Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  Many of the believers in the new religion speak only in whispers about the sour tang of pain that tinges the air there, blood-spattered pagan rites, living victims disemboweled and eaten, their blood and innards offered to the hungry akua. My lineage is one of healers, so we do not know all that the temple priests did, but I know enough to recognise how misinformed this belief is. Our gods did not want putrid flesh and rotting entrails. The mana rests in the bones. People were indeed offered up as sacrifices to our gods — but never living beings. Living offerings were too messy, and the necessary preparations for the bodies were too meticulous. Most were chiefs killed in battle or executed, the flesh cooked to strip away from their bones. The mana rests in the bones.

  I am shaken out of my reverie as the air around me shifts and thickens.

  It becomes harder to breathe, and an insistent buzz fills the air just below my hearing. Heat begins to roll off the thundering waves as they race towards the beach, each breaking set creeping closer to where we stand.

  Everyone turns towards the sea, fans stop mid-stroke, glasses sweating with condensation pause halfway to lips.

  A hundred breaths indrawn at the same time punctuate the appearance of a giant bony spine rising through the rhythmic ocean chop. A few people cry out in fear as a dark shape swells the ocean’s surface and the Tutua’s armored carapace rises into sight. But most stand in quiet awe.

  What emerges from the roiling shorebreak looks like no sea creature anyone has ever seen, yet it is undeniably of the ocean. As it strides powerfully through the shallows onto the mounded sand at the shore, its sheer size overwhelms my mind. This one stands as tall as a mature koa tree, over a hundred feet tall.

  The Tutua stands on four thickly muscled legs, each mottled and scaled like an ‘o‘opu. Its feet are reminiscent of fins, but end in a fringe of webbed spines. Waves of heat rise off the leviathan, distorting the air around the creature. Bony growths range across its broad, variegated, four-armed torso, while the black orbs of its eyes seem to devour light, never letting it escape. What I can not stop looking at, though, is its mouth. Though I quail at the sight of this most bestial of countenances, its mouth is different. The Tutua snuffles at the salt air, crinkling the leathery skin around its nostrils, and I catch a glimpse of its teeth. They are broad and flat, as if for grinding and crushing.

  Truth be told, it is magnificent.

  Now is the time for me to unleash the lā‘au kāhea. I start to chant and my words, amplified, fill the space between earth and sky.

  And then I see my mother, and she is also chanting the words. And I wonder … Although I have come here for one purpose, there may be another …

  I remember the prophecy:

  The land shall come from the sea.

  Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venus [infected], 2015–17, still from video work

  WHAKAPAPA OF A WALLPAPER

  A chimerical fiction

  WITI IHIMAERA

  1.

  A hee mai te tua, e ia papama ‘ehe

  No te tai a tau te Po …

  The sea rolled, the tides mounting

  For a period of nights …

  E po fanaura‘a atua, o te po Mua Taia‘aroa

  It was the God’s birth night,

  The night of Mua Taia‘aroa1

  HERALDS IN THE HEAVENS often presage changes coming to earth.

  Thus did our whakapapa begin when it became known that Venus would transit across the surface of the sun.

  The announcement brought scientists rushing from their hemisphere in the north to set up observatories in the south; on their arrival the womb of the world enlarged. From their centre of power in Europa they came to ours in the azure Pacific where we held the tino rangatiratanga. Here, we kept the sovereign balance to their own domain.

  One such scientist was James Cook who arrived in Tahiti to observe the transit on 3 June 1769. In the world that has gone before us, we were the iwi, the original settlers, with our own music in our southern spheres. Purotu, gift of the gods, was our Garden of Eden. The sky was above, Ranginui ē! The sea was below, Tangaroa ē! The islands were in between, ngā motu of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa ē!

  Other voyagers, of a most marvellous kind, scattered to the Indies and South America. Quickened by the irritation, the pregnancy reached parturition, became swollen; it spat out and delivered of itself ships that were wondrous to look upon, carrying their own clouds above them. Aiming their telescopes to the infinite air, the star seekers saw Venus, moving in the heavens like a giant waka. There it sailed, with the star clusters of Alcyone, Elnath, Aldebaran and Alhena looking on. The canoe bucked in the fiery cyclones that burst across the blazing eye of the sun. Its timbers smouldered, and its sails burst into flame. Would the waka survive? Yes! There Kōpū was, making escape into the cool universe beyond.

