The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The sun was setting beneath Coconut Point as we docked. I could take in the whole place in one glance. Nabouwalu was the pier, two shops, some scattered huts and a stony road. Little wonder no one had said anything about it. What was there to say? Driving in the darkness on such a bad road was ill-advised, so I asked a strolling Fijian where I might camp. He directed me to the Rest House. This bungalow was fully occupied – three or four Fijians in residence – but one of them, a strapping fellow in a skirt named Jone Kindia, said that the only really safe place to camp was at his workers’ compound. He took me there and he explained on the way that Fijians were funny about their land. They were suspicious of strangers who showed up without an introduction, wishing to camp.

  “They wonder how long you are going to stay,” Jone said. “Maybe you will want to stay for years. That is what they worry about.”

  “I just want to stay for a few days,” I said.

  “But how do they know that?”

  “Good point.”

  The workers’ compound was a clearing on a hillside outside Nabouwalu – a few flimsy huts, a wooden bungalow that served as an office, and an unfinished building in which day and night the local Fijians sat around a bowl drinking kava. They did not call it kava, nor even yanggona. They called it grog.

  “Where is Masi?” Kindia asked a woman in a field.

  She mumbled a reply.

  “Drinking grog,” Kindia translated.

  He was sitting around the bowl with Yoakini and they both had the stupefied, slightly stunned and smiling expression of kava-drinkers. Kava-drinkers were never aggressive. They looked numb, like hypothermia victims, or patients who had just been dragged from a dentist’s chair. Kavadrinkers were weak and compliant; they whispered; they swayed when they tried to stand straight. Kava was like chloroform. “He’s not feeling any pain,” was truer when spoken of a kava-drinker than an alcoholic. And because kava deadened the lips and tongue one never heard a harsh word from one of these men.

  Yoakini said, “You stay at my bure.”

  “That’s all right. I have a tent.”

  Masi wore a slap-happy smile. He looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes and said, “Do not go to the beach.”

  Kindia muttered impatiently.

  “Never go to the beach,” Masi said. He was on his feet and swaying.

  “Why not?”

  ‘Alfred Hitchcock is there,” Masi said and stopped smiling.

  “Did you say Alfred Hitchcock?”

  The fellow simply stared at me.

  I set up my tent away from the coconut palms and hurriedly ate dinner – it was a starry moonless night. Just before I turned in, Masi came by. He teetered for a moment and then spoke.

  “Remember, Alfred is at the beach,” he said, and then staggered into the darkness.

  Yoakini was a soldier in the Fijian army. “I am about twenty-eight,” he said. He described himself as a “sapper” – a military engineer. Carpentry was his specialty. He was very black, with thick hair and a fierce mustache, and he was bulkily built, his body like a fortification. He said he drank grog every night when he was off duty. He showed me where I could get fresh water, where I could take a shower, and where the best latrine was located.

  He was shy, but not timid, and though he was quiet, he answered my nosy questions. When he said that he had been in Suva during the coup and the ensuing riots in 1987, I asked whether he found it exciting to be in the thick of a battle on his own island (he was from a village in Viti Levu): the Fijians storming the Indian shops, burning and looting.

  “Yes, it was exciting,” he said. “It was very exciting.”

  “Have you traveled overseas?” I asked.

  “I was in Lebanon twice.”

  “Lebanon?”

  “In the peace-keeping force. In 1982 and in 1984,’’ he said. “I was in Cairo, in Beirut, and in South Lebanon. I visited Israel, too. It was nice.”

  “Weren’t you afraid to be in a place where there was so much fighting?”

  “No. The worst is the weather. Very hot in the day. Very cold at night.”

  “Did you have grog?”

  “They flew in yanggona sometimes – the roots. We pounded it and drank it in our tents. Some we saved for Christmas. We had a good Christmas in Lebanon, drinking grog.”

  “What did you think of the situation there?”

