Pacific Dynamics: Volume 2 • Issue 2 • Nov 2018

FULL INTRODUCTION: This issue of Pacific Dynamics marks the anniversary of the Oceanic Memory conference that was held in November 2018 Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. The three day event was a collaboration between the College of Arts and the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury and the Memory Research Network Aotearoa. The conference attracted scholars and artists from around the world, including the Pacific, New Zealand, the United States, Europe and Australia, who were interested in how memory, as a political, poetic and technological practice, might help us to address some of the more urgent cultural, social, historical and ecological concerns facing the Pacific today. A wide range of disciplines were represented at the conference: this included literary, film and media studies; art history and theory; cultural studies; political science; sociology; anthropology; psychology; social policy; sport; health and law.

Memories are complex, selective, either deliberately or unconsciously, and evolve over time. Some memories are more hegemonic and powerful and some are subordinate and marginalised. The dominant stories of the Pacific are usually told by foreign historians, anthropologists, political scientists, journalists and travel writers, who define Pacific societies through deficit lenses as environmentally devastated or economically undeveloped. These narratives are often at odds with how Pacific peoples see themselves, live their lives and frame their collective and individual memories and meanings.

Contemporary Oceanic memory is shaped by a multitude of forces. For instance, on the one hand, the threat of climate change is the most recent escalation of a long process of ecological degradation and economic exploitation that includes the effects of colonisation, war, nuclear testing and global tourism. Yet on the other hand, Pacific societies and cultures display strength, resilience and agency in facing the challenges of the new millennium and developing new visions of the future. These contending discourses shape the form and resilience of communal memory. Memory plays a vital role in these processes of survival and transformation.

The Pacific Ocean itself is the largest memory system on the planet, as Steven Ratuva suggested in his keynote address: “it stores knowledge of marine life, of climatic changes, of navigational innovations, of life itself.” Like the ocean, memory is a fluid medium, “a changing construct, a dynamic synthesis of multiple forces — ancestral migration and settlement, colonialism and domination, resistance and decolonisation.” Oceanic memory, therefore, is a complex open system, a multidimensional process, that preserves and transmits the knowledge and experience, contested or censored, retained or renewed, of many different traditions, times, histories, identities, and forms of life (human and nonhuman).

Storytelling and images are the privileged medium for conveying memories so it is not surprising that most of the essays in this issue focus on art or various forms of embodied experience. Leonie John and Sylvie Ortega explore the work of well-known Māori authors (Apirana Taylor, Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff), emphasising how specific characters or special objects occupy an “interstitial” space and act as conduits for the transmission of indigenous memory in a postcolonial context. Anna Boswell’s paper extends the concept of memory to consider how nonhuman species, specifically “associative creatures” like the kiore or Pacific rat, are targets of a violent form of “controlled remembrance” that seeks to eradicate memories of migration, ancestral history and Pacific voyaging. Maebh Long examines the history of girmit in Fiji, the indenture system instituted under colonial rule, as a traumatic form of “postmemory” which “haunts” the writings of a number of important contemporary authors. Performance and theatrical production, as Moira Fortin shows, has also been crucial in revitalising language and revaluing local knowledge and practices in Rapanui. Such collective activities are also important for the maintenance of cultural survival on Vanuatu, as discussed in Lisa McDonald’s analysis of the role that contemporary art associations play in creating a public space for a reflection upon kinship, kastom, and shared histories and genealogies. Antonio Viselli, on the other hand, considers memory from an intercultural and intertextual perspective in his reading of Gaugin’s adaptation of Polynesian mythology and French Symbolist motifs in a “primitive trinket” carved during his first visit to Tahiti.

We are also grateful to our keynote speakers, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Sudesh Mishra, for permission to reprint work from earlier publications.

