Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [66]
“Welcome,” said the chief of Yaohnanen when we arrived the following day, muddy and steaming with sweat from the climb up to the village. We had gone as far as we could in the back of a pickup truck until the wheels spun out in the mud. From there, it was another mile of trekking, and we joined hundreds of Ni-Vanuatu marching up the hillside like pilgrims, listening to the songs, the energy emanating from somewhere deeper in the forest. As we neared the village clearing we passed hundreds of snorting and braying pigs enclosed in bamboo pens. These hirsute, tusked swine were soon to be clubbed to death.
“It is still safe,” the chief assured us on our arrival. This, of course, suggested that at some point it would also become unsafe. We made a mental note to inquire about this. The chief assigned us a guide, a teenage boy named Kelso. His duty was less to answer our questions than to ensure that we stayed out of the way. As we soon saw, there were more than a thousand people in the tiny village. In the center of the clearing nearly a hundred women, painted and layered with ornaments, swirled in their grass skirts, performing a dance created solely for this Nekowiar.
“This is the napen-napen,” Kelso informed us. “Today the women dance, tomorrow the men dance the toka, and then with first light there will be the nao.”
We weren’t entirely sure what he was talking about, but we paid it no mind and simply watched, fascinated. On the periphery, men taunted the women, who continued to move with a rapturous intensity, ignoring their tormentors. It was fabulous. All my earlier impressions of Ni-Vanuatu dancing were shattered. The women danced with grace and athleticism, perfectly in sync with one another. They also sang in unison.
“The napen-napen,” said Kelso, “is about the life of women.”
Some of them, we knew, would have their marital fates settled over the coming days. In the past, an alliance between two villages could be forged by exchanging captured men. Of course, the men were meant to be eaten. Now, to deepen the bonds between villages, they agree to share their women. The Nekowiar, however, is also a challenge. Each village is expected to attend the ceremony with a suitably impressive number of pigs. This is a complicated business in Vanuatu, since pigs are what allow men to advance through the grades and hierarchies that color traditional life. No man can possibly have enough pigs to match his obligations, and so he borrows the pigs of others. How well each man manages the debts and obligations involving his need for pigs goes a long way to ensuring whether or not he dies a happy chief. No pigs, no chiefdom. To be invited to participate in the Nekowiar is a huge obligation for villages, because it inevitably divests them of their entire stock of pigs, and it will take them years to recover.
The host village, in order to save face, has to match the number of pigs brought by the village with which they are seeking an alliance. In essence, then, both villages are committing themselves to poverty by agreeing to have a Nekowiar. Then why, one may ask, would two communities agree to do this? It’s just a dance, isn’t it? Well, it isn’t quite just a dance. These are dances infused with magic.
“What kind of magic?” we asked Kelso.
“Beauty magic,” he said.
The women had spent months preparing magic lotions and oils. Their faces were painted blood red and crisscrossed with black stripes. The men, Kelso explained, would also be painted for the toka, a celebrated dance for which the men had spent months preparing.
The women before us were still dancing. Indeed, they would dance without pause throughout the night, never flagging.
“How can they keep dancing?” Sylvia asked, raising her voice above the rapturous singing.
“Magic,” Kelso explained. “You see, they will not stop until the sun rises tomorrow.” Dawn was still a good twelve hours off.