The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  I said, “Have you ever heard of Malinowski:)”

  “I have heard of him,” Sam said, and he laughed. “‘The Islands of Love.’ I have never read his books, but someone told me about him when I was in Moresby.”

  “What did they say?”

  “He came here. Maybe he came during theYam Festival. So he thought we were like that all the year. I think he generalized about us.”

  “Tell me about the Yam Festival,” I said. Malinowski had compared it to a bacchanalia and had given graphic examples of sexual license.

  “The Yam Festival” – Sam smiled and looked at the others, who were picking through my boat, examining my own fishing spear, knotting and unknotting my nylon lines. “It is in June and July. The women do silly things. And the men do silly things. And I also do silly things. It is a funny festival.”

  They invited me to stay at their camp. It was only midafternoon, but the day was hotter than I had expected, and when they brought out a big smoked fish, steaming on a palm leaf, I ate with them and abandoned any plans to go farther south that day. They expressed an interest in my food. I was happy to give them a loaf of my bread, which they passed around, and some fruit and cookies.

  I often had this frustrating experience of handing out goodies. I would take a whole box of cookies or a giant chocolate bar and I would see it subdivided and wolfed down so quickly it was as though I had given them nothing at all. They always shared the food, they never fought over it, and yet food – especially cookies – seemed to vaporize in their eager hands. This stuff was a frivolous and insubstantial present anyway. I had brought spear points and spear rubbers and fish-hooks to give as gifts.

  That night around the fire, Sam asked me the questions the others relayed to him – where was I from? What was my name? Was I married? Did I have children? How had I heard about the Trobriands?

  I answered the best way I could, and I told them about Malinowski.

  Sam said, “I don’t want to read his books. Why should I?”

  “You seem to be happy people,” I said. “But what if you had a chance to improve your lives. What would you do?”

  He thought a long time, and he consulted the others before he answered. Then he said, “If only we had a vehicle. It is so expensive for us to come here on the government truck” –two or three trucks passed for public transport on Kiriwina, and there were no vehicles at all, nor any roads, on the other islands. Though this seemed to me a delightful situation, Sam disagreed. “But we will never have the money. We get some money by selling carvings and selling food at the market. It is so little.”

  I told him that I thought the virtue of the Trobriands was that it did not have a money economy. He said, Yes, but there were some items you just couldn’t barter for – school fees, canned meat, good clothes, and the sort of vehicle his village craved but would never have.

  In the darkness beyond the camp fire, the younger men and boys fussed with spears and flashlights. Sam had once or twice referred to the chief. It turned out that he was with them, a toothless, betel-chewing man in a torn T-shirt, named Goody, or perhaps Gudi.

  “He owns the land of our village,” Sam said.

  Because of the steady wind there were no mosquitoes, so I dug out my sleeping-bag and found a patch of sand to sleep on. It was a night of their muttering and splashing, and when the wind shifted I got a face full of wood-smoke. In the morning I could see clearly what a mess the camp was, a great litter of smashed coconuts, fishbones, crab shells, smoking fires, reeking fish and the same gasping, dying turtle.

  Through Sam, Gudi said, “Let me paddle your boat.”

  The shoreline was all coral and I was afraid he would puncture it, so I said, “Not today. Maybe when I come back for the Yam Festival.”

  Towards the bottom of Kiriwina Island, at Gilibwa, there was another boat passage which I paddled through to cut over to the swampier, western side. Here there was no wind inshore, but the water was shallow, and in some places I had to get out and drag the boat along by its bow line. I sloshed along in rubber reef-shoes because of the stonefish and the sea-urchins and the sharp coral, but listening to Mozart on my headphones and feeling safe among these hospitable people, I found the whole trip around the south end of the happy island of Kiriwina extremely pleasant.

  The lodge was empty except for a sunburned French couple in green army fatigues who complained that the fan in their room didn’t work.

  I restocked with food and water and prepared to head west out of Losuia on about an eight-mile paddle to the next island, Kaileuna, which I intended to circumnavigate.

  “A woman was taken by a croc near Boli Point,” Bill, the Australian manager of the lodge, told me just before I left.

  I would be passing Boli Point in a few hours.

  “When are you planning to be back?” he asked.

  “Tuesday afternoon.”

  “If you’re not here then we’ll come looking for you,” he said in a neighborly way. “One other thing. Don’t camp at random. Get permission from the village nearest the beach. They might charge a few kina, but not more than that. The person who does all the talking is usually the least trustworthy. It could cost you a lot if you’re not careful. Don’t go along with them if they say, ‘Never mind – we’ll settle it tomorrow’ because by tomorrow you could be in deep shit. They could charge you a hundred and you’d have to pay.”

  Just before I got into my boat the sky grew black and rain came down, such a heavy downpour that I was prevented from leaving for another hour. The men and boys laughed when they saw me dripping in my wet clothes and fussing around my boat – the sudden storm had dumped an inch of water in the bottom. They stopped laughing and came closer, seeing me working my bilge pump – just a simple handpump, but quicker and more effective than the wooden scoops they carved to bail out their canoes.

