The Shark God (17 page)

“I tell you,” said Eli, “it is not easy being a
kastom
chief these days.”

In fact, it was much harder than he admitted. It was common
knowledge that black magic was being practiced in Vetuboso. In the most recent case, a boy had been struck with a mysterious illness that caused his leg to swell up like a giant sea slug. Before the boy died, a
kastom
doctor had told his parents that he was the victim of a curse. “Look in the dirt under your house,” the doctor had told them. They did, and found several sinister-looking parcels—lumps of ash wrapped in coconut bark—under the boy's sleeping platform. The
tasiu
had come down from his hill to investigate. He declared that the parcels were evil charms. He dabbed holy oil on the suspected sorcerers to lubricate their confessions. One of them insisted that it was Eli Field who had paid for the curse. Rumors were as effective a weapon in Vanuatu as black magic, and these rumors were enough for village leaders to take away Eli's title of
kastom
chief for several months.

I knew the word
tasiu
. It is Motese for “brother,” and it is reserved for members of an indigenous Anglican order called the Melanesian Brotherhood. I had been hearing stories about the brotherhood for weeks. Some said the brothers were a kind of spiritual SWAT team, dispatched by the church to douse the fires of backsliderism and paganism. “You behave,” I heard a mother tell her squealing child at the market in Sola, “or the
tasiu
will come and take you away!”

I sent a message up the mountain and waited to hear from the
tasiu
.

Meanwhile, the drizzle continued, and my clothes began to rot. One afternoon an acquaintance of Eli's named Ben produced a magician. We all met outside Sabina's kitchen. The magician had the long, stubborn face of a mule. He handed Ben his wooden staff. Ben and I kneeled in the dirt and grasped the narrow end of the staff, hand over hand. The goal was to keep the heavy end of the staff pointed upright. It would be difficult, said the magician, because soon a spirit would come to tug at it. It would be like a miniature version of Mota's
ravve-tamate
game.

“Why can't Chuck and I play the game together?” asked Sabina.

“Because you don't know the special prayer,” barked Ben dismissively, then under his breath added, “girl.”

“
Yufala mas sarem eye blong yu
,” said the magician, closing his own eyes to demonstrate his request. “
Sipos yu openem eye blong yu, devil hem i runaway nao
.”

By now a dozen people, including Eli, had gathered to watch. I closed my eyes, and Ben made a short incantation to harass the soul of some dead man. The stick swayed slightly. I strained to hold it still. Ben's fists flexed against mine. He was clearly trying to push the staff from side to side. I felt tempted to do the same, to make the staff bob and bounce and swing—what a show we could have produced—but I didn't. I held firm, and the staff did little more than tremble. Ben gave up after a few minutes. “Open your eyes,” he said.

“I don't know what went wrong,” said Eli. Sabina just stood at her door with her arms folded and a half-smile on her face, like a mother whose teenager had once again come home drunk.

The magician was not deterred. He led us into the forest for Round Two. We pushed through groves of sharp-leaved shrubs and bamboo thickets where spiderwebs hung like wet laundry. The ground had been ravaged by rooting pigs. Birds screamed. Mosquitoes rose up from the muck. The magician hacked a clearing with his machete. He built a fence of pandanus leaves and gestured for Sabina, Eli, and I to stay behind it.

The magician picked a coconut off the ground, cut a hole in it, and turned it over so that we could see the milk pour out. Then he cut open a second coconut and turned it over. No milk this time. But Ben, who was kneeling a couple of yards away, had turned his face up and was gulping enthusiastically at the air. His mouth swelled like a fish, and his Adam's apple bobbed up and down. The idea here was that Ben was drinking the invisible stream of coconut milk that the magician had mysteriously transported across the clearing into his mouth.

“
Bigfala sapraes, no?
” asked the magician after repeating the trick a few times.

I could feel Sabina's eyes burning into me disdainfully.

“
Yu lookim power blong devil. Yu bilif, no?
” he said hopefully.

