THE SECRET OF TAPA-MAKING

This is the isle of superlatives. The furthest away, the wildest, the rainiest. This morning the forest exhales its humus-infused breath, like a wet kiss from the water-logged earth. The vegetation is luxuriant, the air fragrant with a thousand scents: coconut, papaya, lemon, mango and tapa trees. Here, everything grows in abundance. The lunar calendar invites Sarah to cut banyan tree bark, but she will have to await the morning dew to harvest blackberry bush. This will be followed by lengthy work. The process can take weeks. It consists in detaching the bark and scraping it, in order to save nothing but its inner layer, which is then pounded until it turns into a brownish red cloth.

Men are not allowed to witness tapa-making.

A few facts about Fatu Hiva:

TRANSMITTING MEANS NOT VANISHING

Sarah Vaki is from Fatu Hiva. Her island is a shell, a sanctuary. From the ocean, all one can see is the tiny tip of a white steeple and a main street leading to the village of Oméa, cradled in a narrow verdant valley. Moving closer, a sound can be heard, emanating from a wooden house. It is the sound of the mallet. Sarah has been making tapas for over fifty years. When this schoolteacher talks about these vegetal parchments, made of laminated bark and decorated with Marquesan motifs, which were sometimes used to clothe the men as well as statues of the gods, her eyes light up. She is proud of this know-how and says she is still protected by her ancestors and her stone idols – the tikis, or anthropomorphous sculptures. They watch over her on the land of Fatu Hiva.

Located fifteen hundred kilometers north-east of Tahiti, Fatu Hiva is a French island in the Marquesas archipelago.

We enter this decor, a mere ten kilometers long and reminiscent of a luxuriant cathedral, through its founding myths, because every one of the archipelago’s islands was once associated with an element of a large house and had its own function and specificity.

For Fatu Hiva, it is the palm roof and the tapa, a cloth made from pounded bark and decorated with drawings. This tapa was used as material for rituals and as a cloth to cover men’s nudity from birth to death.

Though it was forbidden by the colonizing forces, to the point of almost being forgotten, the tapa and the know-how to make it was secretly passed on by women, from generation to generation.

But it wasn’t until the 1970s, with the birth of the Marquesas’ cultural awakening and identity awareness, that the tapa was recognized and celebrated. Nowadays, the entire island lives to the rhythm of the tapa. It is a veritable economy, managed by the women.