The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “The worst Samoans and the worst palangis come to Apia,” a schoolteacher named Palola told me. “All the failures. But they never get together.”

  His description made the place sound more interesting than it was. Its Third World dereliction made it look simply unsightly, neglected, abused, and even the sea was hidden from it. From the harbor’s edge, where water lapped feebly at the shore, the reef was a great distance and the lagoon was gray and turbid, the water the ghostly gray color of dead coral.

  “It is worse in Pago,” Palola said. He was polite and well-spoken, on the ferry to visit his folks in Papalaulelei.

  No sooner had I made my mind up that these people were brutes than I met a person who was decent and restrained, dignified and helpful, among the most hospitable I had ever met in my life.

  “The main difference is in the attitude of people,” he said, trying to answer my question comparing Western Samoa, an independent republic, with American Samoa – a territory belonging to the United States. “Take the attitude towards money. If we get money we spend it on our family, on our house, or food and necessities. In American Samoa they use it to buy a car, or for entertainment. They spend it on themselves. They care less about the family.”

  “Why is the family so important?” I asked, pressing him.

  “Because it helps you – it looks after you. It is your life,” Palola said.

  “Is the house part of your life?”

  “Yes. If you go to Pago and see a fine house you will probably discover that the people in that house came from Western Samoa. We are still following our old ways.”

  “But why is Apia in such bad repair? And the rest of the island isn’t much better.”

  “It is getting worse. We had a hurricane last February –”

  Everyone spoke of this three-day gale which wrecked houses and uprooted palms and destroyed roads with high tides and floods. But that was over a year ago and the wreckage remained.

  “– we have not rebuilt it,” Palola was saying. “We have no money. And the government is also to blame.”

  The family looked after itself but was indifferent to the plight of other families, and it was no concern of a family if there were tree trunks and splintered houses up the road. The breakdown of the family in American Samoa (the main island of Tutuila was only forty miles east of here) was said to be the cause of the strife there. Depending on who I was talking to, Samoans either said they were one people, or else as different as they could possibly be. “We have a different language!” one man insisted. “Sapelu means bush knife in Western Samoa and shovel in American Samoa. Ogaumu means an oven here but it means a pot over there. We have different words for east and west!” Great stress was laid on the fact that money mattered more in American Samoa than here, its poor cousin.

  I had a standard island question, which I tried to remember to ask everywhere I went: Why are islands different from the mainland?

  Palola said, “Because you are free on an island, and you can control your own affairs.”

  He went on to say that he had visited his brother in Auckland and that he had been too frightened to drive his brother’s car. “Everything was so fast there,” he said, meaning the traffic, the marching people on the sidewalk, the way they spoke and did business. He had found it unendurable.

  No one was seasick on the ferry – I had assumed that, being Polynesians, they would be puking their guts out, even on this half-hour run. On the other hand, they were none too healthy, and they made their way onto the jetty with a side-to-side duckwalk that was characteristic of these obese people.

  They valued fatness, and to make themselves physically emphatic they ate massive amounts of bananas, taro, breadfruit and such snacks as were on the menu of the eateries in Apia. Toasted spaghetti sandwich, was one I noted. (The New Zealanders have a lot to answer for.) They ate the cuts of mutton that were whitest with fat. Meat that the Kiwis and Aussies refused to eat, unsaleable parts of dead animals – chicken backs, parson’s noses, trotters, withers and whatever – were frozen and exported here. A scrap of meat on a chunk of fat attached to a big bone they found toothsome. The imported canned corned beef they called pisupo was up to ninety percent fat. It was not the solid meaty thing that we sliced with a knife in the United States and made into hash; this Pacific corned beef was often like pudding it was so loaded with fat, and it could easily be eaten with a spoon. Not only was beef tallow added to it, but some brands contained hippo fat.

  Heart disease was endemic and people died young, but still there were only two doctors on the island of Savaii (population 46,ooo) – one was Italian, the other Burmese.

  I met the Italian doctor, Peter Caffarelli, in a roundabout way. He lived just outside the village of Tuasivi where my younger brother Joseph had been a Peace Corps Volunteer. Tuasivi was a number of fales on both sides of the coast road, near a headland occupied by a college, where my brother had taught English. The settlement – a large village – had none of the raddled rundown look of the comparable places on Upolu that I had seen. The fales were well made and there was a busy air to the place, people gardening, feeding their chickens, and a profusion of lava-lavas flapping on clotheslines. The wreckage of last year’s hurricane lay farther down the coast – tipped-over trees, broken culverts, washed-away roads.

  Tavita Tuilagi, one of Joe’s former colleagues, was building a new fale, not only in a traditional style but by a traditional method: none of the men working on the house were paid. They were relatives, part of the extended family, and friends. In theory this was all a labor of love; in practice it could be expensive, since Tavita – Samoan for David – was obliged to supply all the men at all times during the construction with food and drink – and the better the food the harder the men would work. Indeed, if the food and drink ran out, the men might decide to work elsewhere.

  “This man Tavita has just been given a title,” said the Samoan who had shown me the way to Tuasivi. “He is now Oloipola.”

