Tonga - We Are the Ocean

Country: Tonga      
Book: We Are the Ocean
Author: Epeli Hauʻofa
Publication Year: 2008
Genre: Essay/Anthropology/Fiction/Poetry

Writers and thinkers like Epeli Hauʻofa are the reason why I set out on this journey. Born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan Missionary parents, Hauʻofa was an anthropologist, poet and novelist who wrote and lectured about the island nations of the Pacific. As we take a first trip through Oceania in the next three entries, there is no better person to be our guide.

We Are the Ocean, published in 2008, a year before Hauʻofa’s death, is a collection of essays, as well as poetry and extracts from his novel 1987, Kisses in the Nederends.

As an anthropologist native and resident to the regions about which he wrote, Hauʻofa’s work did much to correct the racist stereotypes found in western research and academia on Oceania and its nations. In the pacific, Australia and New Zealand loom large, as do the western coastlines of Canada and the United States. Their influence casts a long shadow over the rest of the Pacific Ocean. Hauʻofa was one of the first indigenous academic voices to push back against western tropes about the island nations of Oceania.

Those tropes loom large in the west, sexualising and infantilising the peoples of the Pacifica Island Nations. When we think of the islands at all, it is of James Cook’s crew trading iron nails for sex with Hawaiian women; of Gauguin’s paintings of topless Tahitian beauties; or of Herman Melville jumping ship in ‘Typee’ to explore and lie amongst the people of the Marquesas Islands in modern day French Polynesia.

Colonialist language is also slow to be replaced. When Hauʻofa was starting out as an anthropologist, terms like the South Sea and South Pacific were still being bandied about and applied to the region. In these and other terms we see an attempt to belittle and reduce the size of the region which, at its widest, spans fully one half of the entire circumference of the globe. 

A Colonial View of the Pacific Ocean Islands

Partly this is because so little of Oceania is made up of land mass or independent states. Asides from Australia and New Zealand, only 11 Pacific island and island groups have a seat in the UN:

Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, The Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Yet there are just as many (more in fact) Pacific islands that are not independent, but overseas dependencies of other, mostly western, nations:

American Samoa (USA), Cook Islands (New Zealand), French Polynesia (France), Wallis and Futuna (France), Guam (USA), Hawai’i (USA state), the Marianas (USA), Western New Guinea (Indonesia), New Caledonia (France), Niue (New Zealand), Norfolk Island (Australia), Pitcairn Island (UK), Rapanui/Easter Island (Chile), and Tokelau (New Zealand)

I am sure this list in not exhaustive, but based on Hauʻofa’s own notes, in which he does away with simplistic colonial divisions of the Pacific into Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia and replaces them with North Oceania, West Oceania, East Oceania and Central Oceania, which at least gives a better sense of the sheer size of the Pacific.

Yet we also see from the two lists of independent and non-independent Oceanic islands presented above, that the region remains under the thumb of the usual global suspects. Of the non-independent territories, only Hawai’i, as the 50^th state of the United States of America, wields any power (unlike its Atlantic counterpart, Puerto Rico). The rest are historically used as places to test nuclear weapons with little thought given to the consequences for the people who live there. As the oceans rise, the Pacific islands are the place that will disappear beneath the waves first, with the same lack of concern demonstrated by those driving climate change.

If you want a true accounting of a society, you have to look to the margins and how it treats the people there. Oceania is perhaps the ultimate margin, vast but virtually unpopulated. Even the major population centres of Australia and New Zealand are virtually, actually empty, unlike, say, the Americas, which are still described as empty by western commentators to disguise the fact that European expansion into the region killed 80-100million people from the diseases they brought with them. Yet we only have to look to the treatment of the Maori and indigenous Australians to see density of population is no barrier to racism.

Hauʻofa’s writing is a touchstone, a way-station and a place to orientate ourselves before looking at what the writers of Oceania have to tell us. It is also a further reminder, should it be needed, that a country is an arbitrary boundary and can act as no more than a guide to Reading the World. We can’t be content just to read the 13 Oceanic countries represented in the UN. Tahiti has just as much to offer as Samoa; the Cook Islands as much as Kiribati.

Hauʻofa’s own fiction contributes to this understanding as much as his work in anthropology. He wrote one major novel, Kisses in the Nederends, two extracts of which make up part of We Are the Ocean, as well as other works of fiction. He was also a poet, writing about the experiences of Pacific island peoples.

Indeed, the arbitrary nature of national boundaries fall apart when trying to locate Epeli Hauʻofa to any one country. He was born in Papua New Guinea and attended school there, but spent much of his academic career in Fiji. He worked for some time as adviser to the Tongan king, Täufa‘ähau Tupou IV, as the keeper of the palace records. He is buried in Fiji, but I have chosen him to represent Tonga. Yes, it is arbitrary, but that is one of the limitations of such a project as this. However, sometimes you just have to choose, even while remaining unhappy with your choices.

The fact of the matter is that Hauʻofa spans the Pacific like a colossus. We Are the Ocean becomes and remains important reference material whenever we return to this region of the world. But one point is not enough to be able to navigate and set a course. So next we turn to another Pacific island scholar and poet. To Fiji and Teresia Teaiwa.

Epeli Hauʻofa