2/8 In our own house now. With all our stuff & routine & the smell of fresh wood. I am like an old Victorian lady, receiving my visitors in the morning & going out to the women’s houses in the afternoon to do my own calling. My mind slips too easily and often from the children I am meant to study to the women here who are such a contrast to the listless Anapa & coarse but powerless Mumb. women. These Tam women have ambition and make their own money. Yes they give some to their husbands for new wives, or to their sons to pay a bride price but they keep the rest. They do the trading, even of the men’s ceramics. And they make their own marital choices, the young men prancing around them like sorority girls. Everything hinges on the decisions the women make. I see fascinating reversals of sex roles here. Fen (surprise, surprise) disagrees.
But he is working more now that the house is done. I have given him a lot of the good stuff: kinship, social structure, politics, technology, religion. He is focusing too much on kinship though, just as he focused too much on religion & totems with the Mumb. He thinks he has cottoned onto some pattern which he refuses to share with me. It does give him direction & energy so I can’t complain overmuch.
2/9 Fen & I have just had the fight I’ve been trying to avoid. Nothing that escalated — he is much better now. It really was a Mumbanyo thing. He has focused on that damn kinship theory to the exclusion of all else so that we now have nothing on government, religion, technology, etc. He suspected it was a cross-sexual rope system, men inherit from their mothers and women from their fathers, and got more & more excited about it, interviewing in the men’s houses all day and staying up sometimes all night trying to put it all together. And now it has all crumbled to bits and he refuses to do anything more, won’t figure out what the pattern really is and won’t work on anything else either. I have asked to trade food & nutrition (which I have already covered sufficiently) for kinship & politics, but he refuses. So I will have to take it all on in secret.
2/10 Thick dreams about Helen in Marseille. Over three years ago now but am still stuck there, going back & forth between the two hotels, trying to split myself in half. H in her blue hat on the quai, her lips quivering: I’ve left Stanley, her first words to me, and then Fen not giving us the time he’d promised me, coming right up behind me, leaving no doubt, no room for an explanation. Oh rotten days. Rotten. And yet I return to them like an opium addict.
I want too much. I always have.
And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform? Charlotte wrote that rumors are flying about Howard and Paul, and Howard might lose his job at Yale. And her nephew, getting his PhD at Wisconsin, was declared insane and committed to a state asylum when they discovered he was a leader in the Communist Party there. I think above all else it is freedom I search for in my work, in these far-flung places, to find a group of people who give each other the room to be in whatever way they need to be. And maybe I will never find it all in one culture but maybe I can find parts of it in several cultures, maybe I can piece it together like a mosaic and unveil it to the world. But the world is deaf. The world — and really I mean the West — has no interest in change or self-improvement and my role it seems to me on a dark day like today is merely to document these oddball cultures in the nick of time, just before Western mining and agriculture annihilates them. And then I fear that this awareness of their impending doom alters my observations, laces all of it with a morose nostalgia.
This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through: my marriage, my work, the fate of the world, Helen, the ache for a child, even Bankson, a man I knew for 4 days and may easily never see again. All these pulls on me that cancel one another out like an algebraic equation I can’t solve.
2/12 Great commotion on the water this morning. The women’s boats which had gone out peacefully earlier came rushing back in shouting & splashing and when I got to the beach I saw that all the screaming had been coming from one woman, Sali, her moans deep and her yelps shrill and then a harsh cry like a mountain lion with an arrow through its flank. She staggered from the canoe to land and crouched in the sand to have her baby. A few of the older women spread bark cloth beneath her. They all began singing songs to lure the baby out. I waited for the taboos to set in and people to be sent away, but no one chased me or anyone else away, not even the few men who had gathered beneath trees behind us. I spotted Wanji among them and sent him up to the house for boiling water & towels. I squeezed in beside Malun.
I assisted in this birth. I saw the baby’s head show and retreat, show and retreat like a moon phasing quickly and then suddenly it pushed through the bright red labia all at once while Sali hollered then was so quiet I thought she was dead but then she was screaming again and a shoulder came through, a tiny knob compared to the huge head and at the next ripple of pain I tugged on that little shoulder and the other shoulder came, followed by the belly and the little fat legs and there he was, a baby boy, as if brought in on a tide. Malun & her sister laughed at my tears but I was overwhelmed by life arriving and remembering my sister Katie’s fat legs and full of a wild selfish hope that my body having now seen the simplicity of it could manage that someday. Malun bit off the cord and cinched the stump with a reed. Many hands reached out to wipe the white coating off the baby and I wondered if this is where the Mumbanyo’s King of Australia myth comes from, the one in which the first man steps out of his white skin. Wanji finally came with the boiled water and towels but we didn’t need them. As we walked up the beach Kolun, Sali’s husband, came forward and took his child without hesitation and the baby curled up like a kitten in the crook of his collarbone. A few men had flutes and played a formless tune. Sali walked without help and chatted with her two sisters and cousin. I wished I could understand all that she was saying but it was too fast, too intimate.
2/16 Sali’s baby died. He wouldn’t suck.
2/17 Fen is being insufferable. He cuffed Wanji for taking a few elastic bands without asking and now Wanji is wailing and Fen is shouting and Sali’s boy is still dead.