Surviving Paradise (33 page)

 

 

 

 

WHENEVER I RETURNED FROM THE SUPREME QUIET OF THE UNINHAB
ited islands, tiny Ujae felt like a rush-hour metropolis. And it was about to get livelier, because March and April were a time of festivals.

The islanders celebrated Mother's Day, but, as usual, they had adapted this Western import to Marshallese sensibilities. Sons and daughters did not honor their own mothers; instead, all nonmothers honored all mothers en masse. The participants picked a mother's name out of a hat and made a gift for her. Who gave gifts to whom was therefore completely unrelated to who had given birth to whom. Westerners considered it key to honor one's own mother on Mother's Day, but the people of Ujae had slyly altered the tradition to fit their communal ethos.

Next came Liberation Day, which commemorated the expulsion of Japanese forces from Ujae during World War II. Six Japanese soldiers
had been stationed on this far outpost, manning a weather station. When American forces showed up in March 1945 to take one of the last of the occupied Marshalls, all but one of the Japanese committed suicide. The victors staged a ceremony to mark the regime change: as one report at the time said, “the American flag was raised . . . one platoon at present arms, staff officers at hand salute, natives in a group in the center. . . . The ceremony appealed to the natives.”

If it did then, it still did now. The community gathered at the airstrip and reenacted that ceremony on its fifty-ninth anniversary, raising the American and Marshallese flags in tandem while singing a deeply affecting song. There was an earnestness in it that moved me. The people of Ujae were genuinely grateful that the Americans had rescued them from a harsh occupation. For a few elders, this event was not just history but memory. Never mind that the Americans had done so only to win a larger war in which the Marshallese were merely incidental. Never mind that the liberators became the new occupiers, treating their charge with extraordinary callousness on at least one occasion. The islanders were nonetheless thankful. There was none of the cynicism, none of the eagerness to point out that the good guys were no better than the bad, that might taint such a celebration in America. The juxtaposition of the two flags reminded me that their country and mine, beyond all of their disagreements, really were friends, just as Ujae and I, despite our friction, were friends as well.

Then the solemnity was broken. Silly contests sprung up left and right. The women ran a race while juggling rocks; if you dropped a rock, you had to start over from the beginning. In the end, it was the skill of the hands, not the speed of the legs, that determined the winner. The schoolchildren were divided by grade and gender, and ran a loosely measured hundred-meter dash. The eighth-grade boys, who in class were outnumbered, outwitted, and even outsized by their female counterparts, were finally on easy street: last place, after all, was still in the top three. The first place prize was five dollars—quite a sum for the outer islands—and my only question was what on earth the children could buy with the money. Then, as if to answer my question, a local man started his generator, attached it to a freezer that I didn't even know existed, and went into business for himself, offering
the first purchasable items I had encountered since coming to Ujae. I could now buy a chunk of ice for twenty-five cents or a chilled coconut for fifty, and so could the Liberation Day's little champions.

The following week was wholly reserved for more tournaments. Baseball was divided into a men's league, a women's league, an old men's league, and an old women's league, and it was played on the only large open area on the island: the airstrip. The tournament of the
lollap
(“old men”) was particularly memorable. While the spectators shouted “
Lollap bota!
” (“Old man at bat!”) and banged furiously on pieces of corrugated tin, the old men played with a level of enthusiasm that put the younger players to shame.

The fishing tournament challenged the men to sail away at seven in the morning and return twelve hours later with as much fish as possible. The canoe headed by Lisson came back with no less than a hundred pounds. It was with vicarious pride that I realized that Lisson, my host brother and best friend on the island, was also the island's best fisherman. That wasn't just another title; for a Marshallese man, that was like being named Most Valuable Player.

