I went into the small mosquito room I slept in. The sheets on the mat hadn’t been changed for weeks and my clothes were strewn everywhere. I shoved everything in the crate I used for a bedside table and spread clean sheets on the mat in the best version of a real bed that I could manage. I had a nice pillow, one from my mother’s house, but the humidity had stuck the feathers together so it felt more like clay than down.
I heard laughing behind me. She was standing on the other side of the netting, observing my attempts to fluff it up. ‘Please don’t worry about that. But point me in the direction of the latrine, if you have one.’
I took her out to it. You had to have them built a good distance from the house in the tropics. I’d learned that the hard way with the Baining. The sky had lightened and we didn’t need a torch. I wasn’t sure what state the latrine would be in, having never expected a woman to use it, and I planned to have a look before I let her in, but she reached it first and jumped in before I could stop her.
Now I was in a predicament. I felt I should stay close by, in case there was a snake or a bat, both of which I had encountered in that small space before, as well as a flying fox and an enchanting red and gold bird Teket thought I had imagined. But I also felt one needed privacy to perform one’s duties. Before I could decide the proper distance at which to stand, her water began to flow at an astonishing rate and kept on for a great while. Then she was out the door and back on the path with me, limping along but with a new burst of energy.
When we returned, Fen had shifted over to one side and was releasing his breath in great suspended puffs, like a surfacing whale. It felt to me like a terribly intimate noise and I wished I’d gotten him to the bedroom before he’d entered such a deep sleep. I thought Nell would go to bed then, but she followed me to the back of the house, where I was planning to make a cup of tea and think of where I could take them to find a decent tribe.
She asked me what the last piece of the puzzle here was, and I told her about a Kiona ceremony called Wai I’d seen only once, when I first arrived, and my nascent thoughts about the transvestitism involved. She asked if I’d ever tried my ideas out on them.
I laughed. ‘ “I say, Nmebito, did you know that by embracing your feminine side that night you have provided an equilibrium for this community that the overdeveloped masculine aggression of your culture often threatens?” Is that what you mean?’
‘Maybe something more like: Do you think men becoming women and women becoming men brings joy and peace?’
‘But they’re not reflective in that way.’
‘Of course they are. They reflect on when they fished the day before—what it brought them, where they might choose to go the next day. They reflect on their children, their spouses, their siblings, their debts, their promises.’
‘But I see no evidence of the Kiona analyzing their own rituals in search of meaning,’ I said.
‘I’m sure some do. It’s just that they’ve been born into a culture that makes no place for it, so the impulse weakens, like an unused muscle. You need to help them exercise it.’
‘Is this what you do?’
‘Not all in one day, but yes. The meaning is inside them, not inside you. You just have to pull it out.’
‘You’re assuming analytical abilities that I’m not sure they possess.’
‘They are human, with fully functioning human minds. If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here.’ She had real color in her cheeks now. ‘I’m not interested in zoology.’
Observe observe observe, I’d always been instructed. Nothing about sharing your findings or eliciting analysis from the subjects themselves. ‘Wouldn’t this approach create a self-consciousness in the subject that would then alter the results?’
‘I think observing without sharing the observations creates an atmosphere of extreme artificiality. They don’t understand why you’re there. If you are open with them, everybody becomes more relaxed and honest.’