The Shark God (23 page)

“What about you, Roni? Are you a Christian?” I asked when Peter left us.

Roni looked at his mother and hesitated. “We have church in the morning, mate,” he said. “I'll take you up the mountain after that.”

I went to bed—or rather, to my grass mat—and hoped, silently, that Roni would rescind his offer. I longed to leave East Kwaio. There was a diffuse hostility to the place, something beyond the heat, the stickiness, the constant drip and rot, beyond even one-eyed Samuel's anger. I felt it spreading through my joints like a poisonous ache. I felt it in the damp night air as I lay awake on the floor of Roni's house. I felt it through the sleepless night, and then I felt it amplified by the sound of a church bell, which began clanging long before dawn.

My legs and feet had been scratched countless times during my trek across the island. What began as nicks had suddenly developed into spectacular abscesses. Purple blisters spread out under my skin. They were streaked like marble with faint intrusions of pus. An inexplicable boil had risen on my little toe and was threatening to erupt. My head throbbed. What was it I wanted from the pagans? I couldn't remember. What could they possibly have to say about the spiritual crisis of the Solomons? I couldn't imagine.

Roni's mother greeted me on the veranda. “Oh, no!” she said when she saw me. “Oh, Roni!
Mi tellem yu finis for no lettem Samuel for touchim disfala fren blong yu!
”

Roni put a hand on my forehead. “Fever,” he said. “Now you
must
climb the mountain with me. It will take
kastom
medicine to fight a curse like this.”

I wanted to tell Roni that it was not Samuel's handshake that
had made me sick. It was the bad air, the unwashed hands, the mosquitoes, the septic sludge that dribbled into the harbor, the sickening heaviness of the air. It was climate and biology that had got to me, just as it had got to Europeans for centuries. The Australian navals who had charged into the Kwaio bush looking for Bell's murderers in 1927 experienced the same thing. Many were carried back down to their ship on stretchers, covered in septic ulcers, shivering with malaria, and dripping with diarrhea.

Just to spite Samuel, we put on clean shirts and attended Sunday mass, which was a show of pure evangelical anarchy. Hands waved. Eyes rolled. The people reassured their god. They shouted that he was the greatest, the mightiest. “Hallelujah!” they wailed. “Hallelujah!”

Roni and I slipped out midprogram. We followed a trail that zigzagged up the mountainside, through sweet potato gardens, limestone rubble, and fallow patches choking with woody brambles. The slope was steeper than the tin roof of the church. The air was dead calm and cruelly hot. My clothes were soaking wet.

“You were loud in church this morning,” I said to Roni. “So you are a Christian.”

“When in Rome,” he said, gazing up into the forest.

“Come on, Roni, which side are you on?”

“I am on the side of my ancestors, that's which side.”

Roni had grown up in Gounabusu. He was a smart kid. He had won a scholarship to Massey University and spent four years in New Zealand. That's why his English was so good. The Kiwi girls loved Roni, but he was startled by their
kastom
. One white girl invited Roni home to meet her parents in the suburbs. When she put her arm around him and told her father, “This is my boyfriend,” Roni screamed and fled. Later, the girl explained to him that in New Zealand it was an honor to be introduced to your girlfriend's father. Roni told her: “If your father was Kwaio, he would have taken a knife and killed me.”

Roni had studied plant science and fraternized with the granola crowd. He returned to Malaita as an environmentalist. He also carried a new sense of Kwaio otherness and took to wandering up into the hills, and into the past. He smoked and storied-on with the patriarchs and pagan priests. He grew dreadlocks—not matted like Bob Marley's but braided as he imagined his ancestors' had been. (Roni's dreads were gone now. His mother had finally ordered him to cut them off. She was worried the ancestors would recognize Roni as one of their own and try to influence him.) Now he was helping to rebuild the traditional school that Keesing had once established on the mountainside, a place for the pagans to learn to write down the names of their ancestors, to pass on their
kastom
, and to study mathematics, so they would know when the Christians were trying to cheat them.

“So you really are a pagan,” I said.

“I went to Christian school. I believe in God. I know he is powerful. But if I had to choose,” he said, “I would choose the ancestors.”

