Surviving Paradise

by Peter Rudiak-Gould

  The Marshall Islands is a textbook of all the lessons we didn’t learn from a hundred other places on earth, brought together in one tiny, meaningful archipelago. The irrevocable damage caused by human overpopulation, the universally evil results of colonialism and the essentially selfish nature of human beings are all miserably illustrated once again by the story of the Marshall Islands.

  These passages were epitaphs for a living person. They reminded me of nothing so much as the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which two men are collecting the latest round of dead bodies from a plague-stricken village. “I’m not dead,” wails one “corpse.” They throw him on the pile anyway.

  These critics saw garbage piles and thought “irreversible devastation!” when they should have thought “solid-waste management problem.” They saw makeshift shelters and thought “abysmal deprivation!” when they should have thought “housing shortage.” They mistook the country’s nuclear legacy for the obliteration of an entire nation, rather than the forced migration of several hundred people and the irradiation of several hundred others. These premature obituaries were based on a kind of cynical paternalism: the assumption that the Marshallese had no ability to solve problems or adapt to change. I had done my share of criticism too, but it was hard to reconcile these dreary descriptions with my own memories of men fishing on pristine reefs and women preparing bwiro for a feast. The Marshall Islands was a flawed and struggling Third World country, not an apocalyptic wasteland. More to the point, it was a real place, not a political allegory. The country was a bit like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man: time after time, outsiders defined it as the perfect exemplar of their worldview, with little interest in the thing as it actually was.

  Yet locals were equally fond of mourning paradise lost. A statement in one government document was typical:

  Before western contact, there was a firm belief in the people and their culture, which was strongly adhered to . . . Sharing and the concept of sharing was then highly valued. In the past, when communal living was strong, everyone helped everyone else as a matter of course . . . With the arrival of outside contacts, the very elements that made this society unique have deteriorated. The sharing and help of the past is not so common today. In Majuro, one has to buy a coconut! . . . The language is now losing its richness and quality . . . As that language fades, so is the breakdown of custom beginning to shatter our identity as proud individuals of a once proud race.

  These elegies were deceptively selective, ignoring the problems of the past and the comforts of the present. True, many old customs had been lost, but this was not always a bad thing. Traditional Marshallese life included a generous share of violence. The prescribed method of population control had been infanticide. Trespassing on a forbidden reef was punishable by death. Non-Marshallese castaways were either executed or enslaved. Within recorded history, Marshallese sailors had landed at Kapingamarangi, a foreign atoll to the southwest, and massacred three-quarters of the population. On Bikini, the royal line had skipped five heirs. Why? Because they had all been assassinated. It also seemed suspicious that the word for sick, naninmej, meant, literally, “almost dead,” and that the dictionary listed an old word, okjanlan, that meant “to kill someone during a typhoon in anticipation of a shortage of food.” These words hearkened back to a lifestyle that bore little resemblance to the precolonial idyll that many imagined.

  Even recently, it was common for the outer islanders to experience famines much worse than the mild food shortages I had seen. There had been no outer island plane service, and the supply ships arrived only once every six months. In Majuro, one former Peace Corps volunteer had described to me how much harder life was even twenty years ago:

  I experienced two famines on the outer islands. The only food left was coconut meat. When the supply ship came, people sold their copra on one side of the ship, then went to the other side of the ship and spent all of that money on essentials. The men would become desperate for cigarettes. I could send men scrambling just by saying, “I will give one cigarette to the first man who brings me ten husked coconuts.” When they had cigarettes, they would smoke them in beautifully carved pipes. But when they ran out of tobacco, they became so desperate that they would chop their pipes into little pieces and smoke the pieces, because the wood smelled faintly of tobacco. After that, they had to wait for the next boat in order to buy more cigarettes—if they had any money.

  Maybe it was good that this isolation forced locals to go cold turkey on tobacco. But it was not as good that it also forced them to go cold turkey on food. These days such desperation was rare.

