The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 17

In which the Author flies Air Kiribati, Lives, Explores the island of Butaritari, famed for Merrymaking, followed by some thoughts on what it means to be Marooned, since the Author had a lot of time to ponder what it Means to be Marooned, because, frankly, Air Kiribati is not one of the world’s More Reliable Airlines.

The longer we spent on Tarawa the more Sylvia and I came to realize that to live on Tarawa is to experience a visceral form of bipolar disorder. There is the ecstatic high, when you find yourself swept away in a lagoonside maneaba rumbling to the frenzied singing and dancing of hundreds of rapturous islanders. And there are the crushing lows, when you succumb to a listless depression, brought about by the unyielding heat, sporadic sickness, pitiless isolation, food shortages, and the realization that so much of what ails Tarawa, the overpopulation and all its attendant health and social problems, need not be as bad is it is. It was after one such low that I found myself surprisingly amenable to Sylvia’s suggestion that we fly Air Kiribati to Butaritari, one of the northern Gilbert Islands. We were to accompany Te Iitibwerere, a local theater troupe that Sylvia had hired to produce message-oriented plays on the importance of green, leafy vegetables and the proper treatment for diarrhea, among other topics not typically explored on Broadway. And so we found ourselves at the airport, where despite our more sensible instincts, we were checking in for a flight on Air Kiribati.

Truthfully, I would have preferred to visit a city, some place with an old town. Despite illusions to the contrary, I was a creature of the city. I was not immune to the lure of comfort, convenience, and options. I liked the hum of a metropolis, the energy that emanates from hundreds of thousands of people tightly confined, by choice working and living among crowds, and I particularly enjoyed the corner respites, the cafés, bars, and restaurants that encouraged lingering and merriment. A perfect day would be spent perusing bookstores and the finery of brick town houses in a city’s old quarter, dawdling in a café and contemplating the listings of plays and films I probably wouldn’t see, having a couple of beers at a friendly neighborhood bar, enjoying dinner at a restaurant with sublime food and easy atmosphere, and returning to a charming hotel, confident that the electricity would be on and the water running. Also, it would be fall. I would wear a sweater.

Alas, Air Kiribati didn’t offer weekend packages to Copenhagen. Instead, we would be flying the wanikiba, or flying canoe, to Butaritari, an island that intrigued us because it was lush and verdant, which was unusual in Kiribati, and its people had a reputation throughout the islands for being exceptionally languorous and easygoing. This excited our curiosity. It is difficult to convey exactly how hard it is to acquire such a reputation in Kiribati, where energy conservation is a quality long cultivated and, as far as we could see, already perfected. Also, Butaritari was known for merrymaking, and this finally sold us on the island as our destination. Each island in Kiribati is known for something—Maiana for white lies, Tabiteuea North for settling disputes with knives, Onotoa for frugality, Abemama for oral sex (I kid you not)—and spending a week idling and carousing seemed like an appealing way to learn a little more about Kiribati. But we had to fly Air Kiribati to get there, and it says much about my willingness to explore an island where the lack of a functioning sewage system did not affect the overall quality of life that I checked in for the flight without the assistance of heroin.

After bowel movements, the state of Air Kiribati was the favorite topic of conversation on Tarawa. Did you hear about when the plane ran out of fuel midair and had to glide in for a landing, someone will say. Or… about when the engine died, or about when the pilot passed out mid-flight, or about when they forgot to turn the beacon on at the airport, or, my favorite, The pilot let me fly the plane. Distressingly, these were not mere rumors. I had never been so uneasy about boarding a flight. It did not help that the shoeless airport official was not pleased with my weight. The expression on his face, which just moments earlier had revealed only benign indifference, contorted into something approaching a scowl. As I stood on a rusting, antiquated scale, fulfilling my role in a preboarding ritual meant to instill anxiety in travelers, I watched the creases on his forehead burrow deeper, saw his eyes recede in a squint of deep concentration, and listened to the strange clucking noises emanating from his mouth. “Tock, tock, tock,” he said. He seemed personally affronted by my weight. And, I must add, I am not a fat man.

