Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Sometimes words carry the weight of a bomb.

  PART THREE

  Under the Southern Cross

  8

  Islands of the Many-Coloured Waters

  Our plane landed in Tahiti at about three in the morning, and despite the ungodly hour, a little ukulele band was there to greet us. Three rather large women plinked their way through a song of welcome. The air was warm and thick with orange blossoms, and overhead, stars were scattered across the sky like sugar on a black countertop. The women swayed in their muumuus, singing along to the ukuleles, and I thought, Hey, this is going to be great. Classic South Pacific.

  I planned on camping in Tahiti. I’d brought my tent and all my gear and now struggled with it, lugging it through customs and into the airport arrivals hall. Now what? I thought. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it was still the middle of the night.

  It didn’t turn out to be much of a problem. A young woman stood near the doors holding a sign that read HITI MAHANA CAMPING, and soon I found myself bouncing along a road in the open back of a truck with three or four other travellers. Trucks take the places of buses here. They’re simply called le truck, and I sat in the back of this particular one while the strange stars of the southern hemisphere whipped by above me. I gazed at them and tried to pick out the Southern Cross, the great crucifix of stars that can only be seen south of the equator. Scouring the sky, I scanned from one horizon to the other, but I couldn’t spot it.

  The campground was an old coconut plantation, and it was pretty much dawn by the time I started to erect my tent. An old Polynesian villager came down to watch me. “Ia orana,” he said, which is the Tahitian greeting. I nodded back at him, and he watched me as I set up the tent.

  I fumbled with the ropes and pegs, and when I finally finished, the old man shook his head slowly. I couldn’t figure out why until his eyes strayed upward and I followed his gaze. I’d put my tent beneath a coconut tree. It had seemed like the right thing to do in the South Pacific, but by the time his eyes returned to mine, I understood him. Coconuts fall out of trees, and my tent was directly beneath them. The villager laughed and walked off as I swore and began to tear down the tent.

  It’s actually a fact that one of the leading causes of death in the South Pacific is being killed by falling coconuts. But I didn’t know that then. For me it was perfectly reasonable to set up a tent under a tree. It afforded shade and some protection from the elements, and where I was from things hardly ever fell out of trees.

  The word for tree in Tahitian is auteraa. That’s important, because a tree in Tahitian and a tree in English aren’t really the same things. Words can stand in for all sorts of information. They represent a whole range of things — in this case, not just a tree but what a tree looks like, what it feels like, even what can be made out of it. For Polynesians, auteraa is mental shorthand for the way a tree’s bark is used for the skin of an ocean-going outrigger, for the way its palm fronds dance in the wind like waves, and for the way those fronds can be woven together for roofing. And yes, even for the fact that it might drop coconuts on the unwary.

  Tahiti is one of a constellation of islands called the Society Islands. They include several hundred reefs and atolls spread over an area roughly the size of Europe. Tahiti is in the middle and is the biggest island. Many of the islands have volcanic peaks, like shards of broken green glass slicing into the hot blue sky. White sailboats bob gently inside the coral reefs that encircle the old volcanoes, and the lagoons are a neon shade of turquoise.

  The ancient name of Tahiti is Tahiti-nui-I-te-vai-uri-rau, all one big fat word that translates as “Great Tahiti of the Many-Coloured Waters.” They’re fond of long words in Tahiti. Tahitian is an agglutinating language, one of those boring linguistic terms I remember only by imagining that it refers to glue. It means that, like Turkish or Hungarian or many of the aboriginal American languages, Tahitian works by “gluing” prefixes and suffixes onto root words so that a single word can encompass an entire thought.

  The language is part of the Polynesian group of languages, which in turn belongs to the larger Austronesian family that includes Malay and Indonesian. In fact, Polynesians are believed to have sailed from Indonesia several thousand years ago. They likely crossed vast stretches of water in nothing more than outrigger canoes, travelling from island to island in what was probably the world’s most remarkable migration. Surveying only by stars, and certainly the Southern Cross, they managed to find their way to all the far-flung islands of the largest ocean on Earth.

