Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  I took the peculiar animal back to Ariraen, and a small controversy began. Lisson dismissed the pufferfish as inedible and therefore worthless. Elina could not have agreed more, judging from the way she grimaced at it. But Fredlee, who had been born on another atoll, said that people on other islands did eat it. He then proceeded to describe an intricate method for properly extracting the meat. I mentioned that, in Japan, the meat of a pufferfish was deadly unless prepared correctly, but Fredlee claimed that the Japanese variety was different. I decided to throw the pufferfish away. Did I really want to eat a fish that half the islanders claimed was poisonous, whose proper method of preparation took two minutes to explain, which was possibly related to the fugu fish of Japan that would kill the diner if the chef was careless?

  I threw the poor creature back in the lagoon. It was still inflated, so it floated melancholically on the surface of the water. Not long afterward, it had washed up on shore again, and Lisson had to warn passing children not to touch it. It was a pathetic specimen. I hurled it even farther into the lagoon, and it disappeared, and I shed a single tear.

  I didn’t get choked up about the stonefish, a creature with hideous skin that looked like dirt and mold, but whose gills were a glorious red. I saw one only once, and speared it by luck. I brought it ashore, still stuck to the end of my spear, to show to a man on the beach. His face contorted into an expression even worse than Elina’s when she saw the offending pufferfish. He asked urgently if I had touched it and was relieved when I told him I hadn’t. The skin of the fish, he told me, was very poisonous and would cause swelling, terrible pain, and occasionally death. He told me to throw the creature away, then reconsidered and bludgeoned it to oblivion with a rock before throwing it back in the water with the aid of the spear. The man seemed to see the animal with a personal dislike. The fish—appropriately called no in Marshallese—was more than just dangerous. It was practically evil.

  There was the needlefish, two-thirds of an inch wide, a foot long. Why the strange shape? I found out when I finally speared one—understandably, after many failed attempts—and the fish bent its body into a U-shape, so that its head was at its tail, and bit the spear with its long, thin mouth, thus extricating itself. That explained why evolution would create such an odd creature.

  There were parrotfish with beaklike noses and aquamarine scales so hard that the spear would often ricochet off them; graceful Moorish idols striped black and yellow with a long wisp of skin floating behind them; brilliant red-and-silver squirrelfish, their dorsal fins held together with sharp spines; banded surgeonfish, little recluses or in schools of five hundred.

  It was amazing to see myself on a coral reef, stringing a freshly speared tropical fish onto a length of handmade cord. For the previous sixteen years I had been a student, assigned to think but never do. Now, finally, I was working with my hands instead of my mind, and there was a pleasant immediacy and concreteness to the results.

  What I was doing was more than just an enjoyable hobby. It was for a reason that the Marshall Islands had a National Fishermen’s Day. Here it was survival: a skill that every man prided himself on and refined throughout his life. It was often the measure of a man. In the Marshall Islands, the “walk of shame” was not the early morning return journey from the house of someone of the opposite sex. The “walk of shame” was returning from a fishing expedition without any fish. There you were: ambling up the beach, soaked from head to toe, spear in hand, snorkel mask on your forehead, empty fish string on your belt. It was pathetically obvious that you had just gone fishing and returned with nothing. You were now officially joda: a bad fisherman—impotent, unskilled, unmanly. You could not provide. If you had been fishing with other men and caught less than them, then you were said to be “shorter,” with all the connotations that such a phrase suggests. It was funny, especially if you were the foolish white man who might not even know which end of the spear to use. But it was also serious. On some level, you were emasculated.

  On the other hand, there was nothing like the pride of returning home with an ile weighted down with the day’s catch. I had instantly gained respect. Goodwill I gained unconditionally here, but not respect. Respect came from doing things the Marshallese way, and doing them skillfully.

