The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  “Come on,” I told him, even though he couldn’t understand, and he looked at me trustingly, his eyes mild, and it was difficult to remember that he had once been a warrior and had once carried a spear that he had protected with his life. Ma’alamakina, ma’ama.

  We walked carefully toward the boat, the last in line. The quilt of rocks beneath us was uneven, and Ika’ana swayed a bit from the effort. I could see the boatman’s shaking hands as he touched Eve’s wrist and helped heft her up. Behind us, the jungle steamed.

  But I didn’t look back.

  34 The villagers were engaged in their lili’ika, or “small sleep,” which traditionally begins directly after the midday meal and lasts well into the afternoon. The lili’ika was probably born as a matter of necessity; during the hot months, it was simply too difficult to get work done in the late sun. Second, Ivu’ivuans have traditionally stayed up very late at night, for it is then that the choicest hunting takes place (many of the Ivu’ivuans’ favorite game animals are nocturnal).

  Although the missionaries were, as Norton has noted, unable to win many converts, they were able, through the occasional envoy, to convince the king that lili’ika was somehow backward and would thwart the country’s rise; King Tuima’ele therefore abolished lili’ika in 1930, in what was to be one of the missionaries’ most significant legacies. However, the tradition persevered on Ivu’ivu because, as Norton notes, they had no knowledge of the king, much less of his kingdom.

  Norton does not significantly address King Tuimai’ele in these pages, but he was by all accounts a fascinating man. Tuima’ele was as old as the twentieth century itself (so he would have been fifty when Norton arrived on the island) and had been ruling since he was twelve. His relationship with the encroaching West was a complicated one. On one hand, he had no doubt heard stories of how his grandfather King Maku had outlawed ka’aka’a as barbaric and backward, probably under direct pressure from the Protestant missionaries who still had a small stronghold on the northern side of U’ivu. And yet he had also heard stories of his own father, King Vake’ele, who as a child monarch had thrown out the last of the missionaries in 1875, shortly after the catastrophic tsunami that destroyed most of their nascent community.

  Tuimai’ele’s reign was marked by an intense curiosity about the West—for him, it was a forbidden place, and therefore exciting—equaled only by an intense suspicion of it. It is said (although there is no written record of it) that the reason the missionaries most upset Vake’ele was that they told him in order to become Christian, he must forsake his spear. And with that one command, the settlers’ several-decades-long, stop-and-start inroads into U’ivu were halted: Vake’ele banished them, and Tuimai’ele grew up in an U’ivu completely without a white presence.

  Before they were banished, however, Vake’ele had made friends with some of the missionaries, one of whom—his name is lost to time—gave him a series of picture books, which the king is said to have passed on to his son. Although Tuimai’ele was subliterate, the books were proof of a world outside his own, and it was he who would later try to establish diplomatic outposts in various South Pacific countries.

  Unfortunately, he was not able to allow himself to commit to these overtures completely, and U’ivu spent the first part of the twentieth century in semiobscurity, falling in and out of notice in the West—until, that is, Tallent and Norton forced it into public consciousness.

  35 In previous renderings of this story, Norton has intimated that this beast might have been human. The New York Times reporter Milo Smoak quotes Norton at length in his book The Lost Boys (New York: HarperCollins, 1989), as saying, “The first thing we saw upon entering the village [of the Opa’ivu’eke people] was a fire, one that burned throughout the day and night. Suspended over it was a creature whose identity I couldn’t quite discern—it was clearly some sort of mammal, for you could see, still edged along its crown, little bits of black threads that snapped like glass in the heat. But its head was too large to be a dog’s, and its limbs too long to be a hog’s. As I stared at it, I began to fancy that it might be a primate of some sort, although I had not until then seen any monkeys as substantial as the creature was, and I was scared to follow my line of thinking for fear of reaching the inevitable conclusion” (298).