Indeed, standing on the scale, I was startled by how much weight I had lost—twenty-five pounds—with absolutely no effort at all on my part. I was fit when I arrived on Tarawa, so this wasn’t a loss of excess baggage. This was a withering away, and I had once been proud of my iron gut. The Tarawa diet is the ultimate weight loss plan—hookworm, roundworm, dash of salmonella, hint of dysentery, season with cholera to taste—results guaranteed, except for women. Sylvia lost not a pound, which confirmed for me that when challenged, women have a much stronger constitution than men. This makes sense, of course. Life in Kiribati has a strong Darwinian cast to it, and men, except for one brief glorious moment, are pretty useless from an evolutionary perspective and can therefore be allowed to wither, whereas women are hardwired to survive. The “weaker sex” moniker may apply to the bench press, but Nature isn’t a gym rat.

And I nearly lost a few more pounds when I contemplated the plane we were about to fly. This would be an old Spanish prop plane that predated Franco. It tilted ominously, exuding an air of exhaustion. As the airport official clucked and fretted over our small, featherlight backpacks, I watched the pilot stand on a stepladder and tug at a wing until it aligned with the other wing. Then I smoked eighteen cigarettes. Even Sylvia asked for a cigarette. Sylvia doesn’t smoke. She’s from California.

I did not want to cause a scene, but walking across the tarmac I did feel it was my duty to highlight to the members of Te Iitibwerere that the two engines were connected to the wings with masking tape. Really. They regarded this as very funny, and I knew then that the I-Kiribati would remain forever unfathomable to me. It was explained to us that the masking tape wasn’t actually connecting the engines to the wings, but merely covering up the parts of the plane that were corroded through with rust, and strangely, as I regarded the swaths of masking tape elsewhere on the fuselage, I didn’t really feel that much better.

The interior of the aircraft, a CASA, resembled that of an aging, decrepit school bus, complete with benches, though it was not nearly so large or comfortable. As we taxied, I hoped that someone was restraining the dogs, pigs, and children that usually occupied the runway. Pigs, let it be said, are stupid animals, though, as we discovered earlier, they do make landing a plane on Tarawa a uniquely interesting experience. Once we were in the air, a cool breeze was felt inside the cabin and it would have been pleasant had it originated from an air-conditioning unit. Clearly, more masking tape was needed. Two men, wiser than I, sought comfort on top of the luggage that was strewn haphazardly in the back of the plane, and as the engine coughed and sputtered and the aircraft trembled, I found myself envying them their alcoholic stupor. The Pacific Ocean below appeared placid and lush and impossibly vast, like a blue universe unraveling toward infinity. It seemed presumptuous to fly over something so expansive and grand as the Pacific Ocean in a contraption so pitiful as ours, and I thought it ominous that when we began to descend we could see in the near distance the island of Makin, a small atoll traditionally regarded as inhabited by the spirits of the I-Kiribati no longer residing in the temporal world. Missionaries, however, dispute this.

Landing on a rock-strewn strip cleared of coconut trees was exactly as I expected it would be. Terrifying. The passenger door jammed, and we scrambled out through the rear cargo door and soon we began to feel like Martian invaders. I-Matang I-Matang, said a chorus of tiny voices. But they quieted when I bared my teeth, and the youngest even scattered into the bush. Parents in Kiribati tell their children to behave or otherwise an I-Matang will devour them, which has led to the wonderful result that the younger segment of the population believes I-Matangs to be cannibals. I, of course, did nothing to dissuade them. Literary endeavors, which I imagined myself to be engaged in, were not enhanced by an audience of children clustered by the windows, watching raptly as I silently pleaded for a thought. In Kiribati, solitude was granted only to the wicked.

With Te Iitibwerere we piled into the Island Council Land Rover, which was dented and scratched and had the words With the Compliments of the People’s Republic of China stenciled on the door. The Land Rover was driven by the island clerk, who is referred to as the island “clark,” an anglicization that reminds the visitor that this is a Commonwealth country, where, just like in England, pronunciation has little to do with spelling.

“How many cars are there on Butaritari?” I asked the clerk.

He pondered this for a long time. “Three,” he finally replied.

“How many cars work?” Sylvia asked.

“One.”

