The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  I collapsed my boat and took a plane from Cairns to Papua New Guinea. It was a little over an hour’s flight to the capital, Port Moresby, one of the most violent and decrepit towns on the face of the planet. Dusty and falling apart, it had been thoroughly vandalized before it could ever be finished, and so it looked like an enormous building site, slums and flimsy bungalows scattered across a number of ugly hills. It was full of ragged bearded blacks, New Guinea highlanders, most of whom bore an exact facial resemblance to the distinguished jazz pianist:, Thelonious Monk.

  “Wonem dispela?” asked the New Guinea customs officer, a wild-haired woman in a filthy dress, at the terminal. She began pinching my canvas sacks.

  This was incidentally the first time New Guinea Pidgin rang against my ear. “Neo-Melanesian,” as it is known by linguists, is one of the fascinations of the Western Pacific: “… many commentators err in thinking of Pidgin as static baby-talk … This is quite wrong … Pidgin is both complex and precise.” That is the opinion (ting) of a distinguished (gat nem) teacher (tisa) who has given this language (tok) a great deal of thought (tumas tingktingk) – according to Captain J. J. Murphy in his Buk Bilong Tok Pisin.

  Later, speaking it – saying the days of the week, for example – I felt that I had talked my way onto the pages of Finnegans Wake, where Joyce writes the days as moanday, tearsday, waitsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday. In Pidgin, they are mande, tunde, trinde, fonde, fraide, sarere, sande.

  “This fellow is a boat,” I said.

  “Yu tinka dispela bot? How long dispela bot blong yu?”

  “Four years, approximately.”

  “You taking dispela away wit’ you when you lusim hia?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “Wonem dispela bek?” Now she was gesturing to the lunchbag I had intended to throw away.

  “Trash,” I said.

  “Samting-nating,” she said, using a precise Neo-Melanesian expression, as she looked inside. “You pas.”

  She made a chalk mark on my canvas sacks.

  I said, “I’m looking for the plane to the Trobriands.”

  Hearing me, one of her colleagues said, “Balus I laik go nau.”

  “Does that mean the plane is leaving?”

  “Yesa.”

  In fact it was leaving in fifteen minutes from the domestic terminal, a shed up the road reeking of fruit peel and urine. I was forcibly helped by a dwarfish highlander in a wool hat. His teeth were black, his feet and his hands were huge, and he was wearing one of the dirtiest shirts I had ever seen. We struggled with my boat and my camping equipment.

  “Yu kam olsem wonem?” he asked. He was grinning. He was sweating. He himself was from Mount Hagen, he said. “Yu kam we? Yu go we? We yu stap long?”

  “I’m just visiting,” I said.

  “Wat dispela bikpela kago?”

  “It’s a boat.”

  “Kago bilong yu, putim long hap, klostu long dua.”And he dropped my bags near the door.

  “Where’s the plane?”

  “Balus i bagarap.”

  “It’s buggered up?” I said.

  The man smiled, he pulled off his wool hat and wiped the sweat from his face, and he then demanded oysters. But the word for oysters in Pidgin was also the word for money. I handed some over and he saluted me.

  The Twin Otter wasn’t buggered up, it was only out of gas, and the Australian pilot was saying to a bearded highlander, “I can’t go to Losuia without fuel now, can I?”

  The Men’s Room (Haus Pek Pek) outside the terminal was almost too disgusting to use. A prominent warning was in two languages: Do Not Misuse the Toilet/No KenBagarupim Haus Pek Pek.

  In the end, I was the only passenger on the little plane to the Trobriands.

  After an hour of high clouds and blue ocean the green islands shimmered into view. They were in the middle of nowhere: it was another experience of the Pacific being like the night sky, like outer space, and of island-hopping in that ocean being something like interplanetary travel. In the Solomon Sea below, there were about a dozen islands big and small; and they could not have been Hatter. Only a few feet above sea-level, without a single hump or mound, they appeared to be floating, like a thin layer of green weed rippling upon the sea. At the center of each of the larger islands was a bright boggy swamp, and I could see the tall coconut palms lining the dirt tracks, their long shadows stretching across the low bush. The pattern of each village was the same, just as Malinowski described – the lovely huts ranged around the stately carved and painted yam house. A great deal was obvious from the air: no cars, no paved roads, no power lines, no billboards, no tin roofs, no motor-boats. The promise of this simplicity thrilled me.

