The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  Tripping off ahead of me, down a concrete path between coconut palms and bungalows, the girl led me to the resort bar, at the top of a bank overlooking the lagoon. There she poured me a beer and explained that her parents who ran the resort were out, so she was in charge for the afternoon. She was in the sixth form at the local college, she said, and her name was Eikura Henry. ‘Related to the first prime minister of the Cook Islands?’ I asked. I was aware that Albert Henry had come from Aitutaki. ‘Yes, he was my great-grandfather,’ she replied languidly. Very pretty and utterly natural, she was still blinking away the vestiges of sleep. And as she did so I was thinking, No, your name’s not really Eikura Henry, it’s Tuaine Takamoa. You are exactly as I’ve always imagined Tuaine to be.

  ‘Why have you come to Aitutaki?’ Eikura asked me. When I told her I was writing a story about the island, her eyes widened. ‘You’re a writer? What’s your name?’ I told her and she gave a slow nod of recognition. ‘I met you once before,’ she said coyly, ‘when you and Ewan Smith came to Aitutaki with the big book about the Cook Islands. I bought a copy and you signed it for my mother and father. I was about twelve, I think.’ Then she added, ‘And we study your One Foot Island novels at school. Are you going to write another one? We all wondered what Tuaine did after Adam was sent back to Australia.’

  I didn’t tell her how much like Tuaine she appeared to me to be, but I did say that if they ever made a movie of the books, they need look no further to cast its heroine. When copies of the third book in the trilogy, The Pearl of One Foot Island, arrived from the publisher, one of the first people to whom I sent an inscribed copy was Eikura Henry of Aitutaki.

  FOUR

  THE MISS TUTTI FRUTTI CONTEST

  SAMOA

  THEY ARE SEEN throughout the islands of the South Pacific, the people known variously as fakaleiti (Tonga), raerae (Tahiti), tutu vaine (the Cook Islands), pinapinaine (Tuvalu) and fa’afafine (Samoa). A third sex, they attract much curiosity from visitors, a fact they don’t seem to mind at all. Since the time of first contact, these people have drawn the attention of European travellers. James Morrison, the twenty-seven-year-old boatswain’s mate on William Bligh’s ship Bounty, who joined the mutiny and wrote a journal documenting the ill-fated voyage and the extraordinary events surrounding it, included this description: ‘In Tahiti they have a set of men called Mahu. These men are in some respects like the eunuchs in India but are not castrated. They never cohabit with women, but live as they do. They pick their beards out and dress as women, dance and sing with them and are effeminate in their voice. They are generally excellent hands at making and painting cloth, making mats, and every other women’s employment.’

  Other recorders of early contact with traditional Polynesia, including Bligh himself, commented on the third-sex phenomenon. According to these accounts, Tahitian mahu were limited in number and were chosen by their families to take a female role from an early age. Bligh was sufficiently interested to closely examine some mahu. He reported that their genitals had been pulled back between their legs and also appeared to have shrunk. Other men, Bligh recorded, derived sexual pleasure from the mahu, and there was no stigma attached to being one. In fact, some mahu used their status for self-advancement. Many were esteemed servants to chiefs, who were prohibited from having female servants. Glynn Christian remarks of the mahu in his book Fragile Paradise, ‘Most were available for sexual purposes, but only performed fellatio.’ From the mahu evolved their contemporary equivalent throughout French Polynesia, the raerae, or transvestites.

  Naturally extroverted and demonstrative, the transvestites of Polynesia are an intriguing social and cultural phenomenon. Although sometimes the butt of coarse jokes in their communities, they are tolerated in a way that they are not in western society. Often large and powerfully built, they are in manner and temperament thoroughly female. Even after years of observing these men-women, it still disconcerts me when a young man with the physique of an All Black flanker approaches my restaurant table with a mincing gait and a flower behind his left ear and asks, in a lilting descant, ‘Sir, would-you-like-something-to-trink?’ I know one versatile raerae, employed as a cultural attendant on a cruise boat in the Society Islands, who each evening entertains his passengers by demonstrating skills ranging from basket weaving, pareo tying, ukulele playing, tamare dancing and, on the last night aboard, the modelling of a range of elaborate wedding gowns. Over two metres tall, the flamboyant Tomita obviously adores her work.

