I grew up in a border town, in a border generation. One side of the river was majority French, the other English. My elders held tight to decidedly parochial views about their respective cultures. The English felt the ascendancy of their language (and subsequent control over business, government and education) was an inevitable and unavoidable result of their conquest of French Canada in 1760. The French, on the other hand, used their language as a cultural badge of courage, an undying assertion that they had never been conquered in spirit.

During the 1960s and 1970s an intense and occasionally violent cultural revival swept the French-speaking province of Quebec. Language became a weapon, leveraging access to public and private services.

Many of these reforms were necessary, long past due. Pierre Trudeau, the bi-cultural, bilingual Prime Minister at the time, had agitated for social justice in his youth. He was, nonetheless, a strong federalist, and opposed growing cries for Quebec’s secession from the Canadian confederation of provinces.

Vanuatu and Canada’s respective histories reveal more than a few parallels. Though different in detail, many common themes emerge. In Vanuatu, French and English camps were pitted against one another in the run-up to Independence, with the largely English Lini camp charging full-blown toward freedom and numerous, largely French-speaking, elements advocating a go-slowly (or not at all) approach.

In the years following his victory, PM Lini was often wont to display his pique at his opponents. His Economist obituary mentions his apparent glee at sending at least one French diplomat packing.
The curious, often absurd duplication of services that characterised the British/French ‘Pandaemonium’ was a perfect example of the intransigence of cultures when they are pitted against one another. The two colonial Powers, ostensibly allies, were incapable of seeing eye to eye on even the most trivial administrative matters.

The common – and often vociferous – claims that the French actively supported Jimmy Stevens’ stillborn Republic of Vemarana only added fuel to a fire that had been guttering and smoking for years.

Notwithstanding its strengths, French’s permanent minority status here in Vanuatu has certainly allowed the perpetuation of some of the same kinds of injustice seen in Quebec in past generations. French has often received less attention than it should. The demonstrably superior education system has not received the recognition it deserves. The use of French in law, in government services and publications is often an afterthought.

Given my personal experience living on the cusp between two cultures, I am naturally sympathetic to Education Minister Charlot Salwai’s efforts to increase the French component in the core curriculum. Having benefited from a completely bilingual education, and having experienced the consequent benefits of a more nuanced, more cosmopolitan view of the world, I can only consider his plan to be a good thing.

That said, I am vividly conscious as well of the potential for division that language issues can create. In Canada in 1970, Quebec separatists conducted a series of murders, kidnappings and bombings that resulted in the imposition of martial law and the arbitrary arrest of thousands of activists, most of whom were guilty of nothing more than caring about their culture.

(On a more personal note, my fluency in both languages got me out of a few scrapes when some local yobbo wanted to pick a fight with a ‘frog’ or vice versa.)

Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that Minister Salwai’s latest education policy proposals are going to result in fisticuffs in the school yard. It’s nonetheless true that on either side of the cultural divide a reactionary tendency exists that often makes dialogue a little more tense than it needs to be.

Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau dealt with the problem with a characteristic display of deftness. He rejected the famous contention that Canada was populated by ‘two solitudes’ incapable ever of truly communicating with one another. In its place he instated a policy of multiculturalism.

Vanuatu should take the same approach. In every important respect, it is the opposite of a monolithic cultural entity. In addition to older French and English traditions, we receive distinct inputs from other Pacific Islands and China, to say nothing of the deep and fruitful integration of the local Vietnamese community.

And of course, at the heart of it all lie the dozens of distinct and varied cultures that make Vanuatu such a unique amalgam of all that’s good in Melanesia.

For whatever it’s worth: If Vanuatu were not such a cosmopolitan place, it’s doubtful I would have found it as appealing as I do. I know I’m not alone in this sentiment.

Minister Salwai should be applauded for his efforts to transpose some of the undeniable successes of the French system onto its decidedly challenged English counterpart. But as he does so, he must remain constantly, vividly aware that language reaches to the root of everyone’s identity.

To speak differently is quite literally to think differently.

Defenders of English and French alike, take note: Education should celebrate diversity, building unity through understanding. Minister Salwai’s effort to achieve this deserve everyone’s support.

I’ve been following a few different stories these last few weeks. Thousands of miles apart and separated by decades, they might seem at first to have little in common.

The first is the story of over 500 websites in China that have decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre by voluntarily taking themselves offline for ‘non-technical maintenance’. The censored are boycotting the censor.

The second story is the ongoing suppression of media in Fiji. In a June 2nd statement, Fiji’s interim Permanent Secretary for Information, Lieutenant-Colonel Neumi Leweni indicated that the current state of emergency would continue into August at least. It’s not clear whether this means that state censorship of media will continue as well.

The last is a story of the Australian movie ‘Balibo’. The recently-released film recounts the story of 5 Australia-based journalists killed by Indonesia during the 1975 invasion of East Timor.

Following decades of patient, determined investigation, the facts of the Balibo case have at last come to light. In the years following the murders, nobody – not even Australia – wanted the full extent of Indonesia’s depredations in Timor to see the light of day. Through a combination of determined neglect and deliberate distortion, countries in the region and across the globe allowed Indonesia to act with impunity against the Timorese people.

