The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  I learned this in Vureas Bay: the rules were catching up to Sabina, tightening around her, suffocating her. I liked Sabina. We agreed on things, on the subjectivity of morality, for example, a concept that was a world away from the kinship codes of Vetuboso. Sabina had a secret of her own, I knew that much. She had made one mistake, she had broken one rule. The backsliders let it slip between belts of kava. The creepers whispered it at night, when they circled like sharks in the shadows of her garden. We know who you are, they hissed. We know you are not as strong as you pretend. You have opened your door once. Now open it again.

  Sabina would not reveal her secret in her doctoral thesis on kinship rules, and I have promised not to reveal it here. I suppose we are attempting to make the story of Vureas Bay our own by erasing the details that do not suit us, just as the missionaries did with the myth of Patteson’s death and the conversion of Nukapu. Now I know that Sabina’s secret has been passed from fire to fire and village to village across Vanua Lava. It has climbed on the mail plane and bounced down to Vila. It has flown around the world. It has entered e-mails. It has arrived like a scandalous guest at university cocktail parties where cold-handed academics snigger and debate the rules of engagement but cannot begin to imagine the lonely nights, the knocked-on doors, the jealousies, the dimmed lanterns, of Vanua Lava.

  The secret’s mobility and tenacity have proved to me that writers are not the only arbiters of history. And Vureas Bay proved that kastom secrets are much heavier, much harder to unearth than gossip. It’s the things that matter most that people are slowest to reveal. Eli Field taught me that lesson, in a roundabout way.

  Eli was hard to catch, which seemed to be a trend among people I had challenged to prove their magic. He spent his days away from the compound. Cali explained that he was doing Very Important Things Related to Culture. I caught him after dark on my fourth night. He wouldn’t talk until I had downed a cup of kava with him.

  “Sabina came here to help you, but you and your friends won’t share kastom stories with her,” I said.

  Eli scratched his belly and smirked. “She can always ask the women for their stories.”

  “But women don’t know about men’s kastom, do they? They don’t know about the suqe or the salagoro. How is Sabina supposed to make a full report?”

  Eli threw back another cup of kava, went to the door, and spat into the night. He lowered his voice and spoke solemnly in English. “Let me tell you what makes a Ni-Vanuatu different than a white man. You people share out all of your knowledge, but you don’t like to share your money. Your thinking is backward. Here in Vanuatu, we are not too rich, but if you want our food, we will cook for you. If you want our money, we will give it to you. We are generous with these things. But knowledge, that is our power, and there are some things only men should know. If you take the secrets that belong to us men, if you write them down or show them to women, you take our power away. And then we would have nothing. Sabina was cross first time I explained this to her. She cried for weeks. But this is our kastom, and she must accept it.”

  “But the men have told me all kinds of secrets, and I am writing them down,” I said.

  “Mmm, but we will never tell you the most important things.”

  “But you said you’d prove to me that your kastom, your magic, still has power. Didn’t you promise to bring a big rainstorm on Wednesday?”

  “Hmm, well, yumi garem wanfala problem. It has rained so much this year, our mangoes are rotting on the trees. It would be irresponsible for me to make rain right now.”

  The truth was that it had been drizzling constantly since I arrived in Vetuboso. A rainstorm wouldn’t have been much of a miracle anyway.

  “Okay then, how about sun?” I suggested. “Let’s have some sun for Wednesday.”

  Eli shifted uncomfortably on his bench. His voice lost its authoritative tone. “I gat wan narafala problem.”

  “What? What now?”

  “I have been trying to help you. I have. But the men who keep the kastom stones are scared. Today, I went to see the man blong shark stone, to see if he could bring you a shark in the bay. He refused. I told him that you would write a bigfala story about him…”

  “To prove that your kastom lives,” I said.

  “But he was afraid tumas. He said if he played with the stone, the tasiu would kill him.”

