Under the volcanoes

Old Vanuatu hands advised us that if we were thinking of going to only one of the cultural festivals held in the islands during the cruising months it should be Back to My Roots in north Ambrym..  

So from the time we left Oyster Island, we had a deadline – Rodd’s Anchorage by August 25. Nada was going the same way, and Panacea, the Swedish boat we met on Pentecost, was bound the festival too. We knew from the Namba Net (a daily radio schedule which links yachts cruising around Vanuatu) of other boats coming from the south. But no-one ever really knows how many boats will turn up to a festival. Marketing is next to non-existent in Vanuatu where most information travels by word of mouth.

About 25 yachts came for this year’s festival to anchor under the volcanoes which reflect the fiery glow of their molten insides up into the clouds above the island. There were a good number of foreign cruising yachts among those (i.e. not from Australia or NZ) -. French, American, English, Canadian, Swedish. Many of these yachties already knew each other. They’d crossed paths in Fiji, in the Cooks, or Whangarei, NZ, where lots of boats sit out the cyclone season. Didier Beachchene, on a large aluminium Ovni yacht called Sea Lance, reckons there are probably about 100 yachts cruising in the Pacific at any one time, so eventually they all run into each other somewhere. This was our third encounter with Didier and his wife, Chantal in Vanuatu. It was unforgettable.

Here he is, sticking out like the proverbial ….what? 

Yes, that’s a 60-something Frenchman, dressed in penis sheath, called a namba,  which is what men wear when they do kastom (traditional) dancing, give or take a bit of luxuriant foliage stuck into their waistband at the back, pig tusks around the neck and/or wrists and for some, face paint and feathers adornments to the hair. As he told it afterwards, his surprise appearance on the dance floor was by accident rather than design. He asked the men to show him how they got themselves up in the namba and they agreed to show him, but only if he danced with them. The honour would be theirs, they insisted. Chantal has been married to Didier for 30 something years. Her only comment was, “Didier has no fear of ridicule”. It gave him a unique perspective, I guess.  

We punters put up 7000 vatu (around $A80) for the three days, or 3000 vatu a day. That’s a lot of money in Vanuatu, but for a ticket into another world who is counting? The festival site had been beautifully prepared. No lights, no sound system, and naturally-derived props  – and the monumental presences of the tamtams, carved wooden drums made from hollowed out trunks of breadfruit trees (above).

The players in this outdoor theatre had their green room, an area of forest behind the tamtams, hidden from the spectators’ view by partitions woven from fresh palm fronds. We, the yachties plus a handful of other visitors who must have flown in from Vila, sat on wooden benches, The many local people who came to watch, especially on the third day, filled in the spaces under trees, sitting or standing.

Around the perimeter of the festival site were four or five freshly-woven stalls where women sold grapefruit, drinking coconuts, bread rolls with canned tuna or canned meat filling, laplap – which is The Vanuatu Dish, a kind of fried stodge made from manioc, with toppings sometimes – and for the quick, rice with some kind of vegetables mixed through. For the white guests, there were were special toilet facilities - some women complained of the smell, but the logs were sturdy over the pit, and all four sides were sheltered from public gaze. There was even a bowl of water outside for washing your hands. I’m not sure the water was ever changed, but it’s the only toilet I’ve used so far in a village in Vanuatu. I liked it.

A lot of what happened during those three days went over my head. Part pageantry, part carnival, part deadly serious communion with the ancestor spirits, part pounding of broad feet on dirt and warlike chanting (how would it have felt to be waiting in the pot, knowing you were dinner once the singing was over?), part a demonstration of virility, part monkey business. The men dominated the dance floor, their brute energy and vivacity of song and laughter completely overshadowing the tedious shuffle of the women dancers (sorry girls, the grass skirts are attractive, but someone’s got to get you a better choreographer). We saw magic performed (the weight of a child supported by fleshy leaves which we saw piled one on top of the other, and “glued” by a man’s spit – huh?), we watched men kneeling in the sand to create beautiful geometric designs and other men playing melodies on bamboo “flutes” with only two finger holes, we watched the sport of throwing coconuts and fruit at the “monkey man” on his jungle platform, and finally, the Rom dance.

What was it all about?  With only a brief introduction to each “item” (given in both French and English by the MC Norbert, whose picture opens this post – he’s the principal of the local Catholic mission school), I found it best to abandon understanding. If you can do that at the Adelaide Festival for a Japanese noh play or a Peter Brooks theatrical marathon, why not in the rainforest where, as my neighbour on the front bench whispered to me, “I’m having to pinch myself to remember that this isn’t National Geographic.” I gave myself over to the pounding and whirling of bodies and voices, to the building momentum of the chants, to my own body’s sweat and dirt, to the inevitability of rain and to the wonder of being in place so strange, so far from what I know. And I played the flute, and I danced. Why not?

