Easter Island

I went to Easter Island at the beginning of August for four days with my mom when she visited French Polynesia. It was a humbling experience. This was for two reasons. The first, more ridiculous, was that I had spent a year on Mo'orea laughing at the endless parade of Americans who tried to speak Spanish to Tahitians. Now, as an American who chose the other Romance language at the age of 14, it was my turn to speak French to Chileans.

The second reason was more sublime. I figured I had been everywhere else in eastern Polynesia--to Hawai'i, to New Zealand, to the Cooks, and all over French Polynesia. I had spent a year living in Tahiti. Easter Island is world-renowned for being weird, but I assumed that after all that time getting to know Polynesia so well, I would get there and it would all make sense. Like a European architect wandering around Boston or Washington, I figured I would see all the connections between the architecture of Tahitian marae (temples) and ti'i statues, and the ahu (platforms) and moai (statues) of Easter Island. I was glad to be visiting Easter Island at the end of my year in French Polynesia. It would be a very appropriate way to end things.

When I got there, I realized that Easter Island was as bizarre and otherworldly for someone like me who "knew Polynesia" as for someone who had never set foot in the South Pacific. The stone-walled houses, the style of the moai, the cult of the tangata-manu (birdman)--all these things were totally unlike anything I had ever seen elsewhere in Polynesia. I "knew" that the moai must be analogous to French Polynesian statues of ancestors or deities--like the Marquesan tiki I have sitting on my desk--but it was hard to see where in the rich Polynesian tradition the bizarre new artistic style had come from. The island is not on the Pacific Plate, and has a smooth, sloping terrain punctuated by volcanic craters that is unlike anywhere in French Polynesia or the Cooks. It's easy to see how it was totally deforested, and how statues carved out of the rock at Rano Raraku crater could be easily rolled anywhere else on the island.

Visiting Easter Island seems to engender reflection amongst its visitors--whether those who are captured by the mystery of the place, those who see its bizarre history as a microcosm of our planet, or those who realize the limits of their knowledge. In that sense it was a very appropriate way to end my stay in French Polynesia.

Postscript: A few days after my return from Easter, I found myself in the Musée de Tahiti et ses Îles, standing in front of a display of ti'i (tiki in Marquesan), stone or wood statues which represent Polynesian ancestors or deities and which I had assumed would be analogous to the Easter Island moai. I suddenly realized that each of the archipelagoes had its own artistic style--the one I had assumed to be representative of all of French Polynesia were the bug-eyed humanoid figures of the Marquesas, but that this familiar style was very different from that of the Society Islands, and that of the Australs, and each of these was different yet again from the photo of an Easter Island moai hanging next to the display.