Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Our first port of call was a swimming-with-dolphins resort being built on Gavutu Island under the auspices of a rather tough Canadian animal behaviorist. We were greeted with the resort’s custom dancing. The male performers wore loincloths—the local word is kabilato—and the women, grass skirts and tops made of seashells, and all had armbands with long grasses stuck in them (John called them the Scallion Dancers). Here I ran up against the constant problem of the would-be adventurer: by and large what you discover has been discovered before, and even people doing the same thing they did a thousand years ago are not really doing the same thing if a veneer of self-consciousness has been added to the enterprise. These performers were proud of their performance and it was all correct to their tradition, but after that spontaneous night in the mountains, we were spoiled, and this practiced exhibition tilted too much toward the Hawaiian nightclub show. In the capital, we had gone to the Miss Solomon Islands beauty pageant, which featured gyrating women wearing grass skirts made of shredded pink plastic bags and bikini tops of coconuts and string—which was comical and rather endearing because it had an absurdist element, but it was also a little sad. This felt sad, too: an enactment of tradition rather than tradition itself.

  So we were all the more delighted when we got to Loisolin, on Pavuvu, where Steve had made arrangements the month before on our behalf. The islanders had been excited by the prospect of greeting us; though they were known locally for their dancing and, living on the coast, had met some foreigners, no tourist had ever come to their village before with the express objective of seeing them. When we arrived, the entire population was waiting onshore. A few launched canoes and circled our boat; then the spear warriors rushed out into the surf and yelled madly and made the usual friendly, threatening gestures. When we came ashore, little girls out of Gauguin put garlands of frangipani around our necks, and we were welcomed by the chief, who wore a remarkable headband of densely packed possum teeth. A bamboo band played harmonies more sophisticated than those we’d heard in the jungle. Then each of us got a coconut from which to drink, and a leaf basket with a whole lobster, a slice of taro, coconut pudding, cassava pudding, fresh fish, two further kinds of taro with slippery cabbage (a slimy, local green), and hard-boiled megapode eggs. As we ate, a few young women fanned us and our food with large leaves to make sure that no flies came our way.

  Meanwhile, some forty villagers, many covered in body paint, performed a sequence of complex dances that ranged from the mesmeric to the passionate, the humorous to the mournful. It was as if the George Balanchine of the South Pacific had been working on Pavuvu. The women, in grasses and shells, did a poetic welcome dance in which they imitated the motion of the waves; the men leaped about like young rams. The rhythms were multilayered, almost syncopated, and then lyrical and sweet. At the end, they asked us to show them something from our culture, and when Jessica and I did our swing-dancing number, they cheered and cheered and wouldn’t let us stop until we were completely exhausted.

  In the long afternoon light, when we and they could dance no more, we set sail and passed great schools of flying fish that soared above the water for five hundred feet; a pod of about two hundred dolphins that came and played all around us, in such numbers that they seemed to be waves, suffusing the air with exuberance; terns and frigate birds and brown boobies; and perfect little islands like the ones in children’s books, dome-shaped, living-room-size, uninhabited, and bedecked with five perfect coconut palms. Occasionally we saw fishermen in dugout canoes waiting to spear fish. We were caught in an endless postcard, a Pacific arcadia, and we sang and talked and drank local beer on the front deck.

  Many of the smaller islands in the Solomons are coral atolls, and these are concentrated around the Marovo Lagoon, the world’s largest island-enclosed lagoon, which may soon be protected by UNESCO. Marovo was described by James Michener as the eighth wonder of the world and was the object of our sailing trip. Over four days, we stopped at various isolated spots in the lagoon for snorkeling, including Uepi, where the variety and density of species outclasses that of the Great Barrier Reef. I saw huge schools of chromides, black-tipped reef sharks and gray whale sharks, a dozen kinds of parrot fish, various wrasses, including the endangered Maori wrasse, angelfish, squirrelfish, clown fish, hawksbill turtles, eels, butterfish, a manta ray, foul-looking groupers, giant clams with fluorescent pink and lavender mouths that closed when you approached, needle-nosed gars, many-spotted sweetlips, mudskippers, lionfish, black-and-blue sea snakes, electric-blue starfish. It was an underwater safari.

