Yu No Kick Part 3: Black Magic

Hanging a breadfruit leaf from your clothesline prevents it from raining. It wasn't entirely clear, when this was being explained to me, what, exactly, the area of effect for this particular weather control device is. Does it just not rain on your clothesline? Sort of like the reverse of the little cartoon raincloud that down pours on just one person? Or does a single breadfruit leaf take out the rainfall for the entire island because, if so, I feel like that might lead to a lot of accidental droughts. There's a leaf for just about anything around here: curing diseases, catching fish, causing diseases, catching women, making money, fertility, birth control, and bringing up the price of copra. In fact, given that there aren't really all that many kinds of plants around I think there are probably more leaf-related spells than there are actual kinds leaves, which suggests that some leaves must being doing double duty, which makes you wonder how if, for example, you're cooking up some papaya-leaf based potion, you specify you want the money-making effect as opposed to the herpes-causing effect. Although I suppose if you assume that each potion has to contain at least three kinds of leaves you open up a lot more possibilities. The local hospitals and health centers are constantly butting heads with practitioners of “kastom” (Bislama from the English word “custom,” referring to practices and traditions predating the arrival of Europeans), so for every guy you see walking around with a professional-looking hospital bandage covering a wound you see a guy strolling around with a heap of leaves fastened onto his cut with a piece of rope (this is even more amazing when you consider the fact that Vanuatu has socialized medicine, so getting bandages and antibiotic creams from the hospital is free whereas getting a stack of leaves from the witch doctor usually costs money). Belief in the magical properties of plants is so strong, in fact, that it's not unheard of for someone to make an announcement at the end of a church service asking if anyone knows of a leaf to help him nab a wife (yes, this actually has happened), which is ironic given how hard the churches work around here to combat belief in black magic and kastom.

Duncan and I go back and forth a lot about the ghost that lives at Aop river. Aop is a small river located about halfway between Lakatoro and Tautu. The road goes right over it and so one really has no choice but to cross it if you're trying to get from my house to Lakatoro or visa versa. Like any good parent, Duncan is worried sick that I'm going to get myself killed. Unlike my Dad in the States, however, who might worry about me getting involved with drugs or ending up in a nasty traffic accident or getting mugged while walking around New York City, Duncan worries that I'm going to get dismembered by spirits (is dismember the appropriate word to describe what spirits do to unsuspecting mortals? I'm not really sure, but I'm going to go with it anyway). You see, while he has no problem with me transiting between Lakatoro and Tautu during the day, I sometimes end up drinking kava in Lakatoro and then biking home after dark, and this is the source of the disagreement. It usually goes something like this:
Duncan: But you're not afraid to ride at night?
Me: No, I like it, it's not as hot.
Duncan: That road is no good at night. There's something no good there. It's not as strong as it used to be when I was little because we all pray now at church, but it's still there, ask anyone.
Me: Mmmm...
Duncan: Like, have you ever seen lights in the coconut plantation at night that look like truck lights?
Me: Yeah.
Duncan: Well, weren't you frightened?
Me: Maybe for a little bit, but then I realized that there was a truck behind me.
Duncan: You are a white man, you can't understand what I'm talking about.
And he's right, I really can't understand him when he tells me that there's a ghost haunting my road home. What's funny is that if he'd told me not to bike home at night because I might get mugged, I probably would've abandoned my late-night kava expeditions, but the idea of another person waiting to jump him on the road sounds about as ridiculous to Duncan as the idea of a ghost sounds to me. In Vanuatu they may be afraid of the dark but in US we're afraid of each other.

