The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  There was a legend about Manono, how it was not a fixed island at all, but rather a piece of land, a sort of floating fortress owned by Chief Lautala of Fiji. The chief had sailed it to Samoa in the year dot in order to fight and conquer the Samoans. It was a bloody battle, and though he lost it he inflicted so many fatalities on the Samoan side that the numerous dead gave an identity to the floating piece of land – Manono means “numerous.”

  I drank beer that night in my hut and listened on my short-wave radio to what turned out to be the collapse of Iraqi resistance in Kuwait – an all-out rout of a raggle-taggle, underfed and demoralized army of cowards and persecutors. And after that, when the clouds parted in the sky, I looked at the stars – ignorant star-gazing providing for me one of the most vivid experiences I had, traveling through Oceania. And I was reminded that such stars were the best part of being in a wilderness or an ocean – and could take the curse off even so sorry a place as Apia.

  It was windy when I slipped into my boat the next morning, preparing for Manono. Stefan repeated that my real problem was the current in the middle of the channel – because of an incoming tide I might be swept onto the reef to the southeast.

  At such times in Oceania, I always reflected on my paddling between Falmouth and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer – a greater distance, stronger wind, less predictable current, and much more irascible and inhospitable natives.

  With that thought in mind I set off and paddled hard for an hour or so until I was within half a mile of Manono – I had passed through a strong but not obnoxious current. Beyond it I could see the tilted volcano cone which was Apolima Island. In the distance, about nine miles away, was the island of Savaii – another good paddling trip and a place I wished to see.

  All that was visible on Manono from my kayak were a profusion of outhouses on stone jetties – some of them hanging over the sea, others poised above the shoreline. They were called by various names – fale ki’o, “shit house,” or fale sami, “sea house,” fale laititi, “little house,” or the more euphemistic fale uila, “lightning house.”

  Closer to the island, the Samoan houses that were visible were traditionally made and as symmetrical as on Upolu, with open sides, but the whole thing had the general shape and contours of a Spanish conquistador’s helmet. A breeze wafted through the hut in the day, and at night the rolled-up woven blinds were let down, and served as walls. The huts of Western Samoa were attractive and comfortable structures, and were stronger than any huts I saw elsewhere in the Pacific. It has been said – by Margaret Mead, among others – that the Samoan extended family, the aiga, is a closely knit and effectively interdependent household; and I wondered to what extent this well-made hut played a part. Certainly it was able to house many people – and with these open sides it was always possible to see children playing inside, or women weaving, or people talking or napping – an atmosphere of activity or repose, seemingly at times almost idyllic.

  I heard roosters crowing and children screeching, but – unusually for a Pacific island – no barking dogs. About eight or ten children met me on the rocky shore as I paddled to the edge and got out, below the village of Faleu. They were chanting “Palangi! Palangi!” and they quarreled among each other as they vied to help me put my boat on the village canoe rack.

  Foreigners walking, cycling or riding motorbikes through [Samoan] villages will frequently be considered moving targets by village children, and stones will fly, a current guidebook to Samoa advised. They will often surround you mockingly and demand money or sweets and will make great sport of trying to upset you.

  This gratuitous hostility I found to be generally the case, from that day onwards, and throughout my time on whatever island in Samoa. Samoans could be merciless to outsiders. It was bad for a man and worse for women. A stranger was persecuted precisely because he or she was a stranger – alone, unprotected, unfamiliar with the language, uncomprehending, easy to confuse, not part of any family, unconnected, weak, an alien, the perfect victim.

  You were mocked if you became angry with your persecutors (who always outnumbered you), and if you attempted to be conciliatory they took this as a sign of weakness and were worse. The conflict – a wicked game – was unwinnable.

  These children pestered me from the moment I stepped ashore on Manono, but I thought it was probably better not to warn them about stealing or damaging my boat, because I didn’t want to give them any ideas – knowing that I was concerned, I guessed it might be the very thing they would do.

  I walked east, counter-clockwise, around the island, ignoring the screeching kids and making a point of talking to older people. The teenage boys I passed were fairly monotonous in their mockery, but I walked on, leaving these Christians behind.

  In spite of their ill-nature, the island seemed traditional – and very likely there was something in their ill-nature that was traditional, too. All explorers in the Pacific, from Abel Tasman in 1642 onward, had to confront thievery, silliness, aggression, greed, and rapacity. Perhaps Samoan mockery was nothing new, but it was rather boring to have to endure this and then have to listen to either a travel writer or someone at the Samoan Visitors’ Bureau extolling the virtues of Samoan hospitality. Of all the places I had traveled in my life, Samoa was one in which one needed letters of introduction or the names of natives. Otherwise, you were condemned to being alienated.

  But alienation was my natural condition. As for their hostility, I kept strolling and watched my back.

  “We are traditional here on Manono,” a man told me, when I asked him to characterize the island. “We relate the stories of our ancestors.”

  This sounded fine, but when I asked him to tell me a few, he went blank – I suspected he meant family histories rather than island legends or myths.