  To me, though, the fish were almost secondary, because the coral of the living reef looked as though Buckminster Fuller, Max Ernst, and Dr. Seuss had collaborated on it. There were long, pink- and blue-tipped asparagus, a thin damask-rose lace that a Spanish lady might have worn to church, expanses of olive-colored stiff scrub brushes, gorgonian fans, lurid striped erections, vaulting mauve domes, voluptuous yellow hydrangeas, orange dreadlocks, and fields of embossed purple grosgrain. Strange things rotated like lava lamps on turntables, and the mimosas of the sea seemed to recoil at our approach. By the time we got out, we were dizzy with color and sheer variety. Every day we sailed; every day we dived into the water; every day we saw wonders beyond all imagining.

  * * *

  After our immersion in the Melanesian culture of the Solomons, the nation’s primary culture, we wanted to see some of its Polynesian life. We left our beloved Lalae in Honiara and flew to Rennell, the largest of the Solomons’ Polynesian islands. Our guide, Joseph Puia, packed us into his car and we headed for Lake Tegano, the biggest freshwater lake in the South Pacific and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, stopping from time to time so that Joseph could machete with astonishing speed and assurance through trees that had fallen across the road.

  The lake is dotted with islets of giant mangrove and pandanus and is home to a multitude of endemic flora and fauna, including unique birds and orchids; it also contains nine US planes downed during World War II (two of which we could see when snorkeling). Because a US military base had stood by the lake during the war, locals still welcome Americans. Despite the best efforts of obtrusive missionaries, the lake people believe that the spirits of the dead travel as shooting stars to meet God beyond the eastern shore.

  In our large, motorized canoe, we saw the famous sunrises over the water, visited the cave where the legendary lake octopus was said to have lived, and saw another cave that Joseph described as “formerly a residential accommodation”—villages have not existed very long on Rennell. We encountered flocks of glossy swiftlets, frigate birds, terns, cormorants, and ibis; as you approached their island rookeries they took to the skies by the hundreds, wheeling like a beautiful reworking of Hitchcock. We visited Circumcision Island, inhabited by the only South Pacific tribe to endorse the practice. We were thirsty, so our boatman shimmied up a tree, threw down fresh coconuts, and brought us limes with green skins and bright orange flesh, a 1960s fashion from the kingdom of fruit. We saw flying foxes, a species of fruit bat, both in the air and hanging in trees like the devil’s Christmas ornaments. We both saw and ate coconut crab, a local species that takes thirty-five years to mature.

  Alas, we did not get off the island as planned; the flight was canceled for five days because of weather, and we spent those rainy afternoons in the depressing guest room of the island’s missionary center. We resisted the call to the local version of evangelical Christianity—John, by reading Moby-Dick; I, by writing this article about the wild and gentle new reality we had come to love.

  * * *

  A period of civil unrest followed our visit, but all seems to have calmed down again politically. A decade after its nomination, the Marovo Lagoon is still under consideration for designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. While this matter was tied up in endless bureaucracy, the Solomon Islands were ravaged by earthquakes and consequent tsunamis in 2007, 2013, 2014, and 2015. Like Greenland, this area is feeling the effects of global warming: coastal erosion, inundat
ion, and saltwater intrusion are all on the rise. One province relocated its capital, Choiseul, because of rising tides—the first township in the Pacific to take such measures. The new site was constructed before residents were moved there in phases. The World Bank sent $9.1 million to the Community Resilience to Climate Change and Disaster Risk in Solomon Islands Project (CRISP) as part of a relief package for warming-induced problems. Some recent research indicates that these areas may face an additional challenge: shifting tectonic plates may be pulling the islands down at the same time that rising seas lap higher on their shores.

