The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  At the first hint of dawn I stumbled out onto the ship’s deck. Men stood doubled over the railing. Drool trailed from their chins until it was caught by the wind and flung into the sea. A half-caste woman waved me over and offered me a spongy white ball, which at first I took for a muffin. In fact, it was the fibrous center of an overripe coconut.

  “Mais this will take that ’orrible taste long mouth blong yu,” the woman said. There was a bit of French and a swath of English. But the finale of her overture was Bislama, Vanuatu’s de facto national language. What she had said was: “But this will take that horrible taste from that mouth of yours.”

  Bislama has been called a pidgin, which is to say it is an amalgamation, a simplification, and a bastardization of other languages by island people. My great-grandfather despised it. He wished Melanesians would learn proper English or at least stick to their own languages rather than using what he called the “vilest of compounds that ever polluted the purity of speech.”

  But the more I learned about Bislama, the more I realized it was one of the great triumphs of Vanuatu. The moniker originated from bêche-de-mer, the name the French gave to the sea slugs they bought from islanders and sold in the markets of Hong Kong. Bislama got its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, when South Sea islanders worked as crew on whaling ships and developed a simple jargon to communicate with Europeans. It is full of nautical references and sailorly slang. When the sun goes down, they say, “Sun hem i draon,” as though the sun is drowning in the sea. When something is broken, “Hem i bagarup.” Say it out loud: “Him, he’s buggered up.”

  The jargon developed further between 1863 and 1911, when more than fifty thousand Ni-Vanuatu were sent to work on plantations in Australia, Fiji, and Samoa. Those workers who spoke the same language were separated so they couldn’t organize against their employers. Separating the wantoks (“one-talks,” or common-language speakers) was easy: there were more than a hundred distinct languages in the New Hebrides alone. Workers had no choice but to speak to each other using the only words they had in common—English and French—though they used Melanesian grammar and syntax. Then they took the new language home with them.

  Bislama may have been the bane of arbiters of grammar, but it gave the Ni-Vanuatu the common tongue they needed to achieve independence. Government documents may be written in English or French, but parliamentary debates are conducted in Bislama.

  Everything is a fala (fellow), even a tree, a shark, or a girl. A boy who admired a girl told me, “Hem i wan gudfala gel. Mi likem hem tumas.” Then I understood that tumas did not mean “too much” but “a hell of a lot.”

  Things are defined by their relationship with other things. The word blong (belong) is everywhere—but the word long is a preposition, not an adjective. So if you ask a Ni-Vanuatu when colonial rule ended, he will tell you, “Kantri blong mifala, hem i winim independens long 1980.” That was the same year the New Testament was translated into Bislama and people began reading the gud nius blong Jisas Krais. If you ask a woman where she is going, she might say, “Mi go nao blong swim long sanbij,” and you would know she was now off to the beach to wash (swim means “wash”).

  Sometimes Bislama is easier to understand if you imagine it originating with a drunken sailor slurring orders to a Melanesian laborer. Take the initially baffling phrase “Sarem olgeta doa.” Now jump back a century, imagine that sailor barking at an islander, “Shut them doors.” Perhaps in his hurry or inebriation the words would emerge something like “Sarem doa.” Melanesian languages require an extra word to denote the plural, so the reasonable islander would respond to the order by shutting just one door. The sailor, if he hadn’t gone and shut the extra doors himself, might happen upon this plural construction: “Shut them, altogether!” Loosen the pronunciation, let “altogether” serve as the plural article, and you have the modern Bislama: “Sarem olgeta doa.”

  Bislama can be poetic in its literalness. A pijin blong solwata is the bird we all associate with salt water: a seagull. A telescope is a glas blong looklook big. A condom is a rubba blong fakfak.

  French words have also slipped into the language. To know is to savve (from the third-person singular save of the verb savoir). There are Polynesian words: Food is kai-kai. Children are pikinini (though some say that word originated with the English label for black children, or the Spanish pequeño). Now phrases are being traded back and forth between various pidgin-speaking countries. The Ni-Vanuatu borrow from Papua New Guinea when they tell you good-bye: lookim yu bakagen. But the strongest word of all is pan-Oceanic. If something or someplace is tabu, it is forbidden. You stay away from it.

