First Visit

Laura slips out of bed, quietly, believing Dan is still asleep. After tying her hair in a ponytail and slipping on an ‘ie lavalava and blue t-shirt, she glances at him and then opens the bedroom door and disappears down the corridor, her burnt skin still stinging from spending the previous afternoon in the hot sun. No one in their family is awake.

Outside she pulls a bush-knife out of the thatching of the kitchen fale, in which a few chickens are foraging, and then heads for the mangroves.

There isn’t yet any trace of sunlight in the transparent greyness of the dawn light that encompasses everything and into which she moves quickly towards the shore, her light auburn hair shimmering in the tangy breeze blowing in from the dark sea and the waves breaking on the reef, her bare feet, now toughened by a week of living in Malie, stepping fearlessly on the sharp rocks, bitsy sand and roots, and soon she is following the narrow leaf-covered track through the stand of palms and into the powerful smell of sea mud and the thick tangled area of mangrove trees whose long crablike roots are now covered by the high tide, her lungs and pores and head and nerves more alive than she’s experienced for many years. Everything is so strange, so new, yet so invigorating, so challenging, like a perpetual injection of self-renewing adrenalin. So contrary to the ways Daniel and she had expected. Life is so basic and difficult and different in Malie, and there’s little privacy, he’d warned her. As for the mozzies and flies and cockroaches, they are humungous! All that is certainly true, she’d concluded after their first two days, but instead of alienating her from Dan’s ‘āiga and village, those aspects had drawn her compulsively deeper and deeper into them. She hadn’t expected herself to react this way, and she is euphorically surprised by it, and in congratulating herself in reacting like that, desires more of it.

For instance, yesterday, against Dan’s, Lemu’s and Fa‘alua’s caution that she’d get sunburn and hurt herself – besides, Pālagi shouldn’t do such work – she’d spent most of the afternoon in the mangroves, with Teva and Ma‘amusa, two of Dan’s young female cousins who are finishing high school at Samoa College, gathering and stacking firewood. Hot, hard, dirty, smelly work, and, in her ineptitude, she’d been relentlessly determined to learn from her new-found cousins how to identify the right wood, use a bush-knife to hack it from the trees, slash the small twigs and leaves off the branches and then cut those into short lengths and stack them. And she hadn’t minded her cousins laughing and giggling and wondering why Dan’s very pale and delicate Pālagi wife would want to do such menial work unworthy of her. She could’ve stayed in their house, which had all the comforts of a Pālagi home. Why voluntarily choose to do this? And to enjoy it – they’ve never enjoyed it – was even more puzzling, strange; what’s wrong with her? After they’d made the first stack and they’d told her that was enough wood and, without replying, she’d continued a second stack, and they then had to continue working, their puzzlement turned automatically to resentment. The Pālagi woman didn’t even mind being covered with sweat-soaked dirt, mud and mosquito bites, and getting her hands blistered and cut and her soft skin burnt to the reddest red they’d ever seen! Serves her right for making them work and work and work and then, when she’d mastered the bush-knife and the techniques of cutting the firewood and stacking it neatly, correctly, outworking them in speed and skill and neatness. They didn’t like that, no; no weak Palagi was going to do that to them! All that soon changed when, unexpectedly, she’d plunged fully clothed into the water and, like a dolphin, had swum into and around the mangrove roots, obviously loving it, and had then, in her hilariously inept Samoan, invited them to join her, and when they hadn’t she’d scooped up handfuls of mud, rounded them into balls, and belted them with the balls, shrieking and laughing and laughing like a Samoan. They’d leapt in and, within seconds, a furious mud fight ensued, until they were all covered with stinking, healing mud and they’d looked at one another and, seeing only their eyes twinkling in their cloaks of mud, had stopped and laughed and laughed some more, with her out-laughing them in the way adults (and Pālagi), like her, shouldn’t, and, in their growing, loving admiration of her, they promised themselves never to tell the elders of their ‘āiga that Laura, their Laura, had behaved like a Samoan and a child while they’d been gathering firewood. They’d joked and laughed some more on their way back to the house. Lemu and Fa‘alua, Daniel’s stepmother, had rushed out, shocked by Laura being covered with mud and sunburn and bites and cuts and had started blaming them for her condition, but she’d laughed and told them she’d had a wonderful time. And again, they were surprised when she’d insisted on showering with them in their outdoors shower (in full view of everyone) and not in the one in the house.

