The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “Yumi go,” he said. “Mapa i stap long ples” – and he pointed down the muddy path.

  “Emi longwe o nogat?” I asked, because if it was far I was much happier simply waiting here.

  “Klostu liklik,” he said, setting off, and I followed.

  It was a forty-five-minute walk along a narrow path; it was the only thoroughfare, and it circled the island. I could see at once that it was an island without a road, or a motor vehicle, or electricity. We passed through six or seven small villages and in each one Aaron called out in the local language that he was taking me to see Mapo.

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  Mapopoza was seated under a pawpaw tree, chewing betel and stuffing his mouth with lime, at a village called Bonala. The village presented an odd spectacle. About a hundred people were milling around whispering and examining great stacks of bananas, baskets of potatoes and more coconuts than I had ever seen piled in one place. And three fat pigs, whickering and squealing, because their feet were tightly bound.

  “Feegs,” Aaron said, attempting English. He gave me to understand that a wedding was about to take place, but that this was the fixing of the bride price. No money was involved; there was little money on this island.

  I handed my letter to Mapo. He shrugged – did not meet my gaze – and looked away. He was a bit dazed from the betel nut, but that was not the only reason for his obliqueness. It soon became clear to me that he could not read, but it was not odd that his brother should write him a detailed letter. Mapo simply handed the thing to a boy nearby, who clawed it open, and as people gathered round, the boy read the letter in a superior way, as though he was rather stuck on himself for being so literate.

  I stood there with salt in my eyes and my arm-muscles screaming from the long kayak trip.

  My name was mentioned – Mistah Foll – and the listeners turned to me and stared. And then, Amerika.

  Mapo was vague. Not only was he illiterate, he did not speak English. But none of this mattered. I only needed his blessing, I didn’t need his hospitality. What I wanted most was his permission to put up my tent, my haus sel, in Balola village.

  So I said, “Plis, mi laik putim haus sel long Balola na stap long?”

  “Orait,” he said. “Mi kam bai.”

  He gestured, showing me that he was being detained. I could see he had a role to play in this betrothal, but still he urged me to sit down and sip some coconut water from a freshly hacked nut. He said nothing. He had a crooked smile. A few feet away the tied-up pigs were quivering with thirst and suffocation. To amuse themselves, some village boys went near and began kicking the poor creatures.

  Women with streaks of white paint on their cheeks wandered around muttering – part of the betrothal, I guessed – and others were talking and spitting betel juice and slurping lime. I noticed another group of people crowding into an open-fronted hut, and asked Aaron what was going on. He didn’t know, but he asked a Bonala man who spoke directly to me.

  “There is a man from Africa in there.”

  “Africa?”

  It was a bit like Sara’s story of the Ethiopian stowaway who had claimed to be a Solomon Islander. But who could this man be, and what was he doing? I thought he might be a preacher or a healer, granting an audience to these villagers.

  I sidled up to the hut, wondering how I might introduce myself, and came face to face with a sturdy fellow who greeted me, “Hey, man.”

  This was Bilal Mohammed, an American Peace Corps Volunteer from Brooklyn, New York, shaven-headed, and very black from the Solomon sun, wearing a jolly T-shirt and baggy Bermuda shorts.

  He was a teacher on another island, Makira, but as he was on vacation he had come here to Savo in a motorlaunch to visit some friends. He asked me whether I knew anything about the stand-off in the Gulf.

  “Just sabre-rattling so far,” I said.

  “I’ve got a bet with a guy in Honiara that there won’t be a war,” he said. “Because no one is that stupid.”

  “It looks bad,” I said, and yet I had no idea where I would place my bet. It was a period of great uncertainty.

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  “There are more than two hundred thousand troops m Saudi Arabia, waiting for the word.”

  Bilal said, “People think they are making plans, but they don’t realize that God has his own plan, and we can’t outwit God.”

  It was spoken with true Islamic fatalism and a rueful smile. We shook hands, and both of us said that we hoped it would all end peacefully. Then he went back into the hut and I walked three miles back to Balola village with Aaron and put up my tent in the dusk, at the edge of the beach.

