The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The women, who had been awaiting the return of the fishing party, were steaming yams, bananas and sweet potatoes by the underground-oven method that is used all over the Pacific, from New Guinea, where it is called mumu, to Hawaii, where it is known as imu. The Trobriand word, which is almost certainly cognate with these, is kumkumla.

  I tried to get the fishermen talking about the kula expedition after we had sat with our food – we were all in a long row on the ground, eating off palm leaves. Leendon was the most serious kula man in the village, but he was reluctant to talk about the arm-shells and necklaces he had in his hut. Finally he said, “I don’t want to show Faul my bagi. He will want to buy all of them.”

  I persuaded him to show me the best necklace, which was a long beautiful string of tiny polished shells and then I said, “I don’t want to buy it. It is not nice enough. In fact it is very ugly. It is nogut, samting-nating.”

  “He say it samting-nating! Ha!”

  They all laughed. Heavy sarcasm was just the sort of clumsy teasing that they loved.

  John was revolving his sister-in-law’s six-month-old daughter Primrose over a smoldering coconut shell as he listened to all the banter. There were so many words in Pidgin for worthless things. (“It is bullseet … It is rabis

  … Namba-ten .. .”).

  They also found Pidgin as funny as I did, and because they seldom used it in the Trobriands the effect was always comic. And speaking Pidgin I could often ask questions that were awkward in plain English.

  Dog-eaters always interested me, so I used this little feast as an occasion for asking, “Yu-pela kai-kai dok?” – Do you people eat dogs?

  “SDA-pela no kai-kai dok,” Leendon said.

  “Yu traiem kai-kai dok – nambawan, moa beta,” I said, patting my stomach.

  John was smiling, still rotating the naked infant in the smoke. “Alotau people traiem dok tumas. Tu, kai-kai pusi.”

  The Kaisiga women stared at him and the men began to shriek with laughter.

  “Why are we speaking Pidgin?” I said. “Let’s talk normal English. We are all normal English speakers, aren’t we?”

  “I am the most normal,” Leendon said, and everyone laughed.

  But I was looking at John. “Let me get this straight. You say that people in Alatau eat pussycats?”

  “Some of the people,” he said. “But not our own dogs and cats. We get other ones from the bush or running in the roads, and we cook them just like any other meat. Yes, sometimes it is sad, because a dog is man’s best friend. But they taste good.”

  “Are dogs and cats mentioned in Leviticus?”

  “No,” John said, still dipping the infant into the smoke. “And not in Deuteronomy.”

  “What are you doing with that baby?”

  He lifted the coconut shell and showed me a smoldering object beneath it, the size of a walnut.

  “You see this grasshopper’s egg?” he said, indicating the smoky walnut. Grasshopper’s egg? “We burn it and when the smoke comes through the coconut shell we let the baby smell it. It is so the baby will walk straight.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Yes. I have seen it.”

  I had found him monotonously biblical – his lengthy way of saying grace was so sententious it set my teeth on edge; so, seeing this Christian islander espousing magic and superstition, I encouraged him.

  I had promised myself that I would paddle to the tiny islands at the edge of the Trobriand group. I could not interest anyone in Kaisiga in coming with me – visiting another village or another island involved a complex ritual of gift-giving and they couldn’t be bothered. It was easier for me to show up, shoot the breeze and placate them with some sticks of tobacco or fish-hooks: a dim-dim was hardly human in any case.

  It took a day to paddle to and from the island of Munawata. The sailors at Munawata remembered me from the days of bad weather when I had paddled off and they had stayed on shore. Their lovely island had only their village on it, and when I praised its beauty they said, “But we have no water.”

  The penalty of living on this island paradise, with sandy beaches and fertile soil, was that whenever they needed freshwater they had to get into their canoes and sail over a mile to Labi Island, where there was a spring. And when there was a northwest wind blowing they couldn’t get there at all. This might last for days.

  “Then we eat green coconuts and try to save rainwater and wait for the wind to change.”

