The story of my ancestors was written in the marks on our bodies and told around meals cooked in an underground oven then shared with the rest of our people over laughs. We had elders who spoke to us in the tongues of our forefathers. From them we learned our myths, legends and cosmologies. Our words played with nature, and the patterns we etched into our skins retold our memories. These marks connected lineages throughout the ages. They held the ancient powers of the ancestors, and when we gazed upon these images, we knew the stories they told.

But times have changed. Our words bent to the coloniser’s promises and the Christian man’s songs. By the whip of their laws, we found ourselves inking blank white pages. And as the power of our hands began to shape the white man’s words, the strength of our tattoos faded with the tongues of our ancestors. Soon we sat in empty spaces, minds locked in an imperial contract that taught us our culture through the foreigner’s eyes. The day I learned of the marks on our bodies was the day my spirit became unbound.

Mạgere had come to me in a dream. She hobbled on the shores at twilight, with a moonbeam on her back lighting her path to me. I lingered in the recesses of dark shadows, the kind that barely gave me sight, and I squinted to see. Mạgere had the silver light of the moon tied neatly into a round bun on her head. On her face were marks, lining down her jawline with fish that moved. On her chin she wore the star of the gardenia, and it traced its way down her thin neck and connected to shark teeth that trailed across her chest to both sides of her shoulders. On one arm, she had three marks etched in a circular pattern with triangles and birds on the inside, and on the other arm she had sharp triangles wrapped around. Mạgere was draped in a single sarong, fastened securely in the center with a knot. She would sit on a large stone under the coconut tree and there she would sing out loudly to me a single word: Hanuj!

I had gone to my Rotuman mother to speak to her of the word I heard in my dream. She was in her open-space kitchen, beating the eggs in a bowl, and whistling a tune from an English rock-band. My mother loved her kitchen. She’d polish the granite top and wipe the silver of her sink to sparkle. She instilled into me the ways of my father and his Australian ways, but when I watched her, I could see the islander in her slip into the food she cooked. In her kitchen, there was life, laughter, and dare I sound like the catchphrase of a showroom poster, joy.

“Hanuj,” I said, the exact same way the old woman in my dream had said it, interrupting her sacred cooking spell.

“Ma!” my mother responded immediately. “Where did you learn that?”

“From a dream,” I said. “What does it mean?”

“It means it is time for a story!”

But she did not tell me any stories at all that morning.

When I saw Mạgere the second time, she spoke sentences to me that sounded like poetry. Her voice was so soft, and the way the words formed flowed out from her and into me, and although I know she spoke a language I should have learned, I somehow knew what it was that she was saying to me. I scrambled in the attic of our home, searching for the old boxes from my grandfather. Beneath bouts of white mats and stringed garlands, I found the old Rotuman dictionary and the book of proverbs to find Hanuj, noun, meaning a tale, a story, a fictitious one, breath from the mouth.

In my third dream of Mạgere, I heard my first story. She sat on the rock, and once more shouted out to me in the dark, “Hanuj!”

And for the first time, I responded with the same enthusiasm my mother had taught me. I called out, “Ma!”

“Let me tell you a story about the Octopus god and the Shark god,” she said, a smile peeling onto her face.

Once upon a time, the Shark god had come to our ocean, flirting with all our women. He playfully marked them with his teeth on their ankles, so that the other sharks will know never to eat them. One day, he saw the chief’s beautiful daughter on the shore. In her hair was the most fragrant flower he had ever smelled. The Shark god brought many gifts to woo her into the water. Instead, her servants would collect them, and they all returned to the village. After many days of trying to seduce the young woman, the Shark god found an inlet that led to the woman’s bathing pools. He swam upstream then waited patiently for her. The woman had come to the pools, and she noticed the Shark god waiting for her. She took the flowers from her hair and began to drop them into the water. The red and white flowers looked like drops of snow and blood. Consumed by their fragrance and beauty, the Shark god seized the flowers from the pool and quickly rushed down the inlet to escape into the sea. Unfortunately for the Shark god, the Octopus god was waiting for him. Having crossed boundaries into the freshwater to meet the woman, the Octopus god was ready to rebuke the Shark god. But seeing that the Shark god had stolen the woman’s flowers, the Octopus god grew angry. Black storms clouded the water, yet the Shark god quickly maneuvered through them. The Octopus god chased the Shark god all the way to Fiji waters. And when the Shark god had crossed safely, he began to laugh at the Octopus god.

“Your fragrant flower is now mine!” the Shark god taunted.

The Octopus god chuckled, “keep the flower! I’m taking my fragrance back home for my women.” And to this day, the red and white flower sits on Fijian land, scentless.

I woke with a smile, quickly rushed down to my mother and retold Mạgere’s story to her.

“Do you mean the tagimoucia?” 

“The what?”

“Tagimoucia,” she repeated slowly, “Fiji’s national flower. It is white, red, and has no scent.”

“Mạgere said the scent returned to Rotuma.”

My mother only laughed.