FULL ABSTRACT: In te ao Māori, the kiore (Pacific rat or Rattus exulans) is a distinguished travel companion who recalls migratory history, Oceanic homelands and distinct ancestral values. Yet for European settlers, kiore are indistinguishable from the two northern-world varieties of rat brought to Aotearoa/New Zealand from the late eighteenth century. Rodents of all kinds have long been viewed by settlers as mundane, dirty, disease-ridden, destructive of agricultural crops and “native” nature, and disposed towards rubbish and refuse. Kiore numbers declined rapidly due to competition with acclimatised European fauna and kiore were thought to have become extinct by the early twentieth century, before remnant populations were discovered. While the ongoing value of kiore to iwi is intermittently acknowledged, care for kiore is more largely framed by the settler state as being counter to the flourishing of life systems. Indeed, rats have been cast as a target species in the world-first Predator Free 2050 campaign unveiled with fanfare by the New Zealand government in 2016. Predator Free 2050 seeks to erase the memory of catastrophic changes to the lifeworld that have unfolded in Aotearoa/New Zealand since European arrival, controlling rats as a means of controlling remembrance. Because rats are associative creatures, however, they transmit striking teachings about the language of the pest and the stakes of stowaway memory.

FULL ABSTRACT: This article discusses how memory has been crucial in the production of theatre in Rapa Nui. Histories of colonial powers in Rapanui have foster the use of memory as a real source of information, not only to gather information about a specific oral narrative, but also about costumes and old customs that otherwise may have been lost from the Rapa Nui culture. The Peruvian slave raids that decimated the indigenous population, the establishment of the Williamson Balfour Company and the implementation of the Chilean education system prohibiting the use of the indigenous language, greatly affected the creation and production of Rapanui performing arts and theatre. This is exemplified by the work of the first Rapanui theater troupe Mata Tu’u Hotu Iti, established in the 1970s. Although the word theatre does not exist in the Rapanui language, this group used the concept of representation to revitalize the language, and re-value past practices and customs of its culture. Through its educational approach and targeting the local audience, Mata Tu’u Hotu Iti laid the foundations for the production of theatre in Rapanui. His influence is such that it continues to inspire the creation and production of theater within the school system and during the local cultural festival Tapati Rapanui.

FULL ABSTRACT: This paper examines the influence of contemporary art on collective memory in Port Vila, Vanuatu. In doing so, two key organisations are introduced – the Nawita Contemporary Arts Association and the Red Wave Vanuatu Arts Association. The establishment of each organisation is explained to contextualise the current socio-cultural environment in which artists work. The influence of kinship, island genealogy and aesthetic ideologies are explored as are gender relations and colonial heritage. By extension, the oeuvres of particularly active members from each association are presented, thus providing an overview of the themes and media that permeate spaces of shared public consciousness in the capital of the archipelago.

FULL ABSTRACT: An exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective. It claims that the novel invokes Oceanic memory more than its author is willing to admit. Against the author’s intention and ideology, a close examination of the narrative’s turning point presents Grace’s suicide as an occasion to revisit the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand from times prior to contact with Europeans – including times of so-called Māori ‘slavery’ – down to the 19th-century British settlement. The novel’s pivotal passage is also seen as a piece of Māori cosmogony revisited: Grace may be said to reenact the founding myth of Hine-Tītama/Hine-nui-te-pō’s flight from her incestuous father into the night. In addition, by encroaching upon the Pakeha owner’s land, she can be said to create a terrain of difference where the cultural and political values of Aotearoa/New Zealand might be negotiated anew. Like the novel’s multiple shifting narrators, and like Duff himself, she constructs ‘interstitial intimacy’ where readers get glimpses of an ‘insider’s outsidedness’, to use Homi Bhabha’s phraseology. This paper suggests that a productive and creative memory of the Maori minority as a social agent may be seen at work throughout Once Were Warriors.

FULL ABSTRACT: Drawing on the creative output of Witi Ihimaera, Apirana Taylor and Patricia Grace, this article examines how memories related to Oceania are woven into these authors’ prose and verse narratives. After a brief introduction of the concept of memory, as well as the selected literary works, the analysis will be subdivided into three broad strands: firstly, the Māori notion of whakapapa and its potential for Oceanic connectivity; secondly, different mechanisms of memory transmission featured in the literary works; thirdly, the representation of special objects embodying or aiding memories. These analytical strands lead to the conclusion that the authors feature various strategies of promoting Oceanic memories, yet are similar in their display of a strong sense of connection and their inclusion of local specificity. It furthermore becomes evident that indigenous memory networks and continuity are promoted.

