Vale Teresia Teaiwa
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Vale Teresia Teaiwa
By Olivier Jutel
The Pacific has lost one of its great scholars, activists, champion of the arts and leading
lights with the passing of Dr Teresia Teaiwa. Teresia’s impact in the Pacific was as
expansive as the ocean which carried her across the region from Hawaii, Kiribati, Fiji
and Aoteroa. In her poetry and scholarship she would turn to the Pacific Ocean as a
metaphor of a universality that connects Pacific and oppressed peoples. Writing of the
diasporic condition which brought her to the makariri (cold) of Wellington she wrote
of ‘toes born in the tropics … it’s hard to believe this is the same ocean’. In the words of
her doctoral mentor Angela Davis, Teresia saw ‘the ocean as a medium of connection
as opposed to separation’.
Her friends spare no superlative in recalling Teresia’s impact on their lives. The word
that her colleagues from the University of the South Pacific return to is
‘transformational’. Robert Nicole called her ‘utterly inspiring’ and the benchmark for
Pacific Studies. The ‘anti-thesis of the arm-chair intellectual’, her work was critically
connected to Pacific communities and sought to break the neocolonial trappings of
academia while modelling utmost rigor. She embodied the concept of Talanoa as
pedagogy requiring her students to share their work with their communities in order
to keep critical knowledge accessible and reciprocal. In her own practice as a cultural
studies scholar and poet she championed storytelling and art as the intellectual
inheritance of Pacific people. Her successful efforts in popularising the writings Epeli
Hau’ofa was concomitant with the intellectual project of reimaging Oceania as one
people, those ‘who sweat and cry salt water … [and] know that the ocean really is in
our blood’. Davis describes the relationship of the two forms in her work as lending
her rigorous scholarship a poetic quality while ‘her poetry always produce[d] new
knowledge’.
Teresia was a scholar of the post and neocolonial condition and understood her role as
an academic as being a commitment to universal principles of emancipation and
forging solidarities between oppressed peoples. Her work on gender, anti-imperialism
and against ‘corporate and state collusions around extractive industries’ was truly
Oceanic in scope, spanning Kanaky, Hawaii, Aoteroa, Fiji, Guam, West Papua and
French Polynesia to name a few. Teresia’s visage was a common sight on the steps of
Parliament in Wellington in solidarity with West Papua and she was very active in
union struggles for a Living Wage and resisting the neoliberal university. She was a
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Vale Teresia Teaiwa
about:reader?url=https://overland.org.au/2017/03/vale-teresia-teaiwa/
forceful critic of Fiji’s coup-plotters in 2000, chiding the ethno-nationalists as utterly
illegitimate: ‘the problem with Fijian nationalism is that there is no Fijian nation’, she
wrote. Teresia shattered the myth of a unified i-Taukei nation, and spoke of an elite
that ‘sacrificed the economic and cultural wellbeing of a people for the advancement of
a few’.
Her own background positioned her at the intersection of Pacific intersections
allowing her to brilliantly speak to the particular and the universal in cultural and
identity struggles. Born in Hawaii to an African-American mother and a father from
Kiribati, Teresia was raised in Fiji, and understood the impact of militarism both as
forms of violence but also as a geographic force shaping worlds. Some of her most
powerful writing was concerned with the relationship between imperialism, martial
cultures and gender exploitation. The Pacific was violently disrupted by the nuclear
age with the testing of weapons on Bikini atoll but as she noted in Militarism, Tourism
and the Native, this act of violence and expropriation was also gendered. ‘Bikini’, a
name which should invoke a harrowing story expropriation and nuclear terror, is now
synonymous with a Western leisure culture and tourism which has instrumentalised
Pacific societies.
Her commitment to anti-imperialism was both strong and considered. Her study of
female Fijian military enlistees sought to understand the complexity of these
institutions and how women navigated them in order to access expanded citizenship
rights. The bind of this militarised feminism of inclusion was a strengthened Fijian
ethno-nationalism and the continued South-North transfer of Fijians as peacekeepers
and mercenaries for broader military interests. These contradictory victories were
cuttingly surmised in her poem ‘Peacekeeping’:
This is the house Peacekeeping built…this is the four-wheel drive…these are the
dentures for my dad….these are the photographs from our Gold Coast
holiday…these are the salty peanut flavored snacks…this is the life
While her critique was incisive there is no shortage of joy in her work and legacy.
Teresia’s friends all speak of an immense warmth and connection to all the people
around her regardless of station. Nicole spoke of an uncanny ability to engage people
around her ‘and let the encounter grow almost seamlessly into something bigger and
deeper than you first thought was possible’. This connectedness was an innate politics
of the everyday beautifully captured in her poem ‘Porirua Market with Susanna and
Jessie’. It is fitting that Gilles Deleuze serves as her reference point for a politics of
affective encounters. Teaiwa asks ‘let’s try a rhizome theory of the revolution?’. The
sounds and tastes of the market, the ‘shouldertoshoulderbustlingbrown’ of people is
rich in diasporic dreams and echoes. It’s simultaneously a space of dislocation and
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reunion that evokes:
past struggles worth each bead of brine each bloody ear
because here you can meet Bernard Narokobi
who wrote his country’s constitution
and is as humble now as he was when he wrote it
This is what Davis describes as the ‘poetic vision [which] shaped her sense of what was
possible in the world’. The masses of the diaspora at Porirua market are
simultaneously deracinated and connected, able to reimagine themselves and the
world.
Across the Pacific this week the Ocean has been a medium of connection for an
outpouring of love and sadness from Teresia’s friends. Her legacy can easily be
measured in her institutional impact on the field of Pacific Studies and what USP’s
Claire Slatter described as ‘more than a lifetime’s work in her short life’. However it is
this richness of colliding worlds, searing critique and emancipatory joy in her work
that best capture her enduring contribution. The reflections of radical icon Angela
Davis are a soaring testament to this impact:
I realize how much more I learned from her than she from me. These invaluable
lessons, especially about the Pacific, the need for new modes of feminism, the
scholarly and activist import of anti-militarism, are as – or even more – relevant
today.
Image courtesy of Victoria University.
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