  The stars faded, and Tanna appeared like an ink stain across the horizon. The silhouette gradually grew into a series of folded mountainsides. Blue smoke curled from thatched roofs. Surf fringed the shoreline, exploding occasionally into bouquets of white spray. Sunlight broke across a ridge serrated by rows of palms. There was no harbor. We maneuvered past a reef and eased alongside a cement jetty that jutted out from a tongue of coral stone at Lenakel, Tanna’s only town.

  I tossed my pack on the grass and waited. I had sent a message ahead to Port Resolution, which was within striking distance of the fabled John Frum stronghold at Sulphur Bay. The villagers at Port Resolution knew someone with a truck. They would come and fetch me.

  “Port Resolution? They will certainly not come to collect you. They are rubbish men,” advised a stern Tannese man who installed himself on the grass next to me. His name was Kelsen. He had come to claim his new wheelbarrow from the Havanna. It shone. Kelsen had an untidy beard, which he tugged on constantly, and a ponderous brow, which at first I mistook for a mark of wisdom. He sat with me as I waited by the sea. I told him I was looking for former John Frum cult members.

  “The John Frum people are all going to hell, that much is certain,” said Kelsen.

  I was heartened. “So then some people here still believe in John Frum?”

  “Yes, the fools believe. But nogud yu stap long John Frum people. They are dirty. They have nothing to eat. They are fighting each other.”

  Kelsen said he lived at the base of the Yasur volcano. He promised to tell me a magic story about the volcano that I would never forget. Nobody else could tell me the story. Just Kelsen. He owned it. The story had been passed down for generations. He was considering writing it down and selling it.

  “I can tell it to you,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  Kelsen’s eyes narrowed. He had a better plan. It was best to tell the story at his home. If I wanted to hear it, I would have to forget about the sinners at Port Resolution and Sulphur Bay and come stay with him. Kelsen had built a hotel of his own at the base of the volcano.

  The day was getting on. I didn’t have much choice. Kelsen threw my pack in his new wheelbarrow and led me along a row of tin-roofed stores. The road was lined with cement poles. Electric power had come to Lenakel three months before my arrival—just in time for World Cup soccer, said Kelsen. We lay in the grass at a road junction. After an hour, a pickup truck appeared. Kelsen flagged it down. We climbed in the box and rumbled east on a dirt road, up through the palms into the mountains.

  Tanna was so thick with life, it was a caricature of paradise: the black volcanic soil exploded with banana, taro, manioc, flowering poinsettia, orange groves, and tree ferns. Melon-sized papaya hung from house-high stems. Banyan trees cast shadows the size of baseball diamonds, their canopies balanced atop hundreds of roots that twisted down from the branches like strands of macramé.

  As we passed in and out of the shadows, Kelsen explained to me that it wasn’t just the John Frummers who were going to hell. It was most of the people on Tanna, including many of the Christians. “These people disobey the Bible every day,” he grumbled. “They break the rules that Moses wrote down in Leviticus. They eat unclean food: pigs, flying foxes, sharks, crabs. They smoke. They drink kava. All forbidden! Worst of all, they go to church on S
unday, when we know that Saturday is the true Sabbath. They will be punished in time.”

  Kelsen knew these rules because his family had converted to Seventh-day Adventism in 1922. They had never fallen for the John Frum message or any other false teaching, he assured me proudly.

  The forest on the east side of Tanna was caked in gray dust, and the trees began to resemble stone carvings. We rounded a bend and entered the devastation. It was as though the jungle had been buried and sealed under a layer of scoured earth. Bucket-sized boulders were strewn across the ash plain like spilled marbles. The volcano rose directly in front of us like a great Saharan dune, a perfect, pristine, and not particularly threatening heap of sand. This was Yasur, the volcano whose fireworks had guided Captain James Cook into Port Resolution—named for his ship—in 1774. Yasur was sacred in those days. Each time Cook attempted to climb it, his Tannese guides led him in circles back to the sea.

