by Paul Theroux
They were not much bigger than pygmies, and they were blacker and more naked. They had terrible teeth – stumps and canines broken into fangs. They looked like cannibals. Indeed, they had been, although on Tanna cannibalism was a privilege usually reserved for chiefs, nobles, and dignitaries.
Once, in Christie’s auction rooms in London, I had seen a large and horrific painting titled “Cannibal Feast on the Island of Tanna, New Hebrides,” by Charles Gordon Frazer, a widely traveled English landscape artist. It had been worked up in 1891 from a sketch he had made of a jungle scene he had actually stumbled upon on Tanna in the 1880s. It has been claimed that Frazer was the only white man ever to witness a cannibal ceremony. He recorded the scene faithfully in his celebrated painting, which showed two victims being brought into a shadowy jungle clearing – just like this – on poles; the gloating villagers (there are almost a hundred figures in this enormous canvas), the muscled, tufty-haired warriors, the women preparing the cooking fires.
“The bodies of the two victims, slung on poles, are painted in a masterly style,” an English critic wrote when it was first exhibited, “the one being evidently dead, the other in stupor approaching death in its growing muscular relaxation.” Another critic, Australian, described Frazer’s painting as a “walkabout by a load of washed-out niggers.”
Put on the defensive by alarmed and nit-picking gallery goers, Frazer explained in an essay why he had chosen to paint the cannibal feast. “It was not from any desire for sensation,” he wrote, “but from the fact of having by accident witnessed a scene of superstition so ancient, a custom that must soon become extinct all over the world before the great march of civilization, that I considered it my duty to illustrate this dark and terrible phase in the history of man …”
He was certainly telling the truth about having been an eye-witness — it was obvious in the painting’s shocking details; and now, on Tanna, I knew that Frazer had been on the island, sketching in the gloomy light of this dense forest. It seems that Frazer’s jungle clearing was farther east, at Yanekahi, near Tanna’s volcano – and near Port Resolution, where Captain Cook landed in 1774.
Frazer also wrote, “If it were not for their superstitious rites [by which he meant cannibalism], these black people are no more cruel than the white men. If a boat lands and treats the natives brutally it is not unnatural that the next white man who lands will be revenged upon.” And he went on, “There is much that is beautiful in these black savages …”
I left Yakel and went a hundred years or so across the island, to White Grass. Chief Tom Namake had returned from his trip to the bush. He had a fat sweaty face and a big belly. He spoke quickly – so quickly he sounded as though he was being evasive. He wore a dirty T-shirt that said Holy Commando, with the motif of an archer, and motto from Isaiah 49:2, He made me into a polished arrow.
He was not only a Christian, he said he also believed in the spirit world, and Jon Frum and kastom. He believed in magic stones and magic dances. He believed that all the people on Tanna Island had sprung from the twigs of two bewitched trees. His strongest belief was in traditional magic. But the T-shirt seemed the appropriate thing to wear around the New Zealanders. “Everyone must be allowed to do as he wishes, even them,” he said of the Kiwis. At that moment they were preaching nearby. And they were planning some late-night prayer-meetings in the village. It struck me that they held their services at very odd times of day, favoring night-time.
“I have just come from Yakel,” I said.
“What do you think?”
I hesitated and then said, “Were those people cannibals at one time?’’
“Oh, yes,” Chief Tom said, and seemed pleased to be disclosing it. “Many people were cannibals. But cannibaiism on Tanna stopped about a hundred years ago. It was mostly over land disputes that they killed and ate each other. The Big Nambas were the last people to be cannibals.”
“What about kastom people like the ones in Yakel. Are there people like that elsewhere in Vanuatu?”
“In Santo and Malekula you will find them. If they see you they will chase you around. What are you writing?”
“Nothing,” I said. But I had been scribbling in my tiny notebooks, Big Nambas chase you around. I tucked it into my pocket.
“If you promise not to write it down I will tell you something,” he said.
“Look, I’m not even holding a pen!”
Chief Tom glanced around and then looked at me with his bloodshot eyes and said, “I think some of those kastom people are still cannibals today, but they wouldn’t tell you.” Chief Tom’s son Peter was reading the Australian weekly magazine which had a lurid cover showing a grinning young woman in a bikini. She had freckles on her shoulders and she looked deeply unreliable.
Peter suddenly snatched up a sharp knife and slashed out a page and stuffed it into his pocket.
Later, I asked him why he had cut the page out of the magazine, and he shyly showed it to me. It was a full-page advertisement, which I read closely:
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With Bodywise Spray you can become a walking magnet to women!!
You will be amazed at the results!! Only $39.95!!
Comments:
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“A much younger beautiful lady sitting next to me at a formal dinner whispered that she wanted to make love to me!” – MF, Pomonia
“As a professional chauffeur I find my clientele has increased” – BC, NSW
Peter took the torn page back, and folded it and put it into his pocket. He was smiling.
Then he said in a low voice, “Me want dis.”
The following day, Chief Tom said in an accusatory tone, “I saw you writing.”
“Just a letter to my mother,” I lied.
