Pacific Possession: What I Learned Interviewing J. Maarten Troost in Kiribati

🌍 Pacific Possession: What I Learned Interviewing J. Maarten Troost in Kiribati

I sat barefoot on the cracked concrete floor of a thatched maneaba in South Tarawa, salt crusting my forearms, listening to J. Maarten Troost describe how he’d once mistaken a coconut crab for a lost piece of luggage—only to watch it scuttle sideways into a storm drain while locals laughed behind their hands. That moment, unscripted and humid and deeply human, crystallized everything I’d come to the Pacific to understand: pacific-possession-an-interview-with-j-maarten-troost wasn’t about extracting quotes—it was about surrendering the illusion of control long enough for the islands to speak back. If you’re planning a trip to Kiribati or similar low-lying atoll nations, know this upfront: logistics are fragile, schedules dissolve in humidity, and the most valuable insights arrive not in press kits but in shared silence over weak instant coffee.

✈️ The Setup: Why Kiribati, Why Then

I arrived in Tarawa Atoll in late October 2022—not during the peak tourist window (which barely exists), not for sunbathing, and certainly not for Instagram validation. I’d spent two years reading Pacific memoirs, cross-referencing maritime charts, and tracing shipping routes on the Pacific Islands Development Program database 1. Troost’s books—The Sex Lives of Cannibals, Getting Stoned with Savages, and especially Pacific Possession—had been my unofficial field manual. Not because they offered travel tips (they don’t), but because they modeled something rare: sustained, self-aware observation without romanticizing or vilifying. His writing treated the Pacific as a place where people lived—not as a backdrop for Western longing.

My plan was modest: spend three weeks in Kiribati documenting everyday resilience amid sea-level rise, with permission to record an extended conversation with Troost, who’d returned after nearly two decades to research new material. I’d secured letters from the Kiribati Ministry of Culture and the University of the South Pacific—but no guarantee of access. In Kiribati, formal permissions open doors; actual entry depends on who shares your tea, how long you sit, and whether you ask questions before offering answers.

I flew Air Kiribati from Nadi, Fiji—a 90-minute hop aboard a 34-seat ATR-42. The aircraft shuddered through tropical turbulence, then descended so low I could count individual breadfruit trees on Bairiki islet. Landing gear touched down on Bonriki International Airport’s single runway, flanked by rusting fuel drums and a faded sign reading “WELCOME TO KIRIBATI – HOME OF THE FIRST SUN.” No customs kiosks. No baggage carousels. Just a concrete shed, a customs officer named Tareta sipping Milo from a chipped mug, and a hand-scrawled list of arrivals taped to the wall. My backpack weighed 12.3 kg. My notebook held six questions. My expectations were already dissolving.

🌧️ The Turning Point: When the Boat Didn’t Come

Troost was scheduled to meet me on Day 3 at the Betio Town Council office—a repurposed colonial-era building with peeling paint and ceiling fans that spun like tired metronomes. I arrived early, notebook open, recorder charged, wearing what I thought was respectful attire: khaki trousers, collared shirt, sandals. A woman named Nei Mere greeted me with a nod and handed me a plastic stool under the shade of a pandanus tree. She said Troost would be delayed—he’d gone to Abaiang to visit elders and verify oral histories about pre-colonial land tenure.

“He will come when the tide allows,” she said, stirring sugar into a cup of black tea. “Not when the clock says.”

That phrase became my first lesson. In Kiribati, time isn’t linear—it’s tidal, lunar, relational. My meticulously color-coded Google Calendar meant nothing here. When I checked Air Kiribati’s website later that afternoon, I learned the inter-island ferry—the Moana Wave—had been canceled due to swell. No email alerts. No app notifications. Just a chalkboard outside the port office listing “CANCELLED” beside Abaiang in shaky blue script.

I sat on that stool for 37 hours across three days. Not idle—I walked Betio’s narrow lanes, watched children chase frigatebirds along the seawall, helped Nei Mere sort dried pandanus leaves for weaving. But the disorientation was physical: a low-grade nausea born of suspended intention. My carefully constructed narrative—interview → insight → article—had evaporated. I’d flown 10,000 km to talk to one man, yet the real story was unfolding in the space between his absence and my waiting.

📸 The Discovery: What the Islands Taught Me While I Waited

On Day 5, Nei Mere invited me to her home in Bikenibeu—a cluster of coral-rock foundations topped with corrugated iron and woven palm thatch. Her compound housed three generations: her mother, two daughters, a grandson learning to carve canoe paddles from banyan wood, and a rooster named Te Rua who crowed precisely at 4:47 a.m. every day. No electricity. A rainwater tank fed by gutters lined with crushed coral. A radio powered by a car battery recharged weekly at the generator station.

That evening, over plates of raw octopus marinated in lime and coconut cream, she asked why I wanted to speak with Troost. I recited my rehearsed answer: “To understand how outsiders write about places like Kiribati without erasing local voices.” She nodded slowly, then said, “Maarten listened first. He wrote second. Many others write first—and listen only if the words fit.”

She showed me her grandmother’s copy of Pacific Possession, its spine cracked, margins filled with pencil notes in Gilbertese. One passage was underlined twice: “I had come to study the islands, but the islands studied me back—with patience, skepticism, and occasional amusement.” She tapped the page. “That is the truth. Not the part about the crabs.”

The next morning, I joined fishermen hauling hand-line nets off the reef flat at low tide. Water so clear I saw parrotfish nibbling algae off brain coral just inches from my toes. Salt stung my eyes. My sandals filled with sand that felt like ground glass. A boy named Ruatei, maybe ten years old, handed me a broken conch shell and said, “This sings when you hold it right.” I held it to my ear—and heard not the ocean, but wind moving through a thousand tiny pores. It took three tries to get the angle right. He didn’t correct me. He waited. And when I finally heard it, he smiled—not at my success, but at my persistence.

