The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  When an American Samoan is finished with a can or a box or a bag, he or she flings it aside. In the past such items were palm fronds and coconut husks and banana peels: biodegradable. These days the trash is beginning to accumulate. The island is noisy, vandalized, and all some-how familiar – it is not the seedy poverty and squalor of Apia, where there is no money and nothing seems to work; it is the fat wasteful American-style conspicuousness epitomized by much too big, much too expensive, rusted cars. Greedy, wasteful, profligate and proprietorial, American Samoans are living on large handouts, forever pushing supermarket shopping carts full of junk food, packages and cans, the Cheez Ball diet of fat-bellied Polynesia – seedy prosperity.

  The two Samoas are close together, but while Western Samoa looks to New Zealand and Australia, American Samoa looks to Hawaii and mainland America. New Zealanders have taught Western Samoans the elements of thrift – the roadsides and lagoons are dreary but noticeably tidier in those islands. What America has accomplished in its Samoan islands – and this is instantly visible – is the removal of the cultural props, by creating a cash economy. The worst effect of this has been a kind of competitive selfishness which has fragmented the family. Most people I met in American Samoa spoke with regret about the loosening of these family ties, which has meant a decline in traditional formality and courtesy and a widespread casualness that borders on insult and disrespect.

  I tended to evaluate Pacific islanders by the way they related to the ocean around them. Did they swim? Did they fish with nets or spears? Did they build boats, and paddle and sail? Could they go from one island to another on their own in one of those boats? Once, these people had been among the greatest sailors in the world. But what now? I wondered whether they were afraid of the sea – whether they knew anything about it, whether they cared. Did they know which way the wind was blowing, could they forecast weather from the patterns of the clouds and the color of the sky? Did they ever venture beyond the breakers on the reef?

  On some islands, it was possible to say that the islanders were still people of the sea. Western Samoans did some fishing and boating in a limited sense, and in a Christianized pig-headed way, they were traditional. In American Samoa some subtle and obscure customs were still practised in their dull bungalows, but the people seemed indifferent to the ocean. No one went sailing. No one paddled. They jumped into the water and splashed – but they hardly swam. Now and then you saw a fat kid on a jet ski. The rest of them hid from the sun. They stayed away from the lagoon. Their fish came out of cans. It had been years since anyone had made an outrigger. It was as though the entire population (and this seemed pretty odd in the Pacific) was possessed by the most virulent form of hydrophobia.

  The tradition is that the first Samoans – the first real Polynesians – arrived from Tonga and Fiji in about 600 B.C., at the eastern tip of Tutuila, near the village of Tula. Never mind that it was now an unprepossessing village, of flimsy bungalows and littered roads and stray dogs; it was the ancient landing place of the canoes. I decided to paddle around there and set my sights on the only island I could possibly paddle to, Aunu’u, off the southeast corner.

  “You’ll never make it,” a Samoan told me.

  This was a true landlubber’s point of view: the island was only a few miles. Even with a rip-roaring current I could have made it, I felt.

  Later, I was looking around Alofau, having just come on the coast road. In an equivalent place in Western Samoa the people would have been watchful and circumspect. Here they were talkative and pushy.

  Kenny, a big brown man, said to me, “You are new here.”

  It was not a question, so I asked whether he meant here in Alofau, or on the island.

  “On the island,” he said. “In Samoa.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “By your face.”

  “I look new to the island, you mean?”

  “We know all the faces. I haven’t seen you before,” Kenny said. “I think you have arrived very recently.”

  “That’s true. But I’m surprised you know that.”

  He said, “We can know everything, because we know everyone on the island.”

  Elsewhere in Oceania, and in Western Samoa in particular, such a conversation would have been essentially friendly, but in American Samoa it seemed intrusive and aroused my suspicions – the man seemed determined to nose around and probe, to find something out. And even the most innocent-seeming remark put me on my guard.

