Getting Stoned with Savages (11 page)

I walked toward them, and as I neared the women they waved hello encouragingly. Between us there was a swift-moving stream that emptied into the ocean. How to ford it, I wondered, without drenching my clothes? It was waist deep. Boys were swimming and diving into the freshwater, and the women, who had been fishing with hand lines, gathered with great smiles of amusement, beckoning me across. I paced back and forth, searching for the shallowest crossing point. Giving up, I marched in, and noticing the mirth and laughter of my spectators as I emerged with sopping shorts, I felt very pleased that I was able to provide the afternoon entertainment.

“Alo, alo,” they said.

Most of the boys were naked, and they stopped their play for a moment. “Whiteman,” they whispered. I stifled an urge to say “Boo.”

“Yu tok-tok engglis?” I asked no one in particular. A half-dozen fingers pointed toward a shy young woman carrying a toddler. Her name was Sally, and she hailed from Paama, a small island to the east of Malekula. Her husband was from the village just up the hill.

“Is this a Small Namba village or a Big Namba village?” I asked her.

“This is a Small Namba village,” Sally said as her little boy and I made googly eyes at each other.

Though twenty-eight languages are spoken on Malekula, most of the island’s inhabitants are roughly divided among Small Nambas and Big Nambas. I found it curious that a people’s identity could be defined by the size of the leaf that men wore wrapped around their penises. And what exactly was the difference? Did the Big Nambas have more to hide, or were the Small Nambas just a little prouder of their members? Historically, the Small Nambas and the Big Nambas were engaged in constant warfare. The hatred seemed rather perplexing to me. “Hey, look,” I imagined a warrior saying. “He’s got a tiny leaf on his dick. Let’s eat him.” Clearly, this needed further investigating, but I sensed that this wasn’t quite the right forum for such a line of inquiry, and instead I asked about the fishing.

“Only small fish,” she said, showing me her catch, a handful of silvery fish, each no more than three inches long.

“Are there any sharks here?” I asked, getting to the crux of the matter.

“Yes. There are sharks.”

“Have there been any attacks recently?”

“Yes. A man was killed off Vao,” she said, pointing in the direction of the island, which lay a little ways to the north of Rose Bay. “And there was another who was killed off Atchin, and another off Wala.” Atchin and Wala were within hailing distance of where we stood. “There was also one whiteman who was bitten off Wala.”

“Really,” I said.

“Yes. He was bitten in the leg, but it wasn’t a shark.”

“What was it?”

“A barracuda.”

Well, that settled it. The ocean was placid and beckoning and alluring. And it was full of monsters. Nothing could induce me to take a swim here. On Tarawa, I had happily swum in an ocean that functioned as a toilet. True, that could kill you too. But it hardly compared to the terror of seeing a fifteen-foot tiger shark barreling toward your naked torso.

“Are there saltwater crocodiles to worry about too?” That would complete the tableau of oceanic terror for me. Crocodiles periodically swam down to Vanuatu from the Solomon Islands.

She laughed. “No, there are no crocodiles.”

“Well, thank goodness for that.”

I gave a thoughtful glance at the ocean, wondering about all that lurked below the surface, when I noticed something odd. The presence of Wala and Atchin and the encircling population of sharks suggested there was a coral reef. And if there was a reef, then there were fish, fish much larger than the meager pickings the women had managed to catch with their hand lines onshore. But there weren’t any canoes or boats of any kind. No one was on the water fishing, which seemed very strange to me. On Malekula people lived off what they caught and grew themselves, and so it seemed peculiar that no one was taking advantage of what I assumed would be a bountiful catch.

“Do the men here go out to catch fish beyond the reef?” I asked.

“Not very often,” Sally said.

“So who does the fishing?”

“We do.”

“And the gardening?”

“The women.”

“And the women take care of the children?”

“Yes,” she laughed.

“So what do the men do here?”

“They tell stories. And drink kava.”

There’s the good life.

“Look,” Sally said, pointing behind me. “Your friend is here.”

My friend? I had a friend on Malekula? Across the stream, my friend, a fleshy Ni-Vanuatu man of about forty with a bald dome that glistened in the sun, waved, encouraging me to cross. What, I thought, my friend doesn’t want to get his shorts wet? I bade goodbye to Sally and marched back through the stream to greet my friend, who was sitting on the sand, resting his legs.

“I am George,” he said curtly. “Do you have a Lonely Planet?”

I did indeed have the Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu. We had brought it out from the U.S. Remarkably, they had a chapter on Malekula, which I had read thoroughly, highlighting all the references—and there were many—to the dangers posed by sharks.

“Turn to page one-fourteen,” he said. “Do you see?” He jabbed at the page. “That’s me.”

The entry to which he referred read, in its entirety: “In the village on Wala Island, George’s Guestroom is small, for one or two people.”

“Well, George,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

We ambled along the beach back toward Rose Bay Bungalows, which was also described on page 114 of the Lonely Planet guide to Vanuatu, just below the entry for George’s Guestroom. “Traditional bungalows,” it read, along with “intoxicating surroundings” and, most important, “the food is good.” I thought of suggesting to George that it might be time to hire a new publicist.

“So what do you want to do on Malekula?” George asked. He was, apparently, the self-appointed guide for this part of the island.

“Well, I think I’d like to talk to a cannibal, if there happens to be one around.”

George nodded. “Yes, we eat the man here.”

Really.

“In time past.”

“Ah…well, is there anyone around who remembers eating a man?”

“Yes,” George said. “There is an old man on Wala Island. He eat the man.”

“Do you think I might be able to talk to him?” I asked hopefully. I hadn’t the remotest idea of what exactly I would say to him. Cultural sensitivity and cannibalism, I found, did not blend easily.

