by Carl Hoffman
During a smoking break, I asked Amates to ask about the trip to Wagin in 1957. Max Lapré’s reports mentioned it as the reason for his actions, but offered few details. Again the long explanation from Amates. We all smoked. The men nodded. Looked at me. They remembered. All of it, as if it were yesterday, and I heard the names Pip, Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai. And then one man, Everisus Birojipts, started talking. He was bare-chested and unadorned, and though clearly older, his chest was firm, broad, strongly muscled. He had short hair and a scruffy beard. He had been a boy and had accompanied his father on the journey, and he grew animated as the story unfolded. The quest for dogs’ teeth. The rain and the fighting in Baiyun and Basim and Emene. His fear.
Over the past two decades, I’d reported hundreds of stories from all over the world, but this one felt different. Michael’s disappearance had been so long shrouded in rumor, and took place in a land so distant, that it had taken on the quality of an impenetrable myth. His own family had so long publicly clung to the notion that he’d drowned; they’d found no way to investigate what happened, and it was easier to give yourself to the mystery, to accept that he’d been swallowed up in this unreachable green and watery fantasy than to untangle it. Here, beyond a certain point, the Rockefellers had been powerless. It didn’t matter how many searchers they might employ, how many attorneys they might set to the task, it mattered little what laws or courts might say, or how many powerful people they might know—all the tools of the rich and privileged had been useless here. The Asmat didn’t care about any of them, were immune to all of them.
But whatever happened to Michael had been real. Asmat was real—and here, strange as it seems, the spirits had been real too, and I began to think of him as having been lost to this spirit world. Something had happened here that had roots deep in Asmat culture, and I was starting to see that every day I spent in Asmat the story was coalescing into a touchable narrative. The more I understood about Asmat culture, the more I began to think of the mystery of Michael’s disappearance in an Asmat way, as if he were one of those spirits who’d never been pushed on to Safan. The Asmat had closed every loop through their rituals—and through violence—but Michael was still floating around out there. Perhaps my journey, both in Asmat itself and through the archives, wouldn’t just solve the mystery but lay his spirit to rest once and for all.
In Birojipts’s telling, the six men from Otsjanep attacked the men from Omadesep first, though I doubted that, since they were in the minority by far. But at the Ewta there was no doubt: “There were a lot of men from Otsjanep waiting for us, and we were exhausted and resting and sitting and Otsjanep people came and killed us with arrows. My father, all the people behind me, were dead,” he said, “and only a few came back to Omadesep. So many were killed.”
By late afternoon, the jeu was filled, a hundred men crowding the floor. Other men appeared, bearing ten-foot-long pieces of green, freshly cut sago palm leaves that they hung like curtains around the central section of the jeu, always a sign that spirits were present, since they inhabited the leaves of the sago. When the sago log was gone, the layers were broken into small pieces and distributed. “We must go,” Amates said to me. “We can stand by the edge.” In an instant, the men divided into two groups, one on each side of the jeu. Wild yelling and screaming erupted, they started pitching the chunks at each other as hard as they could, and around the hearth the old men with their drums hit the deck. The throwers yelped. They howled. It sounded like barking dogs and squealing pigs, and the chunks flew, hard, a snowball fight of sago. When it was over, the drummers drummed and the singers sang and the men danced as though possessed, the crazy cassowary dance of moving up and down on the balls of their feet while frenetically pumping their knees in and out. The jeu shook and the floor moved up and down and clouds of dust enveloped it like fog from the stamping feet and one man pulled his track pants down, lost in ecstasy.
