Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  The Men go naked, it can hardly be said they cover their Natural parts, the Testicles are quite exposed, but they wrap a piece of cloth or leafe round the yard which they tye up to the belly to a cord or bandage which they wear round the waist just under the Short Ribs and over the belly and so tight that it was a wonder to us how they could endure it.

  This was my thinking exactly. How did they endure it? Just watching them dance made me wince. The dance seemed to involve much stomping and jogging. The chief, a slender man with a gray beard, provided percussion by pounding a tam-tam, or slit drum. The dance leader had a crown of bird feathers on his head, and periodically he led the others in a sort of swooning dive. It was meant to evoke the flight of an eagle, but frankly, the naked buttocks and bouncing testicles had a way of interrupting the image. It was remarkably different from the dancing I had known in Kiribati, a Micronesian country. As in Polynesia, the dancing there is very formal, highly choreographed, and often subtle. The dancing I was witnessing here seemed more of the make-it-up-as-I-go-along school. The next dance, however, I recognized immediately. It was the hokeypokey. Put your left foot in, put your right foot out, now take it all out and shake it all about. I couldn’t stop wincing. I made a mental note to send a carton of boxer shorts to the village as a humanitarian gesture.

  The women then did a sitting dance that celebrated the yam harvest. The older women wore a thatch skirt and nothing else. The younger women—and I don’t want to suggest for a minute that I had been looking forward to seeing their breasts—wrapped their breasts in cloth, a circumstance I attributed to the insidious influence of missionaries on the young. Afterward, the dancers stood in a line. I shook their hands one by one, feeling very much like the queen of England visiting her far-flung subjects.

  “The men,” George told me, “live on this side of the village.” He gestured toward several longhouses. “And the women live on the other side,” he said, pointing to the huts opposite the village clearing.

  “What about the married couples?” I asked.

  “It is the same. The men stay on this side, and the women on the other.”

  “But what if they want to…you know…um, make babies?”

  “When the man want to sleep with the woman,” George said, “they go into the bush.”

  I tried imagining the arrangement. “Hey, honey. How about midnight under the banyan tree? What do you say? A little rumble in the jungle?”

  “What about the children?” I asked. “Where do they live?”

  “The children live with the women. But after the boys are circumcised, they live with the men.”

  “And when are boys circumcised?”

  “Sometime between the ages of nine and twelve,” he said. “It is a very important ceremony. Many pigs are killed.”

  George showed me the longhouse where boys were brought after they were circumcised. It was adorned with masks and fern sculptures. It had a dirt floor and a thatch ceiling. “The boys are circumcised as a group, and after they are circumcised, they stay here for ten days. It is very difficult. It is the first time the boys are away from their mothers. And at night, we bother them.”

  “You bother them?”

  “Yes. We bang on the walls, and we howl. The boys are very frightened. They think there are ghosts. And sometimes we go in and kick sand on their wounds. It is very painful.”

  “Well, that’s not very nice.”

  “No,” George said, recollecting his own circumcision. “It is not nice. But it is the custom. Afterward, the boys are men and they live with the other men.”

  What a curious way to live, I thought. One thing seemed clear, though. One certainly didn’t want to be a penis on Malekula.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, George took me to Wala Island. We paddled an outrigger canoe across Wala Bay—or, rather, I paddled an outrigger canoe. George steered. Paddling two grown men into the teeth of an incoming tide and up and over the ocean swell under the blistering midday sun left me sweating and panting from the exertion. There was a fine white sand beach on Wala Island, and when we arrived, I gave in and dived into the warm turquoise water.

  “Maybe not such a good idea to swim there,” George said from the beach.

  Easy for you to say, I thought. Next time I’m steering. “Why, George? This is wonderful.”

  I was in clear, shallow water above a sandy bottom, facing Malekula, not the open ocean.

  “Maybe you should swim there,” George suggested, pointing to the water alongside a dock that jutted out several yards.

