Simbo, Solomon islands.
November 2002
Our meeting on arrival in Simbo
ex premier of the western province has called a meeting, he tells me I do not approve of what you are doing here. There is some talk that one man has taught you the Ey Omba dance and that belongs to the people. Silence in the room. So I start to go on a big speech for 15 minutes straight I give all the argument possible that I can think of to try to convince them that what we are doing will be beneficial for the island. Being Melanesian, I look at Eddie and in Eddie's eyes I see anger. Like in all Melanesian meetings, it always comes down to money. So after we settled the fee for the laand owner rights and anchorage fees, there are now more bullets in our pistol to shoot for our target. And our target is to create a cultural revival on the island of Nusa Simbo. There was a lot of concern about our mentioning filming and we learnt that from past experiences, a man that we know very well Billy Barber, that thankfully enough brought us Eddie on board, spoiled the trust that people have in media. Deep down inside, the filming will only be a medium and a task to give a direction to the ship. The importance is the expedition to experience whatever is left of a very ancient and powerful stone age culture. Experience is the key word, not just passive spectator but active actors in its highest form to get transmission through gestures, sounds, songs, words, energies of the ancestors of the island of Simbo. Eventually we reach an agreement to carry out our mission. With Eddie we run through the island to get to Nusa Simbo to talk to the chief to decide for a general meeting with the whole community. One of the men in the meeting with the premier has claimed more than two thirds of the land of Simbo. Coming back to Gizo with xxxxx that works for a Malaysian logging company in the Marovo lagoon, that was also there during a meeting about the centenary that will happen in Simbo in Sep 2003, it was clear to me that the whole land dispute is about wood. That man told me that he will be the successor of that land. So they have a partnership and their partnership is into the wood resources. His guilty conscience was ringing out from him as he took passage on the Heraclitus from Simbo to Gizo. His eyes did not meet the eyes of the crew. So when I thought that everything was already sorted, the ship had arrived etc etc, to realise that there was so much opposition at work, it was crucial to meet with all the people that would be involved in that cultural celebration. The chief of Nusa Simbo was very receptive and deep down realised that it would be a great opportunity for him to put out a feast to gather his strength and show some power which he truly doesn't have. The village of Nusa Simbo is split between different clans and the chief is unable to reconcile them. Throughout the ten days we spent in Simbo, I have been called privately by every single clan leader in intimate conversation and every one of them was working out to give their side of the story, especially what they owned and what they had the right to and what was their heritage.
A morning scene in Nusa Simbo
Arriving in Nusa Simbo on the morning of the feast to find Ovaline, Cathy, Susie and friends gathered on the table under the tree, surrounded by buckets of cold water containing blossoms freshly plucked from the frangipane trees. White, pink and crimson red - a colour of frangipane I have never seen before. They pass the needle through the stem of the flower and a head garland slowly takes shape in their hands. Ovaline's face is very intent. There is total concentration on making the biggest and bushiest garland for her head to frame her beautiful face. The girls work on the garlands for three hours, non stop and finally we all have head dresses and neck garlands which smell almost more spectacular than they look.
Batu Simbo, Taboo site
With John Tione, Mason pronounce Maysooo by all the villagers and John Tione's son, we walk through the bush. We stop at a stone, a beautitful stone with an air plant, a lush green air plant. And John starts to talk to me about the Ey Omba. The place where we are sitting quietly, peacefully is the melody stone, the harmony stone, where the songs were composed and transmitted. The songs came from the ancestors through the stone. The ey Omba dance is 'owned' by John from his tribe –Patutai- so instead of going into too much detail, I'm asking him to sing the song on the stone. He starts with a soft voice to get the right tone and suddenly John and his son and Maso start to sing the ey Omba in its original birthplace. It is at that moment that I ask John to teach us and allow him to perform with us the Ey Omba dance. We talk about the ancestors, about the spirit and the importance of the transmission through gestures, songs, tones, instead of just talk talk. We are moving on, after the OK, through the bush to climb Batu Simbo. The name Batu Simbo means the head of Simbo. It was originally the first place that my gut feeling told me to visit, thanks to Lonely Planet. Batu Simbo is like a natural magic fortress of a huge stone in the jungle rising all the way up to the sky, grown by fig trees growing up from their root, almost coocconing the whole rock. There is only one entrance to Batu Simbo, going as a small trail in a spiral to reach the top. On the way, John is cutting leaves from a tree. And he holds that leaf up to me to smell it. There is a strong smell, musky smell, a smell that has power. It is that smell, worn on the body that gives strength to the warriors. I ask them if they eat it and he's joking, no way, it's the smell that's important. We will wear this leaf on the day of the feast during our dance. I keep a bunch of leaves in my pocket while starting to climb the fortress of Batu Simbo. Most of the shell money and ornaments, etc. has been vandalised by kids or whoever. But the spirit of the place is still there. As we climb half way up the rock, there is a huge flat stone where the chief used to sit to talk with all the members of the tribe around him listening. I could see the chief standing there, strong imposing himself on that beautiful stone. It was the perfect place to hold a speech. We keep climbing up. It is a steep climb and we reach another place with stones erected like penises with on top of it a ring of shell money as an altar with some remains of skulls and bones. At the base of this altar is a fig tree and Maso cuts a piece of the tree that later on will become a custom cloth worn by one of the dancers. We keep on climbing up Batu Simbo. As we reach near to the top with a view of the lagoon and its reef and the mountain on the other side, like one small window, there is a cave that the spies will hide in as a guard watching for intruders. Then we sit down and John tells us an old story, before the traders. When the men of Simbo were out on one of their head hunting raids, leaving all the women and kids alone on the island, there was different sounds of different conch shells that would be blown for different warnings. And there were people from choiseul, a hunting raid, that approached. The conch was blown and everybody knew they had to reach Batu Simbo to seek shelter from the attack. At that time, Batu Simbo was guarded too by walls of coral stones. All the kids and women were taking refuge while the attackers were coming to get them. One woman stood close to the entrance of the rock with one takiru, a tool usede to make paddle. All the axes were out on the hunting raid. The men used to wear the axe on their right hand and the shield on their left hand but the entrance of Batu Simbo was designed that you had to pull yourself up with your right hand so you had to put the axe in the left hand. Now the women that were guarding put face paint on and started to hit the guys with the paddle, with huge screams. At the same time, the other women started to throw the stones from the wall down from the fortress, killing some of the warriors. Scared, because they thought that dangerous and fierce warriors were already there, they left leaving all the women and children unharmed and safe.
On top of the volcano
Standing on the top of Ove, the sulphurous rocks of the volcanic crater crumbling beneath my feet, shyly pointing the camera in the direction of Michel who is being made up by Maso for the Ey Omba. Four black bodies have just removed their shorts and t shirts and adorned the bark cloth strips around their manhoods. Their fingers are smeared with the chalky white wet powder of the volcanic clay. They are drawing circles around their legs, their arms. Keana paints Eddie's back and face. It almost feels like I am watching two young brothers preparing themselves for a theatre performance, and this is theatre, but there is so much meaning behind what I am watching. Michel's spotty bottom makes its appearance, Ferdi too is down to the bark cloth. The white paint barely shows on their pale skins, whereas on the black skin it looks like swathes of cream. The paint dries and intensifies. They place leaves in their cloths and in their armbands. I feel like I should not be watching. I feel like I should not be at the top of this hill, that I should be down below, perhaps tending to the coconut crabs and sweet potatoes that are steaming in the hot vent below on the beach. Somo catches my eye as I press record on the camera. I look away. I think he was telling me it was kind of OK for me to be here, but at the same time, it was kind of not. Somo doesn't talk to me with words, he looks at me and with an upwards flick of his head, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a straight face but always with a dance in his eyes, he communicates. His left leg is completely withered. He looks like he had polio but in fact he once had a severe boil on his foot which prevented him from walking on it for so long that his muscles atrophied, and never recovered. He walks on the ball of his foot, this leg is now shorter than the other. But somehow when I first met him, I didn't even notice there was anything different about him, perhaps merely hypnotised by his eyes and his mouth. He smokes as much as he can. He sells us megapode eggs as often as he can, so he has money to buy tobacco. He becomes a part of the ship from almost the instant we anchor in Simbo. When I ask Stanley where he lives, if he lives in Nusa Simbo, Stanley just waves his head around and says he lives here, he lives in Lengana, he lives everywhere. The man has a spirit of freedom about him, he is untethered by geography, by his leg, by the ways of everyone else on the island. He is an independent entity. He is Somo.
I watch as Eddie begins to paint Michel. In this moment of physical contact between these two men, there is an affirmation of a relationship that I have watched grow and grow on the ship. Eddie is proud of Michel wanting so much to dance the Ey Omba. Eddie is proud to put the paint on Michel as the sun begins to wane, and the light is almost beginning to fade. There is strength and beauty at the same time in this one moment. Eddie is not an emotional man, on the outer. But sometimes his guard fails him and what is on the inner is revealed. And then the men are ready to dance.
The Eomba dance
The crowd is waiting. The men finished their performance. the originl members of the Ey Omba group have finished their dance. The sun is blazing hot making it almost unbearable. Alot of these men are not young men. More than two thirds of the group are elders, past their fifties. But we disappear in a place where nobody can see us in the unfinished house of John's son. Previously we had drunk green coconut and eaten fresh watermelon from Johns garden with seeds still covering the untied planks. Now Ferdi and myself are being prepared. Somebody is tying the custom cloth around my butt, carefully covering my man's parts. It takes them over three minutes to cover it properly, the bark cloth not being wide enough. There is no sense of shame or uneasiness in the fingers being so close to my penis. And they tell me 'you never show your private parts. they are yours'. In the meantime another man is tying strings around my biceps, putting the fragrant leaves. Somebody else is tying the two custom money around my head. They are Maso's. They are one ring made outof clam shell and another which is like a serrated round tooth and they represent teeth. Now Eddie, John's son and somebody else are all putting the colourful ground from the top of the mountain on my face, my legs, my back. I personally smear loads of it on my white butt to try to cover it. The rattles that has once already been used in the Sepik River with Tambuans and in a performance in Bali, are now on my leg. Big bushy rattles. I try them and the sound is impressive. It will the the leg that I will stomp three times after each conculsion of the Ey Omba refrain. In a quick dash, we get shown the different moves. I had no clue that we will also sing Kooey, Kooey. Now the crowd is waiting so we are stepping down. Keana is my partner. I always wanted him as a partner because he is a good dancer and he is going for it. The canoe of Stanley is called Egotu and Egotu means go for it which I picked up for a toast for Sunday night speeches. Now we are ready to go for it. There is no sign of uneasiness in my whole being. Everything flahshes through my head, all the custom sites, the skulls, Batu Simbo. The moves in Synaestesia that Maso taught us. During hte last two weeks I had the words of the Ey Omba in my head. Sometimes laying down in Nemos quietly just rehearsing the words in my head, waiting for the moment when I will incarnate the warrior spirit of the ancestors of Simbo. And we start to sing - Kooe Kooe Kooe Kooe. John's son looks at me and our eyes lock and he says go for it. Look mean. And our feet are stompign teh ground, slowly marching towards the centre of the village. As we arrive, we could hear the kids laughing but somehow it was only background. Totally concentrated. And we started to walk and stomp our feet and sing the Ey Omba. I knew I messed up some of the choreographed movements of the feet but it didn't matter. My whole being was into it. There was a cue - that would be said by John. I will start to fight with Keana. And the word was Tue and we start. And there is nothing else that exists, there is no crowd, but just fighting and we fight and we fight. It looks like it lasts forever. In retrospect when I watched the video I was so surprised to see that it lasted just a few moments. Almost out of breath, I join the line of the dancers. Suddenly me feet are moving just by themselves, keeping the Eye Omba rhythm. The voice is singing, just trying to catch the breath. I'm learning what it means to always keep a reserve. Always keep a reserve. Then Ferdi and John's son are fighting. My head wants to turn and look at it for a few moments but it is not for me to see. I am part of an ensemble and my face goes straight ahead, my feet stomping in unison with the other dancers. And then we fight again in line. I break the axe hitting the shield too hard. It didn't matter. It's the spirit that was the most important. Once we finish the dance, I had the best compliment ever. They told me the only difference is the skin colour.