“That’s all right then,” he said. “If you promise not to write it down I will tell you a true cannibal story.”
“Why can’t I write it?”
“You will take my magic if you do! Don’t fool with such things! Oh, I don’t think I will tell you after all.”
“Please,” I said. “Look, no pen. No paper.”
His expression was untrusting. We were sitting on a bluff above the chop of the wind-blown sea. It was a rocky coast, with rough ledges instead of beaches. There was nowhere here that I had found where I could launch or beach my kayak, and yet I remained hopeful.
Chief Tom squinted into the wind and then stole a glance back at me, as though he expected to find me sneaking out my notebook. He had become suspicious of my writing. Out of boredom I had been doing a great deal of writing at White Grass, describing the New Zealanders, making notes on the Bible for future disputations, noting down the conversation I had had at Yakel village. Chief Tom regarded all writing with alarm, because it was a way of stealing someone’s magic. I understood exactly what he meant, and I agreed with him. It was a fact, not a savage superstition. If he told a story, and I wrote it down, the story became mine. I did not have the guts to tell Chief Tom that writing was my business.
Wiping his hands on his Holy Commando shirt, he began.
“It was just down the road here, near Imanaka village, about a hundred years ago. A certain European trader came in a ship looking for – what? Some things – food, water, what-not.
“The Tanna people saw him at the beach. They listened to him and said they could help him. They tell him to follow them and still talk to him in a friendly way, and when they get down into the bush they take out bush knives and kill him, then stab him with spears. He is dead.
“They carry him to their village and prepare the fire and the stones for the oven to cook him. And then they take his clothes off. One man feels the arm and says, ‘I like this – I eat this!’ And another says, ‘I want this leg.’
“And another and another, and so on, until they have the whole body divided, except the feet.
“The last man says, ‘I want these’ –
meaning the feet.”
Chief Tom smiled and smacked his lips and poked his thick black forefinger into my chest.
“The dead man is wearing canvas shoes!” he cried. “They never seen canvas shoes before! They take the shoes off and say, ‘Hey, hey! This must be the best part!’ So they throw the body away and keep the shoes. They boil them for a while, then they try to eat them, the canvas shoes!”
I interrupted at this point and said, “I don’t understand why they threw the body away.”
“Because it is nothing to them, but the feet you can remove – that is special.”
“The feet you can remove are the shoes, right?”
“They never see such things before,” Chief Tom said. “That is why they boil them. After they take them out of the pot they chew and chew. Cannot even bite the canvas shoes. They try to tear them with their teeth. No good.
“Everyone has a chew.
“‘What is this? Cannot eat his feet!’
“They take the shoes to another village and those ones try to eat the canvas shoes, but it is impossible.
“So they dig a big hole and throw in the canvas shoes and cover them. Then they plant a coconut tree on top of it. That tree grew up very tall – and when the storm came in eighty-seven it blew the tree down, so they planted another tree. It is still growing. I can show you the tree tomorrow.”
11
The Oddest Island in Vanuatu
Looking for the cannibal palm and the burial place of the canvas shoes late on one hot afternoon, I discovered a wonderful thing: Imanaka was a Jon Frum village – there was the red cross, in wood, at the center of the lopsided woven huts. A cargo cult flourished within.
Imanaka, wreathed in smoke from cooking fires, was in the woods, on a stony hillside, behind a broken fence, at the end of a muddy track. It was easy to see how such a hard-up village would take to the idea of deliverance and develop faith in the idea that one day an immense amount of material goods would come their way, courtesy of Jon Frum, only if they believed in him and danced and sang his praises. But it was also an article of faith that Jon Frum villages had to neglect their gardens and throw their money away: when Jon Frum returned he would provide everything.
I had no idea what sort of reception I would get. I was watched from a distance by a group of dusty women, and the first men I met spoke neither English nor Bislama – which was simply a version of Pidgin (the word Bislama being a corruption of hêche-de-mer – it had started as a trader’s language).
It occurred to me that this visit might be an error of judgment. I was alone. It was obviously a poverty-stricken village. Hungry people can behave unpredictably. Who knows – they might get it into their head to kill me and eat my shoes. Smoke swirled around the village and the smoke alone, the way it straggled this way then that, gave the village a profound look of dereliction.
Men came forward and stared at me. One was clearly a mental case. He giggled in bewilderment. Another had a rag tied around his head. There were six more. They carried sticks and bush knives. Behind them were the women. Every one of them looked very dirty. Still I wondered: Is this a mistake?
“Yupela savvy tok Bishlama?” I asked, and when they shook their heads and grinned, I asked, “Yupela savvy toktob’ Chief bilong yupela is tap we?”
One boy stepped forward and said, “Parlez-vous fr ança is, monsieur?”
“]e parle un peu,” I said. What was this, a French speaking village? “Les gens en ce village parlent français?”
He said some of them did and others didn’t. The chief didn’t, for example. He would be joining us soon, the boy said, but in the meantime perhaps I would like to sit on this log in the shade of this thatched shelter.
