The Real Samoa

SIR: Re John Whitworth’s poem about Samoa (May 2008). This nonsense about Samoan women is all Herman Melville’s fault! In his novel Oomoo, he created the myth of the Polynesian maiden as a fantastic sexual being, an image that somehow resonated with the puritanical culture of the United States in the late nineteenth century. Ageneration later, Margaret Mead reinforced the myth, by giving it anthropological respectability. Her research in Manu’a, undertaken in the context of the then fashionable debate about “nature versus nurture”, gave her a cachet that survives. But, like Melville’s maiden, it is as fake. I’d like, on behalf of all Samoans, to put it to rest.

Mead was the victim of a taufa’alili, a concept that doesn’t translate well into English, but is not dissimilar to the ironic seam that runs through Australia’s sense of humour. Samoans are greatly amused by the gullibility of strangers, and relish the innocent fun that can be had teasing someone into believing their interpretation of Samoan behaviour or customs is actually true. Taufa’alili is why, when Mead asked young girls if they engaged in masturbation, or promiscuous behaviour, they answered “yes” with a straight face. Out of her earshot they must have been rolling about with laughter. And earnestly extending her research across a wider sample, Mead got more of the same answers, and the samples got more laughs.

“Napo”, the little boy Mead befriended and wrote about, was Napoleone Tuitelelepaga. When I met him he was an old man, a Matai from the village of Sogi in the western part of Tutuila, American Samoa. He was inflated with a jolly sense of importance ascribed him by Western “civilisation”. This was reinforced by his local reputation for so successfully pulling the palm fronds over the eyes of gullible Westerners for so many years. Taufa’alili indeed!

If you can find a copy of Jim Sier’s photographic study of the archipelago, there’s a picture of Tuitelelepaga enjoying his own funeral. On rare occasions Samoans have such funerals at which the celebrated, still alive and vital, enjoys listening to the eulogies delivered
by family and friends, and the feast that invariably accompanies the event. The joke of a funeral was a fine metaphor for the joke of his life—having played this great taufa’alili for so long that it was widely assumed to be fact.

Sixty-odd years after Mead left Samoa, Derek Freeman arrived to roundly debunk her thesis. (As secretary of the Pago Pago Rotary Club I introduced him as a guest speaker at our weekly lunch meeting.) He told me his most compelling data was taken from the American Samoa High Court, which recorded several cases of rape, and others of sexual violence during the time Mead was there (for about twelve weeks) recording her research proving an absence of sexual violence. I suppose the distraction of the salacious taufa’alili kept Mead from looking at court records to test her field data.

Whitworth’s whimsical poem is fun. I don’t recall any scarlet parrots but I do recall the secret joy of coming to understand that Samoa is the most civilised place on our planet. There is a whole lotta lovin’ going on there, and not just the mythical trysts invented by Melville and Mead.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph, inscribed on his grave overlooking Apia, is perhaps the bestwritten witness to a happy life lived:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

Only in Samoa!

Mark Reid,
Melbourne, Vic.