The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The Samoan people are, by nature and culture, extremely anxious to please their guests, the pamphlet had said. This might well have been true of some villages, of the attitude of elders or chiefs. If so, I was not privileged to encounter it in American Samoa. It was all foolery and antagonism for no good reason.

  “Go away,” I said. “Let go of my boat.”

  Brown hands were fumbling and snatching at my lines.

  “Bugger off!” I said, very loudly.

  It worked. They splashed back to the jetty. But I still had a problem. The wharf was too high for me to hand. I could tie up, but I would have to climb a ladder and leave my boat to the frenetic attention of these jumping screaming kids and some other lurking adults.

  Some coconuts were being unloaded from another boat. I asked a man what they were used for here.

  “To make palusami,” he said.

  Sticking to that traditional dish of steamed taro leaves and coconut cream seemed old-fashioned and civilized, and it reassured me. It made me curious and encouraged me to look for a landing place on the island.

  I had a good nautical chart of the whole coast of American Samoa, and it showed me the particular jigs and jags of this little island. I paddled out beyond the breakers and then went counter-clockwise, past a shipwreck and another beach and reef. But the beaches were too steep for a landing – they all seemed to be ledges of pale crushed coral bashed by waves. I needed a more sloping beach.

  Farther on, and at the eastern shore of the island, was an inlet, Ma’ama’a Cove, where I thought I might land, until at the last moment I saw surf rolling and smashing on rocks. And so I paddled on.

  There was a lake of quicksand near the northwest coast, or so I had been told. I continued paddling toward this part of the island, still looking for a landing place. I was now approaching another reef, and more breakers, but I could see how I might squeeze myself in between them, and did so, leaping out at the beach and hurrying out of the path of the waves just before they broke over my boat.

  How odd, among all those awful teenagers, and the junk food, and the suspicion, to have been subjected to these tricky sea conditions. But that was the paradox of Samoa: American bad food and popular culture, on a lovely volcanic island that was set in turbulent and reefy seas.

  This small island of Aunu’u was a beautiful place, with a good view of Tutuila and its easternmost point, Cape Mata’ula. I also suspected that it might be one of the best places in American Samoa, since there were no cars here, no amusement arcades, no fast food, no laundromat or takeaways. There was one village and in it, one shop. Like other tiny offshore islands I had seen, this too was a quiet preserve, still living partly in the past. Given the state of American Samoa, this was amazing.

  I pulled up my kayak and hid it, and then walked to the Pala Lake to look at the quicksand. I found it easily – it was sludgy red sand, covering the whole of the lake’s surface, and it shimmered in the sun. But how was I to know that it really was quicksand? I had read that men hunting ducks swam in the quicksand by lying horizontal, keeping themselves perfectly flat. I was alone and decided not to test it by trying this. But these stories about quicksand were the first ones that had ever stirred my imagination when I was ten or so and considering travel to distant places: the idea of being sucked down and smothered by depthless sand the consistency of cold Quaker Oats.

  The idea was that a stranger was supposed to ask permission before making camp here – the old fear of people squatting on your land and never leaving. But I decided not to announce myself. I wanted to be on my own, and I knew that if I asked I would either be forced to stay in one of their fales with an inquisitive and imprisoning family, or else I would be made conspicuous in my camp site and perhaps robbed.

  I walked around looking for a place to pitch my tent, and nearer dusk found a sheltered spot in a grove of trees and set up camp quickly. I did not bother to make tea. I did not light my stove. I ate sardines and bread and listened to the BBC, and did not switch on my flashlight. When it was dark I crawled in and spent a fitful night, wondering whether I would be discovered, or my kayak stolen. And, meanwhile, what about my car on Tutuila? That was the terrible aspect of American Samoa – I could never tell for sure whether I was in America or Samoa.

  At dawn I crept out and checked the boat. It was still well hidden, but a woman walking along the beach saw me. She said hello and I greeted her.

  “How did you come here?” she asked.

