1996 - The Island of the Colorblind (10 page)

And there is also a medical attitude, enforced by necessity, which militates against proper recognition of the maskun. Greg and many others have worked incessantly to train good doctors in under-doctored Micronesia. But their hands are constantly full with critical conditions demanding immediate attention. Amebiasis and other parasitic infections are rife (there were four patients with amebic liver abscesses in the hospital while we were there). There are constant outbreaks of measles and other infectious diseases, partly because there are not enough resources to vaccinate the children. Tuberculosis is endemic in the islands, as leprosy once was.
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Widespread chronic vitamin-A deficiency, probably linked to the shift to a Western diet, can cause severe ear and eye problems (including night blindness), lower resistance to infection, and lead to potentially fatal malabsorption syndromes. Though almost every form of venereal disease is seen, AIDS has not yet appeared in this remote place, but Greg worries about the inevitable: ‘All hell will break loose when we get AIDS,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have the manpower or the resources to deal with it.’

This is the stuff of medicine, the acute medicine which must be the first priority in the islands. There is little time or energy left over for something like the maskun, a congenital, nonprogressive condition which one can live with. There is no time for an existential medicine which enquires into what it might
mean
to be blind or colorblind or deaf, how those affected might react and adapt, how they might be helped – technologically, psychologically, culturally – to lead fuller lives. ‘You are lucky,’ said Greg. ‘You have the time. We’re too harried here, we don’t have the time.’

But the unawareness of achromatopsia is not limited to medical professionals. The Pingelapese of Pohnpei tend to stay among their own, and the achromatopes among them – who often stay inside, out of the bright light and out of sight, for much of the day – form an inconspicuous and almost invisible enclave within the Pingelapese enclave itself, a minority within a minority. Many people on Pohnpei do not know of their existence.

Kolonia is the only major town on Pohnpei, situated on the north coast next to a wide harbor. It has a charming, indolent, run-down feel. There are no traffic lights in Kolonia, no neon signs, no cinemas – only a shop or two, and, everywhere, sakau bars. As we walked along the middle of the main street, almost deserted at noontime, looking in at the sleepy souvenir shops and scuba shops on either side, we were struck by its nonchalant, dilapidated air. The main street has no name, none of the streets now have names; Kolonians no longer remember, or are anxious to forget, the street names imposed by successive occupations and have gone back to talking of them, as in precolonial days, as ‘the street by the waterfront’ or ‘the road to Sokehs.’ The town seemed to have no center, and what with this, and the nameless streets, we kept getting lost. There were a few cars on the road, but they moved extraordinarily slowly, at a walking pace or slower, stopping every few yards for dogs which were lying in the road. It was difficult to believe that this lethargic place was in fact the capital not only of Pohnpei, but of the Federated States of Micronesia.

And yet, here and there, rising incongruously above tin-roofed shanties, were the bulky cinderblock buildings of the government and the hospital, and a satellite dish so vast that it brought to mind the huge radio telescopes in Arecibo. I was amazed to see this – were the Pohnpeians searching for life in outer space? The explanation, more mundane, was still in its way rather astonishing. The satellite dish is part of a modern telecommunications system: the mountainous terrain and bad roads had prevented the installation of a telephone system until a few years ago; now the satellite system allows instant, crystal-clear conversations between the most isolated parts of the island, and gives Pohnpei access to the Internet as well, a page on the World Wide Web. In this sense, Kolonia has skipped the twentieth century and moved direct, without the usual intermediate stages, to the twenty-first.

As we explored further, we also got the feeling of Kolonia as an archeological site or palimpsest composed of many strata, many cultures superimposed one upon another. There were signs of American influence everywhere (perhaps one saw this most in the Ambrose supermarket, where tins of cuttlefish in their own ink sat next to entire aisles devoted to Spam and other tinned meats); but beneath this, more faintly, those of the Japanese, the German, and the Spanish occupations, all superimposed upon the original harbor and village, which the Pohn-peians, in O’Connell’s day, had called Mesenieng, ‘the eye of the wind,’ a magical and sacred place.

