Getting Stoned with Savages (17 page)

“But how did the missionaries learn about Jesus of Tanna?” I asked.

“Jesus flew from Tanna to the land of white man on top of a rainbow.”

This was not a point we could argue. And the fact that Jesus was from Tanna…well, there are many Americans who believe that God is an American. What was odd about this, however, was that it seemed to refute all that we had heard and read about the John Frum Movement.

“What about John Frum?” Sylvia asked.

“He was a prophet.”

“And do you dance on Friday nights?” I inquired.

“Yes, all through the night.”

“And do the women drink kava?”

“Yes, women drink the kava.”

Thank goodness for that. But still, we found what he had said rather odd. What we didn’t know at the time was that the John Frum Movement was on the cusp of a schism. Chief Fred had become, in his own way, a Christian. Another chief, Chief Isaac, accused Chief Fred of heresy. Each had his followers, and soon tensions rose. Not long after we left, Chief Isaac and his followers, the true believers of John Frum, were compelled to leave Sulphur Bay. They created a new John Frum village closer to the volcano. And then the two factions began to fight each other with axes and knives, fists and arrows. Police were flown in from Port Vila. War in Vanuatu, whether between tribes or among religions, remains a serious business on the islands. The future began to look bleak for the John Frum Movement.

On that day, however, we had no intimation of what was to follow. Instead, as we rolled over the Ash Plain, under the simmering volcano, back toward Port Resolution, we and William spent the ride trying to figure out a point Chief Fred had missed: Where was Jerusalem?

ONE MORNING ON TANNA,
we found ourselves in Yakel, a kastom village in the interior of the island, watching several men wearing nothing more than a namba shuffle and hop, performing what was allegedly an important traditional dance. Yakel is indeed a kastom village—“a glimpse into the Stone Age,” as one enthusiastic visitor had put it. We had been shown where boys were sequestered after their circumcisions. On Malekula it had been a longhouse. In Yakel, it was a treehouse. The villagers’ cyclone shelters were located deep within the roots of massive banyan trees. The homes were rudimentary lean-tos, as likely to be inhabited by piglets as by children. The village itself was a muddy enclave hidden in the depths of the forest.

And yet Yakel accepted visitors. Indeed, when we arrived at a trailhead near the village, we were obliged to bang on the tam-tam. I wasn’t sure why. To give them a chance to get decent? But no—what the tam-tam said to the village of Yakel was that it was time to get ready. It was showtime. The dance area was a lofty plateau with a glorious view of Mount Yasur huffing and puffing in the distance. But as we watched the leaping buttocks and the recoiling testicles, it was hard to feel as if we were participating in anything other than a peculiar peep show.

“You may take the pictures here,” our guide said.

A thousand pictures must have been snapped over the years of the half-naked savages, dancing with their spears, framed by the smoking eminence of Mount Yasur. “And they were cannibals too,” one can imagine a colonist from New Caledonia saying with a smirk.

Indeed, they were. It was one of the first things the islanders had asked Captain Cook:
Do you eat people too?

Now, though, the village had the air of spectacle about it.
Yes, we wear no clothes. Yes, we believe in spirits—1,000 vatu, please.
It wasn’t the villagers I reproached for this but us, the visitors, the voyeurs. I felt awkward being in Yakel. Whenever a visitor arrived, the villagers stopped what they were doing and did a little dance
—You can see their balls! The women don’t cover their breasts!—
and you got the sense that now that you had been divested of your vatu, they’d prefer that you just shuffle along.

On the morning we visited, however, only a handful of men and women were present in the village, tending to the business of hopping around for travelers.

“Where are the children?” I asked our guide. “Where are the other people?”

“They are at the Nekowiar.”

“The Nekowiar? There’s a Nekowiar this year?”

What luck, we thought. A Nekowiar—an elaborate three-day alliance-making ceremony between two villages—occurs only every three or four years. We had heard rumors in Vila that there was to be one this year. The exact date was always uncertain. The Nekowiar was, we were told, Vanuatu’s grandest bacchanal, and on our return to Port Resolution, we hastily made arrangements with William to move to the other side of the island, near the village of Yaohnanen, deep in the hills, which was hosting the Nekowiar.

