The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “So there is no problem,” I said.

  “But the body is the temple of God,” John nagged despairingly. “And there are worse things.”

  “I would love to hear them.”

  “The mwaki-mwaki. Tapioca dance,” someone said. “It is shameful.”

  “And tug-of-war,” John said. “They challenge the other villages. Boys from this village challenge the girls from that village. The girls from here tug-of-war against the boys from there. They are half-dressed. Only bottoms. They pull the vines, and whichever side wins chases the other, and when they catch them they fornicate on the grass, just like that.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “Then they put their pants on and have another tug-of-war.”

  “That really sounds like fun,” I said.

  Everyone laughed except John, who left the pavilion and went to his hut. He returned a moment later with a copy of an Adventist magazine, The Voice, which he urged me to read. Then he said he wanted to tell me how it happened that he came here to Kaisiga village.

  “This village was all United Church once. But one morning the people saw that a very big whale had come to the beach and was just lying there at the edge of the sand. The chief of the village had a dream. In the dream a voice told him about the whale. ‘Because you asked for food,’ the voice said. They got ropes and they pulled it out to sea. But the next day it came back. The chief had another dream. This time the voice said, ‘Not physical food but spiritual food.’ So instead of pulling the whale to sea, they took it and buried it on the next beach. The chief had a dream and he was told the meaning of the whale. ‘You are asking to be fed another religion.’ So they left the United Church and they invited the Adventists and I was sent from Poppondetta to lead them.”

  It was now dark over half the sea, though a pinky seashell light still lingered where the sun had set, making looming shadows of the high humpbacked islands on the horizon, Fergusson and Normanby and Goodenough, in the distant southwest. Part of the lagoon was a great pink lake, and the more shadowy ocean close by sloshed against the edge of the village.

  “How do you say ‘good-night’?”

  “Bwoyna bogie,” John said.

  “Bwoyna bogie,” I said, and left them and crawled into my tent.

  And most of the night, under the brilliant half moon that lighted the starry sky and the jungle treetops and the high clouds breezing across it and made silhouettes of the coconut palms, the children sang and laughed, by the surge of the sloshing lagoon.

  The banging of the drum came early – it was a steel oil-drum and made a hell of a noise and went on for ages, because the drummer was another village kid, having fun. It was five-thirty in the morning – first light. Then I heard whispering and laughter and padding feet on the hard tramped earth of the village, and then the creaking planks of the church floor, and then the sweet harmony of children’s voices singing,

  Weespa a frayer in da morning,

  Weespa a frayer at noon.

  Weespa a frayer in da evening

  So keep your heart in tune.

  Jesus may come in da morning,

  Jesus may come at noon,

  Jesus may come in da evening

  So keep your heart in tune.

  And then I heard part of John’s sermon as he read some verses from the Bible and began explicating it, saying, “Now that is not alcoholic wine. It is pure wine. It is, let us say, something like grape juice –’

  I was up, making green tea, when the people from the morning service left the tin-roofed building that served as the church – it was nearly all children, and some women, and a few of the hecklers from last night at the seaside pavilion.

  Seeing John, I said, “You were up early.”

  “Six-thirty, every morning,” he said.

  I said, “You mean five-thirty.”

  “Was it?” he said. “Well, we don’t have a watch in the village. But that’s a nice watch.”

  As he was looking at mine and seemed to be on the verge of breaking the Eighth Commandment, I thought how wonderful it was to have so little idea of the right time.

  “What is this you are making?”

  “Green tea.”

  “We don’t drink tea,” John said. “Or coffee. The body is the temple of God.”

  He was speaking as a Seventh-day Adventist, but it seemed odd to be making a virtue out of something that was untraditional on these islands anyway.

  I drank some tea and almost choked. John took this as a sign from God, but I realized that I had accidentally filled my water bag with brackish water in Losuia. I was angry at myself for having lugged three gallons of undrinkable water in my kayak.

  He invited me for breakfast. The mashed taro cooked in coconut milk and the bananas led us to a discussion of the pleasures of vegetarianism.

  “Also we don’t eat pigs or bats. Or Tulip,” John said.

  Tulip was not his pet chicken but rather a brand name, generic for any fatty pork in a can.

  “Or coneys,” John said.

  “Did you say coneys? Rabbits? Are there any rabbits here?”

  “No,” John said.

  “Which book of the Bible talks about food?”

  “Leviticus. Chapter eleven,” he said. “Also something in Deuteronomy.”

  He showed me his Bible and, reading the chapter in Leviticus, I concluded that it was like an environmentalist’s charter and probably had done more to protect endangered species than all the nature charities put together.

  “I can see you are interested,” John said, sensing my imminent conversion.

  While I was sitting there, eight or ten older boys came over, one with a lei of frangipani blossoms they called a katububula. The boy, whose name was Wilson, said, “The old man asked, ‘Why didn’t you give him flowers yesterday?’ But we said, ‘We didn’t see him coming.”‘

  “Are you through with that?” a boy named Zechariah asked me, seeing that I had put my plate aside – I had eaten half of the stodgy mixture.

  “I’m done,” I said.