  “It is a mess. I don’t know the answer. I was a soldier in Sinai. The Arabs asked us for food, the Israelis asked us where are we from? Then they said, ‘Where is Fiji?’”

  Yoakini laughed at the memory of it – of the ignorance of the Israelis, these embittered and confused civilians living at the edge of the desert. “In Fiji we study geography. We know where all countries are. We know where Israel is.”

  “Were you doing carpentry in Sinai?”

  “No carpentry. In Sinai they gave me a weapon,” Yoakini said.

  “But isn’t it ridiculous that a Fiji Islander should be in the Middle East, risking his life because of a local conflict?”

  “Maybe. But the money is good,” he said. He told me what he was making. I estimated that he was earmng ninety dollars a month.

  “Are you willing to risk dying to earn that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Thirty Fijians have been killed there – by single bullets, by accidents, from sickness. It is a mess.”

  What he did not say – something I discovered later – was that Lt-Col. Steven Rabuka had served twice in the Middle East with the Fiji army, in the same places Yoakini had been posted, in Lebanon and in Sinai.

  I asked Yoakini whether he would serve in the Gulf War. He said it depended on whether the Fiji army was involved, and if it was a question of volunteering the money had to be good – though his idea of good was ninety dollars a month. I had heard that the Fijian soldiers had been highly effective in the Second World War – they had the essential military virtues, a legacy of the British colonial past: they were ferocious, loyal, politically disinterested, impervious to bad weather, and would eat anything. They fought when they were ordered to. They were professionals. They soldiered for money. They were the perfect mercenaries – not elite troops and janizaries, but workhorses and warriors.

  I gave Yoakini some of the yanggona roots that I had brought with me, and he invited me to drink grog with him. Because it was considered rude to refuse I joined him that night around the kava bowl, the tanoa – which was about twice the size of a salad bowl and beautifully carved. These bowls were the only accomplished carvings I saw in Fiji.

  With my lips going numb and my tongue thickening, I said that what I really wanted was to go paddling. “But where will you stay?”

  “I’ll just ask someone in a nearby village.”

  “It is better you stay here.”

  When I explained that my boat was collapsible and that I could take it back here to this camp site – something he urged me to do – Yoakini showed me a good place to paddle that was east of the little town, beyond Solevu Point. The water was muddy and shallow near shore, but out at the reef I could make headway. I realized that this was what I had missed on Viti Levu. Though the Fijian resorts were pleasant, there was a fence around each one, and people could stay for weeks and never know Fiji. Even people who had lived in Fiji for a long time told me that they had not been to this island, Vanua Levu. There was nowhere to stay on this western end of the island, they said. There were no restaurants. It was just jungle and scattered villages. The beaches were muddy and thick with mangroves. The people were simple and suspicious. The roads were appalling.

  FIJI: VIANUA LEVU AND THE ISLETS OF BLIGH WATER This was music to my ears. And these perceptions of the island proved to be true. But I had a tent, and a stove, and food, and a boat. I even had a car, so I could tote all this stuff around. But I paddled during the day, exploring the large bay and the inlets west of Nabouwalu; at night I went back to my tent and stayed put in Kindia’s compound.

  Long after night had fallen, and of
ten until quite late, I heard the villagers pounding the yanggona root in their big wooden mortars. This thudding was continuous, like the sound of a stirrup pump, and it was always a woman using the pestle. The Fijian method was different from the Vanuatu way. In Fiji they sluiced this pounded root through a piece of cloth and the narcotic drink was squeezed into the kava bowl.

  “We don’t chew,” Masi said.

  But I now know that human saliva reacted with the root and made a stronger drink – that was why they called Tanna product “two-day kava”: you were stupefied for two days on a few shells of the stuff.

