The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  I said, “You’re Polynesian?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where do your people in Futuna come from?”

  “From Samoa, I think. Maybe from Tonga.”

  Quite a different reply from the Tanna people saying, We come from two magic sticks, or the Solomon Islanders claiming ancestry from sharks or snakes.

  “Is Futuna a nice place?”

  “Is small. Few people.”

  “What is good in Futuna?”

  “Good kaikai. Good fish. Good wind.”

  I reached into my waterproof bag and took out my notebook and pen, and while we were blown along, side by side, over the curving blue belly of the swells, and sometimes riding the crest of the breaking waves, I asked him certain words and he told me the Futunese equivalent. Many of them were identical to, or cognate with, the languages spoken in Hawaii and Tahiti.

  Often, Oceania seemed not one place but many – a universe of distant islands. But sometimes – like today, with Mr Lishi translating these words for me – it seemed like a small area, with a common language.

  Apart from the deep sea being moana, and the lagoon being tai, big was nui, water was vai, and hand was rima, the same as the word for five. Fish was ika, house was fare. A Samoan, a Maori, even an Easter Islander from seven thousand miles across the open ocean would have been able to converse with Mr Lishi, here in western Melanesia. Thank you was fafatai – the same word in Samoan. I wrote down others, and they too sounded familiar: sun was ra, moon was mrama, and the numbers one to five were dasi, rua, toru, fa, rima. Dugout was porogu, probably from pirogue, and hello was rokomai. Heaven was Rangi exactly as in Tahiti (lani in Hawaiian) and woman was finay, cognate with the Tahitian vahine.

  I made notes, marveling at the linguistic similarities, and we drifted. Meanwhile, Mr Lishi caught some fish, but most of them were tiddlers, fewer than six inches long.

  He wore a crushed straw hat and tattered shorts. He was wrinkled. His outrigger canoe did not look at all seaworthy. He was a small Futunese fisherman and we seemed to be in the Oceanic version of outer space – beyond time – drifting on this dazzling blue day in the chop some miles off Tanna, the oddest outside-time island in Vanuatu.

  That was the setting. That was the mood. I mention this because of what Mr Lishi said next.

  “Yu savvy war long Iraq, long Gulf?” he asked.

  I was startled by the question, but I recovered and said, “No war yet.”

  But I was wrong. After I got to shore I turned on my radio and heard the Pidgin broadcast – the Bislama news on Vanuatu Radio. This was about noon on 17 January, Tanna time, which was early morning in Iraq. The first attack had come in the early hours of the morning, at roughly the time Mr Lishi, the Futunese fisherman in his outrigger canoe, had asked me the question. It was not telepathy on his part: the matter was on everyone’s mind.

  “Fait blong Persian Gulf we i brokaot finis,” the broad cast began, the announcer jabbering very fast. “Mo plante pipol oli stap ting se bae hemi savvy lid i go long wan war bekegen sapos of bigfela kaontri –”

  The superpowers.

  “– oli no stopem quik taem, hemi holem, wan bigfela kwesten mak i stap se bae who nao i winim fait ia –”

  The fear was that it would turn into a world war, involving the superpowers.

  I then tuned my short-wave to Radio Australia, which had a strong signal in the daytime, and I heard that the United States had attacked first by flying 400 missions against sixty targets in Iraq. The newscast spoke of the mood of euphoria surrounding the aerial attack, and even I who had hoped there would be a diplomatic solution felt that same unholy energy, which is the emotion in Louis MacNeice’s poem “Brother Fire,” in which he describes the blitz in London:

  O delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire,

  O enemy and image of ourselves,

  Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear,

  When you were looting shops in elemental joy

  And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire,

  Echo your thoughts in ours! “Destroy! Destroy!”

  Five men on the beach saw me listening to the radio. They had heard their own Bislama broadcast. They knew what was happening.

  One said, “Plante pipol heli kilim ded?”

  I said there were no casualty figures yet. There was a major difference between kilim, which meant hit, and kilim ded, which meant killed.

