Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘Drink,’ said the minister. ‘Drugs. That’s the serious problem. Growing fast, I’m afraid. Kava, the traditional root drink we make here, that’s all right – that calms you and sends you to sleep; nobody fights on kava. But the grog that comes from Apia or Pago-Pago in American Samoa – whisky, gin, vodka – and the drugs brought in by hippies and tourists – marijuana, cocaine, heroin from Auckland or Sydney – that’s another matter. The chiefs here ban liquor in their villages but, all the same, young Samoan men and women who learnt to drink in New Zealand do it secretly in the bush at night, as you saw. In New Zealand they learn to reject fa’a Samoa – the Samoan way of life. That’s what it amounts to.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t mind telling you, I was a whisky and drugs man myself when I was studying in Australia. Oh yes, I was. Of course, that’s all over now. But it shows I know what I’m talking about.’

  Outside, Samoan matrons, demure in white blouses and ankle-length skirts, were coming down the path, leading their children to the minister’s Bible class.

  ‘What is happening to the essence and charm of Samoan traditional culture? We cherish it so much – oh, so much. Why should our people be forced to change by Western progress?’

  The minister himself was a good example of Samoan charm and vitality. But a few days previously I had driven to visit a different sort of pastor on the south coast who had recently married Tolu’s sister – an old man, a Congregationalist with a tight, lipless mouth. The pastor had held an evening prayer meeting in his low, barnlike house by the sea. About ten rows of his parishioners squatted before him under the corrugated iron roof in the dim oil light, listening to interminable prayers and verses of the Bible intoned in a dry voice that seemed quite devoid of compassion – or even of life. The mosquitoes there had made the night unbearable, and in the morning their bites had puffed up my eyes like a boxer’s. At breakfast he had eyed his plump wife as she tucked into her taro and murmured sourly, ‘Greed is not one of the virtues.’

  ‘We are not accustomed to visitors like you. We used to get many visitors!’ the old man said before I left to return to Tolu’s. ‘Americans. Not so many now.’

  ‘Why not now?’

  He gave me a hard glance. ‘I always asked them for their passports when they wanted to stay. Well, the Prime Minister had warned us that foreigners, Americans mostly, were bringing drugs into Samoa.’

  ‘How did they take that? You asking them for their passports, I mean.’

  He cackled with satisfaction. ‘They’d go away and not come back. Not many come now.’

  Would he ask me for my passport? I waited but he didn’t.

  Instead, he leaned towards me. ‘Tell me, Mr Gavin – if modern development means the dehumanization of societies, what is the use of it? No one starves here. These islands – their plantations – could support five or six times the present population. Instead, young people neglect their plantations. They drift to towns, buy beer, see imported X-rated movies, lounge about – go, I suppose one might say, to hell. We Samoans have a paradise here. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. He might not be one of the most lovable citizens of this paradise, but I agreed with him that it was one. Many Samoans, I thought, must be haunted by the image of Apia destroyed by concrete and neon, every thatched house showing re-runs of Dallas.

  To Tolu’s neighbour, the young minister, I said now, ‘Stick to fa’a Samoa like grim death.’

  Animated women followed by little girls with white bows in their hair were coming in. There was much laughter and spirited chat.

  He nodded. ‘Travel doesn’t always just broaden the mind, does it?’ He got up and began to greet his ebullient parishioners. Over his shoulder he called, ‘As far as we are concerned, it can destroy it, too.’

  Twenty-two

  After a few days with Tolu I drove to Apia. The excursion ended dramatically. My notebook records:

  Two unprepossessing Samoans thumb lift. They wear jeans and T-shirts, their hair is wild, their chins stubbly, their eyes red. One has two missing front teeth. Will I take them to Apia? ‘All right, get in.’ After five minutes on the road, one of them says abruptly, ‘Turn off here. We’ll go to such-and-such-a-village.’

  Dutifully, I turn off. We drive for some time on a road that climbs into the bush; there is no sign of a village or even a house. It is disturbing. Am I being hijacked? I have an uneasy feeling that they are communicating with each other secretly, with winks and glances.

  I say, ‘Well, where is the village?’

  They talk in Samoan together.

