The Sex Lives of Cannibals (14 page)

The British experience in Kiribati, such as it was, considering that at no time did the British have more than a dozen colonial officers stationed there, might have remained essentially benign were it not for the discovery that on one of the islands there existed an actual, honest-to-goodness, extremely valuable natural resource. Since this is Kiribati, it is not surprising that this resource was based on shit, specifically old bird shit, which is also called phosphate, probably because it is considered impolite to discuss bird poop, whereas discussing phosphate seems sophisticated and manly, if also boring. This treasure trove of bird shit was discovered on Banaba, long called Ocean Island by
I-Matangs,
an island that lies by itself, roughly three hundred miles southeast of Tarawa. Unlike the other islands in Kiribati, Banaba is a raised island, shaped like an upturned canoe, with a peak that rises to a lofty one hundred feet above sea level. The island is only about four square miles in size, but it had twenty million tonnes of phosphate deposits. For these twenty million tonnes of phosphate, in 1900, the Pacific Islands Company signed an agreement with someone they presumed to be the chief of Banaba. This agreement gave the Pacific Islands Company, which was to become the British Phosphate Commission, the right to mine all phosphate deposits on Banaba in exchange for an annual payment of fifty pounds sterling, “or trade to that value.” The agreement would be in force for 999 years. Someone listed as King of Ocean Island signed with an X mark. Of course, there was no need for such a lengthy contract. The phosphate deposits were thoroughly extracted by 1979, the year of independence for Kiribati. But with the phosphate, so too went the soil, the pandanus trees, the coconut trees, and pretty much everything else necessary to sustain life on an island. Today, only about thirty people live on the blasted remains of Banaba. The rest of the Banabans were removed to Rabi, an island in Fiji, in the 1950s, when the British realized that phosphate mining had rendered Banaba uninhabitable.

Obliterating islands in the Pacific, of course, was the prerogative of superpowers, both rising and diminishing, and in the 1960s the British decided to drop a few nukes on Christmas Island, just to see what would happen. I am always stunned by the presumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. What if some Pacific Islander decided to blow up an A-bomb in Yorkshire, or a hydrogen bomb in Minnesota, or a nuclear bomb in Provence, just to see what would happen. There would be a fuss, I’m sure. Just imagine the letters to the editor. The British say that their testing on Christmas Island, a renowned bird colony, led to no long-term ill effects. The Fijian soldiers stationed there, however, might think otherwise. They were subsequently bedeviled by cancer. Their wives miscarried and the children that were born often had birth defects.

One would think that the I-Kiribati would at least have some very mixed feelings regarding their historical experience with the
I-Matang
world, but this turns out not to be the case. When I asked Bwenawa what he thought of about it, he said: “It was very good. They civilized us. Before, we were very savage. And now we are all Christian.” You never knew for certain whether Bwenawa was just messing with your head, or whether he meant to casually dismiss the entire narrative of colonialism and exploitation that fills Western college textbooks. Christianity was certainly very important for Bwenawa. He has, at various times in his life, been a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Mormon, and even a Baha’i. Today, he is an elder in the Kiribati Protestant Church. “It is all the same. We must love God and we must love one another.” To this end, Bwenawa was seeking to unify the Kiribati Protestant Church with its archrival, the Catholic Church—just a heads-up for the guys in Rome.

And the I-Kiribati are positively effusive when it comes to the British colonial era. This was brought home to me one night when we were invited to attend a reception for the visiting British high commissioner. Typically, the diplomatic cocktail circuit on Tarawa, such as it is, is characterized by a highly immoderate consumption of beer, the occasional fight, and a general atmosphere of keg-party debauchery. The reception for the British high commissioner, however, had ambition. I knew this because on the invitation it mentioned that men would be required to wear “trousers.” The English, of course, are well known for fancying a peculiar sense of decorum over things like climate. They are, remember, the nation responsible for kneesocks. The half-dozen lawyers in Kiribati still do their business in horsehair wigs and black robes that billow above their flipflops. But never before had an invitation on Tarawa stipulated that men had to wear “trousers.” I could understand shirts, and possibly shoes, but pants on Tarawa seemed pretentious. Only Mormon missionaries wore them.

Nevertheless, on the appointed evening I donned a pair of trousers, and like everyone else at the beachside reception, began to sweat profusely. I envied Sylvia.

