Savage Harvest

by Carl Hoffman

  It was true. When cholera hit Asmat in October and November 1962, a year after Michael’s disappearance, the dead of Otsjanep were still laid out to decompose on raised platforms in the center of the village. Only when the flesh was gone could the skull be removed from the body to be preserved and decorated and made an object of veneration. It’s hard to imagine the smell, the flies, the gruesomeness of a single body rotting openly in the tropical sun, and cholera was killing dozens. If so many bodies rotting in the village wasn’t awful in itself, being near dozens of rotting cholera victims was suicidal. Cholera produces violent and unstoppable diarrhea, and victims essentially starve to death. Van de Wouw’s photos are heartrending—men, women, children who were nothing but skin and bones, lying naked and ashen, hooked to jury-rigged IV bottles. By early November 1962, more than seventy men, women, and children were dead in Otsjanep, rotting on platforms. “Now and then you could see dogs walking around with parts of a foot or hand which—after sufficient rotting—fell off the platforms,” wrote van de Wouw. “Some of the corpses were more or less entirely eaten by dogs that were able to climb on the platforms via stumps and shrubs. Because more and more people died, the corpse platforms had become very slovenly.” Van de Wouw’s description of what happened next is worth quoting in its entirety.

  “On November the tenth Gabriel gave a remarkable explanation to all the kepala kampongs. He truly is a gifted speaker. He spoke for at least a half hour and explained to the people that the corpses were sources of new infections and that it was difficult to bury them with such high water. What to do? He left it to the kepalas to come up with a solution. When they weren’t able to find a way out, he came up with a proposition from ‘the mighty doctor who lives under the surface of the water.’

  “After the kepalas had agreed, all the involved family members were called. It appeared there were two families in which the man, wife and children had died. Furthermore there was a single man whose wife and two children had passed away. It was intensely sad to see how devastated this man was.

  “In the meanwhile jerry cans with petroleum had arrived from Basiem [sic]. It was agreed upon that the involved family members would take care of sufficient firewood under each platform for tomorrow.

  “When Sunday November the tenth came, I had to do the most exceptional Sunday mass I ever served and will ever serve. While I carried out the holy ceremony, the folks of the village were searching for firewood. This firewood was put under the platforms of the dead. Starting at the back of the village, I ploughed through the mud. But as it turned out the people were scared to death. Compared to their veneration of the dead, this treatment of their deceased was very cruel. It was sufficiently made clear though that only under these exceptional circumstances this could be done and that it was not going to happen again.

  “The male family members were gathered near the corpse platforms and before the petroleum was poured over the corpses, it was asked again if they agreed to this. Every time I was the one who then personally set it on fire. And at every new death platform it was asked again if the family agreed.

  “As soon as the firewood was burning well, the rattan that tied the corpse down was chopped loose and the platform and the corpse descended into the fire.

  “It took the entire day—because of the mud behind the houses—to discover and burn all the corpse platforms. At the end of the ceremony, the catechists tried to come closer wearing a handkerchief over their noses and mouth. But when they came close, they immediately turned around and went back. The villagers repeatedly made remarks about how strong my stomach had to be. I knew better, but this had to be done so I had to go through with it. When all the platforms were burned and a horrible disgusting smoke and smell was hanging over the village, I jumped into the river as fast as I could, after an enormous yell.

  “The catechist repeatedly told me during that day that the villagers wanted to kill me. But soon after everything was done it turned out this wasn’t true. In fact, they came to give me arrows, bows, rocks, axes etcetera, because they were convinced that the disease was expelled from Otanep [sic] forever now.”

  It was a huge moment in Otsjanep’s history, a sad and tragic blow, not just the deaths of so many men, women, and children, but the burning of their ancestors. Kokai had moved from one story into the next as if they were part of the same event, and it hit me: what if the cholera had been seen as the spirits’ punishment for killing Michael Rockefeller? Even more significant, Australian army helicopters had been dispatched to aid in the cholera fight, which meant that the only two times the Asmat had ever seen helicopters were within days of Michael’s death and as more death, faster than they’d ever experienced, swept through their villages.

  That evening I went to talk to John. I asked him to tell me what Kokai had told him. He seemed nervous and told me that Kokai had merely told the same old story—that Michael had come to the village, had left, was returning when his boat capsized and he swam away and disappeared, and then cholera came. The names Pep and Dombai, the shooting of the arrow—he wouldn’t explain. “They are afraid,” he said.

  I WAS FINALLY beginning to be convinced, especially because of the positions of the men killed by Lapré and their relation to the men van Kessel and von Peij named as having killed Michael. I’d been all along the coast and had never seen a shark or crocodile; the crocs were inland, not along the ocean shore, and certainly not out at sea. Sharks were in deeper water; I’d never heard a single story of a human being attacked by one in Asmat, and their presence was so minimal they rarely figured in Asmat carvings. Sanday’s idea that Michael might have made it close to shore only to be attacked by a shark or crocodile, within sight of the men from Otsjanep gathered there, didn’t make sense. And if he’d been killed at sea, his body would have drifted and been blown farther south, not come straight inland.

