The Shark God (14 page)

I asked Hansen where she had learned the old stories. Some, she said, came from her father. But others, she had learned from a Norwegian anthropologist who had visited Mota six years previously. Since none of his stories contained naughty bits, I suspected that the Norwegian had brought a copy of Codrington's
Melanesians
and that he had used the book to reunite the old myths with their onetime home.

The Norwegian anthropologist's name was Thorgeir Storesund Kolshus. Mota's
kastom
chief lent me a scuffed copy of the thesis Kolshus had written for the University of Oslo. I took it back to my tent. In it, the anthropologist, who lived on Mota in 1996 and 1997, argued that Christianity had not sterilized traditional religion on the island: it had remystified it. The
suqe
had crumbled, but the
tamate
and the ghosts they celebrated were stronger, more respected, and more feared than when the missionaries first arrived. After a year on the island, Kolshus had been partially initiated into a
tamate
society and taught the steps of a simple dance. He was shocked to learn that the dance hats the Motese constructed in their secret glades were treated with more reverence even than the goblet used to serve the blood of Christ on Sundays. The hats were more than decoration: they were the abodes of powerful, living
tamate
spirits. To disrespect or mishandle a
tamate
hat would be to anger the spirit and thus to invite sickness or death. When Kolshus was finally permitted to dance in public, he caused a panic by nearly allowing a
tamate
hat to slip from his head. If that hat had touched the ground, the entire village would have had to be evacuated until the
tamate
energy had been contained and removed.

While
tamate
hats shared the sacredness afforded Christian ob
jects, Kolshus noted that the church on Mota had taken on the Melanesian concept of
mana
. Priests had the power to work miracles, bring rain, even inflict sickness as punishment for wickedness (though, when pressed, they always named God as the source of the power). That's why Mama Lindsay's antimagic curse had worked so well.

How did the islanders reconcile these two conflicting worldviews? Kolshus insisted that the Motese had split their souls in two: there was the one they were born with, and there was the one they received when baptized. When a Motese died, his first soul, the soul of the world, became a spirit and roamed the island as a
tamate
, while the second soul, the soul of heaven, rose out of the grave after three days and flew up to meet God. I liked that idea.

I dozed off, not sure if the faint howls and echoes I heard were coming from the forest beyond the church or the ether of my dreams, which carried me away from the tin-roofed church, through the forest, to the place where mysteries were revealed. Two souls.

 

In the morning, we gathered in the church for the Christian half of the marriage ceremony. First came another excruciatingly long sermon in which the priest rambled on in English for a good two hours. There was chanting and much waving of incense. It was as formal and anesthetizing as Eucharist at Westminster Abbey. I found myself sitting down-bench from the rector from Sola, who gazed dreamily into the rafters and yawned periodically. He still had kava in his veins. I realized with some irritation that we were among the few who actually had arrived early enough to catch the entire service. Most dribbled in just in time to kneel down and accept the body and blood of Christ. I didn't join them. The rector, shuffling back from the altar, noticed this. He sat close, leaned in, and issued his usual disquieting greeting.

“We must talk,” he said.

There were two brides and two grooms. One bride was barefoot; the other wore a new pair of sneakers. They both wore white dresses. Their hair was combed out Afro-style, and powdered white. The grooms wore hibiscus flowers behind their ears.

Later, both couples sat outside the church in a row of plastic chairs. One by one, we came forward to shake their hands and place gifts of rice and sugar at their feet. Then the brides began to wail. They pulled down their veils to cover the tears that streamed down their faces. The two grooms stared at their knees dejectedly. A string band struck up behind the wedding party: three guitars and a washtub bass. The musicians thunk-thunked and jangled away maniacally, and they sang:

Now the grooms began to cry, too.

Just as the scene began to feel unbearable, the brides and grooms stood up and went their separate ways, as though the marriage had never taken place. The crowd dispersed, and the village grew quiet. Mota's Christian soul had had its moment.

