From a distance
November 24, 2017
In Buka, a nightly show plays out as lightning unfurls across the sky, its thunderous partner often missing. Instead a silent display of light dances on the distant horizon. Like watching a movie without the sound, it is somewhat emblematic of the volunteer experience here.
I live with a fellow volunteer in a house that has been affectionately dubbed “Univol Heights”, due to our enviable upper story vantage, whose veranda gives us a commanding view of all that goes on in our Busbin ‘neighbourhood’. The windows are louvers, with only a green screen separating me from the world outside. But projected onto this green screen are sounds, not images. At night, amplified somehow by the darkness, the world turns continuously, like an ever morphing zoetrope. Dogs howl and bark at unseen ghosts, children cry as their bedtime approaches, an early morning plane lands with the sunrise and late night revellers stumble home with their boom box blaring. I hear it all at a distance, a part of it and yet, apart. In my room under a sheet or sheen of sweat, depending on the night, I’m trying not to listen but it’s always there.
A month ago our landlord passed away and we witnessed how the village transformed after a death. Temporary shelters were built for the visiting relatives. Others housed the pigs that eventually became the funerary feast. All through the night drumming and wailing drifted past my window, a test of their endurance (and at times my patience). The final day of the grieving period, the family walked at dawn through our village, singing and blessing the houses. I stood at my window, as the sun rose and watched the procession pass. I’m told of other rituals, of taking on the spirit of the dead so they can have their final meal, of unexpected deaths blamed on sorcery, and messages left behind. My own ideas of death and what comes after stand apart from these stories and yet they still draw me in.
Some days it’s too much. The heat, day long power cuts, weeks without rain, my inability to be lost in the crowd. I create a self-imposed barrier with my headphones and sunglasses, trying to ignore catcalls and hellos and unwanted touches. Sometimes I think I’m being too sensitive, too standoffish, too assuming that my white face is all that warrants this attention. Yet my conspicuousness is also a form of protection. Unlike many Bougainvillean women, who are subject to some of the highest rates of sexual and domestic violence in the world, I can escape.
The reality of this violence is all around. In the black eye of a friend, too terrified to leave. In the stories that emerge from the various safe houses set up for victims. It’s even a drama that unfolds beneath our second story perch. One Saturday morning a man, intoxicated with rage and alcohol advanced on his mother with a stick, beating her once, twice before anyone thought to intervene. He threw himself full force into the side a house repeatedly until, with blood carving a trail down his sweat slicked body, he allowed himself to be taken aside. At home I would grab the phone and dial 111 but here in Bougainville it is not so simple and as volunteers we are often cautioned not to get involved.
My time here is finite and will soon morph from the present into the past. Bougainvilleans themselves divide the country into distinct time layers. There’s the nostalgia for the pre-conflict era, when Bougainville was one of the most successful and richest provinces in the region. Then came the conflict, many fled, more died and Bougainville slid into chaos. Now the region is ‘post-conflict’, trying to move toward a peaceful and prosperous future, while clinging to a dream of the past.
Even those who were not here during the conflict, who weren’t born yet or are too young to remember, it is still a part of their reality. I learn of it only through snippets of memory and through the shadows of buildings that belong to the past. Arawa, the main centre during the time of BCL, is full of these architectural ghosts. The White House, a former government building, now stares out through empty black windows, a few markets stalls filling its lower levels. Or a squash court turned second hand clothing store, necessity replacing leisure. It is a snapshot of the past, faded. Another separation between what was and what is.
My time remaining reduces from months into weeks and now days. The elasticity of time causes these final weeks to condense; I can’t grab hold and slow them down. There are many things I will miss: my wanwok (colleagues) who pushed me to speak tok pisin, so generous with their time and words and made me feel part of the family from the beginning; the markets full of cheap, fresh produce, giant pineapples, fresh coconut flesh and sweet magat (tapioca and banana; the clicks of ghostly geckos, my permanent roommates this entire year; the tropical downpours, that descend, as though someone had dropped a bucket of water, before giving way once more to blue skies; the excited chatter of Nelson, a young boy who lives next door, who spoke his own language and, despite the attempts of his parents, is naked every chance he gets; this place, these people; and I’ll miss that evening session of lightning illuminating the sky, as I watch, from afar.
These words I write and the photos I take create another layer of distance between me and the place I describe. When I leave these fragments will be what I return to. Poor approximations of the place. Yet the distance will shrink when I come back to them, as I recall this island. It has found its way inside of me, I am separated from it yet it resides within me as the border between self and space is forever blurred.
