The Sex Lives of Cannibals

have morphed into hills, mountains even, something to break the monotony of a low island? As I cycled up and down the atoll on a thirdhand mountain bike that would never see a mountain, or a hill, or even a rise requiring a gear change, I realized that Nareau, unlike the great majority of deities, was a humble god, prone to thrift and frugality, and while I believe this should be encouraged among deities everywhere, I did periodically yearn for a god who kept a grander residence. Not that Tarawa is without its moments of grandeur—it is, after all, a tropical island—it’s just that it’s very, very small.

The total landmass of Tarawa is twelve square miles, roughly the size of some driveways in Illinois. This figure is illusory, however, for it creates the impression of a block of land, and this Tarawa is decidedly not. Its twelve square miles of coral are divided into elongated slivers, narrow islets crowned with the tufts of palm trees, prevented from becoming a unified whole by a myriad of channels linking the ocean with the lagoon, and stretched out over a reef extending nearly forty miles. The reef itself is shaped like a tottering inverted L, with the western side open to the ocean. We lived near the nook of the atoll, in the village of Bikenibeu, and this I liked because lagoonside it was possible to see land across the way, and this comforted me because I spent my formative years on continents and grew accustomed to its presence. Elsewhere on Tarawa, however, one could see only the ocean, the lagoon, and the land below one’s feet, which never seemed like enough, and I gave thanks every day that neither tsunamis nor cyclones were prevalent here, though I cast a wary eye on distant swells and ominous clouds because you never know, do you?

Soon I began to wonder about the original inhabitants of Tarawa. Settling down on a coral atoll is not quite like settling down in California, which had the advantage of fertile soil, a temperate climate, and freeways for convenient exploration. Tarawa is a difficult place. The soil, a porous limestone sediment, is lamentable, unsuitable for anything but the hardiest plants. The coconut palm trees that today dominate the island were all planted, and it is likely that the first settlers could only rely upon the humble pandanus tree, which is certainly a useful tree to have around, but its dull, starchy fruit doesn’t quite tickle the palate. Mangoes they are not. The only mammal endemic to Kiribati is the Polynesian rat. A horse was once brought to Butaritari, in the northern Gilbert Islands, but it soon died of starvation. Droughts can last for years. The freshwater lens, which is typically just five to ten feet deep, is often brackish. And did I mention that it’s hot?

There is little research on the first settlers to reach Kiribati. The islands form the nexus of Oceania, but unlike most nexus-type places, to be in the middle of anything in the Pacific is to be in the middle of nowhere. Kiribati lies roughly halfway between Australia and Canada, and Russia and Chile. Looking southward from Tarawa, as we did from our house, there was nothing between us and Antarctica, except, of course, half a planet’s worth of ocean. Far to the southwest lie the black islands of Melanesia—the Solomons, Vanuatu, Fiji, New Caledonia, New Guinea. The heartland of Micronesia, such as it is, is found to the north and northwest—the Marshalls, the Carolines, Nauru, Palau, Guam. Its nearest neighbor is Tuvalu, a Polynesian country. Farther to the southeast are the Polynesian islands of Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti.

The few I-Matang scholars who have delved into the ethnography of Kiribati tend to believe that the very first people to arrive here some four thousand years ago were Melanesians, probably from the Solomon Islands or the northern islands of Vanuatu. Why they believe this remains unclear to me. There is certainly no archeological evidence suggesting that four thousand years ago Kiribati was occupied by Melanesians. Nor is there any compelling linguistic proof. In appearance, the I-Kiribati differ markedly from Melanesians. Unsurprisingly, given the vastly different environmental realities of atolls and the lush, hilly, and (relatively) large islands that comprise most of Melanesia, there are also no lingering manifestations of Melanesian culture in contemporary Kiribati. When four fishermen from Papua New Guinea washed up on Tarawa, having drifted for several months in an open boat, they were not regarded as kin. After church groups nursed the unfortunate fishermen back to health, the I-Kiribati would stop and point at te black man whenever they ventured out. As one who elicited gapes and stares myself, I felt I had more in common with the few Melanesians who periodically appeared on Tarawa.

