The Shark God (15 page)

I was struck by the geography of the spectacle. The snakes strutted and ducked below the eaves of the church, ignoring the house of God completely. The church and the
salagoro
shared congregations, they knocked against each other, and now the serpent was dancing in God's garden, and there was no competition, no conflict at all, because neither acknowledged the other. Strangest of all, the man who had served me the blood of Christ had also served as my interpreter to the world of pagan spirits. The island really did have two souls.

The snake dancers retreated into the woods. The wind picked up. The sky darkened. The storm was upon us. Alfred threw back one last cup of kava and shuffled liquidly down the ravine toward the ocean. I followed. The swell had risen even here on the leeward side of the island. The sea shivered and heaved, then surged across the rock shelf that served as our dock. Two of Alfred's surviving children refused to climb aboard the skiff, which
bounced dangerously off the rocks. Alfred did not force them. He just smiled dejectedly and left the boys with their uncles and the beaming rector, standing knee-deep in the storm surge. He bade them a soft good-bye, gunned the outboard motor, and steered us into the endless gray cordillera of swell. Alfred had plenty of fuel for our journey back to Vanua Lava: at his feet was a half-gallon jug of kava.

Melanesian history has long belonged to foreigners, because the written word always trumps oral history. It was white men who first wrote down the islanders' stories even as they sought to erase their
kastom
. Through sermons and schoolbooks, the words of those early missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators lived on to shape collective memory. Now, Melanesians casually refer to the time before contact as
taem blong darkness
, reducing thousands of years of trading, agriculture, fishing, and storytelling to a shadow world of fear, violence, and suffering. Whether this memory is accurate or not, its foundations lie in the scribblings of foreigners.

On Mota I realized that European accounts of the island's
kas
tom
always seemed to carry the most weight. Thus Hansen Ronung, whose job it was to sing her way through Motese history, could be corrected and humbled with a few anecdotes from Codrington's
Melanesians
, and when Motese argued about modern culture and rituals, their disputes were now arbitrated by whoever was holding the tattered copy of Thorgeir Kolshus's University of Oslo thesis. Was Kolshus an expert on Motese culture? The islanders evidently thought so. Before Alfred and his brothers drank kava, one of them always said a little prayer and spilled a drop of it on the ground. But the men admitted it wasn't their fathers who had taught them that prayer. It was Kolshus. And he, it turns out, picked up that gem from anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers's 1914 book
The History of Melanesian Society
. Alfred's brother had told me that he thought Kolshus's big idea, the one about the Motese having two souls, was just plain wrong. His words faded amid a haze of kava, conversation, and guitar strumming; and they will be transmuted with every year, as conversations do. But Kolshus's versions of
kastom
will live on, unchanged.

When Codrington published
The Melanesians
in 1891, it was hailed as the first thorough study of “primitive” culture. Ever since, anthropologists have flocked to the South Pacific looking for remnants of a primitive Other that they might romance, penetrate, and ride toward scholarly recognition. These foreigners and their books have frequently been lauded as preservers of truth and traditional culture in modern Melanesia. Some communities are thrilled to be the subject of research. It brings them status and attention. But anthropologists, like the missionaries and traders before them—not to mention travel writers—don't necessarily get their stories right. The godmother of modern anthropology, Margaret Mead, proved that much. In
Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization
, Mead presented “evidence” that cultural—rather than biological—factors were the most important determiners of human
behavior: testimony from a trio of Polynesian girls who claimed that they were not subject to any of the sexual taboos and shame faced by American teens. The girls led Mead to believe that they were both carefree and promiscuous. Mead, eager to prove her nature vs. nurture theories, ate the stories up. The book propelled her to fame when it was released in 1928, but half a century later, one informant confessed that she and her friends had been so embarrassed by Mead's interrogation that they had simply fibbed to her.

After nearly two months in the islands I had yet to pierce the thick skin of the Melanesian Other. I thought an anthropologist might provide me with the tools. Before leaving Canada, I had learned about a German scholar who had been living at Vureas Bay, on the west side of Vanua Lava, researching a doctoral thesis. She received my e-mail message at the post office in Port Vila during one of her quarterly visits to the capital. Just drop by, she had responded. Easy.

