Black is the Color of Solidarity: Art as Resistance in Melanesia

Joy Enomoto (bio)

Abstract

This essay centers on three Melanesian women artist activists who use art as a tool for social justice and as visual archive: Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau both of iTaukei descent living on the island of Viti Levu, Fiji, and Sonja Larson of Papuan Tolai descent living in New Mexico. This essay adds to Black/Indigenous Studies in conveying a more nuanced understanding of Blackness from within the Pacific. In this context, Black Oceania is not merely a conceptual counterpoint to the Black Atlantic but a center point of political and artistic solidarity that recognizes the sacredness of Black lives in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Drawing upon the activism and mentorship of the late Dr. Teresia Teaiwa, this essay also illustrates the necessity of highlighting and acknowledging the work of Black/Pacific women artists engaged in West Papua’s struggle for self-determination and collective liberation.

The first people to settle the Pacific were Black.
—Teresia Teaiwa, “Mela/Nesian Histories, Micro/Nesian Poetics”

The late I-Kiribati, African American scholar and poet Dr. Teresia Teaiwa poetically reminds us that Blackness not only exists within but is rooted in the Pacific. Black women of Oceania are often left out of the frame in discussions about global Black liberation struggles, and ironically they are left out of many conversations of Black indigeneity, even though they remain central players in movements for Black self-determination. Perhaps this is because indigeneity in the South Pacific takes precedence over Blackness, or because the Atlantic and the Caribbean have stood for the entirety of the Middle Passage and the motion of Black bodies. Whatever the reason, beyond the South Pacific, Melanesia—and particularly the activism of Melanesian women—remains largely ignored in Black, Indigenous, and diaspora studies. In recent years, several contemporary scholars have developed significant scholarship on the so-called Black Pacific. The work of Quito Swan situates Melanesia in relation to the Pan-Africanist movement and draws out the rich complexities of the rise of Pacific Feminism, particularly in Melanesia during the 1975 Pacific Women’s Conference in Suva, Fiji. Historian Gerald Horne delves deeply into the impacts of the slaving practice of blackbirding in the South Pacific following the US Civil War. Post-colonial scholar Robbie Shilliam examines the conceptual space of diasporic kinship across space and time shared by the African Diaspora and the Maori. Other scholars, such as Joyce Pualani Warren, Maile Arvin, and Nitasha Sharma, interrogate how conceptions of white supremacy and eugenics leeched into the Pacific, effectively ranking its inhabitants according to their “proximity to whiteness,” and also examine the ways that Pacific peoples view themselves (Arvin 4). While the contributions of Shilliam, Warren, Arvin, and Sharma are important, they focus primarily on Hawaiʻi and Polynesia, hence their writings are not considered in this essay.

This essay is part of a continuing dialogue regarding the interventions into Blackness and anti-Blackness in Oceania that began at a performative roundtable entitled “Afro-Diasporic Women Artists on History and Blackness in the Pacific” at the Pacific Histories Association (PHA) Conference in 2016 (“Afro-Pacific Women”). During the first iterations of the Black Lives Matter movement, Pacific scholar Dr. Teresia Teaiwa felt compelled to bring together a small collective of women artists and scholars of Black and Pacific Islander descent to address the rarely-discussed but deeply-felt issue of anti-Blackness among Pacific Islanders. I take my title, “Black Is the Color of Solidarity,” from Teresia Teaiwa’s poem “Mela/Nesian Histories, Micro/Nesian Poetics” (171), in memory of Teaiwa as an artist and to honor her unwavering commitment to placing Black Indigenous and Pacific feminism at the center of her work toward our collective liberation. The roundtable participants included Dr. Teaiwa, Samoan ethnomusicologist and musician Dr. Courtney Savali-Andrews, CHamoru performance artist Ojeya Cruz Banks, and me, a Kanaka Maoli visual artist. Our discussant was ethnomusicologist and assistant professor Dr. Alisha Lola Jones. The design of the roundtable, which combined performance, visual art, poetry, and music alongside presented papers, was unique for a conference, and especially for a history conference traditionally dominated by white male scholars. We opened the space by building an altar and singing a collective song. Each of us in turn shared both art and scholarship on what it means to live as “Afro-diasporic children of the Pacific” (Teaiwa, “Introduction” 145). The forum raised the question, “how have we addressed these culturally and historically complex conditions in our work as artists?” (Teaiwa, “Introduction” 145). Although our experiences have been vastly different, we share the particular experience of being both Black and Pacific Islander but not Melanesian. Our Blackness has remained somehow outside of Oceania. Even though Teaiwa and her sisters were raised in Fiji, their Blackness was still somehow set apart from that of the iTaukei (indigenous) Fijians. What has become clear since the PHA is that there are solidarities that exist within Melanesia that are in alignment with the liberation struggles of the African Diaspora, yet those solidarities remain distinct. As a Black and Kanaka Maoli artist and organizer committed to international liberation, part of my intention in this essay is to honor and center the contributions of Black / Indigenous liberation struggles within Melanesia. This remapping, I argue, has the potential to reorient how we understand Blackness, Indigeneity, and the intersection of the two.

