Refractions on the Pacific Rim: Tongan writers' responses to transnationalism.

Flanagan, Kathleen

My reference for examining cultural transformation in literature of the South Pacific island nation of Tonga is refraction, the process in physics that involves a change of direction when light travels from one medium to another. This notion of travel suggests the mutations of migration that have occurred in this nation. West European explorers of the Enlightenment traveled to the South Pacific to seek (and believed they found) the Noble Savage. Subsequent contact with the West has had more subtle effects than simply taking over governments: Western religious and economic institutions that once refracted (or changed) the political and other institutions of the Pacific now often work to conserve them in their colonial forms, thwarting other Western political institutions such as democracy.(1) That is, they inhibit cultural change. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, has written of the need to "focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1) and has noted that the "postcolonial perspective" of migrants "forces a recognition of the more complex and political boundaries that exist on the cusp of [the] often opposed political spheres [of the Third and First World]" (173). Bhabha's use of the word moment in this definition indicates a notion of time that is applicable to a discussion of the location of tradition. He defines these "interstices," or locations of culture, as the product of overlap of components of self identity (such as gender, race, and class). I would argue instead that the meeting of nations/cultures in colonial and postcolonial moments affects social discourse such as stories by the Tongan writers Pesi Fonua and Epeli Hau'ofa, which explore redefinitions of culture and then self in these societies.

Unlike Tahiti and other South Pacific island nations whose main source of revenue is an influx of tourists, Tonga's main source of revenue is remittances from Tongans living abroad in such English-speaking countries as the United States and New Zealand. By one estimate, these RTAs (as they are officially termed) pay for about 80 percent of private domestic expenditure (Helu, 3). Although never a colony, Tonga long received "advisors" and monetary support from Britain.(3) I. Futa Helu, president of Atenisi Institute, a nongovernmental elementary school through junior college, believes this foreign aid "puts fetters on our freedom to formulate policy" (3). He notes, for example, that the Bank of Tonga is partly foreign-owned and that "because her top management and operational principles are set by a head office in New South Wales we cannot be sure that its policy will always be informed by national interests" (4). Dependence on the money remitted by Tongan economic migrants and by transnational agencies such as international aid groups and churches has similar effects. As foreign aid increased in the 1970s, so did dependence on and desire for foreign goods: thus both RTAs and transnationals center Tonga's economic system outside the country.

As a result of these migrations to and from Tonga, within Tongan society itself (and the stories by Pesi Fonua and Epeli Hau'ofa I will be discussing here) there is debate over the function of "traditional" culture. Some Tongans would use facets of the classical Greek system of education found in the West as a means of establishing critiques of the present political system in Tonga: a strong central monarchy and a weak system of nobles that gives very little political power to the "commoners" who make up two-thirds of the population. Some maintain that this same political system is responsible for the great number of Tongan economic migrants. The crown owns all land, which is distributed by nobles to commoners. Growth in population, however (as well as political considerations), now means that not all commoners get land, even though Tonga's nineteenth-century constitution entitles each adult male to a lot in town and a farming allotment in the country. Thousands of Tongans, educated in English and Tongan, now find that to achieve economic prosperity and social status, it is necessary to migrate, at least temporarily, to one of these other English-language cultures, thus precipitating a diaspora. The effects of this transnationalism are visible in the recent emergence of Tongan written literature, a product of contact with Europe that, like its other cultural institutions, wrought change in Pacific oral cultures. Yet unlike economic and religious transnational institutions, much of Tongan written literature in English does not now inhibit political reform.

The present government in Tonga began advocating a return to "traditional" culture in the late 1970s, building a cultural center with Japanese aid money. The monarchy's version of traditional culture, however, not only supports folk customs and oral literature; it also carefully fixes "tradition" at a moment of contact with the West when the constitutional monarchy was established in the 1820s, which is also a time when Tongan culture was an oral one. Different views exist as to the roles of tradition and change in Tonga: the present monarchy and the two writers Pesi Fonua and Epeli Hau'ofa all fix at different times the origin and function of social institutions such as religion, political structure, and economy, which have metamorphosed in the process of contact with the West. The arts are not exempt from this process: although Tongan culture is still largely oral, with song, poetry, and dance occupying the most prominent positions, written literature (a product of contact with the West) now claims a place there as well, as illustrated by Fonua's and Hau'ofa's short stories.

