The Sex Lives of Cannibals

There is always the sea, the blinding light, but the wind begins to feel strangely potent, and soon you understand why the three thousand inhabitants of North Tarawa rarely go to Na’a, the northernmost tip of the atoll. Na’a is haunted. To stand in this desolate place, where drought has rendered most trees into lifeless stumps, where the ocean runs high, where enormous waves pound the reef with majestic indifference, is to feel an unshakable eeriness, until you turn around and march quickly back, past the graves of the last ten Japanese soldiers to die on Tarawa—suicides—until you reach the village of Buariki, overlooking the friendly lagoon and some friendly mangroves, where you sit in the maneaba, gratefully slurping a proffered coconut, and inquire of the resident unimane the correct I-Kiribati word for spooky.

Fishing here is not a job, or a way of life. It is, like water, an essential precursor to life, and befitting something elemental, it is accompanied by magic and governed by taboos. On North Tarawa, like on the other islands in Kiribati, each family provides for its own needs, and the mechanics of fishing—places and methods—are deeply held secrets, no less guarded despite the replacement of bone hooks by metal, and coconut fiber by industrial-grade line and mesh. Between tides, fish traps are built with stone, tidal pools are scoured, rocks are lifted, and food is secured for another day. Water is procured from shallow wells. Babai, or swamp taro, is grown in pits. Homes are made of wood and thatch. Alcohol is forbidden. Disputes are settled in the maneaba.

South Tarawa is a different place. In the velvet light of early evening, with the tide in and the men high in the trees cutting toddy and singing epics about either a woman or a fish that got away, it is possible to believe that all is well, that here on distant South Tarawa, far away from the hubris of continental life, the good life has prevailed. It was awfully pretty at sunset, and with such an ostentatious sky, the sweet finality of each and every day, illusions and delusions were tolerated. But in the glare of midday, with the tide out and revealing the desolate emptiness of the reef shelf; with the lagoon retreated, its water replaced by desert; with the aesthetic imbalance of sunsets and high water corrected, South Tarawa is exposed as a wretched island, often indistinguishable from a forgotten refugee camp. From Bonriki through Bikenibeu, past the great maneaba in Eita, across the causeways to Ambo and Bairiki and finally Betio, Tarawa’s lone road unravels from idyllic to raw to a Malthusian hell.

There are, simply, too many people on South Tarawa, particularly on the islet of Betio, which has the world’s highest population density, greater even than Hong Kong. Unlike Hong Kong, a city in the sky, there is not a building above two stories on Betio. Some eighteen thousand people, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, live on this shattered islet, one square mile of blight linked to the rest of Tarawa by a mile-long causeway. The tangible squalor of their lives shocked us initially, before we became numb. Housing was most often a strange fusion of coconut wood, thatch, corrugated tin, plywood, and rice bags, and it took time before we could distinguish the dwellings of humans from those of pigs. The beaches on Betio, both facing the lagoon and the ocean, were a minefield of fecal droppings. The odor at low tide, as waste both human and otherwise sizzled in the sun, was repellent, like eighteen thousand stink bombs going off at once. To be on the beach at low tide is to feel your body absorb the stench, internalize the repulsive, until you too feel the need to emit something somehow. Clean water was impossible to find. Most people relied on well water. They did not have to dig deep. The water lens is only about five feet below the surface, which would be convenient if coral wasn’t so porous, allowing everything dropped or spilled, such as piss and diesel, to quickly be absorbed by the groundwater, which soon becomes the happy abode of interesting parasites. Boiling water was essential, but few had stoves or the money to pay for gas canisters. There were still palm trees on Betio, which provided coconuts and toddy, but there wasn’t any shrub left for firewood, which is a poor emitter of heat anyway. Everyone had worms. Every child had hepatitis A. Tuberculosis was rampant. There were lepers. Cholera was inevitable: It had struck once before. It would strike again. Betio still functioned as a village, but it was no longer a village. It was a slum. The rest of South Tarawa trailed behind.