For several scholars writing outside of Oceania, the Black Pacific is a “sort of imagined community” (Taketani) that must somehow be in relationship with Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” in order to be considered a valid Black space, and its Blackness one that does nothing more than expand African American or Afro-Caribbean geographies. It is difficult for scholars outside of Oceania to disentangle a Blackness rooted in Africa from a Blackness rooted in the Pacific because of its long entanglement with the violence of European colonization and the mid-nineteenth century enslaving practices of South Pacific Islanders by Australians, Europeans, and Americans known as blackbirding (Horne). Yet it is important to acknowledge the very real Black Indigenous geographies, complexities, and lived experiences that exist within Oceania. There are more than ten million people living throughout Kanaky (New Caledonia), Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the Torres Straits, and Aboriginal Australia who speak over 1,300 languages and who were the first to navigate and settle the Pacific nearly fifty thousand years ago. Engaging with the Black Pacific and Black solidarity requires a deeper interrogation into the ways in which conceptions of Blackness in the Pacific overlap with the struggles of the African Diaspora and Black Power movements as well as examinations of those ways in which they remain independent from each other.

Like the term “Black,” “Melanesian” is a complex term rooted in European colonialism and anti-Black racism. During the rise of the Black power movement in the 1970s, embraced as a term of empowerment, referred to as Melanesianism (Kabutaulaka 134). However, the term “Wantok”—a linguistically unifying term referring to a common pidgin spoken across the region (Kabutaulaka 131)—is more commonly used. In 1832, Jules Dumont dʻUrville labeled the islands of so-called Melanesia based on the darkness of the islanders’ black skin and the wooliness of their hair, labelling the men savages and the women undesirable (Tcherkézoff). This description essentially erased the millennia it took Wantok countries to learn the winds and rains, birdsong and plants of two thousand islands, erased the time it took to develop trade relationships, forms of governance, epistemologies, cosmographies, and ontologies that were centered in the Pacific. Although, the identities and cultures of ni-Vanuatu, Kanaky, Papuans, iTaukei, and Solomon Islanders developed completely disconnected from an African homeland and they are not a part of the African Diaspora, Wantoks are bound to the diaspora through shared subjugation, but more importantly through solidarity .

While not African, Melanesians were also enslaved by Europeans, sometimes on their own land, other times kidnapped and displaced permanently. Between 1863 and 1904, 62,000 Pacific Islanders were kidnapped, tricked into servitude, or “blackbirded” from 80 Melanesian Islands, primarily within the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Ireland, and Milne Bay Provinces in Papua New Guinea, but also Tuvalu and Kiribati, to work in the sugar and cotton plantations of Queensland, Australia, Fiji, and Sāmoa (“Plantation Voices”). Thousands of men, women, and children died in the plantations, while their homelands were depleted. By 1908, these same people faced compulsory “repatriation” to the islands under the White Australia Policy and the Pacific Island Labourers Act of 1901. Those who remained often suffered harsh treatment and discrimination. Their descendants, known as Australian South Sea Islanders, are now considered “not indigenous to any one place or land” (“Plantation Voices”). They became a diasporic identity unto themselves, and as fourth generation South Sea Islander artist Jasmine Togo-Brisby explains, “it is still so hard for our people to identify, that sometimes our people choose not to identify, because it is such a struggle. You can’t just say, ‘I’m Australian South Sea Islander’ and expect that the person on the receiving end knows what you’re talking about” (“Unfurling Tākiri”). The failure to honor the trauma of blackbirding is not unique to white Australians. Here in Hawaiʻi, we are only beginning to recover and collect blackbirding stories through scholarship, activism, and art. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Black women artists like Togo-Brisby are taking leadership in bringing these stories to light.

Blackbirding is a painful memory specifically held in the bodies and memories of the peoples across Oceania. The rise of blackbirding throughout Oceania coincided with the rising demand for new sources of sugar, cotton, and guano as slavery was coming to an end in the US and the Caribbean. Between 1862 and the 1870s, other Pacific Islanders, such as the Rapa Nui, Tokelauans, Tuvaluans, Niueans, Tongarevans, and Marquesans were blackbirded to the Chincha Island guano mines of Peru (Maude). Because these populations were considerably smaller and easier to kidnap, they were devastated both through the extraction of laborers but also by infectious diseases brought back by those very few who were repatriated. It is clear that American and European enslavers were not content with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but pillaged further into the Pacific. Their voracious greed subjected Melanesians and other Pacific Islanders into the violence of plantation slavery, displacement, depletion, and disease, all predicated upon a notion of Black bodies, Pacific bodies, and especially Melanesian bodies, as enslavable. Confederates left the American south and started new chapters of the KKK in Fiji and Queensland, Australia, joining British settlers to form “a kind of White Pacific/White Atlantic of planters” (Horne 5) to expand slavery into the Pacific just as the trans-Atlantic Slave trade was ending. The legacy of blackbirding is therefore one of the points of entry when considering the solidarity of Black Oceania with the African Diaspora.

During a panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival 2021, entitled “Black Visuality and Solidarity in Oceania,” iTaukei scholar Dr. Ponipate Rokolekutu stated:

When I talk about blackness, as an iTaukei and as a Melanesian, my notion of blackness is intertwined with my identity as an indigenous Fijian. And as an iTaukei, I come from the clan of the Mata ni Vanua . . . So when I think of blackness, It is not only former slaves through the trans-Atlantic slave trade or blackbirding, but someone who is also dispossessed of their lands. So my notion of blackness is complicated, because of the complexity of where I am situated as an indigenous Fijian and as a Melanesian. (“SFF21”)

Rokolekutu conveys that Oceania enters the conversation on Black solidarity not just via blackbirding, but through the dispossession from our ancestral lands. Here the Pacific Diaspora and the African Diaspora flow into each other.

