The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  On one occasion, Codrington heard the bloodcurdling cry of Mota’s great tamate ring out across the island. All business ground to a halt: the island was now in occupation by the tamate and its members. The great tamate was angry, apparently, because a man had disobeyed Bishop Patteson’s teaching by pointing his bow and arrow at another man. The “occupation” continued until the offender paid a pig to the society. This could hardly be a bad thing, noted Codrington, who concluded that the tamate and suqe societies were a means of regulating political authority. He was sure that, after much encouragement, the natives had divorced their societies from any association with ghosts and spirits. Patteson found both societies “distasteful,” but still he advised Christian converts to make up their own minds about whether or not the rituals broke God’s rules. They did make up their own minds: for decades, suqe and tamate rituals were simply delayed until the missionaries had sailed back to Norfolk Island after their annual visits.

  Not until 1900, when a white missionary was stationed permanently on Mota, was the truth about the societies revealed. H. V. Adams reported that George Sarawia’s church school was sparsely attended, while the tamate and the suqe were as strong as ever—and shockingly religious in their rituals. Sarawia had ascended to the grade of suqe headman. It was clear that people listened to Sarawia because he had followed more rituals, knew more secrets, and obviously held more mana than most anyone on the island. One native deacon lamented on his deathbed that the suqe had become the church’s biggest enemy. In order to gain rank in the suqe, he noted, a man needed wealth. And in order to be wealthy, he had to resort to sacrifices to the old pagan spirits. “Rain, wind, sunshine, health and sickness were all bought from those who had power over these things,” the Reverend Robert Pantutun confessed tearfully, then died.

  In 1910, the third bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, pronounced that the suqe was nalinan Satan—an utterly vile thing—and its members would be excommunicated if they persisted. George Sarawia was safe by then: he had been dead for nine years. The age of suqe and tamate was declared over.

  But every generation interprets the will of its gods differently, and I had heard talk of a new dance across the water on Mota about which everyone was proud, even the clergy. Had the church taken the pagan sting out of kastom or not? We hiked back to Sola as clouds boiled up over the peaks. A light rain swept along the beach. The sky turned shades of pink and gold, and so did the hibiscus flowers that littered the brick-red sand. I ditched my guide and found the bishop’s secretary in a commercial kava shack beneath the snake hill. The shack was unlit save for a dim lantern hung on the stoop. The secretary was well into the grog. He smiled, but his words came slowly.

  “The diocese has a ship,” he whispered. “You will get on that ship. Tomorrow you are going to Mota. Big party.”

  Father Saul, the rector who had served me communion, was there, too. His gray beard glowed like an accusing puff of smoke in the semidarkness. He padded forward, kicked at the dirt floor. “We must talk,” he mumbled softly, but couldn’t bring himself to say more. We all drifted into kava’s peculiar silence.

  11

  Death and Marriage on Mota

  Partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic.

  —EDWARD SAID, Culture and Imperialism

  The flagship of the Diocese of Banks and Torres, it turned out, was a wooden skiff the size of a station wagon. The craft felt vaguely seaworthy until it was loaded with ten passengers and the fixings for a week of feasts on Mota. We chugged out from Sola on a slack tide, following a series of ragged bluffs along the southern edge of the bay. It was calm there. I was glad the disapproving rector from Sola was not on board. Sunlight reflected off the water, illuminating the weathered face of our skipper, Alfred, and his teenage son, who stood proudly with him at the tiller. Alfred’s wife, Jocelyn, crouched glumly in the boat’s tiny cabin with an armful of squirming children. I was not exactly sure why these people were heading for Mota. I had heard something about a wedding, but nobody on the boat seemed particularly festive, except for one man, whose face was stretched into a permanent grin. He was not part of the family.

  Alfred had an unruly beard and aged, mournful eyes. He steered toward Kwakea, a palm-covered swath of sand just off the coast of Vanua Lava, and ran the skiff right up onto the beach. A bullock—or rather, the carcass of a bullock—was waiting for us onshore. The animal had been skinned and cut in half. Its shoulder muscles shone in the sun. Blood dripped from its buttocks as we wrestled the hind section into the boat. We took the beast’s head, too. There was still a half-chewed wad of grass between its teeth, and its eyes were fixed in a terrified stare.

