Demon Fish (5 page)

“I saw the sea, and my brother was there,” Solen recounts as we sit in front of the Tembin
houseboy
one night. “It took me two days to go out shark calling. The first day I went out, I tried to catch two, but there was some problem with the loop [that serves as the noose to trap the shark]. The second day it took me ten minutes to find the shark. There was a lot of rubbish in the ocean, so I paddled all the way through it and shook the rattle. Three sharks came up: I caught one, brought it into the canoe, and I killed it with the club.”

The shark Solen caught was nine feet long, enough to feed at least twenty people. “At that point there was no protein for the people,” he explains. “I was happy to give the people something to eat.”

But after taking the belly and dorsal fin that were due to him, Solen headed to the offices of Emirau Marine Products in Kavieng, where he got 20 kina, or about $7, for the fin. What started as a traditional funeral rite ended as a business deal in Emirau’s air-conditioned office, a place where an iPod sits precariously perched in its docking station near a set of dingy appliances.

Brian Green, the general manager of Emirau Marine Products, is a compact man of modest height who bustles with energy. He seems wired to explode at any moment—but in a good-humored sort of way, as if his anger at the outside world were a mix of resentment and affection for his fellow man. A self-described “Cockney from the East End of London” who has spent a decent chunk of his life in Australia and New Zealand, Green sees his business as a form of rape and pillage that will wipe out the oceans in a matter of time. It’s simply a question of supply and demand, he explains, sitting before his standard-issue desk.

“The market is voracious. Shark is under threat, shark fin is in very short supply, and the demand is getting bigger,” he says. “I think something drastic has to be done to protect the sharks. But nothing will.”

There are only three fin-trading outposts in Kavieng—in addition to Emirau Marine Products, there’s Tsang Sang and Darima Marine Products—and all of their managers are watching as fin supplies become scarcer. Like shark fin traders in Hong Kong and elsewhere, Green has noticed how the business has changed in recent years: “You don’t get nearly as much on offer, and what you get on offer is small.” As overfishing is depleting shark populations, the animals are getting smaller, and that’s translating into smaller fins. At this point Emirau trades less than a ton of shark fin a year because of the dwindling supply, while it annually sells sixteen tons of sea cucumber, another Chinese delicacy that hasn’t completely collapsed yet.

While men like Solen and Karasimbe might earn respect at home for their shark calling, Green pays little deference to the villagers who come into his Kavieng office to proffer the fins they’ve caught. He pays them anywhere from $28 to $100 for a kilo of dried fins and sends them on their way. He suspects most of them have abandoned their traditional fishing methods, using larger boats rather than the small, individual canoes that are required to comply with their long-held customs. And even if they do adhere to tradition, it doesn’t mean anything to Green. The idea that shark calling has religious significance, and that these men have mystic powers, is ludicrous to him. Instead, he suggests, they’re just in business like any other fishermen across the globe.

“Shark calling is bullshit,” he says, practically sputtering. “I can take you down to the wharf right now and rattle a Coke can, the sharks will come. The sharks come for the noise.” And when it comes to the boats his suppliers use to catch sharks, “it’s traditional to use canoes. It’s not traditional to use banana boats and motorboats. They’re killing them because there’s a demand for a product, and the product’s fin.”

There are moments when Green feels a twinge of conscience, like when Papua New Guinean authorities—in a rare instance of enforcement—confiscated an illegal Chinese shipment of marine life, depriving the smugglers of their profits. Instead, the Papua New Guinean officials put the cache of sea cucumbers, turtle shells, sea horses, and shark fins—“all this stuff that nobody ought to have,” in Green’s words—up for auction, and Green bought it. “I burned the turtle shells as an example to everybody,” Green says, with a modicum of pride. The rest he destroyed privately.