I had a map that showed a perfect red line wandering all the way west across Vanua Lava to Vureas Bay. Everyone in Sola insisted the red line was a road. But when Melanesians say “road,” they aren't thinking about a highway or even a cart track. They mean there is a way. They mean that yes, once upon a time, perhaps someone walked in that direction.

I filled my pack with bags of rice, corned beef, and Webster's Cream Cookies, then followed a gravel road over the snake ridge and down onto a plain bristling with rows of coconut palms. The road became two furrows in the tall grass. The wind hissed through the tops of the palms but did not stir the soupy air beneath them. My shadow shrank beneath me. Flies landed to sip from beads of sweat on my neck. At midday, the copra plantations gave way to jungle and merciful shade, but then the road disappeared, swallowed by a mound of boulders and an extravagance of shining leaves and knotted vines. Bewildered, I marched
back along the track, looking for the turn I had missed. I poked around the roots of a giant banyan. Nothing. I drank the last of my water. The road had obviously intended to go west, so I went west. I clambered through the boulders and realized that the moss and lichen had been worn from some of them. I followed the route of bare rock until it became a trail. It led over a mountain, through a mosquito bog and down along a great bay, where the sea rose into house-high curls that slammed onto the crags below me. I saw no one.

The trail faded, reappeared, then was joined by others in the afternoon. Like a river, it strengthened and gained certainty with each new tributary. I stopped by a creek and opened my bag of cookies. I listened to my breathing and the roar of the distant surf. The solitude was a gift, but it did not last. Melanesians do not believe in solitude. They will rescue you from it when they can.

It was midafternoon when the red-eyed man emerged from the forest. He carried a broad machete and used it to cut open a coconut for me to drink. He told me that yes, he knew my German scholar, Miss Sabina. She was a good woman, he said, but her story was a sad one: “
Hem i no gat famili. Ino gat husban. No gat brotha. No gat pikinini. I sad tumas.
”

The man insisted that I needed his help to reach Vureas Bay. The problem, he said, was the big water. He took my pack and marched off, pleased with himself. I followed, irritated. Cattle stood beneath the palms. The heat had made them so lethargic we had to push them from our path. We descended into a black rock canyon and forded a river, hopping across a series of submerged boulders. The clear water tugged at my shins. “Men have been swept away here,” said the man. “Yesterday the big water was so high you could not cross it. You should pray for God to keep the sun shining, or you will not be able to leave Vureas Bay for a long, long time.”

As if on cue, the sun disappeared behind a mound of billowing cumulonimbus.

We splashed through water gardens bursting with big-leaf taro, all irrigated by dozens of narrow earthen canals. We hit the suburbs of Vetuboso just before dark. This was supposed to be the biggest town in all the Banks Islands, but there were no roads and there was no power, just hundreds of huts scattered through the forest, all strung together by a network of trails slicked by centuries of bare footsteps. In the middle of the town, beneath the eaves of her own thatch bungalow, was my anthropologist.

Sabina was a sparrow compared to her meaty neighbors. She was pretty but also somehow harrowed, thirsty. When she saw me, she ran a hand through her blond hair, which she had trimmed into a precise bob, and sighed deeply. She seemed relieved to see me, embracing me like an old friend. The neighbors were scandalized, but I understood. I carried the aura of chocolate, books, rock videos, conversations in cafés, bad language: things that were as familiar in Heidelberg as they were in Houston or my own hometown, yet absolutely foreign to Vanua Lava.

Sabina introduced me to the village's
kastom
chief, Eli Field. He wore no shirt or shoes, but he did have a silver watch on his wrist. He had the chest of a bull and the sparkling eyes of a storyteller.

“
Bi yumi dringim wanfala kava tonaet!
” Eli said, crushing my hand inside a callused paw.

“
Kava, hem i numbawan
,” I replied.

Sabina rolled her eyes and led me inside to her kitchen. A thin dog rubbed his haunch across the dirt floor.

“One more month,” she sighed. “Just one more month, then I will escape.”

Sabina set a kettle on her fire and made me a cup of tea. She said she had come to Vureas Bay because the locals had put in a request for an anthropologist to the national cultural center. Nobody had completed an ethnography here since Codrington.

“All their old knowledge is scattered, it's disappearing. The
chiefs thought that if I wrote it down, at least they would have a picture of the
kastom
they still possess. But…” She waved a thin arm dejectedly toward her door.

“Yes?” I said.

