The Land of My Ancestors

Idealized painting by George Baxter of the Queen, her husband and her children
contemplating the landing of the French troops on Tahitian soil

 

 Following on from my previous post, here is an extract from Children of Eden describing the journey that Ariitaimai and Alexander Salmon took to the island of Moorea to persuade Queen Pomare to cede to the demands of the French.

~~~~~~~~~~~

 Salmon was by now convinced that Tahiti needed the protection of a Great Power to stabilize the country. And it was clear to him... that the British government, despite all attempts to persuade them, was not interested in being that power.

... the Queen in Moorea was surrounded by her most virulently anti-French relatives. Salmon was afraid that nobody would be there to argue the case for complying with the French demands unless he were to do so himself. He received “advantageous promises” from the Admiral to intervene on behalf of France, but Salmon turned down all such offers, knowing he had to convince all sides that he was “completely disinterested and without an ulterior motive.” 

“In this difficult position, I followed only the promptings of my conscience… I knew basically the weakness of the Queen’s government in relation to external affairs and I concluded it would be better to end it once and for all and to give Her Majesty powerful foreign protection in the management of her foreign affairs. I had in effect the future of Tahiti in my hands and I decided what I believed then and I still believe to be in her best interests. So I decided... to leave for Moorea.”

He did not go alone. Ariitaimai, seven months pregnant, went with him. They both knew that she, given her closeness to the Queen, was the most likely person to be able to persuade her to sign the French document. And they knew there was no time to lose. It took several hours to cross the nine miles of ocean between the two islands, and it was already evening when they arrived. They docked at the jetty at Papetoia at the same time as the boat carrying Tairapa and Mr. Simpson. They all shook hands and hurried through the compound to the Queen’s house. 

The building was the largest on the compound, one vast room like a marquee, 150 feet long and half as wide, under a low steep roof of pandanus leaves. The travelers stepped into the shaded darkness, their eyes adjusting from the dazzle of the sunlight. The interior was filled with curtains of fine matting that rustled and billowed in the breeze that blew in through the unglazed windows from the ocean, and fringed tassels fluttered from the tall center ridge pole.

Scattered around the room in various enclosures and recesses were gifts from foreign leaders - scratched rosewood writing-desks inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, cut-glass decanters and goblets, gilded candelabras on their sides, sets of globes and mathematical instruments. Fine porcelain dinnerware, some pieces broken, lay underfoot. The pages of an embossed folio were held open with half a coconut shell. Rusty sabers and hunting guns lay among piles of lace hats and velvet and silk European clothes, all tangled in heaps with calabashes, rolls of old tapa cloth, paddles and fish-spears and plain Tahitian wooden furniture, all exposed to the salt air and mold of the tropics.

One of the Queen’s women came forward and led them to an enclosure where Pomare lounged on a pile of layered mats, trying to find a comfortable position for her very pregnant belly. She was surrounded by her retinue, her aunt Teriitaria, Queen of the Leeward Island of Huahine, and Tapoa, King of the Leeward Island of Bora Bora. 

Queen Pomare, looking careworn and weary, greeted them all anxiously, though her pleasure at seeing Ariitaimai was unmistakable. Tairapa delivered the Admiral’s message and showed her the letter that she was expected to sign.

The Queen immediately began raging about the actions of the chiefs, especially Tati, whom she felt had betrayed her. Ariitaimai tried to explain that her grandfather had signed the document only because he feared what would happen to Tahiti if he didn’t, but the Queen was not to be appeased. Her aunt and Tapoa told her in no uncertain terms to defy the French and refuse to sign, but Alexander Salmon respectfully spoke up and tried to counter their arguments. He described the damage that the guns of the French ships could do to the land and property of those she loved. He warned her of the many Tahitian and European lives that would be lost if the clans rose up to oppose the French. He pointed out that the letter guaranteed the sovereignty of the Queen and the chiefs over their dominions and that responsibility for all domestic affairs would remain in the hands of the Tahitians themselves. The French would extend their protection only over the direction of foreign affairs and everything related to foreign residents and port regulations. He painted a picture for Pomare of her capital restored to a state of peace and tranquility once she had the backing of a well-equipped military garrison capable of maintaining law and order. 

The Queen saw the truth in all this. Yet it still did not feel right for her to sign away any of her authority to the French. Darkness had fallen by now, and the lamps had been lit in the house, the candles flickering and dancing in the night air. Tairapa hesitantly reminded the Queen that the time was approaching when he would have to set off back to Tahiti with the answer - her signature or the money. In despair, she said, “But where do I have ten thousand dollars in cash? I have the land of my ancestors, and I have my people, but where have I ten thousand dollars?” At this, she began to cry, seeing no way out. 