The use of the term “Black” as it relates to Black Power and solidarity was not taken up until the mid-twentieth century, when it became a “rallying cry of Pacific Islanders under European occupation” (Elnaiem), appealing not only to Melanesians and Australian aboriginals, but also to other Pacific Islanders across the region, either because of their historical relationship to blackbirding or because they were often called black and treated in derogatory ways by white settlers. In this context, to identify as Black is politically strategic, aligning Oceania with what Rokolekutu calls the “collective Black experience of marginalization, exploitation, slavery and denigration” (“SFF21”) and the global struggle for decolonization, self-determination, and liberation. However, this type of expansion of Black identity can and does continue to render invisible the anti-blackness that is particular to Melanesians, Australian Aboriginals, and Torres Strait Islanders. Blackness is not only a tool with which to fight white supremacy, but also to fight the anti-blackness that comes from other Pacific Islanders. Dr. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka reminds us that because Western discourse has produced over two centuries of negative representations of Melanesia and its peoples, these perceptions have become internalized by Pacific Islanders, including Melanesians themselves, and used to “perpetuate relationships with Melanesia that have racist, essentialist, and social evolutionary elements” (110). Hence by taking up the call for Black Power, Pacific Islanders did not necessarily undo anti-blackness toward Melanesians.

It is perhaps because of all of these complex positionings and embodied relationships to Blackness that Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals were among the first to rise up when cries for Black Power echoed across the world in the late 1960s. They began to reclaim the term Melanesian and to develop the ever-evolving process of Melanesianism, as described by Kabutaulaka: “Melanesianism is rooted in and draws strength from the past but is not confined by it. It exists and is ‘real’ because it is talked about, lived, and experienced, not because it is defined” (127). By asserting the “Melanesian Way” (111), Melanesians determine for themselves with whom and where their solidarities lie. Even today, when they lift their voices for Black Lives Matter, it is not for a Blackness in the US, but to uplift the peoples of West Papua, the Kanaky of New Caledonia, the Aboriginals of Australia, the Torres Strait Islanders, and to support all other powerful Black struggles of the Pacific by people who remain under the yoke of white settler repression. It is on this multi-layered foundation that Black lives matter in Oceania.

To interrogate these complexities even further involves centering Black women and Black gender nonconforming people at the heart of both historical and contemporary black international solidarities. The works of Camari Serau, Mere Tuilau, and Sonja Larson are among the many important interventions that I have had the good fortune to witness. Each uses art as a tool for resistance, storytelling, and solidarity in relation to what Katherine McKittrick calls “geographies of domination” across the solwara.¹ Through the use of photography, poetry, stitching, cowrie shells, and their presence in unexpected spaces, these women push the limits of Black women’s geographies and open up new imaginings for Black diasporas.

Fig. 1.
Camari Serau with Morning Star flag at Melanesian Arts Festival 2018. Photograph courtesy of the author.

We Bleed Black and Red

The first people to settle the Pacific were Papuan.
—Teresia Teaiwa, “Mela/Nesian Histories, Micro/Nesian Poetics”

To understand how anti-Blackness works in Melanesia, a critical understanding of the history and presence of the West Papua freedom struggle is imperative. On December 1, 1961, the people of West Papua raised the Morning Star flag as a symbol of their independence from the Dutch. But Indonesia, which had gained its independence from the Dutch in 1949, desired all of the former Dutch colonial holdings and invaded West Papua in 1963. Unable to secure support for its invasion, Indonesia turned to the Soviet Union for help. US president John F. Kennedy wrote to the Dutch prime minister, urging him to support Indonesian occupation over West Papuan plans for independence. The US orchestrated a meeting between Indonesia and the Dutch, known as the 1962 New York Agreement, which “effectively signed West Papua over to Indonesia (West Papuans were completely excluded from the agreement negotiations)” (Webb-Gannon 354). In 1967, West Papua was transferred to Indonesia, and the American-owned mining company Freeport McMoRan was given consent to begin open-pit mining for gold in the formerly Dutch owned Grasberg gold and copper mine. White supremacy colluded with the postcolonial Indonesian state to advance capitalist mining interests, a devastating blow to West Papuans.² Two years later, in 1969, under the guise of democracy, 1,026 Indigenous West Papuans were held at gunpoint and forced to vote for Indonesian rule. This so-called “Act of Free Choice” was rubber-stamped by the United Nations and the United States. Grasberg is now the largest open-pit gold mine and the second largest copper mine in the world.