All of these stories have one thing in common. Every single one of them has been shaped by our collective complacence. The passive-aggressive self-imposition of censorship by Chinese website operators is more an act of sullenness than outright protest. According to one commentator, the increase in censorship activity in the lead-up to Tiananmen’s 20th anniversary is a “minor annoyance for most, perhaps making them remember, but they don’t care that much.”

I suspect that many Fijians outside of the media establishment feel more or less the same. If media coverage and letters to the editor are any indication, it seems that many of us in Vanuatu and throughout the region concur.

Contrast this with the lavish media attention devoted to the Balibo Five, as the murdered journalists have become known. John Tebbutt, a senior lecturer in media studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, writes that this story has inspired the creation of a feature film, 5 books, 7 reports and an investigation by East Timor’s Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation. In addition, he writes, “[t]here are thousands words in newspaper, television and radio reports.”

International coverage of the Tiananmen Massacre was intense at the time. But since then, it’s dwindled significantly. Though it’s trotted out from time to time and used to deliver a rhetorical rap on China’s knuckles (US Secretary of State Clinton did just this recently), the suppression of truth in China continues unchecked. It is, in fact, aided and abetted by numerous US-based Internet companies who, fearful of ‘missing out’ on the lucrative China market, compromise themselves in order to remain in China’s good books.

Some people I’ve spoken with on the Fiji issue have suggested that more pressure might be brought to bear on the Bainimarama regime if it was of any geopolitical importance. But, lacking influence in the outside world, average Fijians are left to cope on their own with the stifling effects of a censor that won’t allow bad news of any kind to circulate.

The flow of information creates influence. The ability to bring significant media resources to bear on an issue – or conversely, the ability to block its scrutiny – has a distorting effect on how we view history.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people died in Beijing’s streets as the People’s Liberation Army advanced on Tiananmen Square, but all most of us remember is a single man who, for a few brief minutes, blocked a column of tanks.

Years of effort have been expended finding out the exact circumstances of the death of the Balibo Five. But nearly 200,000 Timorese people – 20% of the entire population – died as a result of the Indonesian invasion and occupation. Where is their movie?

And what will historians have to say about this period in Fiji’s history? How will daily Fijian life be recorded if nobody cares to see?

The wealth of nations is often measured in monetary terms. I say it should be measured in how that wealth is used.

Investment in media and in the mechanics of free speech and open exchange of ideas creates immeasurable wealth. Such wealth will never appear in economic reports. It will, however, define our history.

In a recent Daily Post story, Minister of Education and local UNESCO representative Charlot Salwai rightly decried poor attendance at the conference on Vanuatu’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. Unless we invest time and effort in recording these critically important aspects of Vanuatu’s culture and kastom, they will be lost.

The tragedy of such a loss may pale in comparison to the others on this page, but that distinction is a matter of degree, not of kind. The lesson in every case is the same: If we do not invest in our history, it will be utterly lost.

Update: Omitted from the print version (for space reasons) is an obvious corollary to this conclusion: If we leave it  to others to invest in our history, it will be as they see fit to record it. A recent post from a China expert on the Huffington Post illustrates this nicely. While the Chinese have invested no small resources in denying or distorting important aspects of the 1989 protests, Western journalistic and historical writing has been quite selective in its interpretation of events as well.

Public commentators in Vanuatu don’t write nearly often enough about Wan Smolbag. Even when they do, their description of the work and its effect tend to fit them into the ‘development NGO’ straitjacket. That’s not entirely inaccurate, of course; Smolbag is a development NGO. But such descriptions are incomplete.

Woefully so, in my opinion. Once understood, the reasons for this misperception explain a great deal about the failures of many formal development programmes. (That’s programmes, mind you, not projects. But that’s an essay for another day.) The problem, ultimately, is our human incapacity to quantify, or even adequately to analyse, certain cultural inputs.

Now, given that Smolbag has been working with the softer tools of drama, dialogue, understanding and community awareness for twenty years, they’ve got the issue pretty well sussed. At least innately. If there are still tensions between what they want to do and what donors are willing to fund, they’re manageable, and it must be said that, from top to bottom, Smolbag staff know what they’re about. They’re are as good at demonstrating the value of their work to donors, partners and the public as anyone I’ve encountered in a couple of decades of part- and full-time advocacy work.

But the preceding is really just a digression – I need to say a few things about Wan Smolbag as an artistic institution, and the only way to get there is to indulge in a deliberate bit of hand-waving that runs the risk of belittling the dozens of non-theatrical activities they manage. There’s a small mountain of data out there expressing in very finite terms just how effective this group is.

My point, I guess, is that no matter how good that makes them – and they are very good indeed – there’s more to it than that. And that’s what I want to write about today.

I’m not going to attempt to structure this in any useful way. This really is as much a personal exercise as a public one: If I succeed in conveying a sense of what makes Smolbag unique to you, I might understand it better myself….

Sometimes you have to write aimless jumbles like this just to get to what you really wanted to write in the first place.

