Taboo and Fate
Black clouds were said to have billowed up over the Pacific, and the water in the ocean boiled up into a seething white foam; fishing boats and ferries supposedly sought shelter in bays, while people on the shore fell to their knees and prayed. They streamed in their thousands into churches to take confession, and many priests were reported to have claimed that the ‘Day of Judgement’ was at hand. And that was even the case here in the capital Nuku’alofa, apparently, whose name literally means ‘The Abode of Love’!
‘Precisely because of that,’ says the old man who’s telling me what is was like in March 2009, when one of the underwater volcanoes hereabouts – of which there are thirty-six all told – erupted, an event that heated the waters of the Pacific and sent fountains of steaming water shooting up into the air, where they dispersed in a sulphurous-yellow haze.
‘That’s how it is nowadays on the Pacific Ring of Fire,’ he tells me, evidently quite proud of the belt of volcanoes that exerts an elemental hold over the lives of the inhabitants of Tonga.
After all, this kingdom stands only a few centimetres above sea level. Not far from here, in an easterly direction, yawns the 10,882-metre-deep Tonga Trench, a chasm in the ocean floor where every year the Pacific tectonic plate moves by as much as twenty-four centimetres beneath the Australian plate, threatening the island realm with tsunamis. What’s more, it’s also become so prone to hurricanes that it can sometimes take several days for news of the extent of the damage to reach the mainland from the affected islands.
‘So why is Nuku’alofa called “The Abode of Love”?’
‘Hard to say,’ the old man replies, without elaborating further. One hundred and sixty-nine islands and two coral reefs comprise what is officially called the ‘Kingdom of Tonga’, a place which Captain James Cook dubbed the ‘Friendship Islands’ or ‘Friendly Islands’ in 1774. And indeed, that’s exactly what they were, at least until the early nineteenth century. Thereafter, Europeans’ impressions of the place took on a more bitter tone, as by that time the Tongans’ own experience of the new arrivals had also grown more sour and because an almost fifty-year long civil war, which only came to an end in 1852, had spread terror throughout the islands. Two-thirds of the population are said to have been killed at that time, with cannibalism even making an appearance, and still now cultural historians with an interest in the fate of these paradise-like islands ask where this propensity for violence came from, and why this peaceful world is repeatedly disfigured by outbreaks of savage brutality. When he landed here, Captain Cook chose the most beautiful bay, in actual fact a whole system of bays and spits of land, interspersed with patches of bright blue water where dark patches of algal bloom float, drifting out into the intermittently grey and shining blue, dazzling and turbid water of the open ocean. The shores are densely covered with scrubby bushes, but the tip of every spit is home to a palm grove. Even nowadays, this is a landscape that shows virtually no signs of human agency, remaining wild and untamed except for the little spot that has been cleared and tidied up as a memorial to James Cook, and where a tree had had a sleeve put round its trunk bearing the inscription: ‘Here stood formerly the great banyan Malumalu-’o-Fulilangi or Captain Cook’s Tree, under the branches of which the celebrated navigator came ashore.’
We are a quite different breed of traveller. We don’t have to wrest the impressions we glean of the world from situations of danger, nor even very often from mere discomfort, and should we ever by chance find ourselves flirting with danger in our travels, then it’s only as a result of governments having declared an area a no-go zone – like Burma, Murmansk, Kamchatka, Bhutan, or the Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing, say – or because wars have made them inaccessible. The good thing about it is that we can no longer merely judge by appearances. Whereas earlier travellers were able to offer sweeping statements about the life and nature of other countries, all we can do – at best – is capture what they’re like at the moment we visit them, and recount how they appear in our heads, and how they interact with our individual personalities.
On the flight from Sydney to Tonga, I sit in an aisle seat with May, a native of the island, next to me, in a sleeveless top. She’s folded her strong brown hands in her lap and is staring solemnly out of the window. Her face is broad, with a mass of rounded individual features, like her nose, her chin and her cheekbones … and her arms are so smooth that the glare of the evening sun as it sets over the ocean finds its final reflection on her skin, where the grey-blue of the sky mingles with the brown of her complexion to produce a nameless colour.
