The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  They laughed, and clearly it was what they intended, and they continually fine-tuned the paddles they used variously as leeboards and rudders.

  “Look at him,’’ Micah said.

  The other canoe rocked and slewed m the wind, and half a mile of choppy water lay between us. We were heading southeast towards the sea-arm of Kiriwina, to the coastal village of Sinaketa.

  Micah spoke in Kiriwina to the other canoe, a voice of casual contempt and glee, which made the others laugh.

  “What did he say?”

  “Micah say, ‘Go fuck your mother.’ ‘Go fuck your sister.’” And I must have frowned, because he added, “We are just joking him.’’

  The wind was now tearing at our sail and straining the ancient-looking lines.

  I said, “This is what we call a steep and confused sea.”

  “The current is running this way, and the wind is blowing that way,” Leendon said, enunciating an immutable law of the sea. “That is why there are waves.”

  “Does the village have a motor-boat?” I asked.

  “Yes, a dinghy, but the motor is buggered,” one of the oarsmen said. “And there are problems.”

  Leendon changed the subject. We talked about crocodiles. They had no fear of them. They used to come to the village to eat the dogs, one of them said. And another put in, You see them at low tide at Bali Point looking for something to eat. Leendon said, One dim-dim shot a big crocodile that had killed a small girl. They cut it open and found her bones and the earring from her ear.

  We were now way past Kaileuna and almost out of sight of the main island, all the lines tightened and the various sticks and braces in the canoe creaking. Leendon kept up a running commentary on the adjustments, while at the same time answering my questions about marriage in the Trobriands. Not marrying was unthinkable, he implied. (“The Trobriander has no full status in social life until he is married,” Malinowski had said.) There was a partner for everyone. Wasn’t that true of America?

  “Some people never marry,” I said. “I know a man who is fifty-something. He was supposed to marry a woman but at the last moment she changed her mind. He found another. Just before they were to be married she met another man. A third one dropped him – bwoyna bogie, bye-bye, and she was gone. A fourth one agreed to marry him but they argued one day and she went away and sent his ring back in a little parcel.”

  “He is very sad,” Leendon said.

  “He says he hates women now.”

  “He has no wife. No kids. That is terrible. What does he do all day?”

  “He writes things.”

  “He is wasting time. He should come here. We will find him a wife.”

  I said, “A fourteen-year-old girl in a grass skirt with flowers in her hair?”

  “Maybe fifteen,” Leendon said.

  The rest of the way to Sinaketa they told me what I should bring them the next time I came (waterproof watch, a tent like mine, a water bag like mine, more fishing tackle) and we trolled for fish, using fragments of a plastic bag for bait.

  “I ran out of plastic last month when I was out fishing,” Micah said. “I just cut my shirt and used little rags for bait. I caught many fish.”

  At Sinaketa we beached the canoe and went ashore, where the feast was in progress. Our little canoe party found the large number of decorated and dancing people rather overwhelming, and we stayed together. Leendon pointed out Pulayasi, the Paramount Chief of the Trobriands, from the powerful Tabalu clan, who lived in Omarakana with a number of wives. Sir Michael Somare, the former New Guinean prime minister, was seated under an awning. And a man as black and as hip as any American rapper was a Melanesian nutritionist from New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago.

  Frowning, bare-breasted girls in straw tutus danced in a sort of conga line, egged on by sweating drummers. Some of the girls wore kula artifacts – jangling arm-shells and necklaces. They were followed by boys with talcum on their faces – strange white masks – who did the mwaki-mwaki, the so-called “tapioca dance.” This was an explicitly sexual, buttock-slapping, bump and grind, with lots of shouted grunts, and it made the audience scream with approval.

  The dancers wove their way among tall towers made of branches and containing yams which had been provided for the guests of honor. There were flags and flowers, and here and there were hairy black pigs tied up and whimpering as they struggled against their knots.

  I fell into conversation with a man named James from Sinaketa, and asked him about burial customs.

  “There isn’t much burial here,” he said. “The people die and their bones are put into clay pots and hidden.”