  Our driver didn’t slow for the view. He sped over a spur of the volcano toward a gap in the forest on the far side of the plain. We were halfway there when the afternoon was shattered by a deafening explosion. The driver swerved for a moment, then continued, even as a salvo of rocks exploded from the peak like pebbles thrown up by some giant hand. I dove to the floor. Kelsen laughed. The mountain belched a black mushroom cloud of smoke, then fell quiet.

  We entered the forest again and followed a rutted track to a clearing and a collection of thatch huts on stilts. This was Kelsen’s grand hotel. It was crude and beautiful. There were flowering trees and dozens of potted plants. Chickens clucked. Children dashed back and forth. Somewhere in the forest, a pan flute played “Amazing Grace.” It reminded me of the postapocalyptic idyll depicted in the pamphlets that Jehovah’s Witnesses hand out on street corners. Nothing bad ever happens here, I thought. But then a terrific sucking noise ripped through the valley—like a tsunami rolling across a pebble beach—then another appalling roar, and then a momentary vibration, not of the earth but of the air, which caused the huts to tremble and pressed my shirt against my skin. More smoke boiled above the treetops. I noticed there was no grass in Kelsen’s village, only a thick layer of ash on the ground. The garden, the huts, the trees, they could all be burned and buried in an afternoon.

  Kelsen’s wife was too shy to look at me, but she brought me a plate of laplap, a root vegetable pudding baked and served in coconut leaves. The pudding was cold and rubbery. It had been cooked on Friday. Today was Saturday, the true Sabbath, and work was forbidden.

  Kelsen failed to tell me his volcano story that day or the next. He took me for walks instead. We tramped through the jungle, following scant trails from village to village. The forest floor was punctuated by crude holes and littered with coconut husks: the work of wild pigs. At one village I heard the banging of coconut shells and singing, coming from a tiny lean-to. There was an old woman inside, surrounded by children.

  “What are they singing about?” I asked.

  “The grandmother has her own religion. She teaches it to all the little kids,” said Kelsen.

  “Can we talk to her?”

  “No, no, of course not. She’s a woman.”

  “Yes, I can see that. Let’s talk with her.”

  “No!” Kelsen said. “Kastom.”

  “Kastom? Wha—”

  But Kelsen was already stomping back into the forest. He moved with an inexplicable urgency.

  At the edge of the next village, Kelsen led me into a clearing where a lone man stood beneath a banyan tree. He wore a lavalava, a light scarf, wrapped around his waist. He dropped the lavalava the moment he saw me. I was embarrassed for us all, until I realized he had done it on purpose. Kelsen called to him, encouragingly. The man approached, and I saw that he wasn’t quite naked. His penis was wrapped in what looked like hundreds of strands of grass or bark, the ends of which dangled artfully about his bare testicles. The bulk of the contraption, the penis part, was held erect by a grass belt wrapped around his waist. This, I realized, was a nambas, which was the only thing most men in the region had worn for centuries. (The first Europeans to see nambas were scandalized by them. E. Vigors, an early visitor, cloaked his horror in Latin, proclaiming that the men were “destitute of all clothing si excepias penem quem decorant modo dissimilis indigenes Tannae ube membrum virile semper erectum tenent, sub singulo ligatum.”)

  The nambas man beamed at me. Kelsen barked at him in a language I did not understand, and the man performed something like a slow pirouette, as if to prove to me that yes, indeed, his behind was bare. They spoke some more, then the man charged off into the forest.

  We marched through two more villages. At each of them, Kelsen issued more orders and pointed at me, now with a growing tone of urgency and irritation. I was beginning to dislike Kelsen when we entered a clearing, grander than all the rest and flanked by two banyan so huge they made the space feel like an auditorium. Kelsen sat me down on a little bench.

  “You want to see the heathens dance?” asked Kelsen.

  “Maybe,” I said, baffled.

  “You will pay them, of course.”