  They were very concerned and they knew a great deal about the lead-up to the fighting – the invasion of Kuwait, the aggression of Saddam Hussein (and they knew his name), and the dangers of Israeli intervention. It impressed me that ragged fishermen in such a remote island on the Pacific should know so much or care so deeply; but of course a war had come this way before, and it had involved everyone, and had caused a convulsion in their lives.

  “Rambo hemi faet nao – Rambo stap long, long Gulf,” another man said, somewhat lessening my respect for the accuracy of their views.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  The fellow swore that Radio Vanuatu had disclosed the fact that Rambo had been hurried to the Persian Gulf, to help win the war.

  “I strongpela tumas,” another said.

  “How true.”

  I saw Breffny McGeough and told him about the aerial bombardment. It was the first he had heard of it. His reaction was characteristic.

  “A drop of kava would help.”

  We went on his motorcycle to a nagamiel, a village clearing that was also known as a yimwayim, about five miles in the bush. The clearing was surrounded by elephantine banyan trees.

  “And this is me friend, the chief,” Breffny said, greeting a toothless grubby old man squatting on the damp ground with four other men. Three men stood nearby, chewing.

  The chief and the others greeted him as a friend, while Breffny said that I was in for a treat – the real McCoy – some shells of Tanna kava, probably the best in the Pacific. It was certainly the best Breffny himself had tasted, and he had sailed all over Oceania. Fijian kava and Tongan kava were piss compared to this, he confided.

  I had brought my little radio to keep up with the news of Brother Fire. I listened as I watched the kava being prepared. It was being done from scratch.

  – Missile installations were attacked and destro yed. B52 bombers flew numerous missions and damaged Iraqi air-fields –

  One man was cutting the kava plant, Piper methysticum, a dusty little cluster of dry twigs and spindly roots. As he hacked with a bush knife, making a pile of roots, another man scraped and peeled each root, while a third man worked on the half-peeled root with a coconut shell, rubbing off some – but by no means all – of the red dust.

  The coconut rubber handed the piece of root to the men who were standing. They opened their mouths. They had black teeth and gummy, coated tongues. They stuffed the woody kava roots into their mouths and with a crunch like chicken bones, they began to chew them.

  These chewing men – one in a straw pie-plate hat, another wearing a T-shirt that said Alaska – The Last Frontier, the third in a sensationally filthy sarong – walked in circles, chewing seriously, their cheeks bulging.

  I heard, Many eye-witness reports of bombs falling on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad.

  At that moment, one of the men leaned over and spat a big wet wad of masticated wood, the size of a scoop of icecream, onto a green leaf that had been spread on the ground, apparently for this purpose.

  – Bombs also fell on Baghdad Airport, destroying runways –

  Splat went another blob of kava and spittle, as the man in the T-shirt bent from the waist like a bobbing duck and released it onto the leaf.

  Splat – more mush hit the leaf: it was like a kid spitting up baby food he hated. That was the consistency of the stuff – a cowpat of Gerber’s baby food.

  “Bloody marvelous stuff,” Breffny was saying, as he sucked on a stinking cigarette. “What’s the news, Paul?”

  I had the radio to my ear. I
said, “Bombing.”

  Splat. Another disgusting cud hit the leaf. It was pale and juicy, and it turned my stomach just to look at it.

  Now, with a leaf of three blobs of masticated kava root, the chief went to work. With his dusty fingers he picked up the blobs and placed them onto a small, finely woven square of matting. This he held over a chipped enamel bowl, and while a man poured a few cups of water onto it the chief twisted the mesh, twisted the whole mixture – chewed and pulped kava root, saliva, water, dirt – and forced a trickle of water into the bowl.

  “Tanna kava,” Breffny said, smiling in anticipation.

  The chief filled half a coconut shell for him, and the jaunty Irishman lifted it, and drank, and sighed with pleasure.

  He wiped his mouth and said, “In Fiji they pound the roots and stew it. But this – it’s ali in the chewing, you see.

  I was still listening to the bombing, and the chewers were still masticating ostentatiously, and splatting it onto the leaf.

  “Now you’re sure you won’t have a shell?”

