A Sea of Islands

On a map of the Pacific Ocean, the European-trained eye always sees the same thing: tiny dots scattered across a vast blue expanse, far from everything, far from one another. Dry surfaces counted to the bare minimum, states deemed “too small, too poor, too isolated” to ever break free from the aid of wealthy nations. This is the gaze of the continent approaching the sea: islands in a far sea, and between them, emptiness.

Epeli Hauʻofa (1939–2009)—a Tongan thinker born in Papua, longtime professor at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji—first taught this perspective. He propagated it, he says, with conviction: he described to his students their situation of dependence, watching their faces fall without being able to offer them a way out. Then he realized that teaching smallness to young people from his own region was to take part in their diminishment. In 1993, in a lecture that became a foundational text, he flipped the map.

English

There is a gulf of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’. The first emphasises dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centres of power. When you focus this way you stress the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships.

English

There is a chasm between seeing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands.” The first vision emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean, far from centers of power. When viewed this way, the smallness and remoteness of the islands are underscored. The second is a more holistic perspective, where things are seen in the fullness of their relationships.

Everything hinges on where the emphasis is placed. “Islands in a sea” turns the ocean into an interval, a distance that separates and shrinks; the calculation is based solely on the landmass in view. “A sea of islands” makes the ocean the medium that connects, and the unit of measure is no longer surface area but the bond. The ancestors who traversed this world for over two thousand years, Hauʻofa reminds us, did not conceive of their universe in microscopic proportions: they thought big, navigated wide, and what he calls “world enlargement”—the expansion of the world—continues today under the noses of planners. “Smallness is a state of mind”—smallness is a mindset.

This reversal is not a comforting metaphor. It restores an experience: for the peoples of the sea, the ocean is home, not the abyss. In Tonga, Hauʻofa says, people from other islands were called kakai mei tahi, “the people of the sea”—as if the sea were their dwelling. From one island to another, they sailed to trade, to marry, to visit kin; routes were traced in blood ties, and borders—those imaginary lines later drawn across the water by imperial powers—did not exist. The ocean belongs only to those who make it their home: “Conquerors come, conquerors go, the ocean remains, mother only to her children”—conquerors arrive, conquerors depart, the ocean endures, mother to her children alone.

What is a “sea of islands”?

It is a way of seeing Oceania proposed by Tongan thinker Epeli Hauʻofa: not a scattering of tiny, isolated islets lost in an empty ocean, but a vast world that the ocean connects. Islands are no longer measured by the surface of their land, but by the totality of their relationships—navigation routes, kinship, exchanges. The sea is not a barrier: it is the home.

English

Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again.

English

Oceania is vast, Oceania expands, Oceania is welcoming and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire even deeper, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, and we must awaken to this ancient truth to collectively overturn all hegemonic visions that seek only to confine us anew.

One might be tempted to read this as a postcard—the happy island, the endless horizon. That reading must be set aside before going further. Hauʻofa embellishes nothing: his text is a dated polemic, directed against a precise scholarly discourse that reduced the Pacific to micro-states doomed to dependency. The “we are the sea” is not tourist lyricism; it is the argued refusal of a gaze that shrinks. And this is also why his reversal concerns us, we who read maps: we have learned, like his students, to see certain worlds as small, fragile, peripheral—and to confuse the surface they occupy with what they are worth and what they can do.

The question left open by the sea of islands remains, without being turned into a lesson. We measure our places by their surfaces, by their distances, by what separates them. Hauʻofa proposes measuring them by what connects them. Which of our worlds shrink when flattened onto a map—and which would expand if we learned once more to navigate them?