Demon Fish (4 page)

Each aspect of a shark caller’s equipment is meticulously designed to maximize his ability to subdue a predatory animal. The canoe, for example, must be light enough to paddle for long distances but strong enough to withstand the tussle between man and shark that takes place during each outing. The canoe’s seats consist of narrow slats that are uncomfortable to sit on, but that makes the overall vessel lighter, and the trip easier. While this is an efficient design, it’s not perfect: the Tembin shark caller Robert Muskup acknowledges during one of our chats, “When I sit there for a long time, I feel that it hurts.”

Conserving energy on the trip out to sea is crucial because if the trip proves too exhausting, the caller won’t be able to physically battle the shark once he catches it. Toxok admits that he’s often tired by the time a shark lodges itself in his noose, “because of the paddling.” But he also believes he is better off fighting hand to hand when he’s offshore, because he thinks he possesses powers on the water that don’t extend to land: “That particular job, I can do it on one hand. I can do it out there, on the sea.”

For an activity that comes down to such a basic contest between man and shark, it carries an elaborate nomenclature. Consider the names Papua New Guineans have for the different sections of a shark caller’s canoe paddle, a piece of equipment that stretches between two and three feet. There is the
leganbanane
, the top of the canoe paddle that resembles the bud of a baby coconut; the
lebinos
, the leg, or handle, of the paddle; the
lebelik
, the small, V-shaped carving at the paddle’s base; the
legiptas
, the broadest part of the paddle; and finally the
lembiros
, the tip of the paddle that, according to Karasimbe, calls out underwater to wake up the spirit of the sharks in the sea, the
sixilikbe
.

To assess their chances of success, shark callers—like fishermen everywhere—divvy up species by their level of ferocity. Karasimbe and his clan have four names to describe the sharks they catch:
lumnummus
is very fierce,
latixon
is fierce,
lasinabi
is friendly, and
lutino
is very friendly. While some of these names correlate to specific species—
lumnummus
often refers to tiger sharks, among the most combative sharks that troll the shores of Papua New Guinea—these categories are aimed at characterizing the animal’s spirit rather than what it looks like, or even the class of sharks to which it belongs. In the folk religion of shark calling, spirit matters more than science.

——

A few days before they go out to sea, shark callers observe strict dietary and social restrictions. According to tradition, men cannot eat pig, prawn, crab, lizard, or
kapul
, a small marsupial that lives in Papua New Guinea. Shark callers cannot have sex with their wives, on the grounds that the sharks will be able to detect a woman’s scent and will stay away. They cannot step on animal feces for the same reason.

Not surprisingly, some of these prohibitions can prove irritating. Philp Taput, a shark caller from Tembin in his forties, says he’s no longer afraid of confronting the sharks, but “the hardest part of it is to keep away from some of the
tambus
[taboos] like staying away from lying with the ladies, sleeping in the
houseboy
[a small building where shark callers gather], and not stepping on excrement.” But Taput would never think of violating these admonitions: it helps give him the steeliness he needs to confront sharks, single-handed, in the water. He does look for signs in the natural world that plenty of sharks are in the water, such as seagulls flying above the ocean, but he places more faith in the elaborate, time-honored practices he performs before heading for sea. Paying homage to tradition will deliver the sharks. “When we are preparing our rituals to go out, then we have to ask the power of the creator, the spirit, to go with us. It applies to both our ancestors and being a Christian.”

While shark hunting is usually a practical exercise—it supplies the village with food for funeral rites and other special occasions—callers also use their rituals to find answers to the questions that arise from life’s tragedies. In this way, they are seen as wise men who can get answers from the sharks even when they’re not seeking to catch them. Karasimbe’s older brother Mangis Hari, who is in his late seventies, will often perform this sort of divining ceremony for bereaved villagers. As he describes it, speaking in Tok Pisin, it is an extraordinarily precise set of procedures.

