The Last Speakers (18 page)

FEATHERS AND LOINCLOTHS

Standing on the riverbank just two miles downstream from Yimas 2 village, Luis Kolisi of the Yokoim tribe provided a perfect photo op. He wore a woven bark loincloth, red and white body paint, and an outlandish hat that sprouted chicken feathers. Watching him expertly split sago logs and hack away at the pulp with a stone ax, I realize what incredible stamina his life requires, and what ingenuity (and desperation) it took humans to perfect sago as a source of food.

Luis belongs to the “clever” Yokoim people, and much of Luis's demonstration is reimagined culture, like the body mask and carved crocodiles his village offers for sale, neither of which is part of their “traditional” culture. But what good is tradition without the freedom to constantly reinvent yourself? The Yokoim have reinvented themselves with gusto. Their tiny village, Kundiman, is home to nearly half of their entire ethnic group, the Yokoim people. It lies just a quarter mile downstream (ten minutes by boat) from the region's only tourist lodge, a location frequented by foreign tourists.

The Yokoim people have taken an utterly banal, everyday skill—the splitting open of sago logs, washing the pulp, and processing it into pancakes and porridge—into a marketable tourist attraction. Clever indeed. Tour boats bring tourists from the lodge. They may spend a few minutes in the village gawking at the naked children and bare-breasted women, who focus intently on their cooking tasks and avoid making eye contact. They may buy the wooden masks or woven baskets the village produces. The children often run around naked, to be sure, but there seems to be a bit more nudity and enthusiastic casting off of clothes when tourists arrive. In the women's body language, as they put on a cooking show for tourists, I detect a tinge of chagrin, perhaps a sense of doing work that is slightly embarrassing or demeaning, while at the same time utterly necessary and useful (feeding the children). I can only hope that this chagrin is shared by the tourists, who must realize that if the situation were reversed—for example, if busloads of Japanese tourists were delivered to their kitchen at 8 a.m. to observe and photograph them frying eggs in their bathrobe—they would feel utterly awkward and objectified.

Unfortunately, the Yokoim are paid only a pittance for these activities (though, in fairness to the tourist lodge, “locally appropriate wages”). They fear that if they ask for more, the work will be given to another group, and each village jealously guards its tourist prerogatives, specializing in drums, say, or masks, or one particular activity that it alone presents to outsiders. The Yokoim make minimal income from presenting these cultural displays. They also claim to receive no royalties of any kind for the use of the only local airstrip, on which the lodge depends and which was built on their land. Whatever the facts, clearly much progress could be made in how tourists, scientists, tour operators, and local indigenous communities interact, and one hopes for more balance and more economic fairness in these relationships.

What the tourists do not see, and what I was able to witness on repeated visits to Luis's village, is the congenial, close-knit, and arduous everyday life of a small village. Luis resides in a very large, elevated bamboo house belonging to his cousins. His own house had burned down (some local children were “pretend cooking” with real fire, he told me) and was under reconstruction. The house boasts a cozy, wide-open floor plan inhabited by multiple families, each of whom has their nook and their set of bed mats and mosquito nets. No one has any privacy—you can even walk under the house peering up and listening through the loose floor slats, which the neighbors did during our interview with Luis. This was in no way considered rude, and some interesting through-floor conversations and commentary ensued. Allowing someone to watch through the floor seems be a kind of halfway Yokoim hospitality, since the more select guests and residents were allowed up the ladder into the house to observe Luis's performance. What one would never suspect, watching Luis chop sago while wearing feathers and body paint, is that what he truly excels at is the role of a bluesy, folksy guitar singer, someone like Philadelphia singer Amos Lee or the Papuan artist Ben Hakalitz.

Dressed normally—that is to say, in old jeans and a T-shirt, sans feathers—Luis strummed haunting melodies of his own composition and, quite stunningly for me, with original lyrics written in Yokoim language. One, a love song, he explained, was a lament for a wife sung to her husband, a man named Kinjan Bunduwan, who appears to lie sleeping at her side, but has died in the night:

This song will never be a
Billboard
Top 40 hit. Though the tune is catchy, the total number of people who could understand the lyrics without translation is a few hundred. Then there is the matter of the taboo word, which is censorable in English but a common everyday term in Yokoim.

Luis followed with another original composition, a song called “Imba Us” that at first seemed to be about poisonous snakes, but turned out to be a marriage proposal:

That a language as small as Yokoim could have such an inspired songwriter as Luis may be one of the crucial intangible forces keeping it in existence. The importance of such influential individuals, whom I call “language activists,” cannot be underestimated. Though they may not style themselves as activists, they have a deep conviction that their own tongue surpasses all others in its intimacy and power of expression. Based on this conviction, they make a strategic decision to use it with pride and creative force. No role model could be more powerful to the children listening under the floor than Luis's voice, a soft, nasally baritone, sounding out syllables of the mother tongue:
Imba us, imbaaa uuuuus
.

