Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [31]
In Port Vila, I was learning, kava was something else entirely. There were hundreds of nakamals scattered throughout town. If one wanted to chat with the minister of agriculture or any other high-level government official, there was a very good likelihood of finding him at Ronnie’s nakamal, near the parliament. This was a favorite nakamal for expatriates, but as time went by, I came to prefer my local nakamal. Our neighborhood was typical in its peculiarity. On one side of a gutted dirt road, the side that offered a view, stood the lavish homes of Westerners, spacious villas that hummed with air conditioners, nestled behind high walls and electronic gates, guarded by rottweilers and German shepherds. On the other side of the road were the modest bungalows of Port Vila’s civil servants, each containing an extended family, perhaps even two extended families. Interspersed throughout the hilltop were the dwellings of land squatters, shanties built of wood and tin. Our immediate neighbors were land squatters from Tanna Island, and like so many other compounds on our road, in the evening their home became a nakamal. It was really quite extraordinary. During the day, their land was alive with women and children, friendly, energetic little people with the coolest hair ever. They were like Rasta munchkins, sprouting frizzled blond manes. I had thought that blond hair was limited to those of European stock, but it wasn’t at all unusual to see children with blond plumes in Vanuatu, though not adults. In the evening, however, they were nowhere to be seen as their home was transformed into a nakamal, one of a half dozen that appeared in our small neighborhood. Each evening toward sunset, hundreds of red lanterns were turned on in front of the nakamals throughout Port Vila, signaling that the kava had been prepared and they were open for business.
“I think I’ll go meet the neighbors,” I said to Sylvia one evening after I noticed the beckoning red light.
Sylvia looked at me dubiously. “Moderation, okay? I can’t carry you by myself.”
I had little inclination to leave the planet again—well, perhaps into a low Earth orbit—so when I appeared inside the neighbor’s shed, I asked for a sensible half-shell of kava. Stepping outside, I had a view of our house just down the hill and, beyond, the green eminences sheltering Mele Bay. I noticed that the fruit in our papaya tree was about to ripen and that it wouldn’t be long until we’d have another bushel of bananas to gorge on. A lush country, I thought. I sought my moment of poetry and downed the kava, which once again tasted dreadfully toxic.
“Me likem kava,” I said congenially to the bucket ladler as I returned my shell.
“Kava blong Tanna,” he said. And then I became lost as he spoke in Bislama at a clip far too fast for me to comprehend.
“Me no save tok-tok Bislama quicktime,” I said. “Yu tok-tok slow-time, me save.”
Well, some of it in any case. Bislama’s unique fusion of English, French, and indigenous words had a rhythm and logic that I found very appealing. The word for “pope,” for instance, was numba wan jesus man. But when spoken rapidly, and to my ears it was always spoken rapidly, Bislama was like gibberish, vaguely familiar but unintelligible.
Inside the kava shed, we spoke some more in Bislama—he spoke neither English nor French—and I was led to understand that the kava from Tanna was the strongest in Vanuatu. It may very well be. I certainly