by Carl Hoffman
And they all knew some version of the story of Desoipitsj and Biwiripitsj, the first brothers in the world, who taught them how to headhunt and how to butcher a human body and how to use that meat and the skull to make new men from boys and to keep life flowing into the world. As an Asmat creation myth, its origins are unknown, as is an easy explanation for the origins of cannibalism itself, a complex subject that has often provoked fierce debate among anthropologists. Why have some cultures practiced something that others see as one of the most fundamental taboos in human society? Cause and effect, the chicken and the egg, can be hard to pin down, but in Asmat, at least, food—especially food rich in fat and protein—has never been abundant or regular. Besides the crocodile, there are no large animals to eat or hunt—even wild pigs are not indigenous to New Guinea. There is no gardening, and nowhere to go—when the first humans arrived on the island forty thousand years ago, it was the end of the line. The Asmat competed fiercely with each other, village against village, for access to sago and fishing grounds; the anthropologist David Eyde believed that all Asmat warfare resulted from that existential struggle. In a study of cannibalism across a hundred traditional cultures, the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday found that in those who practiced some form of anthrophagy, “ecological stress” was present in 91 percent of them. Even at its peak, the murder rate in Asmat was hardly enough to provide large amounts of nutrients to the population as a whole, but it may have been important to the war leaders and their families. Humans create myth and story to bring meaning to their lives, to explain their lives, and over thousands of years the Asmat created story and ritual that transcended basic nutrition or eating and provided both genesis and justification for their actions. By the 1950s, Asmat cannibalism was seen as a by-product of headhunting and its sacred rituals, rather than as its primary purpose.
Linked with Asmat cannibalism was a whole consciousness, a world of opposites, and the story of Desoipitsj and Biwiripitsj reveals the close link between victim and perpetrator, the I and the Other, in Asmat. Recorded by Gerard Zegwaard, a Dutch priest, in the 1950s, it is the detailed account of the rituals associated with headhunting and cannibalism. The story had fueled my visions of Michael’s death, for if he had been killed, it would have closely followed the tale’s script.
DESOIPITSJ WAS OLDER and unable to hunt, so Biwiripitsj had to do all the work. One day the boy brought home a wild pig. He cut off the head and thrust a cassowary bone dagger into its throat, pinning the head to the floor. “Bah, a pig’s head is but a pig’s head,” said Desoipitsj, watching. “Why not replace it with a human head? That would be something, I think.”
Biwiripitsj didn’t agree, and anyway, where was he to get a human head?
Desoipitsj was fixated on the idea and said, “Well, you can have my head.” After a lot of cajoling, he convinced Biwiripitsj to kill him with a spear, cut into his throat with a bamboo knife, and press the head forward until the vertebrae cracked. Even as Biwiripitsj removed his brother’s head, Desoipitsj continued to speak, describing the correct technique of butchering humans and initiating boys into manhood, instructions that had to be followed to the letter. Time and space shift in this story, for it is also a charter, a set of instructions on how all Asmat men and women were to act in the future, even though there weren’t yet any other people in the world.
When he returned with the men from a successful headhunt, Biwiripitsj blew a bamboo hunting horn to announce their triumphant return.
“How did you do?” the women yelled from the riverbanks. “What did you accomplish?”
“I, Biwiripitsj, have been to the Islands River this night. I killed a man, a big man. The flesh lies in the canoe.”
“What is his name?” the women called.
“His name is Desoipitsj.”
The women cheered and danced and jumped and howled as the warriors in their canoes paddled fast toward the shore.
Once in the jeu, Biwiripitsj had to sit on the floor, his head lowered in a position of shame. He was then given the name of the victim, his older brother Desoipitsj—the nao juus, or decapitation name. Later, having become the man he had killed, he could be welcomed back into the victim’s family as if he were the victim himself.
The mother’s oldest brother then held the head over the fire just long enough to scorch the hair. Mixed with blood collected from the victim’s decapitation, the fluid was smeared on the head, shoulders, and body of the initiate, cementing the identity between him and the victim.
