Surviving Paradise (40 page)

My first mission in Majuro was to talk to Ujae's chief, Mike Kabua. I met him at his compound just across the road from the De Brums' Majuro homestead, and interviewed him while the Marshallese equivalent of a personal assistant delivered canned corned beef and sea turtle fat on a platter and fanned the flies away by hand for the duration of the meal. It was a sultan's court.

Mike Kabua talked a bit about life in the outer islands. Then it happened. “Peter,” he said. “I heard about the jewelry that they found on Ujae. I want it back. Please go to the museum and get it. It belongs to me.”

The saga of the cursed artifacts continued.

I could have pulled an Indiana Jones on him, broke out a bullwhip and bellowed, “They
belong
in a
museum
!” But I decided against it. Instead, I taxied to the museum, convinced I had been sent on a fool's errand. Why would the staff of the national museum just give me these artifacts, merely because I claimed to be on assignment from a chief? I argued my case to a bored-looking employee. He betrayed no
hint of skepticism, as if he received these sorts of requests every day. He took me around the display room and asked me which artifacts I was referring to. Imagine that! I could have pointed to any of the objects on display, the finest of their collection, and he would have opened the case and handed them over. I said that I didn't think the artifacts were on display, so he took me to the storage room, and gave me free reign to ransack the place. Unaware of any irony, he breezily told me how a former employee had made off with a huge number of items. I secretly thought,
well yeah, if you'll give display-quality artifacts to any random foreigner who asks for them. . . .

The jewelry from Ujae could have been anywhere in that room, and the man had no information with which to help me—such as a system of organization, for example. I prepared myself mentally for a very long search. I chose a drawer at random and opened it. It housed a nudie magazine. Perhaps it was some sort of ancient Marshallese pornography flawlessly preserved in a peat bog. I opened a second drawer, pushed aside a few baggies of soil samples, and spied a little envelope. I opened it, and to my great surprise, there they were: two bracelets and a necklace—those unassuming bits of ancient bling that had earned me so many strange experiences.

A note was attached to them, and it had my name on it. I was sure I had donated the artifacts anonymously, to avoid assassination, but no matter now. The employee led me to the museum director, who listened to my story, glanced at the objects, and, without even asking for ID, okayed the operation. Once again I was in possession of the artifacts, and once again I couldn't understand why they had been entrusted to me.

I met the chief the next morning at a parliament meeting, where he was wearing his senatorial hat. The security consisted of a guard asking me to change out of my shorts into pants. Fair enough. Returning in formal wear (T-shirt, flip-fops, and pants), I watched the parliament do its thing. Their discussions were serious and formal, but the atmosphere wasn't. Seven out of twenty-one senators arrived late. Then, with the entire country listening via radio, a senator's cell phone started bleeping one of those familiar electronic ditties, and everyone in the chamber laughed. When it was getting close to lunch, one senator turned on his microphone and said, “Can't we take a break?
We're hungry!” The Speaker carried the motion and the parliament adjourned for lunch. I said hello to my old friend Senator Lucky and delivered the artifacts to Mike Kabua. He was delighted.

Now that I had redeemed my soul, lifted my curse, and joined the global movement to repatriate indigenous artifacts to their customary owners, I had a second mission: to meet the president. This time for real.

It seemed feasible. I had nearly managed it three and half years ago using nothing but an imperfect grasp of the language, and now I had a second advantage: I had already gotten in good with the Marshallese government, and it wasn't just the two senators. After leaving Alfired and Tior with many thanks and even more bags of rice, I shacked up with the just-retired Marshallese ambassador to the United Nations. (Bush had once asked him, off-handedly, how life was in the Marshall Islands. The ambassador was tempted to reply, “You should deal with the legacy of nuclear testing,” but instead retreated to, “Just fine, thank you.”)

In Marshallese, to say that one was lodging somewhere, one said that one was sleeping there. It was a sign that my Marshallese was starting to invade my English that, when an American asked me where I was living, I said, “I'm sleeping with the ambassador.” Maybe that exaggerated the closeness of our relationship, but it
was
awfully cozy. For instance, it is a pretty good feeling when a country's UN ambassador introduces you, warmly, to the Speaker of the House. Especially when you're wearing flip-fops—and so is the ambassador.

Since I was already hobnobbing with the high echelons of Marshallese politics, the president seemed decidedly within reach. It took twenty phone calls to five people over a six-week period, but I succeeded. I had an appointment to interview a head of state. I waited nervously in the air-conditioned corridor with three other appointment hopefuls. One of them was the storyteller Nitwa, who had been living in Majuro for several months; apparently he had some sort of business with the president. Then there was a murmur: “The president is coming.” We stood up and the man himself, Kessai H. Note, entered the room. Not even the chief had received this much deference. He went down the line, shaking hands, and then reached me. As he shook my hand, the following happened, in Marshallese.

“I'm learning about Marshallese culture,” I said.

He smiled. “That old man,” he gestured toward Nitwa, “is the person to talk to about that.”

“Yes,” I said. “He has taught me Marshallese legends. Legends about Letao, the trickster.”

His Excellency guffawed in approval. I was in.

We retired to his lounge with its sofas, Marshallese wall hangings, wide-screen TV, and not much else, and we discussed the state of his country for half an hour in Marshallese and English. When I mentioned that some islanders rejected the idea of sea level rise because God had promised not to flood the Earth again, he erupted in laughter. Then he said, “Even if God is causing this, God also gave people intelligence so that they can figure out what to do. God helps those who help themselves. So you have to do what you can, and that will help.”