It’s unclear why Green makes this sort of distinction, that turtles and sea cucumbers deserve to be saved and sharks do not. To some extent this is the kind of contradictory reasoning many individuals and governments use when they make environmental decisions. Warm and cuddly animals should be spared; scary ones should die. But it’s also something I observed time and time again with people who make their living from the sea, whether they’re fishing it or trading in the goods that stem from fishing. None of these people can ignore the fact that the sea’s resources are dwindling, but they need to reconcile this knowledge with their own conscience. So they come up with some sort of rationalization: their own activities are making just a modest dent in the ocean; they’re not the ones driving the demand; or some other excuse. In each case, the final conclusion is the same: they’re not to blame for the ocean’s decline.

That’s why after Green burned the turtle shells he had purchased from authorities, he could go back to his office and continue trading other animals plundered from the sea, on the grounds that his company is different. Since Papua New Guinean law dictates only native residents can trade in shark fins, Emirau Marine Products’ principal owner is a Papua New Guinean. This, in Green’s mind, makes the business acceptable. “I work for a national company,” he says. “They do it because if not, someone from China will come in and do it anyway.”

And when it comes down to it, Green adds, the Chinese are to blame for putting the world in this fix: “You’ve got an emerging middle class, and they are demanding the products they think they need. It’s going to totally fuck the world as it is … It’s only getting worse. It’s a voracious demand that the world will never be able to satisfy.”

In fact, there’s evidence that artisanal fisheries across the continents—from Asia to Africa and North America—are collapsing as foreign, larger vessels come in and swoop up as many sharks and other fish as they can catch. According to the conservation group WildAid, coastal communities in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have experienced major declines in catches since 2001, which locals describe as ranging between 50 and 70 percent. In the Kenyan shark-fishing village of Ngomeni, industrial long-liners and shrimp trawlers have hampered local fishermen’s ability to feed their own village, let alone sell sharks for profit. In Papua New Guinea, a similar phenomenon is taking place. O’Rourke’s film charted the beginning of this trend in the early 1980s: the final scene captures a Chinese trader haggling with shark callers over the quantity of fins they have brought him. “You must supply at least half a ton or a ton, and then I can give you the world market price,” the trader tells them. As O’Rourke relates, the fins that once served as trophies the men kept in their communal shark-calling quarters have been gathered up and taken to traders in town, as the villagers adjust to a modern, cash-based society: “The fins have come down from the traditional place in the man’s house, because there are taxes and school fees to pay, and new pleasures that only money can buy.”

Cassie Rose, an Australian conservationist now based in Port Moresby, agrees with Green’s assessment. As we sit over drinks at Port Moresby’s Royal Papua Yacht Club (members only, with a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II just to remind guests it is, in fact, a royal yacht club), she looks glumly out at the port that gives Papua New Guinea’s capital its name. “There’s so much illegal fishing in this country it’s outrageous,” Rose says. “Vessels from Asian waters come in, pay a pittance to some locals, rape and pillage, and then they’re out of there. This nation has no chance.”

Men like Karasimbe are less gloomy, because for them shark calling still possesses a sense of magic. Speaking by lamplight one night at his sister’s house, where Laura and I are staying, he tries to explain to me why he goes through so many rites before heading out to sea. “You are paying homage to Moroa, to ask him to give you something,” he says. “You will feel something in your body, and your heart.”

As the sun sets during his traditional offering rite the night before he hunts, Karasimbe prepares a fire into which he throws a piece of taro root or fish. “You will call your ancestor and say, ‘That’s your piece of taro, that’s your piece of fish.’ You tell him, ‘I want one shark tomorrow, you will give me a shark tomorrow.’ And you will be successful. When I make magic, every shark in the sea must come.”

This spiritual connection, Karasimbe suggests, is what sets him apart, both from other villagers and from the few Westerners who come to learn about his practice. “I’m the power maker. I’m the man; I can do something. The power is in me,” he says, pointing to his chest.

There is no question in my mind that Karasimbe believes he’s endowed with special powers and that it is central to his identity. It’s key not just to his self-esteem but to how everyone else views him here. When Karasimbe orders a community viewing of a foreign documentary on shark calling that has a few shots of him in it, everyone in Tembin shows up. They see him as a sort of spiritual medium: it’s not as if he’s a religious authority who tells people how to behave, but he connects them to the departed in a way few others can.

