Notes of a Wayward Native Son
Notes of a Wayward Native Son
A Voice from A World Outside Our Own
Syaman Rapongan is a writer and a Tao, an Australasian ethnic group who live on the island of Lanyu in the Orchid archipelago southeast of the Taiwan. A fisherman, diver, militant, writer and poet – the last two rarities in a culture with no written language – Rapongan’s new book, translated into French as Les Yeux de l’Océan, The Eyes of the Ocean, navigates between autobiography, initiation tale, manifesto for the defense of nature and aboriginal cultures, a hymn to his ancestors and an ode to living on the fringes of society.
Rapongan, now in his early sixties, was among the first Tao to study at university in Taiwan where he encountered discrimination and insults and among many other things, discovered the French literature of Victor Hugo and others, a literature so firmly anchored to the soil, to history and culture, it will always feel formal and foreign, one of the Continentals.
In essence, Rapongan plays spin the globe and asks us to see everything in reverse of our habits. The planet is not dominated by land but by water. We go to war endlessly over territory; the islanders study the waves. For a Tao or anyone else from the islands, what point in dividing humanity into righteous and usurpers? They have to fight all of us.
His book feels like the product of an immense inner struggle. What sort of person is he ? Is it possible to go home again ? Under what conditions ? Rapongan is not content to be a cultural critic sitting in Taipei, issuing jeremiads. He lives on Lanyu, where he parlayed his knowledge of the Han Chinese by mounting a successful campaign to keep nuclear waste off the island in the ‘90s. Asked who he is, he swings a machete through the air and cuts the coco-world in two : Continentals and Oceanics. Taiwanese Han Chinese fall into the former category, not least for the hatred their schools preached regarding the Maoists on the mainland, a recurring motif in Rapongan’s memoirs, a matter of distaste for a young islander finding his way on the Big Isle. Continentals look to the land for sustenance, tradition, innovation. The world Rapongan inhabits is dominated by the primordial waters, a living being, the reality on which everything else depends.
Rapongan, an ‘Oceanic writer,’ was in Paris a few weeks ago. The conversation over tea and cigarettes was conducted by Arnauld Vaulerin for Libération. Here’s your chance to listen to a man who comes from far away, a world we’ll never know, someone who struggles to preserve that tough, ancient paradise.
The text of the interview follows, with book excerpts interjected, translated by myself. Rapongan’s Mata Nu Wava, Les Yeux de l’océan, is available from Paris-based l’Asiathèque publishers.
You defend the Tao culture and your deep involvement on the island of Lanyu. Isn’t it difficult to write in another language, that of the colonizers ?
My heart has gone through a tug of war. Every minority in the world goes through this dilemma. We are a people who don’t use an alphabet. Nothing is written down in Tao culture, so we are obliged to borrow another language, in this case Mandarin. Chinese grammar has nothing to do with our language, so from a very early age I had to learn Chinese characters. I’ve chosen to write in Mandarin with the goal of being read, of having readers.