Past The Old Track

(An exploration)

By Ata Ma'ia'i

SUNSET at the village of Loatai is topical: people talking about fishermen returning to shore with the sunset behind them or father and son hurrying home —from their plan tations before the sun sets. The sunset to the people is a poetic sojourn— that instills in their consciousness a far-away motion: that keeps their minds and souls alive. In fact, ac cording to observation, the sunset is the lifeblood of the village that con stantly carries each individual’s thinking to a new surge, about one’s existence. The sunset is the foreman that reminds the individual of his or her responsibilities—to say the evening prayers or to prepare meals.

In songs and rhetorics that crawl their cultures, in burning oratories highlighting a chiefs coronation— and even the sublime folklores mothers told their children before bedtime —the sunset is revered. Some times, such stories are masked by

“divine” whispers and laughter. All of these things are fleeting to the young, but the old think of them in their interests which is to say, “the sustaining of the tradition of the powerful”.

This sunset the symbol of power the godfather for our needs the big ray shining into our lives.

And now I think about the sunset in Loatai. It is not enough to think of it as a happening—but a symbol alive in the people’s mind. Yet, the passion and the outcries at sunset are underdeveloped, and most certainly embryonic when I come to think of eulogies delivered at the graveyard— when they are linked with Time.

That was a wrecked symbol, for to speak of the sunset and Time was like turning a logic upside-down.

Time flows as the common saying goes The sunset transforms the

individual’s day’s labour into inertia.

And as for the Pastor’s mysticism; the God Almighty thing, my mind turns to the pious revelations shouted from pulpits. Full of vanity and pomposity, the message has mean dered within my wandering thought processes and has reminded me of one good thing: that behind the veil of mysticism there is a logic in play, bridging (perhaps) the people’s God and the sunset. It is stark, I am certain and on the surface, a distorted symbolism, carved in peoples heads.

I have often heard them in their cool moments talking about their feelings; and a long epic voyage of which its connecting points are substantiated by biblical assertions. On second thoughts, these things are the con stitution of matters rebelling—and I remember the outbursts of the young, the erring evenings before the sun dying. But not all evenings were as such.

Appearing for the first time in MANA this month are works by Jack Lahui, from Papua New Guinea, and Makiuti Tongia, of the Cook Islands. Jack Lahui, Assistant Editor of Papua New Guinea Writing, is already an established poet who has published a number of poems in many literary magazines in PNG and overseas. Makiuti Tongia began writing poetry at Tereora College and has continued this interest at the University of the South Pacific, where a number of his poems have appeared in Unispac.

Ata Ma’ia’i, of Western Samoa, published in MANA last year, and editor Marjorie Crocombe starts a series of articles on the museums and Pacific artifacts in Europe.

FOR me one particular visit to Loatai, sums up my position.

That evening, the sun was seen partially behind the “highest peak”; its reflection cast a shadow on the Fale, built underneath the foot of the mountains. The mountains over shadowed the Fale: throwing a some what distorted image on the Fale’s appearance—like a lens out of focus.

Inside the Fale, an old woman sat.

She was partially blind; her head stooped forward as she was weaving a mat. In a while, darkness would descend on the land, filling out the vacuum of natural openings in the caves and in the soil—that muddy ponds were confused with the dry ones. But that was yet to happen.

The Fale and the sun now behind the highest peak presented to the observer the morbid passion known only in holy chapels. Very soon the sun would set. Before it went, it had a habit of sitting on the sea, and some reported that it plunged into the bottomless ocean after that.

Yet now while I revisit Loatai, the betwixt and between of the past (that lingering nausea) I become aware of the two arrows directing/ projecting those paths known for salvation. And the stubborn drag ging towards an undefined Promised Land has somehow triggered this stupid sensibility inside me. For while it lasted, I had wanted to shout—in order to sing heartily.

True enough, that scenery was pas sionate for me for the simple reason that it instilled in me one under standing of humanity; the same understanding that led one painter to transform the scenery onto canvas. He was, I gathered, a certain Mista Bridge, a suave grey-haired white-man; who painted the scenery mercilessly so that the outcome re vealed some mysterious eye—like a woman’s bosom. Nobody in the village liked the painting: it appealed

to them like a devil sucking the milk from a woman’s tit.

