by Anais Nin
Day and night the air is vibrant with what Colin McPhee, the composer, described as the golden metallic sound of the gamelan, a rain of silver. In the daytime there are rehearsals for the night. Exciting, striking at every cell, the sequined sound of the gamelan is like a multitude of bells. The wistful flutes rise above the metallic g’nder, and the ensemble is punctuated by the deep throb of the gongs. The animation comes from the multiple metal rain.
At night the villages are filled with music. Each village has its orchestra of gamelan players. There are dances in hotels, in village community buildings. All the natives, from the smallest child to the oldest grandmother, come to watch. It is their delight, these recurrent stories from India’s mythology, legends they know by heart. As in Japanese theater, it is not the story which concerns them, but the variations in the performances, and they come and go as if music and dance were an accompaniment to their life, not a spectacle, as natural as the breeze from the sea, the murmuring of trees, the pendulum sway of the banyan lianas.
The dancers are tightly bound in hand-woven scarves of many colors mixed with glittering gold or silver threads. Most of the motion comes from the hands, arms, and feet. The body contributes an undulation, like a wave, which arches the back and thrusts the breasts and the hips out. A fan in each hand, held high under the armpits, the dancers flutter continually to suggest the wings of a hummingbird. They dip and whirl, skimming the ground like swallows, shifting their heads from left to right as if they would separate from their bodies. The colors of sarongs, scarves, and headgear are so rich that one must see the same dance several times to become aware of the layers of textures and combinations of tones.
The headdresses of the dancers are triangular frameworks, sometimes painted on thin white wood, sometimes made of gold or silver filigree, sometimes inlaid with jewels or mother-of-pearl or a mixture of the velvet-white frangipani flowers and one red hibiscus in the center. In poor villages they turn to inventive substitutes. Covarrubias, the Mexican painter, once saw on a dancer’s tiara an advertisement with a yellow globe floating languidly among degrees of latitude and longitude, which from afar looked very decorative.
In Bali, color has significance, as does everything the Balinese use. In the Mother Temple, black is for Vishnu, white is for Siva, and red for Brahma. Every gesture of the hands has a symbolic meaning. The arabesque of head and shoulders has a meaning. The puppet show, so dear to the Balinese, is meaningful.
The magically powerful shadow play is not only the first ancestor of Balinese theater, it is also the first expression of the Balinese belief in the reality of the symbol, and the first lesson to the child in the reality of the symbol. It signifies that our life is a shadow play, that man himself is a shadow of god.
The puppets are cut from buffalo hide, then painted, then stiffened with glue. The stems are made from buffalo homs, colored with the juice of plants. The puppeteer sets up his stand in the village and everyone soon knows he is there. He sits behind a screen. An old and smoky oil lamp hangs over him but is bright enough to create the shadows he wants. Tiny boy apprentices sit cross-legged around him, ready to hand him the puppets he needs. His art consists not only of moving the puppets according to the story but giving each one a different voice. The quality of the voice is unreal; the intonations very similar to those in Japanese Noh plays.
The people watch these stories for hours; Westerners rarely can.
To see the shadows talking, fighting, flying, loving, in the emollient Balinese night is stirring enough, but to steal behind the screen and watch the beauty of the puppets, their intricate costumes, embroideries, ornaments, is even more impressive; to see the children so familiar with the characters that they know which one comes next; to see the man sitting cross-legged like the storytellers of old, under the trembling oil lamp, swelling up for the big voices, shrinking for the women’s voices, is to be carried back centuries into the depths of India from which came the Balinese mythology, religion, and theater.
Covarrubias, who lived in Bali, stressed the color of these events and described them as “a pageant that would have made Diaghilev turn green with envy.”
Covarrubias felt that the most charming quality of the Balinese is this happy combination of primitive simplicity and highly refined art. They retain a close contact with the soil, live practically out of doors in simple thatched houses, walls of split bamboo, cool mats for sleeping, using artifacts belonging to a primitive culture, tools made of bamboo, wood, light but strong baskets, clay vessels to keep the water cool, bamboo water pipes, bamboo for their instruments, altars, sun hats, fans. But for their rituals, dances, and temple offerings they demonstrate an art in costume and decoration, in dramatic effects, background, in theatrical atmosphere which is unequalled.
