The Sex Lives of Cannibals

by J. Maarten Troost

  “They say you accused Reibo of stealing twenty dollars. They are crying. They are very ashamed.”

  Oh, dear.

  Stealing, I was told, was a major offense in I-Kiribati culture. I could see why. There is absolutely no good reason for stealing in Kiribati. This is because of the bubuti system. In the bubuti system, someone can walk up to you and say I bubuti you for your flipflops, and without a peep of complaint you are obliged to hand over your flipflops. The following day, you can go up to the guy who is now wearing your flipflops, and say I bubuti you for your fishing net, and suddenly you have a new fishing net. In such a way, Kiribati remains profoundly egalitarian.

  I-Matangs can choose to play along. I know one volunteer, determined to go native as they say, who lost her shoes, her bicycle, her hat, most of her clothing, and a good deal of her monthly stipend to the bubuti. She was a little dim, however, and it never occurred to her to bubuti others, and so she spent her days walking barefoot, with a sunburned scalp, dressed in rags, wondering how on earth she was going to afford her daily fish.

  One day, a man, a complete stranger to me, walked up to the door and politely said: “I bubuti you for bus fare.” Warily, still attuned to big-city panhandlers, I gave it to him. As the bubutis rolled in, however, I felt no obligation to comply. Pocket change, sure. The FSP pickup truck, no. It was my ability, or rather the I-Matang’s ability to say no to a bubuti, that made foreigners useful on Tarawa. Because of the bubuti system, the I-Kiribati tend to avoid seeking positions of power. This was made clear to me when I met Airan, a young Australian-educated employee of the Bank of Kiribati. He was one of a dozen or so Young Turks on Tarawa, benefactors of Australian scholarships and groomed by the Western aid industry to be a future leader. He was, however, miserable. He had just been promoted to assistant manager.

  “This is very bad,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “That’s excellent news.”

  “No. People will come to me with bubuti. They will bubuti me for money. They will bubuti me for jobs. It is very difficult.”

  Jobs are fleeting. Cultural demands are not. Airan begged not to be promoted, and so the management of the Bank of Kiribati remained in I-Matang hands. The bubuti system was why FSP always had an I-Matang director. Sylvia’s presence ensured that the organization would not crumble under the demands of the bubuti system, which is exactly what occurred when the only other international nongovernmental organization to work in Kiribati decided to localize. Its project funds were soon gobbled up in a flurry of bubutis and the organization dissolved. Within the bubuti system, outright stealing is regarded as a perfidious offense, though this didn’t stop someone from stealing my running shoes.

  Tiabo and Reibo arrived again in the evening. They were still sobbing.

  “Reibo said she did not steal twenty dollars,” Tiabo explained. “But if you think she did, you must fire us.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Really, I was just wondering where it was. I found it later in my pocket.”

  Tiabo explained this to Reibo, who began to beam. I did not actually ever find the errant twenty dollars, but I crumble when confronted by tears.

  As I continued to be flailed by “La Macarena,” I took small comfort in the fact that at least no one on Tarawa had ever seen the video, and I was therefore spared the sight of an entire nation spending their days line dancing. Still, the song grated, and I asked Tiabo if she thought it was permissible for me to ask the neighbors to turn the music down. I did not care if I was polite or not, but I did want to avoid antagonizing the household’s youth. They were not in school. They did not work. The traditional rigors of subsistence living did not fully occupy them on Tarawa. And like elsewhere in the world, idle youth have a way of being immensely irritating.

  “In Kiribati, we don’t do that,” Tiabo said.

  “Why not?” I asked. “I would think that loud noise would bother people.”

  “This is true. But we don’t ask people to be quiet.”

