by Carl Hoffman
As wild and untouched as the Dani in the Baliem had been, this was different. Though the Dani fought each other, deaths in warfare were uncommon, and the Dani were farmers, their sweet potatoes giving them a sense of time, a sense of being settled—and most important of all, an abundant and reliable food supply. The Asmat Michael was with were pure hunter-gatherers, cannibals, with a culture far stranger than that of the Dani, and Michael could feel it. “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country,” he wrote, “than what I have ever seen before.” A group of men from another village that had never seen whites were there. They had never seen fishhooks or the nylon line that Gerbrands gave them, and they sang throughout the night, in Michael’s words, in celebration of meeting the whites. But was it in celebration? Or something else, something more complicated, a way of grappling with a profoundly unsettling experience, an encounter with strange, otherworldly superbeings who might be their ancestors in corporeal form?
Michael continued on in the morning away from the temporary refuge high up the river to the permanent village, the rowers from Otsjanep concerned that their women, left behind at the temporary refuge, might be attacked by Omadesep. When they finally reached the main village of Otsjanep, it was the largest they’d seen, with five huge men’s houses. Men and boys swarmed around them, a gridlock of dozens of canoes and hundreds of swimming men. Michael grabbed his Nikon and shot like mad. They found seventeen bisj poles still in the jeus of Otsjanep, with details they’d never seen before—the flag of one of them featured two praying mantises facing each other. The ceremony that the Omadesep poles—which Michael had bought—were carved for had been completed: the souls inside them had been dispatched on to Safan, and instead of being dumped in the sago grounds to rot, the poles had been taken by the village’s teacher. But these poles in Otsjanep were still in the jeus, were not yet disposed of, not yet thrown into the jungle, which hinted that they still embodied the souls of men whose deaths had not yet been revenged, reciprocated. They were a promise, a pledge, to right that balance, to—in our crude terms—avenge their deaths. Michael and Wassing also appeared to have had no knowledge of Max Lapré’s raid three and a half years before, though Michael noted that the poles seemed to have been carved for a feast that had taken place in 1959—just a year after Lapré’s raid.
If that seems as though it would have been a long time before, it wasn’t. The Asmat had no watches or clocks, and they forgot nothing. The village of Otsjanep, as Michael could see, was a place apart, a city by Asmat standards, a place with its own customs and styles of carving unique in all of Asmat.
In exchange for tobacco, the village erected a bamboo scaffold in front of one of the men’s houses facing the river, where they mounted the poles—a custom particular to Otsjanep. Men drummed and sang, and Michael offered to buy seven of the poles, for one lump of tobacco and one ax each, plus a length of fishing line and a hook for each rower. The men from Otsjanep agreed. Michael gave them a partial down payment, and the men said they’d bring the poles to a rendezvous spot on the east bank of the Betsj River in three or four days, and then transport them on to Agats, where Michael would pay them with more axes, knives, and tobacco. He also bought twelve shields.
Michael, Wassing, Putnam, and Gerbrands left Otsjanep on July 3 to visit a few other villages, and the canoes had to cross the mouth of the Betsj. What Michael wrote in his journal is remarkable, given what would happen to him in four months: “On our way to Biwar we had to cross the estuary of the Betsj River which at this point is several miles wide. Strong monsoon winds sometimes sweep the heavy swell from the Arafura Sea far into the estuary, making the crossing a rather hazardous undertaking in an Asmat dugout canoe. . . . Though there was kind of a swell when we arrived at the estuary our Asmat paddlers, after having measured the sky and waves with expert eyes, decided that the crossing could be made.”
Three days later, they arrived at the rendezvous spot, where they camped and waited for two days. The men from Otsjanep—and the bisj poles—never appeared. The paddlers from Amanamkai told them that the men from Otsjanep might have been afraid to leave their women and children behind. That’s one explanation. But they had already done just that when they’d left their temporary safety camp to escort Michael to the main village. Another reason may have been this: the deaths represented by the poles were unreciprocated, the poles were still active, still inhabited by Osom, Faratsjam, Akon, Samut, and Ipi, killed by Max Lapré. And if they were, the men of Otsjanep would not have parted with the poles for all the money or tobacco in the world.