  On Munawata there were traditional bachelor houses, in which young boys lived and where they brought their girlfriends. The girls might stay with them for weeks, though they always had their meals with their parents – a very civilized arrangement, I felt. The boys on Munawata wore flowers in their hair and the teenaged girls and women were bare-breasted and had deeply rouged cheeks. The girls were assertively sexual in their manner and the way they dressed because the yam harvest was in progress.

  It was so strange to paddle from that village of free love back to Kaileuna where the pious folk in Kaisiga laughed at these old ways and clung to their new-found Adventist beliefs. But even they were rooted enough in Trobriand culture not to find a trip to the forbidden and haunted island of Tuma too spooky for words. No one would go with me, and they urged me not to go – the island was full of voices and shadows, the ghosts of everyone who had ever died in the Trobriands lurked in Tuma, and if I spent the night there I would get no sleep. I paddled there – it was another lovely island, empty and overgrown because of its reputation – but in the event I did not camp there. I camped back at Kaisiga and then kept going the next day to the main island of Kiriwina. On the way a motor-boat came alongside – a German anthropologist, Dr Wulf Schievelhovel, and his son Fridjtof. Wulf said he had recognized my collapsible kayak as German.

  “I have never seen anyone paddling a kayak here before,” he said.

  We tied our boats together and shared a Pepsi he brought from his cooler and talked about the Trobrianders. He had been studying them for twenty years. They had an almost perfect diet, he said; they had no heart disease or coronary problems at all. Their blood pressure went down as they grew older, and yet he confirmed what I had heard, that they didn’t live long: their life expectancy was less than forty, because of the high risk of bacterial infections.

  “But so little has changed here, it is as though these people have walked straight off the pages of Malinowski,” he said.

  He urged me to see more of the main island and to visit Omarakhana, the village of the Paramount Chief. Then he snapped my picture – I had found it inconvenient to carry a camera – and we continued on our separate ways, he to his village on Kaileuna, I to Kiriwina, in the blinding afternoon sunshine.

  The heart of the Trobriands, its chieftainship and culture, is Omarakhana. “Ever since we came out of the caves,” Trobrianders say, “our chief has lived here.” They never said that their ancestors might have migrated from other islands; indeed, they firmly do not believe it. Long ago, their people emerged from the caves of coral rock near Kaibola at the top of the island and they divided into separate clans. One of the most respected is the Tabalu, clan of the present Paramount Chief, Pulayasi, who had been chief for about three years.

  Because of the danger of rape – and rape wasn’t a joke; it was exactly what it was anywhere, a violent assault, a humiliation – I went in a truck with a friendly villager named Matthew. On the way he told me that this chief was better than the last one. Traditionally the Paramount Chief controls the weather. The previous chief, always in a foul mood, gave them miserable weather – too much rain, too much sun, and then days of wind.

  “If I say, ‘Please make it rain, chief,’ will he do it?”

  “If he want, he do it.”

  It seemed wonderful to live in a place where you could actually blame someone you knew for the weather.

  The royal village was muddy and humid, in the center of the island, far from the sea breeze, two miles or more from its beach, at the end of a bad
road and an overgrown path. It was nowhere near as tidy or pleasant as the villages I had seen on the outer islands. It seemed neglected and rather haunted, with shabby huts and bad thatching and ramshackle pavilions. Pigs rooted and snorted near the huts, and the snotty-faced children and the scruffy dogs fought one another for scraps. The chief’s hut was one of the flimsiest looking, but Matthew said that he had several, because he was still acquiring wives – he had three at the moment.

  A balding man in torn shorts and a dirty T-shirt lettered Coca-Cola Fun Run 1988 came out of the hut, and spat. He was smoking acrid Trobriand tobacco in a rolled-up tube of newspaper. He was barefoot. He approached me and smiled a stained betel-juice smile and beckoned to a boy who hurried towards him and set up a rickety beach chair in one of the wall-less moldering pavilions. And then he sat and the frayed blue plastic webbing creaked. This was Paramount Chief Pulayasi.