  The airstrip was a grassy swathe that resembled the fairway at a public golf course – rather trampled and untended. The terminal was a shed slightly smaller than a one-car garage. Two battered vehicles were parked near it, and about two hundred brown people were ranged around it. They wore shorts, and the sarongs they called lap-laps; some wore flowers behind their ears, or coronets of white wilted frangipani blossoms. About half a dozen carried carvings – walking sticks, salad bowls, war clubs, statuettes; the rest simply gaped as the plane taxied to a stop. This was one of the group activities of Kiriwina – the main Trobriand island – watching the Moresby plane land and take off.

  On the evidence of this crowd, there was no Trobriand face: these people had few features in common. The people ranged from black, smooth-skinned Nat King Cole Melanesian to light-skinned straighter-haired Polynesian types who would not have looked out of place in a hula competition in Waikiki, And every racial graduation and hair-type in between. Here and there was a woman with sun-scorched hair, almost blonde; and there were a handful of redheads, who looked as though they had overdone it with the henna treatment. It was a very odd assortment of people – there was even a scattering of albinos – and much odder for representing the population of a relatively small island in the middle of the ocean.

  I was approached by a fat little Trobriand woman. The pencil bristling from her frizzy hair gave the appearance of being stuck into her skull.

  “You can get in,” she said, and motioned to a rusted pick-up truck.

  She worked at the lodge, a tumbledown seaside inn, which was the only place to stay on the island – or in the entire archipelago, for that matter. It was assumed that any visitor who got off the plane was headed for the lodge.

  I had planned to get a lift to the shore, and camp there, but this arrangement suited me even better.

  “What is in all this luggage?”

  “A boat.”

  She shrugged, sighed, and made a face. On the way she sat clutching the steering wheel and glowering at the rubbly track ahead, hardly speaking. After a while I coaxed from her the information that her name was Amy and that she had spent some time in Australia. I put her sulkiness down to the fact that she had probably been treated rather badly there – or in the same offhand way as she was treating me.

  “Is there any sort of administration center on this island – a town, or a market?”

  “We just went through it,” she said.

  I had not seen anything but palm trees and wooden sheds. “Is there anyone else at your lodge?”

  “Some dim-dims,” she said, using the local word for white person. “Australians.”

  They were seven expatriates who had flown from a town on the north coast of New Guinea on a private plane for a weekend of heavy drinking and horsing around. They had with them – it seemed to be their only luggage – a number of cases of beer. It was mid-afternoon and they were already drunk, in the state of clumsy geniality that I had come to recognize from my stay in Cooktown.

  They were sunburned and glassy-eyed, all of them fleshy, and they were as friendly as they knew how to be. They became hearty, seeing me and sizing me up, and one handed me a beer, for drunks love companions and hate sober witnesses. I shook hands with the fattest one.

  “G’day. I’m Mango. That
’s Fingers. That’s Big Bird – he owns the plane. That’s Booboo. That’s Ali –”

  It was all nicknames. We had another beer and sat on the veranda, watching the tide drain out of the flats of the lagoon.

  “Fingers saw a croc here just a minute ago.”

  “Unless it was a fucken meri out swimming.”

  Meri was Pidgin for woman.

  “I had three national meris last night.”

  “Fingers is a fucken animal.”

  Fingers was freckled and had close-together eyes, and the odd set of his jaw – his underbite – gave him a moronic expression when he smiled.

  “They’re all looking for white husbands,” Booboo said.

  “Do you find them madly attractive?” I asked.

  “Some of them are pretty and others are ugly as hell,” Mango said. “But they all fuck.”