  Now I saw that Leendon had led Micah and the others to the little shelters that had been erected for the occasion. On long tables there were heaps of rice and boiled yams and bananas, and the sailors from Kaisiga were snatching handfuls of it and stuffing their mouths.

  “But on Kitava,” James was saying, “they take the dead man and butcher him while the widow is lying underneath the body. The blood spatters her clothes. She wears the clothes for three days while the village cleans her husband’s bones. The bones end up in a clay pot.”

  This village was wilder and so much more festive than any I had seen elsewhere that I pestered Leendon on the way back for an explanation. And it became clear to me that this main island, where there were a few schools and the only vehicles, was also the most traditional island. It was the Paramount Chief’s island, it was where the strongest clans and the wealthiest villages were located. This was where the yam harvest rituals were strictly observed, and although there were missions here the missionaries had little influence.

  Normally, traditions were strongest the farther I had been from the center of things; but in the Trobriands, the hinterland, the outer islands, the little atolls regarded the big island as a throwback, full of primitives. That was why the villagers from Kaisiga were so eager to leave the big royal island of Kiriwina. Anything could happen to you there.

  I had a vivid demonstration of that a few days later. Oppressed by the solitude of the village – everyone was working in the hot, mosquito-infested gardens – I had paddled to a swampy mangrove island called Baimapu to go bird-watching. The wind had died, and the morning was lovely and peaceful, and the sea a mirror of limpid light all the way to the horizon, all pinky-blue pastels. Red and black parrots were chasing each other through the trees, and the herons and other fish-eaters were wading in the shallows.

  The water here was shallow and muddy, but a channel ran around the island. I tried to stay in this deeper water, away from the shadowy mudflats where there could have been crocs and where paddling was difficult – in places the water was only a few inches deep.

  Ahead I saw seven or eight boys sloshing through the shallows, occasionally chucking spears into the water in front of them, going for fish. Seeing me, they changed direction and came near.

  “Where you come from, dim-dim?” one said. He was a boy of thirteen or so, and his long spear – he wagged it at me – had a rusty point.

  He was challenging me and being intentionally rude, so I said, “Don’t call me dim-dim. I come from America.”

  Another said, “Give me PK” – the brand name was a generic term for chewing-gum.

  The others pestered me for gum, and then some of them began fingering the boat.

  “We want to ride in your waga.”

  One tried to sit on the stern, another pressed his spear point against the fabric of the boat.

  “Don’t touch it,” I said sharply. “Get away from it.”

  By this time I had drifted out beyond the edge of the channel and was wedged in the shallows. The boys surrounded me, lifting their spears. They wore ragged shorts and their legs were muddy and there were smears of mud all over their bodies.

  Shaking his spear at me, one of the smaller boys began running back and forth, shrieking, “I keel you! I keel you!”

  As he jabbed the spear at me he made a hideous face, scowling and sticking his
tongue out.

  I dipped my paddle blade but my boat was stuck in the mud and I could not move it. I tried not to show my nervousness. In a tone of forced calm I said, “Don’t be silly.”

  But seeing that I couldn’t move, the others took up the chant, “Keel the dim-dim! Keel the dim-dim! Keel heem!”

  The smaller boy came close to me and shook his spear and hissed at me, “Run you life, dim-dim.”

  “Keel heem!”

  All this time I was smiling my rigid smile and speaking slowly and trying to move myself off the mudbank with my paddle. I did not want to get out of the boat, nor did I wish to show my alarm.

  It was a nightmare – the shrieking youngsters, the way they pranced and plopped in the water threatening me, their fierce dirty faces, their hideously dangerous spears. I was seated, they were standing. And of course I was stranded – they saw that I was helpless. I could not understand whether it was merely a macabre game or genuinely hostile. But I decided not to antagonize them – only to ignore them and get myself out of there.

