With this introduction, I embarked on a quest to learn some of the island’s old lore. The jebwa legend was only one out of hundreds of old tales of the supernatural. In typical myth fashion, they looked at first glance more like children’s on-the-spot confabulations than ancient oral histories. Among the entries in the book Marshall Islands Legends and Stories were the following: “Demon Fart,” “Jena, a Big Fart,” “The Flying Wife,” “Half-Boy and the Dog,” “The Big Canoe and the Teeny-Tiny Beach Bird,” and “Two Boys Who Tricked a Tropical Demon.” The whimsy here was unmistakable—after all, part of the reason for storytelling was entertainment. But I learned that they had much more to offer than juvenile giggles.
An American teacher with a long-standing fondness for the Marshalls had compiled a book of legends told by eighteen Marshallese elders. Of these, an elder from Ujae named Nitwa Jeik boasted more entries than anyone else. His encyclopedic knowledge of Marshallese mythology was as impressive as the mythology itself. When I first approached the old man and asked him to share his knowledge with me, I quickly discovered that he could recite a legend for any atoll, any local islet, or any landmark I could name.
As he launched into each narrative, he would enter a storytelling trance, forget I was a ribelle, and lapse into fluid, poetic Marshallese. I was happy he told the stories so authentically; I was less happy that, when he did so, I could barely understand a word he said. But from a combination of concentrating, asking many questions, and strategically ignoring the legends that I couldn’t make head or tail of, I learned a great deal from this man.
The first legend Nitwa told me was a just-so story spiced with treachery and revenge. It concerned the exploits of Joalon, a mythical figure from Ujae Island after whom a boulder, a coralhead, and a deep lagoon pool were named. A rival had abducted Joalon’s wife and fled to Bok Island with her. In a jealous rage, Joalon lifted Ujae’s largest rocks and threw them at Bok Island across the ten-mile gap. With only one boulder left on Ujae, Joalon scored a fatal hit. The one that he didn’t throw was now called deka en an Joalon: Joalon’s rock. I had seen this towering landmark—it was about five feet high, and just as wide. The others could be seen on Bok Island.
Letao the deceiver was an even more popular character. In one legend of the famous trickster’s wiles, Letao sails to Kiribati, a coral atoll nation to the south of the Marshall Islands. There he meets the local chief and promises to hold a feast for him. He instructs the villagers to make an um (not a sacred Eastern syllable representing the unity of the cosmos, but rather an underground oven). Letao then announces he will lie in the heated um himself. The people warn him not to, but he insists, so they place him in the oven and cover it with leaves. Two hours later, they open the um to find Letao vanished and a cornucopia of delicious cooked food in his place. Letao reappears triumphantly, and the Kiribati chief is so impressed by the display that he decides to try it himself. (You can probably see where this is going.) His subjects put him in the oven and cover it. Two hours later, they open it and discover that there is no food, only a thoroughly baked traditional leader. Letao, that incorrigible scamp, has already sailed into the sunset.
As it turned out, this tale, like the tale of Joalon, was a just-so story. When Nitwa related the legend to me, he added an intriguing twist at the end: after fleeing the scene of the crime, Letao sails to America and settles there. “And that,” Nitwa said, “is why Americans are so smart—but lie so much.”
At first, I dismissed this addendum as nothing more than an amusing modern stereotype slapped onto an old legend for humor. But while the statement did produce its fair share of laughs, they seemed sly and satirical rather than frivolous. The more I considered the matter, the more I found Letao to be a perfect symbol of America. Both were cunning strangers who arrived here unannounced from overseas, flaunted their power to generate riches, and promised to share the secret. But, in legend as in history, when the people signed on the dotted line, they found their leadership sabotaged, their autonomy undermined, and the key to foreign wealth as inaccessible as ever. America the trickster, clever but deceptive. What else could one expect the Marshallese to think of the people who built (and brought) the atomic bomb?