A quivering sense of achievement radiates through her as she arrives at the stacks of firewood. She has to take the firewood home before others find it. She notes that no one has done that during the night. The problem is, short of carrying the wood home using her arms – that would take hours – how is she going to do it? Her delighted questing mind finds the solution in Albert Wendt’s novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, which she’d studied in one of her undergraduate English courses. One of the characters had cut the firewood, stripped the bark from the branches of fau trees and used that to tie the wood in a tight bundle, then, using more bark strips round his shoulders to tie the bundle to his upper back, had carried the huge weight home, looking like ‘a beast of burden’. She’s vigorously eager to see how much weight she can manage and over what distance. She should be superbly fit after two hours of gym training, in Auckland, four days a week. Daniel, after years of training for rugby, now detested it and jogged only once a week on his own because she found jogging monotonous and boring.

Using the bush-knife she quickly cuts down long young fau branches, then with her teeth she grips the end of a bark strip at the end of one branch, grasps the branch firmly with her hands, and, triumphantly surprised at how easily the bark comes off and how well her teeth survive the ordeal, pulls it off with her teeth. She does that to two more branches. Still thinking of the passage in the novel, she takes two strips and places them parallel to each other on the ground. Across those she neatly stacks a layer of firewood, considers whether she can carry it and decides to place another layer on top, then another and, now almost bursting with her own self-belief, yet another. There!

With all her strength, and using her knowledge of knots acquired at Girl Guides, she ties the strips around the firewood, firmly, tests how well they are holding, steps back and admires her handiwork. No, she isn’t romanticising the South Seas and the outdoors subsistence life, close to nature and using your ingenuity and the sheer strength of your body to survive. No, no noble-savage-thriving-in-a-South-Seas-paradise bullshit for this badly sunburnt Kiwi Amazon, who is revelling in her ability and strength and desire to overcome all the challenges in this different way of life, Samoa’s, and through that learning other ways of doing and seeing and being, a compulsive continuation of a lifelong exploration of her own possibilities and testing the limits of her courage and body.

Around her the heat and light are intensifying rapidly, and her clothes are already soaked through with sweat and, like Tauilopepe – that’s the name of the character in the novel – she stands above the large bundle of firewood, her muscles tightening with pulsing blood, her courage thudding in her throat, visualising, step by step, how she has to lift her load. She’s relieved her teenage companions aren’t there to see her crumpling under it. Now, one step forward, right above the bundle, turn your back to it, squat, reach down and back, grip the bark handles, first the left, uupp! Shove your arm through the handle now that is almost to your shoulder. Right! Now squat again, your right hand gripping the handle. Uuuppp! Yeah, sshhiittt! Got it! Hold the handles steady round your shoulders. Your whole body trembles with the weight of the bundle, your knees threaten to break; you stagger forward, stop and steady yourself. For a moment you doubt your ability to carry this weight. Just like Tauilopepe! Your saliva tastes suddenly of blood; you’ve bitten the corner of your tongue – yes, but it’s proof of your stoic refusal to break under the weight. You take another step. The handles are cutting into your shoulders. You can bloody well do it! You take another step, then your feet start following each other, determined step by determined step, over the track through the mangrove trees now glittering with sun snared in their dew-covered leaves, through the fertile fetid smell of mud drying in the heat, through your easy comfortable, pampered, smug life of material and physical comfort back into the terrible, terrible cupboard darkness in which your increasingly insane mother had shut you whenever the fiery demons of her inevitable visions threatened to abduct you and where, in your desperate fear, you’d learned the feel and depth and geography of that darkness and had used that to live with it, overcoming it so you could confront any fear …

As she steps over a large puddle in the track, she hesitates and gazes down into her reflection: yes, you do look like a beast of burden, but a grinning victorious one ....

Within a few demanding minutes she is outside the kitchen fale, trembling uncontrollably after bearing the weight all that way. She drops her shoulders, releasing the handles, and her load plunges with a resounding thud into the ground behind her. She flexes her arms, easing the pain from them.

