Masalai

The waterhole at Malimbanja is an inviting thing. Water slides off a low fall into a pool small enough to feel private, cool under the canopy, the kind of place that asks a walker to sit down for a while. A little further along the same stream a heavy log turns and knocks in the current over a deep patch, moving as though nothing is moving it. Both places are pointed out to visitors with the same word. This is a masalai place, and the invitation is not one you should accept.

Masalai is a Tok Pisin word, which is the first honest thing to say about it. Papua New Guinea holds more than eight hundred languages, and each has its own name for the beings that own its rivers and rocks and stands of old timber. The Arapesh call them marsalai, and Margaret Mead was writing about their cult in the pages of Oceania as early as 1933. Tok Pisin gathered all of them under one heading, and the heading stuck. So a masalai is not a creature in the way a dragon is a creature. It is a category, and behind the category are several hundred local spirits who have never agreed on anything, least of all their appearance.

Ask a man in the Yangoru hills what a masalai looks like and he may draw you a shape. Not a face, not a body. A geometric design that stands for a particular grass, or leaf, or animal, the sign that belongs to his clan. When the women of a village cook for a communal roofing, each clan finds its bowls by its own masalai mark. The same abstract patterns run across the painted façade of a haus tambaran, one for every clan under its roof. The spirit is real enough to make a man’s face swell, and its portrait is a sign painted on a wall.

In the stories, though, it has a body, and the body is usually local. A man called Manua was cutting new bush near Soli one morning and lay down at noon to rest under a tree stump. He woke to find a large python hanging over his head. He shouted an apology, calling the snake nephew, saying he had not known the place was his. The sky answered with thunder and a downpour that soaked the village ground for the rest of the day. Manua killed a chicken, went to the waterhole he knew was his masalai place, and poured the blood in.

That is the whole grammar of the thing. A masalai does not want your prayers. It wants you to know whose ground you are standing on.

There is no origin story for masalai in the way there is for the crocodile who split into sky and earth, or for the creator brothers who piled up the Sepik mountains. Masalai are simply already there, waiting in the odd corners of the landscape: an isolated pool, a cluster of boulders bubbled up out of old lava, a kwila tree too big to be ordinary. What they have instead of an origin is a moment of introduction. At Nimbohu they still recite it. An ancestor, grieving his dead wife, wandered through the bush weeping until he lay down at a strange place to sleep, and in the night the masalai came to him and said: this is my place, now you come and settle here, and I will be your masalai, and you will be my man. On that sentence the clan’s title to its land still rests. In land mediation hearings along the Sepik, the man who can tell the story of the first spirit at a site is the man the court accepts as the owner.

So the masalai is not a monster. It is a landlord.

Its powers follow from that, and they are narrow and absolute inside their boundary. It brings sickness, and lightning, and the tree that falls on the pigs. One priest who swam above a hundred-metre waterfall in Madang, at a place the villagers describe as an old lady sitting and pissing, spent that night in a storm that dropped coconut palms onto three pigs and buried them; the blame settled on the boys who had slashed the undergrowth at the head of the falls. A man who kills an unusually large frog at his own family’s waterhole can wake up with one eye swollen shut. That last man was a member of the spirit’s own clan, which is the point. The masalai does not deal in good and evil. It deals in belonging. Villagers in the Yangoru hills are clear that a spirit is not bad or good; it is either one of us, or it is being trespassed upon by strangers. Not every scholar has heard it that gently. Some fieldworkers record masalai as erratic, dangerous and amoral, worthy of fear but not respect, and the difference in tone is itself worth noticing.

The limits are as strict as the powers. A masalai cannot follow you. Its writ ends where its place ends, which is why the East Sepik proverb has it that the masalai goes ahead and the dead spirit follows behind: the dead can walk home to the village, and the masalai cannot. A chicken settles most quarrels. The place itself can shift, since a spirit waterhole is expected to migrate up and down the stream as floods scour out new deeps. And it can be lost. The one thing that seems to kill a masalai is not disrespect but forgetting.

At Gapun, in the lower Sepik, the local language Taiap has been dwindling for a generation, and the older men have noticed that the masalai who used to speak it have gone. They no longer find their tracks in the rainforest on the way to hunt or work sago. The men have worked out an explanation. The spirits must be hiding, they say, clearing off the land out of deference to the white man, who has come to Papua New Guinea to change it.

They have not all gone quietly. Among the Fore of the Eastern Highlands, a bush spirit called Nokoti spent the colonial decades getting into trouble, robbing tradestores and government offices, and was carried off into exile for it. He came back. His likeness is on the provincial flag. And in the Hunstein Range above the Sepik, where the Bahenimo hold certain ground taboo because masalai live there, the rules of the Wildlife Management Area now forbid disturbance to masalai areas in writing, which means that somewhere in a filing cabinet in Papua New Guinea there is a conservation statute that a python is enforcing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a masalai?

A masalai is a place-bound spirit in Papua New Guinean belief that owns a specific feature of the landscape, such as a waterhole, a waterfall, a rock formation or a large tree. The word is Tok Pisin and works as a cover-term for hundreds of separate local spirits, each with its own name in its own language. A place belonging to one is called a ples masalai.

What does a masalai look like?

There is no single attested appearance. Asked to depict one, Sepik men typically draw an abstract geometric design representing a grass, leaf or animal associated with their clan rather than a figure. In narrative encounters a masalai is met in animal form, most often as a python or another creature native to the place it owns.

Are masalai good or evil?

Neither, according to the people who live with them. Villagers in the East Sepik describe a masalai as being either one of their own or as reacting to trespass by outsiders, so the same spirit is protective to its clan and dangerous to everyone else. Some anthropologists have recorded a harsher view, describing masalai as erratic, dangerous and amoral, worthy of fear but not respect.

What happens if you disturb a masalai place?

Punishment usually arrives as illness, storm or accident. Recorded consequences include a man whose face swelled after he killed a large frog at his family’s waterhole, and a violent night storm that felled coconut palms onto three pigs after visitors swam above a sacred waterfall in Madang. The standard remedy is a chicken, killed and its blood poured into the spirit’s waterhole.

Why do masalai matter to land ownership in Papua New Guinea?

Because a clan’s right to its ground is often traced to the moment a masalai granted it. At Nimbohu the founding speech recounts the spirit telling a wandering ancestor to settle and become its man, and in Sepik land mediation hearings the person who can tell the story of the first spirit at a site is recognised as the rightful landowner. Masalai areas are now also protected in the written rules of Wildlife Management Areas in the Upper Sepik.

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