  He was whispering. It was one of the rules of Tanna kava-ritual that none of the drinkers was to speak loudly.

  It was a feeling like novocaine, he said. And he claimed that his whole body was going numb, as we headed back to the shore, in twilight, in an explosive sunset that was appropriate to the first day of war.

  The next day I went out paddling again. I brought my radio and listened with my earphones. Israel was hit by eight missiles. Two people were taken to the hospital, with heart failure. Some others were treated for shock. An Israeli woman’s kitchen was destroyed. There was general outrage. You could hear it in their complaining voices. Meanwhile, in Iraq and at the borders of Kuwait, the first of 150,000 people began to die: the nameless, faceless enemy.

  Paddling in that day, I saw a couple on shore. They stepped into the surf and grabbed my bow-line and helped me beach my boat.

  They were from New Zealand, they said. Odd place Tanna, they said, wasn’t it? I agreed. We talked about the kastom people, the volcano, the Jon Frum cargo cult, the rumors of cannibals, the unbridled attentions of missionaries. But the Solomon Islands, I said, were equally interesting.

  “You travel all over,” the woman said. “Do you write about your travels?”

  I said, yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever.

  “You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books,” she said.

  I said, Exactly, and told her why.

  Eventually I went back to the island of Efate, another happy isle. I paddled out to Pele Island and Nguna. These were protected waters on the lee side of the island, nothing like the gales of Tanna. Off Nguna I could see Epi Island, and the islands in the Shepherd group. I fantasized about staying and paddling and camping on these happy islands, watching the men make copra and the women doing laundry in streams.

  I paddled to an island called Kukula, only a mile or so at the edge of the lagoon. It was idyllic, although there was no fresh water there. And when I landed I stepped into the water and saw a whitish snake, with black bands, floating near the sandy bottom. I poked him with my paddle and the thing recoiled and bit my paddle blade, before it took off.

  Some of the smaller islands were uninhabited, but the rest were populous. The people I met were cheerful and friendly. There was no theft, nor any stories of it. The villages were rather empty. The weather was perfect. Business was terrible, people said, but no one seemed seriously to mind.

  Most days I had enough of the news. I left my radio on shore. I listened to my Walkman. But Chuck Berry was too cheerful for me. For the hundredth time, among the pretty islands, I paddled slowly and listened to a Puccini aria of hope, how one fine day a white ship would appear on the sea and then sail smartly into harbor, and all would be well –

  Un bel di, vedremo

  Levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo

  Confin del mare.

  E poi la nave appare.

  Poi la nave bianca

  Entra nel porto …

  I ate the local delicacy, coconut crab. At night, when the air waves were louder, I monitored the news. I shared what I knew with the islanders, who always mentioned Rambo. Some people said that after the war was over the American troops would head for Tanna and liberate all the people, in the name of Jon Frum.

  When I heard that I was reminded of Tanna – how I had known almost nothing about it before I arrived, and what an odd and pleasant island it had been. I hoped to find another, but that night I had a dream, a rather mournful one, of one of my children writing a story that began, Long after he died – for weeks, for months – we kept receiving postcards from Dad, because he had traveled so far and to such small and insignificant places.

  12

  Fiji: The Divided Island of Viti Levu

  At the very frontier of the Black Islands lies Fiji, the edge of Melanesia – so close that some of its tinier islands, Rotuma and the Lau group, for example, overlap Polynesia. In these transitional straddling dots of land, the people are regarded as Polynesian. There is a strong Tongan influence in the Lau culture. They make and sail canoes in the Lau group. They wear crunchy mats around the waist, Tongan-style. They paddle. They fish. They dance. They recall their great sea ventures. In a village on the Lau island of Lakeba they hold an annual ceremony in which sharks are summoned – a “shark-caller” up to his or her neck in the lagoon is circled by a school of sharks, attracted by the person’s chanting.

  On the Lau islands, you see Mormons. In Oceania, where Mormons regard Micronesians as the sons of Cain, and Melanesians as the dark, scruffy descendants of Ham, the surest sign that you are on a Polynesian island is the sight of Mormons.