  Turning my back on them, I dislodged the boat. It moved slowly, but still they pranced and chanted (“Run you life!”), and cried out, “Look at me!” – they wanted me to see their threatening spears. I deliberately kept my back turned to them and disguising my effort (I was sure that if they saw that I was nervous they would pursue me) kept my boat sliding away from them. I went on talking monotonously to myself in an unconcerned way, “There is no reason for you to be shaking those ridiculous spears at me …”

  “Look!” One of them was holding a small, dead, discolored stingray – a despised fish in the Trobriands, eaten only in the poorer inland villages. “Eat it, dim-dim!”

  They ran in front of me, so that I could see them with their spears, but I tried to appear calm, and I paddled past them. They threw the stingray at me and kept yelling, working themselves into a fury – horrible boys, with rusty spears and dirty faces.

  In deeper water I dipped the paddle and took hard strokes. The boys followed me for a while – I was holding my breath, I had a sense that one of them would fling his spear at me – but I sprinted away and I did not stop paddling until I saw that they were astern, at a safe distance.

  They had threatened me because I had been alone and had not given them any gift, and because they outnumbered me. I had left my fishing spear at the village. If I had shaken my own spear at them, or on the other hand if I had been a total wimp, they might have been much more hostile. I was the perfect victim: an outsider. It would not have been hard for them to injure me, even kill me. Just the bacteria on one of those rusty points would have done the job. What had surprised me most was their sudden cruelty.

  I paddled to the wharf at Losuia, where a number of canoes were tied up. I was feeling unsteady and simply wanted to get out of my boat and sit down. If the little trade-store was open I would buy myself something to eat.

  A fisherman at the wharf said, “You want to tie up your boat?”

  I said yes. I had tied it there many times. “It will cost you thirty kina,” he said.

  What was this? Over thirty dollars, for something that had never cost me a cent. A crowd gathered behind the man.

  “In that case, I won’t tie up.”

  “What will you pay?” the self-appointed extortionist asked me.

  “Nothing.”

  The rest of the people stood gaping at me from the wharf, no one saying anything. Again, I felt a sense of threat. Everyone I ran into seemed hostile. As I paddled away someone called out, “Come back! We will help you!” but I was sure they only wanted to torment me, so I kept going, back to my camp at Kaisiga.

  Even the people at Kaisiga were acting strangely. One day I paddled to the eastern shore of the island, to Koma village – a spooky inland village full of black snorting pigs – where I swapped a couple of silk scarves for some carvings (a canoe prow, an ebony lime-pot). Don’t go toKoma, they said afterwards. The people in Kama are bad.

  The villagers seemed restless and preoccupied. I suggested that we all go fishing in Leendon’s canoe.

  Zechariah said, “I will go if you let me have your goggles and your spear.”

  “I’ll share them with you,” I said.

  In the end, twelve of us set off in Leendon’s canoe and as soon as we were a mile or so offshore they all stood up in the canoe to look for submerged rocks, where there would be fish. The water was so clear the rocks were visible for some distance, and when we found one – it was actually a cluster of rocks and coral – they all dived in and began thrashing towards the bottom.

  The clarity of the water had disguised the depth. I slipped into the water but the others were way below me – thirty feet down, among the twinkling yellow and green tiddlers and the hordes of plump parrot fish. I had never seen people dive so deeply, and they stayed at the bottom, hanging on the rocks with one hand and jabbing with the other. When they needed a breath they kicked to the surface, leaving their spear wedged in the coral; and then they swam down and resumed. I got within about ten or twelve feet of the bottom and then felt pain in my ear drums and had to hover nearer the surface. The others were oblivious to the depth and they stayed down for two or three minutes at a time. They were deadly with the spears, too, for soon after we arrived at the spot they were bringing up fish parrot fish, reef trout, and a dark surgeon-fish with a poisonous spur near its tail they called a blackfish.

  Noticing that the canoe had begun to take on water, I sat in the sunshine, amid the flopping fish, and bailed, scooping with Leendon’s yatura and the water was pink from the diluted blood of the speared and wounded fish. We had brought coconuts – to drink, to eat, and as a native skin remedy (the others rubbed crumbled coconut meat over their shoulders and arms for protection and to ease the scorching). From time to time they brought up fish.