  36 The villagers were vigilant about maintaining their stores; even later, when the outside world began to infiltrate their society more aggressively and there was less time and inclination to hunt, they made sure always to maintain a backup of foodstuffs and supplies that would last them at least an entire season. (No one person was responsible for overseeing this effort; rather, a person was assigned to each of the storage huts and charged with its upkeep; this duty rotated among the adults in the village every o’ana.) But although the work of keeping their supplies replenished was a constant one, to be practiced year-round, the majority of labor—harvesting, plucking, curing, sorting, foraging, hunting for game, etc.—actually took place during lili’uaka, or “small rain” season. Norton, of course, arrived at the end of this period, and what he saw would have been fresh stock, the results of the previous three months’ work.

  37 In traditional Ivu’ivuan culture, all children were held in common. Although they slept with their families each night in their male’es, responsibility for feeding and disciplining them was shared among all the adults in the village. This is why many of Norton’s earlier generation of children were from U’ivu; there, the old model of communal child-rearing had been abandoned for a more traditional Western approach (presumably a legacy of the missionaries), which meant that children with missing or inadequate parents were left on their own and not informally adopted or cared for by the other adults in the society. Therefore, no one in U’ivu posed any objection to Norton’s claiming the unwanted children as his own.

  38 This stream, which was later discovered to run the entire length of Ivu’ivu, was the village’s primary source of water and was used for drinking, bathing, and, as Norton witnessed, play. Many years later, the island was also discovered to be webbed with a series of underground rivers, which the villagers made good use of in the meat hut.

  39 The vast majority of life in the village was lived outside. During lili’uaka, villagers carried about makeshift umbrellas consisting of lawa’a leaves lanced onto the sharpened ends of palm husks; every person had his or her own and carried it from place to place, sitting beneath it when the rain fell. Only during ‘uaka, the “big rain” season, were the villagers forced inside their huts, which they hated—they spent most of their time during that season sitting at the mouths of their male’es, looking mournful and shouting to one another over the sound of thunder. Norton once told me he never understood why they didn’t just erect one large canopy that they could all cluster beneath and unfurl when the rains began.

  40 Astonishingly, the villagers were not only not familiar with the sea, they had no notion of it at all. There is an account by Tallent of a villager being taken to see the sea for the first time and him mistaking it for “a sky without clouds.” The poor man thought that the world had been tipped upside down and that he was entering the realm of Pu’uaka, goddess of the rains. See Paul Tallent, “The Island Without Water: Ivu’ivuan Mythology and Isolationism,” Journal of Micronesian Ethnology (Summer 1958, vol. 30, 115–32).

  41 The four rituals that Norton glancingly mentions here are detailed in Tallent’s landmark book about Ivu’ivu, The People in the Trees: The Lost Tribe of Ivu’ivu (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), one of the canonical titles of modern anthropology. The last ceremony—the one in which eight members of the village dance around the fire holding lizards to their heads—is a fairly obscure rite called tua’ina, which Norton was lucky to observe, as it is performed only during a partial eclipse. (The Ivu’ivuans had a complex system of tracking the moon’s waxing and waning, which is also described in excellent detail in People.) In U’ivuan culture, the lizard—in this case, a rare reptile called an e’olu’eke—is considered a sign of
the moon, and the moon is considered to have eight stages. During a partial eclipse, a specially elected village quorum pays tribute to the moon by urging him to return to his proper state; the lizards are held to the head as a sign of respect and then sacrificed to the fire so that the smoke will travel upward and its fragrance will appease the gods of the skies.

  42 Esme Duff, Life Among the Deathless: A Study of Ivu’ivu (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), is a fairly sentimental memoir of Duff’s excursions to the island. As Norton has noted, Duff was an excellent chronicler of the minutiae of village life—she provides exceedingly comprehensive accountings of the contents of the various storage huts—but there is something cloying about her renderings of the people: the children are described as “fattened cherubs,” and women are singled out for their “gentle eyes.” There is no mention of the a’ina’ina ceremony, nor of the sloth-beating exercises that Norton details. Of Norton, whose presence on the initial, 1950 trip she briefly acknowledges, there is only a single long paragraph, some lines of which I have excerpted here:

  In later years, Perina would prove almost singlehandedly to be the source of the island’s undoing … it is uncertain that he ever really cared anything for the Ivu’ivuan culture, much less its people, evidence of which can be found in his willful disregard for their most sacred of taboos.… Although he is credited, erroneously, with “discovering” immortality—as if such a thing can be discovered at all—he was, in my opinion, always more interested in achieving personal immortality, no matter the cost to the people he had to exploit in order to do so.