The boy, now named Desoipitsj, told them to paint his body with red ochre, wet ash, and chalk. His hair was lengthened with sago leaf fibers, a piece of mother of pearl hung on his forehead. On the back of his head were placed two tassels of black cassowary feathers; in his septum was placed a nose pin from carved pig bone. His arms, wrists, calves, and ankles were wrapped in belts of finely split rattan, and in one arm belt was placed a dagger carved from the thigh of a cassowary. Later, when he had become a man and had killed other men, the dagger could be made from a human thigh or crocodile jaw. From his abdomen hung a triton shell, around his hips a sago leaf apron, and down his back a bamboo plate. He was now dressed as a man.
Then Desoipitsj gave instructions for what the initiate’s maternal uncles had to do with the decapitated head. They were balancing the world, becoming the Other.
The skull was painted with ash, ochre, and chalk and decorated with tassels of cassowary feathers and beads. The nose was filled with resin, and a net was drawn over the whole head to facilitate attaching the ornaments. The decorated head was placed between the spread legs of the initiate. This head, the fruit of a man, would nourish his genitals, the place from which new men came, and ensure his maturity, just as the fruit nourished the tree by making new trees that men ate. The head would remain for two or three days between his legs, and the initiate had to stare at it the entire time.
After a few days, Desoipitsj instructed the villagers how to adorn themselves and how to paint the canoes in stripes of chalk and ochre. Then everyone boarded them. The boy being initiated stood in the canoe of his relatives with the skull in front of him. As they drummed and sang and paddled toward the sea—to the west where the sun set and the ancestors lived—he leaned on a stick acting like an exhausted old man. The farther west they traveled, the weaker and older he got, until he was leaning on the shoulder of an uncle. Finally, he was so old that he died and collapsed onto the bottom of the canoe.
One of his mother’s uncles then immersed him in the sea with the skull. Lifted out, his ornaments were removed and placed in a magic mat. He was reborn, a child of women now born anew as a man, from men this time.
While singing, the men in the canoe carrying the initiate turned back toward land, to the east, to where the sun rises, to the land of the living. First the young man acted like a newborn baby, and then as a child who didn’t know the names of the river, the trees, anything. Gradually he learned more, and at each tributary his name was called and he answered with a bamboo horn. Returning to the village, he spent the night with his family and was again decorated head to foot. After resting awhile, the family gathered sago in the jungle. Then more dancing and sago pounding, and the skull was hung in the center of the men’s house. Finally, the initiate left the jeu, carrying the magic mat under his arm and in his hand the richly decorated skull. The men carried shields, which they pumped up and down while they sang. They danced again, and this time the initiate joined the men, swinging the skull. The songs that had been sung during the preparation of the head and during the sago pounding were repeated.
And once more the skull of Desoipitsj emphatically ordered that in the future all should obey his instructions.
IN MANY WAYS, the Asmat world at the time of European contact was reversed, a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In parts of Asmat, men had sex with each other. They occasionally shared each other’s wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank each other’s urine. They could perform acts of deep intimacy and su
bmission; once all of the men of the village of Tambor sucked the penis of the chief of Basim. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh, and there was nothing strange about this to Pip and his brothers. It is from the Latin word for “woods,” silva, that we get the word “savage,” and the Asmat men from Otsjanep paddling that day on the Arafura might as well have been characters in some European medieval fantasy—men who, in the words of historian Kirkpatrick Sale, lived in woods full of “monsters and hell creatures that abduct women and devour children; of whole races of accursed near human peoples who are animalistic and savage . . . a huge, powerful hairy figure, carrying a wooden club, with large genitals exposed, draped with strands of rank foliage, mute and therefore without reason, possessed of the secrets of nature, slave to natural desires and passions uncontrolled, always lurking there, over there, in the arboreal darkness—and as well in the dark, repressed corners of human desire and anxiety and fear.”