Lina, Eddie’s mother
I have developed an infatuation with a beautiful woman. Her name is Lena and she is Eddie's mother. She radiates an inner strength, an acknowledgement of her duties as a mother and wife, as the first born of her family and she beams her inner beauty to all who come close to her, but especially to the children. We spend a night with her and the Zuna family when we visit Simbo for the first time. She brings us food and hot water to make coffee, makes up our bed. She holds her head slightly downwards as she talks in her half English, half Pidgin. Her eyes are always soft, but ever alert. Her head flicks in sudden movements from side to side as she follows the talk talk. She listens to every word, understands every gesture. Her shoulders are slightly slumped, her breasts are fallen and her stomach hangs about her hips but she is a beautiful woman. I find my gaze landing on her everytime we are in the same place. When she is on the ship, when she is in her house or underneath Maso's when she is in Gizo at the market. She is the one that makes our meals and the one that sits with us as we eat, a Simbo custom that somebody from the island sits with or walks with or talks with a visitor. She dances with Ovaline and six other small girls after our island dance. She is self-conscious. Eddie tells me she is not a great dancer but there is an innocence about this middle aged woman, and yet a worldiness at the same time. Right now she is tending her dying father. Her time is spent during the preparations for the feast by his side. As I write this, she is appraoching the ship in Egotu, they are spending the night with us here in Ghizo.
A Taboo site on the shore of lake Ove
We walk up the hill, having passed the shores of the green lake Ove. We arrive at a clearing in the bush. I see round, shiny objects scattered on top of a pile of rocks. Michel has the camera out before I realise that they are skulls. The landowner who has brought us here asks if everything is alright, or if he should rearrange the skulls. Michel says OK. And he turns some of the uppermost heads so that the eye sockets stare straight into the camera lens. These skulls still don't feel totally real to me, but I peer down and between several of them I spy a set of teeth. Now they are real. It takes at least minutes before I can lose myself in the story of these skulls, but when I do I find it hard to shake off the feeling of death and violent death at that. Michel shoots the skulls from every angle and as the camera passes over them, one of them moves slightly, resettling itself having been moved earlier. But later that night when Eddie and Mason see the footage, they freak out. Eddie keeps saying, did you see that skull move? We have to go and dance at that site. To them, not knowing that the skull had been touched that afternoon, something or some message is conveyed to them by the moving skull. And perhaps they are right. Michel rattles off some slides too. Ferdi stands at a slight distance from the skulls, and takes a while to realise that the more he inches backwards, the closer he is getting to the other pile of skulls behind him. We are surrounded by the heads of the men slain by the Simbo warriors who danced the Ey Omba. The bush around helps to intensify the feeling of being lost in history. And when we return to the shore of the lake, I am not looking at the green water or seeking a peek of the evil crocodile that lives there. My head is still full of the sight of the skulls.
'for the first time, the time of headhunting becomes real. So far it has been talks, words, lost in books and speeches. But now it is real. I feel it's a special place. There is a deep respect invading me. And I feel uneasy but at the same time excited to take the camera out. As i press record, the eyes of the skull are looking in. They do not seem dead although the rational mind tells me it's only bones. I get flashes of axes chopping heads brought back bloody in a tomoko as a sign of victory. I look for marks on teh skull heads but don't find any. There is this whole visualisation process going on and now the ey Omba that we will perform on top of the volcano takes a totally different dimension. It is like we never truly realised what the meaning of the dance meant. It was a cultural curiosity, an aesthetic dance but now the Ey Omba is the dance to prepare the warriors to go on hunting raids. Walking down, the custom site owner shows us the grave of his grandmother among ruins of old wallstone. She was the last one to live on this island. The grave is a slab of cement with a christian cross with a name but engraved in the cement is a custom money ring giving the insight of the two worlds. On one "the savage time" of the headhunting and on the other the coming of Christianity and the slow vanishing cultural heritage that the people of Simbo have been living by for ten thousands of years. There is no judgement but the simple observation of cultural evolution.'
More Taboo sites
Four stones, tall stones, as an altar to the weather making magic. Two of the stones are to keep the weather calm and two stones are to make the weather rough to block the entrance of the tight passsage to Nusa simbo. So whenever a hunting party was going out, they asked for rough weather so the entrance would be blocked by any invader. In those times, rough weather meant security. Ironic for us seamen. Now Eddie tells me that sometimes some kids when they wanted to keep girls on teh island took the stone of the rough weather and hid them and teh stone needed to be found again in order to reestablish the balance of the weather. While I pan the camera over the four stones, I consciously put intention on the two calm stones. We move up a trail between the bushes to come across the biggest altar on the island of Simbo. Some of the custom money is so worn out by the weather it is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. Three conch shell, each with a different sound, lay a skeleton with no colours and holes around them. They are old too. Looking at the shrine with tall, again the penis type of stone shooting out to the sky, about twenty of them on top of a huge mound of rocks and flat slabs of stones and underneath all these flat slabs of stones are the heads of the chiefs only of different islands of the province - Choiseul, Ranongga, Roviana, Kolumbangarra. Nobody knows which is which any more. Again most of the more recent shell money has been vandalised and probably sold to tourists. I do not video that site but a few shots. The trees around the place have been cut and trees that were grown on top of it have been even more recently cut making the place look like an unrespected place. But it's only an impression. Unlike the mount of skulls that we saw on the previous site, all the heads are carefully protected from the weather and the sun in their own little chambers. Then we move on to a third site with a nice surprise in stock for us. With one of the chiefs, dressed in full traditional costume, waiting for us there. He will later on perform the Ey Omba. There more skulls and the site is divided in two parts, one for women and one for men. I can't recall the details but I think that the heads and the bones laying there are not from hunting raids but from their own people After probably annoying the chief by asking him at least five times to redo his move in one creative outburst of wanting to superimpose his images as the ancestors of teh place, we step down the hill back to the lagoon that separates us from Nusa Simbo. Mason and Mason sion were with us. Now sitting under the huge mango tree of Nusa Simbo, talking to the chief, each site is a separate owner meaning a separate fee so instead of just a 20 that I thought we would have to pay it was 60 for two people since Sean was with us. Once again the economics come into play especially when I was told that I could go for Batu Simbo later even when teh time and the man was there to take us. The chief owns the weather making magic site and apart from its nice story and significance, it is just four pieces of rock standing up. So obviously he was making sure that his site was seen first.
Night fishing
It is almost ten o'clock at night. The full moon is high up in the sky and Eddie jumps up on his feet and says, I want to go fishing. Keana is on board who will become my special dance partner in the Ey Omba, one of the most agile and full on dancer of the whole troupe. Also the only young guy ever since a few generations participating and wanting to be in the Ey Omba. Keana earlier on has brought lobster to the ship. He knows how to catch fish and Eddie knows that too. So Eddie runs to teh stern, grabs all the fishing gear and when I say all, I mean all and turns Mason down that wants to go fishing too because somehow they know they're going to catch fish. It's a good night for catching fish. They're not the only ones. Quiote a few canoes are out already and many of the fishermen that know what they are doing are going out tonight to fish. Then we hear a radio call, Eddie who never calls, saying that they will arrive in 15 minutes. I ask did you catch fish and his answer, you will be surprised. As the boat approaches, the Beagle is loaded with 20 huge barracuda. His fingers are cut from the lines, lost all the lures but I wish I could have been there to see the frenzy going on , looking at the almost 2 metre barracuda laying on the beagle floor. There is no way that these fish are going to go into our freezer and having on board Mason, Somo, Peter Ben, Keana, the whole team of teh ship and Stanley with Ovaline, I'm asking how we are going to divide this catch. Everybody stopped watching the movie and came outon deck. So with Mason we decide the ship keeps six barracuda and I see Mason picking up the biggest ones all in a pile and I switch for the small ones just in case having heard that somebody on the island got sick eating barracuda but the real reason is that we get a more equitable share. I suggest that Keana gets a bigger share since he's the one that caught all those fish. So suddenly the fish are examined and put in different piles. Suddenly everyone wants to go home with their fresh catch and I start to fillet the fish on deck with the help of Somo since I told him that he could keep the heads so by giving a hand that means he can go home earlier but unfortunately he is not an expert at filleting fish. Filleting the fish is a western thing. Here the fish are cooked whole and nobody is scared of a few bones. As I start to cut all the fish and cleaning them, unfrotunately after the excitement of seeing all these fish, everybody went to bed leaving me stranded with a dirty job. But I don't care, I'm enjoying the moment, feelign good about catching our own. Eddie is beaming and together past one o'clock we start to clean the huge mess made on deck with sacales and gus everywhere. Now we know what fishing at the right time and the right place really means.
Dolphins are called
Beyond the breakers a school of spinner dolphins is hunting. They cruise up and down the reef in two groups and suddenly all together disappearing under the swells. I know they are munching and have gathered a school of fish ever tighter. It is rare for me to see them from the shore. We ended up with Mason, Sean and Carol attracted by the whole family preparing pandanus leaf, bright green but my eyes always gaze at the ocean. And once the dolphins were discovered the kids started to call out to the sea. I got from the old man the words that they were calling out Rasa tuni bangarra. The kids are shouting their heads off on big boulders their voice projecting out to the sea hoping to reach the dolphins. The words mean kind of 'king of the dolphin, jump'. Now I find myself screaming that same sentence out to the dolphisn hoping to see them leaping. I keep the camera running waiting for the jumps. After ten minutes I turn the camera off and a dolphin ump with a big spin. The kids are screamingver more at the top of their voices. The dolphins will ump but not knowing where they are going to jump, I kep missing them out of fram, a beautiful excuse to stay ever longer. By that time, Carol and Sean already left since I was supposed to meet the chief an hour ago. But the moment is too beautiful not to seize it and the chief will have to wait. As ever, dolphins being my totem, are calling for my attention. As I try to pack I put the camera down here they go again, leaping ever more, higher stronger, and here we go again, the kids ad myself on the rock calling out asa tuni bangarra. It ake out the camera again and finally I get a jump but not satisfied, and also really enjoying watching teh whole pod hunting, I feel that one of them is playing a trick with me still jumping. They approach ever closer to the shore keeping my ttention on them, not being able to move. By now I am really late. But the moment will remain timeless. So being late doesn't exist any more.