She looks warily at the house, at the back veranda, and is relieved no one has been watching her. Swiftly she turns and, with firm steps, hurries back to the stacks, her whole being singing. Since meeting Daniel she’s been learning Samoan and reading everything he’s written and everything she can find on Samoa, including the poetry, and has loved it. Now she is testing that reality against the real Samoa; or is that read reality shaping how she is seeing and being in Samoa? Fuck that dry intellectual wanking, just live it and enjoy it – and she admits to herself that she is loving it. Besides, Albert Wendt’s and Daniel’s versions of Samoa are too bloody dark and bleak and distressing for her. She’s never told Daniel that. Yes, her mind, body, everything that is her is thriving in the reality of Samoa as she lunges headlong into it …

After her fourth load, her body is a quivering bundle of wracked, pain-clogged muscles and bone, but she’s heady with excitement at her refusal to give in. Fifth load. As she staggers towards the kitchen fale, she senses people on the back veranda, but she deliberately stops herself from glancing in that direction, not wanting any of them to interfere with her struggle by rushing forward and offering to take her load. Her sweat-soaked clothes flap round her. She turns her back to them. ‘What are you doing?’ Daniel’s concerned voice slides over her left shoulder. She releases, her load cracks loudly as it hits the ground and, with her back still turned to them, she jogs back down the track. No, not even her crazy mother and the mainly abusive foster homes the welfare department had farmed her out to were able to destroy her. Daniel knows nothing about that – she hasn’t allowed him into that past. Not because she’s ashamed of it or doesn’t want to shock him or win his love with it. No, she wants her whole triumph over the brutal, violent circumstances of her childhood to remain hers and hers alone.

Her astonished ‘āiga is now on the veranda and in and behind the kitchen fale, observing her with her last load; her two cousins have already neatly stacked her previous loads and are now rushing to help her, but she holds her hands up and waves them away. When she falters, they rush forward again. ‘Fuck off!’ she orders. Astounded, shocked, the two look at their elders and Daniel. She pushes past them, stops beside the stacked firewood, throws back her shoulders wildly as if she’s finally conquered the task that she’d set for herself, releasing her last load, turns, squats, pushes her arms under the bundle and, rising to her feet quickly, lifts it and hurls it onto the stack. Wheeling defiantly, she heads for the shower under the breadfruit trees. ‘Mālō, galue!’ Lemu congratulates her.

‘Terrific work, Laura!’ Dan calls.

Wonderful, wonderful! she sighs as the thick, bone-healing shower of cold water pours down over her; fucking wonderful! From the cupboard darkness, she’d learned to cherish even her mother, and after her mother had hanged herself in the asylum, Laura had, over the years, fashioned her memories into the tragic story of an innocent heroine whose insane demons had driven to her death.

Teva brings her a large towel, which, conscious that they’re all watching, Laura wraps around her body. Under that, she copies how she’s seen Dan doing it and carefully slips off her wet ‘ie lavalava and t-shirt, squeezes most of the wetness out of them and, refusing Teva’s offer, takes them and hangs them on the line. There, another achievement: undressing in public and not allowing others to treat you like a permanent guest. Teva and Ma‘amusa are starting the fire in the kitchen fale to boil the kettle, as she hurries past and onto the veranda. ‘Having a good time killing yourself?’ Dan asks, eyes twinkling.

‘Fuck yes,’ she whispers so Lemu and Fa‘alua, who are sitting on the veranda railing, won’t hear, and sweeps past him and into the house.

In the bedroom, she gingerly spreads calamine lotion over the mosquito bites and sunburnt areas of her body, wincing and shutting her eyes in relief as the coolness of the lotion eases out the pain. She’s amused by her appearance when she looks at herself in the dresser mirror: red blistered skin with large expanses of white calamine lotion.

Reluctantly and carefully she puts on some light panties and a clean ‘ie lavalava, dries her hair with the hairdryer and tells herself she is succeeding superbly in achieving the aim of her first visit to Samoa and Dan’s ‘āiga: to learn everything about everything so she can see Dan in his complexity and depth and failings – and he has many of those – and thereby be able to cope better with the boundless, frightening love she’s had for him ever since she’d helped him survive the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Before Dan she’d not experienced such a love – and it is, at times, terrifying because she knows but doesn’t want to know that she would even sacrifice her life for it.

She meets Dan in the corridor, embraces him tightly, kisses him, before he can caution her again, sweeps out and over the veranda and, almost running, is in the kitchen fale, in the thick smoke of the fire, with Teva and Ma‘amusa, who are fanning the smoke away from their choking faces with large breadfruit leaves.

‘You strong,’ Teva says in English.

‘Yes, you very strong,’ Ma‘amusa echoes.

‘Yeah, tough!’ She laughs. She knows her cousins are quite fluent in English after spending four years at Samoa College, where English is the medium of instruction.

‘You not need to do all this,’ Teva says.

‘No, this work for Hamo people not Pālagi,’ Ma‘amusa elaborates.

‘I’m not Pālagi or Hamo, I just want to learn,’ she counters. When Teva laughs and Ma‘amusa joins her, Laura joins them too, and the smoke and fale and surroundings vibrate with their laughter. ‘I don’t even know how to make a fire,’ she admits.