  If he’d made it to shore, he would have met the men from Otsjanep—they were there and that was fact. Max Lapré’s raid had killed the most important men in the village, spread across four out of five jeus, which meant that nearly every person in the village was related to the men killed—even more so Pep, Fin, and Ajim, who had taken over the dead men’s leadership positions. Bisj poles had been carved, a lot of them, and they were still sitting in the jeus when Michael arrived, which meant that the ceremonies had not been completed. And though he had bought and ultimately even taken delivery of some of them, other poles had failed to appear.

  As for Bishop Sowada’s point that “it seems quite improbable at this early stage in their development that the Asmat people would wish to kill, and further, possess the courage to kill a white man,” well, that was condescension at its worst, I was finally realizing. It was the height of Western conceit. It limited the Asmat, made them less than human, relegated them to a people incapable of operating outside of their normal cultural boundaries, as if remote tribal societies could only follow the script of their myths and didn’t possess the creativity or passion to ever deviate from them.

  I had been living with Kokai now, watching the men in the village drum and sing and dance and tell stories, for almost a month, I had traveled with Amates and Wilem, and I had seen human beings. Individuals. If most of them danced the same dance, there was one man who flapped his hands and danced on one foot. If every elder danced and drummed and sang in celebration of the new jeu, Kokai sang alone to himself, enveloped in sadness for those he’d lost.

  It all rolled over me. Human beings follow no script. Human history is the story of people breaking away from patterns and doing things that aren’t traditional, that no one else has ever done. Sailing across the ocean to the New World. Sailing across the Pacific to new islands. Falling in love with someone from the wrong tribe, the wrong caste. White Englishmen throwing on Arab dishdashas to unite disparate tribes of Bedouin. Black men having the gall to run for president. There is always someone doing something different, breaking the pattern—in this case, killing a white man. The fascinating stories aren’t th
e ones about people following patterns, but about people doing the unpredictable. How can you ever explain men who snap and murder their wives and children? Jealousy. Anger. Rage. Love. Sadness. Envy. Curiosity. Pride. People love and yet do violent, even savage things; we humans are all savages at different times and in different ways. The Asmat are the strangest people I’ve ever seen, their secrets deep, their cultural boundaries seemingly rigid. But they are men, and I saw those elemental human feelings in every one of them, feelings that were the stuff of literature and poetry, not logic and reason.

  Whoever had embedded that spear in Michael Rockefeller—Pep, Fin, Ajim—had done so because he could. Because he was a man. A warrior. Because Michael was probably the first white man he’d ever encountered who was powerless, perhaps the least powerful man in all of Asmat when he’d completed his epic swim. Exhausted. Unarmed. With no family, no connections to his world. And he knew Michael wasn’t a spirit, but a man just like them. He was conquered. Consumed. In taking Michael’s life, he had confirmed his own, had triumphed over death in a fragile world, where at any moment anyone could be felled by an enemy or fatally injured by a cut from a bad ax swing, and he affirmed life no differently than any Indy car driver or mountain climber who feels more alive the closer he comes to death.

  To kill is to claim, own, take. Killing is rage and passion. A man kills his wife not because he hates her but because he loves her so much he hates her. The serial killer preying on women takes what he wants the most and can’t have: love, nurturing. The Asmat that day killed Michael Rockefeller out of passion and love, love for what they had lost and were losing—Ipi, Foretsjbai, Samut, Akon, and Osom, their culture and traditions, headhunting—as modernity and Christianity closed in from every direction. The killing fit tightly and seamlessly into Asmat cultural logic. It helped to send the souls of their jeu leaders on to Safan. It righted an imbalance in their cosmic world. They took a man’s power, became him, and perhaps thought that since he was white they might acquire a power they didn’t have in the world of white men. But it went beyond that, to something more elementally human: an effort to avenge their own impotence against the intrusion of the West. In that, the killing probably did fit some of Sanday’s nativistic theory—it was an attempt to reclaim power in the flash of a moment. An assertion of pride.

  In the end, however, the killing only hastened the change hurtling toward them. For the Asmat of Otsjanep, driving that spear into Michael was catastrophic. It was the end of one life, the beginning of another. It unleashed planes, ships, helicopters, policemen, and more technology and power than they’d ever seen in their lives. The spirits retaliated, and almost 10 percent of the village died of cholera. Moreover, that epidemic ended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of funerary practices. It increased the role of van de Wouw and accelerated the end of headhunting and cannibalism and the introduction of Christianity and its shame. Soon after, Indonesia took over, sending government representatives to every village, where they burned every men’s house and forbade all feasting and carving for a decade.

  In 1964 tensions in Otsjanep reached a crescendo when Dombai was cuckolded—the story I’d heard on my first visit to Pirien now had a context—and the jeus went to war with each other. On December 4, Ajim was shot by an arrow and died a few days later. Pep, who most claimed had driven the spear into Michael Rockefeller, demanded the shooter’s nine-year-old sister so he could kill her and balance the conflict. The priests intervened, but the two sides of the village fought for a month. Father van de Wouw wanted to arrest Pep. “Somebody has to interfere,” he wrote in his diary. “I can keep threatening, but if nothing happens, we will not be able to keep this under control.” And it seemed increasingly likely that a disagreement had arisen that day at the mouth of the Ewta between Dombai, the head of Pirien, and Pep, Fin, and Ajim of Otsjanep about the wisdom of killing Michael. If so, the cholera epidemic must have ratified the fear of Dombai and those close to him, which would have profoundly exacerbated the tensions between the jeus.