The anchorage
The ship is anchored in one of the most scenic prtoected places . We needed to anchor three times luring us ever closer to shore. I dove on the anchor the first time to see it on coral rubbles. Somo that we meet then fo the first time points at a spot so I go diving there and find sand, good holding ground. But it feels tight. while I'm diving about five guys meet me midway on my ascent, looking at this strange creature. The ship is surrounded by canoes. Suddenly a young kid with two bands of bleached hair, the leader of one canoe, is paddling in exctly the same style as the tomoko of Munda with his crew being six young boys paddling together with their hands as fast as they can. That same kid will come around the ship every day. Duing our water runs, being called oun our last day for a meeting with the suposedly 2/3 landowner of Simbo, for an invitation of the centenary of teh coming of the church in simbo on september 15th 2003. I drop three containers to fill water empty by the fountain. We have been doing uns to fill our tanks. Our desalinator is broken. On my return from the meeting, I feind the three containers filled up with water, waiting for me. It would have taken me probably 45 minutes to fil them up. Asking around, I discovered that it was that same kid that filled the containers while I was away. The ship gets visited by so many canoes, transporting trading items. Lobster, coconut crabs, andmost ofthe young girls from the two surrounding villages are coming to trade vegetables for shampoo and soap that we still have in stock from our stay in Singapore at RafflesMarina. There are so many tomateos coming our way that we end up creating an incredible recipe of a tomato soup smoothened by megapode eggs. Our chief supplier ofmegapode eggs is Somo and to quothim, I try to sell you as much eggs as I can because I want to buy tobacco. Somo is a total addict on tobacco and will sieze any opportunity to grab either a cigarette or roll a tobacco, cut with a knife and rolled in lined paper. The only real use of paper since no one writes during our whole stay, everything will be done rally. Every meeting, every schedule will be remembeed orally, except on the feast day when John Tuone's son wrote the programme on a piece of paper and handed it down to the chief. Now one dusky evening, the most beautiful sight appeared close to teh ship. Two women, and thei daughters or whoever, all carrying huge bouquets of flowers, bunches of bananas, nuts and fruit, and come on the ship. Orla stands next to the small boat hosting them on board, being given all the flowers that suddenly invade the whole place with their fragramnce. The young girls are beautiful with big bright eyes and I cant help sticking the camera in front of them. shyly they hideb ehind the flowers but then when they discover what I 'm doing and can see from the small screen the faces of their friends, it then becomes the opposite that whenever i frame something there will be a new face apearing konwing that they will be in the shot. Meanwhile Orla is giving a tour. to the women. Everthing is done by canoe. A man comes with a giant chainsaw in front of his canoe, going out close to the volcano to finish up cutting a tree. We will trade with him some old oil for an old trader's pipe of the 1800s with a beautiful tall ship carved on it. That too, that small object, made the whalers and traders more real. The first traders on the island were actually Frenchmen, the Pratt famly that came there in teh 1800s, the first whit settlers on Simbo. Now our own canoe is launched in the water and awkwardly a few of the crew mainly Carol and Justin learn to paddle. they are shockingly stiff and uneasy compared to the natural beauty of the people of Simbo. Kids stand erect with their paddles like they were on firm ground. They just look like they were born in canoes. Maybe by symbiosis, I amg ving it a try and finally I am able to stand on a canoe without falling after five seconds. Mason never giving up on fishing, keeps catching. A school of surgeonfish nd batfish have discovered that our waste are the perfect easy meal fo them to munch on. Lena gave us som custom pudding that didn't meet nay sucdess in teh palate of the crew. It sat there withoutbeing eaten. Fortunately Mason found a sue for it and started to stick it on a fish hook. The surgeonfish like it. Despite all the excitement, all the beauty and the energy getting raised on Nusa Simbo, I sometimes get my nerves wrecked by the nonchalance and unenthusiasm of the crew. Either not realising the unique time and the prvelege to be there =. Later on all these emotions will fade and most of the crew will remember Simbo as a magical place.
Feast in the village
The men have danced the Ey Omba. The bamboo pipe is playing, the children scream and shout as they play a tug of war, coming perilously close to Michel's camera as he films their straining faces. There is almost a fight before the game begins as one small boy holds on tenaciously to the end of the long black rope. Other, bigger, boys are jostling for his position but he will not give up. Keana stands in the middle of the line, oblivious to this commotion. Eventually, with one frantic shove, the boy is displaced and his face shows thunder as he falls to the ground. Size and age have won this battle. The feast now breaks up, the ensemble falling apart as we wait, and wait, for the return of the ship's crew. The chief strolls away, more interested now in securing the permission to use the village generator tonight to watch a movie. There are island dances still to come but we cannot begin without the arrival of Carol. After an interminable interval, in which the crowd dwindles to just the small children imitating the moves of the dancing warriors, the troops finally arrive. Without a pause, we are whisked off into the veranda of a house behind the square and begin our preparations to dance. The grass skirts are a little curled at the ends, the frangipane garlands dripping wet from their rest in buckets of water to keep them fresh. We are dressed within seconds, no banana leave tops much to Chelle's relief - paranoid about them falling off - and Carol's dismay - pissed off that she wasn't told since she's now wearing the 'wrong top' - and my disappointment at not going all the way. We rehearse at top speed, children lined up outside the veranda, peeking through to see this black and white parade, laughing and imitating our attempts at island dancing. We hear the singing of the other island dancing group and Carol marches out the door to go and watch them. I realise that we should stay out of sight since we are dressed and ready to dance, but there is no point in trying to explain this subtlety. We watch the dance from behind the regathered, but smaller, crowd. Some of the ladies are clearly not versed in this dance, others are doing their best to keep the energy high, but all have the fluidity of movement that I am struggling to achieve as I dance. Their hands are so light and the tips of their fingers so airy. They sing beautifully in classic Pacific harmonies. And then it is our turn. We must take ourselves out of sight again, and enter the stage in the proper fashion. Ovaline leads the way, I am behind her, then Susan, Chelle, Cathy and Carol. We have a guitar accompanying us and some women gather to help build the sounds of our weak voices. I cannot boom, the melody is too high for me to project anything more than a soft voice. And booming is not their style anyway. Cathy begins the dance with the word 'tarupa' which means ready and is the cue for us to place our hands on our hips. And we're off.
Hea sa rane ginetu getu
Na rane tinamonai
Leana hola sa rane ninoroi
We dream this day today
As we sing and dance
We welcome you this happy day in 2002
We wish you all good luck
And may God bless you all
As we share our dance
Happy day in Nusa Simbo
I am staring beyond the people, to the trees behind and managing to mostly lose myself in this moment. I am aware of Michel's camera, of the staring children, laughing their heads off, of the expressions on the faces of our audience - a little astounded to see white girls dancing in grass skirts in the Roviana language. I am trying to capture the essence of the Solomons spirit, using the gestures to display my feminity, aware of the purpose of this dance, to lure, to captivate, to entrance. I do not entirely succeed but my attempts remove me from merely moving my mouth, my hips, my arms in time with those on either side of me. And within minutes, the performance is over. We retire from the stage, allowing Lena and seven children (including the natural born performer Ovaline) to take their places for a dance they have made up, 'stylee, stylee'. The little girls wiggle their hips furiously before they groom their hair, some so coyly even at their age of 5 or 6. Watching the small girls all day during the feast, watching their interactions with the boys, they are capable of flirting, seducing and then instantly turning their back on the young boys. We , in comparison, are so physically blocked, so pent up with mental gymnastics that our own creation of a lack of freedom comes shining through as we sing and dance to this Pacific song.
Stern conversations
I ask Maso, one night on the stern, about the place where he wants to gather some dancers together again for the Ey Omba when we return to Simbo. It's a level plain on the top of the hill. I ask him if it is a special place, a custom site. Oh yes. He knows the story from his father-in-law, Peter Ben (a connection I only realise after we have left Simbo for the first time). There were two young boys and their mother living up there. The mother died. The boys were crying and crying and crying. After three days, the mother is resurrected and returns to visit her sons, but she looks different and the boys do not recognise her. But I am your mother, she says. No, you cannot be our mother, she looks so different to you. The mother tells them that the boys must go and kill a lizard and bury it in the ground. The boys go hunting and they find the lizard and duly bury it in the ground. After three days the mother returns and says, see that is what happens when a person dies. And then instantly they recognise that this is their mother. But before they can reach out to her, she has leapt off the top of the hill, dived down into the ocean. She emerges in one big bubble, which is where woman reef is now, then dives down again to send up one more big bubble, the location of man reef.
There is a taboo site up there, a site that only the family of Peter Ben (the landowner) can visit. Any one outside of this clan that comes near to the site runs the risk of contracting leprosy. Maso is terrified of the place, his wife can visit freely to clear the overgrowth and keep the shrine clean. One time, he had a friend (he uses the word boyfriend) visiting from Australia who urged Maso to bring him to the site. Maso would not go close but pointed in the direction of the shrine and told him to go and take a closer look if he wanted. When they came back down to the village, later that night, the man developed a rash on his arms. He was itching like crazy. Maso brought him to see the old man who could help him, happened to be Lena's uncle but he is dead now. The old man touched the Australian's arms, rubbing them gently and within two days, the rash was gone.
Another time, one of Maso's sons developed a terrible rash all over his face and arms - I think he too had been to a custom site that he should have stayed well away from. Again the old man, with gentle rubbing around the eyes and the cheeks, cured him within two days.
Maso describes the power that these custom sites have - how all the sites of Nusa Simbo were stripped of their powers just after the arrival of the missionaries in 1903. The chief of the island was then asked by the missionaries to send the Kulau (woman chief) to all the custom sites and make them powerless. And since then, they have been which explains why Maso could go and site on the musical rock and sing the Ey Omba with Michel and John Tione. But the custom sites of the 'mainland' are all still with power and Maso will not go near them. When I asked him about the site that we were brought to just up from the shores of Lake Ove, he tells me that he told the landowner to go and talk first to the ancestors to let them know that we were coming and that we would be filming. He describes how so many people, tourists, take snapshots or video at these sites and then find that their camera is not working or that nothing appears when the film is developed.
There is a tree whose bark is used for the cloth for the warrior dancers. It was growing between two gardens so the landowner instructed a man to go and chop the tree down, ignoring the fact that this is a special tree. Two men arrived with a chainsaw, ready to sever the base of the tree. The chainsaw would not start. They tried everything but they could not get it to work. The tree is now still standing.
