The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  I had a map that showed a perfect red line wandering all the way west across Vanua Lava to Vureas Bay. Everyone in Sola insisted the red line was a road. But when Melanesians say “road,” they aren’t thinking about a highway or even a cart track. They mean there is a way. They mean that yes, once upon a time, perhaps someone walked in that direction.

  I filled my pack with bags of rice, corned beef, and Webster’s Cream Cookies, then followed a gravel road over the snake ridge and down onto a plain bristling with rows of coconut palms. The road became two furrows in the tall grass. The wind hissed through the tops of the palms but did not stir the soupy air beneath them. My shadow shrank beneath me. Flies landed to sip from beads of sweat on my neck. At midday, the copra plantations gave way to jungle and merciful shade, but then the road disappeared, swallowed by a mound of boulders and an extravagance of shining leaves and knotted vines. Bewildered, I marched back along the track, looking for the turn I had missed. I poked around the roots of a giant banyan. Nothing. I drank the last of my water. The road had obviously intended to go west, so I went west. I clambered through the boulders and realized that the moss and lichen had been worn from some of them. I followed the route of bare rock until it became a trail. It led over a mountain, through a mosquito bog and down along a great bay, where the sea rose into house-high curls that slammed onto the crags below me. I saw no one.

  The trail faded, reappeared, then was joined by others in the afternoon. Like a river, it strengthened and gained certainty with each new tributary. I stopped by a creek and opened my bag of cookies. I listened to my breathing and the roar of the distant surf. The solitude was a gift, but it did not last. Melanesians do not believe in solitude. They will rescue you from it when they can.

  It was midafternoon when the red-eyed man emerged from the forest. He carried a broad machete and used it to cut open a coconut for me to drink. He told me that yes, he knew my German scholar, Miss Sabina. She was a good woman, he said, but her story was a sad one: “Hem i no gat famili. Ino gat husban. No gat brotha. No gat pikinini. I sad tumas.”

  The man insisted that I needed his help to reach Vureas Bay. The problem, he said, was the big water. He took my pack and marched off, pleased with himself. I followed, irritated. Cattle stood beneath the palms. The heat had made them so lethargic we had to push them from our path. We descended into a black rock canyon and forded a river, hopping across a series of submerged boulders. The clear water tugged at my shins. “Men have been swept away here,” said the man. “Yesterday the big water was so high you could not cross it. You should pray for God to keep the sun shining, or you will not be able to leave Vureas Bay for a long, long time.”

  As if on cue, the sun disappeared behind a mound of billowing cumulonimbus.

  We splashed through water gardens bursting with big-leaf taro, all irrigated by dozens of narrow earthen canals. We hit the suburbs of Vetuboso just before dark. This was supposed to be the biggest town in all the Banks Islands, but there were no roads and there was no power, just hundreds of huts scattered through the forest, all strung together by a network of trails slicked by centuries of bare footsteps. In the middle of the town, beneath the eaves of her own thatch bungalow, was my anthropologist.

  Sabina was a sparrow compared to her meaty neighbors. She was pretty but also somehow harrowed, thirsty. When she saw me, she ran a hand through her blond hair, which she had trimmed into a precise bob, and sighed deeply. She seemed relieved to see me, embracing me like an old friend. The neighbors were scandalized, but I understood. I carried the aura of chocolate, books, rock videos, conversations in cafés, bad language: things that were as familiar in Heidelberg as they were in Houston or my own hometown, yet absolutely foreign to Vanua Lava.

  Sabina introduced me to the village’s kastom chief, Eli Field. He wore no shirt or shoes, but he did have a silver watch on his wrist. He had the chest of a bull and the sparkling eyes of a storyteller.

  “Bi yumi dringim wanfala kava tonaet!” Eli said, crushing my hand inside a callused paw.

  “Kava, hem i numbawan,” I replied.

  Sabina rolled her eyes and led me inside to her kitchen. A thin dog rubbed his haunch across the dirt floor.

  “One more month,” she sighed. “Just one more month, then I will escape.”