That night, twenty men appeared in the house we were staying in. It was still hot. Stifling. Without power, candles flickered, stuck onto the wooden floor. We passed out tobacco, and I listened and watched. Smoke filled the room. Pale white lizards crept along the walls. Outside, the crickets buzzed. In bits and pieces, one man and then another, whose names I didn’t know, told me about Lapré coming to arrest the men after the raid, and as always in these villages time shifted and there was no way to separate generations—the village was one, and things that happened to their fathers happened to them. “We were afraid,” they said, and in those moments I felt the clash of cultures, their confusion over what was happening and why, who Lapré had been, the guns and the sudden violence they unleashed. I felt their anxiety over the aliens who might be superbeings, who might be their very ancestors, with guns and boats in their midst.
THE NEXT MORNING we left Omadesep for Otsjanep, as Michael Rockefeller had done, though the river was too low and we had to take the sea route. The entrance to the Ewta was so narrow that I never would have noticed it from offshore. It was a tunnel through thick, monotonous green mangroves hanging over the river from the banks, dangling vines. We motored slowly, and I imagined Max Lapré here, his heart beating against his chest, armed and ready for a confrontation, looking for warriors hidden in these very trees and brush, and I imagined the Asmat watching him come, these strange men in their big, loud boats and their guns. A constant stream of canoes slipped past us, heading to the sea, some with women and children, some with men standing, their paddles dipping and stroking in perfect time with each other. Their ragged T-shirts and shorts made them look like street people, and I wished they were naked, though I also wondered if that was just my own hope for an exotic experience with naked savages. The river twisted and turned, and after half an hour the trees cleared and thatch houses appeared on the left bank. The place felt wilder than anywhere I’d been before. There was no dock, just muddy banks lined with canoes, which we climbed over, picking our way across the logs and poles over the mud. Men stared, Amates and Wilem talked, and we were led to a two-room wooden house, its walls black with soot.
This was Pirien, a village adjacent to Otsjanep that resulted from a violent split between the five jeus soon after Michael disappeared. We were barely inside the house when men started appearing. One. Two. Five. Soon I counted forty squeezed into the sweltering, furniture-less room, crowds of young boys peering in through the windows. We sat on the floor, a sea of faces and sweating bodies and flies, staring, waiting. Amates brought out the tobacco, passed pouches of it and rolling papers to the elders, who emptied the pouches and divided it up, passing mounds of the brown weed around the room. Soon we were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Amates talked, the men nodded. Some introduced themselves. There was Ber, son of Dombai, former head of the jeu Pirien. Tapep was the son of Pep, who had been chief in the 1960s and who had married Osom’s widow, one of the men killed by Lapré. I wasn’t sure why they were here, what had brought them. They didn’t ask me anything, but they seemed to want to see me, and they wanted the tobacco I’d brought, though I was never quite sure what Amates was saying that I didn’t understand.
I asked them how the village had split. There was a lot of discussion, and Amates relayed the story: Dombai was the head of Pirien jeu, and he had three wives. One morning at five a.m., the head of Otsjanep jeu asked Dombai to go into the jungle and collect sago, while Dombai’s three wives went in a canoe to fish. Dombai was suspicious, so he asked men to follow his wives. Eventually Dombai’s spies saw the women fucking—that’s the word Amates used—three men from the Otsjanep jeu, including the head of the jeu.
When the three women returned to Otsjanep, well, there was trouble. Dombai confronted them. The women threw open their skirts and said, yes, we fucked them, and many other men from Otsjanep too. The men made a fire and burned the women’s clothes, and that was that.
Not a problem, Dombai said. Not a problem.
But Dombai remembered. One year later, the men from Pirien jeu attacked and killed Bifack, Por, Fin, and A
jim in retribution and moved their women and children half a mile downriver to a new place, and the Pirien jeu became the village of Pirien. What happened to one man in the jeu happened to them all. There was no separation. No individuality. No I. Collective guilt ran deep in a place where men took certain other men as lovers/brothers and also sometimes shared each other’s wives, where everyone was related and the bisj pole carvings were a tangle of men standing on and connected to other men.
There was a lot of crying. The children were sad. The men from Otsjanep wanted peace. So they gave a daughter to Pirien, and then the men from the two sides drank each other’s urine, an act of submission and bonding.
