by Carl Hoffman
Though we spent hours and hours together, it was often in the morning that we spoke the most, when he opened up a little, patting the space next to him for me to sit, as we munched on dry, flavorless sago and small fish and smoked our first cigarettes and drank our coffee—a luxury for him, since I had provided it from Agats. Pointing to the weapons, he gave them their Asmat names. Amun, bow. Jamasj, shield. Po, paddle. Then he said, “Look!” and showed me a scar on his forearm the size of a quarter. “From an arrow!” He slapped his forearm, slapped his thigh and groin—four wounds, one of which was from an arrow that entered his groin and came out the other side. “Otsjanep!” he said. He jumped up, grabbed a shield, hid behind it, advanced, ducked, advanced, screamed, pantomimed shooting an arrow.
In a world without photographs or television or recorded anything, the Asmat are wonderful storytellers, expressive and dramatic with their voices and bodies, their stories full of the chopping of heads and the shooting of arrows and the driving home of spears. When Kokai talked about canoes or paddling, he’d bend forward and spread his arms wide, become a canoe gliding over the sea, a canoe I could see. Once he imitated a fruit bat: he scrunched up and made a creepy face, exposing his teeth, screeching, holding his hands like he was clinging, and he was the bat—I could see it hanging upside down in a tree.
I’d already heard the story of the split between Otsjanep and Pirien, but I asked him again: Why? What happened?
He pantomimed grabbing someone, struggling over them, pulling and pushing. Made a circle with his index finger, started thrusting the index finger from his other hand in and out—a struggle over women, sex. Now I knew who was who, and the story’s details came alive. It had been Dombai, the father of Ber, whose house stood in front of Kokai’s, who had been cuckolded—and he’d been head of the jeu, the most important man in the clan. The man who’d slept with his wives had been Fin, the head of Otsjanep. It had been a brazen piece of treachery, a direct challenge, a grave insult to Dombai and every member of the jeu, sure to provoke violence.
Pirien and Otsjanep were deeply complex places. On a nightly basis, ten of us were sleeping in Kokai’s house—he and his wife and their two children, his daughter and son-in-law and their three children. But it was so few only because I was there. More people began trickling back the longer I stayed; after a few weeks, on any given night there might be twenty. Pirien itself was divided into five subvillages, each with a name, based around five principal families, who themselves formed a larger clan and belonged to the same jeu. Five houses, at least fifty people, lived in Ufin, all directly related to Kokai, and he was the patriarch—he had, in fact, served as kepala desa (the headman) of Pirien for five years. It was essentially an elected position—he was like the mayor and had received a small salary (which was how he had been given a plank house). But there was another headman too, who was variously called the kepala perang or kepala adat—the war leader or head of custom. This was the most important position of all, and most men served for life. They were the head of the jeu, of which there were five in the twin villages: Otsjanep, Kajerpis, and Bakyer in Otsjanep; Pirien and Jisar in Pirien.
Strangely, although every village I’d ever been in had a jeu—the massive, one-hundred-foot-long houses that served as the ceremonial centers of village life—neither Otsjanep nor Pirien did, a mystery for which I could never get a direct answer. The lack of a jeu was related, I suspected, to the two villages’ long history of violence, and maybe even to Michael Rockefeller’s death. For all of the disruption imposed on the Asmat by the Dutch, Indonesian officials had been far more extreme. While the Dutch had banned headhunting and warfare and brought Christianity, Indonesian government officials had burned all the jeus and banned all carving and feasting. The few Dutch missionaries who remained behind were supplanted by a wave of Crozier priests from the United States. Tensions between the missionaries and the Indonesians grew so tense that Father Jan Smit was shot to death by an Indonesian official in Agats in 1965. Only in the early 1970s did Indonesia begin softening its position and slowly allow traditional Asmat customs to flourish again, under pressure from and subtle manipulation by American missionaries. But even today villages had to get a building permit from the government to erect a new jeu, and I suspected that officials remained apprehensive that the most visual manifestation of traditional spiritual life—five big jeus in a village that had been riven with power struggles for decades—might bring out old prides and animosities, allowing violence to bubble forth.
