My mother is from New Zealand, my father is Samoan. My brother is brown like my father, I have freckles like my mother. My brother carries tau lima both traditional and western. I have none. As children, I had the red curled cap of a recessive English-Stowers gene, while my brother’s hair was straight, black silk like our Saina-Samoan aiga.
Before I
was 5 years old, we had lived in New Zealand, Australia and Papua New Guinea-
where cocoa-coloured children found my red hair an oddity, and trailed me in
giggling packs to touch it.
In
Australian schools, my classmates and their parents were Thursday Islanders,
Fijians, Maltese, Italian, Czech, English, Papuans, Aboriginal. Voluntary and
involuntary Australians, descendents of the land, blackbirders and blackbirds,
colonisers and colonised, deportees, and refugees.
My family
was unusual in our mobility- my father’s 4th nation at age 25, and
my mother’s 3rd- but in many ways, we illustrated stereotypes not
just of our town, but the towns we came from. Pick a statistic- teen pregnancy,
infant mortality, alcohol, violence; or choose a privilege- good jobs and a dual income,
free healthcare, quality education, access to finance and social mobility.
Of my father’s
7 siblings, 3 sisters would marry Maori men, and one a Samoan. His
brothers married palagi women of Dutch, English and Spanish/Maori descent. My
mother’s siblings married palagi and Maori too.
My twenty-three first cousins on both sides courted people of the Pacific – some of them married, and some married again. Their children are like sand now, countless grains coloured from quartz to obsidian, sparkling and intermingled.
When I
first married, my wife was part palagi, part Maori, and her children (by coincidence) were red
haired and freckled like I had been. They grew up fair skinned in brown South Auckland, amid the largest Polynesian and Maori
populations in the country, and on the planet at the time – with growing
communities from Asia and Africa.
I went to live in Samoa, the birthplace of my father for a short time, and I was not even considered afa-kasi (half-caste). I recognized, as others did, that I was a visitor.
I met a new partner, who had grown up in Tokelau and
Samoa, a palagi raised in her early years in villages and on beaches where her
skin was an exception.
The world is small, and people are many. In all nations, even those of the ocean, visitors have always come and gone, have loved, have stayed or left.
There is an obligation upon a visitor to recognize their position and their host; and an obligation upon all to recognize that when someone stays in a place they cannot forever be a visitor; as attachments form there are responsibilities which ensue.
It is
important that cultures be retained, that stories are told, that languages
and arts are shared so that they may be preserved - but culture,
like land is weathered and reshaped by time and by people.
There is a tendency for people to seek to root their identity in a distinct ethnicity and culture. To anchor themselves, in a story and a place and people.
However, in this present, there is sometimes also an unrealistic, and uncharitable individuality expressed not as 'I am this' or 'my place is here'- but extended to ‘I am this, and you are that’, or ‘this is my story and it cannot be your story’.
Such declarations are definition of oneself by exclusion, and often require the recognition of one ancestry, and a denial of others.
We can recognize the past without repeating it, without denying that it is interwoven and that we are each different products of it all. A person can be descended (in fact is likely to be descended) from more than one side of any historical argument.
To exclude me from
your story or you from mine, is to separate our shores in the present, while neglecting the ocean between us.
My identity, and particularly my cultural and ethnic identity, is affected by those around me, but not reliant upon them. Like knowledge, or wisdom, my identity is not fixed, although it has roots. It ebbs and flows with time and exposure, it changes when I listen and when I speak to people, when I find stories and when I retell them, when I discover places and when I leave them. It is not dependent on the melanin in my skin or hair or eyes, but it does react to sun and rain and wind. It is hereditary, but it does not belong to those who came before me. It can be left or shared, but not taken, by those around me.
My skin is creamy where it is covered, and mottled brown where it is not- the freckles move, sometimes they join.
When I look at my family trees, I do not see lines- I see nets, woven strands that extend in several directions, crossing and recrossing- and they have snagged too many types of ancestor to count. Fish may school, but nets do not discriminate - for the ocean is large, and fish abound.
Birds cross great oceans, responding to the sun and the season. Coconuts float to follow the currents, and they take root where they land.
To see your heart, I must look past your skin; to know your mind, I must listen to your voice; and to judge your intent I should observe your actions.
