‘New Guinea Fishing Song’ by Thomas Maschio​

‘New Guinea Fishing Song,’ by Thomas Maschio in Anthropoid, is half ethnography, half personal memoir. Combining these two practices seems more than a little precarious, given the academic rigor required for the former and the associative, boundless possibilities of the latter.

This essay, which chronicles the author’s life in a remote New Guinea fishing village, mostly balances these two forms, and sings loudest when its focus is fully on the traditional poem songs of the people he’s living among:

The fishing song wasn’t just a kind of love song. It was a memorial to lost people, to trying, failing, losing and succeeding. It memorialized effort, the throwing of oneself into a task. It memorialized the fisherman’s hopes and his dashed hopes, and also letting go, which is something all fishermen have to learn to do. Its lessons are like those of the mourning song that Kienget taught us:

I leave you now,

Smoke rising: these things are yours:

(no, they go with you)

While Maschino romanticizes his time in the village—and even says so himself at one point—he does do the work to make a small part of these people and their traditions come alive in a real and resonant fashion. The personal narrative, one of sadness and frustration and the end of marriage, both detracts from and adds to this ethnography. Because I can’t unknow these song poems and the people who sing them without the memory of first knowing them through some stranger’s life.

Therefore there is a good deal of trust involved in this knowing, a trust that the author’s personal truth isn’t warping or erasing the surrounding context. I’m left with a sense of unease, yes, but I’m also richer—and my sense of wonder is richer—for having read about these people and their songs.

Anthropoid