The men’s T-shirts displayed unfortunate English slogans that no one understood. One said “Proud to be an American.” Another said “It’s Payback Time” next to an American flag and an image of 9/11. Yet another said “Herban Legend” over an image of a leaf. Lisson often wore a shirt that said “Sometimes, when I’m drunk, I make mistakes” and showed a moose humping a log. I knew a man whose favorite shirt displayed a “Can of Whoopass” and warned the viewer “Don’t make me open dis.” Later, when the school opened, I learned that this man taught the fifth graders, and I saw him wear the shirt routinely on the job. Meanwhile, little boys and girls alike proudly sported shirts that announced, in frilly colorful letters, “I Being a Princess.”
The coffee klatches made the sound of Marshallese familiar, but I began to learn the language in earnest only when I discovered my loquacious next-door neighbors, Fredlee and Joja. Fredlee paid me an impromptu visit with the youngest of his six children one night, and the next day we started a tradition of daily bwebwenato sessions that commenced in the late afternoon and extended until sunset.
When the sun was starting to dip lazily in the sky and the midday heat was abating, I would hike the hundred feet to Fredlee’s house and find him in whatever work or leisure he happened to be engaged in. Whatever his business, it was immediately dropped. Fredlee would summon Joja, the husband of his wife’s sister, and we would find a proper site for our serious task of chewing the rag. It was important to catch the cool lagoon breeze and to be shielded from the sun, and it was imperative to avoid sitting under brown coconuts. These were the older, riper fruits, and they were raring to fall. Death by falling coconut wasn’t a joke in this country; the sound of one of these bowling balls hitting a tin roof after its thirty-foot drop was deafening, and Fredlee didn’t want the performance repeated on my head. So we were careful to choose the shade of a palm tree with young green coconuts, which stayed firmly on their stems.
Then Fredlee would fetch the seat of honor, which was the only chair he owned. While I sat on this pink plastic throne, he would plop down on an old board and prop his back up on a tree trunk. Joja would simply lie on the gravel, impervious to that bed of nails, and use a nearby coconut as a pillow. This had to be one of the more obscure of the fruit’s many uses. (The coconut tree was a machine: a solar-powered, self-building factory that required no maintenance and cost no money—a clean-running, noiseless manufacturer of useful things. In went soil, air, and water; out came food, drink, fuel, building materials, rope, medicine, and, yes, pillows.)
Then the bwebwenato would begin.
During our inaugural session three weeks after my arrival, we first had to establish exactly who, and what, I was. They knew my first name—this was easy enough, since two other villagers were named Peter. My last name was a bit more difficult. They asked it only once, and after hearing it they decided it was much more trouble than it was worth.
They knew I was from America. But why was I here? They asked if I was pijkor. A Peace Corps volunteer? I tried to explain that I was affiliated with WorldTeach, not the Peace Corps, but their eyes glazed over during my convoluted explanations. I couldn’t blame them. As far as they were concerned, a strange American showed up every once in a while and taught in their school. Until about ten years ago, these people came for two-year stints (Peace Corps). Last year, one had come for a one-year stint (WorldTeach). Did it matter to the islanders that the Peace Corps was a US government agency, while WorldTeach was an independent nonprofit organization? No. Pijkor didn’t mean “Peace Corps volunteer.” It meant “American living on the island for a long period of time, trying to help.” So I was pijkor, and I was here to teach school, which was scheduled to begin in a week.
Next, they wanted to know about America. I described it, trying to pick out the relevant details: it’s big, cold, and mountainous. They asked me about politics: Clinton, Bush, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan. Apparently their radios brought in more than just bastardized Western pop music. I realized I could not escape geopolitics, even on a remote island in an obscure corner of a vast ocean.
“Americans are very smart,” Fredlee declared. “They went to the moon.” I didn’t know how to respond to that. But it was a testament to my improving Marshallese that I could even attempt to talk about these things, although our political discussions were limited to me calling certain presidents emman (good) and others nana (bad).
