I found Bwenawa’s two-room house nearby. He was already an unimane, or respected village elder, when I lived on Tarawa. Now, he was an unimane emeritus, and as I noted his hunched posture and his swooped-back gray hair, I suddenly felt the passing of years. He now worked with the other elders, digging deep into records from the 1947 Land Commission, to discover who the true owners of the land on Tarawa were. As the capital atoll, and the only island with electricity or formal cash-paying jobs, Tarawa attracted wave after wave of outer islanders, and as a result of the overpopulation, the indigenous population could no longer forge a livelihood or maintain a sustainable existence using customary means. Many had sold their land, believing that they were getting a tidy sum of money, but money inevitably disappears and now they discovered that they were both poor and landless.
“But see, Bwenawa,” I said, “pretty soon it won’t matter. You’ll be off to Fiji. Plenty of land there for everyone.”
Bwenawa sighed. “You see that kie-kie,” he said, pointing to a small wooden platform raised on stilts with a thatched roof. “The tide came to there.” This was about eighty yards inland. “No one here can grow food anymore. All the gardens die. The coconut trees are dying. And there is much more erosion of the land, also on the ocean side.”
We stopped for a moment to listen to the squawking of unhappy roosters. I asked him, in all seriousness, about his thoughts about uprooting the entire nation and moving to Fiji.
He thought for a long time. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “We will leave it to the government to decide.”
I went to look for the government. For a brief moment I thought I might even get to speak with President Tong, who, nearly alone among Pacific leaders, has used his perch to voice the alarm. Rising sea levels are not some abstraction, he has said. It is our reality today. So I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which shares a small two-story building with the Ministry of Public Works, whose staff, I was pleased to note, was busy doing Zumba when I arrived. I watched as a dozen public employees did a little meringue, a little salsa, with a dash of mambo and heaps of chachacha, following the instructions on a television that had been rolled into the office. There are moments when you realize just how much you truly love a country, and this was one of them. I joined them because when offered a chance to salsa dance with a Ministry of Public Works, how can anyone say no? “We do the Zumba every day,” a young woman informed me, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. “For the exercise,” she added, like anyone needs an excuse to Zumba.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, alas, was not nearly so fun-loving. I walked upstairs and asked the first person I saw if it might be possible to chat with the Secretary of Foreign Affairs. The secretary was out of the country, I was told, but I could speak to her assistant, and so I did. I told her that I had once lived here on Tarawa, wrote a book about it even, and that I was presently visiting in a kind of quasi-journalistic type capacity and might it be possible to arrange an appointment with the Secretary upon her return.
“You wrote a book?” the assistant inquired. “What was the name of this book?”
“Uh . . . The cough cough cough lives of cough cough cough.”
“I’m sorry, but could you repeat that?”
“The cough cough of cannibals.”
“I still didn’t catch that.”
“Thesexlivesofcannibals. So, looks like it’s another sunny day today.”
She pursed her lips, and in an instant I knew that no one would speak with me. So if you’re looking to see what the government of Kiribati finally decides to do, when do they wave the flag and say the last good-bye, I’m afraid I can’t help you. But look around, follow the news, Google it, bear witness. The very least we could do for the canary is acknowledge its demise.
On Sunday, I went to church. It’s something I’d never done before on Tarawa, possibly because when I lived here, I was still at that age when sleeping until noon on the weekend seemed like a sensible and natural thing to do. One of the surest signs of advancing years, of course, occurs when you begin to regard 8:00 A.M. as a provocatively late hour to rise from your slumbers, a wanton disregard for the preciousness of time. But I wanted to go to church because it’s a good place to mull things over, and I was confronted with a dilemma. Robert Louis Stevenson spent several months in Kiribati, traveling from island to island on board the Equator, though he only wrote about two, Butaritari and Abemama. These chapters, coming toward the end of In the South Seas, are the book’s liveliest, and it is no wonder. Butaritari was then the commercial hub of the Gilbert Islands, so visited by copra traders that the island supported not one but two bars, The Land We Live In “being tacitly reserved to the forecastle,” as Stevenson described the clientele, “and the Sans Souci tacitly reserved for the afterguard.” Typically, the I-Kiribati were forbidden to drink, but the king of Butaritari, Tebureimoa, attired in “pajamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk,” had lifted the taboo on alcohol to commemorate July Fourth, the American Independence Day, and for the previous ten days “the town had been passing the bottle or lying . . . in hoggish sleep.”