At anchor
Every day, there is a morning procession of canoes that come to visit the ship. Some small children are coming out of curiosity, perhaps to watch our strange looking morning rituals - cigarettes and coffee on the stern, faces looking like the world collapsed about them during the night and they have woken to a holocaustic future, gongs ringing, plates of food wafting about the deck, and then everybody disappearing below in a sudden rush as meeting is called at quarter to eight. I too would come to watch the morning show in my canoe. But others come as more than just spectators - they are prospective traders. They do not shout about their produce, there is no sales pitch, they merely pull up alongside the ship with baskets of tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines, leafy greens, spring onions and young coconuts. And sit, and wait for one of the crew to first acknowledge them, and second enter into a business conversation. Our trading goods are soaps from Raffles Marina, a bagload that Maik and Helen gave us a year and a half ago. Many of them have leaked their contents and have just a splash of shampoo left inside them. The children and young women ask for the soap with which they will groom themselves under the free flowing taps of Simbo island. The baskets in Synaestesia quickly pile up with green, red and purple vegetables, to the extent where there is a surplus of cherry tomatoes, too many to use while still fresh and I boil them down to make a tomato sauce. It feels decadent to have so many plump ripe tomatoes in my hands.
We are like the trading ships of a hundred years ago that came to these islands.
'One day, longn long ago, a man was fishing on the reef, and he saw something out in the sea. It appeared to be an island, but it moved. He ran to the beach shouting, 'an island is coming here' and quickly the people gathered on the beach to watch a sailing ship approach and anchor off the reef. The inhabitants of the island came ashore, and our island world ceased to be.'
Casper Luana, "Buka! A Retrospect"
Simbo was first approached by the whaling boats who were following the routes of the sperm whale. Their presence is physically tangible when a man trades a pipe bowl, carved in ceramic with a motif of a sailing ship, not totally unlike the silhouette of the Heraclitus, for a container of old oil. What is waste to us is perfectly useable to these people. The whalers were superceded by trading vessels who brought iron to the islands. These sailors transformed a stone age culture into an iron age one. Tasks that before had taken forever, like carving shell money from clam shells and making canoes for headhunting raids, suddenly became speedy. The whalers came seeking food, water and women. The traders after them sought coconuts,
Meeting for the community
The chief is blowing the conch. The sound of the conch is bringing all the villagers towards the centre of Nusa Simbo under the huge tree. There is a bench in the middle with the chief, a translator and myself sitting on it. Orla sits by my side, on teh ground. She is a woman after all. We sit there, waiting, in full view of everybody. The chief briefs me very quickly on the order of the gathering. He will first address the crowd, then I will hold my speech and then there will be questions and answers. The people gather slowly, in dribs and drabs. Stanley sits under the mango tree, Eddie is lurking on the edge of the slowly forming circle, Mason is nowhere to be seen. There is a feeling of some kind of tension in the air - it's hard to know exactly what is about to be said, but this meeting has clearly been called for more than just an announcement. And Mason's absence is significant. We have already heard the rumours about how some of the village is very displeased with him coming on board the ship to teach us the Ey Omba. But most probably more out of jealousy than anything else. The chief starts to talk and flashes the hundred Solomon dollars that was given for the land use, so much so that I started to feel uncomfortable that an obvious sign of importance of money. So I am standing up addressing 'the audience'. I start explaining the ship, with the concept of an expedition, going around the world with our three main aspects being seamanship, science and art. Our stay in Simbo is a voyage of discovery. discovery of its reef, of its people and its past. We are not here just to see but to experience. Cultures are transmitted from generation to generation and having travelled around the world, we are well aware of the disappearance of ancient culture. Traces that are still present in Simbo. So when we heard Eddie singing a few phrases of the traditional songs, we got excited. Where does this come from? Having Eddie, a man from Simbo on board, we realised that we need to get to Simbo and strengthen in Eddie's heart his cultural heritage. Since we are here to experience and our involvement in theatre what a better opportunity than to learn through gestures, songs and meanings through a dance the spirit of the ancestors of Simbo. In order to do that, we are planning to make a feast on the following Saturday, to create a platform but more than a platform, the celebration of a culture. We will film this to keep a record but also in the hope to create a movie that will naturally benefit the island of Simbo. I stress that it is not a commercial venture without any thoughts of making money. We are actually investing the whole ship, its crew and equipment, to do this. The film will give us a through line, a direction, and a focus for our stay here. Apart from the dances, it is also the relationship of the community and its environment that will be important during this week. We dived in most of the world's reefs and we have a global understanding of reefs and their importance for the future of any community using them as resources for their livelihood. Our view is a planetary view. The community and the people using the reef have knowledge that they might not realise. So I propose that we create an exchange of knowledge. We will dive the reef, film it, and give a report on the health and what we have witnessed. We also propose to invite a few people of the community to come on board, and have a seminar on coral reefs. In many places of the world, the reefs are very sick eg. we travelled in Indonesia and more than 80% of the reef are destroyed through dynamite, cyanide, and you might have expereience that already but people will come to the Solomons to take advantage of the reef that as we witnessed so far are still plentiful in fish. So during our stay, it will be a true exchange between your community and our scientific know-how on how you can manage the resources that you gathered from the sea. I stress again that you have on board a person that you can see as one of your ambassadors. He will travel with us to America representing your island to the people he will meet. So this is in short our plan for our stay in Simbo. And I welcome anybody to ask any questions, doubts, or reserves that they might have into what we are trying to do. As soon as that is said, a man stands up and his first concern is about their resources of sea cucumbers - beche de mer. Asking what will you do if you see beche de mer. And again here I am on my big horses with my voice getting stronger that we are not a commercial venture and that how our drive is to learn. I explained that it might seem strange that we are just coming here to look but that is what we are here to do. there is an obvious clear opposition and that same man kept on talking and talking and talking. Suddenly some young guys in the background started to shut him up, basically. After ping pong balls of questions, I sense myself becoming more edgy. I end up with asking if there is anything wrong in wanting to celebrate, have a good time and experience, if there is anything wrong in trying to learn about the reefs and the beneficiaries will also be the island of Simbo - is there anything wrong with that? By that time, the chief noticing my tone, tells me that the community agreed and that the meeting was over. The question that finally took the biscuit was having explained so emphatically that this was a film just for us and for our friends in America, more questions were asked aboutwhen we would show the film to people how much money we would make as they watched it. The whole concept of doing something just because you want to do it, which is the concept behind us livingon the ship in the first place, was completely alien to this meeting. Eddie whispered in my ear tell them that if people see the movie and they want to come to Simbo then that will mean that the people will have to pay to see the custom sites and stay, that will mean more tourism and more income for the island. It will not be until the two pigs are brought to the shores of Nusa Simbo that the feast becomes a reality. Until then it was only talk talk.
The pigs
Knowing very well that with some pigs that would definitely mean a feast and in true Melanesian custom, the chief wanting to make something happen needs to make a feast. This is a sign of wealth since the Melanesian culture you can't truly accumulate wealth, power was shown through generosity towards the people, making a great chief. So being seen as the chief of our own tribe of sea people, securing the pig as early as possible was of great importance to our stay in Simbo. It is Somo, after talking to Stanley, where we could have got a pig in Raromana, it is Somo coming on is canoe that talked to us abouttwo pigs of teh right size staying at the village across the bay. Wihtout delay we are going to see them. AFter af ew negotiations, we agree on purchasing the two pigs. I pay for them the next day and we will pick them up two days before teh feast. That became a whole scene in itself. We choose to get Ferdi and Sean as the pig carriers, trying to show the involvement of our crew in teh feast. But it is Mason, the pig master, that really did all the work. The pigs started to scream even before we arrived at their pen.
See October 2002 log for rest of description.
The day of slaughter is a red day. There are red blossoms on the tree above the place where the pigs lie, still in the shade of palms where we left them the day before. The pigs are untethered on their hind legs and dragged by a rope down to the sea. Mason says this is the best way to kill them and he is right. One strong man holds the first pig down in the shallow waters. The young boys gather around him, squealing with delight as the pig squeals under the surface. It takes almost three minutes for the pig to stop kicking and for his last breath to leave his body. I am on the shore, watching from the shade of a tree as the scene unfolds in front of me. I am slightly horrified at watching the pig being drowned, but also entranced by the smiles and delight on the small boys' faces. Mason now brings down the second pig - its hind legs get trapped on a log lying on the beach and it struggles to heave its body over it. Mason stands on the pig in the water to drown him. Meanwhile, the other man is wielding his knife with which he will slit the throat of the pig. Blood pours out, the waters around him turn red. Mason takes out his knife and repeats the action with his pig. His white shorts are now inches deep in the bloody water and the children swim and splash in it without noticing the change in colour. It is an intense shade of red. By the time the water reaches the beach it is merely pale pink, and the red colour is gone in a couple of minutes. The pigs are bled then carried back to the coconut palms that lie waiting for their corpses. Hot water is taken from the pot boiling over some firewood just behind the beach, poured onto the pigs and then layers of hessian matting placed over them to soak the skin for a couple of minutes. Mason and John Tione's son work hard with coconut halves to scrape off the soft hairs of the white pig. They come off so easily - this is a young pig without the coarse wiry hair that stuck to our own PNG pig in the freezer. The second pig will not be so easy to shave. He has to be carried over to another pile of palms - this time brown and dried. More palms are put on top of him and set alight. Red reappears in this day. This time an orangey red, We sit and watch the flames rise and the smoke occlude our view of the scene. Now the pig is ready to be shaved. Michel begins work on the first, the soft white pig. He slits him open from his throat to his tail on his belly. I film him as he places his hands inside the pig, scooping out his bowels with bloodied hands. The pig is clean, barely bleeding but Michel's hands are stained bright red immediately. He lays the entrails beside the pig and then describes each piece to the gathered men. The children crowd around behind him, thickly so that i can hardly find the space to stand nearby. Other children sit and waft leaves over the pig and its insides, keeping the flies off. I watch as they discuss each organ - the liver, the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the kindneys, which piece they will keep and which pieces they will throw away. They do not waste much. Then Michel begins to dissect the body into sizeable pieces to put in the oven. First the legs are severed, then the sides, then the ribs. When it comes to the head, and the removal of the tongue, I become a little squeamish. I also hope that this is not what comes out in my parcel when the oven is opened. There are other men, led by John Tione's son, working on the other pig and their methods of butchery are not as clinical as Michel's. There is a lot more hacking and a lot more blood and more mess. But the jobs are done and the baskets of pig meat pieces are then taken away to where they will be made a little smaller and wrapped in beautiful boat-shaped green leaves, tied up with one edge of the leaf, and put in the oven. The oven is inside a small house - a flat layer of stones on top of fire, still the smell of the roasting pig as it is quickly seared on the fire. Then the stem`s of banana trees cut and all the packages placed on top, covered tightly with banana leaves so no steam is escaping, then covered with copra bags. The pigs now rest in pieces overnight in their motu steam bath.