Putting Didier aside (and frankly, I wished him aside on that second day, but the dancers themselves drew him into their midst), this was an exhibition match, put on for commercial gain as well as… all the familiar reasons for keeping culture alive. No-one was getting an anthropological treatise out of it except the earnest young Frenchman who has been living with the village for four months, and will do the same again next year. He will return to the Sorbonne with his immersion experience, and document what’s left of kastom life and be much the wiser than I am, but never the right colour to blend in with the dance either.

The French anthropologist insists, when we talk, that the spectators are an essential part of what we are experiencing here. Without us, the paying audience, there would be no reason to for the villagers to strip down to their nambas, to rehearse their dance steps. Money is an important incentive. Custom dances and rituals were an integral part of the society, but they aren’t now. The Rom dance, which was the climax of the festival, belongs to Ambrym’s tradition of sorcery and magic. The missionaries came to convert the heathen, and they succeeded. The old ways are museum pieces now. The young men participate in the Rom dance but they also take photos with their mobile phones, and they spend six months a year fruit picking in New Zealand to bring home money to raise their status by building a concrete block house. Besides, you can’t believe in sorcerers and in the Christian message, can you? That doesn’t mean that all kastom (tradition) is dead. It isn’t. Most especially, pigs are still the currency which men in Vanuatu have to spend to attain a higher rank and pig killing ceremonies are still integral to village life. The most prestigious kind of pig to kill is one with curly tusks like the one on the flag of Vanuatu and on the Tusker beer label – and around this man’s neck. Apparently they’re sold for big money – around 50,000 vatu (more than $500).

It’s more complicated than this, but basically, because pigs are expensive, the more pigs a man kills at one time, the greater the demonstration of his wealth. We were told in Loltong of a chief who had killed 100 pigs at once. It was the brother of chief Richard’s wife, a marvelous old woman who came across as more than her husband’s equal. I asked her if it was true about her brother and she snorted. Yes, but it was quite unnecessary for him to do that, she said. In other words, what a show off. She also had killed three pigs. Some women, she explained, are permitted to gain a rank.

Here’s a drawing of a pig-killing ceremony that we came across in Asanvari, on Maewo.

The Back to My Roots festival has included pig-killing every year until this one. There had been complaints from white women last year. So, in deference to the sensibilities of the white women, this year the pig was brought in (see picture below) and ceremonially poked, and then taken offstage to be slaughtered. We heard the pig’s agony, but we did not see it. There were grumblings from some male cruisers who felt they’d been short-changed.

As for the festival’s showpiece, the Rom dance, well, Alex’s pictures tell the story far better than my words can. I can’t even tell you about the origins and meaning of this dance – look it up on Google! I will when I get home. Norbert’s explanation was sketchy, and unsatisfactory. The Rom dance is secret men’s business when it’s done properly, and I don’t know if it still is. It is deeply mixed up with magic and sorcery. I guess we saw an abridged version. The cloaks are made from banana leaves, by the way, and the masks are made by the men who wear them, who pay a lot for the privilege of dancing in them.

Reality check - a dancer steps out of the Rom dance and snaps it on his mobile phone.

Reality check 2: There was no shortage of young men in the namba line-up, but only one of the women dancers had a young and luscious body, and she looked decided uncomfortable out there in her grass skirt. For three days she held her elbows close to her sides to keep a necklace of thick leaves pressed tight against her décolletage. I asked Vanessa, the bright-eyed beauty who works behind the counter at the “bank” (open Wednesday and Friday), why there weren’t more girls who wanted to dance. She looked at me as if I were stupid. No way. They’re too embarrassed. She wouldn’t be seen dead in a grass skirt.

Postscript:

Alex made a friend at the festival, Chief Justin (above). It was a friendship based on the one-way exchange of cigarettes! Justin is the tam tam player in the middle of the Rom dancers. He is a ranked man. He took us on a short cut through the forest and coconut plantations, through to the road, and while he was walking he asked Alex very discreetly if he wanted to buy his Rom mask for 8000 vatu. Now, Kukka is too small to carry a Rom mask, but that wasn’t what stopped me in my tracks. I’d been warned off touching a Rom mask at the conclusion of the second day, when they were brought out for a first viewing. “Taboo,” growled a voice from the bushes. So how could we own one? Justin also asked Alex, again very discreetly, if he wanted to buy his pig tusks, the symbols of his status as a kastom chief.

This is the conundrum of Vanuatu. Money has little intrinsic value in the kastom system. But if people want what the Western world offers in the way of goods and services – including education and communications – they must pay for them for them with money. Justin undoubtedly values his pig tusks and his Rom mask, but he has five children at school and at university. Education is shamefully expensive here, as I’ve mentioned before. Kava root and copra earn enough money for tin roofs, bags of cement, rice and sugar, tea, biscuits and tinned food, LPG, pots pans and batteries and a very basic wardrobe. But everywhere, people want money for school fees. We don’t know if Justin found a buyer for his pig tusks or his Rom mask. We hope not, for our reasons, but then again who are we to deny him a man what needs and wants for his future and his children’s future?