  No such escape awaited us. Having calibrated heaven, the strangers began to calibrate the earth. From marvellous they became mischievous; measuring, sketching, surveying, naming, they turned their telescopes on us.

  2.

  Forêts paisibles,

  Jamais un vain désir ne trouble ici nos coeurs.

  Peaceful forests, never a vain desire

  Trouble here our hearts.

  Jouissons dans nos asiles

  Let’s enjoy our refuges

  Jouissons des biens tranquilles

  Let’s enjoy peaceful things!2

  IN OUR GESTURES ARE our genealogies. Our ritual movements convey the stories of the shimmering Pacific womb from which we were born.

  Thirty-five years later, in 1804, we awoke to find that we had been transported to the Napoleonic Empire, Revolutionary Year XII. Our lashes parting, we discovered a new wonder:

  We were figures in a wallpaper!

  And we inhabited an extraordinary, vividly polychromatic, painted world of twenty paper drops, each 10 metres long. We asked ourselves, ‘By what magic and which tohunga have we been brought to this place and time?’

  Our creators were entrepreneurs Joseph Dufour and Jean-Gabriel Charvet.

  ‘Over a thousand multiple woodblocks have gone into your production,’ Monsieur Dufour told us, ‘and careful hand-painting has given you the graduated gouache sky above you. We have named you Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, The Native Peoples of the Pacific Ocean.’

  Monsieur Dufour told us they had drawn inspiration for creating us mainly from the three voyages under Cook’s command between 1768 and 1778.

  ‘Other accounts by de la Pérouse and Louis de Bougainville have also assisted in your composition,’ Monsieur Charvet added. ‘Your world is a set of parkland entrées inspired by such botanists as Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. Their journals and illustrations were re-worked as engravings by John Webber and William Hodges.’

  ‘We researched the most popular illustrations,’ Monsieur Dufour said. ‘And for the wallpaper’s final design we added our own neo-classical, Hellenistic and Pompeiian references and—’ he opened his arms to embrace us, ‘here you are, belle et magnifique.’

  Indeed, we were beautiful and magnificent, and it thrilled us to see ourselves, we from Ra‘iatea and Tahiti, so richly garbed and elegantly attired. Dufour and Charvet had visualised Tahiti as the birthplace of Aphrodite, and the splendid theatricality reflected Jean-Antoine Watteau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère.

  We were both real and mythic living in exotic harmony.

  Were we to blame that our creators had added Greek and Roman touches to our faces, physique, regalia and ornamentation? No! Now chimerical Arioi, bleached, without blemish or physical flaw, we engaged in decorous amorous play and danced a chaconne.

  SUDDENLY, AS WE DANCED hand in hand, we tripped over a gouache rock and found ourselves tumbling from our 10-metre paper drop into the one next to us.

  E hika! What was this? There were other Pacific peoples in the wallpaper!

  We accordingly re-composed ourselves and formally made mihimihi to them: ‘Where have you all come from?’

  The
y told us that Cook and other captains, on other ships with clouds above them, had also visited them in their lands.

  ‘We collected them for our wallpaper world too!’ Monsieur Dufour exclaimed.

  With great wonder we went from panel to panel as our brothers and sisters of the Pacific introduced themselves and showed us their own vignettes: Canadian Nootka Islanders, Islanders of Ha‘apai, Tonga, Tanna, New Hebrides and Vanuatu, the Sandwich Islands, Māori of Aotearoa, Islanders of Sandwich Sound, Alaska, Rotterdam Island, New Caledonia, Tongatapu, the Marquesas, Easter Island and Palau.

  Together we marvelled at the various picturesque tableaux-paysages. Each entrée was a pastoral arioso, unfolding a tale of exoticism amid leafy splendour, of amorous intercourse in a remote part of the globe. One entrée was discordant: Cook’s death by Hawaiian hands on 14 February 1779, had merited only a small pictorial.