Unfortunately for Duncan, I will never be able to believe in ghosts any more than I'll be able to be convinced that breadfruit leaves prevent rain, but I find it increasingly difficult to argue my side of the story. I find it impossible to explain, for example, why it is that I think that antibiotic cream will help a cut heal whereas a leaf won't. Sometimes I catch myself launching into explanations about bacteria and how openings in the skin are susceptible to bacterial infections, especially in Vanuatu's humid climate, and that topical antibiotics help to prevent and fight off such infections, thus leading to better wound healing and I realize that, if one had absolutely no knowledge of bacteria or the microscopes that allow us to see them or the century or so of research into germ theory, this sounds about as plausible as mango leaves channeling the healing power of moonbeams into your skin. People listen to my explanations, of course, and sometimes remark at how right my explanations sound and a few people sometimes take my advice, but none of them really understand what I'm saying, and I realize that I've become something of a witch doctor in my own right. A practitioner of white magic, if you will. I spout scientific theory instead of mystical ramblings, but in the end it all sounds the same to those in the village. I've even had my share of triumphs and I-told-you-so moments. Most memorably, I was once approached by a few friends of mine about a rumor that had been repeated by almost everyone on the island which held that on a certain day the sun would not go down in the evening and we would proceed to have 48 consecutive hours of daylight. My first thought upon hearing this was horror that we would be having two consecutive days of unbearable heat instead of the more usual twelve to fourteen hours, but then I thought about it for a bit, trying to think of any reason why the earth would suddenly stop spinning for a couple days and, unable to come up with anything, I informed them that I was pretty sure that the sun would be going down on schedule. Everyone was duly impressed when this proved true. I felt like I was in one of those movies where some guy from the future, using his almanac, correctly predicts the coming of an eclipse and avoids some horrible fate by proving to everyone that he can blot out the sun from the sky, except mine was a lot simpler because it's WAY easier to predict that the sun will go down seeing as it happens once every 24 hours or so.

However, although it undoubtedly can sound silly, I sometimes find myself envying the Ni-Vanuatu and their black magic. It's something we've lost touch with back home, I think, that experience of standing face to face with nature and the staggeringly powerful forces that make it up. That experience of feeling so small and powerless in the face of something so massive and awesome that makes it possible to think that absolutely anything can happen. Ni-Vanuatu love their weather magic. Stories about controlling the rain are by far the most common for me to hear, and it's easy to see why. Rain is just so mystical and mysterious. It can appear in moments with such terrifying force and disappear just as quickly, sometimes not to be seen again for months. Living on a little island in the middle of the ocean, it's hard to think of anything that one has less control over. And so the breadfruit leaf on the clothesline to keep the rain from showing up. I mean, why not, right? Or the guy in Southwest Bay who can make it rain or (if it's been raining so much that rain has become the norm) stop it from raining by talking to trees (personally, if I could control the weather, I think I'd opt more for a nice, dry, breezy day, maybe in the lower 60's, as opposed to switching between hot and muggy and hot, rainy, and muggy, but I guess that just goes to show how much I know about tree-related weather control). It's easy to laugh at such things when we're sitting on a sofa inside watching the Weather Channel's 10-day forecast sum up nature in a couple of blue boxes with little cloud clip art graphics, but when you're watching the storm clouds race towards you across a rolling sea, it's hard not to see the magic. That's what I think we like to try and forget about science: it doesn't control the world, it just describes it. Newton, for example, didn't invent gravity, as some people like to say. Gravity was always there. All Newton did was come up with a clever way of describing what, exactly, gravity does. Similarly, we had weather before we had the Weather Channel, the Weather Channel just tells us the details of what the weather happens to be doing. But we don't usually think like this. We like to think of science as dictating how nature works when, in reality, the exact opposite is true. We shape scientific theories to conform to what we learn about the world, the world does not shape itself to conform with science. And so, really, we are still doing the same thing as the man hanging leaves on his clothesline. But we've gotten a lot better at it. We don't use leaves anymore. We've gotten very good at describing how the world works. In some cases, we've gotten so good at these descriptions that we can actually predict what the world will do in the future, but we still delude ourselves into thinking that we are in control of these things. We like to pretend that there is no magic in the world, but magic cannot be avoided. Magic is simple. Magic is not whispering at trees to stop the rain, nor is it water vapor in the atmosphere condensing around small dust particles and falling to earth, and it's definitely not a pixel-y smudge on a Doppler radar. When it rains, that's the magic. The rain does not care how we choose to rationalize or describe it, it has been around far longer than we have and long ago decided on its own way of doing things and it will continue to do those things for a long time yet. At its most destructive it swells our rivers, breaks our dams, floods our cities, and washes away our homes. At its gentlest it gives life to our crops, our livestock, and ourselves; it breaks the heat of the day and sends us to sleep with its whimsical patter on our roofs. Tell me that's not magic.