The Sex Lives of Cannibals (24 page)

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 pimps.

End this madness now!
I felt like yelling.
Trust me! It’s for your own good!
But I held my tongue and said a silent prayer fervently hoping that this was the beginning of nothing.

OUR STAY ON BUTARITARI
was to have lasted a week, but as we feared and half expected, it would be extended indefinitely. Air Kiribati, it was announced on the island’s lone radio, would not be making its weekly flight between Tarawa and Butaritari. No one seemed to know when the service might resume or, more troubling, why the flight had been canceled in the first place. Sometimes, months pass before a flight returns to an outer island. And so we waited. And brooded.

There is no romance in being marooned on an outer island. You are stuck, deprived of options, and it is then that your anxious westernness reappears, something we had thought we had long since discarded. We began to feel profoundly bothered by Third World inefficiency. We railed against indifference and incompetence, the two dominant governmental traits. Sylvia worried about deadlines and lost time at work. I . . . did not. Nevertheless, we sulked like petulant children, refusing to budge from the guesthouse, preferring instead to escape into our books.

As the days passed, the island began to feel stagnant and immobile, nothing seemed to move or change, except our perceptions, which no longer regarded languid and indifferent Butaritari as the idyllic paradise of our imaginations. The smiles and stares we received from people were no longer regarded as charming and friendly. We knew that we were the objects of much curiosity, and we began to feel like circus freaks cast into a crowd to provide amusement. When we sat in front of the guesthouse reading our books, dozens of people gathered to watch us read. Our smiles became frozen and plastic grins. The beauty of the island was lost on us. The trees seemed aloof and mocking, the sea a barrier separating us from our lives. We had lost, temporarily, our sense of fatalism and our appreciation for the absurd.

The plane did eventually arrive, five days later, excreted from the clouds on a day that saw tempestuous winds bend the coconut trees straddling what was euphemistically called a runway, and rain showers that struck the earth with the vehemence of machine gun fire. The Air Kiribati representative, whom the night before we had found sprawled on the road, having misjudged, or perhaps judged perfectly, the amount of sour toddy it takes to induce total inebriation, conducted the preboarding weigh-in with bleary-eyed avarice, allowing all excess luggage on board and pocketing the fees, which would undoubtedly be put toward the afternoon sour toddy. The pilot, Air Kiribati’s lone woman, which may or may not mean something, did draw the line when she felt the plane shudder as a motorcycle was squeezed on board. When the doors were finally closed, the air was redolent with the odors of overheated bodies, ripe bananas, and raw fish. Soon the cracks and fissures that punctured the body of the aircraft would allow a cool and cleansing breeze inside the cabin. It would be the worst flight of my life, and I can think of only one reason why I didn’t wholly succumb to panic and nausea. We were going home.