Afterword

The title of the above poem, penned by Vilsoni Hereniko upon news of Teresia Teaiwa’s untimely passing on 21 March 2017, ¹ references one of Teresia’s early-career publications that engages with many of the issues that have permeated her critical and creative oeuvre. The play Last Virgin in Paradise (1993), a Hereniko-Teaiwa collaboration first performed in Fiji in 1991, was a ‘serious comedy’ that explored the nexus—and tensions—between Oceanian and Western epistemologies and values through a panoply of characters gathered on a fictional Pacific island to witness a marriage (between an aging, priapic European and a young indigenous woman who appears to fulfill the Western male fantasy of a nubile yet virginal Polynesian bride). The play draws extensively 203on Pacific comic theatrical conventions (which Hereniko explored further in his 1995 monograph Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma) to underscore as well as leaven the play’s trenchant critique of Western phallocentric and academic exoticization of Pacific peoples (and particularly the stereotypes of the ‘dusky maiden’ and the sexually licentious ‘native’ passed down through various Western discursive traditions since the late eighteenth century). The play is inflected by the rich interdisciplinarity that characterized much of Teresia’s subsequent work, ranging across anthropology, historiography, globalization studies, international relations, feminism/gender studies and religious studies in its exploration of the intertwined modalities that inflect Oceanic histories and cultures. Among the dramatis personae is an avatar for the young Teresia—a youthful, Western-educated Pacific woman who struggles to reconcile her foreign knowledge with her imperative to rediscover and nurture the values she associates with her home culture. The play touches upon many of the existential dilemmas and the search for what Teresia termed ‘intellectual self-determination’ (Husband 2015) explored within a more explicitly autobiographical register in Teaiwa’s (1995) first poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim‘anoa. But creative writing (and later, spoken word) was just one string in Teresia’s richly stranded bow. Well before interdisciplinarity became a buzzword within academia, Teresia was ‘doing’ it: her interest in cultural studies influenced her decision to enroll in the History of Consciousness PhD program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she was a pioneer of the cross-disciplinary field that has come to be known as ‘Pacific Studies,’ overseeing the implementation of the world’s first undergraduate major in this area at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Teresia had taught history and politics at the University of the South Pacific (Fiji) for several years before moving to Wellington (in the year 2000) and deployed a rich tapestry of social science and humanities discourses in her teaching at Victoria, using art, literature and film to complement nonfictional material because, as Robert Nicole notes, ‘she saw art as an integral part of the Pacific’s educational inheritance, of the way Pacific people teach and learn’ (2017, n.p.). She was also a firm believer in making Pacific students aware of ‘how academic learning can be dynamically engaged with who they are, where they are from and where they live’ (Husband 2015), something she modeled in such an exemplary fashion in her own activist work for the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement and as an advocate for the independence of West Papua and the empowerment of Pacific women. As Selina Tusitala Marsh observes, Teresia ‘marched in protests, she attended community meetings, she ran workshops, she taught her sons about feminism,’ throwing ‘her whole self’ into her work rather than merely providing academic ‘commentary on the world’ (E Tangata editors, 2017). She also drew on her abundant empathy and emotional intelligence to utilize students’ existing knowledge as a basis for collaborative 204learning, drawing inspiration from the ‘ancient Micronesian navigating technique “etak” … a system of wayfinding and navigation that visualises the canoe as stationary while the islands move towards it’ (Manson 2017), and her success in this endeavor is evident in the multiple awards she received for her teaching within New Zealand and Hawai‘i.