Getting Stoned with Savages (20 page)

“YOU WANT GOOD TIME?”

Her English was halting, and I sensed that what she did speak had been learned from watching Vietnam War movies. Before she had a chance to inform me that she’d love me for a long time, however, I asked her where she was from.

“I from China.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Gwaidongha.”

“Where?”

“Xiangoyzh.”

I couldn’t say I had heard of it.

“You know where North Korea is? On the border.”

A long way from home, I thought. I asked where the other girls were from.

“All from same place.”

“And have you been here long?”

“Seven months,” she said. “I have a one-year work permit.”

What a considerate government, I thought.

“So what you say? You want good time?”

I didn’t want a good time. After twenty-four hours in Fiji, what I really wanted was a shower.

I
F THERE IS ONE MUSEUM THAT MUSEUM DIRECTORS FROM
around the world should be obliged to visit, it is the Fiji Museum in Suva. It is exactly what a national museum ought to be. Generally, when I am abroad, I no longer visit these places. Too often, I have been awakened with a start by a concerned security guard insistently poking at my slumbering form, trying to rouse me from the spot where I have wilted in boredom in front of a display of a walking stick, circa 1815. Stepping into the Fiji Museum, however, I knew immediately that I was going to like it.

Sylvia had finally arrived in Suva, and we were still getting to know the city. On that day, we had had no intention of going to the museum. But, as happened with some regularity in Suva, we found ourselves caught in a sudden downpour, and we scampered toward the nearest shelter, which happened to be the museum. For a repository of a country’s history, it is rather small and compact, which immediately left me feeling well disposed toward it. There is something about standing in front of a monumental museum, such as the Louvre, that instantly leaves me with wobbly legs. “Okay, we’ve seen that pyramid thing in the courtyard. Can we go now?” Three hours later, I’d find myself trailing puddles of drool until, finally, in front of a glass display case containing a gilded cane, Louis XIV, circa 1770, I’d collapse and fall asleep.

Stepping up to the Fiji Museum, we noticed a sign on the wall informing us that the museum had been officially opened in 1999 by the governor-general of New Zealand, a Sir Michael Hardie Boys. This was like being told that the Louvre had been opened by Tintin. Inside, the exhibition room was dominated by an enormous
drua,
a wooden catamaran used on the open ocean by the Fijians of yore. I stood admiring the boat for a while, until Sylvia brought to my attention a curious display case. It contained a Bible said to be the ordination Bible used by Reverend Thomas Baker, a Methodist missionary who arrived in Fiji in the 1860s with the aim of converting the tribes living in Viti Levu’s remote Nausori highlands. Well, ho-hum, I thought. What’s next, his school report card? Not quite. Instead, there was a small wooden bowl
—Dish in which some of Mr. Baker’s flesh was presented to one of the highland chiefs,
read the description. I had never regarded a wooden bowl in a museum with quite the same level of fascination as I did this one. Alongside it was the wooden fork used for eating Mr. Baker’s flesh. And the most compelling item, the remains of Mr. Baker’s shoe. This was history come alive, I thought. It appeared that the Reverend Baker had made a fatal faux pas. Perturbed to find that the highland chief had borrowed his comb, Baker snatched it back. Alas for him, the chief was storing the comb in his hair, and in Fijian culture, yanking something out of a chief’s hair is a big no-no. Soon all that remained of the Reverend Baker was the sole of his boot.

It didn’t take much, I learned, to get yourself killed in Fiji. While the cannibalism in Vanuatu had left me bewildered, the scale of the bloodshed that colored traditional life in Fiji left me agape with horror. Consider, for instance, the construction of a temple honoring one of the gods. Human sacrifices were called for when the foundation posts were cut. More were needed when the posts were raised. Still more bodies were required once the rafters had been tied together. Naturally, one could hardly call the temple complete without another batch of dead bodies. And still more sacrifices were needed when the god’s favorite shells were hung. Well, that’s interesting, you think. The temple came complete with a full cemetery. But there was no cemetery. The Fijians had another way of disposing of the bodies. They ate them.