  Sabina set a kettle on her fire and made me a cup of tea. She said she had come to Vureas Bay because the locals had put in a request for an anthropologist to the national cultural center. Nobody had completed an ethnography here since Codrington.

  “All their old knowledge is scattered, it’s disappearing. The chiefs thought that if I wrote it down, at least they would have a picture of the kastom they still possess. But…” She waved a thin arm dejectedly toward her door.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “But it has been difficult. Officially, these people want their knowledge preserved, but in reality they are incredibly possessive of it. These are jealous people.”

  A crowd gathered around Sabina’s hut. Heads poked through the window, which was not a window but a rough gap in a wall of woven pandanus leaves. Men and boys strained to hear us. Sabina smiled weakly. “And there are other problems. It’s hard to be a single woman living alone here. To the men, I’m a temptation. To the women, I’m a threat. I have informants, but as soon as I establish a rapport with them, their wives get jealous. They gossip. Some men aren’t even permitted to come drink tea with me. And then there are the creepers…”

  I laughed. I had heard about creepers. As in pagan times, men and women on most islands were forbidden almost any physical contact until they got married. But boys will be boys. Men who couldn’t control their libidos would literally creep through their villages at night, tapping softly at the windows of prospective lovers. It was regarded as a sport by some, but I imagined a creeper’s approach would be terrifying for a woman sleeping alone. Unless she was unusually bold.

  There were a generator and a television in Vetuboso. Someone had returned from Port Vila with porn videos. From them, the men had learned that white women were insatiable and eager to break all kinds of sexual tabus, especially the one forbidding oral sex. As a result, there was constant knocking at Sabina’s window. The creepers didn’t scare her, she said, but what a bloody bother they could be. The trick was to yell as loudly as possible, yell until the creepers were shamed into flight.

  You would do that if you wanted them to go away, I thought. But what if you didn’t? What if you were lonely? What if you were curious? What then?

  “I might leave my door open now and then,” I said.

  “That makes you a man,” she replied.

  And naive, I thought. Since Victorian times, anthropologists have claimed to follow a simple rule, which, though unwritten, is as powerful as any Melanesian tabu. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was said to put it simply for his students at Oxford: Don’t fuck with the natives. Study the Other. Insinuate yourself into its life. Befriend it. Do its dances. Eat its food. Learn its secrets. Become intimate with it. Love it, even. But never cross the line. Anthropologists are less articulate when they try to explain why they should keep their distance, but the sex taboo is about more than scholarly high-mindedness.

  Bronislaw Malinowski won fame in 1929 by revealing the amorous secrets of Melanesians in The Sexual Life of Savages. However, it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of his field diaries that Malinowski’s own erotic fantasies about his Trobriand Island hosts were revealed. After observing one local woman, Malinowski panted: “I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us whites, fascinated me…. I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possessthis pretty girl.” Why could Malinowski not claim his exotic prize? Postcolonial critics say it was because sexual intimacy would have broken down the last barrier between the anthropologist and his Other. The sex taboo reinforced Malinowski’s superior status; as long as he remained pure, he was not part of the Melanesian system but above it. Malinowski was the one
with the right to ask questions, and unlike his “savages,” he would not be expected to give up his own secrets.

  Plenty of Malinowski’s intellectual descendants have broken the sex taboo, but few are keen to publicize their adventures. That kind of story could have you lumped in with three hundred years of sexual exploiters, or it could reveal you as weak, soft, vulnerable. Either way, it could ruin your reputation. The community of anthropologists is hierarchical, one field-worker explained to me in Port Vila. To rise to the top, you must guard your power and your secrets as fiercely as a suqe society member.

  After dark, Sabina led me to the compound Eli had built for his family in the forest far from the village. Eli had decided that I should stay in a hut he had built behind his own. It was cluttered with dusty audiotapes and stacks of National Geographic magazines, the effects of a linguist who came to make a dictionary of the local dialect, then took one of the local lads home to Australia with her.

  We arrived just in time for kava. Eli’s eldest son pushed chunks of the root into a cast-iron meat grinder on the porch. His bright eyes and bare torso shone in the silver light of Sabina’s headlamp. Cali was eighteen. He had a wife and a baby. He wore an ear stud with a tiny pink star.

