The Shark God (24 page)

Not only had Christians rejected their grandfathers in favor of one from a faraway island—how crazy was that?—but they had followed the missionaries to the coast and given up their ancestral lands. This was the biggest crime of all, said Jack. Most Christians, he said, couldn't even find their own land anymore. How could there be peace when men were living on other men's land? “The grannies warned me that one day the people would rise up and start killing each other over the land,” said Jack. “See what happened to the Malaitans who didn't listen, the ones who left the land of them and went off to Guadalcanal.
Bigfala trouble nao!
We don't have those fights here, because we listen to the grannies and we stay close to them. We stay on the land
blong mifala nomo.
” It was clear that the Christians' luck had run out, said Jack. They had completely fallen out of favor with the ancestors, and now they were paying for it. They had no power. Just look at Peter Laetebo, the chief down in Gounabusu.

“What about him?” I said. “God saved his boy's life. That's why he became a Christian.”

Jack thought that was hilarious. While he cackled and wiped tears from his eyes, Roni explained the joke. Just yesterday, Chief Peter had paid Jack a load of shell money so that Jack would sacrifice a pig for the sake of his other sick son. The young man was sick
because he had gone and cut down a tree near a pagan gravesite. The ancestors were naturally furious.

“Years ago, Peter could have made this sacrifice himself,” said Jack. “But now that he is a Christian, he is unclean. He has lost all his power. He has to come ask
mifala
if he wants a favor from the ancestors.”

So much for spiritual fidelity. Roni gave a satisfied smile. He said that Peter was so impure, he wasn't even allowed to enter the pagan villages. But Roni could. The pagans knew
he
wasn't a real Christian.

Jack said he did not mean to be disrespectful. He was sure that Jesus was a strong ancestor. It was just that he was an ancestor from another island; it was natural that his power would be weak here on Malaita. The only Christians Jack knew who actually wielded power were the
tasiu
. Yes, said Jack. The Melanesian Brotherhood. They had
savve
.

I cannot remember the
kastom
doctor's face. Later, Roni explained that this was part of his magic. I do remember that he was a tall bony man and that he wandered out of the forest carrying a black umbrella and a woven handbag full of betel nuts and lime. He did not introduce himself. Nobody said hello to him. He reminded me of a crow. The doctor squatted on a log and watched us silently for a time. He husked a betel nut with his teeth. He pulled out a bamboo container from which he spooned a finger of lime into his mouth, along with the betel. He chewed until the pink juice dribbled down his chin. finally, he let out a bored sigh, lifted himself up, and strode toward me on those long, scaly legs. He paused in front of me, cocked his head, and cooed softly.

“Take your shirt off,” translated Roni.

I took my shirt off, then realized the whole village had come together to watch the spectacle. The only people not paying attention were two teenage boys, who were engrossed in picking through each other's scalps and biting to death whatever it was they found.

I sat still. The doctor paced around me as though inspecting a show dog. He nodded and hummed knowingly. He ran a hand along my shoulder blades. I shivered. He kneaded the skin on my shoulders and along my spine. That was quite nice. Then I felt the doctor's breath on my right shoulder blade. I couldn't see him, but my nostrils quivered at the mulchlike scent of betel nut on his breath. I could feel both his hands cupped against my shoulder, and I could hear the rush of air as he sucked and blew through them. As the exhalations came harder and faster, I could feel spit striking my skin and I could hear the terrible cough and gurgle of the doctor's effort, which reached a troubling crescendo and then ceased with a loud pop.

The crowd gave a communal “Ahhhh.”

“What? What?” I said.

“Lookim!” said Roni, pointing to the doctor, who had retreated a couple of yards. The doctor was retching and holding his throat. Then he let out a tremendous cough, and something came flying out of his mouth, much as a hairball might issue from the throat of a cat. He picked the projectile out of the dirt and showed it to me. It was a tiny wooden disc. It was red, but dusted with lime.

“That is what made you sick,” the doctor said quietly. “
Wanfala
rubbish man down in Gounabusu put this inside your skin.” He bit a corner off the disk. “There. Now I have killed the
swear
.
*
You'll feel better tomorrow.”

The doctor warned me not to spend another night down in Gounabusu. His magic would not protect me from my enemies in the Christian village, he said. Then he extended his black umbrella and strode off into the forest.

