The Island of the Colorblind

The drizzling rain in which we had started had steadily mounted in intensity, and our path was rapidly becoming a stream of mud, so, reluctantly, we had to return. Bill commented on the many streams which traced down through the forest to the gully. ‘They used to be absolutely clear and transparent,’ he said. ‘Now look at them – turbid and brown.’ This was due, he said, to people clearing forest on the steep hills – illicitly, as this is a state preserve – to grow their own sakau. Once the trees and vines are cleared, the soil on the hills begins to crumble, and washes down into the streams. ‘I am all for sakau,’ said Bill. ‘I revere it…you could call it one of the moral vines which hold us together – but it is madness to uproot the forest to grow it.’

There is no sakau in Pingelap; like alcohol, it is forbidden by the Congregationalist Church. But in Pohnpei, the drinking of sakau, once reserved only for those of royal blood, has now become virtually universal (indeed I wondered whether it was partly responsible for the lethargic pace of life here); the Catholic Church, more accommodating than the Congregationalist, accepts it as a legitimate form of sacrament.[41] We had seen sakau bars in town and thatched, open-air bars all over the countryside – circular, or semicircular, with a great metate, or grinding stone (which the Pohnpeians call a peitehl) in the center, and we remained eager to try some ourselves.

We had been invited by a local physician and colleague of Greg’s, May Okahiro, to experience a traditional sakau ceremony that evening. It was a cloudless evening, and we got to her house at sunset, and settled into chairs on her deck, overlooking the Pacific. Three Pohnpeian men, wiry and muscular, arrived, carrying pepper roots and a sheaf of slimy inner bark from a hibiscus plant – a large peitehl awaited them in the courtyard. They chopped the roots into little pieces, and then started pounding those with heavy stones, in an intricate, syncopated rhythm like the one we heard across the water on our return from Nan Madol, a sound at once attention holding and hypnotic, because, like a river, it was both monotonous and ever changing. Then one man got up, went to get fresh water, and poured this in, a little at a time, to wet the pulpy mass in the metate, while his companions continued their complex, iridescent rhythm.

The roots were all macerated now, their lactones emulsified; the pulp was placed on the sinewy, glistening hibiscus bark, which was twisted around it to form a long, closely wound roll. The roll was wrung tighter and tighter, and the sakau exuded, viscous, reluctant, at its margins. This liquid was collected carefully in a coconut shell, and I was offered the first cup. Its appearance was nauseating – grey, slimy, turbid – but thinking of its spiritual effects, I emptied the cup. It went down easily, like an oyster, numbing my lips slightly as it did so.

More sakau was squeezed out of the hibiscus sheath, and a second cup of fluid obtained – it was offered to Knut, who took it in the proper way, hands crossed, palms up, and then quaffed it down. The cup, emptied and refilled half a dozen times, went to each person, according to a strict order of precedence. By the time it came back to me, the sakau was thinner. I was not wholly sorry, for a sense of such ease, such relaxation, had come on me that I felt I could not stand, I had to sink into a chair. Similar symptoms seemed to have seized my companions – but such effects were expected, and there were chairs for us all.

The evening star was high above the horizon, brilliant against the near-violet backdrop of the night. Knut, next to me, was looking upward as well, and pointed out the polestar, Vega, Arc-turus, overhead. ‘These are the stars the Polynesians used,’ said Bob, ‘when they sailed in their proas across the firmament of space.’ A sense of their voyages, five thousand years of voyaging, rose up like a vision as he talked. I felt a sense of their history, all history, converging on us now, as we sat facing the ocean under the night sky. Pohnpei itself felt like a ship – May’s house looked like a giant lantern, and the rocky prominence we were on like the prow of the ship. ‘What good chaps they are!’ I thought, eyeing the others. ‘God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world!’

Startled at this unctuous, mellifluous flow of thought – so far from my usual anxious, querulous frame of mind – I realized my face was set in a mild, vapid smile; and looking at my companions, I could see the same smile had them too. Only then did I realize that we were all stoned; but sweetly, mildly, so that one felt, so to speak, more nearly oneself.