“I don't understand. If you believe in the Christian God, then you must believe he is more powerful. That's what the church teaches.”

“Look. Up there,” he said, pointing to a nearby ridge. Most of the land had been cleared, but a clump of trees had been left on the crest. “Those forests are
tabu
. That's where people keep their ancestors. Now imagine you lived here. When you died, your children would take your skull and put it in the
kastom
hut so your grandchildren could make sacrifices to you, and so you could stay with your own land forever. That's our
kastom
. That's what I want.”

We pushed on, climbing up into the shadows of the rain forest. Roots splayed out from great tree trunks like webbed feet. Vines trailed overhead. Condensation dripped from ferns. We splashed up a creek bed, past tiny clearings thick with taro and papaya. We climbed into the soft belly of a slow-moving mist. It was cooler
there. I forgot my headache, forgot the malevolence of the mountain, didn't think twice when a face appeared through the leaves, then disappeared with a rush of breath.

We rounded a bend and stepped into the iron age. The clearing was all blackened palm stumps, smashed limestone, and fresh-churned mud through which pigs rooted vigorously and women dashed, bare breasts swinging. The women ducked into the doorways of thatch huts and watched me from the shadows. I could see the glowing embers of their tin pipes. The face from the mist appeared at the top of the clearing, a teenage boy in soccer shorts, now wielding a machete the length of his torso. Beneath him, sitting on a white rock, cross-legged, stoking a pipe and smiling like a garden gnome, was Roni's friend Diakake Doaka, who was introduced as chief but may have been more of a priest, and who liked to be called Jack. He had the same worn fishing hat as Henry Fonda in
On Golden Pond
. Jack may have been an eloquent orator in the Kwaio tongue, but he had an even worse grasp of Solomons pidgin than I. Much of what I pass on here is Roni's translation of our conversation.

Jack was pleased to see Roni. He was particularly relieved to see me. He told me he had had a dream about me the previous night. “The grandfathers told me you were not welcome in Gounabusu,” he said. “You must never sleep there again. The Christians will try to poison you.”

Jack seemed gratified when I told him that I was ill and that I was keen to see the
kastom
doctor Roni had promised me.

“Soon,” said Jack with a satisfied chuckle. “The
lamo
is on his way.”

In his book
Kwaio Religion
, Keesing wrote that the Kwaio worldview is reflected in the social geography of their settlements. The men are literally on top. Jack's village matched Keesing's description. The highest point in the village was dominated by the priest's hut, where sacred things were kept. (There were skulls in
side, but I didn't see them. Being sullied by my time in Gounabusu, I wasn't allowed to so much as peek in the doorway.) It was a quaint cottage, the only one in the village surrounded by plants and a bamboo fence. Next down the slope was the unmarried men's clubhouse. This was my favorite: a fort raised on stilts six feet off the ground that looked like the kind of playhouse an investment banker might build for his kids. It had a neat pitched roof and a timber floor, on which were scattered pieces of a radio. (A functioning radio would have been useless anyway, because the price of batteries had tripled since the tension began.)

In the middle of the village were a couple of communal huts, where women cooked and children rolled in the dirt. Smoke rose from one thatch roof like steam from a wet lawn. The communal huts had special rooms just for pigs. “Our
pik-piks
are important,” said Jack. “We love them almost as much as our sons. No good suppose somebody steal 'em.” Farther downhill were the women's communal sleeping huts, which were austere. At the bottom corner of the village, where all the mud and pig piss eventually trickled, was a tiny hovel, not much bigger than a doghouse. A shy girl peeked out from behind. I tried not to gawk at her. This was the place where women waited out their monthly menstruation time.

David MacLaren had explained this geography to me and insisted that it shouldn't be taken literally. The Kwaio didn't really think that women were lowly and impure and that men were more holy. No, they both had their own sacredness, and the menstruation hut was a kind of earthly mirror image of the priest's house. But everyone knows that sewage flows downhill. And here in Jack's village, it was the women's place to wallow in it.

