by Cash Peters
“Anyone here speak English?” I ask breezily.
“'Es.”
A young man, conveniently placed on the edge of the glade, steps into my eyeline. Athletic, he has a beautiful round face carved into a goofy gap-toothed grin. His name is Tom, he reveals, soft-spoken to the point of being inaudible.
“Hi, Tom. My name's Cash. You speak English?”
“'Es, I speak English,” he says.
Of course you do, I thought to myself. It's television!
Did I mention that, unlike the women, Tom's completely naked?
Actually, that's not quite true. He's wearing just the one item: a provocative, permanently erect sheath made from coconut leaves tied in place with a string around his waist like a thong and decorated down below with a dangling sporran of hay. This is a nambas. I don't want to go into details, but let's just say that it does for the penis what buns do for hotdogs. It's also considered a powerful male fertility symbol. Nambas come in all different dimensions. Tom's, I'd say, is about the size of a small car-jack handle.
“You come and meet the chiff,” Tom says.
“Chiff?”
“The village chiff. You meet him.”
“Oh, the chief! How great, yes, I'd love to. Thanks.”
Like a kitten mesmerized by a metronome, I walk into the village, trying not to look down at his horny verticalness, while completely aware that I am doing so roughly every three and a half seconds.
All around, suspicious eyes peer out at me from huts as I stumble by. Frightened kids take a step back into the safety of their mothers' arms. Men, all of them naked too but for their nambas, stop what they're doing (which is nothing, of course) and watch.
The first building we come to is a dusty shack known as a nakamal, or tribal meeting house, on the porch of which someone has mysteriously left a sack of screwdrivers.
“Cash, this is our chiff.”
“What is? Oh—this!”
Wizened and wrinkly, with a foaming froth of sepia-gray hair on his head and two smaller froths at his jowls, it's the oldest person I've ever seen in my life! Little more than a loose arrangement of bones tied together at the neck, he has a craggy tobacco-yellowed smile and an arced spine crushed by the years into an unyielding parabola. Because of this, he crouches. Out of respect, I crouch too. Around here they call the chief Bigman. Yeremanu. A word meaning “what he says goes.” Everyone defers to him, and therefore so must I. Chiefs are thought to possess great magic powers, so you don't want to get on the wrong side of one—say, by mistaking him for a bag of tools, for instance.
“Hello there, I'm Cash. How lovely to meet you,” I beam, reluctant to shake his hand lest it turn to dust. “This is an honor for me.”
Off to one side, Tom translates.
“How old is he, the chief?”
“One hundred seven years old.”
“One hundred seven??”
“'Es.”
While my facial expression may say I'm impressed, privately I'm thinking, jeez, what a bitter curse longevity is. I never, ever want to live as long as this, or to look like him if I do. If I am not dead by the age of ninety I want to be stuffed in a box and cremated anyway. To hell with the formalities. Then, after a small celebration for grieving friends, my ashes—and I've made an express provision for this in my will—are to be taken to Yorkshire in the north of England and flung in my sister-in-law's face. She knows why.
After an awkward moment of introspection, the conversation with the chiff draws to a close. “Anyway, nice to have met you.” I smile.
And the smile is returned warmly. Lovely man.
“How come the chief lives to one hundred seven?”
“Because we eat food and we live long,” Tom says, walking away.
“The secret to longevity is in the food?”
“'Es. Come, I show you the garden.”
Visiting Yakel Village is like stopping off at Bedrock and saying hello to the Flintstones, except that Yakel is ten times more primitive. There are no cars—not even ones with holes in the bottom that you move with your feet. The houses are ramshackle huts like thatched tents made of braided sticks, cane, coconut leaves, and mud. And your waste disposal isn't a hog sitting under the sink with its mouth open. Though that's only because they don't have sinks.
