During the red nationalfanor gathered about fifty protesters to pass through Hanga Roa, the main town on Rapa Nui, easter Island. It looks like a manifestation of autonomy, but turns out to in fact be a local conflict. The march organised by the newly assigned board of directors for världsarvsparken on the island, which is accusing the new to have conducted a ”coup” in collusion with the chilean colonial power.
There are said to be a proverb on Rapa Nui that goes something like ”small village, big hell”. And the administration of the spectacular remains of the ancient civilization with its peculiar sacred pillars is a delicate thing. Financially not least: the revenues from the entrance fees is now the island’s main resource, and amounted last year to four and a half billion pesos, approximately seventy million.
But also symbolic: for more than a century of colonial abuse makes the course of history, the wounds still hurt. In a brottskatalog which hardly is the worst folkmordsregimerna after the island first, almost emptied of its population, and the rest brought together in a ghetto, forbidden to speak their language and really have to leave the island. Rebellion has been beaten down, the land had been confiscated to be used to fåravel, a naval base and leprakoloni. First, in 1966, after the last revolt, the people had on Rapa Nui their civil rights.
They could be spared the humiliation to be knocked over överända, and then be raised up to be photographed by a Swedish tourist.
easy to miss when you land in Hanga Roa. The vast anfadersfigurerna, moai, draws visitors to easter Island, seem to speak a totally different language. Eternity. Outgrundlighetens. Pablo Neruda writes about how they ”show the way, for whom? for no one? … through this loneliness at the navel of the world…”
Something of the sort, I have also always imagined myself. But at Rano Raraku, the quarry where the statues were carved out and probably the most powerful of all relics on the island, I come up with something else. Among all the leaning frightening that looks to be growing up as a dark jättesvampar out of the volcano slope, there are a variety of sculptures that have been abandoned only halfway carved. From a hillside one enters the ansiktsprofil up in a cave, are two figures back to back, still oförlösta out of the ground. Stuck in the room, they are also stuck in time, doomed to forever wait in their own creation.
What happened? What was it that got the people on Rapa Nui, as it looks from one day to the other, to abandon an art tradition that has barely changed expression of several hundred years?
. No one knows. Koloniseringens kulturmord, which took its beginning, where easter Sunday in 1722 when a Dutch sea captain for the first time drew up the island on the maps, obliterating also the historical memory. But these dormant, yet unborn characters managed to at least escape the accidents that befell their predecessors. They could be spared the humiliation to be knocked over överända, and then be raised up to be photographed by a Swedish tourist. They sleep their törnrosasömn while waiting for someone, a beautiful day, to come and redeem them. Kick them out of the base of the cliff, and the history of eggs.
And why not? Considering the huge production of moaifigurer in all sorts of materials – from chocolate to alabaster – which is now marketed in Hanga Roa souvenir shops, one can wonder whether the day is already here. If not, there’s ”eternity” and ”mystery” to most is an excuse to avoid seeing his own time.