  “By boat,” I said, trying to be ambiguous, and to change the subject I asked her the meaning of the island’s name.

  “I dunno,” she said, and laughed, and walked on.

  That morning, after I had packed and hidden my gear – so that it would not be seen and stolen – I walked along a circular track to a marsh and back to the cove where I had seen the thrashing surf. It looked much worse from here on shore than it had from the backs of the waves.

  I killed the day swimming and then walked to the village, hoping not to meet the boys who had been so irritating the day before. The older people were polite, although the kids were still a nuisance, preening themselves and trying to be defiant. It was wonderful to be in a place with no cars, and yet most of these older people and all the schoolkids made a daily trip to Tutuila. And that afternoon, when I paddled back across the channel to Tutuila, I was both uplifted by the mountains and the glorious vistas along the south coast, and also depressed by the seedy modernity of this seemingly spoiled society.

  The next day in Leone, the second town of Tutuila – a shopping mall, a school, supermarkets – I met a woman who was visiting her family. She said she lived in Las Vegas. She was half-Samoan and looked very weary but not old. “I love Las Vegas,” she said. An islander in the desert. It seemed incredible to me, and I remarked on that. “I miss Las Vegas,” she said.

  And that same day, getting a haircut, I asked the barber where he was from.

  “Western Samoa,” he said. “But my wife is from here.”

  His two children had American passports. He said that they would almost certainly end up in the United States, while he would probably go back to his home village on Savaii. So American Samoa was like a convenient ship which people boarded to get them where they wanted to go.

  “I don’t want them to stay here,” he said. He was very polite – and he did not put into words the other thought that must have been in his mind: that there was nothing for them in Western Samoa.

  The traveler’s great fear in Samoa is of musu – the ferocious mood that turns a Samoan man into a brute. You can see it in their eyes, people say, and if a Samoan behaves like a bear with a sore head he is in the grip of musu. My apprehension had made me overly cautious in Samoa, but just before I was about to leave I sat down and examined my Samoan experience, and I realized that most Samoans, on whatever island, had been kind to me – generous, good-humored and helpful. I felt bad about carping, and was it wrong to make so much of their physical size? It was a race of giants, with big flapping feet, and when they walked their thighs rubbed and made a chafing sound that was audible ten feet away. I could only conclude that when Samoans were good they were very very good, and when they were bad they were horrid. But most of the time they were indifferent.

  It was when I was in Samoa that American troops flushed the remaining Iraqis from the suburbs and rode in triumph through Kuwait City. This was a news item in the Samoan newspapers, but it was not a topic of conversation, there was no air of celebration, and not even much interest in it. There was no flag-waving, but was that so surprising?

  American Samoa wasn’t a political entity. It was a social phenomenon – a rescued orphan, a fat feckless child that we had adopted. The arrangement perfectly suited fa’a Samoa, the Samoan way and its family ideal in which everyone was looked after. If you didn’t have one you found one. I met many foreigners who had attached themselves to Samoan families, and were perfectly happy to support everyone. The Samoans remained hospitable as long as someone else p
aid their bills. They sat by the littered lagoon, cooling their bellies, and eating.

  Samoa had become part of the American family and was content. Samoans were generally unenthusiastic, but similarly they were uncomplaining, and this little-brown-brother relationship would continue as long as America fed them and paid for their pleasures.

  18

  Tahiti: The Windward Shore of the Island of Love

  One day in 1768 a bare-breasted Tahitian girl climbed from her canoe to a French ship under the hot-eyed gaze of 400 French sailors who had not seen any woman at all for over six months. She stepped to the quarterdeck where, pausing at a hatchway, she slipped the flimsy cloth pareu from her hips, and stood utterly naked and smiling at the men. Down went the anchor, and in that moment the myth of romantic Tahiti was conceived, a paradise of fruit trees, brown tits and kiddie porn. Like Venus rising from the waves – that was how the naked girl was described by the captain of the ship, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman in Tahiti, who believed he had discovered heaven on earth (“I thought I was transported into the garden of Eden”), the abode of Venus, the Island of Love.

