The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  The Norwegian anthropologist’s name was Thorgeir Storesund Kolshus. Mota’s kastom chief lent me a scuffed copy of the thesis Kolshus had written for the University of Oslo. I took it back to my tent. In it, the anthropologist, who lived on Mota in 1996 and 1997, argued that Christianity had not sterilized traditional religion on the island: it had remystified it. The suqe had crumbled, but the tamate and the ghosts they celebrated were stronger, more respected, and more feared than when the missionaries first arrived. After a year on the island, Kolshus had been partially initiated into a tamate society and taught the steps of a simple dance. He was shocked to learn that the dance hats the Motese constructed in their secret glades were treated with more reverence even than the goblet used to serve the blood of Christ on Sundays. The hats were more than decoration: they were the abodes of powerful, living tamate spirits. To disrespect or mishandle a tamate hat would be to anger the spirit and thus to invite sickness or death. When Kolshus was finally permitted to dance in public, he caused a panic by nearly allowing a tamate hat to slip from his head. If that hat had touched the ground, the entire village would have had to be evacuated until the tamate energy had been contained and removed.

  While tamate hats shared the sacredness afforded Christian objects, Kolshus noted that the church on Mota had taken on the Melanesian concept of mana. Priests had the power to work miracles, bring rain, even inflict sickness as punishment for wickedness (though, when pressed, they always named God as the source of the power). That’s why Mama Lindsay’s antimagic curse had worked so well.

  How did the islanders reconcile these two conflicting worldviews? Kolshus insisted that the Motese had split their souls in two: there was the one they were born with, and there was the one they received when baptized. When a Motese died, his first soul, the soul of the world, became a spirit and roamed the island as a tamate, while the second soul, the soul of heaven, rose out of the grave after three days and flew up to meet God. I liked that idea.

  I dozed off, not sure if the faint howls and echoes I heard were coming from the forest beyond the church or the ether of my dreams, which carried me away from the tin-roofed church, through the forest, to the place where mysteries were revealed. Two souls.

  In the morning, we gathered in the church for the Christian half of the marriage ceremony. First came another excruciatingly long sermon in which the priest rambled on in English for a good two hours. There was chanting and much waving of incense. It was as formal and anesthetizing as Eucharist at Westminster Abbey. I found myself sitting down-bench from the rector from Sola, who gazed dreamily into the rafters and yawned periodically. He still had kava in his veins. I realized with some irritation that we were among the few who actually had arrived early enough to catch the entire service. Most dribbled in just in time to kneel down and accept the body and blood of Christ. I didn’t join them. The rector, shuffling back from the altar, noticed this. He sat close, leaned in, and issued his usual disquieting greeting.

  “We must talk,” he said.

  There were two brides and two grooms. One bride was barefoot; the other wore a new pair of sneakers. They both wore white dresses. Their hair was combed out Afro-style, and powdered white. The grooms wore hibiscus flowers behind their ears.

  Later, both couples sat outside the church in a row of plastic chairs. One by one, we came forward to shake their hands and place gifts of rice and sugar at their feet. Then the brides began to wail. They pulled down their veils to cover the tears that streamed down their faces. The two grooms stared at their knees dejectedly. A string band struck up behind the wedding party: three guitars and a washtub bass. The musicians thunk-thunked and jangled away maniacally, and they sang:

  Kava! Kava! Mi likem kava,

  Kava, oh kava hem i numbawan.

  Now the grooms began to cry, too.

  Just as the scene began to feel unbearable, the brides and grooms stood up and went their separate ways, as though the marriage had never taken place. The crowd dispersed, and the village grew quiet. Mota’s Christian soul had had its moment.

  The rector shuffled up to me and, for the first time since he had served me communion in Sola, looked me in the eye.

  “Hum. Yes. We need to talk,” he said, jerking his head toward the edge of the forest. I followed him there reluctantly. He held out a palm full of gnali—almondlike nuts—and I accepted them.

  “You took communion in my church,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, remembering how our eyes had locked just for a moment as I licked the wine from my lips.

