Empire of the East (35 page)

The admiration Wyn Sargent felt for the Chief must have been returned, for in January 1973, after a few weeks of courtship, they were married. Despite her long experience of such tribal matters, Wyn seems to have been surprised that there were no formal speeches, and that all that was required of her, apart from a simple announcement, was to put herself on display before the tribe wearing a
yokal,
a married woman’s skirt, the equivalent in the Baliem of a marriage document. Picturesque in its simplicity as this arrangement undoubtedly was, certain drawbacks soon appeared in Wyn Sargent’s case. The
yokal
as worn by Dani women leaves much of the buttocks and pubic region in sight, and it is a mystery to most newcomers including myself how it is ever kept in place. Notwithstanding her sympathy with the culture into which she was marrying, she found this garment more than she could take. ‘To accommodate my Western modesty,’ she says, ‘the
yokal
was remodelled. I wanted the skirt high and long.’

It took the ladies of the village eight hours to accomplish this. Each strand and fibre had to be placed in a certain way, and although, she says, the result was beautiful, the fibres scratched and itched, and the skirt weighed seven pounds. ‘To marry a common man was one thing,’ Wyn says, ‘but to marry into royalty another.’ Status obliged her to wear fifteen ceremonial carrying nets suspended from the forehead down the back, each net weighing two pounds. ‘Walking was more in the nature of shuffling than anything else. I had to be steered by four women.’ She also refused to surrender her brassière, but the Danis put up with this, and it even started a brief fashion for bras among Obaharok’s women.

There were attempts at a ritual distribution of Wyn Sargent’s Western garments worn prior to her marriage, and presumed to retain a residue of magic power. Kelion, one of the sub-chiefs, was after the shirt worn before her adoption of the
yokal.
‘ “Since you are my sister,” he said with sad, innocent eyes, “you must give me a piece of your old clothing.” This is the custom. Girls give their
thali
(virginal grass skirts) to their families when they are put in
yokals.
“You can give me your shirt.” He settled for a pair of socks.’

The wedding ceremony was officially over when the last
yokal
knot was tied round my waist and Obaharok had killed his pig … It was a glorious event which continued for nearly one month … During that month the tribes of Kolo, Keliom, Walek and Obaharok streamed across the valley to attend the pig feasts which celebrated the wedding. Many of those previously hostile warriors became brothers, an accomplishment achieved through the Dani cultural laws.

Alas, Wyn’s strident championship of the Dani cause inevitably put an end to the tribal peace ushered in by this symbolical union of divergent cultures. The order of banishment from the valley was delivered by a policeman who fired two gunshots over the village. She flew out and the next day the Indonesian Antara news agency, quoted in
The Times,
reported that ‘she had been ordered to leave the jungle where she lives, because her activities are detrimental to the development of the region’. The agency said:

Miss Sargent had created a stir by announcing that she would shed her Western clothes and wear only leaves and strings to follow the customs of her husband Obaharok, chief of the Mulia tribe. This infuriated community leaders who said her action would hamper efforts to civilize the region. Miss Sargent, aged 42, from Huntingdon Beach, California, had been in West Irian for four months to conduct researches on the sex life of tribes there.

Antara also said she claimed

that her marriage to the already much-married chieftain was not based on love. It was intended to bring together three opposing tribes near Wamena in the mountainous interior of the province and also to promote relations between Indonesia and the United States. What had attracted her most, she said, were the art and culture of the West Irianese rather than the sexual life of the tribal community.

Obaharok’s territory lay to the north of the valleys beyond the frontier of the rich Baliem harvests, and on my way to visit him I passed through a borderland where the surroundings departed from the trim good-order of the Wamena area to become a little untidy. Nevertheless they possessed great charm. No one seemed to have staked out claims in this region of sparse woodland, ponds topped with the enormous leaves of aquatic plants, trees mantled to their topmost branches with ferns, and swamps to be crossed, with some small hazard, over slippery, half-submerged logs. There was a constant coming and going of men — Danis have never become accustomed to their nakedness — hugging themselves against the mountain chill. Women were much better off in this respect, with their grass skirts and layers of fat. All were exceedingly pleasant, the men in particular rushing to the rescue when anyone happened, as in my case, to slip off a log. The women were on their way to market with piglets in baskets and it was here for the first time that I saw a woman suckling one. The sight was all the more unexpected as she appeared well into middle age. The Dani interpreter took this up with her, to receive the good-humoured reply, ‘I can’t produce milk any more, but this keeps him quiet.’

