Having the Time of his Life
Mark Archer
WILD PEOPLE by Andro Linklater
John Murray, £15.95, pp. 208
Some years ago Andro Linklater was commissioned by Time-Life Books to write a feature on the Iban tribe of Sarawak in Borneo for their 'People of the Wild' series. It was not long before he came face to face with the designer savage: Your portraits should be very beautiful [the series designer tells Linklater and his photo- grapher], we find that people like beautiful faces better. So try to keep freaks out of shot, and shoot your portraits a little below the chin to give the face a forceful look, a little determined perhaps, noble if you can. That could give you the cover shot, but remember, you're going to be looking up
their nostrils, so for Christ's sake no runny noses. Take some tissues with you, and give the guy a wipe first.
Linklater's brief was to report on the Iban's resistance to the encroachments of the modern world. When he gets there, the signs of encroachment are all too obvious. The Iban use outboard motors and chain- saws instead of the paddle and the adze, and their longhouses tend to be of concrete and corrugated iron rather than wood. The Iban have also discarded their loin-cloths and replaced them with cotton shorts and T-shirts advertising such folk beliefs as `Love is never having to say you're sorry'.
As anyone who reads this extremely entertaining book will discover, none of this matters, although it is enough to make the Time-Life editors scrap their 'wild people' series in despair. Linklater chroni- cles the whole mismatch of cultural con- ceptions to hilarious effect. It is easy to see Why he likes the Iban so much. With their warm personalities and excitable spirits, they could he southern Italians.
They also provide him with some memorable characters. There is Manga the augurer and consulter of omens, whose canniness not just in the spiritual but also the material world gives him the 'precise manner of an accountant', or Danggang the bard, resembling a beatnik poet in his cap and dark glasses, who recites two-hour long epics from Iban mythology.
Although Linklater's approach to his subject is unconventional by the standards of the Royal Geographical Society (he spies on the women's morning bathe and fails abjectly to seduce one of the more bewitching of the longhouse daughters), his reflections on what unites and divides the Western and the Iban worlds are delightfully sane. The world of the Iban is unitary. The augury of birds or an auspi- cious dream instruct them whether to hunt or where to plant. The centre piece of the book is the gawai kenyalang, a ceremony performed once in a man's lifetime to assure his prestige in this and the spirit world. Jingga, the celebrant, takes as his omen the fact that the Time-Life team offer to help him pay for it. But, as Linklater observes, for all the effort that he put into the gawai kenyalang, it was hard to believe that Jing- ga's future prosperity was much more secure- ly based than that of the book in which he was to figure . . . Wish-fulfilment was com- mon to both the unitary and divided worlds.
When one is reliant on reports from a toreign country, it helps to have someone on the ground who is as self-confessed a sensualist as Linklater. The sights, sounds but above all the tastes of this newfound- land are described with an almost Keatsian evocativeness. But even Linklater has to defer to the Victorian traveller A. R. Wallace's description of the durian fruit:
A rich, butterlike custard, highly flavoured with almonds gives the best general idea of it, but intermingled with this come wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, brown sherry and other incongruities. Then there is the rich glutinous smoothness in the pulp which nothing else possesses, but which adds to its delicacy. It is neither acid, nor sweet, nor juicy, yet one feels the want of none of these qualities for it is perfect as it is. It produces no nausea or other bad effect, and the more you eat of it the less you feel inclined to stop.
After a lunch of durian fruit, grilled suma fish, breadfruit, bamboo shoots and slabs of wild honey, Linklater murmurs 'it was the sort of meal you would only get in paradise.' It is nice to know that not all our wishes are unfulfilled.
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