“Well,” I said, glancing back and forth between Sabina and the magician, “it would have been easy for you to have come out here and empty three of those coconuts early this morning, wouldn't it?” I felt a sudden pang of guilt, or maybe something closer to pity, for the magician. “Oh, hell, sure I believe.
Hem truyu garem bigfala savve
.”

Sabina was not impressed with the magic show, or, for that matter, with me. Back in her kitchen, she spooned the last of her peanut butter onto a crust of bread and handed it to me. “What a performance! What a miracle! Now you have seen your
kastom
magic. Have you had enough yet?”

I gnawed on my bread glumly. “You've spent a year with these people,” I said. “You have heard them talk about magic and spirits. Instead of acknowledging these things, you ignore them. Aren't you at least curious about what drives these beliefs?”

“What drives them? Fear. Jealousy. Superstition. We have all those things at home in Germany. I am not interested in fantasy. I am writing about what I see. You, on the other hand, are romanticizing these people. Look around. Look at this remarkable community, the complex society they have built. I don't understand why this isn't enough for you. Why the world isn't enough for you. Why you are so obsessed with magic when you have all the wonder of humanity around you.”

What could I say? I hadn't left home with the intention of seeing magic. I thought I could remain aloof in my travels, record the stories I heard, chart the legacy of the missionaries while pretending indifference, like a journalist or an ethnographer. But the approach was coming to feel entirely dishonest. Modern anthropologists parachute into communities, dig around for people's
secrets and myths, listen wide-eyed and stone-faced, as though they believe, pretending all the while to be neutral in matters of spirituality—or worse, converts to the local way of thinking—when in reality they hold very strong convictions about the nature of the universe. They may analyze the origins and usefulness of their study communities' beliefs, but they don't hold them to the same standard of critique to which they subject those of their own society.

Field anthropology is a business of deception generally performed by unbelievers. Thorgeir Kolshus was so convincing that the men of Mota welcomed him into the
salagoro
. They taught him how to dance. They even let him leap around with that sacred and dangerous
tamate
hat on his head. But when Kolshus defended his thesis at the University of Oslo, did he insist that his dance hat actually contained a ghost? Not likely, unless he wanted to end his academic career.

At least the Victorian missionaries had been honest about their bias. They never stopped telling islanders just how false their spirits were. (To her credit, Sabina was equally honest about her skepticism about magic and the boasts of Vanua Lava's rainmakers.) Yet despite this cultural scorn, my great-grandfather wrote enthusiastically about the spiritual gift that Melanesians offered their English counterparts. Just as Melanesians needed governance and moral instruction, he felt that Englishmen needed help in the essential act of seeing the unseen.

“I have heard of no race indeed that lives in the tropics, whether civilized or uncivilized, that does not look upon the continued presence of an unseen world as a fact beyond argument. The feeling engendered may be one of fear, but the belief is there,” he wrote in an essay on faith. “It is all very wonderful, and the conclusion of the matter is just this: that all the races of the world need each other to make up one another's deficiencies. The tropical man says to us, ‘I can easily believe in God, come and help me
to make my religion and my conduct one complete thing.' The temperate clime man says, ‘I should find no difficulty about obeying God's commands if only I could first see God and believe that He is. Come and help me to see God, I ask no more.'”

This is an entirely racist idea, and its foundations should not be sheltered from the blows of the postcolonial wrecking ball. And yet now I sensed a truth within it. Were Melanesians hardwired to believe more fervently? Was it in their genes? I don't believe so, any more than they were hardwired to be ruled by Englishmen. But there was something about the closeness of the air, the seething forests and reefs, the precipitous shadows, that demanded a new way of seeing, as though the physical world was a jigsaw puzzle whose cracks offered glimpses of an entirely different picture. How could one not be captivated by it? How could you resist trying to reach through the cracks to the shadow world? Henry Montgomery credited Melanesia with confirming his mystic beliefs. Melanesians shared these certainties with him: The world is more than an accident. The cosmos is not empty. Humans are not alone.

