TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051589/05158900.047

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 9.7 KB | 174 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 12

Pago Pago, American Samoa


Whose Nation Is This Anyway?
A half Polynesian idyll, half Rotary Club protectorate

By Pico Iyer


    All the pillars of American civic righteousness are here: the
YWCA choir, the Boy Scouts, the 4-H club, the church-sponsored
floats, even the pom-pom girls strutting their stuff to the strains
of Happy Days Are Here Again. It could, really, be any All-American
small town putting on an Independence Day parade on any village
green. Except that this truly is, in the strict anthropological
sense, a village, and the green here is really, really green. And
the girls are dressed in grass skirts, and so too are many of the
boys, with sashes of flowers across their oiled chests and woven
tree bark around their ankles. The 50-man long boats are racing
past mist-wreathed rain-forest mountains, and the muddy park is
taken over by cricket. But not the game of white-flannel elegance
as it is played at the Marylebone Cricket Club in London. Oh, no!
This is tropical, Technicolor kirikiti -- buxom girls in lemon
yellow shirts and sky blue skirts thwacking around a homemade
rubber ball with a three-sided bat, while supporters rhythmically
chant and dance and beat vigorously on biscuit tins.

    And the Fourth of July is still two months away!

    What is this? Where are we? Good question. Technically, we are
in American Samoa, an "unincorporated territory" of seven tiny
volcanic islands administered since 1951 by the U.S. Department of
the Interior. Physically, we are midway between Hawaii and
Australia, on the only piece of American soil south of the equator,
and on the very edge of the international date line (this is one
of the last places on earth where the day begins). Officially, we
are celebrating Flag Day, the 89th anniversary of the first raising
of the Stars and Stripes on this palm-fringed South Sea bubble. And
truthfully, we are in a kind of green-fringed gray area, neither
here nor there.

    For American Samoa is not quite American and not quite Samoa:
it sends a Congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to
vote; its 38,000 people are counted as "U.S. nationals" but cannot
cast ballots for anything except island leaders. In the early
1960s, the Federal Government started pouring planeloads of money
into its castaway dependency, partly in the spirit of idealism, and
partly with an eye to its unmatched, and strategically useful,
harbor (last year, Washington sent $45 million in direct aid to a
community with one-sixth as many people as Mesa, Ariz.). Yet the
U.S. has never bothered too much about the legal niceties of its
anomalous territory. After President William McKinley took over the
main island in 1900, fully 29 years passed before Congress deigned
to make the transfer formal.

    Legally, then, "the Peoria of the Pacific" remains in as
mingled a state as its notorious climate of simultaneous rain and
shine. How, for instance, can American laws of inheritance be
applied to a culture in which 90% of the land is communally owned
by extended families? And how can due process be served in a world
in which it is regarded as impolite to refuse a request, especially
from a matai, or all powerful village chief? "We try," explains
Grover Joseph Rees III, the former Chief Justice of the High Court,
"to blend Western procedures with Samoan substance. But often, of
course, it's not so simple -- because the substance is based on the
procedure. Our usual rule is that statute trumps custom, but custom
cannot trump statute." Nevertheless, local leaders are still
bewildered, and often enraged, when federal law is imposed on their
textbook haven of taboos and tattoos.

    On first appearances, American Samoa is anyone's dream of a
South Seas paradise, its narrow jungle roads lined with hibiscus,
its deserted white beaches overlooked by windblown coconut palms.
Waves break gently against the main road, and the girls wear
flowers in their hair. And at night, in every village, local
matrons slouch against wooden posts in thatched, open-sided oval
buildings, engaging in a languorous game of Bingo.

    Yet if the island is part Polynesian idyll, it is also part
Rotary Club protectorate. The map at the airport here is sponsored
by the Lions Club, and the local hospital is named after L.B.J.
Days of Our Lives and Nightingales are shown on TV, and Tiger Beat
is available at the nearest newsstand. All the props of the
American Dream are here, right down to Korean grocery stores and
Mexican food. American Samoa has a ZIP code, a Radio Shack, a
Democratic caucus; the kids wear LIFE'S A BEACH T shirts, dial 911
for emergencies and sing along to Tiffany on the local AM station;
there are yellow school buses, American-style license plates and
U.S. mailboxes. This last item is especially strange, since mail
is not even delivered house-to-house here.

