Melanesia

Black volcanic soil erupts with banana, manioc and taro…huge papaya hang from high stems…banyan trees cast giant shadows, twisting their roots down in cascades…a flying fox shoots overhead… rooting pigs ravage the ground…

The missionary wakes sweating in the dark, sensing Satan close by; the Fiend has possessed these heathens and set them to do his work,-surely the Last Judgment will not be long now?

Mana is flowing, currents are flowing, through everything, through the air, through objects, through actions, through people, though you, through me, for good and for evil, ancestors speaking,- can you catch it, channel it, make it work?
Spirits howl through the night, and sometimes in hidden banyan groves reveal themselves to the worthy…

Alvaro de Mendaña landed at Guadalcanal, believing he had found Ophir; but when his men paddled ashore to find water the tribesmen slaughtered them, cut them to pieces, cut off heads and limbs, cut out eyes and tongues, broke open their skulls and ate the brains…

The dying man whispers: I shall return by sea and the people watch for a shark’s fin in the lagoon.
The shark caller wins his ancestor’s favour and calls him to shore; to herd schools of fish into the net; to capsize his enemies’ canoes and devour them.

This is the sweet-mouth magic: rub a chicken feather on the special stone and repeat her name four times and after four days she will come to you, follow you everywhere, belong to you…

They wait for John Frum to arrive on his great white ship of precious gifts, from far, far across the ocean…they will wait forever, forever, they will never lose faith…they build wharves and warehouses to receive the plenty; they get drunk on kava and dream of the new age about to begin..

Has a sorcerer stolen my footprint and cursed me? Do invisible hands sow poison in my food? I walk among broken stones, cities of ghosts in the coconut groves. Man and woman danced till the spider made death. Church bells’ sobbing seeps into my bones.

Malinowski writes his diary by lamplight in a hut, head full of sea snakes and Trobriand women: “I watched the muscles of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of her body, so hidden to us whites, fascinated me…I was sorry I was not a savage and could not possess this pretty girl.”

Supine on the bed, staring up into the ceiling fan’s hissing revolutions, I fall into the constellations,and the stars break up, meteors streak across the night sky, islands burn like fireflies, I open the big black Bible of the sea and read from the waves, archipelagos of words…