The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 15

In which the Author describes the Behavior of Government Officials (drunken thuggery), the Peculiar System of Governance (Coconut Stalinism), the Quality of Government Services (Stalin, at least, got something done), followed by a recounting of the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition, when for nearly Two Months all government activities Ceased, not that anyone noticed, followed by the Shocking Conclusion to the competition, when the Ministry of Housing won with a dance that Shamelessly incorporated Polynesian influences, leaving the other Competitors to stew in their Bitter Bile.

Elsewhere in the world, governments typically confine their activities to the defense of their nation, the education of their youth, monetary policy, and the disbursement of pensions. True, a few—maybe more than a few—governments have pursued more nefarious ambitions, such as global hegemony and world dominance in rhythmic gymnastics, but most… okay, many… all right some—let’s not get into this—confine their energy to security and improving the quality of life of their citizens.

Not so in Kiribati. The country lacks a military force because the I-Kiribati wisely acknowledge that no one else wants their country. Even the I-Kiribati aren’t too thrilled about having their country. Certainly they wanted to live there, but all things being equal, they would rather have had the British govern it. Nor does the country have any say about monetary policy, since it uses the Australian dollar as its currency. There was a brief pang of worry in Canberra that President Tito’s decision to double the salaries of all government workers would lead to inflation in Australia, but then they remembered that this was Kiribati after all, with a population that could easily fit inside the new stadium in Sydney. Besides, even by doubling his salary, President Tito, the highest paid government official in Kiribati, still pulled in less than US $10,000 per annum, which didn’t strike me as particularly inflated. Like us, he probably couldn’t find anything to spend it on either.

The government in Kiribati also has very little to do with education. There is but one state-run school on Tarawa, the King George V High School, where government workers send their children. At any given time, half of the I-Matangs on the island were there to do “curriculum development” for KGV. This had gone on for several years without any discernible change in the colonial-era curriculum. The consultants, however, did swallow most of the country’s education budget. The rest of the nation’s children made do with church-run schools. And pensions? Few in Kiribati live long enough to collect a pension.

One can then reasonably ask what exactly does the government of Kiribati do? As far as I could tell, the government spends a lot of time drinking and brawling. No workshop on global climate change is complete until the assistant secretary of the environment has passed out in a pool of beer barf. No meeting to discuss interministerial cooperation on transport issues can occur without a climactic brawl between the principal welfare officer and the deputy secretary for transportation. And no reception for the rare visiting diplomat can be considered a success until the chairs are hurtled in a fine display of drunken carnage. The higher one is, the more such displays are expected. The vice president, for instance, decided to honor the visiting Japanese ambassador by guzzling a dozen cans of Victoria Bitter and then punching his wife as the horrified Japanese delegation looked on.

One would assume then that the government of Kiribati practices a laissez-faire approach to governance. This would be an incorrect assumption. The government of Kiribati has, in fact, emulated the North Korean model of governance. It practices what I like to call Coconut Stalinism. It controls everything. It does nothing.

On the outer islands, this was good—the do-nothing part. Subsistence living is rarely eased through diktats from the capital. But on Tarawa, indifference and inaction could be exasperating. The government owns the food co-ops, which specialize in expired tinned fish, just the thing for the fish-weary consumer. It controls the infrastructure and, as a result, rare is the stream of electricity that lasts longer than a few hours before it fizzles. Air Kiribati, government-owned, is a disaster waiting to happen. So too are the state-owned ships.

The government also manages the hospital, and I am using the word hospital very generously here. It is a complex of dingy single-story buildings where dogs wander through the patient wards; where flies torment the unfortunate denizens because no one has bothered to install screens on the windows—even though screening is readily available at the island’s hardware store; where the emergency room lacks a sink and is therefore stained with the blood of innumerable patients; where the incinerator has failed to work, oh, for several years now, resulting in an island littered with hazardous waste; where the X-ray machine stands idle because no one bothered to order film, or general anesthesia for that matter, which means that patients undergo operations with only a local anesthetic, which just makes me shudder. In brief, the hospital on Tarawa was where one went to die.