  Another said, “Manono is a good place, because we have no air pollution.”

  We were looking in the direction of Upolu. I said, “Is there air pollution on Upolu?”

  “No,” he said.

  The fact was that the nearest air pollution was perhaps five thousand miles away in Los Angeles.

  “And we have no buses.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Good. Buses have fumes. They cause dust.”

  It would have been something of a miracle to find a bus on an island with no roads. The path around the island was at its widest not more than twelve inches.

  A man I met on this circumambulation said he was a minister of the church. But his necktie – ties were required among the clergy – was lettered Malua Theological College. He admitted that he was still a divinity student and that he had come to Manono to practice his preaching.

  While the younger people were almost uniformly mocking (Palangi! Palangi!) the older ones were correct – neither friendly nor distant. There are complex rules governing greetings in Samoa, as well as extensive aspects of etiquette, including many prohibitions. A stranger, unfamiliar with the Samoan way, is therefore a sitting duck. The Samoans had not seen many tourists, and their attitude seemed to be that if you were part of the family you were left alone, and if you were a stranger you were fair game.

  I was followed by more kids, and always I heard the word palangi in their muttering. I usually turned to face them.

  “Yes. I am a palangi. Do you have a problem?”

  In a shouting, jeering way one would say, “Where are you coming from?”

  “I think Japan,” one would say.

  This they regarded as very funny.

  “Do I look Japanese?”

  “Yes! He Japanese!”

  A woman sidled up to me at the edge of a village and said, “What you religion? You a Cafflick?”

  I said, “Yes, in a way.”

  “Come with me,” she said, and brought me to her house and showed me little shrines and holy pictures tucked into the eaves of her fale. She was like an early Christian in the furtive way she revealed these items to me.

  “I am the only Cafflick in Salua,” she said. “P
lease stay with me.”

  This seemed rather awkward, but she said that her husband was on his way back home and that he would be pleased. Her name was Rosa, she was twenty-five, and had five children. Her husband returned soon after, and though I half expected him to be angry over finding me alone with his wife – it is very bad form in most societies – he did not take it amiss. He repeated the invitation to stay.

  I said I had other plans, and when he told me he had just been fishing, I asked him whether he ever went to Apolima, the island beyond the reef, two or three miles from Manono.

  “We don’t fish at Apolima. It is too deep.”

  They poled their canoes through the shallow reef and never ventured into water deeper than the length of their poles.

  Continuing my walk, I was accosted half a dozen times and asked, “You have a wife?” and “What is her name?” and “Where is she?” – questions that always presented difficulties to me.

  But I could see that the island had a pleasant side. It was backward-looking, with its coconut palms and its mango trees, its well-tended gardens and its tidy huts set on well-made house platforms, all of black boulders, the sort of stonework that is found in the most traditional parts of Polynesia. The wood carvings in Polynesia did not interest me. The music I found ineffectual – though the drumming could be attractive, when it was strong and syncopated. The cannibalism was just a story of goblins, meant to give you the willies – very few people could vouch for it, and little of it had been documented. But two aspects of Polynesian culture always impressed me – the old navigational skills of the sailors (and canoe-building in general); and the magnificent stonework – altars, dancing platforms, house foundations, plinths for statues, and the statues themselves (though there were no statues in Samoa; there had never been). In Samoa, both of these skills had vanished – there were no more navigators nor any stonemasons. These boulders had survived from an earlier time.

  After two hours of circling the island, I sat on a stone near the shore and began scribbling notes, when I was approached by a woman – I took her to be in her twenties. She was friendly. We talked in general about Manono. Then she said her fale was nearby and did I wish to see it?

  I equivocated until she said, “I want you to see something very important.”

  “Show me the way,” I said.

  Her name was Teresa, and although she was twenty-seven, she was not married. The kids fooling around the hut were her brothers and sisters and more distant affines.

  Was I hungry? Was I thirsty? Was I tired? Teresa galvanized the household and I was given a cup of tea and, when I said I had liked the palusami I had had in Tonga, I was served what I was told was the real Samoan thing – taro leaves mixed with coconut cream, then wrapped and steamed in banana and breadfruit leaves. With this was a disk of hard gray taro.

  “In Tonga they put corned beef inside,” I said. “But I prefer this.”

  “Sometimes we make with pisupo,” Teresa said, using the Samoan word for corned beef, an adaptation of “pea soup,” which was also shipped to the islands in cans.

  While I was eating, Teresa changed her clothes, from a dress to a T-shirt and shorts. The light was failing, too – it was certainly too late to paddle back to Upolu – and rain was softly falling, whispering against the triangular leaves of the taro plants and making them nod.

  So far there had been no further mention of the thing she wished me to see. But after a while Teresa removed it from the pocket of her shorts. It was an American Express traveler’s check for a hundred dollars – quite a lot of money in Manono Tai.

  “Where did you get this, Teresa?”

  “A man gave it to me. But the bank refuses to cash it.”

  Of course: the check lacked the necessary second signature. As for the first, even holding the check near the bright pressure lamp I could not read the name.