Dialogue

Jo Dorras is one of those rare writers who appears to effortlessly traverse the language barrier. (I say ‘appears’ because every writer knows that no good writing is ever effortless.) The language in her scripts is almost perfectly transparent to a local audience. The wit, word play, intonation and cadence of her dialogue manages that tenuous balancing act between remaining natural enough that the audience absorbs it without effort and having her characters say the things we wish we had.

Following one production, I complimented her facility with Bislama (a deceptively difficult but deeply poetic language). With characteristic humility, Jo quickly attributed most of the coruscating, rapid-fire exchanges that typify her work to rehearsal-time ad-libs inserted by the actors. There’s some truth to that – and more on them in a moment – but the fact remains that she does what every playwright dreams about. Without indulging in self-conscious theatricality, her simple, constantly driving narratives are composed of those deftly structured scenes, those often alarmingly direct crises and confrontations that make stage drama worth watching.

I, for one, am hopelessly jealous.

I feel terribly ambivalent when I see her gift in action. I find myself wishing there were some way to translate it back to English, to make the world see just what a wonderful thing it is. But the poetry is sure to get lost in translation. Some of Smolbag’s regional work – the Love Patrol television series, for example – is acted in English. There’s still a great deal to admire in it, but the fact remains that the actors simply cannot bring their full fluency and adeptness to bear on what, for most, is their third or even fourth language.

It’s probably wrong of me to say it, but I occasionally get the impression that Jo feels constrained by English, too.

Acting

To all those with whom I worked in Canadian theatre lo! those many years ago: I wish I could transport you all here, just for one night. I wish I could show you just how good Smolbag’s actors are.

There isn’t one of you wouldn’t walk out of the theatre at once humbled and inspired. These men and women have virtually no prospect of fame, fortune – or even recognition as artists. Their work is their career, and they are almost universally respected for their contribution. But… ah, if only you could see. Just one show. Then I wouldn’t have to belabour myself to express so inadequately what a natural facility for drama they have, how fluent they are in expressing themselves.

This faculty is not at all a universal talent here in Vanuatu, but I do suspect there’s something in the water. I’ve never seen such a consistent capability for spontaneity, such an unquestioning willingness to let the action take them where it needs to. Western actors spend years practising, versing themselves in a craft so unforgiving that only a tiny percentage ever reach any real proficiency in it. There are, at any time, at least half a dozen truly remarkable actors working at Smolbag.

I don’t want to understate the time, energy and sweat Smolbag’s actors invest in the effort, but consider: What city of 200,000 could consistently produce dozens of superb actors, any one of whom could carry an entire show in Toronto, New York or London? Now spread that city over a thousand miles of ocean and tell me how such a thing could be.

One sees a similar phenomenon whenever music ‘fires up’, as they say here. I’ve seen people find the second or third harmony of a song they’ve never heard before within about a dozen bars. For someone to whom nothing creative comes easily, I find it downright intimidating.

I suspect it has something to do with Vanuatu being a nation without mirrors. It’s not that people aren’t every bit as prone to preening, vanity and the natural tropes of beauty, it’s just that they don’t seem to be as self-conscious about it.

I worry as I write this that I might be creating the impression of a nation of prodigies. I’m not really comfortable with that, for numerous reasons, not the least of which is the danger inherent in all generalisation. The fact remains though: This troupe is consistently superior, and some of them are legitimately world-class performers. They’d be stars in any other country.

One particularly compelling example: 40 Dei features something new for Smolbag drama – a character who undergoes what’s often facilely characterised as ‘a journey’. It would be a career-making role anywhere else, a young reprobate who exudes that sense that something’s not quite right about him, nor has it ever been. He’s always a touch too angry, a touch too cynically clear-sighted for his own good. Following his imprisonment for murder, though, he undergoes a transformation. The casually brutal, occasionally fatal prison environment causes him to unwind completely. Watching the young man playing Ben throw himself so unreservedly into this near-impossible role was, for me, utterly transfixing.

This is ground-breaking work. You have to remember that Vanuatu is a fundamentally static society. The very idea that one could be transformed by events creates an entirely new understanding – in Vanuatu, at least – of our frailty in the face of overwhelming circumstance. I can’t think of more than four of five actors in the world who would stand a chance living up to such a startlingly original role as this.

Drama

Vanuatu sometimes reminds me of Ireland. Its tightly – sometimes crushingly – enmeshed society makes drama almost a natural state. Opportunistic greed, petty rivalry, tempestuous behaviour, occasionally brutal outbursts, and the insatiable desire to discuss them all endlessly, make even the smallest events compelling. Life in Vanuatu is very much defined by the individuals one meets. Anonymity is not an option, and privacy in all things is almost impossible to maintain.

In addition, it punishes individual ambition. Nothing seems to excite more glee than gossip that positively luxuriates in the foibles and weaknesses of those who would elevate themselves. Except perhaps watching them inevitably being taken down a notch.

On top of all that, Vanuatu is a society in transition between village life and existence in a much wider world. In spite of the positively nimble adaptability of most of its residents, there exists a pervasive tension between kastom’s natural conservatism and some of the more subversive aspects of modern Western culture.

