The Absence of Race in Hauofas Work, Tales of the Tikongs - Literature review Example

The Absence of Race in the Discussion of Human Response to Situations in Hau’ofa’s Work, Tales of the Tikongs As a writer approaches the writing of stories that are grounded within a anthropological ‘otherness’ that discusses a diversity of ethnic background that is subject to differences in cultural aspects than a Western mindset, issues about race would naturally arise. However, in exploring the cultural differences, often times similarities will arise that are subject to the tenets of the human condition. Although the stories that are told within Hau’ofa’s work are designed to tell the stories from the point of view of the island of Tiko, the tales all can be related to situations in most cultures around the world. Through telling stories that are universal in theme, the cultural tone comes through as a secondary issue in regard to the ethnic race from which the stories are told. The first story could be told about any Westernized culture around the world. In the story “The Seventh and Other Days”, the nature of post-industrial work is examined for its lack of true labor. Post-industrial work has become a non-labor form of earning a wage, designed most often around the office. Most work in the post-industrial age does not require breaking a sweat - thus the concept of work is changed. The first tale tells the story of how employment that occurs during the work week is more of a rest where the work done on the weekend is more laborious than the employment. This irony is pointed out by the way in which the office workers spend a great deal of their day in leisure. However, this is not an example of how a particular race handles its day, but can be translated to most cultures and defined by the office in which work is taking place. Therefore, the discussion is not about race, but about human post-industrial work and the definitions of work in contrast to one another. On the one hand work describes a way in which monetary benefit is gained in exchange for attendance and the meeting of goals, but on the other hand work is defined by using the body in which to exert one’s self to accomplish a goal. In discussing the nature of the linguistic discourse about work, Hau’ofa has brought forth a modern, universally understood theme. Work is a cultural concept that through its Westernized definition has been brought forth to mean a contracted exchange whereby attendance and effort is transacted for pay. The end goal is not relevant to the exchange as it once was when craft and creation resulted in pay for goods, but the end goal will is relevant to whether or not the employee retains his job. “The Winding Road to Heaven” suggests that it is a cultural anomaly to tell half truths and to lie about the events of one’s life. The story speaks as if it is ethno-centric for this type of behavior to go on within the world of this particular culture. However, the stories that are told about the half-truths that are told are once again universally comprehended as they are the types of tales that can be related to most modern societies. The tale of Inoke Nimavave who wrote a bad check for $100 then went into court saying that it was the fault of the cashier who did not read the check correctly. According to the story, his tale of why he did not bring the error to the attention of the cashier was so moving that even the judge cried. In this way, the story is relatable to all societies and is not centered solely on creating a typified culture that is designed to target only the ways of life on Tiko. Although the story is universal, Hau’ofo attempts to make it culturally relevant to only his island, suggesting that the people of his island are experts at telling half-truths and at lying when it helps their cause. He proudly discusses the aspect of the one percent truth and that it is a difficult achievement to make. However, once again, lying is a universally understood concept and is relatable to many cultures. It is not just within the Tiko Island that a lie is told, but throughout most societies. The charm of the story is intensified by the cultural details, but this story is not one that is seated directly within the uniqueness of the Tiko society. Hau’ofa tells tall tales intended to interject humor into his descriptions of the island and life in the Pacific. He uses “oral and literary conventions mainly for social commentary on the ‘oddities of the Tikong and the things that happen to them” (Subramani 42). The stories are designed with the idea that the Tikong are unusual in the way in which they view the world. The irony of their Biblical beliefs in contrast to the ways in which they use less than moral ways in which to wiggle their way out of situations creates the humor as well as a commentary on hypocrisy and the way in which most Christian societies carry their own pettiness next to their righteous intent. Subramani quotes Lucian Goldmann in describing the way in which the prose used by Hau’ofa describes this sense of irony with individuality towards the culture. He said that “it is an autonomous literary form situated midway between philosophy, a conceptual expression of a world-view, and literature, the imaginary creation of a world of individual persons and concrete situations” (43). The world that is created by Hau’ofa is a caricature of the reality of his culture, bound through similarities that can be expressed about his world and the universal modern world. Through the use of this designed world, Hau’ofa has created a series of tall tales to which most people can relate. Within the tall tale format, the identity of the Tikong is both originated and made universal. One of the specific methods of creating the tall tales is in that Hau’ofa creates conceptual problems from which solutions must be found through the themes that he has developed. Subramani states that “events are merely the occasion that allows the essayist to raise a number of problems of universal value” (p. 43). The problems do not create the central themes of the work, but the universality of the responses and reactions to those problems creates a winding thread throughout his work. Hau’ofa is best known as a fictional writer, his work attempting to exemplify something of the South Pacific island culture. However, he has a doctorate in Anthropology and his desires to write in this way on the subject comes not only from his heritage, but from his anthropological understanding of the culture within the world and as a universal member of the world. According to Scott, Hau’ofa began to write his works in order to defy the anthropological means through which cultures that were not specifically Western were being defined through a sense of ‘otherness’ that defined them as being outside of the Western cultural norms. Hau’ofa intended to show how the human condition is the same throughout the world while only the ways in which it was framed might be different (126). According to Scott “In the academic terms that Hau’ofa has rejected, distinct and definable cultural commodities exist in isolation - better known in critical contexts as ’Others” (126). Through this otherness, indigenous cultures are defined separately from modern cultures, thus creating a sense that they have no relationship to the modern world. Hau’ofa has created a world in which both neo-traditionalism and assimilation can occur in the post-colonization life of those who are on the island. Scott states that “the