Karasimbe does not use shark calling as an escape from the travails of everyday life. To the contrary: he sees it as something that orders his world and that of others. And he views it as critical to the survival of a culture that is eroding.

As we talk, I stare at his chest: its gray hair is reflecting the light from the coal-fired lamp. Like many Papua New Guineans, Karasimbe does not know his exact age, and estimates he was born around 1945. “Sorry, I don’t know,” he says. He is still physically fit, but his eyes are clouding over with glaucoma, and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he and the handful of remaining shark callers can train younger men to take their places. “It’s our main job,” he says, even more important than catching sharks for the villagers.

But Karasimbe is also trying to make a buck. I am paying him to stay in his sister’s home and for his services as a translator. And he has the improbable dream of running a sort of rustic B&B in Tembin, where tourists would pay to come and witness shark calling for themselves. It’s understandable that he’s trying to cash in on his most marketable skill, given the fact that Papua New Guinea has shifted from bartering to a cash-based economy. In the unlikely event that he succeeds, it will exact a much lighter toll on sharks than the Asian vessels that come and troll the waters off New Ireland.

Karasimbe, like Toxok and others, worries the underwater mineral mining that is likely to commence soon, along with the Taiwanese trawlers that already fish off the coast, will kill many sharks. But as long as there are shark callers, he insists, the sharks will survive. “We will call out all the sharks in the province and bring them together, and we will have many sharks again,” he predicts.

The next day we are headed out to sea.

It is just after 7:00 a.m. when Selam Karasimbe pushes off from shore in the narrow, bleached-wood canoe he had borrowed from a neighbor. Karasimbe has his own boat, complete with the outrigger that gives him crucial balance when he is fighting a shark hand to hand. But a recent storm damaged his
lesim
, so he is paddling in a newish one, pointed paddle in hand.

Having performed his rituals onshore, Karasimbe moves rapidly through the water, going farther and farther because the water is rougher than he’d like on this summer morning. Sitting in separate canoes with different shark callers, Laura and I keep a respectful distance. Since women are considered bad luck when it comes to shark calling, we’re hoping to avoid tainting the process by staying as far away as possible from Karasimbe’s canoe. As we make our way out to sea, we can hear the beating of drums and young voices in the distance: a group of local children are practicing a musical performance, unaware of our expedition.

After several minutes of paddling, Karasimbe finds a place to stop. He takes out his
larung
, a rattle composed of two hoops of cane strung with coconut half shells in alternating concave and convex positions. The rattle is surprisingly loud as Karasimbe begins the ritual he has performed hundreds of times before, twisting the rattle from side to side as he bangs it against the boat. The coconut shells dance together, swaying back and forth hypnotically. Then Karasimbe plunges the
larung
into the water in short bursts, its sound reverberating throughout the ocean. This is the noise that is meant to lure the sharks: Papua New Guineans believe it resembles the sound of a school of fish in trouble.

No sharks appear. Karasimbe repeats the rattle ritual more than half a dozen times in different spots, each time going farther and farther away from land. At one point he plunges his hand into the water, pulls up something, and calls me over. Once I catch up with him, he holds out his palm, and I peer into it. There’s a tiny hermit crab lying on his calloused hand, and this creature, Karasimbe tells me, has come to convey a message.

“This is the little hermit crab that lives on the skin of the shark,” he explains. “She came up to tell us the shark is below but will not come up because there is a problem with someone in the party.”

“Is it because there are women in the party?” I ask, bracing for a lecture.

“Maybe a woman jumped over the canoe,” he replies, citing one of the more common explanations for why shark-calling expeditions fail.

It’s a polite excuse. For whatever reason, the world-famous shark caller has come up empty.

But a few hours later, I get my hopes up when I hear the strangled bellowing of a conch coming from the beach. Maybe someone’s caught a shark after all, I think to myself, and I rush down to the beach to see whether a canoe’s coming onshore. But I find only Solen’s ten-year-old son, who’s named Alois Talin, breathing into the pinkish shell. It’s just a game for him, his small cheeks swelling with air as he imitates his elders.