Book of the Week: The Bond of Time

John Pule, Canterbury University Press, 2014

Reviewed by Scott Hamilton

The Bond of Time was written in 1983 and published in a small edition in 1985. It was republished in 1998 by the Pacific Writing Forum in Fiji, then appeared in a new edition with an introduction by Jeffrey Papamoa Holman in 2024. This is the cover of the 2024 edition; it features Pule's painting The Great World (to Ha).

RS: Massey University Press has just published This Must Be the Island: Liga Hanai e Motu, a book of texts and images by John Pule and his long-time collaborator Gregory O'Brien. Despite Pule's status as one of Oceania's most acclaimed creatives, his first book of poetry, which appeared in 1983 when he was only twenty-one, remains little-known. But The Bond of Time is essential reading, not for its own sake but because it shows Pule laying out the worldview and method found in his later painting as well as writing.

John Pule's Ocean

1

'We're 50 out, and it's 250 down' says BJ, walking across the listing deck as easily as I walk across my lounge. Niue rises like a green whale in the distance. Robert and Aneirin lean over their rods, against the railing, but I'm not fishing. I'm reading The Bond of Time, a long poem John Pule self-published in a tiny edition in 1983. Gregory O'Brien called The Bond of Love a 'linguistic ocean'. Like the ocean, the poem has no beginning and no end, and can be entered anywhere. It offers no stable perspective, tells no story, makes no argument. Sometimes it is stormy; at other times it is gentle. But the poem like the ocean has a pattern, recognisable everywhere, stable even as it moves this way and that. Whether they lap or roar, Pule's lines keep their shape, like waves. For days now I've been falling into The Bond of Time and emerging refreshed.

Pule was only twenty-one when he wrote the poem. After quitting a factory job he was performing and partying with a group of Auckland writers that included David Mitchell, Bob Orr, and David Eggleton, and reading the European modernist poets—Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Lorca, and many more—who had built strange new dwellings out of the ruins of nineteenth century language. When Pule and his comrades took the stage at the Globe pub, Mitchell would raise a portrait of Rimbaud behind them like a banner.

The Bond of Time consists of eighty-eight poems of twenty-five lines each. Most of the lines contains between eight and twelve syllables, and an iambic beat predominates. Pule's formal education was intermittent, and ended in his early teens. He discovered poetry when he opened a copy of the Listener, and found a page of mysterious jagged lines. He read Blake and Shelley and Keats—'to John, Romantic poetry was holy writ', his friend Iain Sharp remembered—and later the European modernists in translation. At twenty-one he was still finding his way with words, and it is not surprising there are infelicities in The Bond of Time. Sometimes the poet strays into cliche, giving us phrases like 'Queen of my heart' or 'let sleeping dogs lie'. Sometimes his sentences become confused, or his pronouns ambiguous. What young poet writes perfectly? But there are many more pearls than flaws in the book. Marvellous lines like 'You water the plants by walking past them' and 'mountains befriend the frenzied climber' show the twenty-one year's blazing gift.

Pule would remember The Bond of Time as his 'first attempt at looking at love and the emotions involved'. In stanza after stanza, Pule addresses himself to a vivid but mysterious lover. She is protean, baking in the kitchen one moment and raising islands in the next. She can sprout wheat from her palms or turn into a dolphin, but sometimes she lies in bed 'like a wrecked toy', distraught and exhausted. She owes something to the woman Andre Breton celebrated in his poem 'Freedom of Love':

My wife with the hair of a wood fire

With the thoughts of heat lightning

With the waist of an hourglass

With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger

My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude

With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth

With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass

My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host

With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes

With the tongue of an unbelievable stone

My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing

With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest

My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof

And of steam on the panes

My wife with shoulders of champagne

And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice

Breton's series of images is simultaneously dazzling and mystifying. Metaphors and similies flash by, but we struggle to relate them to each other. We feel overloaded, overstimulated, but also moved. 'Great poetry should communicate before it is understood' TS Eliot wrote. Breton's poem and The Bond of Time seem to communicate without being understood.

The Bond of Time is held together by its formal patterning and by the omnipresence of its goddess-woman. The order they provide is tested by the leaps Pule makes through time and space. David Eggleton has written about the way Pule's paintings seem to be 'dancing a fine line' between 'mechanical repetition' and 'cacophony and anarchy'. The same can be said for The Bond of Time.