  It’s thought that these Polynesian explorers reached Tahiti about a thousand years ago. The people of Tahiti call themselves Maohi, and that’s a clue in itself. It’s only a slight hardening of the final consonant to the word Maori, and there you have it. These people came to Tahiti from Samoa via the Cook Islands and then some mysteriously circled back to wind up in New Zealand as the indigenous people there — the fierce Maori. All of them are Polynesians.

  On the north shore of Tahiti there was a small clapboard village on a black sand beach not far from our campground. I was sitting at the edge of the beach with a plump couple from northern England watching the sunset when one of the young men from the village strolled up and sat beside us to talk.

  His name was Tavita, the Tahitian equivalent of David, and like all Polynesians, he was quick to smile and make conversation. He spoke three languages: Tahitian, of course, and French for dealing with officials and the police, and lately he’d taught himself English, good for nothing except speaking to backpackers who occasionally ambled down to his beach.

  His olive skin, tattooed with turtles and geometric patterns, rippled with muscles, and his face, handsome and hardened, set him off from pasty-faced tourists like us. Tavita was slightly drunk and carried a large water container filled with beer. After greeting us and introducing himself, he leaned into us a little aggressively. “I am like the wind,” he hissed. “I can brush against your cheek gently.” Here he swept an opened palm across his cheek. “Or I can sting and cut you.”

  That frightened the British couple, so they moved off and cowered together in whispered conversation, leaving Tavita and me alone. For some reason I was more curious than intimidated and launched into a conversation with the towering Polynesian. He was poor, but he seemed to possess a tremendous intelligence, and I soon warmed to him.

  We talked about the French government that still rules Tahiti as a colony and how it tested, until recently, nuclear weapons on the tiny atolls far out to sea.

  “Do you wish the French gone?” I asked.

  “It is not for me to say. It is not a choice for me.”

  “No, but if you could, would you have them leave?”

  He regarded me wistfully, patting his chest and the multitude of tattoos there. “It is not a choice.”

  “Okay,” I said, determined to get an answer, something that would satisfy my Western thinking. “But the French are a problem.”

  “No … no problem.”

  “But …”

  “It is only a problem if you choose to see it as a problem.”

  I let the wisdom of those words sink in and began to understand him. Tavita was like the multicoloured fish that flitted and sparkled through the coral reefs. He was like the birds that swooped among the palm fronds. Tavita belonged here — beyond governments, rules, and borders. This was Tavita’s place, his beach.

  I asked him about one of his tattoos — an elegant turtle. “Very sacred,” he told me, but he wouldn’t say more.

  Tattoo comes from the Polynesian word tatau. The root tata refers to an act performed by the hands, while the suffix u means something of colour. People here get their first tattoos at about the age of twelve, marking the division between child and adult. Girls receive their first tattoos on their right hands. After that they’re allowed to prepare meals, and more important, take part in the ritual of washing a deceased’s body with anointed oils. For men, historically at least, the more tattoos they
had, the more prestige they were accorded in the community. When the first European sailors appeared, they seemed to like them, too. They brought the practice with them back to their home ports, and tattoos became marks of the sea.

  Tattoos, like words, are symbols. Polynesians never had a writing system, but they most certainly had a complex language of symbols. Symbols are prevalent in all cultures whether there’s a writing system or not. This manipulation of signs or symbols seems to be an essential human trait. With a squiggle or two we manage to indicate complex ideas. Whether something is carved into stone, marked on paper, spoken into the air, or cut into the body, it’s all the same. These marks, or symbols, say where we’ve come from and what we believe in. We construct them carefully to say exactly who we are.