  Eli held up an oil lantern and began his lament.

  His great-grandfather had been the most powerful kastom chief in Vureas Bay. Then the Southern Cross arrived. The missionaries converted Eli’s grandfather and his father, too. The missionaries built a school and started a coconut plantation. The children learned English and, along with it, the new religion. Esuva Din—the district priest who had cursed the sorcerers of Gaua—arrived in Vureas Bay to stamp out kastom. Ten sorcerers died within a week. Magic stones were smashed. The suqe and its secrets were lost.

  Eli grew up hearing the old folks whisper about kastom and about the power and secrets the church had banned. As a young man he was struck by the idea that his family was following someone else’s religion. He had had enough of it. “I had looked at the world, and I knew there wasn’t only one true religion. I knew about the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Hindus. The world had always been full-up with religion. I decided that my kastom was the religion of my country, and I wanted to start living by it again. Don’t tell me my kastom is darkness!”

  The more excited Eli grew, the more he fell into speaking Bislama. It was hard to keep up, especially after my second shell of kava. I caught this much: Eli had planted kastom herbs and built himself a house amid the ruins of the old mission schoolyard. He had started a culture club and invited the elders to come and share their knowledge. He had stopped attending Sunday services. The church elders declared him a heathen and a backslider.

  The kava was strong. The night was dark. I was sitting on a high wooden bench when Eli lifted a plastic cup of kava in the air. Cali gestured for me to get down, squat on the floor. “Taem kastom chief i drink, yu mas stap daon nomo,” he whispered. Eli gulped his drink, stepped outside, spat into the wind, and barked an elaborate incantation. It was an exaggeration of the tamavha rituals I had seen on Tanna. It felt like an imitation, an approximation of what had once been sacred.

  “What about magic?” I asked Eli. “I suppose that has been lost for years.”

  Sabina let out an annoyed sigh. I had forgotten she was with us. This definitely wasn’t Tanna, or no woman of any color would have been permitted near a kava session.

  “It has not been lost,” said Eli. “Some old fellows hid their magic stones from Esuva Din, and now we are learning how to use them again.”

  “What about you? Can you do it, Eli?”

  “Sabina knows I can. I have proved it. One time, Catriona, the last researcher, made me cross tumas. She spent two weeks interviewing me, making demands, asking me to walkabaot with her here and there. Then, to show me her appreciation, she gave me a box of matches. A box of matches! I said no worries. I did not complain. But when she went to the airport at Sola, I sent my boy to give her a message. I told him to tell Catriona that she had better find somewhere to stay in Sola because she would be stuck there for two weeks. Then I made it rain. Hem nao! I made it rain so hard that the airstrip flooded and the big water swelled. Didn’t I, Sabina?”

  “Well, it did happen to rain, and Catriona happened to be stuck, but…”

  “Look,” I interrupted. “On every island, people tell me they can use kastom magic, but nobody ever proves it. I’m tired of magic toktok. I want magic action.”

  “Disfala rain magic takes time. The rainmaker has to make sacrifices. No sex. No talking. He has to fast for three, four days.”

  “Fine. I’ll stay five days, until Wednesday.”

  “Is that a challenge?” said Sabina.

  “You bet it is.”

  “You careful,” Eli said with a mischievous smile. “If we bring rain, you won’t be able to cross the big water.”

  “Well then, hold off on the rain until Wednesday afternoon.”

  There was more said that evening, but I had taken a third cup. Shortly after my last spit, I lost Eli’s voice in a congealed soup of mumbled thoughts, shards of flickering lamplight, and distant dog howls. I remember the silver-blue glare of Sabina’s headlamp, shooting across the yard. Swirling nausea. A fight with a mosquito net. A damp mattress. Rain seeping through the rafters.

  The next morning, I was back in the village, sitting in Sabina’s kitchen, when a few members of Eli’s culture club arrived. Sabina stepped back and tended to her cooking fire. One man had the hungry eyes of a creeper. He sat down and told me that the club was working to start up the suqe again. It would be difficult, he said, giving up all those pigs, spending all those months in meditative seclusion.