The most impressive tournament of all was the
riwut
: the racing of toy canoes. For months, I had seen both men and boys building, testing, refining, rebuilding, and retesting these miniature passengerless vessels. The boys' canoes were only a foot long, with a tiny outrigger attached to the side, and a small triangular sail made from a plastic rice bag. The men's canoes were as long as four feet, with an outrigger attached several feet to the side, and a sturdy sail made of tarp. Men and boys alike showed remarkable determination in perfecting their creations. After carefully carving the outrigger and hull and constructing the sail so as best to catch the wind, they would wade into the lagoon at low tide and test the canoe's speed and seaworthiness. Any deficiencies were addressed by painstakingly tweaking the proportions. When the day of the race finally came, the contestants carried their canoes into the lagoon, pointed them toward the island, and let them loose in unison. The best of the entries skipped across the water in only a moderate wind.

These parties were a welcome change from the sameness of every day. But it was two other gatherings that truly impressed me.

In Marshallese society, it was the unfortunate truth that the two biggest
parties of your life were the ones you wouldn't remember. This wasn't because you would be drunk—the outer islands were, officially at least, dry. It was because the first one was your first birthday party, and the second one was your funeral.

The first birthday party was called a
keemem
. This was the first celebration of a new child. The reason for waiting until then was obvious: for most of Marshallese history, about half of newborns died before reaching this milestone. The
keemem
celebrated the fact that this baby was going to survive and was therefore a real person. Celebrating beforehand would have meant holding twice as many
keemem
s, half of them for babies that would be dead within a year. That would simply have been too cruel to the community. Nowadays, most infants survived, but the
keemem
custom remained.

A few
keemem
s had been celebrated on Ujae since I got there but, predictably, I hadn't attended them because no one had told me they were happening. In March, I had the good fortune of stumbling on one when I noticed that my host family was gone and so were my neighbors, and a generator was humming in the distance. The gathering began with the gradual trickling in of guests, which included a large percentage of the village. We sat and did nothing for what must have been an hour and a half. Almost no one talked. Then the child's grandparents, whose responsibility it was to fund the party, gave long, solemn speeches to the assembled families, and handed over the child to the minister for a blessing. The guests sang a song while walking in a large circle, and, as each person passed the mother and child, they added a modest donation to the ever-growing pile.

Dinner was served. The food was the island's best, served on interwoven lengths of palm frond. These native plates were ingenious: they were fully biodegradable and trivial to construct. (For once, what looked easy actually was. The only problem was that these plates were riddled with holes, and that night's feast included soup.) Everyone ate quietly.

This was a happy occasion, surely: the commemoration of a new bundle of joy. So it seemed odd that the night's main event had been sitting in rows, barely speaking or moving. A young man brought the island's sound system—the same one that had tormented me in December—and played a series of loud Western ballads. It sounded
like dance music to me, but no one danced, tapped their feet, or even swayed their body to the beat, and the applause after each song was scant.

There was no sign of boredom or indifference. It was instead an atmosphere of respectful restraint. Dressed in Western clothes, with American music blaring in the background, a thoroughly non-Western gathering was taking place. I realized that this was the best summary of Marshallese society that I could think of.

If the
keemem
s were notable for their incongruous reserve at a time of joy, then the funerals were notable for their open sorrow. Two deaths struck Ujae while I was there. Both happened elsewhere, but were of men born on Ujae whose families still lived on this island. Both occurred within a few weeks of each other. Both were of young men around my own age. The first young man perished in Ebeye while performing the traditional
alele
fishing method, which involved trapping fish inside a circle of interconnected palm fronds. On the lagoon side, this technique was safe, but on the ocean side it was not. The young man had been washed out to sea by violent breakers, and his body was found later, half-eaten by sharks. The second young man died in Majuro. The cause of death was suicide.

The funeral for the first man took place in Ebeye, and I didn't witness it. The second took place on Ujae, and I found it to be one of the most revealing ceremonies I ever attended on the island. It was a touching reminder of how small and close-knit this country was that, when somebody died, the national airline changed its flight schedule to allow the relatives to fly to the funeral on time.