“When one of my villagers dies, I collect hair from the dead body. I take that [and put it near a particular tree], and there it remains for three days. After those three days I collect that and I wash it with some magic, some leaves, and then I go down to the beach one afternoon and sit down. I go to a clear place and put it down. With the conch shell, I start doing some magic. I prepare it for the next day. I go out to the beach, I get two different branches and perform magic, I sing some magic songs. When I finish one song, I take one branch and throw it out to sea. I do the same with the second branch, but I strike the conch shell before throwing the branch out to sea. I tie a branch and the hair together. Then I bring it to the cemetery where the deceased was buried. The spirit of the ancestors comes.”

Hari then needs to return to the reef just off the beach, to communicate with sharks and other fish in the sea. “I will put my foot on the reef. Three types of fish will appear—two out of the three are dangerous. Then I will ask, ‘How did he die, because of a land dispute, or something else?’ Then the fish will appear and make signs. The fish will be where I put my foot.”

Hari performed this very ritual when his own father died, and says it revealed to him that someone had killed his father with magic. He and his family did not seek retribution for what they perceived as their father’s murder, but it settled a question that had plagued them for days. Karasimbe describes this as the other purpose of shark calling: “It is important also if you want to know about your beginning, or your mother or father when they’re dead, and you want to find out, ‘Why did my father die?’ ” Shark calling is not just hunting: it is a way of making sense of the world.

As Hari explains his traditional practice, it becomes clear he and his brother have turned the common conception of sharks on its head. While sharks represent the terrifying unknown to most of us, Hari and Karasimbe believe they can sense the sharks at all times. And that form of “seeing,” even if it’s not literal, erases the fear that dominates our view of them. But not everyone can lay claim to this sort of vision.

While shark callers are a small group within Papua New Guinean society, there are distinctions within this elite. Karasimbe is known as a skilled hunter, and since he has connections to two villages—he grew up in Tembin but settled on his wife’s property in Kontu, a five-minute drive from his hometown—he commands respect from a wide swath of New Ireland society. Among living shark killers, Karasimbe may rank as the most prominent in his entire region. But from a historical perspective, few people sit as high in the shark-calling pantheon as Alois Kiput, the legendary Mesi villager who died at the age of ninety-six (give or take a year) in 2003.

Kiput’s story matters for several reasons. It shows how a shark caller can anchor a community during his lifetime, giving everyone in the village a sense of possibility and place. But it also shows the fleeting nature of this kind of tradition, especially when faced with strong Western influences. If a religious practice is limited to a select number of individuals—who don’t lead a congregation, but merely perform rituals on behalf of an entire community—it is especially vulnerable to erosion. Few experiences exemplify this historic arc better than Kiput and his tribal members.

What made Kiput special was his ability to help other shark callers by performing magic on their behalf. The shark callers of Mesi would approach Kiput and tell him of their plans to go to sea. He would perform the rituals in private, and the callers would go on their way, taking heart from the fact that a master had bestowed some of his magic upon them.

Kiput’s
houseboy
—an enclosure where callers seclude themselves before heading to sea—still stands, an unassuming structure made largely of cane. At the back sits the panoply of shark-calling tools, including the
larung
that a caller shakes underwater and the
taur
, or conch horn, that he sounds to announce a successful catch. “He did all the magic here,” says Mary Kalasim, Kiput’s eldest daughter, peering around her property. “The power and magic, it stays back here.” At her instruction her children bring out the seven stone sharks that Kiput used as he performed his prayers: these gray stone carvings of varying sizes remain valuable property.

Stone sharks are one of the most complicated aspects of shark calling. According to callers like Karasimbe and Toxok, these rough-hewn sculptures, complete with carved mouths that glare menacingly, contain spirits that communicate with both a villager’s ancestors and the sharks that roam the ocean. By appealing to the stone sharks on an altar—usually at the base of a revered tree—a caller can lure sharks closer in and enlist his ancestors’ aid in bringing one back to a village. In Kiput’s case, his daughter says, he would use the spirit sharks to give other villagers “the power to do the shark calling.”

