The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  Rubbish everywhere, and people sniffing all around me, but even the kids in their contrasting light and dark blue school uniforms half-raise their hands to me in greeting as they pass by, and the clouds are once again setting the tone and grumbling away, and the clam stew tastes like a concentrate of the air here. The women all have flowers in their hair and the men have little tree air fresheners hanging on their rear view mirrors.

  And then there’s the quaint things – called ‘sites of interest’ – that you run into when you’re wandering round here: Railway Road for instance, the dreariest thoroughfare in the kingdom, is renowned as the only one-way street in the country. People come here specifically to look at this sad place, with its petrol station, its car-hire firm, and undeveloped lots along the street, and say: Look, it’s our only one-way street, and they view it with different eyes, and at the end of the street, on a square patch of grass, a marble memorial stone has been erected with an inscription commemorating the day of the street’s extension to this point.

  Another curiosity is the palm tree that people on Tonga have discovered, a really unusual specimen whose trunk divides into three separate crowns high up – a Siamese triplet among palms. This is the only one of its kind in the kingdom, and it’s on land that belongs to the Mormons, who immediately built a new church nearby.

  Then there’s the magnificence of cemeteries here; the tomb of the royal family is more like a mausoleum, segregated from the other graves by a fenced-off area three times the size of a football pitch. Steps lead out to the gravestones, which are guarded by statues. In the hierarchy of piety, the next most important graves are those of Tonga’s mayors. Pink sashes were draped around their houses, front gardens and fences when they died.

  Tongan cemeteries have the effect of lavishly-decorated building sites; the ones that have little white heaped-up grave mounds with scarcely a plastic flower in sight are the graves of the poor. The wealthy have high grave mounds, covered with flowers and with a screen at their head end, decorated with multicoloured geometric patterns. These are people who will want for nothing in the hereafter. As you stand here, you can hear the screaming of piglets being slaughtered as part of a burial rite.

  In village cemeteries, the rich are also interred under high grave mounds with excessive sprays of artificial flowers and tall display walls that look like plush blankets, while the poorest citizens often simply have a low bump in the ground, strewn with a couple of plastic flowers, or are even laid to rest in their own gardens. So it is that people’s unequal financial circumstances are maintained right up to the threshold of the afterlife. But doesn’t the Bible tell us that the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor? Or, to put it less pointedly: couldn’t one grant people the freedom to be poor and even the choice to be that way?

  Only the sepulchre of the royal family rises from the earth with pediments and steps like an Inca temple. The ruler of Tonga is George Tupou V, the eldest son of His Majesty the late King Taufa’-ahau Tupou IV, who reigns over one hundred and seventy Pacific islands yet is still only a monarch on demand. Years ago, the powerful democracy movement on Tonga forced him to declare his abdication, which he did, but without stipulating exactly when he will stand down. Some people maintain that he’s a womanizer. Yet because royal protocol stipulated that the only suitable candidates for marriage were two rather elderly ladies, he elected not to marry, choosing instead to surround himself with pretty young things. This also served to quell any rumours that he actually preferred men. The king loves technological innovations of all kinds, especially those that have helped the Tongan authorities pinpoint foreign poachers on the fishing grounds, bring their boats into harbour and slap heavy fines on their owners. Yet on other occasions, the crown prince is content to sit at home dressed in a silk suit and Italian shoes and play boogie-woogie on the piano.

  I, however, am still sitting on the edge of the cemetery when a colossal man arrives, dressed in the traditional ta’ovala mat, which is woven from pandanus leaves, and surrounded by his black-clad family, and says to a woman on the veranda:

  ‘You know, my mother passed away just recently, but she was old, so it was no surprise,’ and everyone bursts out laughing, even his daughter.

