The Application of Heliaki (Imagery) in Tongan Songs and the Roles of Journalists and Censorial Punake in Their Censorship Between the 1960s and the Early 2000s
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Latu, Kalino
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Treadwell, Gregory
Havea, Janet Tupou
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Auckland University of Technology
Abstract
Hiva kakala (kakala songs), which emerged as a distinctive Tongan genre during the late nineteenth century, became a major focus of censorship by the Tonga Broadcasting Commission (TBC) from the 1960s to the early 2000s. The process was characterised by both agreement and tension. Even Queen Sālote Tupou III, who was instrumental in the censorship process, did not always agree with censorial decisions to ban particular songs. Despite this complex history and its status as one of the richest repositories of Tongan language and literary artistry, hiva kakala has received little in-depth and rigorous scholarly investigation. This study investigates why hiva kakala were required to employ heliaki and undergo scrutiny, initially by censorial punake (composers) and later by journalists (kau faiongoongo), before radio broadcast.
The censorship served several principal purposes. It moderated offensive, culturally inappropriate, or otherwise objectionable content that might breach fetauhiʻaki, the practice that sustains the broader nofo ʻa kāinga which underpin the newly proposed kāinga–ʻulumotuʻa–mehekitanga (fahu) social stratification and the recognised kakai–houʻeiki–tuʻi constitutional hierarchy. It also upheld heliaki as the defining literary and expressive framework of hiva kakala, enabling compositions to be shaped through the figurative potential of literal expressions. In addition, it moderated Western and other foreign influences by ensuring their culturally appropriate integration into hiva kakala. Throughout the investigation, the application of heliaki and the tensions surrounding it revealed conflicting interpretations that ultimately led this study to challenge longstanding misconceptions and address them through the standardisation and reconceptualisation of key cultural practices.
The study reconceptualises hiva kakala as a song genre fundamentally defined by the heliaki system. Accordingly, any song that does not exhibit a sufficient degree of heliaki should not be classified as hiva kakala. The song genre was profoundly shaped by the arrival of the early Christian missionaries particularly through their translation of hymns, the Holy Bible, and other religious texts into Tongan. Against this historical background, the study further establishes that heliaki, the defining literary system of hiva kakala, was substantially refined and further developed through engagement with the English figurative tradition. As no previous study has systematically accounted for this process of literary integration, the research also reconceptualises heliaki as a semantic–figurative system grounded in the intrinsic qualities of literal expressions. Within this system, heliaki is realised through imagery, symbolism, or figuration, which are expressed as lea heliaki (figurative language) and subsequently classified into particular lea ʻo e heliaki (figures of speech). Building on this framework, the study systematically classifies more than 30 lea ʻo e heliaki.