As West Papuans try to protect their land from this colonial and corporate violence, they face genocidal tactics, media censorship, and near silence from the international community. The Amungme people of West Papua refer to Grasberg as Nemangkawi or “the womb” (“Nemangkawi”). They believe that Nemangkawi is the place of their creation and that when their spirit dies it goes to Nemangkawi to dwell with their ancestors and other supernatural beings. For this reason, the tops of their mountains are considered sacred (“Amungme”). If we consider Nemangkawi a symbol of the Amungme mother, then its carving out through open-pit mining is akin to the desecration of the Amungme woman. Today the Grasberg mine produces 700,000 tons of toxic tailings per day, which wash into the Aikwa River system and the Arafua Sea, killing nearly all aquatic life. It is also estimated it will generate about 6 billion tons of waste in the course of its existence (Perlez and Bonner). Acid mine drainage is leeching into groundwater and surrounding farmland. If, as Teaiwa claims, the first people of the Pacific were Papuan, then Indonesia, the US, Australia and other foreign interests are imposing complete control over the lives of peoples of West Papua and attempting a total annihilation of Black lives at the very center of where Blackness originates in the Solwara.

Given the significance of Nemangkawi to the Amungme and the peoples of the Papua highlands, it comes as no surprise that the Indonesian government faced strong resistance when, funded by Freeport McMoRan, it chose to militarize the mine in 1977. Members of the Free West Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka or “OPM”) attacked the mine, and Indonesia responded with several military operations near Wamena, resulting in anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 deaths between 1977 and 1978 (International Coalition). Deaths caused by the Indonesian military have continued to mount since the 1970s. Today, the 250 indigenous tribes of West Papua are still subject to systematic torture, rape, and genocide by the Indonesian military, but they continue to fight for self-determination. Having no legal protection, women feel the violence of this constant military occupation most severely. The widows and children of former OPM members are consistently discriminated against. They are denied access to support services, education, and employment (International Coalition). Their husbands, brothers, and sons are often imprisoned or killed, so that women must carry on the struggle for liberation and the care of the family. Their resilience is the inspiration for pan-Melanesian solidarity and solidarity throughout Oceania.

Indonesia’s aggressive censorship of the media regarding its human rights violations means that the people of West Papua must often rely on its allies to tell their story. Activists, artists, performers, poets, and musicians must constantly find new and creative ways to outsmart Indonesia’s attempts to silence the demands to end the genocide. I have found the courage of developing young women and gender non-conforming Melanesian activists to be particularly inspiring. From marches to social media campaigns to concerts and live paintings, they use whatever is available to them to stand up for West Papua. These activists know that they will not be free until West Papua is free. The murdered West Papuans are the Black lives they will not let us forget. They are teaching us what it means to defend Black life and land in the solwara.

West Papuan solidarity among young Melanesian activists is not surprising given the strong Pacific feminist tradition that is particular to the women of Fiji, Kanaky, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea. In the mid-1970s, scholars and activists such as Claire Slatter, Vanessa Griffen, Amelia Rokotuivuna out of USP, Fiji, and Kanaky activist Dewey Gorodey, situated mainstream feminism’s engagement with issues of gender and culture in the “context of imperialism, colonialism, and liberation” (Swan). The radical stance of Melanesian women stood out among Pacific feminists, because they often looked beyond the customary and familial roles of women toward internationalist issues (George 63). These feminists directly informed the work of Teresia Teaiwa, who went on to mentor the iTaukei organizers Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau, who are continuing the anti-colonial Pacific Feminist tradition developed over the past forty years in Fiji.

In 2014 in Madang, Papua New Guinea, a youth activist organization called Youngsolwara Pacific was developed out of a workshop called the “Madang Wansolwara Dance.” Wansolwara (“one salt water”) means “one ocean, one people.” The gathering brought together community-based organizations, activists, artists, academics, and theologians in order to re-ignite a movement of solidarity across the Pacific with the motto Teaiwa, “One Ocean, One People.” The following year, Youngsolwara Pacific organized its first campaign to build regional awareness about West Papua. The “We Bleed Black and Red” campaign included several marches and events that gained attention on social media, despite the violent threats and intimidation of the Indonesian government. But there is one event I witnessed that I must recount in its entirety in order to communicate its significance.

Between July 1 and 10, 2018, the Solomon Islands hosted the 26^th Melanesian Arts and Cultural Festival (MACFest) in Honiara, Guadalcanal. MACFest is held every two years and brings together over 2,000 participants from throughout the region. The purpose of the festival to celebrate the dance, song, and arts of Melanesian countries. Although the Festival of the Pacific Arts began in Suva, Fiji it quickly became a more Polynesian dominated event, making it difficult for several Wantok delegates to attend. MACFest, was created in direct response to this and while open to delegates from other Pacific countries, remains governed by Wantok delegates, centering Melanesia. When Solomon Islands Prime Minister Rick Houenipwela allowed Indonesia to participate in the festival, he departed from the longstanding pro-West Papuan independence position of previous governments. This decision was considered an insult by many of the festival participants, most especially Solomon Islanders. Houenipwela demonstrated a blatant complicity with genocide and willingness to provide a venue for Indonesia’s self-serving narrative of colonial innocence.

On July 5, 2018, without announcement or performance, gender non-conforming iTaukei poet Camari Serau quietly stood in front of the “Melanesian Provinces of Indonesia” pavilion on the Panatina Grounds in the middle of the festival and unfurled the Morning Star flag of West Papua (see fig. 1). It is illegal to fly this flag in West Papua, and anyone who does so risks arrest. Even into the fifth day of the festival, the “Melanesian Provinces of Indonesia” pavilion had no crafts or food for sale, no information to hand out, no adornments, no symbols of national pride, nothing and no one to represent it, unlike every other country’s pavilion in the festival. A sign above the pavilion served as a political signifier of power, to assert Melanesia’s place in the region. The barren pavilion stood out as a space uninvested in and unconcerned with its presence as a participant in the festival. Serau’s decision to unfurl that flag was a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Indonesian government’s presence at the festival and an assertion of West Papuan sovereignty. This courageous act transformed an otherwise predicatable arts festival into a tinderbox of political tension by provoking an unexpected display of Melanesian solidarity for West Papuan Independence throughout the festival, thus denying Indonesia validation on Melanesian soil.