FULL ABSTRACT: The centenary of indenture in Fiji was celebrated with public displays, speeches, parades, and publications. The momentum for critical and creative response grew in tandem with the wave of publications inspired by the end of colonial rule in many Pacific Island countries. This period of increased agency and autonomy was also a time of political uncertainty in Fiji, as questions of the nation’s identity and direction were raised. For many Indo-Fijian writers rootedness in Fiji was voiced through the traumas of indenture, which they invested with mythic valence, and which can be understood as operating as an origin story for Indo-Fijians. Vijay Mishra considered indenture, or girmit, to be a foundational ideology for Indo-Fijian writers, but viewing girmit in terms of false consciousness leads him to read Indo-Fijian anxieties in terms of political blindness and cultural insularity. Building instead on Sudesh Mishra’s elaboration of girmit as non-agreement, and Vijay Mishra’s later revisions of girmit ideology as founded on memories of betrayal, this article argues that girmit can be productively understood through Marianne Hirsh’s work on postmemory. Looking at writings of the centenary, and in particular Subramani’s short stories, this article proposes that the traumas of girmit that haunt writings of the period do so as postmemories.

FULL ABSTRACT: This article examines the adaptation of Mallarmé’s symbolist poem, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” by Paul Gauguin. During his first trip to Tahiti, Gauguin carved a cylindrical wooden totem that recreates the faun’s lustful dream in Mallarmé’s poem, replacing the faun and nymphs with Polynesian mythology. Memory is understood here from an intertextual, intermedial, and intercultural perspective, where the contrapuntal musico-literary qualities of fugue suggested in Mallarmé’s poem permeate through its afterlives as a palimpsest, culminating in Gauguin’s “primitive trinket.” Finally, to reverse the colonial gaze and to push adaptation and interextuality further, the Pacific gains more agency once we consider the afterlife of the totem reproduced in the recent film Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti by Edouard Deluc.

FULL ABSTRACT: I begin with our earth island; a concept made possible by the satellite technologies developed in the Cold War; a battle that, while largely invisible to the majority of the people of the globe, was violently propagated on the small atolls and great ocean of the Pacific. The myth of the island isolate, adapted by ecologists and anthropologists alike, helped to justify the detonation of hundreds of thermonuclear weapons in the atolls of the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia. In selecting the atolls for nuclear detonations, the island was treated as metonymic of our terraqueous globe. Blowing up the island was understood in a part-for-whole relationship in which one could make predictions for the destruction and irradiation of the earth. Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen weapon that detonated in the Pacific in 1954, might be seen as an originary event for the Anthropocene, in which the human destruction of an island might be scaled up to the earth itself (DeLoughrey, “The Myth”). The radiation from Bravo permeated the global atmosphere, creating the world’s first modern ‘environmental refugees’ and catalyzed the field of atmospheric chemistry. Studying the nuclear irradiation of the global atmosphere led directly to the science of the Anthropocene. While the Pacific Islands were used as laboratories and thus were at the vanguard of new technologies of weaponry, high-speed cameras, color film, radiocarbon dating, and developments in ecology, the islands were consistently denied their imbrication with the globe, interpellated as “isolated” and “primitive” in the films and documents of the Atomic Energy Commission (DeLoughrey, “The Myth” 168, 175).

FULL EXCERPT: Evening. Dye from prayer flags mounted on bamboo poles runs into the western sky. They have fluttered here for over a century now and it is impossible to imagine the landscape without them: the mast of bamboo, the spinnaker of flag, the hulk of shack and the rudder of plough steered by a boy through scalloped earth. My jahajibhai. My shipmate. Though on terra firma, he still sways to the raga of the sea, preparing the land for the advancing season. Draw near him and you see that his skin is salt, his hair kelp, his fingers coral and those are the eyes of a drowned man. The sea. Sagar. Kala pani. Five generations of howling at it has left an indelible mark on him. Now it is a habit, this howling. The sea: sponsor, foe, lover, tormentor. You left him in transit between Calcutta and Nadi, between state and state you left him stateless. Why? The scrolling waves publish dumb sheets in reply. As always. No dues, no riddles. The boy tilts the rudder; he is guided by the earthworm, the koraning cicadas, the sun now the pallor of kavika, the starapples ripening against an olive sky. His sparring with the sea is familiar to both of them, but sometimes he forgets if he is pushing a prow through clods or a plough through surf. For the earth is like the sea here, always moving beneath him. It is leased. They call it the Agricultural Landlord and Tenant Act. He calls it a disturbance in his soul.