TALA FAASOLOPITO DIED AT 2.30 pm yesterday at Motootua Hospital: we heard about it over the radio. He died, so the doctors have diagnosed, of coronary thrombosis. He also died one of the most respected and saintly pastors of the Congregational Church (and of the whole nation therefore).
He was born in the Vaipe, oldest son of Miti and Salamo Faasolopito, both now deceased, and a brother to three sisters and two brothers whose names I’ve forgotten. However, the Vaipe has not seen Tala for over forty years, ever since he walked out of it in 1920, at the age of nineteen. I never knew him. What I know about him I have gained from my father and other Vaipe people who knew him. Or, let me say, the Tala I know is a resurrection, a Lazarus resurrected from the memory-bank of the Vaipe.
Tala did not kill the man who had raped his sister; he walked out of the Vaipe and into Malua Theological College to become an exemplary man of God. He never again set foot in the Vaipe. Not even when his father deserted his mother, not even when his mother died of a broken heart (so my mother has concluded) four years later, not even when his brothers and sisters disappeared one by one from the Vaipe in an attempt to escape his (Tala’s) disgrace, which had become their disgrace. The Vaipe was his cross, and he never wanted to confront it again. I once read an article about him in the Bulletin, in September 1959: his place of birth, the Vaipe, was never once mentioned in that article. Tala became, for most of our extremely religiously minded countrymen, a symbol of peace and goodwill, a shining example of virtuous, civilised and saintly living. But to most Vaipe people he was still Tala, the nineteen-year-old who had refused to become a man, their type of man sprung free like elephant grass from fertile Vaipe mud. Not that they did not become proud of him when he became a ‘saint’ (my father’s description). They forgave him. But I believe that Tala never forgave himself. His choice not to avenge his sister’s (family’s) honour determined the course of his life, the very sainthood he grew into. And he regretted that choice.
I possess copies of three of his now nationally quoted sermons. The sermons are not very original: they reveal little of their composer or the heart of the religion he believed in; they are the usual-type sermons you hear over 2AP every Sunday night without fail. However, I also have the originals of two sermons he composed a few months before he died and which he never made public. (My father, who grew up with Tala, got the originals from Tala’s wife, Siamomua.)
The first sermon, dated Monday, 27 October 1968, and written in an elaborate and ornate longhand (Tala went to Marist Brothers’ School, famous for such handwriting) on fragile letter-writing paper, is entitled: ‘A Resurrection of Judas’. The second sermon, a typewritten script forty pages in length, is more a private confession than a sermon. It is dated 25 December 1968, and under the date is this title printed in pencil: ‘On the Birthday of Man’.
A public perusal of these two sermons would have reduced Tala, in the fickle minds of the public, from saint to madman. For instance, in ‘A Resurrection of Judas’ Tala offers us a compellingly original but disturbing conclusion: ‘Judas Iscariot was the Christ. He did not betray Jesus. Jesus betrayed Judas by not stopping him from fulfilling the prophecy.’
I think the key to the door into the endless corridors that were Tala’s life is his choice not to avenge his family’s honour.
As a child I used to play under the breadfruit trees surrounding the fale which belonged to Tala’s family this was after Tala had left the Vaipe for good. Tala’s mother, who was a big woman with five chins (or so it seemed then) and long black hair streaked with grey, and an uncontrollable cough (they said she had Tb), and ragged dresses that hung down her like animal skins, sometimes invited me into the main fale to play with her children. They were much older than me but they condescended to play hopscotch, sweepy and skipping with me. I sometimes ate with them, mainly boiled bananas and sparse helpings of tinned herrings. (They were poor, so my parents told me.) I really enjoyed those times. The fale and shacks are still there today, reminding me, every time I pass them, of a contented childhood, but the people (distant relatives of the Faasolopitos) who now occupy them are strangers to me.