‘But there is electric stove in the Pālagi kitchen in the house,’ Teva points out.

‘But I’m not a Pālagi, I just want to learn.’

‘What is the use of open fires in New Zealand?’ Ma‘amusa asks.

‘Good bloody question,’ she replies, ‘but I just want to know how to make a fire like this.’

‘What about the electric kettle in the kitchen?’ Teva tests her. ‘It is quicker and no smoke.’

‘Don’t care, just teach me how to make a fire,’ she ends it, her eyes and nose now choking with smoke-induced tears. ‘You teach me Samoan too, okay?’ They nod eagerly. ‘From now on you talk only in Samoan to me, all right?’

‘What if you don’t understand?’ Teva asks.

‘Never mind, only Samoan, okay?’

‘Okay!’ They chorus. ‘We use the “t” or “k”?’

‘I’m not a faife‘au,’ she jokes, ‘so use the “k”.’ She struggles up, swallows back the tears and phlegm, catches it at the back of her throat and then, with a loud swacking sound, spits it out of the fale, like she’s seen Lemu do. She takes the end of her clean ‘ie lavalava and wipes her mouth and the choking tears from her eyes. Her companions try not to laugh when they see the black charcoal streaks she leaves on her face and ‘ie lavalava. Yes, their strange friend is learning, they decide.

‘Laura, ‘o ‘oe ‘o le lōia, ā?’ Ma‘amusa asks. They wait as she struggles to figure out the question.

Teva starts interpreting but Laura says, like a real Samoan: ‘Se, ‘aua!’ So they wait, knowing lawyers aren’t dumb: only very smart and intelligent people go to university and graduate as lawyers, Lemu has told them repeatedly, and every ‘āiga in Samoa wants their sons to be lawyers, so to be a woman and a lawyer, Laura is doubly intelligent. ‘Koe fai … fai mai lau … fesili,’ she requests.

‘Māgaia lau fa‘a-Samoa, Laura!’ Ma‘amusa congratulates her. So Teva repeats her question.

Laura’s face glows, her eyes alight with discovery. ‘‘Ī, ‘o a‘u o le lōia e lē iloa – e lē iloa kafu se afi!’ Her companions clap, and she claps with them. The smoke has cleared, and the fire is now flaming freely under and around the soot-caked kettle.

She’s suffered a week of Pālagi breakfasts of cornflakes, fried eggs, toast, butter, marmalade and coffee because she doesn’t want to offend their hosts by asking for Samoan meals. When she told Dan that the previous night, he’d hedged, and she knew he too didn’t want to cause offence. Dan in New Zealand, where he’d grown up, is more difficult to understand because he’s ‘at home’ there, blending in easily with everything. But in the past week of their first visit together to Malie, where she’s expecting him to be even more part of everything, she is seeing him more clearly, because he is definitely not fitting into what is expected of him. Being a Samoan, Malie is expecting him to know about what that is and behave accordingly. And the Dan she loves has never wanted to conform to what the majority of people want in most things; not in New Zealand anyway. Here he is caught between being that and being ‘a proper Samoan’, which, she’s now convinced, he doesn’t really know much about. She’s deriving enormous enjoyment out of observing him wriggling and squirming as he tries to walk that endless tight rope. Here, the people have accorded her what she calls pre-forgiveness: being a naive, manner-less Pālagi, they expect her to break and trespass and be ignorant of every feature of civilised Samoan behaviour, and when she trespasses, forgiveness is automatic. Poor Dan, though! My beautiful, tortuously introspective darling is caught in the quagmire of identity and his people’s demanding expectations.

‘O le ā le breakfast fa‘a-Samoa?’ she asks her companions, after struggling to formulate the question.

‘O le fa‘alifu, le koko Samoa …’, Ma‘amusa starts.

‘… Ma se i‘a falai po‘o se pisupo,’ Teva ends the menu.

Laura remembers and looks at the basket of taro and bunch of green bananas, which she and Dan had fetched from the plantation two days before and had put on the far rafters of the kitchen fale. Beside those is a large black pot. Dry coconuts lie outside by the firewood, and, getting up quickly, she hurries over, takes down the pot and goes to the outside tap. ‘‘O le ā le mea ‘ua kupu?’ Teva calls. Ma‘amusa gets up to go and help her, but Laura waves her back down to her seat of coconut husks.

