The 'Shiver' Story
Welcome back to Inside 3! It’s been awhile but we’re gonna jump forward here. When I first started these entries, I had more time on my hands and that time is currently getting spread quite thin these days. I won’t say unfortunately as it’s with great fortune that I’m able to work more but I hope you can forgive me for fast forwarding a little because if nothing else, I really want to tell you this story, which is essentially the story of ‘Shiver’.
Where we left off, we were at our first summit at Watabung. Some chickens were sacrificed, I met a whole bunch of relatives I didn’t know existed and we were bracing ourselves to continue our ascent even higher. But alas, here is where I’ll omit the next leg of this hike - fingers crossed, I can come back here if time allows. I want to instead, throw you to another part of the country in New Ireland Province where we ended up after our very physical trip to the Eastern Highlands. It took us about 2 flights, a bout of food poisoning from an airport chicken & mayo roll (note to everyone - never trust a chicken roll anywhere in the tropics, ESPECIALLY with mayo) and a fight with our hire car company before we made it to Luaupul village, an hr out of Kavieng the main town. Let me just take this moment though, to acknowledge the tenacity of Dan Segal who, whilst incessantly vomiting into a bag and schvitzing from his eyeballs (yep - the unlucky food poisoning casualty), argued with a shifty Indian hire car dude so we weren’t stranded at the airport in the dead of night. The problem was I had been dealing with a PNG woman for weeks who had quoted me a specific price and then threw us out to sea when we arrived, to a shifty Indian guy who had not been in the picture at all and was now demanding a significant increase on what was quoted. The hustle was strong in that one and conveniently that lovely PNG woman was nowhere to be seen or heard when we needed things rectified. At that point standing in a long arse line at a Europcar or Avis counter seemed trés glamour. I will never complain again.
The Kavieng airport is tiny like the town itself and we came in on the last flight of the night. If only you could’ve seen us standing in that empty dark terminal car park under very dim street lights. A frazzled Tokelauan Fijian woman who had managed to sleep off her food poisoning at the last airport (how she did that so quickly I am still impressed), two PNG ladies who didn’t look like they’d sat foot on PNG soil for a hot minute, a rather tall lanky gay man who was probably craving a cigarette or a glass of Rosé right about now, my mother, who was probably judging the situation that this wouldn’t happen if she was in charge, and a very vomitty, very sweaty Jew who was pleading at the very rude Indian man through the window of that janky 12 seater van to just let us hire the car. The poetry was real.
BUT. I guess what they say is true - that you can’t outhustle a Jew, especially one with puke breath, as soon we were piled into that van heading on out of what was starting to look like a night spent sleeping on the airport terminal steps.
Out on the Boluminski Highway we’re packed in so tight. No one is really saying anything except my mother. She suddenly launches herself into an episode of ‘20 questions with Miriam’ so as to deter them from possibly murdering us under a coconut tree somewhere off the beaten track. It’s raining and no one can make out up from down as it’s so dark outside. I’m in the front with Dan forcing electrolytes down his throat and his head is wobbling about like a wounded sailor/smacked out junky. On the brief moments he does open his eyes, he says he can see people or beings walking across the road as we drive. There are. NO people crossing the road. Maybe he was high but things started to get weirder.
As we’re traveling along that wet highway, I’m going in and out of reception trying to text my uncle Dominic. Come to think of it, I may have also run out of credit and had borrowed someone else’s phone but it was absolute rubbish trying to communicate where we were exactly on the road. We had no GPS and my visits back home were too long in between to warrant any landmark familiarity especially in the dark. All we could tell the driver was the village we were heading to. Thank goodness there was only one road in and out. After a few false arrivals we caught a glimpse of my Uncle and his torch flashing us down and I cannot tell you how relieved we all were to have made it (but also make it in the life or death sense).
Piled out we say goodbye to that God forsaken van and try our best to introduce the newbies to my family by lamp light. There are many hugs and some happy tears and shortly we are sitting in the sand outside the thatched house my uncle built me on the beach, directly opposite my grandparents house. The gentle lapping of the waves lets us know that we aren’t in the Highlands anymore and the change of pace is apparent.
But here’s the thing. New Ireland is definitely a stunner. It’s typical of what you’d expect of a Pacific Island. Not the Highlands, unless you already are familiar with PNG or the Pacific in general, then you know it’s multifaceted from its cultures, languages, people and ecosystems. For someone living under a rock, when you think about islands - you really only think white sandy beaches, dancing palm trees, lazy ocean breezes, and Polynesian women in coconut bikinis. On the surface this is generally New Ireland (bar the Polynesian women in coconut bikinis - we are Melanesians thank you very much) but when I say that the change of pace was apparent I mean this place runs deeper than the physical eye can see.