The islanders I met may have had differences about which gods deserved their allegiance, but they did not doubt the existence of any of them. I was disoriented and enthralled by the natural extension to this incongruity: If one cosmology was a conduit to the mysteries of the world, then couldn't they all be? And if the islands could produce magic, if some shred of Oceanic faith would just reveal itself as grounded in something I could touch and feel, then it followed that the Christian myth that had sustained my family for generations might also contain more than a metaphor.

Here is the thought I was too shy to admit to Sabina. Despite everything I was sure I knew about superstition, fiction, and science, I was allowing a small part of myself to imagine the impossible: that
mana
did flow through the air, that ancestors and gods could make rain, that men could transform themselves into owls, sharks, and
tamate
. It was a good thing to imagine. I envied the be
lievers, including my great-grandfather. I was drawn by the notion that perhaps they were on the right track when they knew that the world was more than a collection of serendipitously bonded atoms and spinning electrons; more than a series of accidents, collisions, explosions, and diffusions bubbling endlessly in an insignificant corner of an otherwise empty cosmos.

Sabina would not be the one to take me closer to magic. She had given up on secrets. As for Eli Field, his heathen revival had only served to weaken him, making him enemies in the church and putting him in the crosshairs of the mysterious
tasiu
. If supernatural power was being exerted in Vureas Bay, Eli and his friends were not the ones directing it. The coconut trick was proof enough of that. Everyone knew the real power was coming from the hill above the village, where the
tasiu
lived with his apprentices. The latest news of the
tasiu
? He had issued a curse that resulted in the death of a theological rival. Spectacular!

The morning after my argument with Sabina, a long-legged runner arrived bearing word from the hilltop: the
tasiu
was expecting me. The rain had been dumping for two days—incidentally, ever since Eli had rescinded his promise to open the skies. The big water was rising. At the risk of being stranded in Vureas Bay, I went to meet the
tasiu
. Ben, the magic coconut milk drinker, insisted on guiding me. Hymns were echoing from Vetuboso's church when we set off. It was the one hundred and first anniversary of George Sarawia's death. The service went on most of the morning. Ben was terrified the priest might spot him from the open-air chapel, so we slunk around the edge of the village, dashing from hut to hut like commandos.

“
Yu wanfala backslider!
” I hissed at Ben conspiratorially.

He nodded in agreement, then lowered his voice: “You must never talk this way around the
tasiu
.”

We followed a mud track into the forest, up along a low ridge, through a dozen small clearings planted with young banana trees and trailing vines. The earth was the color of boiled yam. Ben whispered to me as we walked. He said I should not run away even if I became frightened. Higher, the wind pulled at the forest. The trees creaked and shuddered.

A terrible scream rose from the forest. Two boys leapt out of the bush onto the trail in front of me. They wore loincloths and had smeared mud over their faces and thighs. They carried spears, which they pointed at me. Two more approached from behind. The boys grunted and yelled until their adolescent voices broke. The ambush was baffling but not scary in the least. It was a performance. Ben winked at me. The lads jumped up and down threateningly, and slapped me gently with lengths of vine rope, which they then wrapped around my wrists. I put on a grimace and allowed them to poke me, prod me, and pull me through the forest.

We headed for the top of the ridge, a bare bluff that appeared
to have been entirely seared by fire. We trudged through a patchwork of broken tree limbs and charcoal until we reached a white cross and a chapel overlooking the desolation. The
tasiu
met us at the chapel door. He was a magnificent-looking man with the physique and rough face of a rugby forward and the deep-set eyes of a mystic. He wore a black T-shirt and black shorts secured by a black-and-white-striped sash. A copper medallion hung from a coral necklace. He said nothing but waved me into the chapel.

My faux-savages led me to a bench. The
tasiu
stood with his novices in a line near the altar, and he led them in song, much as a schoolteacher might lead children in a variety show number.