It was a perilous time for the Stevenson party. The entire island was consumed by brawls and danger, and even Fanny took to carrying a pistol, brandishing it on the beach as she impressed everyone with the accuracy of her shot, blowing apart bottle after bottle, of which there was no shortage, during her target shooting. From the bushes, people flung rocks at Stevenson’s head or loitered threateningly around his compound, next to the king’s thatched palace. No one dared to turn off the tap, to deny the pouring of another round: “too surly a refusal might at any moment precipitate a blow, and the blow might prove the signal for a massacre.” He let it be known that he was the son of Queen Victoria, a man not to be trifled with, and finally, after the carnage and mayhem threatened to unspool the last fine line of order on the island, prevailed upon the king to reimpose the taboo on demon alcohol.
Today, Tarawa serves as the fulcrum where alcohol and trade, what there is of it, intersect in Kiribati. Most of the bars are in Betio, near the Making Cigarettes Factory, one of the new Chinese businesses to have opened on Tarawa. Betio is the islet where the Battle of Tarawa was fought during World War II, and people today live among the detritus of war, rusty Higgins boats and Sherman tanks that reveal themselves at low tide, and the heavy guns and concrete pillboxes used by the Japanese, which sprout like mushrooms amidst palm trees and people—lots of people. Betio is one of the most densely populated spots on earth, a warren of shanties and traditional housing, ringed by beaches brimming with rusty tins, garbage, and innumerable canine skulls bleached white by the sun. The scent of shit prevails. This is where the harbor is, and offshore I could see sunken freighters and Korean purse seiners, their industrial rigging offering a bewildering contrast to the blueness of an unblemished sky seamlessly converging with the lagoon.
To stay true to Stevenson’s travels, I figured I should do some pith-helmeted exploration of Tarawa’s alcohol subculture. I’d been to Butaritari when I still lived in Kiribati and knew it well enough to know that The Land We Live In and the Sans Souci had been closed for nearly a century. It is a soporific outer island now, as peripheral to Tarawa as Kiribati is to the world, and an unlikely scene for alcohol-driven fury or drama. Tarawa was where that action was now.
And yet, blithely crawling from watering hole to saloon through the maze of Betio presented obvious difficulties for me. I was very pleased to have made it this far without succumbing to the voice that says just one or just today, and I was wary of pressing my luck. I was conscientious about avoiding bars. At 5:00 P.M., I typically went for a run and let my endorphins carry me through the hours when I was most likely to have a wandering mind, and I hesitated to alter a routine that had served me well. I was becoming superstitious about my travel habits. Besides, what’s that saying? Spend enough time in a barbershop and eventually you’re going to get a haircut.
> So I went to church to ponder my next step. There must have been eight hundred people packed inside this white sanctuary with more spilling out of the doorways. The interior had a groovy seventies feel to it, all browns and oranges, though the Mass seemed to come from an even earlier era, pre-Vatican II perhaps, because it went on forever. From time to time, I looked at my watch. Sunday became Monday and then Tuesday. Tick-tock went the clock. Why was this dragging on so, I wondered? There were no pews inside this church, just a bare, splintered concrete floor. Maybe it was the pain. Could be. There sure was a lot of it during this Mass. Pleasure is fleeting; misery endures. I kneeled in prayer, observing the other parishioners, bare knees on jagged concrete. There was no slacking or sitting on heels here. But what was the priest doing? Why was the Apostles Creed taking so long? The floor was stained with quarter-size dollops of blood. They were everywhere, the gruesome outpourings of faith, crimson testaments to our suffering. My back was throbbing; my knees splintered; the skin torn. I looked up at the crucifix. You can always tell you’re in a Catholic church by the depiction of the cross. Catholics don’t go for abstractions, which is why you’ll always see the nails and the wounds and crown of thorns, which puts things in perspective when your bones are cracking, your muscles are straining, and the skin on your kneecaps is splitting open on a concrete floor. Would Jesus complain? That’s invariably what you think when your eyes gaze upon a foot-long nail hammered into his feet. And so we suffered the pains of the flesh silently, on a hard floor stained with rivulets of blood. A few began to buckle, sliding flip-flops under their knees, but the truly devoted continued on, holding a pose of penance, becoming one with eternity, because that’s what it felt like, an eternal torment. In Islam, you can tell the really devout Muslims by the knobs on their forehead. In Kiribati, you can spot the pious Catholics by the gnarly scabs on their knees. But I continued to meditate. What should I do from here?