So in our first hour there, we experienced just that. As soon as we arrived, Emele suggested to Dan that she could perform a special Fijian abdominal massage on him to try to ease his discomfort - Dan was still feeling pretty rotten. Emele and Dan disappeared into the house for a few while we all continued to catch up with each other. About half and hr to an hour later, Emele emerges from the house (leaving Dan to rest in the room) and down the wooden steps that run down beside the exterior of the hut. As Emele descends the shift in the mood immediately changes. I hear my Aunty Joyce call out to my Uncle Dominic, “Punion!”; she calls him by his surname. The tone of her voice is that of a mother who doesn’t want to alarm anyone but is tinged with enough urgency that you know something’s up as she makes sure my uncle has their youngest close to him. At that point Emele has sat down and she’s looking behind her as if someone has just brushed past her thigh, my sister has also randomly burst out crying and then my Aunty summons me over to her side.
My Aunty Joyce is my biological father’s first cousin and an extremely powerful woman. She is both feared and revered across parts of New Ireland as someone who possesses the ability to see into the other realm and has learned the different protocols in which to interact with members of that realm. A kind of medium maybe but that isn’t even fit to decipher the breadth of who she is and her capabilities. Aunty says to me in Tok Pisin, “Ngaire, hamas pla man yu kam wantem?”. Translation “How many people did you come here with Ngaire?”.The question alone sent shivers down my spine as I knew exactly what she was alluding to. I asked her why anyway and she responded that when Emele came down the stairs, there was another woman who had followed behind her. Someone she did not recognise but was wearing pas pas (traditional arm regalia) around her arms and almost like she was from the coast but not a New Irelander. As a ‘medium’ Aunty also knows who the spiritual residents of different areas are and who are visitors. I went through and counted everyone who was on my team and reassured her that who I’d come with was who I’d come with. She pauses a bit and starts to think who it would be. She told me that one of our deceased family members had been restless pacing back and forth the front of the house (my house is built about 4 or 5 meteres away from 3 burial plots belonging to family members) the last few days so maybe she had mistook the pas pas wearing woman for her but she couldn’t be sure. Aunty then asks where we’ve been the last couple of days and I tell her we were up on mum’s ancestral mountain Wenamo yesterday where several of my ancestors are buried and previously we had been in Goroka at my Aine’s (grandmother) end of mourning ceremony. She seems intrigued by this so she then speaks to my mother to try to gauge if mum can identify the woman she saw. Mum says the only person she can think of is my Aine’s older sister Kandori who was of a slender tall coastal build and was buried up at Wenamo. Knowing she can’t get any further with the information we have given her she tells us to leave it with her.
At that point we are all suitably freaked out, sitting there in the dark on the beach not knowing how many unseen extra people are sitting there with us so the 6 of us decided we were all going to bunk together in the same room like a bunch of scaredy cats. Poor Dan had been asleep the whole time and missed what had happened so he was confused as to why I was ushering his sick self from the room he was so comfortably resting in, to the room we were all going to sleep in together. He begged me to let him stay in his room but I was like, “Dude, some just shit went down and if we go down,we all go down together”. Anyways, morning comes and Aunty is over with some news. She lives about 50 meters from where we slept so she walked over and at the very steps she had seen the woman appear, she tells me she’d had an interesting encounter as she was sleeping. She had been woken up by a woman who appeared to be my late Aine. Fortunately my Aunty had spent some time with my Aine back in the 90s when my parents were still together, so she was able to recognise Aine. But she noticed that Aine was traveling with someone else and quickly realized it was the woman she saw following Emele down the stairs. Aunty soon made the connection that this woman was somehow related to Aine and asked them what they were doing this side of town. They told Aunty that I had woken them up from the grave when I had brought my team up but hadn’t said goodbye or told them where we were going. So Aunty gently told them we had come to see her and the family and basically we were in safe hands thus sending them back to where they came from. When Aunty had told mum, it confirmed what mum had suspected, that the woman was indeed her Aunty Kandori who was Aine’s oldest sister and that it made sense that they had come here together as they were very close as sisters and moved together even in this physical life. I’ve been exposed to a lot of spiritual stuff in my time here but never something like that where your grandmother follows you all the way to opposite ends of the country just because you didn’t say goodbye properly. A terrifying yet extremely special moment knowing that my Aine was right there at the start of putting ‘3’ together and that in that realm, time has no significance.
This is a story I often just brushed over when ‘Shiver’ was first released because as a First Nations person our understanding of the world struggles to exist within the confines of Western society. A week or so ago I was in a studio with Zaachariah from Electric Fields & Jess Mauboy and one of the things we chatted about was how we feel forced to curate how we move through this world in order to make someone else comfortable which I found so encouraging knowing they had experienced the same things. For ‘Shiver’ I was unsure as to how people would ingest the meaning behind it and sometimes with rapid fire interviews you often don’t feel comfortable sharing something so deeply personal with so much spiritual content attached to it and it became a missed opportunity for both parties. Unfortunately the commercial arena doesn’t necessarily celebrate that even with all its diversity washing, so I’m grateful that I can spend the time now telling the story of ‘Shiver’ to you on my own terms and through my own channels. Maybe next time I’ll tell ya about how Ben (my manager) thinks my uncle Dominic is a mermaid as he is convinced he saw him come up from the ocean and a tail disappear.
(All images taken by Emele Ugavule except *)