Of course, as had been shown by the earliest Dutch efforts to quash headhunting, traditions didn’t die so easily. My question about the lack of a jeu in Otsjanep and Pirien was complicated by the fact that whenever I asked it, no one understood what I was asking. There were five jeus in Otsjanep and Pirien, they’d say, and everyone knew who belonged to which jeu, even if there wasn’t a traditional building per se. Of course! It wasn’t the buildings themselves—the churches, so to speak—that counted.
One day Kokai pointed to a house across from his and said, “That’s the jeu.” “Oh,” I said, “can I see it?” When we went inside, it turned out to be the house of Ber, Pirien’s current kepala desa. Otsjanep and Pirien didn’t have formal, traditionally built jeus, but that didn’t matter in the least.
As it turned out, however, the men of Jisar had convinced the local authorities that a new jeu might foster tourism, and permission had been given to begin construction. A few days after my arrival, Kokai’s son-in-law, Bouvier, took me out to look. Pirien consisted of about thirty houses, nine of them plank, along the banks of the Ewta. Although I could see no dividing line, another twenty at the downriver side of the village were technically in Jisar, perhaps a quarter-mile down a rough, three-foot-wide boardwalk.
In a clearing along the riverbank a Stone Age fantasy was rising. Resting atop a foundation thirty-three poles wide, each pole three feet apart, was the framework of a new jeu. From each of the poles in the front row, looking out to the river, gazed a carved face. The floor was already built, a springy layer of narrow, inch-wide poles, and above it stood the framing—a rough rectangular outline to which the walls and roof would be attached. All jeus had a high, pitched roof descending from a central beam that lay across a series of notched support logs, and it was these logs that thirty men at a time were driving into the mud. The men worked fast, singing, chanting, clutching the poles with their arms and driving them downward with their feet, deep into the mud. It reminded me of a hive of bees or an ant farm: with no central “architect,” no blueprints, no big pieces of machinery, gangs of men worked in some mysterious harmony, driving logs, hoisting the top beams into place, tying it all together with strips of rattan.
“More! A little more!” voices called, and the men heaved and chanted, until everything lined up perfectly. No nails. No wire. They worked with nothing but a handful of axes and machetes, and though not a single pole was uniform in width or length or was even straight itself, the jeu looked as true as if they were working with levels and power tools.
DURING THE HEAT of the day, almost no one moved except the children, but toward late afternoon the village sprang to life, and the next evening I found a different scene altogether. The jeu had no walls, no roof, but the Asmat couldn’t help themselves. It was the first jeu rising in years, and the feasting and celebrating had begun and would continue until it was finished.
I walked over alone, trailed by the thirty or so children who followed me everywhere, constantly laughing at me. Men sat and lay throughout the unfinished structure, and a circle of men with drums was in the center. They called out to me, waved me over, and an old man at the head of the circle moved aside and patted the floor, motioning me to sit next to him. “We will be finished in two weeks,” he said, “after the Bupati [the district governor] comes from Agats. We must cover the walls with gabagaba and the roof with atap [palm fronds] on the day he is here.”
Then, until the sun set, and for many afternoons after, I became lost in triba
l reverie. A fire burned on a lump of mud. The glow of the light, the jungle soft green, the air hot and moist and still, the river flowing, always flowing by like grains of sand dripping through an hourglass, the sun a blazing yellow circle to the west. The men were decked out, claiming their history, dripping with dogs’ teeth and the tusks of boars around their arms, cockatoo feathers sprouting from their hair and fur headbands, their faces painted—some ochre, some black—cassowary bone daggers through rattan bracelets around their biceps. The older men sported pig bones or shells in their septums. Sauer, the old man I sat next to, was the kepala perang of Jisar, with the classic Asmat high cheekbones and physique of raw muscle and bone and black skin, smeared with war paint.
In the Asmat creation myth, Fumeripitsj drummed the Asmat to life from his carvings, and Sauer and his jeu mates began drumming themselves into existence, reconstituting themselves as what they were, how they saw themselves. Months before, when I’d contacted an American woman who was closely involved with Asmat art and the Crozier order and told her about my project, her response had been cold. Not more about primitive headhunters and cannibals, she’d said. “That’s so been done. It’s the past. There are so many problems there, real problems, and the Asmat need to be seen as they are today, suffering from AIDS, poverty, the lack of access to education and health care.”