The I-Kiribati knew this. That’s why no one ever went to the hospital until they were ready to meet their maker. In the meantime, they resorted to local plants presumed to have medicinal value, healing massages, and magic to treat their ailments. Only when the tumor bulged alarmingly under the skin, or the wound turned dangerously gangrenous, or the knife could not be removed from the heart was a patient delivered to the hospital, when, of course, it was too late to do much anyway. It wasn’t as if all of the half-dozen or so doctors on Tarawa were incompetent, though frankly I too was wary of seeking medical counsel from doctors trained in Burma, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea. The United Nations, in its wisdom, sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of Africa and Asia to the Pacific Islands. In turn, it sends doctors from the most medically deprived corners of the Pacific to staff the wards in Africa and Asia. I am sure there is a very good reason for this, but my brain is too feeble to grasp what that reason could be. But I digress. The main problem doctors faced on Tarawa was that they simply did not have the diagnostic tools, the medicine, or a clean recovery ward, to allow them to do their job. Sylvia spent two years trying to donate hospital equipment, for free, gratis, as a gift from the American people, training included, but failed to do so because the secretary of health, a doctor himself, could not bring himself to sign on the dotted line. He was a busy man, attending conferences around the world sponsored by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and other groups that believe the best way to help the Third World is to lure away the few people in those countries who have the power to do something and bring them to a swank hotel in Geneva, where they can… where they can do what exactly? The program usually emphasizes “networking opportunities.”

For a long while, I assumed that the government was irredeemable, that its ministries were staffed entirely by idle sycophants with no greater ambition than to fritter away every foreign aid dollar that arrived in the country. This, however, turned out not to be the case. The ministries were indeed ambitious. They each had a goal, a drive to succeed, a desire to be the very best that they could be, and they were staffed accordingly. Academic credentials mattered not. Nor did experience. The critical skill a potential employee brought to their ministry was their ability to dance.

Every year on Independence Day, the ministries competed for the honor of winning the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition. This was the highlight of the holiday, and ministries spent months preparing. In the evenings, the maneabas on South Tarawa rumbled to the sounds of hundreds of ministerial workers singing and dancing into the small hours of the morning. Costumes were prepared; long grass skirts and pandanus brassieres for the women, matching lavalavas, intricate armbands and crowns that looked to be inspired by the Statue of Liberty for the men. As Independence Day neared, all semblance of official government activity ceased. For a month, each team, consisting of a hundred or more participants, fasted from dawn to dusk. The consumption of alcohol, remarkably, was forbidden. More remarkable still, sex too was prohibited. The dancing spirits—and how they loomed over the participants—demanded purity.

This struck me as a great sacrifice to make for the spirits. In a country like Kiribati, where most people struggle daily to ensure that they have enough to eat, there is little room for asceticism. A vegan, for instance, would very soon be a dead vegan in Kiribati. Even a less militant vegetarian is unlikely to survive on an atoll. In Kiribati, one eats what is available when it is available. And for a government worker to spurn alcohol seemed to me the height of self-denial, surpassed only by the repudiation of sex. The I-Kiribati struck me as a lusty people. Their conversations were laced with sexual innuendo, and in the months preceding the arrival of our dogs, rare was the night when returning from an evening out we did not stumble across a lusty couple coupling in our backyard, seeking an escape from the public forum that is I-Kiribati home life.

“Fasting I can understand,” I said to Sylvia. “And the no-alcohol rule strikes me as a pretty good thing. Most of these guys could use a little drying out. But clearly, this no-sex injunction is going to be hard for the dancers.”

“Clearly,” Sylvia replied, “you haven’t been talking to the women here about their sex lives.”

That was true. I was under the impression that to inquire about a woman’s sex life was a cultural faux pas of the first order, one that would very likely get me killed by an enraged husband.

“And now that I think about it,” Sylvia continued, “don’t start asking a woman about her sex life. She’ll believe you have designs on her, and this will get back to me—everything does, you know—and I’ll be expected to bite your nose off.”

This was also true. Biting off someone’s nose was an acceptable way to display jealousy. I had initially assumed that the large number of people sporting disfigured noses was the result of leprosy, but in fact it was simply the mark of a jealous encounter. Men bit the noses off women, and women bit the noses off men. This did not necessarily mean the end of the relationship. There were many noseless couples in Kiribati. There was, it seemed, a dark side to the sex lives of the I-Kiribati. I asked Sylvia what she knew.

“Have you heard of dry sex?” she asked.

“Isn’t that from the Kama Sutra?”

“It’s when a woman stops lubrication. This is done by inserting a mixture of coral and herbs into her vagina. It’s the preferred form of sex for I-Kiribati men. They claim it increases their sensation.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“I was under the impression that only occurred in places like tribal Pakistan.”

“Here too. And just like tribal Pakistan, kidnapping your bride is an acceptable form of courtship here.”

“I had no idea.”

“That’s because you’re a man, and an I-Kiribati woman won’t talk to a man about that sort of thing. Did you know that Kineita kidnapped Beita?”

Beita worked at FSP. Kineita was her husband. Their marriage struck me as the very model of conjugal bliss. They were affectionate. Kineita was a respectful, doting husband. They had a precocious two-year-old son.

“Beita was in love with another man,” Sylvia continued. “She wanted to marry him, not Kineita. But Kineita apparently couldn’t take no for an answer, so he kidnapped her and held her for two weeks until she agreed to marry him.”

That seemed odd to me. “Why didn’t her family or the other guy rescue her?”