The rector shuffled up to me and, for the first time since he had served me communion in Sola, looked me in the eye.

“Hum. Yes. We need to talk,” he said, jerking his head toward the edge of the forest. I followed him there reluctantly. He held out a palm full of
gnali
—almondlike nuts—and I accepted them.

“You took communion in my church,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, remembering how our eyes had locked just for a moment as I licked the wine from my lips.

“Your granddaddy was Anglican,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good. Yes, good,” he said, clearly uncomfortable. “And you are Anglican.”

The rector was anxious for me to say yes, to know he had not shared the blood and the body of Christ under a false pretense. I did not want to tell my story, to rupture my friendship with the church. I felt my face flushing.

“You are Anglican,” he said again, hopefully. “You are Christian.”

“I was confirmed into the church when I was twelve,” I said. True enough.

“Of course! Good! Yes! Good!”

The rector was immensely relieved, and he was also transformed. He offered me more nuts and led me through the forest to the neighboring village, where members of one groom's family were gathering. There was a strange, apprehensive energy about the crowd: they reminded me of troops preparing for war. Old men argued. Young men paced back and forth, fidgeted, yelped. Girls tied red flowers in their hair. And then they all began to march, solemnly at first. There were more than a hundred people, all led by a dignified old man wearing a
lavalava
and a starched white shirt. He carried an unopened yam shoot—a sign of peace, according to the rector. The others carried bags of rice, sugar, and root vegetables. One yam was so big it had been strung from a pole so two men could carry it. Men hauled buckets full of kava. As the marchers made their way through the forest toward Mariu, they began to whoop and howl. The string band appeared out of nowhere to lead the procession, which now bounced and shook with the joy of a giant conga line. As we entered Mariu, the guitarists strummed faster and the crowd broke into a sprint. They ran to the lawn at the center of the village. They kept running as they were joined by Alfred and his neighbors, now all dashing together around and around in a wide circle, skipping, jumping, leaping, shouting, laughing ecstatically, heaving their yams and their sloshing buckets of kava high in the air until they had run themselves breathless and the circle closed in on itself.

Then the
kastom
wedding ceremony began. Banana leaves
were spread on the grass. The father of one groom made a great show of arranging the bride price. First, he produced a thin string of shell money that had seen better days. Then there was a pile of cash: a stunning 42,000 vatu—about $340. The bride's father made his own pile of gifts, without money. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, then whispers. A man in a Brazil soccer jersey stepped forward, shook his fist in the air, and started yelling at the father of the groom. Something was very wrong. It wasn't about the money, explained the rector. Someone hadn't done their homework, someone had botched part of the ritual. The whole thing hadn't gone according to
kastom
.

“Shhh!” someone hissed at the critic. Three or four more men joined in.

“Shhh! Shhh!”

The groom's father pointed his finger at the critic and yelled at him. The bride and groom stared at the dirt while the old men angrily debated the fine points of bride price etiquette. Lengas had told me this was just the kind of confusion that happened all the time now that the
suqe
societies weren't around to reinforce
kastom
. Men didn't know their traditions. They didn't follow the rules.

“Shhh!” hissed the crowd. The string band started up again, young men joined in the kava song, and the critic was eventually drowned out. Meat was shared. Kava flowed. I sat with the rector, who was in his cups again and content. We were friends. I tried to tease him with a story from the Norwegian anthropologist's thesis. Kolshus had written that ghosts were so strong, so present, on Mota that they could be cajoled into playing games with humans. The most popular spirit game was called
ravve-tamate
, or pull-the-ghost. The object was to go out into the forest and engage in a tug-of-war with the spirit of a dead man. What could be more heretical?

“Oh, I know about
ravve-tamate
,” said the rector, pausing to
wipe the kava scum from his beard. “When I first came to Mota from the Solomon Islands, they told me about it. I just laughed at them. I said, ‘I am a leader of the church, so of course I do not believe in your ghosts.' Well, one night they showed me their game. They filled a basket with the favorite food of some dead fellow. Taro, I think it was. They tied the basket to the end of a long pole, and we went out into the forest. There were a dozen of us, men and boys. Everyone started to shout at that devil. They were cheeky with him. They teased him and they called him weak. And I tell you, I heard him answer back.”

