The Sex Lives of Cannibals

by J. Maarten Troost

  “Have you heard of dry sex?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that from the Kama Sutra?”

  “It’s when a woman stops lubrication. This is done by inserting a mixture of coral and herbs into her vagina. It’s the preferred form of sex for I-Kiribati men. They claim it increases their sensation.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was under the impression that only occurred in places like tribal Pakistan.”

  “Here too. And just like tribal Pakistan, kidnapping your bride is an acceptable form of courtship here.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “That’s because you’re a man, and an I-Kiribati woman won’t talk to a man about that sort of thing. Did you know that Kineita kidnapped Beita?”

  Beita worked at FSP. Kineita was her husband. Their marriage struck me as the very model of conjugal bliss. They were affectionate. Kineita was a respectful, doting husband. They had a precocious two-year-old son.

  “Beita was in love with another man,” Sylvia continued. “She wanted to marry him, not Kineita. But Kineita apparently couldn’t take no for an answer, so he kidnapped her and held her for two weeks until she agreed to marry him.”

  That seemed odd to me. “Why didn’t her family or the other guy rescue her?”

  “What do you think Kineita was doing to her for those two weeks? He was having sex with her. That shamed her family. And the other guy wanted nothing more to do with her. She had no choice but to marry Kineita.”

  “And yet she seems pretty happy with him.”

  “She is. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat her.”

  That made him quite the catch in Kiribati, I realized. And he had job security. Kineita, it turned out, was also a fine dancer. He would be representing the Ministry of Education, where he worked in curriculum development.

  WITH THE COMPETITION LOOMING, the ministries began to finalize their lineups of singers and dancers. Some took a rather expansive view of who constituted a ministerial employee. The Ministry of Environment, for instance, had talent-spotted Bwenawa and Tiabo, excellent dancers both, and so invited the FSP staff to participate under the banner of its ministry. FSP did environmental work; ergo FSP fell under the Ministry of Environment. This greatly excited the staff. Sylvia too was invited to dance. It was felt that the novelty of having an I-Matang woman doing one of the sitting dances would score extra points with the judges.

  “I know I should do it,” she said. “It would be a cultural experience. I should have cultural experiences. That’s why we’re here, right? But I really don’t want to spend the next four weeks in a maneaba, staying up until 3 A.M., learning how to do a sitting dance. Is that bad of me?”

  “No. I am sure there will be other opportunities for you to wear a grass skirt and a pandanus bra.”

  I, of course, was pleased that Sylvia had declined to dance. She too would have been expected to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure a visitation from the dancing spirits. And those sacrifices were not ones I wanted to share in. Nor did I particularly want to see Sylvia’s body inhabited by the dancing spirits. They spooked me. I felt deeply uncomfortable whenever I saw a dancer overcome by the spirits. It begins with uncontrolled yelping and wailing, followed by tears, and ends with the dancer tumbling to the ground, where she flaps like a fish until she passes out. Spectators nod approvingly while she is carried out of the maneaba. It was like watching a schizophrenic have an epileptic fit. I found it deeply unsettling. I wished the spirits would just leave these dancers alone.

  The I-Kiribati, however, are disturbingly eager to be swept away by the dancing spirits. Each day, the FSP staff staggered into the office after a long night of dancing practice. They were exhausted, malnourished, and not at all excited about the prospect of working. Instead, the one-hour lunch break turned into a three-hour nap. At exactly noon, the mats were unrolled and the staff settled into a group snooze, save for Bwenawa, who was banished to another room because he snored.

  “What can I do?” asked Sylvia.

  There was nothing Sylvia could do. All of Tarawa had been swept into the tumult of the Song and Dance Competition. From dawn to dusk, the starving, sex-deprived sleepyheads that made up the dancing teams listlessly staggered through their days. At night, every sizable maneaba on the island thundered to the sounds of hundreds of people belting out the tunes of the ancients. I thought it was wonderful—an entire month free of “La Macarena.”

