I began to wonder why the words “tropical” and “paradise” were so often conjoined. Were Westerners so adverse to cold weather that they preferred the stupefying heat of the tropics? On Ujae, the sun was no friend. It was a fiendish adversary, appearing in the morning when the temperature was just fine, thank you, and then steadily heating the air to something significantly above just fine. At noon, it sent down its rays from an oppressive height. I could not read books on the beach, because the sunlight reflecting off the white pages burned my eyes. And I knew that there was no winter to look forward to on this island. My Caucasian body was not built for this, nor was my gear: every cut, no matter how tiny, became infected, and the bandages I had brought would not stick to my perpetually moist skin. Meanwhile, my envelopes quietly sealed themselves without my permission.
All of this—the heat, the bland diet, the shadow of the previous volunteer, the language barrier, the loneliness, the claustrophobia of fame, the nerve-grating noise—was rolling around in my head as I stood at the airport, waiting for the plane to land as it had done one week before when it brought me here. It was Airplane Tuesday, the only day of the week that rivaled Church Sunday for festivities. Tuesday afternoon saw a large portion of the village relocated to the airport. The villagers took the event as an opportunity to rest, arriving long before the scheduled landing.
Before there was any sound of a motor, everyone somehow knew that the plane was coming. Then it was suddenly on the ground. The men unloaded shipments of rice, sugar, flour, coffee, and flashlight batteries, then quickly replaced them with a new cargo of live crabs, ripe pandanus, and preserved breadfruit wrapped in palm fronds. Hungry outer islanders and homesick urban relatives had made a mutually beneficial exchange.
Would I join that living cargo, cut my losses, and leave this place? I had the motive, the means, and the opportunity. The volunteer director had ensured that each outer island volunteer had enough cash on hand—185 dollars in the case of remote Ujae—to hop on a plane if need be. There was something called “Early Termination”—not, as the phrase suggested, an untimely death or overanxious assassination, but rather leaving before the year was up. The volunteer manual I had received guilt-tripped me against even considering such an action, and I began to suspect that using the sinister phrase “Early Termination” was part of that plan. I wouldn’t be the first volunteer in history to have jumped ship, though. Seven of the previous year’s participants had aborted their missions. And not one of the volunteers who had lived as the only Westerner on their island opted to extend their stay after that first year was up.
Early Termination was also called “ETing.” So would I become ET: The Early Terminator? Like Spielberg’s ET, I was an alien being from a faraway home who first scared the children and then became their pet, who learned a few stock phrases of the local language but wanted more than anything to phone home. Would I take the analogy a step further by returning to my world in a flying machine as the children waved goodbye?
I seriously considered it. I had discovered that Ujae was more paradox than paradise, a place not gentle to naïve expectations. The beauty that the photographs had promised me was only the skin of a complicated and conflicted beast. I had prepared myself to forego modern luxuries, only to find that the true sacrifice was primal needs: privacy, intimacy, understanding, control.
If I had expected life on Ujae to be a romance, then I had been correct. It was a rough and spiteful affair between two absurdly incompatible parties. It was disillusioning and desperate, but a strange irrational attraction kept it together. And so, simply because I couldn’t bring myself to leave, I stayed.
5
Learning to Speak Again
AS IF TO CONFUSE ME MORE, THE ISLAND BEGAN TO SHOW ITS GENtler side. On my fourteenth day, I sat in the shade of a breadfruit tree, picked up three coral stones from my family’s gravel spread, and absentmindedly juggled them. Elina was hunched over a basin ten feet away, washing clothes with her usual grim zeal. As she looked up from her drudgery to watch my game, I suddenly felt guilty for playing while she worked.
But Elina was not looking at me with envy or resentment. While she watched me juggle, her face cracked into a smile. She chose three rocks of her own, sat next to me, and showed me Marshallese juggling. Suddenly she was carefree, so different from those hours of bleak labor.
The venom she showed toward her children wasn’t the whole story either. She could be disarmingly sweet. That morning, she had massaged my throat when a fish bone stuck and splintered in it. From the beginning, she had refused to let me do my own laundry—she washed my clothes, dried them, folded them, and delivered them to me without the slightest complaint. Alone with her children and her crushing workload, her face screamed misery. But when she socialized with the other women, her laugh was loud, frequent, and almost crazed with joy.
All the mothers presented the same paradox: savagely hardworking, harsh with their children, but joyful and risqué when socializing. While the young unmarried women smarted with shyness at the mere thought of returning my casual yokwe, the middle-aged married women thought nothing of brazenly flirting with me. They would wrack their brains for English words they had learned decades ago and call me “husband.” At one village gathering, a married woman literally pulled me out of my seat and danced with me in front of half the island’s population. The islanders accepted this; they loved this. Children and adults couldn’t stop recounting the hilarious incident in pantomime.
The womenfolk, it appeared, were the self-appointed defenders of the right to be silly. The men joked with one another, but retreated to stodgy formality in the presence of women. The women, on the other hand, allowed themselves zany outbursts and playful seizures in plain view of everyone. Even the sacred was not sacred: one time a forty-year-old stepped in front of the choir during a church festival and shook her hips to the noisy approval of the congregation.
