Hi all, food for thinkers.
please find below the full text of a presentation by
performance poet Karlo Mila-Schaaf during the Wed 21 Oct tribute for
Hauofa led by Te Tumu with keynote speaker Ropate Qalo from USP. I
couldnt open his speech, but here is food aplenty from Karlo, who was
at the Oceania centre in Suva not long before coming to Dunedin for
this event. I hope you find it as challenging and inspiring as I did.
Lisa.
Epeli Hau'ofa: The Magical Metaphor Man
By Karlo Mila-Schaaf
Oceania
is her name
goddess of water
the blue taupou
smile, serene green
budda beautiful
her energy flies
peacock butterflies
resting bright on black
winged days
she is the dream
of slate blue clean
sea turtles for memory
sea horses for change
on grey washing days
I dream her
(Mila, 2008, p. 70).
Unlike many of the people gathered here today to remember the man, I
only ever met 'Epeli Hau'ofa on the page. I have no personal
anecdotes, no human touches, just the experience of meeting someone's
mind on paper. I have engaged only with the quality of his thoughts.
It is a testament, perhaps, to the power of the written word and the
impact of ideas; that 'Epeli has come to mean so much to me.
After the recent Tsunami, the shock of the loss and devastation, it
was in 'Epeli's words I sought comfort. He wrote that the ocean is
what we have in common, that it has always shaped and continues to
shape our cultures (Hau'ofa, 2008). He writes:
"We draw inspiration from the diverse patterns that have emerged from
the successes and failures in our adaptation to the influence of the
sea… We may even together make new sounds, new rhythms, new
choreographies, and new songs and verses about how wonderful and
terrible the sea is, and how we cannot live without it." (Hau'ofa,
2008, p. 57)
Inspired by 'Epeli, his thoughts and thinking, I wrote the following poem.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way
that we are all connected.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way,
that our relationship
with the ocean
is never
on our
own terms.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way
why dominion over nature
was never a part
of our epistemology.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way
why we know ourselves to be
simply a part
of a sacred continuum
of sacred relationships
where even
the ocean is alive,
where even
the night birds feel,
where even
the rocks have spirit,
where even
the blood red waves
know why they are red.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way
the balance of life between
is sacred, va tapuia,
endlessly interconnected
across distance, space, time, species, life, death.
We are reminded
in the most brutal way
why long before
Christ arrived
on these shores
we have always been
a people of spirit
a people of faith.
As a writer, as a young Tongan woman of commoner descent, of dubious
"hafe kasi" heritage, who grew up in Palmerston North, far from Tonga,
language-less and uprooted – both privileged and disadvantaged by the
same set of circumstances – 'Epeli's greatest gift to me was an
expansive mind and an inclusive metaphor.
For 'Epeli realised - long before it was fashionable - long before we
had regional conferences on epistemology and long before Benedict
Anderson (1991) coined the term "imagined communities" that "human
reality is a human creation: And that if we fail to create our own,
someone else will do it for us" (Hau'ofa 1993, p. 128-9).
Growing up in Aotearoa, being born and bred here, I have become
attuned to the 'small violence' of being imagined through mainstream
New Zealand's eyes. I have become overly familiar with the narrow
range of ways that Pacific peoples are imagined here over and over
again using the same depleted stock of metaphors. It is such a slim
and limited repertoire of images (rugby players, overstayers, street
kids, hip-hop dancers – and you only have to look at the recent
National Party government delegation to the Pacific to get a sense of
how we are imagined). We are churchgoing. We are fat. We are fat
women in colourful island dresses that make jokes about our private
parts and unmentionables and avoid smear testing and laugh too loud.
We are young men in hoodies with strong, muscular, dangerous bodies
who fit Crimewatch profiles. We are good at sport and singing and on
the rugby filed we contribute speed and brawn and natural flair and
talent rather than brain or discipline.
How we are imagined, inevitably can become the cage in which we become
captured. How we are imagined, as well as how we imagine counts. The
way that we imagine ourselves, as Pacific peoples, and who is in and
who is out, and whose behaviour exceeds the limits of our comfortable
criteria and ideas about "who" and "what we are". This is contested
and political. Do you happen to be too white, too feminist or too
liberal, too gay, too self-mutilating, too outrageous, too much of a
stickler for time or too upwardly mobile to comfortably fit within the
boundaries of the Pacific social imaginary?