  Unfortunately, Duff’s book fell out of print in 1980, just three years after its publication.

  43 In a letter I wrote to Norton after receiving this chapter, I asked if he had ever submitted a paper to any anthropological journals describing the a’ina’ina. He replied that he had in fact done so several times, but that the revelation of the a’ina’ina seemed to contradict the idea of an idyllic and peaceful society that had been proposed by the post-Tallent generation of U’ivuan scholars and therefore the report was never accepted. One can only hope that this second, newer batch of U’ivuists are able to take a less romantic and more clear-eyed view of the island and revisit their long-held opinions about the culture, especially as regards children and sexuality.

  44 Unlike on U’ivu, the position of village chief on Ivu’ivu was earned, not inherited. Typically, it was awarded to the first male to kill a wild hog before receiving his ma’alamakina. After receiving the honor, the boy would usually not actually assume his responsibilities until the current chief either died or abdicated in his favor.

  45 Norton does not say so explicitly, but aside from the tattoo, another indication that a villager had undergone the vaka’ina ceremony was his or her sudden ornamentation. Anyone who had reached sixty o’anas thereafter wore some sort of embellishment, whether a necklace or a cape or a length of fabric (of course, these were often lost or abandoned later, when their circumstances changed). This sartorial addition is not thought to hold any special symbolism or significance; rather, it simply seemed to be an easy way for the honored person to remind the rest of the village about his or her new status and remarkable achievement.

  46 Norton later told me that one of his greatest regrets from this period was not also taking Ivaiva and Va’ana with him, and indeed, I had always wondered why he hadn’t—they were twins, after all, and would have made for a particularly interesting study. But Norton said that at the time he thought he would be able to successfully corral and control only four subjects, and he decided that it was more valuable to chart the differences between two blood relations of different generations, which meant that the twins by necessity had to be left behind.

  47 The Ivu’ivuans’ method of disposing of and remembering the dead is notable mostly for its brisk efficiency, especially given the enthusiasm and glee with which they commemorate the more mundane passages of life. The dead spend a day on display in the center of the village, lawa’a frills covering their eyes. That night, after dinner has been cooked, they are placed on top of the fire and left to burn overnight. (In his book, Tallent, who witnessed one of these outdoor cremations, gives a wonderfully vivid rendering of the little firecracker bursts that are audible throughout the night as various body parts explode and their contents simmer in the flames.) The next morning the fire is extinguished, the remains are collected, and a relative of the deceased is dispatched to bury them under one of the trees lining the village’s rim (each family has a certain number of trees allocated to them for these occasions). Tallent notes that the days surrounding the death are marked not by keening or weeping but instead by a “dignified, almost majestical, sense of quiet and contemplation. The deceased’s immediate family continues to go about their daily rituals, but their silence, their lack of chatter in this busy, intimate community, is a ritual in itself, and the other villagers give them peace until the bereaved signal their intention to return to the life of the community. Sometimes this silent mourning takes only days; sometimes it takes months. But it is a remarkable demonstration of being absent in a place so intensely present, of being granted solitude while surrounded by many” (Tallent, The People in the Trees, 178).

  PART V. THE FIRST CHILD

  I.