  “It is not much,” Tavita said, sounding suitably modest, and hardly looking titled and chiefly in his LA Lakers T-shirt.

  But saying it was nothing was not modesty. It was the truth. This title, which meant “matai chief” – head of the family – had once been a powerful position. But lately such titles had been handed out willy-nilly by chiefs as a way of getting themselves re-elected to positions of power.

  “Sio was a good boy,” Tavita said, giving Joe his Samoan name. “He was a good teacher too. I want him to come back.”

  “Why don’t you write him a note and say so?” I asked. And I found a blank page in my notebook and gave him a pen. “You could invite him back, and I will make sure he gets it.”

  “That is a good idea,” Tavita said, and began scribbling.

  “I doubt whether I’ll get a chance to read it,” I said, when he had finished. I put the notebook into my pocket and walked up the road.

  The note said: Dear Joe Theroux, I’m so happy to meet your father [crossed out] brother. Remembering you for the past years since you were here. I am building a new fale. If you could give me a donation through finance I would like to accept it. May God bless you. Thank you. Tavita Tuilagi.

  On my way back through the village I gave Tavita thirty Samoan tala, which he accepted without ceremony.

  The Italian doctor, Caffarelli, lived up the road, near the beach in a straggling village beyond Tuasivi. He was skinny, burned dark by the sun, wearing a lava-lava patterned in red flowers. I took him to be in his late sixties. His wife was Samoan. Children seemed to be scattered everywhere around his house, and we were outside, strolling around his tussocky grass, among lanky pawpaw trees. The house was badly mildewed stucco in the European style and (so he said) it stood on one of the few plots of freehold land in the whole of Samoa. It had apparently been doled out by a chief on the understanding that as long as the doctor lived on that land he would look after the chief’s health.

  When I asked the doctor direct questions about himself h
e became unhelpful and vague – vague even about the number of his children. “Ten,” he said in a tone of uncertainty, and then, “Eleven.” Answering my questions about Samoan life he spoke with greater confidence.

  “The family is very important here, yes,” the doctor said. “But when we say ‘family’ we are talking about a very large number of people. Times have changed and that has made it all more complicated. There are obligations, but that is not so bad when you are in a non-money economy. When someone offers to work, or gives you fruit, you offer food at a later time.”

  “I noticed. There are always gifts in circulation here,” I said.

  “But when money comes into the picture” – the doctor made the Italian hand-weighing gesture which signifies tribulation – “it can be expensive. Money for this, money for that. And the rule is that you don’t refuse.”

  “Does that mean you give it every time it’s asked for?”

  “You look after children,” the doctor said. “But how far does your obligation extend if the father of those children is out chasing a bar-girl in Apia? Do you go on pretending that he’s just doing his duty and turn a blind eye?”

  “Does this happen often?”

  “All the time,” the doctor said. “And there’s a moral dimension. Why should I give money to someone if all he plans to do with it is waste it on prostitutes? The rule is that you give, if someone asks. But it raises moral questions sometimes.”

  I asked about stealing, since it was mentioned by many other travelers I had met, and all the guidebooks contain warnings. I had not lost anything, but the fact was that so much had been pinched from me in Tonga I had little else of value that could be stolen.

  “When this was truly a non-money economy, when cash didn’t come into it at all, everything was shared,” the doctor said. “So my bush knife was also yours. A person would come and take it. There was no concept of private property. There was perhaps a little pleasure in a person’s taking something. Nothing was privately owned, there was no idea of personal property.”

  He went on to say that money had complicated this traditional arrangement – everyone in Samoa blamed money for their problems: the lack of it, the greed for it, the power that wealthy people had.

  “People steal all the time now,” the doctor said. “Yes, it is the old habit, but it is stealing. Yet no stigma is attached to it. They even admire trickery.”

  “What if you steal from them?”

  “In theory, that is what you are supposed to do. But they are not always so tolerant, eh? They are communal-minded when it suits them, but there are plenty of instances when a person gets something and never shares it.”

  I told him that it wasn’t the stealing, but the inconsistency and the hypocrisy that caused the problems.

  “Yes. I will give you an example,” he said. “A man I know had a very big mango tree. He noticed that everyone was stealing his mangoes as soon as they were ripe. By the way, he was an Australian, but he had lived here for some years. He didn’t say anything to the people, but he thought, ‘Ah, so that is what they do.’ Thus he began picking bananas from the trees of these people. And they didn’t like it!”

  “What did they do about it?”

  “There was a hell of a fuss.”

  “How bad?”

  He shrugged and made the Italian fishmouth that signified a paradox was in the air.

  “They wanted to kill him.”

  We talked about the birth-rate. It was very high – but although sixty percent of the births were illegitimate, the children were well looked after and always part of a larger family. Still, the government authorized the use of birth-control remedies – Depoprovera.

  “Isn’t that a dangerous drug?”

  “Yes, it is bad, but who is sentimental here? You might be sterilized for life, you might die – but isn’t that the motive of the people who give out contraceptives? They want to bring down the birth-rate, at any cost. They are not sentimental.” After a moment he said, “I don’t have anything to do with contraceptives.”

  He walked me to the road, his lava-lava flapping, his numerous children frolicking around us.

