The Shark God (5 page)

I heard the sound of voices coming from the creek. I followed them and found dozens of women bathing, singing, and slapping their laundry, which steamed in the afternoon heat. Some of them were topless, which was not exactly in keeping with the teachings of the Presbyterians who first evangelized the island. I walked on to talk to their husbands, who were bathing upstream.

I had scarcely mentioned the name Isaac One when a young man leaped forward, grabbed my hand, and tugged me away from the creek.

“Not here,” he said adamantly. “Not Sulphur Bay.”

He pulled my pack from my back and strode off with it, heading farther upstream. I had little choice but to follow him. After a few minutes, we entered a clearing much like the ones I had seen on my walks with Kelsen: an oval of earth pounded hard by bare feet, this one shaded by a grove of breadfruit trees. Spiny fruit hung from the branches like green piñatas. The clearing was full of people: old men in filthy
lavalavas
and ski jackets, young men in surf shorts. Boys and mongrels lurked shyly around their heels. The men were tending little fires and puttering with great dirty clumps of roots. They turned to gaze at me silently.

“Isaac One,” I said. An old man stepped forward.

I pulled a bag of rice and three tins of tuna from my pack, intending to hand them to the chief, but thought better of it when he scowled and turned away. I placed them on a grass mat instead. The chief did not acknowledge my gifts. He murmured something to my guide, who took my pack and disappeared into the forest. I was nervous. The sky turned purple over the volcano.
Dusk settled on the
nakamal
—for that is where I had arrived: the traditional kava-drinking ground beside almost every village on Tanna.

“The chief is very drunk,” said the man who brought me. “Kava.”

Isag Wan (as I learned his name was really spelled) was beguiling. He was as thin and bent as the smoldering twig he clutched in one hand, at the ready to relight the cigarette that never left his mouth. He had the bloodshot eyes of a kava addict. But those eyes were still quick. His beard was peppered gray, and he wore a khaki jacket with “U.S. Army” stamped on the chest. He was forever kicking the mongrels that followed him around the
nakamal
.

I tried to introduce myself, to explain why I had come, but the chief just waved me silent with a bony hand, then proceeded to fuss over a grass mat, which he spread on the dirt for me.

“
Long moning yu kam long ofis blong mi,
” he said, then turned away.

Come to his office in the morning? An office, here? I hadn't seen so much as a tin roof in a week.

The night's kava session had already begun, and the chief would not be distracted. The scene was familiar—I had read accounts of the ritual by the earliest Presbyterian missionaries, who noted that the Tannese followed each gulp of the drink with an invocation of a spirit or a prayer meant to activate the power of a magic stone. The missionaries did not like that at all. They banned kava consumption for several decades before John Frum came to challenge them.

No women were permitted in the
nakamal
. I watched the men whittling away at clumps of kava. They halfheartedly scraped off the dirt and woodiest skin from the root, which looked like ginger, only fatter. Then they cut it up into bite-sized portions and handed them to teenage boys, who waited like dogs for table scraps. The boys chewed and the men fed them more bits of root,
until their cheeks ballooned like singing frogs. Then one of the boys spat the contents of his mouth onto what looked like a hankie (which seemed appropriate, given the way he cleared his nose and horked once his chewing was done). The blob of masticated root looked like a cow pie. Isag Wan held the cloth and chewed root over a coconut-shell bowl. Someone poured water over the fibrous mass, then the chief wrapped the cloth around it and squeezed until the juice dripped into the bowl. They kept pouring and squeezing until the bowl was full of mud-gray slurry.

The chief drank his shell in three quick gulps. Then he turned and spat a great bouquet of spray toward the forest. As he was spitting, he made a sound somewhere between a groan and a yawn.

“The chief is saying his
tamavha:
he is praying,” whispered a young man who had settled in next to me. His name was Stanley. A single knot of dreadlocks sprang from the back of Stanley's head. He wore a T-shirt with a cartoon mouse on it. The mouse was drinking tequila.