  When I dived back into the water I saw that the others were ranging all over the broken reef, chasing fish until they cornered them in the cleft of a rock and then jabbing fiercely. I took several deep dives and I was about to take another when I saw – unmistakably – the silvery snout and torpedo body of a shark, drifting downward in the long shafts of sunlight that penetrated the deep water, towards some of the swimming spear-carriers.

  It was the smooth wickedly smirking shark of scare stories, huge and hungry-looking, surveying the naked swimmers with a kind of monstrous patience. The dark cigar-shape of our canoe was just above me. With the fewest strokes (“sharks know when you’re scared”) Imade for the canoe and in one motion shot out of the water and tumbled into it, among the frantic fish.

  Wiping fish-slime from my arms and hands, I tried to see beneath the water. The breeze rippling the surface was like a curtain being drawn across it, and nothing was clear to me.

  Leendon was the first to surface. He snatched the canoe and took a great gasping breath. Then Derrick and Zechariah did the same, and others followed, clinging to the boat.

  “Did you see the shark?”

  Leendon said, “There were three sharks. The big one and two behind him. They were swimming to Zechariah, but he was on the rocks and he did not see them. So I shouted to him.”

  I could just see Leendon’s howling twenty-five feet under water.

  “I turned around and they were near me,” Zechariah said. He was smiling.

  I said, “Were you frightened?”

  “No. I shout at them. ‘Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!’ That scared them away. They are stupid fish.”

  “Why didn’t you swim away?”

  “If they see you are scared they eat you.”

  “Leendon,” I said. “Aren’t you scared of sharks?”

  He laughed at me and said, “No!”

  “Do you know anyone who was bitten by one?”

  “No one.”

  “But you can kill sharks.”

  Now he looked indignant.

  “No. I am a Seventh-day Adventist.”

  And he referred me to Leviticus 11, where fish without scales are proscribed
as an abomination.

  We continued to dive, though I stayed close to the canoe. I was certain that the fish blood I had bailed out had attracted the sharks, and I was not comforted by the serenity of the others. I was afraid. And I disgraced myself again when, seeing a yellow sea-snake moving sinuously through the water above me, I hurried into the canoe.

  Leendon had seen me. “Why you fearing?”

  I said, “Big-pela snake. Long pela. Yellow pela.” r82

  “They not hurt you,” Derrick said. “We play with them.”

  Later, looking for better fishing grounds, more tumbled coral rocks, we saw what could have been a coconut bobbing about thirty yards away.

  “Turtle,” Leendon said.

  “It is a big one. We can chase it,” Micah said.

  “Do you eat them?”

  Leendon said, “No. We are SDA. But the old men in the village eat them. They have a good taste.”

  It was a green sea turtle, with a shell the size of a manhole cover. We went after it, but it slipped away.

  “It is better to catch them at night, when they are sleeping under the reef,” Leendon said.

  We were sitting crosslegged on the platform of poles that had been lashed across the outrigger of his canoe – a comfortable spot that could accommodate eight or nine people. He was watching the others count the fish. Portypive, someone said – ps and fs were interchangeable in the Kiriwina language.

  “The current is too strong,” Leendon said, signalling to the others to prepare the rigging for the return trip. “That is why we get pew pish.”

  Forty-five was quite a few – it was sixty pounds, or more, of fish. But the whole village had to be fed – that was his point. They would need twice that amount of fish to be able to smoke them and keep them for tomorrow.

  On the way back we ate bananas and drank coconut water, and they eviscerated one coconut and rubbed the crumbled meat on their skin to ease their sunburn.

  Out of the blue, Leendon said ruefully, “I am sorry we did not catch that turtle.”

  When we got near to shore the fishermen threw the fish out of the canoe into the water and the children splashed around snatching them up and washing them. Then they carried them to the village where another group of children had made a windbreak and erected a grill over a fire. There were twenty children involved in grilling the fish, many of them the boys and girls I had thought of as the village brats. When it came time for a village chore to be done, everyone lent a hand, even the brats.