Deep Field (22 page)

I had arrived for the first time in Tonga almost a year before and had slowly travelled through the islands of Tongatapu, Vava‘u and Ha‘apai. The Kingdom was quite different from anywhere else I had been in the Pacific and this became immediately apparent when I landed at the airport unknowingly on the same flight as a member of the royal family. As we touched down, a military brass band dressed in red coats and brilliant white plumed pith helmets marched up and down the tarmac playing the national anthem before being left behind by the VIP’s jeep, bearing an enormous royal standard, which took off down Tongatapu’s one road surrounded by motorcycle outriders.

It was a bizarre beginning. The local organisation I worked for, being in many senses a creature of the establishment, was linked intricately with the peculiarities of Tongan monarchic patronage. At the office, ancient staff members wandered in and out, their irrevocable positions owed to long-defunct royal command. A giant carved hat stand, which once held pride of place in the palace bedroom, stood in the central corridor of the organisation—a hindrance to all but an almost untouchable totem of regal favour.

The obscurity and idiosyncrasy of the Tongan political system was a reflection of an extreme form of Polynesian hierarchy (also evident in chiefdom structures of Samoa and pre-colonial Hawai‘i) and the country’s unique position as the only Pacific nation—in a still deeply colonial region—to escape imperial subjugation. While it had been informally a British protectorate, the traditional independence of Tonga had nonetheless led to an absorption of the style and substance of British nineteenth-century politics. Tonga had the region’s first written constitution—that superimposed a Westminster system of government (along with prime minister, cabinet, legislature and judiciary) but which actually strengthened indigenous political structures by constitutionally enshrining the legal, property and political rights of the monarchy and the landed nobility. The lords of thirty politically significant families had the right to govern.

In style, the Tongan political system also appeared odd with its insistence on traditional clothes, and elaborate nineteenth-century military uniforms netted in braid, coloured sashes and the pomp and circumstance of the British Raj, miniaturised and transported to the small Pacific island. But this too was a piece of political theatre designed to reinforce the concept of what anthropologists have called the ‘domesticated stranger king’.

In Tonga there are no migration myths, unlike much of the rest of the region. Instead, the earliest foundation stories talk of the inhabitants of the main island, Tongatapu, as ‘small, black and descended from worms’. Other foundation stories suggested that early rulers had ‘descended from the skies’ following the union of a divine father with a Tongan mother. The fusion of these stories suggested at some stage an invading ruler had cleverly combined elements of both the myth of divine origins while also suggesting that the monarchy was an integral part of indigenous society—hence being descended from worms.

Seen in this context, the apparent incongruity of the miniature Raj of the Pacific—of ermine-clad nobles and Sandhurst-educated, monocle-sporting kings, separated from each other and from the constitutionally enshrined ‘commoner’ class by wealth, power and even distinct dialects—began to appear marginally less unreal. These anomalous traditions had been coopted by an indigenous hierarchy seeking to retain power and influence. The Tongans had understood and adapted to the Pacific the lessons of Frederick the Great in Prussia: reform from above before you are reformed from below.

On the final evening of my Tongan visit, I again saw the royal cavalcade—this time halted outside a small house whose entrance was guarded by brass canon. I stopped to watch and after a few minutes was rewarded as an enormous man wobbled along a red carpet at a stately pace from the house to the royal car as his guards stood to attention and saluted. He got in but the door remained open and the guards stood frozen at attention. Some minutes passed before a minute dog bounded out of the house and leapt into the car and in a second the door slammed, the outriders ripped their motorbike throttles and the cavalcade surged powerfully onto the road forcing the passing traffic onto an embankment, their majesties large and small progressing imperially home beneath the fluttering royal standard, leaving behind the roar, a tail of dust and the gentle lapping of the Pacific shore.

My second visit to Tonga was altogether grimmer. While the world’s eyes had been fixed on Samoa, higher waves with greater force had flattened three of the four hamlets of Niuatoputapu. Many had been caught in waves up to 17 metres high and nine people had died—a catastrophic loss on an island of only 800 people. Unlike in Samoa, where some had received a tsunami warning—15 minutes till impact—there was no warning in Niua. People I spoke to said they had felt a light tremor, but that this was no different to previous tremors except that it had lasted almost ten minutes. Minutes after that the first of three increasingly large waves struck.

I flew in an antique Douglas DC-3—described as a collection of parts flying in loose formation—to the Northern Island of Vava‘u and then transferred to a mosquito-like Islander for the three-hour journey to Niuatoputapu. On the tarmac, as we loaded up, there was a delay—to maintain balance, the eight passengers had to be reseated in order to make way for a colossal noble who by birthright and in order to distribute his weight had to be placed by himself on an even keel at the back of the plane. I was the loser in this readjustment and was crammed in at the front between the pilot and the Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet—a man named Busby—who during the flight and almost incomprehensibly above the roar of the propeller described the World Bank’s Niua reconstruction plan: 150 Californian bungalows to be constructed in neat rows at vast expense from imported brick and concrete on an inaccessible island without a port in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The village of Hihifo was the worst hit and there was nothing left standing except the shell of someone’s lovingly constructed blue-tiled concrete bathroom—standing alone now, without a roof or attached house, overlooking the sea. The rest was rubble: bricks, concrete, and hideously twisted sheets of corrugated iron. The pulverised remains of a car sat on top of what was once a roof but had now been smashed out of recognition and lay on the ground. Through the rubble and debris a road and some paths had been cleared by a New Zealand navy unit sent up from Tongatapu. The ship was too big to land and the navy had to create a helicopter airbridge to the island in order to deliver supplies and help in the clean-up. Near the entrance to the village, a slightly battered community noticeboard still stood and, in a malapropism that had turned into an apocalyptic temptation of fate, the sign read (CLEAN):