November 2002
Our meeting on arrival in Simbo
ex premier of the western province has called a meeting, he tells me I do not approve of what you are doing here. There is some talk that one man has taught you the Ey Omba dance and that belongs to the people. Silence in the room. So I start to go on a big speech for 15 minutes straight I give all the argument possible that I can think of to try to convince them that what we are doing will be beneficial for the island. Being Melanesian, I look at Eddie and in Eddie's eyes I see anger. Like in all Melanesian meetings, it always comes down to money. So after we settled the fee for the laand owner rights and anchorage fees, there are now more bullets in our pistol to shoot for our target. And our target is to create a cultural revival on the island of Nusa Simbo. There was a lot of concern about our mentioning filming and we learnt that from past experiences, a man that we know very well Billy Barber, that thankfully enough brought us Eddie on board, spoiled the trust that people have in media. Deep down inside, the filming will only be a medium and a task to give a direction to the ship. The importance is the expedition to experience whatever is left of a very ancient and powerful stone age culture. Experience is the key word, not just passive spectator but active actors in its highest form to get transmission through gestures, sounds, songs, words, energies of the ancestors of the island of Simbo. Eventually we reach an agreement to carry out our mission. With Eddie we run through the island to get to Nusa Simbo to talk to the chief to decide for a general meeting with the whole community. One of the men in the meeting with the premier has claimed more than two thirds of the land of Simbo. Coming back to Gizo with xxxxx that works for a Malaysian logging company in the Marovo lagoon, that was also there during a meeting about the centenary that will happen in Simbo in Sep 2003, it was clear to me that the whole land dispute is about wood. That man told me that he will be the successor of that land. So they have a partnership and their partnership is into the wood resources. His guilty conscience was ringing out from him as he took passage on the Heraclitus from Simbo to Gizo. His eyes did not meet the eyes of the crew. So when I thought that everything was already sorted, the ship had arrived etc etc, to realise that there was so much opposition at work, it was crucial to meet with all the people that would be involved in that cultural celebration. The chief of Nusa Simbo was very receptive and deep down realised that it would be a great opportunity for him to put out a feast to gather his strength and show some power which he truly doesn't have. The village of Nusa Simbo is split between different clans and the chief is unable to reconcile them. Throughout the ten days we spent in Simbo, I have been called privately by every single clan leader in intimate conversation and every one of them was working out to give their side of the story, especially what they owned and what they had the right to and what was their heritage.
A morning scene in Nusa Simbo
Arriving in Nusa Simbo on the morning of the feast to find Ovaline, Cathy, Susie and friends gathered on the table under the tree, surrounded by buckets of cold water containing blossoms freshly plucked from the frangipane trees. White, pink and crimson red - a colour of frangipane I have never seen before. They pass the needle through the stem of the flower and a head garland slowly takes shape in their hands. Ovaline's face is very intent. There is total concentration on making the biggest and bushiest garland for her head to frame her beautiful face. The girls work on the garlands for three hours, non stop and finally we all have head dresses and neck garlands which smell almost more spectacular than they look.
Batu Simbo, Taboo site
With John Tione, Mason pronounce Maysooo by all the villagers and John Tione's son, we walk through the bush. We stop at a stone, a beautitful stone with an air plant, a lush green air plant. And John starts to talk to me about the Ey Omba. The place where we are sitting quietly, peacefully is the melody stone, the harmony stone, where the songs were composed and transmitted. The songs came from the ancestors through the stone. The ey Omba dance is 'owned' by John from his tribe –Patutai- so instead of going into too much detail, I'm asking him to sing the song on the stone. He starts with a soft voice to get the right tone and suddenly John and his son and Maso start to sing the ey Omba in its original birthplace. It is at that moment that I ask John to teach us and allow him to perform with us the Ey Omba dance. We talk about the ancestors, about the spirit and the importance of the transmission through gestures, songs, tones, instead of just talk talk. We are moving on, after the OK, through the bush to climb Batu Simbo. The name Batu Simbo means the head of Simbo. It was originally the first place that my gut feeling told me to visit, thanks to Lonely Planet. Batu Simbo is like a natural magic fortress of a huge stone in the jungle rising all the way up to the sky, grown by fig trees growing up from their root, almost coocconing the whole rock. There is only one entrance to Batu Simbo, going as a small trail in a spiral to reach the top. On the way, John is cutting leaves from a tree. And he holds that leaf up to me to smell it. There is a strong smell, musky smell, a smell that has power. It is that smell, worn on the body that gives strength to the warriors. I ask them if they eat it and he's joking, no way, it's the smell that's important. We will wear this leaf on the day of the feast during our dance. I keep a bunch of leaves in my pocket while starting to climb the fortress of Batu Simbo. Most of the shell money and ornaments, etc. has been vandalised by kids or whoever. But the spirit of the place is still there. As we climb half way up the rock, there is a huge flat stone where the chief used to sit to talk with all the members of the tribe around him listening. I could see the chief standing there, strong imposing himself on that beautiful stone. It was the perfect place to hold a speech. We keep climbing up. It is a steep climb and we reach another place with stones erected like penises with on top of it a ring of shell money as an altar with some remains of skulls and bones. At the base of this altar is a fig tree and Maso cuts a piece of the tree that later on will become a custom cloth worn by one of the dancers. We keep on climbing up Batu Simbo. As we reach near to the top with a view of the lagoon and its reef and the mountain on the other side, like one small window, there is a cave that the spies will hide in as a guard watching for intruders. Then we sit down and John tells us an old story, before the traders. When the men of Simbo were out on one of their head hunting raids, leaving all the women and kids alone on the island, there was different sounds of different conch shells that would be blown for different warnings. And there were people from choiseul, a hunting raid, that approached. The conch was blown and everybody knew they had to reach Batu Simbo to seek shelter from the attack. At that time, Batu Simbo was guarded too by walls of coral stones. All the kids and women were taking refuge while the attackers were coming to get them. One woman stood close to the entrance of the rock with one takiru, a tool usede to make paddle. All the axes were out on the hunting raid. The men used to wear the axe on their right hand and the shield on their left hand but the entrance of Batu Simbo was designed that you had to pull yourself up with your right hand so you had to put the axe in the left hand. Now the women that were guarding put face paint on and started to hit the guys with the paddle, with huge screams. At the same time, the other women started to throw the stones from the wall down from the fortress, killing some of the warriors. Scared, because they thought that dangerous and fierce warriors were already there, they left leaving all the women and children unharmed and safe.
On top of the volcano
Standing on the top of Ove, the sulphurous rocks of the volcanic crater crumbling beneath my feet, shyly pointing the camera in the direction of Michel who is being made up by Maso for the Ey Omba. Four black bodies have just removed their shorts and t shirts and adorned the bark cloth strips around their manhoods. Their fingers are smeared with the chalky white wet powder of the volcanic clay. They are drawing circles around their legs, their arms. Keana paints Eddie's back and face. It almost feels like I am watching two young brothers preparing themselves for a theatre performance, and this is theatre, but there is so much meaning behind what I am watching. Michel's spotty bottom makes its appearance, Ferdi too is down to the bark cloth. The white paint barely shows on their pale skins, whereas on the black skin it looks like swathes of cream. The paint dries and intensifies. They place leaves in their cloths and in their armbands. I feel like I should not be watching. I feel like I should not be at the top of this hill, that I should be down below, perhaps tending to the coconut crabs and sweet potatoes that are steaming in the hot vent below on the beach. Somo catches my eye as I press record on the camera. I look away. I think he was telling me it was kind of OK for me to be here, but at the same time, it was kind of not. Somo doesn't talk to me with words, he looks at me and with an upwards flick of his head, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a straight face but always with a dance in his eyes, he communicates. His left leg is completely withered. He looks like he had polio but in fact he once had a severe boil on his foot which prevented him from walking on it for so long that his muscles atrophied, and never recovered. He walks on the ball of his foot, this leg is now shorter than the other. But somehow when I first met him, I didn't even notice there was anything different about him, perhaps merely hypnotised by his eyes and his mouth. He smokes as much as he can. He sells us megapode eggs as often as he can, so he has money to buy tobacco. He becomes a part of the ship from almost the instant we anchor in Simbo. When I ask Stanley where he lives, if he lives in Nusa Simbo, Stanley just waves his head around and says he lives here, he lives in Lengana, he lives everywhere. The man has a spirit of freedom about him, he is untethered by geography, by his leg, by the ways of everyone else on the island. He is an independent entity. He is Somo.
I watch as Eddie begins to paint Michel. In this moment of physical contact between these two men, there is an affirmation of a relationship that I have watched grow and grow on the ship. Eddie is proud of Michel wanting so much to dance the Ey Omba. Eddie is proud to put the paint on Michel as the sun begins to wane, and the light is almost beginning to fade. There is strength and beauty at the same time in this one moment. Eddie is not an emotional man, on the outer. But sometimes his guard fails him and what is on the inner is revealed. And then the men are ready to dance.
The Eomba dance
The crowd is waiting. The men finished their performance. the originl members of the Ey Omba group have finished their dance. The sun is blazing hot making it almost unbearable. Alot of these men are not young men. More than two thirds of the group are elders, past their fifties. But we disappear in a place where nobody can see us in the unfinished house of John's son. Previously we had drunk green coconut and eaten fresh watermelon from Johns garden with seeds still covering the untied planks. Now Ferdi and myself are being prepared. Somebody is tying the custom cloth around my butt, carefully covering my man's parts. It takes them over three minutes to cover it properly, the bark cloth not being wide enough. There is no sense of shame or uneasiness in the fingers being so close to my penis. And they tell me 'you never show your private parts. they are yours'. In the meantime another man is tying strings around my biceps, putting the fragrant leaves. Somebody else is tying the two custom money around my head. They are Maso's. They are one ring made outof clam shell and another which is like a serrated round tooth and they represent teeth. Now Eddie, John's son and somebody else are all putting the colourful ground from the top of the mountain on my face, my legs, my back. I personally smear loads of it on my white butt to try to cover it. The rattles that has once already been used in the Sepik River with Tambuans and in a performance in Bali, are now on my leg. Big bushy rattles. I try them and the sound is impressive. It will the the leg that I will stomp three times after each conculsion of the Ey Omba refrain. In a quick dash, we get shown the different moves. I had no clue that we will also sing Kooey, Kooey. Now the crowd is waiting so we are stepping down. Keana is my partner. I always wanted him as a partner because he is a good dancer and he is going for it. The canoe of Stanley is called Egotu and Egotu means go for it which I picked up for a toast for Sunday night speeches. Now we are ready to go for it. There is no sign of uneasiness in my whole being. Everything flahshes through my head, all the custom sites, the skulls, Batu Simbo. The moves in Synaestesia that Maso taught us. During hte last two weeks I had the words of the Ey Omba in my head. Sometimes laying down in Nemos quietly just rehearsing the words in my head, waiting for the moment when I will incarnate the warrior spirit of the ancestors of Simbo. And we start to sing - Kooe Kooe Kooe Kooe. John's son looks at me and our eyes lock and he says go for it. Look mean. And our feet are stompign teh ground, slowly marching towards the centre of the village. As we arrive, we could hear the kids laughing but somehow it was only background. Totally concentrated. And we started to walk and stomp our feet and sing the Ey Omba. I knew I messed up some of the choreographed movements of the feet but it didn't matter. My whole being was into it. There was a cue - that would be said by John. I will start to fight with Keana. And the word was Tue and we start. And there is nothing else that exists, there is no crowd, but just fighting and we fight and we fight. It looks like it lasts forever. In retrospect when I watched the video I was so surprised to see that it lasted just a few moments. Almost out of breath, I join the line of the dancers. Suddenly me feet are moving just by themselves, keeping the Eye Omba rhythm. The voice is singing, just trying to catch the breath. I'm learning what it means to always keep a reserve. Always keep a reserve. Then Ferdi and John's son are fighting. My head wants to turn and look at it for a few moments but it is not for me to see. I am part of an ensemble and my face goes straight ahead, my feet stomping in unison with the other dancers. And then we fight again in line. I break the axe hitting the shield too hard. It didn't matter. It's the spirit that was the most important. Once we finish the dance, I had the best compliment ever. They told me the only difference is the skin colour.