  “Whatever you say.” I was as pleased as I could be to be swimming. The South Pacific, after all, is the South Pacific, and sun, palm trees, a splendid beach, and clear, warm, gorgeous water, I find, are irresistible. I did an easy backstroke toward the pier.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked George. He was standing on the pier, scanning the water.

  “Nothing.”

  “Seriously, George,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

  “The water is very deep over there.”

  “So? I can swim.”

  “There are many sharks living there.”

  If there were six words that could ruin a swim in the South Pacific, George had found them. I was out in a heartbeat. I did not know it then, but shortly before I arrived on Malekula, a seven-year-old girl had been killed by a tiger shark. This had occurred not one hundred yards from where I swam, off Atchin, an islet a short swim from Wala Island. The shark had severed the child’s leg.

  We walked around Wala, a circumnavigation that took twenty minutes. The villagers were slumbering in the shade and hardly gave me a glance, which I found a little peculiar. Malekula and the islets that circled it were not often visited by Westerners.

  “George,” I said. “What are all these stands for?” The entire periphery of the island had the appearance of an empty market.

  “For the cruise ship.”

  Say what? “Did you say cruise ship?”

  “Yes. During the season, a cruise ship comes every six weeks. Not now. Now is cyclone season.”

  I cannot express how disheartened I was to learn this. Here I was, enduring perilous flights in rickety third-world airplanes, canned corned beef, and mosquito nets, all so that I could experience life on one of the most isolated, unchanging islands in the world, and now there were cruise ships.

  “They come for two hours,” George said. “And they buy souvenirs. So we make souvenirs now.”

  “And make lots of money?”

  “Yes.” George laughed. “Dollars, not vatu.”

  At that moment, a boat powered off carrying five exuberant youths, who steered it in the nautical equivalent of a drunk man’s stagger.

  “Ha-ha,” George laughed. “They are going to buy the beer.”

  The only place on Malekula where beer was available was in Norsup. I had checked. It would take the boys the rest of the afternoon to acquire it. What a waste, I thought. Kava offered so much more bang for the buck, which got me thinking.

  “George,” I said. “Do you think I can drink some kava this evening?”

  “You like kava?”

  “George, me likem kava tumas.”

  That evening, in a family compound near the shoreline back on Malekula, I found myself sitting among people who seemed oddly familiar to me. “Hey,” I said to one young man. And then in French, “I recognize you.”

  “I was wondering if you would recognize me,” he said. By this he meant, I was wondering if you’d recognize me with my clothes on. He was the dancer with the plume of feathers. Several of the other dancers had joined me on the benches in the nakamal. An elderly man was grinding the kava roots. Tending the children on the periphery were several of the women dancers.

  “I thought you lived in the kastom village.”

  “Now we live down here,” he said. His name was Philip.

  “So who lives up in the village?”

  “The chief and his sons. But we go for our ceremonies.”


  Interesting, I thought. Looking around, I suddenly noticed a cascade of ropes among the trees. Attached were sharp, dangling hooks. “What’s that for?” I asked Philip.

  “For catching bats.”

  “Ah…and why would you catch bats?”

  “For eating.”

  “I see. And do bats make for good eating?”

  “Yes,” Philip said. Better than corned beef, no doubt.

  George joined us on the bench. “You can go to Botko tomorrow,” he said.

  “It is a very special place,” Philip added.

  “Will you be coming, George?”

  “No.” He laughed. “It is too far for me. But you will learn many things in Botko.”

  “George,” I said. “You had mentioned that there was an old woman on Wala Island who had witnessed her father eating the man.”

  “Yes, yes,” George said. “But she died too. Last month.”

  Clearly, the previous month on Malekula had not been a good one for those with firsthand knowledge of cannibalism. Or George had been joshing with me all along. Or, and I thought this was most likely, my interest in cannibalism had come across as a little unseemly to the powers that be on Malekula. I couldn’t blame them. It was like meeting a German for the first time and asking them to explain their nation’s curious tradition of killing people in concentration camps.