We barreled down the island’s one, lonesome dirt road toward the main village. There were two guesthouses on the island. Te Iitibwerere were staying in the government-owned guesthouse, but we knew enough about the sensibilities of the government of Kiribati to choose the privately owned guesthouse, a tidy cinder-block house of three bedrooms notable for its enigmatic living room. On one wall, a mural depicted a bare-breasted young maiden kneeling as a supplicant to a can of Foster’s lager. On another wall was a glow-in-the-dark crucifix, above which hung the flag of the Kiribati Protestant Church. Obviously, we had stumbled across an avant-garde depiction of the duality of human nature, and I made a note to re-create this scene one day and sell it as an installation piece for an enormous sum to Charles Saatchi, the British art collector—known for his rather expensive view on what constitutes art. A cow carcass? An empty room? How much did you want for that?

Evening light descended, and as we walked through the village the air itself began to assume pink and blue hues. The dinner hour approached and fires were lit and the smoke settled over the village as a fine mist, capturing the soft light of sunset. The homes we passed were traditional structures of coconut wood platforms raised on stilts with a triangular roof thatched with pandanus leaves. These huts, called bua, were set on family compounds around which chickens, pigs, and dogs combated for scraps. The youngest children were naked and the oldest women, reverting to custom at twilight, were bare-breasted. Others, both men and women, wore wraparound lavalavas and T-shirts. A toothless old man, a respected village elder, greeted us warmly while bedecked in a frayed T-shirt that read Shit Happens, which seemed particularly apt in Kiribati.

The blue of the lagoon darkened, blending into the sky, and the small islets that rose from the reef were no longer distinguishable from the clouds neatly bisected by the horizon. Our perceptions were blissfully focused on the evening songs and the beauty of a dying sunset, when we stumbled upon a haunting example of the detritus of World War II. On a small beach, rippling waves lapped at the skeletal remains of a Japanese seaplane, destroyed when the Americans attacked in 1943, liberating the island from the Japanese, who had occupied the island since December 1941. Small boys threw stones at the rusting hulk, as no doubt their fathers had done before. Further, a small shrine consisting of a stone slab on which a rising sun was painted commemorated the Japanese losses.

Dusk quickly turned into night, too quickly for us as we staggered back to the guesthouse in pre-moon darkness. There was no electricity on the island. Kerosene lanterns swayed from the rafters of wood and thatch dwellings, casting figures and objects as shadows flickering through incandescent orange firelight. Dogs awoke from the torpor of the day. They were fighting somewhere nearby and we heard staccato barking and one dog yelping and then only whining and silence. Dogs were eaten on Butaritari, but regrettably, demand did not keep up with supply, and so, as on Tarawa, we walked carrying large rocks.

Back at the guesthouse, we were greeted by Edma, the matronly woman who prepared the meals. She was very thoughtful. No doubt, she believed that as I-Matangs we would prefer to eat I-Matang food, which in Kiribati took the form of fat-enhanced corned beef, served straight out of the can atop a bed of rice. This meat product was regarded as a great delicacy in Kiribati, and I believe that we left Edma befuddled with our request to eat only what the island could provide, she thinking undoubtedly that we were peculiar for wanting the food that the I-Kiribati would prefer to avoid, having eaten fish and breadfruit every day of their lives. But we didn’t care. Nothing could induce us to eat canned corned beef, which is vile and repellent and gag-inducing.

Later that night, it occurred to us why the handful of cinder-block houses on Butaritari were used solely for storage and daytime entertaining. As we watched the geckos flit across the walls, gorging on clouds of insects, we realized that the windows were without screening. The brick walls trapped the heat of the day and nothing stirred the stagnant air. Rats scurried around us. This bothered Sylvia. Tantalizingly, there was an unoccupied bua outside. We contemplated it, but then noticed that the house dog was in heat, attracting a dozen or so male dogs who ceaselessly mauled each other for the privilege, and so we remained indoors, sweltering, frequently bitten by carnivorous mosquitoes, and not at all amused by the resident rodents. “But at least there are no cockroaches,” I noted brightly. Sylvia needed cheering up.

Fortunately, there was also daytime Butaritari. We had a couple of days until Te Iitibwerere was scheduled to perform in the villages and so we toured the island on our own. Our wanderings kept us primarily on the lagoon side of the atoll, where nature offered such an alluring scene of idyllic paradise that one can understand why in the nineteenth century seamen abandoned their ships and their lives and became beachcombers. At low tide, the lagoon retreated, leaving a vast expanse of barren and desolate mudflats, where the ocean beyond shimmered like a mirage. But at high tide, with the clear azure water again lapping gently on a sandy beach that held not a single footprint, the scenery evolved, and as we stared into infinity, perhaps suffering from a mild case of sunstroke, it occurred to us that the essence of life is derived from the color blue—liquid blue, pale blue, deep blue, shades of blue separated first by the breakers that cascaded on a distant reef and then by the horizon. It is quite possible to spend hours doing nothing but floating like driftwood in water as warm as the tropical air, stealing glances at solitary mangrove trees rising brazenly from the lagoon, and the wall of coconut trees leaning over the shoreline offering a shady respite.