The power to impose your vision of the world upon others is what
Bourdieu (1985) calls "symbolic struggle" over the cultural production
of meaning. It is a struggle over the way that we imagine ourselves,
include and exclude, it is about the power to produce human reality
and to "determine, delimit, and define the always open meaning of the
present (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 728).
According to Bourdieu, "To change the world, one has to change the
ways of world-making" (1989, p. 23). 'Epeli Hau'ofa understood how
important our social imaginary was to us. When other smart minds and
bright young stars in the Pacific turned themselves to law and
medicine, economics and politics; 'Epeli devoted himself to the way
that we imagine ourselves. He battled. He was a lone warrior for a
long time, upon the contested terrain of social reproduction and the
social imaginary. He saw that it was worth fighting for. He thought
that the way we imagine ourselves counted. He believed that this has
political and practical, as well as deeply spiritual, implications.
His enduring legacy will be the ocean as a transformative metaphor.
For here was a man that understood the power of metaphor! Milan
Kundera writes in his book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being":
"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give
birth to love." (Kundera, 1984, p. 11) 'Epeli hoped a single metaphor
could give birth to a regional identity that changed the way we
imagined ourselves. As a Tongan, perhaps it is no surprise that he
did not trifle with metaphors, but rather understood the magic of
their power. A Tongan word close in meaning to metaphor is heliaki.
The anthropologist Adrienne Kaeppler (1993) writes of heliaki and
Tongan society:
"The important aesthetic concept here is heliaki, indirectness (to say
one thing but mean another), which requires special knowledge and
skill to compose and understand. The composer manifests heliaki in
metaphor and layered meaning, skirting a subject and approaching it
repeatedly from different angles. Hidden meanings must be unraveled
layer by layer until they can be understood, for one cannot apprehend
the poetry by simply examining it. The most important Tongan arts are
verbal, incorporating social and political philosophy and
encapsulating the ideal of indirectness" (Kaeppler 1993, p. 497)
Metaphor, like the ocean, is something we Pacific peoples share. As
in many other societies whereby relationships between people are
pivotal to survival and sustenance, to use Augsberger's words:
"A rich and elaborate code system of metaphor and simile may
communicate arguments with complex and colourful rhetorical content
that serves profound social purposes." (Augsberger, 1992, p. 31)
Comparative research shows a preference for "indirect verbal
interaction" among collectively oriented cultures, in contrast with
the preference among individualistic cultures for "straight talk"
(Ting Toomey, 1988).
I am someone who grew up exposed to both influences: highly
individualistic as well as having a deeply collective inheritance. I
am someone who is, and who has always been, committed to speaking and
writing and telling a truth - of sorts - committed to finding and
articulating my own awkward and sometimes painful truth. 'Epeli
models a way of speaking truth safely, a way of speaking truth through
metaphor; by taking the long, colourful way, the scenic version, but
never being afraid to pull a heliaki punch. He was never afraid of
salting his work and peppering his words with insights that flavour
somewhat dangerously what is being spoken, served and swallowed. The
loud message of 'what cannot be said' booming with muscle behind the
rhetorical dancing and ducking of 'what can be said': the fist of his
truth connecting, every time.
Although 'Epeli, more than most, sought to explain how there were many
truths, preferred truths, flexible truths, different versions of
reality that existed for different purposes in Pacific cultures. And
despite recognising the multi-dimensionality of truth, still more than
anyone, it is 'Epeli who models the magic of metaphor, the speaking of
the unspeakable through multi-layered, elusive and murmuring words and
images (often somewhere near the Nederends). He was a master of arts
and farts. But he helps us to learn to make our beasts beautiful
enough, camouflaged enough, and well-armored enough to speak them out
loud. Our beasts become chameleon-like and clever, so that we can
speak those bull-rushing words, those bleeding words, in a context of
intense interconnection, of needing to save face, not only yours, but
those whom you are relationally and genealogically connected to.
