Marawa

On Gaua, in the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu, there is no plain word for a traditional story. The phrase the local languages reach for translates as a story of Spider, and four of them say it that way. Whatever the tale is actually about, its whole genre is named after a spirit who, in most of those tales, hardly turns up at all.

Spider is Marawa, and the name is doing nothing more than that. Across the Banks and Torres Islands the word for the animal runs from Vera’a marawa through Mota marawa to a clipped Dorig mraw, and the spirit has never been called anything else. He belongs to the class of beings the Mota language calls vui: things that live and think, that have more intelligence than a man, that know what is out of sight without seeing it, and that were never born human and never died into the state. Robert Codrington, the Anglican missionary who first wrote these languages down in the 1880s, had an islander define one for him in his own words, and the definition has held up. Nobody in the Banks Islands worshipped Marawa.

He enters the record as sabotage. Qat, the hero who shaped the islands and made the first people and eventually went off to buy night, proposed to his eleven brothers that they each build themselves a canoe. He felled a great tree on Vanua Lava and worked it in secret, and every morning he came back to find the trunk whole again, each chip lifted out of the dirt and fitted back into the socket his adze had cut, the raw sap smell of yesterday’s labour gone out of the wood. So he cut one last chip, shrank himself very small, and carried it away from the pile to hide underneath it.

A little old man came up out of a hole in the ground and set about putting the tree back together. He worked his way down to the last chip and reached for it, and Qat sprang out at full size with the axe already up. What the old man did next decided everything after it. He asked to be spared and offered to finish the canoe himself. He was Marawa, and he scooped and scraped out the hull with his fingernails. When the brothers launched their own boats and Qat raised a hand and sank each one in turn, it was Marawa sitting in the stern of the only hull still floating, paddling into view.

The brothers spent a long time afterwards trying to kill Qat, and Marawa spent it undoing them. They walked him to a land crab’s hole beneath a stone they had already dug out from underneath, and when Qat crawled in after the crab they tipped the stone onto him and ran for the village to take his wife and his canoe. Qat, pinned in the dark, called out one name. By the time his brothers reached the houses he was sitting beside Ro Lei as though he had never gone anywhere. Another telling strands him at the top of a nutmeg tree that his brothers make grow taller and thicker under him until there is no possible way down, and Marawa, seeing the difficulty, drops him a thread out of the sky.

He is not remembered mainly for the rescues. Qat cut the first people out of dracaena wood, six figures, three men and three women, and hid them away for three days before standing them up and dancing in front of them until they began to move, then beating a drum at them until they could stand on their own. Marawa watched all of it and wanted it. He took wood of another sort, carved his own figures, set them up, beat the drum, and got exactly the same result: they moved. Then he dug a pit, laid coconut fronds along the bottom, put his men and women down into it and covered them over for seven days. When he opened the ground again they had gone soft and come apart. That is the Banks Islands account of where death comes from. Not a punishment, not a bargain with a god, just a spirit copying a piece of work he did not fully understand and burying it to see what would happen.

The tellings disagree about what he is to Qat. In Mota he is the friend and the guide, the one whose name you shout when the stone comes down on you. On Santa Maria, the island now called Gaua, he stands as Qat’s opposite and his antagonist. Recent fieldwork across the northern islands splits the difference and probably has it right: a spirit who deceives Qat first and ends up his ally. Both roles are the same character viewed from opposite ends of the canoe story.

Nothing in the record describes him. Not his size, not his colour, not whether he bothers with a body at all when he is not being a spider. What the sources give instead is a set of things he does that only something spider-shaped could do. He comes up out of a hole in the ground. He puts on the shape of a small old man when he wants to be looked past. He hollows a canoe with his nails, and he pays out a line from a great height to a man who cannot climb down. The description is in the verbs.

His power is patience and reversal. He can take a day’s work apart overnight and put the wood back into the tree it came out of. He can move a man from under a rock to his own doorway faster than eleven brothers can walk the same distance. He can spin a way out of the sky. But he is small and he can be caught, and Qat caught him by making himself smaller still and waiting under a chip, which is the only trick in the whole cycle that lands on him. Then there is the older limit, the one the tradition is built around. Marawa can copy anything Qat makes and cannot make it keep. He got the wood right, the drum right, the dance right and the movement right, and the one thing he could not manage was leaving them above the ground.

The cycle is not a museum piece. Linguists recording in the Torres and Banks Islands in recent decades have taken Qat stories down from storytellers in a dozen vernaculars, and on Gaua the word maraw still names a ritual headdress worn by young men moving up through initiation. In the Torres Islands the great hero is not Qat at all but Mer̄avtit or Merawehih, names that look as though they grew out of the same spider.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Marawa in Melanesian mythology?

Marawa is a spider spirit of the Banks Islands in northern Vanuatu, and his name is simply the word for spider in the local languages. He belongs to the class of beings called vui, spirits that were never human and are not the ghosts of the dead. He appears almost entirely in the myth cycle of Qat, the culture hero of the same islands.

How did Marawa bring death into the world?

After watching Qat carve the first people out of dracaena wood and bring them to life with dancing and a drum, Marawa copied the whole process with a different wood and succeeded. He then dug a pit, lined it with coconut fronds, buried his new people for seven days, and dug them up to find them rotted. Banks Islands tradition treats that failure as the origin of human mortality.

Are Marawa and Qat friends or enemies?

Both, depending on the island. In the Mota tellings Marawa becomes Qat’s companion and rescuer after being caught interfering with his canoe, while on Santa Maria, now called Gaua, he is Qat’s antagonist. Modern fieldwork describes him as a spirit who deceives Qat first and becomes his ally afterwards.

What does Marawa look like?

No source describes his appearance. He is a spider by name, and in the canoe story he takes the form of a small old man who climbs out of a hole in the ground, but the tradition never fixes a body on him. What it gives instead is what he does: hollowing a canoe with his fingernails and letting a thread down from the sky.

Why do people on Gaua call their stories “stories of Spider”?

In almost all the languages of Gaua, the ordinary term for a traditional story or myth translates literally as a story of Spider, meaning Marawa. The phrase survives even though Marawa himself is a minor figure in most of the tales it covers. It is one of the clearest signs that his name carries weight well beyond the episodes he appears in.

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Qat, Tagaro, Abaia, Adaro, Masalai, Suangi, Tangaroa, Māui, Anansi, Arachne, Jorogumo, Tsuchigumo