She turned to Mr. Simpson, her friend and the only representative of her old ally Great Britain who was with her at that fateful moment, and told him she felt that she had no choice but to sign the paper. “I’m signing it only through my great fear, very reluctantly. I cannot pay the fine. If the Admiral fires on my people, they will massacre all the white men in Papeete before they run to the mountains. So I’m signing this paper only because of my great fear of the French, and to prevent the bloodshed they will cause by firing on my people.”

Then, still crying, she took the pen from Tairapa and signed her name on the document. Ariitaimai tried to console her, but Pomare could not stop sobbing. She went over to where her oldest son lay in the deep sleep of a seven-year-old on a mat nearby and, taking him in her arms, she rocked him against her massive belly saying through her sobs, “My child, I have signed away your birthright.”

The Reine Blanche and escort at anchor in Papeete harbor

This Island's Mine

“Miranda – The Tempest” J. W. Waterhouse, 1916

Some weeks ago my husband and I saw a friend’s 15-year-old son play the role of Prospero in his high school production of The Tempest. (He was great.) Little did I realize how many memories it would bring back. When I was barely a year older than Max, I played Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, in a production at St Andrews University. I was still in high school and was only cast in the production because I happened to babysit the children of the director. The production convinced me I had no acting talent, but it left me with a long-term fascination with Shakespeare’s enchanted isle full of “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

Many critics have interpreted The Tempest as foreshadowing colonialism. In the early 17^th century, when Shakespeare was writing the play, European explorers were discovering new and unmapped worlds. Spain, Portugal, England, and France were sending their seafarers out across the seas to find and claim new lands for themselves.

But it wasn’t until a century and a half after Shakespeare wrote The Tempest that a European set foot on what was to become the world’s most famous island – Otaheite in the South Pacific, better known as Tahiti.

In June 1767, a British frigate HMS Dolphin commanded by Captain Samuel Wallis was on a voyage around the world, sent by the Admiralty to look for a continent in the South Pacific. While Wallis wasn’t able to find that lost continent (because of course it doesn’t exist), he sailed back to England full of praise for the glorious fertile island he’d found instead. “Tis impossible to describe the beautiful Prospects we beheld in this charming spot; the verdure is as fine as that of England, there is great Plenty of Live Stock, and it abounds with all the choicest Productions of the Earth.”

When he’d landed on the island, greeted with great enthusiasm by the Tahitians, Wallis’s first act had been to claim it for the Crown. He’d planted the British colors and named the island King George’s Land. It never occurred to him to ask if that was all right with the inhabitants.

Eighty years later, after Tahiti had been preyed upon by the roving navies and whaling ships of the world, a French naval officer showed up intent on claiming the island for France. Admiral Dupetit-Thouars used threats of bombardment and impoverishment to bully Queen Pomare IV into signing an agreement ceding Tahiti to the “protection” of France. The Queen appealed to Great Britain for aid, but by this time the British government had its hands full with its colonies in Australia and New Zealand and didn’t feel like picking a fight with France over one small Pacific island.

On Prospero’s magic isle in The Tempest, two characters represent the different ways in which the islanders responded to enslavement. From his unapologetically Euro-centric perspective, Shakespeare presented Caliban as a vengeful mutinous “monster” and the sprite Ariel as the cooperative helpmeet to her “master.” However, most modern productions have seen Caliban as a heroic freedom fighter against an alien oppression and Ariel as a collaborator with the enemy.

In 1842, the young Ariitaimai and Alexander Salmon faced the same choice – negotiation/ surrender with the French or taking to the hills to fight. Like the other chiefs and prominent citizens of Tahiti, they found themselves torn, eager to preserve Tahiti’s independence but conscious of her vulnerability to any and all comers. Like most Tahitians, they resented being bullied and were highly reluctant to hand over the island’s sovereignty in response to threats, but they knew that blood would inevitably be shed and the well-armed French would never cease fighting until they had brought the Tahitians to heel. It was a terrible dilemma.

In the end, they decided that their primary responsibility should be to protect the country they loved from conflict. They reluctantly concluded that the benevolent “protection” of France would be the lesser of two evils, and they threw all their energies into persuading the Queen to acquiesce with the Admiral to ensure a peaceful transition of power.  

It was a difficult decision and one they came to regret in later years. They must have often felt as did Caliban in The Tempest:  

“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,

Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first,

Thou strokest me, and madest much of me; wouldst give me

Water with berries in’t; …

And then I loved thee, and show’d thee all the qualities of the isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:

Cursed be I that did so! ...

For I am all the subjects that you have

Which first was my own king.”  

