Risk-taking, ultimately, comes down to how we handle the toughest challenges of life. Do external events destroy us and steal our power, or do we milk them to become more capable and strong individuals?
--Kira Salak
Above photo: Copyright Remi Benali 2003. Contact: www.remibenali.com
It is my pleasure to introduce you to Kira Salak. As I said in my opening editorial, she is a hero of mine. I don’t actually have that many heroes—people who I hold in the highest regard—because I like to chase my own dreams and tackle my own demons. I think we all should and I suspect she would agree. That said, Kira has done things that I can ONLY dream of with an authenticity we can all learn from. In my hearts of hearts, I know I cannot do what she has done. Few, if any of us, will kayak 600 miles into hostile Africa, or go toe to toe with Burmese militants, but we can understand fear and the desire to conquer it. That is why she is a hero to me-- she doesn't just take these journeys for herself, she takes me with her by sharing the experiences with such depth that I don't have to "go there" to "go there." I treasure the moments Kira gave to this interview and hope you can make time to read the excerpt from her debut novel, The White Mary.
1. You’ve been described as the “real life Laura Croft” and “the riskiest woman on the planet.” How do YOU see yourself? Do you think you are taking great risks or is it “just another day in the office?” Are you chasing your dreams or are they chasing you?
Frankly, I find such descriptions a little bizarre. I’m just doing my job—going to countries, reporting, writing articles—and my gender has never made any difference to me in this respect. My whole modus operandi in life is to face my fears. I’m a glutton for understanding my inner process and uncovering any patterns that aren’t working for me. So if there’s risk-taking, I see it as an internal process. My external journeys have allowed me to face my fears about all sorts of things—negotiating male-dominated societies, facing uncomfortable or life-threatening situations, dealing with physical pain or the possibility of death. Risk-taking, ultimately, comes down to how we handle the toughest challenges of life. Do external events destroy us and steal our power, or do we milk them to become more capable and strong individuals?
2. Other than a desire to have more creative license/freedom, what motivated you to write a novel? And how was the process different/the same than with the non-fiction memoirs?
It was my childhood dream to get a novel published. I’ve been writing fiction ever since I was five. It’s always been my passion. Still, I love nonfiction writing as well. Magazine work was how I paid the bills, and it allowed me to have a very free, unconventional lifestyle. Still, after my brother died in Africa, I realized that I needed to finally write my novel. So I was unemployed for a year and a half, and I used up my savings to write the book. I find fiction writing much more liberating than nonfiction writing, ironically. I can reveal more of myself in fiction because, interestingly, readers seem to cut you more slack when they don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. Whereas, with nonfiction, it’s a very naked process. You’re putting your life out there, inviting the world to judge you. That can be pretty hard-core.
3. I love the honesty, or at least what I think of as honesty, in your writing. Your work makes me feel like I am a good friend of yours as I read it—like you are writing me a long letter. That is a gift!!! I appreciate it. Where do you sense your style emerged? Any influences? Mentors? Heroes?
Thanks for your comments. I don’t know that my style emerged from anywhere in particular. It just felt real to me. I value and admire authenticity and sincerity wherever I can find it, so I couldn’t imagine writing any other way myself. One of the most influential quotes I ever read was in J.D. Salinger’s book Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenter: “Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories? I mind getting a rattling good story from you. I want your loot.” That seems the quintessential dilemma that all writers—or artists—face. Do you worry about making money and entertaining the masses, or do you listen to your heart and speak its truth? It’s back to that notion of risk-taking again: writing your truth means taking a risk. It requires courage, because you’re entering unfamiliar territory and may not be giving people what they’re used to getting. But I’ve learned that the pay-off for such courage is enormous.
4. Why so many solo journeys, other than the obvious, they are “assignments”?
I find solo traveling empowering. I grew up with very low self-esteem, and when I started backpacking alone in places like central Africa, I finally felt competent at something. I woke up to myself. I realized how much I had underestimated myself and my potential.
5. What makes an experience special to you?
Any experience which allows me to realize my connection to life, the universe, God, oneness, is special. I value any experience which allows me to see the beauty or goodness in others or the world.
6. What’s next? Book tour, I know, and will post the dates for people, but
what else? Next book? Next trip? Next adventure?