  The one with missing teeth gives a sickly snigger– ‘Oh, we’ll go to Apia instead.’ No explanation.

  Odd – and sinister. I turn the car with relief. At Apia market they get out. A shaggy head pokes through the window. ‘Will you take us back in half an hour?’ Vodka wafts about me. I tell them I am staying the night in Apia.

  ‘Oh,’ and they shrug and walk off.

  But that was not the end. The same evening, in Aggie Grey’s bar, a waiter says a friend of mine is outside. A friend?

  ‘Says he your best friend.’

  It was one of the two hitchhikers, swaying, his eyes blood-red. He looked terrible, clearly drugged but reeking of liquor too. He also looked violent. The two middle-aged Samoan businessmen I had been with in the bar came out and talked soothingly to him. Money, he said, or a drink. We gave him money and luckily he staggered away into the night. One of the businessmen said, ‘Never give a lift to such people. Did you see? On his forearm he has a tattoo – “Deported from New Zealand”.’

  ‘Don’t say the New Zealand Government tattoos deportees!’ It seemed barbaric.

  ‘Oh, he probably tattooed it himself. Some of these Samoan druggies are proud to have been deported from, or even jailed in, New Zealand. They think it gives them status among Samoans here who haven’t been abroad. Did you know Auckland has a bigger Samoan population than any city in the world? Very many unemployed.’

  His friend said, ‘Drunkenness, muggings, killings, too.’

  ‘Yes, a lot of that.’

  In the morning, the singing, dancing waiters and waitresses were rehearsing in the same beehive house. I watch them, hypnotized again by so much beauty and enthusiasm. The songs were conducted by the wife of Aggie Grey’s son Alan, and later she gave me the words of one of the songs, translated (very roughly) from Samoan:

  Samoan teenagers ready to go abroad,

  Remember Samoa’s name and be safe and free.

  So many problems come up over there

  And a Samoan is blamed for causing the lot.

  Thirty days is your permit to stay in New Zealand,

  Yet towards the end you overstayed,

  Hiding and sneaking so joyfully.

  When you are caught, you know it’s deportation.

  Why not be more careful and stay honest?

  You come back so pale and white.

  You’ve gained nothing, and you’re just a fiery barrel of trouble.

  Forget all about these motor cars and that la di da English.

  Time is precious. Do something useful. Get to work on a banana plantation.

  So people are so worried about the emigration problem it has even been put to music. I told them I hoped the song would go to the top of the Samoan charts. It is there already, they said, smiling. I wondered: if these boys and girls go to New Zealand, how great is the chance that they, too, will become denimed derelicts?

  *

  The sight of a Catholic mission down the road from Aggie Grey’s stirred a happy, if flippant, memory. Clipped, unmistakable tones sang wickedly in my head:

  The natives greeted them kindly and invited them to dine

  On yams and clams and human hams and vintage coconut wine,

  The taste of which was filthy, but the after-effects divine….

  Pace Noël Coward’s Uncle Harry, there had been severed heads in Samoa but no edible human hams. Still, the local kava I had tried with Tolu’s friends,
though bitter, had a pleasant calming effect.

  They didn’t brandish knives at him, they were really awfully sweet,

  They made concerted dives at him and offered him things to eat,

  But when they threw their wives at him he had to admit defeat.

  Uncle Harry’s not a missionary now – he’s on the island –

  But he’s certainly not a missionary now.

  I had never met a South Seas missionary and I need hardly say that the venerable Catholic priest I called on was quite unlike poor lapsed Uncle Harry. He was good to talk to because he loved Samoa, speaking the language, knowing the islands as he knew his Bible. He was a humorous Irishman, had been here many years. Indeed, he was not really a missionary at all. Catholics had long ago given up chasing converts. Why convert the converted? By now, he said, Samoans are ninety per cent Christian, so what was the point in Christian proselytizing? That would be to steal from friends – the Methodists, Congregationalists, Seventh Day Adventists, the Assembly of God people, and all the rest. Samoans had not been pagan for a hundred years or more. ‘Samoa is founded on God’, after all, is the national motto. ‘We are not against lava-lavas,’ he said, ‘or tattooing or kava ceremonies, or singing or dancing. Let me put our attitude like this: we are not against the Samoan way of life – on the contrary we, so to speak, baptise the fa’a Samoa. D’ye see? … Only the Mormons are recruiting,’ he continued sadly. ‘Strenuously recruiting, I’d say.’ They seemed to him to go about like the United States Marine Corps, spending enormous sums on advertising – literally millions, perhaps billions, of dollars – across the world. I forget now if it was this quiet Catholic or Tolu’s Methodist neighbour who gave it as his opinion that the Mormons were sometimes not above bribing chiefs to join them. If you could net a chief you could land the whole family. Of course, this may have been sour grapes.