  Philip handed me a shell of kava. I can’t say I recall much of what happened subsequently, except that I felt at one with the Small Nambas of Malekula.

  MY GUIDE UP into the highlands was Rose-Marie, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Chief Jamino, the guardian of Botko. How hard could this trek be, I wondered, if my guide is wearing a Harry Potter shirt, a sarong, and flip-flops? Of course, she also had a machete, but I figured everybody on Malekula carried a machete. It was the accessory of choice. Looking back, I can now say that the five hours it took to hike up to Botko were the most excruciatingly difficult five hours I have ever spent on my feet. We left shortly after dawn, following a well-traveled bush trail that meandered inland. I had filled two plastic bottles with rainwater, which I carried in a backpack. Soon I added two coconuts and a melon that were kindly given to us by a man we encountered on the trail. If there is anything more uncomfortable to carry on one’s back than two bouncing coconuts and a melon, I have yet to experience it. As we climbed up the first of what would prove to be a seemingly endless series of steep hills, following a path evident only to Rose-Marie, who hacked our way forward with her machete, I pleaded for a break. “Would you like a coconut?” I asked, speaking in French.

  “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Rose-Marie, if you don’t drink this coconut, I am going to hurl it off this mountain. I have ill feelings toward these coconuts.”

  With a deft tap of the machete, Rose-Marie opened up the nuts. I took a greedy slurp, downing the milk in one go, and moved on to my water bottle, chugging through half a liter. I asked Rose-Marie if she wanted some water. It was particularly hot and humid. Indeed, I was quite amazed by the quantity of sweat seeping through my pores. “Non, merci,” she said. I wondered what the French word for camel was.

  Not long after, my mind turned to the French word for goat. Chèvre? I found myself on some particularly taxing slope, clutching onto a tree root, wondering how on earth I was going to scale this muddy face, when suddenly I saw Rose-Marie scamper up the incline without pause, seemingly without exertion, without even a hint of perspiration, as I stood there gasping for breath, oozing puddles of sweat. The most disheartening part of the climb, however, was that with each crest of a hill there followed a perilous descent. One moment I’d find myself on a ridge, peering through man-high grass, admiring the view, and thinking, Well, we must be close now, and suddenly Rose-Marie, with a few swift hacks of the machete, would forge a path that led down, back into a dense chirping, mocking forest. We’d ford a stream, and then up we went again. I was expelling copious amounts of sweat. Indeed, I began to worry about dehydration, and it was with particular amazement that I noticed that Rose-Marie’s brow wasn’t even glistening.

  “Rose-Marie,” I panted. “How often do you climb up to Botko?”

  “Every day,” she said.

  You are fucking joking, I thought. I felt that I was reasonably fit, perhaps not quite in peak form, but not the sort of person who withers in a typical hike. Compared to Rose-Marie I was a sack of potatoes. To do such a hike, each and every day, without even breaking a sweat when it’s ninety-some degrees with humidity to match, is a remarkable feat of athleticism. Before I had a chance to feel old, however, we emerged through a clump of trees and I beheld a most welcome sight: a village. Not just any village, but a remarkably neat and tidy village surrounded by numerous fruit trees.

  I was welcomed by Chief Jamino, an imposing man wearing a faded and stained pink oxford shirt with a white collar, a discard, no doubt from the Gordon Gecko era of Wall Street. He guided me to a mat, where I more or less collapsed into an unceremonious heap, panting and sweating without shame. I must have made quite an impression, for no sooner had I taken my place on the mat than the village women appeared with coconuts, sugarcane, and grapefruit. My empty water bottles were filled with rainwater, and it wasn’t long before I began to feel restored.

  Chief Jamino, speaking through a translator, explained that this was a village of seven brothers, of whom he was the eldest. Forty-nine people lived here, the families of the seven brothers. They were the guardians of Botko. It was a very pleasant village. The homes were well-constructed with wood and thatch and obviously cared for. There was a rainwater tank. The grass was kept low. The air was much cooler than on the coast. And the villagers, I was gratified to see, appeared in blooming health.

