408 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1995

ence the outside world. As she says toTemanu toward the end of the play, "Iknow my roots. You come to findroots, that fine, but I ... I want to findwings too!" (Virgin, 52). Then she fliesoff on that redoubtable, velvet-glovedcarrier "Pathetic Air" to rainy Puva,but the fist is there in the stunningstage directions:

the sound of the plane taking off isheard, and becomes louder and louder.A spotlight on the image of the frigatebird on the backdrop. Hina appears inmodern dancing costume (wearing thelavalava her cousin had given her) andstands in the spotlight. The sound of theaeroplane fades out to be replaced byPolynesian drumming.... Hina dancesunrestrainedly, using the whole stage.(Virgin, 55-56)

I saw the play in Suva and again morerecently in Honolulu. The beauty, fra­gility, and power of human freedomstill haunt me in the image of Hina,who in that moment is each of us,become the frigate bird.

Supplementary materials included inthe text provide helpful contextualinformation. Hereniko writes about"Pacific Clowning" and RobertNicole, of the Literature and LanguageDepartment at the University of theSouth Pacific, writes the best essay I'veseen on "Images of Paradise" in thePacific.

From his academic post at the Cen­ter for Pacific Islands Studies at theUniversity of Hawai'i at Manoa, Vil­soni Hereniko has emerged in the pastthree years as a leading voice in thewriting and promotion of PacificIsland literature and the critical con­texts surrounding it. Like his mentorAlbert Wendt, he is one of those excep-

tional, profoundly reflective artistswho integrates contraries and trans­mutes anguish as he portrays a humancomedy where we are clowned intopainful insight even as we discoverresilience, laughter, and hope. Hewears the different robes of artist andcritic and editor and teacher as thoughthey were tailored from the same cloth.In fact his comedic sensibility, his navi­gator's sense of direction, weave thecloth that underlies the different roleshe plays. Hereniko's particularlyhumane and inclusive vision of thePacific Islanders' experience informsboth his creative work and his scholar­ship. Whether reading the diverse edi­torial selections in Manoa or feelingthe universal, seriously comic tug ofHina's longing to travel beyond herown shores in The Last Virgin in Para­dise (subtitled, after all, A SeriousComedy), we have the confidence ofsailors inspired by one who knowshow to navigate by the stars and thewaves, one who will bring us home.

SIG J SCHWARZ

California Lutheran University

Alms For Oblivion, by Fata SanoMalifa. New York: Vantage Press,1993. ISBN 0-533-1°4661, xi + 258pages. US$17.95.

When Pasikale Piso'o sees "two hornyhorses making fierce love" one dayin a kuava field he experiences a spon­taneous orgasm and has his mind"properly ... rearranged." Subse­quently, his unbridled passion haswomen fighting over him. (Thereader's ear is certainly grabbed when

BOOK REVIEWS

one woman, making good on a tradi­tional threat, scissors off a rival's ear.)But while many women "love" him,no one in the village likes him, and hedoes "not care about anyone either."His pursuit of gratification withoutresponsibility to anything, outsidehimself, that is, puts him badly at oddswith human regulatory systems,including the general "laws" govern­ing interpersonal relations, traditionalSamoan law, the fa'a Samoa, andChristian law, here inseparable fromthe impositions of colonial institutions.Not that being at odds with systems,or being married and a father, reinsPasikale's sexual galloping. He rompswith the pastor's wife, which results inthe pastor's suicide. Only tuberculosisslows Pasikale. Then his long-suffer­ing-turned-vindictive wife tries to ter­minate him by roping him to his bed.

The description of Pasikale's pun­ishment that follows suggests the vis­ceral power Fata Sano Malifa oftenachieves:

[T]he sennit rope had cut welts into hisarms and legs. As he kept on tossing upand down to be free, the ropes cutdeeper into his body. Now his woundshad become infected and very painful.Yesterday afternoon, when Pasikale rea­lised that he had to free himself some­how soon or die, the big black fliescame. The flies landed on his wounds,laying their small white eggs there. Earlythis morning, the eggs had hatched intomaggots, and they were now terrorisinghis body.

Finally, Pasikale breaks free, and withhis last energy storms a church serviceto curse his village for pre';lching Chris­tian love for one's enemie"s while ignor­ing his maggot-driven screams.

The cross-hatching of Christian andSamoan traditions working throughsuch scenes ground the book cul­turally. According to one Samoancreation myth, as Albert Wendtrecounted it in Leaves of the BanyanTree (a work Malifa's work recalls atseveral points), "The gods ... coveredthe world's nakedness with creepers.After centuries of light and darknessthe creepers rotted and turned intomaggots. Out of these maggotsemerged Man, who, on his death andthe falling of dark, turned into mag­gots again." In one sense, Pasikale'sreturn to maggots gives birth to youngNikoloa M, the protagonist of Alms.Pasikale's attractive lasciviousness,"tongue-whipping" of the village, and"unconforming ways" make an abid­ing impression on Niko. His faith isshaken, and he feels a giddy potentialfor rebellion.