  Or perhaps they were just humoring me. A local woman once confided in me, “Elina told me that you’ve learned to fish, but that you only bring her tiny little fish that no one would want to eat. She waits for you to leave, then laughs at the fish and throws them away!” It was true. I realized that I had never seen any of my fish being cooked or eaten. My supposed subsistence activity had failed to contribute a single ounce of food to the family. The fish I caught always seemed so much smaller once I pulled them out of the water, and to Elina they were pathetically, inedibly tiny. I admitted to myself that spearfishing was only a sport for me: but it was a Marshallese sport, and one that taught me much about the ecosystem and the culture.

  As I came to understand fishing as a test of Marshallese manhood, I found it affecting me in subtler ways as well. Snorkeling was just watery tourism: watch it if it’s beautiful, ignore if it’s not, get out when it gets boring. But spearfishing kept me in the water for hours at a time and taught me to pay attention to everything. I became familiar with individual coral formations, the habitats of different species, the proper tide for various kinds of fishing. I realized that I could rattle off a list of common reef fish, provide their names in Marshallese, and describe their appearance, edibility, habitat, and behavior when approached by a large creature with a spear. I started dividing the watery world into “edible” and “inedible,” instead of “beautiful” and “boring,” and then I stopped seeing the inedible fish at all. They became invisible to me. Like the islanders, I started to judge outings not by what pretty things I had seen, but by how many fish I had caught.

  The change was deeper still. I began to feel a cold-blooded ownership of the reef. At first I felt guilty when I drove metal into the bodies of living creatures. But that ended quickly. Before arriving in the Marshalls, I had been a vegetarian for ethical reasons; now I would kill even the loveliest of fish. I once saw a startlingly gorgeous specimen, a species I never saw before or since—thin and billowy like a sail, magnificently large, striped with every color. And I tried to spear it.

  I reached a point where snorkeling without a weapon in my hand felt empty, with a nagging sensation that something vital was missing. I found a word in the Marshallese-English dictionary, mom, which meant “lusty, overanxious,” and the example sentence translated as “When I saw the fish I felt that I had to catch them.” Yes! I had never felt that before, but suddenly I appreciated that weird urgency. I felt the deep pull of masculinity: hunting and providing, developing strength and skill, valuing results over aesthetics. I had never before allowed myself to feel this hunter’s instinct, having grown up with a guilty conception of nature as something to gaze upon and respect but never use, or even touch.

  Fredlee said it best one morning as we set out on a fishing expedition: “Once you’re out the ocean, you get this feeling. The ocean belongs to you. Everything there is yours.” As I adopted this feeling—intimacy mixed with callous possessiveness—I became ever so slightly more Marshallese. I had been taught that we, the avaricious Westerners, viewed nature as an object to be plundered, while they, the noble natives, viewed it as a life force to be cherished. In the contemporary Marshall Islands, if anything, the usual roles were reversed. Maybe the locals had once seen themselves as guardians of the natural world, but in the modern era of imported rice and disaster insurance, local resources no longer seemed so important to conserve. Nowadays it was the Marshallese who walked all over the reef, and the foreigners who didn’t dare touch it.

  FOR A SHORT TIME, I FIRTED WITH ANOTHER STYLE OF FISHING. ON THE canoe, I had seen the men catch so many fish with a net that I wondered why they ever bothered with spears. Learning to use a long net would require a partner of boundless patience, but I could try solo
fishing from the beach with one of the small throwing nets.

  The net was a ten-foot-wide circle of synthetic mesh lined with metal sinkers. The fisherman would throw the net into the lagoon and catch a school of fish en masse. This was more than I could land in several solid hours of spearfishing. But, as usual, it was much more difficult than it appeared.

  Joja taught me one rainy day when school was canceled. The first two steps were tedious, but not difficult.

  1. Spread the net over the ground.

  2. Untangle it.

  As we did this I learned that the Marshallese language used the same word for “disentangle” as it did for “explain.” Joja said we would kommelele the net, and then he would kommelele how to use it. Soon the net would be melele (disentangled) and I would also be melele (understanding). I tried to make the pun, but to Joja’s Marshallese ear it didn’t sound like one. It was one word for one concept.