I’m working on my next novel now. My life has really transformed lately, in a number of major ways, so I haven’t been able to plan too far in advance! Honestly, I think I’m done with solo travel now. My partner and I have plans to go to Mongolia together, and he’s shown me the joys of traveling with another.
7. What are your five favorite books?
The best, most satisfying piece of writing I’ve ever read: the short story “Sonny’s Blues,” by James Baldwin
Fiction: To Kill a Mockingbird, Sophie’s Choice, The Catcher in the Rye, Tender Is the Night, The Things They Carried, Jane Eyre, The Hours
Nonfiction: Another Day of Life, Dispatches, Stop-Time, What Am I Doing Here?, Love’s Executioner
Thank you so much for the interview!!!! I appreciate your time and care. Good luck with everything yet to come and all that already is!
Here is an excerpt from Kira’s novel, The White Mary, in stores August 5th!
"Where is your husband?” Tobo asks the white mary, chewing and spitting.
It is a question he has been wondering about since the woman first appeared in his village. White men, he has noticed, are usually married, but only to one wife at a time. Which makes no sense to Tobo. Who is a man supposed to lay with when his wife is heavy with child or sick? Or during her blood time? Two wives, at the very least, are necessary, though more than four can be costly. He, himself, has a very young wife and an older one, his third wife having died while trying to push out her baby. Tobo often tells his youngest wife to meet him in the yam garden for puspus, but she never gets big with child. He thinks it is the gods’ way of joking with him. They know how risky it is for a man to touch a woman, let alone get her bokis fluids on him after lying with her. Were it not for all the protection Tobo puts around his body, he would surely be poisoned by now. He has often wondered if the fluids from a white mary bokis are equally dangerous. Or even more so. It is a question that none of the white Jesus Men would answer for him.
Marika glances at Tobo, alarmed by the witch doctor’s question. In some countries, when a man asks her if she’s married, it means he’s trying to flirt with her. But Tobo has no prurient look in his expression, just curiosity.
She thinks about Seb. His bright brown eyes. The feel of his lips on her cheek. That last, lingering stare he gave her before she left him for good.
She feels a clench of pain. “I don’t have a husband,” she tells Tobo.
“Eh? Why not?”
“In America, some women don’t get married.”
Tobo is sure she’s a witch now. Only women who are hexed can’t get husbands. “This means you don’t have children?”
“No.”
Tobo considers her answer. “What man allowed you to come alone to my country? Was it your father?”
Marika doesn’t know what to do with his question. “My father is dead,” she says, hoping that will satisfy him.
Tobo nods. Now he understands. The white mary has no husband or father to tell her what to do. It explains why she always has the lost look in her eyes.
“Is Robert Lewis your wantok?” he asks.
Marika wishes Tobo’s strange questions would end. She’s tired and hungry, and they have absolutely no food or drinking water. She pretends not to understand him.
“Is the white man Robert Lewis your wantok?” he asks again, insistent.
Her wantok—One Talk. Which is to say, someone who speaks her language, is a member of her tribe. As there are over seven hundred tribes in Papua New Guinea, she knows Tobo must think there are just as many in the United States, if not more.
“Yes,” she says at last. “Lewis is my wantok.”
“Does he have a wife in America?”
Marika sighs. What to say? Lewis, the famous war correspondent, was married once. He had girlfriends—lots of girlfriends. And a few longer relationships, nothing too serious. Some people called him a “womanizer.” Others said he was “fond of the ladies.”
“Lewis had women,” Marika says.
It is exciting news for Tobo: a white man with more than one wife. “How many wives did he have?”
“I don’t know.” Marika dips her hand in the water and washes off the clay on her cheeks.
“Do you also want to be Lewis’s wife?”
Marika stares at him, seeing a mysterious glint in the Anasi man’s eyes. When she was younger, and idolized Lewis, she would fantasize about him sometimes. It was just the sort of harmless thing young girls do, like obsessing about rock stars or actors.
When Marika doesn’t respond to Tobo’s question, he laughs, knowing it must be true. The white mary would like to be Lewis’s wife. Tobo is not surprised. If Lewis’s wives are in America, and if Lewis is here, then he will need puspus. Like any man.