  Eli lowered his voice. The tasiu, he said, was a powerful man of God. He lived with his apprentices on a hill near Vureas Bay. He had a magic walking stick. Wherever Eli had tried to promote kastom, the tasiu had smashed it. Even as we spoke, the tasiu was hunting down kastom stones, exorcising their spirits, wiping away their power. The tasiu confronted the owners of those stones: he told them they must wrap their hands around his magic walking stick and confess their crimes or face a terrible punishment from God.

  “I tell you,” said Eli, “it is not easy being a kastom chief these days.”

  In fact, it was much harder than he admitted. It was common knowledge that black magic was being practiced in Vetuboso. In the most recent case, a boy had been struck with a mysterious illness that caused his leg to swell up like a giant sea slug. Before the boy died, a kastom doctor had told his parents that he was the victim of a curse. “Look in the dirt under your house,” the doctor had told them. They did, and found several sinister-looking parcels—lumps of ash wrapped in coconut bark—under the boy’s sleeping platform. The tasiu had come down from his hill to investigate. He declared that the parcels were evil charms. He dabbed holy oil on the suspected sorcerers to lubricate their confessions. One of them insisted that it was Eli Field who had paid for the curse. Rumors were as effective a weapon in Vanuatu as black magic, and these rumors were enough for village leaders to take away Eli’s title of kastom chief for several months.

  I knew the word tasiu. It is Motese for “brother,” and it is reserved for members of an indigenous Anglican order called the Melanesian Brotherhood. I had been hearing stories about the brotherhood for weeks. Some said the brothers were a kind of spiritual SWAT team, dispatched by the church to douse the fires of backsliderism and paganism. “You behave,” I heard a mother tell her squealing child at the market in Sola, “or the tasiu will come and take you away!”

  I sent a message up the mountain and waited to hear from the tasiu.

  Meanwhile, the drizzle continued, and my clothes began to rot. One afternoon an acquaintance of Eli’s named Ben produced a magician. We all met outside Sabina’s kitchen. The magician had the long, stubborn face of a mule. He handed Ben his wooden staff. Ben and I kneeled in the dirt and grasped the narrow end of the staff, hand over hand. The goal was to keep the heavy end of the staff pointed upright. It would be difficult, said the magician, because soon a spirit would come to tug at it. It would be like a miniature version of Mota’s ravve-tamate game.

  “Why can’t Chuck and I play the game together?” asked Sabina.

  “Because you don’t know the special prayer,” barked Ben dismissively, then under his breath added, “girl.”

  “Yufala mas sarem eye blong yu,” said the magician, closing his own eyes to demonstrate his request. “Sipos yu openem eye blong yu, devil hem i runaway nao.”

  By now a dozen people, including Eli, had gathered to watch. I closed my eyes, and Ben made a short incantation to harass the soul of some dead man. The stick swayed slightly. I strained to hold it still. Ben’s fists flexed against mine. He was clearly trying to push the staff from side to side. I felt tempted to do the same, to make the staff bob and bounce and swing—what a show we could have produced—but I didn’t. I held firm, and the staff did little more than tremble. Ben gave up after a few minutes. “Open your eyes,” he said.

  “I don’t know what went wrong,” said Eli. Sabina just stood at her door with her arms folded and a half-smile on her face, like a mother whose teenager had once again come home drunk.

  The magician was not deterred. He led us into the forest for Round Two. We pushed through groves of sh
arp-leaved shrubs and bamboo thickets where spiderwebs hung like wet laundry. The ground had been ravaged by rooting pigs. Birds screamed. Mosquitoes rose up from the muck. The magician hacked a clearing with his machete. He built a fence of pandanus leaves and gestured for Sabina, Eli, and I to stay behind it.

  The magician picked a coconut off the ground, cut a hole in it, and turned it over so that we could see the milk pour out. Then he cut open a second coconut and turned it over. No milk this time. But Ben, who was kneeling a couple of yards away, had turned his face up and was gulping enthusiastically at the air. His mouth swelled like a fish, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The idea here was that Ben was drinking the invisible stream of coconut milk that the magician had mysteriously transported across the clearing into his mouth.

  “Bigfala sapraes, no?” asked the magician after repeating the trick a few times.

  I could feel Sabina’s eyes burning into me disdainfully.

