Coming of Age in Samoa/Chapter 10
X
the experience and individuality of the average girl[1]
with a background of knowledge about Samoan custom, of the way in which a child is educated, of the claims which the community makes upon children and young people, of the attitude towards sex and personality, we come to the tale of the group of girls with whom I spent many months, the group of girls between ten and twenty years of age who lived in the three little villages on the lee side of the island of Taū. In their lives as a group, in their responses as individuals, lies the answer to the question: What is coming of age like in Samoa?
The reader will remember that the principal activity of the little girls was baby-tending. They could also do reef fishing, weave a ball and make a pin-wheel, climb a cocoanut tree, keep themselves afloat in a swimming hole which changed its level fifteen feet with every wave, grate off the skin of a breadfruit or taro, sweep the sanded yard of the house, carry water from the sea, do simple washing and dance a somewhat individualised siva. Their knowledge of the biology of life and death was overdeveloped in proportion to their knowledge of the organisation of their society or any of the niceties of conduct prescribed for their elders. They were in a position which would be paralleled in our culture if a child had seen birth and death before she was taught not to pass a knife blade first or how to make change for a quarter. None of these children could speak the courtesy language, even in its most elementary forms, their knowledge being confined to four or five words of invitation and acceptance. This ignorance effectually barred them from the conversations of their elders upon all ceremonial occasions. Spying upon a gathering of chiefs would have been an unrewarding experience. They knew nothing of the social organisation of the village beyond knowing which adults were heads of families and which adult men and women were married. They used the relationship terms loosely and without any real understanding, often substituting the term, "sibling of my own sex," where a sibling of opposite sex was meant, and when they applied the term "brother" to a young uncle, they did so without the clarity of their elders who, while using the term in an age-grouping sense, realised perfectly that the "brother" was really a mother's or father's brother. In their use of language their immaturity was chiefly evidenced by a lack of familiarity with the courtesy language, and by much confusion in the use of the dual and of the inclusive and exclusive pronouns. These present about the same difficulty in their language as the use of a nominative after the verb "to be" in English. They had also not acquired a mastery of the processes for manipulating the vocabulary by the use of very freely combining prefixes and suffixes. A child will use the term fa'a Samoa, "in Samoan fashion," or fa'atama, tomboy, but fail to use the convenient fa'a in making a new and less stereotyped comparison, using instead some less convenient linguistic circumlocution.[2]
All of these children had seen birth and death. They had seen many dead bodies. They had watched miscarriage and peeked under the arms of the old women who were washing and commenting upon the undeveloped fœtus. There was no convention of sending children of the family away at such times, although the hordes of neighbouring children were scattered with a shower of stones if any of the older women could take time. from the more absorbing events to hurl them. But the feeling here was that children were noisy and troublesome; there was no desire to protect them from shock or to keep them in ignorance. About half of the children had seen a partly developed fœtus, which the Samoans fear will otherwise be born as an avenging ghost, cut from a woman's dead body in the open grave. If shock is the result of early experiences with birth, death, or sex activities, it should surely be manifest here in this postmortem Cæsarian where grief for the dead, fear of death, a sense of horror and a dread of contamination from contact with the dead, the open, unconcealed operation and the sight of the distorted, repulsive foetus all combine to render the experience indelible. An only slightly less emotionally charged experience was the often witnessed operation of cutting open any dead body to search out the cause of death. These operations performed in the shallow open grave, beneath a glaring noon-day sun, with a frighted, excited crowd watching in horrified fascination, are hardly orderly or unemotional initiations into the details of biology and death, and yet they seem to leave no bad effects on the children's emotional makeup. Possibly the adult attitude that these are horrible but perfectly natural, non-unique occurrences, forming a legitimate part of the child's experience, may sufficiently account for the lack of bad results. Children take an intense interest in life and death, and are more proportionately obsessed by it than are their adults who divide their horror between the death of a young neighbour in child-bed and the fact that the high chief has been insulted by some breach of etiquette in the neighbouring village. The intricacies of the social life are a closed book to the child and a correspondingly fascinating field of exploration in later life, while the facts of life and death are shorn of all mystery at an early age.