The rain finally came, and so did night. We took shelter in the communal hut with the women, who served us unseasoned taro steamed inside lengths of bamboo. We ate with our hands. Everyone mumbled and joked quietly. I lay down on a wooden rack uphill from the women and watched them poke at the coals of the little fire glowing on the dirt between us. I could hear pigs grunting softly behind a leaf wall. I began to feel better. Not from the doctor's cure, I told myself. Oh, no. The doctor and I both knew that his little bark disc had come not from under the skin of my back but from his handbag. It was still caked in lime. This was not the miracle I had been waiting for. Still, I did feel strangely comforted and unthreatened here among Jack's clan. The air felt lighter than that on the coast. The mountain, when you were on it, was not hostile. Despite the outward chaos of pigs and mud and burned forest, I felt an ethereal, ordered calm. The wounds on my calves were beginning to dry out in the smoky air. The ache began to subside.

It struck me that the mountain Kwaio led a peaceful life. It was paganism without the bite.

“This is a far cry from the days of blood feuding and those
ramo
assassins,” I whispered to Roni. “So peaceful.”

He translated for Jack.

“
Ramo
…” said Jack. “
Ramo
…Ah,
lamo!
” The Kwaio, I remembered, substituted “l” for “r” when they spoke.

“
Ramo!
” exclaimed Roni, and they both laughed.

“What's so funny?” I asked.

“You think the
lamo
are gone? Every village still has one! If someone seduces one of the daughters here, or steals a pig, or murders someone, Jack will gather a bounty of pigs and shell money so he can pay the
lamo
to go kill whoever did it.”

“Tell me more!”

“Why didn't you just ask the
lamo
when he was here?” said Roni.

“Wha—you never introduced me to a
lamo!
”

Roni translated, and Jack laughed so hard tears came to his eyes.

“The
lamo
was here all afternoon, but you ignored him, so he just healed you and went home,” said Roni.

The doctor was the
lamo
. The doctor was the assassin.

 

Six months after I left East Kwaio, a new administrator arrived at the Atoifi Adventist Hospital. He hiked out into the forest to measure a plot of land. He did not know that the land was the subject of an ownership dispute. A
lamo
met the administrator in that field and cut off his head. The Kwaio have always been passionate about their land. The severed head was recovered. The assassin was not.

The believer never forgets his first miracle. Mine remains utterly clear. It came to me high on a forested ridge above the skull grottoes, the sacrificial slabs, and the vast cradle of New Georgia Island's Marovo Lagoon. That's where I disobeyed the chief of Mbarejo and performed my ritual in the dead calm of afternoon. I made trees shake and birds take flight. I transformed the muggy stillness into a maelstrom of tearing wind, groaning tree trunks, hot raindrops, and churning mud. Let that be my story. I did make it rain, and for a good cause, too.

It was never my intention to explore the lagoons of the Solomon
Islands' Western Province. The
Southern Cross
had ventured as far west as New Georgia in 1866, but the Anglicans never had the gumption to leave any teachers there. “New Georgia has been known to the Mission chiefly as an island inhabited by bloodthirsty head-hunters and cannibals,” wrote my great-grandfather in explaining the mission's reticence.

I was carried west by a moment of serendipitous frustration. A few days after returning from Malaita to Honiara, I was assured of the imminent departure of both the
Eastern Trader
and the MV
Temotu
, and had hauled my pack down to the port, ready for the five-day journey to Santa Cruz and my Nukapu.

“You go when?” I asked the mate of the
Eastern Trader
.

“
Taem disfala Temotu hemi i go
,” he said.

“You go when?” I asked the engineer of the MV
Temotu
.

“Maybe next week,” he said.

“Bloody liar,” I fumed. “You have said the same thing for a month.”

He just laughed.

A curtain of rain swept across the pier. It lifted the betel husks and the garbage, carrying them in slow-moving streams around my feet. I had had enough. I would not be shackled to Honiara any longer. I marched to the next pier.

“You go when?” I asked a sailor who was leaning on the rails of the first ship I saw.

“
Mi go wea?
” he replied.

“No,” I said. “I don't care where you go. I'll go anywhere as long as it's today.”

“
Cranky waet man
,” he said. “
Mifala go neva. Sip, hem bagarup
.”

I tried the
Compass Rose
, whose steel deck was fully loaded with oil barrels and rebar.

“You go when?” I asked a fat woman sitting with her children on the open deck.

“Good question,” she said.

I tried the
Isabella
. It would leave for Santa Isabel the following morning.

Then the
Baruku
. It would leave for somewhere someday.

Then the
Tomoko
, a once sleek ferry that looked as though it had been pelted with rocks. The
Tomoko
's engines were rumbling. A sooty cloud was erupting from its smokestack. People were tossing babies, bags of rice, and grass mats into arms that reached out from its long passenger decks. Those arms were as black as beetle wings, the color of New Georgia skin. If the
Tomoko
was going anywhere, it was heading west, to New Georgia. Santa Cruz was east, but I didn't care.

