Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [38]
“But…it doesn’t taste like a person. It tastes like a wafer.”
Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday. And, stretching my capacity for understanding human behavior about as far as it would go, I could see how eating the flesh of your dead family members might not be an appallingly deviant thing to do. But this was not how cannibalism was practiced in Vanuatu. Cannibalism there was more like the cannibalism practiced by Jeffrey Dahmer: very disturbing.
Until very recently, island life in Vanuatu had been characterized by a state of endless war. This is where my struggle to understand cannibalism begins, for no war seems more pointless to me than the kind traditionally waged in Vanuatu. Typically, the men of a particular village ambushed the men of another village. The goal was to capture one man, who would then be triumphantly carried back to the attackers’ village, clubbed, and chopped into pieces. Good manners dictated that an arm or a leg be sent off to a friendly village. Again here, I sputter in disbelief. Imagine receiving such a package. “Oh, look, honey. Bob and Erma over in Brooklyn have sent us a thigh. So thoughtful.” Of course, now you are obliged to reciprocate, and so you gather your friends and off you go, hunting for a man, and when you capture one, you will thoughtfully hack an arm off and send it along to Bob and Erma, together with a note—Thinking of you. Meanwhile, no village will tolerate the loss of a man or two without seeking vengeance, and so off they go, looking for you, and just as you’re taking your leisure underneath your favorite banyan tree, perhaps digesting a meal, you may find yourself surrounded by fierce-looking men wearing nothing more than leaves around their penises and carrying heavy, knotted clubs, and suddenly you know that this day is not going to end well. You will be carried, kicking and screaming, to the enemy’s village, a village that once contained men named Henry, Kenny, Luther, and Jeremiah, but they’re not there anymore, and you know why. You ate them. And now it is your turn to be devoured. If you are very lucky, a good solid blow to your head will the end the misery right there and then, sparing you the sensation of feeling your body treated like a boiled lobster as your flesh and bones are plucked and torn, carved and diced, cooked in flames, until nothing remains of you except the faint odor of a satisfied belch. But worry not. Bob will avenge you.
When Westerners began to arrive in some numbers in the nineteenth century, they too found themselves participating in Vanuatu’s exciting culinary world. John Williams, the very first missionary to arrive in Vanuatu, landed on the island of Erromango on November 18, 1839. Sponsored by the London Missionary Society, which had had considerable success in converting much of Polynesia to Christianity, Williams stepped ashore, no doubt confident that very soon he would be breaking bread with the islanders. Within minutes, he was dead, killed by a fusillade of arrows. And then he became lunch. A half-dozen other missionaries would suffer the same fate, and it wasn’t long before Erromango came to be known as the Island of Martyrs. In 1847, the British Sovereign had the great misfortune of finding itself wrecked off Efate. Twenty crew members escaped the sinking vessel on a small boat and made their way to shore, where they were happily received by the islanders. And who wouldn’t be happy to see such a feast? In the end, only two of the unfortunate sailors managed to elude the dismal fate of their companions, who could last be heard asking their hosts, “You’re having what for dinner?