The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  Back at the height of the civil war, the only ships to ply the waters around Guadalcanal without fear were those run by the Church of Melanesia. The militants would never dare harass an Anglican ship. So it was now. And so it was that I was helped across the water by a band of church ladies. The Anglican Mothers’ Union had planned a congress on Malaita long before Rasta’s gang had paralyzed the seas, and they had no intention of being waylaid. After all, they had booked a mission ship.

  The mothers, dozens of them, arrived at the port in T-shirts and skirts. They squawked and huffed and dropped their bags of sweet potatoes into the hold of the Kopuria, a cute wooden tub named for the founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood. The Kopuria was all of sixty feet long and painted honeybee yellow. We chugged off at a donkey’s pace, plowing across the calm sound, rousing schools of flying fish, whose rainbow fins beat like the wings of hummingbirds and left trails of shivers across the water.

  We reached Malaita at dusk. I hadn’t given much thought to where I would sleep. Everyone else had. I would obviously be staying with the bishop of Malaita. Not only was the bishop born on the same island as me—Canada—but we spoke the same language. That made him my wantok, and therefore obliged by kastom to take care of me. In fact, they said, the bishop acted like everyone was a wantok. His house was overflowing with de facto wantoks.

  That night we gathered in the bishop’s yard. The mothers cooed and fussed over the bishop. They placed a flower garland around his neck. The bishop said grace in Solomons pidgin and reassured the mothers that, even though they were on Malaita, they need not be scared. Then he plunged into a plateful of pig fat and mashed yams, scooping the food into his mouth with his fingers while they watched approvingly.

  “There is no helping it,” the bishop told me, licking his fingertips. “The women refuse to serve themselves unless I have started eating.”

  I didn’t trust the bishop at first. I suppose I had decided even before we met that he would be a strange exile living a colonialist fantasy. His very presence on Malaita made him suspect: after all, his mission included the quashing of Melanesia’s most resilient pagan enclaves. Why had he come to Malaita, if not to bear the torch of cultural imperialism?

  I studied him, looking for Victorian anachronisms, conspicuous paternalism, shades of my great-grandfather. But Terry Brown offered none of these things. He was a gentle, slightly awkward man who stumbled through small talk and lurched through his house in a threadbare T-shirt that read “No Fear.” His trunklike legs shook the floor with every step. He seemed always to be rustling through papers, chasing some new administrative emergency, peering through his thick glasses at the ceiling, pondering, pondering. Sometimes his face bore a look of vague shock, as though seized by the first tremors of a heart-stopping epiphany.

  The bishop kept a stained map of Malaita on the wall of his office. He had pressed colored pins into the map to show where the church had spread across the island. There were congregations all along the seashore, clustered in coves and strung out along the road that ran from Auki up the west coast. There were pins scattered through the northern mountain ranges. But in the dead center of the island, across a ragged mess of creeks and peaks and topographic contours, the map was pristine and unpierced: Kwaio country.

  “That’s where I need to go,” I said.

  The bishop hummed thoughtfully. “We can get you to the edge of the Kwaio bush, but our influence ends there,” he said. “You just don’t wander into Kwaio country without an invitation.”

  “But aren’t you evangelizing up there?”

  “Well, the Melanesian Brotherhood has certainly tried. But the Kwaio aren’t interested in the gospel. They only come to the brothers asking for medicine or for help finding lost pigs. The brothers are getting a bit sick of it, actually.”

  “Why aren’t you up there converting them?”

  The bishop looked over the top of his glasses at me. He knew I was baiting him. “Because they do not wish to be converted. And, to be honest, I’m sure they could teach our Christians a few things. They are humble. They are generous. Their communities are strong. People support each other. Look, the Seventh-day Adventists have been trying to evangelize these people for a hundred years, but the bush Kwaio have been quite happy to go on killing pigs for their ancestors. If some of them decide to pack it in and get baptized, well that’s fine, we’ll take them, but I’m inclined to just, oh, live and let live.”

  “But if they die without being baptized, then aren’t they bound for hell?”