  What happened next is so well documented that I hardly think it worth much time to tell it yet again. Indeed, a number of books have chronicled the decade following my initial departure from Ivu’ivu much more thoroughly, and in much more exhaustive detail, than I could have done myself, in particular Jeremy Lauerman’s The Immortals: The Discovery That Changed the World, which focuses mostly on the first three years of my return to the States, and Katharine Hetherington’s An Island Good and Small: Norton Perina and the World He Made, which takes as its subject the later years of my research in what would come to be called Selene syndrome, and the denouement of which is an almost Talmudic rendering of my receipt of the Nobel Prize. Finally there is Anna Kidd’s Of Stone and Sun and Everything In Between: A Biography of A. Norton Perina, which, aside from portraying me as something close to godlike, remains my favorite of the trio for its evenhandedness and its author’s superior scientific understanding. I sat for many hours of interviews with all three of these authors, and they have presented me and my work faithfully.

  However, certain stories from those years remain largely untold, and I would like to use this opportunity to answer some of the mysteries that persist.

  The first concerns the fate of the dreamers. Although I left U’ivu the possessor of perhaps one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, I returned to America a virtual leper. I may have been an explorer with a wonderful, an unimaginable find, but to the academic establishment I was merely a researcher without a lab, and therefore an outcast. Back then, however, I was still too young and guileless to properly appreciate the impossibility of my situation; in fact, I fancied myself something of a ronin, ready to serve anyone who might grant me a home. As it turned out, that place was Stanford, where Tallent—who had, in less than six months, been transformed in anthropological circles from a rebel into a genuine hero—managed to hastily secure me a lab and some money, no doubt funneled improperly from some mysterious slush fund.48 Because my operation was so small, I was made to share techs with a much larger adjoining lab, which of course did not go over well. Mostly, though, my peers didn’t know what to make of me: I was too inexperienced to be running my own outfit and yet too worldly to be under anyone’s command. It was clear that I was protected by someone; I had to hope every day that they wouldn’t discover that it was the Anthropology Department.

  It sounds a silly thing to say—after all, I had not been gone so long—but readjusting to America was more challenging than I had anticipated. I was struck by how sparkly and new everything seemed, by the cars gleaming their bright, artificial colors like saliva-slicked sweets, by the sheer volume and inventiveness of clothing everyone seemed to wear: brogues and hats and suspenders an
d belts and handbags and clinking bracelets and bouncing strands of pearls—a whole language of sartorial excess when only a pouch and a length of fabric would have sufficed. And I marveled too at how stark, how denuded of plant life, the cities were, just one gray block after another, and where there would have been trees there were instead mouse-colored buildings spilling silent people, all in their layers and layers of elaborate and superfluous costumery.

  Inside the lab, however, it was always Ivu’ivu. I had tried to make the transition—from island to mainland, from Stone Age to modern age—as seamless as possible for the dreamers, which meant that I’d had to start drugging them more or less from the moment we had arrived on U’ivu, which had been terrifying, overwhelming, to them. (This was back when you could do such things without ethics boards howling at you, when you could ease a transition that otherwise would have killed with its abruptness and severity.) And I had sedated them, of course, on the plane ride to California (all those hours of checking their pulses, their breathing, of shining a tiny penlight—itself a miracle—into their eyes to watch their pupils contract into beady black pinpricks), and during the car ride to the basement bunker beneath the lab where we kept them for several days while we were assembling what would become their permanent residence, and had woken them only when I had safely ensconced them in their new home: a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room, windowless so they would not be detected by others, with plain walls and a linoleum floor that had been spread with layers of palm leaves and dotted with buckets of bromeliads and potted trees both approximate (a cycad) and not (a ficus) to what they would remember from Ivu’ivu. At one point I tried to introduce a terrarium with a turtle in it, but I came in one morning to find the turtle with its carapace half torn off, its neck limp, and a clot of bloodied feces coating its tail. They were not violent, the dreamers, but they were increasingly agitated and fearful, and their agitation and fear made them sometimes behave in ways that were foreign to them. It was a delicate balance, their sedation: too much and they became logy and staggery, and it was difficult to discern how much of their incomprehension was due to their mental state and how much was artificially induced; too little and they grew anxious, scratching at the walls and wailing at nothing. The goal was to keep them alert enough that they might notice something curious about their surroundings but disoriented enough that they wouldn’t be able to specify what was amiss.