Kuo Hina 'E Hiapo: The Mulberry is White and Ready for Harvest (review)

Kuo Hina 'E Hiapo is a process-oriented documentary about how Tongan women's identities in their communities are tied to their role as makers of ngatu, or barkcloth. The narrator begins by merging historical and contemporary narratives about ngatu when she states, "After centuries of use, ngatu has literally become the fabric of Tongan society." The film documents the process of ngatu-making and highlights women's roles, their personal stakes, and their voices in this collaborative work. Using insightful commentary, vivid imagery, and steady, focused camerawork, the film nicely interweaves three main narratives: one about ngatu-making by women in groups called kautaha toulanganga, another about women finding voice and power through the social relations nurtured in the kautaha, and a third about how they fulfill their expected societal roles by teaching these skills to younger generations of Tongan females. Through clear English narration and Tongan interviews with accurate subtitles, the film effectively communicates its claim that "all the comments made in [the] film are the thoughts and words from the women of these kautaha organizations who have joined together for the making of ngatu."

The film's strength is its privileging of women's roles in, and impressions about, the kautaha. It introduces several women by name and strongly suggests that kautaha is a microcosm of ideal Tongan society, evidenced in the pride with which the women from one such group describe their kautaha as an organization with a constitution and laws. They describe the enforcement of these laws through fines and the strict discipline of work schedules and the sharing of the burden of work. The continual return to beautiful and intimate shots of numerous pairs of women's hands and the range of interviews with them as they work together further illustrates this point. The main tension in the film seems to be between women who make ngatu in the kautaha and those who buy it at market, thereby depleting the nation's natural plant resources. Ultimately, this illuminates local concerns about negotiating between living the traditional way and participating in modernity through the monetization that threatens the "stability of the community and maintenance of its tradition, [which] finds it roots within [the] kautaha."

The gendered work of ngatu is also suggested when an elderly woman is shown harvesting hiapo (paper mulberry plants) for making ngatu's material base and her son-in-law is shown scraping koka bark for dye-making. Whereas agriculture is generally men's work throughout Polynesia, ngatu-making in Tonga, as the film rightly emphasizes, is women's work. Therefore, it is particularly striking that men's interest in helping with ngatu production is contextualized in connection to the monetary value of the textiles. Indeed, other instances throughout the film emphasize the commodity status of ngatu—its price at the market having risen from T$50 -70 in the 1980 s to T$1 ,000 in the 1990 s, when the research and footage for the film were carried out. In one scene, a young woman who helps her mother to paint a ngatu says, "I think it is a good way for me to support my family financially and carry the burdens socially." What becomes apparent through scenes such as this is the central role of western-style money in Tongan practices of identity-making. Throughout the film, the narrator and interviewees explain that money is used for ceremonial purposes, to pay for a child's school fees, to buy daily supplies and foods, and to purchase raw materials or finished ngatu at the market. Working together to provide cloth wealth or cash wealth testifies to the shared shouldering of the burden of fulfilling a family's obligations...