action making her central in her family / community context. Being able to politicise private stories and turn them into a source of knowledge, into something that connects people, is empowering. Hence, Materena’s actions, and her ability to see the best in others contribute to a form of decolonial rhetoric that is focused on Tahitian people and their communities. Each tale told by Materena, Loana or any other of Materena’s aunties comes with knowledge about Tahitian society and culture. When sharing them, I argue, Materena is intentionally educating her children to acknowledge their private realm as a politicised context where knowledge producing occurs complementing the education they receive in school.
2.2. Frangipani: Empowered Motherhood
The events, adventures and misadventures narrated in Breadfruit are left behind, and this second novel, Frangipani (2004), brings onto the stage another phase in Materena’s life. This novel revolves around the new life of Materena, who is now married and moving to a new job as a radio hostess allowing her, and her family to live more comfortably. The narrative starts with Materena recalling the beginning of her relationship with Pito. Following the narrative technique employed in Breadfruit, the conversational tone of a third-person narrator seems to convey the notion that the novel is a long conversation between friends as well as it emphasises the oral nature of Tahitian culture. Ultimately, the nourishment and guidance that Materena provided her children with has shaped the way they learn to understand themselves individually and their positionality in the world. The first chapters of Frangipani are a set of pieces in a puzzle that complete the gaps in Breadfruit as they provide information on the life of Materena and Pito when they met, and when their children were born. However, there is no linearity as the narrative moves backward and forward in time, and events get lost in other recollections that contain extra information about lost relatives, women who were left behind by their husbands, or simple short narratives about how to behave properly in a certain situation. If Breadfruit was an introductory contemplation of
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the life events of a plethora of characters, Frangipani shows the consolidation of women’s power and resistance against ingrained social and economic injustices as well as it puts emphasis on the (tense) relation between mothers and daughters. Frangipani focuses on how mothers and daughters interact and negotiate the spaces they inhabit. The problematisation of the relationship mother-daughter encapsulates the debate around tradition (ancestralism) and modernity (globalisation) as two axial views of Tahiti. Moreover, it is also this relationship that helps the understanding of how community and coalitions are formed to resist stereotypes and fragmented representations of Tahitian cultural identity. Escaping the common tropes of difficult daughters and Machiavellian mothers, Vaite’s depiction of mothers and daughters is one based on love, acceptance, and mutual respect. Although this is a highly contested ground as the maternal body encapsulates myriad of representations, my reading of the novel’s most salient theme takes account of the centrality of the institution of motherhood in the Tahitian social order. By “institution” I am not implying that motherhood is being used as a form of policing women’s bodies or even seen as a biological requirement that dictates whether a woman should give birth or not to be perceived as a woman rather, my use of the word implies that motherhood is perceived as an aspect to be considered when discussing the decolonial practices entailed in turning the private/personal into political forms of contestation. Feminist theories have generally focused on how maternity/motherhood is experienced by (mostly white middle-class) women, though mothering can be a vastly different experience for women according to their specific socio-cultural context, race, or sexuality. Moreover, those experiences have been affected by colonial policies, such as the introduction of Western medicines and new biomedical methods. Kim Anderson points out that “motherhood, both in practice and as an ideology, was the source of Indigenous female authority in the family and in the governance of pre-colonial nations” (2010: 86). Nevertheless, women’s positionality in social life should not be considered in any straight sense the consequence or product of actions, or even the result of their biological category but, on the contrary, of the meaning/influence that their actions acquire through
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effective social interactions. Accordingly, “unlike western ideologies that denied women decision-making power in the family and positioned them in a role equivalent to a family servant, Indigenous mothers historically had responsibility for the life they created and, by extension for the whole family and the entire community” (Lavell-Harvard & Anderson 2014: 4). Although Western ideologies of motherhood may be contentious given the tight relationship between motherhood and women’s social and cultural roles, my point is that through literature, Vaite is contributing to the revitalisation of what Kim Anderson asserted as source of authority within the family realm. She is advancing also in the construction of a social context in which Indigenous ancestry is honoured as integral part of Tahitian cultural identity. Kim Anderson (2010 and 2014) and Lisa Udel (2001) refer to Native American peoples in their studies; however, Indigenous women from the Pacific suffered similar disruptions in their socio-cultural practices caused by colonialism. Therefore, I found Andersen and Udel’s studies particularly relevant as they contribute to sustain my arguments related with the impact of colonial practices in the South Pacific in controlling women’s bodies. Studies concerning the theme of motherhood exclusively in Tahiti are sparse (if not inexistent), and often the theme is examined in a wider context that includes several other Pacific islands (Jolly 1998). Therefore, those studies emphasise the way Indigenous practices related with motherhood and birthing were altered by Western knowledge which largely contributed to the disempowering of women within their communities (Jolly 1998). The universalisation of the theme must be avoided as the experience of motherhood is highly subjective, and Vaite was careful on that matter by depicting it simultaneously as a life-affirming practice but also a profoundly individual choice. Motherhood has been central in Western feminism and women’s movements ever since they emerged, and it has also been from the start a highly contested issue (Snitow 1992; Neyer and Bernardi 2011). It is, according to Andrea O’Reilly (2016), considered the unfinished business of feminism. Moreover, O’Reilly posits that “mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organized from and for their particular identity and work as mothers” (2016: 3) which I read as a form of empowering women who decide to be mothers. Several scholarly works
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have been devoted to its analysis and problematisation, presenting the theme from multiple perspectives.14 bell hooks explains that “early feminist attacks on motherhood alienated masses of women from the movement, especially poor and/or non-white women, who find parenting one of the few interpersonal relationships where they were affirmed and appreciated” (1984: 135). Therefore, Vaite’s portrayal of motherhood partakes of the idea that “one of the biggest targets of colonialism was the Indigenous family” (Anderson 2010: 83) and, consequently a main objective was the disassembling of “traditional societies sustained by kin relations in which women had significant authority” (Anderson 2010:83). Not surprisingly the process described by Kim Anderson in relation to Native American peoples is not unique to that context, and it can be largely applied also to Polynesian societies. Motherhood is, then, celebrated also as form of resistance against colonial impositions. My reading of Vaite’s novel Frangipani considers what Lisa Udel described as a “motherist rhetoric” (2001: 48) a form of activism located not in public demonstrations, but rather on communal struggle for the survival of their children, being education and storytelling the main tools to dismantle stereotypical representations of their peoples and cultures, on the one hand, and on the other hand the tools to fight back any forms of land occupation and militarisation of Pacific regions. Vaite proposes an acute critique to the ever- present separation between public and private spheres along with the idea that motherhood was “simply” a matter of the domestic realm. On the contrary,
14 Any cursory review of research related with the theme of motherhood from a Western standpoint demonstrates that there is an infinite number of articles published regularly. For example, The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering (1999-2020) has examined the topic from diverse angles that span from axial analyses that combine motherhood with other topics such as literature, sexuality, public policies, work, healthcare, popular culture, feminist motherhood, race and ethnicity, gender, adoption, and mothering, just to name a few. It would have been complicated to address the theme exhaustively in this Dissertation, though. Nevertheless, I would like to reinforce, even if briefly, the idea of the complex nature of the topic. One may consider, for example, the way Simone de Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex (1953) addresses the theme from a standpoint that perceives motherhood as a form of subordination, an act never performed in liberty as it is always conditioned by patriarchy, a form of perceiving women as “others”. Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) presents a distinction between two meanings of motherhood, “the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children” and “the institution – which aims at ensuring that that potential – and all women – shall remain under male control” (1976: 4). These two perspectives – de Beauvoir’s and Rich’s – have proven to be relevant and influential in problematising the theme of motherhood. However, most recent research presents other approaches in which motherhood is not seen as form of subjugation but rather as an empowering and significant dimension in women’s lives (O’Reilly 2016).
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domesticity extends beyond the private realm of the nuclear family and comes to include wider relationships of community (Udel 2001). Materena starts by recalling the challenges of being a mother for the first time, and the sense of despair she felt when she was not able to understand the cries of her newborn: “What’s the matter with you today? she asks, thinking that the whole neighbourhood must be wondering what she’s doing to her baby to yell like that” (Vaite 2004: 14). As the time goes by, she learns how to deal with the newly born baby and returns to her daily chores. The mother and daughter relationship assumes the centrality of the novel. The chapter “What is the needle going to say?” focuses on the significance and responsibility of having children. It includes vivid descriptions of Materena’s concerns when she found out about the baby’s biologic sex. Materena uses a needle to guess the baby’s biological sex: “holding a needle attached to a thread above her belly, Materena waits for the verdict. After a while the needle starts to move” (Vaite 2004: 9), the spinning movements of the needle will reveal the secret, “It’s a girl! Materena is going to have a daughter!” (Vaite 2004: 9). And then the acquiescence of responsibility, Materena reflects upon the act of being a mother and raising children, “from the day the child is conceived till the child leaves home you’re responsible for its well-being” (Vaite 2004: 9-10), and she vehemently promises that she “will definitely aim to raise a woman who knows what she wants and makes it happen” (Vaite 2004: 10). Beautifully woven together, the chapter is a sweet monologue through which Materena, in a delicate descriptive style, covers topics such as the weather in Tahiti, Tahitian history and how the islands were occupied, the beauty of Tahitian landscapes, Tahitian traditions and behaviours, as in “she points to trees planted to mark the day a child comes into the world” (Vaite 2004: 11). She also transmits to the baby her genealogy, “one by one, Materena tells her unborn daughter who is who in the family, who is nice, who is not so nice, who is dead” (Vaite 2004: 10). Finally, we see how Materena is, her likes and dislikes. The conversation goes on as a litany that strengthens the connection between the two human beings. Materena is already preparing and educating Leilani, even before she is born; the words, the stories function as forms of nourishment at the same time as they carry knowledge that will be part of Leilani’s identity.
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When the day of Leilani’s birth finally arrives, the narrative of the moment oscillates between Materena’s personal description of her feelings, indistinct conversations between nurses, and the relevance given to midwifery. The family gathers in the hospital’s aisle to support Materena: “Little by little the relatives arrive and get comfortable on the bench and on the ground and they joke around to make the pregnant woman laugh, to give her strength before she goes into the labor room” (Vaite 2004: 47). The moment of giving birth is a women’s moment, aunties, female cousins, grandmothers will take turns to support the mother. Contrasting with the traditional perspective presented through the gathering of family members, the modernity of hospitals with well-defined structures cannot accommodate those traditions, and Materena is taken to the delivery room alone, though shared with other pregnant women. In between contractions, Materena listens to disturbing chit- chat between two other women: “She’s having a baby girl,” Materena hears a woman say. “Girls hurt their mother from the day they come into the world. It’s like that. I can talk because I’ve got six girls… Girls are a curse, trust me.” “Oui, she’s having a girl, all right,” another woman is saying. “It’s more painful to push girls into the world because they don’t want to be born. They resist. They know what they’re in for in this world of miseries.” Another contraction comes up and Materena loses track of the conversation, too busy dealing with her suffering. “Aue!” (Vaite 2004: 50). The implications of this short conversation go beyond the simplicity of the way it is presented. In an ever-changing world that operates based upon hierarchical systems of power fuelled by processes of sexism, racism and misogyny, gender equity remains an unsolved issue, a ground of daily contestations in which Indigenous women, particularly, suffer disproportionate levels of poverty and abuse. The passage above illustrates the challenges faced by women, and to some extent, the violence perpetrated against women is implied. The colonial “civilizing mission” that Lugones refers to as the “euphemistic mask of brutal access to
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people’s bodies through unimaginable exploitation” (Lugones 2010: 744) seems to be recurrent, as the quote above clearly reflects in the line: “they [women] know what they’re in for in this world of miseries” (Vaite 2004: 50). And so the story goes, Materena is still in pain as the baby refuses to be born, and she desperately yells her head off. The midwife’s commands are followed “but still nothing comes out” (Vaite 2004:51), and, suddenly Auntie Stella, “long regarded as the best midwife in the island” (Vaite 2004: 51) appears: “Auntie Stella,” Materena cries. “My baby doesn’t want to come out.” Stella kisses Materena’s forehead and tells her to be strong and not to worry. Then she begins her inspection and concludes that the only way for the baby to come out is for Materena to push standing up. Let gravity help. Stella frees Materena of the tubes and helps her get out of bed” (Vaite 2004: 51). The sequence of events goes from the use of contemporary patterns of giving birth – conventional Western medicine – to the recurrence to traditional ways of helping the woman to deliver the baby in a different position – standing up. Margaret Jolly asserts that “indigenous patterns of mothering have been challenged and to some degree transformed, first in the colonial period and second in the postcolonial epoch, in the name of civilization, modernity and scientific medicine” (1998: 1), and this starts with the very experience of labour. There is an implied critique to the way Indigenous medical practices were also altered by the introduction of Western methods, and to some extent the impossibility of the mother to choose how to deliver the child. The woman’s body is invaded, as in this scene: “Mary [the midwife] thinks her hand will hurry things up. That hand (the whole lot) goes in and Materena shrieks so loud that the hand quickly retreats” (Vaite 2004: 51). The practice, which might have been assumed as the correct one to help the baby, is performed without ask for Materena’s permission, which reveals, clearly, that the focus is not on her – the mother – but on the child who becomes the protagonist of the entire procedure. This is, though, a form of neglecting the maternal body putting it in a secondary position. In the midst of pain, Leilani finally “comes into the world frowning and with her eyes open” (Vaite 2004: 52).
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Materena’s concerns are now of another nature as she seems unable to breastfeed: Materena is so devastated. For her, breast-feeding is the reward that comes after the pain of the birth. Breast- feeding is what makes the mother and child get close, bond. She tells her mother that. Loana’s reply is a reprimand. “Stop talking nonsense… It’s not breastfeeding that makes a mother and her child bond. It’s everyday life” (Vaite 2004: 54). The practicality of Loana’s words when demystifying certain impressions on motherhood is quite interesting as it leads to the description of the everyday life Tahitian style, with the “Welcome into the World rituals” in which we are given a complete description of traditions involving the newborn. There is the recovery of ancient practices such as the introduction of the child to all the relatives, and the aforementioned burial of the placenta: “Materena already chose Leilani’s tree, a beautiful frangipani tree, to be planted after the baptism next week along with Leilani’s placenta” (Vaite 2004: 55), together with the representation of catholic practices such as the baptism of the baby. The entire chapter presents the syncretism of Tahitian culture through the entanglement of Tahitian cultural practices and Christian ones introduced by missionaries. In sum, Vaite employs the image of the maternal body to juxtapose metaphorical and literal meanings, hope and anguish, love and pain, compassion and violence, in an effort to accurately depict the complexities of Tahitian society. The life experiences of Leilani prove to be a challenge to her mother as she questions everything around her, from the household chores to French colonialism. Leilani’s brilliant mind defies Materena while she also carries a lot of her mother’s expectations. However, when Materena accepts the invitation from Ati, Pito’s best friend, to be a host in a radio program, the relationship between mother and daughter changes as Leilani feels inspired by her mother’s courage. The chapter “Into Womanhood” resembles Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl”, though lighter in tone, more focused on love and nourishment. This is in all cases a “talk to enlighten the new woman” (Vaite 2004: 89). Vaite’s offers an interesting recollection of
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“women’s rules and roles” told with hints of humour as Materena keeps being interrupted by her non-conformist daughter, who is more concerned with practical issues than with listening to her mother’s lesson. Materena could foresee that resistance, and so she decides to innovate on the sort of knowledge she wants her daughter to keep: “Materena is not going to give her daughter, who became a woman about ten minutes ago, the traditional Welcome into Womanhood talk. She’s going to do it the new way. Let’s move on to the new century!” (Vaite 2004: 90). The innovation that Materena is seeking has to do with content, given that some of the aspects usually mentioned by mothers are simply wrong impressions that no longer serve her, and also with format, as Materena’s speech rejects the seriousness required by the moment: “I’m not going to tell you not to wash your hair during your period, otherwise the blood is going to turn into ice, because… eh well, I was right, you’re laughing… I knew you were going to laugh…” (Vaite 2004: 92), and so Materena opts for a more modern way of passing on all the important things, Materena is just about to do this – on a tape, so that Leilani can listen to it over and over again, and she can even write the precious information in her notebook. […] It’s quarter past eleven and everyone is asleep, the perfect time for a recording session. Materena presses the record button (Vaite 2004: 97). The lines following this are a beautiful recorded love letter to her daughter, where she offers an empowering speech that focuses on how her daughter should be happy more than anything else, and proud of her herself, “Be proud to have been born a woman” (Vaite 2004: 92), and “It’s important to believe in yourself” (Vaite 2004: 93). The previous chapter, “Catholics Girls”, though presents an oppositional view in which womanhood is framed by the castrating lens of religion, and how Christian indoctrination impacted on women’s subjectivity: “Materena feels she’s a bit of martyr sometimes because when you’re Catholic, you’re not supposed to enjoy yourself” (Vaite 2004: 86). As commented on in the previous section about the novel Breadfruit, and also on Chapter I, Tahitian culture suffered profound alterations after the colonial encounter. Some critics (Kahn, 2010; O’Brien, 2006
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and Salmond, 2009) present interesting analyses of how missionaries altered the way men and women perceived (and experienced) sexuality. Patty O’Brien asserts that “at the center of all missionary aims was the sexual constrains of indigenous women that was to be affected through reeducation and the shining example of male missionaries and their wives” (2006: 101). Concepts of sexuality, beauty, and the performativity of bodies had a powerful effect on the way Indigenous women, in this case Tahitian, perceived themselves, and consequently the “domestication” and submission they were subjected to were mandatory to the agendas of imperialism. Nonetheless, the creation of this “Pacific muse” which is the stereotype that portrays Indigenous women as sexually passive elements, exquisitely beautiful, and merely as decorative objects, was a European construction simultaneously based on fantasy-filled representations of Pacific women, and a profound lack of understanding of Indigenous cultures. Christianity became a powerful instrument used in this mission of transforming Indigenous people and their cultures in the sense that “the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent on erasing community, ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of weaving, of the cosmos, and not only on changing and controlling reproductive and sexual practices” (Lugones 2010: 745). Vaite’s depiction of Tahitian men and women is not exactly focused on their sexuality as a defining feature permeated with exoticism, perhaps because that has been the object of extensive representations and stereotypes. Hers is a portrayal of de-orientalised subjects who constitute an interesting deconstruction of those images. Vaite’s women characters challenge this Pacific muse by being empowered and empowering women capable of bridging “old” and “new” approaches to Tahitian culture in order to contest entrenched stereotypes that have been used to subordinate Indigenous peoples. Out of this space of resistance within the textual fabric of Vaite’s narrative, it is possible to argue that differences of class, race, sexual orientation, and gender, which have been used to inform the silent metaphors of mediation of an elite epistemology, have been reclaimed as emancipatory signifiers, textual sites from which to
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elaborate the ideological forms of containment at work in the production of knowledge (Emberley 1993: 71). The coloniality of gender and the circulation of power permeate all aspects of life, from body to labour and land dispossession, and as Lugones points out given that it will not be possible to resist that alone, “one resists it from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that it is shared and that can understand one’s action, thus providing recognition” (2010: 754). The point here is that the passing of knowledge – beliefs, ontologies, and cosmologies – with evident updates provided by Materena to her daughter is a meaningful way of resisting and enabling differential consciousness through multiple ways of seeing each other animated by a new “feminist geopolitics of knowing and loving” (Lugones 2010:756) that escapes the genderisation of social relations. The metaphoric and literal meaning of the “Welcome to Womanhood talk”, ultimately, reiterates the multiplicity of options in the life of a person, the encounter between subjectivity and intersubjectivity constructions of identity through which subjects (within communities) may as well dismantle colonial and imperial dominations of territories and bodies. The problem that needs to be dismantled is that, in general, gender is priorly ascribed to subjects, “men and women are already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the arena of social relations” (Mohanty 2003: 26). The subtlety and simplicity of Materena’s words may as well be considered to be part of small actions to examine the performativity of gender within a very private and personal realm as Materena refuses to attribute to her daughter a pre-defined social role. Thereby, Materena reinforces the importance of being proud to have been born a woman: “Being born a woman doesn’t mean you have to be the one stuck with cooking and the cleaning and looking after the children for the rest of your life. Women can do anything” (Vaite 2004: 92). This intimate monologue recorded by Materena addresses, to a certain extent, the way knowledge is reproduced via the construction of subjectivities, how it shapes and defines the sense of self, identity formation and one’s position in the world. Leilani is the embodiment of a new generation. Although she acknowledges the struggles of other women before her and pays them tribute by continuing the fight against all forms of violence that Indigenous women suffer from, she is also
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apprehending the reality she lives in from a modern and scientific perspective. Her tribute is, perhaps, her willingness to become a physician, to educate herself so she can make the difference for other generations of women yet to come, and her critical eye towards entrenched stereotypes about Tahitian people that she rapidly deconstructs. When confronted with her mother’s desires to teach her to sew, Leilani promptly explains that “[s]ewing is not really important for our new generation because we care about other things” (Vaite 2004: 130), and she continues elaborating on the plethora of issues that her generation has to be concerned about, such as: The death penalty. The starving children in Africa. The laws. Empowering women. The alarming birth rate in Tahiti and in the world. Our generation has so many issues to worry about, Mamie. We need to loosen up, otherwise we’d go mad (Vaite 2004: 130). Although Materena is impressed by her daughter’s intervention and critical analysis of the world she lives in, she is not entirely convinced and reminds Leilani that before them, other women also had their struggles and concerns. Leilani is far aware of that and she explains that “women of Materena’s generation paved the way for women of her new generation. They said no to arranged marriages. They said no to work without pay. They said less sewing please” (Vaite 2004: 130). In a globalised world where Indigenous spaces are permanently occupied, it remains crucial to rethink, reclaim, and reposition bodies to uncover the historical experiences of Indigenous women in colonial and imperial contexts such as Tahiti. Pacific writers have long engaged in those questions of modernity, rupture, violence that result from globalised and imperial policies. Whilst Vaite’s approach to these issues does not aim at unifying them, they continue to be tangled rather than imbricated, she emphasises the contact points through personal stories that evoke socio-cultural inequalities, insidious forms of violence and injustices. In doing so, it is my argument that through her novels, Vaite connects structural violence and what Rob Nixon labelled as “slow violence” within the Tahitian context. As explained in Chapter I, Nixon formulates “slow violence” as indirect and unseen forms of violence often caused to poorer areas of the globe by industry, proxy wars
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of rich nations, globalised corporations, and “the peaceful” occupation of territories. The effects are frequently related with environmental damage and/or famine, and yet as they are temporally and spatially unacknowledged, they are also not properly documented, attributed and, eventually, punished. Nixon suggests that in a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen (2011: 15). Therefore, writers, through engaged narratives, contribute to the social memory by testifying and denouncing those events. The “coming of age” of Leilani can also be seen as a metaphoric and literal awakening to the world’s struggles that affect all human beings in general, but particularly and more insidiously Indigenous people. Her interventions throughout the novel demonstrate her preoccupations despite the childish tone: Leilani went on with her comments about how it’s so stupid that a mother doesn’t ask her doctor if her child’s skin disease is contagious. It’s so stupid that we let a stupid woman smoke in the truck when it is clearly forbidden. It’s so stupid that we drink instead of feeding our children. It’s so stupid that a priest can decide how many children we can have. It’s so stupid that a woman covers her bruised eye with a bandage instead of leaving her husband. It’s so stupid… (Vaite 2004: 137). Materena feels overwhelmed by her daughter’s critical analysis of how she sees Tahitian people as well as her consciousness of what seems to be right or wrong in people’s behaviours. The strength of that defiance and the insistence on other ways of living is held within the voice of Leilani. In spite of several forces obstructing women’s participation in political life, and the efforts to deprive them from having power that was enabled by colonial practices and perpetuated by a
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newly patriarchal society, Tahitian women played an important role in the construction of social organisation based on the importance of kinship (Ishtar 1994; O’Brien 2014). Given that changes were introduced also with the massification of tourism and the nuclearization of the region, it remains relevant to question those practices – such as the examples provided in the extract – with the purpose of transforming both their use and their meaning within the socio-cultural context of Tahiti, as they may have contributed to a condition of internal colonisation. Borrowing Mohanty’s theory on feminist anticapitalist critique within the context of Third World Feminism, I advocate that processes of decolonisation and self- determination have to uncover injustices – ecological, social and political – by making gender, women’s bodies and labour visible; thus visibility and empowerment need to articulate inclusive politics and the demystification of capitalism (Mohanty 2003). Power and social imbalances are overtly expressed in the way Vaite depicts Tahitian society, and how stereotypes diminish Indigenous people. By exploring the coordinates between those social imbalances, it is possible to gauge how stereotypes have been crucial to legitimise certain relations of power and inferiority. When visiting a shop with her mother, Materena and Leilani are confronted with a small robbery, the owner goes after a Tahitian Indigenous young man who is being accused of stealing a pair of sunglasses. The young man complies with the request to take his clothes off while also emptying his bag, but no sunglasses are found. Meanwhile, Leilani complains about the way the man has been treated and asks her mother why the French woman also in the shop was not inspected – because she did not look like a thie , according to the shop owner’s racist views – and she goes on saying that “We [Tahitian people] can’t even look around in stores without being suspected of stealing! We have to sell coconuts to feed our children! French doctors don’t tell us anything! French priests order us around!” (Vaite 2004: 143). Leilani’s criticism dismantles a certain colonial binarism based on which people were “labelled”. Still, Leilani’s refusal to comply with pre-established assumptions and stereotypes related to Tahitian Indigenous people may as well be acknowledged as a form of resistance against the rhetoric of colonialism that, among other nefarious aspects, was well versed in categorising people. In doing so, through Leilani’s voice
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it is possible to argue that she is enabling the creation of a counter-space for resistance to occur when calling attention on the unequal treatment of people based on stereotypes. Power relations are open to gaps, and the geography of resistance is likely to assume different shapes. Accordingly, resistance assumes different nuances as Pile and Keith (1997) elaborate: Resistance cannot be understood as a face-to-face opposition between the powerful and the weak, nor as a fight that takes place only on grounds constituted by structural relations – because other spaces are always involved, spaces which are dimly lit, opaque, deliberately hidden, saturated with memories, that echo with lost words and the cracked sounds of pleasure and enjoyment. […] Resistance does not just act on topographies imposed through the spatial technologies of domination, it moves across them under the noses of the enemy, seeking to create new meanings out of imposed meanings, to re-work and divert space to other ends. […] Resistance, then, not only takes place in place, but also seeks to appropriate space, to make new spaces (Pile and Keith 1997: 16). New spaces are generated when Leilani refuses to conform and, even though being an adolescent, she apprehends the social imbalances that, to a certain extent, are also part of her mother’s viewpoint about Tahitian people. By questioning the accusation against the Tahitian man instead of the French woman just because she was well-dressed, for example, Leilani is creating new meanings out of those pre- established and normalised ones while she simultaneously contributes to deconstructing stereotypes often entrenched in simple aspects of casual situations. Significantly, the interior world that also constitutes the construction of identities is colonised in the sense that Indigenous peoples’ identities are being othered and marginalised inside their own territories, yet that has exacerbated otherness as a form of demarcating power structures and forms of structural violence. The objectification of people renders them invisible, reduces and fixes ‘difference’ (Hall
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2010), mirroring the ways in which current racial politics work through the polarisation between self and other. Nonetheless, stereotyping functions as a power and knowledge relation that aims at classifying people, fixing boundaries according to norms and constructs that exclude the element who is othered. Subsequently, the binary demarcation self vs other needs to be understood in this context as a power structure “not only in terms of economic exploitation and physical coercion, but also in broader cultural or symbolic terms” (Hall 2010: 259). Within the framework of Western hegemony in which stereotypes flourish unabashed, Native Tahitian people and their lands were produced ideologically, politically, sociologically, and through military power, ultimately leading to the exercise of violence justified by power structures and representational practices (Ishtar, 1994; Kahn 2011). Perhaps, resistance against stereotyping practices may involve what Chela Sandoval termed as “differential mode of oppositional consciousness” that “depends upon the ability to read the current situation of power and of self-consciously choosing and adopting the ideological form best suited to push against its configurations” (2010: 90). Following Sandoval’s ideas, it is my argument that Vaite creates within her narration of Tahiti forms of breaking the imperial ideologies through characters that are able to identify and control those ideological approaches to their culture by reinventing themselves within the imperial milieu and by reclaiming their cultural identity, allowing the creation of “a whole other structure of opposition that touches every aspect of our existence at the same time we are resisting” (Lorde 1981: 731). Therefore, the act of resisting not only takes place in effective and material places but finds space within an oppositional consciousness that strives and exposes dehumanisation and discriminatory harm (Pile and Keith 1997). Frangipani ends with Leilani’s departure to France after a series of adventures and yet again those adventures are small, picturesque fragments in the maturing relationship between Materena and her daughter. The departure is vested in emotions as well as reinforcing and empowering thoughts while Materena says goodbye to Leilani, “Faaitoito girl, be strong. We’re not women for nothing, eh? Bless the day you came into my life” (Vaite 2004: 334). The novel does not fall from the previous analysis of a happy and humours portrayal of Tahitian life in
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which complementary perspectives are presented. Hence the juxtaposition of traditions of the past, together with the modern present are conveyed by spiralling outwards from personal, local, and historical issues. All is unified by the way Materena and Leilani conduct the narrativization of their everyday actions. Vaite makes a significant contribution to interrogations of French imperial practices and the asymmetries of power relations while articulating the Tahitian viewpoint on place.
2.3. Tiare: Toxic Masculinities and “Unknown Fathers”
The last novel from this trilogy, Tiare (2006), is mainly about closure. Materena remains the protagonist and the narrator of the novel. To some extent, this last novel closes all the open endings left behind, and it recovers the plethora of historic and cultural topics that had been developed in Breadfruit. The themes related with the Tahitian colonial relation with France, its military occupation and the nuclearization of the islands are explored through Materena’s position in the radio program assuming a more politicised approach as they are debated and multiple perspectives are presented. Materena’s job as a radio hostess in a radio station that supports independence (Vaite 2006: 23) where she leads a program about “women sharing inspiring stories with other women on the island. Inspiring, interesting stories worth listening to” (Vaite 2004: 317), enables her to contact with an extended audience (mainly women) who are eager to share their concerns but also their joyful moments. The unexpected appearance of a baby girl, Tiare, at Materena’s door is the reason to look close into the life of Materena’s, her job at the radio station and how influential she has become through that, as well as her relationship with Pito. Materena is now living only with her husband, Pito, the children have moved on with their lives, Leilani is attending medical school in France, Moana is living in another island where he has become a renowned chef whose work is praised and awarded, Tamatoa has served the military service in France and is finally returning home to explore all the possibilities of his days as a young and promising man. Put this way, it seems simple and straightforward, though life is never simple and all
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the well-known characters in Vaite’s novels are at the brink of facing new challenges. The success of Materena’s radio program and her personal growth as an influencer set off the plot of the novel. However, we are cautioned when the all- perceiving narrator informs us that despite all those great outcomes that Materena has achieved, “she’s is a typical Tahitian woman” (Vaite 2006: 21). Perhaps, what Vaite is implying by the use of such complex (and totalising) description, is that when women are economically independent as is the case represented by Materena, they may as well be regarded as central members of the family, supporters of community building fully acknowledged and respected within this social construction. Nurturing new lives is understood as the basis of the creation of nations in Indigenous cosmologies, and to some extent Materena is the embodiment of that as she remains the central figure in the realm of her family. Materena represents the mother whose centrality is pivotal in Tahitian culture, and the woman whose work both as “a professional cleaner” and a radio host is praised within her family and community. Therefore, her roles are not exclusionary, rather they complement each other in the construction of Materena’s identity. I would like to extrapolate here by arguing that Vaite’s creation of this woman character may function as a form of deconstructing the hyper-exoticised and eroticised image ascribed to Tahitian women by Western stereotypical representations. The appearance of baby Tiare, soon to be discovered to be Tamatoa’s daughter, will raise questions related with the position of men and fathers in the education of their offspring. It has been common throughout the two previous novels the effacement of the father-figure: men are either “good for nothing” or simply absent from the scenario. However, the arrival of an unexpected child will open up room for a broader discussion of this subject in Tiare, with the depiction of two levels of absenteeism on the part of fathers; on the one hand, the depiction of Tahitian men who barely participate in the education of their children and, on the other hand, men who have abandoned their children. In this last category, the most common representation revolves around the figure of the French military man who maintained relationships with Tahitian women while they were in the islands but long after they left for France they never cared for the women and children left
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behind. It is recurrent throughout the novel the use of the expression “father unknown”. Vaite presents the controversial relationship between Tahitian women and French military men when refereeing to that from a point of view in which parenthood is also addressed. Throughout the three novels there are small tales and impressions related with the topic in which there is, simultaneously, the stereotypical representation of Tahitian women who frequently go out to bars and French men who are in Tahiti for military reasons and engaged in casual encounters with those women. Within this context, I argue that there is a form of militarisation of the sexual encounter, as previously demonstrated in Chapter I, between Tahitian women and military French men, a power relation that has also produced generations of abandoned biracial children who, ultimately, are the living reminders of continuing occupation. In a conversation between Loana and Materena in which Materena is asking about her father whose identity she already knows as Loana never concealed that information from her daughter. Loana elaborates on how Tahitian women are perceived when choosing their partners: Meeting someone in a bar sounds so bad — not serious, not joli to hear. When you tell people, “Oh, we met in a bar,” they automatically think, In a bar! No wonder she has a child with Father Unknown written on her birth certificate! What was she doing in a bar? You don’t meet husbands in bars! (Vaite 2006: 206) Loana’s words are somehow problematic as she is advancing the construction of a stereotype that distinguishes between “good” and “bad” behaviours related with Tahitian women going out to bars. Loana’s controversial intervention is, perhaps, based on the fact that there is a dialectic relation between Tahitian socio-cultural conventions and the morality introduced by Western beliefs of how women should behave in public. In lieu of that, Zohl Dé Ishtar points out that “Maohi [Native Tahitian] women have traditionally taken pride in their sexual behaviours, there was status in sexuality. Now, the French have created a trade in women’s bodies: under French rule, they have become ‘prostitutes’. Women are paying a heavy price for the French presence” (1994: 197).
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It is through the radio program that Materena brings into the light some of the concerns lived by Indigenous people related with identity formation, opening a Pandora box of possibilities, “Who am I?” seems to be the basic question that accommodates personal identity aspirations in conjunction with numerous cultural factors. Materena faces the question posed by a listener, Lovaina, who is confused about her identity, living with a French father that “is now a French tropicalisé” (Vaite 2006: 21),15 and a mother “who is Tahitian [but] acts like she’s French” (Vaite 2006: 22). Lovaina wonders, “who am I? Half Tahitian, half French… but where do I go?” (Vaite 2006: 22), and she does not know where to stand. Her speech on the radio leads to other interventions that provide different perspectives on the matter: After this the switchboard goes crazy, and half an hour later the calls are still coming in about identity, Tahitian identity especially. The Tahitians who don’t speak Tahitian have their say. The Tahitians who don’t have tattoos, who don’t like raw fish, who don’t look Tahitian, the list goes on and on. But all these confused women want to know one thing. What does make a person Tahitian these days? (Vaite 2006: 22) Identity issues have been crucial when debating Indigenous cultures. Reeling between dislocated realities and fragmented memories, the characters in Vaite’s novel are commonly assaulted by ambivalent feelings – their desire for assimilation contrasts with their revulsion against all kinds of discrimination based on ethnicity and gender. Similarly, these interrelated issues highlight the dialectic relation between Indigenous cultural conventions, cosmologies and the metamorphosed translated self. Therefore, there are two other questions here that are of relevance, “What does make a person Tahitian these days?” (Vaite 2006: 22) and “How are we raised the Tahitian way?” (Vaite 2006: 23), and those have served as an interesting dialogue in which Materena does not provide a fix answer – as I believe it would have been impossible – but rather a personal one that
15 The expression French tropicalisé refers to the appropriation of certain Indigenous features and behaviours by non-Indigenous people. This is what Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin registered as “going native” in Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (2007:106).
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combines several possibilities that include Tahitian socio-cultural practices, and the ones introduced by Europeans, though the emphasis is on Indigenous traditions: It means: not eating in front of people if she can’t share; showing respect to old people, to all people; remembering and honoring the dead; not whistling at night; and not marrying a cousin. It means helping the family; planting the child’s placenta in the earth, along with a tree; singing; nurturing the soil and the ocean; doing your best by your children. It means belonging to a family. It also means being strong and getting up after each fall. (Vaite 2006: 23, emphasis in the original) Based on the descriptions presented by the women in Materena’s audience, the multiple meanings of being Tahitian are fluid, personal and a combination of an array of factors, and ultimately it can be argued that “identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions” (Hall 1996: 4). Precisely because identities are constructed within discourse in constant flux, I argue that the double-belonging that characterises Tahitian identities is grounded in the “newness of be-ing” explored in Lugones theory of decolonial feminism. Lugones (2010) addresses this “newness of be-ing” in dialogic terms through which the self is constructed in relation to the social, to the cosmos, and with a sense of multiplicity. It is, then, this capacity that permits the recognition of coloniality as a powerful reduction of human beings to “inferiors by nature” (2010: 751). However, Vaite demonstrates that the fluid nature of identities challenges ossified categorisations. It is my argument that Vaite’s characters when questioning about their identity are simultaneously inquiring about their sense of coloniality as referred to by Lugones, and understanding the world they are living in from a perspective that defies the logic of dichotomies such as being French or being Tahitian only. This dichotomic demarcation often implies the dissolution of cultural identity rather than the inclusiveness of multiple features. Following Materena’s endeavours in the radio station, after the debate on identity issues other women call again this time to discuss and raise awareness to
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the changes suffered after the nuclear testing in Moruroa, and how that had impacted on Indigenous communities, What I’d like to say is that in the old days, the very old days, men were the providers. They hunted fish to feed their women and children. They hunted wild pigs, they climbed up coconut trees, it was the survival of the fittest. Then things started to change. The bomb made an apparition in French Polynesia, I’m talking about the nuclear testing in Moruroa. Legionnaires came by the thousands, it meant more shops, more restaurants, more hotels, more jobs, and women got out of their houses to work. “I’m not saying that this was bad, non, it’s very important for women to be financially independent, but men lost their place in the society. They were no longer the providers. They lost their power, they lost their voice, and that is why men are so hopeless today. These days men are most likely to be the ones who are unemployed, so the statistics say. They sit by the side of road drinking beer with their so-called friends and wait for jobs to fall out of the sky” (Vaite 2006: 169).16 Over centuries, France has occupied Polynesian islands that were used both as military stations and refuelling stations for the navy, and sites for nuclear testing for thirty years (1966-96) as it was the case of Tahiti.17 It is common to all Vaite’s novels the theme of the French militarisation of Tahiti and the impact of that on
16 I find the content of the quote somehow problematic, in that it creates a certain patriarchal myth around the idea that men were the providers of proteins (meat and fish), and women were the ones dealing with domestic chores and cultivating vegetables (vitamins). This sort of categorisation implies a division based on superior and inferior elements within communities based on the importance of the tasks performed. Moreover, this portrayal neglects also the role of women in providing food as important as the food items provided by men.
