by Carl Hoffman
To go to the bathroom I had to exit a plank door, negotiate a ten-foot-long board over mud, tightrope across a three-inch-wide log at a steep angle down into another house filled with people cooking and lying on the floor, then go out on another plank to a wooden outhouse with a hole over a stream.
As it got dark, Filo rustled up some white rice and instant ramen by candlelight and the skies burst open, unleashing dramatic sheets of rain that thundered on the roof and sent a fine mist curling through the eaves. I retreated to the master bedroom, which had been turned over to me, a furniture-less room full of fishing nets and an ax and bow and arrow and hyperbolic, colorful pictures of Jesus. I blew up my thin, inflatable air mattress in the flickering candlelight and lay down, exhausted.
7
December 1957
FATHER CORNELIUS VAN KESSEL WEARING BOAR TUSKS ON HIS LEFT ARM, A CUSCUS FUR HEADBAND, AND TRADITIONAL ASMAT MARKINGS.
(Mieke van Kessel)
AS THE 124 MEN from Otsjanep and Omadesep paddled south along the coast toward Wagin, Pip and Faniptas knew that strange people had lately been appearing from across the sea, as if by magic. But in 1957 those beings were still dim apparitions to them, with little impact on their lives, and they weren’t thinking about the white men at all. The warriors stayed well offshore, but as they neared the Digul the weather turned. Big, low green-black clouds covered the sky, and the wind whipped the sea into whitecaps. A fierce winter storm blew in, piling the Arafura against the shallows in short, steep waves that threatened to swamp the canoes. Water poured in over the gunwales. The men couldn’t balance any longer, couldn’t make headway, couldn’t keep the waves from filling their canoes. Torrents of cold rain fell from low gray clouds. In the roiling surf and breaking waves, they were forced to shore at the coastal village of Emene.
In New York, art critics were celebrating humanity’s oneness, our commonality of love and games and dancing and sunsets. In Asmat, men who would soon be heralded as some of the greatest artists of the world attacked each other with spears, bows and arrows, and axes. In the driving, chill rain, Emene attacked the men from Omadesep and Otsjanep. They fought hand to hand, howling and screaming and covered in mud. It was awful, but glorious too, for they were warriors. One man from Omadesep died and four from Emene, and the men from Omadesep and Otsjanep scattered into the jungle swamp.
In the morning they found their canoes destroyed. Faniptas led them north. They trudged through the mud, fighting their way home through one hostile territory after another. In Baiyun six died, three from Omadesep and three from Baiyun. Near Basim, the men from Omadesep turned on their own traveling companions, the men from Otsjanep, planning to kill them all. Pip took a steel ax blow to his abdomen and fell to the mud. Everisus Birojipts was a small child, maybe six, maybe seven, and he saw Pip fall. “Father,” he said, staring at the dead man, “I saw Pip’s eyes open; maybe he’s not dead.”
“No, he’s dead,” said Birojipts’s father. “Don’t worry.”
He wasn’t dead. After three hours, he stood, nursing his wound, and made his way toward the Ewta River and Otsjanep, his home. Alone, he moved fast, outpacing the others.
The mouth of every river belongs to the village that lies upstream. At the Ewta, Pip encountered his kinsmen, and they paddled immediately back to the village, where he spoke of Omadesep’s treachery. The warriors drew Xs across their chests and rings around their legs and arms with ochre and black ash, adorned themselves with cuscus fur headbands and cockatoo feathers, and put curving shells in their noses that resembled the tusks of the wild boar, giving themselves strength, power. They wanted to look fierce, to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies. They became the animals that lived in the jungle, eaters of fruit, eaters of men. In the jeu they drummed and sang and chanted through the night, sweat pouring off their chests and arms and legs, filling the jeu with their smell, a smell that gave them added strength, bravery. They danced and howled and screamed, pushing themselves to the limits of fearlessness. They danced with their bows and arrows, their spears. There were straight spears with inch-high barbs, spears that branched off to six points, spears with points that broke off in their prey. Just before dawn, they gathered their shields—six feet long and intricately carved with the symbols of the forest and headhunting, fruit bats and boar tusks and praying mantises—and each bore a protruding penis in the shape of a man from its top. They carried powdered lime (a female element that made men hot) to throw into the air and frighten their opponents, and they looked like what they were—wild creatures from the jungle. Two hundred men in twenty canoes paddled silently down the Ewta in the dawn light and waited at the narrow, tangled mouth of the river.
