The Island of the Colorblind

Paul Theroux has called sakau (known on many islands as kava) ‘the most benign drug in the world.’ Its benignness was also stressed by Cook when he encountered it on his first visit to Tahiti (a related variety of pepper in New Zealand is now named captaincookia in his honor). Though it was described by naturalists on Cook’s first voyage, credit for its ‘discovery’ is usually given to the Forsters, the botanical father and son who accompanied Cook on his second voyage, and the plant has since been known by the name they gave it, Piper methysticum Forst.

An eloquent description of its effects was given by Lewin in his Phantastica; I had read this years before, as a student, and had been curious to try it myself. All is benign, stresses Lewin, if one does not overdo it:

When the mixture is not too strong, the subject attains a state of happy unconcern, well-being and contentment, free of physical or psychological excitement.…The drinker never becomes angry, unpleasant, quarrelsome or noisy, as happens with alcohol… The drinker remains master of his conscience and his reason. When consumption is excessive, however, the limbs become tired, the muscles seem no longer to respond to the orders and control of the mind, walking becomes slow and unsteady and the drinker looks partly inebriated. He feels the need to lie down. The eyes see the objects present, but cannot or do not want to identify them accurately. The ears also perceive sounds without being able or wanting to realize what they hear. Little by little, objects become vaguer and vaguer…[until] the drinker is overcome by somnolence and finally drifts off to sleep.

We had all been struck, when we arrived in Pohnpei, by the extraordinary slowness of drivers and pedestrians in Kolonia, but put this down to unhurriedness, a sense of leisure, ‘island time.’ But some of this slowness was clearly physiological, a sakau-induced psychomotor retardation. Sakau use and abuse is widespread here, although the effects of this are generally not dangerous. Dr. G.A. Holland mentions having seen only one sakau-related accident in his many years of practice in Micronesia; this was an elderly man who stumbled while returning home from a sakau party, fell, and broke his neck.

It was remarked even in the last century that sakau was incompatible with alcohol, but in recent years, its use has been much less restrained by tradition, and some younger Pohnpeians have taken to drinking it with beer, which can produce drastic changes in blood pressure and even sudden death. Chronic sakau drinkers, moreover, may develop a hard, scaly skin; we saw many older Pohnpeians with ichthyosis, or ‘fish’ skin.

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John Updike, in In the Beauty of the Lilies, re-reverses the foreground⁄background reversal of Joyce’s image, and writes of a ‘humid blue-black sky and its clusters of unreachable stars.’

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I had not heard of these effects normally occurring after sakau. But I had had a low-level visual migraine for the last three days; I had been seeing squiggles and patterns since landing in Pingelap, and the sakau seemed to have exacerbated this. Knut told me that he sometimes had attacks of migraine too, and I wondered whether a direct stimulation of the color areas in the brain, as may occur in a visual migraine, could evoke color even in someone with no normal experience of it. Someone had once asked him if he saw migraine phosphenes in color – but he had replied, ‘I would not know how to answer.’

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There was, I had been told, a cluster of houses near the Edwards’ on Pingelap, all of which belonged to achromatopic families – but it was unclear whether these families had clustered together because they were related (as virtually everyone on Pingelap is) or because they all shared the maskun.

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