  “Your granddaddy was Anglican,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Yes, good,” he said, clearly uncomfortable. “And you are Anglican.”

  The rector was anxious for me to say yes, to know he had not shared the blood and the body of Christ under a false pretense. I did not want to tell my story, to rupture my friendship with the church. I felt my face flushing.

  “You are Anglican,” he said again, hopefully. “You are Christian.”

  “I was confirmed into the church when I was twelve,” I said. True enough.

  “Of course! Good! Yes! Good!”

  The rector was immensely relieved, and he was also transformed. He offered me more nuts and led me through the forest to the neighboring village, where members of one groom’s family were gathering. There was a strange, apprehensive energy about the crowd: they reminded me of troops preparing for war. Old men argued. Young men paced back and forth, fidgeted, yelped. Girls tied red flowers in their hair. And then they all began to march, solemnly at first. There were more than a hundred people, all led by a dignified old man wearing a lavalava and a starched white shirt. He carried an unopened yam shoot—a sign of peace, according to the rector. The others carried bags of rice, sugar, and root vegetables. One yam was so big it had been strung from a pole so two men could carry it. Men hauled buckets full of kava. As the marchers made their way through the forest toward Mariu, they began to whoop and howl. The string band appeared out of nowhere to lead the procession, which now bounced and shook with the joy of a giant conga line. As we entered Mariu, the guitarists strummed faster and the crowd broke into a sprint. They ran to the lawn at the center of the village. They kept running as they were joined by Alfred and his neighbors, now all dashing together around and around in a wide circle, skipping, jumping, leaping, shouting, laughing ecstatically, heaving their yams and their sloshing buckets of kava high in the air until they had run themselves breathless and the circle closed in on itself.

  Then the kastom wedding ceremony began. Banana leaves were spread on the grass. The father of one groom made a great show of arranging the bride price. First, he produced a thin string of shell money that had seen better days. Then there was a pile of cash: a stunning 42,000 vatu—about $340. The bride’s father made his own pile of gifts, without money. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, then whispers. A man in a Brazil soccer jersey stepped forward, shook his fist in the air, and started yelling at the father of the groom. Something was very wrong. It wasn’t about the money, explained the rector. Someone hadn’t done their homework, someone had botched part of the ritual. The whole thing hadn’t gone according to kastom.

  “Shhh!” someone hissed at the critic. Three or four more men joined in.

  “Shhh! Shhh!”

  The groom’s father pointed his finger at the critic and yelled at him. The bride and groom stared at the dirt while the old men angrily debated the fine points of bride price etiquette. Lengas had told me this was just the kind of confusion that happened all the time now that the suqe societies weren’t around to reinforce kastom. Men didn’t know their traditions. They didn’t follow the rules.

  “Shhh!” hissed the crowd. The string band started up again, young men joined in the kava song, and the critic was eventually drowned out. Meat was shared. Kava flowed. I sat with the rector, who was in his cups again and content. We were friends. I tried to tease him with a story from the Norwegian anthropolog
ist’s thesis. Kolshus had written that ghosts were so strong, so present, on Mota that they could be cajoled into playing games with humans. The most popular spirit game was called ravve-tamate, or pull-the-ghost. The object was to go out into the forest and engage in a tug-of-war with the spirit of a dead man. What could be more heretical?

  “Oh, I know about ravve-tamate,” said the rector, pausing to wipe the kava scum from his beard. “When I first came to Mota from the Solomon Islands, they told me about it. I just laughed at them. I said, ‘I am a leader of the church, so of course I do not believe in your ghosts.’ Well, one night they showed me their game. They filled a basket with the favorite food of some dead fellow. Taro, I think it was. They tied the basket to the end of a long pole, and we went out into the forest. There were a dozen of us, men and boys. Everyone started to shout at that devil. They were cheeky with him. They teased him and they called him weak. And I tell you, I heard him answer back.”