  Too real, perhaps?

  Certainement, the public preferred the fantasy of Pacific harmony. So did our creators glorify the ancient regime. By composing an artful, ethereal, exotic paper enchantment, they enabled the viewer to escape their reality.

  We, however, could never escape ours.

  3.

  E ngā iwi ē, e karanga e ngā iwi ē!

  We call to you, all the peoples of the world!

  Titiro mai ngā iwi me ngā mahi o ngā iwi

  Look at our works, look at us as we dance

  On the strand beside the sea

  Auē te aroha, te mamae i ahau ē!3

  OUR JOURNEYS THROUGH THE 19th century began.

  We floated through Napoleonic France. The well-to-do delighted in our fabular fêtes galantes and the curieux lyric entertainment we provided.

  They also saw themselves in us!

  Just as the ballet heroïque Les Indes Galantes by Jean-Philippe Rameau was played every year on the King’s Feast Day, so did they stage ballroom carnivals inspired by the wallpaper. They transformed their garden bowers into idyllic Pacific arboretums where they held their own fêtes galantes. At the outdoor entertainments the courtiers mimicked us, dressing in the accoutrements of Polynesia but enacting classical baroque scenes within a pristine wilderness.

  When they weren’t looking, we copied them, dipping and swaying and fluttering our eyelashes and handkerchiefs as we danced. Oh, it was so much fun!

  WE BEGAN TO JOURNEY beyond France to the rest of Europe and across the Atlantic to the Americas.

  Hundreds of copies of our wallpaper were produced. We were cloned, and our Utopian landscapes were pasted on the walls of castles and chateaux, palaces and pleasure domes. We were a quasi-travel revelation. Visitors peered with nostalgic interest at the symphonic spectacles of singing, dancing and courtly love. We provided them with a vision of a Paradise that celebrated the universality of human nature.

  AUĒ, OUR PACIFIC HISTORY was no longer paradisiacal.

  In reality the practice that Europe and the Americas exported to the Pacific was exploitative.

  Following Ferdinand Magellan who, in 1520, had renamed our ocean without permission, the explorers were covetous. In our sorrow, greatly troubled and smitten with fear, we saw the impact of European discovery by such as Abel Tasman, James Cook, Jean-François de la Pérouse, Samuel Wallis and Louis de Bougainville. We wept at the subsequent colonial settlement, and the ways in which the indigenous history of the ocean became one of war, division of spoils and rape of its resources. The encounters between Europeans and Americans were disastrous for Pacific civilisations.

  We felt pierced through with darksome nails as the Americans annexed Hawai‘i and American Samoa; the French, Tahiti and New Caledonia; Easter Island became a special territory of Chile in 1888; the Germans held Samoa until 1914; the British, New Zealand and Australia. They variously named our dismembered parts Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia and Austronesia.

  Could they not hear us sorrowing for our sea?

  4.

  Et mon coeur s’est levé par ce matin d’été;

  And my heart arose on this summer’s morning;

  Car une belle enfant était sur le rivage,

  For a beautiful girl was on the beach,

  Laissant errer sur moi des yeux pleins de clarté,

  Letting eyes full of brightness wander over me,

  Et qui me souriait d’un air tender et sauvage.

  She smiled at me with a tender and wild expression.4

  GRIEVING, WE FLOATED THROUGH time and space, through the 20th century with its First World War, Second World War and War in the Pacific and, when we awoke, we discovered that the island nations and their human inhabitants had been subjugated. It was the bitterest of tortures to witness the conflagrations in Korea, Vietnam and other countries on the Pacific Rim.

  Our Ocean had also become the site of nuclear bomb testing by the very country that had first adored and loved us.

  The great foodbasket that had been created to feed all was bickered over as other world nations sought to claim rights over its bounty. From the northern Arctic to the shelves of Antarctica, the Great Powers were rapacious.

  THEN THE 21ST CENTURY arrived and, with it, a young woman to look upon us in 2005. As soon as we saw her our hearts leapt.