  In Samoa the fa’afafine (the expression means ‘to act like a woman’) are ubiquitous. Surprisingly, in a society in which sexual mores still border on the Victorian, they attract little derision or condemnation, perhaps because they have been part of Samoan society far longer than the Christian scriptures. Commonly, and somewhat annoyingly for heterosexual men, the prettiest women are drawn to their company. And every September in Apia, Samoa’s capital, the nation’s leading fa’afafine compete for the coveted title of Miss Tutti Frutti, one of the two climaxes of the annual Teuila Festival. (The other is the Miss Samoa contest, a much more conventional and very protracted beauty pageant.)

  The teuila is Samoa’s national flower, a member of the ginger family. With its long scarlet bloom made up of delicately layered petals, it resembles a burning brand. Both the flower and its elongated leaves are much favoured by those who decorate Samoa’s churches and hotel lobbies. The festival named after it is hugely enjoyable – a sort of Rio carnival, Henley regatta, Hero parade, Mormon Tabernacle Choir and one-day cricket tournament rolled into one – and many expatriate Samoans, of whom there are now tens of thousands, return to their homeland for its full week of cultural and sporting activities, which include kilikiti (Samoan cricket), fautasi (canoe racing), church choirs, street parades, brass-band contest, outdoor variety concerts, craft and art displays – and the two beauty contests.

  This year Miss Tutti Frutti is being held at the Hotel Kitano Tusitala. The hotel has a vague Robert Louis Stevenson theme, but the great Scottish teller of tales would be spinning in his tomb up on Mt Vaea if he could see what was happening. More than 2,000 people have turned up; hundreds more have been turned away. Most have to stand, as there are not nearly enough seats. The catwalk extends well into the audience, which clamours with anticipation as the start of the contest approaches. The lyrics of a suitably plaintive song boom out from stereo speakers, ‘I AM YOUR LAY … DEE … AND YOU ARE MY MAA … AA … NNNN’, before Tanya Toomalatai, the Mistress of Ceremonies, announces the first act. Tanya, a melon-breasted, gravel-voiced Amazon in a pastel-blue micro-skirt, is the size of a lock forward in Manu Samoa, the national rugby team. Describing herself as ‘the whore from Hawaii’ – where she lived for some years – she invites the audience to ‘laugh with us, not at us’, and draws sincere applause. Then the first dancers glide on to the stage.

  They are a troupe from Pago Pago – American Samoa – and they are breathtakingly beautiful, with brown hourglass bodies, lustrous waist-length hair, huge dark eyes, dazzling smiles and gorgeous yellow costumes. Garlanded in frangipani, their dance is more Tahitian than traditional Samoan, their sinuous movements perfectly choreographed as they raise their bare arms and reach for the stars. In astonishment I say to the Samoan man standing alongside me, ‘I can’t believe these creatures are really men.’ He laughs delightedly. ‘Settle down mate, these are girls. This is just the curtain-raiser.’ A strange kind of relief passes over me.

  When the real contestants swan on to the stage, the difference is very apparent. The MC announces each of the thirteen, then one by one they strut their stuff. They have names like Cindy and Dolores and Cleopatra. Some have breasts, others are more gamine; some are tall and well built, others slender, or avocado-shaped. All are outrageously flamboyant, dressed like peacocks in brilliantly coloured, inventive costumes. As they come down the catwalk they wiggle their hips, pirouette, then present their rumps to the crowd, which roars its appreciation. The raunchier the presentation, the louder the applau
se. Tanya becomes very worked up. ‘Here is Blondie. Her statistics are 22–44–88. Give her a big hand. But not the way we do.’

  After the tutti comes the frutti. The contestants do their second presentation festooned with grapes, apples, oranges, pawpaws, pineapples and, in one case, bananas – strung across the contestant’s loins like a tropical sporran. Wearable and edible art. The audience greets each contestant with hoots of approval.

  While the judges, seated at the end of the catwalk, go into a huddle to decide the winner (there are very strict criteria, one judge tells me later), Tanya gives a condom-fitting demonstration on a donkey-sized dildo. At the sight of this the audience is in an uproar, howling with laughter, almost helpless with shock and delight. It is then that I realise that the Miss Tutti Frutti contest is a kind of safety valve for the spectators, releasing some of the pent-up tensions in a society in which piety and its associated double standards too often rule.