It’s almost midnight by the time we descend the aircraft gangway and walk through the warm wind of the Polynesian islands towards the airport terminal; we can taste the saltwater tang in the air for the first time. To both sides of the little whitewashed cube that houses the passport and customs desks, queues of bulky people press forward, calling and waving, and others who are still descending the plane yell boisterously and wave back. Our baggage is spewed out of a hole in the wall and stacked up and sorted by a frantic but not very systematic operative, who fends off all attempts by the owners of the bags to get at their luggage. The customs official cuts a cheerless, authoritarian figure, but what can he do? We’re in Tonga now, and sending us back would be no easy matter, and, anyhow, several hundred kilometres of South Pacific until the next bit of mainland is a pretty effective fortification when all’s said and done.
Outside the terminal, a clutch of strangers are hanging around waiting for a communal minibus to take them into town: a bad-tempered French married couple, a homecoming Tongan with no relatives left here, a woman in a wheelchair who cheerfully explains that she wanted to come back to the island of her birth one more time before her death, and an Australian couple, he with the glazed expression of an alcoholic and she with the spherical head of a native Tongan. The French woman coughs and issues orders to no one in particular, while her husband, either because he’s embarrassed or because they are already too much at odds with one another, looks on with the smug demeanour of someone who’s got more important business to attend to than arriving at a Pacific airport in the middle of the night.
Then a friendly, warm rain sets in, and the Haitian minibus driver reduces his speed from forty to thirty kilometres per hour. So we creep through the night until we find ourselves driving through a nocturnal scene by Gauguin. The scene outside is just like one of his paintings, with the palms not in groups or serried ranks but standing isolated and dotted about the landscape as though all other vegetation – banana trees, sweet potato plants and tomato vines alike – should fall in line with their wilfulness. Groups of men in skirts, some of them staggering, cross the unmade road in front of us.
The riots that took place here in November 2006 – when the democracy movement erupted into violence and shops were set on fire, and both supporters of the movement and opponents could only look on helplessly as the wind spread the fire across the whole of the city centre – left the old heart of the city completely in ruins. Now, the food stalls there are well lit but protected by bars; that’s how these Chinese-owned businesses guard against looting. The vendors wait behind their grilles like workers in a fairground coconut shy. The living rooms of the little houses are mostly lit by neon lamps, while dogs roam around outside. The next shower that arrives is blown horizontally past the windscreen by a sudden gust, and in the hotel lobby, the receptionist announces triumphantly:
‘So – what do you reckon to this weather, then?’
The hotel is a dilapidated old complex of interconnected wings that at some stage were augmented by a half-mildewed main building. In the semi-darkness, I can make out various courtyards, lawns, open loggias constructed out of bamboo; I also notice that the walls are discoloured with fungus. I can hear the sea, and the Vanu Road, along which a couple of cars are slowly approaching, and I can hear two boozers in the nextdoor room crashing about, and their toilet door slamming.
Yet the feeling that now takes a stronger hold of me is one of agoraphobia: being cut off on the far side of an unbridgeable ocean and marooned in the most remote of foreign places suddenly feels deeply oppressive. It’s like I’m cooped up in this vastness, sleep-deprived, yet still harassed by traffic and regularly startled. How can one possibly feel so trapped where everything is so boundless, so free, and so released from the constraints of the mainland, even released from the constraints of my own homeland? If you were to draw a diagonal line from there right across the globe, you’d end up here in Tonga. So, isn’t it a good thing that you don’t encounter the same experiences here, just the reverse side of the same globalized world that’s been given a bit of a folksy twist?
