The Sex Lives of Cannibals (7 page)

But where did these people come from? And who were the first to arrive in Kiribati?

Bwenawa seemed amused by my efforts to discern a beginning that did not involve a divine spider. He was much more inclined to tell me more of the Nareau family.

“. . . and then Nareau killed his father and he cut out his father’s eye and threw it to the sky and it became the sun.”

“Do you believe that, Bwenawa?”

“We are all Christians now. . . . And then Nareau cut out the other eye and threw it to the sky and it became the moon . . .”

I asked him about any legends that refered to islands other than Samoa.

“There are legends that speak of high islands to the west. They are there to protect us from the westerly wind.” The westerlies are the storm winds.

And then he whispered, as if revealing secret, ancient knowledge. “Some think that the first I-Kiribati came from the west.”

I looked pleased. Bwenawa looked pleased.

“From where in the west, Bwenawa?”

“They say Sumatra.”

This was interesting.

“They came with the coconut palm tree and the breadfruit tree and the pig,” he said, listing trees that are not indigenous to Kiribati, but native to Southeast Asia. “And then, maybe a thousand years ago, men came from Tonga and they killed all the men in Kiribati, but not the women. And then, maybe seven hundred years ago, men came from Samoa and on some of the islands they killed all the men again, but not the women. And so you see,” he smiled beatifically, “that is why all I-Kiribati look different from one another.”

It was a heartwarming story. And possibly true. Grimble noted the similarities between the I-Kiribati sailing canoes and those found in the Moluccas Islands in Indonesia. The I-Kiribati language, like all the languages of Oceania (except those found in parts of New Guinea), falls in the Central–Eastern Malayo–Polynesian subfamily of the Austronesian language family, which originates in Taiwan. And though it is indeed a great distance from Indonesia to Kiribati, as the drifting fishermen from Papua New Guinea demonstrated, there is a strong west to east current in this part of the Pacific. While the predominant winds in Kiribati are the trade winds from the east, a strong westerly wind usually blows from November through February. Long-distance downwind sailing would certainly be possible in the large outrigger sailing canoes ostensibly used by the ancient seafarers.

More likely, however, is that people from Southeast Asia first settled in nearby Melanesian islands, possibly interbred, and then subsequently moved farther into the Pacific, perhaps to Kiribati. It is also likely that Bwenawa’s recounting of the Tongans’ friendly arrival in Kiribati is true. Tonga has lately been recognized as a possible “founding colony,” a place from which subsequent expansion and exploration in the Pacific occurred.

But, alas, we don’t really know much about the ancient I-Kiribati. Any evidence of pre-Samoan horde settlements dissipated long ago. We can speculate, look for links between island groups, even do DNA analysis, but in the end it will tell us very little. Bwenawa is correct. There is remarkable variation in the appearance of the I-Kiribati, not in skin color (brown) or hair type (straight and black), but in facial features. One can see the sharpness of Asia, the roundness of Polynesia, even the eye coloring of Europe, as if every intrusion of the outside world has been marked indelibly on the faces of the I-Kiribati. When outsiders arrived upon the islands of Kiribati, they inevitably adapted to the demands of place. The Samoans may have feasted upon the flesh of the I-Kiribati, but very soon they became I-Kiribati themselves, altering hardly at all the culture they found on the islands. This is because one cannot conquer an atoll. The atoll trumps all.

CHAPTER
6

In which the Author, in case Anyone was Wondering what exactly he was Doing on Tarawa while his Girlfriend Toiled, discusses his Plan for making Productive Use of his Time on an atoll.

E
ach morning, Sylvia would rumble to work in a pickup truck, confident that through her endeavors the lives of the I-Kiribati would soon be a little brighter, a little healthier, and a little longer. After Kate left, Sylvia was the only
I-Matang
at FSP. She had a staff of ten, all of whom were older than her, and together they managed programs that sought to improve child and maternal health, alleviate vitamin A deficiency, raise environmental awareness, and advance the cause of sanitation, which included building composting toilets, or Atollettes, because, as mentioned earlier, something really needed to be done about the shit on Tarawa, and Sylvia was the woman to do it. “It’s really cool,” she said, uncharacteristically. “We’re going to use it as fertilizer in the demonstration garden.” Great, I thought. One more potential source of dysentery to worry about. But use the poop she did, and every few months the most malodorous stench imaginable would waft over the island as Bwenawa mixed the compost with fish guts and pig manure and spread it around the garden, teasing the tomatoes and cabbage to life. Sylvia was happy. She was in her element.