These same children go to school with the children of the Karim people of Yimas village, from a neighboring language group. Since it is a mixed-language classroom, a strict ideology of English and Tok Pisin is imposed. Since these two tongues are promoted as superior, the children make a rational choice of abandoning Yokoim to become subtractively bilingual in those two dominant languages. For want of a song or a shred of encouragement from an inspired speaker, the giggling children under the house may soon abandon the mother tongue. It would be fascinating to observe the language dynamics of the school play-ground—who speaks what to whom, and when. The children must constantly negotiate their status, identity, and schooling. In the classroom, we are told, no indigenous language use is tolerated by the teachers. And so an entire village is being “schooled away” from the mother tongue, and Luis's death adder love song will soon be incomprehensible. By comparison, schoolchildren from another Yokoim village farther upstream attend an all-Yokoim school. They, too, know Tok Pisin and English, but they are not abandoning Yokoim.

It seems indeed that a language is a dialect with an army and a school system.
3
Schools can be powerful incubators for language preservation and pride, or a strong force for abandonment.

WATER SPIRITS AND CROCODILES

In Luis's water world, the Karawari River basin, home to the Karim and Yokoim people, dugout wooden canoes provide the only means of travel. They are only about 18 inches wide, but can be 20 feet long. There are even mini-sized ones for children. Incredibly precarious and tippy, they are propelled by two punters. Luis demonstrated for us how he stands in the bow of the canoe, with one foot planted on the floor and one propped up on the side. He used a forked oar that both pushes water and can gain traction on the bottom. A woman or child can sit in the stern of the canoe, using an oval-shaped oar, and smaller children occupy the middle. Wisps of smoke behind the woman show she's carrying burning coals to light tobacco and a cooking fire once she reaches her garden site.

Since we were traveling by motorized boat, a rare sight in these waters, we had to constantly look out for canoes and slow to a crawl to avoid capsizing or flooding them. With this start-and-stop rhythm, we arrived upriver at Konmei village.

What we need is a “Masta talk place,” declared Councilman Chris Nick. “The other languages upstream and downstream have their linguists and translators, but our language is alone. We want an expert to come and study it.” Councilman Nick, along with his entire family, awaited us in full red body paint, a feather headdress, shell and boar's-tusk necklaces, and grass skirts. As we arrived at 9:30 a.m., we had the impression that they had all been sitting patiently for hours in the talking hut, even though we had not promised to arrive at any particular time that day. Their enthusiasm was contagious, and soon what seemed like the whole village (population precisely 396 souls, as the councilman informed us) turned out to watch.

We asked Councilman Nick to reprise the creation story he had told us two days prior. At the time, we felt it was an excellent oration, beautifully delivered, but had no idea what it was about. With the help of a translator from another village, we soon found out, and we were eager to hear it retold when we visited the second time.

The tale he told us recounts how his “clever” Yokoim learned from a mysterious water spirit everything they needed: hunting and architecture, planting and canoemaking, warfare and fire. Nick gestured off into the distance to indicate the mythical past.

I should mention here that the Yokoim people are avid swimmers, and children and adults alike take a daily plunge into the river. People often cross from one side of the village to another by swimming, as not everyone has a canoe. The river is not feared, but is part of the everyday environment that sustains life. It provides transport, news, security, recreation, and sustenance. So being pulled under the river was not so much a dreadful as a magical experience.

Waka did not drown, but breathed water as if it were air, with the help of the water spirit. Still, his wife kept calling from the village, but she got no answer because the water spirit would not release his namesake. After some days, the wife—knowing nothing of the river sprit Waka—concluded that human Waka must have drowned. She painted her face white and began her period of mourning.

Meanwhile, the husband was having a lark underwater. River spirit Waka schooled human Waka in all manner of skills: canoemaking, hunting, and bow-and arrow-making. Day by day they hunted, waged warfare with stealthy raids on other villages, fished with traps, built bamboo houses, and perhaps even made
maley mamakey
, “bad water,” a strong coconut liquor. We may think of it as impossible to build canoes, hunt fruit bats, and build fires underwater, but the tale insists that these all exist there. We may glimpse them on the water's surface, perhaps mistakenly taking them to be reflections of things in our world.

For almost a month, Waka inhabited this parallel underwater world that mirrored the world above the water. Finally the river spirit, having imparted all good and useful knowledge, released the man. He brought back to his people all the skills, techniques, and technologies they still use today. They use them so well, that they refer to themselves as the “clever Yokoim.” “When we raid a village and shoot our arrow, we do not miss a man,” boasts Councilman Nick. “We are the clever Yokoim, very clever men.”

The legendary cleverness may be sorely tested as the Yokoim see their language slip away. “We need a Tok Pleis Masta,” declared Nick. In his mind, that meant an outsider, typically a “white” person, who would come, live, and learn the local vernacular of that place, which locals call Tok Pleis, or “talk place.” He had seen missionaries, linguists, and anthropologists come to other villages, but felt that his own people needed a dedicated scholar. “We want a book for the children.”

The vitality of Yokoim could be greatly enhanced by a team of scientists showing an intense interest in the creation myth, or by a scholar helping the community to prepare their first book. Languages thrive or wither based on their prestige in the eyes of children, and prestige is a fragile quality that can spread as quickly as smoke, but also dissipate as easily. Clearly a substantial, long-term effort is needed, but to be effective that effort must be mostly in the local hearts and minds, not an outside intervention.