Branches
The year before I miscarried on a small island in Maine, I was living on another small island a half-world away, with a Marquesan family I’d known for most of my adult life. The Timaus had adopted me as their “American sister” in the easy way Marquesan families often absorb children in need. They welcomed me “home,” as they had for decades, to their three-bedroom pre-fab perched high over the bay. My project that year was to understand the ancient ruins littering the forest floor of those lush, mountainous French Polynesian islands, and I figured I’d be learning a lot about coconuts, bananas and breadfruit.
But the Marquesans didn’t just talk about cultivating the forest. They spoke of mysterious illnesses, hauntings and misfortune. Of vengeful spirits that caused miscarriage and death. As a native New Englander raised Unitarian, these stories splintered my vague, idealistic notions of “Mother Earth.” And in the months after my miscarriage, they hovered at the messy edges of my pain. Back home in Vermont, gazing out past winking late summer oak and maple leaves to the distant blue-black of Lake Champlain, doubt crept in like a soft and unexpected fog.
The doctors had reassured me that some spotting and dark, clumpy clots were normal. But they couldn’t explain, afterwards, why I lost the baby. So I kept returning to this question, and to the Marquesas, again and again.
Some days at the Timaus began with a dog’s shrill bark in the grey hours before dawn, when a friend would pick up my adoptive father to go fishing. Others rolled lazily into focus as roosters crowed and animé blared on the family television, sunlight flashing through the curtains. I tromped through clinging, prickly weeds, across massive stone platforms furry with moss and ferns. I repeatedly tried, and failed, to remember Marquesan words whose vowels crowded around the same ten consonants, plus a glottal stop. I bobbed on the ocean out fishing, past midnight and shivering from cold beneath a sparkling expanse of stars. I sat on rocks, stone walls and rickety chairs listening to men and women talk about planting trees, chopping coconuts, and harvesting fruits and seeds. I sat quietly through Catholic mass bathed in the heady scents of coconut oil and Tahitian gardenia, surrounded by restless children and ladies in lace-fringed floral dresses. I tried in vain to block out the whine of mosquitoes, sweat dripping into my eyes, as I used an old machete blade to pry stiff chunks of coconut meat from its shell. I tiptoed around countless stone ruins, their half-buried silhouettes whispering of once-thriving settlements inhabited by chiefs, princesses, priests, warriors and craftsmen.
The more time I spent there, the more I came to understand that in the Marquesas, the land is more than a backdrop. It breathes, and it connects. Marquesans believe in spirits and mana, the spiritual power of their ancestors. They tie little Catholic crosses in noni, a squat tree with healing fruit and leaves that protect against angry spirits. Their stories of the forest describe places feared and avoided, where dangerous spirits play sinister tricks. They tell of women who miscarried or bled to death after walking on the wrong ruin, and others who fell ill after peeing next to a banyan tree where bones were buried.
“But you should be fine,” they assured me. “You’re an American!”
For the most part, I believed them. But in a way I had to, since my research brought me so close to so many ruins. Living descendants always gave me permission to visit and, in some cases, take photos, and I was almost never alone. Yet still there were times when the forest enveloped me like a fragrant green cloak, shutting out everything but the chatter of birds and the gentle murmur of the trees.
In one such moment, I had one of the most spiritual experiences of my life.
*
Moiti and I walk along a narrow path littered with fallen mango leaves. Our feet crunch with each step, nearly drowning out the distant trill of a Marquesan warbler. The air is sweet with the tang of earth and rotting mangos. Beneath the leaves, barely visible but for its lower edge, a straight line of stones leads us on, down an ancient road.
When we reach the ancient settlement, I wander up a gradual slope, through a dense array of old stone structures and foundations. The forest hums with the rush of a nearby stream. Chestnut, mango and breadfruit leaves rasp in the breeze, flashing silver in the sun. My curiosity pulls me on through the spindly spread of mango saplings, across terraces and over walls crumbling with age.
Moiti takes a different route through the site, and our paths diverge. I duck through some branches and step carefully over a rotting log, wary of giant centipedes. Then I stop, suddenly realizing I am standing at the edge of a stone enclosure. Most of its walls are crumbling. Those that remain stand a few feet high in spots. And there in the center, surrounded by terraces of stone, looms a massive banyan tree. A tree whose branches reach deep into Marquesan life and spirituality. The aerial roots of banyans are medicine; their bark, cloth; their layered trunks hallowed receptacles for the bones of Marquesan ancestors. Still considered sacred by many Marquesans, old banyans are alive with mana. Inhabited by spirits.
Standing at the break in the wall, I look around for Moiti. She’s nowhere in sight. In most cases I divert my steps around such places. But today I pause to listen and feel. I’ve been told that if I am unwelcome, my skin will prickle with goosebumps. I might feel a weight pressing on my shoulders, or my head might suddenly seem to balloon. I might hear strange animal sounds or laughter.
I wait, and none of the usual signs appear. So I take a deep breath and step inside the enclosure.
Beneath my feet are the smooth, flattened stones of an ancient pavement. I approach the banyan slowly, still half expecting to hear or feel something. But the forest is peaceful, the warblers trilling overhead. About fifteen feet from the trunk, I stop and look up. And as my eyes reach into that vast, vibrant canopy, everything else fades.
I remember feeling something similar staring up into the soaring, layered domes of Hagia Sophia. Only this is even better. A lightness of being. A joy so sudden and complete, it makes me laugh. I am standing in a cathedral, beneath a blanket of leafy buttresses and graceful black columns of roots. The roof sparkles and glows a brilliant green, backlit by the sun. High overhead, tiny in the distance, the banyan’s leaves tap faintly, like pattering raindrops.
For an instant I feel myself rise up out of my body, straight into the arms of that ancient tree.
*
I lost the baby a year later; an unusual, surprising miscarriage that pounced upon us at sixteen weeks. And still today, I worry about all the things I can never know. I think about the spirits, and about all the times Marquesans have volunteered to show me human remains or spirit places. About the few days I ventured into the forest solo and wandered in ways I hoped, but couldn’t know, were respectful. About the women whose miscarriages were warnings.
In these moments I try to focus on the science, the wisdom of my body, and the statistical facts. No one likes to talk about it, but as many as one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage. So the sharing of my story brought out countless others from family and friends, like so many birds waiting to be released into the sky. Yet the question of “why” lingers on, faded and worn. I wonder whether it was a kind of fate, or just bad luck. Or were the spirits angry with me, after all?
Then I remember the feeling I had, standing under that banyan tree. The power and absolute peace of that moment. And the urgent need to know seeps away, through the canopy’s sun-lit filaments, into acceptance.
Emily Donaldson is an anthropologist and writer who has spent over two decades studying and working in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia. Read more.