1/13 Have just spent 4 hours typing up 2 days’ worth of notes. Completed census today, 17 houses, 228 people. Had to pry Fen away from housebuilding to get the numbers from the men’s houses, which I cannot enter.
Every now and then, if I am not careful, I think of B patching me up that first night and everything goes a little wobbly inside me for a few seconds. It is probably good that he has not come back as soon as he promised he would.
1/17 Malun came over today with an enormous basket and a very serious expression on her face. Xambun, she explained, is her son. She opened the basket and showed me hundreds of lengths of knotted palm fronds, a knot for every day he’s been gone. I felt like I grew 4 new ears trying to piece together what she was telling me. It took a while, but I learned that Xambun is not dead. He was lured away by blackbirders to work in a mine, Edie Creek is my guess. He is a big man, a tall man, a wise man, a fast runner, a good swimmer, an excellent hunter, she told me. (Both Bani & Wanji have since confirmed these things and more. Xambun seems to be their Paul Bunyan, George Washington, & John Henry all in one.) Malun wanted to know if we knew the men he went off with. I’m starting to think this is why they took us in so readily, they thought we had information about Xambun. I wish we did. What a treasure trove a man like that would be, what perspective he would have on his own people. Malun believes he is coming home very soon. I didn’t have words or the heart to tell her what I know of those gold mines. I didn’t tell her he might not be free to leave. Oh the love & fear in her eyes as she stroked her basket stuffed with knots.
8
I had three objectives when I sat down to write my mother every week.
1) Provide proof that I was still alive
2) Convince her that my work had value and was moving swiftly in the right direction
3) Imply without directly stating that I would rather be in her house in Grantchester than anywhere else on earth.
The first objective was, of course, the easiest. I accomplished it as soon as I typed ‘Dear Mother.’ The other two required deceit, and she sniffed out duplicity in me like a hellhound sniffs death.
But now there was a fourth objective: Do not mention Nell Stone. Easy enough, you might think. And yet I found it impossibly difficult. Three letters I had already yanked from the typewriter. I crumpled them and tossed them out the window and little Kanshi and two of his pals were knocking them around with cane sticks. I tossed out a fourth and the boys shouted with pleasure and Kanshi’s grandmother called out from her mosquito bag that she was napping and could they please go and drown themselves.
I twisted in another sheet of paper.
Dear Mother,
Today I believe is the first of February. Three months left. Perhaps this letter and I will arrive at your door at the same time. The garden will be in full flourish then, and we will sit for tea beneath the lilacs and juneberries and all will be right with my world once more.
I hope this letter finds you in sound health, and that no winter ‘flu has reached your door. Has it been a mild winter?
I feared I’d asked this very question in my last two letters, but plugged on.
By the time you receive this, winter will be a distant memory at any rate, and we will scheme about how to keep the aphids off the Felicia roses and the Russian vine from climbing too far up the south side of the house. Summer problems.
As I’ve mentioned, my focus these past weeks has been on Kiona death rituals. Yesterday I went to a mortuary ceremony in which the skull of a long-dead man was dug up then covered with clay and refashioned back into a fleshy face with nose and mouth and chin. The poor artist was heckled terribly about his rendition of these features, but finally a portrait was agreed upon and the mintshanggu was performed. The head was set on a stage and the men crawled beneath the platform and played their flutes for the women, who listened stoically, almost trancelike. And then the women rose and hung up food for his ghost and sung the name songs of the man’s maternal clan. When I asked how long he had been dead no one could tell me. There was crying, not the loud theatrical sobbing of the men at funerals but a more natural weeping. Natural. I find I use this word indiscriminately. What is natural to an Englishman might not be at all natural to, say,
I paused here. I was like a schoolboy in my need to just type the word.
an American, let alone a tribe in New Guinea.
Her antennae would twitch. She would detect something.
I find I am more and more interested in this question of subjectivity, of the limited lens of the anthropologist, than I am in the traditions and habits of the Kiona. Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
Why not just mention them?
I have had some visitors, fellow anthropologists who have been, unbeknownst to me, in the region for nearly as long as I have, a married couple. He’s from Queensland, a broad strapping fellow I met in Sydney that time, and she’s American, quite well known but a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin.