to sit in an air-conditioned office in Washington, poring over thousands of pages of buzzword drivel—“disseminating knowledge over the Internet”—and it is another thing all together to be in a village on the far side of the world, watching people get the health care information they need in a clever, effective, low-tech, real-world kind of way. If this had been a World Bank health program, a gazillion dollars would have been spent on consultants and first-class air travel, culminating in a report issued four years later recommending that Kiribati build a dam.
While the actors and the elders traded another round of speeches, lunch was brought to the center of the maneaba, where it remained for a very long time. There were flies, big flies, and they swarmed around the food. A half-dozen women languorously swept their hands back and forth over the assorted plastic plates, which elsewhere are called disposable, but here will be used to the end of time. There were more speeches. Sylvia was thanked for her $20 contribution to the preparation of the meal. There were songs sung heartily. There were garlands placed upon our heads, crowns of flowers. Talcum powder was sprinkled on our necks, Impulse deodorant sprayed under our arms. And finally we could partake of the meal. Ah… one last speech. An elder, a gentle moon-faced man, explained that we hadn’t been expected until the following day—it happens, there is but one radio phone on Butaritari—and so would we please excuse the humbleness of the meal. No worries, we said. It would no doubt be delicious. It was not.
Have you ever wondered what an eel the size of a python tastes like? No? Well, I can attest that it is the most wretchedly foul-tasting victual ever consumed by a human being. Slimy, boiled fish fat that could only be swallowed because, as was the custom, the entire village was silently watching us consume this meal, and they would likely be offended if we let the gag reflex do its work. For ten long minutes, the village did nothing but silently watch us eat. A few of the men were shaving. With machetes. These are tough people. It’s very kang- kang, we said, as another dozen flies settled on the sliver of eel we held in our hands. And then finally, the village elders, the men, the children, and the women, in that order, partook of the meal, and with the center of attention elsewhere, I began to quietly place the contents of my plate behind me, donating it to the mangy dogs that circled the maneaba.
And then we danced. The exuberance of the I-Kiribati for dancing cannot be overstated, as we had already witnessed with the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition. But it is te twist that inspires a certain madness in the I-Kiribati. No matter what time of day or night a maneaba function occurs, there comes a moment when the village generator is brought to life, feeding energy to a Japanese boom box, and with startling rapidity all the old ways recede, replaced instead with the throbbing atmosphere of an outdoor disco devoted not to the nurturing of sexual tension, but rather to the propagation of shameless silliness. It is the pinnacle of bad form to refuse an offer to dance te twist, and as the most exotic guests, we were often asked to dance, Sylvia by good-looking young men and me by the village aunties. To the sounds of Pacific pop and the ubiquitous “La Macarena,” we twisted, flailed, bumped, and grinded. As we danced, someone thoughtfully sprayed us with Impulse deodorant and showered our necks in talcum powder. My dancing aunt goaded me into ever greater displays of silliness, and just as I settled into a series of moves that closely resembled the movements of a chicken surprised to have lost its head, women from every corner of the maneaba rushed at me like linebackers, grasping onto me with ferocious bear hugs. These were strong women. Though I was not quite as substantial as I once I was, I was by no means a small man, and yet they flung me around like a rag doll. Later, outside the maneaba, members of the theater troupe told Sylvia that this was a fairly risky, though not unheard of, method used by women to display their partiality toward someone.
“You should have hit them,” Tawita said to her. “Some women would have bit off their noses if they had done that. You should at least demand mats and bananas.”
“Are you kidding?” Sylvia replied. “Did you see how they threw him around? I’m not getting involved. They can do what they want with him.”
ON BUTARITARI, we felt like we had discovered the true end of the world, where just beyond the horizon ships were known to sail over the rim of the Earth. Such illusions were easily cultivated staring into the blue void, realizing that behind you there was only a slender ribbon of land separating the ocean from the lagoon. Yet, as we rode up and down the atoll on borrowed bicycles (one with a chain that preferred to be elsewhere, the other without brakes, which mattered not on a flat island), watching the men fishing and the women tending gardens and the children playing or shyly staring at us from the heights offered by the coconut trees that they climbed with such ease, it sometimes seemed as if the rhythms of life were focused solely on Butaritari, and that the larger world, the world of continents and great cities existed only as faraway dreams. But the larger world had descended upon Butaritari, of course. When Robert Louis Stevenson visited, in 1889, the island had been reduced to a dissolute kingdom, governed by liquor, guns, murderous traders, and besieged missionaries. Stevenson, though, was soon enough reduced to the timeless lamentations of the I-Matang on an atoll: “I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips,” he wrote in a letter. And elsewhere: “I had learned to welcome shark’s flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beefsteak, had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.” Where else but in Kiribati has deprivation remained so constant?
The most profound visitation of the outside world during the modern era occurred with the arrival of World War II. The Japanese had initially garrisoned Butaritari with troops shortly after their attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The island, and particularly Tarawa, formed part of Japan’s defensive periphery around their conquests in East and Southeast Asia. In 1943, the U.S. Marines destroyed the Japanese forces in what came to be known as the Battle of Makin.
After the war, the missionaries returned and Butaritari reverted to English colonial rule, but unlike elsewhere in Kiribati, where America and Americana fails to resonate, Butaritari retains a strong affection for the United States. As it happened, our stay coincided with the anniversary celebrations commemorating the Battle of Makin. These were to be conducted in the village of Ukiangang, and on the appointed morning we trudged the two miles from our guesthouse, eager to see the festivities. We got there just in time to see the marching competition. Between the school and the great maneaba, Ukiangang has a clearing that approximates a village square, and here dozens of children were marching in formation—left-right-left-right—round and round the square, past the painting of a plump and benevolent G.I. greeting islanders emerging from their shelters, and past hundreds of giddy onlookers, who dissolved into laughter whenever the march master issued his orders—“Huuahh ehhh, huuaahh uhhh”—with Monty Pythonesque exaggeration. It seemed everyone was bedecked in T-shirts connoting America. Monster Truck Madness said one. My Parents Went to Reno and All I Got Was This Lousy T- Shirt said another. Mr. Shit Happens was there. And once again I was amazed at how clothing moves around the world. The stories those T-shirts could tell. One old man, wearing a frayed U.S. Marine Corps T-shirt approached us and sang a flawless rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He sang it the whole way through, Tripoli to Montezuma. He did not speak another word of English otherwise.
With the midday heat, events soon moved into the shade offered by the village maneaba. Mostly it was traditional dancing, and as the dancers fluttered and swayed and undulated I was reminded again how achingly beautiful I-Kiribati girls are, thinking, boy, she’s going to be something when she’s older. And then I looked at those who were in fact older and began to wonder what exactly was going on with the I-Kiribati girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty that prevented all but a very few from becoming beautiful women, until it occurred to me that the past few months in Kiribati hadn’t actually done wonders for my beauty either. And then a group of boys marched into the center of the maneaba and they looked like trouble. They wore droopy shorts. And bandannas around their heads. They glowered menacingly. Someone turned on a boom box and inside this maneaba, in the village of Ukiangang, on the island of Butaritari in the Gilbert Islands, Vanilla Ice was heard. Ice Ice Baby. The boys danced with that skippity-hop-look-I-have- no-shoulders thing that Vanilla Ice made his own. I glanced at the unimane. These were men who could recite their genealogies back five hundred years and more, who knew how to read the water and the sky, who knew how to build things as large as a maneaba without a nail, who knew, in short, how to survive on an equatorial atoll on the far side of the world. What on earth would they make of this sudden intrusion of the most appalling song ever recorded—something far, far worse than anything recorded by Yoko Ono—a song that I daresay represents all that is vile and banal in Western civilization? I am saddened to report that the unimane were delighted by Ice Ice Baby. They smiled and nodded in time to the music, gleefully watching their grandsons prance about like junior varsity