  After a few minutes I heard chatter in the shadows, and then chanting. One by one, a troop of familiar faces emerged from a gap in the roots of the biggest banyan: an old man with a patchy beard, then a sculpted young version of himself, another fellow with tidy dreadlocks, three giggling teenage boys, and finally our friend from the first village. They had all shed their town clothes and were naked except for their nambas. They formed a circle and began to dance. They clapped their hands and stamped the earth, peering over their shoulders to see if I was taking pictures. I was, of course, but mostly out of politeness, since it was no more inspiring than the dinner-hour dances staged for package tourists back at Le Meridien Resort in Port Vila. Kelsen, heathenism’s greatest detractor, had managed to transform the old ways into a meal ticket. The nambas gang was bored. I squirmed on my bench, trapped, despising Kelsen more every minute. But I thought if I was polite I might at least be able to talk to the old man when they finished.

  “You are Christians like Kelsen,” I said to the chief when the dust settled.

  He shook his head. “Ha ha! No, we don’t believe in church,” he said in Bislama. “We believe in kava and pigs.”

  “But didn’t the missionaries ever come and talk to you, to change you?”

  “Yes, they have heard the good news,” interjected Kelsen in English. “But they don’t want to listen. They are going to hell.”

  “The missionaries came,” said the chief. “They told us not to make our kastom”—that word again—“but we were born with kastom and we won’t forget it. My grandfather and my great-grandfather, they followed kastom. So I will, too. My life is easy. We eat, sleep, and drink kava for free. Christians have to work so hard. They have to pay for everything,” he said, eyeing Kelsen slyly.

  Kastom. I would learn that the word means many things to Melanesians. To translate kastom as “culture” is to chart only a part of its power. Kastom is Melanesian history, religion, ritual, and magic, but it also refers to traditional systems of economics, social organization, politics, and medicine. If you say something is kastom, you are attaching it to the traditions of the ancestors. You are sanctifying it. But sometimes the word is simply used to excuse a practice from scrutiny. (Why aren’t women allowed to drink kava? Kastom. Why can’t women be pastors? Kastom. Why don’t kava bowls get washed between servings? “Hem i kastom blong mifala nomo.”)

  “We solve every problem we have using pik-pik and kava,” the chief said. “For example, when we make a fight with another village, we can kill a pik-pik to make it better. If we have other kinds of problems, we drink kava, then ask the spirits for help. A spirit could be in the hollow of the banyan tree. It could be somewhere else, too, but it comes when we ask.”

  Kelsen nodded approvingly, but mumbled in English, “Idolatry.”

  “Friend, let me ask you a question,” said the chief. “Suppose Kelsen goes to church and asks his Jesu
s for rain. Will it rain? No. Ha! But if I want rain I go to the banyan, drink my kava, and make a prayer to my papa or my mama. They are dead, but if I need rain they will bring it. If I have lost a pik-pik in the forest, they will bring that back to me, too.”

  “Foolish heathens,” said Kelsen. “Jesus can make it rain harder.”

  It was impossible to talk to the chief about religion without running the gauntlet of Kelsen’s commentary. I changed the subject.

  “Your nambas. Does it hurt?”

  “No, not at all,” said the chief. “We have been circumcised. Our penises are very strong.”

  Kelsen jumped in again to explain that all Tannese boys were ritually circumcised before adulthood. Even his own boys would be circumcised amid much feasting and celebration.

  “But why would you do it, Kelsen?” I asked.

  “Because it’s kastom.”

  “But Kelsen, you are Christian!”

  It seemed a baffling contradiction. It appeared as though even Tanna’s staunchest Seventh-day Adventist could not wrest himself completely from the ways of the ancestors.

  “Kastom doesn’t mean not Christian,” Kelsen said gruffly, but before he could continue, the chief touched my hand to get my attention, then made a fist and punched the air.

  “We have strong, strong penises! Even very old men on Tanna can make children. Friend, suppose you ever have a problem making babies on your own island, you just come back here and our kastom doctor can give you medicine for your penis.”

  I thanked him and asked about John Frum.

  “Don’t worry about John Frum,” Kelsen said. “John Frum is for crazy people. John Frum has no power—”

  “You must go to Sulphur Bay,” interrupted the chief. “On Friday night they will dance for John Frum.”

  This agitated Kelsen no end. “Time for go now,” he said, then asked me for five hundred vatu so he could pay the chief.