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12

Swan Songs

There were some things that the white man—the Man of Matang—might, with benefit, have left behind him when he came in strength to the Pacific; there were others that, had he brought them in greater measure, would have softened the impact and might have provided a stronger bond between the hearts of the strangers and the islanders. Song, it seems to me, was one of these.

I had been speaking to a clever old native of the Gilbert Islands about aeroplanes and wireless. When I had done, he pondered a little, then said, "Kurimbo, it is true the white man can fly; he can speak across the ocean; in works of the body he is indeed greater than we, but"—his voice rang with pride—"he has no songs like ours, no poets to equal the island singers."

In his ignorance, this old brown warrior thought of us as an page 200utterly material race, destitute of the gift of poetry. We smile with half-pitying tolerance at such unenlightenment—yet how do we think of the islander? Many of us picture him as a savage, pleasant-mannered enough to visit in an idle hour, rather an attractive person altogether and good local colour, but still a savage, having nothing of wisdom or grace in his culture that could possibly command a white man's reverence. As a poet whose work might bear comparison with that of our own master singers, we simply do not think of him. My years among the natives of the Gilbert Islands taught me how mistaken we are.

The islander is a consummate poet. His songs are not the mere barbaric babble of crude emotions that might be expected from men of a culture labelled 'primitive'; they are clear-cut gems of diction, polished and repolished with loving care, according to the canons of a technique as exacting as it is beautiful.

That technique has been elaborated by centuries of singing ancestors who, sincerely convinced of beauty, enlisted every artifice of balance, form and rhythm to express it worthily. The island poet thrills as subtly as our own to the exquisite values of words, labouring as patiently after the perfect epithet. As a result, his songs are literature, though they have remained from the beginning unwritten.

I cannot here give details of the technique that the poet must master, or reproduce the sonorous music of the language he uses. At most, with the help of translated passages, I can hope to convey some faint idea of his results. Translation is the ultimate test of poetry. If, transposed to a foreign idiom and shorn of all its native rhythm, it has still 'a voice to search the heart,' then it is without any doubt true poetry.

Haste, ah, haste thee from the East, my beloved.
Thou has come out of bondage in Tonga,
Thou art gone like a tempest over the land;
Even the waves of the sea shrink back before thy wrath;

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• Thou comest in anger, thou Terrible One, yet I fear thee not.
• Haste, ah, haste thee from the East, my beloved.
• Thou art exalted in thine anger, thou are exalted in Tonga;
• Thou treadest upon the clouds—they are tangled about thy feet;
• Thou pluckest down with thy fingers the mountains of Samoa;
• Yet thy hand upon my breast will be gentle as a child's.
• Haste, ah, haste thee from the East my beloved.
• Thy feet are swifter in the East than the feet of the wind and the rain;
• The noise of thy coming is the tumult of falling skies;
• So that in the face of all men thou art terrible,
• Save only in my sight, who love thee, therefore fear not.

That is a song put into the mouth of a fabulous island heroine, whose love has escaped from captivity in Tonga. Many such songs, of unknown authorship, have been handed down from generation to generation, embedded in the tales of love and adventure that the brown man never tires of telling. In these tales, which are sometimes masterpieces of prose poetry, the transition from narrative verse is always adroitly managed, the hero or heroine breaking into song (as Shakespeare's characters break into rhyme) at moments of high dramatic tension.

Here is a fragment of a dirge from another well-known story; you are to imagine that a son, while walking with a company of friends, has stumbled unawares upon the body of his murdered father:

• son How still, how still thou liest,
• My father, oh, my father, Nakana!
• (Aside) Alas! Is the ghost gone out of him?
• friends The ghost is gone out of him.page 202
• son Nakana! I call thy name. Thou speakes not Nakana.
• Thy eyes look up to me but see me not.
• (Aside) He stirs not. Will he nevermore stir?
• friends The ghost is gone out of him.
• son Oh, dead eyes, light again. Behold my tears to brighten you.
• Oh, still breast, stir again. Behold my breath to move you.
• (Aside) He stirs not. Will he nevermore stir?
• friends The ghost is gone out of him.
• son Oh, cold body, take the warmth of my own flesh; Thou who gavest me life, take back thy gift and live again.
• (Aside) Will not even this awaken him?