The village was only a hundred days old. Apparently, the community—which consisted of an extended family of about twenty—had moved to avoid a spiritual catastrophe. A man had fallen ill at their last settlement. He was near death when Jack received a dream in which the ancestors revealed the cause of the illness. A
woman had urinated, or perhaps begun her menstruation cycle, in one of the village huts. Jack knew that the grandfathers' displeasure about this defilement could only be relieved by moving and starting again. So here they were in the fresh mud.

 

Jack's wife—nobody told me her name—was using a stone to smash a heap of
gnali
nuts she had collected in the forest. They tasted like almonds. Mosquitoes rose in the late-afternoon haze. Jack and his wife were highly amused to see me spread insect repellent on my legs. “
Waet man weak tumas
,” I explained, and Jack nodded in agreement. I was miserable. My joints felt as though they had been battered with a pig club. The boil on my toe had ruptured obscenely. I wrapped it in duct tape. Where was the damn
kastom
doctor? It was not that I imagined any sort of magic would heal me. I wanted to see the
kastom
doctor in the same way a tired mountaineer wants to see the top of Everest. The doctor's arrival would mean the beginning of my journey back out of East Kwaio.

“I think you have a good life here,” I lied to Jack.

He nodded and explained that life in the Kwaio bush was good because he and his family still obeyed the rules that a giant snake had imparted to the ancestor Ofama, 125 generations before. Respect the ancestors and their shrines. Don't steal pigs or women that aren't yours. Don't kill without a good reason. Take care of your own ground, your pigs, and your taro gardens. Be tidy. Don't use your house as a toilet. All quite reasonable. Oh, and men must never eat from a plate used by women. Men should live and shit uphill, women downhill. Women and the things they touch should never, ever, gain more altitude than men. Men's bathing water should be diverted so it doesn't mix with women's pollution somewhere downhill. Priests should offer extravagant sacrifices of burned pig to the ancestors, and the meat should be eaten by the priest alone. Etcetera.

My feminist friends nod when they hear these stories. They tell me that
kastom
, myth, and
tabu
are tools of the patriarchy, of powerful men pushing everyone else down, especially women (i.e., in the menstruation hut).

That may be true, but I was less interested in the politics of the rules than I was in their mythical origins. The bishop of Malaita had introduced me to the theories of French linguist Maurice Leenhardt, who had lived on New Caledonia between 1909 and 1926. Leenhardt concluded that Melanesian myths were not fictions plucked from the ether so much as they were an expression of lived experience. By this I believe he meant that, though Melanesians could not control their natural world through technology, their myths provided tools to help them adapt to it. Every day they saw how the order of the world depended on the standards of their conduct.

In some ways, Leenhardt's theory seemed to fit here in East Kwaio. When the ancestors were honored and their rules obeyed, life generally went well. But when the rules were broken, people got sick, crops failed, and women became infertile. Sometimes natural calamities occurred without warning, but the Kwaio always seemed to find a reason (a shrine disturbed, for example, or a house fouled by urine) to connect these events to the ancestors' wrath. Things could be made better only by offering a sacrifice to manipulate the forces of the supernatural realm in their favor, or at least to placate them.

I couldn't see how the edicts of Melanesian ancestors differed from the exacting rules that Moses had handed down to the Israelites in the Book of Leviticus, or the bizarre prohibitions—no consumption of fish without scales, for example—still maintained by the Seventh-day Adventists. Humans crave structure. We crave rules. Where few are required, we extrapolate; we tease them out of our myths. Obey, or the gods will exact vengeance. Obey, or you will burn in hell. Obey, or the taro will rot in the ground.

All Jack Doaka had to do to reinforce his faith was to look at the world beyond the Kwaio hills. It was going to hell in a hand-basket. Jack had no doubt that all the great evils of Solomon Islands life stemmed from Christian transgression. War? That's what Christians did; it's what the government—which was really just an arm of the church—brought to East Kwaio in 1927. Sexually transmitted diseases? They were spread by Christians who defied the old sex
tabus
. Poverty? That came from dishonoring the ancestors, which Christians were always keen to do. Christians were greedy. They chased money and forgot their place in the world.