  The rector paused, peered into the forest, cocked his head as though listening for something, and continued: “We followed the voice while one man shouted out: ‘Hey devil, if you think you are so strong, why don’t you prove it? Why don’t you try to pull this food from us?’ We were all holding on to the pole when something grabbed the basket and tugged it. It was strong, I tell you. It dragged us through the forest.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Oh, yes! The devil was very rough. It dragged us through the rocks and the bushes. I was bruised! I was bleeding! But the strange thing was, I never felt the pain of my wounds.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The rector was not at all troubled by his demonic flirtation. He was enthralled by it. I sat and thought about the two souls of Mota, the church and the salagoro. I remembered that morning’s church service and the crowd that had trickled in just in time to take Holy Communion. Kolshus had written that the Motese took communion as often as they could. They were swallowing the body and the blood of Christ not only as a way of remembering their Messiah’s sacrifice but as an act of pragmatism. He was sure the Motese believed that the bread and wine of Holy Communion made them strong, not just spiritually but physically. It was a way of soaking up the mana of Jesus. No wonder the rector had been so concerned about wasting it on me.

  A storm was building in the late-afternoon sky. The wind was up. I glanced around the crowd, looking for Alfred, who should have been readying the skiff for our trip back to Sola. His face, when I found it, always seemed to be obscured by the base of an upturned kava cup.

  The rector peered into the forest again, grasped my shoulder. “They are coming,” he said. “Stand back!”

  Then I heard a familiar sound, a faint owl-like hooting. It echoed through the forest. It was the sound I had heard every night on Mota, the sound I was certain was a product of imagination or dreams, only now it was louder and undoubtedly real. Whoop. Whoosh. Coo. Then silence. Children ran squealing from the garden at the edge of the village. Shadows ducked among the glistening leaves. The brush stirred, gained legs and arms. The devils leapt out into the open. There were half a dozen of them. Their heads were crowned with brambles, bamboo branches, and feathers, like oversize birds’ nests, from which sprouted the tentacle-like bodies of snakes: Medusa meets Apocalypse Now. Their eyes were completely obscured by leaves. They wore leather thongs around their genitals. Their legs and arms and gaunt buttocks were smeared with charcoal mud and bands of chalk paste. They crouched and shuffled with bowed knees. They leapt through the air. They peered into the doorways of houses and shook long white sticks at the villagers.

  Alfred’s brothers grabbed wooden poles and began to pound on a plywood drum in front of the church. Everyone else drew back and watched from the fringes of the clearing. Parents held children close. The dancers drew around the drummers, lurching, ducking, craning their necks like snakes. This was the dance of the mai, the poisonous black-and-white-banded sea snake, the rector said. He grunted and cackled with pleasure. The dancers had been practicing in the salagoro all week—hadn’t I heard their shouts at night?—and this was their gift to me. I was too busy fumbling with my camera to answer, or to say, “What the hell kind of priest are you? Shouldn’t you be outraged?” I got on my hands and knees and began to crawl toward the melee. I wanted to fill the frame of my memory. The crowd stirred behind me. I looked back to see the rector gesturing at me frantically to stop.

  “You must not approach the dancers,” he said when I had retreated to his side. “The ground is hot. If you stop too close, you will break it, and it will take days, weeks, to fix the ground. We will all have to leave the village.”

  It was clear that violating the dancer’s space was more than a breach of etiquette. This dance was more than a dance. But nobody could explain the source of its power, or its apparently volatile nature, or if it had anything to do with the tamate at all. The ground had been wound up like a spring by the energy of the dancers, and it needed to be unwound carefully. That was all the explanation I could get.

  I was struck by the geography of the spectacle. The snakes strutted and ducked below the eaves of the church, ignoring the house of God completely. The church and the salagoro shared congregations, they knocked against each other, and now the serpent was dancing in God’s garden, and there was no competition, no conflict at all, because neither acknowledged the other. Strangest of all, the man who had served me the blood of Christ had also served as my interpreter to the world of pagan spirits. The island really did have two souls.