  “You must like it here to have lived here so long.” Twenty-five years he had spent in Samoa.

  “A doctor here is a despised person,” he said, smiling.

  “The great thing is to be a minister in the church. People give you food and money. You have status. You can be rich. But they regard me as ridiculous, because I am a doctor. When my surgery building blew down and was demolished in the hurricane everyone stood near it and laughed. ‘Look at what happened! The doctor’s house is down!’ The Samoans thought it was very funny.”

  There are not many wild creatures in Samoa, and most are near the road, so just walking home I saw nearly every one of them – the black rats, the endangered bats, the pigs, the rails, swiftlets, reef herons and crazed limping dogs.

  I was staying in a fale myself, at Lalomaleva. It often rained in the dark early morning, three or four o’clock, the downpour drumming on the thatch and tin roof – a lovely sound, half roar, half whisper, and it made a tremendous slapping of the big broad leaves just outside the blinds. Then dawn broke, the gray sky lightened, and the rain still fell; finally, when the sun’s rim appeared against the palm trees at six or so, the rain pattered to a stop.

  I lived among a farrago of aging expatriates and more youthful Samoans. In the near distance there was always the full-throated sound of mocking laughter – always children. This sudden explosive laughter I found unaccountably jarring and demoralizing, but it only seemed to bother me – no one else. The expatriates more or less assumed that they would be buried here eventually, though the Samoans all expressed great homesickness for places like Auckland and San Francisco.

  Loimata was typical.

  “Mata means ‘eye’ in Malay,” I said.

  “And also in Samoan,” she said. “Loimata means tears.”

  She had relatives in Hawaii, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Zealand and Australia. Visiting some of them, she had lingered to work, and for a while lived in the Samoan enclave outside Honolulu, called Wahaiwa. She had been traveling with her mother, who missed Samoa, and so mother and dutiful daughter had returned to Savaii.

  “I miss the work,” she said.

  Her friend twitted her and said, “You don’t miss the work. You miss the money.”

  “Yes, I miss the money.”

  Warren Jopling, a New Zealander in his mid-sixties, had simply come to Samoa and become so entangled in his newly acquired Samoan family that he had stayed. He said he liked Samoa. And of course the family had adopted him – but two or three Samoans were attached to twenty more, and in the end they took possession of him and moved wholesale into his house in Apia, occupying it so fully that he moved out and came here to Savaii.

  I had wanted to see an ancient stone mound, called Pulemelei – a great stepped pyramidal structure, the largest mound of its kind in the whole of Polynesia. I asked a number of Samoans about it. Most knew nothing of its existence. The two that had heard of it had never seen it. I asked Warren whether he knew about it – and of course he, a palangi living on the fringes, had visited it many times and knew this obscure ruin in the jungle intimately.

  No one has any idea what this enormous ruin was used for – whether it was a tomb, a fortress, or a so-called bird-snaring mound. It is all the more intriguing for that – for its size and its mystery. It lies in the depths of the Samoan jungle behind the village of Vailoa and it is so seldom visited that there are no paths around it. Even Warren Jopling, who knew it well, became a trifle confused on our approach through the bush.

  Built against the brow of a hill it was covered in jungle greenery – vines and bushes – and yet its architectonic shape in two great steps was vivid: with the contours of a titanic wedding cake it had the look of a ceremonial mound, but it offered a wonderful prospect of the sea. In its day, before any of the palms had been planted, it must have had the grand
eur of the great Mayan pyramid at Chichen Itza, the so-called Castillo, a structure it somewhat resembled in size and complexity. Some archeologists have conjectured that there was a large dwelling on the top of it, which would truly have given it the look of a castle. It was forty feet high, about a hundred and eighty feet wide and over two hundred feet long, with battlements and parapets and flights of stone stairs.

  “You know the oddest thing about this place?” Warren said. “This is an island that is rich in legends. They have stories about the blow-holes and the waterfalls and the caves. They have stories about things that don’t even exist. Giants, dwarfs, ghosts, spirits. How this volcano appeared, where that island came from. But there are no stories about this, not even fanciful ones. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  He showed me a number of other rock mounds – graves, house platforms, altars, all covered with jungle, buried in ferns and vines, all unknown, none of them excavated.

  “A great civilization lived here,” he said. “It must have been here, because there was a great deal of available water – two rivers, the only real year-round rivers on Savaii.”

  The volcanic nature of the soil helped all water to percolate through very quickly, Warren said – he had spent a career as a geologist. Rain fell and then it disappeared, he said. There were few pools, but no lakes. Yet just here there were springs and rivers.

  One of these rivers, the Faleala, ran over a high ledge farther into the jungle and turned into Olemoe Falls. Warren had brought along two Samoan boys in case we should have an emergency – a blow-out, a wreck, whatever. They would come in handy. They were frisky and willing – one named Afasene (“Half a Cent”), the other Siaki (Jack). We sat by the pool and they wove crowns of fern for me and put them on my head, making me feel like the Unbearable Bassington in the Saki novel.

  And then they splashed and dived.

  “Look at me, Paul!”

  “I will get a stone from the bottom!”