  Finally, Independence Day arrived. Sylvia and I had been invited to view the proceedings from the grandstand, which was quite the honor for FSP, never mind that the grandstand was a cement slab of questionable structural integrity. We were told to arrive at 7:30 A.M. sharp. Typically, I don’t celebrate anything at 7:30 A.M. Typically, I am not even conscious at 7:30 A.M. But there was a good reason for the early start. Gathered on what was optimistically called a field were hundreds of schoolchildren arranged like Nazi regiments attending the Nuremberg rallies. In the foreground stood the police, with twenty lucky officers displaying the country’s military might. This consisted of twenty muskets of a type last used during the Boer War. Each was fastened with a bayonet. There wasn’t any ammunition for the guns. It had run out. In 1908.

  I liked the fact that the police force in Kiribati was unarmed. Elsewhere in the Pacific, island armies amuse themselves by staging coups, or instigating civil wars, or pursuing lucrative opportunities in the drug trade and otherwise behaving like schoolyard bullies who happen to have M-16s. In Kiribati, however, the greatest ambition of a police officer was not to carry a musket, but to be selected for Te Brass Band, the police marching band. They stood beside their comrades in arms, waiting, as everyone else was, for the president and the vice president and the other blah-blah-blahs to finish with their speeches. There were many speeches. There were long speeches. There were honors given. Meanwhile, the sun rose ever higher. The field, which was a slab of barren white coral, began to sizzle and it was not long before the participants arraigned on the field began to droop.

  The first to fall was a police officer. He dropped his gun, swayed, and crumpled to the ground. He was immediately scooped up by two men with a stretcher, who carted him off to a spot alongside the field, where a canopy had been raised to offer shade. The next to pass out was a schoolgirl. She too was whisked off to the shade. By the time the speeches ended, eleven people had succumbed to heat exhaustion. It was only 9:30 in the morning. Did I mention that it’s hot in Kiribati?

  Led by Te Brass Band, which played with so much gusto that they would have been the highlight of any Octoberfest, the remaining participants began to march. The I-Kiribati have a great affection for marching. This too was a legacy of English colonial rule. I always found it curious to see which habits and traditions remained after the English departed. Very sensibly, the I-Kiribati wanted nothing more to do with cricket, which is quite likely the most mind-numbingly tedious game ever devised. Sadly, corned beef was a keeper. And so too was marching. Bedecked in traditional garb, the students stomped in formation around the field. Quick-time, slow-time, a goose step here, a wiggle there, they demonstrated their expertise. The audience greatly enjoyed this display of the country’s martial prowess. They were tumbling over each other with laughter. The I-Kiribati have a very appealing way of diluting their pomp with a healthy dose of silliness.

  By the afternoon, the festivities had moved to the Kiribati Protestant Church maneaba in Bikenibeu, which was one of the island’s larger maneabas. It was standing room only as the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition got under way. I tried to think of an American equivalent to the competition. I strained to imagine the Department of Defense dressed up in grass skirts and lavalavas, preparing to dance against the dreaded Department of Health and Human Services. I struggled to imagine Madeleine Albright in a snug-fitting pandanus bra. But I couldn’t quite grasp the image, which is perhaps just as well.

  Each ministry had a hundred-plus singers, includi
ng the ministers themselves, and as they sang you couldn’t help but feel excited. Percussion was provided by what appeared to be an upturned bookcase. A half-dozen men pounded the instrument with the palms of their hands. An emcee pounced around the maneaba, beckoning the singers to greater heights. The dancers were languid and fluid, with highly stylized and suggestive gesturing of hands and eyes, balanced by a sensuous undulating motion in the hips, a movement accentuated by long grass skirts. Unlike the women, men are allowed a greater range of movement in their legs, and they were charged with maintaining the pulse of a dance through a choreographed stomping of feet and clapping of hands. Every gesture was significant. There is no free-form dancing in Kiribati. But there is rhythm, and watching the dancers it was clear that the I-Kiribati have got rhythm. Except, of course, those who were carried off by the spirit. They cried and fluttered and bellowed, until they collapsed unto the maneaba floor for a good shake. Extra points.

