These disputes couldn’t be addressed without airing people’s grievances in public. So the problems simply festered until someone resorted to the only available recourse: an anonymous act of revenge. This was the same pattern behind Marshallese men’s suicides. These incidents violently contradicted the spirit of kindness and appeasement, but the deeper value—harmony at any cost—was perfectly achieved.
My own experience bore this out. Only once did an adult openly confront me. I was in a palm grove near the lagoon beach, preparing gear for a motorboat trip to ane jiddik kan—“those small islands,” the uninhabited islands of Ujae—with my usual companions. I was providing the gas for the expedition, but the boat belonged to an elder, and he was watching the preparations. He approached me, looked me straight in the eye, and said in Marshallese, “This isn’t your trip.”
“What?” I fumbled.
“This isn’t your trip,” he repeated. “I guess ribelles just come along for the ride.”
I was too stunned by his open resentment to respond. (Also, it is hard to come up with a snappy rejoinder or conciliatory response in two seconds in a foreign language.) Once we were seaborne, I asked Fredlee about my earlier run-in. He blamed it on the old man’s bad temper, and told me not to worry about it.
I felt, though, that the resentment had been meaningful, and that I was the intended and perhaps even deserving target. The man felt stepped on. He was an elder, wise and experienced from a long life, but it wasn’t within his power to arrange a trip to ane jiddik kan to collect food. And I was a naïve boy, not even Marshallese, but I had the power to arrange that trip, simply because I had been born in a richer country. It was true that half of the time here I was in Brob-dingnag, and I was a pygmy in skill and comprehension. Yet the other half of the time I was in Lilliput, and I was a giant in wealth and power. Nitwa was quite legitimately irked by that.
Here the exception proved the rule. This was the only incident in which an adult had not taken pains to please me. Surely others had felt what that old man expressed: jealousy at my umbilical cord of privilege, this thing never mentioned but always obvious. Surely others had resented it. But, in a year, this feeling had been expressed only once, and passive-aggressively at that.
Stoicism
If arro was the mantra of Marshallese generosity, then jab jan was its natural, if unpleasant, flip side. Jab jan literally meant “don’t cry,” and it was one of the most frequently heard phrases in the language. It was the first and only thing to say to an upset child, and it was said to reprimand, not to comfort. The true meaning of jab jan was not “don’t be upset,” but rather “don’t show that you are upset.”
Unpleasant emotions simply could not be shown in public. Even the bittersweetness of a temporary farewell was uncomfortably emotional for most Marshallese. Hence my friends’ and host mother’s decision to leave the island without informing me.
Affection was similarly blacklisted. Intimacy was hidden—neither spouses, nor friends, nor parents and children expressed it to one another. I had lived on Ujae for eight months, and this was the tally of public emotion that I had witnessed so far:
Man hugging man: 0
Man hugging woman: 0
Woman hugging woman: 1
Man kissing man: 0
Man kissing woman: 0
Woman kissing woman: 0
Parent kissing child above the age of three: 1
Child kissing parent: 0
Child kissing child: 1
Man and woman holding hands: 1
Man weeping: 0
Woman weeping: 1
Young men and women could date only secretively, meeting in the deserted jungle or ocean beach. (Lisson told me that “strolling in the jungle” was practically a euphemism for having sex.) If they wished to take the next step, appearing in public as a couple was tantamount to declaring an engagement. Even then, public displays of affection were strictly banned. Marriage was by a sort of common law and usually uncelebrated.
Even joyful occasions were subdued. When I came back from Majuro after the winter break, Fredlee—one of my best friends on the island—would not even allow himself to greet me. Instead he asked if I had brought back the ping-pong balls that I said I would buy in Majuro. Then he boarded the plane for Ebeye without saying either hello or goodbye. This may have said more about Fredlee’s obsession with table tennis than about Marshallese stoicism, but surely the latter was also implicated. In the same way, the villagers may well have been thrilled when I first set foot on their island eight months before, but they couldn’t show that.
Stoicism must have been a virtue in the precarious and often tragic world of ancient Marshallese life. In contrast to the inflation of affection in our society, in which even the phrase “I love you” could mean as little as “I think you’re nice,” here in the Marshalls the slightest hint of tenderness was indescribably touching.
If Marshallese society sometimes struck me as disturbingly unaffectionate, perhaps that was only because I didn’t know where to look. Love here was not a kind word or a physical caress: it was a coconut or a plate of rice. In a place where starvation had once loomed perpetually, giving food to someone meant that one cared enough to want them alive. Harsh words aside, my hosts had acted warmly to their children: after all, they fed them every day. They had acted with the same love toward me as well.