In matters of sex the ten-year-olds are equally sophisticated, although they witness sex activities only surreptitiously, since all expressions of affection are rigorously barred in public. A couple whose wedding night may have been spent in a room with ten other people will never the less shrink in shame from even touching hands in public. Individuals between whom there have been sex relations are said to be "shy of each other," and manifest this shyness in different fashion but with almost the same intensity as in the brother and sister avoidance. Husbands and wives never walk side by side through the village, for the husband, particularly, would be "ashamed." So no Samoan child is accustomed to seeing father and mother exchange casual caresses. The customary salutation by rubbing noses is, of course, as highly conventionalised and impersonal as our handshake. The only sort of demonstration which ever occurs in public is of the horseplay variety between young people whose affections are not really involved. This romping is particularly prevalent in groups of women, often taking the form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.
But the lack of privacy within the houses where mosquito netting marks off purely formal walls about the married couples, and the custom of young lovers of using the palm groves for their rendezvous, makes it inevitable that children should see intercourse, often and between many different people. In many cases they have not seen first intercourse, which is usually accompanied by greater shyness and precaution. With the passing of the public ceremony, defloration forms one of the few mysteries in a young Samoan's knowledge of life. But scouring the village palm groves in search of lovers is one of the recognised forms of amusement for the ten-year-olds.
Samoan children have complete knowledge of the human body and its functions, owing to the custom of little children going unclothed, the scant clothing of adults, the habit of bathing in the sea, the use of the beach as a latrine and the lack of privacy in sexual life. They also have a vivid understanding of the nature of sex. Masturbation is an all but universal habit, beginning at the age of six or seven. There were only three little girls in my group who did not masturbate. Theoretically it is discontinued with the beginning of heterosexual activity and only resumed again in periods of enforced continence. Among grown boys and girls casual homosexual practices also supplant it to a certain extent. Boys masturbate in groups but among little girls it is a more individualistic, secretive practice. This habit seems never to be a matter of individual discovery, one child always learning from another. The adult ban only covers the unseemliness of open indulgence.
The adult attitude towards all the details of sex is characterised by this view that they are unseemly, not that they are wrong. Thus a youth would think nothing of shouting the length of the village, "Ho, maiden, wait for me in your bed to-night," but public comment upon the details of sex or of evacuation were considered to be in bad taste. All the words which are thus banished from polite conversation are cherished by the children who roll the salacious morsels under their tongues with great relish. The children of seven and eight get as much illicit satisfaction out of the other functions of the body as out of sex. This is interesting in view of the different attitude in Samoa towards the normal processes of evacuation. There is no privacy and no sense of shame. Nevertheless the brand of bad taste seems to be as effective in interesting the young children as is the brand of indecency among us. It is also curious that in theory and in fact boys and men take a more active interest in the salacious than do the women and girls.
It seems difficult to account for a salacious attitude among a people where so little is mysterious, so little forbidden. The precepts of the missionaries may have modified the native attitude more than the native practice. And the adult attitude towards children as non-participants may also be an important causal factor. For this seems to be the more correct view of any prohibitions which govern children. There is little evidence of a desire to preserve a child's innocence or to protect it from witnessing behaviour, the following of which would constitute the heinous offence, tautala laititi ("presuming above one's age"). For while a pair of lovers would never indulge in any demonstration before any one, child or adult, who was merely a spectator, three or four pairs of lovers who are relatives or friends often choose a common rendezvous. (This, of course, excludes relatives of opposite sex, included in the brother and sister avoidance, although married brothers and sisters might live in the same house after marriage.) From the night dances, now discontinued under missionary influence, which usually ended in a riot of open promiscuity, children and old people were excluded, as non-participants whose presence as uninvolved spectators would have been indecent. This attitude towards non-participants characterised all emotionally charged events, a women's weaving bee which was of a formal, ceremonial nature, a house-building, a candle-nut burning—these were activities at which the presence of a spectator would have been unseemly.
Yet, coupled with the sophistication of the children went no pre-adolescent heterosexual experimentation and very little homosexual activity which was regarded in native theory as imitative of and substitutive for heterosexual. The lack of precocious sex experimentation is probably due less to the parental ban on such precocity than to the strong institutionalised antagonism between younger boys and younger girls and the taboo against any amiable intercourse between them. This rigid sex dichotomy may also be operative in determining the lack of specialisation of sex feeling in adults. Since there is a heavily charged avoidance feeling towards brother and cousins, and a tendency to lump all other males together as the enemy who will some day be one's lovers, there are no males in a girl's age group whom she ever regards simply as individuals without relation to sex.
