Throwback of the week - Mista & young Bobby V

I never understood why these boys never advanced further than this album as a group...still....probably the most played track in my playlist

Tatatau 2

You are probably wondering why I am taking the trouble of talking about a person such as Dr ‘Okusitino Mahina when the issue at hand is concerning tattooing or tatatau. Well, I mentioned earlier that Tongan culture and therefore arts is an intricate weave of elements that are interdependent. And Dr. Mahina’s work has been and is an attempt to unravel this complexity. Parts of the Tongan cultural weave are lost to our knowledge and experience and Dr. Mahina’s work attempts to understand these lost entities. He does this by attending to the implicit and tacit elements professed to be at work primarily behind our language.
Dr. Mahina has constructed out of this a Tongan understanding of time and space that is essential to the recovering of a lost philosophical system implicit in the ways Tongans and also Polynesians thought about themselves and the world. Time and space here is understood as ta (time) and va (space). Though these essentialities are professed to uphold everything that we know of, I am going to focus only on some aspects of its compatibility – especially in terms of where our thinking should be in our attempts to recover parts of our culture that are lost in time, e.g. tatatau.
I should also say that what I am doing as a tattooist isn’t entirely a focus on recovering tatatau; rather, I am merely doing tattoos because I love it and love the creativity involved. My work isn’t about recovering tatatau first and foremost. I came up with the term ‘Urban-Kupesi’ because I want it to speak for my work in the sense that it isn’t about just doing Polynesian patterns but also expanding the skills to other type of imageries. The ‘urban’ stands for modernity in perhaps the widest interpretation – modernity as cultural imperialism, as colonialism and post, as urbanization, as diaspora, as contemporary, and etc.. The ‘kupesi’ stands for the philosophy that is behind the idea of art in a Tongan sense.
Kupesi is a term used in Tongan art to speak of the patterns and motifs in ngatu or tapa, it is used in the traditional art of lashing or lalava, it is also used in genealogy and many other aspects of our culture. To elaborate on how both terms come into contact and how they reference my work would take an entire book so I won’t here. All you have to know is, ‘kupesi’ for me is a concept which incorporates the philosophy of art in a Tongan sense in looking out at the present.
Dr. Mahina’s work though is a very complicated labor rooted in both traditional Western philosophy and Tongan thinking. Everything that exists for Mahina consists of ta (time) and va (space). And a good introduction to this theory you’d have to find it yourself in the internet, especially at Nuama.org. The space and time of this moment isn’t enough for me to elaborate. There are many other artists and writers of Tongan descent who has taken on this theory in their work. However, I only wanted to use Dr. Mahina as an example of how the process of recovering aspects of our cultures and re-utilizing it to re-tell stories of our identities….2bcont..

Tatatau

I’ve been meaning to get my head back into thinking mode for the last month or so, and having some time to spare, I did some browsing on the internet on issues of interest. Thus I’ve been led to think and reflect on important issues relating to what I’m doing as a self-proclaimed artist and my connection(s) to my culture and ethnic background as a Tongan. First of all, there’s the issue of recovering and revitalizing the practice of tattooing in the traditional sense. Indeed, such is an issue that may seem simple and straight forward, and to some extent, it may consider a little knowledge of history. However, the task at hand continues to prove that it is a very laborious process made not for one person and his or her generation but for us and those that have yet to come. The work of Dr. ‘Okusitino Mahina is a very good start in terms of where our knowledge and history may be found, put together and retold. His is a philosophical understanding and methodology for recovering that which has been lost. And although we all encounter elements in which we disagree with such thinking, we know that the process towards decolonization isn’t always in unison.
Dr. Mahina’s work is first of all a highly philosophical and sophisticated labor, both in Tongan and English. His is a movement between Western philosophical traditions such as that announced by the early Greeks and Tongan aesthetic. Thinking in Tongan is an art. Tongan language is complicated with poetics and metaphors – like Old English. By this, I am comparing Tongan language with the kind you’d read in Shakespeare and drama class – that type of talking where everything is referential and poetic. Tongan language consists of complicated and intricate levels catered towards a highly stratified culture and way of living and thus thinking.
This alone is a near-impossible element of our culture to comprehend and to make things more difficult, one has to understand also how it connects to our history and arts. From here, you may begin the process of recovering tattooing or tatatau. But also, you have to take into consideration the fact that the practice has been dead for more than a century or two. And, to make things worse if you are a proud-arrogant Tongan, you have to learn it from the Samoans.
One person I know of who learned partly on his own and from the late Su’a Sulupae Paulo 2, who has already begun part of this process is Aisea Toetu’u. For this, the mana has to be passed to you from the people that have continued the tradition from our past, those that have kept the genealogy in continuation for generations. By now, the task at hand you can say is doable but as I mentioned before, it isn’t for one person and his or her generation, but also for those that have yet to exist. …