The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  David MacLaren had explained this geography to me and insisted that it shouldn’t be taken literally. The Kwaio didn’t really think that women were lowly and impure and that men were more holy. No, they both had their own sacredness, and the menstruation hut was a kind of earthly mirror image of the priest’s house. But everyone knows that sewage flows downhill. And here in Jack’s village, it was the women’s place to wallow in it.

  The village was only a hundred days old. Apparently, the community—which consisted of an extended family of about twenty—had moved to avoid a spiritual catastrophe. A man had fallen ill at their last settlement. He was near death when Jack received a dream in which the ancestors revealed the cause of the illness. A woman had urinated, or perhaps begun her menstruation cycle, in one of the village huts. Jack knew that the grandfathers’ displeasure about this defilement could only be relieved by moving and starting again. So here they were in the fresh mud.

  Jack’s wife—nobody told me her name—was using a stone to smash a heap of gnali nuts she had collected in the forest. They tasted like almonds. Mosquitoes rose in the late-afternoon haze. Jack and his wife were highly amused to see me spread insect repellent on my legs. “Waet man weak tumas,” I explained, and Jack nodded in agreement. I was miserable. My joints felt as though they had been battered with a pig club. The boil on my toe had ruptured obscenely. I wrapped it in duct tape. Where was the damn kastom doctor? It was not that I imagined any sort of magic would heal me. I wanted to see the kastom doctor in the same way a tired mountaineer wants to see the top of Everest. The doctor’s arrival would mean the beginning of my journey back out of East Kwaio.

  “I think you have a good life here,” I lied to Jack.

  He nodded and explained that life in the Kwaio bush was good because he and his family still obeyed the rules that a giant snake had imparted to the ancestor Ofama, 125 generations before. Respect the ancestors and their shrines. Don’t steal pigs or women that aren’t yours. Don’t kill without a good reason. Take care of your own ground, your pigs, and your taro gardens. Be tidy. Don’t use your house as a toilet. All quite reasonable. Oh, and men must never eat from a plate used by women. Men should live and shit uphill, women downhill. Women and the things they touch should never, ever, gain more altitude than men. Men’s bathing water should be diverted so it doesn’t mix with women’s pollution somewhere downhill. Priests should offer extravagant sacrifices of burned pig to the ancestors, and the meat should be eaten by the priest alone. Etcetera.

  My feminist friends nod when they hear these stories. They tell me that kastom, myth, and tabu are tools of the patriarchy, of powerful men pushing everyone else down, especially women (i.e., in the menstruation hut).

  That may be true, but I was less interested in the politics of the rules than I was in their mythical origins. The bishop of Malaita had introduced me to the theories of French linguist Maurice Leenhardt, who had lived on New Caledonia between 1909 and 1926. Leenhardt concluded that Melanesian myths were not fictions plucked from the ether so much as they were an expression of lived experience. By this I believe he meant that, though Melanesians could not control their natural world through technology, their myths provided tools to help them adapt to it. Every day they saw how the order of the world depended on the standards of their conduct.

  In some ways, Leenhardt’s theory seemed to fit here in East Kwaio. When the ancestors were honored and their rules obeyed, life generally went well. But when the rules were broken, people got sick, crops failed, and women became infertile. Sometimes natural calamities occurred without warning, but the Kwaio always seemed to find a reason (a shrine disturbed, for example, or a house fouled by urine) to connect these events to the ancestors’ wrath. Things could be made better only by offering a sacrifice to manipulate the forces of the supernatural realm in their favor, or at least to placate them.

  I couldn’t see how the edicts of Melanesian ancestors differed from the exacting rules that Moses had handed down to the Israelites in the Book of Leviticus, or the bizarre prohibitions—no consumption of fish without scales, for example—still maintained by the Seventh-day Adventists. Humans crave structure. We crave rules. Where few are required, we extrapolate; we tease them out of our myths. Obey, or the gods will exact vengeance. Obey, or you will burn in hell. Obey, or the taro will rot in the ground.

