"The rights were head-high and fast. The wind was offshore. The coral reef was kaleidoscopic. This place was nothing like home." Photo: Kew
After a four-hour nap in my hut, there came a knock.
“Mister Michael? It is time to go,” Tebau said behind the door. The room was dark—night had fallen. In the council truck we drove for 15
minutes down the bumpy dirt road to a large maneaba, a large and sturdy pavilion-style structure with a high A-frame roof, a cement floor, and no walls. Throughout Kiribati, maneabas were village community centers and general meeting areas where locals could discuss politics, get married, play bingo, sleep, or have traditional kaimatoa (“dance of strength”) nights, like this one.
“Come,” Tebau said, motioning to a palm mat on the floor. “Please sit.” A crowd surrounded the outside of the building. Its floor was open but the perimeter was ringed with dozens of older people sitting and fanning themselves, chatting and eating. It was a boisterous, energized event. Most people smoked cigarettes. Several of the men wore red sarongs and white shirts. Small children sprawled asleep on the cement. “They do not need beds,” Tebau told me. “They sleep anywhere.”
An impromptu guest, I was asked to introduce myself to the crowd; Tebau translated for them. When he was finished, a bald elderly man in thick eyeglasses stood and sang “God Bless America,” something he learned from the U.S. soldiers on Tarawa in 1943. Then in Gilbertese he said to me, “Many thanks to you Americans, or we might be part of Japan. Thank you for keeping our home.”
A large amount of food was passed around the circle—plastic bowls of chicken, papaya, bananas, rice, breadfruit, crab, coconuts,
whole grilled fish—and when the meal was finished, dozens of female dancers appeared, ornately dressed in green grass skirts, white tank-tops, garlands of flowers on their heads and across their torsos and down their arms. All were barefooted. Many wore face paint. The dancing started almost immediately, with simultaneous, loud chanting and singing from the male dancers, who remained seated, and the crowd whooped and yelped along.
Behind the women, several men were sitting around a wooden box and, using it for percussion, they pounded it rhythmically with their hands, hollering in baritone against the shrillness of the women and children. The dancing resembled hula, though its purpose seemed more ceremonial than entertaining. The sweating, unsmiling women gyrated with outstretched arms and sudden bird-like jerks of their heads, almost feverishly, and one of them eventually fainted into the arms of an old lady behind her.
“Black magic,” Tebau said. “Ask me about it later.”
After several songs, young male dancers appeared, shirtless, decorated florally, and did a form of sitting dance called bino while the women and crowd clapped and sang. Tebau said most of the songs centered on love, and based on the women who wept, it was highly emotive.
After two hours, the event was finished—the dancers and crowd, including me, were exhausted. The air was heavy with the cloying scent of body odor and leftover food, and my legs were sore from sitting cross-legged on the hard mat.
Tebau looked florid. “We go?” We drove back under a magnificent celestial ceiling—shooting stars, clear moon falling into the ocean. The air temperature was perfect. We bumped along the dirt road through the palm forest, our truck’s lights illuminating the fronds above, like a palm tunnel.
I was curious about the dancer who had collapsed. “Black magic?” I asked Tebau. “Yes. Here, there are old people who are experts and they know quite a lot of magic regarding the dance. Many of them on the island. And so when a young girl wants to dance for her first time, she has
to learn to dance from this expert. After then, he will make you dance, perform the skills for him, and if he thinks you are quite ready to perform a dance during a festival or something like that, he is going to do the magic. This kind of magic is like a black magic, because he is going to give you a kind of magic that will give you strength, so you will be powerful during the dance. A kind of feeling that will make you feel strong, happy, delighted when you perform. During the dance, you scream and shake, because it is from the magic which the old expert dancer did to you.”