“And now it is your turn,” Stanley said, smiling encouragingly.

Everyone in the
nakamal
turned to watch me. I rose and was approached by a lad with red paint smeared across his face. He looked like one of the castaways from
The Lord of the Flies
. Snot oozed from his nostrils in vibrant shades of green and yellow. He cleared his nose and swallowed, then he handed me what I considered to be an unfairly large coconut shell that was close to overflowing with the muddy brew.

“Just like the chief did,” said Stanley. “All in one go, and then you say your
tamavha.
”

The kava looked like dirty dishwater, tasted of mud and cloves, and acted like anaesthetic. My tongue went numb even as I chugged my shell. I spat into the forest, barked “God help me,” then peered into the shadows. After two more shells, the numbness spread to my stomach and my head. All was well. The world
hummed quietly, and I tried to place the source of this newfound feeling of transcendence.

Scientists have been researching the pharmacology of the
Piper methysticum
shrub for more than a hundred years. Researchers in the 1980s found that the pepper's root contains compounds with anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, and local anaesthetic effects. There may also be psychoactive constituents, but nobody seems to agree on whether or not kava contains enough to get drinkers good and high, in the clinical sense.

Kava is consumed in pockets right across the South Pacific. But nowhere is the drink said to be as powerful as on Tanna. That could be because Tanna is the only place where the root is prepared by chewing, rather than pounding or grating. Researchers have suggested that the root's active ingredients, whatever they are, have low rates of water solubility. Saliva might act as an emulsifying agent. In other words, all that chewing by all those snot-nosed virgins might actually release the kava's true power.

The night air was wrapping itself around me like strands of gauze. I sat on my grass mat and proclaimed the goodness of it all to Stanley. It dawned on me that he was a dear, dear friend of mine. “Everything is purple. Life is purple, really,” I told him. “Don't you think?”

Stanley glanced around the clearing and shook his head sternly. “Quiet, quiet. Only whisper now.” The
nakamal
was not like a bar where you could yell at your neighbor, he said.

So I whispered: “Do you believe in John Frum?”

“I believe,” Stanley said.

Bingo.

“But who is he? What is he? Is he your god? Where did he come from?”

“Shhh,” he said, and then he mumbled his answer into the dirt between us. “There is only one God but different messiahs. Your messiah is Jesus. Ours is John Frum. He is our best ancestor.”

Stanley's voice began to trail off. I tapped his knee gently. It was like kicking a jukebox back to life.

“Back in darkness time we only had
kastom
on Tanna,” he said. “The grandfathers drank the kava and did the dances. They had magic stones, and the stones would help them make the ocean rough or calm. They could make sun and rain, too. But then the missionaries came and told the grandfathers: ‘You come to church. God will give you everything.' And they made a law to stop the grandfathers from using their magic stones. They said all
kastom
was bad—even kava.

“That's when John Frum came to us—as a spirit. He told the grandfathers, ‘The white man has a light, the light of his Church, but he wants to use it to destroy your
kastom
. Go back to
kastom
, hold tight to it, because God created
kastom
for us to live by.'”

And then Stanley fixed his gaze on the fire, and he did not acknowledge my prodding, and he was silent for a long time.

 

I wanted more, but I had already constructed a collage of Frum history from European reports I discovered in the Port Vila library. According to these, the prophet John Frum was a direct by-product of Christian zeal. Presbyterian missionaries had established what amounted to a theocracy on Tanna by the time the French and British set up their joint administration of the islands. The church subjected the island to Presbyterian law enforced by roving bands of native enforcers. Anyone suspected of drinking kava, singing, or dancing could expect to be arrested and taken to a church court.