“You go when? You go when?” I hollered. The bowline went slack.

“
Mifala go nao!
” a voice yelled back, and a muscular hand dropped down from the upper deck. I reached for it and was pulled into a crowd of steaming bodies.

“First class! First class!” I shouted. The owner of the hand that had pulled me aboard led me through a passageway—the floor was a slippery paste of oil, spit, crushed insects, and a disturbing slurry that seeped from the ship's head—and then, to my shock, through a door that read: VIP Cabin. It was a miracle. One bunk was piled high with old computers. The other was mine. I smashed six cockroaches, blew air into my mattress, lay down, and let the ship carry me away.

Through the porthole, I watched the sea and the sky merge into night. Tarpaulins swayed. Doors knocked. Cockroaches crept into the folds of my clothing. The ship rolled me gently to sleep.

I was awoken not by the light and bustle of dawn but by stillness. The
Tomoko
had stopped moving completely. The cough and rattle of the engine had settled to a restful hum. I listened. Finally, there came a shout in the distance, followed by a hoot from the bridge. Then, splashing water. I felt my way out onto the deck. A searchlight shot from the bridge into the blackness. It was re
flected back by a dozen pairs of eyes, which drifted close and became men in slim dugout canoes. They paddled alongside the ship and passed baskets of yam, taro, and bushels of betel nut up over the rails. Flats of tinned meat and sacks of Delite Flour were passed down. The trade was carried out in murmurs until the
Tomoko
's engine rumbled to life again. The ship pushed forward. For a while, the market men clung to our side, their canoes pulled along like lampreys on a great shark. Then we left them behind.

As the stars faded, islands took shape around us. To port: dark coves wrapped in jungle, ridges climbing toward clouds and the red edge of dawn. To starboard: a low band of shadows stretched into the distance like sections of a long, crumbling wall. We had entered Marovo, longest of the lagoons that surround New Georgia and its smaller neighbors like a series of enormous moats, protected from the open ocean by a sixty-mile string of barrier islands.

I was intrigued by these lagoons specifically because my great-grandfather had
not
ventured here. The region was considered too dangerous for the
Southern Cross
in 1892. My great-grandfather formed his opinion of New Georgia on his visit to Santa Isabel, a half-day's sail to the east, which he described as a “hunting ground” for raiders from New Georgia. “They are, perhaps, the worst of all cannibals, and great is the dread in which they are held by all who live in these waters, whilst the effect of their raids has been that, of the hundred miles of Ysabel, eighty are practically uninhabited. The people have either been wiped out and eaten, or else they have migrated to safer quarters.” The Isabelan survivors, who lived in a constant state of dread, sought refuge in tree houses or in hilltop fortresses.

By 1892 the New Georgian “savage” had taken on a mythic aspect in the eighteenth-century European imagination, thanks to the shocking tales seafarers related on their return from the lagoons. These days, postcolonial theorists can't agree if many early
accounts of head-hunting and cannibalism in the South Pacific were based on fact or European imagination. Revisionist historian William Arens proposed in
The Man-Eating Myth
that the cannibals who always seemed to inhabit the edges of the Western world were largely the product of intellectual conjuring. He argued that explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists constructed their cannibals using secondhand stories and the glue of their own primordial fantasies. The cannibal was a projection of European psychoses rather than an accurate representation of history. Princeton anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere later deconstructed so-called eyewitness accounts of great cannibal feasts in Fiji to prove that those stories were fictions written to satiate a public hungry for a taste of tropical savagery.

The revisionists aren't suggesting that head-hunting and cannibalism never happened, but rather that cannibal tales reveal more about their believers than they do about the people they describe. Europeans wanted to believe in headhunters as much as they wanted to believe in their own heroes. Both provided psychological fodder for empire-building.

The colonial historian Austin Coates used head-hunting lore as justification for British intervention in the Solomons: islanders needed to be ruled to prevent them from killing each other off. But a perusal of early reports reveals that it was the arrival of Europeans that precipitated the worst violence.

For all the supposedly unchecked carnage, some historians suggest that the New Georgians may have established a steady state of feuding, trading, and head-taking before white men arrived. Yes, the New Georgians were sure that human heads contained concentrated
mana
, and that the raising of a canoe house, the launching of a war canoe, the honoring of ancestors, all required skull offerings. But raids were annual affairs, carefully planned, steeped in ritual, magic, and communal work. Expeditions took weeks of planning and travel, and involved barely a few
hours of fighting, the grand finale of a yearly cycle of preparation, feasting, carving, gardening, and trading.