The present government of King Taufa'ahau Tupou fixes tradition in terms of these categories at the time of his ancestor King George I's conversion to Christianity and subsequent accession to central authority, a time that coincides with Western missionary contact in the early nineteenth century. Epeli Hau'ofa fixes all of these categories at the inscription of the 1875 constitution that established land-tenure laws. Pesi Fonua mediates between these two in his subtle exploration of and references to a precolonial Tongan culture that underline the necessity of democracy and fairness. These three varying definitions of the plastic notion of "traditional" call to mind Kwame Anthony Appiah's use of the term neotraditional: "traditional because it uses actual or supposed precolonial techniques but neo-. . . because it has elements that are recognizably colonial or postcolonial in reference" (346). The king, Hau'ofa, and Fonua all refer to Tongan tradition but differ in distinguishing between pre- and postcolonial elements. They differ as well in their approaches to the transmission of culture. Both Hau'ofa and Fonua draw on written literature to equalize the process of refraction by giving voice to concerns over issues of transnationalization that lead to migration. Their writing also serves to highlight the debate over the function and origin of "tradition." Although putting these concerns in writing does not settle the question of "tradition," it does make apparent the indeterminacy of origin and state of flux in which "tradition" exists in Tonga. The defining of tradition determines not only culture, but is subsequently a means of defining the self.

The elite and the present government appear to favor a "timeless," static, colonial-era Tonga. Time in Tonga is a much-manipulated concept: although Tonga lies east of the 180th meridian, which acts as the international dateline, its government requested that a small loop be created so that Tonga might remain in the same date zone as its major trading partners, Australia and New Zealand. This adaptation has the further advantage of making Tonga, as the slogan of its main newspaper the Tonga Chronicle proclaims, "The Land Where Time Begins." While the present monarch may thus claim that his country is the first to see a new day, the manipulation also has the effect of linking Tonga directly with British Commonwealth nations in the regions, not only in terms of date but in the adoption of religious, political, and economic tradition as well. These institutions in Tonga, however, cling to vestiges of their nineteenth-century form, whereas most of the Commonwealth has moved away from absolute monarchy to more democratic forms of government.

Many writers and theorists in the Pacific region believe that the ill effects of Western colonial influence cannot be redressed by a return to tradition, or what is known as the "Pacific Way." The Fijian author Subramani argues that cultures must be seen in historical perspectives as dynamic and creative and that the "Pacific Way" should not be used to "justify privilege and conformity" (154). The Western Samoan novelist and critic Albert Wendt believes that

No culture is ever static nor can it be preserved (a favorite word with our colonisers and romantic elite brethren) like a stuffed gorilla in a museum. . . . I do not advocate a return to an imaginary pre-papalagi Golden Age or Utopian womb. . . . Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures, but for the creation of new cultures, which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania. (206)

Subramani and Wendt both deplore the exploitation of a return to tradition as the means by which an elite controls the masses. While Wendt advocates a new Oceania free of colonial taint, both submit that cultures are dynamic rather than static. The difficulty Westerners have in seeing Pacific cultures as dynamic is illustrated by Paul Theroux's 1993 work The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific, a travel book that reeks of disappointment at not finding, especially in Tonga, a precontact South Pacific paradise fixed in the past. The changes that Theroux deplores are in large part those prompted by the Christian church: while late-twentieth-century Westerners go to the South Pacific with ahistorical notions of a premissionary, eighteenth-century paradise to wear bikinis (named in 1946 for a Pacific atoll which has been irradiated beyond all possibility of habitation by the United States' atomic-weapons tests), some South Pacific islanders, encapsulated in the nineteenth century by missionary codes of propriety, wear two sets of street clothes to go swimming, lest one set alone be too revealing.

The writers Pesi Fonua and Epeli Hau'ofa are both social anthropologists by training who published collections of short stories in 1983 after the 1970s recession in the United States and other countries forced many Tongan economic migrants home. Their works illustrate the conflicting approaches to problems with development, migration, and the role of traditional culture in Tongan society. Fonua, born on the northern Tongan island of Vava'u, received some of his education abroad. He is currently the editor of Vava'u Press, located in the capital city of Nuku'alofa, which produces books about Tongan culture as well as Matangi Tonga, a bimonthly newsmagazine, and 'Eva, Your Holiday Guide to Tonga, both in English. Fonua, at least in part, agrees with the Tongan government's attempt to recover aspects of traditional culture.