  I made my way around the island. I looked at Tula, I scoped out the island of Aunu’u. At night I returned to my hotel in Pago. I came to think of it as a soggy good-hearted town. Like most other visitors I reflected on Maugham’s “Rain.” Maugham was another writer who had sanctified a place by using it as a setting – he had done the islands a great favor – made them seem exotic and interesting. Camping was out of the question here – all the land was owned, accounted for and heavily protected against any intrusion. A camper seemed like a squatter – indeed, that was how the Samoans themselves sometimes staked their claims – he or she might never go away. And it must be said that not one square foot of land in American Samoa could be owned by a non-Samoan. The Samoans were noted for not being particularly fastidious about other people’s rights, but they were fanatics about their own – being selfish and infantile seemed appropriate to their clumsy obesity, like children who are always insisting It’s mine!

  I was assembling my boat on a beach one day – a futile-seeming operation: the lagoon was inches deep and littered with rusty cans, there was no break in the reef, the surf was high and impenetrable. But I soldiered on, just to see what I might find. And, having left one small item in my rented car (the stoppers for my inflatable sponsons), I found I could not finish setting up the boat until I got them. I had been talking to two fellows – any activity at all seemed to interest people here. No one ever offered to help me, nor did anyone refuse when I asked them to lend a hand.

  I had parked my car discreetly, so that it couldn’t be broken into (the island was rife with break-in stories), and I was in two minds about whether to get the items out of the car. I decided to be oblique.

  “I have to buy something at the store,” I said.

  I went down the street, into the store, bought a drink, went out the back way, tiptoed behind the building and slipped past some thick trees, ducked down, and opened the car door, retrieved the stoppers, crept back to the rear of the building and left through the front door, still sipping the can of Fanta.

  “Is that your car?” one of the men said when I got back to the beach.

  How had he seen me? And of course the question worried me, because he knew I was just about to set off into the lagoon, where I could be seen. It would have been so easy for them to break into my car.

  “Where are you going in that boat?” the other man asked.

  “Just paddling.”

  “How long will you be out there?”

  What was this? Again, their nosiness seemed to give them away. In Western Samoa they would simply have watched me. Here, artless and intrusive at the same time, they seemed to reveal their intentions in all their nosy questions.

  But in the event, the lagoon was too shallow for paddling, and that was the day I planned my trip out of historic Tula, to make for the offshore island of Aunu’u.

  I was continually worried about Samoans stealing my gear. Everyone – even Samoans themselves – spoke of the predilection for theft here in the islands; and everyone had a theory as to why it happened – ranging from It’s-an-old-Samoan-custom to They’re-natural-kleptomaniacs. It was always assumed that if you left something sitting idly by it would be instantly pinched, and no one was very subtle about it. If someone stole a shirt from you, he would probably be seen wearing it the next day; if someone stole a hammer or a knife, the thief would be observed using the item very soon after. “And if you say, ‘That’s mine!’ they’ll laugh at you.” So I was told.

  I was careful, but any traveler is
vulnerable. In Tonga my hotel room had been plundered while I was out. Yet nothing was stolen from me in Samoa.

  I paddled from Tula to the little hamlet of Au’asi, where there was a breakwater, just to verify that there were motor-boats that plied back and forth from Aunu’u Island at a dollar a trip. I thought I would ask one of these motor-boaters about the sea conditions between here and the island.

  A boatman was hunkered down on the jetty, so I asked him, “Is there much of a current out there?”

  It seemed calm enough, but there were waves breaking on all the reefs and shoals, and there was about a three-foot swell – not bad looking, but the sea is a riddle.

  “The sea is move,” the man said.

  “You mean, the sea is moving – a current?” And I made the appropriate gestures with my hands.

  “The sea is move,” he said placidly.

  I muttered it to myself.

  “The sea is smooth?”

  “Yeh. Is move.”