  RWANDA

  * * *

  Children of Bad Memories

  Far from the Tree, 2012

  On the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, I visited the new memorial in Kigali, built by the Aegis Trust, a British company that specializes in genocide commemoratives. Unlike most other buildings in Rwanda, the structure was air-conditioned; its stagey displays felt as though they had been put together by someone previously engaged in dressing shop windows. The wall texts were stirring and the photos horrifying, but the glitzy aesthetic reflected the national urge to dissociate from events of the too-recent past. The exhibits presented the numbers of casualties in keeping with President Paul Kagame’s Tutsi-centric estimates, which differ widely from those of international observers.

  The purpose of my trip was to talk to women who had been raped in the genocide. The memorial treated the events of 1994 as coolly historical, but these women were still living them ten years on. It was as though no time had elapsed at all.

  * * *

  The Rwandan genocide drew on a long history of ethnic strife in the country. The Tutsi arrived in Rwanda at some disputed date, apparently after the Hutu were settled there, and established themselves as feudal overlords. The colonizing Belgians preferred the tall, slender Tutsi herders to the short, dark, wide-nosed Hutu farmers and declared the Tutsi, who made up only 15 percent of the population, the natural aristocracy, granting them privileges denied to the Hutu. These policies engendered fierce hatred. Toward the end of the colonial period, the Belgians fell out with the Tutsi monarch and transferred power to the Hutu. After independence in 1962, the Hutu ruled, periodically attacking the Tutsi. Ethnic battles throughout the following quarter century sent many Tutsi into exile in Uganda and Congo. They then asked to return.

  When the Hutu government wouldn’t allow them to come home, they organized an army—the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), under the leadership of Paul Kagame—that engaged in border skirmishes. In 1993, the UN brokered a peace accord between the Hutu government and Tutsi rebels; hard-line Hutu, however, did not welcome the idea of power sharing. In late 1993 and early 1994, the visionaries of the Hutu Power movement began organizing the mechanisms for genocide. They assembled mobs of impoverished and disaffected youth, building up a force called the Interahamwe, which means “those who fight together,” and taught the gospel that the Tutsi were an inhuman enemy—“cockroaches” in their parlance. They established Rwanda’s first private radio station, Radio Mille Collines, to preach messages of hatred. They stockpiled arms: some guns, but mostly machetes and knives. They systematically edged moderates out of government.

  The genocide in Rwanda began on April 6, 1994, after the plane of President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down. In the one hundred days that followed, eight hundred thousand Tutsi were killed. Unlike the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, where the killings were clinical, systematic, and remote, the Rwandan mass butchery was hands-on. The killings were committed by the Interahamwe and farmers, mainly with farm implements. But killing was hardly the total of that time’s violence. A Rwandan proverb says, “A woman who is not yet battered is not a real woman.” The culture’s underlying misogyny was easily stoked by ethnic propaganda; rape was an explicit tool of the génocidaires. Tutsi women, according to the announcements on Radio Mille Collines, wanted to seduce the Hutu men away so that they could end the Hutu race. Many Hutu perceived the slender, regal Tutsi women as haughty and were determined to teach them a lesson.

  The men raped not only to humiliate and shame their victims, but also as a way of killing; many of the men were HIV-positive and were encouraged by their leaders to infect as many Tutsi women as possible. They raped to satisfy their own curiosity; they raped to traumatize these women; and they raped because it was a slower and more painful way of killing. They raped out of odium and desire. According to one propaganda slogan, they wanted these women to “die of sadness.” One woman recounted having a foot soldier in the murderous youth brigades back her up against a wall and then take his knife to her vagina, cutting out the entire lining of it, and hanging the gory tube of flesh from a stick outside her house, saying, “Everyone who comes past here will see how Tutsi look.”