By the 1980s abstract art had become widely accepted in Aotearoa. Painters like Milan Mrkusich and Gordon Walters, who had struggled to find an audience in the 1950s and '60s, were being acclaimed by reviewers and collected by public galleries. But abstract writing was still rare and controversial. Apart from The Bond of Time, Leigh Davis' much better known Willy's Gazette was the only long piece of abstract poetry to appear in Aotearoa in the '80s. Pule's book was ignored by almost all reviewers when it appeared in 1983. Pule's comrades in the Auckland live poetry scene were mostly writing in more conventional ways. Bob Orr, for example, produced lyric poems that use carefully observed objects to stand for his feelings; David Eggleton wrote long polemics, energetic denunciations of New Zealand's racism, materialism, and philistinism. Pule may have been part of a literary scene, but he stood almost alone in his commitment to abstraction.

Pule also occupies an idiosyncratic spot in contemporary Pasifika poetry. A series of Pasifika poets have won audiences with poems written in a confessional, conversational style. Writing in the first person, poets like Grace Molisa, Konai Thaman Helu, and Karlo Mila have celebrated the landscapes and cultures of their people, and talked frankly about the problems colonialism and neo-colonialism have created for the Pacific. Their work is important: it speaks loudly and eloquently for communities long marginalised or patronised by palagi literature.

But we should not forget that Pasifika poetry has always had other registers. Traditionally many poems have had abstract or esoteric qualities. In northern Vanuatu, for example, poets still sing and chant the 'language of Qat', an occult, incantatory tongue intended not to communicate clearly but to induce a trance-like state. Tongan poets have often retreated to the bush to compose, and have returned with lines wrapped in layers of heliaki, or hidden meaning. Most Polynesian literatures include chants addressed to the gods, chants that have the same repetitive quality and tumultuous, abstract imagery as Pule's poem for his lover-deity.

2

BJ points at the three small outrigger vaka parked on rocks at the end of the chasm. 'Most of the men on the island have them' he says, adjusting his All Blacks cap and scratching the back of his wrinkled neck. 'We get used to being on the sea.' The vaka are both graceful and efficient, light enough to be carried by one person, robust enough to stay together in the deep water that surrounds Niue. 'Nowadays everyone wears a lifejacket, and some people have radios.' As we move toward an opening in Niue's cliffs I admire the colour of the sea: its blue is somehow both dark and bright. Would Yves Klein, who spent his life searching for a magical shade of blue, be satisfied here? I imagine him covering huge canvases in this blue, and leaping off Niue's cliffs in the same way he leapt out of a Paris window in search of the void.

In 2025 John Pule is not only an internationally acclaimed creative but a symbol of Niue. As soon as I stepped into the arrivals room at the country's airport I spotted a large, laminated reproduction of one of his paintings. A Pule original sits near ancient artefacts in Niue's museum. Pule is best known for his reinvention of the traditional hiapo paintings of Niue, and it is these works, with their old motifs and local imagery, that the airport and museum showcase.

Yet The Bond of Time teems with apparently foreign detail. The poem is sprinkled with Niuean words and with pieces of the island's land and seascapes, but it also contains Greek temples, Asian mats, nomadic tribes, redwood trees, the Eiffel tower, and the Great Wall of China. O'Brien notes how it is 'loaded to bursting point', and has an 'almost encyclopedic reach'. In a note for the book's 1997 reprint, Pule said that, when choosing images for his poem, he 'sought the world's landscapes, architecture, storehouses and people...anything that generated melancholy, joy, stillness, movements of energy'.

But despite its settings and imagery, The Bond of Time is a profoundly Polynesian and Niuean poem. Culture is deeper than images or artefacts or even place. I heard a story about a European scholar of Japanese literature who visited the home of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima. He noticed that all the furniture in the house and all the art on its walls came from Europe and America. The visitor was puzzled; Mishima's obsession with Japanese culture and history was well known. He asked Mishima about the furniture and art. 'I have decided to fill this house with foreign objects' Mishima replied, 'so that its Japanese essence is made obvious'. Mishima's furniture may have come from Europe, but the wide spaces between the pieces were distinctively Japanese. The foreign artworks were hung in straight lines and spaced consistently, to accentuate the feeling of airiness and balance created by the furniture. Mishima had given the artworks the thin, naturally toned wooden frames dictated by Japanese tradition. Culture teaches humans how to use exotic objects, as much as ones they are familiar with.