Conservatism
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That was the tacit local attitude to life. If people were surviving, then why risk change? There was a Marshallese adage, “Jab alkwoj pein ak,” which literally meant “Don’t bend the frigate bird’s wing.” But the high-flying frigate bird symbolized chiefly power—the strict status quo—and the saying was often interpreted to mean “Don’t refuse food that is offered to you.” Another proverb was “Jab inojeiklok jani wa kein, ial in mour ko kein,” which literally meant “Don’t drift away from these canoes—they are your path in life.” The implication of both proverbs was, to use one of our own, “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Thus, like every culture, this society’s feet were just long enough to reach the ground. It had discovered a way to eke out a living in a difficult environment, and as long as this was true, only a fool would tinker. This meant that what was taken care of was taken care of well. It also meant that what was neglected was neglected completely.
This conservatism could explain my two brushes with the possibility of marriage, and the islanders’ confusion with my reasons for refusing. In their society, marrying and reproducing weren’t choices: they were simply the thing to do. One did not need a reason to start a family. It was telling that the country’s birthrate—7.2 children per woman—was the second highest in the Pacific and almost as high as that of the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
The path of life was a straight and narrow one, fenced in on either side. The only question in the islanders’ minds was not why people followed it, but rather why anyone wouldn’t. No wonder, then, that my hosts on Ujae wanted a specific reason that I would not marry Jenita, just as my hosts in Arno wanted the same regarding Tonicca. The status quo had kept them alive for thousands of years; why not embrace it?
Strict Social Roles
Marshallese society contained three separate worlds: men, women, and children. Within each world, interaction was frequent and casual. Between two worlds, interaction was infrequent and strictly formal. Same-sex groups held lengthy bwebwenato sessions, but cross-gender conversation was brief and utilitarian. Children played and relaxed with one another, but devolved into yes-men in the presence of adults. During church services, men and women sat separately; the children attended at a separate time altogether.
The duty of men was to provide food. The duty of women was to maintain the household. The duty of children was to obey adults. Women did not fish and men did not wash—period. Except in unusual cases where one gender was not present, or in a few tasks like child-rearing in which both men and women took part, the
duties of each were mutually exclusive.
Now that men no longer fought in wars, maintained multiple canoes, or undertook open-ocean voyages, the division of labor put a much heavier load on women than on men. But this didn’t necessarily entail female subservience. The women held sway in village decisions, though they exercised their power in more subtle ways than the men. The men had the overt power—they were the chief, the senators, the president—but the women had the covert power of influence and emotion. Perhaps they didn’t set the agenda, but nothing could happen without their approval. Women were sometimes called the “sharpeners.” While the men did the obvious work of building, fishing, and fighting, the women held up the fort in the background. While the men built a canoe, the women arrived with refreshments. While the men built the structure of a house, the women prepared the thatch.
Marriage was another cultural script designed not for pleasure but for survival. Lisson and Elina’s interactions were limited to requests, negotiations, and information sharing. They rarely laughed with each other, but they did occasionally argue with each other. Elina was angry that Lisson wasted so much time making inane chatter on the CB radio that had found its way into our house. (The conversation was usually limited to “How are things going on your side of the island?” and attempts to trick the person on the other end into thinking that he was receiving messages from Guam.) Was theirs a happy marriage? That wasn’t the correct question here. In this society, marriage was more an economic pact than an emotional bond. Its purpose was to produce and raise children and maintain a household, and intimacy between husband and wife was valuable only insofar as it contributed to those goals.
Idolization of the Old
Another outer island volunteer told me in Majuro that she had her students write letters to people in the United States. One girl had written, “I hope you are very very old.”
The value of having lived long was expressed in many situations. Elders received special parties and were the first guests to be fed at every gathering. The people of Ujae organized no welcome party in my honor, but they organized three in honor of my parents, one of which was among the year’s most elaborate and extravagant gatherings. (I swear I wasn’t jealous.) One volunteer in Majuro told me that one of her Marshallese colleagues gave her a Christmas present, but then explained “This is for your mother, not for you. Please send it to her.”
In the calculus of survival, this was perfectly logical. If you are old, that means you have survived a long time—and, in a relatively unchanging environment, that means you know better than anyone else how to survive. In the First World, the focus was instead on youth, the idea being that they best understand the ways of their rapidly changing societies.
Marginalization of the Young
“Children are the future” was not a phrase that originated in the Marshall Islands. The natural companion of the reverence of the old was the sidelining of the young.
This was another perfect expression of the necessity of survival. The children’s lives depended on the adults, but not vice-versa. If the adults died, then everyone died; if the children died, only the children died. Therefore, if someone needed to die, better it be a child than an adult. From a strictly survivalist perspective, it was thus coldly accurate to say that adults were more important than children.
No wonder, then, that children were given the least food. They would ravenously eat the rice I had left on my plate or the oily meat of a coconut they had found. No wonder that children were not talked to except to be commanded and scolded. No wonder that corporal punishment was the first solution to misbehavior. No wonder that the unspoken American law against open favoritism toward children did not apply here. Indeed, Elina had once told me, with Easter a few feet away, “Nakwol is good. Easter is stupid.”
