The Ragged Edge of the World (10 page)

Mihalic, who was well aware of the double-edged sword of spreading pidgin, saw his role in part as one of trying to mitigate the pain and suffering that inevitably accompany encounters at the ragged edge of the world. “The problem,” as he explained it, “is that these people were forced to jump from the Stone Age to the atomic age with nothing in between. Many people in the highlands saw their first wheel in their lives in a plane. The director of aviation told me that he rode in a plane before he rode in a car.”

He saw this as one reason why cargo cults flourished here but not in Polynesia. Father Mihalic recalled that when he posed that question to Margaret Mead, she pointed out that the first Europeans the Polynesians encountered arrived in ships. If something went wrong with a ship, ordinary men could fix it, and the Polynesians could see that the ship was something built by people, that it was a larger version of what they built themselves. By the end of the nineteenth century, European machines—for example, the steam engine—had become so complicated that they required specialists to attend to them.

From his earliest years in the order Mihalic had been a different type of missionary. Before he came to New Guinea he, like most members of Divine Word, went through training in anthropology, linguistics and ethnology. His order believed not in supplanting cultures, but in learning about them and then attempting to build upon them. He was proud that on occasion his order had stopped the government from burning
haus tambarans.

Mihalic witnessed the alienation from traditional cultures growing from generation to generation. “Students would wince when I talked about how their dad or mom lived. They don't like history, because history is embarrassing. You won't find anyone in the library reading about Papuan history—for students it's the least interesting subject on campus.”

He then went on to describe how this delegitimization of traditional knowledge led to larger problems in the society. “You leave your family and go to school, which takes you away from the village for many years. You live in a school atmosphere where everything is given to you. You're told that education is the key to a job, but then you graduate and can't get a job. You can't go back to the village, because that would be uncomfortable. Besides, you'd miss the glamour. To make it even worse, in many cases your parents don't want you to come back. They'll say, ‘We spent all our money on you, and you're still sponging off us—go out and get a job.' ”

After leaving Mihalic I wanted to get the perspective of a Papuan who
had
successfully dealt with those pressures. In Port Moresby I met up with John Maru, who then worked in New Guinea's Ministry for Home Affairs and Youth (and who later became chief superintendent of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary). He had grown up in the Sepik region in a village about 20 kilometers from the coastal city of Wewak. One of eight children, Maru acknowledged that he had no idea how his father managed to pay the school fees for all of them.

At first, after graduating, he said that he viewed the bonds of the traditional culture as useless, and the endless gift exchanges (elaborate ceremonies in which pigs and other items are exchanged to seal bonds between different families and clans) as a waste of time and money. He also freely admitted that the price of his schooling was ignorance of the local knowledge of his village. “If you asked me what plant to use if you were hurt or sick, I just wouldn't know,” he remarked a bit ruefully.

But through his job in youth services, he also saw firsthand the costs of alienation from a supporting culture. “If you get rid of these gift exchanges,” he noted, “you also lose your relationship to your family.” He added, “An extended family ensures that there is no poverty. Everybody feels obliged to care for the handicapped.”

A major problem for the modern Papuan is that an extended family also virtually ensures that there is no material advancement. Maru admitted that one reason he didn't take a plum job as a provincial planner in Wewak was that “every Tom, Dick and Harry would drain me on payday.” If it had been only immediate family, it would have been fine, but he worried that if he refused a maternal uncle or aunt or, God forbid, one of his many nephews, “I couldn't face up to my sisters again.”

So Maru tried to walk a fine line. He didn't pay a bride price. When he broke that news to his parents he said, “You can do this with my sisters because you're alive, but in my time it's over.”

His position was entirely sensible, and many in John Maru's shoes would do the same. But, the ingenious resiliency of the aboriginal Papuan worldview notwithstanding, it is hard to see how New Guinea's hundreds of diverse cultures can survive as their most intelligent and dedicated youths are compelled to make this same choice.

T
he time when Tahiti represented the ragged edge of the world probably ended over 200 years ago, but like an aging femme fatale, the place still casts quite a spell and remains many people's idea of the epitome of a tropical paradise. One of the first reactions of those charmed by Tahiti (which often meant European men who couldn't believe their good luck with easygoing Tahitian women) was an immediate sense that the special feeling of the place couldn't last. One enduring and probably apocryphal story has the British explorer Captain James Cook running into Captain Samuel Wallis back in England some years after they had separately explored the South Seas. After listening to Cook go on and on about the charms of Tahiti and Polynesians, Wallis supposedly responded that Cook should have visited the islands two years earlier, in 1767, when Wallis discovered them and before the natives were spoiled by contact with outsiders. Visitors have been repeating variants of this theme ever since, and continue to do so even today when Papeete has suburbs, slums, traffic jams and satellite TV.

