The last
proper conversation I had with Teresia Teaiwa involved a lot of scheming. We
had, the year before, come out of a partial victory through industrial action
at work, and were pondering what we might next have to expect this coming year.
That led to a conversation on the state of our union’s branch, on the Living
Wage, and how we might build the movement of staff and students at Victoria in
order to win this demand. And then that
led – by way of talking about who would benefit from a Living Wage, and who
loses out the most currently – to talk of Māori and Pasefika students, their
needs and aspirations, their literature, how we might be failing them or
serving them as teachers and trade unionists. About where Māori and Pacific
literatures could be found in universities and criticism, and about how they
might unexpectedly offer insights in places – our unionism, our activism, my
socialism – we least expect.
The
exchange was typical of my experiences with Teresia: off-hand and yet urgent;
measured, thoughtful, calm, seemingly infinitely patient and yet all the time
shot through with what Martin Luther King called ‘the fierce urgency of now’.
Teresia was a relaxed and relaxing presence amidst a hum of anxiousness and
self-enforced busyness, but that was only because she realised how much there
was needed to be done. And how little time, once the question of climate change
and the ecological devastation of the Pacific came into consciousness, there is
for us to do what is needed. She brought these qualities to her writing – both poetry
and critical pieces, especially on militarism and the militarisation of the
Pacific – and to her organising and activism. Much of that activist work was,
as usual, unseen or not easily visible: relationships built, colleagues drawn
into union, tensions eased or – sometimes – usefully drawn out into open debate.
Teresia
was a genuine intellectual, something not at all the same as – or often,
indeed, really coinciding with – the role of the academic. She made thinking
possible, encouraged thought and criticism and wrote, spoke, and organised
always with an audience and a goal in mind: anti-colonial struggle, and the
long freedom struggle in West Papua in particular; the project of human
freedom. That project, in Teresia’s work and life, was rooted in the Pacific
and in the celebration and critical exploration of Pacific resistance and
cultures, but, as always with properly critical work, it opened out to us all.
She received accolades and official recognition, all richly deserved, for her
research and teaching, but these were just red roses on the highways: the road
itself led on to getting thought working for social transformation.
Once you
stop thinking about small islands in a large sea and start thinking about a sea
of islands, Epeli Hau’ofa teaches us, what seems insignificant and weak reveals
itself to be vast, strong, knitted together and full of expansive possibility.
I learned about and through that text thanks to Teresia, who herself had
important personal and scholarly ties to Hau’ofa. Teresia managed a similar
kind of reversal with her teaching and her approach to Pasefika students.
Endless repetition of statistics about disadvantage, no matter how well
meaning, can reinforce stereotypes of failures waiting to happen. Talking to
Teresia introduced you, instead, to poets, performers, intellectuals in
formation, almost boundless creative energy wanting to take its place in this
unequal world needing changing. One sign of how much that trust and belief
mattered is the enormous response we’ve seen from her students already, just
hours from the news of her death. Some highly intelligent people make others
around them seem smaller, but Teresia had the anti-capitalist gift of making
you feel, after conversation or exchange with her, cleverer yourself.
Her work
developed in dialogue with Marxism, drawing on the dissident Marxists in
particular of the anti-colonial struggles and, although we adhered to different
traditions, programmes, and organisations,
I drew – and will continue to draw – on her teaching, encouragement,
inspiration and example. These institutions can be lonely places for socialist
intellectual life: Teresia managed, by her work and example, to make this one
feel like it could be made a viable home.
These
thoughts I’ve written down without taking the time properly to revise so I’ve a
chance now to say thank you, and to share them with the many others of us who
have benefited from having this poet and militant thinker a part of our lives.
I only wish it could have been for many more years still.
