Jeikson’s death was typical in one final way. He had grown up in a village and only recently moved to the city. He had experienced a hundred years of culture change in fast motion. It was this demographic, the not quite adult and not quite urbanized, that was experiencing an epidemic of suicide—not, as was sometimes assumed, the population as a whole. The fully traditional and the fully acculturated, in fact, only rarely killed themselves. Thus, the spate of suicides wasn’t proof that the country was descending into some sort of modern malaise. It merely suggested that social change was happening too quickly. Like coral in rising oceans, Marshall Islanders had trouble keeping pace with the changes around them.
Other mourners were gathering now, and Wewe asked for my help in preparing his eulogy. He had an American Boy Scouts handbook, and one page featured famous quotations. Wewe spoke some English, and he felt that Franklin Roosevelt’s phrase “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was appropriate to the occasion. He asked me to translate it into Marshallese to confirm that the meaning was what he thought. (Then he put me through the linguistic wringer: he asked me to translate the other quotes on the page. I labored to render the Marshallese equivalent of such sentences as “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and “Keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” Talking in Marshallese about fishing, coconuts, and other island commonalities had become easy enough for me; talking about threatened justice and celestial fire was a little more difficult.)
The ceremony was about to begin. The minister arrived and offered me a flower necklace and one of the very few chairs. It was an honor to be given the same privileges as the mother and father of the deceased, though I should hardly have been surprised after so many gatherings in which I had been treated with the same deference granted to ri-utiej (“high people”). It was the Marshallese way to treat guests like VIPs.
The eulogies began. First the minister spoke, then a woman from Majuro whose voice wavered and cracked with emotion, and then Wewe, quoting Roosevelt. “Jeikson feared fear,” he said. “And that is why he is dead.”
The frank show of emotions impressed me again. After the ceremony, I saw a man sitting next to another grave, head slumped down. “He’s sad about his son,” a boy told me. “His son died when he was only five months old.” This funeral, it seemed, was everybody’s chance to grieve the griefs they had held in for so long.
It just so happened that this moving spectacle coincided with my second encounter with the possibility of marriage. A few days before the funeral, I had been chatting with Lisson in the Ariraen cookhouse, and the subject of eligible young women somehow came up. (With local men, topics like this always “somehow” came up.) I casually mentioned the young woman next door, whose name was Jenita. Lisson agreed that she was likatu (“pretty”), perhaps even to-jan-lan (“drop-dead gorgeous,” literally “come down from heaven”). On that issue we understood each other. But on the more crucial issue of my intentions, we could not have been further apart. I intended my comment about Jenita as an innocent remark. Lisson interpreted it as a sly marriage proposal.
This fact dawned on me the next day when Lisson cheerfully reported, “Peter—I talked to her and she says ‘yes.’”
Yes to what, I wondered.
The next three days, which were also the three days of the funeral, there she was. Goaded on by her giggling girlfriends, Jenita would sit next to me, and I would attempt an impossible pair of tasks: first, to make friendly small talk at a funeral in a foreign language, and, second, to subtly hint that I was happy to make her acquaintance, but I might just stop short of marriage. It was a testament to my success in the first goal and my failure in the second that by the end of the funeral she was still eager to tie the knot. I may have been stumbling into a cross-cultural debacle, but I couldn’t help but enjoy these conversations. Perhaps the reasons for that are inscrutable and perhaps they are blindingly obvious.
At this sacred gathering, I alternated between contemplations of untimely death and involuntary flirtation sessions. It was a case of the sublime and the absurd. Here was an intimate glimpse into the community’s grief, and I spent half of it in flirtatious banter. Somehow, though, it felt appropriate. If the funeral was a welcome expression of sadness, then chatting up Jenita was a welcome expression of levity. The prim and proper middle ground could be abandoned, and extremes could be indulged.
