The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  The rest house stood in a grove of flowering trees on the hillside above the port. There were papayas in the garden and frangipani blossoms scattered in the dirt. There was a cement porch on which the brothers lounged, smoked, chewed their betel, and guffawed at the world. These brothers were not at all like Tasiu Ken, the stoic dispenser of curses I had met on Vanua Lava. They nestled in each other’s arms like children at naptime. They shrieked like birds when amused. They liked to tease the Sisters of Melanesia, who lived in a house just down the hill. Chester became my home and the brothers my friends.

  A dozen tasiu lived in a communal household next door to Chester. Seven times a day, a bell would ring and the brothers would disappear to the chapel inside their house to pray. That’s what made the brothers powerful, people said. All that prayer. My first friend, little Brother Albert Wasimae, showed me the chapel. It was the size of a bedroom. There was a small wooden cross on the altar, and a picture of a pale, white Jesus wearing his crown of thorns. Also on the altar:

  Two chicken’s feet, bound together and caked in dried blood. The feet were a killing charm, surrendered by a man on Malaita.

  A plastic vial of ground coral. You could kill a man, or at least give him insomnia, if you blew that powder at him.

  A tongue of shriveled gingerroot, wrapped in a brittle leaf. You could use that root to spoil someone’s brain.

  A bullet, whose power was obvious.

  Brother Albert told me that all of these bad things had been rendered impotent by prayer and a sprinkling of holy water, which was kept in glass jugs on the floor. The bad things had been gathered in the course of the brothers’ Clearance Mission.

  I had heard about this Clearance Mission. It was not the same as evangelical work; it was a campaign of direct action against black magic. The tasiu would tour the countryside, making surprise visits to villages where people had complained of curses and sorcery. When they arrived, the brothers ordered the entire community to come to church. All the residents were then obligated to wrap their hands around one of the tasiu’s walking sticks and tell the truth about their own use of magic. People knew that kastom spells were no match for those walking sticks, just as the Egyptian pharaoh’s magicians had not stood a chance against the staff of Moses. They handed over whatever charms they had. A liar would simply be unable to let go of the walking stick until he told the truth. The test left the worst ne’er-do-wells in convulsive fits. Sometimes, said Brother Albert, if the confrontation was with a kastom devil, the clash could be so explosive it would break a walking stick in two. So the tasiu carried spares.

  There was a corkboard by the door of the chapel. Tacked to it were dozens of notes written by people who wanted the brothers’ help—or rather, God’s help, which they hoped the tasiu would direct their way. People asked the brothers to pray for their careers, their marriages, their children’s success in school exams. Some had attached money. A politician’s wife complained that her husband spent too much time campaigning: could the tasiu pray for the politician to come home, or at least send money? One writer lamented that his daughter was having trouble becoming pregnant and explained that this was likely the result of a curse cast by angry in-laws. Another pleaded for the brothers to save him from the “green leaf with satanic power.”

  People in the Solomon Islands had looked to the tasiu for hope and for miracles for almost eighty years. Their journey, like that of Abraham, began with a vision and a message from God.

  It was 1924. Ini Kopuria, a beefy young corporal in the Native Armed Constabulary, suffered an injury while trying to arrest a bad man. His leg was torn open, or perhaps it was broken. Nobody remembered the details. It was the message that mattered. As he rested in hospital, Kopuria had a visitation from Jesus. “Ini,” said Jesus, “you are not doing the work I want you to do.” It took Kopuria several months to realize that what Jesus really wanted was for him to organize a fraternity of native missionaries to carry the gospel to all the places where people still clung to their heathen ways.

  The bishop of Melanesia, John Steward, ferried Kopuria around the islands aboard the Southern Cross so that he could recruit volunteers. By the end of the year, Kopuria had enlisted six. The volunteers returned to Kopuria’s farm at Tabalia, on the northern tip of Guadalcanal. They cleared the jungle and built a house for their headquarters. They called each other tasiu. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience to the church. They adopted a uniform, which consisted of a simple black loincloth and a black belt, underneath which was wrapped a white sash. This was the birth of the Melanesian Brotherhood.