  “Ah! There’s the question that we Christians have been asking ourselves for a century. Some Christians feel that traditional culture is demonic and must be overturned—you’ll hear that from the Adventists. On the other end of the spectrum, especially in the West, people are saying that salvation is possible, um, yes, without any knowledge of Christ whatsoever. Universalism, they call it. The idea is that good Muslims and good Buddhists and, yes, even ancestor-worshippers, can go to heaven, too. So there is less of a drive to evangelize.”

  The pagans were the least of the bishop’s concerns, anyway. He had his hands full with his own flock. It was Christians who were running around with guns, stealing boats and trucks, robbing their rivals’ stores, burning down each others’ houses. The bishop was going to have a serious talk with Jimmy Rasta for starters. But his biggest beef with his flock was theological. Malaitans were still guided by their belief in mana. They believed that kastom chiefs had it. Rich men had it, too. Most of all, they believed the clergy had mana. People asked the bishop to bless tree bark, oils, potions, and kastom medicine. They asked his priests for holy water to pour into the radiators of stalled cars. They pinched the bishop’s dictionary of angels, believing that if they knew the “secret” names of those angels, they could control them, calling on their powers to bring them wealth or kill their enemies, just as the Kwaio called on the mana of their ancestral spirits. They were sure that God’s power could be diverted, focused, distilled, and put to work for themselves.

  And then there was the Melanesian Brotherhood, who had the most mana of all, said the bishop.

  After performing an exorcism in a village near Auki, a group of tasiu had built a small stone cairn by the road to “protect” the village. Not long after, a drunk walking home from a party stopped to empty his bladder on the cairn. “According to the story people told later, that guy only got about a hundred yards before—pow!—he was struck by lightning, or an invisible bullet or, well, something. He died, or so the story went. I never saw any proof of any of this, of course, but the message is that one shouldn’t mess with the brothers. All this is all rather problematic for Christian theologians. I’m very, very concerned.”

  “Don’t you believe in miracles?”

  “Of course I do. But our relationship is supposed to be directly with God. People here are trying to use angels like they once used their ancestral spirits. They are still trying to accumulate and direct mana like their ancestors did. There is almost no reference in this to Christ at all. Christianity is not about wielding power. It’s not about personal charisma. It’s not about mana. It is about meekness. Jesus gave up his power in order to die, weak and helpless, on the cross. This idea is repeated over and over again in Corinthians: Strength is made perfect in weakness!”

  The bishop encouraged his priests to focus on the New Testament, on Jesus and resurrection through love, but Malaitans seemed to crave the battles and divine favoritism of the Old. In fact, they cherished the myth and miracles of the Old Testament so much they extrapolated them, drew them out through the centuries and across the oceans to include their island. Some Malaitans firmly believed they were descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel, said the bishop. A few hundred generations ago, a descendant of the Hebrew tribe of Levi supposedly drifted across the globe, washed up on the shore south of Auki, and started again. The theory made a strange kind of sense: traditional Malaitan kastom paralleled the kastom of the Israelites, the ones given to Moses
and written down in the Book of Leviticus. Rules around the impurity of menstruating women, the sacredness of worship sites, the details of blood sacrifice…Malaitans had followed them all, long before Europeans arrived. Somewhere along the way, the Malaitans had simply substituted their ancestors for Yahweh. The biggest sticking point in this theory concerned those blood sacrifices: the Israelites sacrificed lambs to their god, but there were no sheep in Melanesia, so the lost tribe had no choice but to switch to a less than kosher alternative. Pork.

  The lost tribe theory had gained momentum during the civil war, particularly when Malaita Eagle commanders circulated a treatise whose author used quotes from Genesis and Deuteronomy to “prove” that Malaitans shared their pride and aggressiveness with the sons of Jacob. Malaitans, who had never gotten along particularly well with each other, suddenly had a myth to bind them: they were different from the primitives across the water. They were bound by history and collective superiority. They were the lost tribe! It worked until the armistice was signed in 2000. Then Malaitans turned their guns and machetes on each other again.