When I asked about Lapré’s raid, they grew quiet, and Amates suggested we take a break and head upriver to Otsjanep itself. The river twisted and wound, and after half a mile the trees cleared and we entered the village. On the left bank, there were no plank houses at all, nothing but thatch huts and mud, smoke, and a few banana trees and coconut palms, crowds of people sitting on porches, watching our arrival. Some of the women had no shirts, their breasts dangling long and flat against their bellies. We pulled the boat up to the banks, climbed over canoes and over branches and log walkways, Amates talking to the watching crowd. Children gathered, pressing close. The clearing behind the houses stretched for a few hundred yards, and near here, somewhere, had stood the original village that Lapré attacked and that Michael visited.
The vibe here felt strange. Dark. Oppressive, as if there were something hanging over the village. That wall again, though now it was almost visible to the naked eye. No one moved. If I’d been a cat, my fur would have been standing up. I looked at people and they looked back, but there was no recognition, no welcome, nothing that drew me to them. No one shook my hand. No one invited us into their house. I felt like I had no traction here. I asked Amates to ask if anyone knew about Lapré and his raid, or even had been an eyewitness to it. Amates spoke, but it was like he was speaking in a foreign language. Faces were blank, emotionless. A few people said a few words. “They don’t remember anything,” Amates said. “They don’t know anything about this.” As always, I couldn’t tell if Amates was being straight with me, telling me everything he knew, or if there were things he was filtering, things he was keeping from me.
I’m not sure what I had been thinking, imagining that I could drop into a village and have its people simply open up to me, a complete stranger, a white no less. Had I made the same mistakes as Lapré, or Michael? Showing up with the wrong people, with the wrong motivations? I wanted something, it was true. Not just whatever they were willing to show me, but their deepest secrets, their account of the events that had preceded the possible murder and cannibalization of one of my clan, one of my tribe, my countryman. I had imagined they’d want to tell me, to share it with me, that they’d rush to show me his skull or thigh bone and celebrate the brutality, the violence, that was a part of who they were. I imagined they’d be proud of it. Why did I think they’d be so eager? In America people’s egos get the best of them: they like to talk about what they’ve done, they’re open to journalistic flattery and the idea of being affirmed by seeing their names in a magazine story. And we were talking about events that took place fifty years ago, that involved their fathers and grandfathers, not themselves. I imagined those events would be less immediate, less dangerous. But the people of Otsjanep were as blank and silent as stones.
Getting nowhere, feeling unwelcome, we climbed back in the boat and returned to the wooden house downriver in Pirien. It was late afternoon. A huge black pig rooted in the mud under the house, now empty of visitors. Dogs yelped and fought. Children played on the boardwalks, but I couldn’t see any adults anywhere. I couldn’t keep the flies off my face, my eyes, my nostrils. They were starting to make me feel crazy.
“They are very afraid,” Amates said, apropos of nothing.
“Afraid?” I said. “Of what?”
“There was a tourist who died here,” he said. “An American tourist named . . .” and the name he said was garbled. I couldn’t understand it. This was news to me. In all I’d read, I’d never heard of an American tourist dying in Asmat.
“When?” I said. “What was his name?”
Amates’s English was slow, the words hard to comprehend no matter what he said. He said the name again, and then again, more slowly, and it was a hard name for an Asmat to pronounce, but this time it was unmistakable: “Michael Rockefeller.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had never mentioned Michael’s name to Amates, not once. All I’d said was that I was a journalist writing about Asmat and that I was interested in its history and the story of the trip to Wagin and Max Lapré’s raid.
“Michael Rockefeller?” I said, feigning ignorance.
“Yes, Michael Rockefeller,” Amates said. “He was an American. He was here in Otsjanep. They are very, very afraid. They do not want to talk about this.”
“How did his name come up?” I asked.