All that began to change in 1940. That's when the British district agent James Nicol heard rumors that a mysterious stranger had been calling the island chiefs together for secret meetings. The stranger wore a broad-brimmed hat and a white sports jacket with silver buttons. No one ever saw the stranger's face in the shadows,
but they imagined by his high-pitched voice that he was a white man. He berated them for following other white men's laws. John Frum was his name—though some insisted it was John With a Broom (for sweeping away sadness). Regardless, it was his message that counted. He said the Tannese should turn their backs on the Presbyterian missionaries who had banned the things that made them whole. They should return to the
kastom
Stanley had told me about: extravagant dances, rainmaking magic, circumcision ceremonies, and polygyny. They should throw their European money in the sea and get back in touch with their ancestors. If the Tannese did all these things, the colonial police and the strict Presbyterian missionaries would miraculously disappear. And then the prophet would return on a big white ship, and that ship would be loaded with riches from America. Refrigerators, cooking ware, and Spam would be as plentiful as coconuts.

Some islanders said that John Frum was the king of America, or perhaps the son of God: like Jesus, only older. Others insisted thousands of his soldiers were inside the volcano, waiting for the right moment to charge out and chase the British and French away. Several chiefs claimed to be Frum himself.

The prophet's followers exploded into action in 1941. They slaughtered cattle and pigs and turned in their European currency in preparation for Frum's golden age. Hundreds gathered to swill kava and dance all night on the south end of Tanna. One Sunday that May, the Presbyterian ministers found their churches completely empty for the first time in decades.

Nicol had had enough. He called in reinforcements from Port Vila and arrested dozens of Frum's most adamant followers.

The movement might have died had Frum's prophecies not come true. In December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The American fleet reached the New Hebrides the following March. More than half a million soldiers passed through the islands during the war. The U.S. soldiers were spectacularly gener
ous, handing out pots, pans, cigarettes, and tinned meat. One black GI, hearing of the Tannese struggle, reportedly gave them a flag. (Some say it was red; others insist it was the Stars and Stripes.) He told the Frummers that America would always be there to protect them from their colonial masters. Now the Tannese were even more sure of their prophet's connection with America. They raised that flag at Sulphur Bay on February 15,1957. They built a cross and painted it red, to match the crosses they had seen on U.S. Army ambulances. They carved wooden “rifles” and gathered U.S. Army surplus clothing. To honor the day of their redemption, the Frummers don those fatigues, take up those rifles, and perform marching drills around their Sulphur Bay parade ground on each February 15.

But Tanna is hardly unique in the messiah department. Melanesia produced dozens of cargo cults in the last century. Across the archipelago, a generation of messiahs promised the arrival of shiploads and planeloads of untold riches, but only for those who obeyed their edicts. The cults emerged independently on at least a dozen islands, and they all revolved around the manipulation of supernatural forces to bring about an age of prosperity and freedom. Most advocated giving up foreign goods and customs while at the same time promising the spontaneous arrival of consumer goods. People built wharves, warehouses, and even airstrips to facilitate the cargo magic. The cults that emerged before World War II relied on returning ancestors to bring wealth. But after the war, that changed: the magic cargo would come from America. After U.S. soldiers left Espiritu Santo, three hundred miles north of Tanna, leaders of what became known as the Naked Cult told villagers to cast off their clothes and conduct all their sexual intercourse in public, “like dogs and fowls.” Doing so would bring the Americans back and usher in a golden age of prosperity and everlasting life.

There were so many cults in Melanesia that church leaders
created guidelines for the missionaries who battled them. A 1971 paper advised Christian pastors to be patient. They should try to ignore the villagers' use of Christian crosses in pagan rituals, and divert the cultists' attention with movies and sports events.

A few anthropologists have suggested that the cargo cult phenomenon was a response by primitive cultures to the seemingly supernatural levels of material wealth possessed by Europeans and Americans. The theory goes like this: The industrial products white men used were so shockingly different that islanders thought they must have come from the spirit realm. Guns, Jeeps, and tinned food were also seen as evidence of the white man's mastery over Melanesians. The possession of those things would bring to islanders a kind of material and spiritual emancipation. There was a secret to white men's good fortune. Discover that secret, grab the cargo magic, and the days of slavery would be over.