  All this saddened the bishop. Christianity was supposed to free the Malaitans from their fears and their restrictive kastom rules, but a perverted version of kastom was enjoying a kind of resurgence. Various Christian sects were bringing the old tabus back, especially rules regarding women. They forbade women to wear shorts. They forced women to remain in isolation during menstruation. They jacked up the price of brides to include hard cash as well as the traditional exchange of shell money. One breakaway priest had a vision that told him that women should not be permitted to wear ribbons in their hair.

  The greatest perversion of all had occurred with the age-old kastom of compensation, said the bishop. Islanders had once relied on grand feasts and the ritual exchange of pigs, shell money, and favors to create bonds between clans and to reconcile all kinds of disputes. But the cash economy had twisted compensation into a grotesque caricature of itself. Malaitans were now demanding mountains of cash for bride price, war damages, and affronts real and imagined. The compensation racket was making men like Jimmy Rasta rich. It pretended to be kastom, but it was extortion, pure and simple. Example: A boy in the bishop’s youth choir had touched a girl on the shoulder. The girl’s brothers had demanded $400 for the indiscretion.

  The bishop put me up in the spare room of his tin-roofed bungalow. I studied him, his household, and what I had wrongly thought was his exile. In 1996, Terry Brown had been living in Toronto when the Church of Melanesia announced it needed a new bishop for Malaita. He had spent a few years teaching in the islands, so why not put his name forward? He was elected in a unanimous decision by a committee of Melanesian clergy. He came to Melanesia alone, but his aloneness was not tolerated. The bishop’s Melanesian predecessors all had installed their extended families in the official residence, but Terry Brown did not have a family. It didn’t matter. The residence was like a sponge. It gave him one.

  There was George, a bright-eyed Polynesian teen who had adopted the bishop as his father. George’s function in the house seemed to be to prance Pan-like about the house and hold guests’ hands. He had discovered glitter paint at a church dance. It sparkled from his eyebrows the night I arrived.

  There was Derrick of the deep facial scars and dark moods. One afternoon, Derrick asked to borrow the stick of underarm deodorant he had found while digging through my pack. I said fine. Then he rubbed it through his beard. Derrick had once been Auki’s Casanova, but he had fallen in love with the wrong girl. Her family demanded fifteen lengths of common shell money, two yards of red shell money, two thousand dolphin’s teeth, and a whopping $6,000 in bride price, all of which was taking Derrick years to raise. The bishop paid him to drive his truck.

  There was jovial Thomas, who arrived for tea and toast on the bishop’s veranda each morning, and whose wife would invariably come searching for him by midday. Thomas was very skilled at driving race cars on the bishop’s new computer.

  Then there was gentle Tony, who took care of the bishop and quietly nagged the others to do their dishes. They were an immensely likable bunch.

  “Melanesian society is corporate,” the bishop explained to me one night as he cooked sausage stew for the gang. “There are no individuals here. You are either part of the community or you are quite simply considered something less than human. I have never been alone here—I am not permitted to be alone.”

  The bishop’s residence reminded me of a fraternity house. Dirty dishes were stacked high. Walls were flecked with dried tomato sauce. People came and went without knocking. Strangers lurked in the kitchen, poked their heads into the refrigerator, then froze when they spotted me watching through the screen door. There was a note tacked to the bishop’s bedroom door: “Please don’t search through drawers and take things that aren’t yours.” The boys in the house were not servants. The bishop did most of the cooking. The boys borrowed his slippers and sweaters. They went to the market with his money to buy yams and returned with pockets full of betel nut instead. They played games on his computer late into the evening. They teased him. They rarely called him bishop. They yelled at him from the veranda. “Big B!” they shouted. “Come out, Big B!” And the bishop would shake his head and chuckle to himself.

  For a time, I thought the bishop was being taken advantage of. Perhaps he was, but no more than any other Solomon Islands big man. This is the essence of the Solomon Islands wantok system: if you are a big man, you are obliged to share your wealth. If you have food, your wantoks will come and eat it. If you have money, they will ask for it. If you start a canteen store, they will clear the shelves before you can sell anything. Clothes they will borrow, permanently. If you join the government and move to a house in Honiara, your wantoks will move in with you and pester you until you divert some of that government cargo their way.

