moana | d11 | fin

To navigate, you have to keep your island in your mind

It is always summer in the southernmost waters of District Four, where a smattering of islands stretch across the ocean like freckles against the deep blue water. Motonui - you learn the name of your island in the ancient tongue, three syllables rolling from your lips as you squirm from your parents' arms and toddle across the sand. Not too rocky or too flat, but just right, your tribe has lived on the island for as long as anyone can remember.

And for as long as anyone can remember, things have stayed the same. They fish and make nets and gather fruit, and once a year the youth of the island sail out for the mainland and return the next day - it is, after all, tradition, even if they have never truly understood what the mainlanders meant by 'Reapings' or 'Games'. The Capitol was content to otherwise leave them be as long as the island provided them with coconuts, and the islanders continued to remain in blissful ignorance, for in the seventy-odd years since the great war not one of them has been chosen out of the twin glass bowls.

So the people of Motonui grew complacent, for it was tradition to stack up offerings to the mainland from their bountiful harvests, tradition for there to be one day each year to set sail, and gradually they forgot the ancient words and stories, forgot that there had been a time before when they had not been forbidden from sailing to the horizon.

They all forgot - but for Gramma Tala.

She named me after the sea, she believed in me

You were never like the other children. Whenever they gathered to play you preferred instead to explore the island until you'd all but memorized the angle of the rocks, the clumps of trees, the shape of the edges of sand as they sloped down gently into the waves, and when your boredom drove you to enter the water your father would be there, to pull you back and chastise you for daring to wander into its forbidden depths.

So instead, you stood on the edge with Gramma Tala and danced to the rhythm of its waves. You listened to her stories of gods and demons, of an Earth Mother who gave the islands life and of the trickster who stole her heart. They were just tales, your father would say, but Gramma Tala continued to believe in them, and you alone of the children were captivated by her words.

And on the days you were drawn to the sea - when it seemed impossible to think of anything but going past the reef, not to the mainland but to the great unknown on the other side - she told you stories of the great voyagers, of how thousands of years ago your people had been voyagers who found their way on the sea by reading the wind and sky and stars.

You dreamt of voyaging just like them one day, but you kept those dreams tempered, for you knew that upholding tradition was more important than your idle fantasies. So you learned to climb coconut trees and make baskets and gut fish - you learned to love your island and to be content where you were.

And if the voice starts to whisper, to follow the farthest star

All of that changed the year the coconut harvest faltered.

Nobody understood why the trees had produced much fewer coconuts that year than before - after all, Motonui had always been a land of bountiful harvests. The island's council had met, talking of pollution, of algae growths, of weather patterns - but the fact remained that there had been barely enough for the islanders that year, let alone surplus to send as an offering to the mainland.

It is the Earth Mother, Gramma Tala had said. Without her heart, the darkness has been spreading; it has already tainted the mainland, and Motonui will not be spared for much longer. The council only saw her words as fantastic ramblings of a crazy old woman, but that has never stopped your grandmother from believing in them, and she alone persisted in her worry that the following year - the year you were to join the youth who set sail - you would be plucked by them, never to return.

So she packed her belongings and yours and led you to the Cavern of Wayfinders, where the forbidden boats that could sail beyond the reef were kept. The two of you would set off to find the Earth Mother, she told you, and when you returned her heart - the nephrite jade around your grandmother's neck - all would be well again with the world.

While your father was sleeping, you strung together candle-nuts into a lei, leaving it by his bedside as a message - light, hope, renewal - of your farewell. And you stepped onto the boat with your grandmother, letting its sails pick up the wind and carry you beyond the reef.

You'll know what lies ahead if you remember what's behind you

You never did find the Earth Mother. The legends told that her slumbering form rested on an island far to the east; you set your sails to the sun as it peeked over the horizon each morning, and to the stars as they emerged each night, and for a month the rolling of the waves and the company of each other was all you needed.

But when your grandmother got sick there wasn't much you could do - if only you were back on your island with herbs and medicine and healers, you'd mutter as you paced the length of the boat, but Gramma Tala only smiled to you and said there was nothing the healers would be able to do for an old woman who had reached her time.

On the day she pressed the jade locket into your hands and closed her eyes for the final time, you did not cry. You threw her body into the sea like she had requested, and you imagined her spirit residing in the green stone that dangled on your chest and in the manta rays that frolicked around your boat.

But the loneliness gets to you - you were so unused to being alone that the silence became oppressive after mere hours, and every rustle of the sails and splash of the waves grew a hundredfold louder and threatened to overwhelm your ears. Without Gramma Tala by your side the boat began to seem more like your prison than a vehicle of freedom; tired and helpless and weak, by the third day your impulses threatened to throw you over the side of the boat and down to the bottom of the ocean.