Of course, just as we were convinced that we had returned to Eden who should show up but a brightly banded sea snake. This snake’s claim to fame is that it is the most venomous creature in the world, and its presence as we snorkeled over an old fish trap was not entirely welcome. Like many, I regard snakes as a tangible expression of evil, and I would be very pleased if evolution saw fit to attach large flags to the slinking reptiles, just so we would always know where they were. Perhaps I was still shaken from my time as a landscaper, when in the backyard of a family’s home I experienced an epic conflagration between an angry copperhead and an unforgiving weed whacker. I have ever since been wary of things that slithered. But the sea snake wasn’t slithering, it wasn’t even swimming, it just floated in the warm water, drifting contentedly, and I remembered that to be bitten by this, the most lethargic critter in the world, is to be guilty of being very, very stupid. The only instances I had heard of sea snakes biting involved people sticking a finger down its throat or instigating coitus interruptus among amorous snakes, and I don’t think the human gene pool has suffered greatly from the results. Even Sylvia, clearly sun-drunk, declared that she found the snake “pretty.” Then she began talking to the fairy terns. “Pheeet-pheet,” she called to them. A lagoonside beach on Butaritari is like that.

The great pleasure of Butaritari was that with a population of just three thousand, the atoll was as close to pristine as possible. The reef positively exuded health and at low tide the odors emanating from the reef shelf held none of that fetid stench of decomposition, rubbish, and shit that so marred everyone’s existence on Tarawa. One morning, we left the guesthouse and wandered off in search of an oceanside beach where only some good snorkeling would interrupt hours of resplendent nothingness. We headed toward Ukiangang, a village close to the western end of Butaritari. The road drifted away from the lagoon and toward the middle of the atoll, where breezes did not reach. By mid-morning, the sun was unrelenting. As we walked past the few bua on this part of the road, we saw the inhabitants slumbering in the shadows, waiting for the intensity of the sun to lessen before emerging. Sometimes a child’s voice could be heard, notifying all who could hear that I-Matangs were walking past. Otherwise, it was still.

It was clear why the people of Butaritari were regarded as lazy by the rest of the country. The relatively abundant rainfall had made life on the island comparatively easy. Unlike the central and southern Gilberts, which experience little rainfall and much drought, Butaritari enjoys a true wet season. Subsistence living therefore requires much less work. On most atolls, which offer one of the Earth’s harshest environments, only the coconut palm tree thrives. But on Butaritari, we walked past trees laden with breadfruit, pandanus, bananas, and papaya, as well as many small gardens. There was such an overabundance of fruit that much of it was allowed to drop uncollected, something unheard of elsewhere in Kiribati. And both the lagoon and the ocean were teeming with fish. I had always thought the term “subsistence affluence,” an expression used by international development–types, to be an oxymoron, but on Butaritari, where the cash economy has little relevance, it seemed appropriate.

As we neared the taro pits outside Ukiangang, we turned off the main road and followed a slender bush trail up a northward-jutting peninsula. No one seemed to live on this stretch of land, and so we dropped our anti-dog rocks. After hiking some distance through the bush, we were greeted by an ocean intent on asserting its dominance over the atoll. The waves broke heavily on the reef, a continuous roar punctuated by the cracking sound associated with nearby lightning or artillery fire. The reef extended a mere fifteen yards or so before plummeting into the depths, and waves carried the height and power of ocean swells before breaking, sending frothy chaos barreling toward the rocky shore. Idling on the ocean surface just beyond the breakers were fisherman in small, traditional outrigger canoes, rising and falling with the waves, seeking the evening’s dinner.

