Euphoria

by Lily King

‘Do you have a favorite part of all this?’ she asked. ‘All what?’ I said. ‘This work.’ Favorite part? There was little at this point that didn’t make me want to run with my stones straight back into the river. I shook my head. ‘You first.’ She looked surprised, as if she hadn’t expected the question to come back at her. She narrowed her grey eyes. ‘It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Suddenly it feels within your grasp. It’s a delusion—you’ve only been there eight weeks—and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.’ ‘Bloody hell.’ I laughed. ‘You don’t get that?’ ‘Christ, no. A good day for me is when no little boy steals my underwear, pokes it through with sticks, and brings it back stuffed with rats.’

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong. She told me I sounded as skeptical as my father. She said no one had more than one perspective, not even in his so-called hard sciences. We’re always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl. Look at Malinowski, she said. Look at Boas. They defined their cultures as they saw them, as they understood the natives’ point of view. The key is, she said, to disengage yourself from all your ideas about what is ‘natural.’ ‘Even if I manage that, the next person who comes here will tell a different story about the Kiona.’ ‘No doubt.’ ‘Then what is the point?’ I said. ‘This is no different from the laboratory. What’s the point of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.’

She asked me what the last piece of the puzzle here was, and I told her about a Kiona ceremony called Wai I’d seen only once, when I first arrived, and my nascent thoughts about the transvestitism involved. She asked if I’d ever tried my ideas out on them. I laughed. ‘“I say, Nmebito, did you know that by embracing your feminine side that night you have provided an equilibrium for this community that the overdeveloped masculine aggression of your culture often threatens?” Is that what you mean?’ ‘Maybe something more like: Do you think men becoming women and women becoming men brings joy and peace?’ ‘But they’re not reflective in that way.’ ‘Of course they are. They reflect on when they fished the day before—what it brought them, where they might choose to go the next day. They reflect on their children, their spouses, their siblings, their debts, their promises.’ ‘But I see no evidence of the Kiona analyzing their own rituals in search of meaning,’ I said. ‘I’m sure some do. It’s just that they’ve been born into a culture that makes no place for it, so the impulse weakens, like an unused muscle. You need to help them exercise it.’ ‘Is this what you do?’ ‘Not all in one day, but yes. The meaning is inside them, not inside you. You just have to pull it out.’ ‘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 i...

I have found a language teacher. Karu. He knows some pidgin from a childhood spent near the patrol station in Ambunti. Thanks to him my lexicon has over 1000 words in it now & I quiz myself morning & night though part of me wishes I could have more time without the language. There is such careful mutual observing that goes on without it. My new friend Malun took me today to a women’s house where they were weaving & repairing fishing nets and we sat with her pregnant daughter Sali & Sali’s paternal aunt & the aunt’s four grown daughters. I am learning the chopped rhythm of their talk, the sound of their laughter, the cant of their heads. 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. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

Thankfully Tam words are short—2 & 3 syllables, nothing like the 6-syll. Mumb. words—but I didn’t bank on 16 (and counting) genders. Fen writes none of it down, absorbs words like sunlight, and somehow innately understands the syntax.

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages? Why are you thinking about the common man? Bankson asked me the second night. What does he have to do with the nexus of thought & change? He turns his nose up at democracy. When I tried to explain that my grandmother was my imagined audience for Children of the KK, I think he was embarrassed for me. These conversations with B keep coming back. Perhaps because Fen doesn’t enjoy talking about work with me anymore. I feel him withholding, as if he thinks I’ll use his ideas in my next book if he says them out loud. It’s wretched now to think of our months on that ship home—the freedom of our talk, our lack of self-consciousness and restraint. It all goes back to this idea of ownership again. Once I published that book and my words became a commodity, something broke between us.

Through the leaves she could see she was right: it was a cigarette, and hunched over it was the barely discernible shape of a man. 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. The man on the rock was Xambun, not squatting the way another Tam would be, but sitting, knees drawn up slightly and his torso curled over them, eyes fixed on a point across the water. His body had grown fleshy and pear-shaped from the rice and bully beef they fed mine workers. Shoes were louder than bare feet—he would know it was her—but he did not turn. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. He was still wearing the mine’s green trousers, but no adornments, no beads or bones or shells. An informant like this in the field, a man who has been raised in the culture but removed for a time so that he is able to see his own people from a different angle with the ability to contrast their behaviors to another set of behaviors, is invaluable. And one who has been exposed to a Western culture—she couldn’t think of anyone who had ever accessed that kind of informant in as remote a place. She wanted to move toward him. She might never get this opportunity again. And yet she felt his need for this solitude. She felt s...

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

There was a pale violet light in the sky when Fen read the last pages, Helen’s final push toward the understanding that every culture has its own unique goals and orients its society in the direction of those goals. She described the whole set of human potentialities as a great arc, and each culture a selection of traits from that arc. These last pages reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other. She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was ‘a major means to the good life.’ She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.