  I sat at his feet – it would have been unthinkable for me to sit at the chief’s height and look him straight in the eye – and introduced myself as a traveler and a grateful guest on the Trobriands. I then gave him twenty dollars’ worth of sticky black tobacco.

  And the chief, who knew no English, mumbled something to one of his courtiers.

  “The chief wishes to know how did you hear about the Trobriands.”

  “I read some books about the Trobriands, by a famousdim-dim named Malinowski.”

  “He lived in this village,” the man said. His name was Joseph Daniel and he wore a pair of torn brown trousers. “The people could not pronounce his name, so they called him Tolibwoga, which means ‘Master of Stories’ or ‘Historian’ – something like that. He was always telling old stories.”

  Hearing the name, the chief smiled and puffed his newspaper cheroot. I asked where Malinowski lived.

  “Over there, where you see the string and the clothes.”

  “Near that clothesline?”

  “Yes. He lived near Chief To’uluwa. That man was Chief Pulayasi’s mother’s grandfather.”

  In this matrilineal society all titles and laods passed through the mother’s line, and a woman’s brother was closer to her children than their father, who was hardly even regarded as a blood-relation (but there was no question about the link of the uncle to his sister’s kids).

  “Do they tell stories about Tolibwoga?”

  “No. But the chief knows some stories.”

  “Did Tolibwoga travel to other islands?” I asked, and my question and the reply were translated.

  “He never traveled, because they could not guarantee his safety. At that time there were quarrels on the other islands. The people were fighting. Tolibwoga stayed here.”

  I pretended to write this in my notebook. What I wrote was: Fun Run T-shirt, beach chair, shaven-headed women, spider webs on all houses, pigs and dogs, neglected houses in need of repair.

  The chief mumbled to Joseph, who said, “The chief wants to know if you have any questions for him. He wants to help. You are welcome to ask all questions.”

  I asked a few harmless questions and then decided to risk the one that had been nagging at me.

  “Is it true that Chief Pulayasi has magic that lets him control the weather?”

  When this was translated, the chief chuckled condescendingly and mumbled and puffed his burned tube of newspaper and plucked at his filthy T-shirt.

  “Yes, he can control it.”

  “He has magic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did someone give him this magic when he became chief?” I asked. I had been told that the chief had advisers who were sorcerers, who could bring about a person’s death. If Chief Pulayasi raged, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” the clergyman was as good as dead.

  Joseph said, “No. The chief has had his magic for many years. He was doing the weather even before he became chief.”

  And Pulayasi smiled. He had chubby cheeks. He was one of the rare plump men I had seen in the Trobriands. It was the confident smile of someone who can arrange it so that you will be rained on if you ask too many obnoxious questions.

  He was happy to talk about his wives – his courtiers were smoothing the way for a young girl to be sent from each of the major clans in the Trobriands, and he would probably end up with a dozen wives, like his predecessor. The brothers of those women would all work for the chief, tending their own gardens and bringing him the harvest. Yes, it was hard work and it was a job for life, but it was also useful to be able to remind people that your brother-in-law was the Paramount Chief.

  “How long have there been chiefs here?”

  “Since we came out of the caves.”

  That answer reminded me of a question I had been meaning to ask. Had the Trobrianders of long ago sailed off in their canoes to live in other islands in the Pacific?

  “Yes. In Fiji,” one man said. His name was Patimo Tokurupai and he spoke English well. “We know that because of the facial resemblance. Some Fijians visited us and they said, ‘Our ancestors came from here.’”

  I was getting stiff sitting crosslegged on a loose plank, so I asked whether I could see the chief’s yam house. Only the Paramount Chief can decorate his yam house in an elaborate manner, and this was festooned with shells, pictures of birds and fish, and was surmounted by a strange head – the only head I ever saw carved in the Trobes – at the apex of the roof, a black and white glowering face that looked like that of Mr Punch.