The last time this island realm came to our attention in the media was at the millennium, when European television stations wanted to celebrate the first day of the new millennium in fitting style and Tonga, being situated in the first international time zone, offered to sell them pictures of its sunrise that morning. In point of fact, this honour really should have gone to Kiribati, a nation comprising a few tiny islands, and right through the middle of which the International Dateline ran until 31 December 1994, at which juncture someone decided to shift the line further east. But what lay in store for Europeans beyond this demarcating line that they couldn’t have found somewhere else? So here was a new day, a new year, century, millennium, heralded as it had been since the beginning of time by the breaking dawn, and all you needed to do was go out into the street in Europe twelve hours after sun-up in Tonga to see it live for yourself, breaking over the millennial horizon. However, anyone who found waiting too onerous, or too tardy or sentimental or who somehow didn’t find the experience genuine enough, always had the television, which in turn would not be called ‘television’ if it didn’t have the ability to peer into the far distance to see what the rising sun looked like, the self same sun that had just set over Europe. But in any event, people hereabouts are given to saying: ‘Time begins in Tonga.’
So, because the first sun of the new millennium would be rising over this island kingdom, the rights to capture the event were touted around to the highest bidder, and we came within an ace of enjoying a premiere at the advent of the new millennium: namely, a sunrise with a commercial break.
On my first day in Tonga, I was also keen to see the sunrise, twelve hours before it occurred back home. On the morning I sat waiting for it, the full moon was still visible at 6.30 a.m. Then a bank of cloud rolled across it, extensive enough to completely blot it out. On the opposite side of the sky, the day announced its presence with a grudging hint of brightness – like it was undecided whether to grow light – borne on a cool breeze. At this hour, people were already kneeling down to pray in the neon-lit cubes that are church interiors here, while Chinese shopkeepers were already waiting behind their counters, and cocks were crowing.
But on this particular morning, the sun showed itself only once, as a delicate red cross-hatch effect in a slate-grey bank of cloud, glimmering faintly before vanishing entirely. Then it returned, glowing like a toaster, before it promptly disappeared once and for all. Day broke at a leisurely pace and somewhat lackadaisically. Still irresolute about adopting an unequivocal mood, it wandered aimlessly like a person who has just got up, still heavy with sleep, before finally putting another quintessentially South Pacific weather situation on the agenda: the preamble to tropical rain.
Even so, the minute I set foot outside, I found myself caught up in the sheer verve of the place, the unflappable way its life revolves around a sea frontage that actually isn’t one, but rather port installations visited by a stream of ships covered in great rusting flakes of paint, with other smaller and newer but still battered ships following in their wake. An atmosphere of letting oneself go, of patient waiting and acquiescence pervades the scene, a feeling of exposure and permeability to the onward march of time. Rubbish is strewn everywhere, but how could it be otherwise, given that the wind catches it, whisks it from outdoor dining tables and overflowing skips, from children’s hands and from the quayside. Such an agglomeration of unattractiveness becomes so concentrated that my eyes start to water and I walk ever deeper into the dark wall of cloud that’s looming until rain does actually begin to fall, saturated, warm and incessant, and I take shelter along with three plump, friendly women beneath a plane tree. We get ourselves four coconuts and drink their milk, nodding our approval.
Every morning I walk for twenty minutes to a small Beach Café, as it calls itself, even though there’s no beach anywhere to be seen, only a dingy harbour breakwater where a few halfrusted barges are anchored, while others are in the process of being reconditioned. Every day I do the same thing, not just for the sake of ritual but also because I want to see what else is going on each morning. There’s no better way of getting into the routine of a place than by imposing a routine on yourself while you’re there.
Besides, I like sitting on the tiny, wind-battered veranda made of corrugated iron and drinking coffee and a juice mix of melon and pineapple, and eating buttered toast with orange marmalade. In the general run of things, the landlady is quite severe with me and wishes me ‘Goodbye’ rather than ‘Good morning’, but this morning, when ‘New York, New York’ came on the radio, she started swaying along with her two-hundred-weight bulk, and singing aloud: ‘If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere,’ though there was no one in the world for whom these lines could have been less fitting than her.
Then she approached the table and asked me where I was from, or rather where I was from and how come I’d ended up here sitting at this table. I answered:
‘If I can make it to here, I can make it to anywhere.’
She laughed, put her hand on my shoulder and let it rest there, while translating what I’d just said to her friends behind me in guttural Tongan.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Aren’t we all?’ I replied, thinking that we’d found common ground for friendly banter.
