The Shark God (3 page)

Apparently, Vila's heathen past had been reduced to caricatures and souvenirs. The missionaries had won. A cross hung from every neck. But if all the locals were Christian, why were missionaries still flocking to Vanuatu? Why the weekly revival crusades at the sports stadium? Why was the airport full of black-tied Utahans with name tags supplied by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? Why the sense of evangelical urgency in the scrubbed faces lined up for burgers at Jill's American Way Café, why the hallelujah processions down Kumul Highway?

“Because people here still live with so much wrong thinking! We are just trying to offer them what they need: a purer, more powerful gospel message,” said my first friend in Port Vila. Kay Rudd lived with her husband, Jack, in the manicured hillside compound of the Joy Bible College. Kay wore farm dresses printed with tiny flowers. Her cheeks were thick and rosy. Jack favored khaki leisure suits. The Rudds were as warm and proscriptive as grandparents. They were missionaries. When I told them I was hunting for heathens, they invited me to their bungalow for ice cream.

“Vanuatu might call itself a proper Christian country. People might claim to be Christian,” Kay told me. “But voodoo, black magic, spirits…folks still live in utter fear of all these things. And you know, dear, a true Christian doesn't have to be afraid.”

“Because ghosts and magic don't exist,” I said. “You are helping people overcome their superstitions.”

Kay sighed and gave me a look of strained patience. “I didn't say that. Evil is real. But Christians have the power to break its spell. If we can get Bibles into people's hands, in their own languages, they will see they have the power to beat the black magic. They don't have to fear it.”

“But everyone I've met in Vila is a Christian already,” I said.

“Honey, we are still fighting the battle out on the islands.”

The sun had disappeared beneath the banyans. Cicadas screamed from the trees. Fluorescent lights flickered on through distant windows. Kay put away the ice cream and told me an Inspirational Story. It was about Tanna, an island at the south end of Vanuatu.

A Very Bad Thing had happened on Tanna in the 1940s. Just when the Tannese seemed to have given up their ghosts and other devils, just when the missionaries thought they had won the island for Christ, along came a false prophet. The fellow called himself John Frum and made himself out to be some kind of messiah. He promised the islanders that if they abandoned the church and went back to their heathen ways, he would return one day on a great white ship loaded with goodies from America. The islanders bought the story hook, line, and sinker, said Kay. They nailed church doors shut and ran the priests out of their villages. Except for a few tenacious congregations, Tanna was gripped by John Frum fever—and lost to Christianity—for more than half a century.

But in 1996 that white ship from America finally appeared. On board was a friend of Jack and Kay's. His name was John Rush. Tanna's beleaguered Christian pastors decided Rush was the savior they had been waiting for. After all, he was American, he had arrived on a great white ship, and—best of all—he was named John. The circumstances were too close to the Frum myth not to be put to use.

“You get it, right?” said Jack, rubbing his hands together. “John from America: John—Frum—America! When that ship
pulled in, it was like a prophecy fulfilled, and the pastors knew it. They figured our John could go to the John Frum chiefs and tell them to stop waiting. Tell them that America was not going to come solve all their problems.”

“He didn't want to do it. He really didn't want to be mistaken for John Frum,” interrupted Kay. “But the pastors begged him. So he went down to Sulphur Bay, the main Frum village, and would you believe the John Frum people were waiting for him? They rolled out the red carpet. They lined the path with flowers and gave him a big feast.”

“John's visit was the beginning of the end for John Frum,” said Jack. “That cult is finished now. The Presbyterians have rebuilt the church in Sulphur Bay. God is in. Frum is out. But our John won't take any credit for the good work. He says it was all because of the wise chief who let the Christians in.”

“Chief One was his name. Isaac One,” said Kay. “They call him that because he never repeats himself. Chief One. Isn't that cute?”

Isaac One. I scribbled that name in my notebook, and I mourned secretly. One more cult down the drain. But the Rudds were so full of down-home cheeriness they were hard not to like. Kay shone with perspiration and motherly concern. I let her hug me good-bye, and then I headed for the harbor.