  The old Irishman didn’t look sour. He said, ‘They are buying land all over. They are building modern, American churches imported from Utah. They are building a multi-million-dollar temple here in Apia. You see, the Mormon Church is a great worldwide business, into mines, shipping, supermarkets.’ He made it sound a bit like Goldfinger, General Motors and Billy Graham rolled into one.

  I went to have a look at the great temple.

  The Mormon headquarters in Apia certainly looked as if it meant big business. In this sleepy town, on this sleepy green island it was quite shockingly incongruous, though it would probably attract little notice in Hawaii. Its complex of neat, air-conditioned buildings reminded me of a newly built American Army headquarters in Vietnam. Americans with short hair, in crisp white shirts, walked briskly in and out of doors marked ‘Education Department’ and ‘Real Estate Department’. Shining pickup trucks with ‘Love One Another’ stickers on them stood in parking bays. It was all ‘go’. I half expected to see a helicopter pad, a PX store and people exchanging military salutes.

  The Irishman had been right about the new temple. It was not finished but you could see there was going to be nothing cheap about it. It resembled a combined nuclear fallout shelter, concert hall and ultra-modern city crematorium, and it was designed to be noticed. Its soaring spire would certainly attract the awe of Samoans of one sort or another.

  In a cool office an American woman sat behind a rectangular name plaque on her desk and said: ‘Sure, the temple is very costly. It’s made of very costly material, mostly in white and gold. Three million dollars’ worth, I understand. You could check that out from our Dale Cook from Utah. He’s in charge of construction.’

  I gave Dale Cook a miss, but saw instead the man in charge of the Mormons in Samoa, President Carl Harris, a slim, confident, fortyish man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and a striped tie. He kindly offered me a cup of coffee in his office.

  ‘We have a duty,’ he said when I asked about missionaries and proselytizing in Samoa, ‘to take the Gospel to the four corners of the earth, just as our Scriptures tell us to. When we read John in Revelations saying that he saw an angel in the midst of heaven carrying the everlasting gospel – we take this as applying to the present time. The Mormons have 183 missions around the world now, and we have a duty.’

  Outside President Harris’s office, Samoan youths and girls stood about in an orderly fashion in short-sleeved white shirts and black ties that gave them the goody-goody air of senior prefects at an exclusive school.

  They wore identity badges, too – the boys were ‘Elders’, the girls ‘Sisters’ – like members of a convention or a military mess. None of them wore flowers in their hair. I had already seen young Samoans with ties and shirts in the streets of Apia self-consciously walking in pairs. It would be unfair to describe them as zombies, but they didn’t seem quite real either. They were nothing like Tolu or Fili or Amosa. Carl Harris explained this.

  ‘We like them to walk in pairs of the same sex – because our Scriptures say it’s better that way. A boy or girl alone might feel discouraged, but two can buoy one another up.’

  He smiled ruefully, shaking his head. ‘Sometimes Samoans act very young. They believe in eat, drink, be merry – and then some. That’s their trouble.’

  He shrugged. ‘So we must be strict. No dating with the opposite sex. Rigorous study. More and more proselytizing. And, of course, self-discipline: we ask them to refrain from rugby, cricket, swimming. And there’s to be no dancing, naturally.’

  Questions about fu-fu and moetotolo withered under Mr Harris’s steady Dr Arnold of Rugby gaze. I asked myself a question. What was the point in turning lively young Samoans into self-satisfied, buttoned-down youths from Utah?