Such then was the experience of the twenty-eight little girls in the three villages. In temperament and character they varied enormously. There was Tita, who at nine acted like a child of seven, was still principally preoccupied with food, completely irresponsible as to messages and commissions, satisfied to point a proud fat finger at her father who was town crier. Only a year her senior was Pele, the precocious little sister of the loosest woman in the village. Pele spent most of her time caring for her sister's baby which, she delighted in telling you, was of disputed parentage. Her dancing in imitation of her sister's was daring and obscene. Yet, despite the burden of the heavy ailing baby which she carried always on her hip and the sordidness of her home where her fifty-year-old mother still took occasional lovers and her weak-kneed insignificant father lived a hen-pecked ignominious existence, Pele's attitude towards life was essentially gay and sane. Better than suggestive dancing she liked hunting for rare samoana shells along the beach or diving feet first into the swimming hole or hunting for land crabs in the moonlight. Fortunately for her, she lived in the centre of the Lumā gang. In a more isolated spot her unwholesome home and natural precocity might have developed very differently. As it was, she differed far less from the other children in her group than her family, the most notorious in the village, differed from the families of her companions. In a Samoan village the influence of the home environment is being continually offset in the next generation by group activities through which the normal group standards assert themselves. This was universally true for the boys for whom the many years' apprenticeship in the Aumaga formed an excellent school for disciplining individual peculiarities. In the case of the girls this function was formerly performed in part by the Aualuma, but, as I pointed out in the chapter on the girl and her age group, the little girl is much more dependent upon her neighbourhood than is the boy. As an adult she is also more dependent upon her relationship group.
Tuna, who lived next door to Pele, was in a different plight, the unwilling little victim of the great Samoan sin of tautala laititi. Her sister Lila had eloped at fifteen with a seventeen-year-old boy. A pair of hot-headed children, they had never thoroughly re-established themselves with the community, although their families had relented and solemnised the marriage with an appropriate exchange of property. Lila still smarted under the public disapproval of her precocity and lavished a disproportionate amount of affection upon her obstreperous baby whose incessant crying was the bane of the neighbourhood. After spoiling him beyond endurance, she would hand him over to Tuna. Tuna, a stocky little creature with a large head and enormous melting eyes, looked at life from a slightly oblique angle. She was a little more calculating than the other children, a little more watchful for returns, less given to gratuitous outlays of personal service. Her sister's overindulgence of the baby made Tuna's task much harder than those of her companions. But she reaped her reward in the slightly extra gentleness with which they treated their most burdened associate, and here again the group saved her from a pronounced temperamental response to the exigencies of her home life.
A little further away lived Fitu and Ula, Maliu and Pola, two pairs of sisters. Fitu and Maliu, girls of about thirteen, were just withdrawing from the gang, turning their younger brothers and sisters over to Ula and Pola, and beginning to take a more active part in the affairs of their households. Ula was alert, pretty, pampered. Her household might in all fairness be compared to ours; it consisted of her mother, her father, two sisters and two brothers. True, her uncle who lived next door was the matai of the household, but still this little biological family had a strong separate existence of its own and the children showed the results of it. Lalala, the mother, was an intelligent and still beautiful woman, even after bearing six children in close succession. She came from a family of high rank, and because she had had no brothers, her father had taught her much of the genealogical material usually taught to the favourite son. Her knowledge of the social structure of the community and of the minutiæ of the ceremonies which had formerly surrounded the court of the king of Manu'a was as full as that of any middle-aged man in the community. She was skilled in the handicrafts and her brain was full of new designs and unusual applications of material. She knew several potent medical remedies and had many patients. Married at fifteen, while still a virgin, her marital life, which had begun with the cruel public defloration ceremony, had been her only sex experience. She adored her husband, whose poverty was due to his having come from another island and not to laziness or inability. Lalala made her choices in life with a full recognition of the facts of her existence. There was too much for her to do. She had no younger sisters to bear the brunt of baby-tending for her. There were no youths to help her husband in the plantations. Well and good, she would not wrestle with the inevitable. And so Lalala's house was badly kept. Her children were dirty and bedraggled. But her easy good nature did not fail her as she tried to weave a fine mat on some blazing afternoon, while the baby played with the brittle easily broken pandanus strands, and doubled her work. But all of this reacted upon Fitu, lanky, ill-favoured exceutive little creature that she was. Fitu combined a passionate devotion to her mother with an obsessive solicitude for her younger brothers and sisters. Towards Ula alone her attitude was mixed. Ula, fifteen months younger, was pretty, lithe, flexible and indolent. While Fitu was often teased by her mother and rebuked by her companions for being like a boy, Ula was excessively