Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

When we reached the shore, we went out for a walk without our guides, and along the beach we offered candy to children, who ran away as soon as we talked to them. “Hi!” we kept saying as we distributed the sweets, only to discover later that hi means “copulate” in the local language (in which the word for “father” is mama). Then we had another brief comedy: in this tropical land, no one thinks of sunbathing, and when one of our party lay down on the beach, villagers assumed he must be fighting the chills of malaria and came to provide remedies.

Following our sojourn on Makira, we chartered the Solomons’ only real yacht, the thirty-five-foot catamaran Lalae, to take us island-hopping. After a week of jungle climbing and mud and sleeping with chickens, the immaculate white of the boat, the homemade chocolate cake, the attentive service, and the always-full basket of fresh fruit were a revelation. The boat is built for fishing, and I caught a large barracuda the one time I threw a line overboard. Our dashing captain, Steve Goodhew, a veteran of the Australian Royal Navy, caught an eight-foot marlin and a host of smaller fish.

Our first port of call was a swimming-with-dolphins resort being built on Gavutu Island under the auspices of a rather tough Canadian animal behaviorist. We were greeted with the resort’s custom dancing. The male performers wore loincloths—the local word is kabilato—and the women, grass skirts and tops made of seashells, and all had armbands with long grasses stuck in them (John called them the Scallion Dancers). Here I ran up against the constant problem of the would-be adventurer: by and large what you discover has been discovered before, and even people doing the same thing they did a thousand years ago are not really doing the same thing if a veneer of self-consciousness has been added to the enterprise. These performers were proud of their performance and it was all correct to their tradition, but after that spontaneous night in the mountains, we were spoiled, and this practiced exhibition tilted too much toward the Hawaiian nightclub show. In the capital, we had gone to the Miss Solomon Islands beauty pageant, which featured gyrating women wearing grass skirts made of shredded pink plastic bags and bikini tops of coconuts and string—which was comical and rather endearing because it had an absurdist element, but it was also a little sad. This felt sad, too: an enactment of tradition rather than tradition itself.

So we were all the more delighted when we got to Loisolin, on Pavuvu, where Steve had made arrangements the month before on our behalf. The islanders had been excited by the prospect of greeting us; though they were known locally for their dancing and, living on the coast, had met some foreigners, no tourist had ever come to their village before with the express objective of seeing them. When we arrived, the entire population was waiting onshore. A few launched canoes and circled our boat; then the spear warriors rushed out into the surf and yelled madly and made the usual friendly, threatening gestures. When we came ashore, little girls out of Gauguin put garlands of frangipani around our necks, and we were welcomed by the chief, who wore a remarkable headband of densely packed possum teeth. A bamboo band played harmonies more sophisticated than those we’d heard in the jungle. Then each of us got a coconut from which to drink, and a leaf basket with a whole lobster, a slice of taro, coconut pudding, cassava pudding, fresh fish, two further kinds of taro with slippery cabbage (a slimy, local green), and hard-boiled megapode eggs. As we ate, a few young women fanned us and our food with large leaves to make sure that no flies came our way.

Meanwhile, some forty villagers, many covered in body paint, performed a sequence of complex dances that ranged from the mesmeric to the passionate, the humorous to the mournful. It was as if the George Balanchine of the South Pacific had been working on Pavuvu. The women, in grasses and shells, did a poetic welcome dance in which they imitated the motion of the waves; the men leaped about like young rams. The rhythms were multilayered, almost syncopated, and then lyrical and sweet. At the end, they asked us to show them something from our culture, and when Jessica and I did our swing-dancing number, they cheered and cheered and wouldn’t let us stop until we were completely exhausted.