At a deeper level, Niko internalizesthe sense that one is inevitably boundto the bed of one's own making, andoften even stretched on a rack one doesnot quite deserve. For a book that cele­brates self-reliance and disparagesblind orthodoxy, this outlook has curi­ously bleak religious overtones. A Cal­vinistic morbidity getting the better ofpoetic nihilism. There seems to be auniversal and merciless psychic creditsystem at work, whereby-howeversuccessful-one pays mentally if notphysically for hurting others. Noinjury-psychic or physical, committedor suffered-ever gets set quite right.In the long run the flesh corrodes fromwithin: cancer consumes Niko's grand­father; his mother watches the worldfrom behind the muteness of stroke­induced paralysis, dreaming of love in

410 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC· FALL 1995

the next world. For Niko, a man witha constitutionally philosophical bent,life presents itself as a paradox: If onetires of freedom one is ridden to thewaiting rot; personal ambition shouldnot be sacrificed for others or for cus­tom. But in the individualistic mode­slaving for the money that reputedlyfrees one-"success" tends to involve asteeling of oneself that comes at theexpense of others, and often sacrificestheir potentially healing love.

Niko's odyssey illustrates this pointabout the futility of achievement with­out a parallel socially generous, emo­tional development; the impulse toresist the notion that problems of selfare irreducibly nested within specifichistorical contexts sets the book up asa dialogue on the relations among"self," aiga, village, nation, and worldcommunity. Niko spends years abroad,including a sobering look from NewYork at the America emblematized bythe "gloomy splendor" of the Statue ofLiberty. He returns changed, at firstnauseated and angered by a sense ofvillage life as a stifling sham and thechurch as a "fear-inducing" capitalistscam. This creates a sense of exile athome, an a-partness or being beside hisculture while moving through itslevels, which in turn forces his gazeinward on the mechanisms of self­torture that will not let him eitherconform or escape. Yet Niko alwayscares about his nation; he always atsome gut level believes in the old things(aitu, ancestral spirits) that he intel­lectually dismisses as the thoughts of"superstitious pagan swine," whetherhe acknowledges it or not. In thissense there is some truth to HomiBhabha's suggestion that, "blasphemy

is the migrant's shame at returninghome."

Niko coasts through a footloosephase of drunken bohemian days atthe Barefoot Bar in Apia, indulging inunanchored barroom speculation. Hemakes a brief, intense attempt at beinga writer. Finally, he decides to make hismark by clearing and planting wildland. Traditionally, Samoan aiga usedonly as much of the land as theyneeded to subsist. So, as in Wendt'sBanyan Tree, Niko's decision (likeTauilopepe's) to "develop" the landviolates the old culture's respect for theland as a living and spiritually sustain­ing force. The venture wins him finan­cial success and power, but it costs hima relation to the land that would beemotionally sustaining, and, ulti­mately, costs him a genuine relation tohis children and his future.

The larger points about respectingland, generosity, integrity, and thenecessity for critical introspection, ringas true for nations as for individuals.While Niko is no allegory for Samoa,the unfolding portrait of his lifeinvolves a forceful staging of nationalpolemics, including vexed questionsabout the relations between traditionand "modernity" and about the termsfor Samoa's "success" in the system ofglobal capitalism and culture. How­ever much a man of his time and place,Niko stakes the claim to imagine hisown life and create himself as an indi­vidual; simultaneously, Alms, as a res­olutely Samoa-centered novel, urgesthe nation to imagine its way free ofprior representations, and suggests thepitfalls of corrupted vision in whichpostcolonial bureaucrats mimic"departed" colonists. Niko's entry into

""'.

BOOK REVIEWS

the political arena exposes how thosewho "credited themselves with theachievement of independence fromcolonial rule ... now ... just tookwhat they wanted."

Alms is itself a significant Samoanliterary contribution, a repudiation ofthe viewpoint expressed by Niko'sfather (and centuries of colonialism):"Listen, Son, our people were not bornto write books; we were not even bornto think. We were born to work theland and fish the sea." While acknowl­edging that many problems in post­independence Samoa have a colonialgenesis, or result from modeling sys­tems on those of the "departed" colo­nists, Malifa does not dwell on pastmisrepresentation or exploitation.Rather, Alms insists on the urgency ofremoving a cancerous corruption fromcontemporary Samoan politics. In this,Malifa insists on a version of the artistas gadfly of the state, employing idio-

411

syncratic forms to critique the societyout of which he writes. The book's plotand style are driving, but flexibleenough to cut to interior monologue orfantastic imaginative flight. Malifa'ssometimes wild lyricism is exemplifiedby a fishing trip gone surreal, where anenormous swordfish wrestles Niko'sboat, bill snagged in the prow, leavingan afterimage of a "tall fish envelopedin a ball of flame electrically sparked."Such images momentarily threaten toleap the book right out of the local andsituated. But the narrative voice neverasserts artistic distance from the com­munities described, and the leapingfish becomes a fit emblem for thebook's depiction of elemental strug­gles, in which the things obsessivedreamers chase often wind up chasingthe dreamers.

PAUL LYONS

University of Hawai'i at Manoa