I understood her point, but it was as fanciful as my own, as full of Western ideals and preconceptions. If I saw them through her eyes, I’d see them as poverty-stricken victims in rags, covered in ringworm, subject to exploitation from Indonesia. Which they are. The Asmat are a people who live in palm shacks in the outback on the outermost fringes of human civilization without plumbing or electricity, dressed in our castaway and holey T-shirts and tattered gym shorts, substantially illiterate, with little future in a dynamic and technological global economy.
I didn’t see them that way, though, and, watching them come to life, I saw that they didn’t feel that way either. My American contact wanted them to be victims, requiring our help and our pity, but their dignity and pride and sense of self lay in what they had been, and still were in their own minds: warriors. Former headhunters deeply enmeshed in a rich spirit world. Take that away and they were but victims dwelling in a ghetto swamp. Though they were now Catholics and often crossed themselves before meals, and though they ducked away from directly answering questions about killing and cannibalism, what was taking place before me—and in every story and song I would hear over the next weeks—revealed the Asmat as they saw themselves.
They drummed sitting down, and they drummed standing up, two hundred beats a minute, and they sang, and men danced and children danced, and sweat poured from their bodies, and other men blew eerie, aching-sounding horns, and the floor of the jeu pulsated. They moved to the ground between riverbank and jeu, and more men appeared, and women too, some topless in grass skirts, bouncing and shaking, knees flapping in and out, and they danced with weapons, with bows and arrows and spears, and the sun dipped lower, and smoke curled around the sweating bodies, and in their sameness each was dressed a little differently, and they howled and bellowed and hooted, a wild free-for-all of unadulterated joy and abandon, of culture that stretched back beyond memory.
I welled up in tears. It was powerful and beautiful and unfiltered; it was pure and rich and of the earth and the river and the mud. Huge clouds dangled from the sky, and one young man with ochre stripes across his face and blazing orange gym shorts, clutching a spear, went wilder than everyone else, kicking his legs up high, fluttering his hands, shouting, “Wha! Wha! Woooweee!” The people followed the drummers in rows back and forth in front of the jeu, and just before the sun dipped below the tangled green horizon, giant birds appeared, birds that weren’t birds at all, but bats. Giant fruit bats the size of eagles, hundreds of them, thousands, rising from their resting places near the sea and flying a few hundred feet overhead in a single direction—away from the sun, toward the east. They flew not like bats but like birds, each flying alone, two wingbeats a second, slowly, steadily, and I thought of Hitchcock or the monkeys flying in The Wizard of Oz. They looked purposeful; they didn’t glide or soar, they were just pulsing wings and bulbous bat bodies, two tiny feet trailing behind.
The drumming and singing and dancing continued for the next two weeks, until the big day when government officials were to come and the men would finish the jeu by installing the roof and lighting the family hearths that lined the jeu’s back wall. My Indonesian was growing stronger, and I was beginning to understand more. It helped that Kokai was getting used to speaking slowly and simply with me. The pattern of the days began to unfold. The house and the village woke at dawn. Though there was a primary school, the teacher hadn’t been there for two months. Children played all day, chasing each other, fighting, climbing trees over the river and plunging in. The boys made small bows and arrows, caught snakes and mice; together boys and girls built small forts out of scrub and sent the girls off to collect wood, and then they’d build a fire. The teenagers chased each other, swam, plaited each other’s hair, played vicious games of soccer in a foot of thick mud on the “field” by the schoolhouse. Just after sunrise, women paddled their canoes to the sea, where they fished or shrimped or chopped wood for the kitchen fires all day.