THAT THE ASMAT remained so untouched by the rest of the world for so long was remarkable. It was one thing to live deep in the jungle a thousand miles up tributaries of a river like the Amazon, but Asmat was on the coast, the rivers were roads, and Europeans had been cruising by for centuries. The Portuguese touched the island in 1526, the Spanish a few years later. In 1595 the Netherlands sent an expedition to the Moluccas—nine hundred miles to the northeast of Asmat—to secure its supply of spices and soon established the United East Indies Company, which began ruling over the Indonesian archipelago. But New Guinea was an enormous mystery, its shores hot and moist and its interior an impenetrable land of steep mountains and valleys, the southwest coast even more so; indeed, it remained outside the control of governments for longer than any other non-Arctic coast in the world. Crops didn’t grow there. Asmat nourished no large mammals to domesticate or hunt, possessed no known mineral resources, and was so shallow and tidal it was hard to navigate. The place seemed untamable. When Jan Carstenz landed in 1623, “the natives attacked without warning,” wrote Gavin Souter in his history of New Guinea, and “tore one man to pieces, killed eight others with arrows and spears, and wounded the remaining seven.”
Captain James Cook paused at the entrance to the Cook River—now the Kuti—in 1770 and sent two boatloads of men upriver, where they encountered canoes full of Asmat armed with spears and bows and arrows, enveloped in clouds of white smoke—the lime the Asmat threw—which Cook’s men took for gunfire. “Their Arms were ordinary darts about four feet long made of a kind of reed and point at one end with hard wood, but what appear’d most extraordinary to us was something they had which caused a flash of fire or smook, very much like the going off of a Pistol or Gun without any report, the deception was so great that the People in the Ship actually thought they had fire arms.” When that first contact was over, twenty of Cook’s men and an unknown number of Asmat were dead, and Cook felt no need to remain or encourage others to return.
In 1800 the Dutch government took over the archipelago from the United East Indies Company, and a century later it began a series of forays up the rivers of Papua’s southwest coast, but made little contact with the Asmat. In 1902, under pressure from British authorities, whose territories were being invaded by headhunting Marind warriors from the Dutch side of the island, the Netherlands established a police post in Merauke, 150 miles southwest of Asmat. The Dutch colonial capital of Hollandia, three hundred miles to the north, across the high mountains, was so far away it might as well have been on a different planet.
The Asmat existed in their own world, as if these outsiders were nothing but occasional spirits passing by. When World War II hit the Pacific, huge battles raged across the northern coast, culminating in large American bases in Hollandia and on the island of Biak. The Japanese briefly established a post in what would become Agats and killed twenty-two men there on a single day, but their influence on the rest of Asmat was small.
After the war, in 1947, the Dutch Catholic priest Gerard Zegwaard arrived in Mimika, a culturally and linguistically different region of much firmer land northwest of Asmat. Zegwaard belonged to the Order of the Sacred Heart, a missionary brotherhood that had been working in the Pacific since the late 1800s. OSC priests were highly educated and devout tough guys. They practiced se
lf-flagellation, flaying their own backs with a knotted whip. Besides their native Dutch, they spoke Latin, English, French, and German. They were steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Nietzsche. Zegwaard was twenty-eight when he arrived, with an anthropologist’s sense of wonder and curiosity, and it wasn’t long before he acquired a scruffy beard and deep tan. He smoked a pipe and plunged deeply into Asmat culture, stumbling into ceremonies and headhunting raids, which no white man had ever seen—and recording them in his journals.