Most of Smolbag’s stories are thinly veiled accounts of local events. I don’t want to take anything away from Jo’s remarkable ability to distill these into theatre, but it bears mentioning that Vanuatu provides ample fodder.

What’s really remarkable, though, is just how much Smolbag gets away with. Theatre has always been an innately irreverent, subversive medium, and there’s something about that fourth wall that allows things to be said onstage that could get you lynched under other circumstances. But given the almost complete lack of distinction between formal events and very direct action here, I remain impressed that audiences in Vanuatu innately grasp that the role of theatre is often to speak the unspeakable.

(That’s not always the case, of course. Peter Walker recounts an episode in which a village production resulted in flaring tempers and near-violence on his blog. Go read it. It’s eminently worthwhile, an honest, often agonisingly – to me, anyway – familiar account of the triumphs and tribulations of directing a full-scale theatrical production. It’ll give you a better insight into Wan Smolbag than I could ever hope to do.)

I am even more impressed, though, by the courage of these people in appropriating what is, fundamentally, a foreign influence and making it so much their own that their audiences find themselves transported beyond their own inclinations.

I sometimes worry that Jo might be losing hope. Every one of her scripts tackles difficult – and deeply disturbing – social issues. As I mentioned, most of them are drawn from life. This only makes the plots, which detail the rampant brutality, sexual and spousal abuse, corruption, venality and loss of restraint that punctuate life in Vanuatu, all the more affecting. But in the last two shows I’ve sensed that her stubborn distaste for moral bromides and facile conclusions is being tinged by a loss of patience. It could be that 20 years of working for such tiny increments in societal change has begun to tell.

Of course, it could be that my perspective is changing, that my own optimism and faith in humanity is waning and that I’m just projecting it onto Smolbag’s shows because… well, because they render everything that I most love and loathe about Vanuatu so clearly.

Effects

I took some of my adoptive family to the theatre last week. Some of them had never seen a play before in their life. I can’t tell you the gratification I felt at seeing them sit there, rapt, transfixed by the action onstage. Even little Daniela, not yet three years old, was entranced.

We talked about the play for hours afterward. My tawian (sister-in-law) Georgeline, especially, was touched by the plight of Lei, an intelligent, too-sensitive young woman forced into a loveless marriage. I’ll just say that, for her, art imitates life and leave it at that.

But I’m troubled nonetheless. Troubled that, for all its force, there are some aspects of Vanuatu society that are particularly intransigent. Violence against women and children, for example, is endemic, so common that people often report it with less concern than they express over the football score. It would be a worse than tragic if there weren’t someone brave enough to stand up and address such issues, and for that the entire country is in Smolbag’s debt.

(They are not the only ones showing such courage, of course, but there’s a quantum difference between talking about something and showing it happen onstage. And I’m writing about theatre’s particular effects, not about the social issues generally.)

Nonetheless. Nonetheless. I worry that there’s some aspect of the human psyche that is so pliant that it can witness such events acted out and, in the full knowledge that this is happening all around, right now, still blithely move along exactly as it has done other every day of its existence. I worry, in other words, that a society in which accommodation of others’ shortcomings is a cardinal virtue might not want to change. Or even know how to if it did.

I know that’s not true. I see evidence of it everywhere, in the young men and women openly holding hands where even a few years ago any overt sign of affection was punished. I see it in the devotion of parents to their children’s education, the compelling desire to see them achieve more than they.

Again, I’m fairly certain that this is a case of my own bias coming into play. It’s easy to get tired, to begin to lose one’s sense of optimism when the best one can hope for is tiny, incremental gains, measured like grains of sand in a desert. It’s not really like that.

And just to remind myself that it’s so, I’m going to leave off writing now, and go sit down at the family nakamal in Freswota and laugh and josh and explore the day’s tiny melodramas with whomever shows up.

Update: … A few additional notes after further reflection…

Music

I don’t know how I could have meandered so far without once mentioning Smolbag’s musical work. Rather than go on at length talking about it, though, I’ll just point you to one of their songs. It’s a very rough cut, from the sound of it, recorded ‘live on the floor’ by the actors clustering as best they can around a few mics. When you listen to it, close your eyes, filter out the distortions, and just imagine this scene:

As the actors, still in character, come out for their curtain call, this music is playing. The voices add themselves one by one and few by few until the tiny theatre is brimming with their voices. The lyrics speak of the troubles in this world and wonder if they will ever diminish.

“There’s too much trouble in this world / God help me…”

Most striking of all, a prisoner who’s been beaten mercilessly stands silent, face sheathed in blood, staring straight into the audience as the music rises. He says nothing for the first half of the song. One of the more effective pieces of stagecraft I’ve seen in a long time.

The Director

At the heart of the operation is the theatre’s founder and director, Peter Walker. His efforts animate the entire operation, providing a place where dozens of promising talents from all across the nation can find their own potential.

But there’s no need for me to attempt any explanation. I’d only fumble it anyway. Go read his blog. It’s worth it.

ABOUT THIS SHOW: 40 Dei plays at Wan Smolbag Haos in Tagabe on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The show starts at 6:30 p.m. Tickets are 50 vatu for adults, students and children. Because of its popularity, attendees should arrive at least one hour before show time to be guaranteed seating.