  When it was the Ministry of Environment’s turn, Bwenawa took to the floor. He was their emcee. He shimmied. He swooned. He led his singers up the scales and then down again. He went to the men for the low bass. He gestured toward the women to give him some treble. With his thick mane of billowing hair, he had become the Leonard Bernstein of Kiribati. I turned to the dancers. Tiabo was beginning to get teary-eyed. She was quivering. Don’t pass out, I thought. It makes me uncomfortable. But the spirit eluded her, and she remained upright.

  Afterward, I asked Bwenawa how he thought they did.

  “Not very good,” he said. “But we enjoyed ourselves.”

  As we spoke, the Ministry of Housing had taken to the floor. They were slick. The male dancers were a little more buff; the female dancers a little more lithe. The thatched bras were a little snugger. The grass skirts hung a little lower on the hips. They sashayed. They swayed. Suggestively.

  “Stop staring, you lech,” Sylvia said.

  “Maybe you should have danced after all,” I countered.

  When they had finished with their evocative dance they blew kisses to the unimane judges. The audience let out a collective gasp. And then the audience began to giggle. In Kiribati, giggling is more an indicator of discomfort than amusement.

  “That wasn’t I-Kiribati dancing,” Bwenawa said. “That was more like Polynesian dancing,” he went on, clearly disgusted.

  The judges had wandered off to confer in private. They were gone for a long time. In the meantime, tension rose. There were more than a thousand people gathered around the maneaba, each with firm opinions about which ministry deserved the coveted prize. When the judges returned, they announced their decision. The Ministry of Housing had won. The singers and dancers from the housing ministry cheered. There was muted applause elsewhere.

  And then the tension broke. There was yelling. There was shoving. There was pandemonium. I didn’t understand what was happening. My I-Kiribati language skills had not advanced to the point where I could understand the finely crafted insult. But clearly, a lot of people were upset with the decision. Sylvia and I drifted to the periphery of the uproar, where we found the secretary of education thoughtfully observing the commotion. I liked him. Unlike most in the government, he was devoted to preserving I-Kiribati culture from the encroaching influence of the continental world.

  “Hi,” I said. “How’s the curriculum development going?”

  He laughed. I-Matang humor.

  I asked him what he thought of the judges’ decision.

  “It was a bad decision,” he shook his head. “That wasn’t I-Kiribati dancing. In I-Kiribati dancing every gesture means something. It is very specific. But what the Ministry of Housing did was like the dancing in Tahiti.” The secretary of education began to undulate. “It’s not the Kiribati way.” He paused for a moment. “But the girls were very nice to look at, eh?”

  CHAPTER 16

  In which the Author goes deep inside the mind of the Novelist and expounds—for the benefit of future generations—on what it takes to produce Literature, the noblest Art, to which many are called and few chosen.

  Moving on…

  CHAPTER 17

  In which the Author flies Air Kiribati, Lives, Explores the island of Butaritari, famed for Merrymaking, followed by some thoughts on what it means to be Marooned, since the Author had a lot of time to ponder what it Means to be Marooned, because, frankly, Air Kiribati is not one of the world’s More Reliable Airlines.

  T he longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad is it is. It was after one such low that I found myself surprisingly amenable to Sylvia’s suggestion that we fly Air Kiribati to Butaritari, one of the northern Gilbert Islands. We were to accompany Te Iitibwerere, a local theater troupe that Sylvia had hired to produce message-oriented plays on the importance of green, leafy vegetables and the proper treatment for diarrhea, among other topics not typically explored on Broadway. And so we found ourselves at the airport, where despite our more sensible instincts, we were checking in for a flight on Air Kiribati.