  I found this perplexing. Kiribati is a fairly complex society with all sorts of unspoken rules that seek to minimize any potential sources of conflict. Who has the right to harvest a particular coconut tree, for instance, involves an elaborate scheme in which the oldest son has that right for the first year, and then relinquishes it to the next eldest, and so on, until it loops around again, and then it’s the turn of the first son of the eldest brother, and on and on, with the result that no one feels slighted or deprived. Then it occurred to me that the repeated playing of a dreadful song like “La Macarena” at provocatively loud levels is an entirely new problem for Kiribati. In the United States, we have more than seventy years of experience in dealing with noisy neighbors. After much experimentation, we now resort to a friendly, Turn it down, asshole. This is greeted with a polite Fuck you, which is followed by a call to the police, who arrive to issue a citation, and once again peace and tranquility are restored. Noise pollution in Kiribati, however, hasn’t been around long enough for the I-Kiribati to develop such a sophisticated form of conflict resolution. It was like many of the problems on Tarawa. The problems were new and imported, yet the culture remained old and unvarying.

  This thought occurred to me again when I began to notice with no small amount of disgust the sudden appearance of a large number of soiled diapers scattered around the house. They had been thoughtfully deposited there by dogs, who had picked them up from the reef, and happily emptied them of their contents. I will not hear another word about the alleged intelligence of dogs. A soiled diaper is like catnip for dogs. They are ravenous for them, and what the dogs didn’t ingest, they left in disturbing little piles around the house.

  Disposable diapers should have been banned on Tarawa, as they are on a number of other islands in the Pacific. Their availability on the island was a new and disagreeable development. Tarawa lacked a waste management system. There was no need for one until a few years ago, when goods began to arrive packaged in luminous and indestructible material. Before, bags were made of pandanus leaves, food was encased in fish scales, and a drink was held inside a coconut. When you were done, you simply dropped its remains where you stood, and nature took care of the rest. Now, however, bags were increasingly made of plastic, food was found in tins, drinks sloshed inside cans, and sadly, poop resided in diapers, but, unlike the continental world, there is no place to put the resulting trash. There is no room on an atoll for a landfill, and even if one did bury mounds of garbage, it would soon pollute the groundwater, which on Tarawa was already contaminated by interesting forms of life. Waste disposal on an overcrowded island like Tarawa was an enormous problem, and while governments elsewhere in the world could be expected to do something about it, the government of Kiribati carried on as it always did, blithely passing the time in between drinking binges.

  Actually, that’s not fair. They did do something about it. Once upon a time there was a can recycling program. Kids gathered all the beer cans that were strewn about the island, and there were many, and carried them to a privately owned recycling center, which had a can crusher that molded the cans into exportable cubes. The kids were paid. The beer cans were recycled in Australia. Excellent program, one would think. Income was generated. Trash was disposed of in a pleasantly green sort of manner. But then the government, displaying the brain power of a learning-impaired anemone, decided to institute an export tax. Never mind that the product being exported was the rubbish that was fouling the island, the government, as a minister explained to me, “deserved its cut.” He sounded like a Staten Island capo. The tax put the can recycling program out of business. The island remains awash in beer cans.

  Beer cans, however, are merely unsightly, whereas soiled diapers are repulsive, particularly for those who are unrelated to the soiler. I grabbed a stick and collected the diapers, placing them in the rusty oil drum we used as a burn bin. Without other alternatives for waste disposal, we burned everything—plastic, Styrofoam, paper, even the expired medicine we found in the cab
inet, a tangible catalogue of the ailments that bedeviled Sylvia’s predecessors. In case anyone was wondering what they should do with an old asthma inhaler, I can state with some authority that throwing it into a fire is not a good idea, unless you are prepared to spend the rest of the day deaf and bewildered from the subsequent explosion. As I doused the diapers with a generous amount of kerosene, Tiabo came by to see what I was up to.

  “You are going to burn the nappies?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You cannot do that.”

  “I am fairly certain that I can burn the nappies.”

  “You must not burn the nappies.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you will burn the baby’s bum.”

  This gave me pause. As I stood with match in hand, I did a quick mental inventory to see if I missed something. I checked the tattered remains of the diapers a little more thoroughly. There were, as far as I could see, no babies in the diapers. I pointed this out to Tiabo.