Even the language suggested a frightful existence.
Coco,
or grass, referred to the chief’s wives, who had been strangled so that they could follow their husband into the afterlife.
Lago,
or logs, were the men who had been killed so they could be used as rollers for the launching of war canoes.
Manumanu-ni-laca,
birds-of-the-sail, were dead children from an enemy’s village who had been strung up on the yardarms of a war canoe. This was a culture devoted to killing, and when there wasn’t an enemy around to meet their needs, chiefs took to killing the commoners among them.

Generally, when it came to missionaries, I rooted for the home team. “My god is better than your god” always struck me as an argument that was just a trifle presumptuous. What if the missionaries were wrong? What if the divine creator was actually Isis, the goddess of fertility? She’d be pissed, wouldn’t she? Nevertheless, after just a brief exploration of Fijian history, I couldn’t help but cheer for the Methodists.

The people of Nubutautau, the village where the Reverend Baker was consumed, had begun to feel a little bad about the matter. Indeed, ever since their ancestors ate the reverend, they felt that their village had been plagued with bad luck. To make amends, they’d presented a
tabua,
or whale’s tooth, to the Methodist Church. If you really want to say you’re sorry in Fiji, do it with a whale’s tooth. Indeed, Sitiveni Rabuka, the army colonel who led Fiji’s first coup in 1987, had sent a whale’s tooth to Queen Elizabeth, the titular head of Fiji, demonstrating that he was very sorry for upsetting her with the coup, wouldn’t do it again, promise, now can we please rejoin the Commonwealth? The whale’s tooth that Nubutautau gave to the Methodist Church was displayed in the museum together with a photo of the Reverend Baker’s great-grandniece, who had traveled to the village to participate in a forgiveness ceremony. Makes you feel all soft and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it?

Now why, I wondered, couldn’t other national museums be like this one? Not only did the Fiji Museum contain compelling artifacts like the remains of the Reverend Baker’s boot, but it also displayed random curios for no other reason than the simple fact that they happened to be in Fiji—things like the rudder of the
Bounty.
The mutiny had nothing to do with Fiji, though Captain Bligh and the loyalists did sail through the islands on their way to Java, but Bligh wisely declined to make landfall in Fiji lest the sole of his shoe also one day join the museum’s collection. Even the walking sticks were fascinating to behold. They were made of human bones, circa 1850. See what I mean? It’s fun for the whole family.

Once the shower had passed, we started walking toward the center of Suva. With Sylvia beside me, the
psst
s had stopped, though here and there, I’d receive a friendly hello from the ladies of the night.

“And who was that?” Sylvia asked.

“That was Ramona.”

“And did you meet many women during your week alone in Suva?”

“Many women. They’re very friendly in Suva. But Ramona’s not actually a woman.”

“Ramona’s not a woman?”

“Fooled me too.”

It was a strange time to be in Suva. The number of women—and men—who had turned to prostitution attested to how convulsive the coup had been for people in Fiji. It had been a particularly traumatic experience for those in Suva. The front man had been George Speight, a ne’er-do-well son of a politician. He and his co-conspirators had stormed the parliament and taken much of the government hostage, including Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Speight said that he was acting in the name of indigenous Fijians and promptly declared that, henceforth, all power resided with him. Within hours, thousands of Fijian sympathizers had surrounded the parliament. They encamped there, and soon mob rule descended on Suva. Hundreds of Fijian toughs laid waste to the city. The duty-free shops burned. The cafés were torched. An army of looters carted off stashes of televisions and jewelry, food and perfume. The police disappeared, ceding the city, the pride of English rule in the Pacific, to anarchy.

Elsewhere in the country, long-simmering grievances between indigenous Fijians and Indians had erupted into rolling spasms of violence and intimidation. Between 1879 and 1916, more than sixty thousand Indians had arrived in Fiji as indentured laborers, recruited or tricked into coming by the British, who needed cheap labor to work on the sugar plantations. Most of their descendants still earned their living cutting sugarcane, leasing the land from the Fijians who own 87 percent of all the land in Fiji. With the coup, families who had cultivated the same plot of land for a hundred years and more were suddenly cast out of their homes, expelled from their land, and saw their belongings stripped from them, their men beaten, and their women assaulted. Overnight, Indians who had known no other land than Fiji, shopkeepers and farmers, found themselves living as refugees in their own country. In the following days, the mayhem spread. In the highlands of Viti Levu, Fijian landowners took over the Monasavu Dam, which supplied Suva and much of Fiji’s population with electricity. Increase our payments, they said, or we’ll blow it up. In Savusavu, on the island of Vanua Levu, the Air Fiji pilots were, inexplicably, taken hostage by Fijian nationalists. Turtle Island, a posh, American-owned resort in the Yasawa Islands, was seized by the indigenous landowners. The bewildered tourists were evacuated.