  On my way out, I asked one of the men from Omarakhana why the village seemed so neglected. He told me that it had been deliberately neglected – no one was allowed to repair the huts or cut the grass, because one of the chief’s brothers had died. The widow shaved her head and each day she smeared her face with mud and ashes – I caught a glimpse of her kneeling in the mud, and she looked corpse-like herself. After this five-month period of mourning was over they would repaint and rebuild the village and restore it to its former glory. In the meantime, it looked hideous.

  It was stifling there, and so I was glad to leave a few days later for Kaisiga. But this time, even after I had paddled for four hours, I was given only a perfunctory welcome by Leendon and the others. They were in no mood for joking in Pidgin, or sitting in the bwayma by the sea and chatting. This was uncharacteristic, but I could see that the villagers were preoccupied. They made rather a point of asking me to buy things for them (duct tape, rope, plastic sheeting, another lantern, spear points, knives, fishing-line) and then seemed to suggest that I ought to be on my way.

  They did not ask me to stay, which was the classic villagers’ way of telling me to go.

  They were laconic, thoughtful, apprehensive. I was struck by this wholly different mood, and especially by their eagerness for me to leave. I had not planned to stay long in any case – I would be flying out the day after tomorrow – but I regretted the muted goodbye. Perhaps it was not muted. It was deep emotion, a mood of bewilderment and sadness when words are no use at all, the sort of silent summing-up that is a final farewell. I now knew that sort of farewell.

  I paddled away thinking how I had once seen these islands as idyllic. I had been wrong. An island of traditional culture cannot be idyllic. It is, instead, completely itself: riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries, and its old routines. You had to take it as you found it. The key to its survival was that it laughed at outsiders and kept them at arm’s length. And although it seemed strange that they thought of themselves as human and me as subhuman, a dim-dim, I could now see the utter impossibility of my ever understanding the place. On this second visit I had felt an undercurrent of violence – and it was not only because I had been threatened. It was something in the air – a vibration, the cries of certain birds, the way the wind whipped the trees, the stifling darkness of some jungle paths and the sudden noisy jostling in the leaves that shocked me and left me breathless.

  “What was that?” I would ask.

  “A leezard.”

  A two-hundred pound lizard?

  “Maybe a wi
ld pig.”

  But sometimes even they seemed worried.

  Two days after I left Kaisiga, on the night before I was to take the plane to the Solomons, I ran into an Australian shopkeeper in Losuia. He said, “Did you hear about the battle? Koma village marched on Kaisiga. There was quite a fight, I understand. They’ve sent boats to take some of the people to hospital. About thirty people were injured and some of them are in very bad shape.”

  Before catching the plane out, I mailed a letter to John at Kaisiga, asking for details, and eventually his reply, in neat mission-school handwriting, caught up with me:

  SDA Mission Kaisiga, Trobriand Islands PNG

  Dear Paul,

  You’ve asked about the fight between Korna and Kaisiga. Well, the fight was about a dingy that belongs to Kaisiga Community. After an agreement that has been made by the 2 villages, Korna people began to run the dingy for 2 weeks. After the 2 weeks were over they (Korna) refused to return the dingy to the Kaisiga people and planned to hold it back for a year. Therefore the Kaisiga men went to Korna beach on Monday night and pulled it back to Kaisiga – the dingy.

  Early on Tuesday morning, all the Korna men, with Giwa and Lebola, carne to fight us, on Kaisiga beach about t mile away from the village. They were blowing a shell very loud. They came with bush knives, short sticks, iron rods, and even a few diving spears. The fight began at about 6:30am and lasted until 11:30. I went to stop the fight, but I could not. After the fight finished, the police from Losuia came for investigation. We all went for court. The court fine for Kaisiga was Kr920. The fine for Koma was 7 months imprisonment, for all people about 30 in all, including the women who brought food to the fighting ground.

  There were some men from Kaisiga who were injured, people like Micah, Lyndon, Peter and others. Two men from Koma who were seriously injured were flown to Alotau Public Hospital. After a week one died. When the Koma men return from prison there will be a big party [a feast to reconcile the warring villages.]