12
March 2012
MEN IN OMADESEP CELEBRATING THE CONSTRUCTION OF THEIR NEW JEU.
FIFTY YEARS AFTER Michael Rockefeller shot photos of the men dancing around the bisj poles in Omadesep, I stood in the same place. The Faretsj River lay five feet down a bank of mud. Perpendicular to the river, the men’s house stretched a hundred feet, a massive structure of poles and gabagaba—the stems of sago palm—fronted by a long veranda reached by notched logs. Across the river was a wall of lush jungle—nipa palm and coconut palm and tangled green vines. Next to the jeu was a maze of poles sticking out of the muddy ground—the foundation for a new men’s house. I was lucky. We’d arrived in Omadesep just as the men were beginning to celebrate its construction, and Amates said the festivities would begin soon.
By now, I had been navigating the rivers and villages with Amates and Wilem for almost a week. It felt dreamlike. We had traveled in the darkness and at dawn and late afternoon—whenever the tides dictated. We had motored through crushing downpours—the water cold and fresh, the drops hard and big—and in the blazing sun. I hadn’t felt hot water on my skin since arriving in Agats over three weeks before. I hadn’t seen a chair or a cushion save the sofa in Amates’s sister’s house in Atsj. We ate three meals a day of rice and ramen, supplemented by very small bits of crab, shrimp, fish, and sago, and there was no oil, no fat, no alcohol, and little sugar except what Filo put in my instant coffee. My weight was dropping fast.
In the village of Betjew we slept on the floor of the school, a school with one teacher for eighty students, only half of whom came to class on any given day. “They go fishing or to the jungle to collect sago,” he said, “and I cannot keep them.” We paused for a night again in Atsj, where men gathered on the porch as rain cascaded down and drummed and sang and chanted through the night until dawn. “They sang about a man and a woman,” Amates said, in his usual frustratingly incomplete explanation. “The man was killed by people from Baiyun. It is a love story.”
In Amates’s village of Biwar Laut, we spent a day and a night. Years before it had broken off from Omadesep, Amates said, telling the story. “Some women from Omadesep were fishing when five boats came to the Faretsj and some of the men fucked the women,” Amates explained as we turned upriver from the Arafura toward the village. “The women’s husbands found out and attacked Biwar and killed Biwiripitsj. Biwar attacked Omadesep and killed Escame. My grandfather told me this story.” Egrets flew overhead. Some men in a canoe called out Amates’s nickname—“Ates!”—when they saw us. At the dock, a crowd materialized and Amates’s sister appeared, a gaunt woman in a T-shirt. Seeing Amates, she exploded in screaming and wailing. At an old wooden house, we found his father, small and thin but muscled still, with close-cropped white hair. He, too, sobbed and wailed and rubbed Amates.
As we settled on the porch of his sister’s house, Wilem walked up bearing crabs as big as my hands, wrapped in wet palm leaves. He threw them on the fire, and in walked a woman in a stained, ripped sundress, with a pierced septum and strings in her ears. She, too, exploded in wailing and sobbing and clutching, and then slumped to the floor, holding her head in her hands, weeping and rocking. Rising, she stumbled, as if drunk, out the door, the emotion so high she could barely walk, and she stumbled screaming along the boardwalk for fifteen minutes. “My mother’s aunt,” explained Amates.
Leaving Biwar, we traveled through a cut in the jungl
e that was barely five feet wide and so shallow we had to pole. I couldn’t see the sun or sky at all. The mud banks glistened and teemed with white-bodied crabs with orange legs and mud puppies, primitive tadpolelike creatures with huge heads, long tails, and only a pair of front legs. We ducked beneath overhanging trees and vines and past mangrove roots that looked like the fingers of ancient giants. Butterflies danced over us, and after an hour we broke into the Suretsj River, which was a mile or more wide.
We spent a night in Owus, Wilem’s village on the Bow River, where he introduced me to his wife and their three children and then quickly disappeared. It rained all afternoon and evening, and we sat swatting mosquitoes and flies by candlelight. “You know,” Amates said, “Wilem has two families and two wives here.” Which was as it had always been in Asmat, even though they now considered themselves Catholic.