‘No,’ she replied brusquely, and answered the quizzical look I gave her by adding: ‘The Lord is always with us.’
‘Oh sorry, I’d forgotten about Him,’ I responded.
‘You should never do that,’ she chided me.
I promised I wouldn’t.
From the next-door table, a woman in her seventies dressed in bright red and wearing golden earrings looked over and shrugged her shoulders sympathetically.
‘That’s how it is here,’ she said. ‘You must have seen it for yourself: the place is full of churches and there’s three masses on Sundays, all packed full. People still believe in God here.’
Because she clearly didn’t anymore and wasn’t attempting to convert me, I went over to her table, offered her my hand in greeting and told her my name. Kerry, who had once worked as an anthropologist and had since made a living writing crime novels with her female partner, said ‘pleasure’ and then turned to wave to a local woman who’d just that minute driven up in a large sports car.
‘Dorothy, darling, if it isn’t yourself, back from the islands!’ I went back to my table. From here I had a panoramic view over the neighbourhood: I saw an old woman standing in the receding surf and gathering in fish traps; a flatbed lorry transporting soldiers and blue plastic chairs; an old man lifting up a stone slab covering a drainage manhole and plunging his hand down inside; a massive female truck driver crossing herself behind the wheel; Cassiopeia’s Café, with men coming out of it sporting bouffant hairdos and skirts while women, with their majestic heads, showed their gold teeth when they laughed; a peasant woman carefully putting earthy manioc roots into a basket lined with banana leaves; two people arm in arm, with each of their limbs fully tattooed; a woman in the prime of her life sitting in state on the back of a pickup truck in her wheelchair and gesticulating to a group of her friends, who have gathered round in a large gaggle at her feet, as the truck moves at a sedate pace down the road. And the wind is leaving behind its traces, too, bending the palms, parting the banana bushes, tearing signs from the nails securing them, blowing over bicycles, making coconuts drop from the trees, and catching hold of the large clam shells that have been used as ashtrays on the veranda and sending them skidding across the tarmac below, in a hail of mother-of-pearl splinters.
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 husband. 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 hotel. ‘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.
The Tongans have their Stonehenge, too, an alpha-sign made of volcanic rock. You go through this archway and come to a tall stone slab, in the shadow of which one of the ancient kings of Tonga, who was two and a half metres tall, is said to have leant, as shown by the impression left by his body in the stone, and then you can walk on further into a dense, dark wood full of spiders’ webs and unfamiliar flowers, and further on towards the sea, which you can only hear from here but not see. Leah took a few apprehensive steps down this path, but quickly turned back.
‘It’s haunted,’ she said.
‘That’s your relatives,’ Douglas whispered.
And doesn’t she have every reason to be afraid? In cases like hers, there have been plenty of stories of corporal punishments, mutilations and imprisonment. The violation of taboos has to be avenged, otherwise it wouldn’t be called taboo.
We make our way back. Our gaze grows numb as we watch the receding waves. On the gravel path to her hotel, Leah turns around one last time, like she wants to say something. Then she seems to think better of it.
As evening falls a couple of hours later, four well-built women descend the path just outside my room, notice me standing at the window and give me a wave. I wave back. One of them beckons to me, inviting me to join them. I shake my head, at which she squats down and mimics a riding motion. In former times, the women here offered themselves to strangers for a few rusty nails, and sailors praised their tirelessness. Even the degeneration of charm into vulgarity that I’ve just witnessed is actually quite genial in its own way.
In 1803, a merchant called John Turnbull landed on the island of ’Eua. The natives had little to offer except foodstuffs and a few tools, but in exchange for these few odds and ends demanded valuable items like scissors and axes. When the English sailors refused, the natives had three women – who were clearly war captives and the prettiest they could muster – brought to the vessel, and offered to sell their services to the crew. But in his log, Turnbull calls them ‘stocky, masculine and with hard features’, and none of the sailors wanted anything to do with them, which baffled the natives, who had gone to some lengths to bring them to the British.
