Culture Shock

[Lilith]

Culture Shock
By Isabella Tree

In the Trobriand Islands the annual yam festival is more than just ordinary. Nick burst out laughing when I told him I was heading for the Trobriand Islands. 'I hope you know how to bite off a man’s eyebrows,' he said.

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In the Trobriand Islands the annual yam festival is more than just ordinary. Nick burst out laughing when I told him I was heading for the Trobriand Islands.

“I hope you know how to bite off a man’s eyebrows,” he said. He saw the bewildered look on my face. “And eyelashes,” he added, wiping away tears of amusement. Nick was a native Trobriand islander, but he had been working as a doctor on ‘mainland’ Papua New Guinea for the past four years. In all that time he hadn’t been back, and he needed no encouragement to talk about the tiny archipelago where he was born, just an hour’s plane hop away in the beautiful Solomon Sea.

“It’s a crazy time of year,” he said. “The big yam harvest will be coming in now. And women will be given permission by the paramount chief to capture men and have their way with them.”

“You mean, assault them?” I asked, disbelieving. “Sexually.”

“That’s it,” said Nick. “They will rape them.” He pronounced it ‘rep,’ as in travelling salesman, and made it sound just as casual.

“The women lie in wait in the bushes,” he continued. “They jump out on a man when he goes to work in the gardens or even while he’s just waiting to get a lift to town. It’s always a man from another clan; women will never rape men from their own village. It’s a kind of ritual humiliation. It’s a very dangerous time for a man to be walking by himself. Men will be going round in twos and threes, just in case.”

Nick would elaborate no further. He’d already gone beyond the bounds of decency by talking about the practices to a dim-dim, a foreigner - and a woman at that.

“It’s tabu,” he reminded himself reproachfully and leaned forward to grab another can of South pacific, the Papua New Guinea beer that, appropriately, has a bird of paradise as its logo.

“The Trobs are a beautiful place,” he added wistfully. “Maybe I can give you one of my eyes to take with you so that I can see it all again.”

I thought of Nick as my light aircraft bumped to a halt on the runway on Kiriwina - a runway unimproved since it was built during World War II - and indeed wished I could have brought him along for the trip. I was feeling like a nun about to enter the world of Bacchus and badly in need of a chaperone.

There was little I’d read about the place that was reassuring. Some of it dated to just after World War I, when Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote the then scandalous ‘Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia.’

When American GIs were stationed here some 30 years later, they reported that the Trobrian islanders, for all their hospitality and charm, seemed to relish misleading foreigners. The few outsiders who had visited this remote paradise found themselves the butt of merciless teasing, practical jokes, and sexual harassment.

The modern tourist appeared to be no exception. One visitor had found himself hounded by girls mocking him for his surname, Wheeler, which to them sounded hilariously similar to wila - a word for female private parts.

I girded up my loins and prepared for the fray.

At first glance, at least, the Trobriands looked much as one would expect paradise to look: bleached white sand, coconut palms, dugout canoes, and thatched fishing huts, a line of surf breaking on an off-shore reef, the ripping semaphore of waves out at sea, the aroma of bananas and guavas, and a warm sensuous breeze at once arousing and totally enervating. More the stuff of ‘South Pacific’ than ‘Fatal Attraction’.

The southern half of Kiriwina, the main island of the group, is rain forest; it is in the northern half - a flat, hot, open plain - that everything seems to happen, where the stereotypical expectations of paradise are supplanted by the bizarre and bewildering practices peculiar to the Trobriands. It is here that the all-important yam is elevated from staple food to status symbol, where competition between villages for the title of tokwaibagula, or ‘good gardener,’ is fiercest, where old rivalries can flare into tribal battles overnight.

[Lilith]

It is also where the women are most audacious, wreaking revenge for past grievances by pouncing on hapless males in the post harvest mayhem.

I was greatly relieved to learn, on arriving in the village of Kaibola, that I had missed the annual bacchanalia by a good few weeks. It was late August and the yam harvest had been early that year, culminating in a festival at the end of July. The whirlwind of rampaging women had come and gone, and the place was beginning to return to normal. I could walk easy without being roped into a gang-bang.

However, the yam, the catalyst of all the excitement, was still very much in evidence. Beneath the shade of a giant fig tree, villagers were dividing the spoils. Enamel plates and baskets piled high with tubers were being distributed to each waiting family. Toddlers ran about, cradling the yams in their arms like fat, dusty babies.

In the centre of the village, in pride of place, stood the chief’s yam house - an elegant, stilted construction, part log cabin, part totem pole, already stocked to the gunwales with the best of the crap. The giant yams - some of them a priapic four feet long - had been installed here with great ceremony a week earlier. They stuck out indecently through the walls, like the cannons of a battle ship.

The children had fallen on me as a new source of amusement, and it wasn’t long before I was being shunted around the village like a captured hog.

“Dim-dim,” they chanted. “We’ve got a dim-dim. Over here. Come and catch us, dim-dim.”

When the young ones tired of me, I found myself the focus of the older children’s curiosity. The boys strutted around me like cockerels. One wore a hibiscus flower in his hair and a T-shirt with the handwritten slogan ‘Make love to Whoever takes your Fancy.’ Another had a US Virgin Islands T-shirt under which was written ‘No Probs - We Are Trobs.”

The older girls were more approachable, if irrepressibly coquettish. They wore colourful cotton dressed, woven grass armbands and anklets, and red palm bands in their hair.

