Initiation Rites
I saw the fence first, stiff stalks tied between bamboo posts, thin strips of leaves hanging to the ground. Then I noticed the shelter that had sprung up behind it — thicker, taller posts held up a thatched leaf roof. Logs lay parallel on their sides for benches. I wandered up to the neighbor’s house to inquire and Priscilla’s father filled me in. The island’s boys were going through an initiation rite. They’d been sequestered since Christmas in the Haus Boi. Tomorrow, he explained, they would parade back through their clan’s home turf, rubbed in oil and streaked with red, a single-stranded necklace to proclaim their wifelessness and a single feather on their heads, to reinforce the same point. I sat and pressed them for stories until the dusk’s mosquitoes chased me home.
That night, I played no music and I opened all the curtains. Half a bottle of rosé later, the rain began. The thunder didn’t clap, it applauded for minutes on end. The magic was happening, I felt sure. The boys were becoming men.
Grown men who’d left boyhood long behind were gathering just below my window. A flashlight swung from chest to chest. I, the taboo woman, wanted to eavesdrop, take note, steal their tones and forms for future use. I crept towards the window on my hands and knees, peeked this side and that around the wall, jittered with greed and fear and awe of the event. I wanted to sleep in the living room, washed by the wind, cloaked in the men’s voices, but the floor was too hard. I went to bed.
It kept on raining through to the next day and everything was postponed. Nan promised the deluge would stop by 1 or 2 in the afternoon and so it did. In a slight drizzle I walked next door. The older mamas were packing food; Priscilla had been cooking all morning and hadn’t showered yet. She was still wearing the incongruous top she’d had on the night before, the one with the asymmetrical neckline, one hot-pink strap looped like a belt. She sat me down with some cousins to keep me entertained while she got ready. I chewed betel-nut that made my head spin as their children gaped at me. Bernadette, a short-haired woman with big, expressive eyes and scarlet teeth told me about various taboos for men during the initiation time. No food cooked from their mother, no young single girls around. The girls had to stay back or they’d be seduced by the young men’s scent and oiled chests.
And when at last I saw them, lined in rows under the green roof, staring ahead with grim faces at nothing, it really was overwhelming. At first. It stretched on, though. Babies starting whining, slapping their moms. The initiates posed for pictures with their families. When at last I got my goody bag — a purse woven out of a banana leaf filled with garden vegetables and freshly slaughtered pork — I ate a quick dinner with the neighbors (rice and chicken) and headed home.