A brook curled through the invisible frontier dividing rich valley soil from sparse mountain fields, and I crossed this on a swaying rattan bridge that inspired little confidence. Ahead almost treeless terrain sloped away into the far distance, where that majestic escarpment known as the Mountain Wall seals off the Baliem from the alpine tundra of the North. Clouds lay, as they would all day, like dimpled snow between the peaks. This was a new world of new colour. The Baliem was green and black — the black of rich, freshly upturned earth, and the green of new growth sprouting everywhere. In the Obaharok territory ahead polished ribs of limestone showed through the earth’s surface, and great swathes of weeds flourished, turned yellow and died. Obaharok’s land was the colour of pale saffron, with the great cobalt shadows of the clouds drifting across the fields. It had been spoken of as a hard place to live in, and it produced men, like the Chief of the Mulia, who were tougher and more inclined to assert themselves than the valley people.

After an easy couple of miles uphill I found myself among Obaharok’s fields, enclosed in their scrupulous drystone walls, and soon the compound came into sight. It was hardly distinguishable in arrangement from Da-Uke’s, although on a lesser scale; a village in miniature with women busy at small tasks, naked children chasing each other, and lively, skittish pigs trotting in an orderly way in one direction or another. Obaharok awaited me in a species of arbour newly erected at the entrance to the men’s house. Normally the floor of such a construction, as in the case of the houses themselves, would have been strewn with fresh hay, but on this occasion, probably due to the heat of the day, I was invited to join the Chief and chosen members of his household, who were reclining on a bed of damp leaves.

Obaharok was a man of striking appearance, possibly in his late seventies, with the first signs of wasting in an athletic body, an exceptionally high forehead, grey, divided beard, a reflective expression, and — for his age — the most astonishingly white and perfect teeth. Age often seems to lessen the separations of race, and in this case I was reminded of the face of a Western saint carved in its niche in a cathedral façade. Nestling close among the leaves was Acu, the youngest of his wives — now reduced to five — who wore a new
yokal
correctly showing a four-inch division of the buttocks. Smiling notables presented themselves to be introduced, among them an excited dwarf covered from head to toe with monstrous ganglions. We all prized each other’s faeces.

Obaharok had been promised a meeting with an English warrior and I suspected a certain perplexity in his manner as he studied my face and physique, tried to sum me up, and drew his own conclusions. But good manners quickly vanquished doubt and we launched — in so far as a tenth-rate interpreter permitted it — into an amiable discussion of his life. Previous experience had prepared him for a fresh raking-over of the coals of the Wyn Sargent affair, in which some degree of banality was hard to avoid.

A problem for the foreigner arises among country-folk of the Baliem Valley owing to the absence of any of the trivial abnormalities of daily life that ease the flow of conversation elsewhere in the world. The weather is always the same, there is no news and there are no problems to discuss; in the absence of seasons, crops grow all the year round, gardens produce an unvarying yield of four kinds of vegetables which fill the stomachs of those who grow them to repletion. There are no noxious animals in the valley, even destructive rabbits are absent, and plagues of locusts are unknown. Previous to this I had accepted the common theory that ritual warfare was nature’s method of adjusting population to resources, but now I was becoming inclined to the view that it could also be a defence against ennui, and that it was long vacuums of experience that encouraged the Dani extravagance of conduct in other directions: the wildness of their delight, the uncontrollability of their grief, the strength of their friendships, and their taste for long-delayed Mafia-style revenge. It occurred to me that even Obaharok’s flamboyant and eccentric marriage to a young anthropologist may have been another example of the Dani battle with vexation of the spirit, an attempt to recreate the excitements of his vanished campaignings in the field.