  “Who was the man?”

  “He was staying here. For a week.”

  “Palangi?”

  “Yes. From Germany.”

  We talked about the check. I explained the niceties of traveler’s checks – the need for another signature – and that she would have to send the check back to the man so that it could be cashed.

  “He said he wanted to marry me,” Teresa said, in a tone of complaint.

  “Maybe that’s why he gave you the money,’’

  “No. He was here more than a week. He did not give us anything,” Teresa said.

  “What about this check? You said he gave it to you.”

  “Yes. But I did not want to marry him,” she grumbled.

  That was another trait of the Samoans – evasion that expressed itself as tetchiness.

  “Why not?”

  “He was too old. Born in 1946, something like that.”

  It was now very dark beyond the reach of the lamp, but in that darkness children were seated with older people, all of them watching me with bright eyes.

  “How old is too old?”

  Teresa gnawed her lower lip, and then said, “He was too old for games.”

  “What kind of games?” I asked. Though I knew.

  The lantern hissed, leaking light everywhere.

  “Night games,” she said softly, her voice just a whisper more than the sound of the lantern.

  After that, again and again, I remember the way she lowered her head, but still watched me closely, and spoke those words deep in her throat.

  I asked her again about the man. His name was Kurt, she said. He was a teacher, and he did his teaching in various countries. (Cheechah, she said, and cheeching. I was trying to get used to the Samoan accent.) He loved her, she said, but she disliked him.

  I said, “He might be too old for some night games but not for others.”

  This observation interested her greatly.

  “Which ones do you mean?”

  But at this point her father interrupted me and asked where my boat was.

  I told him it was in Faleu.

  “The children will destroy it,” he said, without much concern.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because you don’t have a family.”

  I heard that explanation many times in Samoa: having a local family gave you status and protection. Samoans quite freely co-opted strangers and made them part of the family – and you didn’t need to be dusky, with webbed feet and a big belly – palangis qualified, as long as they were endlessly generous; but if you were alone on the islands and did not know anyone you would be victimized.

  “And because they are stupid in that village,” the father went on.

  It was a Samoan trait for them to speak ill of each other, so I was not convinced that my boat was in danger. But it was too dark to go looking for it, in any case. That would have to wait for the morning.

  “Everything is so espensive here,” Teresa said, apropos of nothing – or perhaps apropos of the check.

  She was looking at the lantern.

  “The fuel. So espensive.”

  I said, “There is a Chinese proverb that says, ’It’s no use going to bed to save candles. The result will be more children.’ Get it?”

  Then, seeing the others drifting away, she asked me again about the other games that the man might or might not play.

  In the end, the sleeping arrangement was modest, though all night the fale purred with the snores of her large family. I slept beside the small boy Sefulu, whose name meant Ten.

  In the dark I worked it out. The man, Kurt, had stayed for a week or ten days. He pestered Teresa to marry him, though he had come empty-handed and had not given them any money for his stay. At some stage, Teresa had boosted the traveler’s check – extracting it from his rucksack – but it had been in vain: the bank would not cash it without the other signature. She now realized that she needed a signature. Was she asking me to do that?

  Yet I was more concerned about my boat than her possible thievery, and so at dawn I hurried back to Faleu to look at it. Children were playing near
it, as though waiting to pounce, but the boat was undisturbed.

  Over breakfast – more taro, mashed this time – Teresa took out the check and frowned at it.

  I said, “Do you want me to sign it?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  There was no date, and the man’s own signature was no more than a squiggle.

  What to do? They had been kind to me, even if they had had an ulterior motive. And though the money had been thieved, it had in a sense been owed by a tight-fisted palangi who had lived with them. Indeed, I had accepted their hospitality too. So perhaps I owed? Forgery seemed a small matter, and yet it interested me. Without the signature, the check was worthless. And there was always the chance that the forgery would be detected, in which case Teresa would be in trouble – and was that my affair?

  I could be a totally disinterested forger, a sort of philanthropic felon.

  I sat there on the steps of the fale practising the squiggly signature in my notebook, and then I placed the check on my lap and, watched by her family and the neighbor kids, I executed the signature on the traveler’s check – very well, I felt.

  “It’s perfect,” I said.

  “It is close.” She squinted critically at it.

  Everyone crowded close to have a look.

  “Put the date,” Teresa said.

  I wrote the date, as Kurt might have.

  “Will it get stale?”

  “Did you say ‘stale’?”

  She said yes, she had, and so I explained the nature of traveler’s checks, how they never went stale, how she could wait a while before cashing it – thinking that I could be safe and out of the way on another island by then.

  The fishermen said a strong current ran through the Apolima Strait, which separated Upolu and Savaii, the two largest islands of Western Samoa. If I had not been alone I would have risked the trip – I was almost halfway across when I had been at the far side of Manono: I didn’t see a problem. The fishermen did not cross the strait in their canoes, and yet they warned me. Did they know something? I heeded the warning, and with regret took the rusty ferry across to Savaii, with my packed-up boat among my other bags.