  After a few days on Tahiti, I decided to make a run to the legendary island of Bora Bora. Bracing myself on the deck of the heaving, chugging rust bucket of a ferry, I desperately clutched my guidebook to the South Pacific despite the fact that it had already failed me badly. There was nothing in it to warn me about the stomach-churning, seventeen-hour marathon I was enduring. In fact, for a good part of the voyage the book lost all relationship with reading and metamorphosed into a hard but necessary pillow.

  A cyclone, apparently, had blown up from the Antarctic. It had kicked up the sea and wind, and the waves around the ferry were easily eight or ten metres high, like black hills rolling, frothing, and tossing.

  In order to escape seasickness, I gobbled a pill given to me by a girl I’d met on Tahiti. I didn’t know what kind of horse tranquilizer it was, but it worked. All through the night I faded in and out of a coma. I felt the ferry rise on waves as high as a house, then drop like an elevator on the other side. But I didn’t get sick, and in the early morning at last we inched through a break in the coral reef that had been dynamited by American GIs in 1942 and entered the emerald lagoon of Bora Bora.

  My guidebook opens its section on Bora Bora with a quote from James Mitchener, declaring the island to be the most beautiful on the planet. It might have been then, but it was hard to see that now through the driving rain. The book, of course, also insisted that this was the dry season, “somewhat cooler and more comfortable.”

  In the comfort of the somewhat cooler howling maelstrom, I disembarked from the ferry. Palms swayed in the wind like dancers, and I was again told not to stand under the trees. For one thing they offered almost no protection from the rain, and for another they were dropping coconuts like drunken jugglers — cannonballs that thudded into the sand with lethal force.

  I hoisted my bags and tottered to a tiny campground called Chez Pauline. It was set between a Club Med and a second, even more extravagant resort. Either of them were available for about fifty-two thousand South Pacific francs a night or $500. My little spot cost me $10.

  The only other camper was Irene, a fellow Canadian, a pharmacist from Toronto who looked like Queen Victoria in the prime of her reign. To call her portly would be to wrap her in the kindest of descriptions. She bore her great bulk regally and solemnly, keeping much to herself and the affairs of her personal royal court, which she kept in a bag in her tent.

  On the next day, when the rain stopped but the winds still raged at almost cyclone force, Queen Victoria and I rented bicycles to take in the sights of the island. The bicycles were a sight themselves — ancient rusted things with metal baskets in front that rattled and clanked over the palm fronds and the occasional unexploded coconut littering the road.

  It’s only about twenty kilometres around the whole island, and when we turned the very first corner, we were humbled by our initial sight of Mount Otemanu. A green felt covering rises in the centre of the island, but then from the very heart of it a colossal bare black slab of granite thrusts a further thousand metres into the sky. This is picture-postcard stuff, but as we wheeled a little farther we realized the photographers were conveniently cropping out the clapboard village of Vaitape that lies beneath the mountain.

  Polynesians are like any other first peoples. They’ve been swindled and gouged by the French, though it could really have been any other “enlightened” superpower. The South Pacific, like the Caribbean, was neatly divided among all the formerly great powers of Europe. Funny thing is, though, the people here seem really happy. Everyone says hello, and if you answer back in Tahitian, you receive the largest and most heartfelt of smiles.

  Perhaps they’re happy because, unlike other first peoples, their culture is thriving. All the signs are in French, but everyone generally ignores them and speaks Tahitian. The little shirtless children are everywhere, roving in chuckling, tumbling packs across the streets and fields. And everywhere there’s singing, accompanied by ukuleles and sometimes terrific drumming.

  The highlight of the bicycle trip was the discovery of a marae. I say “discovery” because, though my guidebook mentions it, we had to double back up and down the road several times before we spotted it. A marae is an ancient ceremonial site, usually a walled platform of rocks. This one was half tumbled into the sea, but on the rocks that still clung to land there were petrographs — paintings on the stone.

  I bent to peer at one of them. It was a sea turtle. The simple lines were almost identical to the one Tavita had tattooed on his shoulder. The symbol was the same.

