Introduction
Within indigenous languages, the ‘old’ languages, we can glimpse another world – a world that, for Samoans, is almost forgotten. In the stories told and words used, in the way those words are arranged or spoken, in the images and sentiments they express, we find a fundamentally different sense of what is material, spiritual or religious. Ancient proverbial sayings offer windows into this world, as do myths and legends. Each is a system for recording knowledge, culture, values, beliefs, habits, dreams and realities. And each contains whispers – the kind Samoans describe as tala tu’umumusu and tala taumusumusu – that reflect the basic human yearning to know: Who am I? Why do I, or why ought I, do the things I do?
In this book we are concerned with the meeting of ‘old’ and ‘new’ knowledges – specifically old and new indigenous, spiritual, religious and cultural knowledges. We are concerned with the way these knowledges criss-cross. Sometimes, while they touch each other, live in each other’s spaces, they just can’t seem to connect ‘heart unto heart’.1 At the meeting points of ‘old’ and ‘new’ we find not only truths and certainties but also anxieties. We find instances of making real connections but also of talking past each other. These connections and disconnections permeate the whispers and vanities surrounding Samoan indigenous knowledge and religion.
It is common for Pacific scholars and orators to seek out an indigenous proverb (preferably an ancient one) to begin, illustrate, flavour or conclude a speech or support an argument. These proverbs can make the user seem poetic and profound. The practice is an exercise in vanity if the user does not know the proverb’s context, meanings and nuances. But knowing is not easy. Searching for meaning takes commitment and an openness to learn from and negotiate ‘old’ and ‘new’.
In 1906, German High Court Judge Dr E Schultz compiled a collection of traditional sayings. Proverbial Expressions of the Samoans was translated into English by Brother Herman in 1945 and published by the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 1950. It contained the proverb: “E pala le ma’a, ‘ae le pala le ‘upu. / Stones decay but words last”.2 Samoan orators often use this proverb, yet its full repertoire of meanings is rarely unpacked.
This saying is described in Samoan as an alaga’upu (o le tala e ala ai le upu).3 Sometimes orators replace the word upu (word) with tala (story or phrase) (E pala le ma’a, ‘ae le pala le tala). The proverb is commonly interpreted as a caution against being loose with the tongue. Under close analysis, the proverb illustrates just how deep and complex ancient Samoan knowledge was, and is, and the very different way it conceived the relationship between the material and spiritual. Why did our ancestors juxtapose words with stones? Why stones and not rocks? Particularly standing rocks (papatū) as these were prevalent in Samoan creation myths and last longer geologically. Why did they use the term pala, which means rotting or decaying, to describe the erosion of stones? Were they equating stones with humans?
In fact, stones are significant in an ancient Samoan funeral chant, usually recited at the funeral of a high chief.4 In this chant, homage is paid to the nine levels of spiritual wisdom. These stages are called lagi (heavens). In the eighth heaven, stones are directly acknowledged and celebrated: “Tulouna le lagi tuavalu! Tulouna le maa taanoa! / Salutations to the eighth heaven! Salutations to the [moving] stones!”5 The tenth heaven is where the ancient Samoan God Tagaloa-a-le-lagi resides. So what is it about stones that the ancient Samoans so revered?
Questions such as this ruffle the mind. We are forced to confront our ancestral spiritual world in which the sameness of stones and humans is considered fundamental truth, and in which the tangible – ma’a (stones) – and the intangible – upu / tala (words / stories) are comparable. This sameness rubs awkwardly against Christian beliefs about man’s special relationship with God, a single God, and about a world where humans and stones are radically separate. We are forced to contest the reality that God’s existence “has nothing to do with us, and exists gloriously beyond our needs and interests”.6
As Christian knowledge superseded indigenous knowledge in places like Samoa, old indigenous proverbs were replaced or modified by Christian proverbs. In this context, finding cultural custodians willing to openly share their ancient knowledge is near impossible. Custodians of indigenous knowledge in the Pacific have tended not to talk publicly about their knowledge. For them, such knowledge was and is tapu – divine, sacred and subject to the wrath of supernatural forces. This has usually meant that only a few have acquired such knowledge and that selection has usually been determined by equally sacred (that is, secretive and exclusionary) criteria.
This book breaks tapu. It adopts as its driving principle the view that while all knowledge is sacred and to be respected, it is also something to be shared and debated. It is, after all, our knowledge.