From the middle of the 19th century, when they converted to Christianity and lost the reputation for savagery Cook had unfairly given them, Niueans became avid travellers, with an appetite for food, furniture, gadgets, and adornments made far from their shores. A missionary bemoaned the way young Niueans were going abroad, earning money, travelling to Tonga and Fiji to buy goods and horses, and then returning to their homeland to 'live sinfully'. When Niueans went to Raoull Island to work for the New Zealand state they soon discovered they could order goods from Auckland shops and get them delivered to the motu. Many returned to Niue with beds and other treasures. Niueans who did not go abroad could buy exotic products from the trade stores that opened around their island, and eventually watch American movies on a portable screen owned by a palagi entrepreneur. Today Niueans are arguably the world's most transnational people: 90% of them live abroad. The adventurousness of The Bond of Time and its appetite for the exotic seem deeply Niuean.

Niue's egalitarianism helped its people reach out to the rest of the world. Like the Moriori of Rekohu and atoll peoples like the Tuvaluans, Niueans acknowledged no chiefs. The island's traditional leader, known as the patuiki, was elected by the heads of families and had a ceremonial rather than an administrative role. In ultra-hierarchical Tonga aristocrats could often control the movements of their people, and 'tax' exotic goods travellers brought home with them. In Niue no such barriers existed, as missionaries found to their frustration. There were also fewer obstacles to the assimilation of new materials. Niueans had been building graves for centuries, using first stalactites from their caves then, in the nineteenth century, limestone. When traders brought marble locals began to make headstones with it. On Tonga, by contrast, grave decorations were the preserve of the elite until well into the twentieth century.

Niueans did not merely assimilate foreign materials; they often reinvented them. Niuean women weaved replacements for the felt hats they had imported from Australasia, and decorated their creations with flora and feathers. By the beginning of the twentieth the island was exporting thousands of woven hats, and headgear was de rigueur for women in church.

The formal devices of The Bond of Time have Niuean antecedents. The island's weavers and hiapo artists used geometric patterns to organise their surfaces; Pule does something similar when he gives each page of his sprawling poem the same shape. Although many hiapo featured images—a coconut, a fish—as well as geometric patterns, these images were not combined into any easily discernible statement or story. The relations between them were conjectural. The hiapo were abstract, like The Bond of Time.

This poster from 1985 advertises an evening of poetry readings that featured the young John Pule and friends like Bob Orr.

3

We motor into a chasm surrounded on three sides by Niue's cliffs. Robert strips off his top and leaps into the water, decapitating his shadow. I slide in slowly, and let the water flow over me, like Pule's poem.

David Eggleton places John Pule's 'breakthrough' as an artist in 1992, the year he returned to the homeland he left as a small boy and stayed in his old village Liku. Back in Aotearoa Pule began to produce works influenced by the traditional hiapo, or barkcloth paintings, of Niue. He took the grid structure and some motifs and images from traditional hiapo, as well as their colours: brown, black, burnt umber. He added what Eggleton calls a 'personal iconography'. But the method of Pule's paintings of the '90s was already present in The Bond of Time. There is an unmistakable continuity between his poetry and painting. We can see this if we consider them side by side. Here is the 45th section of The Bond of Time:

Romance disappeared like a tragedy

from history. A helmet of dusty dreams,

a shirt of birds and design, a comb

to brush away heaps of metal, and in return

came nomadic tribes, tired and hungry.

Position of love, law and art

when I lie close to you; and see

the border of pennants and gulls,

a vast history of kisses and oranges,

a portrait of health and bondage.

What are those falling in heavy drops

of rain from your shadow? a burning

volcano? a birth of an island?

a woodpecker strangled by insects?

or is it me in your hatred of my nature?

You buy chocolate, mutton, flour,

mushrooms, pastry, eggs. And you bake

delicious food; roast chicken, salad of

carrot, lettuce, cucumber, tomato,

celery, green-pepper, nuts and cheese.

You sleep so still, watching you is

like watching pictures of the victims

of Pompeii. Asphyxiated everything,

decorated villas now dead, now

alive, now waking, you rise!