  I remember long ago going through the ordeal of writing my master’s thesis in linguistics. At the end of the process, with a three-hundred-page manuscript in my hands, I still had to undergo the defence. That entailed sitting at a long table with four professors facing me. It was a bit like a job interview. The professors hammered me with objections to my thesis, and I had to defend it.

  Everything went very well. Most of the process was polite. One professor, I think, told me I should use more commas in my writing. Another thanked me for my analysis of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But there’s always someone who plays the devil’s advocate.

  For me it was Dr. Hirabayashi. He was of Japanese descent and therefore had quite an interest in words like mokusatsu and the whole idea of cross-linguistic misunderstanding. He sat quietly through most of the second round of my thesis defence and then, just as things seemed to be concluding nicely, stabbed me with a question.

  “Where, precisely, does culture fall in all of this?” he asked, staring me down.

  I had talked of nothing but language and grammar, and I was a bit taken aback. My work wasn’t about culture. I was researching languages.

  “How can you separate the two things?” he pressed.

  “I … ah … ah …”

  Another professor jumped in to save me, but I’ve never forgotten that question about culture. Not that I bear any grudge against Dr. Hirabayashi. In fact, he probably pushed me to think harder than the other professors did, especially since I didn’t need more commas, just more common sense.

  It’s taken me ten years to come up with my answer, but I’m ready for you now, Dr. Hirabayashi. A decade of travelling through the countries, cultures, and languages of the world has finally given me some understanding.

  A language is made up of symbols that we call words. It’s what we term a semiotic system, a method for creating meanings. The basis of semiotic theory has its roots in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who noted that languages consist of a vast array of what he called “signs.” Such signs are made up of two parts: the signifier, that is, the symbol; and the signified, the thing that’s being represented. What makes Saussure’s theory different is that symbols don’t necessarily stand in for real things in the real world. Symbols stand in for meanings.

  The thing is, though, symbols are found in a wide array of things, not only languages. A culture is made up of many symbolic, or semiotic, systems. Tattoos, for example. The tattoo of a turtle, to expand on Saussure, doesn’t represent a real turtle. Instead it signifies a meaning — in effect, what turtles mean to Polynesians.

  All the trappings of what we might call culture — clothing styles, food, dance, art, architec
ture — are kinds of semiotic systems. And all of them have their various symbols.

  Language is merely one of these systems. Whether individual words are spoken or written, they are, in plain terms, a random group of sounds, or a random group of lines, standing in for meanings. It’s like what I said earlier about trees. In English we use the symbol tree to represent a whole lot of information about the thing that’s growing in our backyard. Tahitians use the word auteraa, and though some of the meanings are going to be the same between the two languages (both have roots and leaves, both need water and sunshine to live), there’s also a whole lot of other things that differ, such as the fact that an auteraa can bonk the unwary with its coconuts.

  So words can’t always be translated easily from one culture into another. A turtle is clearly a turtle no matter where one goes in the world, but the symbol for a turtle, whether it’s a tattoo, a word, or a pattern on a dress, doesn’t necessarily refer to the same thing at all.

  And that, Dr. Hirabayashi, is precisely where the rough edges and sharp corners of language bump solidly against the bigger picture that is culture. Just like recipes, architecture, clothes, dances, or hairstyles, words are symbols, the building blocks of cultures. Certainly, languages aren’t the only way we create our worlds, but they’re the most intricate, the most nuanced. Languages are the most efficient and versatile means we’ve come up with so far for defining our worlds.

  I boarded the ferry back to Tahiti with Queen Victoria the next day. She threw up once on the trip back but wasn’t amused. On Tahiti-nui-I-te-vai-uri-rau I set up my tent on the beach again, nowhere near a coconut tree this time. The beach I stayed on was beside a spit of land called Point Venus. There’s a story to that. It got its name from a voyage in 1769 by another of my many patron saints of travelling: Captain James Cook. Cook sailed to Tahiti in his ship the Endeavour to document a transit of Venus — that and discover Australia and New Zealand.