  I suddenly realize that the woman is May from the plane, and when she in turn recognises me, her smile grows a bit wider. Then the party turns away again and goes off to the cemetery to confer with the deceased. They discuss the funeral rites, which include burning various parts of their own bodies, lacerating their cheeks or giving themselves head wounds. It is thought that rituals like this can help cure a person who is dangerously ill, overcome the pain of death, and support the deceased in the afterlife. As part of the ceremony for healing the sick, low-ranking relatives will cut off a finger or a joint of a finger. To help speed recuperation, human sacrifices even used to be made for chieftain’s families. The German naturalist Georg Forster, who travelled to the Pacific with James Cook, noted that many people on Tonga had fingers missing, sliced off as a sacrifice to cure a high-ranking person who had fallen ill.

  Likewise, it was Captain Cook who brought the word ‘taboo’ back from this region and gave it to the rest of the world. A whole range of phenomena can be taboo here: places, foodstuffs, actions, and even people or particular relationships between people. For example, fathers have a taboo attached to them, according to which their children are forbidden to touch their heads. Nor are they allowed to eat his food, and if a brother and sister are both in puberty at the same time, they are not permitted to sleep under the same roof. Moreover, the ancestor-spirits mediate between all the living, whether for good or for ill. For Sigmund Freud, ancestors were basically projection figures who embodied the ‘collective clan consciousness’, one of the very oldest forms of consciousness. It is no different on Tonga.

  The state of feitama – that is, pregnancy and the preparations for giving birth – also has a taboo associated with it. The whole family participates in this process, with the result that there is no such thing as a private sphere or any secrets during this period. Husbands share the state of pregnancy with their wives, following various eating taboos and himself displaying symptoms of morning sickness and vomiting. Pronouncing certain things taboo helps lay the first foundations of the superego, which furnishes society with a kind of protectorate formed from the spirit of collective proscriptions.

  The man who sits staring at the sea out of the rolled-down window of his pickup truck, which he has parked at the roadside, has a facial tattoo on his brown skin. He stretches his hand out of the window for me to shake. I do so, and we remain clasping hands. Over the next few days, we are to become inseparable. He will drive me all over the island, offer me a plot of land, and introduce me to his wife and two of his children. He will share his life story and his food with me. But the very first thing Douglas does is assure me in no uncertain terms that he really is called Douglas. He even pulls out a piece of paper with his name clearly written on it. He once played professional rugby in Australia. To prove it, he shows me a fearsome surgery scar running right round his right shoulder. I say:

  ‘I believe you.’

  Whereupon he tells me the story of a man who refused to believe him.

  Douglas is missing the little finger of his right hand.

  ‘Is that a rugby injury, too?’ I ask, pointing at the stump where his finger had once been.

  ‘No,’ he says, shoving his fist inside his jacket. ‘Look at these mangoes all over the place. We don’t know what to do with them all. We’ve even taken to feeding them to the pigs.’

  Douglas has four children; he lives according to traditional principles and is bringing them up strictly. His wife is standing on the lawn outside their little house like an idol, a self-absorbed beauty who is extremely shy, and yet who has a gracefulness that makes her statuesque body seem somehow dainty. Douglas has followed the dictates of his culture to the letter; any other course of action would have been unthinkable: the wife’s family chooses the husban
d. It’s crucial that the family should love the husband. He suddenly stops recounting his story. He doesn’t want to spit it out. Maybe he’s frightened of looking foolish? Did they laugh at him in Australia for being a primitive South Sea islander?

  At the wedding, he continues at length, the bride receives the special third cup in the kava ceremony. Ultimately, the bride and groom sit on the laps of their respective maternal uncles. Kava is a drink prepared from the aromatic root of a shrub, and is said to have an intoxicating effect, but Douglas is having none of that. Drunkenness isn’t good, drunkenness is the work of the devil.

  ‘What about Moemoe?’

  I’d heard about this act of obeisance, but this appears to be another subject that Douglas isn’t comfortable with, or maybe he’s not willing to let me in on the deep mysteries of local rituals. It’s all very personal.