  Before I had finished making camp, a fat man in a dirty lap-lap stepped out of the bush – clearly a busybody – and told me that I would be much happier camping near his hut. Before I could react, he was scooping up my gear and helping me move.

  “I am president of Savo,” he said in a lordly way.

  I had been in Melanesia long enough to know that even if this were true it did not mean a great deal. As it turned out, his being president did not mean much more than that his T-shirt was slightly less dirty than other people’s.

  This man was Kemakeza’s other brother, but they were not on speaking terms – nor was he on speaking terms with Mapa, who he quickly told me was an ignorant villager. His name was Ataban Tonezepo – there were no common surnames here – and he was well-spoken. He said he thought Pidgin was a silly language.

  “But it is useful,” I said, “because people speak it.”

  “That is a very wise observation,” he said, and I suspected on the basis of this obsequious turn of phrase that he might turn out to be a royal pain.

  When we had settled on a place where I might put my tent – it was a freestanding Moss tent, we just swung it fully pitched, twenty feet along the beach – Ataban said, “I am former premier of Central Province, but I lost at the last election. So here I am, back in Balola.”

  “But your duties as president must keep you busy.”

  “That is very true.”

  In the growing darkness people had begun to gather, trying to help me. There were now twenty-eight of them – I counted as I set out my gear, hanging my food from trees, so that the rats wouldn’t get it. As we were facing north, there was no dramatic sunset, only a diminishing glow on the water, and the shapes of the distant islands of Nggela, Isabel and Russell.

  “We used to sail there,” Ataban said.

  “You might be sailing there again, if the fuel prisces.”

  “That is very true.”

  The twenty-eight men and boys sat down and watched me start my kerosene stove and eat my hurried supper of beans and mackerel and fresh bread from the bakery in Honiara. I gave Ataban a beer and some “Conversation Biscuits” to the others. And when I had finished eating, Ataban demanded that four of the boys take my pots to be washed.

  “Do you think there will be World War Three after January?” Ataban asked.

  “Frankly, no.”

  “We think it will come here. Everyone is worried.”

  “Believe me, you are safe here,” I said.

  “World War Two came here,” he said. “Right here. To this island.”

  “Yupela bigpela, strongpela,” I said. “Yupela nogat pret” – you guys aren’t afraid – “Yupela kilim i dai.”

  They laughed at me, and then Ataban sent everyone away and told them to let me sleep in peace.

  “In the morning you can’t go down to the beach,” he said. “The women will be using it. Doing shit there – right there. And the men will be over there, doing shit.”

  The village beach was the toilet in the Solomons; it was where people shat. Even in simple grubby New Guinea people said Mi go haus pek pek, and looked for the privy or the thunderjug. In the Trobriands they had a pavilion on a pier, with a long drop into the sea; and there was a word for toilet in Kiriwina. But in the Solomons things were different. Mi go nambis – “I’m going to the beach,” in Pidgin – meant one thing only,
a BM by the sea. It never meant swimming – that was waswas, and anyway only little kiddies did that, frolicking in the excrement and the fruit peels – for the beach was also the village dump, littered with rusty cans and plastic bottles.

  It was extraordinary how the islanders fouled their beaches, always expecting the tide to purify it twice a day. But I preferred to camp on the beach. The fact that it was generally regarded as a toilet made it emptier – no intruders – and I disliked the mosquitoes, the human gabbling and the cockcrows in the damp shadowy villages.

  The beach was also a graveyard. One of the keenest nineteenth-century observers of the Melanesians was R. H. Codrington, a missionary-turned-anthropologist, who wrote, “In Savo … common men are thrown into the sea, and only great men buried.” Codrington also remarked on the fact that the people of Savo were renowned in Melanesia as poisoners.

  That night while I lay in my tent writing notes, under my swinging flashlight, I heard children just outside whispering. After I switched the flashlight off they went away.