  “If the suqe is so hard, why bother reviving it?” I asked.

  “For power!” he said. “Our grandfathers, they went to the salagoro and prayed, and they would walkabaot down into the ground, deep, deep, until they reached a place under the bottom of the ocean. There they met the sea snake, and he gave them secret knowledge so they could become wealthy.” There was more. Something about eating a tabu fire in order to kill some distant and unsuspecting person. His ideas were a muddled fusion of suqe, tamate, and The Lord of the Rings.

  “So when will you start killing pigs again?”

  “This will take a few years. We have to convince enough men to join us. Right now, most Christian men are afraid of this kind of kastom. They call it devil worship. So we have secret meetings each week to gather the old knowledge and rebuild kastom.”

  “How many have joined you?”

  “Um, hum, six, I think.” His voice trailed off. He scratched his beard and stared over my shoulder. I followed his gaze across the room. Sabina was bending over her fire, revealing the peach-smooth skin at the small of her back.

  Vetuboso sat on a forested plateau above Vureas Bay. That afternoon, Sabina led me down a footpath to the sea. The mountains were girdled with low cloud. The breeze was warm and sticky. Waves curled along a black sand beach. Sabina swam fully clothed—it was tabu for a woman’s thighs to be seen in public.

  My conversation with Eli’s culture gang had made Sabina grumpy. “You know, I have never heard those stories,” she said. “The salagoro, the suqe, the snake spirits—the men won’t tell me about any of that stuff.”

  Once, said Sabina, an informant had told her a tabu story, a particularly erotic one involving the god of taro and his tree-sized penis. When Eli got wind of the informant’s indiscretion, he was furious. He said it was not a story to be shared with women or outsiders. He became even more angry after Sabina defended the old man and told her he would have nothing more to do with her. It took weeks for Eli to warm up.

  “But why would Eli block you? You are here to help him save the kastom.”

  Sabina wiped the seawater from her eyes and swam closer. “You have to understand that women here are seen as a threat to male power. I don’t mean politically; men honestly believe that women can drain their energy. That’s why, when men practice thei
r dances, they steer clear of women. When the men go fishing, women are banned from walking on the beach. Some fish will simply refuse to be caught when women are around. Men even abstain from having sex with their wives for fear of losing this kind of energy.”

  Sabina had come to Vetuboso to write about people’s sense of self. Who do you think you are? she asked them. Why are you that way? All she had gotten were superficial answers. “Mi no savve,” people would tell her. I can’t say. I don’t know. It’s just our way. The more time she spent in the village, the more an invisible grid of kastom rules and relationships closed in around her. The moment Sabina arrived in Vetuboso, she had become Eli’s adoptive daughter and a member of Eli’s wife’s tribe. Her maternal cousins—of which, according to the mathematics of extrapolated kinship, she now had dozens and dozens—became like brothers and sisters. Half the village’s unmarried men had suddenly become potential marriage partners.

  The system landed her in a minefield of manners in a landscape filled with uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, friends, and enemies by default, all people who were bound by kastom to speak to her in specific ways or not to speak to her at all. Sabina was forbidden to utter the name of her “sister-in-law,” Cali’s wife. She couldn’t even use words that sounded like that name. Sabina couldn’t tease or joke with Eli or any of her maternal uncles. She had scribbled diagrams to remind herself whom she could talk to.

  This, she said, was the real story of Vetuboso. The rules were everything. If a man took the wrong person—for example, an unmarried woman—to his garden, the gossip would start immediately. Then the elders would levy a fine. Or worse: they would send a party to trample all the man’s garden, and perhaps those of his family as well. But it was the gossip that hurt the most. Trust me, Sabina said with the gravity of one who knew from experience: you do not want to break the rules in Vureas Bay. She had given up trying to extract kastom secrets—the suqe and salagoro mysteries would have to survive without her help—and she had focused her research on the intricate web of rules she had to follow. The rules, she told me, were everything here. You write what you know.