Women did everything. They washed the tattered clothes in the muddy river and made all the food, a never-ending diet of sago pancakes and sago balls, of rice and ramen and small fish and tiny, krill-like shrimp, which they wrapped in palm leaves and baked on the fire. Mostly the food and wood in Kokai’s house came from other family members in other houses. I never saw a green vegetable or fruit, save for coconuts. If the men weren’t drumming or singing or carving, they did nothing, except occasionally helping their wives cut down sago in the jungle. They were warriors with no war to fight. In the old days, if they hadn’t been fighting, they would have been hunting or protecting the women, but that was no longer necessary, and during my time there I never saw anyone hunt—though they must have, for there was a never-ending supply of cassowary bones and feathers and cuscus fur and cockatoo feathers in the village. To bathe they jumped in the river, fully clothed; no one used soap. The river repelled me. It was brown with muddy silt, and at high tide it flooded the villages and their outhouses—and the whole village of Otsjanep lay upriver. But it was that or nothing. One day, just as I was about to jump in, a log of shit floated by.
Kokai’s son-in-law often escorted me wherever I went, and I was never sure if it was because he wanted to hang out or if he was being tasked to do so. He was young, handsome, and probably in his twenties. He could read and write—he’d been to primary school. Once I asked him how old he was. He thought for a long time and then said, “Fifteen.”
At any time of day or night, there was always a child screaming and a song wafting over the mud and breeze, intermingling with the omnipresent smoke and smell of shit. Kokai’s daughter and nieces and extended family, always coming and going from one house to another, sang beautifully, sweetly—even Kokai’s sister, a rail-thin, nearly toothless old woman with a gravelly voice who lived next door, sang well. Listening to these human sounds, I realized that back home so much of every conversation or experience takes place over headsets or telephones, over computer screens or televisions, through email or SMS message. Much of our experience is prerecorded, heavily produced, often divorced from the immediate source. The West is a place of all these overlapping and competing realities. But everything in Asmat is immediate, present, touchable, live. If you want music, you have to create it. If you want to talk to someone, you have to find that person. If you want a story, someone has to tell it and you have to be next to the person creating it.
Everything in Asmat is raw, that constant emotional intensity of joy or sadness, of fighting or hugging, and everyone is so close, knows their place, is so connected, to family, neighborhood, jeu, village. I’d been thinking a lot about my obsession with what I’d called the primitive, the thing that had d
riven me to Asmat and Michael’s story in the first place. Part of it was simple romance—the romance of the jungle and open fires, of drumming and spears and bows and arrows and dogs’ teeth necklaces. But it was also the hope of seeing something, understanding something, about myself, and the recognition of what was lacking in my own life, a yearning for something. My father’s family were Orthodox Jews, a people who always saw themselves as separate from mainstream America. Yet whatever greater connection to that community my grandparents and aunts and uncles might have felt, my father had rebelled, had rejected it all, had declared himself an atheist to my grandmother at the age of seventeen. Then he’d married my mother, a WASP, and she herself was a quiet reader and lover of books, not much of a joiner. Neither liked to watch or play sports; we didn’t go to church; we lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood that was filled with enormous families—the Murrays next door had eleven children, the Hagues around the corner twelve, the Hannapels across the street six, the Vieths a few blocks away sixteen. We were nothing like them. My parents had even told my sister and me, from the beginning, that there was no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I’d grown up with no tribe, no belief, no ritual, belonging to nothing, never able to surrender to a larger group.
In Asmat behavior I recognized a truth. I had always longed for more connection, even as I’d fled from it, and in Pirien, despite its strangeness, I never felt lonely. In love I had little balance, either keeping intimacy at bay, people at a distance, or tipping wildly in the other direction, falling crazy in consuming love, wanting everything all the time, wanting to consume the other, to eat them up. I felt like I understood the Asmat’s dualism, their lack of balance, and I recognized that sometimes I was but a step away from it myself, at least metaphorically. What I called primitiveness wasn’t really about living in a house or a hut, or dancing wildly in a nightclub or under the moon in a swamp by an open fire, but about your consciousness, your sense of self. Kokai and his family, all of the Asmat in Pirien, were connected to each other and their village in a way I could barely fathom, and there was a huge part of me that wanted to be like them. Their unfiltered, immediate experience of life appealed to my own primitiveness, even as I couldn’t quite throw off my inhibitions and join them completely.