  At the end of a hundred days, the genocide stopped when Tutsi RPF insurgents seized Kigali, the capital. Most of the Interahamwe fled to Congo, where they continued to wreak terror in refugee camps. Kagame entered office as the new president with much cant about building bridges. Instead, he installed a largely Tutsi power structure—exactly what the Hutu Power movement had feared—with the tacit approval of the rest of the world. Kagame periodically orders raids into the Congo camps; some twenty thousand people have been killed in reprisals since the war ended. The Hutu again live under a largely Tutsi regime and feel enslaved by a loathed minority, while the Tutsi hate the Hutu for having murdered their families. Rwandans are defined by the traumas they have witnessed, received, or inflicted. In official interviews, Rwandans say, “Plus jamais” (“Never again”), but in private, most of the people I met said another eruption was only a matter of time.

  * * *

  As many as half a million women were raped during the genocide. About half the Tutsi women who survived had been raped; almost all of them were HIV-positive; and they gave birth to as many as five thousand rape-conceived children. These children are called “les enfants de mauvais souvenir,” or “the children of bad memories”; one writer called them the “living legacy of a time of death.” Ninety percent of the women in one study said they could not love the child of someone who had killed their family. A woman who had attempted to drown herself under these circumstances and been saved by a fisherman said, “I could not even die with this baby inside me. It was a curse that kept haunting me.” One woman who had been married off to a rapist, as often happened, said, “To be taken as a wife is a form of death. There’s no death worse than that.” Because Rwandan society blames the women, these pregnancies were “rejected and concealed, often denied, and discovered late,” according to Dr. Catherine Bonnet, who has studied the Rwandan rape problem. Godeliève Mukasarasi, a social worker, expounded, “The women who have had children after being raped are the most marginalized. People say that this is a child of an Interahamwe.”

  Abortion is essentially unobtainable in Rwanda, but some women self-induced miscarriage in the postwar chaos. Some—no one knows how many—committed infanticide. Others left their rape babies on church steps; the country is peppered with orphanages. Since the women who abandoned their children could not be identified, the women I saw were the ones who had kept their children. The children for whom they were sacrificing themselves served as reminders of their trauma. To love the child who results from violation is almost divine—especially because for most of these women, that violation was only one in a constellation of traumas: loss of family; loss of social status; loss of the societal structures that had once seemed secure; loss of any feeling of stability or constancy; loss of health to HIV. When I went to meet these women and their children in the spring of 2004, their children were nine, and therefore old enough to resemble their Hutu fathers. I went to see how one learned to love such children or reconciled oneself to caring for them without love.

  Rwandan society is hostile to these women and children. Some were castigated by their families and community; some hospitals wouldn’t treat them. As half-castes, the enfants de mauvais souvenir are accepted by neit
her Hutu nor Tutsi. “Some women were forced by their families to give up the child,” explained Espérance Mukamana, whom I met in Kigali, where she works for Avega, the widows’ organization in Rwanda. “In the beginning, it was hard for these women even to see their children as human beings because they are considered children of evil. Most of these women never find true love for their children. They love them enough to survive, but no more. You have to motivate the mothers, repeating again and again that the child is blameless. It’s hard for them to see the child as innocent; it’s impossible for them to see themselves as innocent.” All had faced financial struggles; deemed unmarriageable, most were struggling to feed themselves and their offspring.

  Professor Jean Damascène Ndayambaje, head of the Department of Psychology at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, explained that it was considered a disgrace for a woman to have allowed herself to be raped rather than killed. “Can one say that one of these things is better than the other?” he asked. “Our society does not say so. All the shame goes to the woman.” He described how one woman had to be physically restrained while doctors performed a caesarean because she had clenched her vaginal muscles tightly in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the birth. When the doctors brought her the baby, she began ranting and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. “There are whole mental wards full of such women,” Ndayambaje said. Professor Jean-Pierre Gatsinzi, head of the School of Journalism and Communication at the National University, pointed out a major cultural change, in which a strong bond between mother and child was no longer presumed. “It is a new society we live in,” he said, “with different rules. One must recognize that rape and war are both traumas, and that these women experienced both traumas simultaneously. Rape in war is a crime against humanity; it’s a lot worse than ordinary rape.” While any rape can be profoundly traumatic for its immediate victim, wartime rape is an attack on social norms and more profoundly traumatizes the society in which it occurs.