  ‘It’s true,’ he grudgingly admits. ‘The feet of the person due respect have to be touched with both the palms and the back of the hands. That’s the ritual.’

  He was employed as a rugby pro for long enough in the Australian outback to know that practices like this are seen by outsiders as native superstition, but for him they’re vital, and he’s passing it all on to his children as well. They’ll be brought up according to the traditional code of laws being handed down from the older generation to the younger.

  And yet, in some regards the coming generation is more old-fashioned, and more sentimental, than their elders, who have seen so many things come and go, and who all have the same reaction towards the beauty of the islands and the way outsiders apply the word ‘paradise’ to them – a word they can no longer stand hearing, they who have to live day-to-day in this paradise, which doesn’t even have a refuse collection service.

  We’re sitting by the ocean with a view of the outrigger canoes and black pigs, who are snorkelling around in the shallows for things to eat. It’s true: Gauguin was ultimately responsible for framing and assembling the collective historical memory of these places, which are now like Tahiti was in his day. We step into his paintings, and sometimes just outside, into the spaces that can open up between his picture frames when they are hung together.

  Then Douglas and I set off into the island’s hinterland. You might imagine that the more precious land became in such a geographically limited space, the more pedantically everything would be parcelled out and enclosed. But in actual fact, borders tend to be primarily demarcated by people in those regions where there’s land aplenty. Here, by contrast, where the dimensions of all the islands are very small, the little houses often stand isolated on a green meadow, dotted around haphazardly and not separated from one another by any fences. The pigs dash about, the fruits drop, the colourful washing waves on the line like it’s been hung there for decoration, and the flying foxes dangle in the trees like bunting, so densely packed they look like they’ve been left behind after some fête. Some of them even begin whirring around and squeaking in broad daylight.

  ‘Those were the days,’ says Douglas, ‘when hunting flying foxes, as the white men christened them, was the sole preserve of the royal family!’

  We’ve stopped in Kolovai, an idyll of a place; this loose community of colourful little houses and huts, scattered among the palms, really has the lot: butterflies fluttering up from the field like flying confetti, and hands waved in greeting suddenly popping up from the meadows. The fisherman are sitting around on the grass and mending nets, while a sculptor is busy chipping away at a wet, red chunk of wood. Kids are playing tag among the trees, and an old man is absentmindedly stroking broad vanilla pods hanging on a bush.

  The farthest tip of the island is home to volcanic bays with sharp-edged, porous rocks, which tear your hand open if you so much as touch them, and blowholes, through which the surf blasts with such force that it creates fountains several metres high, over each of which a rainbow forms. Before me is the boiling sea, pressed into the rock as if through a valve. Sometimes, it only comes across as a sigh or a moan, but in the main it produces a blowing noise like an indignant snort, along with fountains of spume which time and again rise ten metres into the air before dispersing in a mist of fine spray.

  Offshore, underneath the cliffs, there is a solid ledge of rock where the waves build up. The ocean sends its undercurrent to the shore, venting itself through the porous composition of the rocks. The wind lisps in the marram grass on the beach. This is the place where the Christians landed and became fishers of men. Even nowadays the smallest villages have four, or even six, well-attended churches.

  Douglas sits down silently beside me. The sea lulls us both. Further. You feel like you want to venture out beyond the line of the horizon … I want to go further, I say, to a landscape that’s even more remote and where this distance is even more palpable, because there’s nothing beyond it.

  Douglas replies:

  ‘I know what you’re looking for. On Wednesday the night ferry sails from Nuku’alofa to Ha’afeva. I’ll get you a ticket on the Princess Ashika.’

  When we get back to the car, there’s an Australian couple waiting there, the same pair who were in the taxi that took me from the airport to the hotel on the first night of my stay. She’s broad in the beam and big-breasted, with powerful upper arms and the dark, lowering face of a native Tongan, while he has the immutably stiff physiognomy of an alcoholic and is taciturn, because talking isn’t worth wasting his breath on.