George indicated that it wouldn’t be a problem. This pleased me, and I happily agreed to all his suggestions for enhancing my stay on Malekula—kastom dancing, a trip to Wala Island. What I really wanted to do, however, was to learn as much about cannibalism as possible. I had read that there was an old cannibal village up in the hills above Wala.

“Botko,” George said. “It is a Small Namba cannibal village.”

“Could I go up there?”

“I will see.”

George joined me for dinner, canned corned beef and rice with slices of pumpkin and papaya, prepared by Peter’s daughter. I made a mental note to send a letter to Lonely Planet. This was the typical outer island grub I had been hoping to avoid eating. It was, in fact, that promising phrase “the food is good” that had induced me to stay here. What was it about Pacific Islanders and their canned corned beef? Paul Theroux theorized that the people of Oceania enjoyed corned beef because it reminded them of human flesh. Could be, I thought as I picked at the gristle. I washed the victuals down with rainwater. George and Peter spoke together in their language. It was quite a serious discussion, I gathered. At length, Peter said, “You want to speak to one old man who eat the man?”

“Yes,” I said, wiping my mouth. “If it’s not too much trouble. I’m curious about the traditional customs on Malekula.”

“That old man,” Peter said, “he died last month.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” I paused for a moment. “Is there anyone in this area who may have witnessed the eating of a man? Could I speak to that person?”

“Yes,” George said. “There is also an old woman on Wala Island who saw her father eat the man.”

“Do you think I might be able to speak to her?”

“Yes,” George said. “I will arrange it.”

He and Peter discussed the matter further. Something was afoot, I deduced. Either George really wanted to get me over to Wala Island, or Peter really didn’t want me talking to cannibals. I left them to their discussion, thanking them effusively for their hospitality, and made my way back to my bamboo bungalow.

Within moments I was pathetically lost. It was a moonless, overcast night. I had forgotten to bring the courtesy kerosene lantern, and I stumbled about in the darkness for a small eternity. Somehow I had lost the footpath. I walked into trees. I had a half-dozen thrilling encounters with spiderwebs. I found myself inches from toppling down a steep gully.
Okay,
I thought, listening to the waves fracturing on the beach.
The ocean is there. If I turn around and walk diagonally away from the ocean, I will reach the food hut, where Peter and George will be able to set me aright.
With a triumphant yelp, I eventually stumbled upon the food hut, only to encounter more darkness. Life on Malekula, I discovered, ended at sunset. Cautiously, I reentered the forest, straining my sensory capabilities as I sought to stay on the footpath. Whenever I was in doubt, I did a sort of crab walk, using my hands to figure out the path’s parameters. I did, of course, finally find my bungalow, where I spent a good ten minutes wrestling with a mosquito net, and when I heard the buzz of a mosquito ringing in my ear, I thought,
Please be on the outside of the net.
And then I smacked myself to sleep.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
spange led me up a bush trail to a dusty kastom village in the hills above Wala Bay.

“Here you will see the kastom dancing,” he said as I settled on a bench. “The men will wear their nambas.”

In his ship’s journal, Captain Cook described the nambas worn on Malekula:

The Men go naked, it can hardly be said they cover their Natural parts, the Testicles are quite exposed, but they wrap a piece of cloth or leafe round the yard which they tye up to the belly to a cord or bandage which they wear round the waist just under the Short Ribs and over the belly and so tight that it was a wonder to us how they could endure it.

This was my thinking exactly. How did they endure it? Just watching them dance made me wince. The dance seemed to involve much stomping and jogging. The chief, a slender man with a gray beard, provided percussion by pounding a tam-tam, or slit drum. The dance leader had a crown of bird feathers on his head, and periodically he led the others in a sort of swooning dive. It was meant to evoke the flight of an eagle, but frankly, the naked buttocks and bouncing testicles had a way of interrupting the image. It was remarkably different from the dancing I had known in Kiribati, a Micronesian country. As in Polynesia, the dancing there is very formal, highly choreographed, and often subtle. The dancing I was witnessing here seemed more of the make-it-up-as-I-go-along school. The next dance, however, I recognized immediately. It was the hokeypokey.
Put your left foot in, put your right foot out, now take it all out and shake it all about.
I couldn’t stop wincing. I made a mental note to send a carton of boxer shorts to the village as a humanitarian gesture.

The women then did a sitting dance that celebrated the yam harvest. The older women wore a thatch skirt and nothing else. The younger women—and I don’t want to suggest for a minute that I had been looking forward to seeing their breasts—wrapped their breasts in cloth, a circumstance I attributed to the insidious influence of missionaries on the young. Afterward, the dancers stood in a line. I shook their hands one by one, feeling very much like the queen of England visiting her far-flung subjects.

“The men,” George told me, “live on this side of the village.” He gestured toward several longhouses. “And the women live on the other side,” he said, pointing to the huts opposite the village clearing.

“What about the married couples?” I asked.

“It is the same. The men stay on this side, and the women on the other.”

“But what if they want to…you know…um, make babies?”

“When the man want to sleep with the woman,” George said, “they go into the bush.”

I tried imagining the arrangement. “Hey, honey. How about midnight under the banyan tree? What do you say? A little rumble in the jungle?”

“What about the children?” I asked. “Where do they live?”

“The children live with the women. But after the boys are circumcised, they live with the men.”

“And when are boys circumcised?”

“Sometime between the ages of nine and twelve,” he said. “It is a very important ceremony. Many pigs are killed.”

George showed me the longhouse where boys were brought after they were circumcised. It was adorned with masks and fern sculptures. It had a dirt floor and a thatch ceiling. “The boys are circumcised as a group, and after they are circumcised, they stay here for ten days. It is very difficult. It is the first time the boys are away from their mothers. And at night, we bother them.”