At this stage, Europeans were primarily interested in trading with China. Yet they had few commodities that were of interest to the Chinese, with the exception of furs and whale fat, which together with all manner of whale by-products found a ready market in China. And so the Europeans extended their whalehunting areas to cover Polynesia, which in turn led to bitter trade wars with indigenous whale hunters, conflicts which were marked by skulduggery and extreme violence that poisoned relations between natives and foreigners. If one also takes into account the fact that an unprecedented wave of Christian missionary activity reached the Pacific region at the same time, it is easy to imagine the Polynesians’ confusion. Who was the quintessential Westerner, they must have asked themselves: the unscrupulous whaler and exploiter, or the missionary fisher of men, who proclaimed brotherly love and shared humanity?
And that wasn’t all. Precisely the fact that Captain Cook characterized the inhabitants of Tonga as peaceable, friendly and helpful and spoke of the abundance of natural produce available there, and because it was generally known that missionaries were well established on the island, led whale hunters to beat a path to Tonga in particular, so exacerbating the conflicts between peoples.
In addition, Europeans spread infectious disease to the islands of Polynesia, and once slave traders had also found their way to the region, the arrival of the white man once again proved disastrous for the indigenous civilization. But despite that, or maybe precisely because of it, Tonga is the only state within Oceania never to be colonized by a European power.
‘Indeed,’ Georg Forster exclaimed while accompanying James Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific, ‘if the learning and erudition of individual men have to be bought at the cost of the happiness of entire nations, then it would have been better for both the discoverers and the discovered if the South Seas had remained forever a closed book to unruly Europeans!’
Sometimes, the idyll looks down upon a car park. This is the case looking out from the Beach Café: every morning the manioc sellers lay out their earthy roots on cloths on the quayside, knock holes in coconuts, display bundles of vanilla pods and pour kava powder into bottles. And every morning the fishermen wait for sloops to take them out. The arrangement of the stalls is always the same, the cars stop in the same places, and the same hands shake one another in greeting. Tourists flock here for the market’s immediacy, in search of sights worth seeing and opportunities to take snaps; by contrast, travellers come here looking for the permanent and the everlasting. You have to have spent a long time in a particular place, visiting the same haunts over and over again in order to discern its true spirit.
Kerry, the anthropologist and crime writer, is already ensconced at her little table outside the café by the time I arrive today; she’s dressed in red and dripping with gold jewellery again, and is also sporting a pink ribbon for Breast Cancer Awareness on her lapel. With the beady-eyed alertness that can equally well characterize both ladies and wild beasts, she’s keeping a close watch on the car park, the quayside and visitors to the café, and immediately waves me over when she sees me.
‘Sit down, keep me company, I’m writing a postcard. Tell me, who were those two people you were with yesterday? Friends? I’ve never seen them round here before.’
I tell her about Stephen and Leah, their conspiracy theories, their resentments, and their fear of her family.
‘The woman’s a local, you can tell that straight away. Simple people. People like that used to be called “dirt-eaters” on Tonga. Don’t be shocked.’
She picks the raisins out of her muesli and lines them up, one by one, on the saucer under the bowl.
‘So, she’s come here with her boyfriend, pregnant I’m guessing? I thought so. Oh dear, that could get tricky. Yeah, the dirteaters can be brutal if you violate their traditions.’
A sports car draws up right in front of us. An Indian beauty of forty or more slips out, wrapped in a formal green and black sari, and with lithe movement floats up the steps to the café.
‘Dorothy, meet my new best friend … what’s your name again? Roger.’
The two friends immediately lapse into a private argot. I catch snippets concerning an appointment, money, some former advice and a warning.
Dorothy announces ‘I must go inside, I’ve got to wait there at a window table.’
The moment she’s disappeared, Kerry’s head comes right up close to mine, so close I can smell her face powder.
‘Some really shady business goes on in this café. Did you see Dorothy? She’s as poor as a church mouse, but she’s dressed in her glad rags and has hired that car; she’s meeting a man here who wants money off her for brokering a leasehold. In the café, I ask you! I’ve warned her already. And in cash, too, can you imagine?’