  Chief Jamino went off to tend to something, and his place on the mat was taken by Elise, a vivacious woman in her twenties who spoke English. “When the chief is here,” she said, “I must be someplace else. When I am in my home, he cannot come in. When he is on the mat, I must be someplace else. I am his daughter-in-law. It is the custom. I wanted to explain why I did not greet you at first.”

  This seemed rather rigorous for such a small village, until I saw Chief Jamino rejoin us on the adjoining mat, which apparently was a satisfactory arrangement. For lunch, we had laplap, a mush of manioc and coconut cream wrapped in taro leaves and cooked in an earth oven over heated rocks. This particular laplap came with freshwater prawns, which pleased me, because, frankly, I hate laplap. It looks like vomit and the taste is insipidly sweet, but I ate it with gratitude, because at least it was something other than corned beef.

  “What is that spear for?” I asked the chief’s son-in-law, pointing to an enormous spear leaning against a tree.

  “We use it for killing wild pigs.”

  “And how big are the pigs?”

  “About this big,” he said, drawing a length on the ground, suggesting that these were gargantuan pigs.

  “And they have tusks?”

  “Yes, they have tusks.”

  “And are they dangerous?” I asked, wondering what else I had to look forward to on the hike back down to Wala Bay.

  “Only when you are trying to kill them. Then they are very dangerous.”

  “Well, if I see one,” I said, “I think I’ll climb a tree.”

  “But you must choose the right tree and climb very high,” Elise added, “because the pig will stand on his legs and jump after you.”

  Great, I thought. Giant jumping pigs.

  But before heading down, I still had, alas, another climb ahead of me. Women were forbidden to visit the cannibal settlement, and so I said good-bye to Elise, Rose-Marie, and the others and joined the men for the march up to Botko. We passed kava bushes and more fruit trees, and soon we were back in the green forest, following a path that led straight up. They are goat-people, I thought as I pulled myself up, clasping onto tree roots and branches. We scrambled over rocks and the sharp, fallen detritus of the forest. I was the only one wearing shoes. Finally,
we stopped.

  “This is the water cistern,” said Chief Jamino, speaking through his son-in-law. There was a gaggle of large rocks through which a small stream trickled. Finally, I thought. The water source. We must be close. We hiked on. A half-hour later, just as I was frothing with exasperation—Where the hell is this cannibal village?—we paused in front of a large, flat slab of rock. The chief spoke.

  “This is the altar where the pigs were sacrificed.” No event of consequence occurs in Vanuatu without a pig sacrifice. “And this,” he said, reaching into a crevice below the altar, “was a very great chief.”

  Hello.

  In his hands, Chief Jamino was cradling a skull. “He was a god. He discovered how to make fire. Do you see this stone?” he said, pointing to a boulder. “He make the fire like this.” The chief returned the skull to its place, rather unceremoniously I thought, and hopped on top of the boulder. With a stick he proceeded to exuberantly demonstrate how fire was made. He scraped the wood back and forth through a well-defined groove in the boulder. In a shallow indentation he had placed some kindling, and after five or so minutes of frantic scraping and blowing, smoke appeared.

  “When did this great chief live?” I asked.

  “A long time ago,” Chief Jamino said. “A hundred years past.”

  Well, I certainly didn’t want to take anything away from the great chief, but it did seem to me that he was a trifle late in joining the rest of humanity in discovering how to make fire.

  Stepping down, Chief Jamino reached into another crevice below the altar and retrieved another, better-preserved skull. “This was his son. And this was the son’s tusk. He wore it like a bracelet, like this,” he said, trying on the pig tusk. He placed the skull and the tusk back into its crevice, then reached for yet another, even better preserved skull. “This was the son’s son.”

  I pondered the skulls for a moment. Very curious, I asked: “How did you get the heads?”

  “After they died, we buried them standing up, just up to their necks. And when the heads fell off, we brought them here.”