“What do you think Kineita was doing to her for those two weeks? He was having sex with her. That shamed her family. And the other guy wanted nothing more to do with her. She had no choice but to marry Kineita.”

“And yet she seems pretty happy with him.”

“She is. He is a Seventh-Day Adventist. He doesn’t drink and he doesn’t beat her.”

That made him quite the catch in Kiribati, I realized. And he had job security. Kineita, it turned out, was also a fine dancer. He would be representing the Ministry of Education, where he worked in curriculum development.

WITH THE COMPETITION LOOMING, the ministries began to finalize their lineups of singers and dancers. Some took a rather expansive view of who constituted a ministerial employee. The Ministry of Environment, for instance, had talent-spotted Bwenawa and Tiabo, excellent dancers both, and so invited the FSP staff to participate under the banner of its ministry. FSP did environmental work; ergo FSP fell under the Ministry of Environment. This greatly excited the staff. Sylvia too was invited to dance. It was felt that the novelty of having an I-Matang woman doing one of the sitting dances would score extra points with the judges.

“I know I should do it,” she said. “It would be a cultural experience. I should have cultural experiences. That’s why we’re here, right? But I really don’t want to spend the next four weeks in a maneaba, staying up until 3 A.M., learning how to do a sitting dance. Is that bad of me?”

“No. I am sure there will be other opportunities for you to wear a grass skirt and a pandanus bra.”

I, of course, was pleased that Sylvia had declined to dance. She too would have been expected to make the sacrifices necessary to ensure a visitation from the dancing spirits. And those sacrifices were not ones I wanted to share in. Nor did I particularly want to see Sylvia’s body inhabited by the dancing spirits. They spooked me. I felt deeply uncomfortable whenever I saw a dancer overcome by the spirits. It begins with uncontrolled yelping and wailing, followed by tears, and ends with the dancer tumbling to the ground, where she flaps like a fish until she passes out. Spectators nod approvingly while she is carried out of the maneaba. It was like watching a schizophrenic have an epileptic fit. I found it deeply unsettling. I wished the spirits would just leave these dancers alone.

The I-Kiribati, however, are disturbingly eager to be swept away by the dancing spirits. Each day, the FSP staff staggered into the office after a long night of dancing practice. They were exhausted, malnourished, and not at all excited about the prospect of working. Instead, the one-hour lunch break turned into a three-hour nap. At exactly noon, the mats were unrolled and the staff settled into a group snooze, save for Bwenawa, who was banished to another room because he snored.

“What can I do?” asked Sylvia.

There was nothing Sylvia could do. All of Tarawa had been swept into the tumult of the Song and Dance Competition. From dawn to dusk, the starving, sex-deprived sleepyheads that made up the dancing teams listlessly staggered through their days. At night, every sizable maneaba on the island thundered to the sounds of hundreds of people belting out the tunes of the ancients. I thought it was wonderful—an entire month free of “La Macarena.”

Finally, Independence Day arrived. Sylvia and I had been invited to view the proceedings from the grandstand, which was quite the honor for FSP, never mind that the grandstand was a cement slab of questionable structural integrity. We were told to arrive at 7:30 A.M. sharp. Typically, I don’t celebrate anything at 7:30 A.M. Typically, I am not even conscious at 7:30 A.M. But there was a good reason for the early start. Gathered on what was optimistically called a field were hundreds of schoolchildren arranged like Nazi regiments attending the Nuremberg rallies. In the foreground stood the police, with twenty lucky officers displaying the country’s military might. This consisted of twenty muskets of a type last used during the Boer War. Each was fastened with a bayonet. There wasn’t any ammunition for the guns. It had run out. In 1908.

I liked the fact that the police force in Kiribati was unarmed. Elsewhere in the Pacific, island armies amuse themselves by staging coups, or instigating civil wars, or pursuing lucrative opportunities in the drug trade and otherwise behaving like schoolyard bullies who happen to have M-16s. In Kiribati, however, the greatest ambition of a police officer was not to carry a musket, but to be selected for Te Brass Band, the police marching band. They stood beside their comrades in arms, waiting, as everyone else was, for the president and the vice president and the other blah-blah-blahs to finish with their speeches. There were many speeches. There were long speeches. There were honors given. Meanwhile, the sun rose ever higher. The field, which was a slab of barren white coral, began to sizzle and it was not long before the participants arraigned on the field began to droop.

The first to fall was a police officer. He dropped his gun, swayed, and crumpled to the ground. He was immediately scooped up by two men with a stretcher, who carted him off to a spot alongside the field, where a canopy had been raised to offer shade. The next to pass out was a schoolgirl. She too was whisked off to the shade. By the time the speeches ended, eleven people had succumbed to heat exhaustion. It was only 9:30 in the morning. Did I mention that it’s hot in Kiribati?

