The islands decolonisation forgot
The islands decolonisation forgot
Two books underscore truths on display at Commonwealth summit and US election
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The Big Story:
Samoa, the Pacific archipelago divided up by Western powers among themselves at the end of the 19th century, hosts the 56-country Commonwealth heads of government meeting (CHOGM). Meanwhile, its eastern half – American Samoa – languishes as a US territory that doesn’t even have the right to vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump on November 5.
More than anything, 21st century Samoa symbolises the unfinished business of colonisation.
Samoa shows that we have not called time on the physical and psychological structures of colonial domination. Consider this:
The people of American Samoa are US nationals but not US citizens, despite 124 years of US control.
And CHOGM, attended by Britain’s King Charles, is the first time in the Commonwealth’s 75-year history that the gathering has been held in a developing Pacific island nation.
As one of this week’s books* says about the West’s attitude: “On the one hand, the Pacific Islands are envisioned as economic and geopolitical ‘stepping stones,’ rather than ends in themselves, and on the other they are imagined as ends of the earth or ‘cultural limits,’ unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity”.
This Week, Those Books:
A critique of imperial representation of the region known as Oceania.
A clutch of short stories about power and powerlessness in Samoa.
The Backstory:
European navigators began to visit Samoa in the early 18th century and Christian missionaries began to convert the islanders a hundred years later.
By the mid 19th century, Samoa became the playground for power games by the United States, Great Britain and Germany. Local chiefs took different sides, keeping Samoa divided.
Eventually, the US signed a treaty allowing it to establish a naval station, while Britain and Germany also managed similar agreements.
In 1899, the US annexed eastern Samoa, now called American Samoa, and Germany annexed the western part. The division occurred without any consultation with the Samoans themselves.
In 1914, as World War I ratcheted up, Western Samoa was occupied by troops from New Zealand, then a part of the British empire.
It would be nearly 50 years before Western Samoa achieved independence.
In 1997, Western Samoa’s legislature changed the country’s name to Samoa.
As for American Samoa,1 its people remain barred from birthright US citizenship.2 In 1901, the US Supreme Court ruled that US territories were “foreign in a domestic sense” and “inhabited by alien races”.3
This Week’s Books:
* American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination
By: Paul Lyons
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2006
The late Paul Lyons, an English professor at the University of Hawaii, situates Orientalism in Oceania. Which is to say, in this scholarly but passionately argued book, he discusses the stereotypical representation of a vast region made up of thousands of islands throughout the Central and South Pacific.
In this telling, Oceania becomes a place of small, insignificant islands that are “culturally eccentric, and the province of anthropologists” because their peoples are conserved or confined “within premodernity”. Noting that “Oceanians have become greeters for the tourist industry”, he quotes an Oceanian scholar’s lament that the islands have become “thoroughly fetishized” as “icon[s] of the exotic”. That’s largely because of the film South Pacific and an avalanche of tourist brochures, writes Lyons, but Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe also played a part in imagining an Oceania that is no more than a backdrop for US ventures.
And so, in relation to American national identity, the Pacific islands emerge “as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing, and eroticized furloughs between maritime work or warfare”.
Lyons examines US cultural interaction with Oceanians within “the broader anthropology of colonialism”. It is usually seen, he says, “as a subset of European representational practices, with the US treated like the derivative ‘paperback’ version to which Europe is the ‘hardcover’.”
In other words, the US has simply continued the imperial relegation of its annexed territories along the lines set by the European colonial powers around the world, in their heyday.
Choice quote:
“One day I was
kidnapped by a band
of Western philosophers”
– ‘Kidnapped’ by Samoan poet Ruperake Petaia
Afakasi Woman
By: Lani Wendt Young
Publisher: OneTree House
Year: 2021
The author, who is of Samoan and Maori descent, explores the split reality of life on the islands – as a coloured person of mixed heritage, but more emphatically, as a girl who’s not from the white ruling class.
The “Afkasi” in the title is roughly equivalent to the mixed race Anglo-Indian from the South Asian wing of Britain’s empire. Its baseline is the same: racial sorting. In these stories, just as those from British-ruled India, young girls are urged to “keep out of the sun”. In Oceania, they must not ruin their “palagi [white, European] skin”. Just as in South Asia, only fair is lovely in the Pacific islands.
So a Samoan woman asks her niece: “Do you want to be black like a meauli?! Do you want to be ugly?”
And a mixed race little girl thinks: “Nobody yells at me for playing in the sun. The blessing of being so brown that I’m a lost cause already”.
Lani Wendt Young is considered one of the leading writers to take Samoa’s story to a global audience. And she does.
Choice quote:
“Do you speak English?” the little girl asks. “Of course I speak English,” I say. “Why wouldn’t I?” “Some Samowans can’t speak English,” she says. My sister jumps in. “Yeah? Well we’re Samoans and we can speak English. Can you speak Samoan? I didn’t think so!” The little girl shrinks in the face of our Big Brown Girl defensive-aggression”.
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American Samoa is made up of five islands and two coastal atolls.
Unlike anyone born in one of the 50 US states, one federal district and four major territories (Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands). Residents of American Samoa can serve in the US military, live anywhere else in the US and hold American passports but because they are US “nationals” rather than US citizens, they can’t vote for the US president, run for office or hold a law enforcement job.
US Supreme Court 1901 ruling that US territories were part of the United States but also outside of it. In the set of early 20th century court cases known as the “Insular Cases”, the Supreme Court said that governing the territories “according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible”: https://www.loc.gov/item/usrep182244/
Thank you Rashmi for your interesting and important comments on CHOGM in Samoa, especially when reporters in countries such as the US may tend to brush over the colonial history of this Pacific nation. I have not read either of the books you suggest, but they look fascinating and I will make a note to do so soon.