feminine. She worked as hard as any other child of her age, but Fitu felt that their mother and their home were unusual and demanded more than the average service and devotion. She and her mother were like a pair of comrades, and Fitu bossed and joked with her mother in a fashion shocking to all Samoan onlookers. If Fitu was away at night, her mother went herself to look for her, instead of sending another child. Fitu was the eldest daughter, with a precocity bred of responsibility and an efficiency which was the direct outcome of her mother's laissez-faire attitude. Ula showed equally clearly the effect of being the prettier younger sister, trading upon her superior attractiveness and more meagre sense of duty. These children, as did the children in all three of the biological families in the three villages, showed more character, more sharply defined personality, greater precocity and a more personal, more highly charged attitude towards their parents.
It would be easy to lay too much stress on the differences between children in large households and children in small ones. There were, of course, too few cases to draw any final conclusions. But the small family in Samoa did demand from the child the very qualities which were frowned upon in Samoan society, based upon the ideal of great households in which there were many youthful labourers who knew their place. And in these small families where responsibility and initiative were necessary, the children seemed to develop them much earlier than in the more usual home environment in which any display of such qualities was sternly frowned upon.
This was the case with Malui and Meta, Ipu and Vi, Mata, Tino and Lama, little girls just approaching puberty who lived in large heterogeneous households. They were giving over baby-tending for more productive work. They were reluctantly acquiring some of the rudiments of etiquette; they were slowly breaking their play affiliations with the younger children. But all of this was an enforced change of habits rather than any change in attitude. They were conscious of their new position as almost grown girls who could be trusted to go fishing or work on the plantations. Under their short dresses they again wore lavalavas which they had almost forgotten how to keep fastened. These dragged about their legs and cramped their movements and fell off if they broke into a sprint. Most of all they missed the gang life and eyed a little wistfully the activities of their younger relatives. Their large impersonal households provided them with no personal drives, invested them with no intriguing responsibilities. They were simply little girls who were robust enough to do heavy work and old enough to learn to do skilled work, and so had less time for play.
In general attitude, they differed not at all from Tolo, from Tulipa, from Lua, or Lata, whose first menstruation was a few months past. No ceremony had marked the difference between the two groups. No social attitude testified to a crisis past. They were told not to make kava while menstruating, but the participation in a restriction they'd known about all their lives. was unimpressive. Some of them had made kava before puberty, others had not. It depended entirely upon whether there was an available girl or boy about when a chief wished to have some kava made. In more rigorous days a girl could not make kava nor marry until she menstruated. But the former restriction had yielded to the requirements of expediency. The menstruating girl experienced very little pain which might have served to stress for her her new maturity. All of the girls reported back or abdominal pains which, however, were so slight that they seldom interfered in any way with their usual activities. In the table I have counted it unusual pain whenever a girl was incapacitated for work, but these cases were in no sense comparable to severe cases of menstrual cramps in our civilisation. They were unaccompanied by dizziness, fainting spells, or pain sufficient to call forth groaning or writhing. The idea of such pain struck all Samoan women as bizarre and humorous when it was described to them. And no special solicitude for her health, mental or physical, was shown to the menstruating girl. From foreign medical advice they had learned that bathing during menstruation was bad, and a mother occasionally cautioned her daughter not to bathe. There was no sense of shame connected with puberty nor any need of concealment. Pre-adolescent children took the news that a girl had reached puberty, a woman had had a baby, a boat had come from Ofu, or a pig had been killed by a falling boulder with the same insouciance—all bits of diverting gossip; and any girl could give accurate testimony as to the development of any other girl in her neighbourhood or relationship groups. Nor was puberty the immediate forerunner of sex experience. Perhaps a year, two or even three years would pass before a girl's shyness would relax, or her figure appeal to the roving eye of some older boy. To be a virgin's first lover was considered the high point of pleasure and amorous virtuosity, so that a girl's first lover was usually not a boy of her own age, equally shy and inexperienced. The girls in this group were divided into little girls like Lua, and gawky overgrown Tolo, who said frankly that they did not want to go walking with boys, and girls like Pala, who while still virgins, were a little weary of their status and eager for amorous experience. That they remained in this passive untouched state so long was mainly due to the conventions of love-making, for while a youth liked to woo a virgin, he feared ridicule as a cradle-snatcher, while the girls also feared the dreaded accusation of tautala laititi ("presuming above one's age"). The forays of more seasoned middle-aged marauders among these very young girls were frowned upon, and so the adolescent girls were given a valuable interval in which to get accustomed to new work, greater isolation and an unfamiliar physical development.