“I’d kill to wear a skirt,” I said.

“I think you’d look very fetching,” she replied.

Sylvia was unfazed by my sartorial preference. Every culture that has developed along the equator has very sensibly included skirtlike garb for men. Like most men in Kiribati, I generally wore a lavalava. Shorts were for formal wear. Pants were an imposition by an alien culture.

My mood lifted, however, when I saw the British high commissioner. He was an enormous man, freakishly tall with a beefy heft, and he lived in Fiji with his diminutive mother, which struck me as a very English arrangement. The British no longer have an embassy on Tarawa. They have, in fact, been doing everything possible to disentangle themselves from the Pacific. Their semiofficial representative in Kiribati was the wife of a Scottish aid worker, and so, once a year, air travel permitting, the British high commissioner of Fiji made an appearance. This year he had been taken to Buariki on North Tarawa, where Captain Davis had first planted the flag on Tarawa. It takes about two hours to cross the lagoon in a Kiribati-8 canoe powered by an outboard engine. It took a little longer for the high commissioner when it was discovered midway on the return trip that they had run out of fuel. In the long hours of paddling that followed, the high commissioner developed what must have been an excruciating sunburn, and so when he finally appeared at the reception, in khakis and a blue shirt that would have looked perfectly respectable were they not stained dark throughout with sweat, he looked like the world’s largest, ripest tomato. He was good enough to inform us, however, that he had recently spoken to the queen and that she was thinking of her subjects in Kiribati, a Commonwealth country. More likely, the queen was busy considering the implications of leaked tapes and licked toes, but this is why high commissioners get paid the big bucks. The president of Kiribati, looking uncomfortable in pants and sandals more commonly found in Bulgarian flea markets, circa 1974, rose and spoke about how grateful the I-Kiribati were to the British for their wise rule during the colonial era. “You civilized us,” he said. The high commissioner nodded magnanimously. And then we tinked our beer cans and toasted the queen.

Feeling very silly, I looked around and watched the gathered ministers, who were all as sodden through as I was in their ill-fitting pants. “Hear, hear,” they enthused. “To the queen.” As one, we guzzled our beer. If it were not for the beer, and the heat, and the bad clothes, the scene would not have been out of place in the House of Lords. They wish the queen well in Kiribati. They really do.

CHAPTER
11

In which the Author tells the Strange Tale of the Poet Laureate of Kiribati, who, in fact, was not a Poet, nor was he from Kiribati, but he was the Poet Laureate, sort of, though more than anything, despite considerable gumption, he was a Cretin.

S
hortly after we arrived on Tarawa, there appeared in the back pages of newspapers around the world a small item regarding Kiribati. The instigator of this tiny tempest in the human-interest media was the English magazine
Punch
, which published a story about a twenty-one-year-old man from Northampton, UK, named Dan Wilson, who in a cheeky display of tactless ambition, sent a letter addressed to “The Government, Kiribati,” offering himself for the job of poet laureate. In his letter, Wilson stressed his range—“I can write poems about anything you want; happy poems, sad poems, songs, anything”—and noted that for a remuneration package he wished for nothing more than a hut overlooking a lagoon. Also enclosed was a sample poem, a three-stanza ditty that began: “I’d like to live in Kiribati/ I feel it’s the country for me/ writing poems for all the people/ under a coconut tree.”

The letter, as one would hope, was delivered to the head of government, President Teburoro Tito, who was sufficiently moved to extend an invitation to Wilson to live the simple, literary life in Kiribati, hut included. That Kiribati is pronounced
Kir-ee-bas
, which undermines the rhythmic structure of the poem, mattered not, since even in Kiribati it is understood that poems no longer have to rhyme. Wilson, however, perhaps unaware of the aching sincerity of the I-Kiribati, decided to pass on his sample poem and a letter from the president’s personal secretary to
Punch
, a satirical rag moving ever further from its illustrious past, and this was followed by a media paroxysm that lasted for a full one-day news cycle. Newspapers from Europe to Asia to Australia carried stories. Even CNN bit. And each story was more or less the same. The tiny Pacific paradise of Kiribati had made a twenty-one-year-old student from the UK its poet laureate, based on the following poem (here followed the poem). The tone was always one of sweet condescension—look at these simpleminded islanders, beguiled by a young prankster from Northampton.