I too was very busy. Thinking. I had decided to write a novel. It would be a big book, Tolstoyan in scale, Joycean in its ambition, Shakespearean in its lyricism. Twenty years hence, the book would be the subject of graduate seminars and doctoral dissertations. The book would join the Canon of Literature. Students would speak reverentially of the text, my text, in hushed, wondrous tones. Magazine profiles would begin with
The reclusive literary giant J. Maarten Troost
. . . I had already decided to be enigmatic, a mystery. People would speak of Salinger, Pynchon, and Troost. I wondered if I could arrange my citizenship so that I would win both the Booker and the Pulitzer for the same book.

To get in the right state of mind, I read big books—
Midnight’s Children
by Salman Rushdie,
Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace,
Ulysses
by James Joyce (okay, I skimmed parts of that one). I read
King Lear
. Inexplicably, Sylvia thought I was procrastinating.

And so one day, I plugged in my laptop. I opened a new document. The cursor blinked. I looked out the window. I watched ocean swells. Were those dolphins? Tuna, maybe. I gazed at a few passing clouds—a horse, a battleship, my aunt’s nose, breasts. I boiled a pot of water. What’s that floating stuff? It’s probably dead. It’s okay then. I turned back toward my computer. The cursor was still blinking. And then . . . nothing. Writer’s block.

I was not worried. I read somewhere that it took Gabriel García Márquez months to come up with his first sentence, and then all followed, the sweet pouring forth of a writer’s vision. Sylvia suggested I write an outline. Outlines are for the creatively impaired, I explained. Did Kerouac use an outline? Not likely. The important thing was to attain a certain state of being, a transcendental awareness of life, and then the words, the magical words, would simply appear and the writer simply had to transcribe those words. Sylvia noted that Kerouac was a drug-addled drunk and quite dead as a result. Well, writing is pretty edgy, I said.

I went back to my first sentence. The hours passed. The days, too. Also the weeks. And then finally . . . a sentence. I read it. I read it again. I altered it. I erased it.

The cursor blinked.

CHAPTER
7

In which the Author settles into the theme of Absence, in particular the paucity of food options, and offers an account of the Great Beer Crisis, when the island’s shipment of Ale was, inexcusably, misdirected to Kiritimati Island, far, far away from those who needed it most.

I
t is entirely possible that somewhere on planet Earth there exists a cuisine more unpalatable than that found in Kiribati. I accept this possibility like I accept the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I have never encountered it. I cannot imagine it. I simply accept that there is a statistical probability of its existence. An eensie-weensie tiny little probability.

How can this be, you wonder, when Kiribati is really nothing more than a vast habitat for fish. Good fish. Delicious fish. Dip a line with six baited hooks off reef’s edge (about 150 yards of line), tug for a minute or two, and you will pull up six large, succulent red snappers. Got a hankering for octopus? Just wander over the reef shelf during a neap tide and look under the rocks. Are you thinking mantis prawns? Search the lagoon flats at low tide for the telltale burrows, insert a sliver of eel, and pluck the creature out. Shark fin soup? Cut open a few flying fish, toss liberally around your boat, bait your hook with the liver of a ray, shake a rattle in the water, watch your arm now, await inevitable arrival of frenzied shark, hook it, tie line to boat, enjoy sleigh ride as shark tires itself out. Cut fin. Want a turtle? Well, you shouldn’t.

Elsewhere in the world, people are willing to pay good money for the fish found in Kiribati. And they do. Every now and then a decaying Chinese vessel limps toward Kiribati to gather the hundreds of shark fins culled by fishermen in the outer islands. The Chinese also take on live lagoon fish—the more luminous, the better—which are then transported to Hong Kong, where a meal isn’t a meal unless something endangered is served. Octopi and bêche-de-mer, turdlike creatures that function as reef cleaners, are rounded up for the Japanese, perhaps the most fastidiously hygienic people on the planet, who are clearly unaware of what exactly a reef cleaner in Kiribati cleans.