  This was one of their topics of conversation, but in their telling they were always passive, the women always the aggressors: So I hear this fucken noise at the window and I look out and it’s a meri lifting up her lap-lap –

  Other topics were the laziness of highlanders, the high crime rate, particularly destructive car crashes, good meals, the horror of Port Moresby, and the good fun of heavy drinking. They were loud and jolly and fairly harmless. They said as much.

  “We’re all going troppo.”

  “What are the symptoms?” I asked.

  “The first one is that you don’t want to go home,” Fingers said. “You go a bit round the twist, see.”

  “And the national meris look bloody marvelous,” Booboo said.

  “And you sit in places like this with a stubbie in your hand,” Mango said.

  Big Bird stood up and walked to the veranda rail. “That’s a croc,” he said. “That’s definitely a croc.”

  A low log-like shape darker than the water around it trembled in the muddy lagoon and then sank, leaving subtle ripples.

  “Ugly bugger,” Mango said, staring at the widening ripples.

  “That one was eight foot at least,” Ali said.

  “Ten is more like it,” Booboo said.

  They discussed the length of the croc, and it kept growing, until Amy appeared on the veranda and sulkily announced dinner.

  We were served by two bare-breasted girls in grass skirts, who managed to look demure, even as Fingers was blatantly leering. The girls were small – Trobrianders were small of stature anyway, but these could not have been older than thirteen or fourteen. Their grass skirts were short and dense, and fitted them like dancers’ tutus. Malinowski remarked on how the grass skirt “is very becoming to fine young women, and gives to small slender girls a graceful, elfish appearance.”

  “Elfish” was just about perfect. And the shell anklets and bracelets and necklaces they wore made pretty wind-chime chuckles as they walked. No one spoke-there were only sighs and murmurs of concentration from the Australian men – as the girls glided near the table, padding around it on bare feet.

  The food was unappetizing and uneatable – fatty meat and boiled white tubers, served with hunks of Spam. “What do you think of this food?” I asked.

  “It’s crap,” Mango said, stuffing Spam into his mouth.

  There was dancing afterwards, by the bare-breasted waitresses and some drummers who had been hauled in from the road. A crowd of people always gathered there under the lights; they crouched and chattered. The rest of the island seemed to be in darkness but people habitually sat outside the lodge at night because it had a generator and a few electric lights.

  When the music was over, and the Australians stumbled outside to look for women, and after Amy had firmly put me in my place (“We don’t have coat-hangers”), and I found out where I could get food and supplies for tomorrow, I went to bed, vowing to paddle away in the morning.

  “Waga,” I heard them say. “Waga. Waga,” as the kayak took shape. A crowd of about fifty men and boys were squatting at the edge of the lagoon watching me assemble it. Most of them were gaping, some were mocking me, some fooling with the kayak pieces, and two or three were in my way, competing to help me put the thing together.

  After that, whenever I put the kayak together, or took it apart, a crowd of males gathered (the women had better things to do) to watch me, or to fool. On this sort of occasion-a hot humid day on a muddy Trobriand foreshore, picking my way among the broken coral, and hearing the laughter of the islanders and their certain mockery (“what is the dim-dim doing now?”), I was often reminded of how Malinowski, the most sympathetic of anthropologists, would spend a day among these laughing people and then go back to his tent and scribble vindictively in his private diary. “The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death,” he wrote. “I understand all the German and Belgian colonial atrocities.” Or: “Unpleasant clash with Ginger … I was enraged and punched him in the jaw once or twice.” Or: “I am in a world of lies here.” Or worse. Publicly he called them “the Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” but in his diary he had his own private name for the Trobrianders. “The niggers were noisy … General aversion to niggers …”

  The entries could have come from the intimate journals of Mistah Kurtz in his hut at the Heart of Darkness, but no, they are those of the founder of the modern discipline of social anthropology, the man who had made it a highly literate, observational science. There was a general outcry when Malinowski’s private diaries were posthumously published in 1966, but they were harmless enough – just trivia, ranting, loneliness, insecurity and self-pity. What is clear in them is that what he hated most – what all travelers hate – was not being taken seriously.