I wandered along the darkened waterfront, where shadows moved among shadows, murmuring indecipherably and erupting into laughter. Somewhere a loudspeaker creaked and hissed, and occasionally let forth the sad squeal of a Chinese violin. Lights from yachts, canoes, and distant villages shone on the slickened surface of the water, as though this was the edge of the universe, beyond which swirled some terrible struggle between good and evil, white and black magic, unseen and formless but still clashing endlessly just beyond the horizon, singeing every life it touched. That, or it was the edge of nothing at all, an emptiness that could be filled only by the force of imagination.

When you read the accounts of Victorian adventurers, it is easy to be convinced that life at sea is exhilarating and romantic. The open horizon, the salt spray, the implied danger and possibility of all that heaving ocean. What could be more inspiring?

My great-grandfather wrote affectionately about his three-month tour of the Diocese of Melanesia aboard the mission's flag
ship, the
Southern Cross
. The three-hundred-ton schooner, the second to bear the name since Patteson's death, was built in 1891. She was fitted with an auxiliary engine, but generally relied on the sails of her three masts, the foremost of which was square-rigged. The ship cut languidly through the waves as it zigzagged from island to island. There were cabins on deck for the white clergy; the Melanesians ate and slept in the hold, so were apt to spend their free time dangling from the rigging or stretched asleep on the ship's dolphin striker. The passages across rough open ocean were trying for the bishop, but he preferred to remember the moments of prayer, the singing of canticles and hymns, the daily Evensong, and the delightful transformation he saw in the natives: “The boys come on board decorated with all sorts of earrings and nose rings, but by degrees these disappear. Before they reach Norfolk Island they have to put on shirts and trousers, and appropriate garments of English pattern are served out to the girls.”

There was no sweeter moment for the bishop than dusk, when the
Southern Cross
had anchored in a quiet bay and a sense of peace settled on his mind. “At such times,” he wrote, “it was permissible even to sit on deck in those suits, light and not elegant, which men find useful as ‘garments of the night' in the tropics.” Now and then, from some village hidden among the coconut palms, he would hear the tinkling of a bell, the whistle of a conch-shell horn or the bang of a drum, and he would know that the converts were being called to prayer, and he would be touched.

There was a certain deception in his focus on the bucolic.

This I know: The ocean is not romantic. Not when you have left the calm of the harbor and the swell is up and the vomiting has begun. The ocean is not a gentle mother, not a bucking stallion, not an adversary you can grapple with. The ocean is a great rotting blanket that won't be still. It is a pool of rancid milk. A gurgling toilet. Something to be endured. This is what I learned on my first sea passage.

The MV
Havanna
had been making the three-hundred-mile run from Port Vila southwest to the island nation of New Caledonia—with a stop at Tanna—for three months, and was said to be the finest ship in the archipelago. She created a stir wherever she went. She had seats, the agent who sold me my passage told me excitedly. But the
Havanna
was more a floating warehouse than the ferry I expected. She had an enclosed main deck with room for a dozen shipping containers, and a passenger compartment welded on top, like an afterthought. Her bow fell open like a broken jaw onto the government wharf.

Scots Presbyterians had laid claim to Tanna Island long before my great-grandfather's journey. He had sailed right past. So technically, Tanna was off-route for me. But I was hooked by the Rudds' story about the mysterious John Frum. I wanted to know why the Tannese had given up on their prophet. And so, the moment the
Havanna
's crew let their guard down, I charged with two hundred others across the loading deck into the maw.

We sailed at dusk. Once we left the harbor, there was nothing to see. There was no squall. There was no lightning. But the spray rose like ghosts each time the
Havanna
's blunt nose plunged into the undulating shadow of the southeast swell. The ship twisted and rolled unnaturally, and the night was filled with the hollow boom of waves striking the bow, the groan and flex of the hull, and a screeching that sounded like twenty-foot containers sliding across the steel floor of the hold. We did not use our cushioned chairs. We clung to the floor like lovers and vomited into plastic bags, purses, and open palms.

At the first hint of dawn I stumbled out onto the ship's deck. Men stood doubled over the railing. Drool trailed from their chins until it was caught by the wind and flung into the sea. A half-caste woman waved me over and offered me a spongy white ball, which at first I took for a muffin. In fact, it was the fibrous center of an overripe coconut.