These were the same women who threatened physical violence on their children two hundred times a day. These were the same women who toiled almost every waking hour of their lives. But if their lives were hard, they were also secure. If their role was narrow, it was also certain. They faced toil but not angst. I didn’t know whether to pity or envy them. If Westerners enjoyed the mixed blessings of radical individualism, Marshall Islanders enjoyed the mixed blessings of radical communalism.
I wondered, as I looked at Elina’s normally cheerless face, was she miserable? Did she want more from life? What did she think about all day? What did she think about as she washed yet another load of laundry by hand, or stooped over at dawn to clear away fallen breadfruit leaves? When she had one of those paroxysms of joy typical of Ujae mothers, was she compensating for misery or expressing happiness?
I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand that union of joy and sorrow, kindness and callousness, freedom and restriction. Was this the soul of Marshallese society? But I could see at least that repression, toil, and unhappiness were only part of the story.
I started to feel the village’s warmth. I was a stranger speaking almost none of the native language, yet the islanders showed only friendliness toward me. My feeble attempts at conversation were greeted with encouragement and smiles, never rolled eyes. Even the paparazzi children were only expressing their excitement at my arrival, even as they compared me ungraciously to my predecessor. I had in no way proven myself to these people, yet their goodwill seemed both automatic and unconditional. I wondered how far I would have to go before they revoked that benevolence. Could anything destroy it? Insult? Theft? Manslaughter?
If I spoke to a villager, I was doing him a favor. If I ate his food, I was honoring him. I scored points for the clumsiest attempts at following Marshallese custom. At a church gathering, I passed out drinks to the guests—which consisted of the monumental task of filling cups and handing them to people—and everyone was so delighted and impressed that you would have thought I had invented the snorkel mask. Never had I worked so little for so mu
ch gratitude. In that way, life on Ujae was absurdly easy.
After all, my very presence in this place was noteworthy. One of the less noble reasons I had come to this country was that its obscurity promised that I—one of the rare visitors—would be significant. Among all the shocks and disillusionments and shattered images, this was one thing that had gone exactly according to plan.
Marshallese life offered another pleasure: the men always had time to spend with me. How different this was from my native country. I had always felt that Americans were terrible at hanging out. We didn’t have places to do it spontaneously. Friendly interaction had to be scheduled, like an appointment. Once it began, all parties were in a hurry to leave, and any momentary lull in conversation was enough pretext for this. Leisure time had to double as something else, something “productive.” Socializing had become a dispensable pleasantry to be fit between other, more important activities: work, solitary hobbies, and work. Sometimes it took a power outage to remind us that there were evening activities other than sitting alone in front of a computer. Ujae was a permanent power outage, and I loved that.
Gone was the American truism “I’m busy.” The men were not what one might call hurried. I once asked a man what he had planned for the day. He looked at the wall and considered this question for a long time; it must have been at least thirty seconds. Finally, he said, tentatively, “babu” (“lie down”). Don’t get too ambitious, I wanted to say.
The men did have jobs, but they rarely amounted to much. In a typical day, the radio operator might sit in front of the communications radio for a few hours, and the airline agent might record a single reservation. A few breadfruit would need to be plucked from a tree, and three nails would need to be driven into an aging plank on a cookhouse. It had been so different in the past. Before the Pax Germanica—when Germany took control of the islands in the nineteenth century and banned interisland fighting—the men would have been on call to defend the village against the territorial ambitions of other chiefs. With no such thing as canned mackerel, the men would have fished nearly every day, and without imported rice and flour providing the daily staples, the men would have worked hard to maintain the land at maximum agricultural productivity. Every zone of the island, from lagoon to ocean, supported a particular crop, and none of this happened on its own—taro thrived only in the rich muck that resulted from dedicated composting. The outer islands were now spoiled on government subsidies, most of which were aid money that originated ultimately from US taxpayers. Occasionally the men were called upon to complete a long and strenuous task—building a new house, harvesting coconut meat for sale, hunting all night with no sleep on an uninhabited islet. But most days, they worked just about as much as they wanted to, which was not very much.
Alfred, my host father, was not an exception to the Marshallese rule. At 52, he was deemed to be beyond the age of required labor. Most of his day was spent lying on the floor of the house, shoeless and shirtless, fanning himself with a rag, waiting for people to come around to buy cigarettes from him at 25 cents a pop. He saw about two customers per day: young men carrying the requisite quarter in the folds of their ear, and producing it like some sort of magic trick. If this counted as working, then Alfred was a workaholic. He took breaks from this grueling labor only to remark at the heat—as if it ever weren’t hot—and to chat with his new American “son.”
It was impossible not to like Alfred. He told me long stories, of which I understood little other than his generous pantomimes. All I could gather was that his favorite tale concerned World War II, the occupying Japanese, the invading Americans, and an explosion. But his enthusiasm was endearing.