Lina, Eddie’s mother
I have developed an infatuation with a beautiful woman. Her name is Lena and she is Eddie's mother. She radiates an inner strength, an acknowledgement of her duties as a mother and wife, as the first born of her family and she beams her inner beauty to all who come close to her, but especially to the children. We spend a night with her and the Zuna family when we visit Simbo for the first time. She brings us food and hot water to make coffee, makes up our bed. She holds her head slightly downwards as she talks in her half English, half Pidgin. Her eyes are always soft, but ever alert. Her head flicks in sudden movements from side to side as she follows the talk talk. She listens to every word, understands every gesture. Her shoulders are slightly slumped, her breasts are fallen and her stomach hangs about her hips but she is a beautiful woman. I find my gaze landing on her everytime we are in the same place. When she is on the ship, when she is in her house or underneath Maso's when she is in Gizo at the market. She is the one that makes our meals and the one that sits with us as we eat, a Simbo custom that somebody from the island sits with or walks with or talks with a visitor. She dances with Ovaline and six other small girls after our island dance. She is self-conscious. Eddie tells me she is not a great dancer but there is an innocence about this middle aged woman, and yet a worldiness at the same time. Right now she is tending her dying father. Her time is spent during the preparations for the feast by his side. As I write this, she is appraoching the ship in Egotu, they are spending the night with us here in Ghizo.
A Taboo site on the shore of lake Ove
We walk up the hill, having passed the shores of the green lake Ove. We arrive at a clearing in the bush. I see round, shiny objects scattered on top of a pile of rocks. Michel has the camera out before I realise that they are skulls. The landowner who has brought us here asks if everything is alright, or if he should rearrange the skulls. Michel says OK. And he turns some of the uppermost heads so that the eye sockets stare straight into the camera lens. These skulls still don't feel totally real to me, but I peer down and between several of them I spy a set of teeth. Now they are real. It takes at least minutes before I can lose myself in the story of these skulls, but when I do I find it hard to shake off the feeling of death and violent death at that. Michel shoots the skulls from every angle and as the camera passes over them, one of them moves slightly, resettling itself having been moved earlier. But later that night when Eddie and Mason see the footage, they freak out. Eddie keeps saying, did you see that skull move? We have to go and dance at that site. To them, not knowing that the skull had been touched that afternoon, something or some message is conveyed to them by the moving skull. And perhaps they are right. Michel rattles off some slides too. Ferdi stands at a slight distance from the skulls, and takes a while to realise that the more he inches backwards, the closer he is getting to the other pile of skulls behind him. We are surrounded by the heads of the men slain by the Simbo warriors who danced the Ey Omba. The bush around helps to intensify the feeling of being lost in history. And when we return to the shore of the lake, I am not looking at the green water or seeking a peek of the evil crocodile that lives there. My head is still full of the sight of the skulls.
'for the first time, the time of headhunting becomes real. So far it has been talks, words, lost in books and speeches. But now it is real. I feel it's a special place. There is a deep respect invading me. And I feel uneasy but at the same time excited to take the camera out. As i press record, the eyes of the skull are looking in. They do not seem dead although the rational mind tells me it's only bones. I get flashes of axes chopping heads brought back bloody in a tomoko as a sign of victory. I look for marks on teh skull heads but don't find any. There is this whole visualisation process going on and now the ey Omba that we will perform on top of the volcano takes a totally different dimension. It is like we never truly realised what the meaning of the dance meant. It was a cultural curiosity, an aesthetic dance but now the Ey Omba is the dance to prepare the warriors to go on hunting raids. Walking down, the custom site owner shows us the grave of his grandmother among ruins of old wallstone. She was the last one to live on this island. The grave is a slab of cement with a christian cross with a name but engraved in the cement is a custom money ring giving the insight of the two worlds. On one "the savage time" of the headhunting and on the other the coming of Christianity and the slow vanishing cultural heritage that the people of Simbo have been living by for ten thousands of years. There is no judgement but the simple observation of cultural evolution.'
More Taboo sites
Four stones, tall stones, as an altar to the weather making magic. Two of the stones are to keep the weather calm and two stones are to make the weather rough to block the entrance of the tight passsage to Nusa simbo. So whenever a hunting party was going out, they asked for rough weather so the entrance would be blocked by any invader. In those times, rough weather meant security. Ironic for us seamen. Now Eddie tells me that sometimes some kids when they wanted to keep girls on teh island took the stone of the rough weather and hid them and teh stone needed to be found again in order to reestablish the balance of the weather. While I pan the camera over the four stones, I consciously put intention on the two calm stones. We move up a trail between the bushes to come across the biggest altar on the island of Simbo. Some of the custom money is so worn out by the weather it is thousands and thousands and thousands of years old. Three conch shell, each with a different sound, lay a skeleton with no colours and holes around them. They are old too. Looking at the shrine with tall, again the penis type of stone shooting out to the sky, about twenty of them on top of a huge mound of rocks and flat slabs of stones and underneath all these flat slabs of stones are the heads of the chiefs only of different islands of the province - Choiseul, Ranongga, Roviana, Kolumbangarra. Nobody knows which is which any more. Again most of the more recent shell money has been vandalised and probably sold to tourists. I do not video that site but a few shots. The trees around the place have been cut and trees that were grown on top of it have been even more recently cut making the place look like an unrespected place. But it's only an impression. Unlike the mount of skulls that we saw on the previous site, all the heads are carefully protected from the weather and the sun in their own little chambers. Then we move on to a third site with a nice surprise in stock for us. With one of the chiefs, dressed in full traditional costume, waiting for us there. He will later on perform the Ey Omba. There more skulls and the site is divided in two parts, one for women and one for men. I can't recall the details but I think that the heads and the bones laying there are not from hunting raids but from their own people After probably annoying the chief by asking him at least five times to redo his move in one creative outburst of wanting to superimpose his images as the ancestors of teh place, we step down the hill back to the lagoon that separates us from Nusa Simbo. Mason and Mason sion were with us. Now sitting under the huge mango tree of Nusa Simbo, talking to the chief, each site is a separate owner meaning a separate fee so instead of just a 20 that I thought we would have to pay it was 60 for two people since Sean was with us. Once again the economics come into play especially when I was told that I could go for Batu Simbo later even when teh time and the man was there to take us. The chief owns the weather making magic site and apart from its nice story and significance, it is just four pieces of rock standing up. So obviously he was making sure that his site was seen first.
Night fishing
It is almost ten o'clock at night. The full moon is high up in the sky and Eddie jumps up on his feet and says, I want to go fishing. Keana is on board who will become my special dance partner in the Ey Omba, one of the most agile and full on dancer of the whole troupe. Also the only young guy ever since a few generations participating and wanting to be in the Ey Omba. Keana earlier on has brought lobster to the ship. He knows how to catch fish and Eddie knows that too. So Eddie runs to teh stern, grabs all the fishing gear and when I say all, I mean all and turns Mason down that wants to go fishing too because somehow they know they're going to catch fish. It's a good night for catching fish. They're not the only ones. Quiote a few canoes are out already and many of the fishermen that know what they are doing are going out tonight to fish. Then we hear a radio call, Eddie who never calls, saying that they will arrive in 15 minutes. I ask did you catch fish and his answer, you will be surprised. As the boat approaches, the Beagle is loaded with 20 huge barracuda. His fingers are cut from the lines, lost all the lures but I wish I could have been there to see the frenzy going on , looking at the almost 2 metre barracuda laying on the beagle floor. There is no way that these fish are going to go into our freezer and having on board Mason, Somo, Peter Ben, Keana, the whole team of teh ship and Stanley with Ovaline, I'm asking how we are going to divide this catch. Everybody stopped watching the movie and came outon deck. So with Mason we decide the ship keeps six barracuda and I see Mason picking up the biggest ones all in a pile and I switch for the small ones just in case having heard that somebody on the island got sick eating barracuda but the real reason is that we get a more equitable share. I suggest that Keana gets a bigger share since he's the one that caught all those fish. So suddenly the fish are examined and put in different piles. Suddenly everyone wants to go home with their fresh catch and I start to fillet the fish on deck with the help of Somo since I told him that he could keep the heads so by giving a hand that means he can go home earlier but unfortunately he is not an expert at filleting fish. Filleting the fish is a western thing. Here the fish are cooked whole and nobody is scared of a few bones. As I start to cut all the fish and cleaning them, unfrotunately after the excitement of seeing all these fish, everybody went to bed leaving me stranded with a dirty job. But I don't care, I'm enjoying the moment, feelign good about catching our own. Eddie is beaming and together past one o'clock we start to clean the huge mess made on deck with sacales and gus everywhere. Now we know what fishing at the right time and the right place really means.
Dolphins are called
Beyond the breakers a school of spinner dolphins is hunting. They cruise up and down the reef in two groups and suddenly all together disappearing under the swells. I know they are munching and have gathered a school of fish ever tighter. It is rare for me to see them from the shore. We ended up with Mason, Sean and Carol attracted by the whole family preparing pandanus leaf, bright green but my eyes always gaze at the ocean. And once the dolphins were discovered the kids started to call out to the sea. I got from the old man the words that they were calling out Rasa tuni bangarra. The kids are shouting their heads off on big boulders their voice projecting out to the sea hoping to reach the dolphins. The words mean kind of 'king of the dolphin, jump'. Now I find myself screaming that same sentence out to the dolphisn hoping to see them leaping. I keep the camera running waiting for the jumps. After ten minutes I turn the camera off and a dolphin ump with a big spin. The kids are screamingver more at the top of their voices. The dolphins will ump but not knowing where they are going to jump, I kep missing them out of fram, a beautiful excuse to stay ever longer. By that time, Carol and Sean already left since I was supposed to meet the chief an hour ago. But the moment is too beautiful not to seize it and the chief will have to wait. As ever, dolphins being my totem, are calling for my attention. As I try to pack I put the camera down here they go again, leaping ever more, higher stronger, and here we go again, the kids ad myself on the rock calling out asa tuni bangarra. It ake out the camera again and finally I get a jump but not satisfied, and also really enjoying watching teh whole pod hunting, I feel that one of them is playing a trick with me still jumping. They approach ever closer to the shore keeping my ttention on them, not being able to move. By now I am really late. But the moment will remain timeless. So being late doesn't exist any more.