At the parliament, the long siege lasted fifty-six days. The president, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, who is revered in Fiji much as George Washington is in America, was compelled to resign. Elements of the Fijian military also mutinied. At the Queen Elizabeth barracks in Suva, members of the elite Counter-Revolutionary Warfare Unit turned on the soldiers who remained loyal to the government, killing four of them.

The repercussions of the coup were playing out as we arrived in Fiji. George Speight was eventually arrested and accused of treason. The Indian-led government he deposed, however, was not permitted to return to power. The chiefs in Fiji, who, despite an elected parliament, remained the true power in Fiji, appointed a caretaker government. Many of those presumed to have played a role in the coup found themselves posted to Fijian embassies abroad, as well as to the U.N. in New York.

Suva remained littered with the blackened shells of buildings torched during the looting that followed the coup. Police checkpoints had been set up on all the roads leading into town. And yet, as we began to settle in, a veneer of normalcy had returned to the city. The curfews had been lifted. Classes had resumed at the University of the South Pacific. Even the tourists were beginning to return to the sunny side of Fiji after the resorts slashed their prices.

As we ambled past the derelict hulk of the Pacific Grand Hotel, idly talking about what, precisely, I knew about the friendliness of the women of Suva, we noticed a Fijian man frantically beckoning us from across the road.

“I am Ahanda,” he said once we had crossed the street. “This means Henry Cooper in English.”

All right, we thought. Technically, my name could be translated as Johnny Comfort.

Ahanda was a security guard at the Pacific Grand Hotel. He had called out to us because he wanted to say hi. This was unusual in Fiji. Fijian men tend to be reserved, even rather regal in their bearing. They’re not unfriendly, just inclined toward the formal. The colonial English and the Fijians had a great affinity for one another, or at least they did once the Fijians stopped eating Englishmen. Kings and queens, nobles and inherited privilege—these were concepts that meshed nicely with the Fijian chiefly system. Unlike the chiefs in much of Vanuatu, who are obliged to earn their position, Fijian chiefs are born to the manor.

There was, as far as we could tell, not much of the Pacific Grand left to guard. Built in 1914, the two-story hotel had once been the finest in Oceania, with stately colonnades and verandahs set to capture the breeze off Suva Harbor. Alas for the Pacific Grand, it was bought by Nauru, a grim flyspeck of a country that was once among the world’s richest. After squandering the wealth it had derived from its phosphate deposits, Nauru was reduced to penury and today makes its living as a prison island housing Australia’s illegal immigrants. The Pacific Grand Hotel, like most of the properties owned by Nauru throughout the Pacific, had been left to crumble.

“Would you like a tour?” Ahanda asked, prying apart the plywood shutters that had been nailed to the entranceway, presumably to keep people out. Ahanda, clearly, had a rather unique interpretation of his role as a security guard. Sylvia squeezed through, carefully maneuvering the volleyball she had evidently swallowed.

Inside, it was like stepping through a time warp and arriving the day after the Gilded Age had ended. The champagne flutes had been picked up, the chandeliers removed, but otherwise the lobby remained as it must have appeared to the fops and dandies of a bygone era. Well, provided, of course, that one ignored the pools of bird shit, the mounds of dust, the acres of cobwebs, and the uncomfortable feeling that, any moment now, you might fall through the floorboards.

“Come upstairs,” Ahanda said. “I will show you something.” We followed him up.
Creak, creak,
the stairs said ominously as we passed a sign informing us that the morning post left at 10
A
.
M
. Pausing for a moment to pluck the cobwebs off our faces, we emerged onto the second-floor balcony. A dozen birds scattered into the air.