Raids could happen at any time, anywhere. Villages were constantly on the move, the larger, more powerful ones extending their range by destroying their smaller neighbors and appropriating their hunting, fishing, and sago-gathering grounds. Face-to-face battles between warriors were few. When canoes of men from two warring villages met on the rivers, the men howled and hurled insults across the water, calling their opponents wives or women. They drew their bows, they fired arrows overhead or into the water, and they threw fistfuls of lime at each other. But being evenly matched, there was little reason to fight.
Far preferable were sudden ambushes on villages or the taking of a stray man, woman, or child with the bad fortune to be caught unprotected in the open. Whole villages or men’s house groups fished or gathered sago in the jungle as protection. Warriors formed a cordon upstream and down from where a group was working, and others accompanied women into the forest to harvest sago. This, of course, often left old people or children alone, and they, too, were fair game.
Even among warring villages, some people related by blood or bond, like Faniptas from Omadesep, had safe passage and could be received as guests. By the exchange of children or marriage or the taking of names of those they had killed, there was always some connection that left villages able to travel and communicate with each other. But the Asmat were opportunists and tricksters, and sometimes those visitors were killed anyway in their sleep, or given presents and killed as they were leaving, or lured as suckers on voyages like the one to Wagin.
Village ambushes were associated with ceremonies meant to restore order in a world of opposites, including the creation of elaborate wooden poles carved from a single piece of mangrove that could be as tall as twenty feet, known as bisj. Each pole depicted a column of stacked ancestors; the pole carried the name of its topmost person. Canoes, snakes, and crocodiles were carved into the base of the pole, and symbols of headhunting extended out in a three-foot-long protrusion from its top. The poles were haunting, alive, often sexually suggestive.
For the Asmat, ancestors are involved in every aspect of their existence. The carvings are memorial signs to those ancestors, and to the living, that their deaths have not been forgotten, that the living’s responsibility to avenge them is still alive and strong, and that the living should not be punished if those deaths haven’t yet been avenged. Bisj itself comes from the word “mbiu”—the spirit or soul of the dead—and the bisj pole, more than any other object, is an embodiment of the dead person, whose spirit lives inside it. The pole is a symbol of his presence, a reminder of the obligation to revenge, and, possessing both a penis and a vagina, a symbol of fertility. Death into life and life into death, inextricable opposites of a unified whole.
To the west lies Safan, the home of the spirits of the ancestors. Man is born in Asmat, lives and dies there, and then enters a secondary level of earthly existence, a sort of limbo. In order to pass through it to Safan, he depends on the help of the living. They must celebrate with bisj festivals that can last seven months, beginning with the warriors attacking a mangrove tree in the jungle just as they would a man. They yell and scream and shoot it with arrows, before cutting it down and bringing it to the village just as they would a man killed in battle. Only a great man can afford to sponsor such a process—the carvers must be fed, for instance, and much food is necessary for all of the feasting.
The completion of a pole usually unleashed a new round of raids; revenge was taken and balance restored, new heads obtained—new seeds to nourish the growth of young men—and the blood of the victims rubbed into the pole. At the end of the feast and the bisj celebration, the spirit in the pole was made complete and could return to help the living. The villagers then engaged in sex, and the poles were left to rot in the sago fields, fertilizing the sago itself and completing the cycle. If no remembrance was made, no bisj celebration held, no new heads taken, life and happiness could not flow into human existence from the ancestral world.
Raids usually took place just before dawn. After a night of planning, the raiding party was divided into three groups: the leaders, who gave advice; the archers, who opened the attack; and the spearmen and shield-bearers, who did the killing. The warriors approached as close as they could by canoe, then surrounded the village. The leaders, all older, distinguished warriors, took the rear. The archers crept to the front, between the village and the river, and the spearmen to the rear, between the village and the jungle, for all Asmat houses have hidden rear doorways.