The anchorage
The ship is anchored in one of the most scenic prtoected places . We needed to anchor three times luring us ever closer to shore. I dove on the anchor the first time to see it on coral rubbles. Somo that we meet then fo the first time points at a spot so I go diving there and find sand, good holding ground. But it feels tight. while I'm diving about five guys meet me midway on my ascent, looking at this strange creature. The ship is surrounded by canoes. Suddenly a young kid with two bands of bleached hair, the leader of one canoe, is paddling in exctly the same style as the tomoko of Munda with his crew being six young boys paddling together with their hands as fast as they can. That same kid will come around the ship every day. Duing our water runs, being called oun our last day for a meeting with the suposedly 2/3 landowner of Simbo, for an invitation of the centenary of teh coming of the church in simbo on september 15th 2003. I drop three containers to fill water empty by the fountain. We have been doing uns to fill our tanks. Our desalinator is broken. On my return from the meeting, I feind the three containers filled up with water, waiting for me. It would have taken me probably 45 minutes to fil them up. Asking around, I discovered that it was that same kid that filled the containers while I was away. The ship gets visited by so many canoes, transporting trading items. Lobster, coconut crabs, andmost ofthe young girls from the two surrounding villages are coming to trade vegetables for shampoo and soap that we still have in stock from our stay in Singapore at RafflesMarina. There are so many tomateos coming our way that we end up creating an incredible recipe of a tomato soup smoothened by megapode eggs. Our chief supplier ofmegapode eggs is Somo and to quothim, I try to sell you as much eggs as I can because I want to buy tobacco. Somo is a total addict on tobacco and will sieze any opportunity to grab either a cigarette or roll a tobacco, cut with a knife and rolled in lined paper. The only real use of paper since no one writes during our whole stay, everything will be done rally. Every meeting, every schedule will be remembeed orally, except on the feast day when John Tuone's son wrote the programme on a piece of paper and handed it down to the chief. Now one dusky evening, the most beautiful sight appeared close to teh ship. Two women, and thei daughters or whoever, all carrying huge bouquets of flowers, bunches of bananas, nuts and fruit, and come on the ship. Orla stands next to the small boat hosting them on board, being given all the flowers that suddenly invade the whole place with their fragramnce. The young girls are beautiful with big bright eyes and I cant help sticking the camera in front of them. shyly they hideb ehind the flowers but then when they discover what I 'm doing and can see from the small screen the faces of their friends, it then becomes the opposite that whenever i frame something there will be a new face apearing konwing that they will be in the shot. Meanwhile Orla is giving a tour. to the women. Everthing is done by canoe. A man comes with a giant chainsaw in front of his canoe, going out close to the volcano to finish up cutting a tree. We will trade with him some old oil for an old trader's pipe of the 1800s with a beautiful tall ship carved on it. That too, that small object, made the whalers and traders more real. The first traders on the island were actually Frenchmen, the Pratt famly that came there in teh 1800s, the first whit settlers on Simbo. Now our own canoe is launched in the water and awkwardly a few of the crew mainly Carol and Justin learn to paddle. they are shockingly stiff and uneasy compared to the natural beauty of the people of Simbo. Kids stand erect with their paddles like they were on firm ground. They just look like they were born in canoes. Maybe by symbiosis, I amg ving it a try and finally I am able to stand on a canoe without falling after five seconds. Mason never giving up on fishing, keeps catching. A school of surgeonfish nd batfish have discovered that our waste are the perfect easy meal fo them to munch on. Lena gave us som custom pudding that didn't meet nay sucdess in teh palate of the crew. It sat there withoutbeing eaten. Fortunately Mason found a sue for it and started to stick it on a fish hook. The surgeonfish like it. Despite all the excitement, all the beauty and the energy getting raised on Nusa Simbo, I sometimes get my nerves wrecked by the nonchalance and unenthusiasm of the crew. Either not realising the unique time and the prvelege to be there =. Later on all these emotions will fade and most of the crew will remember Simbo as a magical place.
Feast in the village
The men have danced the Ey Omba. The bamboo pipe is playing, the children scream and shout as they play a tug of war, coming perilously close to Michel's camera as he films their straining faces. There is almost a fight before the game begins as one small boy holds on tenaciously to the end of the long black rope. Other, bigger, boys are jostling for his position but he will not give up. Keana stands in the middle of the line, oblivious to this commotion. Eventually, with one frantic shove, the boy is displaced and his face shows thunder as he falls to the ground. Size and age have won this battle. The feast now breaks up, the ensemble falling apart as we wait, and wait, for the return of the ship's crew. The chief strolls away, more interested now in securing the permission to use the village generator tonight to watch a movie. There are island dances still to come but we cannot begin without the arrival of Carol. After an interminable interval, in which the crowd dwindles to just the small children imitating the moves of the dancing warriors, the troops finally arrive. Without a pause, we are whisked off into the veranda of a house behind the square and begin our preparations to dance. The grass skirts are a little curled at the ends, the frangipane garlands dripping wet from their rest in buckets of water to keep them fresh. We are dressed within seconds, no banana leave tops much to Chelle's relief - paranoid about them falling off - and Carol's dismay - pissed off that she wasn't told since she's now wearing the 'wrong top' - and my disappointment at not going all the way. We rehearse at top speed, children lined up outside the veranda, peeking through to see this black and white parade, laughing and imitating our attempts at island dancing. We hear the singing of the other island dancing group and Carol marches out the door to go and watch them. I realise that we should stay out of sight since we are dressed and ready to dance, but there is no point in trying to explain this subtlety. We watch the dance from behind the regathered, but smaller, crowd. Some of the ladies are clearly not versed in this dance, others are doing their best to keep the energy high, but all have the fluidity of movement that I am struggling to achieve as I dance. Their hands are so light and the tips of their fingers so airy. They sing beautifully in classic Pacific harmonies. And then it is our turn. We must take ourselves out of sight again, and enter the stage in the proper fashion. Ovaline leads the way, I am behind her, then Susan, Chelle, Cathy and Carol. We have a guitar accompanying us and some women gather to help build the sounds of our weak voices. I cannot boom, the melody is too high for me to project anything more than a soft voice. And booming is not their style anyway. Cathy begins the dance with the word 'tarupa' which means ready and is the cue for us to place our hands on our hips. And we're off.
Hea sa rane ginetu getu
Na rane tinamonai
Leana hola sa rane ninoroi
We dream this day today
As we sing and dance
We welcome you this happy day in 2002
We wish you all good luck
And may God bless you all
As we share our dance
Happy day in Nusa Simbo
I am staring beyond the people, to the trees behind and managing to mostly lose myself in this moment. I am aware of Michel's camera, of the staring children, laughing their heads off, of the expressions on the faces of our audience - a little astounded to see white girls dancing in grass skirts in the Roviana language. I am trying to capture the essence of the Solomons spirit, using the gestures to display my feminity, aware of the purpose of this dance, to lure, to captivate, to entrance. I do not entirely succeed but my attempts remove me from merely moving my mouth, my hips, my arms in time with those on either side of me. And within minutes, the performance is over. We retire from the stage, allowing Lena and seven children (including the natural born performer Ovaline) to take their places for a dance they have made up, 'stylee, stylee'. The little girls wiggle their hips furiously before they groom their hair, some so coyly even at their age of 5 or 6. Watching the small girls all day during the feast, watching their interactions with the boys, they are capable of flirting, seducing and then instantly turning their back on the young boys. We , in comparison, are so physically blocked, so pent up with mental gymnastics that our own creation of a lack of freedom comes shining through as we sing and dance to this Pacific song.
Stern conversations
I ask Maso, one night on the stern, about the place where he wants to gather some dancers together again for the Ey Omba when we return to Simbo. It's a level plain on the top of the hill. I ask him if it is a special place, a custom site. Oh yes. He knows the story from his father-in-law, Peter Ben (a connection I only realise after we have left Simbo for the first time). There were two young boys and their mother living up there. The mother died. The boys were crying and crying and crying. After three days, the mother is resurrected and returns to visit her sons, but she looks different and the boys do not recognise her. But I am your mother, she says. No, you cannot be our mother, she looks so different to you. The mother tells them that the boys must go and kill a lizard and bury it in the ground. The boys go hunting and they find the lizard and duly bury it in the ground. After three days the mother returns and says, see that is what happens when a person dies. And then instantly they recognise that this is their mother. But before they can reach out to her, she has leapt off the top of the hill, dived down into the ocean. She emerges in one big bubble, which is where woman reef is now, then dives down again to send up one more big bubble, the location of man reef.
There is a taboo site up there, a site that only the family of Peter Ben (the landowner) can visit. Any one outside of this clan that comes near to the site runs the risk of contracting leprosy. Maso is terrified of the place, his wife can visit freely to clear the overgrowth and keep the shrine clean. One time, he had a friend (he uses the word boyfriend) visiting from Australia who urged Maso to bring him to the site. Maso would not go close but pointed in the direction of the shrine and told him to go and take a closer look if he wanted. When they came back down to the village, later that night, the man developed a rash on his arms. He was itching like crazy. Maso brought him to see the old man who could help him, happened to be Lena's uncle but he is dead now. The old man touched the Australian's arms, rubbing them gently and within two days, the rash was gone.
Another time, one of Maso's sons developed a terrible rash all over his face and arms - I think he too had been to a custom site that he should have stayed well away from. Again the old man, with gentle rubbing around the eyes and the cheeks, cured him within two days.
Maso describes the power that these custom sites have - how all the sites of Nusa Simbo were stripped of their powers just after the arrival of the missionaries in 1903. The chief of the island was then asked by the missionaries to send the Kulau (woman chief) to all the custom sites and make them powerless. And since then, they have been which explains why Maso could go and site on the musical rock and sing the Ey Omba with Michel and John Tione. But the custom sites of the 'mainland' are all still with power and Maso will not go near them. When I asked him about the site that we were brought to just up from the shores of Lake Ove, he tells me that he told the landowner to go and talk first to the ancestors to let them know that we were coming and that we would be filming. He describes how so many people, tourists, take snapshots or video at these sites and then find that their camera is not working or that nothing appears when the film is developed.
There is a tree whose bark is used for the cloth for the warrior dancers. It was growing between two gardens so the landowner instructed a man to go and chop the tree down, ignoring the fact that this is a special tree. Two men arrived with a chainsaw, ready to sever the base of the tree. The chainsaw would not start. They tried everything but they could not get it to work. The tree is now still standing.