  “Yu lookim power blong devil. Yu bilif, no?” he said hopefully.

  “Well,” I said, glancing back and forth between Sabina and the magician, “it would have been easy for you to have come out here and empty three of those coconuts early this morning, wouldn’t it?” I felt a sudden pang of guilt, or maybe something closer to pity, for the magician. “Oh, hell, sure I believe. Hem truyu garem bigfala savve.”

  Sabina was not impressed with the magic show, or, for that matter, with me. Back in her kitchen, she spooned the last of her peanut butter onto a crust of bread and handed it to me. “What a performance! What a miracle! Now you have seen your kastom magic. Have you had enough yet?”

  I gnawed on my bread glumly. “You’ve spent a year with these people,” I said. “You have heard them talk about magic and spirits. Instead of acknowledging these things, you ignore them. Aren’t you at least curious about what drives these beliefs?”

  “What drives them? Fear. Jealousy. Superstition. We have all those things at home in Germany. I am not interested in fantasy. I am writing about what I see. You, on the other hand, are romanticizing these people. Look around. Look at this remarkable community, the complex society they have built. I don’t understand why this isn’t enough for you. Why the world isn’t enough for you. Why you are so obsessed with magic when you have all the wonder of humanity around you.”

  What could I say? I hadn’t left home with the intention of seeing magic. I thought I could remain aloof in my travels, record the stories I heard, chart the legacy of the missionaries while pretending indifference, like a journalist or an ethnographer. But the approach was coming to feel entirely dishonest. Modern anthropologists parachute into communities, dig around for people’s secrets and myths, listen wide-eyed and stone-faced, as though they believe, pretending all the while to be neutral in matters of spirituality—or worse, converts to the local way of thinking—when in reality they hold very strong convictions about the nature of the universe. They may analyze the origins and usefulness of their study communities’ beliefs, but they don’t hold them to the same standard of critique to which they subject those of their own society.

  Field anthropology is a business of deception generally performed by unbelievers. Thorgeir Kolshus was so convincing that the men of Mota welcomed him into the salagoro. They taught him how to dance. They even let him leap around with that sacred and dangerous tamate hat on his head. But when Kolshus defended his thesis at the University of Oslo, did he insist that his dance hat actually contained a ghost? Not likely, unless he wanted to end his academic career.

  At least the Victorian missionaries had been honest about their bias. They never stopped telling islanders just how false their spirits were. (To her credit, Sabina was equally honest about her skepticism about magic and the boasts of Vanua Lava’s rainmakers.) Yet despite this cultural scorn, my great-grandfather wrote enthusiastically about the spiritual gift that Melanesians offered their English counterparts. Just as Melanesians needed governance and moral instruction, he felt that Englishmen needed help in the essential act of seeing the unseen.

  “I have heard of no race indeed that lives in the tropics, whether civilized or uncivilized, that does not look upon the continued presence of an unseen world as a fact beyond argument. The feeling engendered may be one of fear, but the belief is there,” he wrote in an essay on faith. “It is all very wonderful, and the conclusion of the matter is just this: that all the races of the world need each other to make up one another’s deficiencies. The tropical man says to us, ‘I can easily believe in God, come and help me to make my religion and my conduct one complete thing.’ The temperate clime man says, ‘I should find no difficulty about obeying God’s commands if only I could first see God and believe that He is. Come and help me to see God, I ask no more.’”

  This is an entirely racist idea, and its foundations should not be sheltered from the blows of the postcolonial wrecking ball. And yet now I sensed a truth within it. Were Melanesians hardwired to believe more fervently? Was it in their genes? I don’t believe so, any more than they were hardwired to be ruled by Englishmen. But there was something about the closeness of the air, the seething forests and reefs, the precipitous shadows, that demanded a new way of seeing, as though the physical world was a jigsaw puzzle whose cracks offered glimpses of an entirely different picture. How could one not be captivated by it? How could you resist trying to reach through the cracks to the shadow world? Henry Montgomery credited Melanesia with confirming his mystic beliefs. Melanesians shared these certainties with him: The world is more than an accident. The cosmos is not empty. Humans are not alone.