  The journey to Mota was far from bucolic. When you are in a small boat, you do not cut through the ocean swell. You ride each wave as you would a great wrinkled beast. The wave rises above you, threatens to break over you, lifts you onto its broad back so you can see down into the blackness of the approaching trough, even as the next swell is bulging, shape-shifting, lumbering toward you. And then you fall.

  I was coming to dislike the sea immensely. I held fast to the gunwale as we left the shelter of Kwakea. The bullock glared at me. The grinning man cupped his hand around my ear and told me why Alfred had such sad eyes. It was on a crossing just like this that the last diocesan skiff had taken a rogue wave over the bow. The boat was claimed by the sea. So was Alfred’s six-year-old daughter. I watched Alfred wrestle with our boat’s forty-horse outboard motor, which groaned with every ascent, then screamed with every descent. Alfred pulled that tiller and watched the sea silently, his face pulled into a smile or a grimace. The closer we drew to Mota, the more doleful Alfred seemed to appear. I had thought we were coming for a party.

  From a distance, Mota resembled a great nipple poking from the ocean. Closer, the island looked more like a shark’s fin served on a thick platter. The fin was a dormant volcano, the platter a two-mile-wide plateau of uplifted coral rock, cut short on all sides by black cliffs, down which spilled vines with purple flowers, trailing all the way into the surging ocean. There were no beaches, only shelves of wave-beaten coral hanging over the edge of the electric blue abyss.

  Alfred drew up against a submerged shelf on Mota’s leeward side. We waded ashore, carrying the bleeding bullock on our shoulders, and then ascended the side of a deep, mosquito-filled ravine. The cracked rock was imprinted with the shapes of seashells. Alfred’s village, Mariu, sat in a grassy clearing on the edge of the plateau. There were dozens of the usual thatch huts. Next to them was a church with cement foundations and the only tin roof for miles around. I pitched my tent under a grapefruit tree behind the church.

  That evening the men lit a great bonfire in a pit outside Alfred’s house. An ancient woman heaped rocks on the fire and tended it into the night. Through the mesh wall of my tent, I could see her bent frame as she stirred the embers and poked at the glowing stones long after the flames had ceased licking them, long after the rest of the village had gone to sleep. She ignored the hoots and the choruses of grunts and squawks that echoed through the forest. I did not, mainly because, apart from the odd gecko or bat, I had seen next to no wildlife in the islands, and assumed they had all been hunted to extinction. The forest should have been silent.

  I was awoken early the next morning by the sound of the church bell, which was not a bell at all but an old propane tank against which someone banged a steel bar, over and over. Then the wailing began. It came from the direction of the firepit. It was the voice of a woman. It began like a song, rising softly in the cool morning air, but it grew more insistent and less melodic. The crying broadened until finally it was one long, repeated chorus of anguish. I slipped on my sandals and crept around the edge of the church. There was the firepit steaming in the cool morning air. There was the old woman furiously sweeping around the pit with a straw broom. There was Alfred gazing silently into the
embers. And there was his wife, Jocelyn, who had not said a word since we left Sola. She was on her knees, rocking back and forth, clenching her fists so tightly I could see the whites of her knuckles. Tears were streaming down her face, and she was howling her agony to the dirt, the fire, and the empty sky.

  Later, I asked Alfred to take me to George Sarawia’s grave. As we wandered through the jungle, I asked him if the story about his daughter’s drowning was true. He wore the same strange, meek smile he had worn on our crossing to Mota, and he recounted the story as though it were a fairy tale.