17 After the success of Algerian independence in 1962, France moved its nuclear interests to the Pacific and between 1966 and 1996 more than 150 nuclear weapons were detonated in the region under the surveillance of French government (Alcalay 1998; Kahn 2010). In 1966, France defied the Partial Test Ban Treaty, and that has generated a series of anti-nuclear conferences, declarations, and demonstrations across the region. France performed massive nuclear detonations at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls which were chosen because of their “remote” and “isolated” location. By 1974, there was still outcomes from those actions, and radiation contamination was registered 2,000 miles away in Samoa contributing to local casualties (DeLoughrey 2007).
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Indigenous population. The long extract above introduces an appalling description of the lingering effects of the French military occupation and serves to exemplify the preoccupation and discontentment felt by Tahitians as well as it emphasises the consequences of the systemic violence suffered by Indigenous men. However, it is relevant to point out that this particular example of the experience of Indigenous men does not undermine or ignore women’s experience of objectification and violence who have been historically targeted as doubly colonised. Therefore, the point here is that self-alienation and internalised oppression are by-products of colonialism that have been affecting Indigenous people. The nuclearization of Tahiti has produced vast and violent confrontations between representatives of colonial forces and Indigenous populations. As previously elaborated in the first chapter of this thesis, there is a symbiotic relation between militarisation and mass tourism in the Pacific, with nefarious consequences to Indigenous populations. Robert Nicole (1999) asserts that within the context of Tahiti it is possible to identify two distinct approaches to invasion and land dispossession, those of collaboration and resistance. If there is little doubt that there were benefits out of the connections established, my argument though is inevitably about which Tahitians have effectively benefited from those relations. The question can also be extended to the sort of means used to persuade Indigenous people to consent. Was it induced by ideological means (education, media)? Or was it through force (army, police, law enforcement)? Once again, it may be difficult to produce a solid answer because resistance and collaboration did occur simultaneously (Nicole 1998). But while the struggles against French imperialism took place, the side effects of colonial practices and the disenfranchisement of Tahitian people occurred anyway. Those are the effects described in the passage above, and the ones that require examination. Imperial discourses and practices seek to establish control over people and their lands. Ideologically, it is primarily through the body that differentiation is established as the West is permanently depicted as civilised, superior and even mature, while those who are subjugated are constructed based upon animalistic features, as aberrant (and abject), uncivilized, lacking knowledge and certainly inferior. The compulsion to domesticate Indigenous peoples was produced via
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discourses that either exoticised them or created a sort of militarised masculinity that inevitably reproduced systemic and structural violence but also disempowered male subjects (Tengan 2002; Elliston 2004; Jolly 2008; Biersack 2016). Scholarly work on Pacific masculinities often emphasises the ways in which colonialism and tourism have sexualised Polynesian men as surfers or beach boys “whose body and physical prowess are highlighted in and economy of pleasure” (Tengan 2008: 8).18 Those exotic representations often exacerbate the prevailing portrait of “beachboys” as lazy, sensual, and emasculated (Jolly 2008). Moreover, the toxic masculinity that animated patriarchal societies and imperial policies was rapidly disseminated within Indigenous communities affecting Indigenous men that saw themselves deprived from power and were elided from political and economic decision-making. It is, then, this notion of being disempowered that I find relevant. Although Vaite does not extensively elaborate on the complexity of Indigenous masculinities, it is recurrent throughout her novels an implied critique to colonial practices and the French militarization. Vaite’s portrayal of Tahitian men may be, to a certain extent, problematic as her characters are always alienated from their parental duties, having trouble finding or keeping a job, or even always partying with their friends. The quote above exemplifies the extent to which French imperialism impacted on the lives of Tahitian people, and how Indigenous men were disempowered but it also criticises a certain passivity that results from feelings of alienation. I find this approach slightly problematic as it may fall into a simplistic portrayal of Indigenous men’s struggles assuming a certain linearity when the topic is profoundly complex. However, it is also my point that Vaite puts into perspective women’s activism in finding jobs, for example. Accordingly, Deborah Elliston extensively elaborates on social inequalities in Tahiti, and posits that by the 1990s the emergence among certain kinds of employers (i.e., those running service, retail, and health care businesses, among others indicated above) of a marked preference for hiring women over men and to the phenomenon of women bringing cash into their households more reliably than men (2004: 612)
18 See Trask (1994) and Desmond (1998) for examples of similar situations in Hawai’i.
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Gendered and racialised inequalities seem to be a consequence of imperialism, and an integral component of the militarisation of territories. Moreover, global policies destroyed entire agricultural economies in the Pacific as is the case of Tahiti, and in the early 1990s most Polynesian men worked at subsistence-oriented agriculture or fishing (Elliston 2004). It is my argument that French imperialism – militarization, tourism and global polices – largely contributed to the disruption of Tahitian society. It is important to note that Pati Duncan (2010) refers to militarisation as a globalised way of producing subjects and sustaining notions of gender, race, class, and culture. Consequently, “militarization is supported by a global militarized economy that requires the use of certain (national, socio-political, and individual) bodies for the enrichment of others” (Duncan 2010: 280). Recognising militarisation as a heteronormative and patriarchal power structure that shapes the lives of Indigenous people (and non-Indigenous people for the matter) based on the coloniality of power (Lugones 2007), it seems relevant to construct a counter- discourse that revitalises Indigenous cosmologies and praxis, one that educates Indigenous people to consciously fight back imperial and global policies. After elaborating on the impact of the French nuclearization of the Pacific, Materena’s listener proposes discipline as a performative tool against social alienation, Discipline is the key, 1, 2, 3! Let’s get our boys into sports, because sports are the best way to learn discipline, discipline is the key, 1, 2, 3!” She insists that she doesn’t just mean sports like soccer or boxing, but all kinds of activities, you could even include playing music or dancing as long as there’s some training or practicing involved. (Vaite 2006:170) Discipline in the form of sports or cultural activities is regarded by this character as important means to educate Tahitian men. Perhaps, she is suggesting that it is necessary to focus on activities and training to overcome social and cultural alienation. The last scene in Tiare is one of happiness and hope captured in a photograph of all the family members smiling. Given the optimistic/positive nature of Vaite’s oeuvre, it could not be any different. Materena finally meets her French father and
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her genealogy is complete as she acknowledges that he is “half of the reason she is on this earth today” (Vaite 2006: 246). Vaite proposes a certain rhetoric of hope to dismantle and resist the long history of French colonial occupation, albeit with a certain melodramatic and, to a certain extent, romanticised tone, her characters partake in the task of reclaiming Ma’ohi (Native Tahitian) cosmology within the context of a globalised society. This romanticised and light tone used by the author that I have referred to may sometimes undermine the importance of certain issues discussed throughout the novels. However, in an interview with Anne Collett (2005) Vaite explain that the trilogy is an intimate writing in which she pays tribute to her family and members of the Fa’a community where she grew. It is my argument, though, that even when using a romanticised approach to certain topics, Vaite creates an interesting tapestry of plots and characters that through joy become dissident figures simultaneously capable of questioning oppressive social constructions, and of finding happiness in those action.
2.4. Chapter’s Conclusions
Women are, in Vaite’s novel, central in the contest between the emancipatory promises of living in a globalised society, and the claims of tradition. Subsequently, the act of speaking out and writing about Tahitian culture is more than a simple introspective and restorative action, it is above all an act of resistance because it simultaneously examines the interaction between Tahiti and other cultures, particularly the relation with France, and highlights the vast dissimilarities between Western and Tahitian ways of thinking, knowing, and theorising about Indigenous people’s place in the world. One the greatest examples provided in the novels is the recurrent reference to the connection between human beings and the land through the ritualization of burying the placenta under a tree, signalling the symbolic bound, the permanent sense of belonging, the continuity of life – the human one and the tree with its fructification. Vaite’s trilogy takes a fluid approach to multiple networks of identification, and occasionally the light tone when narrating issues of discrimination and exploitation may deceive us. However, it may be relevant to approach her narratives as informed ways of deconstructing the consequences of an imagined myth of paradise that has trapped Tahiti for centuries. Therefore, the life
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in Tahiti depicted in Vaite’s novels is far from an idealist portrayal of happy and conformed people, rather it is one in which people honour their ancestry and accept the challenges of globalisation, one where nature is bountiful and still the element that must be preserved. Materena is well aware of the abuses of the past, but she frames her life in a realistic approach which seems to be the key that enables her to live it fully, and in view of that the threads of her life are intertwined with the fabric of the community. Vaite’s work as a whole has resonance that goes beyond the apparent simplicity of everyday matters, the novels in the trilogy demonstrate and problematise the challenges faced by Tahitian people who live in-between spaces- places which are real and imagined.19 The production of spaces and the interaction with places, whether by peacefully planting placentas in the land, or rioting in the streets as a form of demonstration against the militarisation and nuclearization of the region, can be acknowledged as the reflexion of practices that encapsulate their cultural identity and experiences. It is, therefore, the clash between Tahitian generated-space, and government generated-place – based upon land dispossession, and military control are enacted – that also contributes to the deconstruction of exotic portrayals of Tahiti as a paradise. Accordingly, Miriam Kahn, when elaborating on the relation between the politicisation of places and Tahitian perception / interaction with those places, posits that the state creates spaces that meet its own needs for capital accumulation, military organization, and social order—whether through developing tourism, detonating bombs, or promoting a conspiracy of silence around the nuclear testing program by controlling the production of imagery (2010: 94) The control of imagery referred to by Kahn, with its dissemination of exotic postcards that perpetuate the marginalisation of subjects seems to be dismantled when an author chooses the depiction of the fabric of life in Tahiti that often challenges and subverts mainstream cultural codes as is the case in Célestine Hitiura
19 Here I am drawing on the differentiation between space – abstract and more psychological – and place – physical, geographical.
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Vaite’s oeuvre. As previously demonstrated, Vaite’s trilogy can be acknowledged as an aesthetic move and a political step in which the personal is highly politicised as a form of resistance. As exposed in this chapter, throughout the narratives it is possible to encounter numerous references to French colonialism, the impact of that on Indigenous people and how women resist several forms of violence. Women’s shared experiences along with their differences contribute to a wider understanding of the intersectionality of gender, race, and class. For instance, when looking close to the construction of Materena as a central element within her family and later on within her society, it is possible to acknowledge what Kim Anderson defined as “empowered motherhood”, and she asserts that in Indigenous communities “empowered motherhood was not only a practice but also an ideology that allowed women to assert their authority at various levels” (2010: 83). Anderson (2010) reinforces the idea that one of the major targets of colonialism was the Indigenous family, and the disruption of that disempowered women within the kin networks they were part of. It was, then, within the family that Indigenous women asserted their authority. Although Anderson’s study focuses specifically on Native American communities, I argue that within Tahitian society Indigenous women were equally disempowered within their communities when Western practices relegated to a secondary position women’s work in the household and the work involving child rearing. As previously discussed in Chapter I, Pacific societies, in this Tahiti, were not matrilineal to use Paula Gunn Allen’s definition (1986), but nevertheless they were societies in which women held power in decision making and were central within the private sphere of family and community, thus their power was also connected with motherhood and childcare / education (Jolly 1998; Elliston 2004; Goettner-Abendroth 2012). Motherhood and the maternal body are highly controversial in Western feminism; however, within the praxis of Indigenous feminism the themes do not clash with individual freedom and/or the right to exclude or embrace motherhood. On the contrary, under the banner of equality, equity, individuality, and collectiveness, Indigenous feminisms propose inclusiveness and systems that serve every subject. Being motherhood vital in Indigenous cosmologies, it is fundamental that the concept does not get stuck into limiting patriarchal interpretations (Anderson 2010: 88).
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I will return to this topic when analysing Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues in Chapter III of this Dissertation. In Davenport’s novel the theme of motherhood assumes a contentious position within the plot and offers an oppositional perspective to the one presented in Vaite’s novels. Also, Sia Figiel presents a different depiction of the relation between mothers and daughters, one that is closer to Davenport’s. However, Materena’s empowerment cannot be solely circumscribed to her role as mother, it is her wilfulness and perseverance that makes her of great importance in my analysis of Indigenous women’s empowerment. Her actions can be viewed as the entanglement between Indigenous knowledge and Western globalised approaches to the Tahitian socio-cultural context. Yet, in spite of the social that Materena lives in – one of poverty and precarity – she actively takes part on the decolonising process developed inside Indigenous communities that focuses on education. Hence, Materena educates her children not only through schooling with more westernised educational methods but also through the act of telling them stories that involve aspects of Tahitian ancestral knowledge. I argue that, through the fictional construction of characters in Vaite’s novels, it is possible to address the complexity of social, political, and economic inequalities faced by Indigenous peoples in Tahiti. Therefore, throughout the narrativization of everyday practices, Célestine Hitiura Vaite’s creation of Materena reinforces what Kim Anderson defined as a four-part process of Indigenous female identity, which includes “resisting oppression, reclaiming Indigenous traditions and culture, incorporating traditional Indigenous ways into our modern lives, and acting on responsibilities inherent in our new-found identities” (2010: 85). This process involves crucial aspects that span from the recognition of Indigenous epistemologies and ancestral knowledge to individual and collective accountability in incorporating those into contemporary ways of life, thus human behaviour and action matters both individually and collectively. Moreover, Vaite’s protagonist, Materena, resists the oppression inherent in class stratification by educating her children based on Tahitian traditions, by combining those practices with Western ones, and always cautioning the children to act responsibly. Materena and her children’s cultural identity
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incorporates Indigenous ways of living and knowing, which I consider relevant in the discussion of Indigenous decolonial practices. Although decolonisation is a politicised project in which different forces interact, it still remains vital to focus on the interconnectedness of political approaches and a specifically committed literature that aims at dismantling imperial discourses and homogenising/globalised policies that tend to conceal the prolonged violence perpetrated against Indigenous people. However, the process is a complex one given the fact that colonised places such as Tahiti comprise overlapping and frequently ambiguous areas of social, cultural, economic, and ecological experience. Therefore, it remains preponderant to address history from another perspective as Vaite has demonstrated. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in the “Foreword” written for Noenoe K. Silva’s research book on Hawaiian intellectual history posits that “when the dispossessed finally get their storytellers and their own workers in ideas, then the story of the struggle will finally glorify the people’s heroism and their resistance spirit” (2017: 2). Tahiti has been the playground on which different globalised forces (colonial and postcolonial) interact based on a supposed myth of “paradise”. Hence, images of people and places circulate in globalised markets presenting a biased perspective while perpetuating and exacerbating “otherness”. Often that categorisation proves to be problematic as it allows the construction of Indigenous people as different, as the exotic Other (Said 1979), which inevitably generates social injustices/inequalities. However, it is the power to narrate other narratives that contributes simultaneously to expose, explore, and deconstruct the rhetoric of colonialism. In this respect, Vaite’s novels participate in the process of “decolonizing the mind”, in the sense that she creatively interweaves history and politics into the fabric and structure of the tales. The creation of a vivid character such as Materena is of great relevance, as within this creative process Vaite covers a wide range of issues, and she places the discussion of those events (precontact history; evangelisation of Tahiti; French colonialism; militarisation, recruitment of Tahitian men to serve during World War II; nuclear testing, and mass tourism) in context, contributing to a wider understanding of what those events actually mean, and the way they have impacted on people’s lives. The fluidity of Materena’s
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narration in which she wittingly combines the personal stories with historic and political events is perfectly conveyed in a condescending style that is joyful and humorous. I have attempted to demonstrate so far that there is a certain joyfulness in the resistance against the marginalisation imposed through exotic representations of Tahitian culture, and there is across the novels an ultimate feeling of hope for a better future. It is my point that the exoticisation of Polynesian women occurs (not only but also) as a consequence of gender dichotomies introduced after the colonial encounter. Therefore, in order to deconstruct or decolonise that it might be relevant to examine the positionality of individuals within the community, and how those subjects create “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983) through coalitions in which differences are part of their resistance against homogenised (and globalised) depictions of “themselves” and their cultures. Yet, resistance against ingrained stereotypes occurs when the gender binarism is dismantled. In Vaite’s novels, women are not seen as passive entertainers, beautiful objects on display to be consumed, but rather they present themselves as central figures within their communities, in which they work hard to overcome poverty, and to give their children a better education, for example. It can be argued that women in Vaite’s novels are not defined by their corporeality, they are not described based upon distinctive bodily features, and to a certain extent by avoiding the exoticisation of the bodies, Vaite is deconstructing those representational practices that force bodies to occupy a multitude of spaces – real and imagined. The persistent exoticisation of Indigenous cultures through bodies and landscapes remains as a form of disguised coloniality that still subalternises Indigenous peoples. The Polynesian body is, according to Teresia Teaiwa, a social and cultural construct that has been used to promote and disempower Indigenous peoples. Subsequently, the act of “representing the female body – a representing that is not representing – successfully counters Gauguinesque and militourist emphases on the visual; it is a strategy that is also feminist in the sense that it does not objectify the body” (Teaiwa 1999: 256).20 It is my point that
20 By using the expression “a representing that it is not representing”, Teresia Teaiwa may be suggesting that the biased way of representing Polynesian women contributes to the dissemination
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Vaite’s contribution to the deconstruction of those ingrained forms of objectification finds resonance in the way resistance is theorised by María Lugones: “resistance subjectivity often expresses itself infra-politically, rather than in a politics of the public” (2010: 746). The infra-politics referred to by Lugones encapsulates “the power of communities of the oppressed in constituting resisting meaning and each other against the constitution of meaning and social organization by power” (2010: 746). Accordingly, resistance can (and must be) produced in everyday actions, in the affirmation of life over capitalism, and ultimately in the revitalisation of communalism over individualism. Resistance against exotic and Gauguinesque representations of women as discussed in Chapter I may as well occur in Vaite’s narratives through the creation of counter-hegemonic characters such as Materena, Leilani and Loana. Furthermore, I advocate that the focus on women and their relationships that prevails in the novels suggests that the act of telling stories and the conversational tone of Materena’s interventions together with the recuperation of place as a sacred entity – in the ritual burial of placentas – are agents of cultural affirmation. The texts’ critique of the ongoing debate about the discursive oppression of Western representations of Tahiti entails the notion that Tahitian culture has become a branded commodity itself in which dominant forces of representation conceal the precarious life of those – Indigenous peoples – who are othered and consumed in an ever-changing globalised world. Opposition to globalised policies and French imperialism are key aspects in the novels, and in order to dismantle totalising practices, and faux representations imposed on Indigenous people, women characters in Vaite’s novels assume total control over their lives, and reclaim their space within the Tahitian milieu. Resistance does not occur in her trilogy as a form of socially organised demonstrations of collective power, rather the spaces of resistance are created within the private realm with everyday practices that involve storytelling as one of many forms of passing on knowledge. Moreover, storytelling emerges out of a process that has often entailed a revisionist return to origins, re-writing and re- telling the past by including suppressed voices and exposing glaring discrepancies
of stereotypes and disempowers Indigenous women, so that those representations or forms of representing did not exactly represent Polynesian women.
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between personal and official histories. Storytelling is, thus, both an aesthetic exercise and a dialogic crossing to others beyond the self. Furthermore, the storytelling is simultaneously a private act of imagination and a public act of history. Since history can be in itself an exclusionary narrative, storytelling may include the pieces cut off by political agendas, and the resisting and resistant bodies that were once silenced from official narratives. Those are the subjects that still resist against ongoing imperialist policies that supposedly ensure prosperity and progress. Elleke Boehmer points out that The stories through which women narrate their subjectivity, like the diverse groups and communities through which they may seek to wield power, are characterised by such iconoclastic, heterogeneous identifications – moulded, too, by where women situate themselves along the axes of differentiation of race, religion, region, sexuality, class and nation. (2005: 209) In fact, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, through the medium of layered narratives, and storytelling often claims several social spaces at once, and those spaces are part of a transnational world. When referring to the literature produced in Tahiti, Robert Nicole posits the question, “if all histories are interest-laden constructions, what are the possibilities of writing a new and credible history of French colonialism in Tahiti?” (2001: 2). I would rather suggest that instead of writing a new and credible history of French colonialism, literature produced by Tahitian authors is considerably more about the recovery of Tahitian ancestral history, on the one hand, and on the other hand about how new generations of Tahitian people live in the interstitial space where globalisation meets ancestral forms of living and producing knowledge. Through the politics of everyday life, Célestine Hitiura Vaite makes an effort to revitalise the relationships between people and land, and that process is framed by hope, referring to a psychic, political and social way of being engaged with a future time which involves specific and diverse aspirations and, to some extent, imagined pathways. Hope allows the invention and/or reinvention of life, and the future is open, multiple though subjected to uncertainties. For Vaite’s
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characters hope is simultaneously invoked as awareness of the present world that involves struggles, upheavals and losses, and the promising uncertainty of imagined pathways. However, hope is not naively assumed, or simply taken as the solution, on the contrary it involves critical and informed perspectives on the current trajectories of globalised and militarised policies as well as it looks for alternative modes of empowering people. At times when Indigenous peoples are navigating cruel forms of environmental degradation, ecological racism, and continuous loss of rights over their lands, hope could possibly be perceived as wilful blindness to reality. It is my argument that in the literary work of Vaite hope does not necessarily mean lack of awareness, rather it contingently responds to injustices, injuries and precarity that typify the world. Hope in this context assumes a structural engagement with social life. Additionally, Vaite’s novels propose a politicised approach to hope as an engaged mode of contesting both present realities and the future. The politicised agenda of hope is crafted on action, accountability and responsibility, “hope is not simply given to people by the broader world, however; it is enabled by their connections with her world, including how they see, feel, act, and imagine” (Shewry 2015: 3). Consequently, the novels evoke a partly promising and open future through the engagement with the social and cultural context that the characters live in, rather than full recourse to and acceptance of an imposed reality in which global policies have little concern for Indigenous cosmologies. In sum, it can be argued that Vaite’s goal may be a pedagogical one, in that, like other Pacific writers, she purports to re-examine the past from a fresh perspective in order to lay open the workings and intersections of gender, ethnicity and class in Tahiti throughout the combination of its traditions and history, and to fill the gaps of the official records. When referring to Pacific writers from a Francophone context (in which indirectly Vaite takes part in), Robert Nicole elaborates that They were also motivated to write by the threat of institutional forgetting, which is sponsored by the educational system of the colonial state and that encourages a lack of knowledge about being Ma‘ohi, the
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past, language, and culture. Their efforts were intended to acquire visibility, identity, and self-respect (Nicole 2001: 179). Further, by focusing on a praxis of decolonising the mind in her writing, Vaite contributes to the development of Pacific literature as literature that mobilises a diversity of relationships based upon respect, mutual recognition of diversity and difference. I posit that Vaite attempts at creating counter-discursive strategies that focus on Tahitian culture from a point of view that it is not explored in tourist representations. Hence, her narrativization goes beyond the postcard and gives visibility to subjects otherwise marginalised, being a good example of that the portrayal of working-class Tahitian women. Bearing in mind Amilcar Cabral’s ideas (1972 and 1975), literature and culture are important tools in generating counter-discourses against oppressive socio-political systems. By focusing on specific features of Tahitian culture and society, Célestine Hitiura Vaite is contributing to an already existing debate about Indigenous cultures and how they negotiate their colonial past. In what follows, Chapter III, I will be analysing two novels written by the Native Hawaiian writer Kiana Davenport, offering a complementary perspective on women’s empowerment and the effects of American imperialism in Hawai’i.
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Chapter III
Understanding Aloha ‘aina: Kiana Davenport and Native Hawaiian Culture
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I ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make. In language there is life, in language there is death (Hawaiian proverb)
ords, either written or spoken, are an unquenchable source of magic with the power to create and destroy depending on how they are W employed. Stories, poem s, chants, songs, and prayers are, indeed, composed of words, and when they circulate, when they are repeated, proffered among people, they gain other meanings beyond the intended ones. Belief and intention empower the spoken words, and ultimately, they gain a “secret life of their own” that reverberates in the mind of those who listen to them.1 And so, that is the power of storytelling, a restorative function. In an anthology about contemporary short fiction by Native American women, Hertha Wong (2008) emphasises the importance of telling stories, the responsibility of those who tell/write and those who listen/read. The stories in the anthology are “survival stories, reckonings with the brutal history of colonization and its ongoing consequences: they calculate indigenous positions, settle overdue accounts, note old debts, and demand an accounting” (Wong et al. 2008: xvi). Also Paula Gunn Allen brilliantly and extensively wrote about the power of stories and storytelling as forms of cultural expression (1986). Hence, the ability to connect people to culture “lets people realize that individual experience is not isolate but is part of a coherent and timeless whole, providing them with a means of personal empowerment and giving shape and direction to their lives” (Allen 1986: 142). To a certain extent, what I am advocating here by following Allen’s theorisation is that the act of telling a story in its oral or written form as is the example of the narratives from Davenport (but also from Vaite and Figiel) may as well be understood as an anti-colonial discourse that simultaneously denounces and resists the brutal history of colonisation.
1 I am borrowing this expression from the film directed by Isabel Coixet (2005) with the same title, The Secret Life of Words (La vida secreta de las palabras) which, in fact, makes perfect sense for my argument as the narrative of the film revolves around the healing and destructive power of words being that quite relevant when discussing Native Hawaiian literature in general, and Kiana Davenport’s novels in particular.
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In Native Hawaiian language, there is a word, mo’olelo, that means story, myth, history, literature, journal, record (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 254), and which translates the act of telling stories, the word is formed by two other words, mo’o meaning (among other things) succession, story, tradition, legend, and ‘ōlelo meaning language, speech, word either oral or verbal (Pukui and Eldbert 1986). It is my argument that the succession of stories, legends, myths, histories in the Native Hawaiian conceptualisation of mo’olelo informs the literary production of Kiana Davenport as a mode of recuperating history and culture, and as an engaged form of resistance. Whilst the complexity of the term cannot be encompassed here as it entails aspects that escape my positionality as a non-Indigenous woman, I argue that from an external perspective, the use of the word in one of its multiple meanings serves to locate Kiana Davenport’s oeuvre within the complex and varied milieu of Hawaiian literature. It is the act of telling stories that are informed by historic and cultural aspects that I seek when using mo’olelo as a conceptual framework similar, if not the same, to storytelling. Accordingly, Brandy Nālani McDougall explains that from a Kanaka Maoli perspective, history is a constructed narrative based on actual events but subject to perspective and interpretation. As such, the term mo’olelo blurs distinctions between academic and literary genres, between nonfiction and fiction, myth and history, as well as oral and written binaries (2016: 4).2 Based on McDougall’s theories, I am focusing on two premises to develop my analysis of Davenport’s narratives. Firstly, the condition of history as a factual narrative that is (and must be) subjected to interpretation, that so it can be revaluated and (re)written from other perspectives that have to include the so-called silenced subjects. Secondly, the fluidity of the term mo’olelo allows not only the inclusion of legends and myths but also other literary genres in their written form, such as the novel, as a genre in which culture and history are recovered. Indisputably, Indigenous texts are a locus of knowledge production in which storytelling can be
2 Kanaka Maoli means Native Hawaiian, and it is used to designate Native Hawaiian people. The term is commonly used as it emphasises Hawaiian indigeneity without referencing blood (Kauanui 2008).
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understood “as Indigenous knowledge production, as disruptive of Eurocentric, colonial norms of ‘objectivity’ and knowledge” (Sium & Ritskes 2013: 1). Davenport’s narrativization of Hawai’i emphasises the existence of reconnections with an ancestral past as well as political and cultural claims to Native Hawaiian lands that remain important until present time. Henceforth, in their structure the novels tackle a certain orature that is typical from the oral transmission of stories as well as they expose and deconstruct ingrained stereotypes that represent Native Hawaiian women as victims, homogenous voiceless objects without agency. Kiana Davenport is a Native Hawaiian writer of mixed origin (Native Hawaiian mother and American father). She was born in Kalihi, Hawai’i, and lived there until her adult years when she moved to the USA. Currently, she divides her time between New York and Hawai’i. In some interviews and posts on social media, Kiana Davenport emphasises that her identity of mixed origin has a great influence on her creative construction of characters whose struggles also revolve around feelings of belonging and identity construction. She has published extensively, Shark Dialogues (1995); Song of the Exile (1999); House of Many Gods (2006); The Spy Lover (2012) and The Soul Ajar: A Love Story (2014). Her novel Shark Dialogues was recently optioned by ABC Studios and Viola Davis productions to be adapted to the screens under a different title “Ohana” but still focusing on the novel’s plot. However, due to the COVID-19 outbreak the TV production has been postponed. Kiana Davenport prolifically uses social media, such as Facebook or her own blog “Davenport Dialogues” to comment on current political issues – Trump’s administration, for example – to give updates on her literary production, and also to write about Hawaiian culture and sovereignty movements currently demonstrating against land occupation and climate degradation. Most recently, she revealed that she is working on a new novel, Mauna Kea, which is according to Davenport a sequel to Shark Dialogues.3 For the sake of the theme of this Dissertation, I have only selected two of those novels, Shark Dialogues (1995) and Song of the Exile (1999). The novels will be analysed separately though they complement each other in their (re)presentations
3 The information provided here is mostly retrieved from Kiana Davenport’s Facebook page which she uses to post updates on her writing production.
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of Native Hawaiian culture and history. My focus will therefore be on Davenport’s construction of women characters and their empowerment in complex contexts as metaphors for the Indigenous struggles against the inception of mass tourism, militarisation (specifically the impact of World War II on Indigenous people) and the anti-colonial perspective developed in her novels, which may function as discursive practices that denounce the occupation of Hawai’i. Therefore, it will be relevant to look closely into the way Indigenous identities are negotiated within the afore mentioned context. The chapter will be divided into two subchapters, one for each novel. The first subchapter presents my analysis of Davenport’s first novel, and it will focus on how Davenport depicts Native Hawaiian culture from a point of view that problematises issues related with American imperialism, land occupation, and ecological degradation. The second subchapter concerns the analysis of Davenport’s second novel, and I will be focusing on questions related with the militarisation of Hawai’i, and the representation of “comfort women”. It is my argument that the novels are connected not only through women characters, but also through the way Davenport’s recovers Native Hawaiian history, and how the author presents an unromanticised portrayal of Hawai’i. It is, then, Davenport’s depiction that contributes to the dismantling of stereotypical representations of Hawai’i that have largely been reproduced to sell it as a product for tourism consumption as demonstrated in Chapter I. Besides, I will also examine the extent to which gender relations were altered after the colonial encounter, and how Native people negotiate the “new” space they inhabit. To this end, I will be looking at Davenport’s women characters and their visibility within the selected novels. Prior to the colonial encounter and the illegal process of U.S. annexation, Hawai’i was an egalitarian society not patriarchal (Trask 1999a, Silva 2004 and Kauanui 2008b), and “women were also symbolically associated with land, valued as producers of high cultural goods, and participants in a separate domain of female ritual and social power. Hence Hawaiian women were seen as powerful autonomous beings and were points of access to rank, land, and political power” (Kauanui 2008b: 283). Gender then was not considered as a deciding factor in the division of political and social power in pre-colonial Hawaiian society (Trask
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1999a, Silva 2004 and Kauanui 2008b). It is, therefore, based upon this assumption that colonialism disrupted (among other aspects) the social balance between genders in Hawai’i that Davenport’s selected novels will be analysed. Given the context within which Davenport navigates, it seems relevant to explore the interconnectedness between environmental degradation and the marginalisation of Native Hawaiian people that is presented her oeuvre. Assuming that imperialism is predicated on an “act of geographical violence” (Said 1993: 271), by emphasising the underlying ecological imperialism,4 that evidently results from American and European colonialism, it will also be possible to establish a clear demarcation that separates Western capitalist perspectives on nature, and Indigenous epistemologies in which nature assumes an intrinsic and complementary connection with human beings. As for most Pacific Islanders and Indigenous peoples, nature is part of their cultural identity, meaning that all forms of altering that will lead to systemic violence perpetrated against people and ecosystems. Subsequently, ecological imperialism cannot solely be perceived as “apparently a simple pattern of invasion, land-clearing, and destruction” (Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 8) but instead it is a form of deliberate destruction of land and natural resources through exploitation which has served the interest of globalised corporations looking for scientific and economic “progress”. The conjunction of international policies over Indigenous lands either in the format of militarisation or enforced occupation for tourism have led not only to ecological imperialism5 but also to environmental racism referring to the mutually reinforcing nature of the relation between the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and natural environments. This ecological imperialism that I am referring to involves an entire system of knowledge that has been part of the Euro-American colonial expansionism in which “tropical islands are depicted as isolated, and remote, and yet seem to be under
4 The term ecological imperialism was coined by Alfred Crosby in a seminal work, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900 (1986) which refers to myriad of practices that span from appropriation of Indigenous lands and the introduction of new species endangering and destroying autochthone ones.
5 The term has been widely used to define the exploitation of ecosystems, and Indigenous lands under Western laws (Whitt 2009). In a very ironic tone, Laurely Whitt defines it as “more of the same” (2009: 1) to refer to colonialism and the appropriation of Indigenous ecosystems. I use the term to reinforce the nature of colonial and imperial practices which have interfered in all aspects of Indigenous way of life, and that inevitably includes the cosmological relation with nature.
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surveillance, visualized and visited by the US military, the anthropologist, the filmmaker, and the tourist. This is made possible by colonial logics in which the metropole is figured as historical and temporal in contradistinction to the presumably atemporal colonies” (DeLoughrey 2018: 186). Therefore, Hawai’i has been framed by acts of possession and the inevitable violence generated out of that in which the possibility of economic and cultural growth for Indigenous people has been circumscribed by an escalating marginalisation and assimilation. Kiana Davenport’s selected novels, Shark Dialogues and Song of the Exile respectively, refurbish the multiplicity of perspectives when dealing with Native Hawaiian history and culture, and through the narratives it is possible to envision the ever-present determination of Native Hawaiian people in regaining control over their lands. Ultimately, Davenport juxtaposes two important metanarratives, i.e., one that speaks of cultural homogenisation and loss, and the other that revolves around socio-cultural emergence and revitalisation. The complexity entailed in those two metanarratives include myriad of factors that span from systemic violence that derives from colonial practices to epistemic violence that reinforces the invisibility of Native Hawaiian knowledge as it was replaced by Western epistemologies. Hawai’i becomes (once more) the postcolonial stage in which an array of ingrained experiences of violence, loss, exploitation, expropriation, and cultural imprisonment impact on the life of Indigenous people. In a thought- provoking essay, “Feminism and Hawaiian Nationalism” (1996), Haunani-Kay Trask draws on the connection between colonialism and gender, and adds that “when Hawaiian land is destroyed by development, by resort complexes, by military installations, it is our family, our history, our past, and our future that are destroyed” (1996: 912, emphasis in the original). Trask’s description of Hawaiian culture, her activism and critical analysis of Hawai’i have been the guiding lights in my own readings of Indigenous cultures as she highlights the problematisation of fundamental aspects that have been affecting Indigenous peoples along history. It is, therefore, based on and following her theorisations that I inform my view on how Kiana Davenport (re)writes and depicts Native Hawaiian culture in her novels. Trask’s assertions are fundamental in order to understand the colonial and imperial history of Hawai’i as well as the emergence of sovereignty movements, the
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importance of land and the right to protect Native Hawaiian culture and the ecosystems against exploitative forms of dominance which occur under the banner of militourism, as described by Teresia Teaiwa. Moreover, bearing in mind Trask’s formulations which share crucial aspects with Kimberlé Crenshaw’s studies on the intersectionality of gender, class and race, and María Lugones’ theories on the coloniality of gender, it is possible to assert that the colonialism practiced in Hawai’i is economic, and cultural violence occurs via tourism and militarism (Trask 2004). Accordingly, violence has colour, which means that the color of violence, then, is the color of white over black, white over brown, white over red, white over yellow. It is the violence of north over south, of continents over archipelagos, of settlers over natives and selves. Shaping this color scheme are the labyrinths of class and gender, of geography and industry, of metropoles and peripheries, of sexual definitions and confinements (Trask 2004: 9). Brilliantly summarised, the colour of violence that Trask describes is the one that has been pervasive in Hawai’i but also the one affecting other Indigenous peoples across the globe. It is, then, the interconnection of elements – gender, race and class – that I am interested in when reading Davenport’s novels, i.e., the way colonial and imperial violence is gendered, classist and racist but also the way resistance occurs informed by the ability of women to be active members within their communities.
