Fresh Air Fiend (3 page)

One of the witnesses, Kirupano Eza'e, said, "Once they had gone, the people sat down and developed stories. They knew nothing of white-skinned men. We had not seen far places. We knew only this side of the mountains. And we thought we were the only living people. We believed that when a person died, his skin changed to white and he went over the boundary to 'that place'—the place of the dead. So when the strangers came we said, 'Ah, these men do not belong to the earth. Let's not kill them—they are our own relatives.'" Another man, Gopie Ataiamelaho, said, "I asked myself: who are these people? They must be somebody from the heavens. Have they come to kill us or what? We wondered if this could be the end of us, and it gave us a feeling of sorrow. We said, 'We must not touch them!' We were terribly frightened."

They had to be from the sky—where else could they have come from? Also, some people took the white men to be incarnations of a mythical being, Hasu Hasu, associated with lightning.

This parallels the Hawaiian belief that Captain Cook, in the year of first contact, 1778, was the god Lono—he seemed to have all the attributes, and he was feared until he too was discovered to be mortal. On an earlier voyage, in October 1769, when Cook arrived at Turranga Nui in what is now New Zealand, the Maori thought these Englishmen were
atua,
supernatural beings, or perhaps
tipuna,
ancestors who were revisiting their homeland. Cook's ship, the
Endeavour,
was taken to be a floating island, the sacred island Waikawa, and the crew to be
tupua,
or goblins. In 1517, the year of their first contact, the Aztecs took the Spaniards to be avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, god of learning and of wind.

Even today the word for foreigner or white man in Samoan is
palangi
(a related word,
papalangi,
is used in Tonga), meaning "sky burster," a person who comes from the clouds, not a terrestrial creature.
Haole
—white person, in Hawaiian—means "of another breath." The polar Inuit assumed that they were the only people in the world, so when they saw their first white stranger, the explorer Sir William Parry, in 1821, they said to him, "Are you from the sun or the moon?"

Dim-dim,
in Trobriand, means someone not human, not at all like the Trobrianders, who trace their origins to ancestors who rose from holes in the northern part of the main island. The Naskapi Indians of Labrador thought the first white men were ghosts, because ghosts were white too, and fairly common. The writer Larry Millman, who collected oral accounts of the Naskapi around Davis Inlet in Labrador, told me that as a result of this belief, "the Naskapi kept bumping into their white visitors, who were Oblate fathers, because they thought they could walk right through them, as in fact they could walk through ghosts." Today in Hong Kong, the word
gweilo
is used for a white person or foreigner; it means "ghost man."

The more isolated a people, the greater the emphasis on a stranger's being benign. I am not referring to their near neighbors, with whom they tended to be in conflict—as in New Guinea and elsewhere—but rather to the hard-to-account-for person of another color who invariably is first seen as a spirit of a dead ancestor, then as a patron with goods to share, next as a pest, and finally as a threat. As they met more foreigners, the Inuit began to see them as fellow humans, but different; the widely used Inuit word for white person is
kabloona
(derived from
qallunaat),
which means something like "eyebrow stomachs," probably a reaction to whites' hairy bodies by the almost hairless Inuit.

In general, the more contact a people have with foreigners, the more they lose their innocence regarding the strangers' motives, and this cynicism is usually reflected in their language. The late-medieval book of travels attributed to Sir John Mandeville has proven to be a compilation of travel narratives from many sources, and, along with the actual accounts of early (thirteenth- and fourteenth-century) travelers to China, includes medieval fantasies about cannibals, one-eyed men, and dog-headed people. Among others, Shakespeare used the more outlandish details in his work—Caliban is taken straight from Mandeville.

Columbus's descriptions of the islanders he encountered in the West Indies show him to have been heavily influenced by Mandeville. He asserted that he saw one-eyed men, and cannibals, and dog-nosed individuals. He was also influenced by Marco Polo, and using his copy of Marco Polo's
Travels
as confirmation, Columbus thought he might be in Asia. Some islanders he took to be soldiers of the Great Khan. It was important for Columbus to establish the myth of Carib cannibalism, for then Spain could enslave the people on grounds that they were savages. This same logic applied in the Pacific (New Hebrides is the most dramatic example), where the apparent existence of cannibalism justified intense missionary activity, or slavery, or both.

Anthropological stereotyping is not new, but one of its symmetries is that when an isolated people are visited, and they discover that the visitors are not gods or ancestors or goblins but are people looking for gold, land, or souls to save—usually all three—they tend to protect themselves, and for defending their homes they are termed "cruel," "brave," "bloodthirsty," "warlike," or "savages." The word in Italian for slave
(schiave)
is related to the word for Serbian
(Schiavone),
as in English (from Latin) "slave" is related to "Slav"—so many Slavs had been enslaved that the words became synonymous, as "barbarian" has its roots in "bearded"—the hairy enemy. And "bugger" is related to "Bulgar."

This European stereotyping is shared by the Arabs and the Chinese. In China there are many words for foreigner, from the generic
wei-guo ren
to the words for "red-haired devil," "white devil," and "big nose." It cannot be a mere coincidence that all these Europeans, Arabs, and Chinese live in places that have been crossroads for foreign travelers, and enemies. Unlike the New Guinea highlanders and the Inuit, they were well aware that there were others in the world.

The Arabic language reflects this worldliness: "foreigner" is
ajnabi,
and the root means something like "people to avoid." Another such word is
ajami,
which means foreigners, barbarians, people who speak Arabic badly, and Persians.
Gharib,
stranger, is related to
gharb,
the West, in the sense of "a person from the West." ("East" appears to have more friendly connotations in Arabic.) But the point is clear: linguistically, first contact exemplifies a kind of innocence, and nothing intensifies xenophobia more than seeing strangers as a threat.

