The issue was more than just symbolic. Even under a democratic government, the chiefs remained the ultimate owners of every last piece of land in the Marshall Islands. Not one square foot of the country was public property. Ujae’s chief also owned land in Lae, Wotho, and Kwajalein Atolls, and although families were allowed to live and collect food on their wato, the supreme owner was nonetheless the chief. This led to certain problems and inequities. A chief or even a subordinate landowner might deny access to a land tract that had always housed a school, and until the landowner and the government could hammer out an agreement, the children sat at home untaught. A landowner could invite the government to build a school on her land, and then renege once it was finished so that she could use the new building as her house. These scenarios had occurred, and, conceivably, even the land on which the capital building sat could be closed. At the Kwajalein military base, the millions of dollars of rent that the United States annually paid went directly to the landowners, to be redistributed among others only according to their whims.
This was not the chief’s proper role. He was the village’s steward, not its master. He collected tribute, but was expected to redistribute it when his people were in need. He owned the land, but granted its use to deserving families. The commoners told him what to do as often as vice-versa. Many islanders felt this ideal had been lost. Nowadays, chiefs remembered their privileges but not their responsibilities. They horded their tribute instead of redistributing it. A few chiefs were now wealthy even by American standards.
The more progressive party promised to rectify this situation. They could invoke eminent domain, a law that allowed the government to seize private property for public works. By taking land into government hands, schools would remain open regardless of the landlords’ whims.
But the pull of tradition was strong. Many islanders remained loyal to their chiefs because they were a link to the Marshallese past, even if they no longer filled their traditional role. Meanwhile, land rights were so closely guarded that a few people suggested, only half joking, that invoking eminent domain would start a civil war. Making private property into public property could be a slippery slope that ended with people losing their land, the basis of all life on these islands. Although poorer communities like Ujae could benefit the most from a redistribution of the country’s resources, these communities were also the ones whose livelihoods depended most immediately on their real estate. With money alone, they would go hungry; with their land, they could survive.
So this was an important election. Ujae’s senate seat was up for grabs now that the old senator had transferred to Kwajalein Atoll. Anyone who lived on the island or claimed ancestry here could vote for Ujae’s new senator. That increased the constituency to a whopping six hundred people.
None of Ujae’s candidates lived on the atoll that they hoped to represent, but all of them arrived in person to campaign. Tani Herong had been demoted from his job as the school’s principal, for reasons I will not go into, and now he made the dubious career choice of seeking an even higher office. Fred Muller focused his political efforts on making dozens if not hundreds of stickers with the words “FRED MULLER—UJAE” on them. I got my hands on one, cut and pasted it so that it said “FREE UJAE,” and stuck it on the cover of my journal. That was the extent of my interaction with the man.
Alee Alik was a garrulous fellow who dominated every conversation and had any audience in stitches within half a minute. The multiple voices of the men’s daily conversation-coffee had become one: his. If the meek shall inherit the earth, this man had been written out of the will. Alee was better educated than the vast majority of the islanders—he had attended college in the United States—and perhaps this was why his platform focused on the inevitability of change. He encouraged the people of Ujae to embrace their country’s growing cash economy. He also addressed a future threat that no other islander cared to discuss. “The Marshall Islands will be inundated,” Alee said ominously. He was referring to global warming.
I didn’t want to think about global warming then. Most of the time, I successfully managed not to. But, every once in a while I would remember the facts. I knew scientists had predicted that climate change, caused by industrial emissions, would melt the polar icecaps, raising the world’s sea level. I knew low-lying countries like Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands were particularly vulnerable to this. I knew that the rising saltwater could seep into the ground and ruin crops and drinking water, that increasingly violent storms could flood and even sweep away entire islands. I knew that warming oceans might kill coral reefs, decimating the islanders’ protein supply and eliminating a natural defense against extreme weather. I knew that, by the end of the century, coral atolls might be not only uninhabitable but nonexistent. If the ocean rose too quickly, the coral would be unable to keep pace. Hope remained: if the world got its act together, climate change might slow to the point where adaptation was possible. But I also reminded myself that if these islands were doomed, then it was all the more appropriate to experience them now.
I admired Alee for broaching a subject both islanders and foreigners preferred not to think about. But Alee’s obsession with change also blinded him to the absurdity of some of his ambitions. “We should get lawnmowers for this island,” he opined. “We’ll use them to get rid of all the underbrush in the jungle, so that we can see straight from the lagoon side to the ocean side. Ujae would be beautiful that way—it would look like Hawaii or a golf course. Then we could get tourism here.” I found it difficult to argue with this only because I didn’t know where to start.
The last candidate was auspiciously named Caios Lucky. (His brother’s name was Lucky Lucky.) But his assets were not limited to his promising surname. He was gentle and kind, and his nervous earnestness during his campaign speech, so far from Alee’s cocky electioneering, endeared him to me. He became my friend, and he would hold long conversations with me in Marshallese even though he spoke excellent English. He had made campaign T-shirts in Majuro and distributed them for free on Ujae. They said “Caios for Senator—Ujae Atoll.” Mind you, it said “Caios” for senator, not “Caios Lucky.” This was a country where one could run for national office using no more names than a pop diva.