  Had this modern security come at the cost of native identity? Perhaps it was telling that the Marshall Islands were called the “Marshall Islands,” that the people referred to their own country using someone else’s name. (That person, incidentally, was English captain John Marshall, who had visited the islands in 1788 and continued the proud tradition of naming beautiful, exotic lands after bland European surnames. The local name Aelon Kein [“these islands”] must have been too evocative and mellifluous for his ears.) It was true that the last half millennium had seen wave after wave of foreign tampering: from the sixteenth century, when Spanish sailors claimed the islands just for the hell of it after chancing upon them during a doomed mission to seize the much more important Spice Islands; to the nineteenth century, when American missionaries hoped to save souls and German businessmen hoped to make a killing off copra; to World War II, when Japanese soldiers desperately defended a far outpost of their new empire; to the present day, when Americans brought their usual package of clumsy optimism, good intentions, and a big stick. For a country with the population of a town, this was a hefty history of international relations. My own host family’s surname came from Portugal, of all places; it had been the name of an early white settler. No country is an island.

  Despite this foreign inundation, the islanders’ identity was far from buried. “Marshall” was English, but its native derivation, majel, certainly was not. Now the people called themselves ri-majel (“Marshall people”), their language kajin majel (“Marshall language”), and their culture mantin majel (“Marshall custom”). They had made the word their own, and its Western origin was now irrelevant. The same could be said of corned beef, ping-pong, and Christianity. All those outlanders, far from making the people forget their ways, had made them hyperaware of themselves. Citing mantin majel was the catchall justification for every belief and practice, to the point where no further explanation was usually needed. Foreign influence had not destroyed Marshallese identity. More likely, it had created it.

  No doubt that alien powers had done some jolly unscrupulous things in these isles, but the record wasn’t all bad. Under the Compact of Free Association with the United States, the Marshall Islands remained sovereign and exempt from taxes, yet reaped all of the benefits of US federal programs. It was American ships and helicopters from Kwajalein that had saved the people of Ujae from starvation after a devastating typhoon just a few decades before. It was FEMA that had financed all of those typhoon-resistant concrete houses, including the one I lived in, after the storm leveled most of the village. US aid provided the majority of the government’s budget, and Marshallese citizens were free to live, work, and study in the United States for as long as they wished. If there was a problem nowadays, it was not that America was victimizing the Marshallese—it was that it was coddling them.

  Fair enough, modernization had brought the usual suspects of cultural upheaval and environmental degradation. In Majuro, the traditional support system of the extended family had been eroded, and alcoholism and suicide had skyrocketed. Imported food and sedentary lifestyles had precipitated an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. The country’s leprosy rate was by far the world’s highest (although, in a country of only sixty thousand people, this amounted to a grand total of fifty cases). The country’s birthrate as of 2004 was set to double its population in only twenty-one years; already, urban Ebeye was a jam-pac
ked breeding ground for disease, and even remote villages like Ujae were too populous to comfortably accommodate their part-subsistence lifestyle. The traditional system of environmental stewardship, in which chiefs declared overexploited islands and reefs to be mo (“taboo”) until they naturally recovered, was now defunct; sea turtles were becoming endangered, and other species weren’t far behind. Instead of becoming a first-rate Marshall Islands, the country was becoming a second rate America.

  At the end of the day, what this mixed legacy meant was that no one really knew if life was better now than in the past. Behind the confident proclamations by foreigners and natives, there was an unacknowledged schizophrenia. Western visitors regretted the demise of yet another glorious indigenous society at the hands of imperialism, missionization, and globalization. Meanwhile, they worked for organizations whose stated mission was to help modernize the country and connect it to the outside world. Natives felt Western values had killed their traditional harmony. Yet when I asked them specifically about pre-Christian days, they praised the missionaries for saving them from heathen barbarism—and they happily earned and displayed American dollars, collected Western goods, and welcomed ribelles like myself. There was a phrase in Marshallese, bwiin-eppallele, “the smell of America,” the odor of imported things. That plasticky aroma was toxic but also narcotic. Who could blame them if they guiltily opened the box?