  Now came the tricky part. How many steps does it take to pick up a net? Two? Three? No, it is closer to fourteen:

  3. Pick the net up from the middle.

  4. Gather the middle fibers together into a thick rope.

  5. Fold this rope over onto itself twice.

  6. Hold this handle about a foot from the end with your right hand, letting the sinkers droop toward the ground.

  7. With your left hand, take a few of the sinkers and fling them over your left shoulder.

  8. Half squat, so that your upper legs are sticking out but you’re still standing.

  9. Switch the grip of the net to the left hand.

  10. Find the end of the sinkers on the right side of the net with your right hand, disentangling them as you do so.

  11. Still half squatting, take a certain number of sinkers (not too many, not too few) and drape them over your right leg, which is sticking out.

  12. Take all of the netting that you slung over your right leg and put that over your right shoulder.

  13. Switch the grip of the net to the right hand.

  14. Gather up all the remaining sinkers with your left hand, while continuing to hold the middle of the net with your right hand.

  Having completed the fourteen steps required for picking up the net, only the following three steps were left:

  15. Walk up and down the beach until you see a school of fish near the shore.

  16. Heave the net into the water so that it opens out completely, trapping all the fish.

  17. Haul in the net from the middle.

  Now all I needed was a school of fish to come near the beach. The only problem was that, as far as I could tell, this never happens. So steps 15 through 17 were replaced with my own technique:

  15. Walk up and down the beach, looking for a school of fish near the shore.

  16. Get bored. Let your mind wander. Feel your arms getting tired from the weight of all those sinkers.

  17. Realize that you are no longer paying attention to the water. Start looking for fish again.

  18. Fail. Conclude that fish will never come.

  19. Remember Joja’s word of advice that if you don’t see any fish, you can just kajjidede (try your luck) and throw the net into an area of murky water that, for all you know, might contain fish.

  20. Do so. Haul in the net. Catch two rocks and a bit of coral.

  21. Repeat from step 1.

  I should also mention that if I threw the net onto a rocky area where the fish came a few times an hour instead of a few times a day, the net would snag like Velcro onto every conceivable nook and cranny of stone. Murphy’s Law applied: whatever can get snagged, will. And when I finally freed the net, it was as tightly tangled as a Jamaican dreadlock.

  For a few weeks, I tried to master netfishing, but I never, technically, caught anything. It required Buddha-like patience and a certain fatalism, which I apparently didn’t possess. The question arose: should I stick with the mind-numbing tedium of netfishing, or go back to the thrilling cat-and-mouse of spearfishing? It was no contest. I returned to my old love.

  13

  From Island to Mainland

  A DOZEN ADULTS AND TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN WERE SITTING RESTlessly on the gravel grounds of the radio operator’s house, waiting with slowly deteriorating patience for the more technically savvy among them to coax life out of a dilapidated TV/VCR. The children took turns making inane conversation with me as I sat, as usual, at the behest of my hosts, on the only available chair. I was still a curiosity, and the kids would search for any excuse, no matter how thin, to talk to me. Two boys brought a coconut and started a poorly conceived vocabulary lesson. They pointed at the fruit and said, instructively, “ni.” I had lived on this tropical island for six months now and was well aware of the word for “coconut,” thank you very much, but they persisted with the lesson. They continued pointing at the coconut, declaring “ni” over and over until I was ready to dub them “The Natives Who Say Ni.”

  Finally, salvation arrived in the form of an eighty-pound battery, delivered by a man via wheelbarrow. The Good Samaritan hooked the television to the new power source, and the tiny screen flickered to life. An old woman inserted a video into the VCR and pressed PLAY, and that was when the scene presented itself: twenty young men and three women from Ujae walking on the streets, eating at the restaurants, and sleeping in the motels of Los Angeles, California. There they were in my world, amid the trendy boutiques and fast-food joints, the incongruous palm trees, the paved six-lane avenues. These islanders, whom I had fancied guardians of one of the last remote places on earth, were standing on a street corner in LA. At the international airport, they were paid no more attention than any other visitors from an unknown country. Had I never come to the Marshall Islands, I would have ignored these people in the airport as yet another set of faces in a diverse nation—but I could not ignore them now, as I watched footage of them being where they plainly could not be.

