The man went on paddling, and he advanced enough for the headland of a village that was halfway between the south village and the big village to come into view. It was a small village with calm shores. That halfway village’s canoemen were spared the worst vagaries of the sea. They could paddle out of their bay with their eyes closed. The man paddled, confident he’d soon be leaving the calm waters of the halfway village behind. But he went on feeling like he wasn’t advancing properly. Either he had a huge invisible load in the canoe or someone was pulling him back, preventing his progress. This had never happened to him before. One woman with a baby could not weigh so much, he thought. He went on paddling and, just to say something to distract himself from his travails, he asked the mother whether she shouldn’t suckle the child. The child wasn’t asking to be suckled, but it was a long time since she’d suckled it and, if it was sick, that couldn’t be a good thing. And the mother said she hadn’t suckled it because the child was asleep and she didn’t want to wake it. That was the end of the matter, although a little later, the woman took out her breast and put the child to suckle. The man didn’t look and, as the child was wrapped in cloth, he couldn’t see whether it suckled or not, though he presumed it did. That she hadn’t suckled the child hadn’t been bothering him: he’d only said it to distract himself from what was puzzling him so. Which was why they were not advancing properly. Something was obstructing them, though he couldn’t think what. And it was beginning to anger him.
It was common on the island for a canoeman paddling from one village to another to throw a fish hook and bait out and to have a length of nylon at his lips. That’s how he held on to the line, by curling his lips. Anyone who’s not been a fisherman on our island might imagine this being troublesome or difficult, but it’s not, and there are two things I ought to make clear: one, the canoeman never stops paddling, and two, the nylon is not really nylon but rather a thicker type of thread used to fish larger specimens, fish of the shark variety. If a fish tugs on the nylon, the line of thread falls away from the canoeman’s lips and only then does he stop paddling, to deal with developments. If he’s in luck, he’ll be able to haul in the thread, pull the fish into the canoe and kill it with his baton. This is easier said than done, and struggling with a large specimen can be dangerous, but anyway, assuming he kills the fish, there might not be enough room for it in the canoe. In which case the canoeman puts it back in the water and tows it to the big village. In such circumstances, he’d be justified in feeling an extra weight as he paddled, because of the drag caused by the large specimen, a shark, a swordfish, a tuna, etc … But no such thing had happened that day. Given the child’s sickness, the canoeman hadn’t wanted to lose any time, so he hadn’t thrown out a fishing line. He wanted to get to the big village as quickly as possible, to seek out the medicine. That being the case, what was the problem? What was hindering their progress? He paddled, he paddled, he paddled, but they didn’t advance as much as they should have. What a tremendous weight, this really isn’t normal. Something’s happening that I’m unaware of. Is someone preventing me from reaching my destination? I never expected an old canoe to weigh so much. I can’t understand it. That’s what the canoeman said to himself. He even thought about pulling up on a beach to see if there was anything stuck to the underside of the canoe, something that was preventing it from advancing properly. But what could it be? Sometimes little fish, the sort that follow bigger ones and travel in pairs, accidentally get stuck to a canoe. They fix on to the canoe using their suckers, though nobody knows why. But they are tiny fish and barely weigh a thing. And besides, they’re found much further out at sea where they follow the bigger fish, fish that are so big they don’t notice a couple of tiddlers stuck to their underbelly, until the fishermen pull them off and throw them back into the water.
The man knew all this, and he knew it couldn’t be the cause of the problem. So he didn’t pull up on a little beach to check whether anything was stuck to the canoe and obstructing it. But it was exasperating and it was making him angry. He was having to make much more effort than he ought to, and they hadn’t got to where they were going yet and he started to worry, for he was getting tired. What was it? He was a long way from guessing what the problem was, but he was right to think there was a reason the canoe felt so heavy, much heavier than there being just a woman and a sick child in it. To understand what it was, we have to go back to when they were pulling the half-built canoe to the beach. Back to the south village, to when the half-built canoe was still a long way from the shore, to when the women who had received the call were peeling malangas to prepare the soup that those pulling the canoe would eat later.
Aaale, toma suguewa,
Alewa!
Aaaalee, toma suguewa,
Alewa!
Maestro: Aaale, toma suguewa,
Alclass="underline" Alewa!
Maestro: Aaaalee, toma suguewa,
Alclass="underline" Alewa!
And the canoe advanced as the men and women cried out in unison. And in among those men and women there was a particular woman, who had gone to see the maestro to ask a favour without knowing a canoe was being pulled that day. She’d gone to see the maestro, who was her godfather, to ask him to take her to the big village because her child was very sick. But there are lots of things you do collectively on our island, and to bring people together collectively you have to give them prior warning. And once people have readied themselves for whatever collective exercise you’ve called them for, you can’t just tell them to go home and come back another day, for those people have volunteered their help out of goodwill, even though they’ve been asked to do an arduous task. Which is why the maestro told the woman she’d have to wait, that they’d deal with her matter as soon as this other matter had been taken care of. Furthermore, because of the way these things are done, the maestro had to be there. He was the only one who had to be there, despite the fact that the song seemed simple, despite the fact that in terms of pulling the canoe, what you might call the actual pulling, he’d do very little. But he was the maestro, and on our island there are many things that seem simple but that are only done when the right person is present. Nobody takes someone else’s place on our island without being publicly invited to do so. And that was the case here. The woman had to wait and she understood this. And although she had a child on her back burning with fever, she joined the men and women who had volunteered to pull the canoe from the bush to the water’s edge, where the maestro would finish his work. He’d earn nothing for the work, because back then people didn’t charge for such things.
As I’ve already said, that woman was an orphan: her parents had died and she’d been left with nobody but a sister. She had nobody else in the world. She was a woman, that’s to say an adult, but she felt like an orphan, for she’d grown up without anybody. With the terrible shortages we suffered on the island, she’d been taken to the boat and she talked to the fish thieves and was given something to help relieve our hardship. And after the visit she was left with a child, a baby boy, and the boy’s fathers came to visit him. But it seemed that we were condemned to go without and we were soon back to living without matches, kerosene, soap, tobacco, clothing, needles or sewing thread. And after seeing so many people die, people began to return to the settlements, in order to get away from the reminder of the cemetery in the big village. That woman went to the south village and she took her white child with her, the boy she’d got after going on board the boat. As the boy was so little, she put him on her back and took him with her to the plantations. Then she left him to sleep on some lengths of cloth, while she went round harvesting and weeding. She covered him up to protect him from the sun and from any creatures that might come along. If the boy cried, she got up and went over to suckle him. On our island it’s said that a mother who doesn’t eat fish is a mother without milk in her breast. And because she was an orphan, she ate very little fish. She only ever ate fish when she was given some by a neighbour whose husband had come back with a big catch. Otherwise she closed the door when night fell and went to sleep with her child in the dark. They slept on dry banana leaves, over which she’d lain lengths of cloth and old bedspreads. If she came across a coconut tree on her plantation, and if it was in season and she was able to climb it, she took coconuts for herself and her child, for the baby liked coconut milk and she could make a mash with the pulp that saw her through times of hardship. She threw a little cassava flower in with the coconut mash and ate well enough. But I’m not sure that woman always had the strength to climb coconut trees. And when she didn’t, she’d look up at the coconuts and sigh, and suckle her child as best she could.