Serau was joined by fellow poet and media specialist, Mere Tuilau, who photographed her. Serau and Tuilau are both members of Youngsolwara Pacific and two of the founding members of the We Bleed Black and Red Campaign. Together they reclaimed the Indonesian Pavillion for West Papua. At first, a delegate from Vanuatu and Kanaky arrived with their countries’ flags and joined Serau. More people approached the pavilion, and ultimately entire families and children from other island provinces in the Solomons, as well as Australian tourists, Fijians, Maori, Samoans, Tongans, Taiwanese, ni-Vanuatu, and many more joined the crowd, seeking a photograph with the Morning Star flag. Tuilau transformed the moment into a social media campaign. A small crowd of community members and members of the local Free West Papua Campaign Solomon Islands Youth movement also gathered. One man from an outer province of Guadalcanal stated: “I want to fly a big flag over my village for my brothers and sisters in West Papua. The Solomons have a deep love for West Papua.” It was quite an amazing action to witness: this was a moment to protect Black lives in the Pacific, with Black women artists leading the charge. On the surface, their action may not seem particularly extraordinary, but the choice for a young woman and gender non-conforming iTaukei to provoke the Indonesian government and festival officials in the middle of festival grounds is quite radical. The Indonesian government is notorious for harassing and threatening anyone willing to challenge their validity in the region. The Honiara government wants the income generated by tourists and are denying the political implications of Indonesia’s presence at the festival. By instigating an impromptu protest without any consultation or plan for their own protection, Serau and Tuilau were actively putting themselves in harm’s way. Even the local Free West Papua Campaign members were very hesistant and remained on the edges of this action, tentatively waiting to see the end result.

About a half an hour later, well-known Papuan artist Jeffry Feeger arrived at the pavilion with a painting he had created just minutes before on the main music stage alongside a band from Papua New Guinea (PNG). He painted a portrait of a West Papuan with a Morning Star flag across his forehead. More than aware that his painting may be considered controversial by festival officials, he had received permission from the PNG delegation to show it. The arrival of the painting along with the pop-up photo action created a small frenzy of curiosity and an overwhelming outpouring of solidarity. Over one hundred people waited to have their picture taken with the Morning Star flag, and an announcer for the festival addressed the crowd: “If you would like to show your solidarity with West Papua and take a picture with the Morning Star flag, please go to the West Papua pavilion.” We were there for nearly two hours, and throughout that time the air was filled with beautiful conversations of solidarity. The crowd was made of residents from the islands of Taumotu, Rennel Island, Kanaky, Fiji, PNG, Australia, and Aotearoa.

Then Indonesian government vehicles arrived. Two military vehicles pulled up beside the pavilion. The Indonesian officials stood by, quietly but visibly angry, taking out their phones to photograph the scene and the crowd. The pleasant atmosphere that had existed for hours before shifted in seconds. The tension was palpable. The lone woman among the military personnel was the designated speaker for the delegation. She asked about those who were in attendance and whether we would be returning to the pavilion the next day, because that is when the West Papuan delegation was expected to arrive. The sudden reclamation of the pavilion as belonging to West Papua and not to Indonesia clearly incensed them. The Indonesian and festival officials let the afternoon pass, but this action would not be the end of it.

That night, Youngsolwara Pacific members and the Solomon Islands Free West Papua Campaign members danced together waving multiple Morning Star flags and singing songs dedicated to West Papuan self-determination. In a multitude of ways, this moment revealed “the indestructible character of the cultural resistance of the people—the popular masses—in the face of foreign domination” (Cabral and Vale 22). In this case, the masses were the people of Melanesia present on that day, who used the platform of MacFEST – a space for both art and political expression – to protest colonial occupation and genocide. The protest began with the unfurling of a flag, photographs, and a painting. This was all it took to subvert the presence of the Indonesian government.

The next day, Serau, Tuilau, Feeger, and I were invited to speak at a community roundtable at the Leaf Haus Kava Bar along the coast of Honiara addressing the role of art in social justice movements. The moderator was Joey Tau, co-director of Pacific Network on Globalisation. As the panel opened, Serau and Tuilau each shared a poem of solidarity for West Papua. Participants were local West Papua activists from the Solomon Islands, students from the University of the South Pacific, and young writers, poets, photographers, and singers. The conversation covered many topics, most importantly the role that artists must play in struggles for social justice. It was clear to all those in attendance that art consists not only in artifacts, but also in using artistic skills to actively resist oppression. It was a truly “Wantok” (one talk) (Kabutaulaka 131) conversation: we did not share the same language, but linguistic differences did not prevent anyone from understanding each other. Rather, they worked to deepen the collective understanding that spaces like these are necessary. While this artist dialogue was taking place, the Indonesian delegation staff spent the day painting the Indonesian flag on the exterior walls of the pavilion with no West Papuan delegate in sight. The purpose of our gathering was ostensibly to celebrate art and the beauty of Melanesian culture, but the presence of the soldiers was a reminder of the bitter ugliness of colonial occupation.