  He snatched up the plate and ate what I had left. Then he smiled and said. “Sena bwoyna! That was very good.”

  They asked me what I was doing. I said I was on vacation and that I was just paddling around the islands. This to them seemed a perfectly natural way of passing the time. A man named Micah said, “But do not paddle to Tuma Island.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is where the dead people go.”

  I found it on my map, a slender island, about five miles long to the northwest, and questioning them further learned that it was a haunted place where no living person went because it was where the dangerous spirits of the dead resided. In Malinowski’s description it was the Trobri-anders’ heaven, a place of eternal youth and perpetual copulation – an erotic paradise, if you were a khosa, a spirit. Even the Seventh-day Adventists of Kaisiga village did not deny this, though they said that the khosas flitted around tormenting and tricking living people.

  I put Tuma high on my list of destinations of places to paddle.

  One of the boys was the son of the master canoe-builder, Meia. I was taken to where they were working on the large outrigger canoe I had seen when I arrived. This labor had occupied them for almost a year, they said. I sketched a picture of it, so that I could remember the names of all the parts – the splashboard and prow were beautifully carved and painted, and clusters of little cowrie shells had been strung along the gunwales. They had given it a name, which translated as “Sailing with the Wind.”

  “Will you take this fishing?”

  “No,” the old man Meia said through an interpreter. “This is for playing.”

  It was to be used in the kula expeditions, as the men from Kaisiga sailed from island to island giving and receiving the elaborate arm-shells (mwali) and necklaces (soulava) that were involved in this enigmatic game. It was outwardly a ceremony of exchange, with people taking shell ornaments from island to island and passing them along t
o friends (the kula partners), who, in turn, took ornaments to other islands. The so-called Kula Ring was partly social and partly magical, a game that has been played in the Milne Bay area for thousands of years, as the players – all of them expert sailors – traveled among the islands. The arm-shells went counterclockwise around the islands, the necklaces clockwise, and they were valuable because of their history, and their power deepened as they passed from person to person over the years. That super-natural power in Polynesia was known as mana – it was soul and strength. Each object (there are hundreds in circulation at any one time) has its own name and pedigree and personality. It is not owned by anyone. It would be unthinkable to sell any of these shell artifacts.

  Joining the kula voyages was not for all Trobrianders. I had the impression that only a minority of the islanders were actually kula people, and that they were brought into the small circle of kula society by friends and relatives, the way one might be asked to join a bowling club in another culture – the comradeship was the important thing, and – this being the Trobeswomen were also included.

  All this I learned from Meia, the master canoe-builder. The seagoing canoe, the masawa, was essential to the kula expedition, since the islands were so far-flung.

  As he spoke to me, Meia was mixing betel with lime in his little pot and sucking red globs of it off a stick. He was one of the few people in Kaisiga who was addicted to this stuff, a mild intoxicant.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Beer,” he said, and smiled his toothless lime-rotted smile.

  It was impossible to tell how old Meia was, but I could estimate his age. He remembered helping American soldiers carry boxes of food and ammunition after their amphibious landings in the Trobriands. (General MacArthur had thought the grass airstrip on Kiriwina might be useful in the Allied air war against the Japanese.) That was in June 1943. If Meia had been fourteen then, he was sixty-one now. His toothlessness and his skinny withered face and cloudy eyes made him look a great deal older than that.

  No one I met in the Trobriands knew his or her exact age, and many could not even guess at it. A birthday, or year, was simply not recorded or remembered. Little breastless girls said, “Feefteen!” and big buxom ones said, “Seex!” “I am one hundred years old,” a schoolboy told me in his teasing way, but when I promised him some candy if he told me his true age he could not do it. Speaking of their parents they would say, “Forty – or maybe fifty or something.”

  I explained what a birthday was to Zechariah, who was in his early twenties.

  “It is an interesting idea,” he said. “But I don’t know. My father and mother don’t remember when I was born.”

  I had not planned to stay long at Kaisiga, but once my tent was pitched and I had ceased to be an oddity I decided to stay. Kaisiga was a good place to set off from to visit the rest of the villages on this fairly large island; and it was a good place to return to in the evening. There was drinking water here, the village was clean and orderly, the villagers were hospitable – they didn’t importune, they didn’t borrow, they didn’t steal, and after a few days they didn’t stare. Most of all they were gentle and peace-loving. That was what impressed me most, the peacefulness of the place. I decided to stay longer.

  My food supplies were gone, but by a happy accident I discovered that I had an appetite for their food. Their staples were steamed or boiled taro roots and sweet potatoes and yams, and the greens they called “pumpkin tops,” and a spinachy green they referred to as ibica.

  They cooked with coconut milk – shredding the coconut meat and squelching it with fresh water. Now and then they had fish, smoked or steamed. Bananas and guavas were plentiful. For religious reasons they never had meat. They never fried anything, they used no salt or spices. It was a nearly perfect diet – in fact, it closely approximated the no-fat, high-energy diet that had been advocated in America and turned into a best-selling book by Nathan Pritikin.