“You have traveled far from home across the sea. Welcome, welcome, we welcome you,” the boys sang in English while flakes of crusted mud fell from their cheeks. It was sweet and heartbreakingly sincere.

Over coconut milk and cream cookies, the
tasiu
explained to me that the ambush was a traditional welcome for European visitors, so that we would know what captured laborers felt during the days of the blackbirders.

“Thank you, I think,” I said. I was their first foreign visitor in months.

The
tasiu
told me his name was Ken Brown. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was half that age, emissaries of the Melanesian Brotherhood had come to his village near Vureas Bay. Ken was captivated by the stories the brothers told him about their adventures in heathen places. He followed them back to their base on the island of Ambae, where he trained, prayed, and emerged after three years as a full-fledged member of the Melanesian Brotherhood.

“But what do you do here in Vureas Bay?” I asked. His English was sparse, so we spoke in Bislama. Ben helped with translation.

“Many things. We negotiate to stop land disputes. We help
married couples work out their problems. We make rebaptisms for backsliders…”

“Magic?”

“Oh, yes, we take care of that. We also organize a youth choir…”

And I felt the sense of urgency returning, and though I had intended to play ethnographer, I knew I did not care about youth choirs or rebaptisms, and I could not stop myself from interrupting him: “But the magic,” I said. “What do you do about it?”

“Well, if there is a rubbish spirit hurting people, we stop it. For example, did you see the black stone down on the beach at Vureas Bay? That devil stone was making people sick, so we took some holy oil and made a small service, and we banged that stone with our sticks to drive the devil out of it, in the name of the Big Man.”

“I'm sorry, who?”

“The Big Man, our Lord in Heaven.”

Ben interrupted.
Tasiu
Ken was like the policeman of Vureas Bay, he said. If you stole something and hid it, he could find it just by praying. And if you were a bad man, if you worked black magic on someone, he could curse you.

“
Yu mas look-look woking stik blong mi
,” said Ken. He left for a moment and returned with his walking stick. It was black. A carved snake wound its way up the shaft, the snake's eyes shining with inlaid abalone. Exodus: God turned Moses' staff into a serpent to prove his power to the Egyptians. Ken had carved this stick himself. It had been blessed by the bishop of Banks and Torres. It was the first of dozens of snake staffs I would see before my journey was done.

“I heard that people are scared of your walking stick,” I said.

“He is one powerful something,” said Ken, running a muscular hand over the carved wood. “For example, suppose I go to a heathen village and want to show people the power of God. I always bring my staff. I throw it up high and it hangs in the air. After the people see that, they know they must follow the Big Man.”

“I can't even imagine it.”

“
Hem ia nao!
It does take a big, long prayer to make the stick fly. We pray and fast for two weeks before visiting the heathens. That helps us work closely with the Big Man.”

I wanted to ask him about the man he had cursed, but it seemed a rude question after all his hospitality, all those cream cookies. I didn't quite know how to bring it up. In the end, I didn't need to.

“You killed a man who defied you, didn't you,
tasiu
?” said Ben. “Tell him about Jim Bribol.”

Ken lowered his head and spoke quietly. The trouble had started back in 1997, during a time of denominational turmoil. While he was away visiting the island of Ambae, the Seventh-day Adventists had gained a foothold down in Vetuboso. Even Eli Field's brother had joined the new church. But the Adventists weren't content with stealing Anglican sheep; they accused the
tasiu
of being a false prophet.

The
tasiu
challenged the entire Adventist congregation to meet him in their church. The Adventist pastor was the only one brave enough to show up. Ken put his staff down and challenged the pastor to an unusual duel. He suggested they point their Bibles at each other and see which one of them was still standing after three days. The pastor refused to face him.

Ken had been due to return to Ambae after winning the standoff, but things got ugly before he left. His own cousin, Jim Bribol, switched churches. One day, Jim decided that his wife's King James Bible was a symbol of Anglican hegemony, so he burned it. That was his first mistake. He would have survived if that was all he had done. But then Jim Bribol announced to the village that he was going to march up the mountain and break the
tasiu
's walking stick in half. Ken's response was swift and unequivocal. He sent his cousin a message: I will leave Vanua Lava, and then you will die.