Epeli Hau'ofa was born in 1939 to Tongan missionary parents in Papua New Guinea and received a Ph.D. in Australia. From 1978 to 1981 he served as Deputy Private Secretary to the King of Tonga. In 1983, while in Fiji, he published the collection of satiric stories Tales of the Tikongs, which was briefly banned by the king. Hau'ofa, though of Tongan origin, has spent most of his life outside Tonga, acquiring an outsider's perspective that gives rise to satiric treatment of his subject, including the Christian church, the cause of his original migration.

Pesi Fonua's literary and nonliterary works demonstrate the effects of societal changes on individuals' definitions of self, especially in terms of national identity. Author of a 1987 study of Melanesian (specifically Solomon Islander and Fijian) settlements in the largely Polynesian Tonga titled "Consequences of Returned Migrants to a Tongan Village," Fonua there noted that a 1976 census showed that 65 percent of the Tongans entitled to land under land-tenure laws have not obtained such property, and that among these Tongans "the present trend is to go overseas if at all possible" (20). At the conclusion of the study Fonua calls for "establishing a secure and positive, political and economic environment" for these Melanesian settlements. In the foreword to his short stories he stresses that modern literature, unlike older works that "are printed in the English language and relate to people and ways of life remote from ours in the Tonga today," serves an important function in "relating to our lives in modern Tonga." In these stories his recognition of the inevitability and difficulties of modern economic and political change is subtle yet apparent. He believes in the importance of the "traditional" in modern cultures, as well as a recognition of transfiguring economic and political forces. Fonua does not advocate a return to a timeless and unchanged Tongan past, although he notes the differences and inconsistencies between pre- and postcontact Tongan "tradition."

Pesi Fonua has not remained a migrant himself, and some of the stories in Sun and Rain deal with themes that, on the surface, seem only subtly to reflect the influences of migration and transnationalization. The stories were written first in Tongan, then translated into English: in his foreword Fonua explains his desire to make modern creative writing accessible in both English and Tongan, so that "we are once again the actors and not merely the audience." His book itself is a physical manifestation of the rift created by the English cultural presence in Tonga. Opening it at one cover displays English versions of the stories, while turning over the book and opening it from the other cover reveals Tongan-language versions. (Ironically, a copy that I examined from one library contained a slip from the book binder requesting correction of a "flaw" - he or she believed part of the book was "upside down" in error rather than in an attempt to provide equal consideration to both Tongan and English versions of the stories.)

Fonua's stories are peopled with commoners whose lives have been affected in subtle ways by refractions of Western religious, political, and economic institutions that have encouraged migration. In the first story of the volume, "Until Death Us Do Part," a young woman is prevented from marrying the man she loves not only by the fact that she is from a noble family and he is a commoner, but also because they worship at different Christian churches. Fonua connects these two factors that prevent democracy in love when he writes that the young woman "could hear her father's voice as he repeatedly recited their remote connection to a chiefly lineage, something that he knew by heart as well as he knew the Lord's Prayer" (10-11). Another story, "Tidal Wave," set on Emancipation Day (celebrating emancipation from British control in 1970), demonstrates how the effects of church, tradition, and economics coalesce. This story illustrates the bifurcated Tongan sentiment toward tourism.(3) In Fonua's story, as three schoolboys are disappointed in their attempt to earn spending money by paddling canoes for tourists, one somewhat mockingly preaches: "Remember what the Bible says - love the stranger in your midst. Don't discard Christianity: your father wouldn't have owned such a big piece of land if it were not for the conversion of your grandfather" (18). One of the boys believes that he knows what palangi (the West) is like because he watches these tourists and because he has a movie poster. For the boy, these microcosmic and inaccurate yet pervasive and influential images of the West perpetuate the process of refraction.

The title story "Sun and Rain" features a main character, Sione, who feels himself a failure because he does not receive a scholarship to study at a New Zealand university. Although Fonua's story makes it clear that an avenue for economic mobility and social status is closed to this character, it also provides an argument against migration: Sione does not receive a status education abroad, but he ultimately achieves more than do his friends who go abroad and return to Tonga to work in bureaucracies created by transnational aid agencies. He builds a factory that cans Tongan agricultural products and employs five hundred people, the grand opening of which is attended by the king. Although this portrayal of the easy move from subsistence to capitalist economy is surreal, the story remains an argument against migration and loss of citizens.