The thematic heart of 40 Dei (40 Days), Wan Smolbag’s powerful new play, is the story of Jesus’ 40 days of suffering and temptation in the desert. With Satan constantly at his side, Jesus fasted, contemplated and steadfastly resisted the Devil’s threats and inducements. Even in the extremities of suffering, he accepted his humanity, refusing assistance either from above or below.

As the New Testament tells it, Jesus embarked on this pilgrimage of suffering immediately after his baptism. It was, in a sense, his preparation to enter into the world. We first meet Matthew, the protagonist in Jo Dorras’ stark, deeply probing script, as he emerges from his own moral desert, a wasted youth of faithlessness, drinking and violence.

Lying on the roadside, bloody, filthy, half-clothed, Matthew presents a repulsive figure. Only Lei, a pastor’s daughter, sees him for what he is – a lost soul. Ignoring imprecations to leave this filth, this ‘doti blong taon’ where he lies, she instead recalls the parable of the Good Samaritan to her father.

Matthew awakes from his stupor to a vision of love – a beautiful young woman beside him, joyous music and light emerging from a nearby chapel. He is transformed, and decides at that moment to leave his errant past behind, to seek redemption and salvation.

But as with Jesus in the desert, the Devil is always at his side. And Matthew is human, all too human. Beset by difficulties, he tries to navigate the narrow passage between hypocritical moral rectitude and the nihilistic, hopeless existence of his young friends.

Like all of Wan Smolbag’s productions, 40 Dei is a powerful, provocative show, acted with conviction and world class talent by its cast. It reminds us again and again that there are no easy answers, that Christian kindness demands more than many – most – are willing to give. Its characters find themselves tested repeatedly. Events conspire to probe the limits of their ability to forgive, to embrace others regardless of their path in life, and to withstand the temptation to trade their fundamental humanity for worldly privilege.

Nobody wins. Dorras’ script is too honest an evocation of mundane human weakness to pretend that our world is populated only by angels and devils. Sinners are not always saved, and the devout are not always as unblemished as they first seem.

Where others fall prey to petty ambition, moral weakness and, in one starkly moving sub-plot, to madness, Matthew is almost alone in his willingness to confront the difficulties he faces. More often than not, this means that things go harder for him than for the others. He sacrifices friendship, even love, to his sense of duty. But in the end, his decision to show kindness to his outcast comrades proves to be his greatest test.

Anybody who’s opened a newspaper in the last few years will recognise the characters and events portrayed here. Smolbag’s greatest gift to us is its ability to show us our own world. The play is populated by the same reprobates, righteous hypocrites, prostitutes, politicians and just plain folks as we find in any neighbourhood in Port Vila.

We all walk with the Devil at our shoulder. Without surrendering to dogmatic, moralistic finger-wagging, 40 Dei confronts us with the knowledge that the most insidious enemy to Vanuatu society lies within it, not without. Until we recognise that there are no easy answers to the complex afflictions of a society in transition, until we accept that prostitutes, prisoners and penitents alike are all our family, until we recognise our own weakness in the face of venality and ambition, we will never completely be whole.

In the words of the immortal Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

I can’t recommend this play strongly enough. Those who have never wandered far from Vanuatu’s shores might not realise what a remarkable thing Wan Smolbag’s contribution to the national dialogue really is. Its painful, sometimes tortured honesty, its willingness to forego simplistic moralising and to grope for the deeper causes, and its stubborn refusal to accept the easy answers stand it in good stead with some of the most notable theatre companies working today.

I sincerely hope their consistent excellence doesn’t make us complacent. As a lifelong devotee of the theatre (and one-time participant), I can testify to the immense effort and sacrifice that this courageous troupe gifts us with in every performance.

If their efforts are to bear fruit, we too need to engage in the dialogue they offer. We need to recognise our own weakness, turpitude and occasional hypocrisy. We need to resist the urge to cast out those who fall by the wayside. We need to live with the difficult, complicated and discomfiting knowledge that we are – all of us – one people.

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation – Robert Frost

This quotation is one of those handy catch-all phrases that scholars love to use to explain – and often excuse – people’s inability to capture the essence of a statement when it’s translated between languages and cultures. Examples of miscommunication between peoples are everywhere.

One of the most startling examples of the limits to cross-cultural communication occurred during US-Russian nuclear talks. Disarmament expert Geoffrey Forden writes:

‘It turns out that when the US START II treaty negotiators tried to explain to their Russian counterparts the need for a “strategic reserve” of nuclear warheads, they called it a hedge. The Russian interpreters alternately translated that as either “cheat” or “shrub”.’

You can imagine the confusion and consternation this would have caused. More than poetry was at stake in this particular translation.

The continuing confrontation between the government of Vanuatu and business interests over recent amendments to the Employment Act is being exacerbated by exactly such a syndrome. Either through unwillingness or inability to bridge the gap between cultures, needs and concerns, people on both sides of the issue now find themselves staring each other down.

The fuse has been lit on an issue that could have explosive impact on ni-Vanuatu and expat alike, but nobody seems to be able to step forward and quench it.