The first stanza shows us Pule's skill as a ventriloquist. It reads like a fragment from an apocalyptic historical narrative: The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage or The Groans of the Britons. A feeling of melancholy and torpor suffuses the lines, as Pule lists relics of an extinct civilisation. The makers of the comb and the 'helmet of dusty dreams' were not defeated in some heroic last stand by stronger invaders; they appear to have disappeared, and their inferior successors are 'hungry and tired'. Pule uses anapestic feet to give his lines a hushed, almost sighing sound.

The second stanza begins with a glimpse—one of many in The Bond of Time—of the poet in bed with his lover, then seems to move into the nineteenth century, a time when Niueans experienced both an expansion of their world and threats to their culture. Palagi who visited their motu might carry either desirable foreign goods or guns and chains. The Niueans scanned the horizon eagerly for traders, but dreaded slavers. Some traders fell in love with Niueans, and stayed on the island. Some Niueans who had been abroad to work brought back Tongan or Fijian wives.

Pule is thinking about the more positive side of 19th century contacts when he imagines 'a vast history of kisses and oranges'. Oranges appear almost obsessively in The Bond of Time. Pule shows them floating between islands, being unloaded at ports, becoming the playthings of dolphins. The great Tongan intellectual Futa Helu made fongufongu, or pumice, into a symbol of inter-island exchange and friendship: he was inspired by the way the soft, light rock floats between motu. Oranges seems to have the same sort of significance for Pule. In the 19th and early 20th centuries oranges were an important Pacific export; millions of them left islands like Rarotonga, Mangaia, and Tahiti for the temperate cities of Australasia. In New Zealand they became symbols of the tropical Pacific's fecundity and warm climate. Niue's soil is rocky and poor, and oranges did not flourish there. Like the Tokelauans, whose atolls lacked the space and soil for orange orchards, Niueans imported the fruit from more fortunate Pacific islands.

But Pule's 'history of oranges and kisses' is also a time of 'health and bondage'. Such seemingly oxymoronic phrases are ubiquitous in The Bond of Time; they reflect Pule's refusal to simplify or sentimentalise. The wider world might have brought adventure and marvels to nineteenth century Niueans, but it also brought epidemics and raids. The lover addressed in The Bond of Time is similarly contradictory: she can she be tender or capricious, conjure soothing rain or famished sharks. In the penultimate stanza she cooks a feast, but in the last one she transforms from a domestic to a cosmic goddess, one capable of restoring the dead city of Pompeii to life.

In the space of twenty-five lines Pule leaps through time and space; his tone and mood shifts with each stanza, and sometimes inside each stanza. In a defence of Leigh Davis' abstract poetry, Roger Horrocks insisted that it offers a distinctive aesthetic experience, one not available through more conventional poems. The same can be said of The Bond of Time. The first person lyric poems Bob Orr was writing in the '80s and the long-lined, punchy polemics turned out at the same time by David Eggleton both offer readers many rewards, but neither of Pule's friends' styles could achieve the effects of The Bond of Time. Pule's poem lacks Orr's stable perspective and linear narratives, as well as Eggleton's stinging arguments; in their place, though, he gives us a series of tumultuous atmospheres that work on our emotions with the directness of a Coltrane solo or a Pollock painting. We can't say what Pule's lines 'mean', anymore than we can describe the story or argument of 'Naima' or 'Autumn Rhythm'. But no poetry could be less meaningless.

When I look at Pule's 1998 painting Take these with you when you leave I find a visual synecdoche for The Bond of Time. The painting's grid finds room for a state house, the Maui Pomare, a ship that connected Aotearoa and Niue for decades, a passport, a guitar, a jug, and a young plant—is it taro?—with its roots hanging in the air. Some of these details have intense personal significance for the artist—the guitar belonged to his father, and he filled the jug with water for a sick relative—but they accept other interpretations, in the way that the geometric patterns Pule has pulled from hiapo perhaps do not.

The panels of the paintings do not collaborate to tell some linear story or make some didactic statement; like the stanzas of The Bond of Time, they often contrast with and contradict each other. Ominous and rhapsodic details confront each other; viewers may find their feelings shifting as their eyes range from panel to panel. The hiapo-influenced paintings that made Pule's reputation in the '90s applied a method he had already mastered in 1983.