Other gatherings offered the same release. I’ve already discussed the one called Liberation Day, but all of them, in their way, were liberation days. One party was staged by the youth to honor the old folk. I asked if I could watch the planned skits, and I was told I could. But when I showed up, the hosts didn’t know what to do with me. As a foreigner, I was supposed to be treated as a guest of honor, but as a young person, I was supposed to assume a humble role in this ceremony in honor of the village’s senior members. It was a formidable dilemma. They finally settled on a solution, which was to temporarily pretend that I was an elder. They seated me with the old people, handed me an identical flower necklace, and fed me the same food. At twenty-one, I was now the youngest elder in history. The real seniors, far from being offended, were tickled by my temporary membership in their ranks.
A series of lighthearted skits followed. In the first, a woman donned a monster mask and terrorized the populace, including a hapless toddler who had wandered on stage. In the second, a woman wore a pantsuit and acted like a man. In the third, a male actor appeared in front of the audience in a state of frightful dishevelment, and proceeded to play the role of the moron with admirable aplomb. His comedic signature was to scratch himself in rude places between every line of dialogue. In the final act, a bevy of women pretended to be freshly caught fish. The other actors dragged the fish-women to the cooking fire, discarding some of them because they were too big and others because they were too small. The humor was earthy and ridiculous, and everyone—the elders included—loved it.
The next day I saw a gaggle of women in a motorboat—that was in itself a breach of etiquette—systematically knocking men out of their canoes, while the community watched from the shore in amusement.
The rules of the island relaxed. The absurd, the subversive, and the raunchy were allowed, even if only for today. It was just the right amount of catharsis to survive the restrictions of social life without destroying them. After all, the Marshallese word for “to have a party” was kamolo: “to cool off.”
16
Getting Past Customs
FIREDLEE SAID IT WHEN I HELPED LAUNCH A CANOE OVER THE ROUGH beachscape of sand and gravel. Elmi said it on Bok Island when I ate raw barracuda with him on the ground, using my hands as utensils, and throwing the inedible bits into the underbrush. Another man said it when he asked me what fish I had speared in the lagoon, and I rattled off a few names in Marshallese. A twelve-year-old said it with no prompting of any kind. They all said it approvingly.
They said I was Marshallese.
It didn’t seem to be a passing whim. None had said it during the first half of my stay on the island, but a number said it during the second half. Lisson asked me who he should talk to about my staying another year. I told him that I was the one to talk to, and he smiled. Another time, he said—with what appeared to be emotional if not literal truth—that if I stayed for three years, the people of Ujae would give me an island.
Such a stew of feelings these statements produced in me. I was touched; I was confused. These were allegedly among the most flattering compliments a foreigner could receive in this country, but how did I deserve them? In my clumsy and barely adequate way, I walked the walk and talked the talk—but I did not think the think. I did not value the values and believe the beliefs. For all my differences, for all the aspects of their culture I still rejected, did the people of Ujae still, somehow, accept me as their own?
Perhaps I was just like gang signs, rattails, muumuus, Mother’s Day, the motorcycle—a Western import, absurdly inappropriate to
this world, yet one which the islanders had found a clever place for and now claimed as their own. The difference was that this object had more than a surface—it had a mind too, and that part didn’t belong to this world. I had found great pleasure in the unrushed friendliness, the fishing and chatting and lore, but many of the values and practices still burned me with unrelenting intensity. The pains of children, always and everywhere seen, but never addressed; the school’s black hole of apathy; the tacit neglect of what appeared to me obvious and easily fixable problems—I resented these things, from day one to day 362, and no pat mantra of political correctness changed that fact.
“Culture shock” was something other than what I had been led to believe. The typical memoir of cross-cultural disorientation presented it as a case of the sniffles, a mild ailment that any mildly open-minded traveler could overcome with a dash of humility and humor. A single chapter might present the difficulties; this was followed by a tidy epiphany of cultural relativism or the moral superiority of this authentic lifestyle over the soulless degeneracy of the West, and everything afterward was a cozy celebration of cultural integration.
