Qasavara

A chestnut fell from a high branch, went down through the leaves, and struck the thatch of a house nobody had thought to look down at. Tangaro the Fool had dropped it. The branches of the make tree hung right over that roof, and under the roof was Qasavara, who came out into the light with his club already in his hand.

That is how the ogre of the Banks Islands enters his best known story, and it is a fair introduction, because everything about him runs on appetite and a short temper. The people of Mota called him a vui, a spirit that had never been a man and never would be. Codrington, who wrote these tellings down in the 1880s, gives him four words and stops: very strong, a great fighter, a tyrant, a cannibal. He lived on the same island as Qat, the spirit who made the islands and then made the first people out of wood, and the two of them were always going to collide.

The collision began with fruit. Qat’s eleven brothers, all of them called Tagaro, went down to bathe and found a make, a Tahitian chestnut, turning in the current. Each of them picked it up, decided it was no good and dropped it back. Qat took it, thought otherwise, and carried it home for his mother to cook. When the brothers came in from the water there was nothing else in the house, so they ate his, a bit each, and Tangaro the Fool finished it. Qat sent them back for more. They followed the stream up until they came to the tree the fruit had fallen from, climbed it, and one of them let a nut go.

What happened next takes a single sentence in the telling. The ogre came out in a rage, caught the brothers, killed them, and packed them into his food chest. Qat waited five days. Then he took his bow and arrows and a shell hatchet and walked upstream, and when he reached the tree he understood the shape of the thing at once and did on purpose what the Fool had done by accident. He dropped a chestnut on the roof. Qasavara came out. They fought, and Qat killed him, and opened the food chest, and found bones. He blew down a reed into each of his brothers’ mouths and told them that if they really were his brothers they should laugh. They laughed.

Codrington sets a second story beside that one and says plainly that the two do not agree, which is the sort of honesty the old collectors managed better than most of the people who have retold them since. In the second, Qasavara is alive and hospitable in the worst way. He falls in with Qat and the brothers, invites them to his village, and lights the fire in his oven. At dusk he tells them they will sleep by themselves in his gamal, the men’s house, and they know exactly what that means and are badly frightened. Qat put them to bed anyway. He rapped one of the rafters apart with his knuckles, and the whole family climbed inside the beam and slept there. In the middle of the night Qasavara came with his men, carrying clubs and bows, found the sleeping places empty, and went away disappointed. The cock crowed. Qat woke his brothers.

The morning that followed is the best scene in the cycle. Qasavara’s men wanted salt water, so two of the brothers were sent to fetch it, and instead they smashed the water vessels and went straight up a casuarina tree. Two more were sent and did the same. It went on until every brother was in the branches and Qat was alone beside the oven with the ogre and his people. When the oven was opened Qat sat down next to it with a great handful of food bags. Qasavara swung his club and missed. Qat leapt to the far side of the pit, scooped up the hot food, called out this for my brother, this for my mate, and stuffed the bags. The club came again and missed again. He kept it up across the steam, back and forth, until the oven was empty and every bag was full, and then he ran.

Up in the tree the brothers had nowhere left to climb. Qasavara came after them and stretched his club out at arm’s length, and Qat shouted at the casuarina to lengthen, and it did, carrying them out of reach. The ogre climbed again. Qat shouted again. The tree grew until its top was against the sky, and then Qat told it to bend, and it bent all the way over to Tatgan, and the brothers dropped off onto the ground one after another with Qat last of all. He kept hold of the tip. Qasavara came down the trunk behind them and reached the end, and Qat said that now he would take his revenge. The ogre begged. Qat refused him and let go.

The tree snapped back. It flicked Qasavara off, and his head hit the sky, and he fell the whole way down and landed face first and full length, and there he turned into stone.

The stone was still there in the nineteenth century, and men still went to it. If a man wanted to be brave, if he wanted strength in a fight, he made his offering at the stone everyone said was Qasavara. They did not ask Qat for courage. They asked the corpse of the thing that had been eating their neighbours, because whatever else could be said about it, it had never lacked nerve.

Nothing in the record says what he looked like. There is no face, no height, no colour, only the club and the oven and the food chest, and one clue folded into the name. Across the languages of the Banks Islands he surfaces as Qasvay, Qasvar, Qasval and Woqastavav, and the ancestral form behind all of them opens with a word meaning bald head, while the second half is worn past reading and nobody has recovered it. The tellings disagree about his address, too. Codrington’s Mota version has him living on Qat’s own island; the versions recorded in the islands more recently put him on Gaua, the giant waiting there after Qat’s brothers steal the canoe and sail it over.

His powers are the ordinary ones of a strong man scaled up: reach, a club, a household of armed followers, and no hesitation at all. His weaknesses are stranger and more useful. He could be brought out of doors by a nut on his roof, reliably enough that Qat used it as a doorbell. He never once thought to look inside the rafter. And when he was already beaten, already high in a tree that was not his, holding a club he had missed with all morning, he kept climbing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Qasavara?

Qasavara is a man-eating giant from the Banks Islands of northern Vanuatu, and the main enemy of Qat, the spirit who made the islands. The Mota tradition classes him as a vui, a spirit that was never a human being. He is described as very strong, a great fighter, a tyrant and a cannibal, and he keeps a household of armed men.

How did Qat defeat Qasavara?

In one version Qat simply fights and kills him, after luring him out of his house by dropping a chestnut on the roof. In the better known version Qat lures him up a casuarina tree, orders the tree to grow until its top touches the sky, then bends it over to the ground, waits for Qasavara to climb down after him, and lets the tip go so that the tree flings him away.

What happened to Qasavara at the end of the story?

The casuarina flung Qasavara upward so hard that his head struck the sky, and he fell back to earth and landed face down at full length, where he turned into stone. Qat and his brothers then settled at Tatgan, the place the tree had bent down to.

Why did people make offerings at Qasavara’s stone?

Because the stone was thought to hold the strength of the giant himself. Anyone who wanted to be valiant and strong in fighting would make an offering at the stone that people said was Qasavara, a practice still recorded in the late nineteenth century.

What does the name Qasavara mean?

The first part of the name comes from an ancestral word meaning “bald head”. The second element varies between islands and its meaning has been lost. The same figure is called Qasvay, Qasvar, Qasval and Woqastavav in neighbouring Banks Islands languages, all descended from the same original name.

Related Entries

Qat, Tagaro, Abaia, Adaro, Masalai, Suangi, Tangaroa, Maero, Ponaturi, Nawao, Ogre, Giant, Polyphemus, Grendel, Humbaba