The real prize, however, is tuna and Kiribati has the world’s richest tuna fishing grounds. Dozens of industrial fishing boats from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and the United States ply across the more than two million square miles of ocean that comprise Kiribati’s exclusive economic zone. Quite likely, these floating colonies of trawlers and mother ships—Death Stars to the fish community—that receive and process the catch, are the very same ships that have emptied the North Atlantic and the South China Sea of life. Add to this an unknown number of illegal fishing boats—Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Russian—and you begin to understand that industrial fishing is something very different than the fishing rhapsodized about in the tomes churned out with alarming regularity by big city writers who summer in Montana. Rich countries are good at offering sweet words, little odes to environmental sensitivity, the homage to sustainable harvesting, haiku for nature—but appetites are not to be denied.

In an average year, nearly $2 billion worth of tuna is
legally
caught in the Pacific. This is a lot of money, particularly for nations where flipflops are regarded as evidence of conspicuous consumption. Yet, Pacific island nations typically only receive around $60 million annually in fees from fishing licenses. Kiribati, no surprise, receives a disproportionately small share. This is because—how to put this politely?—in the Pacific your average minister of fisheries is a) an idiot, or b) corrupt, and c) usually both. It does not help that license fees are tied directly to foreign aid. Japan, for instance, balks at paying more than 4 or 5 percent of the catch value in fees, arguing that it more than compensates in aid. But consider the aid. In Kiribati, this consists of the Fisheries Training Center, where young I-Kiribati men are groomed to work Japanese fishing boats for wages no Japanese would accept, and the construction of a new port to service, yes, Japanese fishing boats. Neat, huh?

Of course, it is not just rapacious foreigners doing the fishing in Kiribati. The country survives at a subsistence level, and subsistence is maintained almost solely by the consumption of fish. Consider this: Annual per capita fish consumption in Kiribati is over four hundred pounds. Pause for a moment and absorb this startling fact. The average man, woman, or child in Kiribati eats more than four hundred pounds of fish every year. That’s fish for breakfast, fish for lunch, fish for dinner. And in Kiribati, there are really only two ways to eat fish, raw or boiled. This, of course, was a dispiriting discovery. Raw fish has a place in my culinary world, but raw fish consumed before an intermediary stop in a refrigerator is, I can attest, a very effective way of eliciting weight loss. And boiled fish, well, I think it’s safe to say that we can blame the English for that. Not for the first time, I wished Kiribati had been colonized by the French, particularly after I asked Bwenawa if there were any local spices on the island.

“Spices?” he said.

“Yes. You know, like salt, pepper, saffron, that sort of thing.”

“Ah yes . . . like the salt fish.”

“Salt fish?”

Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. “You see,” said Bwenawa. “The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It’s
kang-kang
[tasty]. We call it salt fish.”

“Ah,” I said. “In my country we call it rotten fish.”

Since I had, as Sylvia liked to point out, “more time,” it was left to me to gather the daily fish for our evening meal. In the late afternoon, after a hard day of thinking, I usually went biking. Sometimes I turned left and went down the atoll, sometimes I turned right and went up the atoll, but mostly I wished I had somewhere else to bike to, because frankly, biking up and down an atoll every day for two years does little to alleviate island fever. The quest for something edible gave my journeys up and down the atoll a welcome purpose.

As I soon discovered, finding food on Tarawa that is tasty, nutritious, and available is no easy task. After biking the entire length of Tarawa, I realized that the island is, in fact, two distinct places. Where the island’s lone road unfolds along the southern axis of the atoll is called South Tarawa; where a narrow bush trail links the village of Buota with the wind- and sea-blasted end of the atoll at Na’a is known as North Tarawa, and the differences between the two are vivid. North Tarawa, officially classified as an outer island, is beguiling. It is isolated from any hint of modernity. There is no electricity, no running water, no towns, not even a road. With the light and the water and the snow-white fairy terns fluttering in the casuarina trees, it feels very much like paradise ought to feel, except, of course, it is too hot. We were drawn there most weekends, enticed by long swaths of golden beaches, where we tramped like beachcombers, sifting through the tide’s curiosities, eyes straining along the reef, searching for turtles. To reach North Tarawa, we crossed the channel separating Tanaea from Buota—at high tide with a villager poling his canoe through the current—and walked along a footpath through a grove of coconut palm trees until we reached the aptly named Broken Bridge, a slab of cement that functions as a seesaw over a fish-laden channel. Across the bridge lies the islet of Abatao, the first of twenty-nine such islets in North Tarawa, perpetually chiseled by an ocean rushing and running twice daily, and the farther one walks the more elemental the islets seem. 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.