  Now I had a similar experience in Tahiti, involving stark nakedness, the lagoon, the hot-eyed gaze, and an outrigger canoe, but in its suddenness and coloration this incident was more up to date and more representative of Tahiti today. And I was the one in the outrigger canoe.

  After a day or so rattling around the streets of Papeete, Tahiti’s capital, I rented an outrigger from a Frenchman (he called it his “petite pirogue”) and paddled for a day to Tahiti-Iki – “Little Tahiti,” the volcanic bulge that is attached to the eastern shore of the island. The ancient name of the island of Tahiti is Tahiti-nui-i-te-vai-uri-rau, “Great Tahiti of the Many-Colored Waters.” The name is apt. The lagoon beneath Tahiti’s dead green volcanoes is a luminous varying blue, not sea-water colored, but with glittering opalescent depths, and elsewhere shallow coral shelves, white and knobbed like bones, rippling with fish. Overall the water is limpid and unexpectedly bright, like those candy-colored liqueurs made from berries, cordials that are so pretty in the squat glass bottles in a bar that just looking at them cools you and takes away your thirst. The surface of Tahiti’s lagoon was spangled with stars of sunlight. A mile or so offshore was the reef, being pounded by surf that was so heavy it had the muffled boom of distant cannon fire, and it ringed the entire island with a white flash of foam.

  Tahiti has its drawbacks – it is expensive, traffic-choked, noisy, corrupt and Frenchified – but it is impossible to belittle its natural physical beauty, and in spite of the car exhausts there is nearly always in the air the fragrant aroma – the noanoa – of flowers, the tiare especially, a tiny white gardenia that is Tahiti’s national blossom. Visitors are full of complaints, though. Just that morning, on the public vehicle they call le truck (a cross between a mammy-wagon and a school bus, and Tahiti’s only bargain) I had fallen into conversation with a man from Maryland. His name was Don Kattwinkel – he wore a get-acquainted badge – and he was obviously a sucker for carvings, from the look of his war club and his letter-opener. He was on the three-day tour, just arrived at Faa’a a few days ago today Tahiti, tomorrow New Zealand. And he tried to sum up Tahiti for me.

  “No one smiles here,” he said. “And you can’t drink the water.”

  I broke it to him gently that both were half-truths. The locals smiled at each other, even if they didn’t smile at us, and they boiled their water before drinking it.

  Don made no comment on that. He said, “You sound like you’re from Australia.”

  I wanted to tell him that people have been killed for uttering an uncalled-for libel like that.

  “You’re sure not from Mass,” he went on. “I know that dialect.”

  I was thinking about this irritating fart while I was paddling my canoe – nothing like meeting a man like that to preoccupy yourself. There was a current campaign put on by the Polynesian Tourist Board called Put On A Smile! – encouraging Polynesians to smile at tourists, mostly Japanese, none of whom smiled themselves. Is there a Japanese smile that does not seem like an expression of pain?

  By mid-afternoon I had paddled halfway around this part of the island, and was nearing the village of Atimaono. It was not much of a place, but it was the setting of one of Jack London’s masterpieces, his story “The Chinago.” In the story some Chinese laborers – “Chinagos” – are accused of murder, and though all are innocent of the crime they are found guilty by the French magistrate and one, Ah Chow, is sentenced to hang. Another, Ah Cho, is given twenty years in a prison colony, but one morning he is taken to this village, Atimaono, and told that he is to be beheaded. He protests to the various gendarmes – it is a case of mistaken identity, because the names are so similar – and at last, pleading for his life and proving he is not the condemned man, he is believed. But the French officials confer. They have come a long way from Papeete. The guillotine is ready. Five hundred other laborers have been assembled to watch. A postponement to find the right man would mean being bawled out by the French bureaucrats for inefficiency and time-wasting. Also it is a very hot day and they are impatient.