  The islanders I met may have had differences about which gods deserved their allegiance, but they did not doubt the existence of any of them. I was disoriented and enthralled by the natural extension to this incongruity: If one cosmology was a conduit to the mysteries of the world, then couldn’t they all be? And if the islands could produce magic, if some shred of Oceanic faith would just reveal itself as grounded in something I could touch and feel, then it followed that the Christian myth that had sustained my family for generations might also contain more than a metaphor.

  Here is the thought I was too shy to admit to Sabina. Despite everything I was sure I knew about superstition, fiction, and science, I was allowing a small part of myself to imagine the impossible: that mana did flow through the air, that ancestors and gods could make rain, that men could transform themselves into owls, sharks, and tamate. It was a good thing to imagine. I envied the believers, including my great-grandfather. I was drawn by the notion that perhaps they were on the right track when they knew that the world was more than a collection of serendipitously bonded atoms and spinning electrons; more than a series of accidents, collisions, explosions, and diffusions bubbling endlessly in an insignificant corner of an otherwise empty cosmos.

  13

  My First Tasiu

  The day of the Lord cometh as a thief in the night and when men shall say, Peace, and all things are safe, then shall sudden destruction come upon them, as sorrow cometh upon a woman travailing with child, and they shall not escape.

  —“A Penitential Service to Be Used on the First Day of Lent,” in The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of Ireland

  Sabina would not be the one to take me closer to magic. She had given up on secrets. As for Eli Field, his heathen revival had only served to weaken him, making him enemies in the church and putting him in the crosshairs of the mysterious tasiu. If supernatural power was being exerted in Vureas Bay, Eli and his friends were not the ones directing it. The coconut trick was proof enough of that. Everyone knew the real power was coming from the hill above the village, where the tasiu lived with his apprentices. The latest news of the tasiu? He had issued a curse that resulted in the death of a theological rival. Spectacular!

  The morning after my argument with Sabina, a long-legged runner arrived bearing word from the hilltop: the tasiu was expecting me. The rain had been dumping for two days—incidentally, ever since Eli had rescinded his prom
ise to open the skies. The big water was rising. At the risk of being stranded in Vureas Bay, I went to meet the tasiu. Ben, the magic coconut milk drinker, insisted on guiding me. Hymns were echoing from Vetuboso’s church when we set off. It was the one hundred and first anniversary of George Sarawia’s death. The service went on most of the morning. Ben was terrified the priest might spot him from the open-air chapel, so we slunk around the edge of the village, dashing from hut to hut like commandos.

  “Yu wanfala backslider!” I hissed at Ben conspiratorially.

  He nodded in agreement, then lowered his voice: “You must never talk this way around the tasiu.”

  We followed a mud track into the forest, up along a low ridge, through a dozen small clearings planted with young banana trees and trailing vines. The earth was the color of boiled yam. Ben whispered to me as we walked. He said I should not run away even if I became frightened. Higher, the wind pulled at the forest. The trees creaked and shuddered.

  A terrible scream rose from the forest. Two boys leapt out of the bush onto the trail in front of me. They wore loincloths and had smeared mud over their faces and thighs. They carried spears, which they pointed at me. Two more approached from behind. The boys grunted and yelled until their adolescent voices broke. The ambush was baffling but not scary in the least. It was a performance. Ben winked at me. The lads jumped up and down threateningly, and slapped me gently with lengths of vine rope, which they then wrapped around my wrists. I put on a grimace and allowed them to poke me, prod me, and pull me through the forest.

  We headed for the top of the ridge, a bare bluff that appeared to have been entirely seared by fire. We trudged through a patchwork of broken tree limbs and charcoal until we reached a white cross and a chapel overlooking the desolation. The tasiu met us at the chapel door. He was a magnificent-looking man with the physique and rough face of a rugby forward and the deep-set eyes of a mystic. He wore a black T-shirt and black shorts secured by a black-and-white-striped sash. A copper medallion hung from a coral necklace. He said nothing but waved me into the chapel.