Golden Folds of Ease

Gerard Manley Hopkins by Rowan Gillespie

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was one of the greatest religious poets in the English language. Though born an Anglican, in his 20s he began to be drawn to the rituals and beliefs of Catholicism after reading the work of John Henry Newman. Newman was an evangelical academic who had caused a virtual schism in the Church of England in the 1840s when he started the Oxford Movement for those who wished the Church of England to return to many Catholic beliefs and traditional forms of worship from before the Reformation. (There are echoes of this mid-Victorian schism in the Church of England in many novels of the time, including Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles.) In 1845, Newman became a Roman Catholic, eventually rising to the rank of Cardinal. Twenty years later, responding to attacks on him in the press, he published Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A Defense of His Life), and after reading this book, Hopkins decided to follow Newman’s example and convert.

Hopkins entered the Jesuit Novitiate in 1868 and resolved to write no more poetry, but in time he came to see that poetry could be written in service of his beliefs. He wrote in an unusual complex style, using archaic and even made-up words, but their effect is powerful. When studying theology in North Wales, he learned Welsh, and he adapted the rhythms of this melodic language to his verse. He called his technique “sprung rhythm” and described it as “scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.”

In later years as a parish priest and then as a teacher of Latin and Greek in Lancashire and Dublin, he wrestled with his faith, fearing that God was no longer listening to his prayers. He was deeply melancholy and often in ill health, though he pushed on with the exhausting regimen of his chosen life, teaching, grading mountains of papers, preaching, and visiting the sick. He was often close to both mental and physical breakdown and expressed his depression in his verse.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerald Manley Hopkins died of typhoid fever, aged only 44, in 1889, unknown and unheralded, though he had little time for acclaim. In a letter to a friend, he wrote these memorable words which I believe should be taped to the desk of every writer:

“Fame is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.”

Nevertheless, thirty years after Hopkins’ death, his poems were eventually published as a result of the efforts of his friend, Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate. In 1918, Oxford University Press brought out an edition of 750 of Hopkins’ poems, which at last brought the melancholy Jesuit poet to the attention of the “random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust” world.

Hopkins wrote several poems about Easter – this is the most well-known and widely anthologized.

Easter Communion

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast:
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips,
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships,
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased,

God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent:
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Remembrance of Things Past

Rebecca Hall as Sylvia Tietjens in "Parade's End"

I recently had the pleasure of watching the enthralling period drama “Parade’s End” produced by the BBC and HBO. (See the trailer here.) Written by Tom Stoppard from the novels by Ford Maddox Ford, it had excellent credentials from the get-go, and these were enhanced by the marvellous nuanced performances by the actors involved. Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) was a perfect Edward Tietjens, the moral, upright Englishman who let the world think the worst of him rather than allow the reputation of his volatile and sensuous wife Sylvia to be besmirched. And the magnificent Rebecca Hall as Sylvia, a sharp-witted beauty who kicks over the traces out of sheer boredom, desperate for her husband’s love and attention but too perverse to allow herself to accept it.  

This is yet another example of our culture’s enduring fascination of the Edwardian era – the time between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the end of the First World War. In less than two decades, Britain went through a dizzying period of changes, many of which were also happening around the world.

Then, as now, there was a dramatic acceleration of technology in daily life, particularly the widening use of the telephone and the automobiles. And social changes were happening in every area of life - women demanding the vote, the rise of the trade union movement, and the introduction of social welfare legislation by the reforming Liberal government of 1906, including the first national old age pension, free school meals, the National Health Insurance scheme, and unemployment  benefits. And all this was before the great disaster epic of the First World War had even begun.

So it’s no wonder that the period has been mined so extensively not only in literature but also in TV (The Forsythe Saga, the original Upstairs Downstairs, and of course Downton Abbey) and films (Howard’s End, The Shooting Party, The Wings of a Dove with Helena Bonham-Carter, and Joseph Losey’s glorious The Go Between). The over-exposure of this era means that it can be hard to avoid clichés – there are those who are tired of seeing or reading about yet another stately home, suffragette march, or muddy trench. Which raises the question of whether there is anything left to say about this period in British history.  

Clearly, given that I am writing a novel set between 1911 and 1923, I’m hoping the answer is yes. After all, it’s not as if we put a limit on the number of novels that can be written about the present day. There are always new stories to be told of individuals caught up in the same events and against the same backdrop.

Ultimately, it comes down to whether the reader is interested in my characters and what becomes of them. So it’s up to me to make sure that the people in Albion’s Millennium are absorbing and true to life whether they’re wearing jeans and a teeshirt or the enchantingly feminine clothes of the Edwardian age.

 

Light after Darkness

Pictures taken at Brookside Gardens, Wheaton MD, February 28, 2013

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring‒

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Gluck

 

 

 

On a Shining Hill

 

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

For Valentine’s Day, here is a lovely poem that my step-daughter chose and read for us at the blessing ceremony for my husband and me in a 13th century church in England in 2001. It was written by Sara Teasdale, a poet of the Chicago Renaissance who won the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918.

