The next day the usual horrors were introduced quietly under the door of my room via the dailies.
A youth was chopped to death and two houses burnt down in the Kaugere suburb of Port Moresby over the weekend.
Under the banner headline ‘Patients Hungry’ we learn that patients’ food was stolen from Modilon Hospital in Madang.
A thirteen-year-old sex worker said, ‘My aunt kicked me out because she said I slept with her husband. Prostitution is fun and I get a lot of money.’ Tribal fighting now takes place with homemade guns, grenade launchers and Kalashnikovs rather than spears.
The city looks more attractive on my birthday. Red and mauve bougainvillea are flowering, Ela Beach looks inviting and the frangipani spiral down in pink and white. I decide to go for a walk. Outside the US Embassy I am almost arrested for writing down the sign NOKEN PARK LONG HIA meaning ‘No Parking’ in Tok Pisin (Pidgin).
The evolution of Melanesian Pidgin (or bêche-de-mer English, as it was popularly known in colonial days) was complex. There are many regional varieties of this colourful and witty language which originated on the Pacific plantations of Queensland, Samoa and New Caledonia in the early eighteenth century. It had emerged fully formed by about 1885 and is still evolving in rich referential complexity. Around eight hundred or one seventh of the world’s languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea. Some two hundred are Austronesian spoken in the coastal and island regions, and the remainder are Papuan spoken in the Highland areas. There are three lingua francas – English, Motu (spoken in Port Moresby) and Tok Pisin.
Outside the Westpac Bank a huge Alsatian and armed guard in a baseball cap stand in the centre of three signs warning ‘Beware of the Dog’. The brooding atmosphere of male unemployment hangs about like a miasma, and I have not seen a white face in three hours. Huge holes in the pavement and deep storm-water channels offer possibilities of serious injury. The light burst of a glowering Melanesian face suddenly smiling. At the Port Moresby Grammar School, children in pale uniforms are caged up in a security tunnel hung with plants waiting to go home. Fishing trawlers of unbelievable decrepitude are moored at the wharves. Thick, black smoke pours from their funnels, the idle crews lounging in the shade of tarpaulins or carrying huge tuna by the gills. One boy drops a plastic bag full of silver sprats that cascade over the wharf like pirate’s treasure. Six mothers breast-feeding babies inexplicably sit in the broiling sun on a concrete platform raised above a potholed road. I slip into the shade of the Port Moresby Public Library. An eerie silence reigns, but people greet my unexpected presence with smiles of surprise. Useful titles such as Australian Imperialism in the Pacific and Tuscan Cuisine grace the shelves.
A friend, John Kasaipwalova, had invited me for a birthday dinner. He is a prominent and controversial Papua New Guinean poet and writer and was a student rebel during the drive for Independence in the 1970s. He is also chief of the Kwenama clan on Kiriwina Island in the Trobriands, one of my destinations. I was collected in a Mitsubishi Pajero with gigantic bull-bars, a fantastically cracked windscreen and peeling sun filters. John has a round friendly face framed by a halo of tightly curled hair, his sensibility a rich repository of poetic image and symbolic knowledge. But entrepreneurial activities tend to preoccupy him these days, as he attempts to balance the claims of individual business and his responsibility to his own clan community. He was accompanied by Mary, his attractive Malaysian wife, and ‘Uncle Sam’, who drives the Pajero with fearsome spirit, thundering over unsealed roads past striped drums marking dark detours. While avoiding a cavernous pothole, he asked me to guess his nationality. His mother turned out to be from Sri Lanka and his father an unusual mixture of Dutch, Portuguese and Australian Aboriginal. ‘Dad’s family moved about quite a bit.’ Under an Australian bush hat he had the long grey beard of a swami and spoke with a slight Indian accent. It was a striking face, a colonial cocktail.
The shopping precinct that housed the Chinese restaurant was protected by a high security fence with bars two inches thick, armed guards, slavering dogs and a searchlight.
‘It’s a gourmet place!’ explained Sam as we parked among a crowd of children.
We were shown into a private room with intense fluorescent lighting. Geckos erupted into life on the walls like surrealistic wallpaper. Sam’s gold rings glinted on his slender fingers and the cutlery was reflected in his melancholic eyes.
Delicious coconut prawns, chilli crab and coral trout with tender asparagus appeared like magic. The conversation ranged lethargically over many topics, as if we were in an island village. They were shocked to learn of my walking alone in Moresby and even more surprised when I mentioned the young boys.
‘I’m hoping to go to the Trobriands quite soon, John.’ I briefly outlined my island itinerary.
‘You’ve made the best decision in choosing the islands. How come the Trobriands?’
‘Well, it’s a short story that’s taken a long time to complete. I bought a tabuya1 or wave-splitter from Kiriwina in an artefact shop many years ago. It’s been in my music room in London for ages, and I’ve always wanted to visit where it was made.’
‘I can tell you that the tabuya has been watching you. The design symbolises bulibwali or the eye of the sea eagle [osprey]. You had to come. His eye never sleeps, you know. In an instant he decided on you as his particular fish. That’s why you came. It’s very simple.’
‘Do you really believe this?’
‘Of course. You’re a person who possesses concentration. You plan and attend to detail. Am I right?’
‘Actually, yes. I drive people mad with it.’
‘There you are!’ John reached for more coconut prawns in an ebullient mood. He continued his arcane explanations with some seaweed poised between chopsticks in midair. I wanted to hear an account of the famous kula trading ring from the chief of a clan. I was anxious to know if the classical descriptions were still accurate.
‘Tell me something about kula, John.’
‘Well, first you must understand the mystery of Monikiniki or the Five Disciplines of Excellence.’
‘Sounds a bit complicated.’
‘Never! It’s simple! The disciplines are symbolised in the five compartments of a Trobriand mollusc shell. Each compartment represents one of the senses and is represented by a bird, plant or even a grasshopper. The eye is represented by the bulibwali or the sea eagle.’
We had moved into the realm of myth and magic for which these islands are famous, rather daunting for a European unused to the sharing of mystical experience.
‘But what is kula exactly?’ I was impatient as usual.
‘That’s not easy to answer, but basically it’s an activity of giving and receiving between people that results in them growing spiritually.’
‘But doesn’t it involve trading valuable soulava or necklaces in a clockwise direction around certain islands and mwali or arm shells in a counter-clockwise direction?’
‘Of course, but they’re only the outward manifestation of the activity, in fact the consummation of it. The objects accumulate power as they pass from hand to hand over time. Some might even kill you. But it’s the quality of this experience that’s important.’
I began to be drawn irresistibly into the rich mythological world of the Trobriand Islands, so unlike the sterility of my own empirical society where success seemed the sole criterion. I began to look forward to my trip with keen anticipation. A couple of lines of a poetic song concerning the kula came to mind.
Scented petals and coconut oil anoint our bodies We’re ready to sail with the south-east wind
John fell silent and took some more chilli crab. The mood had become serious yet our