We searched for a small bay or inlet, the likely launching point for the canoes, hoping to find calm water where we could don our snorkeling gear. After making our way through an ankle-twisting landscape of narrow crevices and slippery boulders, we came across a small bay framed by a golden beach where dozens of canoes rested under canopies of thatch. Venturing into the turquoise water, we swam among coral and fish of dazzling color. An incoming tide taunted us by spitting into our snorkels and hurling us perilously close to the boulders that cropped up in the most inconvenient of places. We turned to swim back to the beach, when suddenly we found ourselves surrounded by dolphins, a school of twenty-some intent on displaying a playful form of perfection, gleefully leaping into the air, twisting and turning, before falling back into the sea, and as they swam around us they seemed as happy to see us as we them, which could not possibly be true.

TE IITIBWERERE, the theater troupe we had traveled with, were the island equivalent of Hollywood stars. True, they didn’t have any money, nor did they live in fancy houses, and they weren’t stalked by paparazzi and autograph hounds, and Botox and personal trainers didn’t figure very prominently in their lives, but in the entertainment world of Kiribati they were stars. On Butaritari, they were to perform plays in each of the island’s villages. They were five women and one man, whom we will call Lothario as he was then married to one cast member and dating another, which added a certain frisson to their performances. They were staying in the guesthouse adjacent to ours, a government-owned cinder-block house that looked very much like a chicken coop. It lacked beds, running water, and a generator, and it was more abundant in rats than our guesthouse. It did, however, have the benefit of being perched atop a seawall overlooking the lagoon. On Butaritari the hours between dusk and dawn pass slowly and quietly, unless, of course, you are traveling with both your wife and your mistress, and so on most evenings we attached ourselves to the troupe. Around sunset, a fish would be cleaned and a bottle that once contained soy sauce but now brimmed with sour toddy would be passed around. A guitar was strummed and they would sing under the expanding white light of a rounding moon and a million stars. Bright is the moonlight on an equatorial atoll.

“Okay,” Tawita said, finishing a sweet tune and turning to me and Sylvia. “Now it’s your turn. You must sing.”

I dreaded this. It often happened that we were asked to sing. The I-Kiribati are unself-conscious about singing. This is because they have the voices of angels. When I sing, however, small children begin to cry, dogs whimper, and rats scurry to the water and drown themselves. Sylvia, who is ravishingly beautiful, possesses a formidable intellect, and whose very existence illuminates my life, sings like a distressed cow. Entire villages scatter into the bush when we sing together. I tried to explain this to Tawita, but she was having none of it. “You must sing. Do not be shy.”

And so we did. We sang Bob Dylan’s Tambourine Man. We sang it just like Bob, with raspy, nasally voices and a peculiar sense of harmony. Heeey Mr. Tambourine Man/ Play aaa song fer me/ I’m nooot sleepy and there is no place I’m goiiiiing tooo.

The theater troupe drowned themselves in the lagoon before we could finish. Actually, they didn’t do that. Rather, they drowned in tears of laughter. It began with a snicker that turned into a titter which led to guffaws and soon the group was convulsing in hysterical laughter.

“Stop!” Tawita cried. “That was very bad.”

“Yes,” I said. “We are aware of that.”

“You must never sing again,” she said.

“That is how we prefer it.”

During the days, Te Iitibwerere guided us through the formalities of the maneaba, which functions essentially like a town hall, a community center, a church, a Motel 6, and the U.S. Senate, but with more dignity. A maneaba, typically built with coconut wood, thatch, and coconut fiber rope, can be upward of a hundred feet long and sixty feet high, and it is here that just about everything of consequence occurs. Kiribati is a deeply conservative country, and inside the maneaba etiquette is important. As an I-Matang accustomed to a culture that no longer has much place for formality and tradition, I paid attention. There were rules, Tawita explained. Women, for instance, must never reveal their thighs. Breasts, fine. Thighs, no. Shoes must be taken off before entering a maneaba, and it is considered bad form to sit with legs outstretched, pointing your blackened soles at those across. Sitting cross-legged is best, but since you can be sure that once inside a maneaba you will not be leaving for at least a couple of hours, you soon find yourself quietly stretching and unknotting, here and there daring an outstretched foot. A hat must never be worn inside a maneaba, and on some islands hats must be removed even if you are simply walking past a maneaba. If biking, you should dismount and walk. “Also,” Tawita continued, “what is it called when you make a stinky from your backside?”

“A fart,” I offered.

“Yes. You must never fart inside a maneaba.”

