The Sex Lives of Cannibals

“I think you’d look very fetching,” she replied.

Sylvia was unfazed by my sartorial preference. Every culture that has developed along the equator has very sensibly included skirtlike garb for men. Like most men in Kiribati, I generally wore a lavalava. Shorts were for formal wear. Pants were an imposition by an alien culture.

My mood lifted, however, when I saw the British high commissioner. He was an enormous man, freakishly tall with a beefy heft, and he lived in Fiji with his diminutive mother, which struck me as a very English arrangement. The British no longer have an embassy on Tarawa. They have, in fact, been doing everything possible to disentangle themselves from the Pacific. Their semiofficial representative in Kiribati was the wife of a Scottish aid worker, and so, once a year, air travel permitting, the British high commissioner of Fiji made an appearance. This year he had been taken to Buariki on North Tarawa, where Captain Davis had first planted the flag on Tarawa. It takes about two hours to cross the lagoon in a Kiribati-8 canoe powered by an outboard engine. It took a little longer for the high commissioner when it was discovered midway on the return trip that they had run out of fuel. In the long hours of paddling that followed, the high commissioner developed what must have been an excruciating sunburn, and so when he finally appeared at the reception, in khakis and a blue shirt that would have looked perfectly respectable were they not stained dark throughout with sweat, he looked like the world’s largest, ripest tomato. He was good enough to inform us, however, that he had recently spoken to the queen and that she was thinking of her subjects in Kiribati, a Commonwealth country. More likely, the queen was busy considering the implications of leaked tapes and licked toes, but this is why high commissioners get paid the big bucks. The president of Kiribati, looking uncomfortable in pants and sandals more commonly found in Bulgarian flea markets, circa 1974, rose and spoke about how grateful the I-Kiribati were to the British for their wise rule during the colonial era. “You civilized us,” he said. The high commissioner nodded magnanimously. And then we tinked our beer cans and toasted the queen.

Feeling very silly, I looked around and watched the gathered ministers, who were all as sodden through as I was in their ill-fitting pants. “Hear, hear,” they enthused. “To the queen.” As one, we guzzled our beer. If it were not for the beer, and the heat, and the bad clothes, the scene would not have been out of place in the House of Lords. They wish the queen well in Kiribati. They really do.

CHAPTER 11

In which the Author tells the Strange Tale of the Poet Laureate of Kiribati, who, in fact, was not a Poet, nor was he from Kiribati, but he was the Poet Laureate, sort of, though more than anything, despite considerable gumption, he was a Cretin.

Shortly after we arrived on Tarawa, there appeared in the back pages of newspapers around the world a small item regarding Kiribati. The instigator of this tiny tempest in the human-interest media was the English magazine Punch, which published a story about a twenty-one-year-old man from Northampton, UK, named Dan Wilson, who in a cheeky display of tactless ambition, sent a letter addressed to “The Government, Kiribati,” offering himself for the job of poet laureate. In his letter, Wilson stressed his range—“I can write poems about anything you want; happy poems, sad poems, songs, anything”—and noted that for a remuneration package he wished for nothing more than a hut overlooking a lagoon. Also enclosed was a sample poem, a three-stanza ditty that began: “I’d like to live in Kiribati/ I feel it’s the country for me/ writing poems for all the people/ under a coconut tree.”

The letter, as one would hope, was delivered to the head of government, President Teburoro Tito, who was sufficiently moved to extend an invitation to Wilson to live the simple, literary life in Kiribati, hut included. That Kiribati is pronounced Kir-ee-bas, which undermines the rhythmic structure of the poem, mattered not, since even in Kiribati it is understood that poems no longer have to rhyme. Wilson, however, perhaps unaware of the aching sincerity of the I-Kiribati, decided to pass on his sample poem and a letter from the president’s personal secretary to Punch, a satirical rag moving ever further from its illustrious past, and this was followed by a media paroxysm that lasted for a full one-day news cycle. Newspapers from Europe to Asia to Australia carried stories. Even CNN bit. And each story was more or less the same. The tiny Pacific paradise of Kiribati had made a twenty-one-year-old student from the UK its poet laureate, based on the following poem (here followed the poem). The tone was always one of sweet condescension—look at these simpleminded islanders, beguiled by a young prankster from Northampton.