  It had happened eight years ago. They were more than halfway to Mota when the wave hit. The boat sank within seconds. Alfred was left in the swell with his little girl clinging to his neck. He tried to swim for Mota, but the island just kept getting smaller and smaller. He tried to swim west toward Sola, but the current was too strong. Alfred and his daughter drifted north through the morning and the afternoon. The sun sank toward the mountains of Vanua Lava. The girl grew weak. She had swallowed too much salt water. Alfred lost strength, too, as he treaded water and surveyed the explosions of surf along the reef that separated him from the beach at Port Patteson. He felt his daughter’s body go limp. He felt her fingers slipping from his neck. He held her as long as he could. A few hundred yards from shore, he felt her slip off his back, saw her slide into the blue shadows.

  “I gave my daughter to God. I let her go. I buried her inside the sea. Then I said to God: ‘You have taken the daughter of me. Now will you please let me live?’”

  In a clearing just outside the village, Alfred showed me his daughter’s grave. I was confused.

  “I thought your little girl drowned. I thought the sea took her body,” I said.

  It had, he said. This was another daughter, a teenager, who had died exactly a year ago. Cancer got this one. Tomorrow, Alfred would give a feast marking the anniversary of her death. Alfred and Jocelyn would share out their bullock, let the second girl go as they had the first. Alfred would shave for the first time in a year, and Jocelyn would stop crying until God or luck pulled them down into the deep blue of another tragedy.

  The old woman who had been tending the fire was waiting with her broom at my tent. I had been told she was a romoterr, the last of the Mota big women. She was also Alfred’s mother. Her name was Lengas. Her face was as furrowed as a walnut. She had black flowers, or perhaps they were stars, tattooed on each of her cheeks. The tattoos were proof that she had been a high-ranking woman in the time of the suqe, she told me. Her father had killed many pigs and paid many lengths of shell money in order to give Lengas her high status.

  “So the suqe honored women as well as men,” I said.

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter anymore, because the suqe is dead,” she said in Bislama.

  “Right, because the church killed it a century ago,” I said.

  Lengas chuckled. The church certainly did not kill the suqe, she said. In fact, the suqe had grown stronger after the death of George Sarawia, through the patronage of another powerful Anglican priest—who just happened to be Lengas’s late husband, Mama Lindsay Wotlimaru (mama is Motese for “father”). But there were problems. In the 1940s, suqe members had grown increasingly competitive. Their jealousy led to fighting and a renaissance of black magic. Sorcerers used all the usual tricks: poisonings, curses, leaves to induce miscarriages. By 1949, Mota’s population had fallen to a hundred. The island was as devastated as Santa Maria had been, and everyone knew that sorcery, not disease, was to blame. That’s when Mama Lindsay summoned every man, woman, and child on the island to his village and ordered them, one by one, to put their hand on the cross and swear that they would abandon the use of poison and magic. Those who lied or resisted would face the immediate wrath of God. It worked, said Lengas. A handful of sorcerers died. Everyone else was so scared of the mama’s curse that they forsook all kastom magic. Even the good spells were abandoned. Now the population of Mota had climbed back up to nearly eight hundred, but nobody had any idea how to induce the spirits to bring sun, rain, or bigger yams.

  “But why did the suqe have to die, too?”

  “Because these days our men work for paper money, white man’s money. To go up-up in the suqe you must have shell money.” Lengas pulled a plastic bag from her skirt and drew out a long string of red-brown discs from it. They were dirty and chipped. It looked like the kind of necklace you would buy from a beach vendor in Cancún.

  “Shell money. It takes days and days to make these beads, put holes in them, make them smooth. Mmmm,” Lengas said, cooing and stroking her beads. Then her eyes narrowed. She scowled and waved her arm toward the village, where the men were preparing the day’s first round of kava. “Look at these men. They got no savve. They would like to have rank, to go up-up in the suqe, but they can’t without shell money, and they don’t know how to make it anymore. This is the last of ours,” she said, shaking her string of beads. A few tiny discs broke free and fell into the dirt.

  “Why don’t you teach them how to make it?”

  “Mi no savve!” she howled. “This is men’s business. Only a man can make shell money. And the shell carvers are altogether dead now. When I die, the suqe will die with me.”