  The snake dancers retreated into the woods. The wind picked up. The sky darkened. The storm was upon us. Alfred threw back one last cup of kava and shuffled liquidly down the ravine toward the ocean. I followed. The swell had risen even here on the leeward side of the island. The sea shivered and heaved, then surged across the rock shelf that served as our dock. Two of Alfred’s surviving children refused to climb aboard the skiff, which bounced dangerously off the rocks. Alfred did not force them. He just smiled dejectedly and left the boys with their uncles and the beaming rector, standing knee-deep in the storm surge. He bade them a soft good-bye, gunned the outboard motor, and steered us into the endless gray cordillera of swell. Alfred had plenty of fuel for our journey back to Vanua Lava: at his feet was a half-gallon jug of kava.

  12

  The Secret of West Vanua Lava

  How colonial of me, I later thought: I want into their lives, but only as a voyeur.

  —DEBORAH ELLISTON, The Dynamics of Difficult Conversations: Talking Sex in Tahiti

  Melanesian history has long belonged to foreigners, because the written word always trumps oral history. It was white men who first wrote down the islanders’ stories even as they sought to erase their kastom. Through sermons and schoolbooks, the words of those early missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators lived on to shape collective memory. Now, Melanesians casually refer to the time before contact as taem blong darkness, reducing thousands of years of trading, agriculture, fishing, and storytelling to a shadow world of fear, violence, and suffering. Whether this memory is accurate or not, its foundations lie in the scribblings of foreigners.

  On Mota I realized that European accounts of the island’s kastom always seemed to carry the most weight. Thus Hansen Ronung, whose job it was to sing her way through Motese history, could be corrected and humbled with a few anecdotes from Codrington’s Melanesians, and when Motese argued about modern culture and rituals, their disputes were now arbitrated by whoever was holding the tattered copy of Thorgeir Kolshus’s University of Oslo thesis. Was Kolshus an expert on Motese culture? The islanders evidently thought so. Before Alfred and his brothers drank kava, one of them always said a little prayer and spilled a drop of it on the ground. But the men admitted it wasn’t their fathers who had taught them that prayer. It was Kolshus. And he, it turns out, picked up that gem from anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers’s 1914 book The History of Melanesian Society. Alfred’s brother had told me that he thought Kolshus’s big idea, the one about the Mot
ese having two souls, was just plain wrong. His words faded amid a haze of kava, conversation, and guitar strumming; and they will be transmuted with every year, as conversations do. But Kolshus’s versions of kastom will live on, unchanged.

  When Codrington published The Melanesians in 1891, it was hailed as the first thorough study of “primitive” culture. Ever since, anthropologists have flocked to the South Pacific looking for remnants of a primitive Other that they might romance, penetrate, and ride toward scholarly recognition. These foreigners and their books have frequently been lauded as preservers of truth and traditional culture in modern Melanesia. Some communities are thrilled to be the subject of research. It brings them status and attention. But anthropologists, like the missionaries and traders before them—not to mention travel writers—don’t necessarily get their stories right. The godmother of modern anthropology, Margaret Mead, proved that much. In Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization, Mead presented “evidence” that cultural—rather than biological—factors were the most important determiners of human behavior: testimony from a trio of Polynesian girls who claimed that they were not subject to any of the sexual taboos and shame faced by American teens. The girls led Mead to believe that they were both carefree and promiscuous. Mead, eager to prove her nature vs. nurture theories, ate the stories up. The book propelled her to fame when it was released in 1928, but half a century later, one informant confessed that she and her friends had been so embarrassed by Mead’s interrogation that they had simply fibbed to her.

  After nearly two months in the islands I had yet to pierce the thick skin of the Melanesian Other. I thought an anthropologist might provide me with the tools. Before leaving Canada, I had learned about a German scholar who had been living at Vureas Bay, on the west side of Vanua Lava, researching a doctoral thesis. She received my e-mail message at the post office in Port Vila during one of her quarterly visits to the capital. Just drop by, she had responded. Easy.