She took the turn up the women’s road and when she turned back, he was bent over the canoe again. There was no notebook nearby. He hadn’t even brought it.
Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological. It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory—he had wooed her with these qualities night and day for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille—but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure. His interest lay in experiencing, in doing. Thinking was derivative. Dull. The opposite of living. Whereas she suffered through the humidity and the sago and the lack of plumbing only for the thinking. As a little girl in bed at night, when other girls were wishing for ponies or roller skates, she wished for a band of gypsies to climb up into her window and take her away with them to teach her their language and their customs. She imagined how, after a few months, they would return her home and after the hugs and tears she would tell her family all about these people. Her stories would go on for days. The pleasurable part of the fantasy was always in the coming home and relating what she had seen. Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.
In The Children of Kirakira she described for a Western audience the way one tribe in the Solomon island of Makira raised their children. In the final chapter, she made a few brief comparisons between Kirakira and American child-rearing customs. She submitted her manuscript not to a university press but to William Morrow, where it was quickly accepted. Mr. Morrow suggested she expand those comparisons into a couple of chapters at the end, which she did, and happily, for it was what interested her most, but it became the sort of opining that hadn’t been done in ethnographical writing before. Americans, she discovered upon publication, had never considered the possibility of another way to raise children. They were astounded by Kirakira children paddling in boats alone at age three, still sucking on their mothers’ breasts at age five, and, yes, disappearing into the forest or down onto the beach with a lover of either sex at age thirteen. Her research had been a bit too graphic for a general readership, and her theory that adolescence didn’t have to be full of the misery and rebelliousness it was in America got lost in the uproar. Fen liked the money the book brought in, but he had planned on his name becoming a household word, not hers. But he hadn’t written anything more than a short monograph about his Dobu.
In her grant proposal, she claimed that she would continue her inquiry of child-rearing in primitive cultures, but the Tam were tempting her with something even more enticing. At first she dared not hope, but the data kept coming: taboo reversals, sisters-in-law on friendly terms, emphasis on female sexual satisfaction. Yesterday Chanta explained to her that he could not go to visit his sick nephew in the far hamlet because his wife’s vulva would go wandering if he did. They were grand on the word vulva. When Nell asked if an elderly widow would ever marry again, several people said at the same time: ‘Has she not a vulva?’ Girls themselves decided whom they would marry, and when. Fen disagreed with every conclusion she drew on this topic. He said she was blinded by her desire to see them this way, and when she laid out her evidence he said whatever power the women had was temporary, situational. The Tam had been chased out by the Kiona and only recently restored to their lake by the Australian government. Many of their men had been killed or calaboosed or blackbirded, he said. Whatever she saw was a temporary aberration.
She decided to go to the last house first today. She was often depleted by the time she got there, and her notes on those families were always less substantial than the others.
‘Baya ban,’ a little girl called from the first house.
‘Baya ban, Sema.’
‘Baya ban, Nell-Nell.’
‘I’m not coming …’ Nell couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know the word for yet. ‘Fumo,’ she said finally. Later.
‘Baya ban, Nell-Nell.’