That was the kind of pragmatism I had hoped for. In the weeks that followed, I racked up a long list of swanky-sounding interview subjects: the minister of Resources and Development, the general manager of the EPA, the mayor of Bikini. Some of them showed the same resolve regarding global warming that the president had expressed. But behind the words, it seemed that little was being done. Two-thirds of the population lived in jam-packed urban centers that spilled to the very edges of the sea, where storms combined with rising tides could wreak havoc at any time. The strung-out shape of the capital city was charming but also spectacularly unwise. Its location on thin windward islets was not a traditional practice or even a decision at all, but rather a carryover from the days of military occupation. Before urban Majuro had sprung up around the American seaplane base, people had more prudently lived on the much thicker island on the leeward side of the atoll.

So where was the thundering national debate about relocating development? Where were the local climate change charities? Where were the applications for foreign funding to put all new houses on stilts? Where were the concerned meetings of village councils across the nation? Where was the five-thousand-strong march through Majuro to be broadcast on CNN? Why was Tuvalu the media darling of “sinking island nations,” while the Marshalls were barely
mentioned? Why did the news give more of a shout-out to mountainous Vanuatu than the perilously low Marshalls?

There were options, although they weren't always pretty. One solution had been proposed in the late 1980s. The first president of the Marshall Islands, Amata Kabua, had considered making a deal with an American company to have as much as 10 percent of the West Coast's trash shipped to the Marshalls in one-ton, plastic-wrapped bales, which “hopefully” wouldn't leak toxins. The plan? To use these bundles of garbage to build up the land on Majuro so that it wouldn't sink under the rising ocean—and to net $16 million a year, to boot.

Perhaps this idea to beat global warming by turning a capital city into a dump should win some sort of award for Worst Sustainable Development Proposal. Or perhaps it was a masterpiece of outside-the-box pragmatism. Either way, at least the government had been thinking seriously about the problem—and this was years before Kyoto and nearly two decades before
An Inconvenient Truth
. Why had so little been done in this country since then, both on a governmental and on a personal level?

This may all sound like blaming the victim. But if you
are
the victim, the only actions you control are your own. If someone is hitting you on the head repeatedly with a baseball bat, it is their fault, not yours, but you should probably put on a helmet anyway. And I had a hunch that if I got to the bottom of Marshallese inaction, it might shed light on my own society's sluggish response to the problem of climate change.

There were several reasons for complacence. You couldn't blame locals for distrusting the predictions of scientists—those mysterious foreign soothsayers who had declared Bikini safe and then terrified the returned islanders by saying, “Scratch that: you and your islands are poisoned.” For those who did trust scientists, the prophecy fit all too well—uncannily well—with what so many Marshall Islanders already believed: that a force, inflicted by indifferent foreigners, was undermining their lives, and there was nothing they could do about it. Finally, there was that obvious target, the media, which cared about coral atoll nations only as “global warnings”—canaries that had to die to alert us to the danger—and therefore described them, in article after article, as “doomed”: not exactly a message of hope for the islanders.

But behind all of these reasons, I felt, was one central cause: a feeling of disempowerment, inspired by some rather obvious historical events. When you feel you can do nothing, your only options are denial and despair—and those were precisely the popular responses I had seen on Ujae. The saddest thing of all was that a sense of empowerment was what the islanders needed most in order to prepare for climate change, and climate change was exactly what would kill the last flicker of that resolve. It was the perfect realization of everything they feared. So it was the psychological harm, not the physical damage, that worried me most.

The threat of inundation was as old as Marshallese society. But so was a sense of hope. Nearly two hundred years ago, our old friend Adelbert von Chamisso wrote: “The inhabitants of Radak [the Marshall Islands] worship an invisible god in the sky. . . In the case of transgression the sea would come over the island and all land would disappear. A well-known danger threatens all low islands from the sea, and religious belief often holds this rod above the people. But conjuring helps against this. In Radak [a man] saw the sea rise to the feet of the coconut trees, but it was abjured in time and returned to its borders. He named two men and a woman for us who understand this conjuring . . .” I wanted to see the return of that old belief: that though the world was perilous, we ought to try our best anyway. At the moment, I saw little sign of it.

Now, living again in one of the culpable nations, I can see that the Marshallese are not very different from us. In our society, one side depicts global warming as Armageddon, while the other calls it a hoax. No wonder action has been so slow. In the Marshall Islands as in the industrial world, people are given both to disavowal of the problem and to hideous exaggeration of its intractability. Denial and catastrophism are a pair of apparent opposites that reinforce each other more than they oppose each other, because the worse the prognosis, the more reason to pretend the problem doesn't exist. The real battle is not between those two; it is between complacence, manifesting as either of those two extremes, and pragmatism.

The victims and the perpetrators sit on opposite sides of the problem, but in this crucial way they are alike. Ignore the problem and you lose people. Drum it up too much and you lose people,
too. That's the same reason the inclusion of climate change in this book was such a dilemma for me. I didn't want this to be another alarmist treatise that commits that familiar act of emotional violence: namely, to introduce the audience to the wonders of a place, only to announce that said wonders are being horribly, irrevocably obliterated, and yes—it's your fault, as you go about your daily routine. So feel guilty and afraid, and be convinced that everything wonderful in the world is coming to an end.

But in the Marshall Islands, that story was sadly accurate. The archipelago may well come to an end, but its people are here on Earth to stay. Inundation would spell the demise of the country, but not of the nation: the case would not close at the moment the last islet sinks. The people will already have left, one by one, family by family, to settle on our shores. They will be immersed in us as I had been immersed in them. This book was about the pain of leaving home. But it did not claim to know the feeling of having no home to return to.