  All Jack Doaka had to do to reinforce his faith was to look at the world beyond the Kwaio hills. It was going to hell in a hand-basket. Jack had no doubt that all the great evils of Solomon Islands life stemmed from Christian transgression. War? That’s what Christians did; it’s what the government—which was really just an arm of the church—brought to East Kwaio in 1927. Sexually transmitted diseases? They were spread by Christians who defied the old sex tabus. Poverty? That came from dishonoring the ancestors, which Christians were always keen to do. Christians were greedy. They chased money and forgot their place in the world.

  Not only had Christians rejected their grandfathers in favor of one from a faraway island—how crazy was that?—but they had followed the missionaries to the coast and given up their ancestral lands. This was the biggest crime of all, said Jack. Most Christians, he said, couldn’t even find their own land anymore. How could there be peace when men were living on other men’s land? “The grannies warned me that one day the people would rise up and start killing each other over the land,” said Jack. “See what happened to the Malaitans who didn’t listen, the ones who left the land of them and went off to Guadalcanal. Bigfala trouble nao! We don’t have those fights here, because we listen to the grannies and we stay close to them. We stay on the land blong mifala nomo.” It was clear that the Christians’ luck had run out, said Jack. They had completely fallen out of favor with the ancestors, and now they were paying for it. They had no power. Just look at Peter Laetebo, the chief down in Gounabusu.

  “What about him?” I said. “God saved his boy’s life. That’s why he became a Christian.”

  Jack thought that was hilarious. While he cackled and wiped tears from his eyes, Roni explained the joke. Just yesterday, Chief Peter had paid Jack a load of shell money so that Jack would sacrifice a pig for the sake of his other sick son. The young man was sick because he had gone and cut down a tree near a pagan gravesite. The ancestors were naturally furious.

  “Years ago, Peter could have made this sacrifice himself,” said Jack. “But now that he is a Christian, he is unclean. He has lost all his power. He has to come ask mifala if he wants a favor from the ancestors.”

  So much for spiritual fidelity. Roni gave a satisfied smile. He said that Peter was so impure, he wasn’t even allowed to enter the pagan villages. But Roni could. The pagans knew he wasn’t a real Christian.

  Jack said he did not mean to be disrespectful. He was sure that Jesus was a strong ancestor. It was just that he was an ancestor from another island; it was natural that his power would be weak here on Malaita. The only Christians Jack knew who actually wielded power were the tasiu. Yes, said Jack. The Melanesian Brotherhood. They had savve.

  I cannot remember the kastom doctor’s face. Later, Roni explained that this was part of his magic. I do remember that he was a tall bony man and that he wandered out of the forest carrying a black umbrella and a woven handbag full of betel nuts and lime. He did not introduce himself. Nobody said hello to him. He reminded me of a crow. The doctor squatted on a log and watched us silently for a time. He husked a betel nut with his teeth. He pulled out a bamboo container from which he spooned a finger of lime into his mouth, along with the betel. He chewed until the pink juice dribbled down his chin. finally, he let out a bored sigh, lifted himself up, and strode toward me on those long, scaly legs. He paused in front of me, cocked his head, and cooed softly.

  “Take your shirt off,” translated Roni.

  I took my shirt off, then realized the whole village had come together to watch the spectacle. The only people not paying attention were two teenage boys, who were engrossed in picking through each
other’s scalps and biting to death whatever it was they found.

  I sat still. The doctor paced around me as though inspecting a show dog. He nodded and hummed knowingly. He ran a hand along my shoulder blades. I shivered. He kneaded the skin on my shoulders and along my spine. That was quite nice. Then I felt the doctor’s breath on my right shoulder blade. I couldn’t see him, but my nostrils quivered at the mulchlike scent of betel nut on his breath. I could feel both his hands cupped against my shoulder, and I could hear the rush of air as he sucked and blew through them. As the exhalations came harder and faster, I could feel spit striking my skin and I could hear the terrible cough and gurgle of the doctor’s effort, which reached a troubling crescendo and then ceased with a loud pop.