Five families live here altogether, according to Tom. Roughly 140 people per family. Each man in the tribe has up to nine children, and, believe me, it shows. There are little kids everywhere, and they're free-range, running about as they please, climbing trees, idly sitting on the ground picking nits out of their mother's hair, or, in some cases, brandishing giant machetes as long as my arm, with which they expertly slice the skin off wild grapefruit, while coyly examining me from the corner of their eye, showing curiosity without wanting to appear to. Where there aren't children there are chickens, piglets, and stray dogs. The dogs are just rib cages with legs, snuffling for scraps between the huts, and, when they find none—because if there were scraps, the kids, chickens, or piglets would surely have snapped them up by now—they flop down exhausted in a dusty corner, looking like there's only a fifty-fifty chance they'll ever get back up again.
We emerge from the cover of trees onto a sward of parched grass.
“Come—see this.” Tom directs me to one of the larger huts. “This is our kitchen.”
Inside, it's dark. A dying fire coughs sparks that only by some miracle don't set the straw roof alight. Grapefruit and cabbages and a few vegetables I can't name are stacked up on makeshift stick shelves, alongside crude pots and pans.
“You have one kitchen for the whole village?”
“No, for one family,” he says. “Every family has its own kitchen.”
“Oh, okay. And who does the cooking?”
For a moment Tom looks totally affronted by the question. Isn't it obvious?
“Women!” he retorts brusquely. “The women do it.” And to underscore the point, in case I'm in any doubt at all, he adds, “Not the men.”
“Well, of course, not the men,” I respond, adding a curt, “Perish the thought.” Though it's possible my sarcasm is lost on him, because he just shrugs and walks out.
“Hey—dude, over here!”
Director Mark shouting to Camera Mark. He's found a large pig for us to film. The poor creature is cooped up in a tiny circular cell made of shaved wooden posts that allows it to perform the occasional three-point turn, but not much else.
Tanna society is rooted in subsistence farming. The people survive by traditional means: hunting, fishing, rearing animals, growing their own fruit and vegetables. There's a strong social hierarchy, or hunggwe, here, and a man's standing in that hierarchy is determined in the main by how many pigs he owns. The greater the number of pigs in his yard, and the fancier their tusks, the richer he is considered to be.
“How long does the pig have left to live?” I ask, watching the poor creature slam into the pen with its head, then its ass, then its head again.
“If you want to make the pig big and fat,” Tom says, “three or four yizz.”
My God! Three or four years wedged in a space that size—it's barbaric.
“And how long has it been now?”
“Three yizz.”
Ah. So the nightmare's almost over.
“In our village,” Tom continues, misreading my anxious hand-wringing as an invitation to please tell me more, “we buy the wife with the pigs.”
“So,” I say, already pursuing a new train of thought, “what happens if you become sick and …” Half a pace later I stop dead. What did he just say? “You buy your wife and she comes with a pig?”
“No—you buy with the pigs,” he corrects.
“Ohhhhhhhhh, you buy your wife using pigs!”
Seems the women in this culture are not only made to do all the back-breaking heavy-duty work that men won't touch, but they're also traded on the open market like chattels. The average wife costs between six and ten pigs, I'm told. Worst of all, and th
e biggest irony yet: among the many chores the women in Yakel have to complete each day is … guess what! Yes, they have to tend to the pigs. The very pigs they're going to be traded for later on.
No wonder the life expectancy of females in one of these kastom villages is relatively short. Whereas a man may live to 107, many women die prematurely. And when they do, I have no doubt they consider it a blessed relief.
It's devilishly hot out here. The midmorning sun licks my back, leaving a trail of sweat down my spine and causing my spiffy Banana Republic cocktail slacks to stiffen like cardboard before gluing themselves to my legs. At every turn, kids and their mothers stop and stare, amazed to see a white guy stroll through their remote village followed by a TV crew. And look, he's wearing trousers! In this heat. How crazy is that?
Believe me, indigenous people, I hear you.
The path down to the garden is a deep groove worn through the forest by countless feet over countless centuries. It slopes gently in some places but is almost perpendicular in many others, and pitted with holes, roots, and a million other opportunities to injure yourself.
“Tom and Cash—stay there. Don't move.”