In this environment, the odd mixture of Robinson Crusoe–like isolation combined with the favelas of Rio, good eating was hard to find. On South Tarawa, anything caught inshore—lagoon fish, octopus, mantis prawns, sea worms—was guaranteed to induce gastric explosions in the unfortunate diner. More distressing, ciguatera poisoning was common. This occurs when untreated wastewater, which is the technical term for shit, leads to toxic algae, which is then eaten by fish, which are in turn consumed by humans, who soon feel a tingly, numbing sensation in their mouth, the first sign of the impending collapse of the body. The hands and feet become paralyzed. The skin feels like it is carrying an electric current. Bones creak. And if you are old or very young or if your immune system is weak, you may very well die. The most sensible advice we received from a volunteer teacher on the outer islands, who had became ill with ciguatera poisoning from a contaminated red snapper at a first birthday celebration, a feast that ultimately claimed the lives of three children and one old man, was to stick your finger down your throat at the first tingle and keep puking until you can puke no more. Even then, it might be too late.

We would have been happy to avoid reef and lagoon fish altogether, but dining options were few. Little grows on Tarawa. A drought combined with nutrient-deficient coral does not do wonders for the cultivation of fruits and vegetables. The I-Kiribati are quite possibly the only people on Earth without a tradition of gardening. As a result, FSP had a demonstration garden where people were taught how to cultivate something besides coconut trees. The garden was Bwenawa’s pride and joy, though it looked very much like an overgrown dump yard. Tin cans were strewn about and buried to boost the iron content of the soil. Fish guts and pig manure were regularly shoveled into the trenches. And the compost that was the happy result of Sylvia’s Atollette was placed around the banana trees, where, at the staff’s insistence, it would not touch anything edible. Every day, the garden was calibrated just so, but the yield was nonetheless meager for the effort. Tomatoes were no bigger than pinballs. Eggplant could not be coaxed to grow larger than crayons. A head of Chinese cabbage would not feed a rabbit. Bananas refused to bud without rain.

Despairing at the utter meagerness of the island’s culinary world, I too decided to start a garden. Like many writers, I believed that clearing brush under the equatorial sun was preferable to actually writing, and so with machete in hand I carved what would become our garden. It was more like recovering a garden, since years earlier the shady plot conveniently located to take advantage of any leaks in the water tanks, was, by all accounts, a particularly fertile garden, quite likely because years earlier there was rain. I had high hopes that one day soon we would be dining on light and refreshing salads and snacking on tasty fruit. I asked Bwenawa about compost and shade and water and all sorts of other highly technical gardening questions, but he dismissed my inquiries and told me that the most important thing about gardening on Tarawa was a sturdy fence. “Dogs, pigs, chickens, and crabs,” he said. “They must be stopped.” Fortunately, I had the remnants of the old fence and I set about constructing what Bwenawa called a “local” fence. This consisted of sticks tightly knotted together with coconut fiber rope. The effect was to enclose the garden inside something like a mock colonial fort. I say mock because deep down I knew that if a pig so much as huffed and puffed on my garden fort it would blow down, but it looked good and it provided me a fleeting sense of accomplishment. Sylvia too was very impressed with my fence, though her confidence in my construction skills, and possibly even my judgment, suffered when she took a closer look at the gate.

“Where did you find that?” she asked.

“What?”

“That,” she said, pointing at the thin plastic tubing I used as a latch for the gate.

“Oh that. I found it on the reef.”

She stared at it. Her face contorted. She was appalled. I had, it appeared, done something wrong.

“That’s a hospital IV. It’s full of blood.”

And so it was. It’s funny how you can miss things. The hospital incinerator hadn’t worked for years, and so hospital waste, like so much of the detritus that Tarawa generated, was thrown on the reef, where each day the tides took it out and redistributed it a little farther down the atoll. I unraveled the IV—how could I have missed that?—and tossed it into our burn bin. “Maybe I should wash my hands.”

My adventures in gardening ended soon enough. One morning, I discovered that the fence was gone. I knew immediately what had happened. Every evening, the neighborhood kids swept through in a quest for firewood and te non, a foul-smelling fruit that was used for pig food and traditional medicine. They were very polite about it at first. A few boys shyly asked if they could have the te non that dropped uncollected and possibly gather any twigs that might be lying about. Soon though, armies of children besieged what remained of the natural world around our house. A dozen boys would climb the casuarina tree and hack at the branches with large bush knives. The te non would get shredded from the