  The American Mormons who evangelize on these islands can seem rather fearsome and intrusive, like the worst sort of door-to-door insurance salesman – black tie, white shirt, dark trousers, breast-pocket nameplate (Elder Udall), all the answers, clutching copies of the book that the Angel Moroni gave in the form of golden tablets to Joseph Smith in 1827. Smith put “peepstones” on his eyes and a blanket over his head and translated the tablets, dictating the text to Emma, the first of his fifty wives. (“When I see a pretty woman I have to pray,” Smith once said.) These prophetic books in the Book of Mormon not only foretold – if belatedly – that Columbus would discover America but also described how American Indians, descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, had got it into their heads to sail across the Pacific and settle these islands. it was not a question of Polynesians becoming Mormons. They have, according to the Book of Mormon, been Mormons all along. They simply needed to be reminded of the fact.

  Yet the Lau group is one of the pretty little star-clusters in the universe of Oceania. Melanesian Fiji is another story. Fiji is like the world you thought you left behind – full of political perversity, racial fear, economic woes, and Australian tourists looking for inexpensive salad bowls (though why anyone would think a race of Queequegs, proud of their cannibal past, might excel at making salad bowls is not only a cultural mystery, but proof that tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable). Fully half the population is ethnic Indian – Muslims, Parsees, Buddhists – wearing turbans and skull-caps, and Hindus with big staring red dots on their foreheads. They run shops that sell over-priced “duty-free” merchandise and native curios, spears, napkin rings, the salad bowls, and other nameless-looking bits of hacked wood.

  “What is this wooden spindle?” I asked an Indian shopkeeper.

  “Gannibal imblement, sah.”

  “Did you say ‘cannibal’?”

  “And gannibal glub,” he went on, showing me a shiny skull-crushing bat of the sort that had once been used to bash out an enemy’s brains (and then you ate them, so that you would be as intelligent as he was).

  He showed me the section on cannibal artifacts from the catalogue of the Suva Museum. Yes, they somewhat resembled this tourist stuff. And they proved the truth of the travelers’ tales about cannibal Fiji – colorful accounts such as that
of the swashbuckling Irishman, Peter Dillon, who in the 1820s made a narrow escape from a Fijian cannibal feast but not before witnessing two of his fellow crew members being baked in ovens and gobbled up. There is a lurid summary of Fijian cannibal practices in the usually authoritative eleventh edition (1911) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “The Fijians were formerly notorious for cannibalism, which may have had its origin in religion, but long before the first contact with Europeans had degenerated into gluttony. The Fijian’s chief table luxury was human flesh, euphemistically called by him ‘long pig’, and to satisfy his appetite he would sacrifice even friends and relatives. The Fijians combined with this a savage and merciless nature. Human sacrifices were of daily occurrence.”

  You want to say Really? The same entry mentions how many Fijians are a racial blend of Polynesian and Melanesian, with “the quick intellect of the fairer, and the savagery and suspicion of the dark.” On such ludicrous assumptions, the Pacific was evaluated and plundered by the missionary, the trader, and the planter – an unholy trinity who were, it must be said, often the same person, neatly illustrating one of the central mysteries of the religion they crammed down these cannibals’ throats.

  When I inquired about cannibalism, Fijians never denied the anthropophagy of their ancestors – on the contrary, they talked with lip-smacking enthusiasm, reminding me of Australians reveling in stories of how their distant relatives had been convicts.

  “Fahmerly this island was all ferocious gannibals, sah,” the Indian said, glancing furtively behind him. “Feezee pipple, sah.”

  But the reason he looked so nervous, and lowered his voice, was because the Fiji people – most of them, and the government, which was only one man, Lt-Col. Sitiveni Rabuka, known to all as “Steve” : – wanted to send them back where their grandparents, and in some cases, great-grandparents, had come from, the Indian subcontinent. (The first Indians arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers to work in the cane fields over a century ago.) In another age, they might have wanted to eat the Indians. Now they wanted to return them – something like disgusted diners sending unappetizing food back to the kitchen.