Even so short an extract shows the poet's quality. Here is a most compelling blend of artlessness and art. The perfect and unstrained simplicity of the son's lament is enormously dramatized by a flawless symmetry of structure. In each strophe of the poem the mourner's cry is made the more pathetic by his renewed appeal for comfort to the living, and the pitifulness of the tragedy is stressed by the inexorable reiterance of that refrain 'The ghost is gone out of him.' The poet responsible for these lines was an artist penetrated by his theme, in absolute control of his medium, and informed to his inmost fibre with the magic of form and balance.

And here is a Gilbertese lover singing of his mistress:

• How deep are my thoughts as I sit on the point of the land Thinking of her tonight.
• Her feet are luminous over dark ways, Even as the moon stepping between clouds.
• Her shoulders shine like Kaama in the South¹
• Her hands, in the sitting dance,
• Trouble my eyes as the flicker of stars;
• And at the lifting of her eyes to mine I am abashed,
• I, who have looked undaunted into the sun.

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My friend Taata, who, during my years there, was the greatest living poet of the Gilbert Islands, said to me once, "If I did not with heart and body live the life of my people, how could I sing songs to touch their hearts?"

That was his way of asserting that if poetry is to appeal to the people, it must savour of the salt of the people's life. His theory will not sound greatly amiss to lovers of Burns or Mistral, Chaucer or Hans Sachs; and, right or wrong, it has been the conviction of every poet who ever sang in the Gilbert Islands.

The singer of the Central Pacific is no aloof or lily-handed dreamer, who whiles away the languid hours:

In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine.

He is a toiler, a son of sea and soil, a peasant poet. Hard manual labour is the keynote of his life. If it were not so, he would starve, for on the sunscorched atolls that are the home of his race, there is none of that tropical luxuriance of vegetation that novelists love to describe. There are but two trees that yield him food—the coconut and the pandanus palm—and in that arid soil it is only by incessant travail that he can keep them productive. Every day, too, in every weather, he must go out with net or line to wrest from perhaps the most treacherous seas in all the world the fish that forms his only other food.

According to Taata, the poet should excel all other men in performance of these labours. Only by becoming a recognized master of the island crafts can he win reverence for his art. His ideal is therefore to be a perfect man, as manhood is conceived in the Central Pacific.

So it comes about that the champion wrestlers and canoemen, the most valiant warriors, the hardiest shark-fishers, the page 204most skilful builders and agriculturalists in the annals of the Gilbertese race have been poets. In these islands, the dreamers of dreams are the men of action too.

It is only when the poet feels the divine spark of inspiration once more stirring within him that he deviates from the ordinary course of village life. Then indeed he neglects his digging and fishing, but only to subject himself to a far sterner discipline. He removes himself to some lonely spot, there to avoid all contact with man or woman. He eats nothing but the flesh of coconuts, and drinks nothing but water.

For three days he thus purges his body of its vicious humours. On the fourth morning he marks out a twelve-foot square on the ground, in some place where he can get a good view of the rising sun. This is his 'house of song,' wherein he will sit in travail with the poem that is yet unborn. All the next night he squats there, bolt upright, facing east, while the song quickens within him.

Dawn breaks. As the edge of the sun's disc appears over the eastern sea, the poet lifts his hands at arm's-length before him, with palms turned outwards to the rising flame:

"O, Sun," he intones, "thou art reborn out of darkness; Thou comest out of deep places, thou comest out of the terrible shadows;
Thou wast dead, thou art alive again.
O, Sun, behold me, help me:
The word of power died in my heart,
Let it be reborn again as thou,
Let it fill me with light as thou,
Let it soar above the shadows,
Let it live!
So shall I be eloquent."

This incantation (age-old inheritance from his magic-loving ancestors) he repeats three times, then rinses his mouth with page 205salt water, thereby making his tongue 'pure for song.' Immediately after this ritual, he goes to his village to seek five friends. When he has found them he brings them back to his 'house of song.' They carry with them as many withered dancing wreathes as they can collect, together with the feathers of frigate birds, and of this strange fuel they make a small, acridly smoking fire in the middle of the 'house.' The poet sits, in such a position that the smoke may be blown upon him by the breeze, and his five friends face him in a semicircle on the other side of the fire.