Sometimes I would join Alfred in the only work other than vending cigarettes that he did: karkar, which meant scraping dry coconut meat (copra) out of the shell. Alfred would start by breaking open old, liquidless nuts along their equator with a machete. He held the coconut in his hand all the while, skilled enough to split open the shell without splitting open his hand. Then he would take a blunt knife and use a devilishly specific thrusting-twisting motion to remove the hard white meat. The first time I tried my hand at it, I compared our results after an hour. Alfred had produced a heaping pile of chunks. I had produced a pathetic mound of smithereens.
Alfred’s hillock of copra would fetch eleven cents per pound on the next supply ship. Even that paltry price was more than market value; the Marshallese government subsidized copra prices to help poor outer islanders. At one time, copra, which could be made into oils and soaps, had been the economic mainstay of the entire Pacific. Now it was a vestigial industry, crippled by the meat’s high cholesterol content. But on Ujae, eleven cents per pound was still worth the long process of collecting, drying, opening, karkaring, and selling. Along with handicraft sales, generous urban relatives, and a few government-paid jobs, it was one of the only sources of income available to the villagers. Some men worked hard for that eleven cents, while others thought it more productive to raanke: scrape the coconut meat into a bowl to be used as food, instead of turning the meat into money that would then be turned back into food. Raankeing also made a pleasant syncopated music: four scrapes, then rotate the coconut, four scrapes, then rotate.
Alfred also taught me a lesson in resourcefulness. Only one of my two duffel bags had arrived with me, because the two together had exceeded the plane’s weight limit. (This was a plane so small that twenty pounds could make the difference between safety and fool-hardiness.) Only one thing could enter the plane: my second bag, or me. I wasn’t always sure they had made the right choice.
That abandoned bag contained a wide variety of indispensable items that I hadn’t appreciated until I found myself without them. The worst absence was sunscreen. One of my first real tastes of this new life was the unnerving realization that obtaining sunscreen on Ujae was not difficult—it was impossible. Ujae had no stores, nor did it have any official postal service. If you lived in the United States and wanted to send a letter to Ujae, there was nothing at all that you could write on an envelope, and no amount of postage you could attach, that would get it there. Your only option was to send it to a post office box in Majuro to be picked up by a friend who was willing to personally travel to the airport and put the letter on the plane. As for mail from Ujae, I simply handed the letter to the pilot, and, purely out of kindness and not duty, he would drop it off at the post office in Majuro. That was a special favor to lonely expatriates. The islanders had to resort to another method, which was to save up their letters until someone, anyone, bought a plane ticket to Majuro. This individual would be approached by people throughout the village and handed letters to hand deliver, and they couldn’t say no.
Luckily, Alfred turned out to be a Marshallese MacGyver, probably capable of escaping from a maximum-security Soviet prison with only a palm frond and three cowries. When I broke the strap on my one pair of flip-flops—the only footwear I had—I asked for his help even though I was sure it was a lost cause. It is embarrassingly obvious now, but all one has to do to repair a flip-flop strap is to make some string (cut off a bit of your sheet, twist it into a cord), tie it to the top of the broken thong, drill a hole with a pencil through the sole, force the string through the hole with a sharp rock, and then tie the string at the bottom. This was probably the three hundredth time Alfred had done this.
So I learned some important Ujae lessons: never throw away anything that could possibly be useful, look at everything as multipurpose, and never say that something is impossible with what you have. What a good feeling that was, no longer having to purchase solutions. I could survive without that luxury now, and I found it to be an enjoyable deprivation. When my other bag arrived on day twenty-one, it felt almost intrusive—except for the letters from friends and family. I rationed these as carefully as provisions during a famine, because that’s what they were.
HAVING LEARNED A BIT OF MARSHALLESE FROM MY HOST FAMILY, I felt confident enough to approach some of the other men. Hanging out was for t
hem an obsession and an art form. The context might be iukkure (“playing sports”), kope (“drinking coffee”), eonod (“fishing”), jerakrok (“sailing”), or jambo (“going on a trip”), but the main event was always bwebwenato (“chatting”).
I first became acquainted with the art of bwebwenato while I watched the men drinking coffee in the morning. They would gather at the De Brums’ property and sit around their outdoor table. These men enjoyed their daily cup, but it wasn’t what they came for. The beverage was just a prop, an excuse to indulge in their love of gab. Kope meant both “coffee” and “to sit around drinking coffee and socializing.” It was acceptable Marshallese to say “I’m coffeeing with the guys.”
The ritual always followed the same format. The boiling water appeared, the instant coffee grounds were distributed, and sugar or coconut sap was added. One man began telling a story, and soon everyone was having a grand old time. There was an intriguing sort of masculine intimacy. I understood little of their stories, delivered in quick one-two punches of wit, but the atmosphere was pleasant.
Looking around this circle of coffee drinkers was a poor man’s fashion show, in more ways than one. The men had a sense of style all their own: a curious blend of eighties chic, wannabe gangsta, and Hawaii casual, tempered by practicality and poverty. Many sported rattails, and sometimes that formed a majority of their total hair. They smoked with hand-carved pipes or palm-frond cigarette holders, and wore flip-flops to the exclusion of any other footwear. Their basketball shorts doubled as swimming trunks, and the idea that someone would change clothes before or after getting into the water was considered eccentric. (Women often lagoon-bathed in their muumuus.)
Surviving Paradise Page 4
