PART 3
By now, I have probably taken the discussion too deep into a theoretical paradigm, but I think the positive thing about blogging is, there are no constraints and definitely no disciplinary boundaries curtailing the freedom to explore ideas in ways otherwise impossible to do so in academia. Indeed, speaking of constraints, it is adamant that we as Pacific Island people, artists, writers and perhaps also bloggers continue to explore new ways to express understand and explain to ourselves our own culture(s) and experience. The need to do so is a result of our contemporary conditions as living both within and beyond the experience and history within which we are continued to be confined. Call it what you want, and there are a lot of catchy terms floating around in texts as well as in the boundless matrix of the web. However, I think it serves this discussion better to use the term ‘Modernity’.
We theorize and continue to do so for various reasons. A standout reason is our need to understand the world around us and how we fit into that mechanism. But we fail from the outset because our thinking about these conditions is initiated by an eruption and violence to what we understand reality to be. So that our theorizing process begins by disregarding and discounting the very fabric of the reality we attempt to understand by assuming our standpoint from without and beyond the constraints of that reality. We begin by assuming ourselves and our reality outside and beyond temporality. We assume ourselves as existing outside our own experiences so that we collectively attempt to read culture(s) as a simultaneous and contesting mechanism. Indeed, I would also add that our culture(s) is such to the point that we always already from the outset must locate ourselves somewhere outside our own. Indeed also, it is from this without which I tend to designate my discussion from and the ‘palimpsest’ and weaving metaphor helps in breaking the constraints in which we find ourselves.
The paradox of decolonization is therefore a given situation. With the present interest of popular culture in tattooing, it is a situation already violated from the outset. Tattooing in popular culture is already a fragmented collection of its assumed ‘authenticity’, and to say the least, this ‘authenticity’ exists alongside its fragmentations, weaving and mirroring each other.
The question of ‘authenticity’ still remains a problematic issue in that the above sense of co-inhabiting the same plane of existence suggests that such is a reciprocal and interdependent existence. What is an ‘authentic’ form without the in-authentic? Indeed, it is an existence through differences. We can go to and fro arguing in-between these two poles but the fact of the matter is, it is problematic in that such arguments are too reliance on extremity. In the same sense, where does the popular idea of decolonization come from? By this I mean to question the whereabouts of its designation and its origin form of movement. Decolonization is an important albeit problematic issue for all indigenous peoples and cultures. It is an issue raised largely in light of a culture’s mentality towards itself and outward.
Decolonization is revolutionarily thinking about oneself and his or her culture, identity and the world without. I say revolutionary because it is very much a political action. It is a process to overthrow the oppressive psyche dominant in our reality. Decolonization is a strive towards a nostalgic form of ourselves and our culture(s) that’s outside our reality but with which our experiences often at times crisscross to form weaves, therefore marking points in our historical narrative connecting us and that nostalgia even if for a short moment.
In a contemporary Polynesian inspired tattoo sleeve, we see these weaves in several aspects of a sleeve’s own narrative. We see points in a Steve Ma Ching Samoan sleeve that may construct a weave point with the more traditional form of the Samoan ‘pe’a’ tatau. The same could also be said of Joe Brown’s work, or Carl and Afa Cocker’s. More so, the same could be said of every other form of tattoos relevant in today’s so called tattoo renaissance….
to be cont...
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