Book: Sweat and Salt Water
Author: Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa
Publication Year: 2021
Genre: Essay /Poetry/Academia
We sweat and cry salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood. —Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa
If Epeli Hauʻofa (see: Tonga) and his pioneering anthropology gives us a bird’s eye view of the Pacific islands and their peoples, Teresa Teaiwa academia zooms in on the issues facing the nations of the region.
Published in 2021, four years after Teaiwa’s untimely death at 48, Sweat and Salt Water collects together a number of her most influential essays, organised into sections covering Pacific Studies, Militarism and Gender and Native Reflections. Through these essays, Teaiwa drills down into discussions of the history and problems in defining Pacific Studies, the challenges teaching the subject and in engaging students, as well as the consequences of western colonisation and the stain, cultural and environmental, left by US and UK nuclear testing in the region.
What is refreshing about Teaiwa’s writing is she is never afraid to insert herself and her lived experiences into her writing. The great problem with much academic writing, especially that written by western academics, is it tends to be written from ivory towers, where subjective opinion is presented as objective fact. Yet academic research is a moveable feast, continuously beieng reassessed and evolving as new data come to light.
As Teaiwa refers to Howard Zinn in her essays, I will once again make reference to Zinn’s idea that history is an infinite chain of events. To tell any story, historic or fictional, one must cherry pick from those events in order to weave a coherent narrative. How one chooses which events to focus upon is a subjective process decided by demographics and upbringing. How you tell a story depends entirely on where you come from.
As such, a US historian writing about the Vietnam War will have a very different opinion on those events than a Vietnamese academic. A European historian will write about 19th century colonialism from a different perspective than the descendents of the people who were subject to its brutality and oppression.
As we have discussed before in this project, there has been a plaintive cry amongst western commentators in recent years that “they are erasing our history.” This is a disingenuous attempt to preserve the western narrative that European colonialism was all japes and good fun and no-one really got hurt (“at least no-one that mattered”, to paraphrase Douglas Adams) and everyone was delivered to Christ, so what are you bleating about anyway? Mention slavery or the massacre of indigenous populations and you are “doing this country down” as if it needed any help. By “erasing our history” what they really mean is: Asking the victims of those events how they feel about them.
Teresa Teaiwa was born in Hawai’i to an African-American mother and a father from the Banaban people of Kiribati. She grew up in Fiji, studied in Washington DC and California and was teaching in New Zealand at the end of her life. She assimilated “European political thought from Plato to Marx.“ She therefore had a rich matrix of cultural vectors from which to approach the history and politics of the region. She didn’t have the (white) privilege of separating herself from those issues.
While Teaiwa‘s writing is academic and professional, almost to a fault, there is often an undertone of irony and cynicism at institutionalised attitudes to the Pacific region and its population. If you live it, you attitude will be much different from those who pronounce on the lives of others without experiencing them , or, in many cases, even visiting the places on which you presume to opine. A little sarcasm and world weariness is entirely appropriate. It is genuine. It is honest.
‘Bellwether’ is a photographic project by my friend, John Harrison, for which I have contributed a number of pieces of writing over the last few years. The project focuses on three Lancashire towns (known as the ‘Three Towns’) in Northern England. John takes portraits of people in the area to show how they live, work and relax. I coined the term, Bellwether (employed it, more accurately), to refer to those places on the margin of British life. They seem peripheral to the national consciousness, but when taken as a collective of similar sized towns across the UK, they have a greater population than any city other than London. What happens there is a microcosm for what will eventually happen everywhere.
The Pacific is similar, though on a much greater scale. There are somewhere in the region of 20,000 islands across the world’s largest ocean. Like Great Harwood or Mold or Ross-on-Wye, the islands of Kiribati, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea are Bellwether nations for what is to come for the human race. Climate change will effect these places sooner than New York, Paris or Beijing, as they slowly disappear beneath the rising waters. We should look at how the world, how the dominating colonial countries of Australia and New Zealand, treat these countries and ask ourselves if we will be treated any differently when the time comes. These s/pacific n/oceans, as Teaiwa refers to the militarisation of the region, should worry us all.
While the Bellwether towns of Britain are separated by rivers and motorways and hills and mountain ranges, the Pacific Bellwethers are separated only by the ocean. The distances between them are on a whole other scale, but they are, in an important sense, almost claustrophobically close. If it snows in Ross-on-Wye, it might be raining in Great Harwood. When oceans levels rise in Kiribati, they will rise everywhere, and not just in the Pacific. The islands of the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean will feel in too.
There is a kind of wave-particle duality about the islands and the people of this region. Epeli Hauʻofa was born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan parents, but worked for much of his life in Fiji. Teresa Teaiwa was born in Hawai’i but grew up in Fiji. In making her representative of Fiji, it is an unsatisfactory compromise. The easy choice would be to place her in Kiribati, but I would be doing so merely to meet a quota and tick off another country. What I have learned (or think I have learned) so far is that no one in the Pacific region entirely belong to one island or nation.
As this project progresses, I hope individual writers will spread out like a heat map charting the rise of global temperatures to cover most of the region. The western toxic obsession with categorising and pigeonholing of everything leads me to place the authors I read to one country or another. But like a series of unobserved particles passing through the notorious double slit experiment, if we wait long enough, they will form an interference pattern on our memory and imagination. Hauʻofa spreads out from Tonga; Teaiwa from Fiji. Subsequent writers will overlap with them and fill in the gaps. Needless to say that like Nigerian science fiction, or the rich literature of Trinidad and Tobago, the island nations of the Pacific will be the subject of a longer essay at some point in the future.
I feel like I have said very little about Teaiwa’s actual writing here, but that’s ok. These sketches do not conform to any set format. The best writers, the best thinkers and their ideas are the ones that set off a cascade of thoughts in the mind of the reader that lead them to unimagined places.
This can have unintended consequences of course. But as Howard Zinn reminds us, experience and influence vary from person to person. We cannot control how others react to internal stimuli, merely try to ensure our own reactions to the world are constructive and not self-deluding. Teresa Teaiwa is not someone who seemed to suffer much from delusion, but was grounded in the world, region and discipline in which she lived and worked.
There are some writers on this journey for whom I will read one or two books and never return to them after I am done (though I would never be so gauche as to tell you who they are). Teresa Teaiwa is not one of those writers. Like We Are the Ocean (see: Tonga), the title essay of which begins with Teaiwa‘s words quoted at the start of this piece and from which this collection takes its name, Sweat and Salt Tears is a work to which I will refer to whenever I return to the literature and thought from the region. Further collections of Teaiwa’s writings are planned for release. They are most welcome. Anyone interested in the region could do worse than start by reading We Are the Ocean and Sweat and Salt Tears. Like the Pacific itself, they should be propagated far and wide.
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| Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa |
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