We absorbed this, and as we entered the maneaba in the village of Kuma we rehearsed our speeches. We would have to introduce ourselves in I-Kiribati, and we were determined to get it right. Since I-Kiribati has no relationship to the languages we speak, learning it could only be done by rote memorization, which gives a teacher an opportunity to create mischief. Sylvia’s staff enjoyed recounting the time when one of her predecessors, a particularly humorless woman, asked them to help her with a speech she needed to make welcoming the Minister of Environment to a workshop. Instead of bland niceties, they had her say, “I would like to see your penis.” She felt encouraged by the laughter and continued on with ever more lurid statements. “I think it is very big,” she said. I respect I-Kiribati humor. I like its bawdiness.

As we settled in the corner of the maneaba reserved for visitors, a woman offered us young coconuts, which are refreshing and nutritious and impossible to drink without slurping loudly. The entire village was soon congregated inside the maneaba, and after an unimane welcomed us to Kuma, we were asked to introduce ourselves. Following custom, which requires that you share your name, your father’s name, and his home island, I stood up and said, in I-Kiribati: “Greetings. I am Maarten, son of Herman of Holland.”

“Aiyah, aiyah,” the village responded. “We welcome Maarten, son of Herman of Holland.”

I liked the sound of that. Maarten, son of Herman of Holland, had a medieval ring. True, it wasn’t as evocative as say Vlad the Impaler, but still, Maarten, son of Herman of Holland, suggested trouble.

After a few more words, Sylvia followed: “Greetings. I am Sylvia, daughter of Joe of California.”

“Aiyah, aiyah. We welcome Sylvia, daughter of Joe of California.”

“You know, darling,” I said, “California is part of the United States now.”

“Yes,” she said. “For the time being.”

One by one, the theater troupe followed. Now that we all knew each other, the play could begin. One would think that childhood diarrhea and respiratory infections would be difficult subjects for a play, but Te Iitibwerere carried it off brilliantly, possibly because diarrhea and respiratory infections are the stuff of everyday drama in Kiribati, but perhaps also because storytelling and songs are still the primary transmitters of knowledge in Kiribati. There are no I-Kiribati writers. Although the people of Kiribati are fairly literate, there is nothing to read beyond what their church provides, which means that nearly all knowledge of themselves is transmitted orally. Thus the plays about the runs. In New York, plays examine the ennui of contemporary life; in Kiribati, plays explore the art of rehydration. The audience laughed knowingly and nodded thoughtfully, and Sylvia was very pleased. It is one thing to sit in an air-conditioned office in Washington, poring over thousands of pages of buzzword drivel—“disseminating knowledge over the Internet”—and it is another thing all together to be in a village on the far side of the world, watching people get the health care information they need in a clever, effective, low-tech, real-world kind of way. If this had been a World Bank health program, a gazillion dollars would have been spent on consultants and first-class air travel, culminating in a report issued four years later recommending that Kiribati build a dam.

While the actors and the elders traded another round of speeches, lunch was brought to the center of the maneaba, where it remained for a very long time. There were flies, big flies, and they swarmed around the food. A half-dozen women languorously swept their hands back and forth over the assorted plastic plates, which elsewhere are called disposable, but here will be used to the end of time. There were more speeches. Sylvia was thanked for her $20 contribution to the preparation of the meal. There were songs sung heartily. There were garlands placed upon our heads, crowns of flowers. Talcum powder was sprinkled on our necks, Impulse deodorant sprayed under our arms. And finally we could partake of the meal. Ah… one last speech. An elder, a gentle moon-faced man, explained that we hadn’t been expected until the following day—it happens, there is but one radio phone on Butaritari—and so would we please excuse the humbleness of the meal. No worries, we said. It would no doubt be delicious. It was not.

Have you ever wondered what an eel the size of a python tastes like? No? Well, I can attest that it is the most wretchedly foul-tasting victual ever consumed by a human being. Slimy, boiled fish fat that could only be swallowed because, as was the custom, the entire village was silently watching us consume this meal, and they would likely be offended if we let the gag reflex do its work. For ten long minutes, the village did nothing but silently watch us eat. A few of the men were shaving. With machetes. These are tough people. It’s very kang-kang, we said, as another dozen flies settled on the sliver of eel we held in our hands. And then finally, the village elders, the men, the children, and the women, in that order, partook of the meal, and with the center of attention elsewhere, I began to quietly place the contents of my plate behind me, donating it to the mangy dogs that circled the maneaba.