  All this time Ah Cho listens and watches.

  At last, but knowing they have the wrong man, one French policeman says, “Then let’s go on with it. They We can say that we merely carried out instructions with the Chinago that was turned over to us …”

  And, still making excuses, the French strap down the innocent Chinese man and strike off his head.

  “The French, with no instinct for colonization,” London writes at one point, and that is the subject of the grim story.

  An hour past Atimaono was the harbor of Port Phaeton.

  In a lovely garden by the sea was the Gauguin Museum, but in spite of its name it contained no paintings by Gauguin, only a haunted grimacing tiki. Farther on, the village of Papeari was said to be the first settlement of the seagoing people who originally landed on Tahiti and it lay next to the piece of land, like a pinched waist, where Little Tahiti was attached to Big Tahiti. But it was all so suburban.

  One of the curious facts of Tahitian life was that strictly speaking there were few usable beaches on the island – the public ones were dismal and littered, the others were the property of proprietorial Tahitian villages. Looking toward the island from the lagoon, I could see that the coast was an unbroken stretch of bungalows and villas, one enormous attenuated suburb that encircled the whole of Tahiti. Undermined by French aid programs, and besieged by French construction companies, the Polynesians have abandoned their traditional house-building. The houses were extremely unattractive and they were packed cheek by jowl along the coast, surrounded by chain link fences and walls and high hedges. Most Tahitian bungalows had signs saying Tabu, which needed no translation, and the French houses had security cameras and signs saying Attention Chien Méchant! (Beware of the Fierce Dog!).

  Earlier in the day, paddling near Punaauia, I had passed a pair of fares, or traditional huts, but there were not many others like them in the whole of French Polynesia. I was so interested in them that I went ashore there and was told that these two at the edge of the beach at Punaauia were owned by the Swede Bengt Danielsson, who had run aground in Polynesia forty-odd years ago on the raft KonTiki. In his book recounting the adventure, Thor Heyerdahl wrote, “Bengt was right; this was heaven,” and Bengt stayed in Polynesia.

  “Monsieur Danielsson is on holiday in Sweden,” a Tahitian woman on the lawn told me.

  I was sorry to miss him, because Danielsson and his French-born wife Marie-Thérèse have courageously fought a vocal battle against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and in this small and politically incestuous French colony Danielsson has been threatened, obstructed and shunned. Yet he perseveres in publishing to the world the fact that the French have been continually detonating nuclear devices – 160 so far – in one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, a coral atoll, nuking it to pieces, killing fish and causing cancer.


  Perhaps it was just as well that I did not engage Danielsson on the subject of French colonialism, because just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.

  Et c’est vous qui parlez! a French person might reply. Look who’s talking!

  It is true that America has overwhelmed its own territory in Samoa and made it a welfare state, but Samoans have emigrated wholesale to the mainland United States, where they flourish or fail, according to their abilities. There is no profit in Samoa for us. But Polynesia is all profit for the French – they need the land and the distance to capitalize on world air routes for French airlines; and they need Polynesia as a millitary garrison, and – most profitable of all – they need nuclear testing facilities for their arms industry. As an old-fashioned colony it is a racket. The French effort is devoid of idealism.

  Only a minuscule number of Polynesians ever make it to metropolitan France to qualify as doctors or administrators – the French run the entire show. But the patronizing racism inherent in French colonial policy has not had the demoralizing effect that was intended. They planted themselves in the islands and consistently discriminated against Polynesians and refused to learn their language – there was a law passed in French Polynesia in the 1960s forcing Polynesians and Chinese to take French names so they could be more easily pronounced. In this way, the French turned most of these friendly people into sullen adversaries and some into lapdogs. But though they have lost most of their traditional skills of weaving and house-building and fishing and sailing, the Polynesians have retained their oral culture – and that is a good thing, because no one needs their culture more than colonized people. What else do they have?