How do we speak our awkward truths, so raw that they glimmer and
glisten, so painful that we cannot carry them inside us silent? We do
this through metaphor. Fellow poet, Fijian and Tongan writer Tagi
Qolouvaki describes this ultimately liberating but also dangerous
creative process in the following poem:
Untitled/secrets
I release
Relinquish
These secrets
This one
And this one
About my mothers
About myself
I will peel the skin off this secret
Spoon out its soft
Insides
Feed them
To you
This one I will crack open
Like a coconut
Under the blunt edge of a machete
I will pour out its juice
And bathe you in it
So you awaken
And I heal
I will re-seed
My center
Fill my
Insides
Anew
With sweetness
Grow new skin
Soft and brown
I will retrieve
My soul from
Sunlit
Stained glass
Temples
Of childhood
And peace will leak
Through my pores
Like sweat
The scent of guava
(Courtesy of Tagi Qolouvaki)
I think it is no accident that Pacific women, in particular,
proliferate in poetry. Queen Salote, Konai Helu-Thaman, Momoe Von
Reiche, Grace Molisa, Sia Figiel, Tusiata Avia, Teresia Teiawa, Selina
Tusitala Marsh, Serie Barford, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabard, and a
growing thicket of young emerging voices: Leilani Tamu, Grace Taylor,
Helen Tionisio and Courtney Meredith. You'll find us in the narrow
lines of poetry. That's where the girls are. Here we are saying the
things that can't be laid bare, cloaked in the suggestive shimmy of
simile. We are mobilising the metaphoric ambivalence of the maybe.
We are veiled in allusion. We dance, move, mimic with our words,
suggestive and sensuous. We say nothing straight, but we say
everything that needs to be said. Everybody hears us, which version
they feel is dependent and multi-possible in the wonderful fluidity
between fiction and truth-telling. This is where we speak ourselves.
This is where we find each other. As Sia Figiel writes in her poem,
for young artists:
"To a Young Artist in Contemplation"
Y(our) anguish
is a flame
only the night
understands
a journey
with no beginning
no middle
no end
y(our) pain
a child of the salt
in the sea
that surrounds you
a journey
with no beginning
no middle
no end
listen to the stars
for like the night
they too know of
your loneliness
and to the waves
in the distance
for they alone
hear you cry
in silence
the moon will
touch the part of you
- no one else sees
the one that cries
in the day
between your smiles
your laugh
birds will bring joy
from far away
you will hear it
on the tongues of leaves
-eternal joy of
the free spirit that you are
press it gently
to your heart
it is y(our) only possession
the one that will
carry you
carry you
carry you
throughout y(our) journey
and when no one else listens
and when no one else understands you
go back to the sea
and scream
(in silence)
And the mana of salt
will heal
over and over
as you begin y(our) journey
again
and again
and again
(Figiel, 1998, pp. 1-2)
It is no surprise that Sia turns to the metaphor of ocean, to the
healing power of salt, to the ever-flowing source of all of y(our)
journeys. The alternative to speaking and writing ourselves and our
secrets, the anguish of silenced tongues is captured in a poem I wrote
called "Paper Mulberry Secrets". This describes for me the violence
and internal wounds of collusions of silences and the appeal instead
for the thin veneer of appearances.
Paper Mulberry Secrets (where the real stories are)
Women sit
among each other
and beat heartwood
into the finest veils
of ngatu.
Stories stripped, sun-dried
soaked, scraped clean.
bark beaten lean.
Fragile layers
so thin
the tapa is barely connected
to its own self.
If you sit quietly in a village long enough
you hear this silence in the distance
mallet on anvil
like the beat of a headache.
Spider-webbed
paper promises
drying on dyed wooden blocks
like second skins
draped over the midribs
of leaves
in backyards.
Pages pasted
like hands clasped in prayer
to be decorated
with natural dyes
and elaborate strokes
suggesting symmetry
and perfect painted order.
You see,
you cannot peel this back
to the heart
without breaking it.