  The crowd gave a communal “Ahhhh.”

  “What? What?” I said.

  “Lookim!” said Roni, pointing to the doctor, who had retreated a couple of yards. The doctor was retching and holding his throat. Then he let out a tremendous cough, and something came flying out of his mouth, much as a hairball might issue from the throat of a cat. He picked the projectile out of the dirt and showed it to me. It was a tiny wooden disc. It was red, but dusted with lime.

  “That is what made you sick,” the doctor said quietly. “Wanfala rubbish man down in Gounabusu put this inside your skin.” He bit a corner off the disk. “There. Now I have killed the swear.* You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  The doctor warned me not to spend another night down in Gounabusu. His magic would not protect me from my enemies in the Christian village, he said. Then he extended his black umbrella and strode off into the forest.

  The rain finally came, and so did night. We took shelter in the communal hut with the women, who served us unseasoned taro steamed inside lengths of bamboo. We ate with our hands. Everyone mumbled and joked quietly. I lay down on a wooden rack uphill from the women and watched them poke at the coals of the little fire glowing on the dirt between us. I could hear pigs grunting softly behind a leaf wall. I began to feel better. Not from the doctor’s cure, I told myself. Oh, no. The doctor and I both knew that his little bark disc had come not from under the skin of my back but from his handbag. It was still caked in lime. This was not the miracle I had been waiting for. Still, I did feel strangely comforted and unthreatened here among Jack’s clan. The air felt lighter than that on the coast. The mountain, when you were on it, was not hostile. Despite the outward chaos of pigs and mud and burned forest, I felt an ethereal, ordered calm. The wounds on my calves were beginning to dry out in the smoky air. The ache began to subside.

  It struck me that the mountain Kwaio led a peaceful life. It was paganism without the bite.

  “This is a far cry from the days of blood feuding and those ramo assassins,” I whispered to Roni. “So peaceful.”

  He translated for Jack.

  “Ramo…” said Jack. “Ramo…Ah, lamo!” The Kwaio, I remembered, substituted “l” for “r” when they spoke.

  “Ramo!” exclaimed Roni, and they both laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “You think the lamo are gone? Every village still has one! If someone seduces one of the daughters here, or steals a pig, or murders someone, Jack will gather a bounty of pigs and shell money so he can pay the lamo to go kill whoever did it.”

  “Tell me more!”

  “Why didn’t you just ask the lamo when he was here?” said Roni.

  “Wha—you never introduced me to a lamo!”

  Roni translated, and Jack laughed so hard tears came to his eyes.

  “The lamo was here all afternoon, but you ignored him, so he just healed you and went home,” said Roni.

  The doctor was the lamo. The doctor was the assassin.

  Six months after I left East Kwaio, a new administrator arrived at the Atoifi Adventist Hospital. He hiked out into the forest to measure a plot of land. He did not know that the land was the subject of an ownership dispute. A lamo met the administrator in that field and cut off his head. The Kwaio have always been passionate about their land. The severed head was recovered. The assassin was not.

  17

  Raiders of the Nono Lagoon

  I shall define cannibalism as a cult construction which refers to the inordinate capacity of the Other to consume human flesh as an especially delectable food.

  —GANANATH OBEYESEKERE,

  “Cannibal Feasts in Nineteenth-Century Fiji,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World

  The believer never forgets his first miracle. Mine remains utterly clear. It came to me high on a forested ridge above the skull grottoes, the sacrificial slabs, and the vast cradle of New Georgia Island’s Marovo Lagoon. That’s where I disobeyed the chief of Mbarejo and performed my ritual in the dead calm of afternoon. I made trees shake and birds take flight. I transformed the muggy stillness into a maelstrom of tearing wind, groaning tree trunks, hot raindrops, and churning mud. Let that be my story. I did make it rain, and for a good cause, too.