Saturday, July 7, 2018, marked the fortieth anniversary of the Solomon Islands’ Independence from the British. It was on this day that Serau and Tuilau returned to the newly painted, Indonesian flag-draped pavilion. However, this time they returned with members of the Solomon Islands Free West Papua Campaign. Serau did not hold the Morning Star flag, but handed it to West Papuan activist Ben Didiomea. They stood just outside of the pebble-lined border that demarcated the edges of the pavilion from the rest of the festival grounds. Tuilau once again began filming. Didiomea held the flag and began to speak, and almost immediately an Indonesian official tried to take the flag from him. But before the official could do anything, Tuilau ran toward him, camera in hand, and shouted, “Hey, hey, hey! This is your line! This is your fucking line!” Pointing to the rock-lined border on the ground, he shouted, “this is our soil! Melanesian soil! Shut up!” (Tuilau). Somewhat shocked, the Indonesian official took a step back. By this time, a crowd of bystanders had gathered. Didiomea began to shout, “This is Melanesia! What is Indonesia hiding in West Papua? Why are they not letting international media enter West Papua? I am a freedom fighter… International media no enter West Papua.” Meanwhile Serau stood behind him with a handmade sign that read “West Papua Merdeka” (Free West Papua). Once again, she stood in silent protest. Ben Didiomea had been present on that first day when Camari Serau brought out the flag at the empty pavilion, but he did not speak on that day, nor did he lead any actions on the day that the Indonesian officials painted their pavilion the colors of the Indonesian flag. Every action on the festival grounds for West Papua was initiated by Serau and Tuilau. In solidarity and with respect for their Solomon brothers and sisters living in Honiara, they did what they could to carve out a space that allowed the local organizers to speak and be heard. In fairness, Didiomea had more to lose for speaking out in Honiara, because men are often at higher risk for arrest or detention. There remained a high likelihood of arrest for Serau and Tuilau, but they were not afraid. When the Honiara Police department arrived, they stood and challenged the police (Toito‘ona). They did not hesitate to defend Didiomea. But neither the Indonesian officials nor the police wanted to interact with Tuilau or Serau. They only wanted to speak to the men in the movement, and it was the men who were targeted for arrest. Consequently, Didiomea and another Free West Papua campaign member, Maverick Seda, were later temporarily detained by the Honiara police and their Morning Star flag was confiscated. Honiara Police “issued a statement saying the flag was removed to prevent provocation of the Indonesians, reminding the demonstrators that it was not a political event” (RNZ Pacific).

Serau and Tuilau’s protest at the festival did not go unnoticed by Fiji authorities. When Serau and Tuilau returned to Fiji from Honiara, “[they] were taken in for questioning by the Fiji Border Control Police. [They] were asked questions relating to pro-independence advocacy for Papua and West Papua province” (“Portrait”). Serau and Tuilau have since been told by Fijian police to stop “wearing Papuan activism t-shirts or carrying out any form of protest at public events” (“Portrait”). Serau and Tuilau’s social media accounts and activities concerned with West Papua have come under surveillance, yet they continue to fight. The detention and questioning of Didiomea, Seda, Serau and Tuilau reflects a shifting and regressive landscape in relation to Indonesia among regional governments.

The political and economic power that Indonesia wields in the region cannot be underestimated. Because Indonesia controls the mineral wealth of West Papua, they are backed by international corporate mining interests and have developed strong military relationships with Australia and the US. Indonesia will often threaten to cut off trade with or other assistance to Melanesian countries that take a strong position against their occupation of West Papua, pressuring governments to take punitive steps toward openly pro-West Papuan Independence activists. Therefore, the acts of Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau should not be taken lightly. It is important to recognize their solidarity with those on the ground in Honiara, to honor their creative and fearless demands for justice, and to mark their intervention against Indonesia’s violence, which otherwise might go unnoticed. Tuilau and Serau use art as a tool for liberation and incorporate multiple genders into Black liberation, expanding the scope of previous conceptions of Black feminism in Melanesia. They may not declare themselves feminist in the same ways as their predecessors, but their relentless demands for West Papuan self-determination and their willingness to directly challenge Indonesian harassment places them in the continuum of radical Black Pacific feminist solidarity. Following their example, I include the people of the Melanesia and their urgent cry for freedom when I say “Black Lives Matter.” The West Papuan freedom struggle has much to teach the rest of us about what it means to demand liberation under militarized occupation, and what it means to push back against corporations that are protected by a government seeking to extinguish the beauty of Black life, land, and self- determination.