They watch her as she staggers back with the pot now full of water, thumps it down next to the kettle on the fire and goes over to the rafters. Teva brings the pot’s silver lid and puts it on the pot. Laura – and they marvel at her strength – pulls down the hefty basket of taro, and with one hand and on well-muscled legs carries it over to the valusaga outside and dumps it there. Again, more work, Teva and Ma‘amusa sigh and look at each other, and they get up stoically and go to fetch the basins, other ingredients and implements needed for making the Samoan breakfast their Pālagi lawyer friend obviously wants.

‘Why not make your Samoan breakfast in the kitchen?’ Dan suggests hesitantly when he comes out and finds Teva teaching Laura how to husk coconuts using the dangerously sharp mele‘i. One wrong move and you can impale yourself on it.

‘Kaukala in Samoan,’ Laura demands. She jabs the coconut down onto the sharp point of the mele‘i. Dan jumps over and stops her. ‘‘Ou ke fia iloa fai!’ she insists. So he steps behind her, his body tight against her back, his jaw pressing down over her right shoulder, grips her hands from behind and, pressing down on the impaled coconut, twists, and levers part of the husk off the coconut shell; then once again jabs the nut down on the point and twists and levers up, and another strip of husk peels off, and so on until the whole shell is bare of the husk. All the time she’s breathlessly aware of his warm body, his slightly musky odour and his bulge against her buttocks. ‘Sexy, too, darling,’ she whispers. ‘You’ve never been closer!’

‘Fa‘aaogā le gagaga Samoa,’ Ma‘amusa reminds her, and they all laugh.

So for the next hour or so, they teach Laura how to split open the nuts, scrape the meat out of them using a tuai and squeeze the milk out of the meat; and to scrape the skin off the taro and, using the heavy machete, cut them into pieces and lower the pieces into the boiling water; they then help her roast the cacao beans, peel off the hard skins and pound the beans into a paste in the wooden pestle; and when their breakfast is almost ready, her cousins congratulate her on being ‘the best lawyer cooker of Samoan food in the world!’

‘In Samoan’, she reminds them. So they look at Dan who, grinning widely, interprets:

‘Laura, ‘o ‘oe ‘o le lōia e gumela kasi i le makā‘upu kau kuka i le lalolagi.’ Dan and Ma‘amusa and Teva bow to her, and she curtsies to them. When she looks round, the rest of their ‘āiga are on the veranda and in the faleo‘o, grinning and applauding.

She prefers to serve their Samoan breakfast the Samoan way, but when she hurries to the dining room to prepare for that, Fa‘alua has already set the table the Pālagi way, with cutlery and crockery and even serviettes.

Since arriving she has felt uncomfortable being treated as a special guest, eating in the Pālagi house’s dining room, with only Lemu and Fa‘alua and Dan, while the rest of their ‘āiga ate afterwards in the faleo‘o. There are some things in the fa‘a-Samoa that she will never conform to, and one of them is the strict division between class and age groups, the matai and elders receiving all the respect and preferential treatment while the untitled men, women and children serve them and then eat separately, afterwards. This time, she sets places for Teva and Ma‘amusa at the table, and, when her cousins refuse that, she gazes heatedly at Dan, who orders them to sit down at the table.

In tense silence, the others take their places, with Lemu at the head of the table, as usual, and for the first time Laura experiences not one twitch of guilt about offending her hosts.

‘Good morning,’ Lemu greets them, in English. ‘Laura, will you please say our grace for the breakfast that you have prepared?’ What? She stops herself just in time from declining automatically, and for a lost moment she doesn’t know how to react to Lemu’s request, and everyone, especially Dan, experiences a tense awkwardness. Finally, she banishes her qualms about being an atheist, convincing herself that, from what she’s observed of Samoan behaviour, religion is more a social custom than anything else.

‘In Samoan,’ Dan says, and she can feel him enjoying that.

She clears her throat, softly, and then, hesitantly but deliberately, she prays using the ‘k’: ‘Le Akua e, fa‘amolemole fa‘amaguia mai iā Lemu ma – ma lo mākou ‘āiga ‘ākoa.’ She pauses; now more sure of herself, she continues, ‘Ku‘u mai iā Kanielu se loko fa‘amaualalo ‘auā e lē iloa e ia oga fai se kuka magogi pei oga mākou kukaiga ma Keva ma Ma‘amusa. Fa‘afekai mo mea‘ai ‘ua e foa‘i mai mo mākou kino. I le suafa o Iesu, Amege!’

Lemu chuckles and thanks her. ‘You speak better Samoan than your husband,’ he adds.

‘Hear that, Kanielu in the lion’s den?’ Laura laughs.

‘That’ll be the day!’ Daniel counters.