Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [46]
THE FOLLOWING MORNING George led me up a bush trail to a dusty kastom village in the hills above Wala Bay.
“Here you will see the kastom dancing,” he said as I settled on a bench. “The men will wear their nambas.”
In his ship’s journal, Captain Cook described the nambas worn on Malekula:
The Men go naked, it can hardly be said they cover their Natural parts, the Testicles are quite exposed, but they wrap a piece of cloth or leafe round the yard which they tye up to the belly to a cord or bandage which they wear round the waist just under the Short Ribs and over the belly and so tight that it was a wonder to us how they could endure it.
This was my thinking exactly. How did they endure it? Just watching them dance made me wince. The dance seemed to involve much stomping and jogging. The chief, a slender man with a gray beard, provided percussion by pounding a tam-tam, or slit drum. The dance leader had a crown of bird feathers on his head, and periodically he led the others in a sort of swooning dive. It was meant to evoke the flight of an eagle, but frankly, the naked buttocks and bouncing testicles had a way of interrupting the image. It was remarkably different from the dancing I had known in Kiribati, a Micronesian country. As in Polynesia, the dancing there is very formal, highly choreographed, and often subtle. The dancing I was witnessing here seemed more of the make-it-up-as-I-go-along school. The next dance, however, I recognized immediately. It was the hokeypokey. Put your left foot in, put your right foot out, now take it all out and shake it all about. I couldn’t stop wincing. I made a mental note to send a carton of boxer shorts to the village as a humanitarian gesture.
The women then did a sitting dance that celebrated the yam harvest. The older women wore a thatch skirt and nothing else. The younger women—and I don’t want to suggest for a minute that I had been looking forward to seeing their breasts—wrapped their breasts in cloth, a circumstance I attributed to the insidious influence of missionaries on the young. Afterward, the dancers stood in a line. I shook their hands one by one, feeling very much like the queen of England visiting her far-flung subjects.
“The men,” George told me, “live on this side of the village.” He gestured toward several longhouses. “And the women live on the other side,” he said, pointing to the huts opposite the village clearing.
“What about the married couples?” I asked.
“It is the same. The men stay on this side, and the women on the other.”
“But what if they want to…you know…um, make babies?”
“When the man want to sleep with the woman,” George said, “they go into the bush.”
I tried imagining the arrangement. “Hey, honey. How about midnight under the banyan tree? What do you say? A little rumble in the jungle?”
“What about the children?” I asked. “Where do they live?”
“The children live with the women. But after the boys are circumcised, they live with the men.”
“And when are boys circumcised?”
“Sometime between the ages of nine and twelve,” he said. “It is a very important ceremony. Many pigs are killed.”
George showed me the longhouse where boys were brought after they were circumcised. It was adorned with masks and fern sculptures. It had a dirt floor and a thatch ceiling. “The boys are circumcised as a group, and after they are circumcised, they stay here for ten days. It is very difficult.