The funeral took place in three parts. During the
emej
, the mourners gathered informally to look at the deceased in his coffin. During the
ilomej
, the bereaved performed a service around the body, and then carried it to the cemetery to be buried. During the
eorek
, the villagers congregated again around the gravesite to offer eulogies and blessings.

I remember the
emej
chiefly for the spell that the dead man's body cast over me. He was born December 30, 1981, just six months before me, and died at the age of twenty-two. I could not imagine that someone could leave the world having experienced no more than myself. It was sobering to see his sleeping face.

The
ilomej
took place in Jeikson's childhood house. Dozens of villagers
packed into the small room and many more sat outside while the minister delivered a speech about thanking God. This was the only time when I saw Marshallese adults showing unpleasant emotions. Jeikson's mother draped herself over the flower-strewn coffin and wept openly. A young man, who I took to be Jeikson's brother, sat next to the coffin somberly. Jeikson's father sat on the sidelines, biting back tears.

It was heartbreaking, but it was also strangely refreshing. Every other gathering had managed to be neither solemn nor joyful, caught awkwardly in the middle. But this was different. This was grief, this was mourning, this was
sadness
, and openly so. The men held in most of their tears, but even their sniffles and long empty stares were a hundred times more open than their society would allow them at any other time, and a hundred times more than I had ever witnessed. And so this one instance when grief was allowed, this one exception in a culture so cagey about sadness, this one time when the law of stoicism was repealed, this funeral was perversely the most releasing and ecstatic ceremony I ever attended. It was a long-awaited sigh, a fresh breeze blowing into a stuffy room, and I don't think I was the only one who felt it.

During the
eorek
, the third and final day of the funeral, I finally learned the circumstances of the suicide. I arrived early at the gravesite and sat next to Jeikson's father, Wewe. He looked over at me. “Peter,” he said. “I want to tell you about my son's death.” Thus began the most intimate exchange I ever had with a Marshall Islander.

Wewe told me the story in pained matter-of-factness. Jeikson was a taxi driver in Majuro. One day a police officer told him that one of the headlights on his cab was faulty, and that the punishment for this was four years in jail. This was a lie—the actual penalty was a small fine—but the officer wanted to scare him. Jeikson took the threat seriously and hanged himself the next day. Wewe vowed to fly to Majuro to “talk” to the police officer.

The suicide was tragically typical. The Marshall Islands and Micronesia as a whole had experienced a growing epidemic of suicide since the 1970s, and Jeikson's death fell neatly into the statistics. The victims were overwhelmingly male. Their median age was the same as Jeikson's. They hanged themselves after falling out of favor with loved
ones, most commonly parents or spouses. Although Jeikson's family wasn't aware of the incident with the police officer until after his death, it was easy to imagine that Jeikson was terrified of telling his parents he had been sentenced to prison.

While the tendency among foreigners was to blame modern individualism and its discontents, the Micronesian scholar Francis Hezel offered a more nuanced theory. Marshallese suicide had no tinge of ennui or nihilism, identity crisis or existential angst. Instead, it had everything to do with interpersonal relations. Formerly, the father and the maternal uncle had been the twin authority figures in a young Marshallese man's life; the father was the more indulgent figure, ready to intervene on the boy's behalf in disputes with his uncle. But the move toward a cash economy had pruned the family tree. With responsibility concentrated in the now authoritarian parents, instead of distributed over a web of relatives, a disruption in the parent-child relationship removed the keystone of a young Marshall Islander's life. Even if the conflict didn't involve the parents, the lack of an extended support system left little to break the sufferer's fall.

But these changes could affect both sexes; why were men eleven times more likely to kill themselves than women? My guess was this: the men were ashamed to be ashamed. Emotional weakness was the antithesis of Marshallese masculinity, leading the young man to feel distress at his own distress. The final result of this downward spiral was all too Marshallese—instead of confronting his emotions, the young man chose the ultimate withdrawal from them: death. Suicide was Marshallese conflict avoidance taken to its logical extreme.