Surviving Paradise (28 page)

I should also mention that if I threw the net onto a rocky area where the fish came a few times an hour instead of a few times a day, the net would snag like Velcro onto every conceivable nook and cranny of stone. Murphy's Law applied: whatever can get snagged, will. And when I finally freed the net, it was as tightly tangled as a Jamaican dreadlock.

For a few weeks, I tried to master netfishing, but I never, technically, caught anything. It required Buddha-like patience and a certain fatalism, which I apparently didn't possess. The question arose: should I stick with the mind-numbing tedium of netfishing, or go back to the thrilling cat-and-mouse of spearfishing? It was no contest. I returned to my old love.

 

 

 

 

A DOZEN ADULTS AND TWICE AS MANY CHILDREN WERE SITTING REST
lessly on the gravel grounds of the radio operator's house, waiting with slowly deteriorating patience for the more technically savvy among them to coax life out of a dilapidated TV/VCR. The children took turns making inane conversation with me as I sat, as usual, at the behest of my hosts, on the only available chair. I was still a curiosity, and the kids would search for any excuse, no matter how thin, to talk to me. Two boys brought a coconut and started a poorly conceived vocabulary lesson. They pointed at the fruit and said, instructively, “
ni
.” I had lived on this tropical island for six months now and was well aware of the word for “coconut,” thank you very much, but they persisted with the lesson. They continued pointing at the coconut, declaring “
ni
” over and over until I was ready to dub them “The Natives Who Say
Ni
.”

Finally, salvation arrived in the form of an eighty-pound battery,
delivered by a man via wheelbarrow. The Good Samaritan hooked the television to the new power source, and the tiny screen flickered to life. An old woman inserted a video into the VCR and pressed
PLAY,
and that was when the scene presented itself: twenty young men and three women from Ujae walking on the streets, eating at the restaurants, and sleeping in the motels of Los Angeles, California. There they were in
my
world, amid the trendy boutiques and fast-food joints, the incongruous palm trees, the paved six-lane avenues. These islanders, whom I had fancied guardians of one of the last remote places on earth, were standing on a street corner in LA. At the international airport, they were paid no more attention than any other visitors from an unknown country. Had I never come to the Marshall Islands, I would have ignored these people in the airport as yet another set of faces in a diverse nation—but I could not ignore them now, as I watched footage of them being where they plainly could not be.

Then the scene changed to a large grassy expanse. The men were dressed in grass skirts and shell jewelry, leaving their well-toned upper bodies bare, and they were performing a quick and intricate dance to an audience of spellbound Americans. It was a ritualized battle, a mock spear fight in groups of four, but the danger was real enough: if the strict sequence of movements was violated, the sharpened sticks could cause serious injury. Two women were beating bass drums on the sidelines while a third recited a frantic, breathless chant. This, captured in dance, was the heat and tension of battle.

What I was watching was the Marshallese stick dance, or
jebwa
. For a short time, these dancers and I had switched places: while I was living on their home island of Ujae, they were performing in my home state of California. Their journey, funded jointly by the government and by Ujae's wealthy chief, had already taken them to Kwajalein and Honolulu, and their next stop after Los Angeles was the Pacific Arts Festival in the Micronesian nation of Palau.

It was for good reason that little Ujae was receiving this privilege.
Jebwa
was considered to be the one remaining traditional dance in the Marshall Islands, and only the people of Ujae knew how to perform it. The missionaries had kiboshed most of the country's dance rituals, some of which they considered unspeakably erotic. Now only
jebwa
survived, but it was in no danger of being forgotten because the young people were learning it and would pass it on.

The dancers practiced on Ujae while I was away in Majuro, and then left for America before I came back. So it transpired that my Californian parents witnessed the
jebwa
live, and I, a yearlong inhabitant of its birthplace, did not. The islanders thought this was hilarious.

The people of Ujae took credit only for keeping the
jebwa
alive, not for creating it. It had been a
nooniep
, an invisible fairylike creature, who had invented the dance. According to legend, a chief fell asleep under a tree on Ebeju, a now uninhabited islet of Ujae Atoll. The man slept without food and water for a month. When he woke up, he told the people of Ebeju that he had been visited by the
nooniep
, a spirit that can be heard but not seen. The creature had described the steps and chants of a dance, and now the man taught this dance to the other islanders. (The lyrics were neither in Marshallese nor any other identifiable language. Not even the old people knew what they meant, as if the words had sprung from the underworld along with the spirit.) While the men were performing the dance, with the women chanting and beating on drums, another spirit called a
ri-ikjiet
appeared from a well. This spirit was a very handsome man with a resplendent golden beard, and soon the women were so distracted by the newcomer that their chanting and drumming became
dubwabwe
, or out of tempo. The chief was incensed at this disruption and hatched a plan to eliminate the intruder. He told the men to touch their dance sticks to the ground at the end of the dance, instead of holding them up high. When the
ri-ikjiet
participated in the next round of the dance, he held his stick high while the other dancers touched their sticks to the ground. This was all the pretext that the chief needed. He killed the offending spirit with a club spiked with shark's teeth.

This was the origin of the
jebwa
. The dance steps had purportedly remained unchanged since then, although botching them during a performance was no longer punishable by death.