When a shark caller dies, however, the status he once conveyed upon his family dissipates. While people remember Kiput with affection and respect, his daughter is bitter at how things have deteriorated since his death. Her own daughter, Jacinta, had to drop out of school to support the family. Shark calling may be prestigious, but it doesn’t produce a trust fund. Kiput did pass on several rituals to his eldest daughter, such as the
lamaxalum
, which gathers the sharks from the outer reefs closer to shore so a caller can catch them. “When I sing the song, I am sure that the sharks are coming,” Kalasim says, displaying the same sort of confidence as Toxok. But as a woman Kalasim could never perform the song in public, so she stays in her dark hut, largely secluded from the village. The sharks’ power has little resonance for Kiput’s family now that he’s gone, and Kalasim has receded from public view.

The one time it reemerges is when one of Kiput’s three sons, with whom he shared his secrets, returns to Mesi. When the village needs a shark, this son comes back to help. “When there is a feast, they call him,” Kalasim recounts. But it’s not how it was when her father was alive, she rushes to add, when the youth of the village used to surround Kiput and his shark paraphernalia. “Now that he has passed away, they have left it, because there’s nobody like him … Nowadays, no, nobody uses the stone sharks.”

Papua New Guinea has changed since Kiput first came of age, and that helps explain why shark calling has lost some of its cachet. Long insulated from the Western world, Papua New Guinea operated for centuries on a barter system and used kina shells—small, circular shells found on the seashore—as a form of currency. (Even now, the official currency is called kina.) People in rural areas tend to talk about aspects of daily life, including meals, in fairly utilitarian ways. Rather than referring to meat, chicken, or fish, they refer to all of these substances as “protein,” as in “We will have protein for dinner tonight” or “I am going out shark calling to get protein.” These are the ways the vestiges of missionary teaching still surface here: the missionaries have lectured villagers so much about the importance of basic food groups that abstract nutritional categories have earned their place in everyday conversation.

But after enduring colonial rule since 1884 under the Germans, British, and Australians, and having achieved their independence in 1975, Papua New Guineans are struggling to find services and goods that can generate sufficient cash for them. It remains one of the most rural societies in the world, with only 18 percent of its citizens living in cities. As everyday goods have become more expensive, and drinking and drug use among Papua New Guineans have increased in recent years, it’s understandable why some village elders might long for a previous era, and why Karasimbe feels so protective about his profession. “The culture, it’s about to die,” Karasimbe says. “Young males of today, they’re focusing on getting drunk and modern culture.”

Father John Glynn, an Irish priest, has spent years ministering in Papua New Guinea, witnessing both its gloried past and its less than idyllic present. “New Ireland, like much of Papua New Guinea, has lost an enormous amount of its culture, its traditions, over the past century,” Glynn says. “The current generation doesn’t even know how much it’s lost.”

Yet shark calling still carries some prestige in New Ireland: Taput, one of Tembin’s shark callers, says the practice transformed him from “an ordinary person” to one with authority once he caught his first shark at the age of nineteen. “Since then, the community has seen me as a shark caller. They treat me as a shark caller. They see me as a big man in the community.”

The divvying up of a shark once it’s brought to shore also serves as a way of marking the social status of different villagers. A shark caller like Taput expects the liver, the dorsal fin, and the belly once he brings a shark to his village, both because these choice parts pay homage to his skills and because they will ensure him good luck when he ventures out to sea again. In the old days shark callers hung up their fins to dry in their
houseboys:
the gray triangles served as proof of the men’s hunting prowess. But now they bring them to Kavieng to sell them to fin traders. Money matters more than status at this point, and fins bring cash.

In June 2007, Alois Solen’s brother died. Solen—Karasimbe’s nephew—had watched his brother struggle with illness for a long time, and as soon as his brother was buried, he started preparing his canoe and watching for auspicious signs like seagulls circling in the air.