  On the wall, rows of photographs with names under them (‘Elder This’ and ‘Sister That’) stared down with the blank look you see in all passport pictures. These were the Samoan converts, now ‘on mission’. President Harris saw my interest in them and said, ‘Those hundred and seventy boys and girls on the wall are working in Western and American Samoa today. We have about thirty-six thousand in the two Samoas now.’ A number to boast about in a population of a hundred and ninety thousand, already mostly Christian for decades. ‘Of course, some have been called outside Samoa. To Los Angeles, Guam and New Zealand. And, of course, to our Mormon University in Hawaii.’

  I stared at him, wondering whether separating Samoans from their islands and their fa’a Samoa was what God really wanted for ‘His sweetest work’. The other churches on the island did not think so.

  I thanked President Harris and went out into the sun, passing the boys and girls standing about outside in ties and shirts and badges, and drove back to Aggie Grey’s. It was nice to see Mount Vaea’s green hump in the sun and the shine on the bay. Nice, too, to be greeted at the hotel by Big Annie and one of the waiters I’d seen dancing and singing in the garden. I knew he wasn’t a Mormon; he wasn’t wearing a tie. He was probably a Methodist. Whatever he was, he was a real Samoan. I gave him a big smile.

  *

  I had to check on my next ship.

  The Pacific Islander would be on time, Henry Betham said when we consulted his telex messages at Burns Philp. So I prepared to return to Tolu’s for my farewells to Samoa. I bought large bags of rice, sugar and tea, corned beef, baked beans, biscuits – all the things Manino had asked for.

  It was raining when I reached the house. Great silver drops ran down the flanks of the horse tethered on the coral chips at the door. Fili was chopping taro, his hair dripping, his sopping lava-lava clinging to his thighs – lopping the stalks off the fat, edible roots with his long bush knife and tossing them into a coconut-frond basket like a Samoan warrior of a hundred years ago, tossing enemy heads before his chief. He greeted me with an arm thrown about my neck, shouting ‘Talofa!’, and I went in to meet Tolu and the others with a wet smear of dark brown earth down one cheek.

  There was to be a feast. Manino had made a dish called palusami, a delicious, yogurty, spinachy mess of coconut cream, onion and salt wrapped and baked among hot stones in taro, banana and breadfruit leaves. />
  Soon, Amosa brought in a piglet in a woven basket. He and Fili laid the squealing brute on its back, placed a stout but slender pole across its throat and stood with both feet and their whole weight on the pole, one at each end. The pig choked to death, taking its time.

  Not that I waited. Unable to watch this public murder, I drove Manino and Isaia to the lagoon where they scoured the shore for red-lacquered crabs with yellow bellies and large spots the colour of dried blood on their backs, smaller white-bellied crabs, sea slugs, cockles (pee-pee), and the speckled cowries whose shells, with their varnished look and jagged mouths, are in Europe usually decorations on a mantelshelf. (I found their contents hard and rubbery, impossible to chew without making your jaw ache.)

  It had stopped raining as we drove back from the sea. Pink and blue strips of sunset sky lit the horizon. The black wings of solitary flying foxes flapped home overhead. Muscular young men like the bareback cavaliers of a medieval army rode down the track, or led horses straddled with loads of coconuts.

  ‘Tofa, Isaia!’ they called.

  ‘’Fa, Ioane!’

  ‘’Fa! ’Fa!’

  The voices came and went in the dark now. The pressure lamps glowed in homes along the way, turning them into friendly dolls’ houses.

  Tolu’s prayer tonight was a long one.

  ‘Le Atua ua matou faafetai …’ (Emma wrote it out for me later). ‘Fesoasaoni mai i la matou mafutaga ma Gavin … Amene.’ ‘O God, we thank you for your love … and help us to strengthen our fellowship with Gavin. Guide him safely to his country. This is our prayer. In Jesus’ name.’ There was much more, and while Tolu’s deep voice rumbled on I looked surreptitiously at the others. The women buried their heads in their hands – the old woman bent double on her mat in an attitude of devotional abandon. Fili and Amosa made hideous faces. Then the meal came. Along with the shellfish and the poor piglet, now baked in hot stones, we ate mullet and pieces of a fat white squid caught by Tolu.