“
Mais
this will take that 'orrible taste
long
mouth
blong yu
,” the woman said. There was a bit of French and a swath of English. But the finale of her overture was Bislama, Vanuatu's de facto national language. What she had said was: “But this will take that horrible taste from that mouth of yours.”

Bislama has been called a pidgin, which is to say it is an amalgamation, a simplification, and a bastardization of other languages by island people. My great-grandfather despised it. He wished Melanesians would learn proper English or at least stick to their own languages rather than using what he called the “vilest of compounds that ever polluted the purity of speech.”

But the more I learned about Bislama, the more I realized it was one of the great triumphs of Vanuatu. The moniker originated from
bêche-de-mer,
the name the French gave to the sea slugs they bought from islanders and sold in the markets of Hong Kong. Bislama got its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, when South Sea islanders worked as crew on whaling ships and developed a simple jargon to communicate with Europeans. It is full of nautical references and sailorly slang. When the sun goes down, they say, “
Sun hem i draon,
” as though the sun is drowning in the sea. When something is broken,
“Hem i bagarup.”
Say it out loud: “Him, he's buggered up.”

The jargon developed further between 1863 and 1911, when more than fifty thousand Ni-Vanuatu were sent to work on plantations in Australia, Fiji, and Samoa. Those workers who spoke the same language were separated so they couldn't organize against their employers. Separating the
wantoks
(“one-talks,” or common-language speakers) was easy: there were more than a hundred distinct languages in the New Hebrides alone. Workers had no choice but to speak to each other using the only words they had in common—English and French—though they used Melanesian grammar and syntax. Then they took the new language home with them.

Bislama may have been the bane of arbiters of grammar, but it gave the Ni-Vanuatu the common tongue they needed to achieve independence. Government documents may be written in English or French, but parliamentary debates are conducted in Bislama.

Everything is a
fala
(fellow), even a tree, a shark, or a girl. A boy who admired a girl told me, “
Hem i wan gudfala gel. Mi likem hem tumas.
” Then I understood that
tumas
did not mean “too much” but “a hell of a lot.”

Things are defined by their relationship with other things. The word
blong
(belong) is everywhere—but the word
long
is a preposition, not an adjective. So if you ask a Ni-Vanuatu when colonial rule ended, he will tell you, “
Kantri blong mifala, hem i winim independens long 1980.
” That was the same year the New Testament was translated into Bislama and people began reading the
gud nius blong Jisas Krais.
If you ask a woman where she is going, she might say, “
Mi go nao blong swim long sanbij,
” and you would know she was now off to the beach to wash (
swim
means “wash”).

Sometimes Bislama is easier to understand if you imagine it originating with a drunken sailor slurring orders to a Melanesian laborer. Take the initially baffling phrase “
Sarem olgeta doa.
” Now jump back a century, imagine that sailor barking at an islander, “Shut them doors.” Perhaps in his hurry or inebriation the words would emerge something like “
Sarem doa.
” Melanesian languages require an extra word to denote the plural, so the reasonable islander would respond to the order by shutting just one door. The sailor, if he hadn't gone and shut the extra doors himself, might happen upon this plural construction: “Shut them,
altogether!
” Loosen the pronunciation, let “altogether” serve as the plural article, and you have the modern Bislama: “
Sarem olgeta doa.
”

Bislama can be poetic in its literalness.
A pijin blong solwata
is the bird we all associate with salt water: a seagull. A telescope is a
glas blong looklook big.
A condom is a
rubba blong fakfak.

French words have also slipped into the language. To know is to
savve
(from the third-person singular
save
of the verb
savoir
). There are Polynesian words: Food is
kai-kai
. Children are
pikinini
(though some say that word originated with the English label for black children, or the Spanish
pequeño
). Now phrases are being traded back and forth between various pidgin-speaking countries. The Ni-Vanuatu borrow from Papua New Guinea when they tell you good-bye:
lookim yu bakagen
. But the strongest word of all is pan-Oceanic. If something or someplace is
tabu
, it is forbidden. You stay away from it.

