As a young boy growing up in New Zealand, I first saw the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific in 1958, when I was a young teenager in a large, rambunctious group of badly behaved Maori kids. I later saw it as a stage production in the mid-1960s in Hamilton, a small city in New Zealand, when my aunt sang the role of Bloody Mary and some of my cousins were in the Polynesian chorus. I wasn't as politicized then as I am now, but I immediately saw that I was included-if only at the margins. And not only was I included but I felt that my world had been captured with some accuracy.
At the time, the Pacific was usually of the Hollywood variety: picturesque, exotic, color-by-Technicolor fantasies filled with images of an unspoiled Eden. It was most often constructed in the backlot of Twentieth Century-Fox, as it was for Tyrone Power in Son of Fury (1942), about a highborn aristocrat who becomes a sailor and lands in Tahiti; or at MGM, as it was for Lana Turner in Green Dolphin Street (1947). Occasionally, big stars like Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper came down to our part of the world to make His Majesty O'Keefe (Warner Bros., 1954) and Return to Paradise (United Artists,1953, adapted from a James A. Michener short story), but invariably Polynesians were played by Hollywood actors: Gene Tierney did a passable hula in Son of Fury; the stoic Jeff Chandler was a noble Hawaiian prince returning home in Bird of Paradise (1951). In general, the films took the stereotypical perspective: they were filled with beautiful Polynesian women and evil witch doctors, and somewhere along the way the local volcano god was bound to get angry with his people and let off some steam. This is what happened in Bird of Paradise, in which a beautiful Hawaiian girl, Debra Paget, was forced to sacrifice herself to the angry volcano god. Puh-lease.
Other South Pacific-themed films were really batty like South Sea Woman (1953), and Pagan Love Song (1950) which was really an excuse for the Arthur Freed unit at MGM to show Esther Williams doing some underwater calisthenics, and for Howard Keel to sing with a group of happy, smiling Polynesian kids (Polynesians were always smiling).
Although Tales of the South Pacific is still an outsider's perspective on the region (this is not a criticism but, rather, a statement of fact), it's actually closer to the truth. Here credit should be given to James Michener. In Tales, Michener stuck to what he knew by representing, principally, his experiences of the islands during the years of the Pacific war. Four stories were chosen by Rodgers and Hammerstein-the two main ones were "Fo' Dolla'," about an American GI named Joe Cable and a Polynesian girl called Liat; and "Our Heroine," concerning Nellie Forbush, an American nurse who falls in love with a French planter named Emile de Becque.
Tales is extremely authentic, and the characterizations of the Tonkinese people are realistic, with nice linguistic touches as heard through Michener's ear. Of course, in the film version of South Pacific the natives of Bali Ha'i don't look as if they come from either Mono Island in the Solomon Islands or Aoba in Vanuatu, and one could wish for a less comic approach to Bloody Mary and a more active spirit for Liat. But, after all, the pervasive Western way of looking at Polynesians still had to be subverted by Pacific writers themselves-like Albert Wendt, whose sprawling multigenerational novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979) speaks most universally and accurately for all Pacific Islanders about who we are, what we look like, and what it was like to grow up Polynesian.
Rodgers and Hammerstein could have increased the comedic or noble savagery of Michener's characters but, instead, in South Pacific they respected his characters and stories and, remarkably, reflected on the impact of the French and Tonkinese cultures on the main American characters. On the one hand, they created the gorgeously chromatic music of "Bali Ha'i," enshrining the escapist paradisiacal South Pacific trope; on the other, you could have something as bittersweet as Lieutenant Cable's "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught." By loving Liat, he is forced to confront his prejudices with lines like: "You've got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a diff'rent shade.&"You could have something as romantic as "Some Enchanted Evening," sung by Emile de Becque, counterpointed by Nellie Forbush's (and Cable's) subtle acknowledgment of the bigotry they have within them. In Nellie's case, she chooses to stay with de Becque and his two children, but not before considering her small-town American upbringing: "How far are they? Little Rock A.R.K?...How far are they? From coconut palms and banyan trees and coral sands and Tonkinese?..."
Actually, Little Rock (and the race riots) wasn't so far away, after all. But here it is, ironically invoked in what, otherwise, is a simple little song reflecting on the differences between two worlds.
In the world of the 1940s and '50s, would Liat have survived if Lieutenant Cable had taken her back to Philadelphia into a world determined by family expectations that he would become part of the law frm Cable, Cable & Cable? What about today?
South Pacific offers a bittersweet reminder that things must be fought for.
Today, the South Pacific is a different place.
For New Zealanders like myself, it's our front yard on the rest of the world. We're at the southwest point of the Polynesian triangle; by virtue of the Maori population, descended from canoe voyagers from Bora-Bora, we are a Polynesian nation. Hawaii is the northern tip of the triangle; despite slight linguistic differences, it is still possible for Maoris and Hawaiians to speak to each other in our respective Polynesian languages. The third point of the triangle is Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island. We can also speak with Easter Islanders in our native language.
Our destiny as Maori and pakeha (settler New Zealander) is intrinsically intertwined with the Pacific Ocean. This same ocean-with some occasional change of name-stretches from the North to the South Pole and covers a fifth of the earth's surface; our destiny is therefore connected to that of all the islands and great nation-states that border it. My book The Whale Rider-which, incidentally, was written in 1986 on the thirty-third floor of an apartment building overlooking Lincoln Center-attempts to create unity among us by tracing a whale herd as it makes its trek from the cetacean crib in Tierra del Fuego, across to Easter Island and Tahiti, over to Hawaii, and down past Rarotonga to its feeding grounds in Antarctica. Indeed, all of us who write in the region continue the same pursuit as Mr. Michener: the writing of the many South Pacifics into existence.
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