When the subject of money came up, I resolved not to lie. Yes, I admitted—the United States was much richer than the Marshall Islands. But I developed a little speech to put that fact in perspective. “Americans have a lot of money—it’s true,” I would say. “But in America everything costs money. Buy a Coke—one dollar. Buy some fish—several dollars. Live in a house—hundreds or thousands of dollars every month. Sometimes you have to pay just to swim at a beach or go fishing. Here, you can pick a coconut and drink it—free. Fish in the lagoon—free. Live in your house—free. Go for a swim—free. There’s little money, but also little you need to buy.” The phrase ejjelok wonan (“it’s free”) echoed again and again, and soon they were giving me the same speech when the subject came up.
I made sure to tell them other things that were not so great about my country. In America, you often live miles from your workplace. After years, you may not know your next-door neighbor’s name. Worst of all, America’s oceans are a true abomination—compare a deep, rough, frigid, murky California seascape to a shallow, calm, warm, crystalline Marshallese lagoon. I told them of the lamentable absence of reef fish and coral, and I emphasized that it was impossible to fish with a spear. They looked at me like I had been very deprived indeed.
They were nearly as ignorant of my world as I had been of theirs. I wondered if the islanders were experiencing the same thing I was; while I was discarding the myth of island harmony, they were losing their own treasured illusions of an affluent paradise.
Or perhaps they were much wiser than I. They were curious about my country and impressed by some of its details, but they did not seem eager to call it home. The things that gave them joy—that leisurely ritual of conversation-coffee, a day fishing on the lagoon, the relaxed rhythm of work and play—would be difficult or impossible in my land, and they realized this. “ Emman mour in majel,” Fredlee would often say. “Marshallese life is good.” For better or worse, they expressed more satisfaction with their way of life than Americans typically did with theirs. They were intrigued, but not awed, by the grand old USA.
Fredlee and Joja spoke with evident pride about their country and customs, and answered my questions thoroughly but with a generous simplicity of language. The Marshallese flag was displayed on my shirt, and I asked them one day about its meaning. It had struck me as one of the more elegant national banners: a diagonal stripe, half white and half orange-red, shined from the bottom left to the top right like a ray of sun; a twenty-four-pointed star gleamed in the top left corner; and these designs floated on a field of deep blue. The orange-red ray represented peran, said Joja, and, from his numerous examples, I gathered it meant courage. The white ray represented aenomman, or peace. Each point in the star stood for an inhabited atoll, and the four longer points formed the cross of Christianity, while also representing the urbanized atolls—Majuro and Kwajalein—and the more developed outer islands—Jaluit and Wotje. The symbolism of the blue background was obvious: it was the sea, and it surrounded everything.
They taught me Marshallese songs, little ditties in major keys, accompanied languorously on the guitar. They were about as untouched by foreign influence as the name “Fredlee,” but they still expressed local sensibilities. One children’s song, called Ta Kijom in Jota, had these words:
Ta kijom in jota, ta kijom in jota
Ma ma ma, iu iu iu, keinabbu, bu bu bu a bu
Ta limom in jota, ta limom in jota
Jekaro-ro, jekamai-mai, jekajeje, je je je a je
This could be translated with extraordinary awkwardness as:
What are you eati
ng for dinner? What are you eating for dinner?
Breadfruit breadfruit breadfruit, sprouted coconut seedling sprouted coconut seedling sprouted coconut seedling, papaya, ya ya ya ah ya
What are you drinking during dinner? What are you drinking during dinner?
Coconut sap-sap, coconut syrup-syrup, coconut sap by-product, product product product ah product
Those terse native words next to their monstrous polysyllabic English equivalents spoke volumes about the different objects these languages had developed to describe.
Then there was the classic Bunniin Bunun Naam:
Bunniin bunun naam, bunniin bunun naam
Iban kiki, bwe eju naam ekkan niin
This translates as:
There are zillions of mosquitoes tonight, there are zillions of mosquitoes tonight,
I can’t sleep, because there are ludicrous numbers of mosquitoes and their teeth are sharp
The melody could have been composed anywhere, but those lyrics were quintessentially Marshallese.