Mourning and Solidarity in the time of COVID-19

the salt in our veins, the who we are and the who we are not. we have not yet seen the bottom of it, the depth of mourning that birthed us here.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World

These words by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive capture the deep mourning generated by the loss of so many Black lives due to state violence and now COVID-19. In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic sent the world into quarantine as people around the globe began dying at alarming rates. The quarantine revealed cracks in the facade of the health care system worldwide: disparities in wealth, wage protections, and access to healthcare. Reactionary, slow-to-respond governments, particularly in the US, caused many deaths. As of June 23, 2021, 3.88 million people have contracted COVID-19 (World Health Organization). On May 25, 2020, a Black man named George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police officer, Derek Chauvin, who was filmed forcefully kneeling on Floyd’s neck, preventing him from breathing. Floyd’s dying words were “I can’t breathe” (Hill et al.). This recorded murder set the world ablaze overnight. The unbearable sense of rage, pain, and devastation in witnessing in real time the state-sanctioned murder of yet another Black man could not be contained. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castille, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and so many others were still fresh in our collective memory. Uprisings and protest erupted across the US and around the globe. Freeways were shut down and police stations and police cars were set on fire. There were also marches to protest the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Toni McDade, and Breonna Taylor. All of these murders intensified the demands for state accountability and structural change. Organizers such as Patrice Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and M Adams of the Movement for Black Lives began shifting the narrative beyond prosecuting the police to defunding the police, moving toward a Black feminist abolitionist praxis that promotes moving funds away from institutions that have historically brought harm to Black communities and toward an economy that could lead to transformative healing and growth.

Many people in Oceania rose up in solidarity with the movement for Black lives. On June 6, 2020, designated as an international day for marches of solidarity, a march in Honolulu, Hawai‘i led by twelve high school organizers suprisingly drew a crowd of over 10,000 people. The march included many Pacific Islanders and Kanaka Maoli who were kiaʻi o Mauna Kea (protectors of Mauna Kea). Thousands of kia‘i had spent the previous summer on the summit road effectively preventing the multinational Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) corporation from any further desecration of the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawaiʻi island, which already has thirteen telescopes and is considered to be one of the most sacred mountains in the Hawaiian archipelago. The momentum of this movement, which recognized the value of international solidarity, spilled over into the Hawaiʻi movement for Black Lives march, effectively making it one of the largest marches in Hawaiian history.

There were also numerous large-scale solidarity marches throughout the Pacific, particularly in Wellington and Auckland in Aotearoa, and in cities throughout Australia. USP students in Vanuatu waved signs, and a group of eighteen Fijians placed flowers in front of the US embassy in Tamavua to draw attention to police violence both abroad and in Fiji. They stood in quiet protest for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the time it took for George Floyd to pass away from asphyxiation. Fijian police removed the flowers as soon as they left (Boyle), a reminder that threats to freedom of speech exist there also.

Pacific student organizing has been critical in combating anti-Black racism, and the 2020 global protests strengthened movements calling for global solidarity. A group of anti-racist Papuan students, known as the “Balikpapan 7,” was arrested in 2019 for leading protests in Jakarta that called for an end to racism and to violence against West Papuans (Piersen). Student protestors were called “monkeys” and taunted with racist epithets. The protests calling for the release of the Balikpapan 7 were clearly informed by the resurgence of international support for the Black Lives Matter movement, as can be seen from the social media tag #PapuanLivesMatter. Papuan activist Buchtar Tabuni told the Los Angeles Times that “The government was afraid. Black Lives Matter has triggered support for oppressed Papuans” (Piersen). The Balikpapan 7 all faced the possibility of being sent to prison for up to seventeen years on the charge of treason. As a result of BLM protests, the group was only sentenced to serve eleven months. Tabuni continued: “I extend my sympathies for the passing of George Floyd. We know exactly how it feels. But we also ask Americans for their solidarity; to help us stand on our own two feet as an independent West Papua” (Piersen). Tabuni, while extending sympathies to Floyd’s family, reiterates the need for solidarity with the peoples of West Papua. This solidarity is long overdue.

I now turn to the important work of diasporic Papuan artist Sonja Larson. Unlike Camari Serau and Mere Tuilau, Larson did not identify as an activist before the summer of 2020. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of her intervention, entitled BLM Meri Blouse 2020 (see fig. 2). The piece of clothing in the pictures is a handstitched dress known as a Meri blouse, which is worn in PNG. The blouse is covered in both historic and contemporary photographs commemorating Black liberation struggles, social justice activists and those murdered by the state from the United States to West Papua, with delicately placed, sewnin red beads and cowrie shells. This work provides a powerful visual mapping of intersections of Blackness as seen by a Black Pacific woman living in the diaspora in the time of COVID-19.

Fig. 2.
BLM Meri Blouse 2020 by Sonja Larson. Photograph courtesy of Sonja Larson.

Larson descends from the Tolai people of the Gazelle Peninsula of East New Britain in Papua New Guinea, but she has never known these lands. Her only connection to these lands and waters comes from listening to her mother and aunts speaking in Tok Pisin, a language neither she nor her sister speaks. Like many diasporic peoples, Larson has found it difficult to develop a deep connection with her mother’s homeland. Larson was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where, she stresses, she is “always read as African American” (S. Larson, Interview). Larson was a student in a Pacific Islands Studies course, “Art, Ritual, and Performance,” that I was teaching at the University of Hawai‘i. Larson was longing to see a reflection of herself at the university, so the opportunity to engage with Melanesian artists opened up new possibilities for her creative expression.