At anchor
Every day, there is a morning procession of canoes that come to visit the ship. Some small children are coming out of curiosity, perhaps to watch our strange looking morning rituals - cigarettes and coffee on the stern, faces looking like the world collapsed about them during the night and they have woken to a holocaustic future, gongs ringing, plates of food wafting about the deck, and then everybody disappearing below in a sudden rush as meeting is called at quarter to eight. I too would come to watch the morning show in my canoe. But others come as more than just spectators - they are prospective traders. They do not shout about their produce, there is no sales pitch, they merely pull up alongside the ship with baskets of tomatoes, green peppers, aubergines, leafy greens, spring onions and young coconuts. And sit, and wait for one of the crew to first acknowledge them, and second enter into a business conversation. Our trading goods are soaps from Raffles Marina, a bagload that Maik and Helen gave us a year and a half ago. Many of them have leaked their contents and have just a splash of shampoo left inside them. The children and young women ask for the soap with which they will groom themselves under the free flowing taps of Simbo island. The baskets in Synaestesia quickly pile up with green, red and purple vegetables, to the extent where there is a surplus of cherry tomatoes, too many to use while still fresh and I boil them down to make a tomato sauce. It feels decadent to have so many plump ripe tomatoes in my hands.
We are like the trading ships of a hundred years ago that came to these islands.
'One day, longn long ago, a man was fishing on the reef, and he saw something out in the sea. It appeared to be an island, but it moved. He ran to the beach shouting, 'an island is coming here' and quickly the people gathered on the beach to watch a sailing ship approach and anchor off the reef. The inhabitants of the island came ashore, and our island world ceased to be.'
Casper Luana, "Buka! A Retrospect"
Simbo was first approached by the whaling boats who were following the routes of the sperm whale. Their presence is physically tangible when a man trades a pipe bowl, carved in ceramic with a motif of a sailing ship, not totally unlike the silhouette of the Heraclitus, for a container of old oil. What is waste to us is perfectly useable to these people. The whalers were superceded by trading vessels who brought iron to the islands. These sailors transformed a stone age culture into an iron age one. Tasks that before had taken forever, like carving shell money from clam shells and making canoes for headhunting raids, suddenly became speedy. The whalers came seeking food, water and women. The traders after them sought coconuts,
Meeting for the community
The chief is blowing the conch. The sound of the conch is bringing all the villagers towards the centre of Nusa Simbo under the huge tree. There is a bench in the middle with the chief, a translator and myself sitting on it. Orla sits by my side, on teh ground. She is a woman after all. We sit there, waiting, in full view of everybody. The chief briefs me very quickly on the order of the gathering. He will first address the crowd, then I will hold my speech and then there will be questions and answers. The people gather slowly, in dribs and drabs. Stanley sits under the mango tree, Eddie is lurking on the edge of the slowly forming circle, Mason is nowhere to be seen. There is a feeling of some kind of tension in the air - it's hard to know exactly what is about to be said, but this meeting has clearly been called for more than just an announcement. And Mason's absence is significant. We have already heard the rumours about how some of the village is very displeased with him coming on board the ship to teach us the Ey Omba. But most probably more out of jealousy than anything else. The chief starts to talk and flashes the hundred Solomon dollars that was given for the land use, so much so that I started to feel uncomfortable that an obvious sign of importance of money. So I am standing up addressing 'the audience'. I start explaining the ship, with the concept of an expedition, going around the world with our three main aspects being seamanship, science and art. Our stay in Simbo is a voyage of discovery. discovery of its reef, of its people and its past. We are not here just to see but to experience. Cultures are transmitted from generation to generation and having travelled around the world, we are well aware of the disappearance of ancient culture. Traces that are still present in Simbo. So when we heard Eddie singing a few phrases of the traditional songs, we got excited. Where does this come from? Having Eddie, a man from Simbo on board, we realised that we need to get to Simbo and strengthen in Eddie's heart his cultural heritage. Since we are here to experience and our involvement in theatre what a better opportunity than to learn through gestures, songs and meanings through a dance the spirit of the ancestors of Simbo. In order to do that, we are planning to make a feast on the following Saturday, to create a platform but more than a platform, the celebration of a culture. We will film this to keep a record but also in the hope to create a movie that will naturally benefit the island of Simbo. I stress that it is not a commercial venture without any thoughts of making money. We are actually investing the whole ship, its crew and equipment, to do this. The film will give us a through line, a direction, and a focus for our stay here. Apart from the dances, it is also the relationship of the community and its environment that will be important during this week. We dived in most of the world's reefs and we have a global understanding of reefs and their importance for the future of any community using them as resources for their livelihood. Our view is a planetary view. The community and the people using the reef have knowledge that they might not realise. So I propose that we create an exchange of knowledge. We will dive the reef, film it, and give a report on the health and what we have witnessed. We also propose to invite a few people of the community to come on board, and have a seminar on coral reefs. In many places of the world, the reefs are very sick eg. we travelled in Indonesia and more than 80% of the reef are destroyed through dynamite, cyanide, and you might have expereience that already but people will come to the Solomons to take advantage of the reef that as we witnessed so far are still plentiful in fish. So during our stay, it will be a true exchange between your community and our scientific know-how on how you can manage the resources that you gathered from the sea. I stress again that you have on board a person that you can see as one of your ambassadors. He will travel with us to America representing your island to the people he will meet. So this is in short our plan for our stay in Simbo. And I welcome anybody to ask any questions, doubts, or reserves that they might have into what we are trying to do. As soon as that is said, a man stands up and his first concern is about their resources of sea cucumbers - beche de mer. Asking what will you do if you see beche de mer. And again here I am on my big horses with my voice getting stronger that we are not a commercial venture and that how our drive is to learn. I explained that it might seem strange that we are just coming here to look but that is what we are here to do. there is an obvious clear opposition and that same man kept on talking and talking and talking. Suddenly some young guys in the background started to shut him up, basically. After ping pong balls of questions, I sense myself becoming more edgy. I end up with asking if there is anything wrong in wanting to celebrate, have a good time and experience, if there is anything wrong in trying to learn about the reefs and the beneficiaries will also be the island of Simbo - is there anything wrong with that? By that time, the chief noticing my tone, tells me that the community agreed and that the meeting was over. The question that finally took the biscuit was having explained so emphatically that this was a film just for us and for our friends in America, more questions were asked aboutwhen we would show the film to people how much money we would make as they watched it. The whole concept of doing something just because you want to do it, which is the concept behind us livingon the ship in the first place, was completely alien to this meeting. Eddie whispered in my ear tell them that if people see the movie and they want to come to Simbo then that will mean that the people will have to pay to see the custom sites and stay, that will mean more tourism and more income for the island. It will not be until the two pigs are brought to the shores of Nusa Simbo that the feast becomes a reality. Until then it was only talk talk.
The pigs
Knowing very well that with some pigs that would definitely mean a feast and in true Melanesian custom, the chief wanting to make something happen needs to make a feast. This is a sign of wealth since the Melanesian culture you can't truly accumulate wealth, power was shown through generosity towards the people, making a great chief. So being seen as the chief of our own tribe of sea people, securing the pig as early as possible was of great importance to our stay in Simbo. It is Somo, after talking to Stanley, where we could have got a pig in Raromana, it is Somo coming on is canoe that talked to us abouttwo pigs of teh right size staying at the village across the bay. Wihtout delay we are going to see them. AFter af ew negotiations, we agree on purchasing the two pigs. I pay for them the next day and we will pick them up two days before teh feast. That became a whole scene in itself. We choose to get Ferdi and Sean as the pig carriers, trying to show the involvement of our crew in teh feast. But it is Mason, the pig master, that really did all the work. The pigs started to scream even before we arrived at their pen.
See October 2002 log for rest of description.
The day of slaughter is a red day. There are red blossoms on the tree above the place where the pigs lie, still in the shade of palms where we left them the day before. The pigs are untethered on their hind legs and dragged by a rope down to the sea. Mason says this is the best way to kill them and he is right. One strong man holds the first pig down in the shallow waters. The young boys gather around him, squealing with delight as the pig squeals under the surface. It takes almost three minutes for the pig to stop kicking and for his last breath to leave his body. I am on the shore, watching from the shade of a tree as the scene unfolds in front of me. I am slightly horrified at watching the pig being drowned, but also entranced by the smiles and delight on the small boys' faces. Mason now brings down the second pig - its hind legs get trapped on a log lying on the beach and it struggles to heave its body over it. Mason stands on the pig in the water to drown him. Meanwhile, the other man is wielding his knife with which he will slit the throat of the pig. Blood pours out, the waters around him turn red. Mason takes out his knife and repeats the action with his pig. His white shorts are now inches deep in the bloody water and the children swim and splash in it without noticing the change in colour. It is an intense shade of red. By the time the water reaches the beach it is merely pale pink, and the red colour is gone in a couple of minutes. The pigs are bled then carried back to the coconut palms that lie waiting for their corpses. Hot water is taken from the pot boiling over some firewood just behind the beach, poured onto the pigs and then layers of hessian matting placed over them to soak the skin for a couple of minutes. Mason and John Tione's son work hard with coconut halves to scrape off the soft hairs of the white pig. They come off so easily - this is a young pig without the coarse wiry hair that stuck to our own PNG pig in the freezer. The second pig will not be so easy to shave. He has to be carried over to another pile of palms - this time brown and dried. More palms are put on top of him and set alight. Red reappears in this day. This time an orangey red, We sit and watch the flames rise and the smoke occlude our view of the scene. Now the pig is ready to be shaved. Michel begins work on the first, the soft white pig. He slits him open from his throat to his tail on his belly. I film him as he places his hands inside the pig, scooping out his bowels with bloodied hands. The pig is clean, barely bleeding but Michel's hands are stained bright red immediately. He lays the entrails beside the pig and then describes each piece to the gathered men. The children crowd around behind him, thickly so that i can hardly find the space to stand nearby. Other children sit and waft leaves over the pig and its insides, keeping the flies off. I watch as they discuss each organ - the liver, the heart, the lungs, the intestines, the kindneys, which piece they will keep and which pieces they will throw away. They do not waste much. Then Michel begins to dissect the body into sizeable pieces to put in the oven. First the legs are severed, then the sides, then the ribs. When it comes to the head, and the removal of the tongue, I become a little squeamish. I also hope that this is not what comes out in my parcel when the oven is opened. There are other men, led by John Tione's son, working on the other pig and their methods of butchery are not as clinical as Michel's. There is a lot more hacking and a lot more blood and more mess. But the jobs are done and the baskets of pig meat pieces are then taken away to where they will be made a little smaller and wrapped in beautiful boat-shaped green leaves, tied up with one edge of the leaf, and put in the oven. The oven is inside a small house - a flat layer of stones on top of fire, still the smell of the roasting pig as it is quickly seared on the fire. Then the stem`s of banana trees cut and all the packages placed on top, covered tightly with banana leaves so no steam is escaping, then covered with copra bags. The pigs now rest in pieces overnight in their motu steam bath.