  The village women fussed at the firepit all afternoon. They wrapped taro, cassava, and root puddings in banana leaves, then buried them beneath the hot rocks, which they covered in more damp leaves. The men sat around in the grass and prepared kava. They didn’t get their sons to chew the root as was the kastom on Tanna. Instead, they stuck pieces of it inside a short length of plastic drainpipe, plugged one end, then pounded the kava to pulp using a wooden rod as a piston. Next, in plastic buckets filled with water, they massaged the pulp through cloth towels until the drug seeped into the water.

  “You’ll be drinking a bit of kava today,” I said to Alfred.

  “A lot of kava,” he murmured.

  “And tomorrow,” said another man.

  “And the next day, too, for the wedding,” said another, whom I recognized as Father Saul, the rector who had served me communion in Sola. He was as soft and furry as a koala, and he grinned like a teenager who had just raided his parents’ liquor cabinet—until his gaze turned to me.

  “We must talk,” he said for the second time in a week. Despite his shyness, it sounded like an order.

  “Yes,” I said. But we didn’t talk. He lay down on the lawn and closed his eyes.

  The death feast proceeded like a Sunday barbecue back home. The women did the work. The men got drunk and melted into the grass. We ate root vegetables and bullock stew. Alfred’s brother showed me a copy of the Motese dictionary that Codrington had written. He said that two things made islanders proud. One was Mota’s history as an Anglican stronghold. The other was dancing: the Motese still had the best tamate dancers in all of the Banks Islands. The tamate had never died, Alfred’s brother said. In fact, half the village men were deep in the forest as we spoke, practicing their dances at their salagoro. I asked if I could I go watch. Of course not, he said. The ghosts would not permit it. The salagoro was sacred.

  “But you wait,” he said. “You’ll hear the tamate coming.” He rubbed his eyes and lay back on his mat. The kava had done its work.

  There was a woman on the far side of Mota whose job it was to remember the old stories. I went to see her, following the red dirt track that circled the island and the instructions of the chief of Mariu, who advised me to seek permission from each village chief before moving through his territory. This made for an arduous journey. Each chief had me served a plate of laplap, and crowds gathered to watch me lick the pudding and coconut milk from my fingers. At each village, after each meal, after I shook hundreds of hands, a hush would descend, and the question would come. Always the same question.

  “Is he dead?” the chiefs asked.

  “Is who dead?”

  “Bin Laden. Is he dead?”

  People on Mota had radios. They felt close to the great dramas of the world. They had h
eard about aircraft crashing into very tall buildings.

  “I’m sure he’s dead,” I tried to reassure one chief.

  “Well, that is not what they say on the radio,” he replied. “They say that the Bible predicted the rise of bin Laden. And they say that when bin Laden dies, the world will end. The Apocalypse will be upon us. So please do not tell me he is dead.”

  I found the storyteller. She was a vast, fleshy queen ant who seemed to be sinking into the earth by her little cooking fire. Her name was Hansen Ronung. Her cheeks were tattooed with a grid of black spots. In a low drone, she sang me a story of Qat, who had apparently spent his happiest days on Mota. This story was like one Codrington had recorded in The Melanesians, except for one detail: once, when Qat’s brothers had stolen his wife and his canoe, Qat made himself very small so that he could ride the ocean inside a hollow bamboo stick. In this way he caught up to his brothers. One of them, the cunning one, said, “Qat is near, I can smell him,” but the rest did not believe him. Finally, another brother saw Qat’s bamboo boat in the water and picked it up. Qat used a secret weapon to repel the brother, said Hansen. Oh, yes, she said, Qat had let out wan bigfala fart. The smell was so bad that Qat’s brother dropped the bamboo stick before he could peer inside it, and Qat escaped. This detail may have offended Codrington’s Victorian aesthetic; there was no mention of flatulence in his version.

  I asked Hansen where she had learned the old stories. Some, she said, came from her father. But others, she had learned from a Norwegian anthropologist who had visited Mota six years previously. Since none of his stories contained naughty bits, I suspected that the Norwegian had brought a copy of Codrington’s Melanesians and that he had used the book to reunite the old myths with their onetime home.