The Sex Lives of Cannibals

Sylvia spent two years trying to donate hospital equipment, for free, gratis, as a gift from the American people, training included, but failed to do so because the secretary of health, a doctor himself, could not bring himself to sign on the dotted line. He was a busy man, attending conferences around the world sponsored by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other groups that believe the best way to help the Third World is to lure away the few people in those countries who have the power to do something and bring them to a swank hotel in Geneva, where they can… where they can do what exactly? The program usually emphasizes “networking opportunities.”

For a long while, I assumed that the government was irredeemable, that its ministries were staffed entirely by idle sycophants with no greater ambition than to fritter away every foreign aid dollar that arrived in the country. This, however, turned out not to be the case. The ministries were indeed ambitious. They each had a goal, a drive to succeed, a desire to be the very best that they could be, and they were staffed accordingly. Academic credentials mattered not. Nor did experience. The critical skill a potential employee brought to their ministry was their ability to dance.

Every year on Independence Day, the ministries competed for the honor of winning the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition. This was the highlight of the holiday, and ministries spent months preparing. In the evenings, the maneabas on South Tarawa rumbled to the sounds of hundreds of ministerial workers singing and dancing into the small hours of the morning. Costumes were prepared; long grass skirts and pandanus brassieres for the women, matching lavalavas, intricate armbands and crowns that looked to be inspired by the Statue of Liberty for the men. As Independence Day neared, all semblance of official government activity ceased. For a month, each team, consisting of a hundred or more participants, fasted from dawn to dusk. The consumption of alcohol, remarkably, was forbidden. More remarkable still, sex too was prohibited. The dancing spirits—and how they loomed over the participants—demanded purity.

This struck me as a great sacrifice to make for the spirits. In a country like Kiribati, where most people struggle daily to ensure that they have enough to eat, there is little room for asceticism. A vegan, for instance, would very soon be a dead vegan in Kiribati. Even a less militant vegetarian is unlikely to survive on an atoll. In Kiribati, one eats what is available when it is available. And for a government worker to spurn alcohol seemed to me the height of self-denial, surpassed only by the repudiation of sex. The I-Kiribati struck me as a lusty people. Their conversations were laced with sexual innuendo, and in the months preceding the arrival of our dogs, rare was the night when returning from an evening out we did not stumble across a lusty couple coupling in our backyard, seeking an escape from the public forum that is I-Kiribati home life.

“Fasting I can understand,” I said to Sylvia. “And the no-alcohol rule strikes me as a pretty good thing. Most of these guys could use a little drying out. But clearly, this no-sex injunction is going to be hard for the dancers.”

“Clearly,” Sylvia replied, “you haven’t been talking to the women here about their sex lives.”

That was true. I was under the impression that to inquire about a woman’s sex life was a cultural faux pas of the first order, one that would very likely get me killed by an enraged husband.

“And now that I think about it,” Sylvia continued, “don’t start asking a woman about her sex life. She’ll believe you have designs on her, and this will get back to me—everything does, you know—and I’ll be expected to bite your nose off.”

This was also true. Biting off someone’s nose was an acceptable way to display jealousy. I had initially assumed that the large number of people sporting disfigured noses was the result of leprosy, but in fact it was simply the mark of a jealous encounter. Men bit the noses off women, and women bit the noses off men. This did not necessarily mean the end of the relationship. There were many noseless couples in Kiribati. There was, it seemed, a dark side to the sex lives of the I-Kiribati. I asked Sylvia what she knew.

“Have you heard of dry sex?” she asked.

“Isn’t that from the Kama Sutra?”

“It’s when a woman stops lubrication. This is done by inserting a mixture of coral and herbs into her vagina. It’s the preferred form of sex for I-Kiribati men. They claim it increases their sensation.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I was under the impression that only occurred in places like tribal Pakistan.”

“Here too. And just like tribal Pakistan, kidnapping your bride is an acceptable form of courtship here.”

“I had no idea.”

“That’s because you’re a man, and an I-Kiribati woman won’t talk to a man about that sort of thing. Did you know that Kineita kidnapped Beita?”

Beita worked at FSP. Kineita was her husband. Their marriage struck me as the very model of conjugal bliss. They were affectionate. Kineita was a respectful, doting husband. They had a precocious two-year-old son.

“Beita was in love with another man,” Sylvia continued. “She wanted to marry him, not Kineita. But Kineita apparently couldn’t take no for an answer, so he kidnapped her and held her for two weeks until she agreed to marry him.”

That seemed odd to me. “Why didn’t her family or the other guy rescue her?”

“What do you think Kineita was doing to her for those two weeks? He was having sex with her. That shamed her family. And the other guy wanted nothing more to do with her. She had no choice but to marry Kineita.”

“And yet she seems pretty happy with him.”

“She is. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat her.”

That made him quite the catch in Kiribati, I realized. And he had job security. Kineita, it turned out, was also a fine dancer. He would be representing the Ministry of Education, where he worked in curriculum development.

WITH THE COMPETITION LOOMING, the ministries began to finalize their lineups of singers and dancers. Some took a rather expansive view of who constituted a ministerial employee. The Ministry of Environment, for instance, had talent-spotted Bwenawa and Tiabo, excellent dancers both, and so invited the FSP staff to participate under the banner of its ministry. FSP did environmental work; ergo FSP fell under the Ministry of Environment. This greatly excited the staff. Sylvia too was invited to dance. It was felt that the novelty of having an I- Matang woman doing one of the sitting dances would score extra points with the judges.

“I know I should do it,” she said. “It would be a cultural experience. I should have cultural experiences. That’s why we’re here, right? But I really don’t want to spend the next four weeks in a maneaba, staying up until 3 A.M., learning how to do a sitting dance. Is that bad of me?”

“No. I am sure there will be other opportunities for you to wear a grass skirt and a pandanus bra.”

I, of course, was pleased that Sylvia had declined to dance. She too would have been expected to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure a visitation from the dancing spirits. And those sacrifices were not ones I wanted to share in. Nor did I particularly want to see Sylvia’s body inhabited by the dancing spirits. They spooked me. I felt deeply uncomfortable whenever I saw a dancer overcome by the spirits. It begins with uncontrolled yelping and wailing, followed by tears, and ends with the dancer tumbling to the ground, where she flaps like a fish until she passes out. Spectators nod approvingly while she is carried out of the maneaba. It was like watching a schizophrenic have an epileptic fit. I found it deeply unsettling. I wished the spirits would just leave these dancers alone.

The I-Kiribati, however, are disturbingly eager to be swept away by the dancing spirits. Each day, the FSP staff staggered into the office after a long night of dancing practice. They were exhausted, malnourished, and not at all excited about the prospect of working. Instead, the one-hour lunch break turned into a three-hour nap. At exactly noon, the mats were unrolled and the staff settled into a group snooze, save for Bwenawa, who was banished to another room because he snored.

“What can I do?” asked Sylvia.

There was nothing Sylvia could do. All of Tarawa had been swept into the tumult of the Song and Dance Competition. From dawn to dusk, the starving, sex-deprived sleepyheads that made up the dancing teams listlessly staggered through their days. At night, every sizable maneaba on the island thundered to the sounds of hundreds of people belting out the tunes of the ancients. I thought it was wonderful—an entire month free of “La Macarena.”