  Six years after Father van de Wouw’s involvement in the cholera epidemic, in September 1968, it was finally time for him to leave Asmat and return to Holland. After six years of deep intimacy with the place and its people, he’d become convinced about Michael’s fate. “Although the two sides of the villages are not yet back together,” he wrote his superior, “they are now close to each other. I only build temporary houses for the catechist and the school in hopes that after a year or so Pirajin [sic] will go back to the former place. During my last visit to Otsjanep I once again brought up Rockefeller. It is difficult to interrogate the Asmat, especially because the enmity between the two halves of the village is quite strong and it is possible that the one side blames the other. However, it is clear that [he] came to the shore alive.”

  In the end, that village split had never healed, and Otsjanep and Pirien were connected by a no-man’s-land that still stood today—where only John, an outsider, lived.

  The craziest, weirdest thing about all of it was that Michael had photographed so many elements important to his own murder. He had shot Faniptas, whose trip to Wagin would start the chain of events that led to Lapré’s killing of Otsjanep’s jeu leaders. He’d shot the bisj poles that would be carved as a result of that raid and that promised and foretold what would ultimately be his own murder. And he’d shot the men who would do it.

  ALTHOUGH MOST OF the celebrating had been taking place in Jisar, Pirien and Jisar were two parts of a whole, and Pirien had to celebrate too. I spent a whole day in Ber’s house, which served as Pirien’s jeu, and sat, my legs aching, as Ber and Bif (Pirien’s kepala perang) and the other men drummed and sang and sang and drummed, from the early morning until an hour or so before sunset, the day punctuated only by smoking breaks and drum-tuning over the open fire, which filled the room with smoke, and lunch, when women streamed in bringing logs of sago mixed with the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, baked in long tubes of palm leaves. This was sacred food, and the sago worm was synonymous with the human brain. “Take a photo, take a photo!” they yelled when the women started to arrive. They lined the logs up in the center of the circle, then broke into drumming and singing and hooting. Then pulled chunks off for every man, Ber feeding me, a mark of honor. Sago was dry and tasteless, as was all food in Asmat, but biting into the chunks of larvae released hot squirts of flavor and fat. It tasted like buttery, liquid pistachios, like explosions of bacon and ice cream after nothing but sago and rice and ramen and small fish for weeks.

  After we’d eaten, Marco, a man I guessed to be in his late sixties or early seventies, began telling a story in the Asmat language. Everyone listened, some lying down and even falling asleep. I lay down too, noticing a soot-blackened rattan bag at the top of Ber’s roof, round, covered in cobwebs, like it was holding a ball. A skull? I wondered. Although I couldn’t understand the words, and the story wasn’t for me, I watched the drama unfold as dogs scraped around in the swamp below the house. There was the firing of arrows, the powerful side-arm stabbing of someone with a spear. I heard the words Otsjanep and Dombai. Marco walked. Stalked. Stabbed again. Pulled his pants legs up tight, thrust his hips forward, not like he was having sex, but as if he were peeing or having his penis sucked. Men grunted. Nodded. “Uh! Uh!” Finally, an hour into it, I picked up my camera and switched it to video and began filming. But the theatrics were over; he just talked and talked, and after eight minutes, running low on power with no way to recharge, I stopped.

  Although I didn’t know it yet, it was perhaps my most important moment in Asmat.

  They broke just before sunset, then resumed outside on the boardwalk at eight p.m. The moon was only a sliver; it was so dark I couldn’t see my feet, but a fire burned on a bed of mud on the boardwalk and cigarettes glowed and vast numbers of stars cut the blackness overhead, the Milky Way thick, heat lightning rolling across the horizon. At first there were five or six drummers and a handful of men, but a voice called into the darkness, booming, ec
hoing, half song, half call, and soon a hundred had gathered. The drums cut through the night, and the deep, chanting songs called forth the spirits—Kokai had told me they were a “bridge” to their ancestors, and the men of Pirien rocked the boardwalk. Spirits were here, swirling around us in the dark. I couldn’t see them, but they were here, as surely as the mosquitoes and lizards and crickets, filling the night. The air reverberated. The men, their deep voices, the beat of the drums, their imaginations and the images that appeared to them, were as much a part of the jungle as the insects and the lightning and the moist air and the trees and the river a few yards away. It was all gathered in one consciousness; you couldn’t separate any of it out. The drums and voices knitted it all into a wholeness, a wholeness that stretched back years, generations, maybe centuries and even millennia. And I couldn’t help it: I imagined Michael’s spirit among them, swirling overhead in the jungle night, threading through the palms, the stars, a ghost who was finally free now that I was understanding the mystery of his disappearance.