    And all across the islands, amid the run-down pool halls and
basketball courts and liquor stores, stand high rebukes to the
tropical sultriness -- Mormon and Catholic and Baptist and
Congregationalist churches, white and erect in the holiday
sunshine. Here, in fact, is the strictest kind of Southern Bible
Belt: villages enforce curfews during evening prayers each day, and
beaches are often closed on Sundays. Teenagers sashay around in T
shirts that say HAPPINESS IS SHARING THE GOSPEL, and the official
motto of the island is "Let God be first."

    No surprise, then, that it was here in Pago Pago that Somerset
Maugham set his famous confrontation between the missionary and
Sadie Thompson. Or that discussions of Samoa's moral -- and
cultural -- identity continue as heatedly as the much publicized
debate between Margaret Mead's classic vision of pastoral innocence
(Coming of Age in Samoa) and Derek Freeman's revisionist account
of violence and rape (Margaret Mead and Samoa -- The Making and
Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth). "Being bilingual and
bicultural doesn't mean you have to be schizophrenic," says Bernie
Oordt, who taught at a local high school for twelve years. "As long
as you have a basic bedrock, a strong system of values, you should
be big enough to incorporate both cultures. And I think these
people have a very sound sense of who they are, tied up with family
and community."

    Yet the fact remains that the majority of young American
Samoans leave the island within a year of graduation, often to
return disenchanted with both the mainland and their island
homeland. And alcoholism is a perennial concern in a country where
beer sometimes seems as much in abundance as water. In the
cricket-chattering dusk, John Kneubuhl, a grand old man of the
island, who went from here to Yale and then to a screenwriting
career in Hollywood, recalls how he used to play hide-and-seek in
the ghost-filled dark as a boy. Now, he says, traditions are
fading. "It's like a volcano getting ready, not exactly to explode
but at the very least to ooze out."

    To see what is peculiar to American Samoa, one need travel only
40 miles across the waters to Western Samoa, a relatively forgotten
independent island that has four times as many people as its
American namesake, but no congressional support. In Western Samoa,
people speak English in the gentle, sea-lapping cadences of the
South Pacific; in American, they favor the twang of Beach Boys and
Valley Girls. In Western, residents play the genteel old colonial
game of lawn bowling; in American, they converge on a twelve-lane
bowling alley. And in Western, the roads are lined with pigs, while
in American, they are crowded with Jeep Cherokees. Although the 76
square miles of American land is clearly more affluent, it is also,
in a curious way, more derelict. "You'll notice that the ceremonies
in Western Samoa are much more relaxed," says John Enright,
American Samoa's Folk Arts Coordinator. "Over here they're more
uptight. There's always a fear that they're losing their
traditions, or that they won't get things quite right. I think of
this island as a kind of retail store of Samoan traditions, with
Western Samoa as the warehouse."

    Thus the local song that boasts "Samoa, there's no place like
you" rings all too true for some of the palagis, or foreigners, on
the island. At American Samoa Community College, Philip Grant
gamely leads Laborday Fatali and a group of other flamboyantly
named students through a discussion of Rousseau and Romanticism,
only occasionally thrown off by a modern sensibility ("What does
self-serving mean?" "Well, the gas station is self-service"). Yet
Grant, one of those gypsy scholars who move from country to
country, finds Samoa considerably more alien than his last posting,
in Beirut. "In Lebanon," he says, "there was at least some bridge
with the West. But here you feel totally cut off. The culture is
3,000 years old and very complex and so different from ours that
we wouldn't know how to begin to penetrate it."

    Yet the strangeness is both spiced and complicated further by
stubborn traces of the familiar. On Flag Day, a legal secretary
suddenly re-emerges as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin. A U.S. Army
man appears amid a group of spear-shaking warriors in lavalava
skirts, fierce tattoos on many thighs. A former Hollywood bit actor
resumes his role as the "talking chief" of Leone, leading his
villagers through hymn-inflected island chants and primal dances.
And then, just before Governor Peter Coleman, Congressman Eni
Faleomavaega and various other dignitaries get ready to join in the
final swaying dance, a village chorus sits on the ground, chants
its age-old traditions and dramatically, for its climax, flashes
-- what else? -- an American flag.