Pago Pago, American Samoa Whose Nation Is This Anyway?

By Pico Iyer

All the pillars of American civic righteousness are here: the YWCA choir, the Boy Scouts, the 4-H club, the church-sponsored floats, even the pom-pom girls strutting their stuff to the strains of Happy Days Are Here Again. It could, really, be any All-American small town putting on an Independence Day parade on any village green. Except that this truly is, in the strict anthropological sense, a village, and the green here is really, really green. And the girls are dressed in grass skirts, and so too are many of the boys, with sashes of flowers across their oiled chests and woven tree bark around their ankles. The 50-man long boats are racing past mist-wreathed rain-forest mountains, and the muddy park is taken over by cricket. But not the game of white-flannel elegance as it is played at the Marylebone Cricket Club in London. Oh, no! This is tropical, Technicolor kirikiti -- buxom girls in lemon yellow shirts and sky blue skirts thwacking around a homemade rubber ball with a three-sided bat, while supporters rhythmically chant and dance and beat vigorously on biscuit tins.

And the Fourth of July is still two months away!

What is this? Where are we? Good question. Technically, we are in American ; Samoa, an "unincorporated territory" of seven tiny volcanic islands administered since 1951 by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Physically, we are midway between Hawaii and Australia, on the only piece of American soil south of the equator, and on the very edge of the international date line (this is one of the last places on earth where the day begins). Officially, we are celebrating Flag Day, the 89th anniversary of the first raising of the Stars and Stripes on this palm-fringed South Sea bubble. And truthfully, we are in a kind of green-fringed gray area, neither here nor there.

For American Samoa is not quite American and not quite Samoa: it sends a Congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to vote; its 38,000 people are counted as "U.S. nationals" but cannot cast ballots for anything except island leaders. In the early 1960s, the Federal Government started pouring planeloads of money into its castaway dependency, partly in the spirit of idealism, and partly with an eye to its unmatched, and strategically useful, harbor (last year, Washington sent $45 million in direct aid to a community with one-sixth as many people as Mesa, Ariz.). Yet the U.S. has never bothered too much about the legal niceties of its anomalous territory. After President William McKinley took over the main island in 1900, fully 29 years passed before Congress deigned to make the transfer formal.

Legally, then, "the Peoria of the Pacific" remains in as mingled a state as its notorious climate of simultaneous rain and shine. How, for instance, can American laws of inheritance be applied to a culture in which 90% of the land is communally owned by extended families? And how can due process be served in a world in which it is regarded as impolite to refuse a request, especially from a matai, or all powerful village chief? "We try," explains Grover Joseph Rees III, the former Chief Justice of the High Court, "to blend Western procedures with Samoan substance. But often, of course, it's not so simple -- because the substance is based on the procedure. Our usual rule is that statute trumps custom, but custom cannot trump statute." Nevertheless, local leaders are still bewildered, and often enraged, when federal law is imposed on their textbook haven of taboos and tattoos.

On first appearances, American Samoa is anyone's dream of a South Seas paradise, its narrow jungle roads lined with hibiscus, its deserted white beaches overlooked by windblown coconut palms. Waves break gently against the | main road, and the girls wear flowers in their hair. And at night, in every village, local matrons slouch against wooden posts in thatched, open-sided oval buildings, engaging in a languorous game of Bingo.

Yet if the island is part Polynesian idyll, it is also part Rotary Club protectorate. The map at the airport here is sponsored by the Lions Club, and the local hospital is named after L.B.J. Days of Our Lives and Nightingales are shown on TV, and Tiger Beat is available at the nearest newsstand. All the props of the American Dream are here, right down to Korean grocery stores and Mexican food. American Samoa has a ZIP code, a Radio Shack, a Democratic caucus; the kids wear LIFE'S A BEACH T shirts, dial 911 for emergencies and sing along to Tiffany on the local AM station; there are yellow school buses, American-style license plates and U.S. mailboxes. This last item is especially strange, since mail is not even delivered house-to-house here.