Instead of selling flashy plans for progress, Caios vowed to protect what Ujae already had. His campaign speech focused on the here and now: maintaining tradition, defending land rights, and ensuring an adequate food supply. But even in his present focus, he found it necessary to make reference to something that had happened fifty years earlier in another part of the country: the nuclear testing at Bikini and Eniwetok.
This was the central irony of the archipelago’s history: its isolation, rather than deterring foreign tampering, had instead invited it. In the early nineteenth century, Adelbert von Chamisso (a German botanist who produced the first detailed description of the islands) had said, unpresciently, “the poor and dangerous reefs of Radak [the Marshall Islands] have nothing that could attract Europeans.” That statement seemed ludicrous now, after sixty-seven atomic bombs had been dropped on the country. The Marshall Islands, thousands of miles from any superpower, might be one of the safest places on Earth in the event of World War III, but nuclear war had come here anyway. It began in 1946, when gunboat diplomats arrived on Bikini Atoll and convinced its 167 natives to relocate. In achieving this, the officials combined the gentle persuasive power of Christian rhetoric with the subtlest grace note of possessing the world’s mightiest military. At that time, the Marshalls were a United Nations mandate under American administration—a de facto US territory—and the islanders didn’t have the option of saying no.
(The inevitable aside to this story is that, in the same year, a French fashion designer named his scandalous new two-piece bathing suit after the equally scandalous atomic test site. The atoll was not named after the swimsuit, nor was the swimsuit modeled after the dress of the islanders. Bikini Atoll had no bikinis at all.)
For the next decade, the Am
erican military bombarded the now unpeopled Bikini and its neighbor Eniwetok with dozens of nuclear bombs. The most infamous of those was the Bravo Test, the largest explosion ever produced by the United States. But it was the tragic timing rather than the explosive power that secured Bravo’s place in Marshallese history. Fifty years later, activists still debated whether it was premeditation or merely negligence that allowed the military to detonate this weapon, a thousand times more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima, on a morning when the winds would carry the fallout to nearby inhabited atolls.
For Rongelap Atoll, March 1, 1954, was the “day of two suns.” Just before dawn broke in the east, a nuclear fireball rose like a second sun in the west, bringing a snowstorm of radioactive ash to the bewildered islanders. The immediate effects were burns, vomiting, and hair loss. The long-term effects were thyroid cancer and birth defects. Meanwhile, the Bikinians had nearly starved in their new home, Rongerik Atoll, with its poisonous fish and poor agriculture. Their placement thereafter was another island uninhabited for good reason: Kili, sometimes called “prison island,” with no lagoon for fishing or anchorage.
By contaminating several atolls instead of one, and by failing to relocate the refugees to suitable land, the United States had multiplied the ills of an already cavalier plan, ensuring that both countries would spend at least the next half century dealing with the fallout, both radioactive and political, of the testing. Bikini Atoll was once again lush and gorgeous; but it was safe only to visit, not to inhabit, and the Bikinians still lived the lives of nuclear refugees. The fact that a senate candidate on a largely unaffected atoll half a century later would feel the need to address this issue attested to the continued legacy of the tests. Caios spoke about the monetary reparations that the US government had granted—belatedly and reluctantly—to the affected citizens, which indirectly supplied a significant percentage of the country’s wealth and trickled down to even the remotest islands. Some of the promised payments were in danger of being revoked by US political whim, and Caios promised to fight to keep them.
The day of the vote arrived. The village’s single police officer stood by the school–cum–polling place, taking a rare break from his usual job of doing nothing because there was nothing to do.
Mr. Lucky was the winner. His lead was on the order of twenty votes, but this hardly counted as a dead heat when only about three hundred people were eligible to vote. He belonged to the more conservative party, which was appropriate enough for traditionalist, chief-fearing Ujae. Curiously, though, Caios had narrowly lost on Ujae itself, and won because of absentee voters in Ebeye, Majuro, Arkansas, and even California.
Caios’s triumph was the exception to the rule of that year’s election. The progressive party had consolidated its majority in the parliament and appointed the commoner president to a second term. Tradition had been defeated, or progress had been won, depending on who you asked.
ELECTION TIME WAS ALSO FEAST TIME. EACH CANDIDATE ORGANIZED a lavish campaign party replete with all manner of Marshallese cuisine. It was in this way that I made two discoveries. The first was that Marshallese food wasn’t entirely limited to the rice-and-breadfruit doldrums to which I had resigned myself. The second was that democracy wasn’t the only popular Western import. There was another one called jipaam.
Spam.
American GIs had introduced it to the Marshall Islands as part of their rations during World War II, and it had stuck. In the sixty years since, Spam had become as typically Marshallese as preserved breadfruit and fried reef fish. Vending machines in Majuro sold chips, candy bars, and Spam.
