There's something about that drive from the airport along that long single road (in my experience usually made in the dark): the coconut trees, the fales open to expose the inner workings of the people and their lives, the small shops and their pyramids of tinned pisupo and eleni, the gorgeous initiation of the sea. Traveling that road brings back memories of the first time I came to Samoa as a 14 year old.
In those days Faleolo airport wasn't much more than the most basic of structures. I remember landing into that incredible heat, stepping off the plane and being hit by a hot, wet wave which made my clothes stick to my body. I remember too, before conveyor belts, the sweating men hauling baggage on their shoulders and the chaos of matching bags to owners. That drive from Faleolo was a revelation of sights and smells and to a girl from Christchurch it was like landing on a different planet. Now many years and trips later, I don't experience the same culture shock, but there remains something of the wide-eyed 14 year old still; Samoa retains the power to mesmerize and astonish me.
It's very easy to get idealistic about Samoa; foreign visitors from Robert Louis Stevenson to Margaret Mead have been doing it for centuries. I wonder what impression those Palagi tourists (my Dad struck up a conversation with a few of them in the departure lounge in Auckland) will take home with them? Will it be all smiling native waiters round the resort pool and technicolour sunsets? Is it even possible to get a deeper impression of Samoa than that of the ten day package tour to The Outrigger? It's very easy to see Samoa through hibiscus-coloured glasses, I think we as New Zealand Samoans tend to idealise Samoa too - albeit in different ways - our homeland, our heritage, our roots.
When I was twenty I decided to 'return' to Samoa. I recognised I was never really going to understand myself until I understood the land of my father. So I spent a year in Samoa and returned to New Zealand with more questions than answers; it wasn't as easy and certainly nowhere near as romantic as I had imagined. In the intervening years I've developed my own relationship with Samoa and 'Samoan-ness'; it is a fluid one, full of contradictions and often means having to inhabit two worlds and the sometimes painful points of their crossings.
But, Samoa for me is not all identity angst, not by any means. Something happens to me there, something like letting go of a huge sigh when you didn't realise you were holding on to one. The dictates of everyday life in the West - the emails to answer, phone calls to make, deadlines to die for - slowly seep away and a different rhythm takes over. The slower, saner pace of the islands revolves around something larger than the self. Something - I could have never foreseen when I was younger and fiercely convinced that independence and individuality were the be all and end all - happens; that burden of individuality and independence starts to lessen, and along with it, the isolation and loneliness that is its hidden curse.
As a fulltime poet, performer and longtime world traveller, independence and individuality, isolation and loneliness have been my intimate companions; they are the flipside to the fulfillment and excitement of writing and performing and the adventure and glamour of travel. Being in Samoa reminds me that I am more than myself, I am part of something bigger: my family. Being in Samoa also reminds me I am not alone, for family are the other parts of the body that I belong to. After nearly 55 years in New Zealand, my father has made his final return to Samoa. He wants to spend his remaining years in the land of his people, and for me that exerts an even stronger pull to be there. I suspect my life will always be full of returns to Samoa; it does, after all, put a smile on my face.