They led me on a short walk through the yam and taro gardens to some local caves. I asked them if the boys, none of whom could have been older then ten, understood what their T-shirts suggested. They giggled and responded with a lesson in the Trobriand art of sexual sign language: when a boy gave a thumbs-up, for example, a girl could answer with a finger on the lips [which meant ‘yes’] or a toss of the head [which meant ‘no’]. Hitchhiking here was clearly a risky business.

The eldest girl, who told me she thought she was 14, said her mother would sometimes suggest boys to sleep with. It was a good way of getting to know who would make a good husband, she said.

To get married, I was told, all you had to do was make sure you were still in bed with your intended at dawn. Sometimes a girl would try to drug her boyfriend or make him sleep late by putting a spell on him with a love potion. Or she’d simply exhaust him with sexual antics throughout the night. Some of the boys were planning to make their fortune importing alarm clocks.

I was beginning to feel decidedly priggish. There seemed nothing those liberated youngsters didn’t know about - including sexual positions, and terminology that made my hair stand on end.

We made a lot of noise as we meandered down the path, partly because my companions thought my naïveté so hilarious, partly as a warning to couples who might be in the bushes. Making love was supposed to bring fertility to the crops, and the yam and sweet potato gardens were popular trysting sites - as was the cave to which they took me.

It was an undeniably seductive spot: a series of limestone chambers with soft, sandy floors, thrusting stalactites and stalagmites, and rock pools glowing with purple and green colours. The walls were plastered with graffiti: ‘Susan, give me a favour.’ ‘Joe, Tom, and time.’ ‘Clara, I am yours.’

It was only when the discussion moved on to the facts of life that I seemed to have the advantage over my companions. The girls believed that babies were conceived inside a woman’s head, the spirit of the unborn child arrived as a thought from the spirit island of Tuma, just across the water. The thought would travel down the woman’s body to materialize and grow in her womb.

Later, I learned from a health worker how this belief had persisted among the islanders, despite all efforts to persuade them otherwise. The Trobrianders believed there was no connection between the act of sex and conception. One theory had it that the yam, on which the islanders depended for the bulk of their food, acted in some way as a contraceptive, so that the majority of women conceived only when yam stocks began to dwindle every year, before the next harvest.

The health worker had heard that a Mexican species of yam contained a substance from which the contraceptive pill was first developed. As far as she was concerned, that theory did much to explain why the birthrate in the Trobriands was historically so low, especially considering the level of sexual activity, and why it has rocketed since the introduction of imported food like bread and rice.

There was a stubborn resistance to modern contraceptives, she added. When a boatload of condoms arrived at the dock in Losuia as part of Papua New Guinea’s national family planning program, the islanders blew them into balloons and sent them drifting out to sea.

One beautiful, warm evening, the villagers came down to the beach to rehearse their traditional dances for a local sing-sing. Each dance celebrated a different crop, and all reverberated with sexual suggestion. The girls performed a seductive, swaying cassava dance, making full play of the swishing grass miniskirts slung low on their hips. Their breasts were bare and glowing with coconut oil and yellow pollen. Their hands snaked from side to side.

The mweki-mweki dance performed by the boys was not so subdued. To the fiercely rhythmic sound of drums and whistles, the young bloods of the village lined up in a column three-deep. They wore nothing but their belts and cache-sexes of dried palm leaves. Their torsos were generously oiled and sprinkled with pollen, and they stamped their feet like toreadors, kicking up the sand and whipping up a fever of excitement among themselves and the girls who were watching them. In time to the drums and a lewd, untranslatable chant, they marched down the beach, thrusting and grinding their pelvises with gleeful vulgarity. They lined up in front of my camera as if daring me to hold my ground and then gyrated off down the beach. A band of infants ran behind the group, squealing with delight.

After the dancing I found myself sitting on the beach with some of the boys and a couple of other dim-dims. Talk turned, inevitably, to the excesses of the yam harvest just weeks before. Despite the taboo surrounding the subject, a couple of bottles of South Pacific were enough to loosen one boy’s tongue, and he agreed to describe what it was like to be raped, provided I, the only woman in the group, removed myself from earshot. One of the other tourists could repeat what he said, word for word; it was just that it was forbidden for me to hear it directly from his lips.

There followed a jaw-dropping account of an ambush, relayed in tantalizing installments as the dim-dim ran 50 yards up and down the beach between us, describing what had happened. Leaving out the details, the islander, who had been raped twice, confessed it was a surprisingly pleasant experience once he had got over his initial shock. What was harder to bear, he said, was the ridicule. Sometimes, if their victim can’t perform, the women urinate on him. And then there was the biting-off of eyebrows and eyelashes. When this poor chap, bedraggled, shaken and eyebrow-less, had returned to his village, he’d been teased relentlessly for days.

I was allowed to return to my place among the men only after the subject had changed. Sitting on a piece of driftwood, looking out to sea, it was difficult not to anticipate a downside to all this wild eroticism. How long before some irresponsible dim-dim brings Western diseases to the Islands of Love? How long before the serpent finds it’s way to paradise? Was I seeing the Trobriands in the last days of innocence?

The sliver of a new moon rose above the palm trees, and the young men leaped to their feet, whooping to welcome it. Some girls walked past with burning firebrands to look for crabs on the reef. A school of wild porpoises rose and fell on the seaward side of the bay.

As I got up to retire to my hut, one of the dancers handed me what he’d been making whilst we’d been chatting. He called it a katububula. A garland of white frangipani flowers, petals delicately folded back with spiders’ webs to expose the blossoms’ scent, it was the Trobriand token of love.

[dannyk]

Hmm... suddenly have an idea for my next vacation.... :D