  The bishop confided to me that at first he had been shocked by the touching, the familiarity, the closeness, the relentless communalism of Melanesian life. Now it made him smile. He wanted to write a book to convince people in places like Toronto that this was a better way to live. It is hard to disagree. His peculiar home was the warmest and most loving I had entered in years.

  I lingered for days while the boys planned my invasion of the Kwaio bush. One afternoon, as we shared tea and biscuits on the veranda, George grabbed my hand excitedly: we could climb over the spine of the island and surprise the Kwaio! Nope, said the bishop. Too dangerous. Better to start from the Seventh-day Adventist mission on the east coast. A dirt road crossed the island north of Auki; from there, I could catch a canoe down the coast to the mission. The road hadn’t been maintained since the start of the war, but Derrick insisted that with him at the wheel, the bishop’s truck could make the crossing. I told him I knew that “road” didn’t really mean “road” in Melanesia.

  On Sunday, I went with the boys to the tin-roofed cathedral, where I saw the bishop finally transformed into the Victorian version of himself. He towered above his congregation, a giant in cream vestments and shining tassels. He wore a honey-gold miter and clutched a great curled staff. He swung a silver censer full of incense, and the smoke drifted around him as he prayed. The bishop’s magnificence carried me back to my childhood, to the morning of my father’s death, to the bishop of Tasmania gazing down at me from his portrait, noble, good, at peace with God. Now the choir rose, and the cathedral echoed with the sound of pipe drums. Two dancers appeared, teenage boys with bare shoulders shining and stone discs clattering on their chests. The boys stamped their feet and shook their rattles. The cement floor vibrated as they punched the air and charged up the aisle toward the bishop. In their wake came two girls, breasts bound with strands of shell money, arms straining under the weight of a wooden tablet. The tablet was decorated with flowers. On it was an open Bible. The girls brought the Bible to the bishop. He lifted it and he kissed it.

  This was not the moment that revealed the bishop to me. He had not imposed all this Anglo-Catholic
ritual on the islanders. It was they who had preserved it since Victorian times and only recently layered it with kastom’s drumbeat. It was they who had provided the bishop with his finery and insisted that he read at least part of the liturgy in English, rather than Solomons pidgin. No, I saw the bishop most fully after the service.

  Raindrops thundered down on the tin roof, but still the people poured out of the church onto the lawn. There, the drummers were joined by a pipe band. The pipers blew on hollowed sections of bamboo. The drummers smacked at the open ends of sections of PVC pipe with their flip-flops. The rhythm was playful. People formed a circle and began to dance under the flowering trees. They surrounded the bishop, who had changed back into shirtsleeves and shorts. They took him by both his hands and pulled him in among them, and they shrieked with joy as he lurched about, elbows high, eyes raised ecstatically to the sky. “Look at B! Look, he dances like a frog!” George shouted. And the rain fell on the bishop, and mud squeezed out from the lawn and splattered his great calves, and flower petals fell from the trees, and the big man closed his eyes and giggled like a tickled child.

  I felt a surprising joy, and as the wind swept across the grass and the eastern sky, I allowed myself to be pulled into the dance. And I realized this:

  The bishop had not come to Malaita to rule. He did not love Malaitans because they revered him, deferred to him, waited on him, or obeyed him—for they did none of these things. This bishop loved Malaitans because they bossed him around. They harangued and chided him. They yelled at him. They invaded his house, asked him for favors and money. They were not afraid to touch him, not afraid to pat him on the shoulder while he was cooking, not afraid to grasp his hand tightly, without reservation and for no particular reason at all. He loved them because they ate his stews, and when they were finished, they leaned back and belched in unself-conscious contentment; because he had spent years in a northern metropolis where good people lived half-lives, and he had known what it was like to rub shoulders with thousands of them and still feel an immense, crushing solitude. He loved Malaitans because they surrounded him like water, because they made him know beyond any doubt that he was not alone, and in this way they were proof that his god, the God of Love, was real.