The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Nareau the Elder and Nareau the Younger and Nareau the Cunning and Nareau the Wise, and Grumpy Nareau, Sneezy Nareau, Dopey Nareau, and Sleepy Nareau. There was, it seems, much slumbering going on in the beginning until Nareau the Elder, or the Younger, or possibly Dopey, awoke the spirit of the land, which had been entombed (where? you want to ask, but I didn’t), and united it with the spirit of the air, which was drifting aimlessly, as air is often wont to do. There was the North Wind and the South Wind and the East Wind and the West Wind and they blew, from the North, South, East, and West, respectively. There were eels and bats and rays and they all came to bad ends. Ditto an octopus.

“You see, it was like the movement of a turtle,” said Bwenawa. No, I didn’t quite see. I picked up the severing of limbs, the tossing of flesh, and the general sense that the world’s creation was largely due to the boredom of the gods, but the poetry of creation—the movement of a turtle—escaped me, and I was too incurious of mythology to find out more. I’ll take just the facts, if you please. What I did find interesting, though, was the implied permanence of the ocean. Before all else there was that great blue mass of water. That the I-Kiribati could not conceive of a world or a state of existence that precluded the immutability, the constancy of the ocean, was not surprising. To view life from the perspective of an atoll, where land and all that resides upon it seems acutely impermanent, is to view the ocean as other, more tethered, cultures perceive the universe. The ocean does seem infinite when seen from an atoll, by day merging with the blue sky, by night extending toward the stars, seamlessly. Just as many westerners cannot conceive of God without placing him within something—the black void of space, a puffy white cloud, the throne room at a Renaissance fair—the I-Kiribati could not conceive of life without it being immersed within the context of the ocean. But someone had to have crossed that ocean to be the first to set foot on the islands of Kiribati. I pressed Bwenawa.

“Some educated people think that the I-Kiribati came from someplace else. But most believe that we have always been here, as descendants from the spirits.”

We were sitting on mats. A kerosene lantern offered a dim light. Shadows flitted across the rafters of the maneaba. The ocean offered its usual white noise. It was easy to believe that what is always was. But the great Pacific migrations that brought people from Asia into the Pacific were all about change and movement. Beginning several thousand years ago, many of the remote islands of Oceania were reached by people whose feats in seamanship and navigation have never been equaled, not by Columbus, not by Magellan, not even by Cook. That these peoples took to the seas at a time when Europeans were still exploring the utility of femur bones is staggering, and one can only wonder about what would have caused these people to take sail, for these were no mere voyages of exploration, but of colonization.

But where did these people come from? And who were the first to arrive in Kiribati?

Bwenawa seemed amused by my efforts to discern a beginning that did not involve a divine spider. He was much more inclined to tell me more of the Nareau family.

“… and then Nareau killed his father and he cut out his father’s eye and threw it to the sky and it became the sun.”

“Do you believe that, Bwenawa?”

“We are all Christians now… . And then Nareau cut out the other eye and threw it to the sky and it became the moon…”

I asked him about any legends that refered to islands other than Samoa.

“There are legends that speak of high islands to the west. They are there to protect us from the westerly wind.” The westerlies are the storm winds.

And then he whispered, as if revealing secret, ancient knowledge. “Some think that the first I-Kiribati came from the west.”

I looked pleased. Bwenawa looked pleased.

“From where in the west, Bwenawa?”

“They say Sumatra.”

This was interesting.

“They came with the coconut palm tree and the breadfruit tree and the pig,” he said, listing trees that are not indigenous to Kiribati, but native to Southeast Asia. “And then, maybe a thousand years ago, men came from Tonga and they killed all the men in Kiribati, but not the women. And then, maybe seven hundred years ago, men came from Samoa and on some of the islands they killed all the men again, but not the women. And so you see,” he smiled beatifically, “that is why all I-Kiribati look different from one another.”

It was a heartwarming story. And possibly true. Grimble noted the similarities between the I-Kiribati sailing canoes and those found in the Moluccas Islands in Indonesia. The I-Kiribati language, like all the languages of Oceania (except those found in parts of New Guinea), falls in the Central–Eastern Malayo–Polynesian subfamily of the Austronesian language family, which originates in Taiwan. And though it is indeed a great distance from Indonesia to Kiribati, as the drifting fishermen from Papua New Guinea demonstrated, there is a strong west to east current in this part of the Pacific. While the predominant winds in Kiribati are the trade winds from the east, a strong westerly wind usually blows from November through February. Long-distance downwind sailing would certainly be possible in the large outrigger sailing canoes ostensibly used by the ancient seafarers.

More likely, however, is that people from Southeast Asia first settled in nearby Melanesian islands, possibly interbred, and then subsequently moved farther into the Pacific, perhaps to Kiribati. It is also likely that Bwenawa’s recounting of the Tongans’ friendly arrival in Kiribati is true. Tonga has lately been recognized as a possible “founding colony,” a place from which subsequent expansion and exploration in the Pacific occurred.

But, alas, we don’t really know much about the ancient I-Kiribati. Any evidence of pre-Samoan horde settlements dissipated long ago. We can speculate, look for links between island groups, even do DNA analysis, but in the end it will tell us very little. Bwenawa is correct. There is remarkable variation in the appearance of the I- Kiribati, not in skin color (brown) or hair type (straight and black), but in facial features. One can see the sharpness of Asia, the roundness of Polynesia, even the eye coloring of Europe, as if every intrusion of the outside world has been marked indelibly on the faces of the I-Kiribati. When outsiders arrived upon the islands of Kiribati, they inevitably adapted to the demands of place. The Samoans may have feasted upon the flesh of the I-Kiribati, but very soon they became I-Kiribati themselves, altering hardly at all the culture they found on the islands. This is because one cannot conquer an atoll. The atoll trumps all.

CHAPTER 6

In which the Author, in case Anyone was Wondering what exactly he was Doing on Tarawa while his Girlfriend Toiled, discusses his Plan for making Productive Use of his Time on an atoll.

Each morning, Sylvia would rumble to work in a pickup truck, confident that through her endeavors the lives of the I-Kiribati would soon be a little brighter, a little healthier, and a little longer. After Kate left, Sylvia was the only I-Matang at FSP. She had a staff of ten, all of whom were older than her, and together they managed programs that sought to improve child and maternal health, alleviate vitamin A deficiency, raise environmental awareness, and advance the cause of sanitation, which included building composting toilets, or Atollettes, because, as mentioned earlier, something really needed to be done about the shit on Tarawa, and Sylvia was the woman to do it. “It’s really cool,” she said, uncharacteristically. “We’re going to use it as fertilizer in the demonstration garden.” Great, I thought. One more potential source of dysentery to worry about. But use the poop she did, and every few months the most malodorous stench imaginable would waft over the island as Bwenawa mixed the compost with fish guts and pig manure and spread it around the garden, teasing the tomatoes and cabbage to life. Sylvia was happy. She was in her element.

I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost… I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book.