To talk of the landscape and the canvas is to re-echo a platitude popular to us all. For entangled in the thickness of complexes (the pastor’s sermons, the undefined Promised Land, etc), there is a meeting place; this is the world stage where nice, cynical, sane and insane actors and actresses develop their talents.

The rumour about mista is a point in mind; for after painting the out-offocus scenery he worked on the women. He did it with an earthly tact and he did it with passion too; developing a new awareness of posture and mannerism among the women— which is to say a living drama performed in all settings.

Going back to the landscape— those beautiful green valleys and the glittering sea at night—and determining its position in relation to one’s humanity, is opening up a new world punctuated by a question mark. But then maybe it is because it is now coloured by one’s present —that thief known to us all,

TOUT thinking of Loatai, that A# evening when this narrator saw it from a distance was warming enough. The village was half empty; for the young men had been on the open sea for many days and were expected soon. The women had gathered at the shore to wait for them, and in their pastime of gossip ing, they talked and laughed about their private loves; they knew who slept with whom and how rich was the richest merchant in Loatai. And before nightfall, the cool breezes blew. The flights of the seagulls— returning to hanging cliffs, with fishes hanging from their beaks— went unnoticed for the women. They laughed. More than often, they looked at the horizon; one of them reckoning that it was time the men appeared.

And as for the old woman in the Fale, she would not pay any attention to such things. She attended to her own business, often weaving away into the night, or complaining that she was dying slowly. In recent years, the old woman had lived between the

horns of death; when her fits would paralyse her for many days or when she would vomit blood after sitting too long into the night. She had be come so immune to those bouts that afterwards her pale face would always force a smile.

To tell the truth, she was a great fighter, whose greatness stays remote to me. I had wanted to share her arrogance—at least to feel the way she thought of the sunset —or eulogies at the graveyard. She had her reasons, as she told it, that one shouldn’t hope of living the last stretch for it was lonely. At her age —a span of 90 years —one would have thought that she had outlived loneliness. But no. For her loneliness was always stealing something from life, a process of debit and credit that digs into every human being's lifetime. And as for the long march the Pastor preached, the idea antagonised her for it was absurd.

Rather, life was a dictation of chal lenges, which she interpreted as a test of nerves, a hapnening that lived in people’s minds, a twisted parable that was still to be defined by theologians. Her moods were erratic and her outbursts captured the young rebels, for she was to them an old

woman rebelling against the thought of death. At Church, she sat with her whip; like a goddess presiding over her subjects and waved her whip about as if to warn the con gregation that it was a sign of authority and wisdom.

Indeed, she was lonely, but no more lonely than the young rebel who still loves the sunset. Was the split—the different aesthetic sojourns a sign of history? that was: the changing curtains open and close before ones eyes. If so, should I or the old woman change the scaffold to support the imposing forces —or should one let them fall through?

For that, I recalled the old chants: Wear a mask paint a face oil your body and see you are the same, A falling star moved towards the highest peak. By then darkness was settling in; the sea like an open bowl received the descending darkness and the village appeared like a half-lit arena. The old woman was still weaving and as usual mumbling

meaningless words as if she was her son and daughter-in-law. The horse tied to a coconut tree outside the Fale neighed and the noise set her goose-pimples alerted. The evening breezes blew hard, causing the blinds to rustle. She coughed: her finger placed like a V sign on her lips and spat the filth from her lungs. The mucus landed short of the track out side. She coughed again and she felt a pull in her stomach. She fell back and in a diabolical frenzy kicked the blinds. Her face covered with foaming saliva, she rolled over once. There was no sound of life. She was dead.

Life was too cunning for the old woman. That she overlooked. Even at her burial, that was not considered; for life is revered at her never ending existence, yet meaningless at cold hours. To speak kindly of life is a misnomer and the old woman had known that. She knew life the way she thought of God: an elusive pleasure that has its own demands: one suffers in order to trigger off some happy illusions. Life is a dead scenario, in which the actors and actresses are busy to resuscitate and pump into one corporate form. The sun had already set and it was for ever—for one more old woman.