Symbolism aside, there was something unnerving about the sudden entrance of America in these stories. I had assumed that legends took place in a distant, hazy past, but Nitwa was making reference to something that the islanders had encountered only in modern times. He was no longer operating under the convenient unverifiability of prehistory. The stories were told in the present tense, but in Marshallese this could be used as easily for historical anecdotes as for timeless narratives. Did Nitwa consider these stories to be literally true? I approached the issue from the side. “Did Letao die there, in America?”
“Maybe,” Nitwa replied. “He could be alive or dead now. Nobody knows.”
“So he was a real person?”
“Oh yes, he was a real person.”
“How did he do all those things?”
“Magic,” he replied. That was all the explanation he offered.
By all indications, Nitwa believed in the truth of these tales of spirits, magicians, and presumably demon farts as well. He wasn’t the only one. It was not only the oral tradition that had survived from precolonial days—it was also the belief in the supernatural forces that they described. In America, I considered the isolated, the uneducated, and the superstitious to be ruefully backward. Here, I thought of them as the cool ones, and it was the college-educated urbanites who bored me. I had to learn more about these fantastic beliefs.
The missionaries had zealously suppressed the traditional spirituality, but much of it dies hard. Magic spells—some malicious, others benign—were still known and used. An American missionary in Majuro had complained to me that the Marshallese still clung to their old animism. “They call it a Christian country, but they have all of these superstitions,” he lamented, and then added, “Of course, I do believe there’s such thing as demonic activity, but . . .”
According to one boy on Ujae, a dead female ancestor lurked in the depths of the ocean between Ujae Atoll and Lae Atoll. Allegedly, saying the words “that old woman will eat your head!” would give your enemy a terrible headache. My young informant told me that two men on the supply ship couldn’t work because they had been cursed in this way. More benignly, if a bit unscrupulously, Lisson taught me a love spell which he claimed worked without fail. The suitor places a fly on the ground, writes his sweetheart’s name in the dirt, and encloses it all with a tiny fence. Then he chants the name over and over until she falls in love with him. Useful, I thought. But after the incident with Tonicca on Arno, I reasoned that my foreignness was enough of a love spell in itself. I never used Lisson’s formula.
Another vestige of the old spirituality was a widespread belief in the existence of demons. This had smacked me in the face during the incident of the cursed artifacts, but it was not my only brush with those ideas. Every child, when asked, claimed to have seen a demon. They could point to where the spirits had appeared, and might report that they were as tall as palm trees. One American volunteer had arrived in the outer Marshalls trusting that demonic activity was nothing more than a superstition. After several close encounters, she was a true believer.
Parents sometimes mentioned demons in order to scare their children into behaving, but they used white people just as often as bogeymen. When a woman wanted her toddler to go away and leave her alone, she pointed to me and said, “The ribelle is going to bite you!” She must not have noticed the irony of terrifying a child using the one person on the island who would never do such a thing.
The islanders believed that supernatural beings roamed Ujae’s jungle at night. Even in Westernized Majuro, many taxi drivers refused to take passengers to certain places late at night, because they were thought to be the haunts of ghosts. I was afraid of the dark forest too, but, unlike the people of Ujae, I was confident my fear was groundless. So I pitted my brain against m
y gut and resolved to walk across the jungle at night in order to see the Southern Cross. When I returned, everyone was not just surprised but impressed by what I had done. No other person would dare to cross the demon-infested jungle alone at night. This was the only advantage that I had over the men. My fishing, climbing, sailing, husking, and swimming skills were either nonexistent or laughably inferior to theirs, and I earned no respect for my now useless abilities to solve polynomial equations or critique Cartesian dualism. But I did possess one enviable skill: I could travel anywhere in darkness, and the men respected me for that.