“But it has been difficult. Officially, these people want their knowledge preserved, but in reality they are incredibly possessive of it. These are jealous people.”

A crowd gathered around Sabina's hut. Heads poked through the window, which was not a window but a rough gap in a wall of woven pandanus leaves. Men and boys strained to hear us. Sabina smiled weakly. “And there are other problems. It's hard to be a single woman living alone here. To the men, I'm a temptation. To the women, I'm a threat. I have informants, but as soon as I establish a rapport with them, their wives get jealous. They gossip. Some men aren't even permitted to come drink tea with me. And then there are the creepers…”

I laughed. I had heard about creepers. As in pagan times, men and women on most islands were forbidden almost any physical contact until they got married. But boys will be boys. Men who couldn't control their libidos would literally creep through their villages at night, tapping softly at the windows of prospective lovers. It was regarded as a sport by some, but I imagined a creeper's approach would be terrifying for a woman sleeping alone. Unless she was unusually bold.

There were a generator and a television in Vetuboso. Someone had returned from Port Vila with porn videos. From them, the men had learned that white women were insatiable and eager to break all kinds of sexual
tabus
, especially the one forbidding oral sex. As a result, there was constant knocking at Sabina's window. The creepers didn't scare her, she said, but what a bloody bother they could be. The trick was to yell as loudly as possible, yell until the creepers were shamed into flight.

You would do that if you wanted them to go away, I thought.
But what if you didn't? What if you were lonely? What if you were curious? What then?

“I might leave my door open now and then,” I said.

“That makes you a man,” she replied.

And naive, I thought. Since Victorian times, anthropologists have claimed to follow a simple rule, which, though unwritten, is as powerful as any Melanesian
tabu
. Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was said to put it simply for his students at Oxford: Don't fuck with the natives. Study the Other. Insinuate yourself into its life. Befriend it. Do its dances. Eat its food. Learn its secrets. Become intimate with it. Love it, even. But never cross the line. Anthropologists are less articulate when they try to explain why they should keep their distance, but the sex taboo is about more than scholarly high-mindedness.

Bronislaw Malinowski won fame in 1929 by revealing the amorous secrets of Melanesians in
The Sexual Life of Savages
. However, it wasn't until the posthumous publication of his field diaries that Malinowski's own erotic fantasies about his Trobriand Island hosts were revealed. After observing one local woman, Malinowski panted: “I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us whites, fascinated me…. I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possessthis pretty girl.” Why could Malinowski not claim his exotic prize? Postcolonial critics say it was because sexual intimacy would have broken down the last barrier between the anthropologist and his Other. The sex taboo reinforced Malinowski's superior status; as long as he remained pure, he was not part of the Melanesian system but above it. Malinowski was the one with the right to ask questions, and unlike his “savages,” he would not be expected to give up his own secrets.

Plenty of Malinowski's intellectual descendants have broken the sex taboo, but few are keen to publicize their adventures. That kind of story could have you lumped in with three hundred years
of sexual exploiters, or it could reveal you as weak, soft, vulnerable. Either way, it could ruin your reputation. The community of anthropologists is hierarchical, one field-worker explained to me in Port Vila. To rise to the top, you must guard your power and your secrets as fiercely as a
suqe
society member.

After dark, Sabina led me to the compound Eli had built for his family in the forest far from the village. Eli had decided that I should stay in a hut he had built behind his own. It was cluttered with dusty audiotapes and stacks of
National Geographic
magazines, the effects of a linguist who came to make a dictionary of the local dialect, then took one of the local lads home to Australia with her.

We arrived just in time for kava. Eli's eldest son pushed chunks of the root into a cast-iron meat grinder on the porch. His bright eyes and bare torso shone in the silver light of Sabina's headlamp. Cali was eighteen. He had a wife and a baby. He wore an ear stud with a tiny pink star.

Eli held up an oil lantern and began his lament.

His great-grandfather had been the most powerful
kastom
chief in Vureas Bay. Then the
Southern Cross
arrived. The missionaries converted Eli's grandfather and his father, too. The missionaries built a school and started a coconut plantation. The children learned English and, along with it, the new religion. Esuva Din—the district priest who had cursed the sorcerers of Gaua—arrived in Vureas Bay to stamp out
kastom
. Ten sorcerers died within a week. Magic stones were smashed. The
suqe
and its secrets were lost.