3.1. Shark Dialogues: Biocolonialism, Indigenous Ethics of Care, and Cultural Survival
Shark Dialogues (1995) is an epic family saga, one in which the history of Hawai’i goes hand in hand with the personal narrative of the family. The narrative of Shark Dialogues is told from a multiplicity of narrators, whose voices create a tapestry of stories that contribute to a complex and rich portrayal of Native Hawaiian history and culture. These voices are mostly women’s voices creating a sort of women’s narrative that reinforces the importance of looking at history from a standpoint that has been silenced and subalternised. The novel’s polyvocality
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makes visible diverse ways of seeing and knowing that are relevant in underlining the relationship between characters, inasmuch as those voices contribute to a more complete understanding of Hawai’i as a multicultural place. Pono, the main character, is the matriarch and the plot revolves around her life. The novel is divided in two parts, the first one “Ka ‘ōlelo Makuahine – Mother Tongue” deals directly with the history of Hawai’i, it describes the struggles of Native Hawaiians and how their spiritual and physical connections with the land were altered. To a certain extent, it can be considered a historic narrative. The second one, and also the longest, “Ka Po’e Hapa Hawai’i o ka Honua Hou – Hybrids of the New World” gives a detailed description of Pono’s granddaughters – Ming, Rachel, Vanya and Jess – and their relation with the their family and with their identity, as well as it introduces the “new” challenges faced by Native Hawaiians in current times, namely tourism and military occupation. The novel presents a genealogic construction that helps in creating a thread that links all the events, and all the perspectives of a multi-layered narrative. Paradoxically, this genealogic construction solely based on the familial connections is not linear, it moves back and forth in time, symbolically resembling the movement of the waves. Thus each chapter brings a new character and her/his story which is always connected with the previous and the following ones. The family narrative starts with a puzzling description provided by Run Run, Pono’s best- friend and the keeper of the family secrets: SAILORS, LEPERS, OPIUM, SPIES—with such a family history, how could we be anyt’ing but sluts?” Dese Jess’s last words to her grandmot’er, Pono. Dat night Pono walk into da sea. But dis happen later, much later, after Ming rinse from our lives full of Dragon Seed. After Vanya become a terrorist, and Hiro suffocate from his own tattoos. It happen long years after dese little half-orphan girls— Vanya, Ming, Rachel, Jess—swim into Pono’s life. I seen. I seen it all. Da years dey run from her. Da years she pull dem back, like bait. So, in a way, dis my history, too. Now, “talk story” time. Early 1990s. Dese four cousins comin’
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home. Grown women, now, life t’rown everyt’ing at dem. But on dis island, dey still called “Pono’s girls.” And when she call, dey come. (Davenport 1995: 3 italics in the original) This is the entire chapter titled “Run Run”, composed only of just one paragraph. It not only introduces most of the major characters of the novel but also describes their actions and features. Run Run is the mediator and the narrator, a secretive woman, and the only person capable of reasoning with Pono. The plot in its polyvocality traces historical events and the political situation that contributed to the annexation of Hawai’i (1898), prior antecedents dealing with the “discovery” of the island in 1778; the military overthrown of Native government in 1893; and the banning of Native language in 1896. Although the family saga starts from “a present time” when Pono’s four granddaughters have been summoned to visit her dying grandmother, the narrative goes back to the 19th century – 1834 to be precise – to introduce the family founders and the love story of Mathys, a Dutch-descent whaler from Hudson River Valley, and Kelonikoa, a Polynesian (Tahitian) princess, thus opening room to the introduction of several events that have defined the history of Hawai’i. The first part of the novel, “Ka ‘ōlelo Makuahine. Mother Tongue”, revolves around the love story of Mathys and Kelonikoa, and the adversities they face because of their interracial relationship. Carrying just a bag full of mysterious black pearls, Kelonikoa defies her family and runs with Mathys into the wild where they remain for a long time until they manage to emerge again into the crowded shores of Maui, allegorically alluding to the rebirth of their new life. The chapter “Pavilions in the sea” traces the personal stories of Mathys and Kelonikoa, their enchanted encounter as well as it presents detailed descriptions of the inner-land of Hawai’i, and Mathys’ journey in the sea as whale-hunter. It is, then, Mathys’ recounting of the sacredness of whales that firstly caught my attention, as it resembles Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), and over all how he reached the Hawaiian shores to escape the brutality of killing such magnificent animals, arriving at “Lahaina on the island of Maui, whaling capital of the Pacific” (Davenport 1995: 35). The novel carries a “sense of environmentality” (Carrigan
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2015:83) that starts right in this first chapter, showing an ethic of care reinforced by Mathys’ concern for the whales. The conceptual frame of ethics of care that I am referring to is informed by ecocriticism and animal studies, as it implies inclusiveness (see Haraway 2008; Gruen 2015) – the interaction rather than the juxtaposing of human and animals – and it also values the multiplicity of ways that tend to organise human moral experiences based on compassion (see Braidotti 2013; Allen 2002). Elizabeth DeLoughrey defines the ethic of care as “constitutive to our being of (and on) earth/Earth, and to our embodied relation to our futures, human and otherwise” (2019: 196). Accordingly, it is this ethic of care that characterises Polynesian cosmologies that becomes legible in Davenport’s novel. Mathys is overwhelmed by the majestic power of whales and how they behave, thus the narrative is acutely framed by ecocriticism when depicting the nonhuman world as constitutive of human actions.6 He knew he could no longer be part of an industry that was depleting the oceans, so he decided to run away from it: He had never imagined anything as magnificent as these giant mammals, never felt safer than when rowing beside them. Warm-blooded, air-breathing, they belonged to families, and clans, and talked through code-songs sung for fifty million years. Like humans, they played, mated, tended their young. (Davenport 1995: 34) The entire passage constitutes an exquisite rendering of the way whales interact with each other; mothers tending their calves, the melodic sounds that are songs in a language incomprehensible to humans are some of the scenes imprinted in Davenport’s description. However, what matters here the most is the connection between human and non-human elements, and how ecosystems are disrupted by human intervention. The preoccupation with the land, the oceans, and entire ecosystems is part of Davenport’s narrativization of Hawai’i, it is also part of her anti-colonial discourse, and of her portrayal of Native Hawaiian cultural identity.
6 I am drawing on ecocriticism as a crucial approach to the analysis of Davenport’s novel asserting the novel’s importance in presenting a connection between the marginalisation of Indigenous people and the degradation of their ecosystems, being nature an integral element in Native Hawaiian cultural identity.
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Despite Mathys’ bewilderment when observing the whales, he is the embodiment of the white men who cross continents and oceans in pursue of power. His relationship with Kelonikua is an allegorical story in which two different perspectives about nature are depicted, and even though he immerses himself into the wild not only to escape from the whale ships but also as a form of purifying himself, when emerging from that dream-like reality, Mathys becomes the owner of a liquor saloon in Honolulu selling the opium that highly contributed to the corruption of social behaviours, the increase of violence and the death of so many Indigenous people. It is well-known, and well-researched the nefarious impact of liquor to Indigenous populations when it was introduced by European navigators and used as a trading tool. Davenport’s novel overtly problematises the impact of that on Native Hawaiian people, alluding to the violence and alienation caused by the excessive consumption of alcohol and the leniency toward opium use. Mathys is not the “gone native” typical character of (post)colonial narratives mentioned in Chapter II in reference to the French “tropicalisé”, and Davenport critiques this classic figure by making the character a destroyer of the Indigenous community despite all his pretence of integration into native life/lands. Therefore, Mathys may be sensitive to the destruction of the whales, but he contributes to the destruction of the Indigenous humans. The story of Kelonikua is one of a Tahitian princess escaping from an arranged marriage with someone she later found out to be the cousin of the Hawaiian King Kamehameha III (Davenport 1995: 36). While her attendants are asleep, she flees Honolulu in an inter-island boat buying the captain’s silence with one of her precious black pearls. Arriving at Lahaina, a city “unprepared for thousands of whalers descending on them in increasing numbers” (Davenport 1995: 37), Kelonikua is horrified with the scenario and “fearing they would take her for a whore, afraid missionaries would report her to the king – for often their sympathies went to the highest bidder – she fled, working her way along the coast, until the town was far behind” (Davenport 1995: 37). She searches for the ocean to find solace and there she stays alone until the ocean brings her a strange creature, “what resembled a yellow dog” (Davenport 1995: 37). Mathys looked like a semi- disintegrated human but still alive and in need of care. The time he spent alone in
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the forests almost costed him his life. She then tends him for long weeks, “never speaking, touching him only to put food to his lips, or spread antiseptic root juices across the suppurating eye socket” (Davenport 1995:37). The time has come when the two lonely runners can finally communicate, and they fall for each other. Then what follows is their journey out of the rainforest where they have been hiding for months, and the arrival at Honolulu where Kelonikua sells two of the black pearls so they can buy a piece of land to build a house. The portrayal of Honolulu amidst a turbulent and industrialised 19th century is indicative of the changes already in progress that were affecting Native Hawaiians, and the way the archipelago was transformed into a massive harbour where all kinds of transactions (legal or not) took place under commercial blindness caused by greed: In the early 1840s, wealth was being accumulated overnight in Honolulu —human cargo smuggled in from the Orient as cheap labor, opium packed in champagne bottles, rare jade and gold slipped past immigration authorities. (Davenport 1995: 38) Davenport thus recovers part of Hawaiian history while demonstrating the impact of colonialism and the complexity of political alliances forged against Native Hawaiian people. Whereas economic development was the preoccupation, the consequences of reckless political decisions not only alienated Native Hawaiian people from their culture, but they also foregrounded racial and ecological problems with long-term consequences. The first part of the novel is crucial to understand the history of Hawai’i and how Indigenous people were destroyed not only by the introduction of diseases (smallpox, syphilis and leprosy) but also at the hands of harsh policies, and treaties between Hawaiian monarchs and white people with power. Alfred Crosby, in an ecological study about the dissemination of germs, seeds and animals across the globe explores in detail the case of Hawaiian colonisation and points out that when James Cook arrived in 1778, “the Polynesian population numbered from 242,000 (the lowest contemporary estimate) to 800,000 (a recent assessment: startlingly large; yet the product of exhaustive scholarship and analysis). A hundred years later
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there were only 48,000 [N]ative Hawaiians, including even those of only part Hawaiian parentage” (1994: 121).7 The success of colonial and imperial domination over Hawai’i is one that falls into the category of biocolonialism, thus it was not only the domination of the territory that allowed colonialism to thrive, it was its biological and ecological component that granted the triumph of new policies in which Native Hawaiian people were marginalised.8 Therefore, as in other colonised areas, “a changed ecology also introduced a changed political system that, in the eyes of the nationalist poet or visionary, seemed retrospectively to have alienated the people from their authentic traditions” (Said 1993: 77). The novel recovers historical events and locates them from the perspective of those who were marginalised in their own territory. For instance, during the 19th century, Native Hawaiian people faced severe damage with the proliferation of Hansen disease (leprosy) leading to the creation of “a leper settlement” in the small peninsula of Kalaupapa, located in Moloka’i island, and described in the novel as the “Place of the Living Dead” (Davenport 1995: 63).9 Davenport explicitly links the spread of diseases with levels of poverty: “Kelonikoa and vigilante women of the Bustle Club roamed tenement sections of Honolulu and Chinatown, introducing locals to boil water before drinking, to bathe frequently, since leprosy seemed to flourish in poverty and filth” (Davenport 1995: 63). Diseases are one of the many forms of biocolonialism with great impact on Indigenous peoples, and they are commonly described sardonically as the “gifts of civilization” (Bushnell 1993). Davenport also registers this in her novel:
7 According to the World Population Review (online) consulted in July 2020, within the ethnic diversity of Hawai’i currently only 10.08% of its population is Native Hawaiian which represents a decreasing in the numbers of Native Hawaiians living in the islands.
8 I am using the theoretical framework of biocolonialism rather than merely colonialism as the former suggests a broader emphasis on the environmental impact of colonial practices. It emphasises the nature and the extent of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples that goes further than the human impact on the socio- economic and cultural levels.
9 Currently Kalaupapa remains an isolated place, and due to its isolation, and lack of medical facilities people cannot enter the area without a special use permit. Originally, the settlement at Kalaupapa was created as a quarantine site, but people affected by Hansen disease remained exiled there for years, even decades. Even after the end of mandatory isolation in 1969, many were those who never left the place fearing social rejection. Kiana Davenport revitalises the theme trough Duke, Pono’s eternal love, who was rejected by his wealthy family and sent to the settlement, erased from the family genealogy, thus problematising the impact of the disease among Native Hawaiians and the discriminatory practices against those who were affected by the illness.
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Until Cook arrived, Hawaiians had been the most isolated people in the world, and so had not built up a strong immune system. But through ingenious, rigid systems of hygiene, they had remained fiercely strong and healthy. By now, trading and whaling ships from around the world had spread syphilis, measles, typhoid, whooping cough, and worse. Quarantine laws requiring health inspectors for visiting ships had come too late (Davenport 1995:49). Le’a Malia Kanehe elaborates on the consequences of colonialism in Hawai’i, and posits that currently, Kanaka Maoli are living “in an era of biotechnology and biocolonialism – the extension of the process of colonization to genetic material and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples […] Biocolonialism in Hawai’i is an extension of U.S. invasion of our kingdom in 1893” (2014: 331). The allusion to the decimation of Native Hawaiian population in Davenport’s novel demonstrates the level of destruction introduced by European navigators, though there is also an implied criticism to the way Native women were sold and used as assets during this time. It is clear that Indigenous populations suffered terribly with the impact of diseases; however, Native women suffered also specific sexual violence that exposed them further to those diseases, as Davenport describes: Kelonikoa saw how smallpox had spread so swiftly in Honolulu: refuse dumped in gutters running into harbors, gigantic cesspools where rats bobbed up and down like seals, opium addicts – men, women, children – sleeping, eating, defecating in alleys. One day, she knelt beside a thirteen-year-old native girl. For fifty dollars, her father had sold her to a whaling skipper. She had been taken to sea, used for months as the crew’s recreation, until she contracted “sailor’s pox.” Someone had dragged her from the ship and dumped her in an alley (Davenport 1995: 51). Native women were used as commodities and the paragraph above exemplifies the level of violence exerted against them. The bodies of Native women were
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acknowledged as assets to be traded; hence violence is gendered to the extent in which it subjugates and marginalises women. It can be argued, then, that race-based imperialism and colonialism resulted in radical modifications in how Native Hawaiian men perceived and treated women, which was the case of Tahiti too, as discussed in Chapter II. I would like to suggest that gendered violence was in itself a consequence of the introduction of gender binarism – men vs women – used to destroy the social arrangements in pre-colonial societies, and consequently leading to the disruption of Indigenous communities and cosmologies. Subsequently, this new gender system introduced (and imposed) by colonialism generated social, economic, and cultural unbalances among Indigenous populations. Henceforth, as explained by María Lugones this modern/colonial gender system establishes oppressive colonial gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life (2007: 187). So, in the specific case of Hawai’i, either in politics or social life organisation women were seen as relevant elements within those spheres, they “played a crucial role in chiefly rank determination and in the composition of the local group” (Linnekin 1990: 6) which means that the imposition of colonial rules diminished the status of Native Hawaiian women. Nonetheless, to a great extent, the decline of that status was promoted by the introduction of sexual dichotomisation emphasised through the demarcation of private property or even the emergence of class stratification. Native women’s subalternisation is correlated with Western epistemologies that have also located women in a lower rank with few or no rights in terms of landownership, for instance, which ultimately proves the intersectionality of race, class, and gender aiming at accounting for collisions, and disjunctures among multiple sites of power. Subsequently, the continuity of gender oppression may as well entail a certain “indifference that men who have been racialized as inferior exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color” (Lugones 2007: 188). Despite the contentious ground we may be navigating here – as Hawaiian sovereignty movements have always been characterised by the crucial role played by women within their struggles – I believe that the objectification and consequent marginalisation of Native Hawaiian women occurs in any case because women were progressively deprived of economic autonomy, and of an egalitarian society.
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Accordingly, Lugones asserts that the indifference generated out of socio-cultural assimilation “is insidious since it places tremendous barriers in the path of the struggles of women of color for our own freedom, integrity, and well-being and in the path of the correlative struggles toward communal integrity” (2007:188). Asserting Native Hawaiian women’s vital autonomy may be problematic if not paradoxical, since J. Kēhaulani Kauanui explains that: “although processes of colonialism eroded Hawaiian women’s status, it is still unclear whether Hawaiian nationalist projects can help to restore that status through forms of decolonization” (2008: 282). I, nevertheless, argue that the structural importance of Native women is, to a certain extent, enhanced in some contexts of relevance in the process of decolonising minds and places as referred to in Chapter I. For instance, Native Hawaiian women became the keepers of knowledge of hula, by memorising and telling the mo’lelo and passing cultural practices to younger generations, and by sewing the national flag into quilts (Silva 2004). Noenoe K. Silva, when referring to the positionality of Native women within sovereignty movements, asserts that Native Hawaiian women effectively took part on the struggles through the revitalisation of cultural practices, and by passing them on to young generations. In Davenport’s revitalisation of women’s resistance against the overthrowing of the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani, there is a clear allusion to the importance of using the printing press: “[t]hey bought a printing press, circulating underground pamphlets, urging Hawaiian women to take up arms for the queen” (Davenport 1995: 69). In her study of the role of the printing press in sovereignty movements of Hawai’i in her book Aloha Betrayed (2004), Noenoe K. Silva refers to the relevance of some newspapers, among them the Ka Hoku o ka Pakipika (1861) that was characterised by its dissident viewpoints in resisting the erosion of Native Hawaiian culture and history, asserting that it “provided space for women to contest the attempted domestication” (2004: 83). By focusing on this specific aspect of Hawaiian history, I am suggesting that Davenport depicts women’s experiences under colonialism as a starting point for the articulation of resistance and self-determination. The possibility of cultural and political decolonisation should be informed by women’s experiences of oppression as well as the deconstruction of the universal social categorisation of people in terms of
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race, gender and class (Lugones 2007) that has been permeating Western-centred capitalist models of power. The possibility of a decolonial project that simultaneously considers the intersectionality of race, gender and class may be more inclusive, and may as well reveal what has not been seen when those categories were conceptualised separately (Crenshaw 1995; Lugones 2007). While revitalising Hawaiian history, Shark Dialogues shares a political critique, conveying a broad agenda in which there is a commitment to problematising issues regarding the lack of acknowledgement of Native Hawaiian peoples’ rights over their lands in conjunction with several forms of exploitation of peoples and ecosystems. Within this debate, Davenport emphasises the importance of looking at exploitative systems from a gendered and racialised perspective. The social turmoil lived in Hawai’i during the 19th century cannot solely be described based on the dissemination of diseases and the decreasing of Indigenous population, other changes occurred simultaneously and they were promoted by policies approved by Hawaiian monarchs, political changes that persist into the present day. The Great Māhele (or Land Division) of 1848 is one those historical events whose consequences resonate until today. It is broadly perceived as a watershed in the alterations of Hawaiian society with long-term and disastrous effects on Hawaiian people (Trask 1999; Silva 2004; Kauanui 2008). Noelani Goodyear-Ka’ōpua in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (2014) extensively elaborates on the impact of land dispossession on Native Hawaiians, with long-term consequences, and presents interesting data regarding the U.S occupation over Native lands, The vast majority of the lands controlled by the state of Hawaiʻi and the U.S. Department of Defense in the islands are the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Crown and Government lands that were seized at the start of the U.S. occupation in the 1890s. Of the 4 million acres that make up the islands, 1.8 million comprise these two classes of seized Hawaiian national lands. The two separate inventories of lands became commingled. Just over twenty years later, the U.S. government threw a crumb to benefit “native Hawaiians.”
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In 1921, the U.S. Congress set aside 200,000 acres—a tiny fraction of the 1.8 million acres of seized Hawaiian national lands—for a beneficiary class defined by a 50 percent blood quantum (2014: 14). Davenport presents in Shark Dialogues an acute recollection of those historical events and problematises the social divisions that land ownership introduced, dividing families, separating them from their land: “officially separating Hawaiians from their land, had been the true death knell of the people. Perhaps, it was the moment the islands had become and American colony” (Davenport 1995: 56). As previously demonstrated in Chapter I, the Kanaka Maoli struggles against foreigners continued even after the formers lost power over their lands. The Annexation and the overthrowing of Queen Lili’uokalani are crucial moments that dictated the sombre fate of the Hawaiian Kingdom, opening the archipelago to a long history of militarisation, as the novels records: “in 1887, the sugar Reciprocity Treat was renewed, conceding full use of Pearl Harbor to the United States Navy. Military ships began to glut Honolulu’s harbor” (Davenport 1995: 65). Nevertheless, the alleged legitimacy of U.S power over Hawaiian lands began to be challenged, and sovereignty movements’ discourses were informed by “building consciousness about history, status, and health of those lands” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua 2014: 15). Likewise, genealogical rootedness, and the significance of aloha ‘āina – love for the land – are not only integral parts of Native Hawaiian cultural identity, but conceptual frameworks that have been informing the sovereignty struggle. Within the realm of resistance against marginalisation, Kiana Davenport not only reminds us that lands and ecosystems are, in fact, living ancestors according to Native Hawaiian cosmology, but she emphasises the urgency of resisting the destruction of Native Hawaiian culture too. The focus must be, then, on how to implement measures, political and otherwise, to ensure that Indigenous peoples are not forced into migration because their islands are disappearing. In the Pacific region the best-known case of forced migration is exemplified by the current situation in Kiribati.10 The sort of ecological preoccupation demonstrated in
10 Kiribati is a small, non-industrialised island in Central Pacific that is gradually disappearing due to pollution and the rising of the sea-level. Currently, diplomatic measures are being taken to ensure that the young population can move to live and study in New Zealand and in Fiji.
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Davenport’s novel can be extended to situations lived in small non-industrialised islands whose ecosystems have been irreversibly altered as a consequence of climate change, globalisation, capitalism, and unbridled consumerism. Davenport frequently alludes in her novels to the impoverishment and marginalisation of Native Hawaiian people as a result of American imperialism. In “The Subject and Power”, Foucault points out that “in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance” (1982: 780). Following Foucault’s idea, I argue that multiple forms of resistance have been informing Native Hawaiian culture and history. Cultural revitalisation, whether through literature or any other artistic form, contests the tyranny of globalising policies and discourses, hence assimilation into the dominant Americanised culture is also challenged and resisted when the so-called subjugated peoples retain and reproduce their traditions (Silva 2004). It has been my argument throughout this Dissertation that Native languages are seen as forms of resistance against colonial impositions, they are used as decolonising practices and the novels dealt with are paved with clear examples of how Indigenous languages were replaced and how writers revitalise their use by including them in the writing of stories. Even though the novels are not written in Native language, they recover the importance of languages in the construction of cultural identities by calling attention to the way Native languages were forbidden to be taught in schools and replaced by colonial languages. This multilingualism seems to facilitate the creation of new forms of cultural expression and may as well work as an assertion of Hawaiian cultural aspects that Kiana Davenport finds important to represent symbolically in terms of language. The non-compliance with using standardised English language can also be acknowledged as a resistance practice employed by many other Pacific writers, such as Sia Figiel whose novels include entire paragraphs in Gagana Sāmoa, the Native Samoan language as it will be demonstrated in the following Chapter of this Dissertation. The theme of language is recurrent across Davenport’s novel, and there is always the notion that language is a defining cultural feature, and its loss inevitably directs to the disruption of cultural identity:
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“Loss of one’s language is the first step toward extinction,” she warned. “Your children are learning English and history from Christian textbooks. You must keep up Hawaiian conversations at home.” Kelonikoa suspected that most haole didn’t want natives educated. They wanted them in the fields, and as house servants (Davenport 1995: 48). Moreover, it is always depicted in this novel that colonial practices took place based upon land occupation and the Christianisation of Native Hawaiian people, “Hawaiian children were forbidden their Mother Tongue. In school and church they were taught about Jesus, a haole child, while Hawaiian gods and ancestors were forgotten” (Davenport 1995: 56). The narrative is extremely critical about colonialism and the disruption of Native Hawaiian culture, as well as it presents an array of examples of how Native Hawaiian people were not only subjugated but also objectified and stereotyped. For instance when Mathys was searching for a priest to marry him and Kelonikua he was confronted with prejudice: The haole missionary stared at Mathys as if he were mad. “If you are sure you want to marry a kanaka, she must take instructions, become a Christian first.” He studied Kelonikoa, took Mathys aside. “I warn you, they are without morals. The women row out to ships, offering themselves!” (Davenport 1995: 43) The exotic and sexual myths that were attributed to Tahiti by Westerners, as demonstrated in the previous chapter are also part of the colonial rhetoric imposed on Native Hawaiian women where sexuality is regarded as a moral sin, and Hawaiian women depicted as licentious. Hence those are legacies of centuries of narratives and iconic portrayals of women that have so far contributed to fixed gender stereotypes inculcated on Native women. The pervasiveness of exotic portrayals of Native women and the coloniality of gender roles have been particularly challenging for Native Hawaiian women. The heteronormative ideology institutionalised by Euro-Christian ideals reflects the polarisation of masculine and feminine domains, which has largely served to stigmatise and
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marginalise the diversity of gender expressions featured in Pacific societies, including the Hawaiian one, and to devaluate women’s status within their communities, both within the public/socio-political realm and within their families. Gender diversity in pre-colonial Pacific islands’ communities was largely understood in relation to cultural constructions which often differ from Westerns socio-cultural understandings of gender (Presterudstuen 2019). In pre-colonial Hawai’i, gender variance was not used in discriminatory terms, and people, regardless of their gender, were respected within their communities. Moreover, māhū or transgender people were highly respected as teachers, particularly of Hula dance and chant (Tarrant 2016; Kauanui 2017). J. Kēhaulani Kauanui extensively elaborates on the consequences of gender demarcation and how it should also be part of decolonial project in Hawai’i. Hence, she asserts that some sovereignty groups have consider it in their projects, such as the members of Nā Mamo that “pushed Kanaka Maoli at large to consider all forms of decolonization, and their open reclamation of Indigenous practices with regard to sexual politics enabled a space to consider a more complex view of how people think about traditional Hawaiian norms with regard to sexuality and intimate unions” (Kauanui 2017: 48). The disruption of Native Hawaiian cultural practices has a lot to do with the colonial paranoia of fear (of the unknown) and the desire to domesticate and consume the bodies of those who were represented as uncivilised. Particularly, hula was the Native Hawaiian cultural practice that missionaries fought against the most, as it represented the subversion of all European values and was often referred to as pornographic (Turnbull and Ferguson 1997; Trask 1999a). Failing to understand its meaning, the new colonial order in Hawai’i restricted its practice by imposing clothes “on the offending Hawaiians bodies” (Turnbull and Ferguson 1997: 100), and by entirely discouraging people to express themselves culturally. Davenport revitalises the ancestral meaning of hula while acutely criticises its adaptation (and translation) for touristic purposes: the hula, the ancient narrative dance designed to enhance the meaning of mele, singing-chants containing legends, genealogies, the history of Hawaiians. It was the sound of dancers accompanied on gourd drums, of kāne and wāhine
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in malo and kīkepa, wearing dog-tooth anklets, sacred fern and feather crowns. This was not the cheap, flirtatious hula danced for tourists. These were sounds of warriors, movements quick and bold, movements of the hands, not hips, dancers who didn’t smile, who danced to honor ancients, or call down death on enemies. (Davenport 1995: 268) It is, nonetheless, the implementation of patriarchal structures and ideologies implied in the demonisation of certain cultural practices, that was essential in the colonial process of the Pacific, and “fundamental to the securing of and maintenance of the imperial enterprise” (McClintok 1995: 7). The narrativization of those events goes hand in hand with the personal struggles of each character, and history becomes personal inasmuch as private experiences became political. Primarily, I will be focusing on the creative construction of Pono, the main character, the family’s matriarch and by far the most complex character from the plethora of others that inhabit the novel. I have chosen to focus on this character because everything revolves around her, and ultimately it is through her that we acknowledge the extent to which the personal is political. Nothing is simple in her construction, Pono entails far too many contradictions, and challenging complexities, as well as she also seems to embody representative features relevant in the struggles endured by Native Hawaiian women. Although I am not advocating that all Indigenous women fight the same struggles which may be dangerous and problematic as I have previously demonstrated in Vaite’s novels, still we may see the effects of ongoing colonialism in the depiction of the lives of these Indigenous characters and analyse the strategies that they offer to overcome those disruptive socio-cultural impositions. It seems relevant to situate Pono within the narrative in order to clarify some of the following ideas. She is Mathys and Kelonikua great-granddaughter, described as kahuna, meaning wise person, sorcerer (Pukui and Elbert 1986: 114), “she was kahuna, creating more life around her than was actually there, heightening the momentousness of each living thing by simply gazing upon it” (Davenport 1995: 25). After the fall of Mathys’ empire, there was not much left in the family
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so the story of Pono starts in a plantation where her parents worked as servants, and from where they were sent to prison after a series of conflicts with the police. Pono was left alone, and so “for weeks she lived like an animal, sleeping in ditches […] she began to survive on the goodness of natives and immigrants who took her” (Davenport 1995: 87). Pono witnessed the brutality of the conflicts between plantation workers and police officers. Soon after her parents’ disappearance, she became a worker in a cannery where she suffered all sorts of abuses. Davenport revitalises in her text one of the many historic conflicts between plantation workers and white owners, the Strikers’ Massacre (1924), in which several people were killed after a confrontation with police officers: The Portuguese policeman stood over him yelling, “Sneaky Daikon eater!” striking again and again, brains hanging pendant from his club […] Thirty Japanese were murdered that day, remembered as the Strikers’ Massacre. Witnessing the slaughter, so close she smelled the blood, Pono forgot to die. She forgot to do everything but hate (Davenport 1995: 94). The appearance of Duke will momentarily suppress the hate Pono keeps inside her as she profoundly loves him and feels the intensity of his love for her. However, their love story was not meant to be a conventional story of love as one may expect. In the chapter “Nā Hūnā. The Hidden”, Pono and Duke’s trajectory together is disclosed by Duke’s disease (leprosy) when he was sent to Kalaupapa, and their time together in the house in the coffee plantation owned by Duke is brief. It is, then, Duke’s health condition that will dictate their fate: “sometimes they forgot the frailness of the veil that with which they camouflage their life, their refusal to acknowledge what was coming” (Davenport 1995: 109). The quiet days in the house are over when Duke realises he suffers from Hansen disease, and soon he decides to run into the jungles of Waipi’o to avoid being sent to the leprosy settlement in Kalaupapa. And then she followed him, though Duke begged her not to. The time in the jungle is described as if they were entering an ancient time. Pono and Duke had been living for months in the jungle in a sort of parallel reality when they were finally caught, and Duke’s body was inspected in search for sores
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indicative of the disease. Days later “he was caged on the funeral ship for Kalaupapa, “Place of the Living Dead”” (Davenport 1995: 115. Unable to return to Duke’s house in the coffee plantation as it has been sentenced with a quarantine notice, Pono already pregnant with their first child, Holo, wandered in the city until she “found work on a sugar plantation as scrub maid for the Portuguese luna and his frail, childless wife” (Davenport 1995: 117). Here she would suffer at the hands of this white man, she was constantly beaten and sexually abused by him, “terrified, she sat on beaches, calling out Duke’s name. Two years… Beloved, are you still alive? No word from him” (Davenport 1995: 122 italics in the original). When Pono could no longer bear the abuses committed by the while man, she lured him into her shack: That night when Calcados climbed on top of her, she wrapped her arms around him, feigning affection. When he was deep inside her, crooning all those obscene things, how he loved her, loved fucking her, would never let her go, she drove the bamboo chopstick in with all her might, left of the midline, between the ribs (Davenport 1995: 127). With the help of other plantation workers, Pono got rid of the corps, and the story of Calcados disappearance was soon forgotten, and he was replaced by “a new luna, a brutish-looking Scot, assigned the camp to overtime, killing hours without food or pay” (Davenport 1995: 128). Two years had passed when finally Pono received a letter from Duke, and on her twentieth birth she reaffirmed their vows of love, being determined to find him again. When she finally found him at the Kalaupapa settlement the place had already been transformed into a medical care centre where patients could receive visits. However, Duke’s disease had progressed so much that his body was severely wounded, and he was not able to leave the island. Pono managed to live there for a while without taking Holo with her. When the couple was finally discovered by a nurse, Pono was expelled only to return there as a visit. Pono got pregnant three times more, and Duke despite being aware of the existence of his daughters never met them. The girls, Holo, Edita, Emma and Mina were never told about the real
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story of their father. Theirs was an unrealistic truth that Pono decided to keep, never mentioning the leper settlement and the existence of Duke. When discussing Vaite’s novels, I have extensively referred to the nurturing features of motherhood and the importance of that within the Tahitian community. In contrast, Davenport’s portrayal of motherhood is vested in complicated assumptions, cruder in its descriptions as she critically questions a certain romanticisation and idealisation of the theme. If Materena in Vaite’s novels asserted her identity somehow based on her capacity of being a mother, Pono presents an oppositional perspective as she seems unable to emotionally connect with the girls: Their daughters. She gave not much thought to them, sometimes confusing them, forgetting their names, absent- mindedly patting a head in passing, like a dog she must remember to feed. When the day came for the inter-island steamer to Kalaupapa, she left the girls with neighbors, strangers, anyone, pilling them up like sacrifices offered to the world, throwing it off her scent while she lived for this man, this one obsession. When is love too much? she wondered. When is it not enough? If she neglected the seed for the father, was it neglect? If she sacrificed part of their lives to enrich his, was it sacrifice? (Davenport 1995: 149 italics in the original) Although Pono seems to be aware of her actions, of her lack of interest in her daughters, she proves to be quite authoritarian with them: Four growing girls, bills, sleepless nights, the one thing really important occurring in shadow. Some nights, she longed for Duke so badly that she woke wounded all over, her body aching. Next day she would abuse the girls, slap or ignore them, make the three oldest eat in silence while she fed the infant with disdain. Fatherless little bastards, wondering where he is. Who he is. When they finally summoned up the nerve to ask, she told them their father
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worked the gold mines in Alaska (Davenport 1995:154 italics in the original). It is my argument that Pono partakes on the literary construction of tyrannical mothers which within the narrative makes her agency somehow problematic. Her manipulative features can be perceived when she excludes her daughters from the family history denying them part of their identities, and when she obstinately excludes them from the visits to their father. Pono seems to be capable of loving Duke, she cares for other people when practicing her healing powers, but she is incapable of nurturing her daughters. Nonetheless, the two fictional constructions of motherhood – Vaite and Davenport’s – are valid while presenting the multiplicity of individual and collective features that are part of any identity construction, meaning that women – either Indigenous or not – cannot be solely described based upon monolithic representations. However, the representation of Pono as a mother also seems to imply the possible fragmentation of her daughters’ and granddaughters’ identities, and it appears as a cautionary tale about the consequences of alienating people from their own genealogy. Questions of identity formation are raised here, and Davenport makes a clear attempt at relating the socio-cultural realm with the construction of individual identity when describing in detail the abuses endured by Pono both as a child and as an adult, to a certain extent suggesting that because she was constantly sexually abused by the plantation owner she was incapable of dealing with the human proximity implied in her role as a mother. Historically, rape has been described as a colonial tool that exerts power over and against Indigenous peoples, endeavouring to destroy or obliterate their sovereignty. It can be argued, then, that the “civilising mission” of colonialism was an excuse for “brutal access to people’s bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systemic terror” (Lugones 2010: 744). Perhaps, because of the trauma Pono had experienced, both as the witness of the massacre described above and as a sexual abuse survivor, she was unable to connect emotionally with her daughters. The chapter “Ka Wahine Nele ‘Ohana – Woman Without a Clan” traces the conflicts between sugar plantation workers and haole – white foreigner – owners
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which recall some of the historical events in Hawai’i. Throughout the chapter Davenport simultaneously conveys the idea that traumatic events are like fingerprints in people’s identity construction as well as that the oppression experienced by Native Hawaiians and other ethnic minorities in Hawai’i derives from highly racialised discourses. These two approaches are intertwined as they dictate the emotional space in which Pono deals in, paradoxically turning herself into a tyrannical mother but also into a pro-active member within her community against land occupation. To some extent, she could not overcome the loss of her parents and her own abuse, and transported that to her own private realm, but the loss and the institutional violence were able to trigger in her a sense of community beyond the personal. “No Mother Tongue” is the chapter that better illustrates Pono’s relationship with her daughters, and why they abandoned her to escape her (s)mothering behaviours. Edita was the first to escape when she fell in love with a Filipino man: “Edita struggled to her feet, thrusting her face into Pono’s. ““Yes! I am his! I am carrying his child”” (Davenport 1995: 167). Then, Holo, her mother’s favourite, could not cope with Pono’s injustice of not accepting her relationship with Tang Junior, a Japanese descendent and the son of the keeper of Duke’s coffee plantation: “later, Pono’s memory would be that of a woman [Holo] in a moving car, looking backwards” (Davenport 1995: 168). Mina followed her sisters’ example, and without much ado, disappeared not to be found again: “intent on Emma, Pono ignored the youngest one. One day when she was fourteen, Mina disappeared. A note in Pono’s slipper. ““I hate you. You made me indecent”” (Davenport 1995: 169 italics in the original). Emma stayed longer and soon became the centre of Pono’s attention, onto whom Pono projected many expectations, giving her the best education Pono could afford to. However, when Emma fell in love with a haole (white; non-Native Hawaiian) soldier, and intended to get married, Pono threatened to kill them, and so Emma ran away too, “Not you”, Pono whispered, staring at Emma. Her voice seemed to come from the netherworld, slow and deep, and hoarse, like someone damned. “Not you. My last, my best daughter… You would go with… haole? You would be a…
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change-face? Do you know what they are? What they did to me?”” (Davenport 1995: 174). Thus, personality and blood ties collide in Pono’s character. The realisation of her daughters’ wishes, and sexual awakenings provokes a thetic crisis in Pono, aggravated by her own sense that she has failed to nurture and love her daughters. It is, then, Duke that reminds her of that: “She knelt at Duke’s feet, in abject despair. “I thought I had given our girls character, and conscience.” He stroked her head, thinking how one needed love to sustain those things” (Davenport 1995: 169). After her daughters escape from their mother’s domain, Pono is left alone with her best- friend Run Run who will try to find the girls. Run Run eventually managed to find the girls and convince them to let Pono meet the granddaughters who are, then, sent by their mothers, every year to visit Pono until they grow apart from their grandmother too. Pono’s behaviour towards her granddaughters is contested by her friend Run Run who becomes the mediator in their conflicts. Run Run insists on the importance of clearing the family genealogy in order to create a connection between the granddaughters and their land as well as to attempt to recover ancient forms of knowledge, and thus she presses Pono to fulfil this duty: You do it for kahe koko, flow of blood, for kahe ‘aumakua, flow of ancestors. Dese t’ings you gonna tell dem been waiting all dese years. Written by yoah mot’er’s mot’er’s hand. Dese girls been livin’ empty-handed in da world. Now you gonna’ give dem dere destiny. (Davenport 1995: 322) This genealogical legacy referred to in Run Run’s speech reinforces the relevance of preserving cultural and historical memory that permits the fluid of construction identities. Hence, Davenport is well-aware of the importance of preserving memory as form of resistance against cultural obliteration, and genealogy reinforces the roots of Native Hawaiian people and their land (Silva 2004; Wilson-Hokowhitu 2019). The second part of the novel introduces a more contemporary Hawai’i still struggling with past events that have been exacerbated by “new” global policies, and it is narrated from a point of view that gives voice to Pono’s granddaughters. When the four women – Rachel, Vanya, Ming, and Jess – finally return to the big
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house some old secrets have to be unleashed so they can come to terms with their own personal stories. They are the “Hybrids of the New World” returning once more to their homeland, and this time in an attempt to recover their story while reconnecting with the land. Paradoxically, the following passage illustrates the complexity of identity construction when portraying the clash between Pono and her granddaughters, “their mothers’ revenge” (Davenport 1995: 6) because Pono has always been at odds with the fact that the girls “were all mixed-marriage mongrels” (Davenport 1999: 6), the offspring of inter-racial marriages. These women are, to a certain extent, the only hope for continuity of the family legacy, and the continuity of resistance against Hawaiian occupation. The multiplicity of identity features, the racial background of each woman alludes to the ever-present myth of Hawai’i as a melting pot (see Fojas; Guevarra & Sharma 2018). It is Duke who tries to dissuade Pono’s strong ideas on the (ir)relevance of “blood quantum” (see Kauanui 2008) when referring to their granddaughters: And yet, each girl was half of something else. Duke said she had to learn to accept this, that the true, original blood of their ancestors, the only one she recognized, was dying. Their granddaughters, Duke said, were hybrids of the new world. Their offspring were even more alien, Hawaiian blood blurred into quarters, someday eights. A world Pono didn’t want to know. Yet, now she was asking them to bring that alien, that mixed-mongrel world, home. (Davenport 1995: 231) However, this is complicated through the cross-racial dynamics that Davenport explores when describing the particularities of each character, thus reinforcing the disruptive nature of racial inequalities, and providing counternarratives of resistance forged through examples of alliances among several marginalised groups in Hawai’i. Davenport does not necessarily pursue any form of “authentic” or “genuine” Native Hawaiian identity, rather the novel implies the possibility of coalition between several communities as exemplified in civilians donating blood after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese arrived, offering blood, and money, each family dressed in black, the color worn when respect is due. A
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blind Hawaiian couple gave two pints, then stood in line to give again. In hospitals round the island, immigrant workers arrived, donating Chinese blood, and Filipino, blood of Puerto Rican and Korean. […] And for a time people drew together, forgetting race, religion, thinking only of each other and their precious islands. They would never be as vulnerable again, nor would they ever be as kind (Davenport 1999: 158-59). This paragraph is one of several examples presented throughout the narrative suggesting the possibility of coalition among marginalised groups, a form of reflexive solidarity that goes beyond blood, and underpinning the sort of engagement that locates Native Hawaiian within the spheres of collective struggles. Instead of narrowing her perspective writing solely about historical events from a Native Hawaiian standpoint, Davenport incorporates also the voices of migrant populations whose struggles are shared by Native Hawaiians such as the permanent battle against exploitative labour practices or the discriminatory identity constructions often suffered by Filipinos, Chinese or Koreans. Consequently, Davenport proposes a more inclusive society, shifting from race-oriented identity to cultural and political identity reconfiguring collective resistance as one in which “the centrality of self-reflexive practice in the transformation of the self, reconceptualizations of identity, and political mobilization” [are acknowledged as] “necessary elements of the practice of decolonization” (Mohanty 2003: 8). The dehumanisation of Native Hawaiian people, and the translation of their culture for a globalised audience had its beginning when tourism started to proliferate in the archipelago. Pono is assertive when describing the haolificafion of Hawai’i, as in the following paragraph of the novel where Davenport’s description of the events resembles Haunani-Kay Trask’s critique of tourism across the islands in From a Native Daughter. Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (1999): Departing tourists took snapshots of them.
