By Maryanna Gabriel
The heat continues to be humid and heavy. You know that sensation
when you open the oven and you are hit with a blast of heat? It is like that. The landscape is mesmerizing with jagged undulating mountainsides and columnar towers that are impossibly high. We are most certainly in a remote and unspoiled part of the world. The people of these islands have been incredibly hospitable. We have been entreated to Polynesian feasts three days running. We have been given food cooked in earth ovens wrapped palm leaves, ceviche, ahi, crab salads, palm hearts, bread fruit, cooked purple plantain, tapioca and poi flavoured with vanilla that is so delicate and exotic in flavour that I almost did not recognize it. We have been
entreated to dancing and drumming. When we dock the children play on the lines and the crew keep a watchful eye. We visited on Ua Pou, the grave of Paul Gaugin and Jacques Brel. I have seen marae (sites) with tiki (statues) that are quite pulsating with mana (energy). The tiki are quite fierce looking. This was a blood sacrifice culture with strong affiliations to Easter Island to the east (now belonging to Chile). In one marae I was the only person who found it and I asked a Marquesan (in French) about it. Surprisingly we were able to communicate and he said it had been inhabited until the 1960’s. I asked him when did his culture start and he said it was not known. I asked had there been any archaeological excavation done here and he said not. Then he began to sing in Marquesan, which sounds quite a bit different from Tahitian and Maori. He translated the song to me and it was all about the beginning of time, an experience I felt quite honoured to receive. This place is the same as Herman Melville’s first novel “Typee”. I have been reading his book and it is a very good record of what it was like before the French culture infiltrated it. It is written from a Victorian ethnocentric perspective.
“Among the permanent inmates of the house were likewise several lovely damsels, who instead of thrumming pianos and reading novels like more enlightened young ladies, substituted for these employments the manufacture of a fine species of tapa.” Herman Melville.