One of the attackers would make a noise.
“Who is that?” someone in the houses would call.
“Your husband, Sjuru!” he would reply, using the name of the attacking village.
Then panic. Women and children would try to escape into the jungle or by canoe. Sometimes they were spared, the women taken as wives if there was a shortage of women in the attacking village, the children adopted. As soon as a victim was overpowered, he was pushed and beaten, especially his head, as the killer yelled, “My head, my head won in the raid!” The victim’s name was discovered, if it wasn’t already known. Preferably, if there was time, the victim wasn’t killed immediately, but taken to the canoe and made to sit with his hands and chest hanging over a pole.
At the confluence of rivers or river bends, the victims were decapitated (sometimes even by women—the wife of a great headhunter could become great too), and the horns were sounded upon their return to the village for the ensuing ceremonies and feasts.
WHEN ZEGWAARD ARRIVED in Mimika in 1947, this had been going on for as long as the Asmat could remember. In 1928, ten canoes of a hundred Asmat came ashore at the Mimikan village of Atuka, near a Dutch outpost. The Atukans fled, and the Asmat stripped the village, particularly anything made of steel. They tore apart the desks and benches in the Atuka school and pulled out the nails, which they flattened and used as carving tools. By 1947, the raiding and warfare in Asmat had become so fierce that as many as six thousand Asmat fled their villages to escape the violence. They ended up next door, in Mimika, where Zegwaard encountered them for the first time. This was a refugee crisis; the Dutch government forced them to return to their villages, and Zegwaard and the Dutch Resident, the local official in charge, began making regular voyages into the swamps and rivers.
Zegwaard remains the best authority on the Asmat in their purest state, at the time of first sustained contact with Europeans, and his writing draws a bloody portrait. “There is a tendency to minimize what we have heard about the violence in Asmat’s culture,” he wrote. “I frequently sense that government officials are very skeptical about the ‘wild stories’ they have heard about Asmat. I do not blame them as I, too, had this initial impression when I knew the Asmat only in superficial contact situations. As I mentioned above, the Asmatters are such good actors that they can give favorable impressions and suggest that things are ‘not really too bad.’
“The Asmat language,” he continued, “has an abundance of words for such concepts as ‘fight,’ ‘argue,’ ‘quarrel,’ ‘murder,’ and ‘headhunting.’ Any conflict between two persons will usually escalate into involvement of all members of their immediate families, then their clans and finally can involve the entire village. A conflict with a related or friendly village usually ultimately involves a major battle. Asmatters fight with all weapons they possess: clubs, bow and arrow, spears, paddles, etc. They try to maintain a balance in conflicts with ‘friendly’ or related villages but anything is fair in battle or warfare with non-related
or enemy villages. Some examples from this post–World War II period will serve to clarify this state of affairs. Two men from Sjuru were killed by Jasakor’s arrows in a fight over tobacco and women. Another six men from Ewer were killed, as well as five men and a woman from the village of Sjuru. In 1950 two children were beaten to death in a conflict over a woman. This was countered by the other party. . . . I know of three men killed in Jamasj during 1952 and another three in March 1953. These were revenge for [the] 1952 killings. The fights may continue for hours and even spill over into days without pause. If a man feels that he has been wronged in any way he will quietly bide his time looking for revenge. Sometimes this means waiting for the opportunity and the killing place. This pattern of revenge through the children was used as an explanation for the scarcity of children in Asmat when I was taking a census there. I know of similar child-revenge-killing in Erma in 1952. This child was killed because his parents had gathered sago in someone else’s sago area. The child’s parents in turn took revenge on a man from Joni who was a relative of the man who killed their child. These conflicts (frequently culminating in killings) are the usual reason for the division of clans (i.e. JEW units) [sic] or the disintegration of village units. The history of almost every Jew [sic] begins in conflict.”