The Sex Lives of Cannibals

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.

Shortly 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.