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“That’s how they see us,” Pono whispered. “Porters, servants. Hula dancers, clowns. They never see us as we are, complex, ambiguous, inspired humans.” “Not all haole see us that way…” Jess argued. Vanya stared at her. “Yes, all. Haole and every foreigner who comes here put us in one of two categories: The malignant stereotype of the vicious, drunken, do-nothing kānaka and their loose-hipped, whoring wāhine. Or, the benign stereotype of the childlike, tourist-loving, barefoot, aloha- spirit natives” (Davenport 1995: 338). Consequently, the plethora of cultural alterations that occurred during and after annexation are still felt today shaping the way Native Hawaiians interact with their own culture, and “in the twentieth-century and twenty-first century Hawai’i, a tinsel version of Hawaiian culture adorns the tourist industry, prostituting not only our lands and waters, but also our customs and our people” (Trask 1999a: 17). The Native Hawaiian activist, Haunani-Kay Trask, overtly proclaims an anti-tourism attitude towards the Americanisation of her nation, demonstrating that there is a profound need to understand the voices of Native Hawaiians that are deeply engaged with the protection of ecosystems as they are part of Native Hawaiian identity. Davenport’s environmental concerns are explicitly presented in the way Pono describes the on-going effects of tourism: They stood gazing along the coastline, site of earliest Polynesian landings almost two thousand years ago, site of ancient villages and fishing fleets, and sacred heiau still being excavated. “Between here and Miloli’i up the coast,” Pono said “they’re building a nine-hundred-million-dollar Riviera Resort with marinas, the whole works. Chemicals, oil pollution, sewage. It will kill the fishing and the reef, impoverish all the ole-time net fisherman of these small coastal villages. I tell you it will kill off everything this side of the island”. (Davenport 1995 :188)
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Whereas the novel asserts the nefarious impact of tourism, it also disparages the way local people get detached from their ancestry and sell the land where they once belonged as an act of desperation: Real estate agents were already cruising Miloli‘i (a village so tiny and “quaint,” signs were posted: NOTICE TO PIG OWNERS, ALL STRAY PIGS WILL BE SEIZED ON AND AFTER JUNE 30), offering outrageous prices for small parcels of land. Fishermen had shot the tires out from under chartered buses bringing in potential investors. But two locals had sold out and fled the island. Toru saw that as the beginning of the end. Fishermen giving in, selling out, becoming no-job, no-land people, pockets full of haole money which they would blow on fast cars, high- tone rents and booze. One day they would end up living in Honolulu’s slums. The pattern kept repeating itself. (Davenport 1995: 225) There is a mixture of anger and sorrow in the novel when dealing with land occupation for tourism or military purposes, the actions of corporations tend to obfuscate the consequences of their activities by inducing people into a misleading impression of economic stability. Perhaps even more significantly is the inability of “the tourist industry to recognize fully the complexity of the island’s population, which far exceeds the stereotype of Hawai’i as home only to Native Hawaiians happy to play host to visiting whites” (Desmond 1999: 33). Henceforth, in line with Desmond’s assertation, Anne Keala Kelly ironically describes the connection between tourism and militarisation of Hawai’i using belligerent imagery, as a “lovely, symbiotic relationship – send in the calvary to secure the perimeter and after that it’s all real state, pilgrim” (2014: 43). Nonetheless, tourism has been simultaneously singled out as a particularly grasping neo-colonial phenomenon that is the basis of cultural loss and the disruption of Native Hawaiian identity, and one of the most profitable industries operating in the archipelago. A good number of tensions and disputes have been generated between Native Hawaiians who claim the right to protect their land, and
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business entrepreneurs who effectively own entire areas that are used to construct hotels and resorts. These have been especially evident in reference to cultural and environmental issues, with many Native Hawaiians acknowledging their storied and sacred places concurrently as objects of their Indigenous power, and as relevant material symbols of that authority (Bacchilega 2007). Consequently, there is a semiotics of “South Pacific” landscape in which Hawai’i is inscribed, that I have already referred to in Chapter I, with its exuberant nature and the eros of (female) bodily allure that is often used as tourist-flow attraction. As Ferguson and Turnbull point out, The ascension of white male power had not only spelled out safety for the sugar industry and the military, but it began to underwrite the sexual fantasies and social practices of tourism as well. Desire and anxiety worked together to create the exotic/erotic Other. Feminized Hawaiian males, desexed Asian menials, and exoticized Hawaiian ‘hula- hula’ girls constituted the sturdy labor base and the refigured subjects for this new order (1999: 40). Ty Kāwika Tengan, who has extensively studied Native Hawaiian masculinities, explains that “the desire and admiration for the Hawaiian male body were also linked to anxieties that were experienced by [Native Hawaiian] men who felt that civilization and modernity had softened them, thus creating a need to reconnect with the “primitive masculinity”” (2008: 52). As such, notions of race and masculinity were inscribed on Native Hawaiian male bodies in ways that further enabled the rise of Hawai’i as a tourist destination (Desmond 1999), and largely contributed to their disempowerment (Tengan 2002 & 2008). In sum, Tengan asserts that “colonial masculinities have worked to disempower and marginalize Native men” (2002: 245) with great impact on the structure of families. However, contrary to those representations and stereotypical images there are parallel narratives that reinforce the idea that “the conditions of everyday life in Hawai’i expose a history of dispossession and occupation that saturates its very geography and architecture”, thus “when invasion is recognized as a structure, not an event, its history does not stop” (Wolfe 2006: 402). The predatory abuses of
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tourism corporations demonstrate how tourism appropriates Indigenous culture as a commodity, and by doing so those practices also engage in forms of systemic violence against people and ecosystems. Environmental degradation caused by the assumption that every element human and non-human can be consumed/domesticated is acknowledged not only as a form of cultural disruption but also as a form of violence. Davenport describes the particular grasping way in which dolphins are treated as commodities: The Halenani, where, for the amusement of guests, eight dolphins were imprisoned in a pond less than the size of an acre. Now and then a dolphin died, ciguatera, pollution from the motorboats, an infected human’s hands, who knew? and more dolphins were shipped in. Each time Toru drove past the place, he thought of the dolphins at night, circling, hearing the clicking, squeals and chirps of their own kind calling to them from beyond lava walls too high to leap. The ocean, so tantalizingly close, so impossibly attainable (Davenport 1995: 225). This perspective presents captive animals – dolphins – yearning for their natural habitat, used to entertain audiences, which entails an anthropocentric perspective that excludes non-human others and legitimates Western supremacy over Native Hawaiian natural elements. The disruptive nature of Western behaviours towards animals and ecosystems, namely the imprisonment of animals in zoos, for example, is concomitantly informed by the “tourist gaze” that promoted the consumption of Indigenous cultures. Jane Desmond elaborates on this parallelism extending it to the axial connection between the exotic and the erotic by asserting that “in such spectacles, the exoticism of the animal was important, as were its size, strength, and wilderness. Nature was here subdued by men in an eroticized display of phallic power” (1999: 156).11 Moreover, displaying “exotic” animals for the consumption of masses remains as symbolic of imperial triumph over colonised lands, thus
11 This phallic power and, consequently, phallic order is described by Desmond as a narrative that was not only visible in the control over Native Hawaiian people in terms of the gender demarcation – male and female – constituted through the imposition of gender roles, and the Western model of family’s structure, but it was also reinforced by the introduction of zoos with animals such as tiggers and lions metaphorically associated with men’s prowess (Desmond 1999).
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ultimately it can be argued that “in a Judeo-Christian philosophy that values mind/spirit over bodies, animals are placed lower in the hierarchy of valuable beings and therefore more subject to domination” (Desmond 1999: 149). Subsequently, the ontological split between humans and nature is currently at the basis of ecocatastrophes and pandemics across the world. Yet Native Hawaiian culture offers a different mode of thinking in which all entities – human and non- human – are included and actively interacting with each other, being part of each other. Donna Haraway observes that, “species are the dance linking kin and kind” (2008: 17), a kind of kinship that Davenport has presented in her novel, one that includes multiple perceptions of the world but always grounded in the Native Hawaiian concepts of aloha ‘aina and kuleana, love for the land and responsibility, implying that all elements are interconnected in webs of kinship and accountability. The novel hence portrays local concerns grounded in the survival of ecosystems, positing that the environmental crisis caused by the misuse of natural resources has simultaneously a cultural, social, and political agenda. Davenport demonstrates the extent to which social plans are indifferent to Native Hawaiian communities, Irreversible pollution of coral gardens at Kāneohe. Stockpiling of nuclear weapons at Waikele. Radiation of productive fishing grounds at Pu’uloa by nuclear submarines. A proposed rail transit system on O’ahu, that would devastate the tiny island’s fragile volcanic foundations, traumatizing Hawai‘i’s entire ecological system. And the hideous and dangerous H-3 Freeway under construction, costing $1.2 billion federal dollars. While high schools crumbled. Day-care centers went to rust. While college scholarships for native locals disappeared. While unemployment, alcoholism, crime, suicides soared among Hawaiians (Davenport 1995: 317). The institutional neglect towards the Native Hawaiian community is paired with the desire to acquire extensive tracts of land to be used either for the construction of resorts or to build military facilities (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua 2014; Kelly 2014), and Native Hawaiians are currently facing varying degrees of
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oppression and marginalisation, which suggests inasmuch as it proves that racism, as a signifying practice, can be extended to the environment and how natural resources are distributed among the population. Race continues to be crucial in social demarcation, also playing an important role in distinguishing between those who benefit from some protection or even get compensated for environmental damage, and those who are left with the disproportioned burden of resource depletion, toxic debris, and natural catastrophes – such as sea level rising or typhons – caused by the acceleration in climate changes. Racial inequality and geographical uneven development as well as environmental damage are directly correlated with the legacies of colonialism. Davenport not only exposes environmental degradation, but she focuses on community-based practices that are disrupted when human and non-human elements are separated. The novel challenges global policies and mainstream culture by forcing us to acknowledge the interconnectedness of people’s life and ecosystems. Instead of a romanticised approach to Native Hawaiian culture, Davenport opts for a complex and nuanced narrativization of historical events while emphasising that resistance against any form of violence towards Native Hawaiian culture directly implies resistance against social and political marginalisation. She, thus, reinforces the idea that the permanent attack to their culture encounters a continuous (and collaborative) fight to stop obliteration. In rage, Duke exemplifies this permanent state of resistance: “They’re rinsing us from history. All we can do is fight, until the end” (Davenport 1995: 281). Land acquisition and the shift to private property caused irreparable damage to Native Hawaiians as it has so far been demonstrated with the example of The Great Māhele as explained in Chapter I. From a Western perspective, the more tracts of land one owns, the wealthier one is, and this has been the principle applied whenever overseas territories where conquered. In Native Hawaiian cosmology the interconnectedness of elements – human and non-human – dictates the well-being of people, being cultural identity informed by that specificity. Davenport carefully pays attention to that relationship and to the importance of preserving it. Pono (advised by her old-time friend, Run Run) tells her granddaughters the suppressed parts of their personal stories and she combines those recollections with the
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importance of preserving land as a form of resistance, telling them that “freedom depends on possession of land” (Davenport 1995: 336). However, the meaning of “possession of land” explicitly escapes the Western approach I have previously referred to, and its meaning is not correlated with ownership: The land doesn’t belong to us, you see. We belong to the land. So it ever was, even when we lived under a feudal system, long before the haole came. But this the haole cannot see. They use our land to adorn themselves. And so adorned, they delude themselves that they’re superior. Hawaiians who are stupid and greedy, sell their honor with their land for easy money, then find whites laugh at them, think of them as low, lazy, without culture. (Davenport 1995: 337) Therefore, Davenport’s emphasis here, in foregrounding the differences between Native Hawaiian and Western’s perspectives on land further reinforces the idea that resisting cultural assimilation will only be possible if people retain their connection with the land: “sell your land, and you sell your souls” (Davenport 1995: 338). The ultimate goal of Pono’s decision to summon her granddaughters is to educate them within ancestral knowledge so they can make informed decisions about the legacy they are given – the house and the plantation – which symbolise more than mere commodities to be exchanged in a growing capitalist society. Native Hawaiian identity is firmly rooted in the ties to the land and the sea as expressed in the proverb, “ka mauli o ka āina a he mauli kānaka”, the life of the land is the life of people (Oneha, 2001). In the task of preserving land, and Native Hawaiian culture, Kiana Davenport reinforces the importance of forming coalitions, and revitalises the Native Hawaiian concept of mana wahine, powerful women, as central agents in the process of regaining sovereignty. Addressing an audience of other Pacific women held in Brisbane in a conference on Pacific Women for Saving the Environment, Vanya, Pono’s granddaughter, tries to raise awareness for the similarity of the struggles endured by other women across the Pacific region: But you and I share the same ocean continent. We are all Oceanians first!” She raised her hands beseeching. “We’re
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such small nations, our news gets pushed aside. We have to count on each other, keep each other from dying. You know how the rest of the world sees us? You know what the London Times calls the Pacific? ‘An irradiated lake.’ We’re losing touch with the natural world, the mother-sea, our beginnings!” […] “Sisters, I entreat you! Be iron-fisted! Commit yourself to our future, our children, and our children’s children. Shout! Lobby! So they’ll stop mining out your lands! Fight your husbands and sons seduced by white men’s wages, wasted by his booze. I tell you, the future, our salvation, is in the… Hands of Pacific women!” (Davenport 1995: 250 italics in the original) The entire chapter revolves around the common struggles faced by Indigenous populations of the Pacific, and the importance of forming coalitions among women as they are acknowledged as the core of their communities with the possibility to educate younger generations, and also alluding to the importance of the private realm in processes of decolonisation. However, following Audre Lorde’s theorisation on coalitions (1984), it is crucial to avoid homogenisation in the formation of coalitions by exploring all possible relations in terms of “non- dominant differences” (1984: 99). Extending this idea that it is necessary to devise ways to use each other’s differences to enrich perspectives and struggles (Lorde 1984), I also suggest that Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s work (2003) is relevant in this context since she elaborates on the importance of valuing the plurality of the differences when forging coalitions. It is, therefore, that incursion into the realm of differences that also contributes to more inclusive acts of resistance. Thus, while similarities, sameness of experiences are adequate to construct the space of resistance, it may as well be relevant “valuing not just the plurality of the differences among us but also the massive presence of the Difference that our recent planetary history has installed” (Mohanty 2003: 119). Furthermore, Mohanty posits that “this ‘“Difference”” is what we see only through the lenses of our present moment, our present struggles. And this ‘“Difference”’ emerges in the presence of global capitalism at this time in history” (2003: 119). I argue that Davenport stresses
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the importance of coalitional work to dismantle the varying degrees of oppression suffered by Indigenous peoples without erasing the singularity and difference featured in those specific experiences. In the end, Davenport’s novel follows a path of hope that reiterates the importance of belonging, of decolonial practices based on love that revitalise cosmologies and genealogical connections: Then, by a play of light, Jess saw countless images spring up before her in the waves, the light like a well chain drawing up not water, but faces, all, each of them, faces from other eras, and those more recent, their history more beautiful in remembering. She spoke their names […] Lives permanent because someone, Jess, was there to pass them on. […] They were all out there watching, assembled, in formation, in ancient dialogues. She was not abandoned, she would never be alone. (Davenport 1995: 479-80) As Pono and Duke vanish into the ocean, “they have gone home, to the Mother Sea” (Davenport 1995: 380), which can be perceived as a reference to the connection between human and non-human elements. Jess reminds her cousins and extended family that the future and the fight for the continuity of culture is left in the hands of the younger generation. Therefore, Shark Dialogues validates the importance of the connection between people and land as a form of cultural survival, and Davenport underscores the relevance of that symbiotic link stressing its importance in recovering ancestral knowledge as a mode of actively participating in struggles against American cultural hegemony in the islands. Understanding Indigenous beliefs, modes of knowing and producing knowledge, the interconnectedness of human and non-human elements will teach us more about preservation and continuity. The novel beautifully ends in a mode of hope, but not a romanticised depiction of hope, rather the notion that responsibility/accountability are necessary to carry out any decolonial project. Imua, to move forward, to press on, and perhaps never stop fighting for justice is the last enduring image of the novel, and somehow the idea that best summarises all struggles. Regardless of cartographies, of geopolitical locations, people press on, move forward to achieve
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their goals, and what characterises those never-ending movements is hope (imua) which may be translated differently according to each context or subject.
3.2. Song of the Exile: Militarisation, Gender Violence and Healing
In the second part of this chapter, I would like to bring into discussion, Kiana Davenport’s second novel, Song of the Exile (1999). The novel revolves around the love story of Keo and Sunny, whose voices are combined in narrating the events of their lives. Keo is a gifted and promising jazz musician, and Sunny a talented Arts student, both living in Honolulu in the mid-1930s until Keo is given the chance to travel abroad to play his music. The nonsequential structure of the narrative may leave a sense of fragmentation in its beginning, but it gains a certain constancy as the story of Sunny unfolds. The novel moves backward and forward through the life events of the star-crossed lovers Sunny and Keo, a love-story described using the mythological narrative of Orpheus and Euridice. The complexity of their life- trajectory goes beyond the simplicity of the myth itself, though it relies on its symbology to create the fragmented scenario in which the characters dwell, and the inescapable search for each other. Keo has become part of the music scene in famed jazz clubs all around the USA and then, in France, where he is working in night clubs. The love letters they have exchanged in which Keo describes the places he visits trigger Sunny’s desire to join him and explore Europe by his side, but when she decides to travel, the war (World War II) has already broken, and Europe is being consumed by destruction. Even in this scenario, Sunny leaves Hawai’i to join Keo in France. For some time, they lived and experienced the cultural frenzy of Paris, but Sunny wants more and they draw apart, Sunny then travels to Shanghai where she ends up being captured by the Japanese army. Although different from Shark Dialogues, in Song of the Exile Davenport reintroduced some familiar characters from her first novel, Pono and Run Run, somehow generating a sense of continuity or complementarity between the two novels. Moreover, there are other similarities that might be of interest, such as the historical scenario of the novel, World War II, and the Pacific War with the attack against Pearl Harbor (1941) already described in Shark Dialogues. It is a common thread in Davenport’s novels, the recurrence of historical events that, in varying
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degrees, have impacted on Native Hawaiian culture. From the multitude of events covered in the novel, I will be solely analysing the ones that directly or indirectly contributed to the alteration of Native Hawaiian cultural identity. Furthermore, I would like to look closely to the way that Hawai’i became a militarised territory; the impact of this on the livelihood of Native people; and how Kiana Davenport introduces the representation of so-called “comfort women” as an example of the insidious violence against women. Hence, violence against Indigenous women is also described in Davenport’s narrative as a consequence of the militarisation of Hawai’i. The militarisation of Indigenous lands, namely the entire Pacific region, remains highly problematic, and, nonetheless, contested by activists, artists, and scholars alike. Therefore, it can be argued that Native Hawaiian cultural identity has also been simultaneously affected by Western tropes of paradise, and by the nuclearization of lands that continues to be forged and framed by the social, economic, and ecological legacies of colonialism. Based on that, and despite the vast cultural diversity across the Pacific region, Tilman Ruff points out that, The social impacts of disempowerment; victimization; abuse of basic human rights; disruption of traditional communities, ways of life and means of sustenance; displacement; justified concern about unpredictable long- term health impacts extending to future generations; and concern about transmitting genetic mutations to one’s children can all have profound and long-term direct and indirect physical and mental health consequences. Especially among the indigenous and traditional communities disproportionately impacted, these effects are not only individual and family, but extend to kin, communities and peoples. (2015: 801) As Ruff indicates, in tandem with cultural disruption and ecological despoliation, Indigenous peoples in general have been exposed to a myriad of health problems caused by nuclear testing and nuclear contamination of lands and oceans. Militarisation and, consequently, the nuclearization of Indigenous lands have been
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largely debated, and commonly described as “nuclear racism” (Maclellan 2019) in which the occupied territories are treated as testing grounds with disregard for peoples’ health and the survival of fauna and flora. In Hawai’i, the impact has been of major relevance given the degrees of oppression suffered by Native Hawaiians and, therefore, the cultural assault that has disrupted Native Hawaiian livelihood and epistemology. Accordingly, Anne Keala Kelly elaborates that “military and nonmilitary are partners in the theft and decimation of Hawaiian land and resources. Every single day the occupiers’ housing and material needs are met as countless Hawaiians go homeless” (Kelly 2014: 42).12 Following the same line of argumentation, Jacqueline Lasky posits that militarisation and tourism have been operating together to disrupt Native Hawaiian culture, though there has been permanent resistance to those impositions. Hence she explains that the islands’ postwar and post-statehood tourist economy brought Hawaiian culture to the forefront in order to commodify and sell it for corporate profit and state tax coffers, Hawaiians began mobilizing against their economic and political marginalization as well as to reclaim their culture from its bastardization by the prevailing political economy. (2014: 61) As for Kiana Davenport’s portrayal of a militarised Hawai’i, she blames the U.S for their permanent occupation of vast tracts of land confiscated to build military facilities and to accommodate military personnel. Consequently, I argue that Hawai’i became what the French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, designated a “dominated space transformed – and mediated – by technology, by practice” (1991: 164). Lefebvre’s theory on dominated (and politicised) spaces proves to be useful in analysing the Kiana Davenport’s oeuvre as a form of engaged activism and resistance. Following the opposition between dominated and appropriated space,
12 Homelessness in an on-going reality in Hawai’i mostly affecting large cities such as Honolulu, and Native Hawaiian citizens are also the most affected group. It has been repeatedly raised as a social and political issue in which the capitalist need for profit goes hand in hand with cheap labour and poor job conditions. Anne Keala Kelly (2014) extensively elaborates on the pernicious connection between those two axial premises, adding that the militarisation of Hawai’i has been promoting the precarity of the lives of Native Hawaiians.
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Lefebvre presents an interesting framework for the political use of land from a Western standpoint, and he explains that Thanks to technology, the domination of space is becoming, as it were, completely dominant. The ‘dominance’ whose acme we are thus fast approaching has very deep roots in history and in the historical sphere, for its origins coincide with those of political power itself. Military architecture, fortifications and ramparts, dams and irrigation systems – all offer many fine examples of dominated space […] dominant space is invariably the realization of a master’s project. (1991: 164-5) The military space occupied by U.S infrastructure can be acknowledged as the apex of state power over Indigenous land rights.13 Anne Keale Kelly describes this occupation as an act of ethnic cleansing (2014). Therefore, Davenport exposes in her novel the extent to which “the realization of a master’s project” (Lefebvre 1991:165) has been in the agenda of imperial practices: Land that was supposedly set aside for native Hawaiians, for one dollar per plot each year. Instead it’s leased to foreign corporations, the U.S. military. All these years, those folks are still on the waiting list for land. (Davenport 1999:300-1, italics in the original) Despite the evident contradiction between a Marxist-based spatial analysis (as proposed by Lefebvre) and Native Hawaiian epistemology in which land is not considered a commodity, I think that Lefebvre’s theoretical structure may still be useful; within his idiom, I argue that Pearl Harbor can be perceived as an example of a dominated space, whereas in Davenport’s narrativization of Hawai’i it also
13 The militarisation of Hawai’i has been an on-going issue and had acquired different shapes in its occupation of Indigenous lands. Several are the groups demonstrating against land desecration using all available means, most notably social media, to form coalitions with other marginalised groups within the U.S territory. In July 2020, the on-going battle over the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope owned by NASA in Manua Kea, a sacred mountain came to a halt, and the construction of the telescope was postponed which has been celebrated as a victory for Native Hawaiian people who from the beginning have protested against its construction.
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appears as a symbolic and “representational space” (Lefebvre 1991:34) where resistance is enacted. The restoration of Native Hawaiian appropriated spaces may not be entirely possible. However it is through the writing of Native Hawaiian voices by recalling stories, by human actions and reactions, that resistance to occupation takes its shape within communities. Moreover, Kiana Davenport also alludes to the possibility of recovering ancestral values by looking at a simpler way of life, in a rural context, and, perhaps, by journeying into the inland, the core of Hawai’i with its sacred places. The following passage clearly illustrates the importance of ancestral knowledge and connection with nature: Up in the sharp, bold Wai‘anae Mountain Range – paralleling the Ko‘olaus to the east – were steep ridges, rain forests of double canopies. Here were sacred heiau, ancient temples, and caves, spirit dwellings of dead chiefs. Here was also a district where, within eroding houses, people’s lives were endangered. […] Lives were once again based on the old tradition of bartering and sharing. It was still a hard and challenging land. It kept the people hard, wary of outsiders. Haole saw the Wai‘anae Coast as primitive and dangerous, rebellious kānaka living in shacks of weathered wood and rusted tin. But this coast had one thing much coveted: broad white strands of beaches, the pure unblemished sea. (Davenport 1999: 303-4) Lefebvre points out that “any revolutionary ‘project’ today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the reappropriation of the body, in association with the reappropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda” (1991: 166-7). It is my argument that the “revolutionary project” in Hawai’i, as in any other Pacific island, includes simultaneously the (re)writing of bodies in dominated and appropriated spaces that occurs via art – namely literature – in which those bodies are re-inscribed and, ultimately, the recuperation of ancestral knowledge via the (re)connection with sacredness of places and ecosystems, contributing to the transformation of appropriated spaces into places
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again. In the face of eminent cultural dispossession – “Our people are being erased. It’s done by stealing land, then wiping out culture, and Mother Tongue” (Davenport 1999: 296) – Davenport proposes active interventionism through education and art. This is exemplified in the novel through Keo’s gifted skills as a musician: “Jazz is everything. It’s slavery. It’s massacres. It’s black skin, red skin. It’s crying for your mother. Your motherland” (Davenport 1999: 296). Jazz is no longer personal as Keo had thought: “Man, jazz is personal – not racial” (Davenport 1999: 296), it has become politicised and a form of intervention and resistance. Traditionally, jazz is not part of Native Hawaiian culture, though its cooperative modes open space for collaboration between cultures – Native Hawaiian and Afro-American – that have been historically subjugated. Davenport overtly locates marginalisation and subjugation as global rather than merely local or circumscribed to a specific location, alluding to the glocalisation of violence.14 Song of the Exile depicts one of the major events in Hawaiian history concerning the American militarisation of the archipelago during the early period of World War II, the attacks on Pearl Harbor: “we’re now an official combat zone. Tanks guarding ‘Iolani Palace. Waikiki Beach a mass of barbed wire” (Davenport 1999: 151, italics in the original). Geoffrey M. White asserts that “for mainstream America, World War II remains largely the ““good war”” (2001: 267); however that may not be the description used by Native Hawaiians when remembering Pearl Harbor, which continues to be one of the major symbols of dispossession and militarisation of the archipelago. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i was under Martial Law from 1941 to 1943, with military impositions enforced on all residents of Hawai’i. Under Martial Law, every aspect of Hawaiian life was under the control of the military governor. Rationed food, censored news, imposed blackouts and curfews were some of the measure taken, called General Orders; any violations led to punishment by military tribunals (Trask 1999a; Scheiber 2016). During the years that Martial Law was enforced, Hawai’i became “a militarized outpost of empire, deploying troops and nuclear ships to the south and east to
14 I am purposely using the term “glocal” not to refer to a certain romanticised approach that tends to imply the happy inclusion of local realities into global spheres but to extend the concept to the realm of cultural dispossession and violence in which multiple peoples from different localities can share similar problems and form coalitions.
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prevent any nation’s independence from American domination” (Trask 1999a: 17). When referring to the military presence in Hawai’i as a dynamic process that imbricates the inclusion of military codes, symbols and above all values, Phyllis Turnbull and Kathy E. Ferguson posit that “telling the history of the militarized presence of Hawai’i entails paying attention to how these observations are facts, of how they qualify to enter into discourse, to be spoken and understood, contested or taken for granted” (1997: 97). It is, however, the normalisation of a specific type of discourse that includes military codes/imagery and has, so far, reconfigured human and natural landscapes that seems to be problematic and needs to be dismantled. Furthermore, the effects of militarization and, consequently, of war extend to the fragmentation of identities and post-traumatic feelings. Accordingly, the future is vested in profound uncertainty for those who have lived under those conditions, being that future also shaped by the naturalisation and legitimisation of military mores. The confessional tone used by Malia, Keo’s sister, in her letters to her brother exemplifies what the war will cost to Native Hawaiians and their future: “whatever happens, even if this war ends tomorrow, Jonah will come home different. I’ll tell you something. We’re all going to come different” (Davenport 1999:152, italics in the original). In 1943, Honolulu became “a town of war nerves, the mighty whip of sirens. Everything rationed, beyond their means” (Davenport 1999: 169). Throughout Davenport’s narrative, discourses of militarism and tourism are inextricably interwoven, demonstrating that imperial “slow violence” is promoted by “a wider network of articulations that create the fundamentally modern tension between work and leisure” (Teaiwa 2005: 16). Western perspectives on nature disregard the Native Hawaiian sense of belonging and cultural identity profoundly connected to non-human worlds as well as their sense of aloha ‘aina. The divergence of paradigms is well-illustrated in Song of the Exile, in a conversation between Malia and Vivian, a white woman married with a Native Hawaiian man and living in Hawai’i: I know I’m ignorant about your culture,” Vivian said. “I’m just not meant for the islands. Your local talk. The food you
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eat. I have no friends. All his friends talk about is ‘āina, ‘āina.” “Land is what Hawai‘ians are about.” “But, you’re not forward-thinking. Don’t you see? You people can’t waste precious land on farming, planting taro. You need developments. Hotels. That’s what progress is.” “Hotels! So my nephews can be busboys?” Malia turned away, afraid she would hurt the woman. “Please. Get out of here. (Davenport 1999:2 55, italics in the original) Vivian represents the Western unsympathetic relation towards Native Hawaiian epistemology, and the glorification of economic development, so that from her viewpoint it is possible to perceive the unawareness of the sacredness embodied in farming or planting taro. The Native Hawaiian cosmic genealogy perceives these two activities not only as sacred but also as activities that highlight Native Hawaiian people’s connection to Papa – Mother Earth – and Wakea – Mother Sky – divinities who brought taro to the earth (Beckwith 1976), hence symbolising kinship between people and land. Additionally, Davenport problematises here the extent to which the development of mass tourism causes ecological and cultural disruptions as was the case in Shark Dialogues, studied in the previous section. Henceforth, Davenport proposes a land ethic that simultaneously includes a strong sense of community and the sacredness of non-human elements vital to the formation and continuity of Native Hawaiian cultural identity. Subsequently, the novel fosters the importance of land as fundamental in Native Hawaiian cultural identity, and it is possible to draw a parallelism between certain cultural practices in Hawai’i and Celéstine Vaite’s description of the ancestral practice of the burial of the placenta. Davenport depicts a similar practice that bounds people to the land and to the ocean: “one night her mother came to her with her piko, her umbilical cord […] until her mother swan her piko to the reef, she was not condoned or blessed by ‘aumākua, ancestor gods” (Davenport 1999: 334), further proving that all elements are intertwined. Grappling between ancestry and a globalised economy, Hawai’i has been the space where multiple forces interact, being also relevant to point out that environmental issues
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are intrinsically connected with aspects concerning race, gender, and class. Thus, the intersectionality of those axial elements has been crucial in land distribution, access to private property and protected natural areas, and involvement in Indigenous peoples’ political decision-making (Stein 1997; Adamson 2002 and Silva 2004). When acknowledging racialisation partially as a constitutive element of vulnerability, communities at risk – such as Indigenous peoples – are given a starting point to form coalitions that go beyond territory and skin colour. Colonialism and the environmental racism that I have been addressing are informed by a clear racial demarcation that includes the racialisation of people, and also the racialisation of the so-called oversea territories. Ultimately, Davenport prioritises questions about ethical behaviours towards Native lands and the consequences of militarising places, thus her second love, Song of the Exile, reveals a tapestry of human experiences disrupted by direct or indirect consequences of wars. Framed through the lens of love and sorrow, the life story of Sunny after being captured and made prisoner by the Japanese army revisits the history of the so-called “comfort women”. Let me digress here to, briefly, contextualise the history of such ‘comfort women’ since they play an important role in Davenport’s narrative. The fictional construction of “comfort women” in Davenport’s work highlights the importance of looking at historical events from a position that gives voice to silenced subjects. While reparation seems to be difficult to achieve as it is vested with political complexities (Barkan 2000), it is particularly significant that the voices of these women are given projection, which happens throughout Davenport’s text. The term was common and officially attributed by the Japanese Army to women mainly from Korea but not only (Barkan 2000; Soh 2008), as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Filipino, Dutch, and Indonesian women were forced into a system of organised prostitution, the so-called comfort-stations. However, Elazar Barkan makes a point that “comfort women were not prostitutes; they were slaves. Most were neither persuaded nor seduced to work in brothels. Rather they were imprisoned and forced to submit to rape and sexual assaults” (2000: 49). It is precisely this demarcation in the categorisation of these women – organised
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prostitution and sex slavery – that Davenport explores through the trajectory of Sunny, Hawaiian-Korean descendent. Elazar Barkan (2000) and Sarah Soh (2008) explain that the majority of women who became sex-slaves were abducted, misled, sold and drafted into the Japanese system. However, wartime sexual violence against women is not exclusive to the Asia-Pacific conflict, and undoubtedly the Japanese military was not the first and only one to perpetrate such atrocities – nor can these unacceptable practices be imputed to some hazy, cruel past and simply erased from historical records. As pointed out by the historian Yuki Tanaka, “the contemporary incarceration of Bosnian women in ‘rape camps’ in the former Yugoslavia is strikingly similar to the comfort stations of 50 years ago” (Yuki, 2002: 50). Subsequently, what happened to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women forced into the “comfort system” cannot and should not be ascribed to any inherent “Japanese-ness” or national feature (Mendoza 2003). Rather, it has to be acknowledged that sexual violence against women remains as a foreseeable and unremarked part of war-crimes (Caruth 1996; Chuter 2003), another potent weapon through which an aggressor wields power over the victims. Undeniably, sex and militarism are connected even in times of peace, a phenomenon that can be seen from the flourishing sex industries that have a propensity to appear near military bases (Mendoza 2003). The debate around “comfort women” has never ceased to be addressed as Japan refuses to acknowledge those women as war victims. Katharina Mendoza explores the case of “comfort women” in the Phillipines, and asserts that the various collectivities that comprise the comfort women movement (mostly in the Philippines and the two Koreas) continue to seek an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government, demanding reparations not only for those wartime atrocities but also for the decades that followed, during which the comfort women had been, for all intents and purposes, erased from public memory (2003: 249). In a short interview published alongside with Song of the Exile, Kiana Davenport claimed that she had relied on extensive research about World War II
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and got inspired after attending a lecture at Harvard University in 1993 where several women survivors were speaking. In the interview, she explains that “they wanted to educate people to what had been done to them by the Japanese. I learnt that “comfort women” was a term despised by these women for it suggested prostitution. Since eighty percent of all women kidnapped and raped were Koreans, they preserved the word chongshindae, which means “‘conscripted worker’” (Davenport 1999 n/p). In the novel, Davenport depicts simultaneously an unromanticised Hawai’i being torn apart by the American military impositions, and the violence suffered by women who were abducted and turned into sex slaves. The novel explores the vulnerability and the resistance of Sunny, who has endured pain since early childhood, witnessing gender violence at home: “One night, sitting on a bench, Sunny talked about her abusive father, how he had never wanted her, how he abused her Hawai’ian mother. How being unloved sometimes made her feel invisible” (Davenport 1999: 31). Davenport projects into the construction of Sunny one of the most heinous crimes committed against women, sex slavery, and the life trajectory of Sunny is sadly exemplary of the pervasiveness of violence against women in times of war. Firstly, Sunny was sent to a concentration camp, and later when the Japanese troops moved to Rabaul, “military bastion of more than a hundred thousand men, major supply base for Japan in its drive to take New Zealand and Australia” (Davenport 1999: 16),15she was also held captive, together with “nearly eight hundred girls” (Davenport 1999: 16). When finally Rabaul is freed by the Allies, Sunny chooses to return to Hawai’i, and the journey back home is embedded in mythical features. The process of journeying home and the attempt to find solace in a familiar place assumes a restorative meaning, but nonetheless vested in some complexity as Sunny will have trouble in healing from the trauma. Thoughts about the experiences in the camps will haunt her day and night. Nightmares will keep her awake at night as a reminder of her own suffering, and of other women who did not survive the abuses. Back in
15 Rabaul is located in New Britain, Papua New Guinea. During World War II, Rabaul was captured by the Japanese army (1942) and it became the major naval and military settlement in the South Pacific region. Nowadays, it is one of the many tourist destinations in the Pacific popular for its fauna and flora, volcanoes and sea, being also a major harbour were several cruise ships dock every year contributing the escalating levels of sea pollution already a key problem for Pacific Islanders.
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Hawai’i, Sunny recalls the days in the camps, and the atrocities suffered by so many other women: She thought again of Quonset huts in the Pacific. Typhoid barracks in Jakarta, Manila. Frozen tents and boxcars in Manchuria, Nanking. Kidnapped P-girls forced to march into blizzards, into swamps, into battle, defending their executioners. And when they were raped to death, diseased and finished, their bodies were split open, their warm organs used to thaw cold feet, or feed the army’s livestock. Thousands of young girls. Hundreds of thousands (Davenport 1999: 344).16 Susan Soh, in her ground-breaking study, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (2008), traces the history of sexual slavery during World War II and the constitutive features that framed the system of violence and abuses against women who were kidnapped or sold to be sent to “comfort stations”. Soh explains that the nature of sexual slavery is pervasive to patriarchal societies, since “gendered structural violence emanates from the economic, political, and cultural forces that are embedded in everyday life – notably gender, class, racial and ethnic inequality, and power imbalances” (2008: xii). Therefore, and in line with Susan Soh’s study, I argue that Davenport’s depiction of “comfort women” demonstrates how militarisation is connected with colonialism, and how the militarisation of sexuality was a direct consequence of empire building. My argument fundamentally revolves around the spheres of violence and vulnerability to which women are permanently exposed to. Judith Butler in Precarious Life (2004) acutely problematises the connection between vulnerability and violence, pointing out that “women and minorities, including sexual minorities, are, as a community, subjected to violence, exposed to its possibility, if not its realization” (2004: 20). If violence produces vulnerability, and then vulnerable subjects are the easiest targets meaning that the condition of being vulnerable is, consequently, produced within certain contexts and perpetuated
16 Throughout the novel, the expression P-girls refers to the designation attributed to young girls forced into sex-slavery. It means prisoner girls.