  “It does not matter,” she said. “If you burn the diapers you will burn the baby’s bum.”

  Tiabo scooped out the diapers and returned them to the reef. I was baffled. I am very fond of babies, and under no circumstances would I ever wish for any harm to come to a baby’s bottom, but I was mystified here. Somewhere between cause and effect I was lost.

  “Tiabo,” I said. “I don’t understand how burning diapers will lead to a scorched baby bum.”

  “In Kiribati,” Tiabo explained, “we believe that if you burn someone’s… um, how do you say it?”

  “Shit,” I offered.

  “Yes,” she giggled. “If you burn someone’s shit, it is like burning a person’s bum.”

  To readers, I wish to apologize for the frequent references to all things scatological, but such is life on Tarawa. I tried resorting to cold, heartless, Western logic.

  “Tiabo,” I said. “I can prove to you that burning diapers will not harm the babies. We can do an experiment. I will burn the diapers, and you listen for the wail of babies.”

  Tiabo was aghast. “No!”

  “I swear. No babies will be harmed.”

  “Yes they will. You are a bad I-Matang.”

  I did not want to be a bad I-Matang. I thought of myself as a good I-Matang, a good I-Matang who happened to be at wit’s end. “But, Tiabo, something has to be done. It’s not healthy to live surrounded by dirty diapers.”

  She pondered this for a moment. Then she came up with an idea. “I will make a sign,” she said.

  On a piece of cardboard, she wrote something in I-Kiribati. The only words I understood were tabu and I-Matang. “What does it say?” I asked.

  “It is forbidden to throw diapers on the reef here. All diapers found will be burned by the I-Matang.”

  “That’s good. Will it work?”

  “I think so.”

  We posted the sign on a coconut tree near the reef. The real test came on a Sunday. Due to their expense, diapers are used sparingly, and it was only on Sundays when mothers resorted to their use. The churches in Kiribati are, without exception, shamelessly coercive. It mattered not whether it was the Catholic Church or the Protestant Church or the Mormon Church or the Church of God, or any other of the innumerable churches to have set up shop on Tarawa; if a family found itself unable to pay their monthly tithe to their church, which typically took 30 percent of their meager income, they were called up to the front of the church by their pastors and loudly castigated for their failure to pay God His due. And woe to the mother who decides to skip the four-hour service to stay home and tend to a newborn.

  On a Sunday afternoon, after the churches had released their flocks, I was pleasantly surprised to see a woman approach the reef with her child’s morning output, pause for moment to read the sign, and turn around, no doubt searching for someplace where she could be assured that her baby’s poop would be spared the flame. That’s right, lady. Not In My Backyard.

  I GREW MORE appreciative of Tiabo. She was helping me along, conscious of the realities of Kiribati and the foolishness of the I-Matang, and it was not long before I began to feel at ease on Tarawa. I felt I understood its rhythms and peculiarities. I was adapting. Sylvia and I were temporary residents on the island, visitors really, and as much as we could we adjusted to island life. Here and there, we drew certain lines—the outrageous bubuti, the diapers in the backyard—but mostly we shrugged our shoulders and accepted that that’s just the way it goes here. It’s their island. Sylvia, of course, spent her days encouraging the I-Kiribati to manage their islands a little more thoughtfully, and were it not for the enthusiasm and good sense of her staff, she would have been brought to the brink of despair, but there is only so much a foreigner can do on Tarawa. It’s their island.

  And so when a man walked by the window and gave me a friendly mauri as I stared miserably at my computer screen, I turned to Tiabo and said: “You know, Tiabo, I think I have adapted to Kiribati.”

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  “You see,” I said, “in my country if a very large man wearing only a tiny lavalava were to walk through my backyard while carrying an enormous machete, I would be worried. I would probably call the police. But here, I just give a friendly wave.”

  Tiabo looked upon me as if I was irredeemably stupid. She sighed.

  “He is only walking here because you are an I-Matang. He does not respect you.”

  “Oh.”

