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The Samoan Chronicles: Tattoos and Tattooing
One thing I have learned in my travels through the South Pacific -- the more than 50 voyages I made there decades ago -- is that we humans are in a most basic manner all alike. We all feel happiness, pride, fear, anger, jealousy, regret, hope, despair and all the other emotions you can think of. We try to be manly or feminine. We all feel shame. What differs is the cultural manner in which these emotions manifest themselves, and what causes their expression. Consider the following. A young man perhaps twenty-two years old lies prone on the floor of a Samoan fale, his eyes dilated as he endures pain in a state of shock. His legs are bare, as is his back and buttocks. Seated next to him, a wrinkled, grey-haired man is hard at work, dipping a comblike instrument into a half a coconut shell filled with black liquid. The tool is mounted on the end of a stick, and ends in a series of needlelike projections. He places the instrument on the young man's skin, and strikes the handle with another stick, driving the needles into the young man's skin and despositing pigment. This is what happens when a young man receives a Samoan tattoo. The pain is extreme, but he is forced to bear it. There is no anaesthesia. He knows that if he gives up on the tattooing during the week or two or more that the process requires, the consequences will last the rest of his life. Like a neighbor who ran away many years ago and climbed a coconut tree to avoid the agony, he will be regarded by the rest of the villagers as a buffoon and somewhat less than a manly man for the rest of his life. When I lived in Western Samoa in a village I was present at a number of tattooings. The design the tufuga or tattoo "carpenter" applied was carefully patterned and geometric, based on traditional patterns that have been used for years. The persistence of these patterns is indicative of Samoan culture's resistence to change. In the late 1960's the tattoo designs being applied to young men were still almost identical to those diagrammed in a book by a German named Kramer called The Samoan Islands. Contrast this conservative cultural attitude with that of the Marquesans, also Polynesians, who live some thousands of miles to the northeast, and you discover a striking difference. Traditional Marquesians also covered their bodies with extensive tattoos, but visitors to the islands in ther nineteenth century found that current trendy designs changed noticeably even within ten years of each other. What was stylish at one time become outmoded a decade or so later. The pattern of a Samoan tattoo covers the area of the body from just above the knees to just above the waist, buttocks and all, mercifully skipping the genitalia, but covering everything else. The Samoan name for it, "pe'a" comes from the name of the flying fox, a fruiot-easting bat common in the islands whose wing span can approiach five or six feet. Two projecting "wings" on a tattooed man's back suggest the wings of the flying creature. When seen from a distance, a naked young man would appear to be wearing clothes -- very tight to say the least. And the purpose of this excruciating process ? To give the young man an extra bit of prestige, status, and masculinity over those young men who haven't submitted to the ordeal. When you consider carefully, this purpose isn't very different from that of California high schoiol students when they dress with long T-shirts, baggy pants, brightly-colored underwear (always showing) and lots of rings, chains and other "bling-bling." In each case, the young men are trying to appear strong, tough and masculine. Culture never ceases to amaze me. There is an old saying that "You can take a man out of the country, but you cannot take the country out of the man." Samoans, at least those brought up in traditional Samoa, retain many of their traditional attitudes. Because of this, a Samoan friend of mine who lives in Santa Rosa returned to American Samoa several decades ago when he was in his thirties and got a traditional tattoo. Another fellow, part of whose tattooing I actually witnessed, received his tattoo in the licingroom of a split-level ranch house in Auckland, New Zealand. In doing research at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, I came across an account of an interestiong murder done through tattooing. Someone poisoned the tattoo pigment that a tattoer was applying to a young man, and the young man died. |
Samoan photos, beagles, chocolate, Komodo dragons and other fascinating features drawn from a wonderful life.
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