  It was never my intention to explore the lagoons of the Solomon Islands’ Western Province. The Southern Cross had ventured as far west as New Georgia in 1866, but the Anglicans never had the gumption to leave any teachers there. “New Georgia has been known to the Mission chiefly as an island inhabited by bloodthirsty head-hunters and cannibals,” wrote my great-grandfather in explaining the mission’s reticence.

  I was carried west by a moment of serendipitous frustration. A few days after returning from Malaita to Honiara, I was assured of the imminent departure of both the Eastern Trader and the MV Temotu, and had hauled my pack down to the port, ready for the five-day journey to Santa Cruz and my Nukapu.

  “You go when?” I asked the mate of the Eastern Trader.

  “Taem disfala Temotu hemi i go,” he said.

  “You go when?” I asked the engineer of the MV Temotu.

  “Maybe next week,” he said.

  “Bloody liar,” I fumed. “You have said the same thing for a month.”

  He just laughed.

  A curtain of rain swept across the pier. It lifted the betel husks and the garbage, carrying them in slow-moving streams around my feet. I had had enough. I would not be shackled to Honiara any longer. I marched to the next pier.

  “You go when?” I asked a sailor who was leaning on the rails of the first ship I saw.

  “Mi go wea?” he replied.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t care where you go. I’ll go anywhere as long as it’s today.”

  “Cranky waet man,” he said. “Mifala go neva. Sip, hem bagarup.”

  I tried the Compass Rose, whose steel deck was fully loaded with oil barrels and rebar.

  “You go when?” I asked a fat woman sitting with her children on the open deck.

  “Good question,” she said.

  I tried the Isabella. It would leave for Santa Isabel the following morning.

  Then the Baruku. It would leave for somewhere someday.

  Then the Tomoko, a once sleek ferry that looked as though it had been pelted with rocks. The Tomoko’s engines were rumbling. A sooty cloud was erupting from its smokestack. People were tossing babies, bags of rice, and grass mats into arms that reached out from its long passenger decks. Those arms were as black as beetle wings, the color of New Georgia skin. If the Tomoko was going anywhere, it was heading west, to New Georgia. Santa Cruz was east, but I didn’t care.

  “You go when? You go when?” I hollered. The bowline went slack.

  “Mifala go nao!” a voice yelled back, and a muscular hand dropped down from the upper deck. I reached for it and was pulled into a crowd of steaming bodies.

  “First class! First class!” I shouted. The owner of the hand that had pulled me aboard led me through a passageway—the floor was a slippery paste of oil, spit, crushed insects, and a disturbing slurry that seeped from the ship’s head—and then, to my shock, through a door that read: VIP Cabin. It was a miracle. One bunk was piled high with old computers. The other was mine. I smashed six cockroaches, blew air
into my mattress, lay down, and let the ship carry me away.

  Through the porthole, I watched the sea and the sky merge into night. Tarpaulins swayed. Doors knocked. Cockroaches crept into the folds of my clothing. The ship rolled me gently to sleep.

  I was awoken not by the light and bustle of dawn but by stillness. The Tomoko had stopped moving completely. The cough and rattle of the engine had settled to a restful hum. I listened. Finally, there came a shout in the distance, followed by a hoot from the bridge. Then, splashing water. I felt my way out onto the deck. A searchlight shot from the bridge into the blackness. It was reflected back by a dozen pairs of eyes, which drifted close and became men in slim dugout canoes. They paddled alongside the ship and passed baskets of yam, taro, and bushels of betel nut up over the rails. Flats of tinned meat and sacks of Delite Flour were passed down. The trade was carried out in murmurs until the Tomoko’s engine rumbled to life again. The ship pushed forward. For a while, the market men clung to our side, their canoes pulled along like lampreys on a great shark. Then we left them behind.

  As the stars faded, islands took shape around us. To port: dark coves wrapped in jungle, ridges climbing toward clouds and the red edge of dawn. To starboard: a low band of shadows stretched into the distance like sections of a long, crumbling wall. We had entered Marovo, longest of the lagoons that surround New Georgia and its smaller neighbors like a series of enormous moats, protected from the open ocean by a sixty-mile string of barrier islands.