We tried to imagine what the town had been like in the 1850
s
, a couple of decades after O’Connell landed here. Then too it had been a roistering town, for Pohnpei had become a favorite stopping place for British vessels plying the trade routes to China and Australia and, a little later, for American whalers. The attractions of Pohnpei, allied to the brutalities and hardships of shipboard life (which had caused Melville to jump ship in the 1840
s
), incited frequent desertions, and the island rapidly acquired a colorful assortment of ‘beachcombers,’ to use the contemporary term.
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The beachcombers brought with them tobacco, alcohol, and firearms; and fights, inflamed by liquor, would end, as often as not, in gunfire. Thus the atmosphere, by the 1850
s
, was that of a frontier town, not unlike Copperopolis or Amarillo, full of high living and adventure (for the beachcombers, not the Pohnpeians), but also of violence, prostitution, exploitation, crime. With these outsiders descending on an immunologically naive population, disaster, in the form of infectious disease, could not be long in coming. Half the population was wiped out by smallpox in 1854 following the arrival of the American whaler
Delta
, which landed six infected men on the island; and this was soon followed by epidemics of influenza and measles.
34
Barely a seventh of the population was left by the 1880
s
, and they might not have survived had it not been for the Scottish, English, and American missionaries who had started to come thirty years earlier, determined to bring morality to Pohnpei, turf out the beachcombers, stop sex and crime, and bring medical and spiritual aid to the beleaguered people of the island.

If the missionaries succeeded in saving Pohnpei physically (it was not totally destroyed, like Melville’s valley of the Typee), it may have been at another, spiritual cost. The traders and beachcombers had seen Pohnpei as a rich prize to plunder and exploit; the missionaries saw it as a prize too: an island of simple heathen souls waiting to be converted and claimed for Christ and country. By 1880 there were fourteen churches on Pohnpei, dispensing an alien mythology, morality, and set of beliefs to hundreds of converts, including several of the local chiefs; missionaries had been sent to Pingelap and Mwoakil as well. And yet, as with the Marranos in Spain, the old religion was not so easily denied; and beneath the veneer of an almost universal conversion, many of the old rites, the old beliefs, remained.

While beachcombers and missionaries were fighting it out, Germany had been quietly building an empire in the Carolines, based especially on the marketing of coconut meat, copra; and in 1885 she laid claim to Pohnpei and all the Carolines – a claim which was immediately contested by Spain. When papal arbitration awarded the Carolines to Spain, Germany withdrew, and a brief period of Spanish hegemony began. The Spanish presence was passionately resented, and there were periodic rebellions, quickly suppressed. The colonists fortified their district of Mesenieng (now renamed La Colonia), surrounding themselves with a high stone wall, which by 1890 encircled much of the town. A good part of the old wall survives today (though much of it was destroyed by later colonists and by Allied bombing in 1944); this, along with the bell tower of the old Catholic church, gave us some sense of La Colonia as it must have been a century ago.

Spanish rule in the Carolines was ended by the Spanish-American War, and the whole of Micronesia was sold to Germany for four million dollars (apart from Guam, which remained in American hands). Determined to mold Pohnpei into a profitable colony, the Germans instituted large agricultural schemes, uprooting acres of native flora to plant coconut trees and employing forced labor to build roads and public works. German administrators moved into the town, which they now renamed Kolonia.

A blow-up finally occurred in 1910, when the resentful people of Sokehs province gunned down the tyrannical new German district administrator and his assistant, along with two of their overseers. Reprisals were swift in coming: the entire population of Sokehs had its land confiscated, many were killed or exiled to other islands, the young men being sent to labor in the phosphate mines of Nauru, from which they returned, if at all, broken and destitute, a decade later. We were intensely conscious, wherever we walked, of Sokehs Rock – it looms massively to the northwest and forces itself upon the eye at every point in Kolonia – a reminder of the brutal German occupation and the hopeless uprising of the rebels, whose mass grave, we were told, lay just outside town.

We found oddly few reminders of the Japanese occupation, though of all the occupations, this most transformed Kolonia. It was difficult to visualize, as we wandered through the rundown, slow-paced town, the bustling place it had been in the 1930
s
, in the heyday of the Japanese occupation. Its population then had been swelled by ten thousand Japanese immigrants, and it was a thriving business and cultural center, full of commerce and recreation (including, I read, some twenty restaurants, fifteen dispensers of Japanese medicines, and nine brothels). The Pohnpeians themselves enjoyed little of these riches, and indeed were strictly segregated, with contact between Pohn-peian men and Japanese women totally prohibited.