“Welcome,” said the chief of Yaohnanen when we arrived the following day, muddy and steaming with sweat from the climb up to the village. We had gone as far as we could in the back of a pickup truck until the wheels spun out in the mud. From there, it was another mile of trekking, and we joined hundreds of Ni-Vanuatu marching up the hillside like pilgrims, listening to the songs, the energy emanating from somewhere deeper in the forest. As we neared the village clearing we passed hundreds of snorting and braying pigs enclosed in bamboo pens. These hirsute, tusked swine were soon to be clubbed to death.

“It is still safe,” the chief assured us on our arrival. This, of course, suggested that at some point it would also become unsafe. We made a mental note to inquire about this. The chief assigned us a guide, a teenage boy named Kelso. His duty was less to answer our questions than to ensure that we stayed out of the way. As we soon saw, there were more than a thousand people in the tiny village. In the center of the clearing nearly a hundred women, painted and layered with ornaments, swirled in their grass skirts, performing a dance created solely for this Nekowiar.

“This is the
napen-napen,
” Kelso informed us. “Today the women dance, tomorrow the men dance the
toka,
and then with first light there will be the
nao.
”

We weren’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but we paid it no mind and simply watched, fascinated. On the periphery, men taunted the women, who continued to move with a rapturous intensity, ignoring their tormentors. It was fabulous. All my earlier impressions of Ni-Vanuatu dancing were shattered. The women danced with grace and athleticism, perfectly in sync with one another. They also sang in unison.

“The napen-napen,” said Kelso, “is about the life of women.”

Some of them, we knew, would have their marital fates settled over the coming days. In the past, an alliance between two villages could be forged by exchanging captured men. Of course, the men were meant to be eaten. Now, to deepen the bonds between villages, they agree to share their women. The Nekowiar, however, is also a challenge. Each village is expected to attend the ceremony with a suitably impressive number of pigs. This is a complicated business in Vanuatu, since pigs are what allow men to advance through the grades and hierarchies that color traditional life. No man can possibly have enough pigs to match his obligations, and so he borrows the pigs of others. How well each man manages the debts and obligations involving his need for pigs goes a long way to ensuring whether or not he dies a happy chief. No pigs, no chiefdom. To be invited to participate in the Nekowiar is a huge obligation for villages, because it inevitably divests them of their entire stock of pigs, and it will take them years to recover.

The host village, in order to save face, has to match the number of pigs brought by the village with which they are seeking an alliance. In essence, then, both villages are committing themselves to poverty by agreeing to have a Nekowiar. Then why, one may ask, would two communities agree to do this? It’s just a dance, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t quite just a dance. These are dances infused with magic.

“What kind of magic?” we asked Kelso.

“Beauty magic,” he said.

The women had spent months preparing magic lotions and oils. Their faces were painted blood red and crisscrossed with black stripes. The men, Kelso explained, would also be painted for the toka, a celebrated dance for which the men had spent months preparing.

The women before us were still dancing. Indeed, they would dance without pause throughout the night, never flagging.

“How can they keep dancing?” Sylvia asked, raising her voice above the rapturous singing.

“Magic,” Kelso explained. “You see, they will not stop until the sun rises tomorrow.” Dawn was still a good twelve hours off. “It is because they have the magic.”

Well, I certainly couldn’t come up with a better explanation. It had been at least four hours since we arrived, and on they danced.

“And you see there?” Kelso pointed to a cluster of elderly men. “Those are the chiefs. They will decide who the women marry.”

Clearly, the stakes were high for those participating in a Nekowiar. Before it ended, however, and the new couples settled down to life in a village destined to be impoverished for the foreseeable future, the participants would have the opportunity to experience a night of debauched mayhem. This would follow the dancing of the toka on the second night of the ceremony, and it is what the chief was referring to when he noted that, for the time being, it remained safe. As the men dance the toka, should they encircle a woman—spectators included—they will toss her in the air. A frenzy is reached, and throughout the night, until the first glimmer of dawn, the participants of the Nekowiar are permitted to have sex with anyone they choose. Afterward, they promise that what happens at the Nekowiar stays at the Nekowiar.