Despite that one missionary’s grumbling, it didn’t seem to me that the islanders felt any real affinity to their old religion. It had been several generations since anyone had professed belief in it, and their commitment to Christianity appeared unflinching. Even these demons that seemed to hearken back to the old days were referred to with a word borrowed from English: timon. And far from worshipping them, the villagers reviled them. They appeared at night, in jungles, on uninhabited islands: all the times and places farthest from safe, civilized, modern Christian life. If anything, Marshallese belief in these bad spirits revealed a reaction against their past, not a residual allegiance to it. When I talked to the minister on Ujae, he had no trouble fitting demon-belief into a Christian worldview: “There used to be many demons in these islands, before the missionaries came. But then we learned to pray to God, and the demons went away.”
Old skills and crafts had also survived in reduced forms. I was particularly taken with the idea of open-ocean navigation. In a place where one’s home atoll could be 150 miles from its nearest neighbor and the land was so low that the curvature of the earth would make it invisible from only ten miles away, seafaring had become a well-honed skill in ancient Marshallese society. While celestial bodies could be used anywhere in the Pacific, the Marshall Islands had another seamark that most other archipelagoes lacked. The orientation of the islands was at a right angle to the trade wind and the wave swells it created. So waves hit the windward side of each atoll and bounced off, while the sea on the leeward side remained calm. Navigators could detect these telltale wave zones long before the islands were visible. If the voyagers were approaching an island from the leeward side, they would know they were on course if they entered calm water. They were assured of making landfall as long as they stayed within this zone. In this way, a good sailor could navigate literally with his eyes closed. Although inter-atoll canoe voyages were now a thing of the past, a few elders, including one man on Ujae, still used traditional navigation techniques to keep modern ships on course.
Open-ocean expeditions had ceased only within the lifetimes of the elders. A seventy-six-year-old Ujae man recalled journeying in his youth to Bikini (two days to the north), Lae (one day to the east), and Ailinglaplap (several days to the southeast). At the time, only a hundred people lived on Ujae, but they had between them ten walaps: large canoes for open-ocean sailing, each of which could accommodate twenty people. In the Caroline Islands, oceanic voyages are still undertaken by outer islanders to the present day.
Senator Lucky, who was visiting Ujae at the height of my traditional knowledge kick, told me the story of one of the last inter-atoll voyages undertaken by the people of Ujae. Two men from neighboring Lae Atoll arrived on Ujae Atoll on a motorboat, hoping to replenish their home island’s supplies of coffee and sugar. When it came time to return to Lae, the weather worsened, and the men were afraid to cross the passage alone. They asked to be escorted back to their home island. The next morning, ten men from Ujae set sail on two outrigger canoes and accompanied the Lae dwellers back to their home. The men from Ujae were planning to spend a week socializing on Lae before returning to Ujae.
The thirty-mile passage between Ujae and Lae is one of the shortest atoll-to-atoll voyages in the archipelago, but a treacherous current runs at a right angle to the correct route. The canoes stayed dead on course, and by noon they were halfway to Lae. But they had outpaced the motorboat. It was nowhere to be seen. The men worried that the current had taken the men from Lae off course, so they turned around to find them.
Two and a half months later, a Japanese boat happened upon one of the canoes drifting aimlessly in the open ocean. The men were alive but extremely weak. The Japanese crew found the other canoe and the motorboat, and saw that those men were in the same condition. They had survived by drinking the blood of a particular species of fish that was attracted to boats, swam near the surface, and could be caught by hand. The Japanese crew destroyed the canoes, as if to teach the islanders a lesson, and then returned the men to their islands.
This incident happened long after the heyday of Marshallese seafaring. The short passage between Ujae and Lae must have been trivial for sailors who routinely journeyed to Wake Island, four hundred miles from the nearest land, and may have even reached distant Hawaii and equally distant Yap. Marshallese navigation wasn’t what it used to be.
