We were standing in the shallows yesterday waving him off and I remembered a fall day when I was about 8 or 9 and my brother & I had played with some new children in our neighborhood for the first time and we were being called to dinner and we stood in the yard with them chilled by the sudden evening but warm from running and I had a terrible fear that we’d never play like that again, that it would never be the same. I don’t remember if my premonition proved true. I just remember the stonelike weight in my chest as I went up the back steps.
I am tired tonight. Trying to learn another language—3rd one in 18 months—probing a new set of people who but for the matches & razors would rather be left alone—it has never felt more daunting to me before. What was it B said? Something about how all we’re watching is natives toadying to the white man. Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible. He despairs at the deepest level that this work has no meaning. Does it? Have I been deluding myself? Are these wasted years?
1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes.
I went down this afternoon to see how our real house is coming along. I like the spot we chose, right at the intersection of the women’s & men’s roads (the men of course have the best water views) where we will be able to keep an eye on the action. There are about 30 people on the job at this point and Fen bossing every last one of them around with only a handful of Tam words but a big barking voice when he needs it. So glad it is not directed at me.
Slowly winning over a few children. I go up to the field behind the women’s sleeping houses where they play or down to the lake where they swim and I squat on the ground and wait. Today I brought a bright red toy train and pushed it through the sand, making it rumble. Their curiosity was stronger than their fear and they approached until I said “Toot toot!” and they scattered and I laughed and eventually the train lured them back. I added at least 50 new words to my little lexicon while I sat with them. All the body parts plus landscape terms. They don’t tire as adults do explaining things. They like to be experts. And these are little kids 3 to 8 maybe. They’re an independent bunch, so different from the Kirakira with their protective adolescent guardians. Here those older girls are meant to start fishing & weaving by 9 or 10 it seems, and the boys apprenticing in the pottery & painting trades. So the little children roam free. Oh little Piya & Amini with their round bellies & tulip bark belts. I just want to scoop them up and carry them about, but for now they keep several yards between us, wary, looking up the beach, making sure there is an adult within sight.
1/11 This afternoon Fen brought home a houseboy, a shoot boy & a cookboy. He had his pick down at the construction site, though the shoot boy seems too delicate to bring us much more than a duck or a shrew and the houseboy Wanji tied a dishrag on his head and raced off to show his friends and never came back. But the cookboy saw the yams & the fish and got to work without a word. His name is Bani and he is serious & quiet and I think a bit of a misfit here among the loud chatty men. If he were a little older he’d make a good informant, but I don’t think he’s more than 14. Fen & I haven’t had the informant battle yet. I told him today at lunch that he could have first pick. He said it didn’t matter who he picked because he’d just want who I had in the end. So I said he could choose then I’d choose then he could choose again. We had a laugh about it. I told him that my next book would be How to Handle Your Man in the Bush.
I have found a language teacher. Karu. He knows some pidgin from a childhood spent near the patrol station in Ambunti. Thanks to him my lexicon has over 1000 words in it now & I quiz myself morning & night though part of me wishes I could have more time without the language. There is such careful mutual observing that goes on without it. My new friend Malun took me today to a women’s house where they were weaving & repairing fishing nets and we sat with her pregnant daughter Sali & Sali’s paternal aunt & the aunt’s four grown daughters. I am learning the chopped rhythm of their talk, the sound of their laughter, the cant of their heads. I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.