Euphoria

by Lily King

Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict

Reals vs ideals, as Rick Beech used to say

Wai I’d seen only once, when I first arrived, and my nascent thoughts about the transvestitism

The naven

‘You’re assuming analytical abilities that I’m not sure they possess.’ ‘They are human, with fully functioning human minds. If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here.’ She had real color in her cheeks now. ‘I’m not interested in zoology.’

observing without sharing the observations creates an atmosphere of extreme artificiality.

lured away by recruiters—blackbirders, they were called then—to the mines.

I shut my eyes and remembered the ceremony as I had witnessed it. It had been during my first month and I’d been sitting with the women—I was often put with the women in large gatherings, along with the children and the mentally ill.

What was it B said? Something about how all we’re watching is natives toadying to the white man.

I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words.

Tam words are short—2 & 3 syllables, nothing like the 6-syll. Mumb. words—but I didn’t bank on 16 (and counting) genders.

?

Vailala Madness

And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn’t want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread.

The nausea had passed but I was still not quite myself. The sweat that had covered my body a few minutes ago was now ice cold.

Malaria

‘I am perfectly well,’ I said. Then, they told me later, I fell to the ground like a kapok tree.

She shows me the plants they are made from but they aren’t familiar to me. Bankson would be able to identify them.

Today Malun brought the medicine man Gunat who placed charms—little bits of leaves and twigs—in the corners of the house and sang a song through his nose. The Loud Painful Nasal Song, Fen called it. If it doesn’t kill you, nothing will.

a Kiona navigational chart in B’s boat. It is such an intriguing thing, a crisscross of thin bamboo slats with small snail shells tied on in certain places. You hold it up to the night sky and align the shells with the stars to locate your position. It is the most exquisite instrument.

Etak?

Bankson had some sort of seizure while I was out. Fen is shaken & exhausted but won’t let me relieve him, won’t leave his bedside, keeps talking and talking, a sort of reverse Scheherazade, as if his words will keep B alive.

‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest—the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation—it’s all comprehensible, nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go. Even for you Pommies, I’ll bet.’

He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.

Light in August,

Nell said she’d got so sick in the Solomons of hearing their pigman creation myths and their enormous-penis myths that she told them the whole story of Romeo and Juliet.

Bankson’s Kiona is understood by many. He is trying to adopt our ethnographic ways but they don’t come naturally to him. You get the sense he would have a hard time asking for a light in a pub. But he’s an excellent theorist.

even the bugs looked like chips of meteorites falling through the air at us.

we looked at the stars and talked about death and named all the dead people we knew and tried to make a song out of all their names.

said they never found the whole of his brother’s body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

He asked me a great number of questions and, because the Kiona elders pass down their knowledge as secret family heirlooms, he treated the information I shared with great care. When an argument broke out between his clan and another about the nature of night, he’d asked my opinion. I told him what I believed about the earth’s diurnal rotation and its orbit around the sun. Afterward he coyly referred to it as ‘that matter we both know about,’ and whenever the sun or the moon came up in conversation among others, he always shot me a special look.

On the one hand I was disgusted by Nell and Fen’s employment of the natives, the way they came in like a corporation and hired up the locals, skewing the balance of power and wealth and thus their own results. But on the other, I saw how efficient it was, how much time it freed up if you weren’t making the meals and washing up and scrubbing clothing, all of which I had been doing for myself for the past two years.

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it. Not even a possum walks alone was the Tam’s most repeated one.

Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.