Lily King: Euphoria

I feared I’d asked this very question in my last two letters, but plugged on.

By the time you receive this, winter will be a distant memory at any rate, and we will scheme about how to keep the aphids off the Felicia roses and the Russian vine from climbing too far up the south side of the house. Summer problems.

As I’ve mentioned, my focus these past weeks has been on Kiona death rituals. Yesterday I went to a mortuary ceremony in which the skull of a long-dead man was dug up then covered with clay and refashioned back into a fleshy face with nose and mouth and chin. The poor artist was heckled terribly about his rendition of these features, but finally a portrait was agreed upon and the mintshanggu was performed. The head was set on a stage and the men crawled beneath the platform and played their flutes for the women, who listened stoically, almost trancelike. And then the women rose and hung up food for his ghost and sung the name songs of the man’s maternal clan. When I asked how long he had been dead no one could tell me. There was crying, not the loud theatrical sobbing of the men at funerals but a more natural weeping. Natural. I find I use this word indiscriminately. What is natural to an Englishman might not be at all natural to, say,

I paused here. I was like a schoolboy in my need to just type the word.

an American, let alone a tribe in New Guinea.

Her antennae would twitch. She would detect something.

I find I am more and more interested in this question of subjectivity, of the limited lens of the anthropologist, than I am in the traditions and habits of the Kiona. Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.

Why not just mention them?

I have had some visitors, fellow anthropologists who have been, unbeknownst to me, in the region for nearly as long as I have, a married couple. He’s from Queensland, a broad strapping fellow I met in Sydney that time, and she’s American, quite well known but a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin.

There. That couldn’t put her in much of a state, could it? Yes, it would. It absolutely would. I clutched the top of the page and pulled hard, ripping it in two. Blast her. I dragged out the other portion then wadded them together and tossed the ball out to the boys who, when they saw it, sent up another cheer. Direct violation of objectives #2 and #4. After a certain number of sentences, my letters to my mother now became letters to Nell. My mind was stuck in conversation with her and the feeling of talking to her rang through me, disturbed me, woke me up as one wakes from sudden illness in the middle of the night.

Before I left them, I’d slipped a copy of her book in my bag. I read it as soon as I got back, without stopping. And then again the next day. It was the least academic enthnography I’d ever read, long on description and sweeping conclusions, short on methodical analysis. Haddon, in a recent letter, had mocked the success of The Children of Kirakira in America, and joked that we should all bring a lady novelist along on our field trips. And yet she wrote with an urgency most of us felt but did not have the courage to reveal, because we were too beholden to the traditions of the old sciences. For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.

Several times I’d set out toward Lake Tam but turned back within an hour, having convinced myself it was too soon, they wouldn’t be expecting me, they couldn’t afford the disruption of a visitor yet. I would be a lurking nuisance lumbering along after them as they tried to do the work of twelve months in seven. If they were closer, I could stop by, have a pretext. Fen had spoken of wanting me to go on a hunting expedition with him within a fortnight, but he would have sent word already if he’d been serious about it.

I suspected Fen didn’t have Nell’s discipline, but he had a sharp mind, a gift for languages, and a curious, almost artistic way of seeing things. On the beach he’d noticed the way the Kiona turned their canoes sideways, with the fishing gear together in front. They look like pews before an altar in a country church, he’d said, and now I could not see the arrangement any other way.

I felt I loved them, loved them both, in the manner of a child. I yearned for them, far more than they could ever yearn for me. They had each other. They could not know what twenty-five months alone in this hut was like. Nell had been in the Solomons for a year and a half, but she’d lived with the governor and his wife, and had all their friends and visitors for company. Fen had been alone with the Dobu, but hadn’t he mentioned going to Cairns for his brother’s wedding in the middle of it? Home for him had been within a thousand-mile reach.

Outside the boys had switched to bows and arrows, practicing their shooting on a fast-rolling paw paw. One of the boys’ strings snapped and he ran into the bush, pulled up a bamboo stem, and, using only his hands and teeth, stripped out a thin fibre, tied it to his bow, and ran back to the game.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

1/20 Watching the women out fishing, barely any light in the sky yet. Their boats gliding on the flat black water, silver blue columns of smoke from fires in pots at the stern rise thick and taper to nothing. Some of the women are still wading around up to their chests in the cool water, checking their traps. Others are back in their canoes warming themselves at their small fires.

We got our slit gong beats yesterday. They surprised us with a little ceremony. Fen’s is 3 long wallops followed by 2 quick ones. Mine is 6 beats very fast like footsteps, they said, imitating my swift walk. Men from Malun & Sali’s clan performed the dances, an old woman beside me complaining that the younger generation hadn’t learned the steps properly.

1/24 Our house isn’t done yet but the children come to me now in the morning, along with anyone else who wants to draw or roll marbles while suffering my halting interrogations. They laugh at me and imitate me but they do answer my questions. 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. He is making himself perfectly well understood and people are much less apt to laugh at him as he is a man and taller than all of them and the dispenser of most of the salt & matches & cigarettes.

1/30 Our stores have arrived from Port Moresby as well as our mail. One solitary letter from Helen. She probably had 30 from me in the same amount of time. Two pages. Barely worth the postage. Mostly about her book, which is nearly done. At the end she slips in: ‘I have been spending time with a girl named Karen, in case Louise has already told you.’ Which of course Louise had. A very cool letter. And mine to her still so full of apology & regret & confusion. Sometimes I wake up in the night with the thought: She’s left Stanley for me. My heart starts racing — and then I remember that it has all already played out and I see her standing at the quai in Marseille in her blue hat and I see me coming off the ship with Fen. That night at Gertie’s when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn’t say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn’t know the difference then.