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against certain elements in societies, then, ultimately, they can be subjugated and marginalised. As a mode of relation, Sunny in the novel gives voice to women who were silenced because they were not acknowledged as human, and whose lives were not grievable. Butler posits that An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others. (2009: 38) I bring into my argument this categorisation of grievable and ungrievable lives as explained by Judith Butler to highlight the nature of violence exerted against women and Indigenous peoples, not only in the strict sense of contexts of war, but expanding it to contexts in which globalised and imperialist policies are implemented without further concern and respect for those who are being forced to accept them. Henceforth, by giving visibility to ‘comfort women’ through the voice of Sunny, Davenport underlines the historical conjuncture of structural power in colonialism and militarism, and customary violence against women under patriarchy, classism, and racism. The nature of gender violence navigates through realities organised based upon spheres of power relations, and it is often supported by global militarised economies. The porous nature of power relations is amply problematised through Sunny’s recollections when asked questions about the time in Rabaul. For instance, the conversation between Sunny and an U.S. Army officer demonstrates the extent to which victims are frequently blamed: He was white, well fed. He had spent the war behind a desk. She told what she could bear to tell, and when she finished, the man quietly suggested that P-girls had been too passive, too accepting. Sunny shook with rage. “We were never meek, or passive! We were women with bamboo sticks. They were soldiers with machine guns. (Davenport 1999: 239, italics in the original)
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Evidently, in the face of such reality, women could not escape, though the mere assumption on the part of the officer that they could possibly have done so is, per se, an act of violence which implies that those women complied with the aggressors, thus delegitimising the actions of those who deliberately raped and killed women. The end of the novel is bewildering and full of fragments, which suits the life experiences of Sunny. The juxtaposition of thoughts by Sunny and Keo respectively represents the fragmentary nature of official narratives in the sense that there are myriad of untold histories, and it is mandatory to re-evaluate “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured” (Butler 2009: 5). The lives of Indigenous peoples have not been acknowledged as grievable in Butler’s sense, and any form of colonialism, militarisation and/or nuclearization is a premeditated failure in apprehending those lives. Ultimately, Indigenous women and men alike all over the Pacific did not ask to be part in a war battled quite far from their shores, though colonial alliances had been forged and people from all corners of the world were summoned to join Europe and later the United States. Therefore, Pacific islands were viewed as strategic sites for military interests leading to the events of Pearl Harbour, for example, or the occupation of Rabaul in New Guinea by the Japanese army, just to name a few. The degradation and dehumanisation of Sunny’s body demonstrates the extent to which that violence is insidious, and how she became a fragment, an occupied body that did not matter: After three years, Sunny’s clothes have worn to yeasty rags. Her leather shoes are green with fungus, crumbling with decay. When she walks, they feel like dank mushrooms. A bit of shrapnel lodged in her leg has worked its way out after months. It leaves a large infected hole which maggots feed on. She grows used to the sensation, her body as a living host (Davenport 1999: 147) The “living host” referred to here can be seen as a metaphor also for territories and occupied lands, living organisms that host the predators’ hunger for progress and economic development, and the maggots an analogy for colonialism and its parasite condition feeding on Indigenous cultures. In the vein of that, the representation of
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Sunny’s body functions as a metaphor of the tragic effects of World War II in the Pacific region in the sense that in the aftermath of the conflict both, women and land/ecosystems were left behind damaged, the land suffering the nuclear impact of bombs being dropped on, and Sunny turning out a crippled woman, broken into a thousand pieces. The land and Native Hawaiian people’s identity are intrinsically connected validating Native Hawaiian epistemology of aloha ‘āina or love for the land demonstrated by Sunny’s desire to return to Hawai’i as an attempt to heal but also reinforcing the human interconnectedness with land. Despite the differences in landscape in the midst of an urban ethos altered by tourism, Sunny intimately recognises the place where she once belonged: “Seventeen years. She cannot comprehend the changes. So many tourists […] Tall, parched buildings inching their way up to the light […] Yet somewhere, she knows, in dark humid valleys, in moist green groves, things remain primordial”. (Davenport 1999: 238, italics in the original). The journey back to Hawai’i is both Sunny’s tribute to herself as a survivor despite the inner exile that is at the core of her existence, and the dignification of a nation that was torn apart by a conflict that was not chosen by its people. Following Sunny’s life trajectory, one may ask if some form of closure, healing or reconciliation is, eventually, possible in the face of such atrocious life experiences. The answer seems to be highly personal depending on each individual’s capacity to overcome tragedy, given that people respond to or acknowledge events at many different levels. In relation with South African post-Apartheid reconciliation process, Nancy Scheper-Hughes “Is reconciliation possible without some kind of powerful, transcendental faith? Surely, as many have argued, a first step in the politics of reconciliation and forgiveness is knowledge seeking, learning exactly what happened to whom, by whom, and why” (2004: 126). Knowledge seeking is therefore crucial to heal the wounds of traumatic pasts. Nonetheless, when returning to Hawai’i, Sunny was unable to live a public life, to socialise, thus mirroring the life experiences of many “comfort women” who lived the remaining years of their lives in exile, fearing shame and rejection (Mendoza 2003; Soh 2008). Still, she
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could find solace in her proximity with the ocean. This proximity is rather relevant as it demonstrates the cosmological relationship between Native Hawaiians and natural elements that are integral components in Native Hawaiian cultural identity. Davenport emphasises the intricacy of human connections, and the spiritual interconnectivity of ‘ohana (family that can be extended to community not only blood-related members of a group) as constitutive aspects of Native Hawaiian cultural identity. In an effort to engage intersubjectively with community building to confront gendered violence, Davenport elaborates on the importance of genealogy, to a certain extent beyond blood, as a restorative healing practice: Healing hands of the mothers of her mother, ancient mele chanters and tale weavers chorusing in Mother Tongue. They will gently bathe her, soothing her bones. They will rinse her hollows. Swaying on the ocean floor, they will turn, passing her nightmares from hand to hand like heirlooms. Her pain will be made bearable; they will bear it with her (Davenport 1999: 354). Hawai’i surges as a liquid space, and the ocean as a healing element in which other sacred elements – mele chanters, Mother Tongue – are preponderant in restoring Sunny’s identity. The last scene of the novel beautifully puts together the connection between all the elements – women, land, water – reinforcing the possibility of resisting and, fighting back, as well as it recuperates the water imagery as purifying: And into that sea she pours. Down, down to the arms of mele chanters and tale weavers. To that army of young women swaying on the ocean floor. Women who died voiceless, and will never stop telling. Women whose memory ripples the skin of soldiers’ dreams. Women whispering at our nerve ends. A hand on each other’s shoulder as they walk away from time (Davenport 1999: 355, italics in the original). Water can also be read as the amniotic liquid, and Sunny journeying home metaphorically alludes to the entrance of a sacred realm that may be perceived as a
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“return” to the maternal womb. Moreover, water is in Native Hawaiian culture a sacred element, D. Kapua‘ala Sproat asserts that “In addition to providing a foundation for Indigenous society, fresh water was also deified as a kinolau or physical embodiment of Kāne, one of the four principal akua (ancestors or gods) of the Maoli pantheon” (2014: 202). Henceforth, the allegoric meaning of the passage quoted above also demonstrates that culture, kinship, or cartography are part of Indigenous beliefs that reinforce the importance of sharing experiences, seeking knowledge so the voices of women “will never stop telling” (Davenport 1999: 355), and never stop denouncing the violence and the abuses they have (for centuries) endured. Engaging plurality in ways of seeking and producing knowledge possibly resists the ubiquitous logic of elimination of historical abuses, and to a certain extent it also reinforces the importance of restitution. In Song of the Exile, Davenport not only recovers some of the major themes developed in Shark Dialogues but she also exposes the nature of violence committed against women alluding to the ever-present connection between Native Hawaiian identity’s formation and their symbiotic connections with land. By focusing on the relationship between gendered violence and environmental violence, I am also addressing the way Davenport’s novel reinforces the nature of storytelling as an expansive means of performing survivance (Vizenor 1999; McDougall 2016) with tangible and intangible cultural benefits. In conjunction with Shark Dialogues, Song of the Exile proves to be part of “resistance literature” (Harlow 1987) when denouncing colonial forms of ideological repression and the disruption of cultural production. Both novels challenge the notion that Indigenous literatures serve solely as a site in which the “othering” and “otherness” of Pacific women as victims, homogenous objects without agency (Mohanty 2003), is criticised and alternatives are offered.
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3.3. Chapter’s Conclusion
Davenport’s novels are among other aspects love stories, and inevitably we are drawn into a context where the private realm coalesces with the public sphere, firstly proving the interconnectedness of human and non-human elements, and secondly reinforcing the nature of political awareness in every day actions. I am paying attention to this creative construction of “love stories” given that they prove to be quite relevant as Davenport demonstrates a profound sensitivity to the ties that bind Native Hawaiian people to their lands, to the ocean, the environment as a whole, and ultimately love surges as a restorative tool, a decolonial practice as described by Chela Sandoval (2000) whose theory I will be addressing in the following chapter. Henceforth, those are some of the characteristics that define Native Hawaiian cultural identity as exposed in the Davenport’s selected novels, in which the political commitment forged through Native Hawaiian attempts at regaining autonomy is amply depicted. By articulating Native Hawaiian continuation and connection to aloha ‘āina, Davenport explores the conceptualisation of dominated and appropriated spaces in order to demonstrate how colonial and imperial practices were (and continue to be) imposed on Native Hawaiian culture. Love in Native Hawaiian language can be translated as aloha, a word with multiple meanings that has been used to describe human relations but also the relation established between human beings and land, for instance aloha‘āina is the feeling/bond between people and the land, thus it fully informs decolonial practices within the Hawaiian context. It seems to be the ontological framework of aloha ‘āina that transforms it into a counter-discursive concept that, ultimately, challenges coloniality in Hawai’i. Therefore, the possibility for decolonial practices to be enacted resides in the epistemological assumption of aloha ‘āina within which people are inseparable from their ecosystems, and this assumption informs their struggles based upon this “ethic of care”. It has been my argument in this chapter that Davenport addresses Native Hawaiian cultural identity within the complex tapestry of her novels, thus the continuity of that cultural identity occurs through the revitalisation of telling stories that take into account Hawaiian history and cultural practices. Therefore, these two novels which combine the fictionality of literary productions and crucial historical
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events also underpin the political beliefs that have characterised Native Hawaiian sovereignty movements. The stories narrated in Davenport’s novels examined here entail the possibility of resistance against the on-going cultural assimilation promoted in American-globalised policies, as well as they indicate an engaged perspective with Native Hawaiian epistemology. Davenport’s sense of aloha ‘āina appears articulated in her form of denouncing colonial impositions and neo-colonial touristic discourses about Hawai’i where resistance to dominant structures can be possible. Rather than looking for silences or silenced subjects that may eventually speak from the margins, Davenport’s narratives are informed by the power of what can be said. However, contentious as it may seem, it cannot be claimed that Davenport partakes directly in what has been commonly described as literary activism as others before and after her were engaged in, such as the literary work of Haunani-Kay Trask or the prominent work of Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. Nonetheless, it is also my point that Davenport’s informed narratives can be recognised as a fundamental source of knowledge in which there is a clear preoccupation with Native Hawaiian values and cosmology. In Davenport’s oeuvre her recuperation of aloha ‘āina as a counter-colonial discourse is simultaneously visible through the construction of her characters, in how Native Hawaiian history is traced/recovered, and in the overt preoccupation with denouncing an American imperialism that continues to alienate people’s sense of belonging and cultural identity. The two novels cross-fertilise and enliven one another by exploring the lingering effects of American occupation and Americanisation of Hawai’i. Davenport explores the ways in which representation of environmental issues is moulded by social inequalities, and the necessity of political resistance in the face of relentless and disproportionate ecological threats inflicted upon Native Hawaiians. She problematises the sort of colonial rhetoric that is based on two apparent antagonist ideas, on the one hand the enforced militarisation of Hawai’i, and on the other the paradisiacal narrative of tourism that has been imprisoning Native Hawaiian people. Whereas tourism and military forces have been a source of income and employment, it is undeniable the massive consumption of natural resources or the desecration of sacred sites. Therefore, Teresia Teaiwa defines this
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construction as a “militourist complex” (1999: 249) in which colonial relationships are negotiated based upon the treatment of the Pacific as testing ground for nuclear experiments and a strategic commercial space. The contrast between the implied violence of militarism and the alluring images of Hawai’i is appalling as the majority of Native Hawaiians are homeless and landless (Teaiwa 1999, Kelly 2014), which is the sort of image that is concealed from the common postcard used to commodify Hawai’i. Subsequently, the intertwined correlation between militarism, tourism and environmental degradation has been asserted by Kiana Davenport illustrating the extent to which Native Hawaiian people have been marginalised. When telling the history of Hawai’i from a Native perspective as is the case of Davenport’s narratives, it implies reflecting upon multiple spheres of violence: material violence of dislocation endured by Native Hawaiians; discursive violence entailed in telling Hawaiian history from a colonial perspective; ontological violence inscribed in creating a particular order to organise spaces and bodies; and gender violence as a result of the inferiorisation of Indigenous women in that ontological order. When describing the colonial process in Hawai’i, Phyllis Turnbull and Kathy E. Ferguson (1997) refer to the spheres of violence entailed in the process which are connected to the militarist nature of land dispossession, the dichotomy between civilized and uncivilised, and the entire alienation of Native people from their beliefs and cultural practices. It is, then, explained in the manner of a detailed summary that The explorers encountered a place they defined as largely empty of meaning, lacking in culture, and therefore available for Western expansion. The missionaries found a people they defined as dark, mysterious, lacking civilization, but capable of being domesticated. Entrepreneurs and sugar planters found the people lacking industry, the land uncultivated, but a promising venue for profit once an appropriate labor force could be secured. The military saw/sees Hawai’i as strategically important and in
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need of defence which imported American soldiers can supply (1997: 99-100). Therefore, it is through these conceptualisations that inform colonialist and imperial discursive practices that Hawai’i has been coded into an available space through which “an imperial megalomania” (McClintock 1995: 26) asserts its domination. Sexual metaphors have been widely applied to the context of colonised territories, describing the hierarchical relation between colonisers and those who are colonised, thus current Western perceptions of Hawai’i still perpetuate the imperial megalomania referred to by McClintock through exoticised and still militarised territories across the Pacific. Despite the differences between Davenport’s two novels, together they produce a form of counter discourse that recuperates Native Hawaiian history from a perspective that validates the symbiotic relation between humans and non- humans, a sheer preoccupation with the survival of Indigenous cultural practices, and that overtly denounces the ongoing imperialism in the archipelago. Therefore, Davenport offers a perspective in which cultural resistance is part of a situated understanding of Native Hawaiian struggles for self-determination. Informed by some of the main issues pervasive also in the narratives of Vaite and Figiel, Davenport partakes in their notion that culture is political. Writing is an artistic creation but simultaneously political, and resistance may occur enlightened by both the recuperation of ancestral knowledge and its applicability to contemporary (and globalised) realities. Moreover, when referring to her own poetry, Haunani-Kay Trask explains that “writing is both decolonization and recreation. It is creativity in the Hawaiian grain, and therefore, against the American grain” (1999: 19). I dare assert that this formulation can also be applied to Davenport’s oeuvre in the sense that it, simultaneously, exposes the American subjugation of Native Hawaiian culture, while it celebrates every historic and cultural aspect of Hawaiian culture as a form of resistance in a continuing refusal to be silent in the face of pervasive American (neo)coloniality. Alongside with the historical/cultural decline, militarisation and the nuclearization of the archipelago, Native Hawaiian people have been suffering from land dispossession and poverty, with a great impact on the way they interact with
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spaces – public and private – and interfering with their relationship with their cultural practices. Those are the cycles of violence produced by colonial and imperial practices, hence by isolating Indigenous people from their culture, which implies the direct connection with the land, I have argued that those are ways of distributing vulnerability in Butler’s understanding of the concept. Shark Dialogues and Song of the Exile describe the far-raging process of ecological imperialism in Hawai’i since the arrival of Euro-American settlers as well as both novels demonstrate that Native Hawaiian people were not merely passive recipients of colonialism. On the contrary, Native Hawaiians soon organised political events, marches, and demonstrations which are significant constitutive elements in Native Hawaiian movements to raise awareness for their problems (Lasky 2014). Throughout the two selected novels, it is possible to find traces of a certain rhetoric of resistance that attempts at recovering Native Hawaiian ancestral knowledge while combining it with current challenges faced by Indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, it is my argument that within the colonised space, the intervention of Native Hawaiian women in the construction and negotiation of power relations remains crucial. Brilliantly put together, Noenoe K. Silva asserts that resistance against all forms of oppression was always visible, it took place and form in several ways and involving men and women alike, because “as power persists so does resistance, finding its way like water slowly carving crevices into and through rock” (2004: 163). The following and last chapter of this thesis, Chapter IV, will address Sia Figiel’s novels from a standpoint in which Samoan culture will be preponderant in framing the literary narratives also as constitutive elements in the discourse of resistance and decolonisation. Building up on the discussion of Indigenous traits in Vaite’s and Davenport’s fiction, the focus of analysis will be placed on the Samoan context.
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Chapter IV
Searching for Light(ness): Knowledge and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Novels
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Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth… the transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change… When all else has fallen away, love sustains. bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love.
n an interview conducted by Paula Moya for the Boston Review (2012), Junot Díaz, the Dominican-American and award-winning writer, explained that I the kind of love that I was interested in, that my characters long for intuitively, is the kind of love that could liberate them from the horrible legacy of colonial violence. I am speaking about decolonial love […] Is it possible to love one’s broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power person? (Díaz 2012: n/p). While reading the interview, Sia Figiel’s novel Freelove (2016) came immediately to my mind, and it is difficult not to relate the question posited by Junot Díaz with the characters from her novel. I have chosen to address in this chapter two of Figiel’s novels, Where We Once Belonged (1996) and Freelove (2016) from this perspective, thinking of love as a decolonial practice, because it seems relevant to understand Samoan culture (and Figiel’s role within it) as part of those Indigenous Pacific cultures in which ethic relationships are forged. As such, my readings of Figiel’s selected novels stem from this theoretical approach in which love assumes a decolonial possibility, though this will not be the only aspect explored in the texts. This is not to advocate a romanticised analysis of Sia Figiel’s novels, which in fact sometimes escape the realm of romantic love to assume a deconstructive praxis of dominant ideologies. Throughout Figiel’s novels Western and Samoan epistemologies are problematised from the point of view of young girls whose lives are shaped by the interconnectedness of Western and Samoan cultural practices and knowledge. Rather I am paying attention to the possibility of seeing love as a
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political action as described by bell hooks (2001), an important source of empowerment when deconstructing issues of race, gender, and class in conjunction with Sandoval’s conceptualisation of a “differential mode of social movement” (Sandoval 2000: 137). Accordingly, decolonial love is thus not so much an individual feeling as “a hermeneutic, […] a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, towards a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement” (Sandoval 2000: 139). According to Chela Sandoval in her book Methodology of the Oppressed (2000), love, when perceived as a mode of “differential consciousness”, as counternarrative or as a state of being in a third space (Bhabha 1994) can generate decolonial practices revealing social actions and identity constructions that are necessary in the understanding of individuality and collectiveness within a context of cultural and economic globalisation. The transformative power of love calls for a detailed look into the possibility of resistance in which love shows its potential as both affect and action. Sia Figiel is a contemporary and acclaimed Samoan writer. Her novels have won admiration for Figiel’s use of traditional Samoan storytelling techniques, the use of Gagana fa’a Sāmoa, the Samoan native language, and the use of Samoan myths, particularly in her first novel, Where We Once Belonged (1996), which won the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Figiel’s oeuvre includes other works such as The Girl in the Moon Circle (1996), a novella published nine months after the publication of Where We Once Belonged, followed by a collection of short stories, poems and autobiographical fragments, To a Young Artist in Contemplation (1998); the novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), and most recently Freelove (2016). She has also recorded some performances with Teresia Teaiwa. Figiel has won several literary prizes and has held numerous writer-in-residence positions in universities both in Europe and in the Pacific. In 2003, Figiel was diagnosed with type two diabetes, a disease that had run in her family, both parents died as a consequence of it. During some time, she kept her medical condition a secret, feeling it to be a sign of weakness. With help from family and friends, she began to address her health problem publicly, and since then she has been raising awareness for the problem by sharing her personal experience. Her story was featured on CNN,
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where she talks about her struggles with food.1 In sum, she has been actively contributing to demystify the disease, diabetes, and obesity as well as participating in a wider debate about food habits as a form of cultural expression in globalised societies. As in several other contemporary novels from the Pacific, the thematic core of Figiel’s narratives revolves around the tensions among the multiplicity of contesting interpretations of social practices and of the social place that can be acknowledged as an ethnospace (see Appadurai 1990) occupied by dissimilar forces. Besides, Figiel writing focus on the life of Western Samoan girls and women whose voices had been largely absent from Pacific Indigenous writing (Keown 2005). Despite the differences between the selected novels, Sia Figiel maintains common denominators that permit a certain continuity between them, such as the recurrent portrayal of the life experiences of young teenager girls. Figiel’s narrativization of Samoa and the colonial encounter is, to a certain extent, more focused on the chaotic moral landscape produced out of that moment, and on the violence enacted against young girls and women not only as consequence of colonialism but also as a feature in pre-colonial Samoan society. When choosing adolescents as the narrators in her novels, Sia Figiel is proposing a new (refreshed) look to Samoan culture based upon multiple and diverse interactions between ancestral practices and modernity as is also the case in Vaite’s novels, discussed in Chapter II. In an interview conducted by Juniper Ellis, Figiel refers to the importance of empowering silenced voices within the Samoan socio-cultural context to better understand its dynamic, and she posits that she wanted to prioritise the voices of young girls: No one asks for an opinion from a child, unlike in the west where children's opinions are sometimes so powerful they put their parents in jail in some instances, especially in your country [the USA]. Whereas in mine, there is such a sense that children are seen and not heard. So it's empowering of
1 Information retrieved from CNN website, “From a minute to a mile: A beginner runner’s journey (2014) and “I’m no longer stressing about the scale” (2014) where there is full coverage of Sia Figiel’s life story, and her participation on a triathlon competition. https://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/11/health/fit-nation-sia-running/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2014/05/30/health/fit-nation-sia-scale/index.html
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people who are otherwise disempowered by social hierarchy. (Figiel 1998: 75) The novels to be analysed in this chapter, Where We Once Belonged and Freelove, explore the intricate hierarchical relations established within Samoan society in conjunction with the complexities of individualism, the “I”, and communalism, the “We” that are part of cultural changes and Samoan relational identity. Conversely, by creating the sort of fiction that unpacks the silences and experiences of girls and women, Figiel is creating a rhetoric that discusses the positionality of Indigenous women within the socio-cultural context of Samoa, reinforcing the notion that Pacific Islands women’s voices need to be asserted, heard, and heeded, [f]or the colonizers also prescribed roles for us as the sexual servant, the dusky maiden, the exotic native, the innocent savage, the “‘happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired’” girl. We must not consent to our own abasement, or invisibility” (Marsh 1999: 343). The refusal to acquiesce with imposed exoticisation and invisibility is expressed through the rewriting of traditional myths, and the creation of spaces that escape those colonial frameworks. However, Figiel’s stories are nuanced somehow given the innocence ascribed to children who voice the inequalities and violence suffered not only by themselves but also by women, thus violence and inequalities are often by-products of power relations and hierarchical stratification. Figiel’s depiction of the life of women and girls is puzzling given the nature of violence that they are exposed to within their communities governed by strict patriarchal norms. However, the story of Alofa, the narrator of Where We Once Belonged, does not idealise any static notion of pre-contact Samoan culture and way of life, rather Figiel recognises that centuries of colonisation and the current stage of globalisation have been imprinting significant changes in Samoan society, largely contributing to the disruption of Samoan culture and cosmology. The realisation that cultural and societal changes have occurred does not necessarily imply that ancestral and traditional knowledge should not be part of contemporary Samoan cultural identity, yet it may imply that social norms need to be reconfigured from a less gender-biased demarcation. Annemarie Tupuola, a Samoan scholar, explains that fa’asamoa values, the Samoan way of life, forbid women, particularly young women from rebelling
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against codes of conduct validated by family and community (aiga), being sexuality the most regulated behaviour, and women responsible for controlling girls’ sexuality. Tupuola refers to the difficulty of women in talking or even denouncing abusive behaviours, and she posits that “young Samoan, as subordinate members of the social structure of Samoa, are forbidden to speak in the presence of adults, and elders in particular, on topics related to the human body and sexuality” (2000: 64). Jeanette Mageo in her anthropological study about Samoan society, Theorizing Self in Samoa: Emotions, Genders, and Sexualities, defines Samoa as “sociocentric”, a categorisation that refers to the hierarchical roles occupied by each individual within the society, the “ontological premise” of how Samoans should be, and behave in the social milieu (Mageo 1998). However, as problematised by Jeanette Mageo, the major implication of this sociocentric feature is the subversion (and annihilation) of “inner thoughts or feelings” (1998: 11), the marginalisation of the self in its subjectivity (lotto) to comply with the wishes and expectations of the aiga, the wider collective that often includes family members, and community members (from church to village leaders). The complementary nature of these two studies contributes to a better understanding of Samoan socio-cultural practices, and theoretically inform my readings of Sia Figiel’s overt critique to some ingrained practices among Samoan people. Accordingly, I will point out how Figiel offers a literary construction of Samoan sociocentricity that coincides with the one elaborated by Mageo, on that can be put in dialogue with Tupuola’s analysis of women’s sexuality in Samoa. It is, however, the shifting paradigm in Samoan relational identity – I versus We – that seems relevant to understand certain processes of cultural assimilation that Sia Figiel introduces in her narratives. Figiel’s problematisation of Samoan culture goes hand in hand with processes of colonialism and imperialism that have also transformed the way Indigenous people interact with their socio-cultural contexts as previously demonstrated in Chapters II and III. Therefore, the indoctrination that occurred when missionaries entered Samoa, and the introduction of Western ontologies exacerbated the pre-existing differentiation between men and women, also allowing that men could exercise even more power over women. Accordingly, Theophilus Okere asserts that
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The dehegemonisation of the world order, the decolonisation of the mind and the dismantling of prevailing Western thought patterns and world views, too long dominant and suffocating, that have for so long locked the genius of three-quarters of humankind and still hamper authentic indigenous self-understanding and self- expression, has become the agenda and programme for the rest of the Third World. (2014: 20) It is exactly this dehegemonisation of the world order referred to by Okere that seems to be part of Figiel’s decolonial project through knowledge seeking, and also the importance of focusing on Indigenous self-expression and ways of knowing that have been amply marginalised as demonstrated by Florencia Mallon when elaborating on how “decolonization, therefore, involves the questioning of the racial and the evolutionary bases of colonial power, and how these have tended to underlie the construction of knowledge” (2012: 2). However, processes of questioning and problematising colonial power are never simple or straightforward and tend to be complicated by the hegemonic power of globalisation and multiple processes of cultural assimilation. The unevenness of globalisation in tandem with imperial domination either in terms of geographic occupation or cultural appropriation are evident in overseas territories governed both by the USA or European countries. The economic growth that has always been advertised as a consequence of global policies and markets soon impelled Samoan people to migrate to New Zealand, Australia, Hawai’i and the USA, and “Samoans with kin ties to American Samoa could use these to gain access to the United States and did so in steadily increasing numbers” (Macpherson 2004: 166). It is, therefore, these links that help in establishing power relations within communities, thus the wealth and the importance of each aiga is measured based on how many of its elements are living and working abroad, as well as how much money or goods they send back to the relatives. Moreover, Macpherson posits that “goods and cash from abroad fueled competition between families and villages in Samoa” (2004: 170). Power relations are established based on those who could
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name more relatives living a good life abroad and capable of sending back home either goods or cash.
4.1. Where We Once Belonged: Coming of Age in a Glocalised Samoa
Where We Once Belonged is Sia Figiel’s debut novel published in 1996. It tells in the first person the story of a young girl named Alofa Filiga, living in the fictional village of Malaefou. While focusing on Alofa’s life and her coming-of- age, Figiel explores the intricacy of Samoan culture and the legacy of colonialism. In terms of structure, the novel follows the pattern of traditional Samoan storytelling, fagogo, which overtly reinforces the nature of Indigenous knowledge in terms of its orality. When describing her creative process in the above-mentioned interview to Juniper Ellis (1998), Sia Figiel explains that I think of myself first as a performance poet. And second as a writer. Writer to me is a very western thing, the mere act of writing is non-Pacific Island in origin, which is why I did not prioritise it. Which is why the oral tradition was just very much a part of the origins of Where We Once Belonged (Figiel 1998: 77). By taking advantage of the fluidity proper to oral tradition, Figiel exquisitely interweaves prose and poetry, fiction and mythology as well as she makes great use of the juxtaposition of the lyrical and the comical, as in these lines: “We laughed whenever Sugar Shirley, the fa’afafige, walked around Malaefou with nothing but Tausi’s panties and bra stuffed with coconuts. These incidents filled our days with butterflies and grasshoppers” (Figiel 1996: 5). It is, then, this fluidity that also describes the movements of the characters, reiterating the inseparability of the individual from the social landscape that proves to be one of the major themes developed by Figiel throughout the narrative. Nostalgia or any remote wistful feeling related to pre-colonial times are overtly avoided, and Figiel focuses on dismantling any possibility that may reduce her characters to mere agentless victims of colonialism and the Westernisation of Samoan culture; accountability thus is crucial in understanding the cultural dynamics produced through the juncture of the
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oppositional forces – Western and Samoan knowledge – that characterise Samoan society. Alofa Filiga, 13 years old, is the narrator of the novel, her sharp-eyed analysis of Samoan culture proves to be challenging and covers diverse themes spanning from the banal sexualisation of Polynesian women, particularly Samoan girls, and the hyper-exoticisation of clichéd images of tropical abundance, which contrast with the acts of abuse and systemic violence committed against young girls. Jennifer Newell explains that processes of resilience and adaptability in Samoan culture are rooted in this concept of community which means that “Fa’aSamoa is a particular Samoan approach to living. It is at the heart of strong social cohesion; ways of relating to each other and to environments; customs and material culture; long traditions of being both rooted in land and effective in migration; and a capacity for adaptability” (2018: 144). It is, therefore, from Alofa’s internal positionality that Figiel also describes a locally rooted cosmology, the Samoan way of life – fa’asamoa – characterised as an embodied worldview, “a sacred trust and the basis of the Samoan claim to autochthony within the islands and, indeed, within the Pacific” Macpherson 2004:165Moreover, previous to the arrival of Western colonisers and settlers, the social dynamics of fa’asamoa was “articulated, managed, mediated by its guardians, explained and justified social relations within that archipelago and became the authorized version of Samoan reality” (Macpherson 2004: 165). Alofa lives in-between contrasting realities – one constructed to promote Samoa abroad, and another that entails the everyday life of Samoan people – and learning her way through this dichotomy may be quite tricky for a young girl. However, it is also this in-betweenness that allows her to navigate (not very peacefully) through the controversial life of her village – full of Christian rules, torn apart by those same rules – and her own sense of discovering what may reside in that interstitial place between tradition and modernity. Alofa’s narration of her days reinforces the tensions between traditional Samoa, in which Indigenous knowledge competes with Christian mores introduced by missionaries, and a globalised Samoan society in which imported commodities, American pop culture, and,
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mostly, imported education systems are consumed and, to a certain extent, have replaced Indigenous epistemologies. When discussing the representation of cultural identities in the Pacific, Vilsoni Heneriko elaborates on the impact of Western education and the missionarisation (Heneriko 1999) of the region by asserting that “Christianity, like formal Western education, endeavored to impose values and beliefs that were supposed to prepare Islanders for life in a modern world” (1999: 147). The processes of converting Indigenous Samoan people and the prohibition of certain cultural practices (dances, chants, the use of Gagana fa’a Sāmoa, the Indigenous language in Samoa) often culminated in the alienation of Indigenous Samoan people from land and community, an erosion of cultural identity that, to a certain extent, generated a gap between people and their Samoan cultural identity. Alofa perceives the world from her own positionality within the community she is part of, however, her perspective allows her to question certain behaviours or some of the rules inasmuch as she tries to make sense of them. Albeit Alofa’s subalternised position, she simultaneously questions the legitimacy of punishment and violence against young girls, and acknowledges the effacement of “I”, the individuality, in favour of “We”, the family, and the collective. In an essay assignment written to her schoolteacher, Miss Cunningham, Alofa tries to explain this duality, by answering her teacher’s questions, “Nothing was witnessed alone. Nothing was witnessed in the ‘I’ form – nothing but penises and ghosts. ‘I’ does not exist, Miss Cunningham. ‘I’ is ‘we’… always” (Figiel 1996: 133. Figiel demonstrates here a clear preoccupation with this contentious binarism – I versus We – as a form of subjugating and subalternising women, thus Samoan women are understood in terms of corporeality that needs to be tamed, and controlled given its “unbridled passion, undirected energy” (Lugones 59: 2002). Despite the important nature of community building in Pacific societies, this effacement of one’s individuality is gender-biased which inevitably leads to women’s double colonisation. Furthermore, the double colonisation of women within the socio- cultural context of Samoa is perceived through the towering presence of patriarchy and the coloniality of being (Maldonado-Torres 2007) that locates Alofa in an in- between place that she intimately contests: “what are we supposed to do to reverse
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the verdict that we were only in-betweens? And why was it so important for us to be ‘good’?” (Figiel 1996: 5). Alofa always questions the pre-established order, always paying the price for being curious, punished constantly for daring, for laughing: “we loved laughing, and laughed and laughed at the slightest things” (Figiel 1995: 5). Laugh assumes its transgressive form and disturbs silence and apparent quietness. Laughing is subversive, and also used to disrupt the order because, even if remotely, Alofa’s voice may be heard through this laugh (innocent as it is, though) that defies authority. In a large sense however, I argue that within the dialogic features of Figiel’s novel this allusion to laughter may as well be understood as a way of challenging the socio-cultural constrains lived by women. I am not advocating that violence is dismantled through laugh, though laugh assumes an escapist feature that proves to be rather useful in the way young girls deal with multiple abusive practices. Behind the apparent communal harmony, Figiel portrays the strict taboos surrounding women’s sexuality, violence and physical punishment suffered by young girls, thus revoking the exotic depictions of Polynesian women and ironically writing back to Margaret Mead’s treaty about the sexuality of young Samoan girls, which had been known as an anthropological failure due to Mead’s misconceptions about the theme, and her fallacious assumption that all Samoan girls were happy adolescents. Alofa brilliantly describes the Derek Freeman vs Margaret Mead controversy as follows:2 Mead was a palagi woman who wrote a book about Samoan girls doing ‘it’ a lot… and they were loving and loved ‘it’ too. Freeman was a palagi [white] man who said that Mead, the palagi woman, was wrong about Samoan girls doing ‘it’ a lot… and that Samoans are jealous, hateful, murderers people who do not know how to do it (Figiel 1996: 204).
2 The Mead-Freeman controversy has been amply debated within the field of Pacific Studies as one of the many erroneous anthropological studies that had promoted a series of stereotypes about Samoan people. Neither Margaret Mead in her book, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (1928) nor Derek Freeman’s response to it, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983), proved to be correct in depicting Samoan culture as both at length failed to understand fundamental aspects that characterise Samoan history, society and culture which was analysed and discussed through a Western perspective.
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This naïve adolescent perspective diminishes the anthropological debate centred on the European obsession with the sexuality of Indigenous peoples to a trivial argument between Mead and Freeman functioning as well as “ethnographic satire that is deployed to show a frank disregard for the explanations and achievements of outside ‘experts’” (Huggan 2001: 44). Significantly, this satire is a deconstruction of Mead’s claims for her representation of well-adjusted heterosexual Samoan teenagers. Robert Young points out that “[n]ineteenth-century theories of race did not just consist of essentializing differentiations between self and other: they were also about a fascination with people having sex – interminable, adulterating, aleatory, illicit, inter-racial sex” (1995: 171). Because Indigenous women from the Pacific have been historically represented based upon those stereotypes, sexuality provided numerous metaphors for the submission of Indigenous societies and territories as permanently available (women and lands), that ostensibly offered themselves for capture and possession. Under this colonial rhetoric of Indigenous women’s uncontrollable sexuality, it became particularly pertinent for missionaries and white settlers alike the introduction of social reforms that simultaneously removed Indigenous women from positions of power, replaced traditional gender roles, and exerted social control over their bodies, the sort of control that linked sexual freedom to issues related with maternity and giving birth (Jolly 2002; Penn & Lee 2010; Andersen 2010). Henceforth, centuries of ingrained hyper-eroticised and exoticised images of Polynesian women, including Samoan ones, have amply contributed to the notion of sexual paradises in far islands, being those depictions part of the colonial rhetoric that has marginalised Indigenous women. Thus Figiel demonstrates through the repetition of words such as “palagi”, meaning white person, and sentences such as “doing it a lot”, how complicated and biased the representations of Polynesian women in general are, and how patterns of cross-cultural connections in Western discourses are largely articulated in gendered terms of sexual relations (Young 1995). However, the oppression of women and children referred to by Sia Figiel in her first novel cannot be solely acknowledged as being exclusively a consequence of colonial practices, white hegemony or simply repressive Indigenous socio- cultural practices. Rather, it is crucial to consider the multiplicity and the
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complexity of dialectical exchanges that frame those cultural systems. Western (mis)understandings of Indigenous cultural practices and social relations are pivotal in Sia Figiel’s novels. Postcolonial and Indigenous Feminist theories have extensively debated on the constitutive dynamic of gender in imperial and anti-imperial power. It is relevant to note that pre-contact Samoan society was profoundly stratified, women and men occupied specific places within the dynamic of the matai, the village, but there was no assumption that women were hierarchically inferior to men (Fairbairn- Dunlop 1998), which means that their roles were respected based on the position occupied in the village/community (Su’ali’i 2001; Shore 2014; Chen 2014). Johanna Schmidt elaborates on gender in Samoan culture as a fluid and flexible system, which is coincident with other Pacific cultures. Schmidt asserts that “the incursion of Western models of sex/gender/sexuality into Samoan discourses has arguably resulted in hegemonic ideals of masculinity becoming increasingly physical” (2016: 15). I argue that the introduction and imposition of patriarchal systems is informed by a Western demarcation between genders with the subsequent demonisation of women based upon their stronger association, in Western patriarchal thought, with corporeality and the materiality of bodies. Yet, the disruption suffered by the Indigenous Samoan society derives from this constitution of bodily boundaries, gender binarization, and religious beliefs of impurity and sinfulness. In effect, Anne McClintock posits that to the colonisers “[b]ody boundaries were felt to be dangerously permeable and demanding continual purification, so that sexuality, in particular women’s sexuality, was cordoned off as the central transmitter of racial and hence cultural contagion” (1995: 47). If, on the one hand, there was an implicit fear of contact, and “panic about blood contiguity, ambiguity and metissage expressed intense anxieties about the fallibility of white male and imperial potency” (McClintock 1995: 47), on the other there was a strong desire compelled by the necessity to consume, domesticate, and colonise Indigenous bodies. In any case, the body boundaries were increasingly under scrutiny, and all sorts of efforts were made to control women’s bodies (McClintock 1995). The colonial encounter with its civilising mission promoted the control of women’s bodies and sexualities through guilt and shame.
