The restless natives (of my heart) keep vigil--through the night, into morning, across the dull expanse of afternoon--with the thunderous drum of that muscle. The repetition, the force of the rhythm and the resonant bass, speaks to the people's resolve: "We will cast out the colonists with their hidden ambitions, their proud insinuation, their (supposed) good intentions." This heart, this island, will again be free. The islanders will (slowly) forget the new words. Or as the invaders tongues are silenced, the words will warp and form new meanings. Their pronunciation will be garbled. The beads by which the foreigners first tricked us will tarnish and the glass return to sand. The handsome strangers will be forgotten. And we will return to the tasks from which we were distracted, from which the others--coming in their tall ships, marvelous phantoms possessed by the wind--were able to exploit dissatisfaction, supplanting the sense of obligation to this place with the idea of the horizon, the fruitless longing that the idea conveys.
"We will never be the same again."
The shaman nods. He knows that the bones of the colonists, the one's that will have to die, will lay exposed on the beaches or tangled in the jungle heat. Bones keep talking. They will turn this history back in upon itself. Bleached and grinning, the skeletons will heckle the indigenous resolve: there will be more colonists, more bones, there will be ghosts and the nightmares they contain.
"Like breadfruit, coconut, papaya, my heart is cracked open and laying at my feet. You have eaten your fill--like worms, like imperialists--and left the organ rotting (the church you have abandoned to convert me contains an instrument now crowded with the noise of nesting birds). And the holes you have anticipated--in our hearts, our minds, our culture--contain treason." The shaman is alone now, naked beside the feathered crown and robe of tooled abalone. "I admit that I ache for the colonists to return."