Marika watches Tobo’s lips furl into a smile. Irritated, she throws down her water bottle and walks off.
---
They’ve been paddling for days across swamps, through mangroves. The whole time, the sun blazes in a sky without clouds. Marika finds the heat nearly unbearable. She hangs her billum bag over her head to try to protect her face. She slathers clay on her exposed skin, though sweat soon melts it from her body. The sunlight burns her relentlessly, cruelly, and her only means of cooling off is to continually throw water on her clothes.
But now a change: they enter a stream. Trees arc overhead, providing blessed shade as the swampland gives way to forest. Everything grows dim, the sun losing its dominion to giant fern trees and hardwoods which block out the sky. Marika still hasn’t seen any people, nor any trace of human passage, since leaving Krit village. She imagines herself and Tobo as First Man and Woman. All around them is unmolested jungle, resounding with bird calls and insect wails. Cockatoos and hornbills watch her fearlessly from the trees. Flocks of green and red parrots materialize from the forest only to resettle themselves and disappear again. The world has come alive with resplendent, surreal hues: neon-colored damselflies, butterflies with giant wings of blue satin. It is a glimmering, sultry place, everything reaching tentacles out, overtaking and wrapping and fondling.
Tobo uses his bow and arrows to shoot them food—ducks, usually, or crowned pigeons. Or he goes off into the jungle to hunt, returning with tree rats and possums. At dusk, he hacks away a clearing in the jungle, builds a fire, and puts up a couple of lean-tos. Burning betel nut palm leaves to keep the mosquitoes away, he shows Marika how to cut and clean animal carcasses and fasten them to spits. He must show her how to do everything. How to construct a pallet aboveground, away from the ants. How to bring smoking cinders with her into the jungle at night to keep mosquitoes from biting her when she goes pekpek. Slowly, the white mary learns.
They make gradual progress upriver, though to what end Marika doesn’t know. The more the river narrows, the more tedious the journey becomes, dead trees blocking their way and forcing them to stop. Usually, they can lift the canoe over the debris, but at times the route is so blocked by tangles of branches, or by the enormous trunks of ancient trees, that Tobo has to cut them a portaging route through the jungle.
At last, when their canoe butts against a high wall of logs, Tobo orders them out of the boat.
“Yumi go long bikbus,” he says.
They will head into the “big bush.”
It is what Marika has been fearing: leaving the waterways. At least with a river they have something to follow, with a beginning and ending. The jungle appears as a dark green void, without any landmarks, seemingly without end. If she ever emerges from it, she’ll be in the village where Lewis is supposed to be—or she might not ever get out.
“Are there any villages between here and Walwasi?” she asks Tobo.
“Nogat,” he says. Nothing.
Tobo makes no ceremony about entering the jungle. He simply removes their few belongings from the canoe, fills his billum bag with smoked meat and water gourds, and hacks a route into the jungle. Marika watches him, immobilized, as he swiftly, expertly, disappears into the rain forest.
Here is the moment, the precise point in time, that will define who she is. The moment of irreconcilability, when she must pick up her own billum bag, fill her own water bottle—hopelessly reeking of kerosene—and follow Tobo into the dim greenery. There seems to be nothing left behind her and, quite possibly, nothing waiting ahead. Her ex-boyfriend, Seb, used to tell her that every foolish choice a person makes is an attempt, however misguided, to find happiness.
Marika knows she could still go back. Tobo would gladly return her to civilization. He might even take her as far as the Sepik River, if she asked. Though Seb would consider that the “sensible” thing to do, he also knew the trademark stubbornness of her character that listens to no reason, heeds no warnings. It is the part of her that, ironically, Robert Lewis would have admired.
Lewis. Does she actually believe he’s alive, and that she’ll find him? But it’s crazy-making to think that far ahead. It’s enough just to face the difficult journey in front of her, and all it will entail. Probably, she’s about to risk her life for a ghost—though it has never bothered her, risking her life. Marika doesn’t know if that’s a defect of her character, as Seb might think. Death has never really scared her.
All she knows is that if Lewis is alive, and if she can find him, the hard journey will be worth it. She won’t give up on him. He would have never given up on her, after all.
“Yumi go!” Tobo shouts from the jungle, waiting for her.