  The brothers traveled in pairs, trekking barefoot to the most remote pagan villages in the Solomon Islands. They did not behave like other missionaries. They were humble. They worked in people’s gardens, slept in people’s homes, and spread the word gently. They also carried walking sticks, which they used to exorcise evil forces from bodies and places. Even in the early days, islanders recognized that the tasiu carried a tremendous amount of mana. People said they could heal the sick and perform miracles. They were not afraid of devils or ancestral spirits. Their mana was similar to the power held by kastom priests, but it did not come from traditional spirits or ancestors. It came from God. What made the tasiu holy was their prayer, their devotion, their vow of poverty, their separation from material striving. People respected the clergy. But they revered the tasiu. Everyone knew that God worked through the tasiu, and that crossing them was akin to crossing God.

  Everyone knew that when the darkness closed in on Honiara, when the city and its shanties were claimed by chaos, fear, and dumb violence, it was the Melanesian Brotherhood—not the police, the government, or foreigners—who brought back the light. In 2000, when bullets were whizzing back and forth between the barricades that surrounded Honiara, the brothers camped for four months in the no-man’s-land between the Malaitan and Guadalcanalese militants. The tasiu negotiated for the release of hostages, they calmed bands of vigilantes, they sheltered refugees. They carried the bodies of the dead back to their relatives. They exhumed corpses from shallow graves so that murder victims could be identified. They marched into militant camps to press for peace.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ we appeal to you: stop the killing, stop the hatred, stop the payback,” went their official letter. “Those people you kill or you hate are your own Solomon Islands brothers. Blood will lead to more blood, hatred will lead to greater hatred and we will all become the prisoners of the evil we do.”

  Their prediction was accurate. After hundreds of people were shot, chopped, or tortured to death, hundreds more were wounded, and tens of thousands of people displaced, it was generally agreed that the country had indeed become a prisoner of hatred. The killing did not ease up until the tasiu made their most famous stand, out past the airport on the Alligator Creek Bridge. Everyone knew the story: how the tasiu had walked right out onto the concrete stage of the bridge with their walking sticks; how, shielded from the bullets only by their holiness, they created a human barrier between the ignorant armies. The fighters saw that the tasiu were not hurt by their bullets. They saw that God disapproved of their violence. This was the beginning of the end of the war.

  After the peace agreement was signed, members of the Melanesian Brotherhood led the ex-militants and their convoys of stolen trucks into Honiara and presided over the peace celebrations. For all their dashing back and forth amid the bullets, not a single tasiu was killed during the conflict. Most people agreed this was a sign of their special relationship with God.

  Now, when people in Honiara wanted to forget their sad stories and push back the darkness a little, they talked about the Melanesian Brotherhood. The tasiu had pulled a demon from so-and-so’s soul. The tasiu had used a dash of holy oil and a tap of a walking stick to extract a sickness-inducing stone from a man’s wrist. The tasiu had rescued a bloodied victim from Harold Keke’s boys and taken him to their base at Tabalia, where God had made him strong again, then sent a single thunderbolt to i
lluminate the faces of the man’s rescuers.

  Everyone’s favorite tasiu story was one about the snake gun: The Peace Monitoring Council had been attempting for more than a year to retrieve arms from all the ex-militants. But the boys liked their guns and did not want to give them up. The police weren’t much help, largely because members of the Royal Solomon Islands Police had stolen their own guns and distributed them to wantoks in the first place. The situation seemed hopeless. So a few months before my arrival, the government had asked the Melanesian Brotherhood to take over the job of disarmament. The tasiu formed a special unit to go out and ask for the guns back, in God’s name.