  In the end, I was inclined toward a viewpoint that struck many islanders and expats as ever so slightly heretical: that the Marshall Islands were currently experiencing something of a golden age—a cozy lull in their oddly tumultuous history; a time after the imperialists had quit but before the sea had risen; when chiefly scuffles and world wars did not periodically devastate people’s lives; when floods from typhoons or from global warming did not push locals to the brink; and when foreign handouts guaranteed an easy security without shattering all sense of national pride. For all of my own private discomforts and personal critiques, for all of the doomsaying of locals and visitors alike, Marshallese life strolled on with something resembling good cheer.

  14

  On the Waterfront

  AT LOW TIDE, WHEN THE LAGOON DISPLAYED ITS MOST DIVERSE COLORS, my eyes were often focused not on the water but on the tiny islets that appeared on the horizon. If I squatted down, they disappeared; if I waited until high tide, they were again invisible. Even at low tide on the clearest day, I could see only the treetops of these uninhabited islets of Ujae Atoll. Everything else was covered by the curvature of the Earth. That was how distant and flat Ujae Island’s nearest neighbors were.

  In many Marshallese atolls it was possible to walk from one islet to another on the connecting reef. At high tide the channels between islands were flooded, but at low tide they could be crossed without getting one’s feet wet. The islets I saw on the horizon were much too far away for this. It was unfortunate that Ujae Island, located as it was on a remote atoll, was also far from its nearest island neighbors. But this inconvenience also gave those islands the allure of inaccessibility. The pull of these islands—distant, mysterious, pristine—grew stronger with every day I spent on the tiny expanse of Ujae proper. I started to dream about these islets, feeling the same enchantment I had felt toward Ujae Island before that world had grown familiar.

  What was it about islands that I found so alluring? It was this: islands are isolation, isolation is differentness, differentness is possibility, and possibility is hope.

  I studied the map I had brought from Majuro. Ujae Island was a little boomerang tucked away in the far southeastern corner of long, skinny Ujae Atoll. Like every atoll, it was a necklace on the ocean: green islets were the beads, bright blue reef was the cord, and a deep blue lagoon was the neck. Ujae Atoll—a kite shape twenty-six miles long and seven miles across at its widest—was one hundred parts lagoon, ten parts reef, and one part land. The atoll’s twelve islets, including Ujae Island, totaled only 0.72 square miles of land. Only Ujae Island was inhabited. By local standards, then, my island home was the very opposite of what any foreigner would think: large, heavily populated, and—compared to the wild desert isles that shared the same atoll—rather civilized.

  A few families had dwelled on the outer islets until recently, but now everyone had moved to Ujae Island, lured by the airport’s connection to the outside world. Men sometimes visited the uninhabited islands to collect food and make copra, but they usually stayed only a few days or weeks. Some of the islands were smaller than a city block, but they abounded with crabs, lobsters, seabirds, clams, and coconut seedlings, all of which had become scarce or extinct on long-inhabited Ujae. They also teemed with fish, sharks, and eels. So there was every reason to visit: my own burning curiosity, and my companions’ perpetual pursuit of food.

  The islands were too far away to be visited by canoe, and gas for the motorboat was scant. I had to take matters into my own hands. I had a fifty-three-gallon drum of gasoline delivered on the supply ship in March, rolled up the beach, and deposited at Ariraen. Alfred told me to leave the drum in the outhouse, and to be sure to lock it every night. To protect it from theft? No, to protect it from ri-nana: “bad people” who would sniff the gasoline as a drug. Alfred told me that he had checked his barrel of fuel one morning and found a young man lying unconscious next to it. He also mentioned that I could have ordered the gas from Kwajalein for a third the price. Again I puzzled over my hosts’ reluctance to share useful information with me.