These songs were a welcome change from the usual radio fare, which alternated between Western pop offerings and their tedious Marshallese derivations: endless ballads, lackadaisically sung and accompanied by monotonous drumbeats from an electric keyboard. (I learned ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” and Britney Spears’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” all too well during my year in the alleged middle of nowhere, and I became equally familiar with their Micronesian knock-offs.)
I was learning many things during these bwebwenato sessions. I noted my companions’ love of reciting lists, counting each item zestfully on their fingers. But I was floored by some of the uses they put this to. One day I asked Fredlee, “How many children do you have?” He readied his hand and said, “Well, let’s see. There’s little Tairina.” He counted off one on his fingers. “Then there’s Tona, and Jela, and Bobson.” He kept counting. “And then I have two children in Ebeye.” He read off his fingers. “That’s six, I think.”
Did he not know the number offhand? It seemed absurd, but anything was possible here. Later I would witness a lengthy debate about whether the radio operator had sixteen children or only twelve, and when I asked an old woman how many grandchildren she had, she just looked at me impassively. “ Bwijin,” she answered (“many”).
I began to notice and adopt Fredlee and Joja’s native body language. Raising the eyebrows meant “yes.” Furrowing the face into an exaggerated frown meant “no.” Grimacing by pulling the face muscles back until the tendons showed alarmingly on the neck meant nothing more menacing than “I don’t know.” When they told big-fish tales, they always reported the size of the animal by karate-chopping the left forearm with the right hand and measuring the distance between the right hand and the tips of the left fingers.
If the women had a monopoly on outrageous public humor, the men held their own in the category of dirty jokes. “American men have big penises,” declared Joja, putting his two fists end to end. “Much bigger than Marshallese penises,” and he stuck his index finger out limply. Agreeing and disagreeing both seemed in poor taste. Fredlee was also fond of espousing the theory that the United States funded the Peace Corps not as charity but as a ploy to spread the Yankee seed, leaving half-American babies across the globe.
There was another joke that Fredlee and Joja never got tired of. Thousands of Marshallese immigrants had settled in Hawaii, California, Washington, Utah, and, of all places, Arkansas. In Springdale, Arkansas, Marshallese transplants—most of whom worked at a local chicken processing factory—were so numerous that one of the ethnicities that could be checked on official forms was “Marshallese.” So it was conceivable that I would run into a Marshall Islander when I returned home. Wouldn’t he be surprised when this white American spoke Marshallese to him? Wouldn’t he be perplexed when he heard a Marshallese word, looked around and saw only nonchalant Caucasian faces? So the jokes ran freely: see a Marshallese man, yell yokwe when his back was turned, and then casually blend into the crowd while the man looks around in bewilderment. Or better yet, suggested Joja, shout kijo bwiro (“give me some preserved breadfruit”) and see his reaction to that.
Talking was still challenging, but I found that I enjoyed the directness and unpretentiousness that resulted when communication was not automatic. The difficulty of conversation meant that even a rudimentary exchange of information qualified as an accomplishment. This was a new concept. Back in my own country, a conversation was successful only if it was witty and fluent and devoid of any awkward pauses. It was a hefty task. This new kind of talking was much easier.
Conversation here was often a sort of scripted recital. My conversation partner and I would default to familiar, unoffensive formulas to avoid the embarrassment of silence or incomprehension. I learned to expect and correctly answer questions such as “Do you like eating breadfruit?” (correct answer: “yes—it is tasty”) and “Do you like eating pandanus?” (correct answer: “yes—it is tasty”) and “Do you like Ujae?” (correct answer: “yes, it is really good, because we eat breadfruit and pandanus, and they are tasty”). Paradoxically, my inarticulateness made me a natural comedian. If humor depends on surprise, then I no longer needed to rely on the surprise of an offbeat observation, because the shock of me saying anything at all in Marshallese was enough. If the statement was whimsical or, better yet, naughty, I would get an even better response. I could produce gales of laughter with such brilliant zingers as “on Ujae, there are pretty girls” and “Marshallese men like to have sex.”