Without further preamble, he begins to recite the 'rough draft' of his poem, which he has ruminated overnight. It is the business of his friends to interrupt, criticize, interject suggestions, applaud, or howl down, according to their taste. Very often they do howl him down, too, for they are themselves poets. On the other hand, if the poem, in their opinion, shows beauty they are indefatigable in abetting its perfection. They will remain without food or drink under the pitiless sun until night falls, searching for the right word, the balance, the music that will convert it into a finished work of art.

When all their wit and wisdom has been poured out upon him, they depart. He remains alone again—probably for several days—to reflect upon their advice, accept, reject, accommodate, improve, as his genius dictates. The responsibility for the completed song will be entirely his.

Like the songs of the old English 'makers,' of the French troubadours, of the German minnesingers, Gilbertese poetry is nearly all vocal in character. Usually, too, its proper accompaniment is the dance, for it is intensely dramatic.

Before a poem can come before the public, therefore, it must be fitted to a chant, and interpreted in terms of movement by the sinuous and poised gestures of skilled dancers. The adaptation of words to movement is called, for obvious reasons, the 'Raising of the Hands.' Unless the poet be himself an expert in this art, he must hand over his work to a committee of 'producers,' past masters of dancing, who, for no page 206reward save honour, will elaborate the exquisitely difficult and intricate movements of torso, head, eyes, arms, and fingers intended to interpret the artist's theme.

Before this august body the village dancers assemble, perhaps two hundred strong, and phrase by phrase they learn the new song. As each passage becomes known, the experts sketch out the appropriate attitudes, which are tried and retried until satisfaction is reached. There are interminable repetitions, recapitulations, revisions, until the flesh is weary and the chant sickeningly familiar. But from a ragged performance of ill-timed voices and uncertain attitudes, the song-dance becomes a magnificent harmony of bodies, eyes and arms swinging and undulating in perfect attunement through a thousand poises, to the organ tone of ten score voices chanting in perfect rhythm. Then dawns the poet's day of glory.

The dance chants cover the whole range of experience that may befall an island people. They are heroic, celebrating warriors and travellers; elegiac, mourning the dead; lyrical, singing of love; and humorous, burlesquing men or manners. Even poems which profess to be nothing but farcical are worthy of serious attention, for they often delight one with satirical passages of a shrewd childlike penetration, and sometimes achieve epigram in the authentic manner of Martial— as in this scrap of a modern song:

That man came shouting, "I am a chief."
Certainly he looks lazy enough for the title;
He also has the appetite of a king's son,
And a very royal waddle.
But he shouts, "I am a chief";
Therefore I know he is not one.

This is the sort of sally which particularly delights the humour of a Gilbertese audience.

But you come upon sudden beauty too in these comic songs, page 207that soothes the senses as the trilling of a bird heard through the clatter of a farmyard. Here is a stave of pure music, which I found sandwiched between passages of not very decent buffoonery:

Whence camest thou, my sister? Tell me for I would hear.
Thou camest on a laggard wind, a day of baffling calms.
Thou hast brought unease to the land. My dreams are heavy,
For thou has brought the sickness of love to me.
Would I had never seen thy face! I love thee, I love thee!

The island singer knows full well that beauty is never out of place. And he realizes also that there is no 'leaden metal' that his alchemy cannot 'into gold transmute,'no subject however humble that cannot be turned into song, and no song, if it expresses the heart, that cannot outlive the years of a man and the ravages of time. Perhaps the song for the marriage of 'Movement of Clouds' and of the fulfilment of Old Eri's prophecy when a new home was found for his descendants, will be sung long after the facts are forgotten.

When, early in 1932, I was transferred to islands on the other side of the world and the time came for me to leave the Gilbert Islanders for good, I left their problems in other hands but I kept their songs: and amongst them was one that my friend Taata gave me:

Even in a little thing
(A leaf, a child's hand, a star's flicker)
I shall find a song worth singing
If my eyes are wide, and sleep not.

Even in a laughable thing
(Oh, hark! The children are laughing!)
There is that which fills the heart to overflowing,
And makes dreams wistful.

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Small is the life of a man
(Not too sad, not too happy):
I shall find my songs in a man's small life. Behold them soaring!
Very low on earth are the frigate-birds hatched,
Yet they soar as high as the sun.