  It was too late that day to paddle out, so I returned the following day and set up my boat. Seven boys – big bulky teenagers, just out of school – sat under the palms at Au’asi, watching me struggle with my boat parts. The scene could have been idyllic – healthy youths under the shade of the coconut palms, by the beach, on a sunny day in Samoa. But the tussocky grass was littered with paper, the fence was broken, the beach was scattered with broken glass and in the shallow water there were bottles and cans and soggy sunken blobs of paper. Dogs barked nearby, overloaded buses wheezed past (because the shoreline in Samoa is a road), and music played – reggae or rap – from each bus.

  The boys wore T-shirts with various motifs – one showed a black Bart Simpson making an obscene gesture and was captioned Fucking Bart, another showed an angry duck – I Got An Attitude!, it said. One said Hawaii, another – the most preposterous – Samoa: People of the Sea; and still others were simply numbered and colored athletic shirts.

  “What’s that – a tent?” one said.

  I was unfolding the canvas hull. Before I could answer, another said, “Is a pig boat. Is a chip.”

  I said, “It’s a boat.”

  I was trying to assemble it quickly and get out of there.

  “What kind of boat? You can give us a ride?”

  “It’s for one person,” I said.

  “He don’t want to give you a ride, you stupid shit.”

  They hovered around me.

  “Did you just come from school?” I asked.

  “We just come from fucking these guy’s girlfriend.”

  “Shut up, you stupid.”

  I found their insolence remarkable, because on arriving at Pago Pago Airport I had been given a pamphlet with no less than a dozen admonitions on how to behave in American Samoa. One concerned general behavior: It is hoped that you will take extra care to ensure that none of your actions is misinterpreted as dissatisfaction with your host; and the reason was given: The Samoan people are, by nature and culture, extremely anxious to please their guests.

  “Where you come from, mister?” asked People of the Sea.

  “I’m from the States. What about you?”

  Would they say “American Samoa”? “Samoa”? “Tutuila”? or what?

  “I’m from Compton,” one said, naming a black area in Los Angeles – the name frequently occurred in the violent songs of a rap group that called itself NWA or Niggers With Attitude. Needless to say, this group was immensely popular in American Samoa.

  I said, “Are you really from Compton?”

  “He lying,” another said.

  “I’m from Waipahu.”

  “Isn’t that in Hawaii?” I asked.

  “He never been to Hawaii!”

  “Me, I’m from California, man.”

  “Dis a lie!”

  And so they went on, giggling and yakking, and none of them told me where they were really from, the offshore island of Aunu’u.

  “I think you’re waiting for the boat to Aunu’u,” I said. “What do you do out there?”

  “We kill people!” the one in the Fucking Bart T-shirt said.

  “Ya, we do dat!”

  Tedious little bastards, I thought, but I said, “You are being very rude to me. Do you think it’s funny?”

  They were silent a moment, and then one jabbed his finger sideways. “He tink so.”

  It seemed to be one of the oldest Samoan customs to victimize the person without a family, the individual, the outsider, the stranger; because it was a society where, if you had no family, you had no status. Perhaps this was the reason they had achieved so little, either here or on the mainland. They did not want to stand out. They were the most pathetic conformists, and so the greatest bullies, in the Pacific. Who was I but a middle-aged oddball on the beach, trying to assemble a foreign-looking object that they did not recognize as a boat. They mocked me because I was an outsider, and they mocked me because they outnumbered me. None of them would have had the guts to face me alone, unless he had been suffering the Samoan affliction of extreme bad temper, a sort of hideous Black Dog mood called musu. A Samoan with musu was a man to avoid.

  When my collapsible boat was once again set up, one of the youths stood and said in a demanding way, “You give me a ride.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Where are you going?” another asked.

  “I think I’ll paddle out there.”

  “You go to the island?”

  “Maybe. Do you live there?”

  “I live in Hawaii. Hee hee!”

  I said, “You’re all very funny guys,” and turned my back on them.