“They told me,” he said. “Today, when we were talking, they are afraid you are here to ask about Michael Rockefeller. And they are afraid. Very afraid.”
“Why?”
“Otsjanep killed him. Everyone knows it. My grandfather even told me this when I was a little boy.”
13
September 1961
BISJ POLES COLLECTED BY MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER FROM OMADESEP AND OTSJANEP IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.
“WHAT TIME IS it and where am I? It is nighttime with the crickets going berserk all around me and I’m back in Hollandia,” wrote Michael in September 1961. “I arrived exhausted today and found that tomorrow at 8:40 a.m. René and I will fly to Merauke in order to make a 6:00 p.m. boat to the Asmat. I am now surrounded by my little reality for the next ten weeks: a chaos of cameras and recording equipment cluttering up everything including my mind.”
Immediately after returning from his first Asmat voyage in July, Michael wrote Goldwater a long letter. “I think I can report with some confidence that my first trip to the Asmat has met with success.” He was elated with the objects he’d collected. Though he and Goldwater had been told that Asmat was “already well acculturated,” that was only partially true around Agats and “for anyone taking a very rapid, relatively short trip . . . by motor boat,” he wrote. “However there remain 2 parts of the Asmat which are as yet very little known: the extreme Northwest and the entire Casuarinas Coast, which has only just begun to be patrolled and is known well only by the missionary, Father van Kessel.” He wrote that while it was true that “headhunting has ceased”—a strange thing to say given the simmering tensions he’d seen between Omadesep and Otsjanep and the art he was hoping to find, which was based entirely on headhunting—“Western ideas have made remarkably little dent on the Asmat mind.” The art and ceremonies associated with it, he wrote, were healthy in nearly every village. His biggest coup, he said, was acquiring the bisj poles from Otsjanep, which he’d negotiated for but which hadn’t been delivered. “These have resulted from the well known bise [sic] ceremony . . . the poles from Ochenep [sic] have carved patterns all over the figures’ arms and legs. This is apparently a style typical of the Casuarinen [sic] Coast area. Dr. Gerbrands tells me that there are none like these in Europe. Here once again we were able to induce the villagers to put on part of the bise [sic] ceremony for us. 12 poles were involved, they were placed, not standing but leaning on a constructed wooden framework out over the water of the river—before all 3 men’s houses of the village.” Again there’s that strange disassociation, almost a denial. If the culture was intact, if Western ideas had made no dent in the Asmat mind, then by definition that meant headhunting—and the eating of human flesh that was part of it—was alive and well. Which, of course, it was. In fact, that very month, Sanpai, one of the warriors from Atsj who’d accompanied Lapré in 1958, had been invited to a feast in Otsjanep. But the villagers were just up to their old tricks. “He arrived in Otsjanep and was immediately stabbed/shot with an arrow, murd
ered and eaten,” wrote von Peij. Which meant that the deep, vibrant spirit world was alive too, and yet it always feels, reading his letters and journals, as if Michael was trying to shy away from it.
Instead, he was thinking of the things he was getting and what he could do with them and how he could acquire more good stuff. The opportunity to purchase the poles, he said, was “unique” for the United States, and he was off to a great start. He’d also decided to forget Australian New Guinea and concentrate on the Asmat.
Goldwater wrote van Kessel, as Michael had requested. “Mr. Rockefeller is, as you know, the son of the founder of the Museum of Primitive Art, and he is himself a valuable member of our Board of Trustees. You will have been able to appreciate his real enthusiasm, scientific background, and artistic understanding. We at the Museum are looking forward eagerly to the collections he will be able to bring back to the Museum, because we know they will be well chosen and documented. But Mr. Rockefeller is young, and new in the field. Any instruction and assistance you can give him will be greatly appreciated by our Board and our Staff, and eventually by the public who will admire these works and so gain in insight and understanding. May I add my sincere personal thanks for your friendly cooperation.”