This, of course, was unfair. Let some snarky “LifeStyle” journalist try to forge a living from a canoe and a coconut tree. The I-Kiribati, however, are utterly irony deficient, a liability in the modern era. And the government wasn’t exactly savvy to the ways of the global media. Most governments would have shuddered in embarrassment and hired legions of media-relations specialists to advance some form of plausible denial. But George Stephanopoulos had no counterpart in Kiribati. Instead, the president was left wondering what all the fuss was about. A very nice young man from England was kind enough to think of Kiribati, write a touching poem, and inquire about the possibility of spending some time on the islands to write verse about the lovely people here. How could one say no?

And so President Tito had another letter sent to Dan Wilson. Was the poet sincere? Did he really want to come to Kiribati? Did he wish to live in a hut overlooking a lagoon? Wilson, stunned to receive another letter from the president’s office, wrote back immediately and apologized for creating such a stir, observing that the media is an uncontrollable beast, and that he was, indeed, interested in writing poems in a hut overlooking a lagoon.

The mail to and from Kiribati often operates at a steamship pace. Eighteen months passed until Wilson received a reply. Soothed by the poet’s good intentions, the president’s personal secretary reassured Wilson that he was indeed still welcome. “Now to the question of His Excellency’s hut,” the letter continued, “rest assured that this generous offer still stands and furthermore, the hut is conveniently located on one of the outer islands.”

This letter eventually found Wilson working on a Christmas tree plantation on the German-Polish border. It was November. Let’s reiterate: German-Polish border. November. And so it came to be that one day, Dan Wilson, the first poet laureate of Kiribati, sort of, arrived on Tarawa, ready to assume the wreath. Greeted at Bonriki International Airport by a presidential aide, Wilson was taken for a brief tour of the island—the brevity having more to do with the meager size of the atoll than with any shirking on the sights—and deposited at the president’s private home, a spartan gray cinder-block house located on a narrow spit of land between the lagoon and the Mormon high school, which is where I found him one morning, utterly inebriated.

It appeared that the president’s family had discovered kava, a narcotic mud water ritually drunk in much of Polynesia and Melanesia. I put aside my bicycle and entered a room barren of all furnishing or ornament, save for mats, where a dozen men reclined in a satisfied stupor around a kava bowl. Kava is derived from the roots of
Piper methysticum
, a pepper plant requiring water and rich soil and hillsides and occasional cool weather and all sorts of other conditions not found in Kiribati. The I-Kiribati have a great appetite for intoxicating substances, and since the country lacked anything like a Food and Drug Administration, it was probably in the spirit of public service that the president had enlisted his family, at least the male members, to imbibe the mud water, presumably for research. Bowl after bowl was consumed without fuss or ceremony. Women brooded on the fringes. Punctuating the strange, stoned silence was Wilson, who sat around the kava bowl plucking a guitar.
Twang
. Snort.
Twang
. Giggle.

I politely declined a bowl. I am very firm when it comes to the consumption of intoxicating substances. Not before 10
A
.
M
., I say. It’s a slippery slope. I was eager to speak to Wilson. Our only knowledge of the poet laureate saga came from a couple of faxes sent to us by friends, which simply left us befuddled, and we forgot all about it until we heard, through the coconut wireless, that the poet laureate had indeed arrived on Tarawa. Wilson, who in person looks much like a diminutive Liam Gallagher, the loutish front man of the onetime supergroup Oasis, agreed to join me outside, where we sat in the shade offered by the presidential lean-to, and where I asked him about his first impressions of Tarawa.

Snort
, he began. “I’s fookin small, i’s wha ie is.”

Pardon?

“I’s fookin small, i’s wha I sed. N i’s fookin hot too.”

Yes, quite. The poet laureate, it appeared, did not speak the Queen’s English.

“Y gut a fag?”

Pardon?

“I sed y gut a fookin fag? A ciggy?”

I gave him a cigarette. With trembling hands he drew the smoke in. “Ugghhh.”
Snort.
“Hrrmgghh.”
Snort
.

As a skilled journalist, I knew how important it was to establish a connection with one’s subject and find a common language. I asked him, “So what the fuck were you thinking, fucking poet laureate and shit?”

