The late Tongan-Fijian social anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa wrote Our Sea of Islands to inspire Oceanic peoples. Below are a selection of excerpts from his influential essay.
During recent research for a Virtual Reality 360° documentary on climate security in the South Pacific that I was contracted to produce with a team at PHORIA for the the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, I discovered the influential works of Tongan and Fijian social anthropologist, author and academic, Epeli Hau’ofa. In particular, an essay, Our Sea of Islands stood out amongst a selection of works in his book, We Are The Ocean.
Revisiting the expansive worldview of indigenous Pacific Islander cosmologies, Our Sea of Islands argues that developing Pacific Island states are not small and dependent as they are often referred to by developed nations. Rather, they are vast, interconnected, and richly diverse.
The Pacific Ocean. Credit: Angie Richard.
Hau’ofa reminds Oceanic peoples that “smallness is a state of mind,” invoking contemplation around migration, kinship, and custodial responsibility for the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific.
Here I share a selection of excerpts from Hau’ofa’s essay are italicized below for each of us to consider and discuss together.
But if we look at the myths, legends, and oral traditions, indeed the cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania, it becomes evident that they did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions. Their universe comprised not only land surfaces but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their way across the seas. Their world was anything but tiny….Smallness is a state of mind.
There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands.” The first emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centres of power. Focusing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships.
The difference between the two perspectives is reflected in the two terms used for our region: Pacific Islands and Oceania. The first term, “Pacific Islands,” is the prevailing one used everywhere; it denotes small areas of land sitting atop submerged reefs or seamounts.
“Oceania” denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants. The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves. People raised in this environment were at home in the sea. They played in it as soon as they could walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought on it. They developed great skills for navigating their waters – as well as the spirit to traverse even the few large gaps that separated their island groups.
Theirs was a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers. From one island to another they sailed to trade and to marry, thereby expanding social networks for greater flows of wealth. They travelled to visit relatives in a wide variety of natural and cultural surroundings, to quench their thirst for adventure, and even to fight and dominate.
Hau’ofa continues to comment on how 19th century imperialism attempted to sever the ties of kinship and free movement across Oceania:
…transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other. No longer could they travel freely to do what they have done for centuries. They were cut off from their relatives abroad, from their far-flung sources of wealth and cultural enrichment.
Following World War II, the expansion of the global economy enabled the free movement of Oceanic peoples once again:
The new economic reality made nonsense of artificial boundaries, enabling the people to shake off their confinement. They have since moved, by the tens of thousands, doing what their ancestors did in earlier times: enlarging their world, as they go, on a scale not possible before. Everywhere they go to…they strike roots in new resource areas, securing employment and overseas family property, expanding kinship networks through which they circulate themselves, their relatives, their material goods, their stories all across their ocean, and the ocean is theirs because it has always been their home…we all know that only those who make the ocean their home, and love it, can really claim it as their own. Conquerors come, conquerors go, the ocean remains, mother only to her children. This mother has a big heart though; she adopts anyone who loves her.
Hau’ofa goes on to speak to this new era of Oceanic people’s movement across the region, dispatching all kinds of materials and resources to and fro, “enlarging their world, establishing new resource bases and and expanded networks for circulation.”
Importantly, Hau’ofa reminds his people of their duty as custodians to the Pacific Ocean, and the role Oceanic Peoples must play to ensure global climate security:
No people on earth are more suited to be guardians of the world’s largest ocean than those whom it has been home for generations…Our role in the protection and development of our ocean is no mean task; it is no less than a major contribution to the well-being of humanity. Because it could give us a sense of doing something not only worthwhile but noble, we should seize the moment with dispatch.
Ocean is vast, Oceania is expanding. Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that ultimately aim to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom. - Hau'ofa, E. 1994. Our Sea of Islands.
About the Book
English Title: We Are the Ocean, Selected Works
Author: Epeli Hau’ofa
Page Count: 216 pages
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
From the Publisher:
We Are the Ocean is a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry by Epeli Hau'ofa, whose writing over the past three decades has consistently challenged prevailing notions about Oceania and prescriptions for its development. He highlights major problems confronted by the region and suggests alternative perspectives and ways in which its people might reorganize to relate effectively to the changing world.
Hau'ofa's essays criss-cross Oceania, creating a navigator's star chart of discussion and debate. Spurning the arcana of the intellectual establishments where he was schooled, Hau'ofa has crafted a distinctive--often lyrical, at times angry--voice that speaks directly to the people of the region and the general reader. He conveys his thoughts from diverse standpoints: university-based analyst, essayist, satirist and humorist, and practical catalyst for creativity. According to Hau'ofa, only through creative originality in all fields of endeavor can the people of Oceania hope to strengthen their capacity to engage the forces of globalization.
"Our Sea of Islands," "The Ocean in Us," "Pasts to Remember," and "Our Place Within," all of which are included in this collection, outline some of Hau'ofa's ideas for the emergence of a stronger and freer Oceania. Throughout he expresses his concern with the environment and suggests that the most important role that the "people of the sea" can assume is as custodians of the Pacific, the vast area of the world's largest body of water.
