Bougainville carver seeks closer links with New Zealand
Joe Dutaona at Ngakau Carving Symposium.
Photo:
Supplied
Bougainville wood carver Joe Dutuona spent April in New Zealand, learning a little about the country and introducing local artists to Bougainvillean culture.
He was brought to New Zealand as a guest of Volunteer Service Abroad, with the featured event being a symposium on indigenous art in Thames.
Dutona spoke with RNZ Pacific about art, the Bougainville efforts to make money, and the
ongoing quest for independence
.
He began by talking about staying with friends in Rotorua whom he had hosted in Bougainville.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Turtles carved by Joe Dutuona at Ngakau Symposium.
Photo:
Supplied
Joe Dutuona:
And I went and stayed with some of the people there. They used to stay in Bougainville. I always looked after them, and then they wanted me to go and stay with them.
Then I was going around visiting the sites for the Māori history things before the exhibition. I just visiting the sites. I went and visited some of the artists in different places. It was really interesting to get some ideas, because it is all about our culture.
Don Wiseman: What sort of artists?
JD:
I think they carve, like wood and then stone. Back home, we carve only a wood.
DW: So at the carving symposium itself, how was that?
JD:
Before I left Bougainville, I got just a few chisels with me. I think five of them. I could not bring everything because I do not have money to buy access [weight], so I have five to make it lighter.
I just worked with these five chisels at the symposium. They helped me with grinders. They asked me, 'just when you need something because you do not have anything. So you can borrow things from us'. So, I just borrowed a grinder.
DW: What's it like working in New Zealand wood?
JD:
Oh, the wood. They call it totara. It is really heavy, and it is tough, strong, and it is really hard to lift it up by yourself. So you need somebody to carry the wood.
Joe Dutuona with Ngakau Carving Symposium attendees.
Photo:
Supplied
DW: And you visited other artists. What have you learned?
JD:
I just go and visit. We got the same thing, like they got this marae, then back home, we got the same buildin, but we call it karakeni. It is sort of the same building.
They made the carving. They carved the poles and everything. I got the idea from here now. So if I go back home, I can tell the local people or the clan because we always go with a clan. Our culture is based on our clans.
And then we have to do these things again because it starts to die out. We must start and build this thing again.
DW: You're from a part of bougaville that's been at the centre of the upheavals of the last 40 or so years. How's it been for you?
JD:
Because we are going through this crisis from the mining so we got a hard time there.
We just try to build something again and just coming up very slowly, not really fast, but we are coming.
I think we are going to come up sometime.
DW: Well, I know there's still opposition to a reopening of the Panguna mine, but the government itself is very determined to reopen it, and sees it as the solution to the economic issues facing Bougainville. How do you feel about that?
JD:
It is true about economy. But we got something - like it is not only mining. We [have] got everything on our land that we can make money with it.
Why talk [only] about mining every day? We got agriculture there. We got everything. We can run tourism [industry].
It is not all about mining, because [by] mining we are going to destroy our land; we have cultural people, and then we are living with our environment. Money is not mining. Money is everything. We can just rebuild the plantation.
Back, before the crisis, plantations were working really good. But now, nobody is looking at it and they are talking about mining. We have to plant these things back to try and build our economy.
Stingray carved b Joe Dutuona at Ngakau Symposium.
Photo:
Supplied
DW: The classic example, of course, right at the moment is cocoa and how the price of cocoa shot through the roof last year. And we heard stories of people having so much money they almost couldn't believe it.
JD:
Yeah, cocoa farmers, I think now they are making lot of money now because of cocoa. You can see lot of people buying Land Cruisers and all this.
DW: What about the political situation? Bougainville is planning independence, and it wants its independence in a little over two years time. How important is that to you?
JD:
It is all right. Independence, it is all about money, how we can make money, and that is why they were talking about mining.
And then I said, it is not all about mining. It is agriculture and tourism. They are really important things. It is on the ground. Save our environment. I think politically, independence, it is alright. But we have to find a way to make money, like we got so many things, such as like war relics and then beautiful beaches, and we need sites to advertise it, and then people see and come, like [for] tours.
DW: In your time in New Zealand. Will that change how you look at art now, when you go back?
JD:
Back home now young kids they just staying doing nothing back home. I have to go and maybe I start down South and then come to Central, and then then down to North Bougainville, because young people now, they do not know what to do.
The young generation, they grew up in a crisis, because they do not know what law and order looks like or feels like.
They do not know what to do, drinking and smoking drugs, or we call it, jay jay [jungle juice] drinking, and then somebody should go and teach them what to do, make them busy, instead of just staying there and then drinking jay jay.
Joe Dutuona with Wati Ngamane Ngati Mari chairperson.
Photo:
Supplied
DW: How do you make them busy?
JD:
Just give them something to do, tell them what to do, and then you stay with them, make sure they earn money, and then they will see that. This is the thing where I can [help] when I get married or something, I can look after my family.
DW: When you were in Thames you were exposed to all these other artists, and they were all indigenous artists. So to what extent did you intermingle with them? Did you relate to them?
JD:
When I arrived there, I think they already knew me, who I am, and then they saw me because I am black.
I [was] surprised to see the ladies who also welcome me, the artists, because we never really see the ladies carve something. And then during the session, while we are doing this carving thing, the ladies were carving the stone, where some of us were carving the wood.
We were talking about our culture, my culture, and their culture, because we are multicultural people. We were sharing these ideas, how they carve, and then what I do. And I said, because I am from a clan, from the Hornbill [Kokomo] Clan. And I tell them I always carve Hornbill. I also carve Eagle. Eagle is another clan. And then cockatoo. We carved the birds. They carved the stone And they told me that this one is this, and this one is that, and then how we go to the heaven, or when we die, or all these sort of things.
