Bird of Paradise

The air is sticky, and the floorboards slick with spilled drinks – my makeup is melting, and I am learning for the first time what it feels like to sweat through my shins. We have been dancing to eccentric covers of golden oldies – Creedence Clearwater Revival with a reggae twist, and multiple reprisals of Mustang Sally – the band interrupted periodically by the scratch of the loudspeaker for another speech or endless lucky door prizes.

Alotau Enterprises – the Chinese family business which owns and operates the main supermarkets in town – is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, with hors d’oeuvres in palm baskets, free flowing booze and a cake the size of a coffin. I have a nametag. It reads ‘Lydia: Australian Volenteer [sic]’. I am foreign and I am well-meaning, and in this town that is enough to make me a lightning rod for kindness and unearned invitations.

The sound system jags and crashes, and we are hurried away from the catwalk stage in the centre of the floor. I find myself perched between an expatriate magistrate – a tweedy intellectual left out in the weather – and an older lady known to me only as “That Auntie”. Lights dim – music swells – and we are plunged into an increasingly hallucinatory sequence of narrative dance.

It begins with tradition: bare breasts and grass skirts, and near-naked men with polished thighs, stamping, swaying and vigorously tumbling, until a small child totes an enormous crucifix into their midst, and everything pauses for an interminable period of dirge-like worship. Then a figure in camouflage and green bodypaint, who breakdances to thumping nineties heavy metal – somewhat inexplicably, given that this stage of the performance appears to be devoted to the Second World War and the occupation of Milne Bay – followed, most mysteriously, by a series of undulating dancers strangely costumed in a mix of island dress (cowrie shell skirts, jangling neckpieces) and junk shop tinsel. The soundtrack is contemporary pop and nightclub anthems: Ke$ha and Gaga and Rihanna.

That Auntie nudges me, and giggles.

“That one,” she states informatively, “is not a girl.”

I glance up and check myself. Under her bodypaint, the dancer is long-muscled, broad-shouldered, sinewy like a big cat. She has no discernible breasts behind the pert absurdity of her painted coconut shells. In my layman’s opinion she is definitely gifted with a y-chromosome. She is gyrating to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’.

My amateur sociology is so not up to this.

Papua New Guinea is an intensely religious country – although this, too, is hard to chart by my Sunday School points of reference: Pacific Christianity has its own logics, and eccentricities which are far beyond my grasp. It’s a country saturated in machismo, yet men dance with men, and I mean dance – loose-hipped, grinding – and engage in public displays of affection that seem surreal to me: broad-shouldered, bearded men, linking pinkies or walking hand-in-hand through the market. It feels like a sort of hyper-heteronormativity – an understanding of sexuality where ‘gay’ is so far from possible that all sorts of transgressive behaviours are somehow neutralised. (Men and women barely touch.) Under the penal code of Papua New Guinea, consensual homosexual contact is criminal offence – one punished in all sorts of extra-curial ways by police and the interested citizenry. It is also a place where drag seems a curious decision – I struggle to understand what freedoms can be found in the trappings of the feminine, here.

This is something brave, and something confusing.

I search the darkened room. People are cat-calling, cheering and clapping, but their faces are innocent of mockery. They are just enjoying the show. The dancer dips her headdress and sashays back up the catwalk, and I realise like applause: she is dressed as a bird of paradise – the image of this nation’s flag, and the curious, flamboyant symbol of PNG.