She throws herself back in her seat like someone who can look back on a gratifying tradition of smart-aleckry, but what she says is true: because foreigners aren’t permitted to buy land here, just lease it for fifty years, at which point it either reverts to the owner or the leasehold is extended, some dodgy dealings have evolved between Westerners wanting to get away from it all and native landowners.
It clearly bothers Kerry that from her seat outside on the terrace here she hasn’t got sight of the second entrance, which Dorothy’s would-be business partner might use to enter the café.
‘Excuse me, dear, I’d better go inside and give Dorothy some moral support. She can be such an airhead.’
When Douglas drives up a moment later, he hasn’t got a ticket for the Princess Ashika, but in its place he has a suggestion.
‘I’ve been thinking and wanted to ask you, now that we know one another a bit better, why don’t you come with me to ’Eua, my home island? We’re burying my great aunt there at the weekend. That way, you’ll get to see the real Tonga and witness a genuine funeral ceremony with my own family. You’d be very welcome to join us.’
The two islands now known as ’Eua and Tongatapu were named Middelburgh and Amsterdam by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman. ’Eua was the second island of the kingdom that James Cook landed on, a small, nowadays largely neglected island largely untouched by tourism, where people are left to their own devices and on which reason has so far failed to impose order.
Douglas recounts some of the other advantages of life on ’Eua:
‘On ’Eua we always say: Just keep calm. It’s not nearly as hectic as on Nuku’alofa …’
‘… and the top speed for cars is fifteen kilometres per hour, and hefty people waddle comfortably along the pavements, and I’ve never seen anyone there make a sudden movement. That’s just the way it is: the farther away you get from the centre of things, the slower the pace of life.’
Two days later, the little aircraft begins its descent to the island of ’Eua. The pilot puts his plane down on the grass next to the runway, because it’s safer than landing on the rutted tarmac. The paths running off into the palm groves between the huts are a bright cinnabar-red colour. Sometimes, the women here rub a bit of this soil into their washing water and use it to dye their hair.
We can tell we’re approaching Douglas’ parents’ house from the purple sashes that have been draped around the whitewashed wooden sheds in the compound, as a sign of mourning for his grandfather’s sister.
‘She was eighty plus, I think,’ Douglas says.
He doesn’t really categorize people by their age. The oldest of the mourners is Douglas’ mother, who has a fine-featured face etched by austerity and is wearing a shawl decorated with a blue and yellow flower pattern. A Hammond organ is tootling away in the background on the radio. All the sheds surrounding the meadow have been cleared and laid out with mats with the designs of peacocks, coffee jugs or rhombuses woven into them.
The women are sitting in a circle preparing for the interment. Even the professional mourners are draped in bast-fibre mats, which make them look like scarecrows or Christmas figures from the Krkonosze Mountains in the Czech Republic. Douglas’ mother puts tapioca served on pandanus leaves in front of me, and next to it a little pile of finely chopped beef, including the fat, gristle and bones.
‘Now say your prayers and eat.’
I fold my hands and lower my eyes. The meat has a doughy taste, and there’s country music playing on the radio now. My gaze is drawn through a back door, to the open fireplace behind the house, surrounded by a pile of coconut shells and more upholstered chairs in a circle. From this afternoon on, no more radio music will be allowed. Instead, there will be communal singing of spirituals, the whole night through until ten o’clock the next morning. That’s how long the deceased great aunt’s family members will have to keep the fire outside going, while others tell all the good stories from her life. Indeed, a young girl with a very deep voice has just begun to do so.
I go out and sit in the open. From the steps of a shed for housing guests, I can see the black and brindled pigs. A boy is grating coconut flesh coarsely, skinny dogs with scarred faces are panting in the grass, there’s the bleat of women’s voices and an old woman comes singing through the finely drizzling rain; she stops, noisily snorts up her mucus and lingers a while under the flat green canopy of the mango trees.
An hour later Douglas has mobilized his lethargic cousin Winter, along with the family car. From the glove compartment wafts the aroma of vanilla pods, green ones and black and brown flecked ones. The little tree air freshener on the rear view mirror can’t compete.