I did so, and while we waited he asked me whether I had news of the war in the Gulf. I bumblingly explained what I had heard that morning – that there were diplomatic missions flying back and forth in the hope of averting war.
The chief, whose name was Yobas, shambled over to the shelter. He was old and feeble, carrying a stick that was smooth where his hand gripped it. He wore a torn undershirt and a dirty cloth tied like a sarong, and he had the oppressed and wincing expression of a chief who was probably being blamed by everyone, including his own people, for presiding over such a miserable village.
“Yu savvy tok Inglis?”
Incredibly, he nodded: yes, he did.
I greeted him by making an insincere speech saying what a delightful village it was and how happy I was to be in it, and I hoped that this would put all thoughts of killing me out of their minds.
“So this is a Jon Frum village?”
“Yiss. All dis. Jon Frum.” And he motioned with his stick.
“The village dances for Jon Frum?”
“We dance here” – it seemed that we were sitting in the open-sided dance hall. “For Jon Frum. Also sing-sing. For Jon Frum.”
“Sometimes do you see Jon Frum?”
“Nuh. But the old fella they see him.”
“What does Jon Frum look like? Is he black or white?”
“White like you. From America. He is a beeg man – very fat! He strong!”
“What does he wear?”
“He wear clothes. He wear everyting. He wear hat.”
I was wearing a baseball hat. I said, “Like this?”
“Nuh. Big hat. Like a missionary.”
I took out my notebook and drew a picture of a widebrimmed hat. He said, Yes, that’s the one. And when he spoke the other men and the children crowded around me and jostled for a look at the notebook page.
Later, when I had spoken to more Jon Frum adherents, I discovered that I might have confused the chief with my questions, because he seemed to be describing a Jon Frum emissary who was known as “Tom Navy.” This Floridian was a Seabee who had turned up on Tanna in 1945 and briefly had the island at his feet. Another Jon Frum had appeared in 1943 and proclaimed himself “King of America and Tanna” – and an airfield was cleared on the north of the island, so that when his cargo planes arrived they would have a place to land.
I wondered about the prayer houses, in which certain Jon Frum prophets, called “messengers,” knelt and had visions of their benefactor. I asked the chief about this.
“Old fella talk to him,” he said, “but me no talk.”
The crucial question–crucial for the Vanuatu government, at any rate – was the extent to which the Jon Frum Movement displayed American paraphernalia. The most egregious aspect, from the government’s point of view, was whether these villages flew the American flag. The notion was that since Jon Frum was an American, the cargo would come from America, and mixed up in this iconography of the red cross and the mysterious vanishing American was the Stars and Stripes. In some villages the American flag was flown often; in others, every February. The Vanuatu government frequently lost patience with the Jon Frum people and actively persecuted them, jailing them or confiscating their American paraphernalia.
I decided to be blunt. “Do you have an American flag?”
Chief Yobas hesitated for a while, but finally made a sheepish face and nodded. I asked him why the flag was necessary.
“During the war he come again and he give an American flag to an old fella.”
“Do you raise the flag on a pole?”
This was too much for him. He said, “You go to Sulphur Bay. See Chief Mellis. Isaac One. He tell you everyting.”
I pretended not to hear him. I smiled at the men with knives and sticks who hovered around me. It was about five in the afternoon. The sun was just low enough to slant through the thin tree trunks and it seemed to be much hotter at this hour than it had been at noon. I was reminded of how dreary such a village could seem, and this was – dusty and fly-blown and poor, clinging to its belief in Jon Frum – sadder than most I had seen. It was silent, except for the clucking of chickens and the crowing of an occasional rooster.
Gesturing at the thatched shelter in which we sat, I said,
“You sing-sing h
ere?”
“Yiss. We sing-sing.”
“Please. Sing-sing for me.”
The old chief considered this, and then hitched himself forward and in a whispering voice that rustled and hissed like tissue paper he began to sing.
Jon Frum
He mus come
Look at old fellas
Give us some big presents
Give us some good tok-tok
He wheezed and riffed, sounding a good deal like the groaning blues singer he much resembled – John Lee Hooker came to mind – and he continued.
Jon Frum
He mus come
Mus stap long kastom
Mus keep kastom
He looked squarely at me and rolled his head and whispered again,
Jon Frum
He mus come.
When he had finished I fossicked in my knapsack for my gift bag, a plastic sack of fish-hooks and spear points and trinkets and scarves that I gave to people who were hospitable. I had made several rules on my trip. One was that I would not kill or eat any animal. Another was that I would not give anyone money in return for a favor.
Chief Yobas spread his fingers and clutched a slightly used but still radiantly colored Hermes scarf. He touched it to his face.
“Handkerchief,” he said.
“They were lying to you,” Chief Tom told me that night. “Jon Frum was not fat. He was small, very slight. A small man. This is the truth. If you write this down I will not tell you anything. He could speak all the languages. He saw one man and spoke that man’s language. He saw another man and spoke to him in his own language. And so on.”
“How do you know this?”
“You promise not to write it? You promise not to steal my magic?”