The Sex Lives of Cannibals...

[fajrdrako]

I give The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost the award for having one of the best titles ever. I kept wanting to quote or read bits of it to people. This is my chance: the LJ captive audience.

The books is about the two years Maarten Troost and his girlfriend spent on the island of Tarawa, in the Kirabati Islands. I am pleased to see that the Kiribati National Tourism Office now has a web page, offering "a relaxing simple life". I like their list of activities: Camping & Fishing – bring your own camping and fishing gear - yes, because there is none on the island, even though everyone fishes.

It's non-fiction, and a bit of a hybrid: part memoir, part humour, part environmental editorial, part travel book. Troost, a former journalist in Washington D.C., tells how his career was stagnating in clerical temp jobs, he was bored, and his girlfriend was working in international development.

Suffice it to say that the Washington end of such work can be a mite dispiriting and Sylvia soon began to yearn for the field, which is international development-speak for Third World hellhole. And so we both began applying for jobs in the most miserable places on earth.

So they went to the Republic of Kiribati, pronounced "kir-ee-bas" because, according to Troost, the English missionary who created their alphabet skimped on letters out of spite.

Kiribati is in the equatorial Pacific. The nation covers roughly the area of the continental United States, but is made up of twenty-one inhabited atolls, a land mass about the size of metropolitan Baltimore, says Troost, "though I believe it halves at high tide". It has a population of about 80,000 and is the most densely populated area anywhere. It has no arable land. It has no military, though there is an 'easygoing' police force. There is one school. There is no television, one government-sponsored radio station, and one semi-monthly government sponsored newspaper. There is no coffee. There is almost no industry - tuna fishing was a going concern, but the large fishing boats from Korea and Japan have overfished the waters so there are no tuna left. There is not much running water - not much water of any kind, at least in Tarawa, the island where Troost was living. There is a state of chronic drought. There are no sanitary facilities. There is no clean water. There is one fire truck, which doesn't work, and which is not supplied with water. There is one hospital, which has no equipment and no medicine. There is leprosy and cholera and chronic diarrhea. Inhabitants supplement their diet of fish with cans of foodstuff from China (the bits of chickens the Chinese won't eat) and beer. Lots and lots of beer, which is nutritious and parasite-free. One of the funnier chapters is about what happened when a planeload of beer went to another island and there was no beer in Tarawa for six weeks.

It is, says Troost, an incredibly beautiful island completely surrounded by shit. "To readers," he says, on an unusual note of apology, "I wish to apologize for the frequent references to all things scatological, but such is life on Tarawa." Their only piece of advice from Sylvia predecessor on the island: "Don't take anything you value. Everything rots." The temperature is unvaryingly high. So is the humidity.

And it it five thousand miles from anywhere else.

The Tarawa airport doubles as a soccer field for kids. There are two planes on the island:

...The Air Kiribati fleet. One looked like a sickly dragonfly with a thin fuselage - was that tin? - and spindly wings. Each passenger had their own door. The windows were made of plastic sheeting with snap-on buttons. It was less an airplane and more a treacherous carnival ride.... I could think of only one circumstance that would compel me to fly Air Kiribati. I wondered if there was any crack on the island.

And from another chapter, when, even without crack, Maarten and Sylvia take a trip by air:

...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 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. ...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 of Te Iitibwerere [the theatre troupe accompanying Maarten and Sylvia] 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-Kirabati would remain forever unfathomable to me.

Each chapter covers a different topic, in roughly chronolgical order, as Maarten and Sylvia get used to life in Tarawa. There is a chapter about the history of the islands, both mythological and factual. The islanders are of mixed race, because millennia past, boats of warrior cannibals came to the island, slaughtered all the men, settled down with the women, and became just like the former inhabitants. Then it happened again. And probably again. And eventually, the Europeans came and, while the phosphate export industry lasted, the islands were ruled by the British. One of the nastier battles of World War II was fought there, still commemorated by the Japanese.

There is a chapter about the annual dance competition, one about a trip, by boat, in a storm, to another island; a chapter about the Chinese embassy; a chapter about pets; a chapter about the Foreign Aid Industry - of which, put briefly, the author does not have a high opinion. A chapter about the author's attempts to use his time on Tarawa to write a novel. A chapter, at the end, about the cultural shock of return to Washington D.C. after two years of getting used to Kiribati. My favourite chapter is the one about their trip to the island of 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 langorous and easy-going. 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.

The funniest part was when the meerymakers of Butaritari persuade Maarten and Sylvia to sing with them. Everyone in Tiribati sings beautifully.

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 explained this to Tawita, but she was having none of it. "You must sing. Do not be shy."

So we did. We sang Bob Dylan's Tambourine Man. We sang it just like Bob....

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 lead to guffaws and soon the group was convulsing in hysterical laugher.

"Stop!" Tawita cried. "That was very bad."

And then there is the dancing:

It is the pinnacle of bad form to refuse an offer to dance te twist, and as the most exotic guests, were 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. ...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 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."

And there is a chapter about Maarten's fruitless attempts to get a subscription to the New Yorker while in Tarawa, in his frustrated desire to learn more about the Clinton sex scandal.

Most of the inhabitants of Kiribati are Christians, with a fair number of Mormons - the religion appealed to them because it allowed polygamy. There is one Muslim missionary, who married a local girl, and is quite popular and respected on the island - but he has never made a convert, not even his wife.

From this book I learned the phrase "subsistence affluence", a phrase that has not yet made it to Wikipedia. A search online for this phrase was interesting; it seems to have been coined by Harry Shue in the 1990s for Pacific Island cultures "where poverty is due to lack of health and education services, rather than to hunger". Many sites refer to this as 'a myth', though Troost says he saw it in action on one of the islands which gets more rainfall than the others, and fruit can be grown; islanders are no wealthier than in the rest of the country, but they have more variety of food, and even an excess.


As I'm sure you can tell, I enjoyed this book - which, delightful comedy thought it is, is (like all the best comedy) heartbreaking. I couldn't help seeing Tarawa as the world in miniature: a nation of people struggling with overpopulation and illness and pollution and conflict, but making the best of things from one day to the next.