In the total absence of small-talk Wyn Sargent still held the field as a conversational topic, so I took the easy way out, plunged in and asked Obaharok if he had news of her. With obvious regret he replied that he had none. Like all the Danis, time, for which they had so little use, had come hardly to exist. The nineteen years that had passed since her departure had been shortened by lack of incident. There were no longer guarded watchtowers over his fields, and the blood debts incurred in the local wars had been settled. It was clear that he was trying to focus the date of her going among the other events scattered in the deep space of his mind. Her presence had made its impact, and left its mark. He thought that she had stayed in the house he had specially built for her for about a year. The marriage, he said, had been very happy. She and the ten other wives had lived together in the greatest imaginable harmony. This he repeated several times.

Acu, the current senior wife, seized on this matter of harmony in a polygamous household, when — inexplicably to her — it might have been called into question. They all lived together, worked together and brought up their children together in complete happiness, she insisted. Wyn had only been given a separate house because that was the way foreigners lived, but she would have been more than welcome to join the other wives in the women’s house. And this may well have been the case, according to Father Lieshout, the Franciscan missionary whom I saw later. Harmony in a Dani compound, he assured me, was the normal thing. Sexual jealousy was rare, and he believed (as others had reported) that sexual activity was in any case maintained at a lower level than in Western societies.

Obaharok seemed to be tiring. We broke off for a while to stretch our legs and dry off the patches of clothing made damp by contact with the sodden leaves. Small pigs, grunting and whimpering in ecstasy, fussed around us like dogs. (There is a tendency in such Papuan communities to overindulge them until, having tied them in a position offering the best target, the archer approaches with bent bow.) The dwarf with the ganglions capered about us waving his arms. A large long-legged spider leaped on me, scampering up to my chest before being cuffed away, and even then, to the huge amusement of my Dani friends, returning twice to the attack. Women with bunches of twigs were brushing away to remove every fallen leaf, every alien speck from the floor of the compound. Two young children who had come by a box of matches were striking them one after another and sniffing at the smoke. Obaharok wandered round on the arms of two of his friends. I had presented him with a radio which he believed to be a camera. He started to talk about the wars, although what came through in translation was largely gibberish. He promised to show me his fetiches, which as a Catholic he had been allowed, like Da-Uke, to keep, but this he forgot.

It was the personality of Acu that counted in this little community. She was extremely genial, lively and nimble, although old enough to have a grand-daughter who was an expert sniffer of matches. Acu kept her hands out of sight, giving rise to the suspicion that she had suffered ritual mutilation in the mourning rites of childhood — a possibility strengthened by an unusual arrangement of her hair with which she covered her ears. She was in no way averse to a discussion of this matter, probably even eager to ventilate a topic that had been dismissed from mind for so many years. There was a trace of almost ghoulish satisfaction in her description of childhood sufferings — although it later transpired that the details illustrated by theatrical gestures had largely been forgotten. Acu was on her feet, eyes starting from her head, as she recreated phantom images of a child’s terror, the spurting blood, the snap of a stone axe on shattered bone. Between us, as always, stretched the barrier of language, with the interpreter rummaging among a tiny vocabulary to come up with the wrong word used in the wrong place and a result that so often came close to absurdity. The following is the simplest possible version of what was said.

NL: How
did you come to lose your fingers?

ACU:
I had four cut off when my grandfather died. That left only two for my father. I don’t know how old I was. I was just a very young girl.

I had read that it was usual to reduce the pain of such operations by tying the finger with a ligature below the joint to be severed; then immediately before the amputation striking the elbow over the ulnar nerve. I asked if this had been done.

ACU:
No nothing. These four were cut off all at the same time. Like this … One by one they were cut off. My grandfather was a good man and I loved him, so they cut off my fingers. When he died I put my hand on a piece of wood like this, then one by one they were cut off. This was done because I was sad, and to appease the ancestors.