The next older girls were definitely divided as to whether or not they lived in the pastor's households. A glance at the table in the appendix will show that among the girls a couple of years past puberty, there is a definite inverse correlation between residence at home and chastity, with only one exception, Ela, who had been forgiven and taken back into the household of a pastor where workers were short. Ela's best friend was her cousin, Talo, the only girl in the group who had sex experience before menstruation had begun. But Talo was clearly a case of delayed menstruation; all the other signs of puberty were present. Her aunt shrugged her shoulders in the face of Talo's obvious sophistication and winning charm and made no attempt to control her. The friendship between these two girls was one of the really important friendships in the whole group. Both girls definitely proclaimed their preference, and their homosexual practices were undoubtedly instrumental in producing Talo's precocity and solacing Ela for the stricter régime of the pastor's household.
These casual homosexual relations between girls never assumed any long-time importance. On the part of growing girls or women who were working together they were regarded as a pleasant and natural diversion, just tinged with the salacious. Where heterosexual relationships were so casual, so shallowly channelled, there was no pattern into which homosexual relationships could fall. Native theory and vocabulary recognised the real pervert who was incapable of normal heterosexual response, and the very small population is probably sufficient explanation for the rarity of these types. I saw only one, Sasi, a boy of twenty who was studying for the ministry. He was slightly but not pronouncedly feminine in appearance, was skilled at women's work and his homosexual drive was strong enough to goad him into making continual advances to other boys. He spent more time casually in the company of girls, maintained a more easy-going friendship with them than any other boy on the island. Sasi had proposed marriage to a girl in a pastor's household in a distant village and been refused, but as there was a rule that divinity students must marry before ordination, this has little significance. I could find no evidence that he had ever had heterosexual relations and the girls' casual attitude towards him was significant. They regarded him as an amusing freak while the men to whom he had made advances looked upon him with mingled annoyance and contempt. There were no girls who presented such a clear picture although three of the deviants discussed in the next chapter were clearly mixed types, without, however, showing convincing evidence of genuine perversion.
The general preoccupation with sex, the attitude that minor sex activities, suggestive dancing, stimulating salacious conversation, salacious songs and definitely motivated tussling are all acceptable and attractive diversions, is mainly responsible for the native attitude towards homosexual practices. They are simply play, neither frowned upon nor given much consideration. As heterosexual relations are given significance not by love and a tremendous fixation upon one individual, the only forces which can make a homosexual relationship lasting and important, but by children and the place of marriage in the economic and social structure of the village, it is easy to understand why very prevalent homosexual practices have no more important or striking results. The recognition and use in heterosexual relations of all the secondary variations of sex activity which loom as primary in homosexual relations are instrumental also in minimising their importance. The effects of chance childhood perversions, the fixation of attention on unusual erogenous zones with consequent transfer of sensitivity from the more normal centres, the absence of a definite and accomplished specialisation of erogenous zones—all the accidents of emotional development which in a civilisation, recognising only one narrow form of sex activity, result in unsatisfactory marriages, casual homosexuality and prostitution, are here rendered harmless. The Samoan puts the burden of amatory success upon the man and believes that women need more initiating, more time for the maturing of sex feeling. A man who fails to satisfy a woman is looked upon as a clumsy, inept blunderer, a fit object for village ridicule and contempt. The women in turn are conscious that their lovers use a definite technique which they regard with a sort of fatalism as if all men had a set of slightly magical, wholly irresistible, tricks up their sleeves. But amatory lore is passed down from one man to another and is looked upon much more self-consciously and analytically by men than by women. Parents are shy of going beyond the bounds of casual conversation (naturally these are much wider than in our civilisation) in the discussion of sex with their children, so that definite instruction passes from the man of twenty-five to the boy of eighteen rather than from father to son. The girls learn from the boys and do very little confiding in each other. All of a man's associates will know every detail of some unusual sex experience while the girl involved will hardly have confided the bare outlines to any one. Her lack of any confidants except relatives towards whom there is always a slight barrier of reserve (I have seen a girl shudder away from acting as an ambassador to her sister) may partly account for this.