Find thee a nun, a voice said.
Which is how I found myself in island rehab.
Was this the voice of God? Or a memory of my last communication with my wife, who had heard of a Catholic charity that helped alcoholics in Kiribati and thought I might want to have a gander. Do I sometimes confuse the two voices? Probably, but both usually lead me to good places so I don’t spend a lot of time parsing. I found the nuns next to the runway, in a Robinson Crusoe–like compound made of plywood and thatch. I had taken a blaring minibus to the airport, and then, making sure to look both ways for approaching aircraft, wandered the length of the runway until I found a smattering of jolly sisters in blue frocks and white habits, and the next thing I knew I was addressing twenty I-Kiribati alcoholics on Day One of their treatment. They were as mixed as any group of alcoholics—young and old, male and female—and they had introduced themselves with the same tales of woe and misery that are common to rehabs everywhere, except it was followed by laughter and much conviviality, because that’s how they deal with unpleasant things in Kiribati—with a smile. I told them my little story, how I’d ended up in a place much like this, except it wasn’t on a runway, and there weren’t mangy dogs sauntering about, and it didn’t ask random strangers who just ambled by to get up and speak, as far as I know, but otherwise it was very similar. Things are going to suck for a little while, I said, as if I had any wisdom to offer, but eventually it gets better and you’ll enjoy seeking out others like ourselves, that we are all of the same tribe, and that life is way better when you can actually remember it.
Actually, during a break, I decided that this was far better than my rehab. These sisters can bake. There were trays of doughnut holes and pancakes filled with coconut shavings and doused with coconut syrup. Alcohol has heaps of sugar in it, of course. Take it away, and what emerges is a sweet tooth that will not be denied. And these nuns, bless their hearts, stepped into the breach, and while we spent the rest of the afternoon in diabetic shock, we were sated.
I spent much of my time at Island Rehab with Sister Matarena, a whip-smart nun of about sixty-five with twinkling eyes and a seen-it-all disposition. She ran the program, had been doing so for twenty-three years, which meant that she had seen it all. It was a three-week program, she explained, focused on alcoholism, the family, and spirituality. Most of the participants were from Betio. The islet was divided into thirteen sectors and every month they scooped up the neighborhood’s alcoholics, one sector at a time, calling to my mind that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” They didn’t have many resources, she said, but they do what they can. “It’s a terrible disease,” she said. I hear you, Sister.
When I lived on Tarawa, I had no idea that this place existed. Of course, I wasn’t looking for it either. I was similarly surprised to hear Sister Matarena discuss the scourge of kava on the islands.
“Haven’t you seen all the kava bars?” she asked me.
I admitted that I had not, but, of course, I wasn’t searching for them either.
“It’s a big problem now,” Sister Matarena said.
“But, Sister,” I said, “how can kava be a problem? People who drink kava simply get sleepy, they relax, they don’t start fights and cause trouble. And it’s cheap, unlike alcohol, so it doesn’t take so much money away from food and school fees.”