  For hours after that I heard them singing and strumming, making their way around the village from hut to hut, like carolers at Christmas.

  Large crabs gathered against my tent at five in the morning and their scratching woke me – the rising sun gave them distinct silhouettes. Remembering what Ataban had said about the women doing shit I stayed in the tent and listened to my short-wave radio for the Gulf update. The Voice of America, which sounds like a local radio station, had hardly altered its programming schedule to take account of the crisis – it still ran its trivial music and frivolous features, interspersing them with little bursts of solemn news, delivered by credulous-sounding journalists. Radio Australia and the BBC had actually changed their whole news format – they reported news, scoops, rumours and in-depth pieces, and in the mounting suspense gave a plausible commentary on the crisis.

  Yet I listened to it all feeling that I was a million miles away, on another planet, lost in the galaxy of Oceania.

  After the news I crawled out and shooed the crabs away, made tea and noodles and sat listening to music and looking at the sea until Mapo came by, to ask me the news. It was hardly past five-thirty in the morning.

  “Sapos ol bigpela kaontri pait,” he said, “mi tingting ol kam na pait long Solomons.”

  Which in fact was everyone’s fear: if the superpowers went to war they would eventually fight in the Solomons. This lurking fear was evident in the questions of nearly everyone I spoke to in that period, and for some it was an absolute terror – the complete disruption of their way of life and a brutal disorder imposed upon them.

  They had not felt liberated by World War Two; they felt as though a succession of cyclones had passed through their islands – first the Japanese one, the invasion, the take-over, the occupation; then the allied bombing, the fire-fights, the battle of Guadalcanal, and the destruction of villages, the sinking of scores of ships, the deaths, the arrival of the sharks to feed on the bodies.

  The aftermath – the post-war chaos – had been just as bad. American troops attempting to disentangle themselves from the islands and demobilize had been nearly as disruprive. During the war, there was little fishing, and very little farming was done – three years’ crops were lost. With no harvests the islanders had become dependent upon the foreign soldiers, and had developed a dreary taste for canned food, in particular for the corned beef and pork luncheon meat that persists to this day.

  I gave him my now standard reassurance in Pidgin: if the war started it would not come here. For emphasis, I said it was Tru tumas.

  Mapo smiled. He did not believe me.

  He said, “Yu laik lukim megapode pisin?”

  Savo was not an island that was short of strange features – it had an active steaming volcano, it had hot springs, it apparently had a president – but the megapode birds were the strangest of all.

  The local word for the birds was ngero; in Pidgin they were called skraeb dak; ornithologists called them “mound-builders;” but most people on Savo, when speaking to strangers, called them by their scientifically correct name, megapodes, from their family, Megapodidae. It was a fairly rare variety of big-footed bird, of which twelve species were known from Indonesia to Vanuatu. Its distinguishing habit was that it relied entirely on environmental heat to incubate its eggs. The bird laid its eggs in sand that was always warm because of its nearness to the volcano. The megapode had the most precocious hatchlings of any bird – the birds did not sit on the eggs, they did not feed or tend their young. After they had dug a deep hole in this unnaturally warm sand, they laid the egg, covered the hole and flew off.

  Three weeks later the bird hatched, dug itself out of the hole and, fully fledged in a matter of minutes, started running. Within hours of its birth the baby bird had learned to fly, and – if it had managed to elude the pariah dogs and the bush pigs – it made for the trees.

  But relatively few of the eggs ever hatched. Mapo told me in Pidgin that they were disinterred by egg-diggers later in the morning. We walked through the bush, parallel to the beach, for about half a mile and down a narrow path to a stretch of fenced-off beach where, in the dawn light, I could see hundreds of squawking, strutting moorhen-like birds digging holes or kicking sand with feet the size and shape of salad tongs.

  Mapo sat on a rock in the shade and smoked a cigarette, while I crept forward on my belly and watched, fascinated, relieved that I did not have a camera. The sight was unphotographable – the birds were too deep in the holes, a camera could not do justice to the noise, and clearly the birds were skittish – they would have run from a photographer. All you heard were squawks, and all you saw were bunches of sand being flung out of the holes. Now and then a nervous bird would emerge from a hole, fill it hurriedly, and flap away, like a startled coot.