Camera Mark, doubtless relishing the challenge of possibly tripping and breaking his neck, races ahead, chunky legs covering the terrain in small leaps, dragging the rest of the crew behind him, slithering wildly over loose stones, skidding into foliage, and becoming entangled in vines. Twenty feet away, he braces himself against a sapling.
“Okay, and … action. Go, Cash. Walk toward me.”
Tom is barefoot. Yet he springs across the rock-strewn terrain many times faster than I do, and with only a fraction of the histrionics, even offering to take my hand at one point and lead me over a gulley by means of a fallen tree trunk.
“You're so remote out here in the jungle. Do you not find yourself,” I ask him as we go, “wanting things from the outside world?” Would he not like a television, for example?
Sensible question. I mean, he can see how much fun we're having making the show. Who wouldn't want to set their TiVo to watch this debacle every week?
After a moment's thought he shakes his head. “No.”
“So you've never seen television?”
“No. We have no TV, no radio either.”
“That's unbelievable. So what do you sit and stare at each evening?”
“Stare?” he asks, not even amused. “We don't stare. We don't like TV. We like the life.” And without offering specifics, he walks on.
To the naked eye, the Yakel garden is a lush and shambolic but quite unspoiled wilderness on the banks of a chuckling stream. Sadly, I'm not a botanist (And I'd be grateful if you'd stop telling people I am. Tank yu.), so quite honestly I have no idea what the trees here might be: Mulberry? Banana? A pandanus or two? Not a clue. It's certainly beautiful, though. Serene, sunny, extremely green, and … a mess.
Every day, the men of the tribe come down here, take out their machetes, and harvest fruits, vegetables and … something else. Something very special. A root I've never heard of before today, called Piper methysticum. Popularly known as kava.
Kava is Polynesian chloroform, part of the black pepper family, a distant cousin of the coca plant, and the angry ex-wife of marijuana. Apparently, it's either chewed or mixed with water, then drunk to combat stress and anxiety, treat cramps, or chase away migraines. Or you can just get stoned on it—your choice.
Captain Cook himself was high on kava during his visit to these islands in Historical Times.1 Even Pope John Paul II, who built a reputation on issuing broad statements of Christian policy so retrogressive in nature that they made sense only if you were totally wasted, was given kava when he came to the South Pacific years ago. Also, anyone who's ever stopped by Fiji on vacation has probably tried the commercial variety that's sold in bottles. But that's Fiji. Here in Yakel they don't have a commercial variety, it seems. Theirs is hard core, the real thing, no decaf. Pulped up into a liquid and drunk, it allegedly opens up a mystical bridge to the supernatural, putting you in touch with the spirits. According to tradition, kava is consumed only by the men of the tribe. It's their way of relaxing after … well, after a long day of relaxing.
“Here,” Tom announces, diving into the undergrowth and pouncing on a clump of heart-shaped leaves, which he quickly tears aside. “This is kava.”
After another little search, he picks up a tree branch off the ground, whittles it to a point, and hands to me.
“What do I do with this?”
Do?
For a few moments, the words just kind of hang in the air like damp washing.
Then the penny drops.
Oh no! No, no, no. Are you crazy? I don't dig, I'm sorry.
But this is TV. And I'm afraid on TV there's a rule: The host must participate in all activities whether he wants to or not. So, egged on by Eric and both Marks, I crouch and with great reluctance start hacking away at the soil.
Kava—same as most Stephen Sondheim musicals—doesn't yield its fruits without a struggle. First you must find it—and, as I said, in a garden as haphazard as this it could be anywhere—then you must disinter it, but carefully, because the roots, where the narcotic compounds lie, are fragile and snap easily.
“Dig down!” Tom urges after watching me get nowhere for a while.
“I am digging down,” I snap back, scratching feverishly at the ground with my stick. “Look at me! There's nothing here.”
It's no use. Whatever soil I manage to extract from the hole just rolls right back in again. It's like having an expensive mortgage. I'm spending all my time paying off the interest, making no inroads into the principal. This is my Sunday in the Park with George.