A few days after the
tasiu
's departure for Ambae, Jim Bribol went wading in the sea. A strange fish—a swordfish, perhaps—swam up through the shallows and cut his shin. The wound became infected. Bribol fell desperately ill. His family rushed him to the hospital in Santo. The doctors couldn't temper his fever, nor could they stop his flesh from rotting. They called in a
kleva
, a
kastom
medicine man, who told the family that no medicine could save Bribol because he had been cursed. Bribol's family sent a message to Ambae by teleradio, begging for
Tasiu
Ken's forgiveness.

“And you didn't help him?” I said.

“No,” said Ken, solemnly.

“You just let him die. How could you?”

“Listen: we have our
kastom
, and we must stick to it. We have one Church and one God. We were all born Anglican, and we must stay that way. If Jim Bribol lived, people would forget the power of the true God.”

Either the
tasiu
had capitalized on a coincidental death to reinforce his own mythical status, or he was guilty of some admittedly awesome, but extremely un-Christlike, behavior. It didn't seem polite to point this out at the time. Ben and I retreated from the mountain in silence. The oaks had ceased their creaking. Mist drifted up from the sea. Drizzle fell like sadness.

The southeastern trade winds had eased for the first time in weeks, but the rain continued to fall through the night. The trails around Vetuboso were as gummy as
laplap
. My sandals were useless. I left for Sola in bare feet, letting the puree of mud, cow shit, and rotten mango squeeze through my toes. In lieu of a sun-producing miracle, Eli sent his son, Cali, to help me across the big water. The river had swollen. The water was waist-deep and flowing swiftly. Cali held my hand tightly as we crossed. I felt like a grandmother.

I carried on alone through the warm drizzle. I was surprised
at midday by Ken Brown himself, who emerged from a trailside shack halfway to Sola, rubbing his eyes. He was now more Ken than
tasiu
. He wore his civvies: baggy surf shorts and a tank top that gave him the aura of a Santa Monica surf bum. He had crossed the river the night before, hoping to intercept me. He wanted to carry my pack to Sola. There was no dissuading him.

We walked through the afternoon. The rain ceased, steam rose from the grass, and the overcast sky radiated white heat. Ken was silent.

The path became a road again. We crossed the plain of palms and climbed the hill above Sola. Ken stopped on the crest of it and set my pack on the ground. This was as far as he would go. He said he couldn't walk into Sola without his uniform; the bishop might see him. I wasn't ready to part. I hadn't been able to shake the image of Jim Bribol, rotting to death in some dreary hut.

“Are you still glad you cursed that man?” I asked. “Did you do the right thing?”

A thousand tiny beads of sweat had broken out on Ken's forehead. He looked to the sky, kicked the gravel on the road. Here, without his local audience, he was less keen to take credit for Bribol's misfortune. “Maybe I made the curse,” he said slowly, “but I didn't kill Jim Bribol. No, I asked the Big Man to decide on his fate. I made prayer for hours. I said, ‘God, it is for you to choose. You make Jim live or you
killim hem i ded.
' So it was truly the Big Man who ended the life of Jim Bribol.”

“So your God is an angry God.”

“He is a god
blong
love. But yes, He is also a god
blong
vengeance. The unrepentant will be punished.”

Of course. This was the same conflicted god my great-grandfather had worshipped, a spirit vacillating between love and anger, war and power. It was a god who behaved very much like the ancestor spirits of old Melanesia. Later I would learn that the bishop of Banks and Torres had given Ken a firm talking-to
about the whole Jim Bribol episode. Apparently the punitive direction of divine power wasn't the kind of work a member of the Melanesian Brotherhood should be doing. I did not approve of cursing. But I was enthralled to have brushed against the bounds of a mystery so foreign and yet so familiar. I resolved to seek out more members of this strange order as I moved north.