I introduced Sonja to the work of Australian-based Tolai artist Lisa Hilli, which addresses Black identity and colonial encounters. Hilli curated an exhibition of her work called Trade and Transformation. The purpose of the exhibition was to draw out narratives of the Tolai people and “non-indigenous people to that land—Europeans, missionaries, and colonists” (Hilli, “Trade and Transformation”). Hilli’s exhibition focuses on the small red beads that were ordered by the pound from Europe, which missionaries would hand out to the Tolai inhabitants, initially as a tool to convert them to Christianity but eventually as material with which to acquire land and to extract labor. Hilli ordered twenty pounds of red beads, based on a passage she read in the journal of a reverend who engaged in this trade. She then strung them into rows and hung them from ceiling to floor in multiple strands of varying lengths to display what this payment for labor looks like. At the end of each strand, she added small colonial coins, crosses, or photographs of her ancestors in lockets to represent the unknown history of the Tolai people (Hilli, “Trade and Transformation”). In this same exhibition, Hilli shares a video of green beads being poured into thimbles, invoking workers being paid by German plantation owners “four thimblefuls of beads for every pound of coconut or copra in a coconut pound bag… I wanted to see what that looked like in Black hands” (Hilli, “Trade and Transformation”).

Inspired by Hilli, Larson stitched in a few small red and green beads at the neck, hem, and sleeves of the blouse, thereby putting Larson into conversation with ancestors she had never known. According to Larson’s mother, Diane Mali Larson, Meri blouses were first given out on the Islands of New Ireland, New Britain, Manus, Louisiade Archipelago, and the Northern Solomons by missionaries in the 1870s to promote humility in bare-breasted Black women. Over time, however, the blouses became a marker of Papuan women’s identity. Women individualized their blouses by embroidering designs or adding different textures or prints. Larson chose to hand-stitch a blouse made of cotton with a faint floral print. Her choice of white cotton was, in part, a practical one, as it is easier to transfer black-and-white photographs onto white cloth, but she chose white cotton also because it was a primary commodity of colonial plantations. It then becomes a material in conversation with the plantations of Fiji and Queensland and the Americas, which are key sites of blackbirding, as Gerald Horne’s work has shown. By hand-sewing the blouse, a craft taught Larson by her mother, she joined a diaspora of Black women artists–from the outer islands of Papua New Guinea to Gee’s Bend–who use cloth and thread to reclaim their identities.

The materials that Larson chooses transport the viewer across spatial-temporal realms of Black resistance and survival. The cowrie shells stitched into the sleeves of the blouse are particularly relevant from a Black historical perspective. The shells were collected by Larson’s mother from the shores of her home in New Ireland. Larson shared, “By hand-stitching these specific Cowrie shells onto my blouse, it is as though I am bringing a piece of New Ireland closer to me” (“Meri Blouse 2020”). But the cowrie shells are much more than just reminders of her homeland. Cowrie shells or “blood cowries” were ballast on slave ships and a currency for Black bodies (Hartman 205). In this way, Lawson notes that cowries can be both Pacific and Atlantic, both beautiful and bloodstained, gesturing toward an inclusive vision of global Black liberation. As Tolai artists living in the diaspora, Larson and Hilli navigate centuries of anti-blackness and colonialism across oceans. By creating the BLM Meri blouse, Larson hoped to “illustrate the complexity of Black-Pacific identity within the diaspora” (S. Larson). But her decision to incorporate iconic Civil Rights photographs, contemporary photographs of the protests for West Papua, and images of the protests for George Floyd also visually brings to the forefront those intersections and distinctions that define Black Pacific women in the diaspora.

On the last day of the course, I invited Black Pacific scholars Courtney Savali Andrews, Joyce Pua Warren and Black Maori artist Poata Alvie McKree to critique the students’ final projects. While all of the students in the class shared powerful and moving work, Sonja Larson’s BLM Meri Blouse 2020 produced a collective silence. Larson’s work had marked and made visible the collective pain that we were all holding. This one small garment conveyed colonial violence, our being severed from our ancestors, and the cries for liberation we could not name. In its shells it held the sea and the whispers of those unnamed, carrying all of us to the shores Larson hopes to touch one day.

Sonja Larson, Camari Serau, and Mere Tuilau are all born out of a Blackness whose lineages of resistance and liberation anchor and overlap in Papua. Their actions and art explore the ways in which Blackness ebbs and flows within the same salt water as the African Diaspora but is grounded in their experience as Pacific peoples. Their work creates a new locus from which to understand Blackness not as an imagined, distant place but instead as a vitally important multi-faceted region that “becomes ‘real’ through pan-Melanesian connections that are manifested in the idea of ‘Melanesia’” (Kabutaulaka 127). From this pan-Melanesian center they build international solidarity. This essay bears witness to the clarity and courage of Melanesian women and gender nonconforming people. Their longings, their suffering, their imagination, and their struggles for liberation provide visionary leadership for Black futures that is so urgently needed.

Black is the color of solidarity.

Joy Lehuanani Enomoto is a community organizer, visual artist and lecturer at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Pacific Islands Studies. Her work on climate justice, embodied archives and demilitarization in the Pacific is featured in Frontiers Journal, The Contemporary Pacific: Experiencing Pacific Environments: Pasts, Presents, Futures, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi, Routledge Postcolonial Handbook, and Amerasia Journal. Her current work focuses on anti-Blackness in Oceania/Solwara.

Footnotes

1. The term “solwara” is Tok-Pisin word for “salt-water” or “ocean.”

2. This history stands in contrast to rosy accounts of Indonesia as the host of the infamous 195 Bandung conference, still imagined by scholars an activists as the apex of Third World solidarity.

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