It seemed odd to me that the legend never mentioned the resemblance between the movements of the dance and the movements of battle. My hunch that there was a connection between the two was confirmed when I came across the following account of traditional Marshallese war in Adelbert von Chamisso's early-nineteenth-century account—a
description equally interesting for its depiction of the role of women:

The women take part in the war, not only when it is a matter of warding off the enemy on their own soil, but also in the attack, and they make up a part of the military force in the squadron, even though in the minority. . . . The women form a second line without weapons. Some of them at the leader's bidding beat the drum, first at a slow, measured beat (
ringesipinem
) when the antagonists exchange throw upon throw, then with doubled rapid beat (
pinneneme
) when man fights against man in hand-to-hand combat. . . . The women throw stones with their bare hands; they help their dear ones in the fight and throw themselves propitiatingly between them and the victorious enemy to succor them. Captured women are spared, men are not taken prisoner. The man takes the name of the enemy he subdues in battle. Captured islands are despoiled of their fruits, but the trees are spared.

With this introduction, I embarked on a quest to learn some of the island's old lore. The
jebwa
legend was only one out of hundreds of old tales of the supernatural. In typical myth fashion, they looked at first glance more like children's on-the-spot confabulations than ancient oral histories. Among the entries in the book
Marshall Islands Legends and Stories
were the following: “Demon Fart,” “Jena, a Big Fart,” “The Flying Wife,” “Half-Boy and the Dog,” “The Big Canoe and the Teeny-Tiny Beach Bird,” and “Two Boys Who Tricked a Tropical Demon.” The whimsy here was unmistakable—after all, part of the reason for storytelling was entertainment. But I learned that they had much more to offer than juvenile giggles.

An American teacher with a long-standing fondness for the Marshalls had compiled a book of legends told by eighteen Marshallese elders. Of these, an elder from Ujae named Nitwa Jeik boasted more entries than anyone else. His encyclopedic knowledge of Marshallese mythology was as impressive as the mythology itself. When I first approached the old man and asked him to share his knowledge with
me, I quickly discovered that he could recite a legend for any atoll, any local islet, or any landmark I could name.

As he launched into each narrative, he would enter a storytelling trance, forget I was a
ribelle,
and lapse into fluid, poetic Marshallese. I was happy he told the stories so authentically; I was less happy that, when he did so, I could barely understand a word he said. But from a combination of concentrating, asking many questions, and strategically ignoring the legends that I couldn't make head or tail of, I learned a great deal from this man.

The first legend Nitwa told me was a just-so story spiced with treachery and revenge. It concerned the exploits of Joalon, a mythical figure from Ujae Island after whom a boulder, a coralhead, and a deep lagoon pool were named. A rival had abducted Joalon's wife and fled to Bok Island with her. In a jealous rage, Joalon lifted Ujae's largest rocks and threw them at Bok Island across the ten-mile gap. With only one boulder left on Ujae, Joalon scored a fatal hit. The one that he didn't throw was now called
deka en an Joalon
: Joalon's rock. I had seen this towering landmark—it was about five feet high, and just as wide. The others could be seen on Bok Island.

Letao the deceiver was an even more popular character. In one legend of the famous trickster's wiles, Letao sails to Kiribati, a coral atoll nation to the south of the Marshall Islands. There he meets the local chief and promises to hold a feast for him. He instructs the villagers to make an
um
(not a sacred Eastern syllable representing the unity of the cosmos, but rather an underground oven). Letao then announces he will lie in the heated
um
himself. The people warn him not to, but he insists, so they place him in the oven and cover it with leaves. Two hours later, they open the
um
to find Letao vanished and a cornucopia of delicious cooked food in his place. Letao reappears triumphantly, and the Kiribati chief is so impressed by the display that he decides to try it himself. (You can probably see where this is going.) His subjects put him in the oven and cover it. Two hours later, they open it and discover that there is no food, only a thoroughly baked traditional leader. Letao, that incorrigible scamp, has already sailed into the sunset.

As it turned out, this tale, like the tale of Joalon, was a just-so story. When Nitwa related the legend to me, he added an intriguing twist
at the end: after fleeing the scene of the crime, Letao sails to America and settles there. “And that,” Nitwa said, “is why Americans are so smart—but lie so much.”

At first, I dismissed this addendum as nothing more than an amusing modern stereotype slapped onto an old legend for humor. But while the statement did produce its fair share of laughs, they seemed sly and satirical rather than frivolous. The more I considered the matter, the more I found Letao to be a perfect symbol of America. Both were cunning strangers who arrived here unannounced from overseas, flaunted their power to generate riches, and promised to share the secret. But, in legend as in history, when the people signed on the dotted line, they found their leadership sabotaged, their autonomy undermined, and the key to foreign wealth as inaccessible as ever. America the trickster, clever but deceptive. What else could one expect the Marshallese to think of the people who built (and brought) the atomic bomb?

Symbolism aside, there was something unnerving about the sudden entrance of America in these stories. I had assumed that legends took place in a distant, hazy past, but Nitwa was making reference to something that the islanders had encountered only in modern times. He was no longer operating under the convenient unverifiability of prehistory. The stories were told in the present tense, but in Marshallese this could be used as easily for historical anecdotes as for timeless narratives. Did Nitwa consider these stories to be literally true? I approached the issue from the side. “Did Letao die there, in America?”

“Maybe,” Nitwa replied. “He could be alive or dead now. Nobody knows.”

“So he was a real person?”

“Oh yes, he was a real person.”

“How did he do all those things?”

“Magic,” he replied. That was all the explanation he offered.

By all indications, Nitwa believed in the truth of these tales of spirits, magicians, and presumably demon farts as well. He wasn't the only one. It was not only the oral tradition that had survived from precolonial days—it was also the belief in the supernatural forces that they described. In America, I considered the isolated, the uneducated, and the superstitious to be ruefully backward. Here, I thought of
them as the cool ones, and it was the college-educated urbanites who bored me. I had to learn more about these fantastic beliefs.