In the midst of all these happy discoveries, there was one thing that bothered me: my new Marshallese friends hated Chinese people. This wasn’t an unspoken attitude that I gleaned from close observation. It was a sentiment they voiced openly and unapologetically. Since I was curious to know the reason, I hid my disagreement and asked them innocently why. It seemed that a number of Chinese immigrants had settled in Majuro and started businesses, and the Marshallese believed they were taking away income from the islanders and disrespecting native custom. The natural conclusion from this, of course, was that the 1.3 billion other citizens of China were also evil. I was reminded of my time spent in Spain, where I discovered that even the well educated often displayed open contempt for los moros (“Moors,” or Arabs). In both countries, the prejudice had become fashionable and beyond scrutiny. I was disturbed by the sentiment, but fascinated to see these countries’ ethnic tensions in plain view, without the doublespeak of political correctness.
ONE DAY, FREDLEE ACCIDENTALLY INTRODUCED ME TO AN ESSENTIAL bit of island lore. We were planning the next day’s bwebwenato session, and he told me to come to Loto in the afternoon. Loto? The name of a person, perhaps? No, it was the name of a property, specifically Fredlee’s. Without much coaxing, he told me more.
Since ancient times, Ujae and every other Marshall Island had been divided into wato, or land tracts. In this country, islands were oases of dirt in a desert of water. Land was so precious that, before conversion to Christianity, only royalty had the privilege to be entombed in the ground; commoners were buried at sea to conserve land. The usual wato was a cross section of the island running from the ocean side to the lagoon side, thus giving each household access to every kind of resource the island offered. Ujae was sliced into about two dozen of these land tracts, which still bore their ancient names and boundaries. I had no address; instead I lived at “Ariraen.” Fredlee’s property was Loto (“Rope House”), and my neighbors to the west lived at Mwiddik-kan (“Small Houses”). Other wato on Ujae included Monkaruk (“Crab House”), Monujooj (“Grass House”), Monalwoj (“Watching House”), Monumen (“Oven House”), Baten (“The Hill”), Anedikdik (“Small Island”), and a lovely estate on the far side of the island, next to the roar of the ocean waves, called Likiej (“Windward Side”).
That night, I browsed the Marshallese-English dictionary that I had brought. I was delighted to find that I could look up my own house in the book’s appendix of place names. While perusing that long lis
t, I found some wato names from other islands:
Batilijarron: Deaf Woman’s Hill
Jab-ajeej: Do Not Divide
Rere-bajjek: Just Looking Around
Toeak: Feces
Mojaninbod: House of the Sound Made When Hitting a Turtle Shell
Given that the dictionary listed four thousand place names for a country of only seventy square miles of land, it was obvious that the Marshallese were fond of naming things. What the dictionary suggested, my friends confirmed. Every scrap of land, from the largest atoll to the smallest islet or barren sand spit, deserved its designation. Every landmark or oceanmark of any significance—outcrops of coral, deeper pools in the reef, rocks higher than a few feet—had a name. And so did every person, pet, canoe, and variety of fish, crab, bird, and plant. Only coral was omitted from this enthusiastic classification, and I guessed that this was only because coral was so difficult to see before the advent of snorkel masks.
Taking a dictionary tour of this nomenclature was as entertaining as it was enlightening. I spent long hours marveling over just how many words this language had devised for island commonalities.
There were at least eleven words for coconut, specifying different stages of growth:
kwalinni: just beginning to grow on the tree
ubleb: larger but still immature
ajin aulaklak: almost ready to drink
uronni: ready to husk and drink
mejoub: a bit too late to drink
manbon: starting to get brown, with the meat starting to harden
waini: ready to be husked and the meat removed
tobolaar: fallen off the tree, starting to sprout
iu: sprouted, with the spongy innards now edible
debweiu: sprouted more, too late to eat the inside
Surviving Paradise Page 5
