Notes of a Wayward Native Son

A Voice from A World Outside Our Own

Back on Lanyu, the island of my ancestors, I returned to living the oceanic life of the real Tao. – Syaman Rapongan

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.

An island you hear about in the Western press for other reasons, so take this chance to see it from another point of view. Lanyu, lower right corner.

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.  

The Tao, organized by Rapongan, took their protests over nuclear fuel to Taipei in 1994.

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.

Today I’m recognized as a Chinese language writer from Taiwan and I realize that my readership is largely 25 to 45 years old, a generation much younger than myself. It’s an important recognition for me after the somewhat chaotic path I’ve taken.

There’s a saying in the Tao language – mapa ka Dehdehdeh – which means, ‘I’m definitely not a Han, but I act as if I were.’ The saying translates the aboriginal will to be like a wild horse, free in nature, not a tame animal inside a stall. ‘To have your degree’ means to be ‘domesticated’ by the Han. You must stay on guard against this.   

What does it mean to be an ‘oceanic writer’ ?

Literature is a physical practice for me. I dove into the sea, my body directly experienced the waves. And that’s where I’m different from urban writers. I’m one of the Tao but the other writers are Han. They come from the world of the city whereas I’m a world traveller, from an island not settled by the Han. Traditional Tao canoes are painted with four eyes, eyes that know what to look for in the ocean. I left my small island in order to go to Taiwan to study and I brought the eyes of the ocean with me : a much larger vision than that of the people from solid ground. I’ve tried to learn the other culture, even to integrate myself but I haven’t been treated as an equal.     

Man on a trail on one of the Pacific islands. Photo possibly by Véronique Arnaud, a French researcher who lived on Lanyu in the 1970s.

What is it about your writing that attracts them ?

They find things in my writing that they don’t see in the Han Taiwanese. I’ve been one of the first to set out my stall, to talk about my people’s experience of climate and social change, to engage with economic and ecological questions. I come from a people who live close to nature. We know what to do to preserve it. I feel that I’ve successfully documented this way of living. It was an innovation that touched and inspired young Taiwanese writers. It’s possible that I enlarged literature’s field of vision. I don’t create my writing with an eye on the market or to be ‘alternative.’ I simply describe it as belonging to the ‘oceanic trend.’ It’s possible that I enlarged literature’s field of vision.

You present yourself as a dreamer, a bad student, hanging out with people who refused to submit to the Han.

To be a rebel isn’t a bad thing, especially in relation to a powerful culture. It’s necessary to resist their domination. And I still, you know, remain completely submissive to the oceans, to the flying fish. In my short, collective experience as a practitioner of a traditional culture, I try to apply what nature and my ancestors taught me regarding the dominant culture.

I’ve talked about the colonial religion, brought to us by priests. When I was very young, they tried, with their bibles, to win us over, to make us believe in God. But it didn’t mean anything to us. They weren’t interested in knowing if our people were going to disappear or not. They wanted to propagate their monotheism; happily, our tradition is very strong, we’ve managed to maintain our language, our rituals, such as the offerings to the ancestors. We believe in the soul of every living being.

Tales and legends transmitted orally sleep in forgetfulness, the empiric philosophy of the ocean is abandoned, and the literature of the ocean, written on the body, that has been written since time immemorial is today only a fiction. As if this weren’t enough, we are now drowning in waves of information coming to us in a bevy of languages, all of it creating a world that has lost its way. From Eyes of the Ocean.

Pirogue (boat) launching, Summer 2022, Lanyu. Photo: Willy Chen.

*

There is another way to read the book – as a novel. As perhaps the first Tao proto-novel, the story of a young man’s wanderings, his encounters, what he gathers as he goes, what he scorns and how he returns. He not only sees Taiwan through the eyes of a Tao, he somehow makes a go of it, becomes a success, publishes in Mandarin, travels to exotic Greenland, where the immensty of the great fjords of ice stun him. The book reaches its peak, its visionary moment long after early youth and university training, in a sea voyage from Indonesia to Jayapura, with a Japanese captain and a crew from across Oceania, reduced to silence by their terror of the vast waters and their inability to communicate in a shared language. The waters stretch on and on, there are no fires or lights to be seen. Pirates still operate in these straits. The professor, as the crew calls him, has something else on his mind. Somewhere between the Moluccas and Halmahera he has a vision – a vision of language.

During a long, a very long moment, I let myself be hypnotised by the waves, finally falling asleep, plonged into a transe, carried away on a dreamlike journey of divine wanderings. A wave of sound rose to the surface from the deeps. In the Tao language, spoken forcefully, the ocean whispered to me : I’m carrying you on these voyages so that you become the eyes of the ocean.

I believe that this is the type of litarary creation I will pursue, transporting my body in the aquatic world, while the text, in Chinese characters, rises to the surface. The ocean has become a vast library which contains all the literary classics dear to me. From Eyes of the Ocean.

So the book, one part manifesto, another memoir, has its catharsis, its reconciliation, acceptance of fate : the world traveller, the man half-in half-out of both Tao and Han cultures goes home again. He accepts the ritual of purification (reed juice prepared by his father) and settles, still dreaming of writing – he’s a well-known writer in Taiwan now – but finding his inspiration not in books but in the vast ocean, where the words of his text float to the surface before he pins them on the page.

The legends of my oceanic tribe that I preserve in my memory flow over my body and penetrate my soul. While undertaking this long journey, it was as if my destiny was to accept this voyage that the fairies had spent a long time getting me ready for. From Eyes of the Ocean.

°

Riffs readers are greatly appreciated, whether subscribed, unsubscribed, paying - everybody. Creating a small community of people who tune into France on a regular basis is the goal. My ‘other’ novel Volte-Face in Paris will be out next year. Let’s get this new one going.

In the Very Good news department, I at last have my official rendezvous to secure legal status here in France. January 10th, in the Jura, where they don’t make you wait six months to tell you No. Good news all around. Seasonal cheer to everybody, whether you can afford it or not.