  Some older people, eight or nine of them, were sitting nearby, also waiting for the boat to Aunu’u – fat women, fat men. They heard this bantering, but took no interest in it; they looked hot, and bored, and irritable. They carried parcels of food, and when they walked to the water’s edge to look for the boat they crunched old crumpled soft-drink cans.

  I vowed that I would not leave the beach until the boys did, because I suspected that such cranky kids might find my car and break into it. The launch came and went. The boys stayed. I wondered what to do. And, waiting, I slapped on some suntan lotion, because of the dazzling sun.

  “What dat stuff?”

  “So I won’t get sunburned,” I said. I knew if I ignored their silly questions it would be worse: they would consider it a victory to irritate me.

  “Looks like sperm,” one said.

  “He putting sperm on.”

  I said, “Is that funny?”

  “You got sperm on you face.”

  I said calmly, as though seeking information, “Why are you saying that to me?”

  He laughed at me, but I pursued it, and finally said, “What’s your name?”

  “M. C. Hammer.”

  More insolence – another name from the rappers’ Parnassus.

  This was ridiculous, but it was wrong to think that it could have happened anywhere else in Oceania. I had traveled enough in the region to realize that this was a uniquely American Samoan experience. They were victimizers, they were oafish, and lazy, and defiant and disrespectful. Would they be different when they grew up? It was impossible to say. Perhaps, like so many others, they were just waiting for a chance to go to Honolulu or Los Angeles like a hundred thousand other Samoans whose culture had become degenerate.

  Eventually they boarded their motor-boat, and were swept away, jeering, and the oafs I had met in Western Samoa now seemed to me the very picture of innocence.

  Paddling out to the island of Aunu’u I thought again of the pamphlet that had been given to me, with the rules that all visitors were urged to observe.

  – When in a Samoan house, do not talk while standing.

  – Do not stretch your legs out when seated.

  – Do not carry an umbrella past a house.

  – Do not drive through a village when chiefs are gathering.

  – Do not eat while walking through a village [it seemed to me t
hat Samoans ate no other way, and usually were munching a very large jelly donut].

  – Samoans are deeply religious – pray and sing with them.

  – Do not wear flowers in church.

  – When drinking kava, hold the cup in front of you and say “manuia” [“When drinking Coke” would have been more apposite, since that seemed firmly part of the culture].

  – Bikinis and shorts are not considered appropriate attire in Samoan villages or town areas.

  – Ask permission before snapping photos or picking flowers.

  – Be extra quiet on Sundays.

  And there were more. How odd that this joyously piggy society should be so obsessed with travelers’ etiquette, or apparently so easily offended.

  No, I told myself, this is a comedy.

  I continued paddling out to this small low crater in the sea. I was always concerned, in one of these stretches of open water or channels, whether a current would pick me up and sweep me sideways, into the blue moana. I had left the safety of a shallow lagoon, cut through a break in the reef, and now I was between a large peaky island and a small green islet.

  It was a lovely day. My consolation on such a day was that if something went drastically wrong I would still have plenty of time to get straightened out, either by paddling hard for shore or sending up flares. But so far it seemed easy paddling to Aunu’u, and as I glided down the back of the swell towards the island, I congratulated myself on having found in this somewhat degenerate and tentative territory a good place to go.

  And where would I have been without my boat? At the mercy of mocking and xenophobic islanders, or worse – people who hated boats. An astonishingly large number of people in American Samoa seemed to hate the water, or at the very least were indifferent to it – didn’t go near it. How odd for them to be islanders, and to live on a small island at that.

  I set my compass for a low white building and when I drew nearer to the island I saw a pair of breakwaters below it. A launch was just leaving this enclosure – so this was the place to go. I was there in twenty more minutes, and paddling into this tight harbor I saw eight or ten boys swimming and diving – jumping from the little stone jetty. Three of them immediately jumped into the water and swam towards me and tried to tip my boat over.