“Use the stick.”
“I'm using the stick, Tom! But nothing's happening.”
To make matters worse, the cheap sunblock I slapped on my forehead earlier in the day is starting to mingle with my sweat. Together they form salty rivulets that dribble into my eyes, stinging and blinding me. And Tom is no help. He just stands there, berating me with his eyes, the way he might if I were, for instance, one of his wives.
“Dig down with the stick,” he urges again.
“TOM—I AM DIGGING DOWN WITH THE BLOODY STICK! Look at me, I'm digging down.” Even as I'm proving my point by dragging it hard across the ground, the damn thing snaps. Sonofabitch!
“What happened?”
“What d'you think happened? I broke my stick!”
“Wait—I find you another.”
“No, no, it's okay, I'm good,” I leap in. “You know what?” And I let out a long sigh. “Maybe I'm more suited to doing women's work.”
“No,” he says very firmly. “Men dig kava only. Not women.”
Thirty seconds later, with sweat cascading off my chin, I quit again. “Come on, Tom, can't we skip kava for today? Let's go without. Let's have bananas instead.”
Well, that does it! You'd think I'd just made a casual offer to castrate him with his own machete, because instantly the most peculiar silence envelops us.
Go without kava? These people never go without their kava. It's the mainstay of their life; their savior, their mistress, their reward each night for making it through another miserable twenty-four hours in this humid, monstrous pit of hell.
Through a halo of circling flies, I see him glowering. Until, in the end, perhaps realizing that, left to the likes of me, nothing will ever get done—which is a pretty fair assessment—he crouches down by the hole and pitches in, shoveling dry earth aggressively with his bare hands, until …
Success!
“Hey look, we've done it!”
… we uncover a set of bagpipes.
Yay!
Three gentle tugs, and out pops a bulbous vegetable with a dozen frayed woolly tendrils dangling from the bottom like dreadlocks. All of a sudden, the mood in the garden lightens. The addict has his fix; he's happy again. And, after repairing the damage we've done, kicking the loose soil back into the hole and patting it down,
we set off on the long steep trek home, with Tom dangling the dirty, disgusting object at his side proudly, like a severed head.
“So how about a telephone?” I begin again. “Wouldn't you want a telephone?”
“No.”
“A car?”
“No.”
“How about electricity?” I try to explain electricity, and how it's all the rage where I live. “Come on, you've got to want that. Refrigeration, air conditioning, lights. Who doesn't want lights?”
But he's resolute. “No.”
“A microwave oven, a toaster …?”
“No, no.”
“Do you even know what they are, Tom?”
No. But even if he did, something tells me he wouldn't want them.
“We like the life,” he repeats. “We like our culture. Our kastom.”
Kastom refers to customs (forgive me if I translate these difficult words for you): the many diverse traditions the tribe adopted centuries ago and which it insists on sticking to even today, despite overwhelming evidence that there may possibly be a better way.
Tanna was first settled in about 400 B.C., during Ancient Historical Times, by Melanesians from neighboring islands. These early pagan tribes were a superstitious bunch. They believed that mankind was evolved from volcanic rocks—which was a bit of a hard sell, I'm guessing, even then. The world, they claimed, was created by a rock spirit called Wuhngin who lived inside a mountain. Wuhngin decreed that it was the woman's job to do the household chores, from cooking to gardening, while the men, he insisted, should focus all their efforts on sitting and not much else. Well, suffice it to say, the menfolk worshiped Wuhngin.
Skipping forward now a couple of thousand years to Historical Times …
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, wave after wave of missionaries set sail from Europe, especially Portugal and Spain, to indoctrinate the people of the South Pacific with Christianity. The place became a virtual revolving door for every Tom, Dick, and Pedro with a Bible and a torch to read it by, determined to save “the savages” and their souls by doing away with their ancient version of reality—a rich heritage of pagan folklore, dances, beliefs, ceremonies, as well as a bunch of other stuff they were absolutely sure God wouldn't approve of, the way Christians so often are—and replacing it with their own.