  “You give this to me,” one of the men said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and stored it.

  He fooled for his friends. “The dim-dim no give to me!”

  “Because you laughed at me,” I said.

  Steam was rising from the lagoon, and the air was heavy and humid, all the big trees on shore drizzling, as I set off across the flats of Losuia Bay, picking my way among the muddy chunks of coral. Fish were jumping, and birds squawking, and kids screaming and splashing at the bank.

  There was little wind at first, but I was fighting an incoming tide. I left the shallow area and paddled to the main channel of dark blue water, deep enough to take the trading-boats that crossed Milne Bay with supplies from the New Guinea mainland port of Alatau.

  Approaching Boli Point I thought of Bill’s croc and kept about a mile offshore in a freshening wind and three-foot waves. I could see the muddy inlet where the crocodiles were reputed to be. There is a certain stagnancy and opaqueness to crocodile-inhabited water, a sheltered quality to the vegetation, stillness and stinky shadows. I could well believe there were crocodiles in this smelly estuary.

  Beyond the point I saw Kaileuna Island, flat and deep green, about two miles away, across a stretch of open water. I paddled across to the far point, Mamamada, which was a chunk of spiky coral and a narrow beach. By then it was early afternoon – lunchtime – and as I ate I congratulated myself on having reached one of the smaller islands in the group. There were no villages here that I could see, though I had seen some huts farther up the eastern shore. I decided to avoid them, to paddle along the south side of the island.

  I came to a white sandy beach, protected by a pair of jutting cliffs. There were green parrots in the trees, a big eagle overhead, and terns strafing the lagoon. There were no human footprints, only lizard tracks, and it looked like a perfect camping place, but while I was sizing it up a dugout canoe went past, two bare-breasted women paddling it, and they called out, sort of yodeling at me. So now my presence was known. I got back into my boat and paddled in the direction they were headed. Soon I saw a plume of smoke about a mile away and the light outline of some roofs of hut
s lining the beach. The village was not marked on my chart.

  I first came to a little thatched pavilion at the end of a pier, and I nearly beached my boat there. It was a good thing I didn’t, because this was the toilet for the women of the village – the men’s was on the beach at the other side of the village. As I paddled parallel to the shore a group of boys began following me, running along the beach, whooping and hollering. I waved back at them.

  By the time I got to the village’s main beach a large number of people had gathered to watch me drag my kayak onto the sand – jeering boys, frightened infants, boys in lap-laps and bathing shorts, topless women, muttering men – some of the older men were holding lime-gourds and sucking betel juice from sticks.

  “As soon as an interesting stranger arrives,” Malinowski wrote of a typical reception in the Trobriands, “half the village assembles around him, talking loudly and making remarks about him, frequently uncomplimentary, and altogether assuming a tone of jocular familiarity.”

  This was the general impression I had of my arrival, but what drew my attention most was the good health of the villagers, in particular their good teeth.

  “Does anybody speak English?” I asked. “Everybody speaks English here,” a man said.

  An older man came towards me and shook my hand. He said that he was the chief, and asked where I was from, and what kind of a boat was this?

  I told him and explained that I was paddling around the islands and that I had found a camping place about a mile away. Could I have his permission to camp there?

  “Why don’t you stay here in the village?” a man standing beside him said. “The missionary will show you a place.”

  “Where is the missionary?”

  I expected to see a dim-dim in a black frock, but instead I was greeted by a Trobriander in a T-shirt and bathingsuit.

  “I am the missionary,” he said.

  He said his name was John. He was a tall brown skinny man with frizzy gingery hair and, close up, I saw that his skin was reddish. He was holding a small naked child, and for some reason the child was clutching a long carving knife and slashing the air with it and snorting through his snotty nose.

  Some small children trooped after us, as John led me through the village. The rest of the villagers had gone back to their chores – seven or eight of the men were building a large sailing canoe, some women were tending smoky fires, and a soccer game resumed nearer the edge of the clearing.

  Toddlers, seeing me from their mother’s arms or from where they were playing on straw mats, howled and pissed in fear. To torment them further, people picked the kids up and pretended to hand them over to me, and the more the kids screamed at the sight of the dim-dim the louder people laughed.

  John said that he was from Alatau and that God had sent him here to Kaisiga – which was the name of this village. This was a very fortuitous choice on the part of the Almighty because it so happened that John’s wife, Esther, was from the next village, Bulakwa, just along the coast. John and Esther had two children – the snotty one in his arms, and another one torturing a cat under the ladder to their hut: Cleopas and Waisodi. Esther was heavily pregnant and she sat in an open-sided shelf by the sea cutting vegetables.

  “I would like to have a little girl,” Esther said. “What is your wife’s name?”

  Whenever my marriage was mentioned, even in the most casual way, I grew sad and fell silent. At first I pretended I had not heard, but Esther persisted and eventually I gave her the information she wanted.

  “I like that name,” Esther said, placing her hands on her belly. “If we have a girl we will call her Anne.”

  Meanwhile, John was telling me about his conversion.

