Telly Tuita’s Tēvolo series is an elaborate convergence of personal memory, cultural mythology, and operatic grandeur. Infused with historical and contemporary references, the series introduces four striking new characters: Carmen, Lucia, Norma, and The Tormented Victim, the latter played by a golden-bodied Hikule’o, the Tongan goddess of the underworld. These figures exist in a liminal space between fiction and reality, spectacle and sincerity—each a vessel through which Tuita reflects on the emotional and psychological dimensions of his identity and heritage.
The inspiration for Tēvolo emerges from childhood recollections in Tonga, where Tuita remembers witnessing women running through the village, claiming to be tormented by a Tēvolo—a presence clinging to their back or shoulder. Anthropologist and filmmaker Michael Poltorak has noted that Tēvolo defies direct translation; often rendered as "ghost," "devil," or "spirit," it carries deeper implications tied to mental health, spiritual possession, and colonial religious influences. With the arrival of Christianity, many pre-Christian deities and practices were demonized, their spiritual weight repurposed into a framework of fear and affliction. Within this context, Tēvolo functions as both a cultural signifier and a psychological construct, embodying the ways in which behavioral deviations from societal norms are explained or rationalized.
Tuita’s Tēvolo figures stand in direct opposition to conventional portrayals of Pacific life as idyllic and harmonious. Instead, they revel in their contradictions—Carmen, Norma, and Lucia do not exist to please or pacify. Their presence is defiant, theatrical, and excessive, drawing from the heightened emotional states of operatic heroines who embody both passion and destruction. These characters become avatars of the artist himself, performing a tension between self-exploration and public display, between external expectations and internal realities.
By weaving together operatic divas with the ancestral power of Hikule’o, Tuita crafts a universe where emotional turmoil, mental strain, and cultural hybridity are given form. The Tēvolo series refuses to sanitize or simplify the complexities of identity; instead, it demands confrontation with the specters that inhabit both personal and collective histories. In doing so, Tuita positions his work as a reckoning with inherited narratives, forcing us to acknowledge the unseen forces—whether historical, psychological, or spiritual—that shape and haunt Pacific existence.