She charges into the jungle, shoving branches aside. Reaching Tobo, she asks him how far to Walwasi village.
He doesn’t need to think about it. “Longwe tumas,” he says.
Long way too much. Marika already knows that distance isn’t given in numbers out here. Miles, kilometers—they’re meaningless. In the bush, distance is measured by how long it takes a normal person, traveling at a steady clip, to get from one point to another. She knows that Tobo’s conclusion of longwe tumas takes into consideration all the streams and rivers they’ll have to cross, all the mountains they’ll have to climb. It takes into consideration the storms and heat and agonizing nights of no sleep, attacked by mosquitoes. His answer is, to Marika, a sobering assessment. Long way too much. A very long way.
Tobo glances at the white mary’s face. At the changing expression. She looks like an old woman with tired, troubled eyes, who has seen too much, though she asked for this journey and paid handsomely for it. Tobo will never understand the white people. Not for as long as he lives.
“Once you start a journey,” he scolds her, “you must give up all fear. That is the man’s way.”
He turns from her and continues chopping them a path through the jungle.
---
Marika wakes and tries to sit up, but a wave of stomach cramps sends her reeling and clutching her abdomen in pain. Tobo sits nearby, watching her, speaking incantations in a low voice. All around her the jungle regards her pensively, its leaves barely stirring.
“Can you give me some water?” she whispers.
He reaches for one of his gourds and hands it to her. She drinks all the water inside and lies back, wiping sweat from her forehead. She knows she has a fever, is badly dehydrated. She wonders how many people die from something like this when they have no medicine for it.
Ants climb over her arm. Something crawls up her pants leg, but she’s too sick to swat at it. She keeps looking for the sun through the thick canopy, longing for open space.
Tobo stops his incantations to cut brush for their camp. He cushions a makeshift pallet with leaves and drags her onto it. Getting a fire going, he builds a shelter over her with branches and digs a hole just behind the structure so she has a place to go pispis. Marika throws up anything Tobo tries to feed her, but he keeps feeding her anyway, stuffing smoked bush meat into her mouth. Knowing she would do better with something starchy, he descends the mountain to harvest a sago palm.
Marika turns onto her side, closing her eyes, soft moans escaping from her throat. The pain is excruciating, unrelenting. She’s convinced she’s going to die; there can be just so much punishment her body will take. She sees images of Seb and speaks to him. She tells him that Lewis is dead, that he’s always been dead. Seb doesn’t answer, just stares at her with that concerned, helpless look in his eyes that he had the day she left him.
Tobo returns, carrying a billum bag full of moist, white sago pith. He dries it over the fire, pressing it into white patties and forcing Marika to eat one. Again, she throws it up, but he feeds her more until her stomach surrenders and she can keep it down.
The days pass. There is only the wrenching pain in her guts, and the mad dashes to relieve her bowels. The nights are the worst, the pain and mosquito onslaughts keeping her from sleep. Tobo does what he can. Sometimes he sings to her. Often, he puts his mouth to her stomach to suck out the bad energy, spitting it over his shoulder. But there is so much dark smoke to suck out that he can’t do it all himself. He will need help. Great help, as he has no experience with the formidable demons of the white people.
Tobo knows he will need to call on one of his most powerful helping spirits, but first he must prepare the white mary and himself for such a ceremony. She often opens her eyes to see red parrot feathers circling her head, as Tobo builds a protective barrier of white light around her body. He goes carefully, respectfully, so as not to anger the demons causing her illness. Three times a day, Tobo puts his most potent charms around her: his effigy of Balu, the head spirit of the jungle trees, and several cassowary feather bundles empowered with protective energy by Agane, guardian of the lower realms.
Tobo debated for days whether to summon Agane, who is very hard to please and easily offended. An ornery trickster spirit, Agane is half man, half wild-pig, and can only be contacted by burning the bark of the wild mango tree. Tobo spent an entire afternoon harvesting Agane’s favorite wood, knowing that if he offers the spirit a large fire at night, Agane will come to the earth realm to warm his body from the frigid cold of the lower realms. Then, in gratitude, he will order his armies of healing spirits to do Tobo’s bidding.