Pip and his jeu mates weren’t savages, however, but complex, biologically modern men with all the brain power and manual dexterity necessary to fly a 747, with a language so complex it had seventeen tenses, whose whole experience, whose whole world, was here, constituted in this isolated universe of trees, ocean, river, and swamp, cut off from other resources, other men, other ideas, other technologies. They were pure subsistence hunter-gatherers. They had no crops, no food source that lasted more than a few days. Headhunting and cannibalism were as right to them as taking communion or kneeling on a carpet facing Mecca. There was no Empire State Building, no America or Shakespeare, no atom bomb or rocket ships or cars or radios, no Jesus Christ or telephone. They had other symbols, other things that ordered their world and their place within it. They knew that a red sunset meant a big headhunting raid was taking place somewhere. They knew that the moon changed shape every night because it was annoyed by the sun, which retreated to the underworld, the land beyond the sea, every evening. They knew that they were descended from the trees because both trees and men had feet, legs, arms, a fruit on top. A man was a tree; a tree was a man. They knew that they were like the fruit bat, the cuscus, the King Cockatoo, because they all hunted and ate the same thing: fruit, whether it was the fruit of trees or the fruit of men. They were like the wild boar and the crocodile, because boars and crocodiles killed men and ate flesh and so did they. And they were like the praying mantis, because it was just like them: it, too, ate heads—in the very act of reconstituting itself.
They knew that a man who had taken many heads was a powerful man, admired by other men and wanted by women. They knew the tides and every creek and where the fish and shrimp ran and how to find cassowaries and wild pig in the forest with their hunting dogs. They knew how to make canoes and how to construct a house in a few hours from whatever was at hand. And they knew how to carve wood, how to instill an inanimate piece of tree with life, in a language of form and symbol that every man and woman in the swamps could read. That was, after all, how they had come to be—the first man had carved men from wood and then drummed them to life. The drum, the spear, the canoe prow, the shield and bisj pole, their songs—that was their literature.
“There is a bird on the sea,” the men from Otsjanep sang, clacking their paddles on the sides of the canoe.
Watching me,
because I am here in this boat.
Don’t push a big wind in my way
Until I return.
The water splashed against its gunwales. The coast appeared as a line to their left—nothing but ocean and sky and green. They were bound for the village of Wagin on the Digul River, seventy miles down the Casuarina Coast. For Asmat, this was a long journey, and it would take them past half a dozen villages, all of them hostile.
The warriors from Otsjanep didn’t know it yet, but they had been lured into a trap. Deception was common in Asmat. The enemy had to be deceived to be taken, the spirits had to be deceived if they were to be driven back to Safan, all to keep the balance so essential to Asmat life. Otsjanep and Omadesep were enemies. They had been tricking each other and killing each other for years, and Otsjanep had often been the victim. But they were neighbors, and they were also closely connected by death and marriage.
Faniptas, a master wood-carver and head of one of the jeus in Omadesep, for instance, was related to three men in Otsjanep. He was tall, with long strands of sago leaf braided into his hair and a carved pig bone in his nose. A few days before, he’d paddled up the Faretsj River, which at high tide meandered into navigable swamps and connected to the Ewta, leading to Otsjanep, a two-hour journey. “Hello, my brothers and sisters,” he had said to the men in the village. “Don’t attack me. Come to Wagin with me.” Some years back, a contingent of families from Omadesep had moved there. “There are many dogs’ teeth in Wagin; we will go there and get rich.”
In the jungle near Wagin, on a tributary of the Digul, lay a whirlpool, and every Asmat knew that whirlpools were entries to the underworld; they were places where the spirits dwelled. This particular doorway had a guardian, a dog, and the well produced jursis—dogs’ teeth. There was no money in Asmat, and necklaces of dogs’ teeth strung together like bandoliers had symbolic power and great value; they were the preferred currency used to acquire a bride. But for the whirlpool to produce the dogs’ teeth required offerings of fresh skulls wrapped in banana leaves. Where were the men from Omadesep to get those skulls? Faniptas and his mates from the jeu Desep hatched a plan: they would convince some men from Otsjanep to accompany them and then kill them and give their heads to the pool.