  There is a serious subtext to the evening, too. One of the beneficiaries of the pageant’s gate-take is an HIV-AIDs awareness programme. Already there are officially twelve cases of HIV in Samoa, possibly more. Tonight’s contest – which carries an R16 restriction – raises $22,000 tala (dollars) for the cause.

  Whether in rugby, choral singing or cross-dressing, Samoans are the most fiercely competitive of all Pacific peoples. The result of the Miss Tutti Frutti contest is eagerly awaited, and when it is announced that the winner is the generously proportioned, banana-wearing ‘Blondie’ (aka Alosina Ropati), there is widespread approval.

  Later I interview Ken Moala, one of the organisers and himself a fa’afafine, who tells me that in pre-European times the fa’afafine were the entertainers of society. ‘They were considered very creative, artistic people and were accorded great respect. The Miss Tutti Frutti contest is a portrayal of our lifestyle, not a beauty pageant.’ As for the vexed question of how the fa’afafine come about, Ken’s response is unequivocal. ‘We are born that way,’ he declares. But when I mention this to a fa’afafine I know well, he rolls his eyes in exasperation and pronounces archly, ‘Well, you can’t believe everything he says.’

  Preparing for take-off from Faleolo Airport a few days later, the flight attendant going through the safety routine is a big-boned, handsome young Samoan man with shiny black, cropped hair. He looks somehow familiar. Was he in one of the canoe-race teams I watched getting into their boats at the bottom of the steps opposite Aggie Grey’s? Or maybe he was one of the airline crew by the pool at Aggie’s yesterday. The young man takes off his lifejacket, buckles himself into a cabin crew seat and sits bolt upright as the noise from the plane’s engines intensifies. Seconds later, the plane is hurtling down the runway.

  This is a daylight flight, so when the plane banks over the Apolima Strait between Samoa’s two main islands, there below us is the ‘big island’, Savai’i, its great volcanic backbone and forested slopes clearly visible. The island’s highest peak, Mt Silisili, rises to over 1,800 metres, while on the northeastern slopes the dark patches of its lava field stand out starkly.

  When another of Savai’i’s volcanoes, Mt Matavanu, erupted between 1905 and 1911, lava from its crater flowed down to the northern coast, causing the population of villages in its path to be evacuated before the flow eventually solidified. It left behind a landscape that looked like a vast slab of black toffee, whorled and twisted into fantastic patterns. Walking across this lava field is like being on the planet Mercury, the temperatures are so hot, the landscape so harsh and barren. It was near there that I once stayed in a most interesting hotel, the Safua. Interesting not only because it was situated so close to Savai’i’s huge lava field and natural swimming pools, but also because I met there for the first time that most bizarre of human animals, a husband-and-wife pair of social anthropologists.

  I had first heard about this species from a Tongan man, who told me that anthropologists were forever coming to Tonga to research some aspect of traditional life. One had come from a university in Chicago to live in his village on Tongatapu because she was writing her doctoral thesis on Tongan funerals. She stayed in one of the village houses, waiting for someone to die. Months passed, and nobody did. The Tongan man shook his head in disbelief. ‘She watched everyone every day for signs of ill-health, especially the old people. But everyone stayed healthy, and the healthier they were the more pissed-off she got.’ He laughed, sardonically. ‘I thought she would poison one of us, just to get the funeral she wanted. But when we went on living, she packed up and went off to Eu’a, because she heard that someone in a village there was dying.’

  I thought this sounded like a tall story until I met the couple at the Safua. They had come to Savai’i because they knew it was a place where fa’a Samoa – the traditional Samoan way of life – was still strong and relatively unchanged. But were they researching traditional Samoan customs or art? No, they were writing a book on suicide in the South Pacific.

  Gerhardt and Ula were German, from Berlin, and they had the fanatical, humourless, narrowly focused attitude of academic researchers everywhere. He had a long fair moustacheless beard. She had a round pale face and blinked constantly. It occurred to me as we spoke over dinner that a century earlier they would probably have been missionaries, seeking souls rather than suicides. Only when the subject turned to self-killing did Gerhardt become animated and voluble.