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Whispers and Vanities (this edited collection) is a response to and a celebration of the wisdom and knowledge of His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Tupuola Tufuga Efi (hereafter Tui Atua or His Highness). Tui Atua is Samoa’s current head of state. He is today also one of Samoa’s most respected cultural custodians. The renowned Samoan writer Maualaivao Albert Wendt states, “among his generation, Tui Atua is the most knowledgeable and passionate leader about ‘things Samoan’. He brings to the discussion a hard-earned wisdom acquired over his lifetime in politics at the international, national, nuu and aiga levels, a wisdom also derived from his study of, and deep knowledge of and experience in, trying to live out ‘the Samoan indigenous knowledge’, and restoring that to a central position in our lives and the ways we view reality”.7 Tui Atua protects Samoan indigenous knowledge not just by recounting what he believes it to be, but also by allowing it – his representation of it – to be publicly explored, critiqued and evaluated. Such openness is not easy, especially for men of authority. Nevertheless such openness is critical to whether this knowledge can live, grow and flourish beyond the select few.
This book has its genesis in Tui Atua’s essay to the Fifth Parliament of the World’s Religions,8 titled “Whispers and Vanities in Samoan Indigenous Religious Culture” (reproduced in chapter one and hereafter abbreviated to “Whispers and Vanities”). The parliament was held 3–9 December 2009 in Melbourne, Australia. It was the first time in the parliament’s history that indigenous religious values and beliefs were publicly explored. ‘Indigenous peoples’ and ‘Oceania’ were made visible in many ways, including as a major theme for the conference and as a focus for papers by participants.
In the spirit of furthering a deeper interreligious and intercultural dialogue on the themes of the Fifth Parliament, and in particular on Tui Atua’s “Whispers and Vanities” paper, a weekend retreat was held in January 2010 in Samoa. On the morning of 15 January, a small group of about twenty people gathered in a marquee on the freshly mowed lawns of the head of state’s seaside Vailele residence. Most were church leaders, but some were also leaders within government, tertiary institutions and non-government organisations (see photograph of retreat participants in the opening pages of this book). The retreat, as Maualaivao Albert Wendt describes in the Afterword, emphasised the value of ānapogi (the ritual or practice of abstinence and meditation) and of the principle of sufiga (gentle persuasion). At the end of the retreat, participants felt strongly that there was a need to continue the dialogue in the form of a book, so that authors from other parts of the Pacific could be invited to participate. An editorial committee was formed and those who had presented papers at the retreat were invited to submit these for inclusion in the book.
The task of inviting and selecting contributors to a publication such as this can be delicate. As an editorial team, we not only wanted input from our wider Pacific family of scholars and religious leaders, we also wanted to ensure that we had male and female contributors and some intergenerational representation. Our final selection of thirty-eight authors reflects the editorial team’s desire to offer a range of perspectives that would enlarge, in meaningful ways, the debate Tui Atua was promoting. Given the religious focus of “Whispers and Vanities”, it was clear from the outset that input from religious scholars and leaders was important. As well, we were keen to invite well-known indigenous Pacific (which turned out to be mainly Polynesian) writers, who have over the years contributed to related debates on sexuality, colonialism, education, history, psychology and culture in the Pacific. We encouraged all contributors to engage with the issues in whatever way seemed most natural to them.
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Whispers and Vanities opens with Tui Atua’s address, which forms the reference point and launching platform for the thirty-seven poetic and prose responses that follow. A poem begins and ends all the responses. Twelve poems in total weave themselves through and around twenty-five prose essays. There is symbolism in this. All twelve poets – Maualaivao Albert Wendt, Momoe Von Reiche, Serie Barford, Ruperake Petaia, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Tafea Polamalu, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard, Sia Figiel, Peseta Noumea Simi, Tusiata Avia and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl – are of Samoan ancestry and have considerable standing in the contemporary Pacific literary community. Most of the essayists are similarly well-known in their respective fields. (See the biographical notes to learn more about all the authors).
In his chapter, Tui Atua argues and provokes responses to three main points. First, that the God of Christianity is also the God of Ancient Samoa. Second, that Samoans today (and by extension other indigenous Pacific peoples) have ‘hang-ups’ about their naked bodies that stem not from indigenous but from Christian, arguably Augustinian, ‘hang-ups’. And thirdly, that there is an equivalence between humans, animals, stones, rocks, earth, mountains and all other material and cosmic life.
Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, one of Samoa’s most well-known historians internationally, responds that one of the most interesting areas of study in Samoan history is the interface between Samoan ancestral spirituality and Samoan Christianity: where “Samoans became Christian and Christianity became Samoan”. He shows us in his chapter how the tools used for developing literacy and for translating between Samoan and Christian languages hid the fact that the Bible is not actually about monotheism, as many presume, but about monolatry. The problem for Christian missionaries, he says, was not that they believed ancient Samoans to have no gods (or no religion). It was that they believed them to have too many gods and of the wrong kind. Either way, any claim that indigenous Samoans did not know God, or that God did not know them, before the arrival of Christianity is, as Tui Atua says, an insult both to God and to Samoa’s ancient forebears.
But this assumes, as Anthony Kelly draws out in his chapter, that the God of Christianity is also the God of pre-Christian Samoa. There is tension in this assumption, which stems from the criss-crossing religious and philosophical schemes that cause what Jione Havea refers to in his chapter as “schooners on the reef”.
Guilt and shame surrounding nakedness and sexuality form one of the largest schooners on the Oceanian reef today. Tui Atua suggests that this (Augustinian) guilt is endemic to the Christian rather than the indigenous Pacific and is the source of many of our whispers and vanities. Raymond Pelly argues that naming and juxtaposing guilt in this way is unfair because it places undue emphasis on only one part of St Augustine’s writings (his Confessions)9. He pleads for a fuller reading of St Augustine. Karen Lupe examines the question by drawing out the relationship between Augustinian guilt, ideas of original sin and what she calls “original sanctity”. Karen Lupe and Tui Atua find analytical value in posing the western (Christian) against the indigenous as binary opposites. Yet Raymond Pelly along with Anthony Kelly and Paul Morris ask how, given the messiness of contact, the contemporary revival of the ‘indigenous reference’ is or ought to be named and seen. They articulate how in this naming and seeing we can gain insight into our cultures of whispers.
The discomfort in our whispering cultures intensifies when we examine more closely what Fonoti Lafitai I Fuata’i describes as “x-rated cultural practices”. When reading about the highly sexualised Samoan sa’ē dance for example, and how the dancers “teased and tantalised” their audiences by exposing themselves (their genitalia), Naomi Fuamatu, our youngest contributor asks, without actually asking, why it is that we might feel self-conscious? Why might we feel this same self-consciousness when we read of the origins of the Rotuman phrase “Noa’ia e tau” (an abbreviation, as Vilsoni Hereniko explains, of a longer phrase meaning: “thank you for fucking [me]”)? Would we, as Raymond Pelly and Pamela Stephenson Connolly explore in their chapters, feel angry, disgusted and ashamed, or liberated, when we read the word ‘cunt’ in this book? And do we feel equally uncomfortable, or just a bit nervous and giggly, when we read of Karen Lupe’s present-day conversations with her long-deceased great-grandmother Tuame, and of how Tuame got angry and disgusted at “the white man [who was watching the sa’ē] go red in the face” after he saw the vulva of the naked women dancing? What kind of man is he, Tuame asks, if he has not seen or is embarrassed by seeing a vulva? When we read all this, how do we feel?
All cultures, as Raymond Pelly points out, have tala taumusumusu, based on shame and repression. Tui Atua’s point in forcing us to acknowledge this is not to make us uncomfortable but rather to plead for responsibility. To admit to the existence of a Samoan culture of whispers and vanities is to admit that in order for our ‘indigenous-ness’ or Samoan-ness to survive, even our most tapu knowledge – Christian and indigenous, old and new – needs to be open to scrutiny and evaluation, and re-evaluation. Several authors affirm this: Caroline Sinavaiana Gabbard in her poetic examination of Samoa’s myths and legends and the power of the feminine; Upolu Luma Va’ai in his metaphorical examination of the message of the Trinity in the Samoan concept of faaaloalo; Bradd Shore, Cluny Macpherson and Laavasa Macpherson in their explorations of the relationship between local, religious and global knowledge; Tui Rakuita in his intricate analysis of our Wittgensteinian language games; Reina Whaitiri in her passionate defence of mana wahine (the power of having strong female activists in indigenous movements); Konai Helu Thaman and Unaisi Nabobo-Baba in their respective summaries of why and how we must teach our indigenous Pacific knowledges in formal (classroom) and informal (village and home) educational settings; and Jennifer Freeman in her reflections as a practitioner of narrative and just therapies on the living legacies of growing up in Samoa as the daughter of Derek Freeman. Being open to publicly discussing our various cultures of taumusumusu demands, as Vitolia Mo’a points out in her chapter, an institutional, individual and societal culture of taking responsibility and being accountable.