“It’s a different kind of problem than alcohol,” she said. “It is a problem for the culture. People sleep all day and drink kava deep into the night. They are served by teenage girls called the flowers of the yaqona. It’s on the outer islands now too. It’s very difficult to get alcohol to the outer islands, but easy to bring kava. Then no work gets done as they sleep all day. No fishing, no gardening, no sweeping, no building. And it’s not just the men. The women drink it too.”
I was happy to have been informed about the presence of kava on Tarawa by Sister Matarena. In any other context, and my brain would have lit up like a Christmas tree, and started to babble about how this intoxicant should be fine, no worries, and why don’t we mosey on down to the kava bar and have a flower of the yaqona serve us up a shell or two. What’s the worst that could happen?
Oh, I know. I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but during one of my quitting attempts I went on the Kava Maintenance Program. Someone with a kava bar in the United States had looked me up and very kindly sent me a box of powdered roots. Needless to say, I drank it every evening, making a colossal mess in the kitchen with a blender and a bowl, and the moment I finished the kava I headed out to find a drink. I let that thought linger in my mind, and when Sister Matarena asked if I wanted to come back the following day, I said I did. I was among my people here. Robert Louis Stevenson may have found more drama in Kiribati, as undoubtedly I would have had I spent my evenings in the bars of Betio, but when an island offers up a little serenity I reach for it with both hands now.
Chapter Seventeen
So I was wrong. Much, in fact, has changed in Kiribati since I was here last. Take, for instance, the presence of a sandbar off Na’a, the northernmost tip of the island. It wasn’t there before. At no point during my years on Tarawa did I recall the existence of a long, elongated sliver of sand extending far to the south, at least a mile, following the contours of a submerged reef, the rim of an undersea volcano that separates the lagoon from the ocean. And now, here it was. Over the years, surging tides had extended their reach, scraping off soil that the island could ill afford to lose, and depositing it in places where before there was only water. The atoll was in motion, changing with startling rapidity, as the ocean toyed with it like a cat fiddling with a mouse. At some point, of course, the mouse would be no more.
I found myself on a . . . what, exactly? A boat? A sea-bus? Driftwood? A floating junk pile? It was yellow and it had an engine that coughed and sputtered and strained against the incoming tide. It had two plywood hulls, a squat wheelhouse, and a kind of awning over the weathered deck. In any event, I was on the water, chug-chugging toward Abaiang. This was now th
e only outer island that people could reach by sea. There was once a similar ferry to Maiana, but a year earlier, it capsized and sank and thirty-three people drowned.
As we passed through the channel, we were buffeted by lazy swells. Few sights are more visually stunning than that place where the lagoon meets the ocean. There is a riot of color, hues of blue so radiant that you’d swear someone slipped you a tab of acid, and below, just beneath the surface, were clumps of coral in ardent bloom surrounded by schools of darting fish. I was in the wheelhouse, sharing a bench with a woman nursing an infant. The captain lay sprawled beneath me on the floor, snoozing through the torpor of midday. At the helm was a one-eyed sailor wearing hot-pink Capri shorts. A gold hoop dangled from his ear. Another crew member offered me a plastic mug of sweetened tea, and I sat contentedly watching this wonderland go by.
Stevenson alighted upon Abaiang but didn’t write about it. Instead, it was Tembinok, the king of Abemama, who caught his eye. “The last tyrant,” he wrote of him, “the last erect vestige of a dead society.” They hadn’t meant to land upon Abemama. Ships avoided the island and the terrifying despot who ruled it. But a wind caught their sails and they entered its lagoon. Tembinok was a gift of the gods for Stevenson, a character so unique, menacing, and charming that you could almost feel the writer’s pen lurching across the page, scribbling furiously as he sought to capture every nuance, every detail of the great king: “a beaked profile like Dante’s in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye brilliant, imperious, and inquiring . . . Where there are no fashions, none to set them, few to follow them if they were set, and none to criticize, he dresses ‘to his own heart.’ Now he wears a woman’s frock, now a naval uniform; now (and more usually) figures in a masquerade costume of his own design . . . The masquerade becomes him admirably. In the woman’s frock he looks ominous and weird beyond belief.”
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