And then we danced. The exuberance of the I-Kiribati for dancing cannot be overstated, as we had already witnessed with the Interministerial Song and Dance Competition. But it is te twist that inspires a certain madness in the I-Kiribati. No matter what time of day or night a maneaba function occurs, there comes a moment when the village generator is brought to life, feeding energy to a Japanese boom box, and with startling rapidity all the old ways recede, replaced instead with the throbbing atmosphere of an outdoor disco devoted not to the nurturing of sexual tension, but rather to the propagation of shameless silliness. It is the pinnacle of bad form to refuse an offer to dance te twist, and as the most exotic guests, we were often asked to dance, Sylvia by good-looking young men and me by the village aunties. To the sounds of Pacific pop and the ubiquitous “La Macarena,” we twisted, flailed, bumped, and grinded. As we danced, someone thoughtfully sprayed us with Impulse deodorant and showered our necks in talcum powder. My dancing aunt goaded me into ever greater displays of silliness, and just as I settled into a series of moves that closely resembled the movements of a chicken surprised to have lost its head, women from every corner of the maneaba rushed at me like linebackers, grasping onto me with ferocious bear hugs. These were strong women. Though I was not quite as substantial as I once I was, I was by no means a small man, and yet they flung me around like a rag doll. Later, outside the maneaba, members of the theater troupe told Sylvia that this was a fairly risky, though not unheard of, method used by women to display their partiality toward someone.

“You should have hit them,” Tawita said to her. “Some women would have bit off their noses if they had done that. You should at least demand mats and bananas.”

“Are you kidding?” Sylvia replied. “Did you see how they threw him around? I’m not getting involved. They can do what they want with him.”

ON BUTARITARI, we felt like we had discovered the true end of the world, where just beyond the horizon ships were known to sail over the rim of the Earth. Such illusions were easily cultivated staring into the blue void, realizing that behind you there was only a slender ribbon of land separating the ocean from the lagoon. Yet, as we rode up and down the atoll on borrowed bicycles (one with a chain that preferred to be elsewhere, the other without brakes, which mattered not on a flat island), watching the men fishing and the women tending gardens and the children playing or shyly staring at us from the heights offered by the coconut trees that they climbed with such ease, it sometimes seemed as if the rhythms of life were focused solely on Butaritari, and that the larger world, the world of continents and great cities existed only as faraway dreams. But the larger world had descended upon Butaritari, of course. When Robert Louis Stevenson visited, in 1889, the island had been reduced to a dissolute kingdom, governed by liquor, guns, murderous traders, and besieged missionaries. Stevenson, though, was soon enough reduced to the timeless lamentations of the I-Matang on an atoll: “I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips,” he wrote in a letter. And elsewhere: “I had learned to welcome shark’s flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an onion, an Irish potato or a beefsteak, had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.” Where else but in Kiribati has deprivation remained so constant?

The most profound visitation of the outside world during the modern era occurred with the arrival of World War II. The Japanese had initially garrisoned Butaritari with troops shortly after their attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The island, and particularly Tarawa, formed part of Japan’s defensive periphery around their conquests in East and Southeast Asia. In 1943, the U.S. Marines destroyed the Japanese forces in what came to be known as the Battle of Makin.

After the war, the missionaries returned and Butaritari reverted to English colonial rule, but unlike elsewhere in Kiribati, where America and Americana fails to resonate, Butaritari retains a strong affection for the United States. As it happened, our stay coincided with the anniversary celebrations commemorating the Battle of Makin. These were to be conducted in the village of Ukiangang, and on the appointed morning we trudged the two miles from our guesthouse, eager to see the festivities. We got there just in time to see the marching competition. Between the school and the great maneaba, Ukiangang has a clearing that approximates a village square, and here dozens of children were marching in formation—left-right-left-right—round and round the square, past the painting of a plump and benevolent G.I. greeting islanders emerging from their shelters, and past hundreds of giddy onlookers, who dissolved into laughter whenever the march master issued his orders—“Huuahh ehhh, huuaahh uhhh”—with Monty Pythonesque exaggeration. It seemed everyone was bedecked in T-shirts connoting America. Monster Truck Madness said one. My Parents Went to Reno and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt said another. Mr. Shit Happens was there. And once again I was amazed at how clothing moves around the world. The stories those T-shirts could tell. One old man, wearing a frayed U.S. Marine Corps T-shirt approached us and sang a flawless rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He sang it the whole way through, Tripoli to Montezuma. He did not speak another word of English otherwise.