In the 1990s John Pule published two novels, The Shark that Ate the Sun and Burn My Head in Heaven. They are remarkable for the way they integrate ancient and modern Niuean history and Niue experience at home and in the diaspora, and for their non-linear form. It is a disgrace that both books have been out of print for some time. They are essential parts of not only Pacific but Aotearoan literature. 

4

Back in the open ocean I look from page to horizon. I see a sharp dark line, the blade of a bush knife. In Tonga or Fiji or Samoa there are usually islands on a sea horizon, and they are somehow comforting, like strangers approaching across a desert. Niue, though, stands alone.

David Eggleton has written about the teeming detail of Pule's paintings, and the way his oeuvre seems to aspire to become 'an all-encompassing data bank of imagery'. Paintings like Take these with you when you Leave are as turbulent and encyclopedic as The Bond of Time, and Eggleton wants to explain the maximalism of Pule's work in psychological terms. 'Being a Pacific Islander', Eggleton says, 'is a state of mind'; Pule is painting his way into the depths of his mind.

I want to make a different argument. I see Pule's style as an attempt to recapture and preserve an endangered way of thinking. Carl Mika is a philosopher at Waikato University and a guide to this way of thinking. Mika insists on a fundamental difference between traditional Polynesian cognition and the type of thought dominant in the capitalist 21st century. Mika brings Martin Heidegger with him on his journeys into Te Ao Maori, just as Albert Wendt has taken Albert Camus with him into Samoan history and Futa Helu used Heraclitus to help him understand Tonga.

Mika agrees with Heidegger that modern thought is characterised by a 'metaphysics of presence': by a belief that any object under human examination, whether large or small, can be isolated, quantified and summarised. He believes that Polynesian thought is very different, because it acknowledges the partial inaccessibility of all objects and the relentless interpenetration of all aspects of the world. Mika considers the different ways palagi and Polynesians think about land:

When a phenomenon such as whenua is to be discussed, for example, then dominant Western practice encourages us...to approach it as whenua and nothing else...a smooth and unproblematic entity...an object utterly undistracted or uninformed by other objects...

Mika uses the word 'wa' to refer to the 'overwhelming convergence of all things in the world'. 'Things' he says, are 'excessive' rather than 'knowable'. Excessive, not knowable: is there any better short description of The Bond of Time and Pule's hiapo-based paintings?

It seems to me that Pule's writing and art has the same restlessness as Mika's thought—that it refuses, like Mika, to look at one thing without considering another, and refuses to treat any one thing as complete and completely knowable. Dylan Thomas, a writer Pule reveres, said that he began a poem with one image, then let that image 'breed another', which often contradicted the first, then came up with a third image that moved on from the second. Pule's poetry and painting looks like the same sort of accretive process, with details breeding further details in unexpected ways. Just as The Bond of Time refuses to become a narrative or argument, so the hiapo-influenced paintings refuse to resolve into a whole. We cannot take them in with one glance, or even a dozen glances. There is no obvious hierarchy of meaning, no focal point, no keystone in the arch Pule builds.

Pule has studied Niue's pre-Christian religion, poring over ethnologists' reports and missionary narratives in search of mentions of ancient deities and rituals. In an interview and a later poem he compared Christ to a sick palagi 'explorer' of the nineteenth century. The cross carried this ailing god into the Pacific, he suggests, the way indentured servants carried malarial missionaries over their beaches and through their forests on litters. Christianity simplified the Niuean universe, turning a cyclical history into an eschatology, a dreary wait for disaster and salvation, and replacing the thousand deities of the island with a single, invisible god.

The old gods had proliferated because Niueans saw the interdependence of the universe's parts. How could Tuuaiua, a deity who bestowed peace, exist without Fakatefau, the warlike god who lurked with his club in the forest near Pule's native village of Liku? Puefou, the bringer of droughts, implied Tagaloa, who brought rain and other gifts from his sky. The creation chants of Polynesian literature offer one of the world's first accounts of evolution, and the deities of Niue reflect a knowledge of the interdependence of different species and habitats. Tilalofonua was a rat who was given wings, after begging more powerful deities for the privilege; he linked earth and sky, patrolling both the clouds and the forest floor. In his writing and his art, John Pule honours the old gods.

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