For much of his life, Syaman Rapongan’s world involved unresolved and seemingly unresolvable dialectics. Sea vs land; culture vs barbarism; the Tao Celestial Spirit vs the Christian godhead: These are among the polarities that informed the writer’s outlook.
A native of Pongso no Tao — or Lanyu (Orchid Island, 蘭嶼) — Syaman Rapongan dedicated himself to challenging these fractures and the prejudice they engendered.
The channels he navigated, turbulent and impenetrable as the Kuroshio Current that pulses the shores of his homeland, shaping its ecology and culture, crisscross this autoethnographic work of “colonial ocean island literature.”
Even the issue of names — his own, those of his people and birthplace — are bones of decolonial contention.
As Scott E Simon explains in his introduction, Pongso no Tao was early known to Europeans as Botel Tobago. It is still called this in the Philippines, with which the island historically had cultural and trade ties via the Batanes archipelago across the Bashi Channel (巴士海峽); a nipponized version of this name — Tabako — is found in historical Japanese records.
Under successive Chinese dynasties — the Ming and the Qing — it was dubbed Hongdouyu (紅豆與, Red Bean Islet) and Hongtouyu (紅頭與, Red Head Islet) respectively, the latter apparently deriving from features of the island’s mountains. Finally, under Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) rule, it was rebaptized Lanyu after the island’s orchids.
Yet to the Tao, whose endonym — like other Taiwanese indigenous peoples — translates simply as “human(s),” their homeland is the “island of humans.”
The designation Tao, writes Simon, has “proven to be remarkably resilient” and was emphasized during early indigenous activism in Taiwan, in which Syaman Rapongan participated. However, it is not favored by all islanders — some preferring the Japanese-era exonym Yami.
With Tao nomenclature dictating that names are used in full, “Syaman” indicates fatherhood and “Rapongan” the child’s name. The author is thus “Father of Rapongan.” On becoming a grandfather, he is “Syapen,” followed by his grandchild’s name.
Just as the matrilineality of Taiwan’s Amis people is a refreshing surprise to dabblers in anthropology that first encounter the phenomenon, there is a profound humility in the cultural foregrounding of children in Tao society. It contrasts with the filial piety of those who colonized Pongso no Tao during the twentieth century, repressing traditional indigenous values.
EMASCULATING EXPERIENCE
Trampled by Christian and Han Chinese moralizing, the self-identity of the Tao — branded “hillbillies,” “potlids” (after their bowl haircuts) or, most hurtfully, “savages,” — is irrelevant. When a 16-year-old Shih Nu-lai (施努來), as the author was known in Chinese, introduces himself by his birthname of Cigewat, he learns, “[n]o one cares about your Yami name.”
Aside from the shock, he recalls, the “distress of having misnamed myself.” The young man had assumed his name “was something to be proud of.”
This early taste of colonial emasculation comes from Father Cheng Hung-sheng (鄭鴻聲), of the Swiss-founded Bethlehem Mission Society into whose care Cigewat is entrusted. Cheng heads Cultivating Character House (陪質院) — next door to a pair of brothels.
While residing here, Cigewat becomes just the fourth Tao child to attend Taitung Senior High School. Bare necessities are covered, though, during holidays, the apostolic brothers lease their indigenous youngsters to an avaricious, gammy-legged taskmaster in the remote mountains.
Recalling the work of Malaysian scholar Syed Hussein Alatas in The Myth of the Lazy Native, Syaman Rapongan reveals the hypocrisy of the clergymen via another duality.
“A teacher or doctor has an occupation and belongs to a certain ‘social class,’” Cheng says. “Someone who engages in tribal activities, like a fisherman, a hunter or planter of taro and sweet potato does not have an occupation, he’s just making a ‘living.’”
PUZZLING INTERACTIONS
Continuing this theme, the “gloomy priest” avers that a primitive lifestyle “aims at nothing more than self-sufficiency” involving “the simplest form of social organization,” the Tao “don’t have any culture.” Embracing Chinese culture to “edify” future generations is thus “the best way out for you.”
The hypocrisy of such admonishments is exposed by the habitual sneering of the priests at any aspirations deemed fanciful. When a Bunun classmate suggests he would like to be a history teacher, a “look of disdain appeared on [Cheng’s] face.” His “racist tendencies,” writes Syaman Rapongan, were renowned.
Perhaps the most interesting of the book’s oppositions is that of the pure, innocent islanders vs the manipulative, menacing Taiwanese — both Minnanners (閩南人) and Mainlanders, to use translator Darryl Stark’s preferred terms.
There is something satisfyingly in the simplicity of Sterk’s use of “bad guys,” throughout the text to describe this murky threat.
As a youth, the author regularly encountered “hooligans,” serving sentences on the island — “the sort of guy [village elders] were worried I would turn into in Taiwan.” Yet, his interactions with such types are puzzling.
On the ferry to Taiwan, he meets Mr Chen, a recently freed Bamboo Union gangster and university graduate. Chuffing Long Life cigarettes, with other passengers doubled over, vomiting, the old lag “offers words of encouragement [that] seemed much more sincere than anything my schoolteachers had ever said.”
But when Cigewat sees his seasick female classmates receiving Chen’s untoward attention, he “could feel his breath, a mouthful of nastiness” and it appeared “as if behind his words was the lesson of Han patriarchy that we had learned in junior high, and a fantasy of sexual slavery.”
CHALLENGING THE NARRATIVE
This ambiguity surfaces anew in the character of Pasuya, a Taiwanese ex-con, who offers Cigewat great kindness, zero discrimination and financial support.
Still, while laboring for peanuts across Taiwan, Cigewat soon understands who these “bad guys” are, as he is exploited and belittled.
As the first indigenous student to attend university without minority credits, Cigewat “is not the kind of ‘hillbilly’ who lets himself get fostered by the KMT.” Instead, he dreams of being an “ocean writer” — a pursuit incomprehensible to landlubbers.
Among the perplexed is a priest to whom Syaman Rapongan presents his first book. The man doesn’t understand it. Like others who grew “up without the sound of the ocean to serve as an alarm clock … he lacked maritime imagination.”
One can’t entirely blame him. Aside from concrete examples of “Tao maritime life,” such as canoe building, diving for nine-holed abalone, and the exorcism of malevolent anito spirits to ensure a bountiful maritime harvest, there are oblique references to the “emotions of fishes,” becoming a fish scale, and the “speech of the starry sky” — part of a “translational ocean island literature of my own creation.”
The eye motif of the title, which recurs in relation to the sky, the sea and the author’s own mind, is particularly elusive. In postscript translator’s note, Sterk suggests that its interpretation “lies with reader.”
Perhaps it is understood through its “potential to unsettle many dominant understandings of Taiwan,” writes Simon. Removing the Tao from the margins of colonizing cultures, Syaman Rapongan places his island First Nation at “the center of something new.”
Like the map he finds in a Rarotonga bookshop, Syaman Rapongan presents a reconfigured world, with the sea as its beating heart.
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