One of the most depressing areas of social injustice today is our ambivalence towards male responsibility. In her chapter, Jenny Plane Te Paa Daniel forces us to address that question. She asks, for example, what kind of society do we have when we condemn our daughters for having babies out of wedlock but expect the fathers of these innocent babies to take no responsibility? Similarly, Stephen L Filipo implores the Christian community of Samoa to search within themselves and ask: what kind of Christian nation do we have when our sons are encouraged by their teachers to impose physical violence on their peers as a show of superiority and manliness?
Ambivalence towards responsibility is equally present when, as Pacific scholars, we might knowingly, ignorantly or naively privilege one source of knowledge over another. Teresia K Teaiwa, Anne-Marie Tupuola and Tracey McIntosh caution against this in their chapters. They press: what kind of scholastic tradition are we creating as indigenous scholars when we dismiss one source of knowledge over another without fair consideration of their merits?
All these questions and many more are asked in this book. All emerge from the heart of Tui Atua’s plea for an honest and open conversation about our whispers and vanities and how these affect our understanding of who we are and what we believe in.
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Since its conception, it has taken four years for Whispers and Vanities to be born. There were times when as an editorial team and as contributing authors we were anxious it might never appear. In our moments of doubt, we consoled ourselves by saying that the book would be born when it was meant to be born, namely ‘in God’s time’. Given this book’s religious and spiritual focus, this saying seemed apt. Thankfully these moments passed and we are now able to celebrate the book’s birth. Needless to say, we are both relieved and excited that the work has finally come to life on these pages. It is our hope that Whispers and Vanities, a collection of short, thought-provoking poetic and prose essays, will impact strongly on the hearts and minds of all who choose to read it. We hope it will open up, in deep and inclusive ways, constructive, probing and loving dialogues that honour the best of our indigenous heritages.
We end these introductory comments by sharing two short texts, one a well-known poem titled “He wishes for the cloths of heaven”, by one of Tui Atua’s favourite poets, William Butler Yeats, and the second, a biblical text in Samoan and English by the crying prophet Jeremiah. Both sum up the many sources, themes, wishes, dilemmas and challenges that inspired this book.
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.10
O lo’o faapea ona fetalai mai o le Ali’i,
ia outou tutū i ala, ma va’ava’ai,
ma fesili i ala o le vavau,
po o i fea le ala lelei,
ma ia outou savavali ai,
ona maua lea e outou o le malologa mo outou agaga.
A ua latou fai mai, Matou te le savavali i ai.11
Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it’.12
Let’s walk.
1 In the manner described by Cardinal John Newman.
2 Schultz, E. (1950). Proverbial expressions of the Samoans. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 59 (2), 112–134. Retrieved from http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document/Volume_58_1949/Volume_58%2C_No._4/Proverbial_expressions_of_the_Samoans%2C_by_E._Schultz%2C_p_139–184?action=null.
3 Ibid, p.139.
4 Tui Atua, T.T.T.E. (2009). Samoan jurisprudence and the Samoan Lands and Titles Court: The perspective of a litigant. In T. Suaalii-Sauni, I. Tuagalu, N. Kirifi-Alai, N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su’esu’e Manogi: In Search of Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan indigenous reference (pp. 153–172). Le Papaigalagala, Samoa: The Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa.
5 Ibid, p.155.
6 Owens, J.F. (2007). Animals, ontology and Rorty’s giraffe, Colloquium, 39 (2), 170–184, p.184.
7 Wendt, A. (2009). Foreword. In T. Suaalii-Sauni, I. Tuagalu, N. Kirifi-Alai, N. Fuamatu (Eds.), Su’esu’e Manogi: In search of fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi and the Samoan indigenous reference (pp. ix–x, p.x). Le Papaigalagala, Samoa: The Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa. Italics in original.
8 The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions is a non-profit organisation. The council was founded in 1893 and oversees the activities of the parliament. A Parliament of the World’s Religions has been held every five years in a different country since 1993. The inaugural parliament opened in Chicago in 1893. The next parliament could not be held until a century later in 1993, again in Chicago. At that centennial parliament, a resolution was passed to hold subsequent parliaments every five years in a different city. Thus the Third Parliament was held in Cape Town in 1999, the Fourth Parliament was held in Barcelona in 2004, and then the Fifth Parliament was held in Melbourne in 2009. Brussels will host the 2014 parliament. See https://www.parliamentofreligions.org/
9 Saint Augustine. (1992). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). New York, U.S.A.: Oxford University Press.
11 Ieremia 6:16. The Bible Society. (1981). O le Tusi Paia o le Feagaiga Tuai ma le Feagaiga Fou. Suva, Fiji: The Bible Society of the South Pacific.
12 Jeremiah 6: 16. Retrieved from https://www.bible.com/bible/111/jer.6.16.niv.