With the midday heat, events soon moved into the shade offered by the village maneaba. Mostly it was traditional dancing, and as the dancers fluttered and swayed and undulated I was reminded again how achingly beautiful I-Kiribati girls are, thinking, boy, she’s going to be something when she’s older. And then I looked at those who were in fact older and began to wonder what exactly was going on with the I-Kiribati girls between the ages of sixteen and twenty that prevented all but a very few from becoming beautiful women, until it occurred to me that the past few months in Kiribati hadn’t actually done wonders for my beauty either. And then a group of boys marched into the center of the maneaba and they looked like trouble. They wore droopy shorts. And bandannas around their heads. They glowered menacingly. Someone turned on a boom box and inside this maneaba, in the village of Ukiangang, on the island of Butaritari in the Gilbert Islands, Vanilla Ice was heard. Ice Ice Baby. The boys danced with that skippity-hop-look-I-have-no-shoulders thing that Vanilla Ice made his own. I glanced at the unimane. These were men who could recite their genealogies back five hundred years and more, who knew how to read the water and the sky, who knew how to build things as large as a maneaba without a nail, who knew, in short, how to survive on an equatorial atoll on the far side of the world. What on earth would they make of this sudden intrusion of the most appalling song ever recorded—something far, far worse than anything recorded by Yoko Ono—a song that I daresay represents all that is vile and banal in Western civilization? I am saddened to report that the unimane were delighted by Ice Ice Baby. They smiled and nodded in time to the music, gleefully watching their grandsons prance about like junior varsity pimps.

End this madness now! I felt like yelling. Trust me! It’s for your own good! But I held my tongue and said a silent prayer fervently hoping that this was the beginning of nothing.

OUR STAY ON BUTARITARI was to have lasted a week, but as we feared and half expected, it would be extended indefinitely. Air Kiribati, it was announced on the island’s lone radio, would not be making its weekly flight between Tarawa and Butaritari. No one seemed to know when the service might resume or, more troubling, why the flight had been canceled in the first place. Sometimes, months pass before a flight returns to an outer island. And so we waited. And brooded.

There is no romance in being marooned on an outer island. You are stuck, deprived of options, and it is then that your anxious westernness reappears, something we had thought we had long since discarded. We began to feel profoundly bothered by Third World inefficiency. We railed against indifference and incompetence, the two dominant governmental traits. Sylvia worried about deadlines and lost time at work. I… did not. Nevertheless, we sulked like petulant children, refusing to budge from the guesthouse, preferring instead to escape into our books.

As the days passed, the island began to feel stagnant and immobile, nothing seemed to move or change, except our perceptions, which no longer regarded languid and indifferent Butaritari as the idyllic paradise of our imaginations. The smiles and stares we received from people were no longer regarded as charming and friendly. We knew that we were the objects of much curiosity, and we began to feel like circus freaks cast into a crowd to provide amusement. When we sat in front of the guesthouse reading our books, dozens of people gathered to watch us read. Our smiles became frozen and plastic grins. The beauty of the island was lost on us. The trees seemed aloof and mocking, the sea a barrier separating us from our lives. We had lost, temporarily, our sense of fatalism and our appreciation for the absurd.

The plane did eventually arrive, five days later, excreted from the clouds on a day that saw tempestuous winds bend the coconut trees straddling what was euphemistically called a runway, and rain showers that struck the earth with the vehemence of machine gun fire. The Air Kiribati representative, whom the night before we had found sprawled on the road, having misjudged, or perhaps judged perfectly, the amount of sour toddy it takes to induce total inebriation, conducted the preboarding weigh-in with bleary-eyed avarice, allowing all excess luggage on board and pocketing the fees, which would undoubtedly be put toward the afternoon sour toddy. The pilot, Air Kiribati’s lone woman, which may or may not mean something, did draw the line when she felt the plane shudder as a motorcycle was squeezed on board. When the doors were finally closed, the air was redolent with the odors of overheated bodies, ripe bananas, and raw fish. Soon the cracks and fissures that punctured the body of the aircraft would allow a cool and cleansing breeze inside the cabin. It would be the worst flight of my life, and I can think of only one reason why I didn’t wholly succumb to panic and nausea. We were going home.