The fact that educating one sex in detail and merely fortifying the other sex with enough knowledge and familiarity with sex to prevent shock produces normal sex adjustments is due to the free experimentation which is permitted and the rarity with which both lovers are amateurs. I knew of only one such case, where two children, a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifteen-year-old girl, both in boarding schools on another island, ran away together. Through inexperience they bungled badly. They were both expelled from school, and the boy is now a man of twenty-four with high intelligence and real charm, but a notorious moetotolo, execrated by every girl in his village. Familiarity with sex, and the recognition of a need of a technique to deal with sex as an art, have produced a scheme of personal relations in which there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, no impotence, except as the temporary result of severe illness, and the capacity for intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility.
Of the twenty-five girls past puberty, eleven had had heterosexual experience. Fala, Tolu, and Namu were three cousins who were popular with the youths of their own village and also with visitors from distant Fitiuta. The women of Fala's family were of casy virtue; Tolu's father was dead and she lived with her blind mother in the home of Namu's parents, who, burdened with six children under twelve years of age, were not going to risk losing two efficient workers by too close supervision. The three girls made common rendezvous with their lovers and their liaisons were frequent and gay. Tolu, the eldest, was a little weary after three years of casual adventures and professed herself willing to marry. She later moved into the household of an important chief in order to improve her chances of meeting strange youths who might be interested in matrimony. Namu was genuinely taken with a boy from Fitiuta whom she met in secret while a boy of her own village whom her parents favoured courted her openly. Occasional assignations with other boys of her own village relieved the monotony of life between visits from her preferred lover. Fala, the youngest, was content to let matters drift. Her lovers were friends and relatives of the lovers of her cousins and she was still sufficiently childlike and uninvolved to get almost as much enjoyment out of her cousins' love affairs as out of her own. All three of these girls worked hard, doing the full quota of work for an adult. All day they fished, washed, worked on the plantation, wove mats and blinds. Tolu was exceptionally clever at weaving. They were valuable economic assets to their families; they would be valuable to the husbands whom their families were not over anxious to find for them.
In the next village lived Luna, a lazy good-natured girl, three years past puberty. Her mother was dead. Her father had married again, but the second wife had gone back to her own people. Luna lived for several years in the pastor's household and had gone home when her stepmother left her father. Her father was a very old chief, tremendously preoccupied with his prestige and reputation in the village. He held an important title; he was a master craftsman; he was the best versed man in the village in ancient lore and details of ceremonial procedure. His daughter was a devoted and efficient attendant. It was enough. Luna tired of the younger girls who had been her companions in the pastor's household and sought instead two young married women among her relatives. One of these, a girl who had deserted her husband and was living with a temporary successor came to live in Luna's household. She and Luna were constant companions, and Luna, quite easily and inevitably took one lover, then two, then a third—all casual affairs. She dressed younger than her years, emphasised that she was still a girl. Some day she would marry and be a church member, but now: Laititi a'u ("I am but young"). And who was she to give up dancing.