The colors, the perfumes, the dances, the music of Bali, stay with us because they all penetrate deep into our psychic life; it is one of the bardo states we are allowed to live, a privilege, a voyage through a karma of joy not granted to Western man, a joy which comes from shared work and symbolic oneness with nature, with religion, and with other human beings. We could not create this, but it was given to us as an offering, perhaps with the message “Do not corrupt it.”
Port Vila, New Hebrides
From Travel & Leisure, November 1975.
The approach to an island is always a reawakening of childhood expectations about islands. From our reading, islands were the undiscovered, the mysterious, the isolated, the unfamiliar.
Port Vila, on the island of Efate, has a history which appeals to the imagination. It was first discovered by Captain Cook, then later by the sandalwood seekers. The Chinese paid high prices for this fragrant wood, which was used for religious ceremonies. The search for sandalwood was like the American gold rush until the island was quickly depleted of its sandalwood trees. Then came the whalers, the missionaries, the colonizers. All of them were exposed to cannibalism as the native Melanesians hungered for sources of protein.
Seen from the plane, the tropical verdure presents infinite variations of green, from gold-yellow to the darkest shade, and it is difficult to remember that it is described as an island of ashes and coral, subject to erosion by the sea. Remembering this gives a mood of fleeting beauty to the island, as if we must love it in the present.
At the airport there are two customs lines, each headed by gigantic blue-black Melanesians in tropical uniforms, French for one line, British for the other. Then I remember that the New Hebrides islands are run jointly by England and France as a condominium, referred to by the locals as a pandemonium.
Driving to the hotel through the rain forest, one sees the first curtains of lianas, masses of ferns, the breadfruit tree with its spatulated leaves, the banyan tree, ever-present in fairy tales, because of its spreading roots, convoluted like giant human hands or like the long fingers of witches, grasping the earth, encroaching, invading, and throwing massive shadows and strangling vines into our dreams.
Not as many flowers as Tahiti, not as many birds or animals, more like an ocean of striated leaves, some as large as elephant ears. What emanates from the island is tranquility, remoteness. There is in us a hunger for remoteness. It places a great distance between our preoccupations. The island makes the break with the mainland of our concerns. There we are, adrift in a new world. The stillness is soothing, the lagoon is tranquil with all the colors of the opal stone.
The New Hebrides have several variants of a myth which may demonstrate they did not wish to be an island. They claim that Maui, the hero who fished up their island, also fished up Australia, and if his line had not broken, they would still be joined.
The Hotel Le Lagon was built on the best site of the island between rolling hills and a beautiful protected lagoon surrounded by tropical rain forest. Separate bungalows, built like native huts, melt into the brown of tree trunks, into the vegetation. They have roofs thatched of palm leaves, plaited wild cane on the walls, supports of kohu trunks—a wood unique to Port Vila.
> I was told I could walk along the beach of fine coral sand, shaded by casuarina branches, to the Museum of Oceanic Art established by Nicolai Michoutouchkine. I had already been initiated to some of this striking collection at the Maeva Beach Hotel in Tahiti and the Hotel Château Royal in Noumea. But these great pieces are not in their element in hotel lobbies. Here, as I arrive by way of the beach, the sculptures suddenly tower twelve feet high out of Michoutouchkine’s tropical garden, carved out of huge tree trunks, slit down the middle to be used as drums, but ending at the tip with powerful gods’ faces. They become presences out of the past which can never be erased from memory. The first sight of these sculptures gives to the early part of the trip a strong flavor of past cultures, a past of people who could sculpture gods out of trees.
Standing with a group of gods among the trees and bushes are Michoutouchkine and Pilioko, the most famous painters of the region, known for their own work and for the collection Michoutouchkine has spent so much love and care upon. Pilioko wears a colorful sarong, a shirt, bracelets of shark bones; he is tall and lean, with enormous, soft, dark eyes and features drawn with power. His later works are embroidered tapestries featuring animals, people, flowers, and trees interwoven in a mythical, abstract style of his own. Michoutouchkine wears a chieftain’s robe; he has short hair, lively humorous eyes, a warm smile, and the sturdy body we associate with Russian origins. He goes to sleep at sundown like the natives, is up at sunrise. He has no need of a telephone, electric lights, newspapers, or radio. The group of buildings is artistic and simple. One closed house serves as living quarters and Pilioko’s studio; the rest are open thatch-roofed buildings housing the collection and the paintings and tapestries. Extensions and sheds were added as the collection grew.