The majority of business owners recognise the need for improved economic conditions, in the abstract at least. But ask them about the details and one quickly encounters significant intransigence. In one particularly spirited discussion I was reminded that much of Vanuatu’s cash economy was supplemented by informal transactions at the family and village level. That’s true, but does nothing to diminish the fact that Vanuatu’s minimum wage is too small to live on.

Recent studies have shown that many village livelihoods are significantly supplemented by transfers of cash from family members in town. Food from the garden no longer comes free for much of our workforce.

I remain convinced that Minister Crowby introduced these recent amendments with the best of intentions. There might be something to the intimations that there’s political hay being made, but I see nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Helping one’s constituents is the very essence of a politician’s role.

It’s also likely that the details of the legislative changes were inspired by a mistaken perception of just how much of a burden local businesses can realistically bear. That too is understandable. One needs only walk the streets of Nambatri to see the stark contrast between walled expat compounds on one side of the road and corrugated tin shacks on the other. Any observer could be forgiven for believing that the distribution of wealth in Vanuatu is decidedly uneven.

But there’s a vast distance between understanding the fact of these economic disparities and understanding the mechanisms that bring them about.

Vanuatu society’s most salient feature is the collective refusal to allow any individual to raise himself so far above the others as to be out of reach. There are no kings here. Imagine how it feels, then, to walk several kilometres to work every morning, breathing the dust of countless Hilux trucks roaring past at speed.

Ask the driver about this, and they’ll reply with the central tenet of capitalist culture: If you work hard, some day you can be the one in the Hilux.

That’s true enough. But even at twice the minimum wage, that truck will be forever out of reach.

In times past, village chiefs used to carefully arbitrate the use of land and resources in order to make sure that nobody went without and nobody – himself included – got too much. Their carefully cultivated humility is a direct response to the sharp-eyed jealousy that drives island egalitarianism.

As far as I can tell, Minister Crowby is playing the role of chief. He’s spotted an inequity and decided to correct it by adjusting the proportions to be distributed to employer and employee alike. The numbers, of course, are wrong. But only when viewed through the capitalist lens.

Of course, that’s the only lens we have when dealing in a market economy. A supplier in Australia isn’t going to drop its prices just because we want to get a higher mark-up without raising our own rate, no matter how good our intentions are. They might sympathise with our plight, but their sympathy stops at the cash register.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a capitalist system, and that system cannot bear the onerous burden placed on it by these new amendments. Whatever his intentions, Minister Crowby must accept this indisputable truth.

We need to find common ground. We need to find a way to bring the market into the nasara. We need to know our place, too. Capitalism is a compelling force, but it’s not stronger than kastom here in Vanuatu. We need to recognise and validate the chief’s role, to recognise his imperatives as well as our own.

That’s not an easy job, but it’s got to start now, before these conflicting cultures clash.

One of the hallmarks of a healthy democracy is our right – and our responsibility – to question every aspect of our national institutions. If the political dialogue over the last few years is any indication, Vanuatu’s democracy is alive and kicking.

Kalkot Mataskelekele’s adult life has been devoted to promoting and defining an independent, democratic Vanuatu. The nation has benefited from his consistency, wisdom and guidance. He has long been a public proponent of a US-style system with a clear division of power between legislative and executive branches of government. He has been joined by others in suggesting that factionalism could be addressed by putting limits on the number of political parties.

Mataskelekele is one of many leaders who have remarked on numerous occasions that we should not take the structures of government for granted. He rightly points out that Vanuatu’s Westminster system was created mostly as a sop to its departing colonial masters seeking reassurance that the nascent democracy would remain recognisable to them.

In the rush to create a new constitution, important aspects of Vanuatu culture were overlooked. The consensus-driven style of leadership-from-within that typifies chiefly rule is difficult to reconcile with majority rule and a codified, winner-take-all legal system.

Most difficult of all are the contending principles of public service and entitlement.

The no-confidence motion currently pending in Parliament is yet another symptom of a sense of entitlement that subverts stability and erodes the ability of the Opposition to perform its appointed task.

No one questions Harry Iauko’s contribution to the VP, nor the mandate handed him by his record 1600-plus supporters. But it doesn’t logically follow that he automatically merits a cabinet position. The public interest is only served when cabinet positions are filled by those most able to serve.

The tiff between Iauko and party leader Edward Nipake Natapei has crossed the line from intra-party rancour to a crisis in governance. Surely there are other mechanisms to resolve this issue than bringing about the downfall of the government?

A congenital weakness in Vanuatu politics is the lack of real opposition. In most parliamentary democracies, the term ‘loyal Opposition’ is more than just a pleasant bromide, serving only to placate the loser. It’s an effective reminder that policies must be publicly, thoroughly and constructively scrutinised and critiqued. The give-and-take of parliamentary debate is the most valuable service MPs can render their constituents.

In Vanuatu, however, there is little if any critical evaluation of policy and legislation. Rather than accepting the implicit legitimacy of the ruling coalition and performing the integral public service of scrutinising its every action, the Opposition fritters away its political capital in a petty game of parliamentary musical chairs.