My teaching manual presented vignettes about previous volunteers, and they followed the same conventions: always the golden memory of a picturesque cultural exchange, random act of kindness, or obstacle that the plucky young volunteer surmounted with her can-do attitude. Reading these stories, one got the image of volunteers spending eight to twelve hours a day receiving timeless words of wisdom from local elders. No mention was made of inescapable trade-offs, of inherent dilemmas, of problems to be endured and not crisply solved. No hint was whispered that anyone before me had found life on the outer Marshalls more interesting than pleasurable. Instead I had only sugar-coated tales of other people’s triumphs to keep me company. Even when the islanders ran out of lionizing accounts of my predecessor’s achievements, the printed stories were always there to inspire the same sentiment: my difficulties were also failings.
So culture shock, for me, wasn’t a sharp sting: it was a dull ache, a basso continuo of frustration and confusion. I never overcame it. But one thing did fall into place, perhaps in April. I realized—to my surprise—that their way of life made sense.
So much that had once seemed accidental now revealed itself to be deliberate. When I first arrived on Ujae I wondered why people covered their properties with gravel; surely some nice green grass would be prettier and more comfortable. Now, I credited that gravel with preventing the complete collapse of Marshallese society. Those rocks, called la, were constantly picked up and thrown to shoo away animals, indicate directions, and reprimand children from afar. They provided juggling balls and toys at a moment’s notice. They let people lie down (Marshallese people loved to lie down) without getting dirty and pour out washing water without creating a mud slick. Best of all, they kept weeds and insects at bay, which was no small feat in this climate. Without them, every property would soon be engulfed by the encroaching fertility of the tropics, not to mention muddy puddles and dirty children. What at first appeared arbitrary was in fact necessary.
Then I realized just why so many things were necessary. Maybe it was when I saw Joja throw stones at one of the rare seabirds that landed on Ujae, concerned only with killing and eating it, that I understood what had been happening the whole year. This was a culture based on survival.
What looked like paradise was actually one of the hardest places on earth to live. Past generations scraped by in a world where storms, famines, and war could devastate life on a moment’s notice. The islanders could not escape these things—there was no high ground, and the chiefs of other atolls did not welcome refugees. There was nowhere to flee. The same was true in a social crisis: feuding neighbors had no choice but to live in close quarters with the people they despised.
And although the modern islanders—protected as they were by two governments, interlinked by weekly planes, nourished by imported food, protected by typhoon-proof homes—were no longer at the mercy of these things, their values were still in service of survival. Culture changed more slowly than outside circumstances, and a half century of comparative security had not erased the mores left over from two thousand years on the edge of disaster. Their society had evolved to serve survival in a confined space—the same thing I had struggled with since I arrived.
The centrality of survival in a confined space had a natural corollary, which could be summed up in two words: get along. Fill your role, do your part, and don’t rock the boat. Conflict within the community had to be avoided at all costs, because conflict disrupted the activities necessary for survival. Individualism had to be checked, because personal whims could interfere with daily duty. Harmony had to be maintained, because there was nowhere else to go.
More specifically, I reasoned that the central goal of confined survival led to these closely interrelated Marshallese values: kindness, generosity, communalism, avoidance of open conflict, stoicism, conservatism, strict social roles, idolization of the old, and marginalization of the young.
Kindness
The Marshallese had a proverb: “Jouj eo mour eo, laj eo mej eo.” It meant “Kindness is life, cruelty is death.” That was more than just a pretty turn of phrase. Cooperate in this perilous world and you will survive. Fight your neighbors and you will die. It was literal.
Lisson once stood beside me, fanning the flies from my food, for the length of an entire meal. At the end of any fishing expedition, my hosts would give me an equal share of their catch and offer a sincere “thank you” for my participation. Thank you? All I had done was tag along and get in the way. When I hurt my foot a few hours before a large feast, a man brought a wheelbarrow to my house and carted me to the other end of the island so I could attend the gathering. When the party was over, he delivered me back to my house. He called it the “Ujae taxi service” and offered me a fifty-cent discount over Majuro rates: that is, I paid nothing.