And all across the islands, amid the run-down pool halls and basketball courts and liquor stores, stand high rebukes to the tropical sultriness -- Mormon and Catholic and Baptist and Congregationalist churches, white and erect in the holiday sunshine. Here, in fact, is the strictest kind of Southern Bible Belt: villages enforce curfews during evening prayers each day, and beaches are often closed on Sundays. Teenagers sashay around in T shirts that say HAPPINESS IS SHARING THE GOSPEL, and the official motto of the island is "Let God be first."

No surprise, then, that it was here in Pago Pago that Somerset Maugham set his famous confrontation between the missionary and Sadie Thompson. Or that discussions of Samoa's moral -- and cultural -- identity continue as heatedly as the much publicized debate between Margaret Mead's classic vision of pastoral innocence (Coming of Age in Samoa) and Derek Freeman's revisionist account of violence and rape (Margaret Mead and Samoa -- The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth). "Being bilingual and bicultural doesn't mean you have to be schizophrenic," says Bernie Oordt, who taught at a local high school for twelve years. "As long as you have a basic bedrock, a strong system of values, you should be big enough to incorporate both cultures. And I think these people have a very sound sense of who they are, tied up with family and community."

Yet the fact remains that the majority of young American Samoans leave the island within a year of graduation, often to return disenchanted with both the mainland and their island homeland. And alcoholism is a perennial concern in a country where beer sometimes seems as much in abundance as water. In the cricket-chattering dusk, John Kneubuhl, a grand old man of the island, who went from here to Yale and then to a screenwriting career in Hollywood, recalls how he used to play hide-and-seek in the ghost-filled dark as a boy. Now, he says, traditions are fading. "It's like a volcano getting ready, not exactly to explode but at the very least to ooze out."

To see what is peculiar to American Samoa, one need travel only 40 miles across the waters to Western Samoa, a relatively forgotten independent island that has four times as many people as its American namesake, but no congressional support. In Western Samoa, people speak English in the gentle, sea-lapping cadences of the South Pacific; in American, they favor the twang of Beach Boys and Valley Girls. In Western, residents play the genteel old colonial game of lawn bowling; in American, they converge on a twelve-lane bowling alley. And in Western, the roads are lined with pigs, while in American, they are crowded with Jeep Cherokees. Although the 76 square miles of American land is clearly more affluent, it is also, in a curious way, more derelict. "You'll notice that the ceremonies in Western Samoa are much more relaxed," says John Enright, American Samoa's Folk Arts Coordinator. "Over here they're more uptight. There's always a fear that they're losing their traditions, or that they won't get things quite right. I think of this island as a kind of retail store of Samoan traditions, with Western Samoa as the warehouse."

Thus the local song that boasts "Samoa, there's no place like you" rings all too true for some of the palagis, or foreigners, on the island. At American Samoa Community College, Philip Grant gamely leads Laborday Fatali and a group of other flamboyantly named students through a discussion of Rousseau and Romanticism, only occasionally thrown off by a modern sensibility ("What does self-serving mean?" "Well, the gas station is self- service"). Yet Grant, one of those gypsy scholars who move from country to country, finds Samoa considerably more alien than his last posting, in Beirut. "In Lebanon," he says, "there was at least some bridge with the West. But here you feel totally cut off. The culture is 3,000 years old and very complex and so different from ours that we wouldn't know how to begin to penetrate it."

Yet the strangeness is both spiced and complicated further by stubborn traces of the familiar. On Flag Day, a legal secretary suddenly re-emerges as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin. A U.S. Army man appears amid a group of spear- shaking warriors in lavalava skirts, fierce tattoos on many thighs. A former Hollywood bit actor resumes his role as the "talking chief" of Leone, leading his villagers through hymn-inflected island chants and primal dances. And then, just before Governor Peter Coleman, Congressman Eni Faleomavaega and various other dignitaries get ready to join in the final swaying dance, a village chorus sits on the ground, chants its age-old traditions and dramatically, for its climax, flashes -- what else? -- an American flag.