Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

The Mana of the Moai

There are certain tribes in the Amazon who elongate their ears. This is not to say that the first settlers of Rapa Nui, the “long ears” who lost the civil war here to the second wave of settlers, the men who toppled the Moai, were not Polynesian. Only to say it is possible, and Thor Heyerdahl may have a point in that respect at least. Nothing is for certain. But there is evidence that Marquesan people also elongated their ears. Yan, who lives here and is from here and was educated in England, where he was ridiculed when he told his classmates and teacher about Moai, said all Moai have carved long ears and were those who for centuries subjugated the more powerfully built “short ears” until the workers rose up against their bosses. Moai is not a god or a representation of a god, but an ancestor-tribute turning it would seem into a kind of deification of the Mana of the Moai, the respected ancestors, their family who protected the villages. But the deification is not to be confused with Maki-Maki (Makemake), the One God, Ta’aroa in Tahiti, Yahweh in Judaism, Allah in Islam. Akin perhaps to Shinto. At any rate, the Mana of the Moai was completed only with the placement of their coral eyes, the pupils of Hani-Hani volcanic rock, Escoria Roja. The Moai were all toppled, some have been “restored” but not with the coral eyes - all broken and lost except for one eye of one Moai in the local Museum here. There is a Moai in the British Museum, and it, like the sacred Tiki from Rurutu, was simply taken (stolen) from the people, like most of what is in the British Museum, that “storehouse of imperialist theft”. Most of the Moai faced inland, to the villages, to protect them. Only the first Moai faced outward to the open sea to await the coming of other voyagers. These first seven Moai, the ones facing the sea, face what is now Polynesie Française, not the coast of South America. That, really, is the strongest evidence for this place being Polynesian in origin.

Report on Easter Island : (HMS Sappho), 1882

After questioning most of the inhabitants and elders of the island it was unanimously stated that the ancestors of all those then alive came from the EAST, landing at Anakena (North Side of Island).

The “prolific father”, HOTOMETUA:
yams, taro, sweet potato, 2 canoes.