To the American, Spam epitomized low-quality food; to the Marshall Islander, it was just the opposite. Living in the villagers’ limited culinary world, I came to agree with them. I was reading For the Good of Mankind by Jack Niedenthal, who had spent six years “surviving his own brain” in the outer Marshalls, and the author mentioned—and extolled—Spam on both the first and the last page. In his acknowledgments, he thanked only God, for giving him life, and Hormel Foods Corporation, for making Spam. The bland monotony of outer island food was occasionally punctuated by something delicious—but, just as often, something revolting. It was a case of the good, the bad, and the ugly.
The bad—that is, the bland—was by far the most common. I’ve already described the curse of plain rice, baked breadfruit, and boiled bananas. What I haven’t described were my desperate attempts to make it taste better. Alfred had bought a bottle of soy sauce and a bottle of Tabasco on the supply ship. I applied them liberally to almost everything, using them up within two weeks. It is astounding how pleasurable an experience can be when you have not had it for months. Here, that experience was flavor. After the soy sauce and Tabasco, I resorted to Sriracha, a Thai hot sauce whose taste I will never be able to forget. Was an overbearing spice better than nothing at all? The answer was a marginal yes.
That was the bad; now I will describe the good. Local cuisine included a number of mouthwatering dishes, although I am not expecting to see Marshallese restaurants thriving in the United States anytime soon. My sense of taste had been so hypersensitized by the usual blandness that these foods seemed, in comparison, more delicious than they really were. After all, at the time, I would have classified the gummy worm a child gave me as “heavenly.”
There was fresh seafood beyond the flavorless fish—succulent clams, crabs, and the occasional langosta. At night during low tide, the children collected tiny snails on the shore to be boiled and eaten. Baked breadfruit could be drenched in coconut oil, which made as big a difference as adding butter to dry toast.
There was pandanus: a two-and-half-foot-long monster of a fruit covered in green protuberances called keys. Each key was green and inedible at the outer end, and orange and delicious at the inner end, where it was attached to the fruit’s core. Toddlers sat and sucked the sweet ends like pacifiers, getting stringy fibers stuck between their teeth. Pandanus could also be made into jaankun, a sweet fruit leather: the keys were boiled, their meat scraped into a barrel and cooked over a fire, and then the resulting paste was sun-dried in large sheets. Shipping this treat to Ebeye and Majuro for sale provided a small supplementary income for a few outer island families, including my own. The De Brums also made ametoma: balls of coconut meat soaked in sweet, sticky coconut syrup.
The most delectable dish of all was a sauce made from crabs. It was a savory dip as well as a prized baby food. But I tried to think as little as possible about where it came from. The islanders boiled the crab and then squeezed the abdomen until an oily paste emerged.
Then there was bwiro, the famous or infamous preserved breadfruit. The lengthy preparation included removing the rind with a scraper made from a seashell, cutting the inside into sections, dunking them in saltwater, stepping on them for half an hour (which looked a bit like old-fashioned wine making, except performed in a lagoon), and burying them under rocks for months. The result was a nonperishable substance halfway between bread and fruit, which made the name “breadfruit” apt when “potatofruit” had always seemed more so. Bwiro came in two main varieties. Americans often compared the sweet, moist variety to fruitcake. The sour, dry variety had a less favorable reputation among expats; my mother said it was the second worst thing she had ever eaten. Taste aside, bwiro used to be the islanders’ insurance against starvation. The always available coconut was a wonderful snack but a terrible staple, and fresh breadfruit and pandanus were seasonal. After a typhoon or during a shortage between seasons of plenty, preserved breadfruit saved lives.
Then there was the coconut. I would be remiss in my duties as a writer of tropical island literature if I did not take this opportunity to describe the perfection that is this fruit. I once saw a graffitied message in Berkeley, California, titled “An Atheist’s Nightmare.” It described how perfect bananas are for human consumption. From the good taste, to the convenient handle, to the neatly removable natural packaging, how could one eat a banana without believing in divine d
esign? Such was the argument, anyway.
For the religiously inclined, coconuts offered an even better example. Leaving aside the other uses of the coconut tree—the fronds, the bark, the wood, and the seedlings, without which life on coral atolls might well be impossible—coconut juice is a remarkable beverage. It comes in its own container. It is just the right amount to wash down a meal. It opens obligingly, at a thin part of the shell called the “eye,” making a drinking channel of perfect size. The juice is sweet but not excessively so, and the slight fizz adds a kick. It is nature’s soft drink, and the islanders were fond of calling it kola in majel—Marshallese soda. (It was also true, though, that young coconuts, when opened, love to spray into one’s eye with the power of twenty grapefruits, and stain fabric beyond any hope of removal.)
That was the good; now onto the ugly. Marshall Islanders ate dogs. In a letter, one of my fellow volunteers had told me about improvising a vocabulary exercise with her students in which they classified various animals as food, pests, or pets. They put dogs into all three categories. At orientation I had heard the story of an outer island volunteer from the year before who had adopted one of the village’s stray dogs. One night he was eating dinner with his host family and noticed that his dog was missing. He asked where it was. The family pointed to his plate. I was lucky—I was never served dog, at least as far as I know.
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