Today one would be more likely to find the Polynesian equivalent of the ragged edge in some of the more northern and remote islands of the Cook chain, or perhaps the less accessible Austral Islands. Indeed the aphrodisiac overtones of the spell Tahiti continues to cast over the Western imagination are something of an affront to the actual tragedies unfolding at the real ragged edge of the world. Polynesia has not escaped the cultural holocaust affecting so many once serenely isolated areas of the world, and, as I will explore later, its bitter encounters with the outside world in centuries past resonate today. But the aftermath of contact also offers valuable insights into the nature of this moveable frontier, insights that are accessible once you look past the gaudy facade of sex and indulgence. What you find is that if a people remain in place, and the ecology retains some continuity with its past, then a type of deep culture lingers even after the natives abandon most of their traditional ways. It's a bad bargain, and its price is most of the knowledge that is a culture's patrimony, but to the degree that some form of deep culture can endure, there is hope for the world's indigenous peoples.

If you manage to get away from Papeete and Bora Bora (now blanketed with hotels), embers of the old Polynesian magic still burn here and there. While many of the places I've visited succumbed to modernity in the blink of an eye, Tahiti has held on to some degree of its essential Tahitianness for hundreds of years. The common refrain is “It's changed, but it hasn't changed.” Polynesians were once very warlike (and even today, they are disproportionately represented on the front lines of America's most bellicose sport—NFL football), but in Tahiti the locals long ago abandoned fighting foreigners in favor of seducing them. Most Tahitians gladly embrace modern conveniences, but far fewer are willing to make the sacrifices we make to climb the slippery pole of upward mobility.

I initially went to Tahiti in 1971, on my way to Vietnam on assignment as a journalist. I financed the trip through a Rube Goldberg contrivance of loans and grants, but since I intended to go around the world on my first real trip outside the United States, I decided to make the best of it, and one thing I wasn't going to miss was a stop in Tahiti. I'd fantasized about the place (in line with the standard-template fantasies for males of European ancestry) since high school days, reading Michener and Maugham, Jack London and Conrad, and getting lost in the paintings of Gauguin. Its appeal wasn't based just on sex, though. As I got caught up in the baby boom rat race to get into a decent college, nothing had more appeal than Tahiti's reputation as a place where nothing mattered, where a living could be plucked from the sea or a nearby mango tree. It may sound preposterous for a seventeen-year-old suburban American to be dreaming of a place famous for the acceptance and restoration of human wreckage, but then, when have teenagers ever displayed a sense of proportion?

Looking back today, I find it easy to perceive the narcissism at the core of the fantasy of the South Seas. Nathanael West skewered the tawdry French postcard image of Tahiti beautifully in
Miss Lonelyhearts,
when he had the demonic editor Shrike sarcastically and systematically torment his miserable reporter:

Take away the context and the sarcasm, and Shrike has captured the essence of the dream. The image is powerful enough to make visitors overlook all the changes that centuries of contact have wrought.

What put me over the top, however, were stories recounted by a friend from Yale named Jeff Stookey. Jeff graduated a couple of years before me, and after getting a glorious 4-F from his draft board, he miraculously recovered from his disabling knee injury and went off to explore the world. He got to the South Seas intending to stop for a few weeks and remained for two years.

Jeff spent most of his time in Tahiti working at a tiny English-language newspaper in Papeete, but he also spent time on Western Samoa. Indeed, Jeff pretty much lived out Shrike's taunting vision: In Samoa he fell into a relationship with the chief's daughter on an out-island, lived by spear fishing, and, as he told me with pride, went close to a year without wearing shoes. For me the message was that the Tahiti that enthralled Europeans for two centuries still existed—you just had to dig a little to find it.

Jeff might have stayed forever, but he was eventually gnawed by the feeling that he hadn't given real life a fair shake. He had been around Tahiti long enough to know that after a few years it would be difficult for him to live “in a place where nothing matters.” In fact, he observed that it was difficult for almost any American to live where no one cares what you've accomplished. After ten years or so, expatriates typically went into a decline often described as “Pacific paralysis.” Or, as Jeff put it, “The tragedy of the
popaa
who comes to live in Tahiti is that he left civilization to free himself of what is not important, and while he succeeds in this, he almost invariably loses the energy or the desire to seek what
is
important.”

Ten years seemed a long time off to me when I was an undergraduate, and listening to his reasons for leaving after hearing the descriptions of his idyllic life in the South Seas, I thought he was crazy to have left and wrote it off to his Puritan ethic. He was no slacker, and the longer he stayed the harder it would have been not to succumb to his sense of guilt that he was indulging himself. My attitude was, “If that's the way you feel, well then, that's your problem.” It's fair to say that the idea that grace might be achieved through humility, diligence and self-denial had somewhat less of a hold on me at that age. As I set off for Vietnam, I budgeted just a few weeks for stops on the way there, but in the back of my mind I kept my options open.

Jeff had given me the names of a few contacts in Tahiti, and I quickly found a welcome presence when I arrived in August 1971. The first person I looked up was Jim Boyack, who over the years edited some of the island's tiny English-language papers. If Stookey's analysis of Pacific paralysis was considered, Boyack's was succinct: “Tahiti is a giant, green, sweet-tasting stupid pill!”