Community

Leader

Eradication

Around

Niuatoputapu

Strangely, amid the wreckage of the tsunami, I suddenly felt almost at home. Far from being the shock they had once been, disasters had become an almost familiar scene—the constant accompaniment, however grim and destructive, of human settlement and construction. And in this place, so different from my own, this destruction, the entire reason for my visit, was also a point of connection. Fortunately, while the villages had been destroyed the agricultural land was at a higher altitude and remained untouched. Everyone had moved from the villages to their gardens and were living in shanties and tents. What had gone, however, were the food stocks, and the water wells near the coast had been contaminated with salt water. Beyond the digestive biscuits, stale chocolates and tinned beef at the one remaining general store, there was almost nothing to eat and very little to drink. We slept on the floor of the local school and ate one meal a day—boiled rice mixed with tinned beef and cooked over an open fire made of broken pieces of people’s former homes. In the dry heat of the day, as I walked between the villages comparing the elaborate reconstruction plans with the more practical concerns of recovery—shelter and water—a small party of children followed this strange, pale foreigner through the rubble. They clearly had taken pity on my wanderings and had each brought delicious, refreshing gifts. And so I found myself moments later standing in the sun, on my own, the proud possessor of half a dozen watermelons—extravagant gifts in a context of food and water shortage for a total stranger from a people whose island lives had been shattered only a few short weeks before.

In the ruins of what had been the local bank branch, situated next to a twisted wreck of metal that was all that remained of the island’s satellite dish, I met the bank manager and we talked, sitting on a stray block of concrete. She had been at home but was alerted by shouts that ‘the sea is coming’ and went outside to the ground wet and pigs running around in mad confusion—clearly the result of a large wave. Getting in her van to drive down to the shore, she suddenly saw a second wave:

surging up ashore behind the bank, and then an even larger wave beyond that a few hundred metres away. This wave was higher than the coconut trees and I felt a surge of panic and began reversing up the road. By this time, people had jumped into the back of my van, onto the roof too, and others were clinging to the sides, standing on the running board. I was keeping an eye on the larger wave all the time, which by now had lifted and was floating an entire house towards us.

Another survivor described how he had left home early in the morning to go fishing and had felt the earthquake as he returned with his catch. Turning around, he saw the sea surging over the reef where he had just been. He climbed a tree just in time because a second wave crashed through the village and watched helpless as bits of debris from his house floated past. Eventually the sea receded and he climbed down to find that there ‘was nothing left at all, and it was much the same for the village, nothing but wreckage, and fish flapping on the ground’.

On the way back, we stopped at the island of Vava‘u awaiting a connecting flight back to Tongatapu. After Niuatoputapu’s dry heat, destruction, solemnity and the incredible generosity of its people, ‘normality’ in the tourist centre of Vava‘u was bizarre, and my Tongan colleague Iengi and I felt equally out of place. ‘These strange foreigners,’ Iengi muttered to me under his breath as we watch a group of international yachting families dressed up for Halloween—and it took me a second to remember that I was a foreigner too.

ENCLOSED IN THE OBSIDIAN
blackness of a Russian winter’s night, the Krasnoyarsk Express had come to an unscheduled stop. In the last carriage—‘hard class’—passengers began to stir. I peered over the edge of my steel bunk, dazed and dimly aware that we had not yet arrived. There were people silently milling around outside, connected somehow to swiftly moving sparks of light. The carriage door opened, refreshing us all with a trans-Caucasian frost and a man entered, walking with arctic slowness through the carriage carrying a chandelier, followed by another chandelier-carrier and another. Chandeliers of all cuts, sizes and varieties—for grand drawing rooms of the people or modest workers’ apartments—the glinting high-Soviet procession of cut glass paraded in silence past the barely conscious inhabitants of hard class and out again into the night. And as they went, the Krasnoyarsk Express resumed our journey eastward to Kazan.

It was 1999, a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, six years after the dismemberment of the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States, and Russia was still groaning in transition. In this place, Vladimir Putin resurrected Stalin’s national anthem (minus references to the USSR and the ‘Party of Lenin’). Isaac Rosenbaum, a former underground chanteur, revived ballads from the Soviet Union’s last colonial misadventure in Afghanistan and sang with confusedly heartfelt historical anachronism: ‘I’m from St Petersburg, Russia, USSR’. Camp boy bands—like Ivanushki International—also vied for the public’s affection by lip-synching anodyne schmaltz-pop before stiff rows of teenagers unsure of how to respond to their new musical freedom but desperately wanting to be fashionable in the New Russia. Leninism, great-Russian chauvinism, authoritarianism and plastic consumerism commingled toxically along with the horrendous human cost of state collapse.