The most telling story, however, is "The Point of No Return," in which a young Tongan man lives an unproductive life waiting for his father, an economic migrant to Hawaii, to send for the family. As the mother, Lute, points out, the children dropped out of school, and they have lost their farm allotment while waiting for money from their father. Like his friend and others in the story who wait for their chance to migrate to New Zealand, Australia, or the United States, the narrator dissipates and neglects the small resources available to him in Tonga. The first-person narrator notes, "As time dragged on our daily living depended on the money he [the father] sent us monthly and, as now, when no letter arrived, all we could do was to beg food from our neighbours" (37). A beggar is what this former student becomes, as he and a friend panhandle for money to get drunk, and a bank employee, a young Tongan man like himself, says in sad disgust, "Tamasi'i [child], why don't you go and work for your money instead of standing here begging like a fool" (38).

Although the young men are not successful with the bank employee, they do obtain money from a fakaleiti, the commonly accepted male cross-dresser of Tongan society, who has become a prostitute for the palangi (foreigners). A society in which "traditionally" all property was communal - and thus it was not "begging" to ask for goods - has been transformed, though in a culturally unresolved way, through institutions such as banks (represented by the bank employee) and market economies from the West. These economic and social changes in turn affect the individual, turning this protagonist from student into "beggar." The story's final sentence suggests a similar transformation of his mother and sister into prostitutes for foreign tourists: "We were not very successful in town that day either, but we went home with the hope that Lute and Feketa would be more successful when they went out looking for work that night" (42).

Fonua's focus is on the ills promoted by Tongan migration abroad, as well as unmitigated foreign refractions on Tongan life. The story "Mateuteu (Be Prepared)," whose bilingual title indicates that English does not sufficiently convey the desired idea, describes the effects of a storm on islanders and their dwellings. When the island's church is "shattered" (57), the protagonist is able to save his traditional Tongan fale (house) by employing his father's method of lowering the roof. The only other house left standing is that of the nobleman whose father owns the island and who has consolidated his power by studying in "Palangi" (a foreign land) and returning to be a government minister, indicating that pre- and postcontact "traditions" are equally strong. To his son the protagonist explains, "I am the descendant of the builders of canoes and Tongan fales, like this one, but there are no more suitable trees on our island, and the people no longer want to live in fales, so all I can do is grow manioc and go fishing for us to eat" (57). Yet even the protagonist's traditional way of life, vindicated in the story by the sturdiness of his house, may soon change, for his son inquires, "If I go to Palangi will I become a Government minister?" The protagonist, "surprised that my son wanted to change our life," replies, "If you are clever" (57).

While Fonua recognizes the inevitability of change, he emphasizes the use of tradition for its power in promoting not the inequities created by religious or political systems but rather the strength of the individual. In an article about contemporary Tongan art in Matangi, the bimonthly newsmagazine published by his press, Fonua writes that "Tongan traditional motifs feature prominently in the work of these artists, and are used to reflect their dreams and the new environment that they are now living in" (44). Fonua values precontact Tongan artistic and economic traditions, fixing "tradition" outside the reach of the West, all the while recognizing the effect of Western refractions on Tonga in terms of religion and politics. He appears to suggest the possibility of reclaiming identity through art (of being "once again the actors and not merely the audience"), even if creative writers must create not only in Tongan but also in English. That which is originally Tongan, that which provides identity, should remain, not migrate: in the same magazine article Fonua quotes the admonitions of an artist, emphasizing them through repetition, that Tongans should make replicas of artifacts rather than sell originals: "These old objects have inspiration and they belong here in Tonga" (45).