“I’s a feelinn out a jub application to deliver fookin newspapers ’t fookin four o’clock n the mornin, n I thut to meself ther ass to be somethin better n this, u know wha I meen? N wha cuud be better n bein e fookin national poet, sittin round writin fookin poems all day.”

Indeed. But not in England.

“Problem wi fookin England is A, u’v got to be fookin good, and B, the fookin job’s taken.”

These inconvenient facts would dissuade many, but not Dan Wilson. He consulted an atlas. “I’s lukin fur someplace remute. I luked at the fookin Pacific, luked at the fookin middle, n found Kiribati.”
Snort.
“Y gut another fag?”

I gave him another cigarette. “Y mine if I take two?” He lit one and placed the other behind his ear. “Hrrmmph. Hak-hak. Chhhhhhh-thwoooo.”

Wilson was not quite the semiliterate wreck of a being that he appeared to be. His answers, despite the
fookins
, were practiced, smoothed over after dozens of interviews in the UK. His correspondence with the government of Kiribati was arranged chronologically in a neat folder. His round-trip air ticket was paid for by a film production company, which had provided him with a camera to record a video diary. But now that he had arrived on Tarawa, far away from the media glare, what on earth was he going to do here? I asked him how he had been spending his time.

“I’m jus swimmin, sleepin, chillin out, partyin. U know, doin what the fookin I-Kiribati do.” Not quite, but never mind. Did he plan on writing verse? (“Have you written any fucking poems yet?” I asked.)

“I aven’t written a fookin thing. I’m waitin until me fookin hut is ready and then I’m just gonna write and see wha fookin comes out. I don’t really write serious poetry, just comic verse.” Who would have thunk. “So I’m jus chillin til I get to Tabiteuea North.”

Tab North? The Island of Knives?

In Kiribati, whenever one hears of a murder, one’s reaction is,
Really?
And then, inevitably, one hears that the murderer is from Tabiteuea North, and the reaction is,
Ah, yes, of course, that explains it.
They are very sensitive on Tabiteuea, and very quick to resort to the blade. Was Wilson aware of the island’s well-earned moniker? I wasn’t sure, but I decided not to tell him. I was, frankly, very curious to see how he would get along on Tab North. Perhaps the president was more devious than I thought.
Honest, embarrassing me in front of the world is no problem at all. Now here is your hut on Tabiteuea. Feel free to sleep with the women
.

But I don’t think Wilson would have been perturbed. The palm fronds swayed. The lagoon shimmered. He had a good kava buzz going. An attractive young woman walked past—the president’s niece? “Y know,” said Wilson, who seemed very content, in a glazed sort of way, “I’s temptin to fookin disappear here, to jus cut copra and make fookin babies.”

A highly original thought, little explored in verse. I wondered what would become of him, carried so far by a little jest. Kiribati certainly had no need for him. Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote of a chief on Butaritari: “His description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as ‘about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea—and no true, all the same lie,’ seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.” Perhaps then it was Wilson’s job to introduce the limerick to Kiribati.

But this would not happen either. In the weeks that followed, Wilson disappeared into the belly of Betio, the seaman’s bars where it is considered bad form to demonstrate an ability to walk upright. The expatriate grapevine was rife with tales of drunkenness and lechery and, unusual for Tarawa, where expatriate drunkenness and lechery are the norm, the stories carried the faint whiff of disapprobation. It was often noted that he had no money, and that he was living off the generosity of the I-Kiribati. He had discovered the
bubuti
. He manipulated custom. He brought women to the president’s house. The president’s wife was livid.

I encountered Wilson once more in the bar of the Otintaii Hotel, a modest cinder block hotel donated by Japan, where
I-Matangs
and government workers gathered on Cheap-Cheap Fridays. Wilson was shit-faced, and deliriously, rapturously happy. He was getting married. The lucky bride was a Chinese woman who had arrived in Kiribati to buy a passport, and Wilson kindly offered himself as a husband to improve her chances of escaping China. He liked Asian women, he explained. And island women too. They knew their place. A man could be a man and a woman a woman. None of this gender equality nonsense. Sylvia said: “It must be very difficult being so short.”

Snort
, said Wilson, and then he retreated into the night, two more cigarettes dangling behind his ears, continuing on his dissipated journey, shortly to end with a ticket back to the UK and the resumption of the (brideless) life of an English lout.