  The disarmament unit had already collected several hundred guns when news came of a shootout on the outskirts of Honiara. The tasiu, not the police, went to investigate. They drove to the house of the man responsible. He denied everything. The lead tasiu told him, “We know you were shooting a gun at your neighbors, and if you don’t give us that gun, we will just have to wait here until you change your mind.” They waited. The man sweated nervously in the sun. Minutes passed, maybe hours. Finally, a shadow appeared on the man’s dirt floor. It slithered out into the sunlight. The man’s son said: “Daddy! Daddy! Look at the snake!” The man tried to ignore the shadow, which continued to writhe threateningly in front of him. One tasiu said, “Don’t touch it.” Then he reached down and grabbed the snake by its head. The serpent stopped writhing. It became as hard as metal. The tasiu lifted the snake in the air, and it was transformed back into the machine gun it had always been. This is the kind of story they tell now in the Solomon Islands.

  I was fascinated by the way the brothers had grafted the traditional concept of mana onto Christianity. Like the old kastom priests, the tasiu were credited with directing supernatural forces, but their power came from the same God I had learned about in Sunday school. I had been taught to see biblical miracles as educational metaphors. But the brothers had taken the Anglican God and wrestled him back down to earth, where he was behaving much like a Melanesian ancestor spirit, much like the god of my own ancestors. Here he was, allowing his power to be directed by incantations and walking sticks. Here he was, getting involved and taking sides, just like in the Old Testament.

  I was drawn to the tasiu, though for weeks I had felt unfit to befriend them; surely they would sense my skepticism and know my questions were insincere. But my time in the lagoons had changed me. Now I was ready. I wanted to witness the spectacle of the clearance and disarmament missions. I wanted to see the brothers make those sorcerers squirm in church. I wanted to see them turn guns into snakes, or at least to see them strike the fear of God into the hearts of men like Jimmy Rasta. But the brothers in Honiara had no idea which of their outstations were conducting clearance raids. We learned of clearance victories only after the fact (some ginger collected here, a sorcerer humbled there). The disarmament crew was more easily caught. They were based in the bishop of Melanesia’s old house. I went there and found them watching videos of old American cop shows—“to improve our investigative skills,” they explained.

  One member of the team promised to take me along on a mission. Brother Clement Leonard was a great bear of a man with enormous hands and ruby-stained lips. “You stick with me,” he said. The brother had so much betel crammed into his cheek, he could only slur. “I am your connection. I am your source. I will help you.”

  “There is urgency,” I said. It was true. I was running out of money and time. But the urgency was about more than that. I was worried that my memories of lagoon magic might fade. I was worried that I would lose my new way of seeing.

  “I understand,” said Brother Clement. But he must not have understood, because I didn’t see him for days.

  I could not get close to things. The adventure was always yesterday. The action was always beyond the horizon. In fact, receiving news of any action in the Solomons was a bit like looking at the night sky; you knew a star had been real at some point because its light reached you, but you also knew that spark was thousands of years old and that the star’s fire might by now have died entirely.

  I was waiting out the midday glare at Amy’s Snack Bar on Mendaña Avenue one afternoon when a tallish man with delicate pale skin strode by. I noticed white skin in Honiara because, like everyone else, I kept an eye out for my own wantoks. (After months alone, I was beginning to grasp the wantok concept. Nobody understands you like someone from your own island, or even better, like someone you can talk to without resorting to pidgin, which is nobody’s mother tongue.)

  The white man wore glasses and had an unruly shock of light brown hair. He was smoking. That wasn’t remarkable. This was: he wore a black shirt, black shorts, and a black-and-white sash around his waist. I had never thought of asking the tasiu if there were any white men in their order. I couldn’t imagine someone from my world falling so completely into the realm of miracles. I pushed my way onto the street and chased him down.

  “Awright?” he said when I caught him. His accent, to my untrained ear, suggested south London, salt-of-the-earth, but he had the bearing of an Old Etonian.

  I knew of the brotherhood’s vow of poverty, and I had seen their diet of root vegetables and mush, so I suspected the white tasiu would accept an invitation to dinner at the Hong Kong Palace, where the spring rolls were served with ketchup but the beer was cold.