I often ran over the muddy track leading over the left bank of the Vaipe from the ageless breadfruit trees to the home of the family of the man, Fetu, who, by raping Tala’s sister, became the springboard of Tala’s life. The track is still there, like a string you can use to find your way out of a dense forest, but Fetu is dead, he has been dead for a long time — he died in prison, stabbed to death by another prisoner who could have been Tala twenty years before because Tala should have killed Fetu but didn’t.
Tala and his ill-fated family, and Fetu, and this whole section of the Vaipe are anchored in my mind and made meaningful by the memory of that awesome deed which Tala did not commit; by the profound and unforgettable presence of the ritual murder which Tala and his family and most of the inhabitants of the Vaipe committed in their hearts, and which has become a vital strand of my heritage of memories — a truth which Tala, by avoiding it, had to live with all his life.
‘We are what we remember: the actions we lived through or should have lived out and which we have chosen to remember.’ Tala has written this in his sermon ‘On the Birthday of Man’, page five.
Tala’s ordeal, his first real confrontation with the choice that separates innocence from guilt, occurred the night of 3 March 1920.
Behind the Vaipe, stretching immediately behind Tala’s home up to Togafuafua and Tufuiopa and covering an area of a few uninhabited square miles, is a swamp. An area into which a number of freshwater springs find their way, turning the soil into mud and ponds alive with crabs and shrimps and watercress and waterlily and wild taro and taamu and tall elephant grass and the stench of decay and armies of mosquitoes. Scene of children’s war games: cowboys and Indians, massacres and ambushes and mudfights.
Tala, so my father has told me, was the most skilful and adept crab and shrimp hunter in the Vaipe. His father (still remembered and referred to in the Vaipe as ‘that spineless, worthless failure’) was incapable of supporting his large family. He despised work of any type or form. So the burden of feeding and clothing and keeping the family together was left to Miti and Tala. She worked as a house-servant for expatriates while Tala, who had left school at standard four, stayed home during the day to care for the younger children and to forage for food. The swamp became a valuable source of food: succulent crabs and shrimp, taro and taamu. Sometimes he sold these at the market to get money to buy other essentials, such as kerosene for the lamp, matches, sugar, salt and flour.
The children always looked clean and healthy and happy, so I’ve been told. (When I came on the scene five years after Tala’s departure, the Faasolopito children I played with were dirty, unkempt and spotted with yaws.) ‘There was enough love and laughter and food to go around then,’ my father tells me. The eldest girl (and her name is of no importance to this story), a year younger than Tala, was extremely beautiful: a picture of Innocent Goodness, as some Vaipe elders have described her to me.
The youth who emerged from the swamp that evening as the cicadas woke in a loud choral chant was on his way to meet a saint, a destiny he wasn’t aware of yet. He was tired and covered with mud after a whole afternoon of digging for crabs, but now the thought of a cool shower and a hot meal and the smell and warmth of his family was easing his aching as he went through the tangled bamboo grove onto the track that led to his home ahead — behind clumps of banana trees he had planted the Christmas before. Something brushed against his forehead, a butterfly? He looked up and saw through the murmuring bamboo heads a sky tinted with faint traces of red; the sun was setting quickly. Tomorrow there would be rain. As he moved past the banana trees the broad leaves caressed his arms and shoulders like the cool feathery flow of springwater. He saw the fale, oval and timeless in the fading light. (He took no notice of the group of people in the fale.) He veered off towards the kitchen fale expecting, at any moment, his youngest brother to come bursting out of the fale to greet him and inspect his catch. But no one came. He looked at the main fale again, at the silent group gathered like a frightened brood of chickens round the flickering lamp. Knew that something was terribly amiss. He dropped the basket of crabs and ran towards the light; towards the future he would avoid — to attain a sainthood that he would, on confronting the reality of old age, deny — in order to be Judas.
Tala walked — more a shuffle than a walk — towards Fetu’s fale, trying to overcome the feeling of nausea which had welled up inside him the moment he had pulled the bushknife out of the thatching of the kitchen fale. The bushknife, now clutched firmly in his right hand, was a live, throbbing extension of his humiliation and anger and doubts and fear of the living deed which he had to fulfil in order to break into the strange, grey world of men. His whole life was now condensed into that cross-shaped piece of violent steel, a justification for Fetu’s murder; ‘my murder’, Tala has written in ‘On the Birthday of Man’. Fetu’s imaginary murder was also his own murder, Tala believed. ‘There is no difference between an imagined act and one actually committed.’