We trudged back down the hill, promising to return the following day to witness the dancing of the toka. We hadn’t decided yet if we would stay through the night and watch the debauchery. Sylvia, of course, was with child, and a frenzied orgy was probably not the most wholesome environment for expectant mothers. There had been disagreement among the Ni-Vanuatu when we asked whether it was even safe for her to attend. Spectators, we had been told, were fair game for the toka dancers. Alas, in the end, it didn’t matter. Disaster struck. In the morning, the sky unleashed a sea of rain. It was unrelenting, and we instead spent the day huddled at the guesthouse. The rain had flooded out a bridge, and until the water receded, we were stuck.

The hours passed. Yaohnanen was unreachable. We scanned the sky, searching for a break in the weather, but it didn’t come. We would miss the toka.

The driver of the guesthouse’s pickup truck was James, and he was as eager to return to the Nekowiar as we were. “I will check through the night,” he said, “and if the bridge is clear, we will go and see the nao.” The nao was danced by the men of the host village on the morning after the toka. It was the culmination of the dancing, and we hoped we’d have the chance to see it. Our flight back to Port Vila left later in the morning.

At 4
A.M.
, we were summoned. We were seeing a lot more of 4
A.M.
than we cared for on Tanna, but this time we hopped into the pickup without complaint. The bridge was still flooded, but the water had receded enough to allow us over. James eased the truck through the muddy track that led up to Yaohnanen.

“This is far as we can go,” he said as we began to slide backward through the mud. We abandoned the pickup and trudged up through the mire, panting and sweating. Ahead of us, we could hear chanting and stomping. We felt a kinetic energy and fairly bristled in anticipation. Emerging from the forest with the first gray light of day, we saw hundreds of people running from one end of the clearing to the other, beckoning the dancers of the nao with a rhythmic cry. The atmosphere was intense, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. The people before us had been awake for three nights straight, dancing and fornicating, and now this was the climax.

We found Kelso near the pigs. They would soon be slaughtered for the feast. The young boys were busy chewing and masticating the kava roots, which had been gathered in enormous piles, and soon the Nekowiar would end in a kava dream.

“The chief is very angry,” Kelso told us. “Someone has used black magic.”

“How does he know that someone used black magic?” Sylvia asked.

“The rain,” Kelso said. “Someone used black magic to cause the rain.”

This struck me as a rather benign manifestation of black magic. If one’s magic was powerful enough to change the weather in the South Pacific, I think a snowstorm would have made for a more potent demonstration of one’s mastery of the dark arts. Causing rain to fall upon a rain forest during the rainy season was, for me, in any case, a little unimpressive, nothing more than a black magic card trick.

“The chief thinks it’s one of two people,” Kelso added.

“What will happen to the person who caused the rain?” I asked.

“He will be killed,” Kelso said.

Kastom, we were learning, was a powerful force on Tanna. Three hundred men emerged from the forest, led by the chief, who carried a ten-foot-pole wrapped with feathers. On top were the plumes of a hawk. The performers, painted and adorned, danced and sang in unison as the ground trembled beneath them, sweeping everyone away in an ecstatic collective rapture. It was the most extraordinary spectacle I had ever witnessed. I had not thought I could be moved by the dancing in Vanuatu. I had always been befuddled by the kastom interpretation of the afterlife: Live a good life, respect the spirits, tend to your pigs, and once you die you will dance into perpetuity. What, I thought, do an endless hokey pokey? What a woeful heaven, I’d imagined. Watching the nao, however, I was soon transported. It was like the bolero of the forest, a rhythmic dance that gathered ever more force as it went through the stages of a man’s life. Slowly and surely, the three hundred dancers attained an ecstatic crescendo. This was the Man dance, and watching the dancers, I felt something primal stir. The dancers were farmers and warriors, and while I have never been either, there was something about their interpretation that resonated deep within me
—We are Men. Hear us Roar—
and as we descended the hill to the squeals of pigs being clubbed and drove through the lush hills of Tanna toward the airport, I didn’t think anything could possibly end the bliss I felt, not even a Twin Otter to Vila.