For all Fonua's recognition in his stories of the refraction of Tongan nationals to places abroad and of subsequent changes to the island's cultural dynamics, however, they are not at all so removed and distant from Tongan society as are Epeli Hau'ofa's satires. The satiric short stories collected in Hau'ofa's Tales of the Tikongs examine the impact of Western imports such as Christian religion and conflicting political and economic systems that reshape "Tikong" (Tongan) cultural and individual identity as well as provide the basis for the debate over "traditional" ways of life. The author's 1977 sociological study Our Crowded Islands argues that the best way of life for Tongans involves population control as well as personal and political freedom. Hau'ofa notes that since the midnineteenth century "two opposed and complementary features" have operated in Tonga: "an authoritarian political and bureaucratic structure at the national level, and at the local grassroots level, something akin to familial and individual anarchism" (resulting from the land tenure system). He adds that the churches "have tended more to providing a strong ideological support for the state" (12). In other words, Hau'ofa believes that Tongan personal freedom depends on the nineteenth-century system of land tenure, which guarantees a farm and town allotment to all adult males.

If a civil servant or any other paid worker with properly registered allotments feels that he has been treated grossly unfairly by his superiors, he only has to resign from his job and go to his land where no one will order him around, and where, if industrious, he can conceivably grow sufficient vanilla to earn an income greater than those of our ministers of state. (12)

Hau'ofa thus demonstrates that the social structure of land tenure affects the life of the individual; he believes, however, that this system is threatened by overpopulation. Yet in his 1983 collection of stories he satirizes the brain drain created by educated Tongans' going abroad. When he writes that Tonga "is a country with the kinds of resources that will not support a profitable entry into the type of economic and consumer life that we have been dreaming about" (24), Hau'ofa seems to advocate a return to the traditional Tongan subsistence living as a means of maintaining both personal and national freedom. In his stories, however, while he satirizes such transnational influences as international aid agencies and foreign-based Christian churches for their parts in eroding these freedoms, he also recognizes that a return to "tradition" as advocated by the Tongan bureaucracy translates into a lower standard of living for poorer Tongans, though not the elite.

In his stories Hau'ofa does not wholeheartedly embrace a return to "traditional" culture as a remedy for past and present foreign influence if it applies only to commoners and not to the elite. Although he calls for population control and less dependence on foreign goods and existence in his 1977 book Our Crowded Islands, in his fiction he avoids romanticizing the "Pacific Way," possibly because he believes the latter is used to justify the preservation of the present antidemocratic government. In the story "Blessed Are the Meek" he depicts the life of a commoner not included in elite development schemes, emphasizing the word traditional: "Puku . . . built on a corner of his father's land a traditional thatched house that was traditionally small, traditionally dark, and traditionally damp, a traditionally appropriate abode for a man of his lowly station" (72). Elsewhere in Our Crowded Islands Hau'ofa writes that "we see glimpses of . . . [Tongan] identity in our daily interactions with one another, and in the depth of our language as expressed in our songs, poems and oratory"; certainly within Hau'ofa's own short stories, though they are written in English, one sees glimpses of this troubled identity as well. Hau'ofa protests against institutions of West European origin that were once catalysts for change but now inhibit it - with the exception of written literature in English. He does not support an inequitable or wholesale return to the "Pacific Way" that refuses to take into account these refractions.

Hau'ofa's most frequent target in his satiric stories is the Christian church in its various forms as introduced by Western missionaries. A prime mover in the origin of political and economic "tradition" for the monarchy it helped create in the nineteenth century, the state church today exerts an impulse toward conserving other areas of "tradition" (at least as they have their origin in the early-nineteenth-century missionary contact) such as politics and economics. In addition to the vast state-sanctioned influence of the Free Wesleyan Church in Tonga, other Western churches exert economic influence and must be viewed as acting as transnationals. For instance, many Tongans convert to the Mormon faith, which not only provides secondary education (at a premium in Tonga) to its members in Tonga but also maintains a college in Hawaii, to which its Tongan members have access, and assists Tongan members in emigrating to Salt Lake City. The cost of tuition, as anthropologist Paul van der Grijp puts it, is one's soul (155, note 9).

