Dan Taulapapa McMullin is a painter and poet. His paintings and sculpture have been exhibited at Okaioceanikarts Gallery, McCarthy Art Gallery and Fresh Gallery Ōtara in Aotearoa, as well as the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the Gorman Museum at University of California, Davis, and with the Indigenous Forum at the United Nations. He won a Poets&Writers Award from The Writers Loft in Saint Paul, and a Best Short Film Award from the Rainbow Film Festival of Honolulu. His parents, Lupelele and Samuelu, are from Manu‘a and Tutuila in American Sāmoa. He is teaching a course on the contemporary art of Oceania at the University of California, Irvine, but his heart is always in Sāmoa.
In Lagituavalu a ghost roamed the land,
it was a crying ghost and it lived in the trees.
People talked about the crying ghost and what a nuisance it was.
They petitioned the Governor to do something,
send it away on priority mail, or maybe express mail post haste.
The workers at the airport told the workers at the post office.
The workers at the post office told the fire department.
The fire department told the police.
The police chief visited the attorney general.
The attorney general called his sister the governor’s wife.
The governor’s wife said to her husband in bed that night, ‘Call the president.’
The governor’s wife’s husband said,
‘No … Let God solve things in his own time …’
But God let it all go,
because the ghost was on a sacred journey through Lagituavalu.
‘Life is a dream, nothing comes to sleepers but a dream,’
as the song went on the radio, over and over,
‘Far beyond the sky, the source of everything.’
Every time the song came on again, the ghost began wailing, wailing,
until the governor’s wife called the radio station herself and asked,
‘Please, please stop playing that song, I can’t stand it any more.’
But the radio station attendant replied,
‘I can’t do anything about it,
the DJ went to Lagituafitu to attend a conference,
everything you hear is on a tape
and I can’t stop it because it’s looped.’
After a very long time
when people began getting used to the wailing of the ghost
and even little children would no longer wake up and notice it crying in the night,
God, walking about came upon a talie tree with big waxy leaves
and hearing the tired ghost snoring through the wood, told it,
‘My dear, the one you seek is not here.’
Waking, the ghost shook itself from the tree’s trunk and branches
pouring like rain from the leaves, and rising like mist from the grass
it went away at last from Lagituavalu, the Eighth Heaven,
back to Lalolagi, the Earth,
back to the land of the living.
For the crying ghost was a living person in Lagituavalu the land of the dead
where the living are only ghosts, and the real ghosts are flesh and blood.
And back in Lalolagi the land of the living
I broke a glass again, against the kitchen sink.
Jerry always stayed in the kitchen
that’s what fags in American Sāmoa do
take care of the young
the old, haunt the kitchen, cooking
and washing dishes. Anyway,
one usually saw Jerry
at the kitchen sink.
Now, this part of the story I made up:
One day
a missionary gave Jerry an eel to cook
but Jerry knew it was a sacred eel
and was taken by it.
He kept it in a rain barrel filled with water
as a pet. A sacred pet.
Every once in a while
Jerry put on a bright frock
beat her face and caught a taxi to town.
Pago Pago!
As Sheree she went to all the clubs
and asked all the straight boys to dance
because she only danced with straight boys.
And of course they all did
because you know
it’s impolite to a person’s entire family
to say, No.
Meanwhile
the sacred eel
grew larger and larger,
until its head was the size of a coconut.
Sheree, screaming,
made a pond to hold it.
This part’s true:
One day
Sheree decided to form her own club with all the fa’afafine on the island.
They called themselves the Daughters of Sāmoa.
Sheree grew her hair long,
dyed it red
and got a job as Executive Secretary to the President of American Sāmoa Community
College,
which she runs to this day.
And the ending I made up:
One night
the sacred eel grew so large
(as tall as a coconut tree)
that it chased Sheree
from village
to village
through
all
of
Sā
Moa.