No wonder, too, that parenting more or less stopped at age four. In all my time on Ujae, I never saw an adult engage in a two-way conversation with a child. Alfred stated it in brutal simplicity as he shooed away three children who had come to hear us talk: “Ajri rej jab bwebwenato ippan rutto” (“Children don’t talk with adults”). I was the only adult who ever talked to the children. Nor did the parents teach their children necessary skills. It was the child’s job to learn by observation.
The message was this: physical needs matter, but emotional ones don’t. In a dangerous environment, the former was a necessity, the latter a luxury. Beyond keeping their children alive, the parents focused their attention on the essential task of putting food on the table.
These values flowed from one spring, the necessity of survival in a confined, dangerous space, but that is not to say that they were free from inconsistency. Survival mandated kindness, but encouraged harshness toward children. It required appeasement, but prevented disputes from being openly resolved. It necessitated togetherness, but strictly separated men from women, and children from adults. It discouraged provoking others, but also gave no one the privacy of their own thoughts. These were contradictions, but they stemmed from the contradictions of survival itself.
I WOULD LIKE TO POINT TO ONE MORE MARSHALLESE QUALITY. THIS quality was forgiveness, and I have mentioned it last for a reason. I never made mental peace with life on Ujae. I never accepted the values of my hosts. My mind screamed intolerance throughout the year.
The extraordinary thing was that they forgave me for this betrayal. They forgave me for what must have been a mountain of cultural misdemeanors and worse. I must have seemed to them coldly reclusive, childishly indiscreet, wantonly ungenerous, sappily sentimental toward children, and insultingly uncomfortable with the status quo. My behavior, certainly, must have struck them as even more foreign and questionable than theirs seemed to me. But they called me Marshallese, and Lisson asked me to stay. Me? The uncalm rebellious possessive white man, the antithesis of all Marshallese values? He wanted me to stay?
Somehow he did, and this said as much as anything about Marshallese culture. If the islanders hadn’t wanted to welcome me, they would have had ample reason for it. But instead they let me be both as American and as Marshallese as I wanted, and for that I was grateful. The same values that I found so hard to accept allowed them to accept me.
And in all of my cultural critiques, I was reminded of a rather withering story recounted to me by another solo outer-island teacher. Frustrated with the community’s treatment of women and its neglect of the school, the American volunteer stayed up deep into the night hurling a litany of cross-cultural vexations at her Marshallese boyfriend. For four hours, he sat silently and listened. Then, for the first time since she had met him, his face betrayed annoyance. He simply said, “One day, you will understand Marshallese culture.”
I realized, too, that my understanding of their lifestyle revealed as much about my own culture as theirs. It wasn’t about their world, but rather the interaction of my world and theirs—like this book. What I spent so many long hours on the beach mulling over was what stood out to me, and what stood out to me spoke volumes about my own country, my own unlikely time and place to be born. My surprise at their concept of time said as much about the prepare-for-winter survival codes of temperate Western civilization as it did about the every-day-is-the-same attitude of tropical peoples.
Entirely by chance, I was born in one of the rare countries that had been rich and safe and mobile for a long enough time that survival now felt ensured. In most of the rest of the world, the Marshalls being just one example, it didn’t. What was exotic to me may have in fact been the world’s, and history’s, norm. The greatest insights I had gained were into my own culture; the only true realization was that, as inscrutable as they were to me, I was just as strange, if not stranger, to them. Discarding my binoculars in favor of a mirror, it occurred to me that my own culture was just as brilliant, exasperating, delightful, and paradoxical as theirs.
I had achieved the beginning of understanding, if not acceptance, and now I was scheduled to leave in a month. It was within my power to stay. I could extend my servi
ce for a year. If I chose, I could remain on Ujae until my dying day. But the understanding of this culture that I had gained was also an understanding of its fundamental incompatibility with my heart. If my hosts intended their compliment literally, then they were mistaken: I was not Marshallese, nor could I ever be, nor did I want to be. I was at peace with my Westernness.
Once upon a time, Western do-gooders were expected to come back from their travels with the following story: we went there, and we saved them. Nowadays, audiences craved a different myth: we went there, and they saved us. Neither story fit my experiences on this island. I hadn’t saved them and they hadn’t saved me, and being surprised by this would be as foolish as expecting a marriage to alter the fundamental temperaments of the spouses. For Ujae and for me, the result of this time together was not transformation, but memory making—and that is how it should have been.
I decided to leave, but not without a certain fondness. As with a person, I had to overcome infatuation before I could achieve love. This was impossible until I recognized Ujae as flawed but well intentioned. Even as it tried my sanity, it also tried its best. I came to love the island—not in spite of the hardships, not because of them, but simply beyond them. I came to care for it like the spouse you fight with or the relative whose visits you dread, because if you share your life long enough with anything, even if you hate it, you must also love it.
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