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Extrapolating from McClintock’s theories, bodies and sexuality are, to a certain extent, a kind of palimpsest in which social formations are enacted, and those constructions rely on perspectives that explicitly exalt the demarcation of gender distinctions that perpetuate social inequalities. There was, indeed, a complete failure in understanding Indigenous practices related with sexuality, and colonial discourses and practices were imposed on Indigenous societies. Those “new” approaches privileged Western epistemological treatment of the human body, and the social stratification that have always characterised industrialised societies over Indigenous knowledge. Thus the result was, from the inception of colonialism, a compelling desire not only to domesticate Indigenous peoples but also to mirror Western societies in those far lands. This desire was, consequently, reproduced through the conquering of bodies, and the permanent punishment of every “deviant” sexual behaviour because those practices did not mirror the purity of white civilisation. In fact, Western humanism and epistemologies can be viewed, according to Leela Gandhi, as “an ethically unsustainable omission of the Other” (1998: 39). Gandhi further asserts that the all-knowing and self-sufficient Cartesian subject violently negates material and historical alterity/Otherness in its narcissistic desire to always see the world in its own self-image. This anthropocentric world view is ultimately deficient on account of its indifference to difference, and consequent refusal to accommodate that which is not human (1998: 39). Such notions of Otherness are intimately connected with the exotic and erotic representations of Polynesian women that locate them in that interstitial space of the “not human” due to features that escape normative Western categorisations of the body. When referring to the colonialization of the Americas and the Caribbean in relation with processes of coloniality of gender, María Lugones points out that “Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species – as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild” (2010: 743), and therefore their behaviours – social, cultural, sexual – as well as their personalities were considered as bestial, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, impure
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and sinful (Lugones 2010). Moreover, viewed from this perspective and assuming that exoticism is a mode of subjugating people based upon phenotypic characteristics, the sexuality-saturated image of Polynesian women was extensively commodified and used in the construction and maintenance of Otherness as a category that differentiates civilised and uncivilised, human and non-human. Consequently, controlling women’s sexuality was one of the fundamental premises of colonialism which is causally linked with how sexuality was viewed in Western societies. Although Samoan traditional practices in pre-colonial times were also based upon the importance of guarding women and controlling their bodies, the fundamental difference between these two modes of controlling women’ sexuality resides in the way sexuality was perceived. From a Western viewpoint, women’s sexuality was simultaneously stereotyped and constructed within a web of ideological forces that, inevitably, shaped subjectivity. Yet, the ossification of gender roles also coincided with discourses that promoted prominent hypermasculinist traits, such as relevant roles within the public realm, physical strength, or virility which emerge as features attributed to white male figures. Anne McClintock posits that: Controlling women’s sexuality, exalting maternity and breeding a virile race of empire-builders were widely perceived as the paramount means for controlling the health and wealth of the male imperial body politic, so that, by the turn of the century [the 19th century], sexual purity emerged as a controlling metaphor for racial, economic and political power. (1995: 47) Additionally, it is also relevant to note that 19th century views on gender were largely informed by Western medical knowledge around the 18th century. Thus the science of craniology, formulated that based on the shape of the skull it was possible to measure the brain and its intellectual functionality, thus women’s brains were considered to be smaller and less firm than men’s, which reinforced the idea that women were less capable to participate in public life (O’Brien 2006). Oddly enough, those presumptions dictated norms of sexual and gender difference
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but also became pivotal in the construction of a colonial rhetoric that aimed at democratising (and domesticating) Indigenous peoples, further magnifying social inequalities. In contrast, Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese Efi explains that in Samoan culture the human body as well as sexuality are vested in sacredness, and that According to Samoan indigenous traditions, the reproductive and sexual organs of the human body underline human divinity and spirituality. […] Preparing the body for sex, where the ultimate aims of sex were to give sexual pleasure and to procreate successfully, meant offering more than a perfunctory education on the dos and don’ts of copulation. It meant understanding one’s own sexuality and making the mind and body comfortable with the idea of sex. […] In ancient Samoa, it was more common for girls to marry during adolescence and virginity was prized as a sign of good breeding. To prepare for marriage, often as part of their learning within the aualuma, girls would be taught about the erotic sensations of the body through playful and serious conversation with fa’atosaga (traditional birth attendants) or other elder women. They learned about female and male sexuality and received counselling about the ups and downs of marriage and parenting. (2014: 66-7) I am quoting Tamasese Efi at length because his explanation about how sexuality was lived in pre-contact Samoa reveals fundamental differences from Western practices. Tamasese Efi goes further in explaining that “this was easier to achieve when there was less social and religious stigma associated with the naked body, genitalia and their public mention or display” (2014: 66). By contrasting these two perspectives, I want to demonstrate the extent to which human behaviours and sexuality were altered, and how stigma, shame, fear, and punishment became integral elements when living and representing sexual comportments. For nineteenth-century missionaries the supposedly unrestrained sexuality of young girls and women was acknowledged as proof of the “heathen” state of Samoan
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culture, and special attention was paid to that so they could be re-educated (Mageo 1998). Accordingly, missionaries saw Samoan sexual relations as behaviours without rules, however, “these relations simply reflected a set of rules invisible to the missionaries because of their radical novelty” (Mageo 1998: 121), and they exposed the colonisers’ inability to perceive Samoan culture from its own set of socio-cultural practices. The civilising project of missionaries partially began with the control over bodies, the sort of control that also “began to erode in the cacophony of discourses that characterized Samoa from the late nineteenth century onward. This erosion resulted in a repositioning of girls’ discourses on self” (Mageo 1998: 121). Western knowledge has defined the politics of gender and sexuality by mapping bodies insofar as it produces power relations based upon sexual dimorphism which means that “the colonizing mission used the hierarchical gender dichotomy as a judgment” (Lugones 2010: 744). Nevertheless, this categorisation not only produced hierarchical relations, but it was also used as a tool of domination by which women were subjugated. In Figiel’s novel it is possible to understand in practical terms this “hierarchical gender dichotomy as a judgement” referred to by Lugones in the sense that women and men occupy very distinct spaces within the societal sphere, the same way that women’s behaviours and bodies are permanently policed by other women and men. Far from assuming that Samoan culture privileged women if one considers the excessive policing of their sexuality, I am rather suggesting that colonialism constructed powerful tools based upon gender demarcation in which colonised men were co-opted into patriarchal systems (Lugones 2007) allowing them to perform even more control over women that was translated into women’s marginalisation within the social dynamics of their communities (Tupuola 2000). Consequently, hierarchical relations between men and women in the European domestic space facilitated the right model to the reorganisation of colonised spaces and places. The Western reinvention of domesticity and domestic spaces facilitated the marketing of the empire as a global system (McClintock 1995) in which women were clearly marginalised in a “domestic space” that was in itself secondary. It is, then, this patriarchal conception of societies that was imposed on Indigenous
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communities, and Indigenous women saw their role within the social milieu diminished. Alofa perceives violence in multiple ways, and usually violence seems to be linked with sexuality, as for example when her friend Lili is brutally raped, or when Alofa is beaten up by her abusive father when he discovers that she has had sexual intercourse with a boy: “Before my hair was cut, before my hair was shaved, I was slapped in the face. Then a belt hit me across the face, too… around the waist, around my legs, around my face again. Fists blew in my eyes and mouth and cheeks, and blood flew out onto the cement floor” (Figeil 1996: 215 ellipsis in the original). Alofa cannot understand the duality in his father’s (Filiga) behaviour, whom she has caught having a love affair with a schoolteacher, which according to the community rules, is morally wrong as he is a married man. However, Alofa cleverly analyses his rage as a mirroring behaviour; Filiga was projecting his frustration onto Alofa by severely punishing her: As if I was the punisher and he the punished… and he knew it… and I knew it. We both knew it too well. By beating me he was beating himself. Beating the Wind. Beating Mrs. Samasoni. Beating the memory of that bridge-umbrella rainy day when I saw him naked – completely naked. And since then he was always naked in my eyes. (Figiel 1996: 216 ellipses in the original) The nature of his rage towards her, his daughter, goes beyond the imaginable, reiterating the extent to which women’s bodies and sexuality are policed and regulated by their male counterparts, who can be either family members or elements of the community occupying a privileged position in the social ladder. The continuous subalternisation of women within the social milieu based on their ability (or lack of it) to perform certain pre-established roles is further demonstrated when Alofa recalls the stories of other women who ended up being despised by their families because they could not bear children. The patterns of violence described by Figiel throughout the novel illustrate how subordination intersects in women’s experiences of gender violence and sexual violence. When recalling the sexual assault that her friend suffered, Alofa explains that “Lili was
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not the daughter of the faifeau or of a chief, or someone with steady employment. She was a bad girl as far as the women of Malaefou were concerned” (Figiel 1996: 59). Following Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory on the intersectionality of gender, race and class, I argue that Figiel is problematising here the fact that women from a societal low-rank are not only less protected from abuses, and subjected to multiple forms of violence, but also that it remains crucial to re-examine the dynamics of communities in order to analyse sexual behaviours and rape within communities focusing on women rather than merely protecting the perpetrators. Accordingly, Crenshaw asserts that “in the context of violence against women, this elision of difference [intragroup differences] in identity politics is problematic, mentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class” (1991: 1242). Social stratification is, in fact, one of the factors that significantly contributes to violence against women, and Sia Figiel explores in this novel that biased context through the life experience of young girls who are even more marginalised than their women counterparts within the communities they belong to due to their age. The toxic masculinity promoted by patriarchal societies implicitly blames women for the attacks suffered, making the processes of denouncing and healing difficult to achieve. The strict regulation of women’s sexuality in Samoan culture (Mageo 1998; Tupuola 2000) common in pre-colonial times, and prolonged into postcolonial Samoan society may lead to feelings of culpability often translated into feelings of alienation and non-belonging. When referring to violence against Black women in the U.S., Kimberlé Crenshaw explains that when dealing with sexual crimes it is generally believed that “the victim brought the rape on herself, usually by breaking social rules that are generally held applicable only to women” (1991: 1275). Unfortunately, this is not exclusive to the American society, and Figiel’s novel expose how Samoan girls and women not only hide the crime committed against them, but they also internalise feelings of culpability. Lili is a good parallelism of what Crenshaw has theorised in the context of Black America; the young girl due to her socio-economic status works as a cleaner for a palagi man and she is not only objectified by him – “Mrs. Brown never called Lili, Lili. He always called her Sheila… my Samoan Sheila” (Figiel 1996: 6 ellipsis in the
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original) – but also stereotyped and vilified by adult women in her village: “[w]omen were constantly whispering about her. ‘I bet she cleans more than just the house’” (Figiel 1996: 9). She is known by everyone in Malaefou “as the paumuku. Everyone thinks she sleeps with sailors and Korean fishermen from American Samoa. Everyone thinks she sleeps with anything that moves… and she does “it” with Mr. Brown… and she’s a slut” (Figiel 1996: 16 ellipsis in the original). Lili was thought to be a prostitute and no one would have given her credit if she denounced the abuser, she is labelled as a bad influence to other girls because as Alofa puts it, “people see surfaces only, and that’s all” (Figiel 1996:15). Given Lili’s connection to the white man, when she was sexually abused by her father, she could not find help and empathy from other women, and so she had refused to denounce the crime, she had refused to break the rules of silence. In effect, Lili’s silence has much to do with her social class, being poor and from a non- respected/privileged family, and with the centrality of community rules that forbade young girls from expressing themselves freely as “young Samoans are taught from early childhood to conceal their true feelings in times of adversity” (Tupuola 2000: 69). Moreover, Lili’s shame is a product of recurring patterns of domestic violence, which is, in fact, gender violence, as explained by bell hooks (1992) when problematising violence against women in African-American communities. bell hooks asserts that violence against women and against children, either exerted by men or other women, is often a consequence of “community acceptance of male violence against women” in which “deeply internalized pain and self-rejection”, to a certain extent, leads to abusive behaviours by men, and “informs the aggression inflicted on the mirror image” (1992: 41-42). Hence, this mirror image described in hooks’ assertion refers to women who replicate the violence they suffer onto other women and young girls which, ultimately, generates complex spirals of violence that are difficult to dismantle. Within the scope of Alofa’s family which is, in fact, a microcosm in a wider community, violence is performed at multiple layers both by men – Alofa’s father – and by women – Alofa’s mother and grandmother – being the women the mirror image referred to by bell hooks. Usually women are the targets of violence, being
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constantly silenced, beaten, chastised and excluded also by other women. Alofa remembers the threats and verbal abuse from her mother: Pisa, the woman who gave birth to me and reminded me every day of my life that it was the worse pregnancy ever. She nearly died. I nearly fucking killed her. […] Alofa, I swear in front of this holy church and all the people listening, I’m gonna stand on your throat and pull your vocal cords out (Figiel 1996: 230). This, ultimately, reinforces hooks’ ideas that patterns of violence are performed by mothers onto their daughters when mothers have also experienced violence and are subjugated either within the intimate core of the family or publicly when marginalised by their male counterparts. As previously noted throughout this chapter, the social structure of Samoa is referred to by several scholars (Meleisea 1987; Tupuola 2000; Su’ali’i 2001; Tchekézoff 2014) as a complex one in which power relations have been established upon social stratification. It has been, so far, acknowledged that gender roles also obey to highly coded interactions between subjects (women, men, and transgender), and it has been explained that gender demarcation was not constructed upon hierarchical categorisation (Schmidt 2010; Chen 2014; Tamasese Ta’isi Efi 2014). Within this social configuration, diasporic movements have largely contributed to the intensification of social stratification as those who leave Samoa “share their wealth with those at home, because hard work and generosity are core social values” (Lilomaiava-Doktor 2009: 66). Prior to the colonial endeavour, Pacific Islander, in general, were already skilled voyagers, and the Pacific region was a vibrant diasporic place (Campbell 1989; Fisher 2002; Matsuda 2012; Armitage & Basford 2014). However, it was the European colonial incursion that prompted other forms of migration. These diasporic movements were motivated by opportunities related with employment, and education, thus several islands became dependent upon those powerful neighbours both for imports and financial support. In Figiel’s novels, those diasporic movements are described in terms of power relations. Counting relatives is described as a child’s play so children can see who is more powerful, “and it was
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always clear at the end of each night that Mulimuli – or Mu, when someone showed affection, or Muli, when not – had the biggest ‘aiga ever. They were the richest too” (Figiel 1996: 26). Diasporic relatives help improve the material conditions of those left on the islands, and Muli’s case is a good example of the accumulation of materialistic possessions. All children, including Alofa, aspire to share in Muli’s privileges and want to be seen with her who lives in a house full of interesting things. They are specially attracted by the tv: Two coloured TVs. Mu’s family had two coloured TVs – one on the first floor of the fale, and the other on the second floor in Pola and Lalolagi’s room – and all the kids and some adults went there to watch Little House on the Praire, Charlie’s Angels, and Dallas. Plus a video machine, too… with Rambo and Mickey Mouse, and men and women without clothes. (Figiel 1995: 26 ellipsis in the original) Figiel exposes here the extent to which young generations are seduced by American pop culture, by imported products from global markets that often replace local ones, but she also ironically parodies the idea that cultures interact and influence each other generating unexpected glocal combinations: Modern Samoa is an electric guitar, and bass, and drums. Unlike old Samoan music where there where perhaps a hundred members in a group: men-women-children… anyone old enough to sing. Singing to the clap of their hands, or to the beat of a tree trunk, or stones. Modern Samoan music is a band. A band consisting of four or five members, grooving to a Samoanized version of ‘Love Me Tender’”. (Figiel 1996: 81, ellipsis in the original and emphasis added) This Samoanized version of Elvis’ song mentioned in the text can be extended to several other cultural adaptations, and it is this mélange that seems to be productive as part of the cultural construction of Samoa. It is, then, the slight touch of parody implicitly present in the use of one of the greatest American icons that undermines the fixity of imposed cultural forms, i.e., “Love Me Tender” and Elvis are no longer
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American, they became Samoan from the moment they are appropriated and turned into something that mirrors the features of those who appropriate it. Thereby, a hybridised cultural element gains shape in dialogical negotiations between traditional and globalised Samoan society. Figiel creates a powerful representation of Samoan cultural traditions, in which the life of people within the community/village is permanently challenged by Western stereotypes and global cultural forms that enter the islands through the media, music and films. The fact that Samoa is territorially divided – into American Samoan and Western Samoa – further helps this circulation and commodification of products which also complicates identity construction questions and notions of belonging. Alofa and her friends define themselves as “Charlie’s Angels” which implicitly alludes to a form of sisterhood, and they are fascinated about American pop culture that they have access to through magazines, TV shows, clothes – jeans and t-shirts – or even foods, which highly contributes to their identity’s construction. Figiel’s attention to these Americanisation processes suggests that despite the relentless desire of children in consuming imported foods, music, and clothes as exclusive demonstrations of power, there is a clear disruption of socio- cultural values that affect the way youngsters apprehend the legacies of ancestral Samoan culture. Although it is also clear that children know best when it comes to the reasons why some people migrate, which are not always to seek a better life, sometimes young women are sent away because they had brought shame on their families, and that has to be hidden from the public eye, as Alofa describes: When Pua was sent to New Zealand three years ago, everyone thought she was on a government scholarship. Of course, everyone believed it! After all Pua was the only girl from here to attend Samoa High School. […] Who would have expected that she was three months pregnant? And that she has done it with Mr Maseligo, who was twenty-three years older than her, and had eight children from three different wives” (Figiel 1996: 22). The camouflage of the issue is ironically described by Alofa, who implicitly criticises the hypocrisy of adults, and again it is made clear that women are doubly
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punished while men remain untouched. For, if anything is certain, the historical alienation between women and men, the Christian belief of shame and sin, and the punishment associated with sexuality are part of this practice of exiling women. Globalisation, consumer capitalism, and education are relevant in Figiel’s critique of modern Samoa, which appears extensively demonstrated in Siniva’s interventions. Siniva is Alofa’s aunt, Filiga’s sister, and the “village fool”, an ostracised madwoman who returned to embarrass her family. She had left Samoa to study in New Zealand, having returned after ten years away. The expectations around her were immense as she was the first in the family and in the village to get a scholarship to study abroad, though she had other plans that did not meet the criteria of getting a secure job in the government. While studying abroad, Siniva was in contact with other realities, thus through the exposure to those “other” realities and knowledge seeking it was possible for Siniva to realign her thinking with ideas about self-determination and sovereignty. And she returned different, “No one recognized her” (Figiel 1996: 185), no one recognised her both physically and intellectually. Through the fictional creation of such a character, Figiel imparts poignancy and a certain irony to the manner in which Siniva’s corporeality alludes to sexual imperialism in the Pacific, and to the impact of Western education. Before leaving Samoa “she was once the most beautiful woman in Malaefou. She had hair the length of a river. Her eyes the color of lava.” (Figiel 1996:185), a description that neatly fits the stereotype of the exotic Polynesian woman, but which also employs natural elements – river and lava – that reinforce, even if metaphorically, the connections between Samoan people and nature. When she returns the changes are immediately perceived, “She was fat, wore an afro, wore no bra” (Figiel 1996: 185). All those features disrupt the stereotype insofar as a fat person is deemed unruly, a demonstration of indiscipline and far less attractive than those exotic subjects that Figiel is parodying. I dare argue that the metaphoric meaning implied in Siniva’s obesity alludes to the excessive consumption of Western models, both cultural and educational. But Figiel goes even further by putting together multiple references inscribed onto Siniva’s body, such as the afro hair alluding to African- American women, the absence of a bra alluding to the image of “burning bras” that characterised feminists from the “Women’s Liberation Movement” in the late
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1960s. Moreover, I argue that the multiple references inscribed in Siniva’s body may as well be read as a reference to women’s bodies as a site in which multiple forms of violence are enacted, but also sites of resistance. In Elizabeth Grosz’s words, bodies “are not only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the very social constitution of nature itself” (1994: x). Accordingly, the several meanings inscribed into the body and the various ways that oppression is materialized through bodies are represented in Siniva’s use of multiple cultural references. Rather than merely appropriating the above-mentioned elements that may symbolise women’s struggles against violence and patriarchal systems, Siniva is including herself in those struggles which can be acknowledged as a way of forming coalitions through difference (Mohanty 2003). While studying abroad, Siniva was able to perceive the extent of women’s marginalisation, she was also exposed to multiple struggles, and joined her voice as an Indigenous Samoan woman to the voices of other women because, to a certain extent, they share the same ruling power of patriarchal ideologies that have obfuscated and marginalised women in terms of gender, race or class. Upon arrival, she commits herself to reminding her family and villagers about Samoan traditions and cosmology, and to criticising the damaging interventions of the Christian church: “She went around reminding the aualuma of Tagaloa’alagi and the cosmos of ancient Samoa, and the old religion, too, which taught respect for trees, for birds, for fish, and the moon. And she started telling everyone, too, that pastors and nuns killed Tagaloa’alagi” (Figiel 1996: 186). Extrapolating from Bhabha (1984) and Spivak (1986), as previously noted, I argue that the imperial project was not only visible through territorial and economic domination, but that it inevitably re-enacted a subject-constituting project through which colonised people were subalternised and re-educated, based on new forms of perceiving the world. However, unlike those who became deluded with (and seduced by) capitalism and globalisation, Siniva refuses to accept passively the new order, and despite all her Western knowledge she tears up all the certificates, resembling Tsitsi Dangarembga’s character in Nervous Condition (1988), Nyasha, who tore with her teeth the pages of a book about colonial history, and maddened, starved herself. Like Nyasha’s,
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Siniva’s anger is also against Western education which has been largely focused on the imperial conquest. Maldonado-Torres asserts that “Western methodic knowledge acquired normative status and led to the rejection or subordination of other forms of knowing. This is an important dimension of what some have referred to as epistemicide and epistemic colonization” (2017: 433). It is, then, this colonial methodic knowledge that Siniva is contesting for it has been one of the many sources of disempowering Indigenous peoples, revealing itself to her as biased and inaccurate. But Siniva’s actions, her attempts at changing paradigms, have a price (perhaps too high), and she ends up being battered by her community – “her father beat her up. Her brothers beat her up… bad. The village women beat her too, with their words” (Figiel 1995: 186, ellipsis in the original) – ostracised by her family and villagers counterparts, and thus exiled in her own home country. Figiel is criticising overtly Western knowledge based on written forms, translated into multiple certificates, the knowledge that has been the basis for perpetuating coloniality among Indigenous peoples, because, as Siniva puts it, they can no longer see the light, they can no longer see beyond the colonial machine that assumes the shape of knowledge, a subliminal way of depriving Indigenous people of their cultures and history as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1981) asserts. In her decolonial quest, Siniva tries to draw attention to the way Samoan culture has been appropriated, and how Samoan history has been written from a Western perspective, and even translated to serve the purposes of colonialism: We are not living in Lightness,” she would say. “We are not. Lightness is dead. Lightness died that first day in 1830 when the breakers of the sky entered these shores, forcing us all to forget… to forget . . . to burn our gods . . . to kill our gods . . . to re-define everything, recording history in reverse. “Now,” says Siniva. “Is our turn to re-evaluate, re- define, re-member . . . if we dare. For this is Darkness (Figiel 1996: 233 ellipses in the original). And she goes further pointing an accusative finger to those who are blinded by too many Bibles, too many cathedrals, too many cars, and too many dollars. Metaphorically, Siniva alludes to the dichotomy Lightness vs Darkness to assert
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that it might be necessary to re-define the current socio-cultural paradigms. There is a clear tension between multiple and competing interpretations of social place as previously demonstrated in Chapters II and III when discussing how Tahitians and Native Hawaiians perceive and feel their lands. The debate is transversal to those islands, since their cultures and territories have been appropriated and represented in a way that locals are estranged from those places as their own home-nations. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has asserted in Decolonizing the Mind (1981) that “imperialism is the rule of consolidated finance capital and since 1884 this monopolistic parasitic capital has affected and continues to affect the lives even of the peasants in the remotest corners of our countries” (1981: 2). In conjunction with the militarisation of the Pacific region, the flow of cash and the globalisation of economic markets have largely contributed to vulnerable dependency ties between the so-called rich nations and the poor ones in the global South. Siniva is critical about the way Samoa has been conducting its own progress, and how tourism has also been a form of masquerading economic dependency. Alluding to the ever- present struggles of many other Pacific Islanders and activists, Siniva bluntly yells at tourists in Apia, “‘Go back to where you came from, you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!’” (Figiel 1996: 187) resembling Haunani-Kay Trask’s similar provocative sentence “We do not want or need any more tourists, and we certainly do not like them” (Trask 1999: 146). Contentious as it may seem, from an Indigenous perspective this is exemplary of how Indigenous people navigate in complex waters when it comes to preserving their cultures, lands, and ecosystems, how difficult it is to dismantle the symbiotic relation between consumer capitalism and globalisation when those forces are coexisting in the same space. Symbolically, Siniva represents the voices of those who fight back, those who become aware of exploitative systems and imperialist policies. It is, however, in taking action both in thinking and in practice that Siniva becomes the agent in a process that aims at rehumanising her socio-cultural context. The re-awakening of Siniva is vested in magical realism elements, and Figiel is not only alluding to Samoan popular stories – the story of Sina and Tigilau3
3 The story of Sina and Tigilau narrates the adventures of Sina and her attempts to find Tigilau. It is a story tinged with jealousy and deception that also talks about sacrifice. Sina dreamt of Tigilau and decided to live her village after being told that Tigilau also dreamt of her. After a succession of
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– as she is also establishing a clear connection between human and non-human elements: She was anointed by a bird who flew out of the Lightness and took her in his beak. The bird carried her body to the tears of Apaula. […] Siniva listened and listened, and agreed with the bird. And the bird laid an egg in a nest nearby and ordered Siniva to eat the egg. […] Siniva tasted mythologies in the shell of the egg. She drank legends, too, in the yolk of the egg… licking fagogo… tasting the adventures of Sina and Tigilau… tasting eels, turtles, owls, sharks and other war gods worshipped in the Light… worshipped by all of Samoa. ‘You are free,’ said the bird to Siniva. ‘You have remembered, again. Return to Malaefou and live among children. Tell them about us, Siniva. Tell them about our Lightness. Tell them that we are still here, that we live on.’ […] But, before she left the pond the bird scratched out her eyes and threw them to a water-eel swimming in the tears of the forgotten light (Figiel 1996: 187-88, ellipses in the original unless marked). The allegoric meaning of the passage above reinforces Siniva’s re-connection with her Samoan ancestry, and the importance of passing that knowledge to young generations as an active engagement with decolonial practices that aim at liberating people from the colonial yoke. In this same excerpt, Siniva’s blindness can be compared to the condition of prophets or clairvoyants in other cultures who are blinded before they are able to touch true wisdom/knowledge, and as a matter of compensation they are given supernatural powers such as the ability to predict the future. However, in a broader sense the allusion to blindness may as well represent the idea of a nation dominated by multiple forms of progress and global policies on the verge of losing cultural sovereignty, of which Siniva becomes the oppositional symbol. It seems reasonable that this blind, exiled woman can see the present, and
events. When they finally met Sina realised that her promise of eternal love was compromised by Tigilau’s desire for other women (see https://samoanmythology.net/st-desires/).
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the future because she has a premonitory vision; her omnivision contrasts with Samoan people’s metaphoric blindness caused by colonialism and consumer capitalism who refuse to acknowledge the extent of the oppression they are living in. Figiel is here criticising Samoan people who are unable to see Western education, religion, tourism and militarisation as part of their colonialization because technological progress, economic growth and jobs – “development” in sum – are associated with those modes of colonialism. The visionary end of the novel is mesmerising, and it speaks volumes about our modern and contemporary globalised world. Siniva’s words resonate with the current struggles of Pacific Islanders, in particular, and world environmental activists, in general. Her tragic but prophetic words are worth quoting at length as a manifesto of today’s environmental crisis and consumer capitalism: Suicide – it is the only way. For isn’t that what we’re all slowly doing anyway? Each time a child cries for coca-cola instead of coconut-juice the waves close into our lungs. Each time we choose one car, two cars, three cars over canoes and our own feet, the waves close in further. Further and further each time we open supa-keli… pisupo… elegi instead of fishing nets… raising pigs… growing taro… plantations… taamu… breadfruit. Each time we prefer apples to mangoes… pears to mangoes… strawberries to mangoes. Each time we prefer tin and louvres to thatched roofs. Each time we order fast-fast food we hurry the waves into our lungs. We suffocate ourselves – suffocate our babies and our reefs with each plastic diaper… formula milk… baby powder… bottled baby food and a nuclear bomb, too, once in a while. Drowning our children with each mushroom cloud, Love Boat… Fantasy Island… Rambo… video games… polyester shoes, socks – everything polyester. We kill ourselves slowly. Every day. Every Sunday. Each prayer to Jesus means a nail in our own coffin. Each time we switch something ON (radio, lamps,
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TV, ignitions…) means a nail in our coffin. And agaga as we once knew it dies in our still biologically functionable bodies, full of junk food… darkness food… white-food… death food. For that is what we consume on a daily basis. We eat Death and we are eaten by Death, too. Symbiotically we live side by side (Figiel 1996: 234-5, ellipses in the original, emphasis added). This paragraph is in itself a treaty that explicitly identifies the major consequences of globalisation and its impact on Indigenous societies. The disruption of Indigenous cosmologies is intrinsically connected with colonialism, a Western cosmovision that is human-centred and individualist, relying on a moral basis of consumerism, private ownership, and profit-seeking, which all combined inevitably lead to ecological and human exploitation (Mellor 1997). Figiel touches here major topics that span from the consequences of bad dietary practices, causing numerous health problems; the nuclearization of the Pacific, which has been largely used as a testing ground for all sorts of nuclear experiments; and the plastification of the world, with plastic everywhere and microplastics spreading all over the oceans, polluting the waters and killing sea animals. This is the legacy of waste that shores in the Pacific coastlines: plastic bottles, plastic bags, chewing gums, fragments of polyester clothes, nuclear debris, electronic components, waste from cargoes and cruise ships, and medical waste. They all are part of the interminable list of “things” that enter the oceans every day, being this a portrait of the Anthropocene, an era shaped by climate changes and environmental catastrophes. Accordingly, George Handley asserts that “climate change has introduced the problem of a human agency that is so profoundly collective that accountability for the changes wrought on the climate is no easy matter to trace” (2015: 333). But are we as a collective being held accountable for the impact of actions that majorly affect non-industrialised nations? I am afraid that the answer is no. More than ever, it seems relevant to re-think the paradigms that inform Western (neo-capitalist) societies, to a large extent, re-think the way human beings interact with nature and ecosystems. Societies, in general, have reached a state of emergency, with planetary diseases that are translated into pandemics as well as an escalating number of environmental catastrophes. These
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are irreversible consequences of human actions, though the deceleration may occur through collective actions that aim at protecting Planet Earth. Propelled by this growing eco-consciousness, writers such as Sia Figiel, Celestine Vaite and Kiana Davenport are exploring literary possibilities of raising awareness, of producing knowledge based on differential modes of thinking, i.e., emphatically looking at Indigenous cosmologies as sources of knowledge that are not only focused on, but mainly preoccupied with environmental questions. Borrowing Handley’s words, “a tale, like an ecosystem, is a human way of organizing the appearance of separation and of chaos into a workable and animated order that our imagination can use as a method for seeing and understanding our limits” (2015: 336). Figiel, as well as Vaite and Davenport, is criticising the ongoing experience of empire, and predominantly the lack of engagement with Indigenous perspectives leading to permanent modes of slow violence (Nixon 2011) against peoples and ecosystems. However, this critical standpoint is extended to those who refuse to see beyond the enticing features of globalisation. The tenacity of Siniva’s words reinforces the contentious nature of environmental sovereignty and the ever- present, never-changing pressure of economic globalisation that overspills temporal and spatial boundaries by simplifying violence and underestimating human and environmental costs. Bearing in mind Nixon’s words, “Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seen – and deeply considered – as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time” (2011: 8). The opening lines of this final chapter in which the narrator details the death of Siniva are crude, dark and without a gleam of hope, but, to some extent, they seem to function as a warning for the dangers of silencing contesting voices and ideas, the dangers of consumption without critical analysis: “The village of Malaefou does not weep and the village of Malaefou does not mourn. It continues. […] It continues as if Siniva never existed, as she was never part of Malaefou…” (Figiel 1996: 233). Sinava’s may not be mourned by her family and community, but her ideas, and her words will resonate in Alofa’s mind. It may happen that the Lightness she passionately talked about might be regained when people conscientiously opt to fight back what Siniva labelled as Darkness (capitalism, globalisation), and actively engage in actions that seek coalitions capable of
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contesting global policies inasmuch as those connections should be capable of working in solidarity across national and regional boundaries (Teaiwa 2018). The permanent state of alert, the precariousness that characterises modern lives, the vulnerability lived by more than a half of the world’s citizens, more insidiously felt by women, children, and elders either victims of wars, unemployment, or environmental catastrophes, causes among many other complex feelings, despair, exhaustion, frustration and anger. All at once, it exhausted Siniva whose life was shaped by precariousness, and she saw in taking her life the ultimate solution. Siniva’s suicide can be seen, to a certain extent, in metaphorical terms, as the death of Indigenous cultures, knowledges, and traditions, an alert, perhaps, telling that for the survival of cultures it is necessary to listen carefully to the messages of those who know better, those who have lived and seen that the world is rapidly changing. However, contrary to the narrator’s assertation that “Siniva’s body is dead. Siniva’s agaga is dead too.” (Figiel 1996: 233), I refute death as the ultimate end of a person’s life, since Siniva’s spirit and words live in Alofa’s mind which, ultimately, sheds a frail light on what might be the future if Alofa chooses a path in which Siniva’s teachings resonate and are possibly translated into actions. There might be hope in Alofa’s engagement with her new self-awareness recognising that it may be important to re-think cultural practices, education formats and people’s behaviours towards ecosystems. This hopeful possibility emerges from the change influenced by Siniva’s letter to Alofa explaining her that the world is composed of multiple realities: there are, in fact, other worlds within the cultural realm that they both once belonged, and a story, a myth or a cautionary tale can assume many forms according to its teller. Perhaps, Siniva was hoping that Alofa would look into her own reality differently, seeking other patterns in Samoan culture that are less biased, less dark, and from that search she could find strategies to move actively towards the light that Siniva has always mentioned. The recurrent use of this image – Darkness and Lightness – is, certainly, metaphoric. Hence, Figiel presents here an attempt at reversing the colonial trope by showing that the Darkness used to characterise Indigenous peoples and cultures by Westerners becomes a feature of the colonisers. This binary construction may, to a certain extent, be problematic as it divides and categorises
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cultures in unsophisticated terms, though it is my argument that by reversing the significance of the colonial trope, Figiel is highlighting the way Indigenous people were depicted and the impact of colonial practices. Furthermore, it is also my argument that this construction presented in Figiel’s text, from darkness to light(ness), implies a decolonial movement through which Samoan people, and Indigenous people for the matter, may seek self-determination based upon knowledge. The questioning attitude of Siniva and Alofa is a form of decolonial love, a decolonial attitude that is profoundly epistemological, ethical, political and aesthetic (Maldonado-Torres 2017). Whether in the end the result is positive remains debatable though I argue that there is always hope, critical hope, in the future as previously demonstrated in Vaite’s and Davenport’s novels. In sum, Where We Once Belonged presents a trajectory that slowly moves from darkness to lightness in a metaphorical sense, meaning that pre-contact Samoan culture was initially portrayed in Siniva’s interventive words as a time of Light in contrast with the Darkness brought by colonialism, and as Alofa becomes aware of Samoan pre-colonial culture, she might be contributing to an hypothetic recovery of certain cultural values. Hence, Figiel recreates a space in which characters navigate towards the possibility of finding within themselves the capacity to resist the darkness embedded in cultural assimilation, and global capitalism only if they acknowledge the possibility of rereading their world from a perspective where contemporary and traditional performances of cultural identity are met without colliding. Perhaps, one of the most powerful aspects in Figiel’s first novel is the permanent negotiation between the use of tropes and symbology from traditional Samoan society and the experiences of young Samoan girls who are influenced by a globalised education that often collides with the ideologies of fa’asamoa (the Samoan way of life). Therefore, the juxtaposition of elements from Samoan and Western cultures respectively is part of and contributes to identity formation as each individual is exposed to a plethora of stimuli. Further, Figiel’s bold engagement with contentious socio-cultural issues – such as gender violence, sexual abuses, extra-marital sex, and suicide – opens room for a debate that questions certain Samoan cultural practices that, to a certain extent, perpetuate the coloniality of
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gender which, according to María Lugones, is produced by intercultural misunderstandings. Subsequently, Sia Figiel’s narrative poignantly portrays the multiple ways in which Samoan culture and society have changed and are still changing, perhaps edging further towards a materialist approach to society already characterised by excessive consumerism. The possibility of change is figuratively enacted by Alofa when walking to the village, As I thought these thoughts the Tuli of Tomorrow flew high up in the sky, a fue tattooed on her wings, a to‘oto‘o tattooed on her peak. The Tuli called to me, her voice music to my feet, and I began walking...walking-walking… away from Siniva’s grave… walking now towards Malaefou, towards the new gathering place where ‘we’ once belonged” (Figiel 1996: 236, ellipses in the original).4 The evocative reference to the “Tuli of Tomorrow”, the mythic bird, is, perhaps, suggesting that in such exhilarating globalised era, in our Anthropocene time, it may be necessary an acute critique to the way each subject/individual interacts with their socio-cultural reality. When contemplating her future, Alofa proves to be aware of what she wants given the sort of experiences she has lived, the stories she has heard, and deeply in her heart she makes her own decision: “I’m never gonna be like Pisa when I grow up. I’m never gonna be like Fiakagaka when I grow up. I’ll never look at men. Men don’t exist. They won’t” (Figiel 1996: 149). Just like a magic spell repeatedly pronounced, Alofa is dictating her future from which she excludes abusive people – women and men alike – as she refuses to perpetuate the abuses she has been subjected to. Her choice might be one of (decolonial) love. Additionally, Alofa as a young teenager will have to deal with several challenges in a place where she once belonged, and somehow embrace the future from a perspective that includes both tradition and modernity. Throughout the
4 Tuli is associated with the myth of creation of Samoa. Tuli is the son of Tagaloa, and one day he left the sacred realm of his father in the shape of a bird. When Tuli left the heaven where he lived with his father, he flew over the ocean, and realised that there was no place to rest. Then, he returned to his father’s realm complaining about the absence of places made to rest. Tagaloa threw down stones to the ocean that became land in order to give his son what he requested. Tuli is also used to designate an endemic species of birds in Samoan language (see https://web.stanford.edu/~hakuta/www/archives/syllabi/E_CLAD/SU_SFUSD_cult/stoneberg/stori es.html).