"Every stranger is an enemy," a notion I have encountered in my travels in various cultures, achieved its cruelest expression in Nazism. In his preface to
Survival in Auschwitz
(also titled
If This Is a Man),
Primo Levi discusses this delusion. He writes, "For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the
Lager
"
—
the Nazi extermination camp.

It is rare to find the opposite view, but not long ago, Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, wrote in his essay "Compassion and the Individual": "All that is necessary is for each of us to develop our good human qualities. I try to treat whoever I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion."

But I was not embraced as a traveler. I was seen as a stranger, sometimes a dangerous one. My experience of that conflict made me a writer.

 

One of the paradoxes of otherness is that in travel, each conceives the other to be a foreigner. But even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life. Every day we meet new people and are insulted or misunderstood; we are thrown upon our own resources. In the coming and going of daily life we rehearse a modified version of the dramatic event known as first contact. In a wish to experience otherness to its limit, to explore all its nuances, I became a traveler. I was as full of preconceived notions as Columbus or Crusoe—you can't help it, but you can alter such thoughts. Non-travelers often warn the traveler of dangers, and the traveler dismisses such fears, but the presumption of hospitality is just as odd as the presumption of danger. You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.

It was as a solitary traveler that I began to discover who I was and what I stood for. When people ask me what they should do to become a writer, I seldom mention books—I assume the person has a love for the written word, and solitude, and disdain for wealth—so I say, "You want to be a writer? First leave home."

 

Except for "Down the Yangtze," all the pieces in this book were written since my previous collection,
Sunrise with Seamonsters
(1985). I have placed them thematically, in a way that seems right to me, rather than putting them in chronological order.

O
NE OF THE MORE
bewildering aspects of growing older is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened.

Of course, this is also the case when you are younger, but it is only with the passage of time that you're sure of the lie. I was driving up to Amherst with my parents a few years ago to accept an honorary degree, and my mother, who was excited and talkative, said, "I always knew you were going to be a writer."

I said to myself,
No you didn't. You always said I was going to be a doctor.

My father said, "Yep, you always had your nose in a book."

I said to myself,
No I didn't.

When I got to Amherst, one of the officials said, "Remember when we arrested you at that demonstration?" And he laughed. "That was something!"

I said to myself,
It was horrible. About fourteen people on the whole campus protesting what was the beginning of the Vietnam War, and everyone else calling us Commies. The so-called student left was composed of freaks, misfits, kids with glasses and hideous haircuts, dope smokers, a jazz pianist, and a handful of Quakers. I had the glasses and the haircut. It was no joke. My uncle in Boston heard about my arrest on the radio, and he called my parents, and people said, "This is going to affect your whole future." My whole future!

Someone else that weekend said, "Well, when you were editor of the student newspaper..."

I said to myself,
I was never editor ofthe student newspaper, which was
actually quite a prestigious post and much more respectable than anything I would have chosen or been given.

I think perhaps I have made my point, and I don't want to belabor it. But the subject has been on my mind a great deal lately: I have just turned fifty years old. Who wrote this?

 

Fifty: it is a dangerous age—for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn the lights on because he'll see the cockroaches he smells. The man of fifty has the most to say, but no one will listen. His fears sound incredible because they are so new—he might be making them up. His body alarms him; it starts playing tricks on him, his teeth warn him, his stomach scolds, he's balding at last; a pimple might be cancer, indigestion a heart attack, he's feeling an unapparent fatigue; he wants to be young but he knows he ought to be old. He's neither one and terrified. His friends all resemble him, so there can be no hope of rescue. To be this age and very far from where you started out, unconsoled by any possibility of a miracle—that is bad; to look forward and start counting the empty years left is enough to tempt you into some aptly named crime, or else to pray. Success is nasty and spoils you, the successful say, and only failures listen, who know nastiness without the winch of money. Then it is clear: the ship is swamped to her gunwales, and the man of fifty swims to shore, to be marooned on a little island, from which there is no rescue, but only different kinds of defeat.

 

I wrote that in my novel
Saint Jack
when I was twenty-nine years old, and I think it is inaccurate as it applies to me—I cannot identify with that person or relate to that state of being middle-aged and clapped out. Nor can I share even remotely the sense of loss Philip Larkin expresses in his fiftieth-birthday poem, "The View":

 

The view is fine from fifty,
   Experienced climbers say;
So, overweight and shifty,
   I turn to face the way
   That led me to this day.

 

Instead of fields and snowcaps
   And flowered lanes that twist,
The track breaks at my toe-caps
   And drops away in mist.
   The view does not exist.

 

Where has it gone, the lifetime?
   Search me. What's left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I'm
   Able to view that clear:
   So final. And so near.

 

These sentiments give me the willies. Larkin at fifty seems to regard his life as just about over. I do not feel that way; I hope I never do. I have always felt—physically at least—in the pink, no matter what my age. One line in
Saint Jack
goes, "Fiction gives us the second chances that life denies us," and this remark, which I regard as prescient, is one of the themes of this excursion today.

When I began writing
Saint Jack
in 1970, one of my friends was turning fifty in Singapore, and it seemed to me, I suppose, salutary to observe that climacteric, for as I say, one of the strangest aspects of growing older is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened—and worse, they ignore what actually took place. The invented reminiscence of "I'll never forget old what's-his-name" has a cozy quaintness and seems harmless enough, but the element of self-deception in it can lead you badly astray.