The sea’s resources seemed so readily available to us that people overlooked the need to make provisions for the times of shortage. Ways might have been found to make that huge quantity of fish last to cover less plentiful times, times when men went out to sea and came back complaining that it was too windy, that it was too calm, that little fish were eating the bait and stopping it reaching the bigger fish, that conditions basically weren’t right for fishing … Some efforts were made, fish were salted and smoked, the only preserving techniques the adults knew on our island, but the smoked and salted provisions soon ran out and then it was back to eating chillies again.
Wham! Blowing on your lips, and ouch if you touched yourself where you shouldn’t.
Fish was for us a product of primary necessity; as I’ve already said, if there was no fish, you didn’t eat. What I didn’t realise as a child was that the whole island suffered from disastrous shortages. Yes, they can be described as such. And maybe I didn’t realise the island suffered disastrous shortages because I didn’t wash my own clothes or light the lamp in our house. Therefore I didn’t know there was no soap on the whole island and I didn’t realise that kerosene was in such short supply that at a certain time at night we had to switch the lamp off or turn the flame down to preserve what little we had. Reducing the light’s intensity was a tricky operation and only grandmother did it well. It seemed like such a simple thing but really it wasn’t and if you hadn’t mastered it, and we little ones never mastered it, nor did our aunties, it was better not to get involved. Only grandmother did it well, and this was significant, for it might happen that the lamp went out in the middle of the night, leaving the house in total darkness, all because whoever had reduced the flame had not done so with a steady hand. Then grandmother would have to trouble herself with getting out of bed and calling for a neighbour in a low voice, asking if we might relight our lamp from hers. And grandmother did this because she believed that so many children under one roof ought not to spend the night without any light, in case something happened to one of us and some problem needed resolving. And why did she call on the neighbour in such a situation? Because the neighbour shared her sentiments and also kept the light on low all night. And because we didn’t have any matches in the house.
When the lamp went out for some reason before we’d gone to sleep, it constituted something of an education for me: I started to learn about our life and started to realise that things weren’t the way I’d always seen them. I started to realise that we didn’t have it so good. That kerosene, the liquid saviour, was scarce, that we had no matches and possibly no soap either. But how did all the kerosene lamps in our big village get lit? The same way the fires were lit. You took a coconut shell, with its leftover kernel, and went to the neighbour’s house, or to the neighbour’s neighbour, and asked for some burning embers. And you went back home and got some kindling you kept in the house and added it to the embers and the cuscús, which is what we call the kernel when it goes dry after all the oil is pounded out, and you lit the fire. If your neighbour had matches but already had a fire going in the stone tripod, she saved on a match and sent you into the kitchen to light your lamp. You had to kneel over the ashes, and this always betrayed what you’d been doing, though some people were able to squat and avoid getting dirty.
If your immediate neighbour had nothing to make fire with, you went to the next one, and from the next one to the next one, a hundred yards, two hundred, it didn’t matter, you might walk two hundred and fifty yards until you found someone with smoke coming out of their kitchen. Often what you did when you were sent out with the lamp was peer over the rooftops looking for smoke. Then you headed straight for where you saw it, avoiding having to go from house to house singing ‘Mum says can we have some fire?’ That’s what you said in our island’s language.
What with going from house to house asking for embers, a matchstick or a fireside to kneel over and stain your knees on, I realised that the adults on the island were exasperated by our situation and sought solutions in everything they could lay their hands on. But they could hardly lay their hands on anything, for our island was all alone at sea and there was no other land we could join forces with to combat our lack of everything. It was around then that I realised we islanders had no one to depend on but ourselves. That’s to say, we were on our own out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. People had given up hope of the boat ever coming back — the boat from the place where our fathers were. And in this great solitude, they stared out at the horizon all day, looking for a boat to appear that we could go and ask for things from. As children we saw how they rushed out to sea whenever they saw a stick on the horizon, thinking it might be a boat full of everything we needed. And they set off chasing after it with such conviction that they persuaded themselves the strength in their arms was equal to the power of the motor on the boat they were trying to catch. In any case, they tried, and they came back looking so disappointed it was as if they’d received confirmation that our situation was hopeless.
In the period I’m talking about, those who had someone to go out fishing ate fish, and those who had nylon and hooks went out fishing. So the lack of fish was considerable in some families. We longed for the big fish to chase the little fish and for them all to fling themselves on the sand, as we’d seen happen so many times before. And we longed for the squid beaching, that it might become a weekly event. And if we longed for such miracles, which is basically what they were, for it’s quite something to have fish flung at your feet, it was because our situation had become desperate. And it was during those desperate times that the extraordinary events I mentioned began to occur. All the evil came at once. The worst moments in the history of the island.
With the shortage of everything really squeezing at our throats, a boat appeared off the coast, and it was so close that we could tell it was taking fish from our larder, our sea. And so out we went, for we had something to say about this. But it turned out to be a boat from a friendly nation, stealing fish because it knew our island belonged to no one. Or rather that it belonged to us, but that we had no control over it. And we didn’t say anything about what they were doing, for every man’s conscience is his own, but we gave them a list of things we needed. This was it: soap, kerosene, matches and food. We didn’t ask for clothing because there was no need to say we lacked things to wear. But do you know what those men gave us? Cigarettes and fish. So many they wouldn’t fit in the canoes our men had gone out to the boat in. Can you believe it? They gave us cigarettes and fish. It was therefore clear that the owners of the boat from the friendly nation knew the fish were ours and wished to share them with us. And what about the tobacco? Our men had an unhealthy yearning for it, because for a long time they’d been reduced to smoking papaya leaves. So the men came back from the boat and no one can say things weren’t shared out evenly: fish for the women, tobacco for the men. In fact hardly any women on the island smoked, though a few of the older ones did something similar, chewing it and stuffing it in their gums. But only a few of them, and they never used it as snuff.
When they saw all that fish and tobacco, some people thought we could maybe have done better, that fish and tobacco wasn’t exactly what we needed most. So it was decided it would be a good idea if the women went to ask for themselves, because if the men on the boat saw the women and talked to them, then things would doubtless change for the better. That’s right, for the better. The problem was that the women on our island didn’t know how to paddle — they still don’t — and so they had to be taken out to the boat to talk to the white men. I remember one of the women told me … No, nobody told me anything. The result of the deal the women struck with the white men was the arrival on our island — not in the canoes that the women were taken out in, but in the big boat’s fishing vessels — of everything the women felt we lacked in that terrible time of shortages: soap, kerosene, salt, clothes, shoes, matches, a variety of things to eat, fish and cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks. There were several containers of soap powder, which was good because it meant people could take a handful for themselves and everyone left happy. The same thing with the salt, because most of it was unrefined. The alcohol and tobacco caused a great furore among the men, and one or two of the women too, it has to be said. A few people were lucky enough to get a shirt; others made do with seeing someone they knew take one away. The products that stretched the furthest were the fish, the salt and various things for making fire. And the alcohol, which spreads fast. Perhaps due to its flammable nature.