Her cousin Lotu was a church member, and had attended the missionary boarding school. She had had only one accepted lover, the illegitimate son of a chief who dared not jeopardise his very slender chance of succeeding to his father's title by marrying her. She was the eldest of nine children, living in the third strictly biological family in the village. She showed the effects of greater responsibility at home by a quiet maturity and decision of manner, of her school training in a greater neatness of person and regard for the nicety of detail. Although she was transgressing, the older church members charitably closed their eyes, sympathising with her lover's family dilemma. Her only other sex experience had been with a moetotolo, a relative. Should her long fidelity to her lover lead to pregnancy, she would probably bear the child. (When a Samoan woman does wish to avoid giving birth to a child, exceedingly violent massage and the chewing of kava is resorted to, but this is only in very exceptional cases, as even illegitimate children are enthusiastically welcomed.) Lotu's attitudes were more considered, more sophisticated than those of the other girls of her age. Had it not been for the precarious social status of her lover, she would probably have been married already. As it was, she laboured over the care of her younger brothers and sisters, and followed the routine. of relationship duties incumbent upon a young girl in the largest family on the island. She reconciled her church membership and her deviation from chastity by the tranquil reflection that she would have married had it been possible, and her sin rested lightly upon her.
In the household of one high chief lived the Samoan version of our devoted maiden aunts. She was docile, efficient, responsible, entirely overshadowed by several more attractive girls. To her were entrusted the newborn babies and the most difficult diplomatic errands. Hard work which she never resented took up all her time and energy. When she was asked to dance, she did so negligently. Others dancing so much more brilliantly, why make the effort? Hers was the appreciative worshipping disposition which glowed over Tolu's beauty or Fala's conquests or Alofi's new baby. She played the ukulele for others to dance, sewed flower necklaces for others to wear, planned rendezvous for others to enjoy, without humiliation or a special air of martyrdom. She admitted that she had had but one lover. He had come from far away; she didn't even know from what village, and he had never come back. Yes, probably she would marry some day if her chief so willed it, and was that the baby crying? She was the stuff of whom devoted aunts are made, depended upon and loved by all about her. A malaga to another village might have changed her life, for Samoa boys sought strange girls merely because they were strangers. But she was always needed at home by some one and younger girls went journeying in her stead.
Perhaps the most dramatic story was that of Moana, the last of the group of girls who lived outside the pastors' households, a vain, sophisticated child, spoiled by years of trading upon her older half-sister's devotion. Her amours had begun at fifteen and by the time a year and a half had passed, her parents, fearing that her conduct was becoming so indiscreet as to seriously mar her chances of making a good marriage, asked her uncle to adopt her and attempt to curb her waywardness. This uncle, who was a widower and a sophisticated rake, when he realised the extent of his niece's experience, availed himself also of her complacency. This incident, not common in Samoa, because of the great lack of privacy and isolation, would have passed undetected in this case, if Moana's older sister, Sila, had not been in love with the uncle also. This was the only example of prolonged and intense passion which I found in the three villages. Samoans rate romantic fidelity in terms of days or weeks at most, and are inclined to scoff at tales of life-long devotion. (They greeted the story of Romeo and Juliet with incredulous contempt.) But Sila was devoted to Mutu, her step-father's younger brother, to the point of frenzy. She had been his mistress and still lived in his household, but his dilettantism had veered away from her indecorous intensity. When she discovered that he had lived with her sister, her fury knew no bounds. Masked under a deep solicitude for the younger girl, whom she claimed was an innocent untouched child, she denounced Mutu the length of the three villages. Moana's parents fetched her home again in a great rage and a family feud resulted. Village feeling ran high, but opinion was divided as to whether Mutu was guilty, Moana lying to cover some other peccadillo or Sila gossiping from spite. The incident was in direct violation of the brother and sister taboo for Mutu was young enough for Moana to speak of him as tuagane (brother). But when two months later, another older sister died during pregnancy, it was necessary to find some one stout-hearted enough to perform the necessary Cæsarian post-mortem operation. After a violent family debate, expediency triumphed and Mutu, most skilled of native surgeons, was summoned to operate on the dead body of the sister of the girl he had violated. When he later on announced his intention of marrying a girl from another island, Sila again displayed the most uncontrolled grief and despair, although she herself was carrying on a love affair at the time.
The lives of the girls who lived in the pastor's household differed from those of their less restricted sisters and cousins only in the fact that they had no love affairs and lived a more regular and ordered existence. For the excitement of moonlight trysts they substituted group activities, letting the pleasant friendliness of a group of girls fill their lesser leisure. Their interest in salacious material was slightly stronger than the interest of the girls who were free to experiment. They made real friends outside their relationship group, trusted other girls more, worked better in a group, were more at ease with one another but less conscious of their place in their own households than were the others.
With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.