He stopped in the darkness under the talie trees in front of Fetu’s house — a small shack made of rusting corrugated iron and sacking. The clinking of bottles and glasses and the sound of laughter were coming from the shack. (Fetu operated what is known in the Vaipe as a ‘home-brew den’; he had already served two prison terms for the illegal brewing of beer.) Tala had never been in the shack before, even when he had been sent by his mother to fetch his father, who sometimes came to Fetu’s den and got violently drunk. He knew Fetu quite well, as well as he knew most of the other men in the Vaipe. He went up the three shaky steps and into the shack.
At the far corner, under the window and partly covered by shadow, squatted an old man, still as an object. In the middle of the room three youths were drinking at the only table. He knew them and they knew him, but they said nothing, they just stopped drinking and watched him. Tala saw no one else in the room. He went up and stopped in front of the three youths. The mud had dried on his skin and it felt like a layer of bandages throughout which blood had congealed. All the walls of the room were covered with pictures clipped randomly from newspapers and magazines and the one light-bulb that dangled from the middle rafter gave the pictures a dream-like quality, ominous and unreal. A few empty beer bottles lay scattered across the floor, glistening in the harsh light.
‘Are you looking for him?’ one of the youths asked. Tala nodded. (Fetu and his family lived in the back room, but no sound came from that room.)
‘He isn’t here,’ the same youth said.
‘I … have … I have to,’ but he couldn’t say it; it was too difficult and final a step to take into the unknown.
‘To kill him?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Yes, you have to kill him,’ the other two youths said. It was as if the youths (and the Vaipe) had resolved that he should kill Fetu, or die trying.
Tala turned slowly and left the shack. He told himself that he wasn’t frightened.
No one in the Vaipe knows what happened next, for there was no one there to observe what Tala did before leaving the Vaipe for ever. To the rich-blooded inhabitants of the Vaipe, a tale without an exciting (preferably violent) climax, no matter how exaggerated and untrue that climax may be, is definitely not a tale worth listening to. A yarn or anecdote especially concerning courage, must, in the telling, assume the fabulous depths and epic grandeur of true myth. And, being a Vaipean to the quick of my honest fingernails, I too cannot stop where actual fact ends and conjecture (imagination) begins; where a mortal turns into maggotmeat and the gods extend into eternity, as it were. So for Tala’s life, for my Lazarus resurrected, let me provide you with a climax.
Tala waited under the talie trees until the youths had left the shack and the light had been switched off; until he glimpsed someone (Fetu?) slipping into the back room of the shack; until he thought that Fetu had fallen asleep. Then, without hope (but also without fear), he groped his way round to the back of the shack and up into the room, which stank of sweat and stale food.
A lamp, turned quite low, cast a dim light over everything. Two children lay near the lamp, clutching filthy sleeping-sheets round their bodies. On the bed snored Fetu; beyond him slept his wife. Tala moved to the bed and stood above Fetu. He raised the bushknife. He stopped, the bushknife poised like a crucifix above his head. Mosquitoes stung at the silence with their incessant drone.
‘Forgive me,’ he said to the figure on the bed which, in the gloom, looked like an altar. Carefully, he placed the bushknife across Fetu’s paunch, turned, recrossed the threshold and went out into the night and towards an unwanted sainthood in our scheme of things.
In ‘On the Birthday of Man’, page forty, second to last paragraph, Tala writes: ‘I believe now that to have killed then would have been a liberation, my joyous liberation.’
My father, a prominent deacon in the Apia Congregational Church, is getting dressed to go to Tala’s funeral service. (Tala’s wife wants him to be one of the pallbearers.)
I’m not going to the funeral.
It is only a saint they are burying.