The mark of occupation, of desecration, of conversion and exploitation, has been imprinted not only on the place, but on the identities of those who live here. There is another Colonia a few hundred miles away, on the island of Yap – there are Colonias and Kolonias all over Micronesia – and one elderly citizen there, when questioned by E.J. Kahn some years ago, said: ‘You know, we’ve learned in our day to be Spanish, and we’ve learned to be German, and we’ve learned to be Japanese, and now we’re learning to be American – what should we be preparing to learn to be next?’

The following day we set off for the rain forest with a botanist friend of Greg’s, Bill Raynor, and he brought along two Pohnpeian colleagues: Joakim, a medicine man, deeply knowledgeable about the native plants and their traditional uses, and Valentine, an expert on location, who seemed to know every inch of the island, where every plant was to be found, its favorite conditions, its relationship to all the other inhabitants of the ecosystem. Both men seemed to be born naturalists; in the West, they might have become doctors or botanists.
35
But here their powers had been molded by a different tradition – more concrete, less theoretical than ours, so that their knowledge was intimately bound up with the bodily and mental and spiritual balance of their people, with magic and myth, the sense that man and his environment were not separable, were one.

Bill himself came to Pohnpei as a volunteer Jesuit missionary, prepared to teach the natives about agricultural management and plant conservation. He had arrived with a sort of arrogance, he told me, flushed with the hubris of Western science, and then had been astonished, humbled, by finding in the local medicine men a vastly detailed and systematic knowledge of the plants on the island – they recognized dozens of different ecosystems, from the mangrove swamps and seagrass beds to the dwarf forests at the summit. Every plant on the island, Bill said, was considered significant and sacred; the vast majority were seen as therapeutic. Much of this he had discounted as mere superstition when he came to Pohnpei, but now he was more inclined to think in anthropological terms, and to see what he had first called ‘superstition’ as a highly developed ‘concrete science’ (in Levi-Strauss’ term), an immense system of knowledge and principles wholly different from his own.

Having come to teach, he found himself instead listening and learning, and after a while started to form fraternal or collegial relationships with the medicine men, so that their complementary knowledge and skills and attitudes could be joined. Such a working together is essential, he feels, the more so as Pohnpei is still formally owned by the nahnmwarkis, and without their willing cooperation, nothing can be done. In particular, he believes, a comprehensive investigation of all the plants in Pohnpei is needed to see whether any have unique pharmacological properties – and it is urgent to do so now, before the plants themselves, and knowledge about them, become extinct.

It has been similar, in a way, in the matter of religion. Arriving as a missionary with a firm conviction of the primacy of Christianity, Bill was struck (as many of his fellow missionaries have been) by the moral clarity of those he came to convert. He fell in love with and married a Pohnpeian woman, and has a whole clan now of Pohnpeian in-laws, as well as a fluent command of the language. He has lived here for sixteen years, and plans to remain for the rest of his life.
36

Islands were thought, in the eighteenth century, to be broken-off pieces of continent, or perhaps the peaks of submerged continents (and thus, in a sense, not islands at all but continuous with the main). The realization that for oceanic islands, at least, no such continuity existed – that they had risen as volcanoes from the depths of the ocean floor, and had never been part of the main, that they were
insulae
, insulated, in the most literal sense – was largely due to Darwin and Wallace and their observations of island fauna and flora. Volcanic islands, they made clear, had to start from scratch; every living creature on them had to make its way or be transported to them.
37
Thus, as Darwin noted, they often lacked entire classes of animals, such as mammals and amphibians; this was certainly true of Pohnpei, where there were no native mammals, other than a few species of bats.
38
The flora of oceanic islands was also quite restricted, compared to that of continents – though, because of the relatively ready dispersal of seeds and spores, not nearly to such a degree. Thus a considerable range of plants had made it to Pohnpei, and settled and survived, in the five million years that it had existed, and though the rain forest was not as rich as the Amazon’s, it was, nonetheless, quite remarkable – and no less sublime. But it was a rain forest of a peculiar sort, because many of the plants here occurred nowhere else in the world.