Reach Nirvana
By Michael H. Kew
NOSE: salt, fish rot, frangipani. Ears: noddies, terns, surf, crickets, constant whooshpulse of wind. Eyes: tide low but swells clean and could burst with potential come high.
Once thick with sand, this “beach” was a foundational flat brown slab of ancient coral and fields of wave-tossed rocks. I sat on the nearby concrete dock and absorbed the simple yet complex web of atoll life, enjoying the swoopingly sweeping black noddies darting to and fro, stacking nests with scavenged leaves and twigs amongst great breadfruit boughs, blowsy along the poor low shore.
Hallucinatory, amid this zen, I heard drumming and sweet singing. From the meeting hall, floating across the breeze, came Vanikai’s group rehearsing choruses and dances for the evening’s liturgical performance.
Nukunonu’s church was the atoll’s hub—bell-tolling and faith swamped the landscape. By this I was reminded of something croaked by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell: “You can tell what’s informed a society by the what the tallest building is in the place. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach a 17th-century city, the political palace is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach a modern city, the office buildings and dwellings that are the tallest things in the place.” On Nukunonu the tallest things in the place were the church and the Taupulega (government offices), my top-floor corner room there ideal for observation of both the natural (eyes open) and the supernatural (eyes shut).
With our minds we can see, hear, even smell lore of the insular. Each night while Nukunonu slept, I meditated aside the sparkly lagoon, gently luminous from the waning gibbous Moon and tricks of phosphorescence that may or may not have existed in my visual cortex. The dreamy arc of the Milky Way was violet and for thousands of years served as the GPS for Oceania’s sailors navigating celestially amid “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit,” as Joyce wrote at the end of Ulysses.
Studying the firmament I pondered the cosmogenesis of Tokelau, its tales of origin— indeed cosmogonic myths—and the pre-Christianity spirits unique to each atoll, the spirits fussing with one another, suggesting each atoll had separate but simultaneous origins. For eons, supreme gods like Tui Tokelau, from whom all Tokelauans “descended,” ran society.
Archaeology proved humans found Tokelau a millennium yore. The atolls’ oral history, much fantastical, was set to English into the delightful 1991 tome Matagi Tokelau. Of tradition and ancestry, what was true was the nation behaved like three autonomous chiefdoms whilst sharing linguistic and social codes. Daily life was ruled by clans and aliki (kings). There was incest and war but also serenity and fine health. Before today’s cash economy and imported food and New Zealand’s lactating nipple, Tokelau mouths sustained via fishing and gathering—seafood and coconuts, abundant always.
As they were and are citizens of New Zealand, most locally born-and-raised Tokelauans have emigrated for work or school or both. More than 7,100 of them live abroad. This all began in 1966 with a plan to move Tokelau’s entire population (then 1,835) to New Zealand. That January, Cyclone Ofa had scalped the atolls and Wellington launched its “compassionate and brotherly” Tokelau Islands Resettlement Scheme.
“The problem is overpopulation,” Jock McEwen, then-Minister of Island Territories, told the media as he cited poverty, land shortages, and food scarcity. “It has become necessary for us to help at least some of them to resettle.”
Those who did were handed homes, cars, clothes, and well-paid tasks like tree-planting in Rotorua. But in 1976 the Scheme was nixed due to the dearth of Tokelauans remaining in Tokelau, gentle rings of coral so freely abandoned for a cold, loud, hustling world.
Which was better?
What is better?
Plucked from Rainbownesia, available globally via Amazon.
Aerial photo courtesy of Arno Gasteiger/New Zealand Geographic.
Nukunonu crepuscular. Photo: Kew.
