Surviving Paradise (35 page)

The centrality of survival in a confined space had a natural corollary, which could be summed up in two words: get along. Fill your role, do your part, and don't rock the boat. Conflict within the community had to be avoided at all costs, because conflict disrupted the activities necessary for survival. Individualism had to be checked, because personal whims could interfere with daily duty. Harmony had to be maintained, because there was nowhere else to go.

More specifically, I reasoned that the central goal of confined survival led to these closely interrelated Marshallese values: kindness, generosity, communalism, avoidance of open conflict, stoicism, conservatism, strict social roles, idolization of the old, and marginalization of the young.

Kindness

The Marshallese had a proverb: “
Jouj eo mour eo, laj eo mej eo.
” It meant “Kindness is life, cruelty is death.” That was more than just a pretty turn of phrase. Cooperate in this perilous world and you will survive. Fight your neighbors and you will die. It was literal.

Lisson once stood beside me, fanning the flies from my food, for the length of an entire meal. At the end of any fishing expedition, my hosts would give me an equal share of their catch and offer a sincere “thank you” for my participation. Thank you? All I had done was tag along and get in the way. When I hurt my foot a few hours before a large feast, a man brought a wheelbarrow to my house and carted me to the other end of the island so I could attend the gathering. When the party was over, he delivered me back to my house. He called it the
“Ujae taxi service” and offered me a fifty-cent discount over Majuro rates: that is, I paid nothing.

Generosity

The mantra of Marshallese generosity was
arro
. This was the first-person dual inclusive possessive—that is, “belonging to both you and me.” Emphasis was on the word “inclusive.” The house was
arro
. The fishing net was
arro
. Even the islands my host family owned were
arro
. On Arno, a man asked me to hand him
arro
flashlight. Yours and mine? I had been on the island for all of one hour.

It was considered bad form to say that anything was merely
ao
(mine). Generosity was automatic, and most acts did not require thanks. When I first arrived on Ujae I said
kommool
(“thank you”) for everything. I said
kommool
when Elina gave me my breakfast. I said
kommool
when someone passed the sugar to me. I said
kommool
for favors so trivial that to refuse to perform them would be an insult. Then I noticed that my hosts rarely said
kon jouj
(“you're welcome”); much more often they would laugh or say nothing at all. To them, ordinary acts of kindness were a matter of course, and expressing gratitude for them was unnecessary. Perhaps they found it insulting, as if I didn't expect kindness from them. It sounded as strange to them, I imagined, as “Thank you for not killing me.”

The ideal of
arro
also meant that I was allowed to use almost any resource. Most objects were owned, but it was obligatory to lend them if asked. I could fish with anyone's spear, eat at anyone's house, pick fruit from anyone's tree, and tag along on anyone's journey unless there was a very good reason to disallow it.

On the other hand, the ideal of
arro
meant that anything I left unattended was fair game for indefinite borrowing. The line between borrowing and stealing became exceedingly thin. When even my treasured drum of gasoline became
arro
, I realized that this system of automatic generosity had a downside.

The same idea of
arro
explained the lack of privacy. If everything belonged to everyone, then that would include one's body, space, and thoughts. Perhaps that was why the islanders so often declined to
inform me of things. In a society where most material objects had to be shared, knowledge was one thing that could be hoarded without anyone knowing it. The villagers' first instinct was to keep this precious possession to themselves.

Communalism

The most common phrase in every speech at every gathering was
ippan doon
: “together.” When I arrived on Ujae, this phrase was all I understood in speeches—but it was also the most important part.

Everyone contributed to festivals. When a house needed to be built, the entire community chipped in. Special foods like turtle meat were divided evenly between every family in the village. No one went without in the Marshalls—if you were down on your luck, you moved in with relatives. One did not buy insurance in the Marshalls; one was born with it.

This necessarily had a darker side. The odds were stacked against individual entrepreneurship. A local man told me that he once tried selling rice on Ujae. It was a win-win situation: he would make a modest profit, and the other villagers would be able to purchase their main staple when there was no supply ship. But relatives insisted that he give them rice for free. Other people bought rice on credit and never paid him back. So he closed the store. If the community had allowed the merchant a small monetary gain, everyone would have benefited. But the culture didn't allow that.

Avoidance of Open Conflict

Inheritance of land and royal titles followed a matrilineal formula. Everyone agreed to this code, and thus what could have been an ugly war of succession or a drawn-out real estate dispute instead occurred peacefully—the assassinations of yesteryear notwithstanding.

But in other contentious issues there was no such apparatus for resolution, and here the avoidance of open conflict manifested in a more sinister fashion. I had heard of several such incidents on Ujae.
In a controversy over motorboat ownership, an anonymous saboteur cut the boat's moorings and let it disappear into the lagoon. When villagers accused the mayor of nepotism in the hiring of the radio operator, an unidentified individual removed the radio's antenna, rendering the device useless. Many years before, the islanders had built a large outrigger canoe that could carry fifteen men. It was a beautiful craft and a boon for Ujae's fishermen, but only a few of the men took responsibility for its maintenance, and they quickly became angry that no one else was contributing. Their solution was to burn the canoe to the ground. I also learned that there were two families on Ujae who refused to have anything to do with each other. They hadn't visited each other's properties since 1982.

These disputes couldn't be addressed without airing people's grievances in public. So the problems simply festered until someone resorted to the only available recourse: an anonymous act of revenge. This was the same pattern behind Marshallese men's suicides. These incidents violently contradicted the spirit of kindness and appeasement, but the deeper value—harmony at any cost—was perfectly achieved.

My own experience bore this out. Only once did an adult openly confront me. I was in a palm grove near the lagoon beach, preparing gear for a motorboat trip to
ane jiddik kan
—“those small islands,” the uninhabited islands of Ujae—with my usual companions. I was providing the gas for the expedition, but the boat belonged to an elder, and he was watching the preparations. He approached me, looked me straight in the eye, and said in Marshallese, “This isn't your trip.”

“What?” I fumbled.

“This isn't your trip,” he repeated. “I guess
ribelle
s just come along for the ride.”

I was too stunned by his open resentment to respond. (Also, it is hard to come up with a snappy rejoinder or conciliatory response in two seconds in a foreign language.) Once we were seaborne, I asked Fredlee about my earlier run-in. He blamed it on the old man's bad temper, and told me not to worry about it.

I felt, though, that the resentment had been meaningful, and that I was the intended and perhaps even deserving target. The man felt stepped on. He was an elder, wise and experienced from a long life, but it wasn't within his power to arrange a trip to
ane jiddik kan
to
collect food. And I was a naïve boy, not even Marshallese, but I had the power to arrange that trip, simply because I had been born in a richer country. It was true that half of the time here I was in Brob-dingnag, and I was a pygmy in skill and comprehension. Yet the other half of the time I was in Lilliput, and I was a giant in wealth and power. Nitwa was quite legitimately irked by that.

Here the exception proved the rule. This was the only incident in which an adult had not taken pains to please me. Surely others had felt what that old man expressed: jealousy at my umbilical cord of privilege, this thing never mentioned but always obvious. Surely others had resented it. But, in a year, this feeling had been expressed only once, and passive-aggressively at that.

Stoicism

If
arro
was the mantra of Marshallese generosity, then
jab jan
was its natural, if unpleasant, flip side.
Jab jan
literally meant “don't cry,” and it was one of the most frequently heard phrases in the language. It was the first and only thing to say to an upset child, and it was said to reprimand, not to comfort. The true meaning of
jab jan
was not “don't be upset,” but rather “don't show that you are upset.”