Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia

Abstract

Reviewed by: Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia Dan Taulapapa McMullin Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia. Exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1911 2018–27 10 2019. Exhibition catalogue available at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Atea_Nature_and_Divinity_in_Polynesia. For additional details, see the exhibition website at https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2018/atea-nature-and-divinity-in-polynesia. Atea No time to close the door of light To shutter the sight of each other in dark wood The dark wood of his arms, her legs Standing on the body of our wailing. Spin the tail of light As pigs run up and down the wand As the wand bursts into feathers inside us The long red, long white streams of tropic birds. Unite angels with their demon Sacrifice the iconoclast to the sea Watch his clothes float away to broken sky. Look for tongue of red molten rock In the sweet hole of the temple of our bodies Wear the bio gifts of missiles In our hair like plastic flowers. There is no point that can free us Of this desire to be buried in light To sleep with these deities deep In cliffs hooked up from the sea. I moved to New York in the summer of 2014, around the same time that London-born Māori curator Maia Nuku moved there to begin work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since that time, I've watched her nurture a cultural center for the community of Pacific Islanders who live and work here, much like her family helped nurture the diaspora in England. Although I live mostly in the country town of Hudson in upstate New York, I feel I'm a part of the steady stream of Moana people who come to New York City to visit or bring work or to live, like previous generations from the early 1800s when Kanaka Maoli sailors arrived on whaling ships, through to my Aunt Tutasi, who worked in television and hosted Malietoa Tanumafili II and Tupua Tamasese Mea'ole when they came to the United Nations in 1962, right up to the exhibition Te Maori, which the Met hosted from 11 September 1984 to 6 January 1985. Lonoka'eho, Lono of the Stones, of the eight stone foreheads, towered overhead at the entrance to the opening of Maia's exhibition Atea. Kanaka Maoli artist and curator Marques Hanalei Marzan and Shinnecock artist Shane Weeks chanted blessings for the space to a mixed crowd of Pacific community members and artists and prominent New York collectors and curators (for videos of the opening, see the exhibition's website). Looking at the curved figure of Lonoka'eho or at the beautifully carved figures of Hikule'o in the exhibition (figure 1), I felt blessed that these few deities survived colonization, and yet I can't help but see my own feelings about Indigenous disembodiment or removal in these figures. The word "atea" throughout Polynesia has connotations of light and [End Page 596]space, of openness, of day; it is the space in which sound travels, the logo/longo/lono (perception by senses other than light) of chanting across time. Contemporary philosophy of Polynesia, following Lilikalā Kame'eleihiwa, Maualaivao Albert Wendt, and Hufanga 'Okusitino Mahina, often asks what space-time means in the Pacific context, in Polynesian terms: vā being the space (of relations) and tā the beat of time. This search for Indigenous time is caught in a kind of language drift toward Western definitions, but its goal is to bring Polynesian meaning into the greater space. The word "time" originally referred to the tides in old English, and the word "clock" originally meant bells sounding the hours of prayer at abbeys and sounding the change of watch on ships. Like Polynesian words for space-time, such as "vatea" in Samoan, which is the space of light over the sea that defines distance, these English sea meanings changed into something to match the Cartesian lines of maps, arbitrary demarcations, the mechanics of clocks, objects elided of stories, naturalized functions. As I look at the rising shield foreheads of Lonoka'eho and the sumptuous forms of Hikule'o in the...