  In the rising heat of early morning – even in the palmy shade I was perspiring heavily – I watched for almost an hour, and by the time I was about to leave many of the birds had finished burying their eggs and flown.

  I wondered whether they ate the birds, and so on the way back to the village I asked, “Yupela kaikai megapode pisin?”

  Mapo said, “Sapos dok i gat long tit, mipela kaikai.”

  If a dog gets it in its teeth, we eat it.

  But it was forbidden to kill the bird, he said, and he said rather obscurely that once tambu ceremonies were held in which the bird was worshiped.

  Mapo took me to his house and introduced me to his wife, Rebecca, who served us each a megapode egg omelette with rice. And he showed me an egg from his kitchen. It was an extraordinary size – the thing was large – about four inches by two, larger than any duck egg I had ever seen, and heavy.

  People on Savo really depended on the eggs, he said. They collected them, they ate them, they sold them in Honiara for a Solomon dollar apiece. I began interrogating him, as best I could in Pidgin, about the history of the island, the worship of the birds, the mythology of the eggs. He answered in a halting way.

  But then he said that I would have to ask someone else – and he said shyly – it was a try at English, it was not imperfect Pidgin – “I no have education. No school.” And he smiled sadly. “Now I too old to go school.”

  One of his children was nearby, and Mapo swept the little boy onto his lap and pushed his half-eaten megapode omelette aside.

  “Dispela pikanin savvy toktok Inglis!”

  Because of the megapode eggs this half of the island was prosperous and well fed. The eggs were greatly in demand on Guadalcanal. The opposite side of the island was welloff, too – it had a reef and plenty of fish. The whole of Savo was rich in fruit trees – oranges, lemons, guavas. There were betel-nut trees and ngali nuts (which were similar to macadamias) and coconuts. But gardening was basic – cassava, taro, beans – fairly easy crops. The result of this abundance was that life was undemanding, a little sweeping, a little weeding. The villages were very quiet and had little of the harum-scarum that I had grown used to in the Trobriand
s. Most of the time Savo slumbered.

  What terrors would the Japanese have had in store for these happy indolent folk if they had won the war? At the very least there would have been a golf course here, and someone like Mapo would have been a caddy, and Rebecca would have had a job in the kitchen of the golf club, rustling up megapode omelettes for the hungry Sons of Nippon.

  In the first few days I camped on Savo the stillness and inactivity were profoundly apparent, and there was even something lugubrious about it, as though the place were haunted.

  I paddled south to Mbonala, a village in a little bay, where children were splashing, and boys were spear-fishing, and women were washing clothes. The men of the village sat under trees, chewing betel nut. A screeching crowd gathered on shore as I asked directions to Monagho. Savo on my chart was a yellow disk, showing topographical lines and a few elevations. Whenever I spoke to someone I added detail, and filled in the blanks, noting the names of villages, and bays, and streams.

  The village of Monagho turned out to greet me. It was – like Balola and Mbonala – a village of topless women, many of them smoking briar pipes. Soon James joined them – he had been thatching the roof of his house. He introduced me to his family. His pretty sister Mary, who was about sixteen, wore a necklace of dolphin’s teeth. James said he was looking for a husband for her.

  “You marit pinis?” he asked me – but the fact that he spoke in Pidgin meant that he really did not expect an answer.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  He showed me his house, which was large and well-built like most of the houses and huts on Savo – thickly woven palm leaves on a strong frame of poles, with an ingeniously woven roof that was both waterproof and graceful. While I sat talking with his family he borrowed my kayak and amused the village, as he paddled up and down the shore.

  I paddled three miles farther to Kaonggele, the village which had the right of way to the volcano, and when I came ashore I was helped by twelve boys, who put my kayak on the village canoe rack. I told them I wanted to see the volcano.