That afternoon, I visited the Kiribati National Archives, housed in a converted warehouse near the old Japanese bunker. There, I found handwritten logs from the 1930s detailing copra shipments, census records noting “one blind man, two widows, seven children under five” per household—and Troost’s own donated field notes from 2004, annotated in blue ink: “Asked about ‘possession.’ They spoke of kinship, not ownership. Spoke of debt, not title. I misunderstood the question.”

🌅 The Journey Continues: When Troost Arrived

He arrived on Day 8—not at the council office, but at Nei Mere’s compound, carrying two tins of condensed milk and a plastic bag of roasted breadfruit. No fanfare. No entourage. Just a tall man in faded cargo shorts, sunglasses pushed up onto his forehead, squinting against the glare.

We sat on the same stools where I’d waited. He declined my recorder. “Let’s talk like neighbors,” he said. “Then you write what matters.”

What followed wasn’t an interview. It was a layered conversation—interrupted by Nei Mere bringing tea, by Ruatei demonstrating how to split a coconut with a machete, by the distant wail of a siren signaling high tide at the causeway. Troost spoke frankly about the ethics of writing across cultural lines: “Every sentence is a negotiation. You choose which silences to honor, which contradictions to preserve, which translations to leave untranslated.” He described abandoning a draft chapter after elders told him his description of a funeral rite confused mourning with celebration—“not wrong, but incomplete.”

He showed me a map he’d drawn on scrap paper: not of islands, but of relationships—lines connecting villages, families, schools, and the Fisheries Department, with annotations like “trust built after cyclone Pam” and “disagreement over mangrove replanting, resolved via maneaba consensus.”

When I asked about practical advice for travelers, he paused, then said: “Don’t optimize your itinerary. Optimize your attention. Skip the ‘must-see’ list. Sit where people sit. Learn one phrase in Gilbertese that isn’t ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’—try ‘Ko na mauri?’ (How is your life?). Then wait for the answer. It might take minutes. It might take days. That’s the point.”

We walked to the seawall at sunset. Concrete eroded down to rebar in places, patched with coral rubble. A group of teenagers practiced breakdancing on a flattened section, their movements synced to bass thumping from a phone speaker. Troost pointed to a rusted metal pole half-submerged in the lagoon. “That used to be a basketball hoop. Now it’s a marker for high tide. We measure change not in centimeters, but in what we stop doing.”

📝 Reflection: What This Experience Taught Me About Travel and Myself

I left Kiribati with fewer quotes than planned—but more usable understanding. The myth I’d carried—that deep cultural insight required privileged access or expert mediation—crumbled. Insight arrived in increments: in the weight of a conch shell, the rhythm of a shared silence, the way Nei Mere always poured tea for guests before herself. Troost hadn’t granted me wisdom; he’d modeled how to receive it.

I’d gone expecting to analyze Pacific Possession as a text. Instead, I experienced its central thesis firsthand: that possession—of land, language, narrative—is never unilateral. It’s negotiated daily, revised with each tide, contested in maneabas and affirmed in shared meals. My own sense of possession—over my schedule, my story, my expertise—softened. I stopped taking notes constantly. I started watching how light fell across woven mats at different hours. I memorized the names of three fish species, not for utility, but as acts of respect.

Most unexpectedly, I confronted my own discomfort with uncertainty—not as a problem to solve, but as data. The canceled ferry, the delayed meeting, the unanswered questions—they weren’t obstacles. They were the curriculum. Real engagement with place requires surrendering the fantasy of mastery. In Kiribati, that surrender wasn’t passive. It was active listening disguised as waiting.

💡 Practical Takeaways: What Readers Can Apply to Their Own Travels

These insights weren’t theoretical. They reshaped how I travel—and how I advise others:

• 🧭Logistics are cultural texts. Ferry cancellations, clinic hours, market days—they’re not inconveniences to workaround. They’re expressions of local priorities, environmental constraints, and social rhythms. Checking the Air Kiribati schedule 2 matters less than asking, “Who decides when the boat sails—and what do they weigh most?”
• 🤝Relationships precede access. Troost spent months living in villages before writing a word. If you seek meaningful exchange in remote Pacific communities, allocate at least 30% of your trip budget—not for hotels, but for shared meals, small gifts (school supplies, quality pens), and time spent without agenda. Formal permissions open doors; informal trust keeps them open.
• 📚Read locally, not just about. Before visiting Kiribati, I read Pacific Possession—but also Te Rau I-Matang (a collection of Gilbertese oral histories) and academic papers from the University of the South Pacific’s International Journal of Pacific Studies 3. Western accounts provide context; local voices provide grounding.
• 🌊Prepare for sensory recalibration. Kiribati has no traffic noise, no streetlights, no Wi-Fi beyond government offices. Your ears adjust to wave rhythm. Your eyes learn to read cloud formations for rain. Your sense of time expands. Pack earplugs—not for noise, but for the sudden quiet that can feel louder than any city.

⭐ Conclusion: How This Trip Changed My Perspective

I used to think travel writing was about translation—converting experience into accessible English. Kiribati taught me it’s about transformation: allowing place to reshape your assumptions until your sentences carry the weight of local grammar, local silence, local time. Troost didn’t give me a quote about Pacific possession. He helped me understand that possession isn’t something you claim—it’s something you’re invited into, slowly, conditionally, and always reciprocally. Now, when I plan a trip, I don’t ask “What will I see?” I ask “What am I prepared to unlearn?” The answer determines everything else—how long I stay, what I pack, whom I listen to first, and whether I ever truly leave.