  “Brother,” I said, after we had polished off a couple of SolBrew, “what the hell are you doing in that uniform?”

  He laughed. “Sometimes I wake up and think I must be bonkers,” he said, wolfing down the last of our chop suey. “I’m forty-two years old, and I have no estate, no house, no money, no car, no material symbols to mark my existence…”

  “You are an ascetic,” I said.

  “Actually, yes.”

  Richard Carter was born in Guildford, a cathedral town just south of London. His father was an Anglican priest. He had studied English and drama. He had always been a Christian, at least in a postmodern sense. He had thought that God was a good idea, that Jesus was a very good teacher. Christianity had seemed a useful religion.

  The young man’s view of the cosmos changed after he moved to Indonesia, and then to the Solomons in 1987. He came to teach at the Church of Melanesia’s Selwyn College. He saw things he had never seen in England, things that convinced him, just as they had convinced the Victorian missionaries, that the struggle between good and evil was something that could be seen and touched. Carter was ordained a minister in 1992. From the beginning, he was drawn to the tasiu, and they to him. He was captivated by their lives, by their meekness, by the tenderness and nobility of their community, by the holiness he saw in their poverty. The brothers must have seen a similar holiness in Carter; they invited him to join their order, and he became Brother Richard. Soon he was rewriting Christian parables as Melanesian dramas, which the brothers performed on tour throughout the islands.

  “But what about the miracles?” I asked. Did he believe in the fantastical mana-ization of the brotherhood or in all that funneling of divine power through walking sticks and holy water? Had the islanders wiped the rational skepticism from his English soul? I wanted him to shout yes.

  But instead he smiled cryptically. “I have become more receptive to the mysteries of faith, to things that can’t be explained simply…”

  “Bending bullets?”

  “No, I don’t believe in bending bullets. But believe me, somehow this community of young men is able to do things that other Melanesians can’t. And it’s all through the grace of God. The brothers don’t spend three or four hours a day in prayer for nothing, you know. Here, let me tell you a story.

  “In my early days, I was on the Southern Cross, heading for the Reef Islands with the brothers. We heard on the ship’s radio that a man back at Taroaniara, the ship’s base, was possessed by some kind of evil. The poor guy had been foaming at the mouth, that kind of thing, and finally he had died. Well, by some miraculous coincidence, our first landfall in the Reefs
happened to be this man’s home village. We went ashore. The old folks gathered around and told us that the dead man had recently been selected as their next chief. But not only that: they said that anyone they had ever chosen to be their chief had been afflicted by a death curse—there had been possessions, sickness, freak accidents, all kinds of stuff. It had been going on for decades. You could feel the darkness in the village. We were faced with an ancestral curse so strong it had cast a pall of darkness over the place. So the brothers sat down and decided to perform a clearance.

  “The next morning we conducted a rousing service about the power of light over darkness. We reminded people that in the presence of God, evil is a nonreality: it cannot exist. We made a procession around the village with big pots of holy water. We went from house to house, driving out evil and praying while the brothers marked crosses in the sand. A lot of this ‘driving out’ involves using primeval symbols, you know: water, fire, or marks in the sand to express spiritual truth. Anyway, this exercise was incredibly powerful. More and more people joined the procession. They followed the brothers around. They started singing hymns to the rhythm of kastom songs. Then, after the ceremony, all the people who had been pie-faced, dark and gray, they were suddenly light and cheery and laughing. You could feel the oppression lifting like a great weight from their shoulders! There was a physical sense of release from darkness. I felt it, too, the darkness dissolving away. And, you know, the village has never been bothered by that curse again.”

  “And this is your miracle?”

  “Yes, it is. I would probably explain those events differently than the Melanesians would. But their fears were real. The darkness that held them was not something you could simply dismiss. It was killing people, and the brothers helped put an end to it. I have no difficulty coming to terms with the miraculous aspect of what happened there.”