Pilioko is a Polynesian from Wallis Island; two other young men, Joel and George, are from the Solomons. Freddy is a boy from the “small nambas” tribe on Malekula Island in the New Hebrides. They are all preparing a Polynesian lunch in a pit nearby; I can see the smoke issuing from the hot stones.
It is difficult to concentrate on the collection because it is interesting to talk with both Nicolai and Pilioko. Pilioko’s presence is vivid, Nicolai is the eloquent one. A book should be written about Nicolai. When he finished his studies at the Sorbonne, he went off without a penny on a journey that was supposed to last six months (the first hitchhiker before it became popular). He stayed away twenty years. He has been all over the world, a man who travelled with love, who was no tourist, who entered deeply into the life of each country, learned the language, painted, sketched, absorbed, gave exhibitions. He began to collect Oceanic art, finally gathering five thousand pieces, weighing twelve tons, of a craft and art which might have been obliterated. Now, most of this collection is continually travelling to give it maximum exposure to people of the South Pacific and other parts of the world. Nicolai has a passion for art and a genius for friendship. He is truly described by the French word formidable. (Once he talked the crew of a French destroyer into transporting items he had collected on a distant island thousands of miles to the Museum at Port Vila.) He can speak all the languages and dialects of the various tribes and has used this to advantage in his collecting throughout the South Pacific Islands. As he collected, he also set up exhibitions in plazas and churchyards of little island hamlets. The response of the natives was amazing; either they knew the artifacts displayed, or some racial memory enabled them to respond to the symbols of their roving Pacific ancestors. Now Michoutouchkine, understanding the intermingling of races and arts among the different islands, insists that the collection be united as Oceanic art.
The collection deserves a life study. It reveals exquisite craftsmanship in wood, shells, tapa cloth, coconut fiber. Masks, animals, birds, gods, are skillfully sculptured, and as much art is spent upon fishing implements, agricultural tools, baskets, cloths, combs, necklaces, headgear, and weapons. Every object made for use is decorated, embellished, enhanced.
Michoutouchkine’s own paintings are either strong, bold studies of native heads, or groups of figures in dense, diffused tones. Pilioko is justly considered as Oceanic Picasso because he has extracted from his native Polynesian background a decorative, abstract, modern essence.
The living quarters themselves are a museum of another kind. Pilioko has hung on the walls, on the ceilings, over the banister, mementoes of their voyages: prayer rugs from Tibet, scarves from India, coins, Berber mats, Portuguese earrings, New Guinea masks, tapa from Fiji, whales’ teeth, petrified bats, shell necklaces. As a dramatic climax, Nicolai opens a trunk containing his diaries, a treasure trunk, enough to entertain for a thousand and one nights! We talk of travels, people, art. He describes the museum he wants France to build. He has offered his entire collection and the land he owns if they will erect a building. He is concerned that a hurricane might damage the fragile, open structure now housing the collection.
The lunch is cooking with unfamiliar pungent smells. The pit is covered with hot stones, and water sprinkled on them makes them steam. The food is wrapped in banana leaves. It has been sealed for three hours. Now the stones are being removed and the food is unwrapped and placed on hand-carved wooden trays four feet long. The bowls are carried to the long table facing the sea. The dishes are of carved wood in the shape of a turtle or a fish. As the inner banana leaves are opened there is poi, taro, breadfruit, yams, crab, pig. A coconut sauce is passed in a bowl to be used on everything. There is wine. Before lunch a silver loving cup is passed around, filled with lime juice and pisco from Peru; later it is filled with champagne. The boys from other islands serve with gaiety. Nicolai is telling us that when he visited tribes to find pieces for his collection, the first test of his genuine friendship was to eat with them. Any sign of repulsion or indifference to their food was a sign of unfriendliness. Once he had to eat pancakes made by an old woman whose skin was in tatters. They watched him. He did not admit to having been ill. He knew the sharing of food was the symbol of fraternity.