Underway, Douglas’s commentary is all on the one topic:
‘Look at all these coconuts. See how rich the soil here is! We’ve got any amount of mangoes, so many we’re even feeding them to the pigs. We only need money for electricity and fresh water and for the kids’ schoolbooks, everything else literally grows on trees. Look how much kava we’ve got; I’ve never seen this much kava on Nuku’alofa.’
Here and there a few plots have been cut into the sparse jungle of coconut palms, mango trees, weeds and other undergrowth and planted densely with vanilla and kava bushes – land for cultivation chopped out of the bush, and which nature, from all sides, is constantly trying to reclaim, with rampant undergrowth and encroaching branches everywhere.
Presently we find ourselves climbing a cliff high above the sea. A good five metres from the edge, Douglas stops dead and keeps tugging at my shoulder to pull me back. Far below us, birds wheel out from the cliff-face, and spume froths between the black volcanic boulders.
‘I get dizzy easily,’ Douglas explains. ‘Even when I’m sitting in the sea and put a diving mask on and look at the bottom, it makes me giddy.’
Suddenly, this colossal man seems quite delicate. We carry on along the cliffs. The cliff tops are rounded and grassy, while inland the land sweeps away in loose folds, like careless drapery. Here, on the most beautiful spot on the island, high above the sea where one only has the wind for company, there once lived a German friend of the old, plump king of Tonga. This mysterious German built his house in complete solitude, cut off from everyone, and set about raising pigs.
But after a few years it emerged that the man had six passports and twice as many aliases. Also, a U-boat which he was in radio contact with was once rumoured to have surfaced in the bay. When these stories began to seep into the public domain, the authorities picked up his scent and he was forced to flee. The king, greatly perturbed, took swift action and summarily had the mysterious German’s house razed to the ground. It was as if, by doing so, he was wanting to expunge his memory of the man too. Under the house, a vast hole came to light, presumably a dungeon of some sort. But for whom? Soon after, the fugitive was shot in the back on a neighbouring island. No one ever found out who he really was.
We drive back to his mother’s house, where the mourning party has by now dispersed. They’re all waiting for the arrival of the coffin, which is supposed to come on the ship first thing that morning. Douglas sets off to do some condolence visits.
In a village that’s been very much left to itself, I find myself likewise left to my own devices, amid free-running hens, free-running pigs and free-running strangers. Here, too, there are scarcely any fences. Throughout the island, everything lies strewn about like on some opulent lawn, with pigs and huts and columns of smoke and stories and songs. Today we’ve had all kinds of weather, none of it very long-lasting. The clouds are scudding by.
If you were to ask me what my ideal footpath is, it would be one of the paths here: light or reddish-brown earth, without any demarcation, and palms dotted about irregularly and piglets crossing it now and then. You hear the wind, the shouts of children, an axe, a cockerel, and in the fields to either side stand the mango trees with their broad-leaved canopies. The huts are surrounded by flowerbeds that are home to the most exotic plants, and butterflies of an unimagined size and colour flutter round the banana bushes. The voices of the old women crack in the wind like flags. You hear our own footsteps, you stop and it is perfectly still and complete.
We take the family car to the harbour and park by the bollards. Men lurch up like they’re staggering under their own weight. A large group of black-clad, mat-bedecked people, solemnly bowing to each other and respectfully greeting one another, gathers at the quayside.
When the ship docks, Leah and Stephen are the last people to disembark, before the coffin is unloaded. They sidle up, pale and earnest, to a group of locals who make not the slightest move towards them, but who immediately close ranks around the couple, so that I lose sight of them. In a great throng, they walk off down the dirt track, and I ask myself how they’re planning to square their own conspiracy theories with the great system of taboos.
The ornate coffin is the last thing to come off the ferry. Where the ship’s ramp meets the quayside, they’re all standing there in black, and in the grotesque bulk of their bast and mat cloaks, which they sometimes roll up laboriously. Douglas especially, who’s wearing a mat that looks dirty and frayed and keeps on popping open, seems to have changed character entirely. He appears comical, and when the women start fiddling with his mat cowl, he gawps at them like a village idiot. But at one point both of his hands, with all nine fingers, are pressed up against a gate on the breakwater. His niece looks at him, I look at him, and then she and I look straight at one another. A taboo wouldn’t be a taboo if he were simply to tell us what had happened at that juncture.