islands themselves become the loci for the assemblage of new community based on the fragments of the old, each past contributing to an improvised present” (126). The island of Tiko is where the events take place, but the events are situated in the universality of the theme, thus the location is a vehicle through which the them is exploited. Despite the universality of the themes, the stories do reflect the cultural linguistically rhetoric in which the Tikong define their world. Heriniko and Wilson quote Hau’ofa in speaking about his own work that the people of whom Hau’ofa tells tales are not altogether happy with the revelations about their nature. They believe that through these stories Hau’ofa has revealed aspects of their cultural point of view that may have been better left within the community. The people of the Pacific Islands have a particular sense of humor about themselves that do not believe that outsiders can understand. They believe that Western judgment will believe them to be unintelligent or without ethical centers should they read the stories of Hau’ofa. Therefore, they are not fully comfortable with the work that Hau’ofa has done (42). However, reading the material from a Western point of view does not particularly point to an unintelligence or lack of moral character on the part of the indigenous people, but on the aspects of Western culture that are very similar to the way in which the Tikong handle their own issues and lives. In the example of the bad check story, Western society has many opportunities in which wrong doing at that minor level is excused, covered, and cleverly escaped from punishment. This is similar to the girl flirting her way out of a traffic ticket, or the offender spinning a tale in court that the judge buys in order to set him free. Finding an excuse for wrong-doing is a universal situation in which the Tikong show no more or less intelligence or moral issues than do from within any other culture. It is human nature to do things in order to circumvent the system, and it is just as human to try to get out of the consequences. Despite the universality of the themes within the stories, Geoffrey White writes in his foreward to Hau’ofa’s book We Are the Ocean: Selected Works that “Each story about life among the Tikongs portrays some aspect of the subtle distortions and absurdities that emerge in the border zones between island cultures and global economic forces” (xiii). The discourse revolves around the interwoven tapestry of life that has developed through Western influences on the indigenous culture. While the responses and reactions have universal appeal, aspects of the approaches that are displayed are purely associated with the ways in which the Tikong view the world. It is through these revelations that some discomfort is felt among the population that their private sense of the world has been exposed. The character of Manu, who escorts the unknown narrator, “delivers criticisms of the effects of neo-colonialism in his country” providing a balance to the sardonic and irony thick narrative (Keown 63). The stories provide a satire of the “foreign aid dependency and the various forms of political and economic corruption” that has developed throughout the culture (Keown 63). The commentary can be extended to include a discourse on the ways in which a self preserving culture has been made dependent due to the colonization efforts, creating a society that no longer survives on its own, but is tainted by the Westernization that has brought economic imbalance. The people express their universality through the Westernized influences, but are translating their own aesthetics on top of those infiltrations. The underlying satire reveals that the Westernization of the Tikong has done nothing to truly improve their lives. While they struggle to create themselves within this new influenced world, this too becomes a universal parallel in which the state of the world economy is commented upon through a microcosm point of view. According to Slaughter, “the people ‘to be developed’ find themselves as destitute as they started and burdened by a mounting debt that they have no hope even of servicing” (207). While this is the often the result of colonization and the intent to elevate indigenous populations towards Western ideals, this can also be said of Western cultures who have developed a system of debt in which borrowing has become a way of life and where debt is never conquered. Even within the specificity of the Western intrusive intent to change the foundation of their social structure, the globalization of their culture becomes a reason in which to understand that their responses are still familiar, thus discounting any notion of race as being relevant to difference. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists has determined that genetically speaking, there is no such thing as race. Race is a social construct that cultures define through specifying traits that stereotype people into groups (Ferrante-Wallace and Brown 12). Therefore, a discussion about race is always a prejudicial discussion based on ideas that have been developed through the influence of cultural concepts that do not serve humanity. Culture, on the other hand, is defined by groupings of people that develop concepts and linguistically discourse on concepts that define their identity. The Western influence on cultures has stripped many of their basic, fundamental viewpoints on the world, creating worlds that are a mixture of Western and indigenous concepts. The work by Hau’ofa creates a discussion of this combined sense of culture, putting the Tikong spin on the Westernized economic structure that has been forced within their cultural boundaries. In looking at the way in which the people respond to this world, the issue of race becomes immaterial as even their individualized culture creates a normative universality that can be related to any other Westernized people as they navigate through the economic global world. The stories that are created use literary devices such as satire and irony in order to create the discourse, creating charming tall tales with globally relevant morals. The post-colonized world in which the Tikong live is a statement on the false sense of superiority for which the imposition of the Western culture has come to represent. The tales of the people of the Tikong allow anyone from a Westernized culture to relate to their themes and responses without relationships to race, thus proving that there is no such thing as race. Works Cited Ferrante-Wallace, Joan, and Prince Brown. The Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity in the United States. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 2001. Print. Hauofa, Epeli. Tales of the Tikongs. Talanoa. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 2001. Print. Hereniko, Vilsoni, and Rob Wilson. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Print. Keown, M. Post-colonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. Scott, Jamie S. And the Birds Began to Sing: Religion and Literature in Post-Colonial Cultures. Cross/cultures, 22. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. Print. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Print Subramani, . South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation. Suva [Fiji: Inst. of Pacific Studies of the Univ. of the South Pacific, 1992. Print. White, Geofrey. Forward. Found in Hauofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Print Read More