This, of course, was unfair. Let some snarky “LifeStyle” journalist try to forge a living from a canoe and a coconut tree. The I-Kiribati, however, are utterly irony deficient, a liability in the modern era. And the government wasn’t exactly savvy to the ways of the global media. Most governments would have shuddered in embarrassment and hired legions of media-relations specialists to advance some form of plausible denial. But George Stephanopoulos had no counterpart in Kiribati. Instead, the president was left wondering what all the fuss was about. A very nice young man from England was kind enough to think of Kiribati, write a touching poem, and inquire about the possibility of spending some time on the islands to write verse about the lovely people here. How could one say no?

And so President Tito had another letter sent to Dan Wilson. Was the poet sincere? Did he really want to come to Kiribati? Did he wish to live in a hut overlooking a lagoon? Wilson, stunned to receive another letter from the president’s office, wrote back immediately and apologized for creating such a stir, observing that the media is an uncontrollable beast, and that he was, indeed, interested in writing poems in a hut overlooking a lagoon.

The mail to and from Kiribati often operates at a steamship pace. Eighteen months passed until Wilson received a reply. Soothed by the poet’s good intentions, the president’s personal secretary reassured Wilson that he was indeed still welcome. “Now to the question of His Excellency’s hut,” the letter continued, “rest assured that this generous offer still stands and furthermore, the hut is conveniently located on one of the outer islands.”

This letter eventually found Wilson working on a Christmas tree plantation on the German-Polish border. It was November. Let’s reiterate: German-Polish border. November. And so it came to be that one day, Dan Wilson, the first poet laureate of Kiribati, sort of, arrived on Tarawa, ready to assume the wreath. Greeted at Bonriki International Airport by a presidential aide, Wilson was taken for a brief tour of the island—the brevity having more to do with the meager size of the atoll than with any shirking on the sights—and deposited at the president’s private home, a spartan gray cinder-block house located on a narrow spit of land between the lagoon and the Mormon high school, which is where I found him one morning, utterly inebriated.

It appeared that the president’s family had discovered kava, a narcotic mud water ritually drunk in much of Polynesia and Melanesia. I put aside my bicycle and entered a room barren of all furnishing or ornament, save for mats, where a dozen men reclined in a satisfied stupor around a kava bowl. Kava is derived from the roots of Piper methysticum, a pepper plant requiring water and rich soil and hillsides and occasional cool weather and all sorts of other conditions not found in Kiribati. The I-Kiribati have a great appetite for intoxicating substances, and since the country lacked anything like a Food and Drug Administration, it was probably in the spirit of public service that the president had enlisted his family, at least the male members, to imbibe the mud water, presumably for research. Bowl after bowl was consumed without fuss or ceremony. Women brooded on the fringes. Punctuating the strange, stoned silence was Wilson, who sat around the kava bowl plucking a guitar. Twang. Snort. Twang. Giggle.

I politely declined a bowl. I am very firm when it comes to the consumption of intoxicating substances. Not before 10 A.M., I say. It’s a slippery slope. I was eager to speak to Wilson. Our only knowledge of the poet laureate saga came from a couple of faxes sent to us by friends, which simply left us befuddled, and we forgot all about it until we heard, through the coconut wireless, that the poet laureate had indeed arrived on Tarawa. Wilson, who in person looks much like a diminutive Liam Gallagher, the loutish front man of the onetime supergroup Oasis, agreed to join me outside, where we sat in the shade offered by the presidential lean-to, and where I asked him about his first impressions of Tarawa.

Snort, he began. “I’s fookin small, i’s wha ie is.”

Pardon?

“I’s fookin small, i’s wha I sed. N i’s fookin hot too.”

Yes, quite. The poet laureate, it appeared, did not speak the Queen’s English.

“Y gut a fag?”