poi

Poi has two distinct meanings in Polynesian contexts, both of which have entered English, and both are genuinely Polynesian words though from different contexts. The first poi is the Hawaiian staple food — a purple paste made from cooked and pounded taro root fermented to a slightly sour, sticky consistency, eaten with the fingers as the starchy base of the traditional Hawaiian diet. The second is the Maori poi — a small, light ball attached to a cord, swung in rhythmic patterns as part of Maori performance arts and used historically to develop wrist strength and hand-eye coordination. The two words are linguistically related through their Polynesian ancestry but name different things, and both have entered English in different ways and through different cultural channels. In modern global culture, poi most often refers to the fire-spinning variety evolved from the Maori form.

The Maori poi as a performance art involves swinging balls (traditionally made from flax weaving or raupo bulrush) on cords in complex patterns around the body — single poi swung in one hand, or pairs swung simultaneously with crossing patterns, to the accompaniment of song. Poi was performed by women and men for different purposes: women's poi developed into an art form (poi awhiowhio) with elaborate group choreographies performed at cultural gatherings, while warriors used weighted poi as a training tool to develop the wrist flexibility and speed required for weapons use. The poi appears in traditional Maori song, the movements of the poi coordinated with the words of the performance. It is one of the most visible elements of Maori cultural performance in New Zealand's national consciousness.

The global spread of poi as a performance art occurred through New Zealand's cultural exports in the late twentieth century and through the subcultures that adopted fire spinning and flow arts in the 1990s. Fire poi — wicks attached to cords, lit and swung in the same patterns as traditional Maori poi — became a staple of music festival culture worldwide, and the word poi traveled with the practice. The fire spinning community often acknowledges the Maori origin of the word and the basic form, though the elaborate fire choreographies and the social context of festival performance are contemporary inventions distinct from the traditional Maori practice. The word has traveled further and faster than the traditional form it names, which is common for words that attach to adaptable practices.

The Hawaiian taro poi represents a different trajectory: it entered English primarily through documentation of Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century and through the Hawaiian culinary revival of the late twentieth century. Taro poi has never achieved the global cultural presence of the Maori performance poi, partly because food words travel more slowly than performance words and partly because poi's taste — tangy, starchy, unfamiliar in texture — has not found a universal audience the way performance poi's visual spectacle has. Both meanings coexist in English without significant confusion, their contexts distinct enough that speakers generally know which poi is meant. The sound is the same; the cord connecting the two meanings runs through the deep history of Polynesian culture and its migrations across the Pacific.