  Truthfully, I would have preferred to visit a city, some place with an old town. Despite illusions to the contrary, I was a creature of the city. I was not immune to the lure of comfort, convenience, and options. I liked the hum of a metropolis, the energy that emanates from hundreds of thousands of people tightly confined, by choice working and living among crowds, and I particularly enjoyed the corner respites, the cafés, bars, and restaurants that encouraged lingering and merriment. A perfect day would be spent perusing bookstores and the finery of brick town houses in a city’s old quarter, dawdling in a café and contemplating the listings of plays and films I probably wouldn’t see, having a couple of beers at a friendly neighborhood bar, enjoying dinner at a restaurant with sublime food and easy atmosphere, and returning to a charming hotel, confident that the electricity would be on and the water running. Also, it would be fall. I would wear a sweater.

  Alas, Air Kiribati didn’t offer weekend packages to Copenhagen. Instead, we would be flying the wanikiba, or flying canoe, to Butaritari, an island that intrigued us because it was lush and verdant, which was unusual in Kiribati, and its people had a reputation throughout the islands for being exceptionally languorous and easygoing. This excited our curiosity. It is difficult to convey exactly how hard it is to acquire such a reputation in Kiribati, where energy conservation is a quality long cultivated and, as far as we could see, already perfected. Also, Butaritari was known for merrymaking, and this finally sold us on the island as our destination. Each island in Kiribati is known for something—Maiana for white lies, Tabiteuea North for settling disputes with knives, Onotoa for frugality, Abemama for oral sex (I kid you not)—and spending a week idling and carousing seemed like an appealing way to learn a little more about Kiribati. But we had to fly Air Kiribati to get there, and it says much about my willingness to explore an island where the lack of a functioning sewage system did not affect the overall quality of life that I checked in for the flight without the assistance of heroin.

  After bowel movements, the state of Air Kiribati was the favorite topic of conversation on Tarawa. Did you hear about when the plane ran out of fuel midair and had to glide in for a landing, someone will say. Or… about when the engine died, or about when the pilot passed out mid-flight, or about when they forgot to turn the beacon on at the airport, or, my favorite, The pilot let me fly the plane. Distressingly, these were not mere rumors. I had never been so uneasy about boarding a flight. It did not help that the shoeless airport official was not pleased wi
th my weight. The expression on his face, which just moments earlier had revealed only benign indifference, contorted into something approaching a scowl. As I stood on a rusting, antiquated scale, fulfilling my role in a preboarding ritual meant to instill anxiety in travelers, I watched the creases on his forehead burrow deeper, saw his eyes recede in a squint of deep concentration, and listened to the strange clucking noises emanating from his mouth. “Tock, tock, tock,” he said. He seemed personally affronted by my weight. And, I must add, I am not a fat man.

  Indeed, standing on the scale, I was startled by how much weight I had lost—twenty-five pounds—with absolutely no effort at all on my part. I was fit when I arrived on Tarawa, so this wasn’t a loss of excess baggage. This was a withering away, and I had once been proud of my iron gut. The Tarawa diet is the ultimate weight loss plan—hookworm, roundworm, dash of salmonella, hint of dysentery, season with cholera to taste—results guaranteed, except for women. Sylvia lost not a pound, which confirmed for me that when challenged, women have a much stronger constitution than men. This makes sense, of course. Life in Kiribati has a strong Darwinian cast to it, and men, except for one brief glorious moment, are pretty useless from an evolutionary perspective and can therefore be allowed to wither, whereas women are hardwired to survive. The “weaker sex” moniker may apply to the bench press, but Nature isn’t a gym rat.

  And I nearly lost a few more pounds when I contemplated the plane we were about to fly. This would be an old Spanish prop plane that predated Franco. It tilted ominously, exuding an air of exhaustion. As the airport official clucked and fretted over our small, featherlight backpacks, I watched the pilot stand on a stepladder and tug at a wing until it aligned with the other wing. Then I smoked eighteen cigarettes. Even Sylvia asked for a cigarette. Sylvia doesn’t smoke. She’s from California.