After leaving Owus, we’d encountered a sixty-foot-long dugout manned by a Bugis trader, filled with supplies. We flagged him down, loaded up on clove cigarettes and tobacco, and motored on. On another river, we hailed some fishermen and bought a three-foot-long catfish, which Filo later cleaved into chunks and fried in oil. It was the most protein I’d had in days.
Even as we went deeper, there was that wall that I couldn’t pass through, an unsettled feeling that didn’t go away and which I’d never felt anywhere else in the world. Slowly it began to sink in. The thing I couldn’t quite shake, couldn’t quite figure out, couldn’t put my finger on, was cannibalism.
Headhunting and cannibalism and the rituals associated with them—all of Asmat culture, to put it simply—had only begun changing little more than a generation earlier. Amates’s father and the parents of possibly every single person over the age of forty had eaten human flesh. And not eaten it like we eat steak today—purchased in some air-conditioned megastore all wrapped in plastic—but with active participation in the butchering of bodies, the cutting off of heads, the evisceration of the skulls and chests and bowels of men, women, and children. Think of the blood. The gore. The dismembered limbs and hands. Maybe it was just in my imagination, my own American squeamishness about the human body and death, but what had been ordinary for the Asmat—just a few years before!—was utterly inconceivable to me. Living in huts, hunting and gathering your food, believing in spirits and magic, warfare—these are all just different varieties of what we all do every day. We used to be naked; now we wear clothes. We used to live in palm huts; now we live in wooden houses. We used to believe in exotic magic and spirits; now we believe in Jesus and the Holy Ghost. Big deal. These are all differences of degree, not kind. But what the Asmat had done regularly had crossed a line uncommon in human history, even in traditional hunting-and-gathering cultures. The most horrific, most monstrous thing we could think of had been central to their everyday life. And to me that fact hung over every moment in Asmat. It was the elephant in the room—even now, forty years after the practice had finally been stopped by missionaries and the government.
If I asked anyone about cannibalism, they would acknowledge it. Sure, we used to eat people, but now we don’t. They didn’t want to talk about it. They are Catholics now, though many still have multiple wives and all believe in an active spirit world and ceremonies that their Catholic God has no part of. Under the influence of the Church, they have been schooled to believe that what they did in the past was wrong, and they feel shame about it, at least in conversations with Westerners. What they think of it in private among themselves is hard to know. Many of their songs recall it, after all, and their whole ceremonial life has been based on it; it is clearly still part of their consciousness.
The longer I stayed in Asmat, the more I felt that disconnection—between what had been and what appeared to be now, between what they talked about openly and what they thought about in private, and between the Western fascination (my own included) with the idea of cannibalism and the actuality. As Michael Rockefeller wandered through Asmat, the headhunting and the killing and eating were still widely practiced. Every piece of art was rooted in it, and every Asmat he met in the remoter villages had consumed human flesh. And every piece that he collected, even now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, refers to it—the very poles that stand in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Met were created to avenge deaths, and they had the blood of the murdered rubbed into them. Yet he had never seen headhunting or cannibalism. Few Westerners ever had, besides Zegwaard, and it’s questionable whether even he actually saw any humans being slaughtered or consumed. I wondered: What would have happened if they had? If I had? What if it had been going on in their sight? Would they have seen the “art” any differently? What would I do, how would I feel, if that butchering and those feasts were going on around me?
In his field notes, journals, and letters, Michael repeatedly makes reference to the connection between headhunting and the art he was collecting. Yet he remains disassociated from it, never confronting it; it’s an academic, historical association. That was the wall I was feeling. I wanted to know what it was like, what it felt like, what they felt and thought about decapitating someone’s child or wife and butchering the body with their hands and rough tools. They did it, they knew all about it, everyone in Asmat did—the whole museum in Agats was built on it—and yet no one spoke about it. Tobias Schneebaum romanticized the Amazonian Indians he lived with until the day they raided another village, brutally murdering their victims with clubs. Schneebaum went with them, he watched it all, he pushed a spear into the chest of a man already dead, and it horrified him. And then he participated in the consumption of one victim’s heart, raw, bloody. It affected him so deeply that he fled soon after. My guess was that so, too, would Michael have done, and so, too, would I. Somewhere, somehow, there was some fundamental and profound cultural difference between me and the Asmat around me, as there had been between Michael and the men he was photographing, writing about, collecting from. The idea fascinated us because we never had to see the thing itself. But it was what separated me from the Asmat every hour I was with them.