  They teased him and they teased me. It is irritating, but so what? The Trobriand children are rambunctious; they are seldom scolded. No children I had ever come across lived a less repressed existence. The youngest played all day, and on the moonlit nights they all went frolicking – I was often to hear kids’ laughter at midnight. Yet they do what they are expected to – work in the gardens and pick coconuts and go on fishing expeditions. There are schools, but though half the village children never see a classroom, they are skilled in the arts of the island and have an intimate knowledge of their own stories and traditions. This attitude of self-possession, which seemed like arrogance – the teasing of dim-dims – had kept the Trobriand culture intact and was perhaps the key to their survival.

  And after I pulled the pieces out of my two bags and assembled the kayak, I stowed my food and the rest of my gear, and – as they watched, still muttering and laughing – I simply pushed off and paddled away. This was on the east coast of Kiriwina, near the village of Wawela. On my chart I saw a break in the reef marked “Boat Passage” – and I paddled to it. A strong riptide was moving through it and waves were breaking just outside it, so I stayed inside the lagoon and paddled south along the reef in pretty, greeny-blue water, across shelves of brightly colored coral.

  I paddled about five miles south, until the lagoon narrowed, squeezing me into a small neck of water between the reefs and the beach. I looked onshore and saw a crowd of people, seemingly camped – but there were no huts or shelters of any kind. I thought perhaps they were killing time, waiting for a boat to Kitava Island which lay about five miles in the sea beyond the reef.

  Seeing me, several men began waving and whistling, gesturing for me to come over. Having nothing better to do, and wishing to add a little coastal detail to my rather stark fifty-year-old chart, I paddled towards them.

  A green sea turtle lay on its back on the sand near the men, gasping and feebly working its flippers. From time to time, whenever the turtle tried to turn itself over, a man would kick it.

  The men who had called me over did not speak English, but another fellow, named Sam, spoke English fluently. Pidgin would have been of little use. It is regarded as pig-English in the Trobriands and is spoken self-consciously and with great reluctance. Sam had learned English in Port Moresby, where he had worked in a bank. But he hated the city and when h
e had earned enough money returned to his Trobriand village, Daiagilla.

  “It is in the north of this island, near Kaibola, but not on the beach,” he said. “That is our problem. We have trouble fishing there. So many people, and all of them fishing.”

  The solution was to come here, fifteen miles away, and establish a temporary fishing camp, which was what this group of thirty-three men and boys comprised. They wore ragged bathing suits. One was feeble-minded. One was deaf and dumb. They lived in complete harmony. They had made an arrangement with the village that owned this beach, and they fished day and night, using spears and nets, until they had enough fish to bring back.

  “Why is this village willing to help you?”

  They said that the local village was given some of the catch, and in return they brought vegetables and drinking water to the fishermen.

  “There is no trouble,” Sam said. “We don’t fight. We want to live in peace.”

  They had been there for four days, and when they weren’t fishing they were processing the large (eight- and ten-pounders) coral trout, smoke-drying them on a sort of rickety table erected over a smoldering fire. Fish hung from lines that stretched from palm trunk to palm trunk.

  “We catch more at night,” Sam said, and showed me the long waterproof flashlights they used for night-fishing. He showed me a wooden spear with a rusty barbed point. “And these harpoons are good, too. This is a good place for fishing. But we don’t come here much. This is only the second time this year.”

  “What do you eat the rest of the time-yams?”

  “Yam is for feasts. It is special. We don’t eat it when we are in our huts, but when we are together at a feast we eat it. We eat other vegetables. Taro. Sweet potato. Pumpkin tops.”

  “I don’t see any women here,” I said.

  “The women don’t fish. They are home tending the gardens, looking after the little children, and preparing for us to return.” He glanced at the struggling turtle and gave it another kick. “When we return there will be a great feast. We will eat most of the fish. We have to eat it – there is no way to keep it.”