  “I was blind. I spent many years as a blind man,” he said. “Then I became a Seventh-day Adventist and I learned to see. Paul, would you like to learn how to see, like your namesake on the road to Damascus?”

  So they were Seventh-day Adventists: that obviously explained their good teeth. They did not smoke or drink, the younger ones did not chew betel. No pig-eating.

  “Do you want to convert me?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “I’ll have to think it over, John. It’s a pretty big decision in any person’s life.”

  “That is true,” he said, and then looked doubtful. But his mind was on other matters. “The trouble with camping here is that the small children will bother you. They are very curious and troublesome.”

  “Why don’t we tell them not to be curious and troublesome?”

  “They will just laugh at us.”

  Another man confirmed this. “Yes,” he said. “They just come and go as they wish, the small boys.”

  “What time do they go to bed?”

  “Whenever they like,” the man said. “At eleven or twelve, or even later.”

  “And the other problem for you,” John said, “is that I will beat the drum early in the morning to call people to the morning service. So don’t put your tent close to the drum.”

  “What do you call early?”

  “Maybe six o’clock.”

  “I think I’ll put my tent way over there,” I said.

  I went back for my kayak and dragged it through the shallows of the lagoon to the edge of the village and when I unloaded it a crowd gathered – forty-seven people, big and small, I counted as I started to set up my tent. The little kids were touching everything – feeling the tent cloth, the kayak skin, twisting the ropes and stakes, most of them hindering me and getting underfoot in their attempts to help me. The naked, dusty munchkins rather fearlessly fingered my gear, and yelped and grabbed and passed various items to their parents for inspection.

  “They are impressed with your tent,” John said.

  I shot out the shock-corded poles and, as they clicked together into their nine-foot length, there was applause and laughter. The people sat down around me, awaiting more. I hung up my water bag on a tree, turned the kayak over so that the kids wouldn’t get in, and then, distracted by all the people, took a walk down the beach. When I returned at dusk the villagers had gone away. I crawled into my tent, took three swigs of sherry from my bottle, so as not to demoralize the Adventists, and started cooking my dinner.

  Before leaving Losuia I had bought some kerosene for my camp stove. I got the stove going and boiled some water and made tea and then noodles, which I had with beans and canned mackerel.

  While I was eating, John came over, still holding his snotty child.

  “They think you are strange,” he said. “But I told them you are not strange.”

  “I appreciate that, John.”

  “They have never seen anyone eat alone, but I told them that Westerners do it all the time. When you arnve m a place you make your own food.”

  “Very true, John,” I said. “Have a cookie.”

  He took a handful and we wandered back together in the fading light, to the thatched pavilion they called a bwayma by the sea, and I passed out cookies to the others there and we sat and talked while the kids still chattered and splashed at the edge of the lagoon.

  “What do these kids do until midnight?”

  “They play. They sing. They tell stories,” he said. “No one tells the children to go to bed.”

  It was supper time, a bright fire blazing in front of each hut, the woman poking it and cooking, her husband sitting on the porch of the hut eating.

  “We share everything here,” John said. “If the men catch fish, every family will get some. We have the same garden. We cook for each other. Whatever someone has, he shares.”

  Five of us were sitting in the breezy pavilion, eating the last of the cookies. John wanted to tell me about the Seventh-day Adventists, but I headed him off asking him about the Yam Festival.

  “The Yam Festival is very un-Christian,” John said, and the others smirked at me. “The girls and the women just rush at you. They grab at you anywhere” – and he gestured at his groin and frowned.

  The others shrieked with la
ughter.

  “It is not funny,” John said, sadly.

  “It is unusual,” I said.

  “It is worse than unusual,” John said. “The women can hold you down. There might be seven or eight of them. They hold you and one of them sits on your face and laughs at you and she presses her waist against you.”

  “Presses her waist?”

  “Her thing,” John said.

  “Her wila,” someone said, and there was more laughter. “I get it,” I said.

  “There is much fornication, and even rape,” John said, with great solemnity. “Yes, I tell you, five or six girls can rape a man. They take a man and they sit on him, and they touch him and when his –”

  “Kwila!” someone said.

  “Yes, when his kwila gets hard the lucky one sits on it. What do you think of that?”

  Everyone looked in my direction. I was smiling. I said, “Honestly, it sounds like traditional fun.”

  The men began to laugh at John, and I thought, Tennyson, anyone?

  I will take some island woman, she shall rear my dusky race. Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun; Whistle back the parrot’s call, and leap the rainbows of the brooks, Not with blinded eyesight poring over miserable books.

  The men were poking John and demanding that he speak up.

  John said, “The Bible says that your body is the temple of God.”

  “It does say that,” one man said, and was jeered at by the others.

  “But God is love,” I said. “And the Yam Festival is love, isn’t it?”

  “Yes! Yes!” the men and boys were chanting at their missionary, who was looking miserable.

  He said, “Adultery can break up a marriage.”

  “Do the marriages of these people get broken up by this Yam Festival fornication?”

  “No,” John said, frankly. “For two months the husband goes this way, the wife goes that way. Then after the Yam Festival is over they come back together and all is the same as before.”