By the time the storm hit, there was little you could do but cling to the mast and pray to an Earth Mother you weren't sure you believed in anymore. The waves caught and tossed your tiny wooden vessel, dashing it against the shore of the mainland, and it was a miracle that you were not torn to pieces by the jagged rocks.

Sometimes the world seems against you, the journey may leave a scar

Without your ship, with only broken wood and torn sails, you were not a wayfinder any more. Just a lost child on the shores of an unknown land. Your provisions had been swept away by the storm, and you were no longer on Motonui where the palm tree and the taro root provided all you needed.

You rubbed your thumb against the stone around your neck, and wished your grandmother's spirit would come to you and offer advice. But the air remained silent.

You sat there on the seaweed-slick rock for a long time, feeling the rough barnacles against your feet and staring up into the darkened sky. The stars - the beacons that you depended on at night - wove the same patterns that they did back on your island, the same patterns that you imagined your ancestors the legendary wayfinders navigated by when they sailed the ocean.

But the hunger that gnawed at your stomach overshadowed those thoughts as the sun rose, and you made your way inland until you came to a towering wall that stretched to either side until it disappeared within the hills. Between its cracks, you could see rows of crops on the other side and people bent over, working amongst the rows.

It is far more difficult to scale a surface of flat concrete than the round trunk of a coconut tree, but your little fingers and toes were small enough to catch on the crevices, and before long you found yourself inside a world filled with strange vegetables and strange people, with voices that were neither the tones of your island nor the brogue of the fish-traders. And you were still hungry, so you reached down and plucked a squash from the vine to nibble on because it was the only thing you could recognize amongst the tall stalks and swirling tendrils.

You realize now that you were lucky the woman who caught you was a kind old lady, with soft eyes and a gentle voice. You had been naive in the ways of the mainland, ignorant to the white uniforms and the harsh boot they kept over the districts, the sacrifices they demanded out of the people of Eleven. But instead of turning you to the Peacekeepers to be sentenced for the crime of wayfinding, for the crime of having dared to venture beyond the lines people set out for you, she took you in and lied when they came knocking, about who you were and where you'd been. She took you in and taught you the ways of the earth, just as Gramma Tala had taught you the ways of the sea, and the stories of Eleven joined the stories of Motonui in the lessons you kept to guide you.

With one foot here and another in the distant past

Papa Tui had always dissuaded you from sailing, and how you missed him now, missed Mama Sina, missed the island you had grown up in and always known. They must have believed you drowned by now, swallowed by the ocean that Papa had always feared would claim the islanders' lives were they to sail again. If only, you thought to yourself, if only you could gather enough supplies, if only you still had the boat, you would have tried to climb over the wall again and set a course back to Motonui. But you did not, and when Katelyn Persimmon disappeared they strung electrified wire over the top of it and set Peacekeepers to patrolling the boundaries, killing off any budding plans you had of leaving.

Yet he had also been the one who taught you to find happiness where you were, and so you grew within these walls, and found fast friends in your adoptive family and in your classmates. You learned to work the earth side by side with those who were born to it, and you found love in the old woman who treated you like her own; is this the world you had wished for, where the fields were so wide you had yet to walk from one end of the district to the other like you could back on the island?

No. No, it is not - you think of the glass bowls, of the youth from your island who set sail barely realizing that the mainlanders might choose them to be sacrificed, of the men and women in white uniforms who gaze down at your people with darkness in their hearts - for these are no less your people. You have always been a child of the sea, but you are a child of the corn fields as well, and you have never stopped believing in helping your people. There were just more of them, now, the pirates and crabs Gramma Tala had foretold would test you replaced by faceless cogs of the Capitol.

And nothing on earth can silence the quiet voice still inside you

You still ache to see the outside world again. It isn't any better, to be trapped by concrete walls instead of island traditions, to shut your mouth and your heart because the stakes have grown to be so much higher than the gentle chastising you used to receive from Papa Tui. And perhaps others in this district were content to work and eat and sleep, but - being caged has never stopped you from dreaming of the horizon.

As the ocean fills your heart you pray to Te Fiti that your family of the earth may one day stand with pride, no longer fearing the glass bowls; you pray that your family of the sea will remember their ancestors and seek out new islands to settle and explore. And you pray that one day, you will be out on the open ocean again, with the waves below your feet and the stars shining above you, sailing to bring your people a brighter future.

I know my story doesn't end at the shore
There's gotta be more