The natives told Nicolai: There are four kinds of people who visit us—the administrator, the trader, the missionary, the ethnographer; but we never met a man like you that walks into our house and behaves like one of us. You are able to eat our food, sleep on the ground, to behave just as we do. We feel you must be one of us.
When Nicolai takes me on a tour of the island, I find that this is true. The natives build their huts inland, quite a distance from the road. You might not see them if you do not know where to look. Nicolai knows and suddenly darts into the woods, then beckons to me. As I approach, there is a complete Melanesian family sitting around a wood fire, which is cooking their meal. He purchases and gives me a basket which has been hanging in their hut over the smoke. It is black and smells of many foods.
He knows their songs: “Air me no save.”
He knows how they describe a brassiere: “Basket belong titi.”
He knows what they call the white man’s saw: “Something belong white man you push em I go you pull em I come I save kai kai wood.”
He knows the definition of a piano in pidgin English: “Something belong white man em I got white tooth em I got black tooth you kill em I cry.”
He knows of the rousette, called a flying fox by natives but really a bat. It feeds on fruit at night and is delicious to eat when it has fed on certain fruits.
We meet natives from other islands, Toara and Tongariki. We meet a Polynesian couple with children, the most beautiful of all. The man tall and proud, the woman with delicate Oriental features. He carries a machete and a basket of woven banana leaves. They are picking fruit and taro.
We see coconut trees with red bark, orange butterflies in droves, tropical trees in flamboyant orange, ironwood, and the tobacco tree, which contains an antidote for fish poisoning.
Most delightful are the tiny, untended roadside stands. Little thatch-roofed sheds offering melons, bananas, papaya, breadfruit, taro, fresh eggs, with the price of each item marked. You put the money in a box. In the old
days they had a sign: “Don’t cheat as God is watching you.”
The ease with which Nicolai walks into their shacks, jokes and laughs with them in their own language, makes me understand why they relinquish their most sacred crafts to him.
One morning at 6:30 AM Nicolai comes to fetch me; there is something I must see. Outside his museum garden, industrious spiders have woven yards of the most delicate webs covering all the bushes, and the dew has turned them into fine threads of diamonds glittering in the early sunlight. The webs are intricate, spanning from branch to branch, creating inner rooms of jewelled castles, labyrinths, cellular interweavings as carefully patterned as lace, forming necklaces, pendants, trailing brides’ veils which will soon vanish with the warmth of the sun. Nicolai does not want me to miss any of the wonders of Port Vila.
Every time I see the great drum statues, the hollow tree trunks ending in carved and painted faces of gods, I am reminded of Jerome Robbins’ ballet “The Age of Anxiety,” when the parents appear on incredible stilts and walk on stage just like these ancient gods, to frighten and intimidate. Here they seem more like guardians, with their hooked noses and immense popping eyes looking down on us as we pose for photographs. We photograph Pilioko and his tapestry; Nicolai and his painting of the heart of a jungle; an incredible bird carved of wood by a native, which has not only the swift cutting edge of flight but carries the head of a man half sculptured out of his belly; another bird with a man’s face.
Nicolai, the artist and world traveller, effaces himself to present Port Vila with a tenderness for the place which is more contagious than any of the descriptions made by journalists, by art critics, by literary visitors. He is never detached from what he is showing me. One morning he takes me to the market early, before the sun is too hot. Here under the trees beside the main road, the native women have come to lay out their wares. The most intricate and beautiful sea shells lie on mats. Coconut shells carved into cups. Fruits and flowers arranged as if they were colors for a painting, composed, layered, with a sense of design. Flowers are arranged with the art of a Matisse or of a Japanese flower arranger. Crabs are tied and are foaming at their plight. The women wear short mumus of bright flower patterns, the colors fusing with the colors of flowers and vegetables and fruit. Their muscles are relaxed like those of dancers about to sway; they move lightly even when fat. They sit under umbrellas. They wear bands around their foreheads similar to those worn by American Indians. The very old women do not disintegrate, they age like wood carvings, veined and wrinkled but their features intact, set in a mould of dignity. Many are stringing shells for the necklaces they sell, necklaces which, as in Tahiti and Hawaii, are tokens of greeting, welcome, friendship. Nicolai is shopping; he carries a basket made of soft green palm leaves neatly plaited and with a handle of coconut fiber braided for strength.