Led by Te Brass Band, which played with so much gusto that they would have been the highlight of any Octoberfest, the remaining participants began to march. The I-Kiribati have a great affection for marching. This too was a legacy of English colonial rule. I always found it curious to see which habits and traditions remained after the English departed. Very sensibly, the I-Kiribati wanted nothing more to do with cricket, which is quite likely the most mind-numbingly tedious game ever devised. Sadly, corned beef was a keeper. And so too was marching. Bedecked in traditional garb, the students stomped in formation around the field. Quick-time, slow-time, a goose step here, a wiggle there, they demonstrated their expertise. The audience greatly enjoyed this display of the country’s martial prowess. They were tumbling over each other with laughter. The I-Kiribati have a very appealing way of diluting their pomp with a healthy dose of silliness.

By the afternoon, the festivities had moved to the Kiribati Protestant Church maneaba in Bikenibeu, which was one of the island’s larger maneabas. It was standing room only as the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition got under way. I tried to think of an American equivalent to the competition. I strained to imagine the Department of Defense dressed up in grass skirts and lavalavas, preparing to dance against the dreaded Department of Health and Human Services. I struggled to imagine Madeleine Albright in a snug-fitting pandanus bra. But I couldn’t quite grasp the image, which is perhaps just as well.

Each ministry had a hundred-plus singers, including the ministers themselves, and as they sang you couldn’t help but feel excited. Percussion was provided by what appeared to be an upturned bookcase. A half-dozen men pounded the instrument with the palms of their hands. An emcee pounced around the maneaba, beckoning the singers to greater heights. The dancers were languid and fluid, with highly stylized and suggestive gesturing of hands and eyes, balanced by a sensuous undulating motion in the hips, a movement accentuated by long grass skirts. Unlike the women, men are allowed a greater range of movement in their legs, and they were charged with maintaining the pulse of a dance through a choreographed stomping of feet and clapping of hands. Every gesture was significant. There is no free-form dancing in Kiribati. But there is rhythm, and watching the dancers it was clear that the I-Kiribati have got rhythm. Except, of course, those who were carried off by the spirit. They cried and fluttered and bellowed, until they collapsed unto the maneaba floor for a good shake. Extra points.

When it was the Ministry of Environment’s turn, Bwenawa took to the floor. He was their emcee. He shimmied. He swooned. He led his singers up the scales and then down again. He went to the men for the low bass. He gestured toward the women to give him some treble. With his thick mane of billowing hair, he had become the Leonard Bernstein of Kiribati. I turned to the dancers. Tiabo was beginning to get teary-eyed. She was quivering. Don’t pass out, I thought. It makes me uncomfortable. But the spirit eluded her, and she remained upright.

Afterward, I asked Bwenawa how he thought they did.

“Not very good,” he said. “But we enjoyed ourselves.”

As we spoke, the Ministry of Housing had taken to the floor. They were slick. The male dancers were a little more buff; the female dancers a little more lithe. The thatched bras were a little snugger. The grass skirts hung a little lower on the hips. They sashayed. They swayed. Suggestively.

“Stop staring, you lech,” Sylvia said.

“Maybe you should have danced after all,” I countered.

When they had finished with their evocative dance they blew kisses to the unimane judges. The audience let out a collective gasp. And then the audience began to giggle. In Kiribati, giggling is more an indicator of discomfort than amusement.

“That wasn’t I-Kiribati dancing,” Bwenawa said. “That was more like Polynesian dancing,” he went on, clearly disgusted.

The judges had wandered off to confer in private. They were gone for a long time. In the meantime, tension rose. There were more than a thousand people gathered around the maneaba, each with firm opinions about which ministry deserved the coveted prize. When the judges returned, they announced their decision. The Ministry of Housing had won. The singers and dancers from the housing ministry cheered. There was muted applause elsewhere.

And then the tension broke. There was yelling. There was shoving. There was pandemonium. I didn’t understand what was happening. My I-Kiribati language skills had not advanced to the point where I could understand the finely crafted insult. But clearly, a lot of people were upset with the decision. Sylvia and I drifted to the periphery of the uproar, where we found the secretary of education thoughtfully observing the commotion. I liked him. Unlike most in the government, he was devoted to preserving I-Kiribati culture from the encroaching influence of the continental world.

“Hi,” I said. “How’s the curriculum development going?”

He laughed. I-Matang humor.

I asked him what he thought of the judges’ decision.

“It was a bad decision,” he shook his head. “That wasn’t I-Kiribati dancing. In I-Kiribati dancing every gesture means something. It is very specific. But what the Ministry of Housing did was like the dancing in Tahiti.” The secretary of education began to undulate. “It’s not the Kiribati way.” He paused for a moment. “But the girls were very nice to look at, eh?”