Tobo will go to every length to try to keep the white mary alive. She is not a bad sort of white person, after all. She may be strange and bewitched, but her soul, he has noticed, is pure. Not to mention that if the white mary does die, Tobo is sure his family members will be cursed because he didn’t uphold his part of the payback bargain. He knows he must get Marika to the village where Lewis lives—or even all his sorcery skills won’t save his family from the consequences.
On the fifth night of Marika’s illness, Tobo is prepared to call Agane. The bark is collected. The fire is ready.
“Tonight, Agane will come,” Tobo tells Marika solemnly.
Marika, weak and in pain, opens her eyes.
“You must be polite to Agane,” Tobo explains. “And you must not be scared of him, because he doesn’t like frightened women.”
Marika doesn’t know what Tobo is talking about, but she nods. She tries to eat the sago that he hands her, barely swallowing any before she throws it up. She finishes the water in her water bottle instead, and Tobo takes it from her and walks away with it. She assumes he’s going to refill it in a nearby stream and come right back, but as dusk falls, he doesn’t return.
The jungle descends into darkness, Marika’s ears ringing with the bold calls of night insects. Mosquitoes engulf her, buzzing in her ears and biting the bottoms of her feet. She covers her face with her hair, and the insects bite her scalp instead. Without the smoke from a betel leaf fire, the mosquitoes will feed on her liberally, and she knows there’s no way to stop them.
Marika hears a screech. Another screech. She sits up with difficulty, seeing a fire moving quickly toward her through the jungle. She assumes it’s Tobo coming at last, and she lies back down, waiting for him. But as the flame approaches, there’s a frantic rustling behind her, the lean-to shaking. She jumps up and peers into the darkness, unable to see anything.
The fire comes closer to her. Thankfully, she realizes that it is Tobo, holding a torch. Screeching madly, he thrusts the fire into a nearby pile of wood. As the bark erupts into flames, the rustling intensifies behind her. Marika huddles, terrified. Tobo runs over to her, carrying a lit piece of bark. Yelling and gesticulating, he desperately blows smoke over her body. Marika feels the patter of something mothlike striking her bare feet—the soft yet firm wings of a night creature. She kicks her legs at it, but the moth wings just flutter more urgently against her.
More moths strike her. On her arms, her face. Tobo is too busy screeching like a madman to help her. Marika slaps at the creatures, trying to drive them off, but they only return in greater numbers. She grabs a couple of them with her hand, discovering that the bodies are too large to be moths. Bats.
Marika flails her arms and tries to protect her face. But as suddenly as the winged creatures appeared, they vanish. Heart pounding, she searches the darkness. She doesn’t know if they’ll return, and she curls up on her side, hopelessly exposed to the jungle. She feels profoundly tired now. So tired she can’t keep her eyes open.
She falls asleep.
When Marika wakes, the dawn is just arriving. Its light gradually defeats the darkness, giving shape to trees and brush. She sits up. A trace of betel leaf smoke curls over her body from a nearby pile of cinders. Cassowary feathers cover her clothes and the ground around her pallet. The night actually passed in its entirety without waking her once with diarrhea. The pain in her abdomen is gone, and she feels as if she’s slept for centuries.
Tobo rests under his own lean-to several feet away. She looks at him—at the red paint covering his face, and the mysterious, carved statue in his hand. Marika remembers the bats from last night. Had it been a nightmare? She didn’t know bats could land on a person. It was uncanny.
She gets up, excited that she can move without pain. She crouches behind the privacy of her shelter to relieve herself. Cassowary feathers litter the ground like confetti. She picks one up, seeing a trace of blood on it and on the ground. How bizarre, she thinks. It is her only response to Tobo and everything that happened last night: bizarre.
Marika returns to her pallet and sits down. Her pants are muddy and torn. She needs a bath and a change of clothes. What she wouldn’t give for a bar of soap right now, and some fresh water! She sees her filled water bottle nearby and picks it up, taking a sip and running water over her face. Tentatively, she chews a piece of sago, discovering she can swallow it without nausea.
Tobo stirs and opens his eyes, staring at her.
“Mi ken kaikaim nau,” she says to him happily. “I can eat now.”