  At one time, village girls in Fiji had prepared the root by chewing it and spitting it out. Having a winsome Fijian girl smilingly masticating by my side seemed infinitely preferable to me than a filthy man with black tooth stumps munching and drooling. But as Masi said, We don’t chew. Non-chewing islands in the Pacific were invariably the islands where the missionaries had exerted the strongest grip, for nothing was more disgusting to a European than drinking someone else’s saliva. Missionaries had encouraged the use of mortars and pestles.

  I usually dropped off to sleep to the rhythm of yanggona being pounded. One night in my tent in that compound I dreamed that I was going home – “home” was the concept I had in my dream, but it was not my house. It was a mansion set amid parkland, very serene as I approached it, but chaotic and filled with people when I stepped inside the ornate front door. There were a number of women in the mansion: all of them at one time had been married to me. And there were many children, all mine. It dawned on me that I had been away a long time, and these wives and children had multiplied in my absence. They were all having a wonderful time, and yet there was great confusion. I wandered outside, to the swimming pool, on which floated chunks of blue ice.

  Jane Kindia was the Roko or head of the Fijian Affairs Board. This was a glorified name for an agency that spent most of its time settling local disputes. The burden fell upon Jane. He was the dispute-settler. He set off each morning for his office in his starched shirt and his wrap-around gabardine skirt and his polished sandals. There were usually a dozen people waiting at the veranda of the wooden bungalow which housed his office, and one by one Jane listened to their tales of woe. On the walls of his office were lithographs of British coronations, a large one of George V, and other portraits of George V and VI. Jane said they dated from before independence, when an Englishman had had this office. Jane had not taken them down. He said he thought they were very pretty, and they took his mind off his wearying job. He said sometimes he spent days or even weeks on just one dispute.

  “What sort would that be?”

  “Land dispute. They are the worst,” he said, smoothing his mustache. “There is no end to them, and I find it very hard to straighten them out.”

  Fijians were intensely territorid. But of course all the islanders in the Pacific were territorial: land was their birthright, their wealth, and in Melanesia it was the origin of their creation – they had sprung from this soil. We came out of the caves at Kaibola, as they said in the Trobriands. They could account for every foot of land, and because it was family land it had been extensively subdivided – that also made it unsaleable, for how could you get all these people to agree to sell? If you made the mistake of camping without permission on an uninhabited island, God help you – because someone owned it, and camping on it meant that you were attempting to claim it. Fijian territoriality was at the heart of their animosity against the Indians. Fijians did not mind being outnumbered – in fact, Fijians had been outnumbered by Indians off and on from as far back as 1946 – what they minded was losing their land to these pagan aliens.

  “I own this beach,” a Fijian said to me, up the coast at Nasavu. “You go two chains and that is Tumasi’s. Three chains and it is Alesi’s.”

  They often used this old English measurement, too. A chain is equal to 100 feet. Ten square chains is an acre.

  Jone, Masi and Yoakini became protective of me in a way that puzzled and irritated me. I knew they were trying to prevent misunderstandings, but I felt I could handle myself – hadn’t I managed in Vanuatu and the Solomons, reputedly much wilder places?

  They always wanted to know exactly where I was headed. I would find a place on the map and say, “I am going to Wailiki.”

  Jone or one of the others in the compound would then say, “Where will you stay?”

  “I’ll pitch my tent. I’ll ask permission.”

  They would go silent, or else mumble among themselves. “It is better you stay here.”

  “I want to go to Wailiki.”

  Then they would giggle, and this meant that going to Wailiki was difficult. Loud laughter was the Fijian way of conveying the bad news that something was impossible.

  “Someone can go with you.”

  “I want to go alone. Why does someone have to go with me?”

  “To introduce you.”

  “Can’t I introduce myself? I’ll give them some yan gg ona.” I still had three dusty bunches of the horrible stuff. “Yes?” they would say, meaning no.

  They weren’t kidding, and after a while I knew that their anxiety was justified. At three villages I was asked the same insulting question: “You’re a businessman?”

  The feeling was that I had come to diddle them out of their birthright, when all I really wanted was to pitch my tent and paddle my boat.