"The Seventh and Other Days" illustrates Hau'ofa's contempt for the hypocrisy and corruption of the church, as well as his view that the church generates other mistaken "traditions." The satiric premise of the story - that the heavy demands of church participation on Sundays make people less productive on other days of the week - is personified by Sione, a "Most Important Person who holds high positions in both the secular and the spiritual affairs of the realm" (1-2). Sione, who "drives every morning from Monday to Friday to his office to loaf on the chair behind his desk," ignores the counsel of his foreign-aid advisor, "to whom he has delegated all his work" - that is, relinquished all his power (3). Sione, susceptible to flattery like most of Tiko's "Sitters-on-Chairs, Wise Men, Traumatised Experts, Devious Traders, and assorted Pulpit Poops" (3), listens instead to the "honeyed words" of the office cleaner, the commoner Lea Fakahekeheke (whose name translates as "flatterer"). The description in this story leads the reader from the Christian church of Western origin to the usurping presence of foreign economic and political advisors, the same progression followed in the nineteenth century which is accepted as "tradition" by the present monarchy but here is satirized by Hau'ofa as wholly ineffective.

Political tradition and refraction surface in the story "Paths to Glory," in which Tevita Poto, a Tikong migrant who received a university education abroad, is castigated by his elite family for questioning the church and the monarchy and by the common people for supporting the "Pacific Way." The Fijian critic Subramani defines the Pacific Way as "a quasi-political ideology [which] has a self-referential side. Its basic objective is to assert that Pacific people should not be intimidated by foreign models but develop their own priorities. Some use it to extol settled values rather than promote an ongoing discourse" (154).

Tevita's quandary illustrates the inherent duality of the Pacific Way ideology in its adoption of seemingly progressive principles of nonreliance on Western culture, an ideology that does not take into account the accompanying conservative, refractory nature of this potentially ahistorical policy. Tevita's uncle scolds him: "You're Elite and you should walk and act like one. . . . Why do you criticise the Government so much? Why do you criticise the Church so much? You say you want to speak the truth. What's the use of truth in Tiko?" (44). A taxi driver berates him:

The Pacific Way belongs to regional Elites, Experts, Wheeler-dealers, and Crooks! And Tiko is in Tiko. . . . And one more thing. You are so fond of talking about democracy. Democracy is a foreign idea. You Wise Men are for ever bringing in foreign things. This is Tiko, doctor. Democracy and Tiko don't dance. . . . Pray to God and you will have your democracy in Heaven. Goodbye, professor, I'm off to New Zealand tomorrow. Yes, for good. (46-47)

Hau'ofa recognizes the inevitable influence that Western goods and ideals have already had in the South Pacific, and he calls attention to the self-interested practice of adopting Western religious and economic systems that benefit the existing government and elite while rejecting a Western political system - democracy - that might benefit the common people.

Just as Pesi Fonua's "Point of No Return" draws attention to the way in which the change from a subsistence economy to a market economy has had an impact on the lives of his characters, in "The Tower of Babel" Hau'ofa pokes fun at the abandonment of a viable subsistence economy for the surplus production economy which shortsighted foreign development schemes cannot sustain. Here Hau'ofa tells the tale of Ika Levu, a part-time fisherman and gardener:

His dual occupation meant that Ika worked whenever he felt like it; and he had very little money, which bothered him not at all. Ika never felt miserable until Sharky [the Australian development coordinator] laid hands on him. It was his most urgent duty to help develop his country, said Sharky. . . . In helping the development of Tiko, Sharky had helped the development of himself and his companies most generously. And what of Ika . . .? As soon as he got his fishing equipment, and got himself thoroughly in debt, Sharky dropped and forgot about his existence. (21-23)

Although a Western-style developed economy will benefit transnationals and the existing elite in "Tiko," it effectively destroys the way of life for most commoners in a subsistence-based economy. Refractions of West European economic systems, the result of the meeting in the interstices between Pacific and Atlantic cultural institutions, affect the life of the individual in an adverse manner.

In the story "The Glorious Pacific Way" Hau'ofa presents an account of a Tikong amateur folklorist, Ole Pasifikiwei ("Pacific Way"), who needs a typewriter to record his findings in an orderly fashion. The folklorist, who, despite his name, is portrayed not satirically but sympathetically at the story's outset, applies for a grant with an international agency, whose conditions force him to become a migrant from Tiko on the international conference circuit. The folklorist leaves his carefully collected papers with a relative, who unknowingly sells them (appropriately enough in a market economy) as toilet paper, thereby destroying a rare written archive of Tikong oral culture. The story's last sentence notes that Ole Pasifikiwei "has since shelved his original sense of self-respect and has assumed another, more attuned to his new, permanent role as a first-rate, expert beggar" (94). Hau'ofa's protagonist attempts to bridge the gap between oral and written culture, but Western transnationals, through their part in destroying his manuscript, force a return to "traditional" oral transmission.

