The poem “Tiki Manifesto” is paired here with this important male tiki from Mangareva. Wood images were fashioned to contain the supernatural power, or mana, of a variety of deities and were originally placed in sacred sites (known as marae) where communities gathered. In this poem, Dan Taulapapa McMullin addresses the appropriation and commoditization of tiki culture, speaking directly to the melancholy and anger that Polynesians feel when they encounter this complete misreading of Tiki, which dismisses and ignores their mana as vessels of the sacred.

— Maia Nuku

“Tiki Manifesto” by Dan Taulapapa McMullin

Tiki mug, tiki mug
My face, my mother’s face, my father’s face, my sister’s face
Tiki mug, tiki mug

White beachcombers in tiki bars drinking zombie cocktails from tiki mugs
The undead, the Tiki people, my mother’s face, my father’s face
The black brown and ugly to make customers feel white and beautiful

Tiki mugs, tiki ashtrays, tiki trashcans, tiki kitsch cultures
Tiki bars in Los Angeles, a tiki porn theatre, tiki stores
Tiki conventions, a white guy named Kukulelei singing in oogabooga fake Hawaiian
makes me yearn to hear a true Kanaka Maoli like Kaumakaiwa Kanaka'ole
sing chant move her hands to the antidote to tiki bar people
who don't listen because tiki don’t speak any language
do they

Tiki bars in L.A., in Tokyo, in the lands of Tiki, Honolulu, Pape’ete
Wherever tourists need a background of black skin brown skin ugly faces
to feel land of the free expensive rich on vacation hard working
with a background of wallpaper tiki lazy people wallpaper
made from our skins our faces our ancestors our blood

Dan Taulapapa McMullin

Artist, Poet

Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa'e (American Samoa). Taulapapa creates paintings, sculpture, video, and installation works. Their publications include a collection of poems entitled Coconut Milk (2013), a co-edited volume Samoan Queer Lives (2018), and the artist book The Healer’s Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia (2022). Their work has been shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the de Young Museum in San Francisco; and the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as in Paris, Hawai’i, Los Angeles, and Auckland.