  I paddled down the coast, and at Sawani, Solevu and other coastal villages, I presented myself to the Yaganga ni Koro, “Master of the Village” (Yaganga was also the word they used for Almighty God), who was a sort of chief or headman. I had a message from the Roko. This cut little ice. They were not used to seeing travelers here. They had heard about them.

  They winced at me. They smiled – this was an expression of disagreement – and they said: It is not nice here. It is not even clean. This is a poor village. You would do better to keep moving and to go somewhere else.

  “Can’t I put my tent here?”

  Their bewilderment seemed to say: Why would you want to do that?

  When I camped I did not stay longer than a night. Their suspicion and anxiety made me uneasy – although I should add that they were pleasant people, gentle, unthreatening, helpful to each other.

  But an encounter could be an unusual experience. One day after paddling three or four miles I stepped on shore and saw a bushy-haired man and woman. The woman was carrying a dog in her arms like a baby. The man wore a filthy T-shirt lettered with the slogan Nibble Nobby’s Nuts. He carried a wicked-looking bush knife, a slasher that was about two feet long. They were both very dirty and rather apprehensive.

  “Where is Nakawakawa village?” I had found it on my map, but there were no huts in sight.

  “Just here,” the man said.

  “Can I get there on this path?” I asked. “You want to go there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “If it’s all right” – a man carrying a knife like that could make me very circumspect. “Otherwise, I’ll just paddle away.”

  “Yes,” he said, which I took to mean: That is what I

  advise you to do.

  And then – and this was also typical – the man asked whether he could be my pen-pal.

  Farther up the coast I paddled into a little bay where there was a large cathedral-like church, made of wood and gray plaster. A horse cropped grass in the churchyard, and there were school buildings behind the church. But there were no people anywhere. I crept into the church and in the large dusty nave there were no pews, only wall-to-wall mats, and over the altar verses from the gospel in Fijian.

  I found two Fijians sitting on the floor of a nearby wooden building. There were chairs in the room, which had the look of an office, but the men were drinking kava. It was unthinkable to engage in kava-drinking while sitting in a chair. You had to sit crosslegged, around the bowl.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Drinking grog.”

  They must have
started early. It was nine-thirty in the morning and both men had the dazed and somewhat anesthetized expression of kava-drinkers who had knocked back a dozen shells.

  “Where is the priest?”

  “At the priests’ conference in Savusavu.”

  This was obviously the priest’s office – his desk, his papers, his crucifix. It was a good secluded place, perfect for kava-drinking.

  “Very nice,” I said, watching the bigger of the two men working a coconut shell around the bowl, stirring the opaque muddy liquid. This dishwater color was standard, no better or worse than any other I had seen.

  The man filled the shell and offered it to me.

  By now I knew the ritual. I sat and clapped a little as he handed me the shell – and drank it down in a gulp – then handed the empty shell back and clapped again. It had a revolting taste. It was lukewarm, and it had the slightly medicinal flavor of mouthwash to which some mud had been added. There was nothing alcoholic in it, though there was a mild afterburn and a hint of liquorice.

  With the first shell my lips were numb and my tongue was furry. The second shell deadened my tongue and killed my facial nerves. Successive shells paralyzed my legs, reaching my toes first then numbing my shanks.

  “It is a good safe drink,” an Indian told me in Nabouwalu. Though Indians themselves didn’t touch the stuff. “People just get very sleepy and tired. They are slow. There is never any violence. They are too weak to fight.”

  No one ever went haywire and beat up his wife after bingeing on yanggona. No one ever staggered home from a night around the kava bowl and thrashed his children, or insulted his boss, or got tattooed, or committed rape. The usual effect after a giggly interval was the staggers and then complete paralysis.

  These men were at the giggly stage. They answered a few simple questions I had about the church – it was called the Immaculate Conception Church, it had been founded by French priests, and they said it was 120 years old, which seemed unlikely; and then they smiled and passed the shell.