It wasn’t going to work out so simply. A mutual massacre was about to take place, the first in a series of interwoven events that would lead to the death of Michael Rockefeller. And Pip, Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai were paddling right into it.
6
February 2012
THE AIRPORT IN EWER, THE ONLY AIRSTRIP IN ASMAT’S TEN THOUSAND SQUARE MILES OF JUNGLE AND SWAMP.
THE ENGINES OF the Tregana Airways Twin Otter droned. I was strapped into a bench seat in the front row with so little legroom that my knees were pressed against my chest. The plane was threadbare, the floor bare plywood. Ten thousand feet below us lay a carpet of green with so many rivers zigzagging through it that it looked like a training area for backhoe drivers who’d gone wild. The engines slowed, we dropped altitude, and the plane banked hard to the left as a slash in the jungle below opened—a few houses and corrugated roofs and a green grass-and-dirt airstrip covered with World War II–era aluminum mats. We banked again, swooped low over the river, and touched down, braking hard at the end of the runway. The rear door popped open, and heat and humidity poured in, a moist, hot thickness. I was barely down the two rungs of the ladder when the Otter revved and roared airborne, and I stood alone in Asmat.
It had taken me nine days and a lifetime to get here.
I DON’T QUITE know where my obsession with the primitive, as it used to be called, started. Clichéd though it may be, I have vivid memories of Tarzan movies on our old Philco black-and-white television, some of my earliest TV memories—I couldn’t have been older than four or five. Thick jungle. Drumming. Howling. Fires. As I grew older, themes emerged. I couldn’t subsume myself to a group consciousness; I stuck out, or always felt like I did. I was bullied. I got in fights. In fifth grade I found karate, an old-fashioned kind of karate taught by an outsider that was punishing, full of endless repetition and physical contact and brutality. I loved it. Me, the small guy, the guy who couldn’t catch the ball, could do straight kicks till everyone around me dropped and could take hits and pain until I was black and blue and green and my nose was squished and bloody, and it wasn’t long until I could make those big tough talkers drop to their knees.
I read a lot. Hours and hours on summer hammocks and porch swings and late into the night. I loved the idea of alternative worlds, universes. At some point I saw David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, too young to understand the subtleties of T. E. Lawrence’s internal
struggles, but old enough to sense them, to recognize a fellow outsider.
Fantasies gave way to the great nonfiction adventure narratives. I read the real Lawrence—Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, about his punishing treks across the Arabian Empty Quarter with the Bedouin. The great sailing classics, loners all: Joshua Slocum. Francis Chichester, who, passing Cape Horn while circumnavigating the earth alone, heard a noise, stumbled on deck, and saw an airplane buzzing overhead to check on his progress and wish him luck. Instead of a momentary feeling of companionship, he felt only annoyance, his solitude interrupted. Or Bernard Moitessier, who would have won the Sunday Times Golden Globe race, the world’s first single-handed sailing race around the world, if he hadn’t approached the finish line and then just kept going. He couldn’t bear to stop; he sailed halfway around the world again to Tahiti before he finally came to shore.
After college, I went traveling. I remember stepping out of Cairo’s airport and smelling a smell I’d never smelled before, acrid and sweet. Smoke. Dust. A hint of rotting fruit mixed with car exhaust. A darkness barely illuminated by too few and too weak streetlights. A bus with no window glass, rusted and beaten down, rattling and spewing gray smoke, and a charming, persuasive man with rotting teeth insisting that the hotel to which my girlfriend and I were headed was closed. We ended up in a ramshackle but friendly hotel off Tahrir Square, and I have never loved a place like I loved Egypt. I left fear behind. In Luxor we spent hours on the banks of the Nile negotiating with a felucca captain, not for a normal three-hour sail but for a five-day voyage to Aswan, a thing of beauty and meals of tomatoes and Nile fish and strange fires burning on the sterns of boats at night.