---
It takes Marika three days of rest to recoup her strength for more jungle travel. She sleeps a lot and eats as much as she can. Her stomach, deprived of food for nearly a week, takes time to adjust to normal-sized meals. Marika guesses she lost nearly ten pounds, her hip bones protruding through her skin. She knows she probably wouldn’t have lived without Tobo’s ministrations, but whenever she tries to thank him for his help, he looks at her curiously and shrugs. Her days of sickness seem to have already passed out of his mind, gone and long forgotten.
Tobo feels extremely pleased with Agane’s work on the white mary, and his mind has been filled with plans to offer the spirit mango bark fires in the days ahead, to show his gratitude. Now, though, the woman needs to start moving as soon as possible. He’s worried that her expelled demons will come back and try to make her sick again. Whenever a place has been touched by sickness or death, it is always better to move from it as soon as possible. Everyone knows that. Everyone except for the white people, who don’t know anything about demons and have no idea how busily they’re always trying to enter a person’s body to create mischief.
With enormous reluctance, Marika returns to the grueling jungle treks each day. She starts out clumsy and stays that way, not fully recovered from her sickness and feeling more discouraged than ever. As they plunge forward into the rain forest, she imagines they’re only backtracking or looping around to where they were the day before. She has already forgotten how long it’s been since they left Krit village, but she figures it has to be over a month, at least. They’ve walked so far that she can’t imagine ever returning the way they’ve come. If they don’t keep going forward, she doesn’t think she’ll have any hope of making it out of the jungle alive.
Deep in the mountains, they come upon a new obstacle: raging rivers. If Marika can’t easily ford them on foot, Tobo ties a vine across the water for her to cling to as a guide rope. Or he cuts down a tree to act as a makeshift bridge, and she carefully walks across the trunk, agonizing over what would happen if she fell onto the boulders below. The rivers are yet another of the jungle’s tests for her to pass. Another of its torments.
Facing a new day of climbing, Marika sits next to Tobo to tell him that she can’t go on much longer. Her body gets weaker by the day. Her leg muscles more and more cramped. She can never drink enough water to stave off dehydration from the heat and exertion.
“Tobo,” she says to him, “I need to know—are we lost?”
“Eh? Lost?” He stops repairing a hole in his billum bag and looks at her.
“Do you really know where Walwasi village is?”
Tobo thinks the white mary is acting bewitched again and makes a protective sign over himself with his hand. “Yes, I know where Walwasi village is,” he says.
“How do you know?”
Tobo is perplexed by her question. Doesn’t she see the sun? The stars? How could he get “lost,” as she says, when he has always known his way? It is offensive to him that she thinks he is as confused as she is, when the jungle has been his home and his friend for over forty years.
“We are not lost,” he says firmly. “Walwasi i klostu. Walwasi is close.”
It is the first time Marika has heard the word close coming from Tobo’s lips. Always, it has been longwe, until she finally stopped asking him. Now, after hearing this new word, she knows she should be filled with hope, but she finds it hard to trust him. Why should she believe anything he says? Hasn’t this journey been all about hardship and failed expectation? And worse: what if, by a miracle, they actually do arrive at Lewis’s village, and he isn’t even there? What if he never was there? Then this whole trip—all the sickness and pain of it—would just be a worthless ghost hunt.
Exasperated, Marika says nothing more to Tobo and gets up to fill her water bottle from a nearby stream. So they are “close” to Lewis. She will believe it when she sees it.
A day later, they encounter tree trunks laid across streams: marks of old hunters’ trails. Though the jungle never waited for those men to return, filling their paths with new foliage, the trunks are indisputable evidence of the existence of civilization—the first such evidence Marika has seen since leaving Krit village so many weeks ago.
But with no actual villages or people, each day’s disappointment continues to take its toll on her. She no longer cares about arriving anywhere. Before the unrelenting jungle, all she wants to do is curl up and retreat into sleep. She grows progressively weaker, even as she manages to hoist herself up the mountainsides, her feet and legs torn and punctured, the wounds slow to heal. Heat headaches become part of the grueling ritual, and she follows Tobo until she feels too dizzy or worn out to continue. He has to constantly scold her now, pushing her into streams to cool her off and spur her forward.
“Lewis i dai pinis,” she keeps telling him. Lewis is dead.
“No,” Tobo insists. “He is very close.”