Oral culture is "traditional" in Tonga; still, both Hau'ofa and Fonua believe that written discourse is not only the inevitable product of refraction between Atlantic and Pacific cultures, but is beneficial as well. Written documents of "tradition" may inhibit false interpretation: written fiction about society, like written constitutions, provides interpretations of individual lives and freedoms, a necessity once Tongan society has been affected by Western refractions. Hau'ofa, distanced from his country as a political migrant, creates satires that comment vigorously on the inroads made upon "traditional" culture by the dynamics of the interstices or the meeting of cultures. Hau'ofa fixes tradition at the adoption of the written constitution and insists on the adoption of Western traditions such as democracy, a stance that accounts for his current migrant status. Fonua appears drawn to portrayals of Tongan culture that predate Western missionary influence, a concept seemingly less in conflict with the position of the present government. His short stories, however, are equally observant of a Tongan national identity troubled by notions of origin and tradition. The government and these two writers seem to hold differing perceptions of tradition and fix its origin at different times, thus illustrating that the advocacy of a return to "tradition" as a solution to transnational migratory problems is neither an uncomplicated nor an apolitical act. Although Pesi Fonua's preference is to work within the existing social system, not to be a migrant, his stories, like those of Epeli Hau'ofa, recognize that migrations to and from Tonga create a dynamic society rather than a static one. Both writers and their texts work within the interstices of cultural contact, describing the transformation and fragmentation of protagonists in a changing society.

Longwood College

1 As Christine Ward Gailey convincingly argues in Kinship to Kingship: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands, Tonga's present political system is a product of contact with Western missionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (xvii). Pre-Christian Tonga consisted of island regions ruled by numerous chiefs. The economy was mainly a subsistence one of agriculture and crafts produced by women. Chiefs were dependent for their status partially on hereditary claims to royal kin, but also on the goodwill of the commoners they ruled, who produced the chiefs' visible signs of wealth in the form of agricultural and artistic products. Property was communal. In the 1820s Wesleyan missionaries helped one of these chiefs gain control over Tonga as a whole and thus create a centralized government. The relationship was mutually beneficial, as it gave the Wesleyan missionaries a loyal supporter who eventually made this Christian religion the state church, which it remains to this day. The present king thus depends in part on the church for succession and legitimacy. Western missionaries helped create not only the centralized monarchy but also the commodity production and marketing operations that characterize capitalist colonialism and on which the centralized government is dependent. This economy, rather than the original subsistence-based one, creates large numbers of economic migrants to English-speaking industrialized countries such as the United States.

2 Although Tonga was never a British colony, in 1890 the country became a British protectorate and in 1900 ceded its foreign affairs to Great Britain as a way of deflecting imperialist overtures from other European nations. Until her death in 1965, Tonga's Queen Salote discouraged foreign tourism, hoping to preserve a "traditional" way of life. In 1970 her son, the present King Taufa'ahau Tupou, ended the treaty with Great Britain and resumed control of the country's foreign affairs, an act that seemingly promised to minimize foreign influence. The king also, however, built a new hotel and international airport to attract foreign tourism, accepted greater amounts of foreign aid, and negotiated migratory labor agreements with other English-speaking countries. Contact with West Europeans thus initiated Tongan dependence on foreign and transnational grants in aid.

3 This sentiment is found also in a poem by another author displayed at the Visitors' Center in the capital city of Nuku'alofa which describes tourism as a double-edged sword that brings needed capital but inevitably has an impact on indigenous culture.

WORKS CITED

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Critical Inquiry, 17:2 (Winter 1991), pp. 336-57.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York. Routledge. 1994.

Fonua, Pesi. "Consequences of Returned Migrants to a Tongan Village." In In Search of a Home. Pat Hereniko and Leonard Mason, eds. Suva, Fiji. University of the South Pacific. 1987.

-----. "Contemporary Artists Bring Exhibition to Tonga." Matangi Tonga, 9:5 (October-December 1994), pp. 44-45.

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KATHLEEN FLANAGAN is Associate Professor of English at Longwood College in Virginia. She is the author of various articles on orientalism in twentieth-century British and American poetry. Her work on women writers and representations of colonialism in Africa has recently appeared in the MAWA Review and Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.