  I was now free to move about the atoll. When word got out I was planning a trip, people started offering fantastic descriptions of these islands. Joja spoke of three-foot-wide clams and eels so large they could swallow a person. “I’m not afraid of sharks, but I’m afraid of eels,” he confided. “I’ve seen an eel swallow a fish bigger than myself.” A man named Randall, who I had previously known only for his superior ping-pong skills, continued this impressive account: “Bok Island is a very good island. But you must be careful. It is teeming with sharks. If you look out into the lagoon, you can see their fins sticking up from the water. There can be hundreds at the same time. And that’s not all. There are eels eight feet wide and as long as palm trees, and clams that can grow to six, eight, or ten feet across.”

  My excitement battled with my skepticism. Could there really be eels the size of whales, clams the size of cars? Was Bok Island also home to stegosauruses, woolly mammoths, Bigfoot? If the descriptions were to be believed, I was now embarking on an expedition to a lost Eden where dinosaurs still roamed and strawberries grew to the size of watermelons.

  Lisson, Fredlee, and Joja were to be the intrepid explorers, and I their bumbling sidekick. Thankfully, my much-coveted stash of fuel meant I had more to contribute than comic relief.

  One day before we planned to leave, Lisson hinted that something was missing. “Who’s going to get the giant clam from the lagoon?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Can you do it?”

  “Do you know Elmi? He is an expert at it.”

  I agreed we should bring him along.

  I later learned that Elmi’s family owned several of the islands we were planning to visit. Like all islands, they had three tiers of owners: the irooj (“chiefs”), who held ultimate authority over them; the alab (“clan heads”), who dictated their day-to-day use; and the rijerbal (“workers”), who were allowed to gather food on them. In the case of Bok Island, Elmi’s father, Sam, was the alab in question, and everyone other than his family and the chief had to ask permission before using the island’s resources. Since Sam was too old to come on the expedition, we were obliged to invite Elmi in his stead. In the usual Marshallese way, Lisson couldn’t tell me this directly; he had to approach the issue from the side by asking who would fetch the giant clam.

  On a Friday afternoon after school, we packed rice, coffee, pots, cups, matches, machetes, spears, snorkel masks, swimming flippers, and fifteen gallons of gas and waded into the lagoon to deposit the gear onto the motorboat. Fredlee siphoned gasoline from
the drum into the outboard motor with his mouth, but it sputtered for an hour before it started. That was not an encouraging beginning to an expedition into watery wilderness. Finally we were off, heading northwest toward Bok Island on the inner side of the reef. I was excited to see these distant islets. My companions were excited to gather food.

  The approach to the island was different than what I had become used to when riding on outrigger canoes. Instead of following the contour of the reef from within the lagoon, we crossed the reef and entered the open ocean. Fredlee guided the motorboat to a stretch of reef where the breakers were unusually mild. There were some tense moments as the men timed the waves, with Lisson and Elmi urging Fredlee to run the engine now and pass the break, but Fredlee holding back—and then finally he drove forward and the craft passed the danger zone with perfect smoothness.

  We had left the atoll’s womb and entered the large and unprotected sea. To the west there was nothing but the horizon, and below us there was only the blue ledge of an underwater cliff before a seemingly endless deep. The waves rolled gently, making the ocean into picturesque hill country, but the hugeness of the ocean was unnerving. I imagined all the water draining away and seeing the ocean floor as a broad valley, and distant atolls as flat-topped mountains. We were in a vast wilderness.

  We traveled northwest along the edge of the atoll, and then I discovered why my companions had left the comforting bounds of the lagoon. There was food to be found here. Not far out in the ocean, huge flocks of dark birds were repeatedly diving down onto the surface of the water. The birds had found a school of fish, and now we had too. Lisson let out a long fishing line, and Fredlee drove us at full speed through a tangle of black wings. Then he circled around and did it again, and we landed a smooth, silvery fish called a nitwa: the same name as Ujae’s master storyteller.