(Mila, 2008, p. 29)
But there is something much worse than silence. And this is something
'Epeli understood very well. That is someone else imagining you 'for
you'. Someone else imposing their vision of the worlds over
everything you do. Someone else telling your stories and dreaming
words coming out of our mouths. Someone else writing us, dreaming us,
small, insignificant, backwards, native, simple, loud, poor,
history-less, savage. Someone else dreaming us with their own limited
repertoire of metaphors, stereotypes, grass skirts, and what Shigeyuki
Kihara so appropriately encapsulated in the word: "ooga booga". As
'Epeli said and I repeat it: "Human reality is human creation. If we
fail to create our own someone else will do it for us by default."
(Hau'ofa 1993, p. 128-9)
'Epeli's enduring legacy, for me, was purposively taking charge of our
social imaginary, caring for it, investing in it with the magical
power of metaphor. His inclusive metaphor, aimed to transcend the
territorial ways we imagine our identities, rooted in land, vested in
fonua / whenua / vanua. 'Epeli, in conflict ridden Fiji, understood
that a vision of unity could not be found in a land-based metaphor.
He understood that an inclusive identity had to move beyond our
existing and ancient metaphors often rooted in associative rights to
land and land tenure. And although we are attached to the magic and
power of our land-derived identity metaphors and although they will
endure, the less attractive practices – such as strategic burying of
the dead to settle land claims and disputes and so on, do come to
mind.
'Epeli looked to the vast, expansive and inclusive ever-movement of
the ocean. He did this also in a context of being familiar with how
the Pacific region was perceived on a global stage. He had enough
international experience to see how it was constructed and imagined on
the level of the global economy, as speaks of atolls, resource poor,
scattered, tiny islands; mere specks on a global stage. He drew on
the power and vastness of the ocean. He writes:
"It is shared by all… It is the inescapable fact of our lives. What
we lack is the conscious awareness of it, its implications, and what
we could do with it. (Hau'ofa, 2008, p.54).
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest ocean in the world. It
covers more than a third of the earth's surface and provides more than
half of its free water. 'Epeli was clear that he was not merely
talking about the sea as an economic development resource but also as
an imaginative one. He wrote:
"The sea is not merely our omnipresent, empirical reality, equally
important it is our most wonderful metaphor for just about anything we
can think of." (Hau'ofa, 2000, p. 51).
As a writer, as a young Tongan woman, of commoner descent, of dubious
"hafe kasi" heritage, who grew up in Palmerston North, far from Tonga,
language-less and uprooted, the ocean is also my metaphor. Epeli's
metaphor is vast enough, wide enough; open enough, to include even me.
Far from the soil of Tonga, my fonua burned in a hospital furnace (as
was the practice here). Born in Aotearoa and trying to learn the
trick of standing upright here, in a land where I have no ancestral
claim or connection to. As New Zealand poets before me, such as Allen
Curnow wrote:
Not I, some child, born in a marvellous year
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.
(Curnow, 1997, p. 220).
And as Glenn Colquhoun (1999) expressed so well in his book, "The Art
of Walking Upright", the challenge of belonging to the land in a
context of not being tangata whenua or Maori is a defining issue for
most thinking / feeling people who came here as immigrants and feel
the ache of the land, who feel the injustice of the history which has
bequeathed the land to us, in quarter acre buyable blocks.
But 'Epeli offers us the fluid hope of the ocean. The ocean is
another source of sustenance, connection and identity for those of us
in the Pacific. It is the all encompassing and inclusive metaphor of
the sea. No matter how much we try to divide her up and mark her
territory, she eludes us with her ever-moving expansiveness. The
ocean is what we have in common.
I will end with a final poem called: "A Place to Stand" and hope to
honour 'Epeli in my own choice of metaphors.
A place to stand
it was on the marae atea
in the blue-veined moonlight
somewhere near Halcolm
I learned
turangawaewae
i felt the earth
beneath me tremor
a wiri
a wero
a haka
it was
named
known
sure of itself
connected
to awa
maunga
iwi
rich red mud
shuddering
haemoglobin
in the soil
transforming
landscape entire
into urupa
i
could not
stand upright
there
'ka mate ka mate'
beating eardrum
in the earth
enter
Oceania
her blue body
promising
distant shores
a blue taupou
follow that star
seek
unfamiliar
constellations
speak alien tongues
follow the bloodlines
to the terra incognita
of your own body
flat-footed
i began to swim
(Mila, 2008, p.9)
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