It was a shocking, yet quite sustainable, way of life until white traders began arming their allies with axes and guns. Although European governments had agreed to ban the sale of firearms to islanders in the 1890s, apparently only Germany, which controlled Santa Isabel, enforced the ban. The gun-toting tribes of New Georgia were rendered superhuman compared to their unarmed prey on Santa Isabel, whose tree forts were not much protection against lead shot. That was one factor. The other was European tinkering with the supply and demand of skulls. The Royal Navy punished unruly lagoon dwellers by smashing skull collections that had taken centuries to accumulate. This caused a crisis of
mana
. In response, the Roviana chief, Ingava, put together the greatest war machine the region had ever seen—hundreds of warriors, hundreds of breech-loading Snider rifles, and at least two European whaleboats—then spent much of the next decade replenishing his stock of skulls.

Amazingly, the lagoon population only really began its downfall
after
the Royal Navy had put a stop to all the raiding. The pioneering anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers noted a spectacular drop in birth rates among communities on the Vella Lavella and Eddystone islands in the first two decades of the twentieth century. People had stopped getting married and having children. Rivers concluded that this reproductive lethargy was, in fact, triggered by the ban on head-hunting, which was essential to the fabric of religious and community existence. Without head-hunting, islanders simply lost their zest for life. They grew bored and listless. Communities were dying from
tedium vitae.
The only hope, he felt, was for Melanesians to embrace Christianity with the same passion and vigor as they had their old beliefs. Rivers, who did much of his traveling aboard the
Southern Cross
, would likely have suggested the Church of England as a cure, but it was far too late for the Anglicans to set
up shop in New Georgia; Methodists and Seventh-day Adventists had gained a foothold in 1902, and their charismatic worship turned out to be just the heartfelt substitute for cannibalism that Rivers had prescribed.

A century later, it was clear that New Georgia had got its groove back. There was no shortage of children in the village of Seghe, the
Tomoko
's first landfall. We pulled up to a coral rock jetty, and all hell broke loose. Passengers tumbled over the rails and scrambled away from the ship as though it were on fire. It might as well have been. The head had been overflowing like a fountain all night, transforming the ship's passageways into a frothy slough of gastrointestinal horrors.

I bought a coconut in the market that had sprung up at the foot of the jetty, and sat under a tree, sipping the sweet milk, and I let the
Tomoko
pull away without me. The market disappeared, too, carried away on the backs of women with shining skin and frizzy hair bleached surreally blond by the sun. Seghe fell silent. I picked up my pack and wandered through the palms.

There was a line of plywood shacks strung between the sea and a vast lawn, which steamed in the morning sunlight. That lawn, it turned out, was all that remained of the airfield the Americans had built during the war. There was a red shack beside the field. I went inside and found the air agent yelling into a radio phone. The only point of interest in Seghe, he told me, lay in the lagoon at the end of the runway, where there was an American fighter plane from the war. It shone in the depths like a great silver fish.

“You could fly back to Honiara,” he said. “The plane will be in this afternoon.”

“Skulls. Maybe I could look for skulls,” I said.

“There's a girl you could have. Over at the village rest house,” he said.

“Or crocodiles. I could look for crocodiles,” I said.

He shrugged and pointed through the chicken wire of his window to where a few men were lying under a tree. “That boy will help you. He has a
kanu
. Hey! John Palmer!”

John Palmer was the tallest Melanesian I had ever laid eyes on, topping out at about six-foot-six if you included his hair: his head was shaved except for an island of braided dreadlocks on the crown. He had bound the strands together so their splayed ends resembled the fronds of a palm tree. He wore army fatigue shorts. He had the wide eyes of a child, but to be accurate, he was not a boy. He was at least twenty-five.

The air agent told John he should quit whatever mischief he was up to and take me away to look for skulls and crocodiles. I could come back to Seghe and catch the plane out in a week.

John suggested I come stay with him on his island. If I had strong legs, he could also show me the Nonotongere.

“Nonotongere?” I asked.

The air agent interrupted. “Crocodiles, fine. Skulls, fine,” he barked, then poked me in the chest with his finger. “But don't you lead John Palmer astray. Don't you put his Christian soul at risk. Leave that stone alone.” I left it for the moment.

I was suspicious of John Palmer. I wasn't sure why he was so willing to help me. “You want money?” I asked.

“
Yu savve pem petrol long kanu blong mi
,” he said hopefully. Gas money.

“And…”

“And nothing.”

John left to hunt for fuel, and I waited with the boys by the airstrip. In the afternoon a Twin Otter buzzed in, released a trio of Asian men in gum boots and polyester business suits, then took off again.