This stems from a system of debt and obligation that lies at the heart of Vanuatu culture. A man’s stature is often directly proportional to his ability to deliver wealth and bounty to his family and his village. Gifts of food, pigs, mats and other symbols of wealth lie at the centre of most ceremonies. But, as with so many other aspects of kastom, pigs and mats do not translate directly into western-style government.

Moana Carcasses Kalosil (ironically, a supporter of this latest motion) said in a pre-election debate that a cabinet position should mean more than 17 jobs for one’s supporters. Indeed it should. It seems, though, that the wisdom of his words remains lost on MPs on both sides of the floor.

As long as every politician’s main objective is to get his ‘fair share’ of the spoils, the guidance of our elder statesmen serves no purpose. The US, for example, has learned in the most vivid terms that even their vaunted democratic mechanisms can be subverted by greed. Regardless of the number of parties, the division of powers or the roles and responsibilities of elected representatives, the popular will is sapped by an anemic culture of government.

Instilling a sense of duty and purpose into politicians is not a simple process. Significant effort has been invested in recent years to bolster the civil service, making it more resistant to the worst aspects of this venal approach to governance. It’s taken years to make even tenuous gains, but Vanuatu’s rapidly improving stature in the Pacific community is testament to its success.

We need to begin the same process in politics.

We need to find a way to express – not just to politicians, but to the electorate as well – that everyone benefits more from the application of a principled, patient and indirect approach to good governance than they do from short-sighted, paternalistic vote-buying and nepotism. Only then can we begin a productive dialogue on how best to integrate the best aspects of kastom with the tools of western democracy.

I often feel a rush of vicarious shame when I contrast the insights of leaders like Mataskelekele with the actions of some of Vanuatu’s elected representatives. His vision of democracy and its role in society is far in advance of current practice.

My fervent hope is that one day soon the state will deserve a president as good as this.

The rain drives the tourists off the sidewalks, diminishes the Pacific to a neighbourly size, and melts all my plans like ice cream.

I open the paper and read a wandering, questing letter about the ‘beautiful, innocent people of Vanuatu‘, and ache a little because it’s so nearly true.

In the wall-high mirror, a woman spins her Mickey Mouse umbrella, angles it into the wind, and passes the doorway humming. Her vibrant purple and white island dress is garlanded with ribbons and bows.

An obese Hyundai motor coach lumbers to a halt beside the cafe. Emblazoned in heavy capitals along its side: ADVENTURES IN PARADISE. There is no one on board.

I wrote those paragraphs back in 2003. I’d just arrived in Vanuatu, and was trying to express my first inklings of the nature of the people and the place.

The beauty of Vanuatu and its people has worked itself into the very fibre of my being. The ability to remain gracious and smiling through the most arduous circumstances, to snap out a bawdy joke without missing a beat, to remain impassive in the face of gross affront – these aspects of the national character have impressed, confounded and ultimately seduced me.

But this is no one’s Paradise. Nor will it ever be.

The myth of Paradise is bread and butter to tourism operators, to land speculators and investment advisors alike. It occupies a useful niche in ni-Vanuatu rhetoric, batted around like a shuttlecock when we hark back to a time before exploitation and Development came to roost like Mynah birds. It is a fable.

Someone once remarked that Vanuatu resorts change ownership more often than a tourist with diarrhea changes undies. That’s because some owners actually believe a little of the Paradise myth they sell to their clients.

I remember one couple in particular, their bafflement and exasperation that things never worked out. They could not comprehend why their project just wasn’t progressing. Hadn’t they been clear enough?

They’d been perfectly clear, of course. Too clear. The problem was simply that people didn’t like them. They barged around like tots in a tantrum, demanding this and that, treating everybody like Sydney-siders. They seemed to have forgotten where they were.

The smiling, laughing faces that every Vanuatu visitor so loves belong to people who’ve simply learned to be polite. Living on islands with limited living space has taught people that there’s little value in confrontation. Courtesy matters, even if it means allowing someone else to make a false promise, to say something with complete sincerity one day and to utter its antithesis the next. Subterfuge, deceit and neglect, then, are more desirable weapons than bluster and braggadocio.

Friendliness, accommodation and flexibility are all cardinal virtues. This means that everyone can expect to get away with things here that they might not elsewhere. Taking a hard-and-fast line on most issues is not often useful.

There’s an important corollary to this: Stretch someone’s patience if you must, but don’t push your luck. People in Vanuatu will bend and bend, but not forever. You should realise you’ve stepped beyond the pale when people are no longer available, when your exhortations for action have no effect. If you do not slow down and take stock, things get slowed down for you.

It’s a common temptation to express impatience with this, to try in spite of everything to run one’s affairs the same as in any other country. In Port Vila and increasingly in Santo, expats doing business with expats manage to achieve some semblance of what they’re used to. Their services tend to be aimed outward and (economically) upward, and to the extent that their actions don’t impact directly on ni-Vanuatu, they’re left alone to do as they please.

There are just as many rogues per capita here as elsewhere, though living in a smaller locale makes it harder for them to achieve their proper station in life. There are, after all, only so many management positions available.

Some ‘investors’ have done their best to provide these deprived individuals with new opportunities. Through shady land deals, sweetheart ‘partnership’ agreements and other tools of convenience, they’ve collaborated in maximising their own profit at the expense of the community at large.

And who cares? If people are just going to keep rolling with it, why shouldn’t the predation continue? If the ‘locals’ really cared about anything, they’d protest, wouldn’t they?

People do care, and they do protest. They just haven’t done so in a way that some are capable of recognising.

Vanuatu may seem like a paradise to the tourism operator, the developer and the speculator, for good reasons or bad. And ni-Vanuatu may appear to acquiesce to circumstances that are entirely in the investor’s favour. But we would all be wise to learn a little discernment of our own, and a little restraint, too. Vanuatu is as much of this world as any other country. Actions have consequences here as everywhere.

If we ignore this lesson and forget where we are, we may find our adventure in paradise ends with a short, sharp shock.

But for most of the residents of this so-called paradise, little has changed.

Prices have increased somewhat, but curiously many of the more common expenses have not. Bus fares, for example, have not budged even though fuel prices have soared. Consequently, Vanuatu’s minimum wage has about the same buying power today as it had years ago.

That’s not entirely good news….

20,000 vatu a month is not enough to properly raise a family on here in town. Not without cutting a lot of corners. You can squat on unoccupied land in a house that you and your relatives build from scrounged materials. Or you can build in a corner of a family member’s yard. That will keep housing costs down.

If you wait long enough in the morning, you might be able to board a bus belonging to your tawian, so you can save on the fare. You can share baby clothes with other young mothers in the family.

If big expenses arise that can’t be ignored, you can hold a fund-raising. And if things really get tough, you can always send your children to live with other family members for a while.

For the vast majority of people in Vanuatu, living on 20,000 vatu per month – and it’s usually far less – is possible only because of the strength of family obligations.

Lest it be said that this is an unalloyed good, let me quickly point out that family pressures can be overwhelming for those who want to improve their lot in life. Dig around a bit and you’ll hear stories about people in well-paying jobs arriving home on payday to a literal queue of family members waiting for a hand-out. As a result, people sometimes spend years working in top positions without accumulating any savings at all.

The biggest part of having nothing to worry about is having nothing at all.

The best and worst of Vanuatu are encapsulated in family: As long as everybody stays close, society remains strong. This means that those who try to elevate themselves inevitably get dragged down. One need understand nothing else to make sense of the constant churn of Vanuatu politics. To coin a phrase, Vanuatu’s motto seems to be: Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your family closest of all.

The strength of kastom is in preservation. It asserts the primacy of collective over personal good, of peace over justice, of moral suasion over physical force. It resists pressures by subverting them. The simple knowledge that it only takes one person’s disapproval to bog an undertaking down for years – that’s often enough to stop even the most modest of dreamers.

The static nature of things is in no small part responsible for prices of certain key commodities remaining flat while costs elsewhere increase. Bus fares don’t increase because drivers fear the backlash that might arise. Kava prices rise and fall at the wholesale level, but the price of a shell never does.

It can be argued that poverty would be making itself much more sharply felt in Vanuatu were it not for the strength of its culture. You could say the same about wealth.

This is emphatically not what gets sold in the estate agent’s brochure. Even the VIPA website says only, “The population is renowned to be the friendliest in the region with little if not no [sic] resentment towards expatriates based in the country.” It does not explain that there’s little overt resentment because ni-Vanuatu and local expatriates live in separate worlds that seldom overlap.

I often wish they would. I wish there was a requirement that new investors live on minimum wage themselves for a while. I wish that people could recognise the efforts of the shop assistant who works 10-12 hour days with only one day off every 2 weeks in order to earn that much.

I wish that employers would stop calling people lazy if they don’t like to work alone. Every single aspect of life in Vanuatu militates against going solo.

I wish that they would realise that silence is not consent.

But that’s just not going to happen. Capitalism has been packaged as rugged individualism for far too long. There’s no backing off now. A confident smile and a jaunty ‘I’m all right, Jack’ are the very mark of a modern-day mercantilist.

Family solidarity has long since succumbed to the siren song of private ownership and wealth. The idea of being one’s brother’s keeper is saved for Sunday, and handled as gingerly as the collection plate.

For many expats, nothing’s going to change that. Let’s face it, most people don’t move here to be part of something; they come here to escape. What motivation does someone moving to a tax haven paradise have to take on the burdens of others? Nobody ever got rich by spending money.

To an extent, that’s just fine. Everyone gets along more or less, no one starves and only a few get hurt that wouldn’t otherwise.

Economic planners speak of introducing market forces and creating wealth; they treat growth as if it were axiomatic. Yet Vanuatu is a world apart. It resists growth because growth is change. It punishes the entrepreneurial spirit among its own, because individualism costs the community. It asks little of investors (and offers little too) because they serve no purpose until they invest in the community itself.

There are two dreams of Vanuatu today, neither one recognisable to the other. I don’t know that this explanation will help much, but here’s the thing: If we don’t understand where we are, we’ll be condemned to continually repeat the same mistakes.

And that’s just boring. If we could just see Vanuatu as it is, perhaps we can move on to newer, more interesting mistakes instead.