Generosity
The mantra of Marshallese generosity was arro. This was the first-person dual inclusive possessive—that is, “belonging to both you and me.” Emphasis was on the word “inclusive.” The house was arro. The fishing net was arro. Even the islands my host family owned were arro. On Arno, a man asked me to hand him arro flashlight. Yours and mine? I had been on the island for all of one hour.
It was considered bad form to say that anything was merely ao (mine). Generosity was automatic, and most acts did not require thanks. When I first arrived on Ujae I said kommool (“thank you”) for everything. I said kommool when Elina gave me my breakfast. I said kommool when someone passed the sugar to me. I said kommool for favors so trivial that to refuse to perform them would be an insult. Then I noticed that my hosts rarely said kon jouj (“you’re welcome”); much more often they would laugh or say nothing at all. To them, ordinary acts of kindness were a matter of course, and expressing gratitude for them was unnecessary. Perhaps they found it insulting, as if I didn’t expect kindness from them. It sounded as strange to them, I imagined, as “Thank you for not killing me.”
The ideal of arro also meant that I was allowed to use almost any resource. Most objects were owned, but it was obligatory to lend them if asked. I could fish with anyone’s spear, eat at anyone’s house, pick fruit from anyone’s tree, and tag along on anyone’s journey unless there was a very good reason to disallow it.
On the other hand, the ideal of arro meant that anything I left unattended was fair game for indefinite borrowing. The line between borrowing and stealing became exceedingly thin. When even my treasured drum of gasoline became arro, I realized that this system of automatic generosity had a downside.
The same idea of arro explained the lack of privacy. If everything belonged to everyone, then that would include one’s body, space, and thoughts. Perhaps that was why the islanders so often declined to inform me of things. In a society where most material objects had to be shared, knowledge was one thing that could be hoarded without anyone knowing it. The villagers’ firs
t instinct was to keep this precious possession to themselves.
Communalism
The most common phrase in every speech at every gathering was ippan doon: “together.” When I arrived on Ujae, this phrase was all I understood in speeches—but it was also the most important part.
Everyone contributed to festivals. When a house needed to be built, the entire community chipped in. Special foods like turtle meat were divided evenly between every family in the village. No one went without in the Marshalls—if you were down on your luck, you moved in with relatives. One did not buy insurance in the Marshalls; one was born with it.
This necessarily had a darker side. The odds were stacked against individual entrepreneurship. A local man told me that he once tried selling rice on Ujae. It was a win-win situation: he would make a modest profit, and the other villagers would be able to purchase their main staple when there was no supply ship. But relatives insisted that he give them rice for free. Other people bought rice on credit and never paid him back. So he closed the store. If the community had allowed the merchant a small monetary gain, everyone would have benefited. But the culture didn’t allow that.
Avoidance of Open Conflict
Inheritance of land and royal titles followed a matrilineal formula. Everyone agreed to this code, and thus what could have been an ugly war of succession or a drawn-out real estate dispute instead occurred peacefully—the assassinations of yesteryear notwithstanding.
But in other contentious issues there was no such apparatus for resolution, and here the avoidance of open conflict manifested in a more sinister fashion. I had heard of several such incidents on Ujae. In a controversy over motorboat ownership, an anonymous saboteur cut the boat’s moorings and let it disappear into the lagoon. When villagers accused the mayor of nepotism in the hiring of the radio operator, an unidentified individual removed the radio’s antenna, rendering the device useless. Many years before, the islanders had built a large outrigger canoe that could carry fifteen men. It was a beautiful craft and a boon for Ujae’s fishermen, but only a few of the men took responsibility for its maintenance, and they quickly became angry that no one else was contributing. Their solution was to burn the canoe to the ground. I also learned that there were two families on Ujae who refused to have anything to do with each other. They hadn’t visited each other’s properties since 1982.
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