The next dream Mạgere came to me, she held in her hands small bone tools and a coconut shell filled with black ink. I sat by her feet and watched as she took my arms into her hands and began to sing in her soft voice an old song. As she did, she began to rhythmically tap her bone tools into my arms, and I can see the marks slowly emerge on me. It was like watching the ink unfurl in water, but instead it happened on my skin. There was no pain, just a soothing feeling, almost like I was being softly caressed. I saw the motifs that Mạgere put into my skin, and I saw the Shark god’s teeth, and the Octopus god’s tentacles wrapped around an island.

The next morning, I sat with my mother to tell her about Mạgere tapping me, and my mother’s face darkened. There were no laughs or smiles or jests from her this time. I could feel the tension between the words that I had just said and a secret she kept hidden from me brew faster than the coffee she was trying to make for breakfast. She set the knife down on the chopping board, and took my hands into hers, slowly rubbing at my knuckles in contemplation.

“If you ever get a tattoo, I will smack you with a wooden spoon,” she whispered.

The sounds of her whispers were afraid, spoken behind a cage that wanted to be free.

I could see fury behind her eyes, the way her jaw feathered holding in her rage and I was not sure if my mother realised I merely retold her a dream. The fear and rage that stormed in my mother’s presence were softened in her forced smile.

“Are we clear?” she asked in her sing-song voice, squeezing onto my hands until they began to hurt.

“Yeah!” I responded, halfway off my own seat.

My hands were squished, red and white like the flower in my dreams. The blood rushed back into my hands, and I rubbed the pain away from them.

“You know, it’s just a dream,” I said, a small flicker in my own voice stealing bravery to say the words aloud.

“Dreams tend to sometimes become realities. We do not tattoo our bodies.”

And that was the end of our conversation but not the end of my dreaming.

When Mạgere came to me once more, she put a stringed garland like the ones my grandfather collected over my shoulders and wrapped a soft white mat like the bouts stored in our attic around my waist. Mạgere taught me their names in this dream: tefui and tofua, our island’s garlands and waistcloth. My dream felt like another life, the kind that gave my mother’s voice back to her, without the rage or the fear. Mạgere stroked my hair and promised me to free my mother and myself from the turmoil that devoured our core. I believed her.

The following weeks that passed, I did not dream of Mạgere. Instead, she had come to me. She sat in my living room one afternoon, opposite my mother,. her silvery hair bound in her bun. Instead of wearing a sarong, she had on a long-sleeved top. Her face had wrinkles where her face tattoos once were, and beside her was a well carved cane. This old woman shouted in excitement when I had walked into the room. It was like I was a gift she had waited for her whole life.

“This is your Mapiga,” my mother said slowly, as though trying to tell me that she was not a dream turned into life, “your grandfather’s sister.”

When our hands touched, it was a familiarity that warmed my soul. Something in me fluttered at the way she spoke Rotuman. The language softly rolling off her tongue, almost as if she was untouched by the times of the present taxing us to speak a language forced onto us. While she spoke our language, my mother responded in English. I watched the two have a conversation in two languages and realised my mother understood Rotuman.

“Why didn’t you teach me to speak Rotuman?” I blurted out; there was a pain piercing my chest when I heard the words echo back to me.

“You needed to learn English,” my mother said. Her response was cold, spoken in a matter-of-fact way, and I could see her heart wrapped in iron chains forced by the ones who colonised our people.

“I will teach you,” the old woman said, pulling down the chill in the room with her softness. “You can speak English and Rotuman.”

I absorbed the way our words played with nature, and the way my Mapiga cradled these like memories as she spoke slowly for me. It was like grasping the lineages of those who came before my mother and my Mapiga and feeling the ancestors breathe life from the stories. There was a liberty in the songs Mapiga sung, and in my mind’s eye I could the Mapiga from my dreams hand me a key in the form of words, poetically tearing at the cages the coloniser’s promises built around me and my family. In the power of my Mapiga’s words I sought the blackened colours of ink in my own skin, willing for its existence to unfurl into visual landscapes. The day I learned of the marks on our bodies was the day my spirit became unbound.

While I was granted lessons of the Hanlepherua, the sandy women who guided Raho and his family to Rotuma, and the story of Hanitemausu, warrior deity and spirt of the land, I asked to learn the story of my ancestors written in the marks on our bodies, while we shared meals.

“Do you have any tattoos?” I asked. I could sense the sharp stare my mother willed into my direction.

“Yes,” Mapiga responded, “I have two.”

She rolled up her sleeve, and just like the three marks I had seen on Mapiga from my dream, I saw the one pattern on both sides of her inner arms.

“This is the mark of our women, our tupu’a, navigational motif.”

I told Mapiga of Mạgere and the dreams where she visited me.

“Mạgere is the name of a fish,” Mapiga explained, “it is a slow fish, like the way we old people walk and hobble – slowly. Maybe Mạgere was telling you that even though it is slow to see our marks return, you will soon wear these too.”

“Oh no, she will not,” my mother interjected.

I looked up at her, with a smirk as cheeky as the Octopus god from Mạgere’s story, and I said, “Dreams tend to sometimes become realities.”

Image: a woman’s tattoo illustrating the story of the Octopus god and the Shark god (author’s own)