  ‘In Fee-gee zay are mostly using veed-killer, vee haff found, especially za Indians. In Papua New Guinea, though, zay are nearly alvays us-ing guns. To za head, in most cases. Here though, in Samoa, vee are finding zay are mostly hangging theirselfs.’

  ‘Yah,’ put in Ula, ‘so for our thesis, vee must ask ourselfs, vat is der reason for zees differences? Vat is za pattern in all zees suicides?’

  When I asked these professional voyeurs and documenters of human misery how long they had been working on the research, wondering what the long-term effects of such a study would be on their psyche, Ula replied, ‘Oh, a long time, now. Vee haff grants from many universities, to carry out our verk. Alvays, vee are traffelling in za islands. Vee haff been on za run for … for … eight years now. Next, after Samoa, vee go to Wanu-atu.’

  ‘Veedkiller there too, mainly, zay say,’ Gerhardt put in thoughtfully.

  After Savai’i has receded into the distance and we have levelled out high above the clouds, the handsome flight attendant refills my wine glass. He is very attentive and considerate. ‘You like this wine, Sir?’ he inquires softly. ‘I do, yes, thank you.’ As he bends and carefully pours the merlot, I am struck by a gust of aftershave lotion. It has the tangy smell of ripe tropical fruit. Glancing upwards, I notice too that the young man has a touch of mascara under both his eyes. And in that moment I realise where I have seen him before. At the Miss Tutti Frutti contest. Wearing pawpaws.

  FIVE

  MOST TREASURED ISLAND

  SAMOA

  ‘I SHOULD LIKE TO RISE and go / Where the golden apples grow, / Where below another sky / Parrot islands anchored lie.’ Robert Louis Stevenson wrote these lines as a young man, the son and grandson of lighthouse engineers, growing up in Scotland. His dream of leaving his wintry homeland and fetching up on ‘parrot islands’ was realised when he and his wife Fanny and her two children arrived in Samoa in 1889. He was thirty-nine years old. He was to spend the last six years of his life there, and the couple’s tomb lies high up on forest-covered Mt Vaea, overlooking Samoa’s capital, Apia. Stevenson was already a world-famous author when he came there to live. A tuberculosis sufferer, he needed Samoa’s balmy climate to ease his suffering and prolong what he well knew would be an attenuated life. The Samoans came to revere him, calling him Tusitala – ‘Teller of Tales’.

  The name Vailima, which Stevenson chose for his mountain home, is seen everywhere in Samoa today as it’s also the brand name of the nation’s beer, which is brewed on the outskirts of Apia, in a building complex even larger than the largest of the country’s many large churches. Vailima means ‘Five Rivers’
, a reference to the network of natural waterways which cascade down the slopes of Mt Vaea. So every time I have a beer in Samoa (and it’s a very hot country, so a high fluid intake is necessary), I think of Robert Louis Stevenson. And every time I visit Samoa, I have to climb Mt Vaea and visit the writer’s home.

  Four years before he arrived in Samoa, Stevenson had written to a friend, the poet W. E. Henley: ‘Do you know anyone that wants a cough: a hacking, hewing, tickling, leacherous, choking, nauseating, vomitable cough; a cough that springs like a rattle, rakes like a harrow and deracinates the body like a stick of dynamite?’ His solace, however, was that ‘when I spit blood I write verses’. Several times during the 1880s he nearly died, his tuberculosis compounded by sciatica, and an eye infection which almost blinded him, but amid the blood-spitting and verses came his most famous prose fiction: Treasure Island (1883), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886).

  A few years earlier, in France, he had met and fallen deeply in love with Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcee of Dutch extraction, ten years older than him and the mother of two children, Lloyd and Isobel. After tenaciously following Fanny to America, Stevenson wooed and married her in 1880.

  In the late 1880s the couple and their large entourage sailed in a chartered schooner through the Pacific in search of their ideal island refuge, calling at Hawaii, the Marquesas, the Tuamotus and Tahiti. Stevenson found all these islands lovely, but he settled on Samoa because, it has been claimed, the postal service there was more reliable. As a serialising novelist who depended on episodic publication to provide his income, Stevenson needed the service of the mail-boat that called regularly via Auckland or Sydney.