It is likely that we will never know for certain where the original I-Kiribati came from, which has led to some speculation among New Agers that they came from outer space. I find this improbable. One need only consider Air Kiribati. Those who have spent months marooned on an outer island waiting for the wanikiba (flying canoe) to be fixed will find it inconceivable that the same people responsible for Air Kiribati were once masters of intergalactic travel. But a dearth of evidence requires conjecture. Outside of a few Polynesian islands, where stone structures from distant eras still stand, and the enigmatic Lapita pottery, which has been found in both Melanesia and Polynesia, there is little archeological evidence to be found on the islands of the Pacific, particularly on the atolls, where nearly everything is built from wood and thatch, which rarely survives ten years in a hot, humid climate, much less four thousand years. Add to this the absence of writing until the arrival of missionaries in the late nineteenth century and the story of Kiribati can only be found in tales passed orally from generation to generation. This is too bad, of course. Myths and legends are mutable, varying in tone, meaning, even in substance, to reflect the bias of the storyteller or to accommodate changing times. I have always preferred the shard of pottery, the bronze coin, the blackened hearth, the ancient bill of receipt, and evocative statues of fertility goddesses for what they say of the past. For the I-Kiribati, however, their entire history resides in the stories told by a few old men. Fortunately, someone recorded those stories.

In 1914, the British Colonial Office sent a remarkable young cadet to its outpost in Kiribati. One would think that at the dawn of the Great War there would be numerous applicants for a position in the empire’s most remote colony, but in fact there was only one. His name was Arthur Grimble, and in a boon for students of Kiribati history —both of them—the Colonial Office in London ignored his subsequent entreaties to be sent to the Somme, and he remained in the islands, rising eventually to the position of resident commissioner, which is colonial-speak for God. Grimble became very fond of the I-Kiribati and today there are hundreds of islanders who can trace their lineage to him. When not dispensing justice and promoting civilization, a burden he afflicted primarily upon frothing missionaries and perfidious traders, Grimble set about recording genealogies and the nuances of island mythology, recognizing that the unwritten story inevitably becomes the forgotten story.

Kiribati mythology points strongly toward Samoa. Grimble’s research suggests that sometime around A.D. 1250, a fierce Polynesian tribe found themselves expelled from Samoa, whereupon they set forth for the islands of Kiribati. These were the same Polynesians who colonized Tahiti and New Zealand, and when they reached the islands of Arorae, Nikunau, Beru, Tabiteuea, Nonouti, Butaritari, and Tarawa, they did what they usually did upon arriving someplace new. They ate the men they found there.

The Polynesians worshipped the god Rongo, and what Rongo liked was human flesh. The sails of their war canoes were creatively decorated with the likeness of a human head, called te bou-uoua. There was another crest called tim-tim-te-rara. This translates as drip-drip-the-blood, a reference to the heads driven on stakes that Rongo liked to see scattered around like knickknacks. So, picture lolling about on the beach, idly scanning the horizon, when suddenly you see hundreds of warriors approach in canoes bedecked with the image of a severed head. It’s not going to be a good day.

But who were the people they found there? One evening, I went to ask Bwenawa, an unimane, or old man, who oversaw the demonstration garden at FSP, a job akin to that of an alchemist on Tarawa. In Kiribati, the unimane and unaine (old women) are considered the guardians of the culture, a state of affairs that sets it apart from the United States, where the final arbiter for all things cultural is the adolescent male, which explains the otherwise inexplicable popularity of the World Wrestling Federation, gangsta rap, and Pamela Anderson. Bwenawa, a dark, stocky man with bad teeth and a forest of ear hair whose appearance was not entirely displeasing on account of his gentle face and luxurious Elvis hair, was, like most I-Kiribati, deeply incurious about the outside world. There were no distinctions between Australians, Germans, and Russians, or the languages they spoke. They were simply I-Matang. But when it came to the minutiae of island life, there was not a more informed, enthusiastic student and teacher than Bwenawa. He became luminous upon hearing of the medicinal uses of a shrub found on Beru. He marveled at the strength of locally made coconut fiber rope. When he danced the up-tempo traditional dances, he was full of mirth. When he sang the sad songs, he trembled on the brink of despair. He was about as agreeable a conduit to all things Kiribati as could be. And so when I met with Bwenawa in a local meetinghouse, a maneaba, made of coconut timber with a thatched roof that descended nearly to the ground, he seemed very pleased to answer my questions about Tarawa’s beginnings.

“It is a very interesting story,” he began. His eyes lit up and he seemed to go into a trance, and then he lost me completely in his efforts to translate the story of creation into English. There was Nareau the Creator and