Response to "Real Natives Don't French Kiss"

Teresia Teaiwa portrays many ideas relating man to violent natures in a few of the readings done thus far. She does no different in “Real Natives Don’t French Kiss (When They’re Making Love)” when she discusses French kissing and its relation to disease and cannibalism. Through her relations, she brings to light the negativity and negative influences of French kissing in Oceania. After the two young girls witness the couple on the beach rolling around and French kissing and then the girls do it themselves, there is a “They were going for it. Licking and biting each other like nobody’s business. It became their favourite game” (16). The young girls can be seen as naïve given their age, and therefore they have a very simple mind and would address things with more simplistic manner. So it makes sense that they can picture the Western romantic gesture as a game of nearly eating each other’s mouths. This negates the romanticism of French kissing into a game than could be seen as more violent since it appears to the young girls as eating people in the simplest of the nature. After the girls’ grandmother catches them and talks to them about the game they were playing, she points out the idea of people eating each other and acting cannibalistic. She reminds the girls that their natives “never ate people. It was the white people who wanted [the natives] to make the cannibal forks. It was the white people who wanted the cannibal forks” (17). Teaiwa’s use of the grandmother’s statement establishes that the natives do not eat people and therefore do not French kiss. White people, or the European colonizers, pictured the natives as savages and pictured them as cannibals. So if they told the natives to make the cannibal forks, the colonizers are able to manipulate their idea about the natives being savages into a more accurate idea by using the cannibal forks as artifacts from the native people. To say that French kissing is lethal can be a stretch. On the other hand, Teaiwa