The stars faded, and Tanna appeared like an ink stain across the horizon. The silhouette gradually grew into a series of folded mountainsides. Blue smoke curled from thatched roofs. Surf fringed the shoreline, exploding occasionally into bouquets of white spray. Sunlight broke across a ridge serrated by rows of palms. There was no harbor. We maneuvered past a reef and eased alongside a cement jetty that jutted out from a tongue of coral stone at Lenakel, Tanna's only town.

I tossed my pack on the grass and waited. I had sent a message ahead to Port Resolution, which was within striking distance of the fabled John Frum stronghold at Sulphur Bay. The villagers at Port Resolution knew someone with a truck. They would come and fetch me.

“Port Resolution? They will certainly not come to collect you. They are rubbish men,” advised a stern Tannese man who installed himself on the grass next to me. His name was Kelsen. He had come to claim his new wheelbarrow from the
Havanna
. It shone. Kelsen had an untidy beard, which he tugged on constantly, and a ponderous brow, which at first I mistook for a mark of wisdom. He sat with me as I waited by the sea. I told him I was looking for former John Frum cult members.

“The John Frum people are all going to hell, that much is certain,” said Kelsen.

I was heartened. “So then some people here still believe in John Frum?”

“Yes, the fools believe. But
nogud yu stap long
John Frum people. They are dirty. They have nothing to eat. They are fighting each other.”

Kelsen said he lived at the base of the Yasur volcano. He promised to tell me a magic story about the volcano that I would never forget. Nobody else could tell me the story. Just Kelsen. He owned it. The story had been passed down for generations. He was considering writing it down and selling it.

“I can tell it to you,” he said.

“I'm listening,” I said.

Kelsen's eyes narrowed. He had a better plan. It was best to tell the story at his home. If I wanted to hear it, I would have to forget about the sinners at Port Resolution and Sulphur Bay and come stay with him. Kelsen had built a hotel of his own at the base of the volcano.

The day was getting on. I didn't have much choice. Kelsen threw my pack in his new wheelbarrow and led me along a row of tin-roofed stores. The road was lined with cement poles. Electric power had come to Lenakel three months before my arrival—just in time for World Cup soccer, said Kelsen. We lay in the grass at a road junction. After an hour, a pickup truck appeared. Kelsen flagged it down. We climbed in the box and rumbled east on a dirt road, up through the palms into the mountains.

Tanna was so thick with life, it was a caricature of paradise: the black volcanic soil exploded with banana, taro, manioc, flowering poinsettia, orange groves, and tree ferns. Melon-sized papaya hung from house-high stems. Banyan trees cast shadows the size of baseball diamonds, their canopies balanced atop hundreds of roots that twisted down from the branches like strands of macramé.

As we passed in and out of the shadows, Kelsen explained to me that it wasn't just the John Frummers who were going to hell.
It was most of the people on Tanna, including many of the Christians. “These people disobey the Bible every day,” he grumbled. “They break the rules that Moses wrote down in Leviticus. They eat unclean food: pigs, flying foxes, sharks, crabs. They smoke. They drink kava. All forbidden! Worst of all, they go to church on Sunday, when we know that Saturday is the true Sabbath. They will be punished in time.”

Kelsen knew these rules because his family had converted to Seventh-day Adventism in 1922. They had never fallen for the John Frum message or any other false teaching, he assured me proudly.

The forest on the east side of Tanna was caked in gray dust, and the trees began to resemble stone carvings. We rounded a bend and entered the devastation. It was as though the jungle had been buried and sealed under a layer of scoured earth. Bucket-sized boulders were strewn across the ash plain like spilled marbles. The volcano rose directly in front of us like a great Saharan dune, a perfect, pristine, and not particularly threatening heap of sand. This was Yasur, the volcano whose fireworks had guided Captain James Cook into Port Resolution—named for his ship—in 1774. Yasur was sacred in those days. Each time Cook attempted to climb it, his Tannese guides led him in circles back to the sea.

Our driver didn't slow for the view. He sped over a spur of the volcano toward a gap in the forest on the far side of the plain. We were halfway there when the afternoon was shattered by a deafening explosion. The driver swerved for a moment, then continued, even as a salvo of rocks exploded from the peak like pebbles thrown up by some giant hand. I dove to the floor. Kelsen laughed. The mountain belched a black mushroom cloud of smoke, then fell quiet.