  “He would not walk on this land if I-Kiribati people lived here.”

  “Oh.”

  I had noticed that when people visited one another, they would first yell out from the road, announcing their presence. I had assumed it was because of the dogs.

  “I see,” I said. “What would happen if that man had walked by and I-Kiribati people lived here?”

  “They would kill him.”

  Well. That seemed a mite severe. I thought of the hundreds of I-Kiribati I could have killed. Lucky for everyone that I was blissfully ignorant. I was vigilant when it came to nighttime prowlers, but I was unaware that those who walked by during the day were also slighting me. But no more. Now that I knew that my manhood was being dissed, I resolved to do something about it. I did not think I was capable of murder, but I felt that I could at least look like I was capable of murder. The next time a man walked near the house I fixed him with an ice-cold stare, every muscle coiled with barely contained violence, and I felt pretty confident that my body language expressed contempt and agitation, and if this trespasser did not leave now he would meet his end, and it would be swift and merciless. The trespasser, for that is now how I thought of him, rather than as a friendly villager, met my gaze and quickly his smile turned into an expression of savage hostility, and that’s when I noticed that he was an extremely muscular man and that he was carrying a machete, and that he did, in fact, look like he was capable of murder.

  “Mauri,” I said, with a friendly wave. My smile wrapped around my head. I wondered if he might like a glass of water.

  Tiabo shook her head sadly. She turned to the man and began to yell at him, chasing him off.

  Clearly, Tiabo was not much impressed with my manliness. It did not help when several weeks later I returned from a short snorkeling expedition beyond the reef. The tide had been exceptionally high and for a half hour or so, when the tide was no longer surging, but not yet receding, the breakers had been reduced to flat water. I was curious about the coral and fish life beyond the house, and so I donned my mask and flippers and swam out. By now, I was no longer worried about sharks. I often saw a man swim out with a long spear. Inevitably, he returned a short while later with a half-dozen fish tied around his waist. This could only mean that he possessed an astonishingly small brain, or that this particular slice of reef was devoid of sharks.

  Past the break zone, the reef wall descended about forty feet, where it plateaued. Fifty yards farther, the reef plummeted into a blue-black void. As I snorkeled, I hugged the initial drop, periodically eme
rging to see what the waves were doing. I was pleasantly surprised to see live coral. It was nothing to rave about, a clump here, a branch there, some brain coral, a few splashes of color on an abused reef. Elsewhere the color was provided by those with advanced degrees in marketing and package engineering. There was rubbish everywhere, cans and rags and diapers listlessly swaying in the current. Swimming through and around this garbage were parrotfish and Great Trevallies and longnose emperors, some quite big. It was disheartening seeing what was being done to their habitat. Above an outburst of brain coral I saw a lionfish, a magnificent and exceedingly poisonous fish. I dived to get a closer look, and as I did so I nearly blew out my sphincter. I had dived directly on top of a shark.

  In my panic, I filled my lungs with water. Then I began to flail and kick and otherwise behave like weak and injured shark fodder. I was out of sorts. Jittery adrenaline bursts are not helpful when you happen to be in deep water with lungs full of seawater. I had no idea what the shark was doing. I was too busy drowning. For all I knew, it was having a cup of tea, merrily watching me die, which saved him the trouble of having to kill me before he set to work dismembering me limb by limb. Then I heard that little voice that has saved me so often in the past—relax, get a grip, swim up, clear your lungs, breathe, and get the hell out of the water, you twit.

  There is nothing quite so disconcerting as having your head above water as the rest of your body dangles below the surface, knowing that there is a shark near, a shark with which you have had an interaction, and not knowing exactly how the shark feels about the interaction. Did I make him mad? Did I make him hungry?

  Apparently I had frightened the shark. And it is no wonder. I was twice as big as he was. With my mask back on I could see it swimming rapidly away. It was only about three feet long, a young reef shark. Nevertheless, as I swam back to shore I kept glancing back. Did he rush off to tell his parents? Was papa shark looking for me?