  ‘This is one of our descendants,’ we exclaimed with joy.

  Thus did the artist Lisa Reihana come into our lives. We called to her: ‘Neke mai e mokopuna, i raro i a Kōpū.’

  She was a filmmaker and installation artist with a fierce political intelligence.

  She stood before us and made her karanga, her ritual call. She gave us her whakapapa, her genealogy.

  ‘My ancestor Kupe was from Purotu,’ she began. ‘His mother was from Point Venus, the same place from which Cook observed Venus in 1769. Kupe voyaged from Ra‘iatea to New Zealand but, although almost two hundred and fifty years have gone by, the Māori still honour you and remember you, our ancestors of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa.’

  She then gave greeting across the genealogical latticework to all the Pacific peoples on the wallpaper. Driven by her faith in legacy and enduring power of kinship, she placed her nose against the wallpaper in hongi.

  We felt the sweet brushing of skin on our parchment as she exchanged the breath of life with us.

  THUS BIDDEN, WE ROSE to discover that we would have a new purpose in the world.

  Whereas Dufour and Charvet had originally created us ‘to delight the imagination without taxing it’ Lisa Reihana wanted to develop us as a panoramic video installation.

  E hika. He aha tēnā video installation?

  ‘Oh, that’s an easy question,’ she answered. ‘I am going to make you into a moving image of the wallpaper.’

  Well, she sure took us on a long ride, that one.

  For six years she travelled worldwide to many countries, including Hawai‘i, Australia, the UK, the Netherlands, France, the US and New Zealand. She worked with a huge diversity of contributors including performing arts students, filmmakers in costume and production, musicians, animators, technicians and actors and dancers from Pasifika and Māori communities.

  Her project was on the scale of a feature film. There were many stories to tell, collaborators to communicate with, performers to include and computers to be wrestled with.

  ‘I am giving you a new visual language,’ she told us, ‘and within it you will move and dance and tell your stories in an altogether different way.’

  WHEN LISA WAS FINISHED we discovered that we were in a different Time and Space.

  It was 2012, and we had become a two-channel panoramic work called in Pursuit of Venus. Our new purpose was to engage the legacies of European romance and representation in the Pacific in relation to our own sense of self. It was also to interrogate representations, gender, mythologies in our original make-up.

  ‘I want to restore to you your tino rangatiratanga,’ Lisa said. ‘I’ve used 21st-century digital technologies to reclaim you and to re-imagine you, not through the European Gaze but through the eye of the Pacific. You have been a fabulat
ion invented in someone else’s elsewhere. Let all who look upon you marvel at your mana, the ways in which you powerfully bestride our world.’

  We danced in Auckland, we sang in Amsterdam and we boogied in Toronto. We got down in Singapore and Dunedin. We danced, danced, danced.

  And then we made a triumphal return in the hokinga mai where, as in in Pursuit of Venus [infected], we were fêted among the iwi in Auckland in May 2015. The references of the original wallpaper have been expanded to include vignettes that concern cultural resistance and conflict. The small pictorial account of Captain Cook’s death is no longer background to our narrative but foregrounded as the pivot point of Pacific–European history. The red-coated marines and blue-coated European sailors are now there as part of the evolving narrative of Oceania.

  5.

  A te, sovrana augusta,

  You august sovereign,

  Indiandeniam la chioma,

  We crown you,

  A te l’Asia, a te l’Africa s’atterra

  A te l’Europa …

  Ora consacra e dona,

  Now let Europe consecrate

  And bestow on you this imperial crown

  Of the world!5

  The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki sends its greetings.

  We send them to Mount Aetna, the Seven Hills of Rome.

  To the Doge of Venice, also, greetings.

  Look upon us now:

  Here we are, emissaries arrived at the Tesa dell’Isolotto, Arsenale, in the city once one of the great powers of the Western world.

  The kuia rangatira, Rhana Devenport, and a travelling ope of the Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki have escorted Lisa Reihana here to join the pantheon of international contemporary artists at the most important art event in the world, the Venice Biennale.

  We lift our arms and offer you, halcyon citadel, the haka.