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novel, Alofa also reveals the possibility of rearticulating her (new) self and her body, which stems from being aware of her positionality within the community as she also demonstrates to be aware of the tenue boundaries between individuality and collectiveness. In fact, her self-awareness may be considered a form of decolonial love as it attempts at transforming power structures of domination (Sandoval 2010). Alofa’s choice to return to the village, to the community and to her family entails a process of redefinition of herself as an individual subject and as a member of all those groups – village, community, family – that radically determines the sort of relation that she may establish with herself and her community, perhaps in a transformative way. Yet, the transformative process that I am alluding to cannot be seen as a simple set of behavioural changes, it rather encapsulates deconstructive processes and new modes of conceptualising identity, gender and class that in this specific analysis may, ultimately, generate an interstitial subjectivity whose performativity opens up room for the enactment of decoloniality of being. Figiel reveals a strong preoccupation with the future of young generations as her novels are always rewriting and reinventing the spaces occupied by adolescents, spaces that juxtapose desire/love and violence enacted against young girls and women alike. Therefore, while young women do not separate themselves completely from the traditional way of life, fa’asamoa, and its values such as compassion and reciprocity, it is evident that they seek independent lifestyles (Tupuola 2000). Despite the ambiguity of the novel’s concluding sentence, “walking now towards Malaefou, towards the new gathering place where ‘we’ once belonged” (Figiel 1996: 236), I suggest that Alofa may represent the individual capacity to problematise the complexity of Samoan culture, the articulation between the possibility of a new “we”, a new collective that reconfigures and mediates tradition and modernity, the local and the global, the possibility of being “in the midst of a concrete plurality, a multitude of interrelated subjects” (Lugones 2002: 60). In fact, Figiel also demonstrates a strong preoccupation with cultural and historical continuity, suggesting that it is relevant to rethink Samoan culture in its form, content, and modes of expression, particularly focusing on the contexts of transition and adaptation. This is the main theme also in Sia Figiel’s third novel,
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Freelove, which explores in detail the juxtaposition of traditional values and globalisation, and to a certain extent, it represents an answer to Alofa’s questions of belonging. However, since it is impossible to turn back time and return to a pristine pre-colonial era, Figiel embraces a project in which “old” and “new” cultural practices are integrated to create a more inclusive future. Ultimately, the bittersweet scent and the harsh descriptions that characterise Figiel’s first novel are replaced by a long hymn to love in its multiple assumptions. Without being melodramatic or naïve, Freelove asks for a more empathic conception of social relations, and Figiel constructs a narrative that, despite the recurrence of themes, seems to be less cynic about the ongoing fashioning and re-fashioning of cultural heritage.
4.2. Freelove: Decolonial Love, Sex and Care
Published twenty years after Figiel’s first novel, Freelove (2016) is, as commented above, her third novel, and it has been selected for study in this study here due to Figiel’s innovative narrative structure if compared to her previous novels. For instance, Where We Once Belonged may be characterised by the existence of multiple characters each bringing something new into the story of Alofa, contributing to a better understanding of the socio-cultural context she lives in. The narrative of Freelove is told by two narrators, Inosia and Ioage, who are the main protagonists of the plot, whose voices speak of the same themes but from quite different angles/positions. Their voices are, then, intermingled creating a sort of dialogue that highlights Samoan epistemology and ontology. These characters present a deep engagement with sexual union that is portrayed in terms of respect, sacredness, but also as a taboo. Sia Figiel presents an exploratory journey through the sexual encounter between Inosia and Ioage that simultaneously attempts at demystifying the taboo around sexual relations between subjects from different social ranks (Mageo 1998; Tcherkézoff 2004 and 2009), and opens up a space in which Samoan cultural and social practices are revised and analysed. Throughout this subchapter I will be focusing on some of the ideas and themes explore by Figiel, such as Samoan women’s sexuality and decolonial love, globalisation, and environmental issues in the Samoan context.
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At first sight, Freelove seems to be a love story told by its 17 years old protagonist, Inosia Alofafua Afatasi, a bright and curious girl who narrates her own sexual and intellectual awakening while navigating through the harsh life in her village full of norms and Christian mores. What Freelove might be about is apparently signposted in the title of the novel: a story about love, freedom, and sacrifice. However, the title seems to function as a game of shadows that simultaneously reveals and hides its intentions. On the one hand, it immediately shows that it is a narrative about love, on the other hand, it also hides the complexities of other major topics explored through the words of the characters that can only be decoded as the narrative progresses. And so, the narrative proves to be more than a simple love encounter. Intertwined with the thoughts of Inosia about her self-awakening, the general preoccupations of an adolescent regarding friendship, her own future, music, popular American TV series, and the usual mother–daughter conflicts, Figiel revitalises the themes that have shaped her previous novel spanning from the colonial and pre-colonial history of Samoa, the relevance of preserving ancestral knowledge, and the impact of globalisation in Samoan culture. There is a clear emphasis on Samoan language as a primary source of educating and decolonising the mind of young generations, and the impact of migration to the USA, New Zealand or Australia in order to develop further studies at universities, shedding some light on how Indigenous people have seen themselves deprived from cultural sovereignty. In a minimalist tone (if compared with the previous novel) and full of poetic nuances, Sia Figiel brings to life the ancestry of Samoan culture through the beautiful and wise words of Ioage Viliamu, a passionate and unconventional school teacher who is given the title of “the best teacher” by his students. Divided in two parts (Book One and Book Two), the story of Inosia (or Sia) about her sexual and cultural awakening is told from a perspective that reinforces respect between feminine and masculine subjects. Book One is the longest part of the novel and revolves around Inosia’s thoughts and ideas, and the narration of the day Inosia (the adolescent girl) and Ioage (her teacher) spend together in a forest where they share intimacy and exchange their personal perspectives on sexuality and on Samoan culture. Book Two comprises the correspondence exchanged between the two
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protagonists after Inosia leaves to study abroad. The love letters not only contain intimate confessions, but they are used by the lovers to keep their discussions on matters related with their village. The novel is thus a long conversation between Inosia and Ioage that demonstrates the complexities of contemporary Samoan society and culture. The love affair between Inosia and Ioage takes place in a forest, an Eden-like site as Figiel herself described it in the interview published alongside with the novel (Heneriko 2016); surrounded and protected by nature the protagonists share intimacy that can be understood as a manifestation of free love. According to the author, free love means unconditional love, a Samoan concept of love that remains highly misunderstood by foreigners as explained by Figiel in her interview with Vilsoni Hereniko mentioned above. The love encounter between Inosia and Ioage is a journey through the senses described in a sort of “sexual realism” (Figiel 2016: 225) that celebrates Indigenous women’s sexuality, intrinsically connected with a profound respect for women’s bodies as a sacred repository of ancestral knowledge (Mageo 1998; Tupuola 2000; Sua’ali’i-Sauni 2014). This is, perhaps, one of the major differences between the two novels, sexuality and the sexual awakening are represented in Freelove as based on sacredness, rather than as sinful, dirty or impure. Freelove may be in its structure a minimalist narrative comprising only two main characters, though it encapsulates an intricate narration that juxtaposes the private realm of Inosia and Ioage’s love encounter and the complexity of history and culture woven together in an exquisite mix of images and words. Figiel brilliantly develops the concept of freedom of love and the freedom to express it, but, to a certain extent, avoids any naïve assumption that the love between the protagonists may be uncomplicated. Thus, the relationship that Figiel creates between Inosia and Ioage is one that attempts at defying social constructions of class. Knowing, for instance, that in social terms their relationship would never be accepted given Ioage’s social status as a teacher, the son of the chief of the village and therefore symbolically Inosia’s oldest brother, both Inosia and Ioage cross the boundaries of pre-established order. Regardless of their social constrains, they opt
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for crossing the boundaries that are socially imposed on them. However, Inosia foresees their future, and she is warned to be careful: What is he trying to do, get us both killed? As I thought these thoughts, an Owl appeared mysteriously out of nowhere. It hovered momentarily above us before it flew away. Disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. And in the shadow of its path I heard a whisper, There’s nothing to be afraid of, Girl. He won’t hurt you. He can’t. But tread carefully. Or someone is going to get hurt. (Figiel 2016: 62, italics in the original) The premonitory appearance of the Owl and the mysterious whispering voice warn Inosia of the dangers of defying the rules. The excerpt above is, to some extent, paradoxical given the double nature of its content. It simultaneously reinforces the possible dangers of a forbidden involvement, and it underlines the trusting nature of Ioage’s character. When in retrospect Inosia recalls the day she embarked on a journey when she was asked to go to Apia on an errand, she describes it as a journey “into a new world were the rules of civilization as we knew it were instinctively abandoned and forgotten” (Figiel 2016: 25-6). However, as she (ironically) puts it, her “journey was not to benefit mankind or anyone else, other than the discovery and exploration and ultimate fulfillment of my own 17½ year old curiosities and desires and those of the one I came to call Night, who was my brother and my lover” (Figiel 2016: 26). Therefore, Inosia and Ioage’s sexual encounter comprising the longest part of the novel is a poetic hymn to love, beautifully described in an indulgent way, pleasurable to all senses for all the images it awakens, unapologetically celebrating freedom and Indigenous sexual practices (Figiel 2016). Consequently, it celebrates not only the power of sex and intimacy between the characters, but it also revitalises the importance of recuperating through literature Indigenous sexual practices framed by mutual respect, hence escaping the long-term stereotypes that have
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always circulated about the Pacific as a sexual paradise. Western understandings of sexuality in Indigenous cultures from the Pacific failed to comprehend the reverence and sacredness attributed to that by Indigenous people, as previously addressed throughout this Dissertation. Henceforth, it is my argument that in Freelove, Figiel is highlighting the importance of respect between subjects as a fundamental feature of inter-personal relationships, including sexual ones. Through the sharp and insightful interventions of Inosia, Figiel exposes the importance of breaking (pre-established) silences regarding sexuality in which female voices are for the most part unheard. It is also the prolific dialogue between Inosia and Ioage that contributes to dismantling the silences surrounding sexuality, the socio-cultural impositions on Samoan young girls and women. According to Figiel it was important to create a male character that is “the antithesis of what I had previously written [and is based] on the different types of men I grew up with” (in Heneriko 2016: 223). Moreover, having a male co-protagonist is also a strategy that helps highlight the extent to which Indigenous men have greatly suffered from colonial impositions of gender binarism. Indeed, Freelove escapes the spheres of violence depicted in Where We Once Belonged, and this male character contrasts with Figiel’s earlier portrayals of masculinity, proving that “men” are not a homogeneous category and, most importantly, demonstrating that colonial practices and traditional cultural frames also condition individual and communal views on masculinity. Despite the privileged social position occupied by Ioage, he is not entirely free to make his own decisions as he is compelled to obey to what his father, the village’s chief, dictates. It has been clear so far that Samoan culture is not exactly one that has always promoted gender equity, though major socio-cultural differences had been introduced and exacerbated after the colonial encounter (Mageo 1998). However, in Freelove, Sia Figiel seems to have opted for a creative process through which it is conceivable to imagine the possibility of ethical relationships beyond the spheres of power present in Samoan society, in spite of the impositions of “colonial difference” and “coloniality of being” (Maldonado-Torres 2008), Inosia and Ioage are representatives of those who dare challenge socio-cultural conceptions of power as they occupy very distinct places within the community. Ioage is the son of the
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village’s chief, his mother is symbolically considered the mother of all members of the community what makes Inosia and Ioage’s relationship problematic, which is, nonetheless, contested when they meet. Sia Figiel challenges colonial socio- cultural patterns that have reified ways of being, thinking, and producing knowledge while problematising the complex nature of Samoan culture in terms of class and gender. Following Roland Barthes’ theories on the hermeneutics of love, and Derrida’s theory of différance, Chela Sandoval centres her discussion on the possibility of love as a decolonial practice and a “differential consciousness” (2000), asserting that “the language of lovers can puncture through the everyday narratives that tie us to the social time and space, to the descriptions, recitals, and plots that dull and order our senses insofar as such social narratives are tied to the law” (2000:139-40). In her interview with Heneriko quoted above, Sia Figiel elaborates on the understanding of free love, and posits that alofafua or free love refers to the “unconditional love that Samoans are taught to have for anyone who seeks one’s help” (in Heneriko 2016: 221). Can free love as defined by Sia Figiel be perceived as a form of decolonial love? I do believe so. Bearing in mind Chela Sandoval’s definition of decolonial love, it can be argued that within the scope of the narrative love assumes its decolonial performativity and, to a certain extent, seems to lead to resistance against oppressive socio-cultural norms demonstrated in Inosia and Ioage’s way of communicating with each other. Accordingly, “romantic love provides a kind of entry to a form of being that breaks the citizen-subject free from the ties that bind being, to thus enter the differential mode consciousness” (Sandoval 2000: 140). This kind of romantic love described by Chela Sandoval differs from the Westernised conception of it that is frequently framed by heteronormative practices and centres itself in a more abstract and transcendent conceptualisation. According to Sandoval, “the act of falling in love can thus function as a “punctum”, that which breaks through social narratives to permit a bleeding, meanings unanchored and moving away from their traditional moorings” (Sandoval 2000: 140). Definitely, Sandoval draws out the possibility of love as a social movement that self-consciously resists socio-cultural categorisations, thus demonstrated in my analysis of Figiel’s novel through Inosia and Ioage’s defiance
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of social stratification, as they belong to different social groups within the community. The possibility of love between the characters happen when they see each other free from social constrains, when they perceive each other as individuals. Nonetheless, their subversion of community rules is only made possible when they escape to the forest, which assumes its secrecy and spiritual power by protecting and hiding the lovers. The forest holds the secrets of nature, and intensifies the characters’ desires, physical and emotional ones. While immersed in this pristine place, Inosia and Ioage cross the social bridge that separates them, and they feel free to be themselves, sharing intimate stories, laughing with each other’s jokes, discussing the nature of love, and explaining that there are considerable differences between perceptions of love depending on one’s socio-cultural background: social and intimate relations, there was no such concept as romantic love in old Samoa. Romantic love is purely American Hollywood illusion. Our people believed in something more long lasting. Something that wasn’t just instant gratification. (Figiel 2016: 89) There is a clear contrast here between two dissimilar ways of perceiving love, and an allusion to the influence of cinematography from Hollywood produced for the masses, which has been (so far) extensively consumed world-wide and dictating or, at least shaping behaviours. Part of the dialogue between the characters revolves around this influence of films over people, and how they construct biased notions of identity, how bodies are represented and the sort of features that are inscribed in those representations: “I was talking about looks and appearances and how it’s irrelevant to Samoans when it comes to the choosing of partners. And yet how it’s the end all to Americans and their plastic cinematography” (Figiel 2016: 91). In this formulation, indeed, Figiel maintains a certain cultural configuration that not only separates the Western (American) cultural trope of appearance from the way Samoans perceive the body, but also reiterates the influence of films from a specific context, Hollywood, on Indigenous Samoan people. The plastic cinematography referred to is part of a globalised industry that has been promoting and disseminating multiple stereotypes
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about Indigenous peoples and places and influencing how Indigenous people perceive themselves. Partly, the dissemination of imagery produced in Hollywood about the Pacific islands has been facilitating the commodification of Indigenous lands and bodies, transforming them into packages for the tourist industry to sell (Desmond 1999; Trask 1999; O’Brien 2006). It is, however, through writing from the perspective of the insider, that Figiel contributes to the revitalisation of Samoan culture, challenging hegemonic codes, and troubling images pervaded by exoticism. Grappling with the difficult operational space of tradition and modernity in Samoa, Figiel strives to empower and to increase the visibility of women’s sexual experiences that have been silenced because of the colonial gaze and the insidious patriarchal mores and social hierarchy characteristic of Samoan culture. Outside the constrains of colonised spaces such as the city of Apia, Inosia and Ioage plunge into the secret forest which may allegorically be understood as an uncolonised space given its description based on its multiple natural elements, animals, and plants, harmoniously intertwined, and its location off the roads built by neo-colonial powers: Fern and vines and banyan trees and rows and rows of co- conuts and blue birds and red birds and giant green lizards were just a few of the fauna and flora that surrounded the road to the secret place Ioage knew to be heaven on earth, pungent with the fragrance of pua and moso‘oi that intoxi- cated our senses, or at least they did mine. […] As he led us further and further away from the government road, I couldn’t help also but be stunned by the abundance of medicinal plants and trees, sasalapa, o‘a, fau, tuise, lau matolu, magamaga, fetau, lau mafatifati, tauanave and all sorts of other leaves I recognized from when Aunty Aima‘a and I would make treks to the Gu‘usa Uka forest to collect them for her fofo, something I first began to do when I was 8. Seeing them in abundance made my heart expand and in that moment, I felt the healing sacredness of their presence
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and remembered almost immediately the first time I met Ioage and how Ioage told us that leaves contained veins and that the veins carried the very essence of life (Figiel 2016: 102-3). Figuratively, there is an (invisible) frontier that separates the city – representative of progress, capitalism, and globalisation – and the forest, secular, magical, pure, where life thrives. By crossing that boundary, Inosia and Ioage are momentarily freeing themselves from the social constrains that limit their relationship as well as vesting their sexual encounter in the sacredness that characterises that specific Samoan ritual (Meleisea 1987; Mageo 1998; Tamasese Ta’isi Efi 2014). The lovers’ first step into a magic place where Inosia and Ioage will intimately connect with each other is also a celebratory incursion through a natural space emphasising the symbiotic relation between human and non-human elements. As a principle for liberation, nature then becomes a transcendent force that has to be (re)discovered from a point that addresses sustainability and an ethic of care, as illustrated in Inosia’s words above. The sacredness of their encounter is parallel to the sacredness of nature which also illustrates the intimate relation between human beings and the cosmos. The allusion to nature as a sacred and protective realm partakes of the importance of ecosystems in Indigenous knowledges and worldviews that are always related with balance and sustainability of the Cosmos (creation) and the Anthropos (humankind). These cosmologies have defined Indigenous peoples’ identities and are the source of their major struggles against imperialism and the occupation of their territories. Believing. Seeing. Knowing. Awareness. Those are the principles addressed in Inosia’s words, and they demonstrate the extent to which it is relevant to connect with ancestry to recover access to spaces that have been extensively occupied and colonised. Akin to this perspective is a deep and nurturing form of love extended to the feelings shared by Inosia and Ioage. There is a clear relation between finding the lake with all its stunning beauty, and Inosia’s sexual awakening: I had never seen a lake before and found my breath leave my body the instant I laid eyes on it. Intuitively, I closed my
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eyes and listened to the sounds of birds and bees and other forest creatures that made up the band of the most exquisite music I had ever heard. As I stood there, stunned by the majesty of the lake, I looked over at Ioage and saw that he had removed all his clothes, including his underwear and motioned to me to remove mine, the same way he asked me to roll the window down. My heart stopped at the sight of him. So that’s what a grown man looked like naked, I asked myself. As if I had come in direct contact with a sacredness that left me breathless (Figiel 2016: 103). Inosia’ education combines socio-cultural practices – Western and Samoan – that in conjunction form complex frameworks that subjugate women’s sexual freedom (Mageo 1998). However, despite being raised and educated in ways that demonise and forbid sexual intercourse before marriage (let alone with someone from a higher social rank), Inosia is not immediately concerned with any of that as she seems to acknowledge sexual impulses and desire as constitutive elements of her identity, and she listens to the urges of her body in a natural way, inquisitively and curiously as she is discovering an entirely new realm of sensations: Naturally, as if it were my normal practice, I removed my hair from my breasts so that they were more visible to him and bowed my head to my feet, surprised not only that there was not a single mosquito in sight but that I had no shame whatsoever of being naked before him, which I know would have stunned my mother and the aunties and the faletua (my other mother) into strokes (Figiel 2016: 104). However, “naturally” does not necessarily imply lack of fear of being punished as Inosia often recalls the lesson she learnt from her mother and aunts, proving the impact of education on her way of living intimate experiences, because “we were told very soon, as soon as we were visited by the Moon that sex was something bad and dirty and nasty and that no good girl would want to be engaged
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in it until she was properly married in a ceremony […] only sluts and whores enjoyed it, not good girls” (Figiel 2016: 123-4). Shame, fear, prohibition and punishment are part of the colonial religious rhetoric that influenced Samoan society by categorising women in good or bad terms according to their behaviours, and by obliviating eroticism, sexuality, and knowledge that are constitutive elements of bodies (regardless of gender). The confluence of Western knowledge and Samoan cultural practices greatly contributed to the formation of a society in which young girls and women lacked authority over their bodies. I have chosen to examine Inosia and Ioage’s relationship from a decolonial standpoint given that Figiel has extensively emphasised the importance of women’s sexual experiences from a point where they can unashamedly talk about those experiences. The decolonial practice that I am referring to has much to do with activism – individual and collective – and women’s empowerment through the possibility of talking about their intimate experiences. Inosia’s intervention in the following excerpt reinforces the importance of focusing on women’s sexual experiences, and the relevance of talking about it without the fear of being punished. Inosia calls attention to the problem, and addresses it from a perspective that has been marginalised: I’m happy that I lost my virginity to you, Ioage. I wish all girls I know who’ve ever told me a sad story about their first time experience would get to meet men like you, Ioage. Men who listen when we tell them something is wrong. When we say no, it hurts. And respect us enough to stop and to say, I’m sorry. How can we do it so that it doesn’t hurt? The way you did just now Ioage. There are so many girls that walk around thinking sex is a horrible, dirty and nasty act they have to endure just to have a boyfriend or a man or just to say they’d done it just to do it. To get it over with. (Figiel 2016: 125-6) This decolonial love simultaneously allows the possibility of connections between people and communities that forwards the recognition of the failure of Western discourses, of the entire matrix of Western modernity that sustains its power based
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on the coloniality of being. Henceforth, Inosia and Ioage may function as agents that together recognise the manifestations and influence of coloniality infiltrated in every aspect of life (Lugones 2010), and problematise it from a point of recognition that recuperates Samoan ancestry in a globalised (capitalist) society in relation with the oppositional consciousness that Sandoval (2000) refers to. Theirs is a relation in which recognition is thoroughly defiant and permits the enactment of decolonial practices, exactly, through the defiance of socio-cultural norms but also the sort of relationship that recognises love and desire as constitutive elements of their identity: “If anything, Ioage and I shared a private, intimate and sensual moment of mutual respect with an urgency of touch that I knew sealed him to me and me to him and connected us beyond infinity” (Figiel 2016: 108). As explained by Jeanette Mageo (1998) and Tamasese Efi (2014), Samoan culture was highly coded in terms of gender and social stratification, however, both authors agree that the introduction of Western religion and knowledge exacerbated the already existing inequalities. Accordingly, the exercise of sexuality was oppressed by conventions of gender, as girls and women were admonished from engaging in sexual practices, and of social stratification, as sexual intercourse was forbidden between elements of different social stratum (Mageo 1998). Negotiating freedom and imposed norms dictated by Western and Christian constructions of sexuality seems to be complex, as Inosia’s referents (mother, aunts, women in the village) have internalised the sinful nature of bodily pleasures. Ultimately, sexuality is also a trope for other power relations that elicit social demarcation (McClintock 1995), and thus Inosia explains the extent to which power and the inculcation of fear is exerted against young girls, though she cleverly questions that while establishing a critical parallel between women’s body parts and morality: I heard women talk talk talk about girls who’d lost their virginities before they were married: what did the rupturing of a small part of a woman’s anatomy have to do with her character? And in my case, it wasn’t like I had hurt anyone. Or stolen from anyone. Or killed anyone. And neither did Ioage. But if someone were to spy on us that very minute, the stories that would circulate out of context would be done so with such vicious malice and such
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cruelty I had no doubt it would kill a cow or a horse or a young girl (like me) who decides to hang herself or to drown herself or to slit her own throat in the middle of a stormy night if pushed enough closer to the edge. (Figiel 2016: 108, italics in the original) Repeatedly, Figiel addresses the complexity of the Samoan social fabric that is imbued with notions of sin and shame extensively promoted by Western religious mores and assumptions regarding women’s sexuality. But none of that prevents Inosia from living and experiencing sensations previously unknown to her, and from discovering an entire realm of unknown feelings both physical and psychological: I looked straight into his eyes and he looked right into mine and I started moving my hips then according to the movements of his own hips. Until later it appeared like we were performing a dance. An old and ancient dance. A dance that ended with the universe vibrating at the explosion of stars and constellations all across the galaxies, one that made me feel like I had just dived into a black star in the middle of the day and died. And lived. And died. And lived. And died. A thousand small deaths. (Figiel 2016: 125) Although described in terms that resemble the Western literary tradition, Figiel addresses sexual intercourse with an attitude of celebration that reinforces the way in which sex/sexuality should be grasped as a mode of connecting with Samoan Indigenous knowledge and understandings of sex and sexual sovereignty (see Schmidt 2016; Kauanui 2017). Part of the decolonial love in Figiel’s text reinforces that Samoan society was, in fact, a structure in which gender and sexuality were fundamental in the organisation of villages. Tamasese Efi (2014) elaborates on the sacredness of bodies, specially women’s, and asserts that young girls and boys were taught that “according to Samoan indigenous traditions, the reproductive and sexual organs of the human body underline human divinity and spirituality” (2014: 66). It is, then, from this perspective and bearing in mind Mageo’s study (1998) that while
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Samoan culture was per se coded and complex, the introduction of colonial and Christian discourses contributed to a culture of shame that changed ceremonies, social behaviours and peoples’ intimate relations, as exemplified in the passage bellow in which Inosia and Ioage are discussing the nature of sexuality in Samoan context: I was and still am disturbed by our propensity at selective memory, which means that we tend to remember or want to remember some things, things that are flattering to our present identity as the most Christian people in the Pacific and on the planet, at the expense of other less flattering things, things closely linked to our sexuality and our conception of the next generation, which is a natural human impulse. […] A woman’s vagina was sacred, Sia, as was a man’s penis. They were not dirty or nasty or attached to any of the negative connotations sex is known today among our people, because both were sacred. (Figiel 2016: 152-3, italics in the original) Within the Western construct, there was no place for the sacredness that characterised Samoan culture, so it was mandatory to alter that and turn the colonised against themselves to perpetuate abuses and exploitation (Lugones 2010). Lugones asserts that the process “justified the colonization of memory, and thus people’s senses of the self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity, and social, ecological, and cosmological organization” (2010: 745). The process of coloniality is inseparable from the dehumanisation of Indigenous peoples (Maldonado-Torres 208; Lugones 2010), and this is addressed in Figiel’s text from a decolonial standpoint that denounces and implicitly raises awareness through storytelling – Ioage’s passion about Samoan culture – and memory recollection of pre-colonial times that also alludes to Oceanic interconnectedness: “The most drastic conversions happened in the Hawaiian Islands. Where the fast spread of Christianity was like wildfire” (Figiel 2016: 154).
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Decolonial love in Figiel’s novel, Freelove, is neither nostalgia for a pre- colonial era, nor a linear movement towards a Westernised and globalised future, rather it partakes on Sandoval’s assertation that decolonial love “is not the narrative of love encoded by the West: is another kind of love, a synchronic process that punctures through traditional, older narratives of love, that ruptures everyday being” (2000: 141). Therefore, it is my argument that Figiel’s orientations of decolonial love are framed by a set of possibilities for engaging with reality with critical awareness and accountability. Actions matter as much as ideas, being an example of this activism Ioage’s commitment with teaching by methodologically combining Western and Samoan principles. His methods and approaches to teaching are described as radical, and they “made us not only understand such processes [metamorphosis and symbiosis] or relationships or chain reactions, but to know that our own people understood the same, in their own language” (Figiel 2016: 69). It is, then, this combination of knowledges that it is used to demonstrate that Samoan epistemology and ways of knowing were as “modern” or advanced as Western knowledge. The following passage from the novel is quoted at length in order to show the combination of Samoan Indigenous language and English in Ioage’s addresses to his students. This reinforces my initial argumentation that the process of decolonisation starts with knowledge, with the recuperation of ancestral practices, focusing on the symbiotic relation between human and non-human realms, and all that expressed in a language of love and pride: O le matati‘a muamua lava o lo‘o o‘u mafaufauina mo tatou uma i le tatou vasega, o le tatou naunau lea i lo tatou tiute i aso ta‘itasi, ina ia tatou iloa Le Natura. The first thing I want to challenge you with is a daily commitment from each and everyone of you in this class, to know nature. I le tulaga na iloa ai Le Natura e o tatou tua‘a. The way our ancestors did. Oute mana‘o ina ia tou va‘ai toto‘a i lau, le vao, ma le ele‘ele. I want you to look closely at leaves, grass, dirt.
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Aua ne‘i tatou manatu fa‘atauva‘a iai. Don’t just pass them by. Oute mana‘o ina ia tou u‘uina le lau ma va‘ava‘ai lelei i ona ua. I want you to pick a leaf up and look carefully at its veins. Su‘esu‘e auili‘ili ma va‘ai toto‘a iai aua o ua o le lau o lo‘o taofimauina ai le fatu o le ola. Examine it carefully and you will see that it contains the essence of life. E le na‘o le fafagaina o le tino le galuega a lau, ae o le toe fa‘afo‘isiaina o le malosi pe‘a tatou mama‘i. Not only do leaves nourish your body, they will help heal it if we’re ever sick. O le malamalamaga lea a o tatou tua‘a i lau, e le gata i le itu fa‘asaienisi, a‘o le itu fa‘aleagaga. That’s how our ancestors understood leaves, not only in a scientific manner but in a spiritual one. […] It is my mission to make you understand that Samoans understood science long ago and practiced it with great precision, even though it wasn’t called Science back then but they knew and were very much aware of it. […] Just like other ancient civilizations you’re learning about in History, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Africans, the Chinese, the Mongolians, the Romans, The Greeks, the Indians and our brothers and sisters throughout the Pacific Ocean. Ma e tatau fo‘i ia te‘i tatou ona tatou fa‘atauaina tutusa. And it’s equally important for us to do the same. (Figiel 2016: 65-6) The attitude expressed in Ioage’s choice of initially addressing students in a language that was supplanted by English when Missionaries became responsible for the education process in Samoa (Mageo 1998) remarks his commitment to the
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vindication of Indigenous epistemologies. Moreover, from the extensive passage, I would also like to emphasise the relevance of teaching to young people how human and natural elements are interconnected, and that there are no forms of knowledge superior to others. By thinking beyond globalised and capitalist frameworks that clearly condition multiple other perceptions of the world in general, and Indigenous cosmologies in particular, Ioage presents a committed activism through which knowledge is a means of healing as well as a mode of (re)imagining decolonial futurities (Sandoval 2000, Maldonado-Torres 2008). By alluding to the connection between elements that Cartesian rationality has kept apart – natural and human – Figiel is defending the idea that Samoan people are deeply rooted in their landscape and this is translated in multiple ways of caring for the land and the ecosystems. This behaviour is coincident with other Indigenous cosmologies, and it amply explains the relevance of belonging to a community. Jennifer Newell posits that Aspects of the fa’a Samoa that support the effective management of the tangible, changing environment help people and their environments to bounce back from environmental disaster and protect existing systems (such as terrestrial and marine ecosystems and food production systems). (2018: 154) Certainly, education, awareness and accountability are intrinsically woven together in Samoan resistance against exploitative systems and eco-violence, and those are certainly aspects to be considered when referring to decolonial futurities that must be built upon the commitment (or mission) expressed in the passage above taken from Freelove, that is, Ioage’s mission to educate his students in order to make them aware of the existence of multiple epistemologies. There is a strict relation between education and decolonial practices informed by methodologies that promote love as a form of healing and/or nurturing, “[s]tudents under the guidance of their school teachers learn best through life-affirming, love-affirming and faith-affirming recognition and communication. Such an environment grows naturally confident and inquisitive learners” (Filipo 2014: 459). Ioage’s commitment to teaching and education is, to a certain extent, his contribution to the process of decolonising the minds of younger people as they represent the future
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and the survival of Samoan ancestral culture. Ioage explains that he wants to inspire his students, “let them know that there are opportunities out there that can be accessed direct from here [from Samoa]. But that they should hold on strongly to their roots and their identity because it gets easily confusing out there” (Figiel 2016: 95). This process revolves around challenging colonial perceptions about Samoan people, culture and knowledge, insofar as it challenges the perceptions that youngsters may have about their histories, ways of life and ways of producing knowledge. In fact, the process of looking at history, culture, society and the cosmos is a dialogical process that implies looking at the past. Ioage is facilitating the process of understanding the past in conjunction with the present based upon the infinite number of possible ways of knowing, ways of living, while shedding some light on what has changed, and how relevant it is to critically perceive those changes. Accordingly, Maldonado-Torres posits that decolonization cannot be solely about overcoming the subject-object split, or about the rescue of the human from objectification, as some traditional humanism would have it, but about overturning a world structured around polarities of ethical and to some extent religious values, where good and evil, colonizer and colonized, are seen in their more pure and extreme form as unbridgeable essences. (2012: 2) In the same essay, Maldonado-Torres goes even further to explain that coloniality cannot only happen with anti-colonial resistance, but also with decoloniality, understood as the multiple and varied forms of recreating the matrix of power, knowledge, and being, as well as of culture and structure, beyond the Manichean divisions that inhere at the center of modernity/coloniality and its naturalization of war. (2012: 3-4) My argument here is that Figiel’s decolonial approach stems from a decolonial temporal and spatial horizon (Maldonado-Torres 2012) that involves a critical appropriation of elements of American (pop) culture along with Samoan culture
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and multiple conceptions of knowledge. Moreover, it equally involves the recognition of hierarchical relations either class or gender biased, and also when there is an attempt at rescuing the human from objectification (Maldonado-Torres 2012). It is my argument that love as a decolonial practice falls in and within the way knowledge is an integral part of Ioage’s project, but also happens as a romantic connection between subjects – Ioage and Inosia – that is an ethical relationship through which they travel to each other’s worlds/realities (Lugones 1987) as an exercise of self-recognition. It seems convenient to elaborate here a bit further on this theme of sexual sovereignty, not as a heteronormative categorisation but rather as a more amplified approach that revolves around the gender fluidity that characterises most Indigenous societies, including the Samoan one, and that was suppressed by Western patriarchal assumptions of gender binarism. Ontologically, the world is organised in terms of homogenous, atomic, and separable categories (Lugones 2010) that have simultaneously shaped the experiences of Indigenous peoples and have hindered processes of decolonisation. Nelson Maldonado-Torres in his essay “On the Coloniality of Being” draws on Franz Fanon’s theories to explain that decolonization should aspire at the very minimum to restore or create a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity. Receptive generosity involves a break away from racial dynamics as well as from conceptions of gender and sexuality that inhibit generous interaction among subjects. (2007: 21) Race, gender and sexuality marked the way Indigenous people worldwide were colonised, and the imposition of heteronormative behaviours dictated the suppression of gender fluidity that was part of Indigenous peoples’ identity (Besnier 2014; Schmidt 2016). The decolonisation of gender that Figiel proposes is one that restores gender and sexual fluidity as a dynamic that promotes freedom and discloses the notion that sexuality and gender have historically been diverse. Even though the narrative of Freelove focuses on a heterosexual relation, it does not exclude the
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problematisation of gender fluidity as another repressed element in Samoan culture and society. If Inosia is able to contest pre-established social rules, she does so because she is surrounded by a variety of elements that help her think critically, for instance, her friend Cha who largely contributes to that process. Being Cha a transgender person, fa‘afafige, she elaborates on the way she is often perceived, and, judging from her words, clearly that “modern” way of perceiving people is largely influenced by Western sexual codes and gender binarism. This fluid identity illustrated by Cha is often the evidence of non-normative sexualities and genders proving that Indigenous societies are more generous with sexual and gender diversity than Western cultures (Besnier, 2014; Tcherkézoff, 2014). The intervention of Cha is relevant here as it presents a great example not only about how sexuality was a central tenet in the colonial project but also the importance of the performativity of gender in the sense that behaviours create gender(s) (Butler 2011 [1990] and 2004a). Both aspects are addressed in the following paragraph from the novel, quoted at length to gather Cha’s main vindications regarding her “two-spirited” identity: she detested for instance being told by outsiders that her mother dressed her as a girl when she was a child because there were no girls in her household to do family chores which is why she was what she was, a fa‘afafige. And I could still remember her indignant voice of protest as it rang and rang and rang in my ear and each time it did, I knew some cultural anthropologist had gotten to her! How dare they say that about the origins of my sexuality! As if I were some 2nd class citizen in a Star Trek episode whose sexuality was determined by the woman who gave birth to me and her choice of clothing for me which weren’t the best at times, I would have chosen less bright colors myself but what does that have to do with poverty and not being able to afford the clothes I wanted? The audacity of such a thought! How preposterous! How utterly offensive to assume that I am what I am because of the chores I do and
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the clothes I was dressed in! Not only is this offensive to me personally but to our entire culture as Samoans, Sia! I mean, think about it Sia! Think about it! You as a woman of Science and Mathematics know just as well as I do, that my sexuality had nothing to do with how my mother supposedly dressed me as a boy and the kinds of chores I did to help our family. I was born this way, dahling! With both man and woman in me! I am two-spirited! Why do people have such a hard time understanding that? I am the blessed child! I don’t want to be a man or a woman! Why should I have to choose when I am both! And why should I be made to feel like I am a leper? That I am diseased? When everyone knows perfectly well that I am the end-possibility of the universe? (Figiel 2016: 32-3, emphasis added) Judith Butler advocates that the gendered body is performative, insofar as the “essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (2011: 173 emphasis in the original). In Elizabeth Grosz’s words, bodies “are not only inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external to them but are the products, the direct effects, of the very social constitution of nature itself” (1994: x). Butler’s and Grosz’s theories complement each other as they prove the performativity of gender within socio-cultural spheres. Accordingly, the gendered body is produced within the axis of a multitude of competing elements and power relations. By relying on Butler’s and Grosz’s theories whose background is not an Indigenous one, I am looking at gender from a non-binary constitution, and emphasising performativity as a mode of undoing the gender categorisation that was imposed on Indigenous peoples, thus altering the plurality of gender roles and sexual practices encompassed in the fabric of Indigenous cultures. Moreover, “Indigenous cultures have long recognized non-heterosexual sexualities and alternative genders – socially respected, integrated, and often revered them” (Picq 2019: 174). The reclamation of the Indigenous body, male, female, transgender, two-spirited, is addressed in Cha’s speech by tackling the problem of shame, purity
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versus impurity symbolically alluded in the reference to the body perceived as infected/diseased leading to segregation. Defiantly, Cha also responds to the audacity of Margaret Mead in her simplistic categorisation of Samoan girls (Mead 1928). Moreover, Figiel also exemplifies the extent to which the introduction of binary categorisations of gender are validated within the community via Christian beliefs: our spiritual father and pastor Tama Esimoto who always called her Charlie because that’s the name she was bap- tized with and the name God would recognize her with when s(he) entered the pearly gates, preferably in a black suit and iefaikaga and not the dress Cha had been design- ing since we were in Form 3, which I reckon the angels would also envy since it radiated with a sequence of real diamonds and rubies that would blind even the Sun. (Figiel 2016: 34) Reflecting on the weight of culture on our gender identity, Jeannete Mageo posits that “gender is a powerful form of self-definition, and in our need to define ourselves, we make choices. But we are also captives, captives of a collective cultural imagination – an imagination that is vested in cultural figures” (1998: 209). Creating a binary gender system largely impacted on the life and experiences of Indigenous peoples, thus marginalising bodies that have continually been used and abused within a Western construct that has been replicated in Indigenous communities. The silencing of fluid gender conceptions was part of the civilising mission, and “Christianity became the most powerful instrument in the mission of transformation” (Lugones 2010: 745). In fact, the rhetoric of colonialism, Christianity and capitalism combined together form a triumvirate that simultaneously connects the body and a culture of shame in ways that reinforce gender binarism and allows processes wherein Indigenous bodies are labelled, commodified and exploited. Having the way Indigenous peoples perceived gender and sexuality transformed was part of a process that attempted at the reduction of those colonised to less than human primitives and it stemmed from the profound inability to recognise other ways of knowing, living and loving. In a very intimate
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essay titled, “Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception” (1987), María Lugones draws on her experiences as a child to explore a sort of intersectional feminism based on the ability of people to cross over the emotional bridges that may eventually connect or separate subjects, exploring the interconnectedness between white women and women of colour as a process that involves dependency without subordination. She sustains that “we are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated; we are lacking. So travelling to each other’s “worlds” would enable us to be through loving each other” (1987: 8, emphasis in the original). The understanding that Lugones refers to is the one I want to extend to the way Inosia travels to Cha’s “world” as a form of loving with respect, and without subordination. In agreement with Chela Sandoval’s theorisation of decolonial love, I read Cha and Inosia’s friendship- sisterhood as a coalition that implies a decolonial practice informed both by the multiplicity of experiences lived by each subject, and the way Cha’s life influences Inosia’s perception of Samoan socio-cultural reality: Cha is my real life heroine! Her ability to express herself openly and with wild abandon; ways of being that I was only able to dream about since all eyes were always on me and how I behaved and how my behavior represented not just me but my mother, my grandmother, my Aunty Aima‘a, my Uncle Fa‘avevesi, my spiritual parents Tama Esimoto and Tina Lakena and everyone else that I was related to by blood or through marriage! (Figiel 2016: 33) Their relation is inherently one of respect and understanding, which prove to be important in discourses that aim at restoring balance to Indigenous peoples and communities. Figiel, repeatedly, denounces the extent to which colonialism, Christianity and capitalism have largely contributed to social imbalances in Samoan society, how Western discourses inflated inequalities and promoted policies that marginalised Indigenous peoples. Sexuality has been a fundamental construction through which those discourses divided Samoan people from their communities. Hence, Cha and Inosia can be acknowledged as dissident voices that aim at
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reclaiming gender and sexuality as identity features rooted in the spirit of equity and decolonisation as was also the case of Siniva in Where We Once Belonged. The final pages of the novel are intently focused on the letters exchanged between Inosia and Ioage, after her departure to the USA; therein the metaphoric meaning of the names they chose to address each other – Day (Inosia) and Night (Ioage) – allude to the cosmic relation they cultivate. Hence, the interconnectedness of those temporalities – days do not exist without nights and vice-versa – is expressed in the Samoan concept of vā that can be translated as “essentially kinetic, a transactional field or space open to negotiation between things and/or entities framed within its permeable boundaries” (Gabbard 2018: 34). The synergic nature of vā can be illustrated in its pertinence in the Samoan worldview (Gabbard 2018) that implies an ethic of care that binds entities/subjects together, and it can be extended to the way Inosia and Ioage interact with each other, the way they communicate with each other through a language of caring and respect that celebrates Samoan legends and myths of creation. Figiel’s strategy of recuperating ancestry also entails the permanent questioning of people’s attitudes and the lingering effects of colonialism in Samoan culture: Men like my father (your father), and women like my mother (your mother), who play roles: social and cultural roles that maintain the status quo and uphold their so called ideas of dignity, of nobility and of good standing Christians who have sadly, forgotten. Forgotten what it’s like to abandon one’s self to dancing without fear that someone might be looking. To adore one’s own body and that of the lover’s. Not only in the privacy of one’s own thoughts but in the very public exhibitions of poula nights that shocked the first missionaries out of their very Victo- rian minds and sent them back to England with reports of our savage ways. Ways that needed to be desperately reformed and erased all together from the social, religious and cultural imagination. […] So they called us barbarians whose sins needed to be cleansed. And by blood, no less. But tell me this. What is sin, I ask? What is sin but the inherent belief that one’s culture
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and way of life is superior to another’s? That one’s God is the only God? That you can deliberately annihilate a people’s history and wipe it completely from memory, replacing it with guilt and shame and terror while you stand there at a podium dressed in white, telling them about the sins of the body while you offer them flesh to eat and blood to drink on Sundays. And they have the audacity to call us cannibals! To say that our ways of having sex are dirty and sinful. (Figiel 2016: 197-8, emphasis added) Ioage’s words echo again Siniva’s interventions in Where We Once Belonged, both expressing a clear preoccupation with the influence of colonialism in Samoan Indigenous society and the impact of that on future generations. In Decolonizing the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o elaborates on the impact of alienating people from their history and ancestry with consequences that reverberate until current times. Figiel’s writing resonates with Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s assumptions and Maldonado- Torres’ theories on the dehumanisation of subjects deprived of cultural memory that is extended to a permanent state of coloniality of being. However, it might be possible to refer to a decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2007) in the sense that Sia Figiel’s creative production is largely about “making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves” (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 262). Indeed, this decolonial turn implicates interventions that revolve around power and knowledge, including “a radical shift in the social and political agent, the attitude of the knower, and the position in regards to whatever threatens the preservation of being” (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 262). In fact, part of the process also implies a whole other structure of opposition that Sandoval, for instance, develops in her theorisation of a differential mode of oppositional consciousness which “depends upon the ability to read the current situation of power and self-consciously choosing and adopting the ideological form best suited to push against its configurations” (Sandoval 2010: 90). Figiel proposes a controversial end for the narrative, that is, in fact, an open ending as it leaves room for the imaginative mind of those who read her novel to
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create multiple paths for Inosia and Ioage. Inosia travels to the USA, pregnant, to live with her sister and to study Physics in an Ivy League American University. Life there proves to be rather challenging and after being expelled from her sister’s house because her sister cannot accept the pregnancy, Inosia makes her mind about the baby, and gives her for adoption: I have decided to give the space girl to Kevin and Losa. They are good people who don’t have children of their own. They have tried for the last 10 years but they discovered a cist in Losa’s fallopian tube that prevents her from ever conceiving and successfully carrying a baby to full term. […] They keep asking me if you are ok with giving them the baby. I tell them you are. That you are the kind of man who respects his woman’s mind and that whatever decision I make, I will make on your behalf. They were impressed with that and thought that was very mature and thoughtful. (Figiel 2016: 207-8 italics in the original)5 In such a short paragraph, Figiel is alluding to multiple aspects of modern societies. The adoption here may be acknowledged as an act of love towards the woman that cannot conceive, and the sacrifice that Inosia has to make to be able to pursue her career. Perhaps, Figiel is also drawing attention to one of the greatest injustices suffered by women, who have to choose between maternity and a professional trajectory. However, Inosia’s story is one that also pays close attention to how families – in this case, her sister – are able to punish those who defy pre-established roles. Without the support of her family, and living in an entirely new context, Inosia makes her own decision, and keeping the baby would have been difficult. Perhaps, Figiel is suggesting that it remains crucial to evaluate certain behaviours that exclude women from their families and communities when they decide to live their own experiences of sexuality, for example, without the constrains and norms that characterise certain societies. Despite being in the USA, Inosia’s sister lives
5 Throughout the novel there are multiple references to Star Trek, and Inosia often uses expressions taken from the series to refer to her life experiences; “space girl” is one of those examples. However, I dare say that the expression used to refer to her and Ioage’s baby daughter may also allude to their cosmic relation.