The rector paused, peered into the forest, cocked his head as though listening for something, and continued: “We followed the voice while one man shouted out: ‘Hey devil, if you think you are so strong, why don't you prove it? Why don't you try to pull this food from us?' We were all holding on to the pole when something grabbed the basket and tugged it. It was strong, I tell you. It dragged us through the forest.”

“Weren't you afraid?”

“Oh, yes! The devil was very rough. It dragged us through the rocks and the bushes. I was bruised! I was bleeding! But the strange thing was, I never felt the pain of my wounds.”

I didn't know what to say. The rector was not at all troubled by his demonic flirtation. He was enthralled by it. I sat and thought about the two souls of Mota, the church and the
salagoro
. I remembered that morning's church service and the crowd that had trickled in just in time to take Holy Communion. Kolshus had written that the Motese took communion as often as they could. They were swallowing the body and the blood of Christ not only as a way of remembering their Messiah's sacrifice but as an act of pragmatism. He was sure the Motese believed that the bread and wine of Holy Communion made them strong, not just spiritually but physically. It was a way of soaking up the
mana
of Jesus. No wonder the rector had been so concerned about wasting it on me.

A storm was building in the late-afternoon sky. The wind was up. I glanced around the crowd, looking for Alfred, who should have been readying the skiff for our trip back to Sola. His face, when I found it, always seemed to be obscured by the base of an upturned kava cup.

The rector peered into the forest again, grasped my shoulder. “They are coming,” he said. “Stand back!”

Then I heard a familiar sound, a faint owl-like hooting. It echoed through the forest. It was the sound I had heard every night on Mota, the sound I was certain was a product of imagination or dreams, only now it was louder and undoubtedly real.
Whoop. Whoosh. Coo.
Then silence. Children ran squealing from the garden at the edge of the village. Shadows ducked among the glistening leaves. The brush stirred, gained legs and arms. The devils leapt out into the open. There were half a dozen of them. Their heads were crowned with brambles, bamboo branches, and feathers, like oversize birds' nests, from which sprouted the tentacle-like bodies of snakes: Medusa meets
Apocalypse Now
. Their eyes were completely obscured by leaves. They wore leather thongs around their genitals. Their legs and arms and gaunt buttocks were smeared with charcoal mud and bands of chalk paste. They crouched and shuffled with bowed knees. They leapt through the air. They peered into the doorways of houses and shook long white sticks at the villagers.

Alfred's brothers grabbed wooden poles and began to pound on a plywood drum in front of the church. Everyone else drew back and watched from the fringes of the clearing. Parents held children close. The dancers drew around the drummers, lurching, ducking, craning their necks like snakes. This was the dance of the
mai
, the poisonous black-and-white-banded sea snake, the rector said. He grunted and cackled with pleasure. The dancers had been practicing in the
salagoro
all week—hadn't I heard their shouts at night?—and this was their gift to me. I was too
busy fumbling with my camera to answer, or to say, “What the hell kind of priest are you? Shouldn't you be outraged?” I got on my hands and knees and began to crawl toward the melee. I wanted to fill the frame of my memory. The crowd stirred behind me. I looked back to see the rector gesturing at me frantically to stop.

“You must not approach the dancers,” he said when I had retreated to his side. “The ground is hot. If you stop too close, you will break it, and it will take days, weeks, to fix the ground. We will all have to leave the village.”

It was clear that violating the dancer's space was more than a breach of etiquette. This dance was more than a dance. But nobody could explain the source of its power, or its apparently volatile nature, or if it had anything to do with the
tamate
at all. The ground had been wound up like a spring by the energy of the dancers, and it needed to be unwound carefully. That was all the explanation I could get.