In Majuro, I met a man who told another tale of traditional seafaring in the modern age. As part of a movement in the 1970s to revive Pacific heritage, he and other Pacific Islanders built a traditional Polynesian sailing canoe, the Hokule’a. In its maiden voyage, they sailed the craft from Hawaii to Tahiti using only traditional navigation methods. It was an impressive feat, to be sure, but it should be mentioned that a modern ship was following them only a mile away in case of an emergency. When the ship came close to take pictures for the media, the crew of the canoe was obliged to hide various modern luxuries they had taken aboard so that the scene would look a little more picturesque. We had all done it, I realized: changing the things we were trying to document, ironically in the name of “authenticity.” With camera in hand, the media had asked for the nylon jackets to come off, as I had asked Ujae’s children to drop their gang signs before I took their picture. But those jackets and those gang signs were real parts of our subjects’ lives, whether or not they fit our pretty picture. The photos we took home were of what we had wanted to see, and it was often less work to manufacture our preconceptions than to confront things as they were.
The outward appearance of things had been a battleground in this country before. Until the arrival of the missionaries, both men and women had worn garments that covered the body only from the waist to slightly below the knees—a woman’s knees were considered sexually suggestive and had to remain hidden, but her breasts were openly displayed. The topless apparel also allowed the upper body to be elaborately tattooed according to motifs suggested by the patterns on fish. But to the missionaries the garb was indecent, and the tattoos reminded them of criminals in their own society. They opposed the native dress so adamantly that they had earned the name ribelle: “people who cover up.”
They won in the end, of course, and Marshallese women adopted not only the muumuu but also the particular notion of bodily decency that went with it. But 150 years later, all of this had resulted in an unforeseen irony. Marshall Islanders had once scandalized Westerners with their revealing garments. Now it was the Westerners who scandalized the Marshall Islanders. No Bikinians wore bikinis, but a few tourists did, and the locals considered such exposure improper. After all, they said, it was against Marshallese tradition.
Now the islanders wore quasi-traditional dress only in unusual circumstances—and even when they did, it wasn’t always clear for whose benefit it was being done. When the people of Ujae first performed the jebwa dance for outsiders, they wore their usual T-shirts and pants. But the audience felt that it would look so much quainter in exotic dress, so the dancers switched to grass skirts.
So you see, one never knew whose culture it was that was being practiced.
AFTER MY FORAY INTO THE COUNTRY’S PRECONTACT WAYS, I HAD TO ask a simplistic but necessary question: was life better now in the Marshall Islands than it had been in the past? Morally speaking, what had been the result of Marshallese contact with the West—in Micronesian scholar Francis Hezel’s words, “that benefactor and despoiler, that cultural ca
talyst par excellence”?
Before answering this question, I had to wade through a swamp of ideology. Both foreigners and locals tended to talk about the country’s modern history as a decline and fall. J. Maarten Troost had this to say about the Marshalls, where he stopped briefly before moving on to Kiribati:
Majuro . . . is besieged by traffic jams, mountains of garbage, aimless youth . . . and a population as a whole that has already moved beyond despair and settled into a glazed ennui . . . [They] were the fattest people I had ever seen, wan and listless, munching through family-sized packets of Cheetos. As we passed, nodding our greetings, they offered in return quiet contempt, and it was not long before I became sympathetic to the spleenish air of the Marshallese . . . In a generation [they] exchanged three thousand years of history and culture for spangled rubbish and lite beer . . .
We . . . yielded to a simmering anger, anger at the United States for obliterating a nation, just for practice, and anger at the Marshallese for behaving like debased junkies, willing to do anything for another infusion of the almighty dollar.
An Internet commentator called Kali painted a picture so bleak and misanthropic that it could stand as a sort of Platonic ideal of cynicism:
[T]he United States unbalanced the human ecology of the Marshall Islands such that it is now horribly, irrevocably, irredeemably out of whack . . . The traditional culture of the islands is gone and, without wholesale forced exile or mass slaughter, the human population will never again be low enough for the Marshallese to resume their way of life . . . Without a culture of responsibility and with U.S. aid to rely on, people resort to the one source of meaning always available—producing children . . . These children have a bleak future but their parents won’t hear of having fewer . . .
Surviving Paradise Page 20