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according to the rules of the ‘aiga. She not only brings this system of rules and knowledge to her life in the USA – the social norms remain largely intact and inform behaviours even in a new socio-cultural context – but also extends her conservative thoughts to Inosia’s life by not accepting the baby child and by condemning her sister. Craig R. Janes explains the extensivity of the values of the ‘aiga even in a context of migration: “All ‘aiga members are bound by mutual rights and obligations that include participation on kindred events and economic or political support when it is need” (2002: 124). Besides the extension of those values referred to by Janes (2002), what is at stake here is also the perpetuation of patriarchal values and behaviours that still interfere in the life of Indigenous women. The intimate tone of the letters between Inosia and Ioage in this last part of the novel reveals an interesting incursion through a new world that Inosia is exploring in an academic context where she is exposed to the possibility of coalition beyond blood, of the kind demonstrated in Kiana Davenport’s Shark Dialogues. It is in this academic context that Inosia demonstrates the multiplicity of possible modes of decolonisation through knowledge and coalition forged out of relations that are based upon the collective power of people: I met a Tongan-Fijian Samoan woman. Her name is Kat Lobendahn. She is here studying astrology more specifically and wishes to some day sail the vast Pacific from Hawai‘i to Tonga all the way down to New Zealand. But guess what? She wants to do this with an all female crew and has suggested that I join her. […] I’ve been working mainly with Professor Philip Culbertson. Professor Culberton worked on Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i and was adopted by a Samoan family there and considers me a daughter which is very comforting. […] Even a linguistic professor, Lyons. Professor Paul Lyons, who is studying Pacific languages to understand the origins of our people’s migratory patterns. (Figiel 2016: 210-213 italics in the original)
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The references that Figiel uses here, the names of real scholars, to validate the importance of forming coalitions in order to dismantle colonial imperialism are multiple and cover a wide range of fields, from Physics to Linguistics. Thus, Inosia is exploring, navigating the waters that connect those alliances forged out of knowledge. The cross-referencing in Figiel’s construction of Inosia’s life in the USA validates the importance of decolonising knowledge in academic contexts, as it also demonstrates the extent to which Pacific Studies are being represented in Western universities. Figiel’s references to this interconnectedness seems relevant as it supports knowledge production and activism outside the Pacific. Indeed, this imaginative process of cross-referencing employed in Figiel’s text is, certainly, a way of empowerment through which the Pacific is being reconfigured in ways that enhance the dignity of Pacific peoples (Heneriko & Wilson 1999). Henceforth, to a certain extent, her writing contributes to a discussion that may reexamine Samoan socio-cultural configurations of globalisation and capitalism, as well as it attempts at avoiding the marginalisation and trivialisation of Indigenous Samoan practices The compelling love story of Inosia and Ioage defies their social constrains, and love assumes its decolonial form since it is free from approbation and social trappings. I would like to go back to the question quoted from Junot Díaz’s interview (2012) opening this chapter: “Is it possible to love one’s broken-by-the- coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power person?” (Díaz 2012: n/p). This coloniality of power intersects gender, class and race issues as discussed by Lugones, and the characters in Figiel’s novel firstly wrestle to dismantle the spheres of coloniality of power ingrained in Samoan society, and, secondly, they address the possibility of reparatory dialogue informed by knowledge and love. Therefore, Inosia and Ioage’s trajectory exemplifies the extent to which love is “the humanizing task of building a world in which genuine ethical relations become the norm and not the exception” (Maldonado-Torres 2008:244). Accordingly, Sandoval’s and Maldonado-Torres’ complex understandings of relationships and love acknowledge the possibility of “alliance[s] and affection across lines of difference” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008: 187). The lines of difference that I am referring to are the ones that, for instance, have separated Inosia and Ioage in terms of class stratification, and the ones that based on gender are demarcating
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the spaces occupied either by men or women in Samoan culture. The recognition of forms of violence and dehumanisation are not only crucial but also necessary in order to forge ethical relationships based upon love and affinity. Acknowledging violence is an integral part of decolonial love, as well as looking at the present from a transformative and restorative standpoint. If we aim at achieving decolonial practices that may impact on the way social relations are established, new ways of being and acting both individually and collectively, then it seems relevant to acknowledge systemic violence as a problem that is the matrix of power often manifested in conceptions of gender, bodies, and social stratification. By unravelling coloniality through knowledge seeking as demonstrated both by Ioage and Inosia, the matrix of power that has subjugated Indigenous people is deconstructed and dismantled in a transformative way that can, ultimately, be translated as a form of decolonial love, a political and social project.
4.3. Chapter’s Conclusion
Sia Figiel’s oeuvre reveals itself to be rather complex, and it acutely questions the way Samoan culture not only has been altered but also how certain forms of subjugation still persist among Samoan people. Subsequently, in Figiel’s fiction the interest in Samoan women’s bodies and sexuality has shifted from the margins to the centre, and with that Figiel is reversing both Samoan practices, and Western exotic representations. While the stereotypical representations of Indigenous women’s bodies may be acknowledged as incomplete constructions, simultaneously vested with mythical features, and imperfect projections of the Eurocentric gaze, Figiel’s portrayals are the product of an informed insider whose knowledge is rooted in socio-cultural conceptions. From this position, Figiel’s narrativization of Samoa is one in which that privileges the everyday life of Samoan women, as was also the case in Vaite’s oeuvre analysed in Chapter II. The fluid boundaries of Figiel’s creative imagination explore the intricacies of Samoan culture, history and society from an insider’s standpoint. By doing so, her texts entail a decolonising project calling attention to the life experiences of individuals within their communities, while also exposing the oppressive dimensions of women’s experiences framed by a permanent quest between tradition and global
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modernity. I argue that, partly, the process of decolonising the mind may begin with the recognition of imposed values and cultural practices, the deconstruction of globalised policies, and the questioning of systems of education that have negated the vitality of Indigenous knowledges. The thematic agenda of Figiel’s two novels discussed here includes the discussion of gender relations, the rebellion against pre-established socio-cultural norms that directly exposes women’s subordination, and the deconstruction of patriarchal hegemony and by focusing on the stories of women by breaking the silence over sexual violence, which has proved to be of great importance as the matter was basically non-existent in the Pacific literary landscape (Keown 2007). Subsequently, Figiel proposes a positive strategy that aims at valuing Samoan culture when adapting Samoan legends/tales from a different perspective, by focusing on marginalised elements and giving them a new interpretation more centred on the empowerment of women rather than in subordinating them. It is my argument that the empowerment of women within the context of Samoan society occurs when individual stories are told from another angle, i.e., when women problematise the socio-cultural aspects that have been framing their experiences, thus the act of breaking the silence from an insider’s standpoint is not only a liberating strategy but appears to be a powerful mode of decolonising the mind. In this line, Figiel calls attention on the gaps between lived realities, individual experiences, and expressed ideals in which global, regional and local forces are articulated. Both her protagonists, Alofa and Inosia consent to subvert pre- established norms by reinventing the “I” within the “We” they belong to. They seem to have embraced their positionality as a capacity or even responsibility to, simultaneously, voice unuttered stories and question pre-established socio-cultural practices (Barad 2003; Haraway 2008). There might be a paradigmatic shifting in Figiel’s narratives which engenders the possibility of breaking the public silence around violence and hierarchical power relations, as well as it excavates ancestral histories that, ultimately, contribute to decolonise the core of Samoan identity. Considering the amplitude of any decolonial project, it seems relevant to evaluate “the destruction of the spiritual landscape with its mythologies and pantheons and the disruption of
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the links of piety and communion with the ancestors” (Okere 2014: 20) that was introduced by colonialism in order to reconfigure Indigenous knowledge and “ways of knowing” from a central positionality rather than a peripheral one. Decentring imperialist hegemony and global homogenisation thus means decentring the West and recentring Indigenous epistemologies. Sia Figiel proposes a decolonial rhetoric that aims at understanding the organisation of socio-cultural practices so as to uncover systemic racialised gender violence which, ultimately, may be the recognition of it in our maps of reality (Lugones 2007). Moreover, Figiel’s texts explore the possibilities of decolonial practices that are informed by the critical analysis of both tradition and modernity in Samoan society. By interrogating the connection between bodies and violence, and by redefining relations across differences (Sandoval 2000), Sia Figiel opens room for the achievement of decolonial love as social and ethical practice that empowers subjects. Therefore, there is a process of reimagining the future of Samoan culture that occurs through radical redefinitions of socio-political concepts. The decolonial approach that is undertaken in these novels goes beyond the deconstruction of capitalist and globalised cultural frameworks, it rather focuses on strategies to re-inscribe bodies wracked by violence in re-imagined spaces that bear witness to multiple aggressions and cultural appropriations. Those spaces, imagined or not, are differently perceived by each individual, and to a certain extent Figiel is deftly undermining traditional representations of Samoa, and exploring the ways Samoan girls and women are influenced by them either when defying those representations or when accepting them. However, it is my argument that Sia Figiel values the individual experiences within her community as a mode of empowerment, to the degree that in the midst of plurality young girls and women lean towards “non-subjection as possible beings whose possibility lies in the uncertain creation of a loosely concerned intersubjectivity” (Lugones 2002: 60). Ultimately, as María Lugones suggests, “we are moving on at a time of crossings, seeing each other at the colonial difference, constructing a new subject of a new feminist geopolitics of knowing and loving” (2010: 756). It is, precisely, this “new” feminist geopolitics referred to by María Lugones that I am interested in, given its nature of inclusiveness and its decolonial praxis, based upon multiple
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knowledges and ways of living and loving. In seeking visibility and in creating spaces for Pacific women’s stories to be included, I argue that Sia Figiel as well as Célestine Hitiura Vaite and Kiana Davenport are engaged in active processes of decolonising the mind in which abasement is confronted and invisibility is contested in varying degrees. The acknowledgment of the intersectionality of gender, race, and class that Sia Figiel demonstrates in her novels is, perhaps, the most relevant mode of reclaiming, re-establishing, and renewing the positionality of women within colonised contexts. Furthermore, the writers selected for analysis in this Dissertation are committed to investigating ways through which decolonial futurities are possible by “hinting at a new and growing disposition in the world to grant equal validity and respect to each culture and to each people” (Okere 2014: 20). Taken together, Célestine Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel demonstrate that Indigenous narratives and histories can be rendered in multiple ways, from the recordings of local community history to personal stories and the everyday actions of people to discussions that focus on Indigenous Rights and sovereignty or globalisation and ecological imperialism. Each one providing a different but necessary perspective on Indigenous cultures that contributes to a better understanding of how colonialism has shaped Indigenous’ lives, and how decolonial practices are even more relevant when power structures informed by capitalism and globalisation seem to refuse to acknowledge Indigenous cultural practices and epistemologies. In the Conclusion, it will be presented a summary of the major themes discussed throughout this Dissertation, closing the circle of this journey through the Pacific Ocean. Bearing in mind the allegoric title of Chapter I, “Departing, Journeying, Returning”, the Conclusion may as well symbolise the return from this journey to its initial point of departure.
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Hope at Sea…
Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Fiction from the Pacific
Unpacified This ocean Still Has much to teach me. Teresia K. Teaiwa, “L(o)sing the Edge”
he islands in the Pacific Ocean have been colonised in multiple ways, and during different periods of time in history with different degrees of T violence enacted against their Indigenous peoples. This ongoing process of global imperialism cannot solely be addressed in economic and political terms, but it should also be considered in terms of how these islands were and still are intellectually occupied and conceptually shaped by Europe and the USA. Serge Tcherkézoff and Françoise Douaire-Marsaudon explain that the Pacific peoples have long lived in their islands and, until the arrival of the Europeans, had never encountered large- scale wars of conquest imposing a social and linguistic unification, all of these groups, whether they inhabit the space of an island or a valley, developed notions of identity rich in a diversity of symbols (2008: 3). Hence, in nearly two centuries, Pacific Islanders saw it all, the changes brought with colonialism and the lingering effects of imperial policies that have culminated in partial disintegration of Indigenous cultures. Unsurprisingly, a considerable proportion of Indigenous Pacific literature creates a counter-discursive approach to Western violence enacted against Indigenous peoples. Within current debates about Indigenous cultures, questions related with gender, race, and cultural commodification have been extensively addressed. Moreover, it is also significantly demonstrated that Western fantasies about “the Other” are continually exploited through filmography, advertisements, tourism, and “cannibalistic consumerism” (hooks 1992) that not only translate Indigenous cultures into Western cultural modes but also deny the significance of their histories through multiple processes
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of decontextualization. There is a subjacent cultural imperialism in these forms of cultural appropriation, and often it perpetuates systemic violence against Indigenous peoples whose cultures are exploited to fulfil Western colonial nostalgia. Within this context of exploitation, gender and race are transformed into commodified assets for pleasure, thus the cultures of Indigenous peoples can be perceived “as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other” (hooks 1992: 367). It has, therefore, been my main argument in this Dissertation that despite colonial and imperial oppression perpetuated in capitalist globalisation, the voices of Indigenous peoples strive to reclaim intellectual authority and reassert cultural autonomy and that this occurs simultaneously inside and outside of academic spheres. Within academia these themes are highly discussed both by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, and from the 1960s onwards Pacific Studies have become part of academic syllabus worldwide (Firth 2003; Thaman 2003). Teresa Teiawa assembled a vision of Pacific Studies education as a “journey of cooperative learning towards alternative spaces where indigenous knowledges can be fully reclaimed, affirmed, and revitalized” (2005: 48). Following Teaiwa’s assertation, I argue that education is part of the decolonial process in the Pacific or anywhere else for the matter. Henceforth, processes of decolonisation may revolve around the reclamation of Indigenous perspectives, cultural practices, cosmologies, and knowledge that had been suppressed by colonial, imperial, and global policies. Accordingly, decolonial processes in the Pacific are still “work in progress” given that they progressively acknowledge, recognise, and dismantle the dominance of Western epistemologies in the lives of Indigenous peoples, but also because through those processes it is possible to develop new forms of perceiving Indigenous cultures in a globalised era. The critical pedagogy of decolonisation should be constituted by knowledge about the historic and cultural past of Indigenous societies because that can contribute to form the basis of alternative ways of understanding those societies while also respecting the validity of their epistemologies (Smith 1999). However, it cannot go without saying, that while Euro-American imperialism is being contested by Indigenous groups, there is still
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a veil of silence in privileged socio-political spheres that intentionally fail to acknowledge Indigenous rights and sovereignty, and whose power and global policies have largely promoted neoliberal approaches to Indigenous lands/ecosystems which are permanently used as testing grounds, as I have discussed at length in Chapter I of this Dissertation. In fact, globalisation has proven to be a challenge for Indigenous peoples whose cultures and territories have been appropriated both by tourism corporations, and military forces. Furthermore, the texts selected in this study problematise (and denounce) globalised anthropocentric and capitalist discourses that perceive ecosystems as objects to be used and exploited by human beings. In lieu of that, Indigenous writers make use of literature in ways that challenge the validity of those abusive behaviours towards Indigenous cultures. Questions about colonialism, power, knowledge, belonging, and resistance have been examined in this Dissertation, thus the novels selected here prove to be prolific sites in which colonial and global policies are contested. Throughout this Dissertation I have analysed contemporary fiction produced by three Indigenous women writers from the Pacific, Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport and Sia Figiel, from Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa, respectively. Hence, I have tried to demonstrate that a reading of the selected novels that takes into account their specific cultural contexts may contribute to comprehend Pacific cultures; their struggles against cultural subalternisation; their sovereignty movements; and their environmental concerns. My interest at looking for connections between the authors and their cultures allowed me to develop a dialogic reading of the texts in which it was possible to understand Indigenous histories and cosmologies as powerful forces in challenging white Euro-American domination in national and global policies. Moreover, I have also attempted to demonstrate that the literature produced by Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Kiana Davenport, and Sia Figiel provide a site where the voices of Indigenous women are heard, and a site where to honour the continuity of the past in the present by insisting on the possibility of a decolonised future for Indigenous peoples. It is my argument that much of what these texts share is a concern for the future of their islands and their people, and the relationship with the past and the globalised, capitalist present time.
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The three women writers studied here revitalise Indigenous cosmologies, socio-cultural practices, and ways of knowing in relation with the challenges faced by Indigenous populations in a globalised era. At the most fundamental level, these writers address the importance of discussing Indigenous rights in conjunction with global polices that tend to homogenise cultures. Their novels largely contribute to a decolonial rhetoric that highlights diversity through a multiplicity of characters whose voices speak against cultural homogenisation, and whose stories challenge Western ideologies. It is possible to formulate that these texts stress the shared language and circumstances of colonialism and allow for counter-discursive strategies in which questions of gender, class, and race intersect. Moreover, these writers are concerned with ethical questions, and political issues, thus they explore in their fictional texts forms of Indigenous activism that respond to Western constructions of their cultures. Vaite, Davenport and Figiel describe struggles aimed at challenging the dominant colonialist and patriarchal vilification of women and nature insofar as their texts restore (or contribute to restore) Indigenous women’s centrality within communities. Differences of gender, sexual orientation, class, and race that have been used to inform Western epistemologies, are now reclaimed as emancipatory signifiers by the authors of the novels examined in this Dissertation. There is a great amount of scholarly work that has been produced since the 1980s (see Trask 1999; Fergunson and Mironesco 2008; Andersen 2010; Besnier 2014; Rawwida and Harcourt 2015; Altamarino-Jiménez 2016; Kauinui 2018) demonstrating that Indigenous women from the Pacific largely contributed to the economy and social life of their communities. Western socio-cultural dynamics have often neglected domestic labour that is particularly, but not exclusively, associated with women. Contrary to this perspective, in Indigenous communities the relation between labour and the domestic sphere is rather distinct from that presented in capitalist economies. Within those domestic spaces, Indigenous women were fundamental, and their work – caregiving, cooking, or sewing – was not considered to be secondary or undervalued, rather the opposite, it was an integral part of the well-being and balance of communities. It is, precisely, the devaluation of Indigenous women’s work and their subjugation perpetuated by
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colonialism another aspect that Vaite, Davenport and Figiel denounce in their narratives. Thus, these authors also seem (even if indirectly) to propose alternative ways of dismantling gender inequalities by calling attention to Indigenous women’s experiences in multiple contexts. The empowerment of Indigenous women may revolve around the rethinking of the implications of how gender demarcation imposed by colonial practices is both constructed and contained by notions of sexual difference (Lugones 2007). bell hooks eloquently asserts that “Western conceptions of humans and of cultural life are founded on beliefs that the human is somehow separate from and superior to nature” (1998: 150), thus it is precisely this axial aspect that has also served colonialism and has been serving globalisation, and the one that is fundamental in Indigenous struggles against cultural and land dispossession. Most Pacific Indigenous cultures, including Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Samoan ones, developed profound connections to land and oceans as evidenced in oral traditions that demonstrate genealogical links between Indigenous peoples and their ecosystems. Uninterested in Indigenous cosmologies and ways of knowing, imperial and global ideologies were implemented by Western nations, and Indigenous peoples were often coerced to accept them. Accordingly, forms of coercion and persuasion often occur in ways that are complicated to dismantle as is the example of economic growth in Hawai’i motivated by tourism (Kelly 2014). Nevertheless, Indigenous groups have been permanently fighting against imperialism still promoted through globalisation and capitalism, and part of their resistance resides in the importance given to ancestral knowledge, and to the politics of everyday life. In the first chapter of this Dissertation I have presented an overview of the colonial and postcolonial contexts of Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa from a historiographic and cultural standpoint. It was my aim to present key aspects in terms of those Indigenous cultures and their struggles against on-going processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation. While I focused on processes that have disempowered Indigenous peoples and undermined their ways of knowing and organising social life, I have also argued that Indigenous peoples continuously resist and fight back cultural assimilation. It is, then, the dissident movement against
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imperialism and globalisation that is central in my approach to Indigenous peoples and cultures. As seen throughout Chapter I, the colonial and imperial endeavours relied on the establishment of economic power in conjunction with Western cultural practices whose consequences disrupted Indigenous societies. The establishment of hegemonic ways of perceiving and, consequently, apprehending Indigenous cultures is contingent with the Westerners’ desire to domesticate and subjugate those cultures. Using this perspective, I have discussed various elements that contributed to the disruption of Pacific societies – colonial power, globalisation, militarisation, and mass tourism – being these fundamental aspects also when examining Indigenous women’s roles within their societies/communities. Equally important, I have observed, is the way the Pacific has been produced in the Western imaginary (Salmond 2005; O’Brien 2006; Kahn 2011), and how those representations have further contributed to the perpetuation of hegemonic power relations. According to these notions, I have also demonstrated how Indigenous peoples in Tahiti, Hawai’i, and Samoa have been continuously reclaiming their rights over their lands and fighting for self-determination. Throughout Chapter II, I have analysed three novels by Célestine Hitiura Vaite, Breadfruit, Frangipani and Tiare in which I have not only focused on Tahitian culture but more specifically on the role of Tahitian women within their communities. Vaite’s novels prove to be relevant given that they present a de- exoticised portrayal of Tahiti, and, to some extent, they can be acknowledged as a counter-discourse against ingrained stereotypes that have circulated in Western narratives in which Tahiti was depicted as a paradise. However, there is more than that beyond the postcard image, and Vaite focuses on the daily experiences of working-class women to demonstrate the hidden side of Western cultural constructions. Vaite presents an interesting portrayal of women that is no longer based on the passive and seductive figure that was part of the Western imagination, but a working-class woman, active, hard-working, and busy with everyday concerns, both political and familial ones. In this second Chapter I have pointed out how the romanticised tone of the narratives may sometimes overshadow the importance of what is being narrated, though it has also been my argument that Vaite constructs a narrative in which it is possible to find a certain demystification
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of Tahiti as a paradise. Using a conversational tone and stream-of-consciousness, Vaite portrays women’s experiences of day-to-day resilience living with, and within a community-centred ethos. It is, then, through these multiple connection between family and community members that the author highlights the importance of kinship (Haraway 2008) as a form of decolonialisation. It may as well be possible to state that Vaite’s novels present an interesting form of joyful insurrection (García Zarranz 2016) against Western stereotypical representations of Tahiti, and against the on-going French economic domination. Conversely, by describing the life events of Materena, the protagonist of the trilogy, Vaite is simultaneously dismantling exotic portrayals of Tahiti, and validating several connections between Tahitian people and their land as cultural aspects that are part of Tahitian identity formation. Besides, Vaite’s narratives highlight the importance of looking at individual and private actions as constitutive features of politicised expressions of self-determination. Relatedly, Vaite’s female characters create an interesting human tapestry whose harsh life-experiences do not limit their activism, rather through small but consistent actions they strive and resist structures of psychic and social domination by reinforcing love and care as a decolonial praxis. The third chapter of this Dissertation revolves around the examination of two novels, Shark Dialogues and Song of the Exile written by the Native Hawaiian author Kiana Davenport. These two novels present a relevant portrayal of Native Hawaiian culture and history, and Davenport brings to the forefront how Native Hawaiian people have negotiated the impact of American imperialism and the militarisation of the archipelago. Hawai’i remains a colonised territory and has not (yet) attained political self-determination despite the efforts of activists in sovereignty movements that keep on fighting against American imperial occupation. It is, therefore, this condition of being occupied that Kiana Davenport denounces throughout her novels while she examines the way in which Native Hawaiian people have been marginalised. By recovering cultural memory and Hawaiian history, Davenport creates a space in her texts in which marginalised voices are heard and given agency. This is, of course, relevant to consider when assuming that her novels can be read as being part of “resistance literature” (Harlow 1987). Consequently, it is my argument that Davenport’s novels can be perceived
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as a site of understanding the socio-political dynamics of Native Hawaiian culture in which the author recreates the experiences of Native Hawaiian women as crucial to comprehend the extent to which colonialism has disrupted Indigenous cosmologies and livelihoods. In Native Hawaiian culture aloha ‘āina (love for the land) represents one of the fundamental aspects of Native Hawaiian identity, and it has been at the core of those discourses against land occupation, militarisation and mass tourism that have largely contributed to contest the impoverishment and marginalisation of Native Hawaiians. There is a decolonial rhetoric in the Hawaiian concept visible in the symbiotic relation between human and nonhuman elements. It is, then, this counter- discourse that animates the narratives produced by Davenport as the author clearly alludes to the importance of protecting the islands from the excessive use of natural resources and describes processes of identity formation based on those connections between land and Native Hawaiian people. This is important to observe because the concept of love for the land may also be extended to the way Vaite and Figiel portray Tahitian and Samoan cultures, respectively. To this end, these authors contribute to an “ethic of care” (DeLoughrey 2019) that is constitutive to the embodied relation between Indigenous peoples and their lands. Taken together, the novels selected here create, to some extent, a counter-narrative that questions and critiques the Western split between nature and human beings which has engendered multiple forms of violence. The fourth and last chapter of this Dissertation presents an analysis of two novels, Where We Once Belonged and Freelove, written by Sia Figiel. Throughout the chapter, I have tried to demonstrate the extent to which Samoan culture has been impacted on by colonialism and imperialism, and how Figiel’s narratives dismantle those forms of cultural subjugation by presenting alternative views of Samoan culture that privilege knowledge seeking and love as possible answers to fight back subjugation. I have attempted to demonstrate in Chapter IV that the complexity of Samoan culture in terms of class stratification proved to be a source of women’s subalternisation, and that Figiel addresses their inferiorisation from a perspective in which Samoan culture (precolonial and colonial) is questioned from inside. Hence, Figiel critically questions socio-cultural behaviours that had a nefarious impact on
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the lives of Samoan women. The protagonists of the novels are lively young girls whose socio-cultural context interferes with their personal desires, and their personal points of views. By focusing on young girls and their stories, Figiel is raising awareness on gender violence and how women are controlled within their communities. Besides, Figiel’s engagement with Samoan culture remains double- edged – it gestures towards respect for tradition and ancestry, but also demonstrates her criticism of some traditional socio-cultural values and practices that served to perpetuate forms of gender violence as evidenced in her depiction of how Samoan women’s sexuality is controlled. Through the sharp eyes of the young protagonists growing in a society at odds with the clash between tradition and globalisation, Figiel is denouncing the long-term effects of global and neo-capitalist economies, highlighting that the changing patterns of consumption may be unhealthy for the continuity of communities. Furthermore, Figiel raises relevant critiques to the way Samoan society changed through the influence of Christianity, and how Samoan people rapidly embraced more changes towards a capitalist consumer-driven economy. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, those changes are an immediate reflex of globalisation whose tentacles reach every nation and whose policies that promise economic growth are effectively complex socio-cultural disruptions. None of these authors and their novels had been studied together to this day, and I hope I have contributed to a better knowledge of them from an analytical approach that emphasises decolonial practices forged across difference (Sandoval 2000). Bearing in mind the ground-breaking theories of Chela Sandoval (2000), Chandra T. Mohanty (2003), and María Lugones (2007), I argue that the literary narratives selected here attempt at offering discursive spaces through which it may be possible to imagine and reimagine decolonial futures based on love, hope and affinity. Besides, it is also the recognition of violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples, and their dehumanisation that is fundamental to be acknowledged in the narratives selected in this Dissertation. Tahitian, Hawaiian, and Samoan cultures respectively were portrayed in the novels examined here, and through their cultural representations, the authors reinforce the resilience of Indigenous women who have tried to maintain a sense of continuity between past and present in spite of the diverse experiences of colonialism. The dynamics of
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power relations in this dialectic of resilience and resistance offer insights to better comprehend contemporary manifestations of globalisation, and how Indigenous people are still fighting to achieve self-determination and social justice. Consequently, Indigenous people’s resistance defies the hegemony that capitalism and globalisation fortify, but their struggles are often difficult and not without problems specially when governments – in the cases examined, French and American – respond with political and military repression. Although processes of decolonisation are complex and, therefore, slow, I have been arguing that the critical debate entailed in the creative work of Vaite, Davenport, and Figiel largely contributes to the continuity of processes that focus on the importance of intellectual and political sovereignty. Following the ideas of historians such as David Armitage (2014) and Allison Bashford (2014), it is possible to assert that, progressively, the Pacific is being reincorporated into the world’s history from a standpoint that focuses on Indigenous perspectives and knowledge. Moreover, this standpoint is one that also highlights Indigenous women’s empowerment by acknowledging their actions and intervention within the private and public spheres. Consequently, it becomes evident that Indigenous women’s experiences are crucial to decolonising knowledge production. The authors selected here share common views on gender imbalances promoted by colonial epistemologies, and they insist on the importance of restoring gender equity in Pacific societies, which depends not only on challenging patriarchy as endemic to both colonialism and globalisation, but also the gender-specific consequences of militarisation in the region. In sum, the novels together form a tapestry of human experiences through which it may be conceivable to examine the possibility of forming coalitions that aim at dismantling imperial, global and patriarchal regimes. Therefore, the spaces – physical and psychological ones – that were once colonised and culturally appropriated are progressively recovered through everyday acts of resistance, and to achieve that it may be necessary to re-examine cultural practices or as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) suggests, it may be necessary to use different methods, and alternatives to the gaze of coloniality. The methods used to dismantle colonialism and coloniality are, clearly, diverse, though it also seems obvious that they should focus on Indigenous ways of knowing, their cosmologies, and the importance of
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educating younger generations. Bearing in mind Chela Sandoval’s theory (2000), I point out that the decolonising of the mind to use Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo’s expression requires the acknowledgement of humanity and affinity across difference, which consequently implies actions forged through processes of learning that are capable of assembling multiple standpoints related with gender, class, and race. Henceforth, the possibility of decolonisation involves, among other things, an anti-imperialist attitude that I, personally, believe is expressed throughout the novels I have studied here. Ultimately, it is my argument that the notion of shared experiences of colonialism and globalisation across the Pacific connects the narratives examined here, thus they can be acknowledged as means of material and ideological survival of Indigenous cosmologies, and ways of knowing. I would like to conclude this Dissertation by reinforcing my initial idea of the interconnectedness between Vaite’s, Davenport’s, and Figiel’s literary production as relevant examples of narratives that entail forms of decolonial approaches to their cultures and societies. To a certain extent, the fracturing binary constructions – male/female; heterosexual/homosexual; black/white; rich/poor; same/different; human/nonhuman – that colonial and imperial discourses perpetuate, find resistance in oppositional ideologies expressed by the Indigenous women writers selected here. Their contribution to processes of decolonisation of Indigenous cultures and societies of the Pacific occurs through the representation of multiple social, political, and cultural aspects related with those Indigenous cultures. The textualization of their cultures becomes fundamental in raising awareness for shared struggles in which multiple perspectives are (re)inscribed in the officialised and politicised version of Indigenous historical narratives that are often written from a Western standpoint (Trask 1999; Silva 2004). Contemporary Indigenous literatures of the Pacific are inextricably connected with social movements, thus the narratives I have examined here foreground Indigenous socio-cultural practices and contribute to the ongoing debate about Indigenous women’s rights, land occupation, and ecological degradation. It can be argued that Indigenous writing is “a powerful tool in the struggles against colonialism and in the subsequent efforts to cast off the legacies of empire and dispossession” (Ballantyne, Peterson and Wanhalla 2020). However, there is a
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pertinent question that remains partially unanswered, in the face of a globalised and predatory economy, what is the future of Indigenous cultures? Perhaps part of the answer lies in the fact that it is our duty whether Indigenous or not to work on every front to protect endangered locations, to educate future generations, and ultimately to raise awareness of the world’s leaders to seek equity in order to protect Indigenous peoples, their territories, and their cultures. I would like, thus, to conclude this Dissertation by stating that it is crucial to build solidarity across the divisions of place, gender, class, race, and identity. In these very fragmented and complex times we are living in, it may be fundamental to question globalisation and capitalism from an angle that uncovers their masculinist and racist values and practices. The struggle must continue, always, in every action, so that other futures can be imagined.
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