  “Obesity is extremely rare, and in its more pronounced forms is called a disease,” Malinowski had written seventy years ago on the Trobriands. This was still true. One Saturday when there was nothing to do in the village – no one could cook or work on the sabbath – I persuaded a small group of villagers to come on a nature walk with me so that I could learn some of the island’s names for these creatures (most of them proscribed in Leviticus – herons, snakes, lizards, turtles). I quizzed them on the topic of obesity, and with real emotion Lyndon (Leendon) said, “It is horrible.”

  The rest of them agreed. It was almost unknown in the Trobriands for anyone to be napopoma (pot-bellied), they said, and a fatty was in their view as unerotic as an elderly person, a cripple, a leper or an albino.

  The Saturday sabbath in Kaisiga was a day for eating cold yams and clammy greens; for sitting around and talking; for sleeping, while the younger villagers sang and prayed or listened to Pastor John’s biblical texts – he called them “Memory gems.” However distant and solitary I felt all week in this little eventless village on this little humid island, I felt even more so on a Saturday. It made me jumpy and watchful. But by my second Saturday I had learned to glide along, and when John asked me to speak I decided to give a vegetarian sermon. I read from the Book of Daniel, of how Daniel had refused to defile himself with Nebuchadnezzar’s meat and wine and how he had grown healthy and wise insisting on his diet of lentils and water.

  John felt that I was ripe for conversion, and whenever we were together he preached the Adventist message. One day I expressed an interest in seeing the communal gardens, which were a mile or so in the interior of the island. We trekked in on a path that was partly mud and partly coral, and in the jungle the air was still and humid. I tried to leap from one tree root to another over the black shiny millipedes, and the mud, as I was stung by no-see-urns and mosquitoes – here and there was an eight-inch spider clinging to a web the size of a wagon-wheel, bits of the web smeared on my face and I was hot and thirsty and gasping and my feet hurt from my stumbling on the coral – and all this time John was sermonizing.

  “Jesus said, ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.’ Now what does that mean when Almighty God says that? It means –”

  And perspiring and stung and covered with mud, I staggered onward, batting the spiders away, and each time I brushed past a tree trunk the ants leapt from the bark to my skin and began biting me.

  “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,” John was saying.

  The gardens, when we reached them after an hour of bush-bashing, were rubbly and helter-skelter, the yams, the sweet potatoes, the taro, the paw-paws thriving among chunks of coral and tree roots on uneven ground.

  “I tell them not to waste food,” John said, standing on a coral boulder. “There are people in this world who are starving to death!”

  I saw a chicken scratching in the garden. I said, “Do you eat chickens?”

  He frowned at me. “The body is the temple of God.”

  This was his text for the return trip.

  “The yam harvest is terrible,” he said, clucking. “Everyone commits fornication.”

  “In the village?”

  “Yes, they do it right in the village.”

  “Can you see them?”

  “Yes, they do it while people’s eyes are on them!” he said, batting branches. “Yes, you can see them going up and down! Oh, it is terrible.”

  “I don’t even like to think about it,” I said, and clucked in disapproval as he gave me more details.

  At night the church services were held in the dark – there were no working lanterns in Kaisiga; the flashlights were used only for fishing. In the early evening I went to my tent and drank sherry and wrote my notes, and heard the children singing Weespa a frayer in da morning. I knew the service was ending when they sang,

  Lord keep us safe dis night,

  Secure from
all our fees

  May ainjoos guard us while we sleep

  Till morning light appees.

  Amen!

  And then they left the church and hurried into the dark, where they ran and played and sang, giggling and fumbling and sometimes – in spite of all their apparent piety – raising hell, and often singing,

  London Bridge is palling down,

  Palling down, palling down,

  My pair lady!

  The best beach on the island was on the western side, in an uninhabited cove, a two-hour paddle from Kaisiga. It was a white crescent of sandy beach with clear water and shady trees. On some days I brought my lunch here and swam and watched the parrots and fish eagles.

  But that was only part of it. The rest, and in a way, the most blissful, was sitting in the pavilion on the Kaisiga shore, among a dozen softly chatting villagers, as the sun went down and the cool breeze wafted from the lagoon. We drank the sweet water from green coconuts.

  When you come back bring us chocolate, they said. Bring us spear rubbers, bring us spear points and fish-hooks and fishing-line. Bring us T-shirts. Bring me a lantern, Micah said. Bring me baby clothes, Esther said. Bring me a watch, John said.

  And on those nights we talked in whispers about ghosts.So many ghosts in the Trobriands! It was the reason people lived in huts that had no windows – they barricaded themselves in at night, even as their children were out playing. They told me about the khosa, the spirits of the dead. “They come and trick us!” About the mulukwausi, the invisible flying witches who perched in the trees and on the hut roofs and then swept to the ground and penetrated people’s bodies, and lived in their hearts and lungs, killing them that way. Or the bwaga’u. No, they are not ghosts, they whispered: they are real men who kill at night. The bwaga’u were sorcerers.

  “Give me an example,” I said.

  This was on one of those moony nights at the pavilion by the lagoon when the bliss of the South Seas dream was palpable – the breeze on my face, the sound of the sea, the aroma of blossoms, the last squawks of the birds settling in the branches for the night.