And then they will l go, I wake up the animals, because of our clan, I carved the totem pole, I think one totem pole in Buka Courthouse, and it is still there. It is about the clan, it is all of the birds. And then while we were there, I carve one eagle, and then three turtles, and one [indistinct] and then, and then a stingray. And then I was bending them. And then they come and saw me while I'm doing this, and they talk, 'oh, it's another idea. Again, you're showing us the you know, we never do this thing.'
People are using the blow torch to bend the wood, and then they said, 'oh, you're teaching us the new thing.' It is okay. It is good because you already told me something too. So you give me idea. I'll give you ideas. So that is all about it.
Joe Dutuona at RNZ studio in Wellington.
Photo:
RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
DW: Can you envisage that it would be beneficial to have more of this sort of contact?
JD:
I think that I want our government, like New Zealand government or Bougainville government, make us artists, all artists, we can share. If we have an exhibition in Bougainville, we can get some [artists] from New Zealand to go down and we can carve there, because we never carve the stones, they can carve the stones. We [have] got so many stones there. We got so many scrap metals from the mining, because some of [New Zealand artists are] doing scrap sculptures.
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He tells her she is poison and in response Roz proceeds to systematically disassemble her life while avoiding any meaningful human contact. Roz isn't outright punished for her transgressions; in fact it's evident she's largely escaped culpability across her life, but this means she's not learned anything of worth and has instead elected to pursue impulsive hedonism and choices—or avoidance of choice— born of delusion, which proves deeply harmful. So, punishment as psychic pain. For Roz, as with other women in the book, there is no absolution. In a scene that journeys the plains of the central plateau, Roz rises from a valley, where 'birds folded themselves into origami in the pale sky' and a hitchhiker she collects gently wonders why she only asks questions, never answering. The accruing tension of this story, and the remembrances that float and disappear from Roz's consciousness are stunning. In a final scene, Roz's incoherence and pain is so complete she begins to fall, a tipping that summons the surplus women onboard; the rolling pitch of the boat reflecting their own bewilderment and lack of tether though for reasons entirely distinct to Roz's, whose delirium conveys the destruction of habitual denial and repression on one's psyche. Another woman trapped in an illusion of her own is Sash. In 'Torn', Sash is a detective in a small town 'sandwiched beneath the ranges and the low-slung river'. Here is a riveting, quick-paced story that wrestles with conflicting moral questions, where Sash wilfully represses the violence of her own home and where a younger Jade and Lauren reappear; recurring characters haunt as motif across the stories. The girls remind Sash of 'pit bull puppies she found shoved in a shed out the back of a gang pad once, snarling. Cute, she thinks, but also, they've already learned this is how you survive'. Positioning the girls as victims caught up with heavies, Lauren retorts that the decision was theirs to make. 'Feminism has a lot to answer for', Sash thinks. 'Repositioning exploitation to make it seem like agency'. The story 'Gracie' deals with similar themes, involving two young girls living with their single mother who is employed in shift work at a freezing works and can barely keep it together. The three live in a hotel in dire conditions of poverty and great risk of harm. The girls eat two-minute noodles and lose clothing at school that can't afford to be replaced. 'All goods, my Gracie. We'll get you another one', her mother assures. A sympathetic school pupil offers Gracie a muesli bar and through this gesture we understand how Gracie must appear to others. In 'Orbits', a couple try to escape the disorderly reputation of their pasts. At their back are their respective families, who struggle with drug addiction, crime and other expressions of intergenerational poverty. The couple reside in a meagre home outfitted by items sourced from the Salvation Army and paid for by Whetū's job as a meat packer. Like many of Duff's characters, Whetū has not yet learned to live with his ghosts. Here, and in similar stories, Duff has various characters make reference to 'white trash' families, a term important for the purposes of her narrative but one she treats with circumspection and care. It tends to be those who speak in generalised terms out of habit or convenience who make such claims; police officers requiring shorthand qualifiers, for instance, which Duff both critiques and accepts. This class represents a strand of Pākehā culture thoughtfully imprinted throughout the book, and in doing so reaches back in time to the women who arrived poor, owning nothing, whose prospects were uncertain, and who dwell in and bewitch the book through their future ancestors, some of whom continue desolate lives of poverty and abject suffering. Duff is an immersive storyteller. Her stories captivate and pull the reader under. Her women are desperate and dysfunctional; they feel they have vacated their own lives. They all want. They all long. Duff is interested in a woman's unconscious, that inaccessible part of ourselves that yet reveals who we are without our knowing; the slips of the tongue, our habits of mind, the ways we behave when we think no one is watching. And Duff's nose for a story is utterly compelling. She offers both lively, sophisticated plot and thoughtful mediation on themes that at their core concern strong, complicated women, as Mary Gaitskill does in Bad Behavior or Elizabeth Wurtzel theorises in Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. It is clear Duff loves women, and she loves her characters; she trusts her characters and believes in them. She presents the fallible lives of girls and women who live, largely, on the margins, on their wits. In a sense, Surplus Women belongs to the tradition of contemporary New Zealand Gothic. These stories are, in essence, ghost stories; where women wile and haunt and seduce and possess, from mother to daughter, ancestor to progeny, friend to friend; and there are generational curses at work, too, where the repressed returns in eternal recurrence despite a character's best efforts to amend or outrun their lives. In this country, realism is gothic, after all; a place freighted with unrest and spirits as anyone attuned to the landscape, the people themselves notwithstanding, will attest. In these stories, spectres of the past haunt the present as does colonialism itself; abandoned selves and undone futures reappear and manifest in form and women are resurrected, inhabit other voices, other lives, or their own, years later, though still with the same old ghosts of shame and bitterness, self delusion or violence that rises and falls from places women fear within. Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
