Bronislaw Malinowski

“Come down, O wood-sprites, O Tokway, dwellers in branches, come down! Come down, dwellers in branch forks, in branch shoots! Come down, come, eat! Go to your coral outcrop over there; crowd there, swarm there, be noisy there, scream there!

“Step down from our tree, old men! This is a canoe ill spoken of; this is a canoe out of which you have been shamed; this is a canoe out of which you have been expelled! At sunrise and morning, you help us in felling the canoe; this our tree, old men, let it go and fall down!”

This spell, given in free translation, which, however, follows the original very closely, word for word, is far clearer than the average sample of Trobriand magic. In the first part, the tokway is invoked under various names, and invited to leave his abode, and to move to some other place, and there to be at his ease. In the second part, the canoe is mentioned with several epithets, all of which denote an act of discourtesy or ill-omen. This is obviously done to compel the tokway to leave the tree. In Boyowa, the yoba, the chasing away, is under circumstances a great insult, and at times it commands immediate compliance. This is always the case when the chaser belongs to the local sub-clan of a village, and the person expelled does not. But the yoba is always an act of considerable consequence, never used lightly, and in this spell, it carries these sociological associations with it. In the usual anticipatory way, characteristic of native speech, the tree is called in the spell “canoe” (waga).

The object of this spell is written very plainly in every word of it, and the natives also confirm it by saying that it is absolutely necessary to get rid of the tokway. What would happen, however, if the tokway were not expelled, is not so unequivocally laid down by tradition, and it cannot be read out of the spell or the rite. Some informants say that the canoe would be heavy; others that the wood would be full of knots, and that there would be holes in the canoe, or that it would quickly rot.

But though the rationale of the expulsion is not so well defined, the belief in the tokway’s evil influence, and in the dangers associated with his presence is positive. And this is in keeping with the general nature of the tokway, as we find him delineated by native belief. The tokway is on the whole a harmful being, though the harm he does is seldom more than an unpleasant trick, perhaps a sudden fright, an attack of shooting pains, or a theft. The tokway live in trees or in coral rocks and boulders, usually in the raybwag, the primeval jungle, growing on the coastal ridge, full of outcrops and rocks. Some people have seen a tokway, although he is invisible at will. His skin is brown, like that of any Boyowan, but he has long, sleek hair, and a long beard. He comes often at night, and frightens people. But, though seldom seen, the tokway’s wailing is often heard from the branches of a big tree, and some trees evidently harbour more tokways than others, since you can hear them very easily there. Sometimes, over such trees, where people often hear the tokway and get a fright, the above quoted incantation and rite are performed.

In their contact with men, the tokway show their unpleasant side; often they come at night and steal food. Many cases can be quoted when a man, as it seemed, was surprised in the act of stealing yams out of a storehouse, but lo! when approached he disappeared—it was a tokway. Then, sickness in some of its lighter forms is caused by the tokway. Shooting pains, pricking and stabbing in one’s inside, are often due to him, for he is in possession of magic by which he can insert small, sharp-edged and sharp-pointed objects into the body. Fortunately some men know magic by which to extract such objects. These men, of course, according to the general rule of sorcery, can also inflict the same ailments. In olden days, the tokway gave both the harmful and beneficent magic to some men, and ever since, this form of sorcery and of concomitant healing have been handed on from one generation to another.

Let us return to our canoe, however. After the rite has been performed, the tree is felled. In olden days, when stone implements were used, this must have been a laborious process, in which a number of men were engaged in wielding the axe, and others in re-sharpening the blunted or broken blades. The old technique was more like nibbling away the wood in small chips, and it must have taken a long time to cut out a sufficiently deep incision to fell the tree. After the tree is on the ground, the preliminary trimming is done on the spot. The branches are lopped off, and the log of appropriate length is made out of the tree. This log is cut into the rough shape of a canoe, so as to make it as light as possible, for now it has to be pulled to the village or to the beach.

The transporting of the log is not an easy task, as it has to be taken out of the uneven, rocky raybwag, and then pulled along very bad roads. Pieces of wood are put on the ground every few metres, to serve as slips on which the log can more easily glide than on the rocks and uneven soil. In spite of that, and in spite of the fact that many men are summoned to assist, the work of pulling the log is very heavy. The men receive food in payment for it. Pig flesh is cooked and distributed with baked yams; at intervals during the work they refresh themselves with green coco-nut drinks and with sucking sugar cane. Gifts of such food, given during work in payment of communal labour, are called puwaya. To describe how heavy the work sometimes is, the native will say, in a characteristically figurative manner:

“The pig, the coco drinks, the yams are finished, and yet we pull—very heavy!”

In such cases the natives resort to a magical rite which makes the canoe lighter. A piece of dry banana leaf is put on top of the log. The owner or builder beats the log with a bunch of dry lalang grass and utters the following spell:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Clyx.com