  Stephen and Leah are mineworkers, who live in the outback a couple of hundred kilometres north of Sydney. Their job demands hard physical labour, which has led them to the conviction that nobody can put anything over on them. They’re unashamedly anti-American and anti-Semitic and are dyedin-the-wool conspiracy theorists, yet they consider their theories to be a private matter which they’re not about to share with all those false friends out there. When Douglas calls the 9/11 terror attacks an ‘unexplained mystery’, they dismiss him like some hanger-on trying to parrot their opinions. The car they’d hired to get up to the promontory was pulled over by the police for speeding when it was doing forty kilometres per hour. The officers took the woman cab driver off to the station, and turfed out her two passengers. So we find ourselves obliged to give them a lift, and clear the back seat for them.

  I ask Leah what work she does down the mine.

  ‘I don’t work down at the face. I repair the heavy machinery, the drilling equipment, power shovels and lorries.’

  Leah’s parents are from ’Eua, a neighbouring island. The couple have come here on a kind of pilgrimage, so that Leah can show her man the land of her forefathers, the fabled Tonga, which her parents – now eking out an existence on the Australian mainland – have told him so much about.

  They stare straight ahead, it’s like they prefer to look through the landscape. The thing about the forefathers is one explanation, until it emerges that Leah has never visited the islands herself before. Basically, their primary reason for coming was to get the family’s blessing, at least, the part of the family that still lives here and who they’re long overdue to pay a visit to.

  ‘Do your relatives know you’re here yet?’

  ‘We’ve still got to call them,’ Stephen says wearily, and glances across at Leah, who gazes down at her lap.

  Douglas gives her a dubious look.

  ‘They’ll sacrifice a pig to celebrate your arrival, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Leah says. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

  She lives with Stephen. The family didn’t choose him, nor are they married, but under her smock-top, her belly reveals a slight swelling that might well belong to a woman who’s already four months pregnant.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ she tells Douglas, who’s giving her a very severe look.

  ‘When’s the best time of year to come here?’ Stephen asks. ‘At Christmas,’ says Douglas. ‘You can go to church twice, and in between you can even eat for free.’

  ‘What about all these Chinese, then?’ Leah says, pointing at a sign advertising a hot
el. ‘They’re writing their names in Chinese characters already!’

  It turns out that she hates the Chinese, too, who do business everywhere they go and who, like the Americans, ‘give nothing, it’s all just take, take with them’.

  ‘But in the paper yesterday, there was …’ Douglas starts to object.

  ‘Forget the paper,’ Leah interrupts this mere novice in conspiracy theories, ‘you know who controls them, after all.’

  ‘As a rule,’ I tell her, ‘it’s women who tend to give things, even to strangers … a smile, food, jewellery even. Men keep themselves to themselves more.’

  ‘But I’m here for you,’ Douglas says.

  ‘That’s true,’ Leah agrees, ‘yesterday a woman wanted to give me a chain. Just like that: I’ll give it to you, she says to me.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘I’ll give it to you out of love, is what the woman said to me. But then you’ve got to give me some money in return for my love.’

  Leah only had ten dollars with her. So, that’s all my love’s worth to you, is it? the woman had asked indignantly.

  ‘That’s a bad example,’ says Douglas.

  The shadow of an impending visit to his relatives loomed over him, as well. At least ’Eua, the island they’re having to visit, is only two hours away by ferry.

  ‘Why haven’t you at least called them yet?’

  ‘We will do.’

  Leah looks serious and pale and her eyes shift uneasily as she reads the words from Douglas’ lips. In this moment, the landscape means nothing to her.

  During their lunch break, workers here flake out on the ground under the palms and rest, while the kids play tag round the bus stops, and those who venture out to sea do so in tiny boats where seven or at most nine of them sit hunkered down, making the little sloops lie low in the water, and one person among the crew constantly has to bale out.