Easter Island/Rapa Nui

One of the many reasons I wanted to go to Easter island was to investigate their use of string figures, which they call Kai-Kai, since Aloha International has a whole project involved with string figure research and education run by Lois and Earl Stokes. I knew that the Easter Islanders had some knowledge of string figures from two paragraphs about them in the Games and Recreation section of Ethnology of Easter Island, by Alfred Metraux (Bishop Museum Press) in which the author states that only thirty figures are remembered, and those by very few people, and that hardly anyone understands their purpose and accompanying chants.

I got more excited when I read that there would be string figure contests at the Tapati Festival, and even more excited when I saw that one of the main features of the stage set was an old woman doing a string figure. I had brought a bunch of strings and figures from Hawaii and I naively imagined myself sitting on a rock and amazing the young children and adults with the figures I knew, and then creating good will by giving them all strings to play with. The reality was very different.

My first awakening occured with Victor, our guide. While on our way to Ahu Aviki in the tour van I pulled out a string and did a simple string trick called Kohola, the Humback Whale. Victor looked mildly amused and i asked him if he knew anyone who could do Rapa Nui string figures. He said that he had won the string figure championship when he was a young boy and that at that time he knew about seventy. He said he still remembered a few, so I handed him a string and he said he couldn't do anything with that because it was too small. I made one larger string out of two and he proceeded to quickly make Four Eyes (a figure with four diamonds) in a beautiful and complicated way that I had never seen before (to be fair, he had never seen it done the simple way I made it, either). At Ahu Aviki he made a more complicated pattern related to a canoe and the site called Akahenga and did the chant for it, which was for protection of the area (I finally learned this one). and then he did some more.

On the day we visited the beach at Anakena I got another awakening. During a break Victor invited me up to a snack booth and introduced me to the woman who ran it. Victor had already told me that knowedge of string figures was mostly kept by the women, and he told me that this woman knew more than he ever did. She jokingly offered to show me some figures for $50,000, and $10,000 for each picture I took, and I replied that instead I would share a Hawaiian figure with her. I handed her a long string and she then proceeded to run through an amazing series of figures, most of them blending into each other with smooth expertise. For my part I showed her Po (seven diamonds representing the night sky) and transformed it into Hoku (a blinking star). This was the best one I had, and fortunately, both she and Victor were impressed.

By now I was beginning to realize that string figures played - and still play - a more important role in Rapa Nui society than most people, even respected researchers, realized. This awareness reached full bloom the night of the Tapati String Figure contest. There on stage, one young woman after another, using string loops at least two meters in length, wove fantastic figures and chanted. As part of the contest, they had to explain the figure in Spanish and/or Rapa Nui before they made it, then make it, and then hold it while they chanted in Rapanui. They were judged on skill, the complexity of the figure, the accuracy of the explanation, and the quality of the chant. At least two things about Rapanui string figures have become very clear since this experience: a) there is a great lack of knowledge about them outside of Rapanui itself, and b) for the people of Rapa Nui they are not just a game.

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