  Then the scene changed to a large grassy expanse. The men were dressed in grass skirts and shell jewelry, leaving their well-toned upper bodies bare, and they were performing a quick and intricate dance to an audience of spellbound Americans. It was a ritualized battle, a mock spear fight in groups of four, but the danger was real enough: if the strict sequence of movements was violated, the sharpened sticks could cause serious injury. Two women were beating bass drums on the sidelines while a third recited a frantic, breathless chant. This, captured in dance, was the heat and tension of battle.

  What I was watching was the Marshallese stick dance, or jebwa. For a short time, these dancers and I had switched places: while I was living on their home island of Ujae, they were performing in my home state of California. Their journey, funded jointly by the government and by Ujae’s wealthy chief, had already taken them to Kwajalein and Honolulu, and their next stop after Los Angeles was the Pacific Arts Festival in the Micronesian nation of Palau.

  It was for good reason that little Ujae was receiving this privilege. Jebwa was considered to be the one remaining traditional dance in the Marshall Islands, and only the people of Ujae knew how to perform it. The missionaries had kiboshed most of the country’s dance rituals, some of which they considered unspeakably erotic. Now only jebwa survived, but it was in no danger of being forgotten because the young people were learning it and would pass it on.

  The dancers practiced on Ujae while I was away in Majuro, and then left for America before I came back. So it transpired that my Californian parents witnessed the jebwa live, and I, a yearlong inhabitant of its birthplace, did not. The islanders thought this was hilarious.

  The people of Ujae took credit only for keeping the jebwa alive, not for creating it. It had been a nooniep, an invisible fairylike creature, who had invented the dance. According to legend, a chief fell asleep under a tree on Ebeju, a now uninhabited islet of Ujae Atoll. The man slept without food and water for a month. When he woke up, he told the people of Ebeju that he had been visited by the nooniep, a spirit that can be heard but not seen. The creature had described the steps and chants of a
dance, and now the man taught this dance to the other islanders. (The lyrics were neither in Marshallese nor any other identifiable language. Not even the old people knew what they meant, as if the words had sprung from the underworld along with the spirit.) While the men were performing the dance, with the women chanting and beating on drums, another spirit called a ri-ikjiet appeared from a well. This spirit was a very handsome man with a resplendent golden beard, and soon the women were so distracted by the newcomer that their chanting and drumming became dubwabwe, or out of tempo. The chief was incensed at this disruption and hatched a plan to eliminate the intruder. He told the men to touch their dance sticks to the ground at the end of the dance, instead of holding them up high. When the ri-ikjiet participated in the next round of the dance, he held his stick high while the other dancers touched their sticks to the ground. This was all the pretext that the chief needed. He killed the offending spirit with a club spiked with shark’s teeth.

  This was the origin of the jebwa. The dance steps had purportedly remained unchanged since then, although botching them during a performance was no longer punishable by death.

  It seemed odd to me that the legend never mentioned the resemblance between the movements of the dance and the movements of battle. My hunch that there was a connection between the two was confirmed when I came across the following account of traditional Marshallese war in Adelbert von Chamisso’s early-nineteenth-century account—a description equally interesting for its depiction of the role of women:

  The women take part in the war, not only when it is a matter of warding off the enemy on their own soil, but also in the attack, and they make up a part of the military force in the squadron, even though in the minority. . . . The women form a second line without weapons. Some of them at the leader’s bidding beat the drum, first at a slow, measured beat (ringesipinem) when the antagonists exchange throw upon throw, then with doubled rapid beat (pinneneme) when man fights against man in hand-to-hand combat. . . . The women throw stones with their bare hands; they help their dear ones in the fight and throw themselves propitiatingly between them and the victorious enemy to succor them. Captured women are spared, men are not taken prisoner. The man takes the name of the enemy he subdues in battle. Captured islands are despoiled of their fruits, but the trees are spared.