Sara Teasdale received public admiration for her well-crafted lyrical poetry which centered on a woman's changing perspectives on beauty, love, and death. Many of Teasdale's poems chart developments in her own life, from her experiences as a sheltered young woman in St. Louis, to those as a successful yet increasingly uneasy writer in New York City, to a depressed and disillusioned person who would commit suicide in 1933. Although many later critics would not consider Teasdale a major poet, she was popular in her lifetime with both the public and critics. She won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

 

The Tree of Song

I sang my songs for the rest,
For you I am still;
The tree of my song is bare
On its shining hill.

For you came like a lordly wind,
And the leaves were whirled
Far as forgotten things
Past the rim of the world.

The tree of my song stands bare
Against the blue --
I gave my songs to the rest,
Myself to you.

Sarah Teasdale

 

To Look for America

"Jo in Wyoming, Painting" Edward Hopper, 1946



 In 1981, I had just moved to London from Scotland to take up my first job after graduating from university. One February day, I went to an Edward Hopper exhibition at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank and I found myself standing in front of the picture above. The image was like an electric shock to my hippocampus – suddenly I was once again looking through the eyes of my six-year-old self. For the first years of my life, I’d seen the world from the cave-like interior of a big old American-made car just like the one in Hopper’s painting. That steering wheel planted like a tree in that mahogany dashboard, the window cranks, the couch-like seatback separating me from my parents in front – it was all as familiar as if it were playing on a monitor in my brain instead on a canvas on a wall.

Of course this was before a great big ship, its hull rising sheer from the dockside as we boarded in New York harbor, took me away from everything I’d known. As the Queen Elizabeth I sailed slowly across the vast blank of the Atlantic, it could not have been clearer to me that my old life was gone for good. If the ocean was five whole days wide, how would I ever be able to find my own way home?

So it was not surprising that I took some time to adjust to my new country. The words “uprooted” and “transplanted” were exactly how it felt to be pulled up from the comfortable soil and exposed to a new earth and a new light, with no guarantee I would thrive. Never a particularly nervous child before, I became clingy and wouldn’t let my mother out of my sight. I started sleep-walking and, worst of all I had a recurring dream from which I’d wake screaming in terror.

In the dream, I was in the back seat of that car, my father at the wheel and my mother beside him, when suddenly with no warning at all, they both evaporated, leaving me utterly alone in the car as it continued on its relentless way through time and space.    

But the nightmares faded, and life in rural Scotland became the new reality. Glimpses of America on TV or in photographs would stir something primordial in me – a yellow school bus, a fire hydrant, a billboard along a highway. And then there was music. Simon and Garfunkel singing, “‘Kathy, I'm lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping, ‘I'm empty and aching and I don't know why,’ Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, They've all gone to look for America.” And Joni Mitchell, the eternal traveller, singing, “I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel, To shower off the dust, And I slept on the strange pillows of my wanderlust, I dreamed of 747s, Over geometric farms, Dreams, Amelia, dreams and false alarms.”

And when I read John Updike’s story collection, Pigeon Feathers, yet more inchoate images surfaced like some deep water fish –

“The windshield wipers beat, and the wonderland lights of the Newark refineries were swollen and broken like bubbles by the raindrops on the side windows. For a dozen seconds a solemn cross of colored stars was suspended stiffly in the upper part of the windshield; an airplane above me was coming in to land.”

Even as I read the passage, I already knew how it felt to be inside that Hopper-like car with the wipers creaking as the rain lashed down on the New Jersey turnpike. I'd already been there.  

And then came the day when I stood in front of that Hopper painting and saw again with the eyes of my American childhood. By that time, I was in my early 20s, and the country had taken on the quality of a myth, rooted in early 1960s Technicolor. A Camelot of the brain, a conglomeration of other people’s visions and stories. I had been back to the US once – a month-long odyssey into my past in New Jersey and Pittsburgh and then onto pastures new in San Francisco – but an idea had seeded within me that I needed to go back for longer.

A few years later, I made it happen. I only planned to stay for a year, but as of last August 2, I have been here for a quarter of a century. Once more, my world was cut in half, and there are times when I think that my bifurcated life has left me permanently wounded, neither here nor there nor anywhere in between. Though I feel at home in both my countries, wherever I am, I’m always homesick for something or someone.

But then another memory surfaces, a very early one, of being with my parents in the parking lot of a roadside diner somewhere in America on a fresh sunny morning. I remember looking up at the diner’s roof and seeing the Stars and Stripes snapping against a blue, blue sky and knew beyond a doubt that there was nothing better in the world than that sense of possibility before you set off on a journey, even when you have no idea of what is ahead of you or when, if ever, you’ll arrive.