BY THE TIME we got to Omadesep, we were traveling farther from Agats into narrower and more remote rivers. Atsj, Ayam, Becew, all had stores, docks, trash from Western consumer goods, a few generators that roared on in the evening. Omadesep had nothing, not even a store, and what really struck me was its lack of trash. There wasn’t any. It was a place with only a few manufactured products—pots and pans, a few machetes, fishing line—and nothing else that didn’t come from the sea or the jungle.
Under a flat white sky, and in humidity you could swim through, I heard screams, wild howls, a rhythmic clacking sound. Amates grabbed me and led me to the end of a rickety dock crowded with barefoot children, some naked, others in the ubiquitous tattered and stained T-shirts and gym shorts. Coming down the river were twelve canoes packed together in a mass, just a foot apart, ten to twelve men in each canoe. Though all were wearing shorts, they were decorated for battle, draped in dogs’ teeth bandoliers and carrying spears embellished with cockatoo feathers, their bodies smeared with chalk Xs and bands around their legs and arms. They had black grease across their faces, and their eyes were encircled in red, like the enraged King Cockatoo, and they wore cuscus fur hats sprouting cockatoo feathers. They were born on the water, born standing in their tippy canoes, and they clapped their paddles against the sides of the canoes. “Huh, huh, huh, huh,” they grunted, a guttural yell interspersed with high-pitched ululating cut by a single, deep voice singing a few lines of a groaning, melodic dirge, before the grunts and paddle-beating started again. They jumped up and down and horns blew, like the foghorns I’d heard as a kid at my grandparents’ in Newport, Rhode Island, and clouds of white smoke engulfed them—lime—as they rowed to the shore. From out of the scrum emerged ten or fifteen men carrying an eight-foot-long cylinder, the top trunk of a sago palm, wrapped in a fancy dress of green sago leaves; sago is female and so wears a skirt, for sago comes out of the inside of the tree as a child comes out of a w
oman. They hoisted the dressed sago log up into the jeu.
Inside the jeu it was dark, but shafts of sunlight pierced the palm walls and roof. Five men sat cross-legged on the springy floor, their backs to the central fireplace hearth, each with a long, narrow, carved drum across his knees. Here, the center of the jeu, was also the center of the Asmat cosmos. It was where the world of the living and the world of the dead met, where both were present. The men were dressed as animals that eat fruit, headhunters. Tucked into rattan armbands were long, sharp daggers of cassowary thigh bone—the same daggers used to pin the heads of victims to the floor in the origin tale of Biwiripitsj and Desoipitsj. They drummed in unison, chanting; one man started the song and the others soon joined in, and it ebbed and flowed in between moments of silence with no apparent direction—each man just knowing his part. “Ohhhhhhh,” a voice would sing, a long, drawn-out, deep voice, followed by speaking, then more long “ohhhhhhhhhs.” “He is singing the name of a man killed by Omadesep in Biwar Laut a long time ago,” Amates said. Thousands of flies buzzed. The men smoked. Sang. Drummed. Chanted. On and on it went, for hours, as others filtered in and out, the crowd gathering until there were fifty sitting around the sago log, which was white and glistening and covered with flies.
At some signal that I never understood, a man with an ax began slicing the log lengthwise, pivoting the ax head at each cut, separating an inch-thick layer of sago, which peeled away like the layers of heart of palm. Again and again he sliced, each time the stalk becoming narrower, until it was the diameter of a fishing pole. The end of the log bulged into a head that was repeatedly shaved into small chunks. Men took their drums to the fire, heating the heads made from the skins of iguana, to tighten them, rubbed their palms over the drum heads, constantly adjusting the small knobs of beeswax, stuck to the drum heads like gobs of chewing gum, that tuned them. I lost track of time in the dark and the smoke and the heat and the pulsating drumming and chanting, each chant a story of death and headhunting and battles that stretched back years, generations, according to Amates, and recalled the ancestors and their spirits.