The coffin is loaded onto a decorated truck and immediately covered with mats. The women sit up alongside it as it sets off on its final journey in a slow-moving convoy with a police escort. It will come to a halt finally on the lawn in the middle of a great feast, where the guests will contribute their good memories of the deceased and the bereaved will contribute the food. Throughout the whole night, until sunrise, they must stay by the fireplace, since it is the family’s duty to keep all the funeral guests supplied with nourishment on a running basis.
Finally, at dawn, when the visitors’ stories have dried up and the spirits have all departed, the fire may also be extinguished. Justice has been done to the deceased. It was a lovely send-off, a worthy feast, and now the departed may rest in peace.
Next morning, when I walk into my familiar Beach Café in Nuku’alofa, Kerry is already sitting there. She’s busy picking out bits of spaghetti with her fork from a fish stew, and waves me over.
‘You’ve heard the news, I suppose? It was bound to happen sometime. I warned about it time and again …’
‘Warned about what?’
‘The Princess Ashika sank on the overnight sailing to Ha’afeva. It’s been less than a month since she came into service. They’ve only picked up fifty-four people alive, eighty-seven are still missing, but the toll’s rising by the hour. Trouble is, who on earth here had a regular ticket, who was a registered passenger?’
‘How did it happen?’
‘The police are acting very professionally, they’re not jumping to any premature conclusions or issuing statements. But I hear the ship wasn’t even properly seaworthy. Anyone who had a berth below deck will have drowned. They haven’t even been able to salvage the bodies. But the men standing at the railings and the smokers are probably the only ones who’ve survived. Did you really hear nothing about it?’
I tell her that I’ve been on ’Eua at the funeral of Douglas’ great aunt, though originally I’d been intending to sail to Ha’afeva on board the doomed ship.
‘That’s how stories go in this part of the world,’ Kerry says. ‘You miss your own death because you’ve been at someone else’s burial.’
Over the following days, the number of dead rises to one hundred and twenty, and the authorities ask publicly how it’s possible that there should have been so many unregistered passengers on board.
Then the same old pattern as everywhere: an incident had taken place and now the hunt was on for the moral high ground, and for someone to take the blame, carry the can, no stone was left unturned and no cesspit left undrained. The king was told about the catastrophe, expressed his deep sympathies and a few hours later went off on holiday to Scotland. The democracy movement immediately came out onto the streets to stage public protests and to reiterate what they’d been saying for years, namely that it was high time that the monarch abdicated.
‘We don’t need a king like this.’
But on the road to the airport, there’s still a prominent poster of him, just as before, with his image and the slogan: “King George Tipou V – Icon to the World”…’
‘When are you off back home?’ Kerry wants to know. ‘Monday. An hour and a half’s stopover in Sydney, then it’s on to Singapore …’
‘What, you’re planning to catch an onward flight to Europe one and a half hours after arriving in Sydney? You can forget that straight away. The flights from here are never on time. They’re driven away from Tonga by the wind. Either they’re stuck here unable to take off in the first place, or they can’t land, and are diverted somewhere to wait, or you’re advised to fly to another island and pick up a flight there …’
‘Clear off as fast as you can. Now the Red Cross people are flooding onto the island as well. Doctors, journalists, relatives of the victims from the mainland. Who’s to say when you’d next be able to get away?’
So, I grabbed a seat on the late flight to Auckland the following evening, days before my planned departure. In a back hall at the airport, I saw coffins piled up. People in bast-fibre mats were solemnly taking delivery of them and bowing to the boxes like they were bodies from which the souls had already departed.
In Auckland, long after midnight, I check into the first hotel I can find at the airport. On the transistor radio on the night porter’s counter, a voice is reading the local weather forecast: ‘Clouded skies with occasional rains, heavy winds up and single thunderstorms on all Tongan coasts.’