There's a Bat in my Soup: A Stint with the Gimi of West New Britain

Leafing through an atlas. As if crossing a Ouija board, my fingers alight on crescent-shaped New Britain, its western half unmarred by the strokes of a geographer's pen.

*

The hotel driver introduces me to a bald, barefooted man in the waiting room. An ex-rugby player twice my girth, Ronald is gifted with liquid litheness and a statesman's elocution:

- You’re a student? You can visit my village, if you wish. I live in the interior. It won’t be what you’re used to.

Our bush plane shudders over Whiteman Range, drops into a landing strip. We stock up on tinned mackerel, rice, batteries, tarp, lug them to an outboard boat. The craft skims out of the cove like a flying fish. Miles of numbing sea spray, then flickering torches, huts on stilts. Ronald’s name joyously echoed by an unseen chorus like frogs piping in the night. Elders convene for a tense conference: a dispute between Malaysian logging companies has cleaved the region into contentious factions.

Daybreak. Maw of a mangrove channel. We pole through topaz shallows, hike a slippery trail to bobbing hedges of bougainvillea. Mired in harsh isolation, the Gimi people subsist on tubers and windfalls of pork. One evening, crumbly yams are doled out. Ronald's grown-up nephews pine for "protein", so I pass them a few sweaty kina to buy flashlight batteries. In the morning, a tin pot hangs overhead: boiled flying fox, eyelids wrinkled in resignation. Primal craving drives me to scarf the bat, greyish oily skin and all, sparing only the bones and brains.

*

Men pound on lizard skin drums. Mothers clench pig tusks in their mouths, hop around a perimeter till dawn. A three-year-old boy, eyes gleaming in terror, the tendril of his penis positioned over a wood slab. Flash of a razor, the foreskin peeled back. At the same time, pigs are speared: a hubbub of wailing waifs, screeching swine. A child dips her finger in steaming entrails, daubs her face and a friend’s with a vermilion fresco. They study one another, giggle, smile.