the fate of theworld, 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 littlefat 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.
10
S he dreamed of dead babies, she wrote in her bark cloth book. Babies on fire. Babies caught in webs of trees. Babies covered in ants. She lay in her bed and counted the number of dead babies she had seen in the past two years. The Anapa boy was the first, cut out of his dead mother’s womb so that he would not haunt them. The girl Minalana, nearly a year old, bitten by a redback spider. With the Mumbanyo there was often no death ceremony for infants. You stumbled on them half buried or caught among reeds in the river. Any baby that was an inconvenience or thought to be another man’s. And a man could avoid the six-month postpartum taboo against intercourse by disposing of the child. There had been five with the Anapa, seventeen with the Mumbanyo, and now Sali’s. Twenty-three dead babies. Twenty-four if she counted her own, a dark clump wrapped in a banana leaf and buried under a tree she’d never see again.
She heard them below the house, waiting for her. Sema’s hiccoughy nine-year-old giggle and her little brother’s whine, probably for more of the sugarcane that his mother was dangling over his head. She heard the words for eat and sweet and their name for her, Nell-Nell.
She was surprised they still came. They had
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 littlefat 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.
10
S he dreamed of dead babies, she wrote in her bark cloth book. Babies on fire. Babies caught in webs of trees. Babies covered in ants. She lay in her bed and counted the number of dead babies she had seen in the past two years. The Anapa boy was the first, cut out of his dead mother’s womb so that he would not haunt them. The girl Minalana, nearly a year old, bitten by a redback spider. With the Mumbanyo there was often no death ceremony for infants. You stumbled on them half buried or caught among reeds in the river. Any baby that was an inconvenience or thought to be another man’s. And a man could avoid the six-month postpartum taboo against intercourse by disposing of the child. There had been five with the Anapa, seventeen with the Mumbanyo, and now Sali’s. Twenty-three dead babies. Twenty-four if she counted her own, a dark clump wrapped in a banana leaf and buried under a tree she’d never see again.
She heard them below the house, waiting for her. Sema’s hiccoughy nine-year-old giggle and her little brother’s whine, probably for more of the sugarcane that his mother was dangling over his head. She heard the words for eat and sweet and their name for her, Nell-Nell.
She was surprised they still came. They had
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