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rose like ghosts each time the Havanna ’s blunt nose plunged into the undulating shadow of the southeast swell. The ship twisted and rolled unnaturally, and the night was filled with the hollow boom of waves striking the bow, the groan and flex of the hull, and a screeching that sounded like twenty-foot containers sliding across the steel floor of the hold. We did not use our cushioned chairs. We clung to the floor like lovers and vomited into plastic bags, purses, and open palms.
    At the first hint of dawn I stumbled out onto the ship’s deck. Men stood doubled over the railing. Drool trailed from their chins until it was caught by the wind and flung into the sea. A half-caste woman waved me over and offered me a spongy white ball, which at first I took for a muffin. In fact, it was the fibrous center of an overripe coconut.
    â€œ Mais this will take that ’orrible taste long mouth blong yu ,” the woman said. There was a bit of French and a swath of English. But the finale of her overture was Bislama, Vanuatu’s de facto national language. What she had said was: “But this will take that horrible taste from that mouth of yours.”
    Bislama has been called a pidgin, which is to say it is an amalgamation, a simplification, and a bastardization of other languages by island people. My great-grandfather despised it. He wished Melanesians would learn proper English or at least stick to their own languages rather than using what he called the “vilest of compounds that ever polluted the purity of speech.”
    But the more I learned about Bislama, the more I realized it was one of the great triumphs of Vanuatu. The moniker originated from bêche-de-mer, the name the French gave to the sea slugs they bought from islanders and sold in the markets of Hong Kong. Bislama got its beginnings in the first half of the nineteenth century, when South Sea islanders worked as crew on whaling ships and developed a simple jargon to communicate with Europeans. It is full of nautical references and sailorly slang. When the sun goes down, they say, “ Sun hem i draon, ” as though the sun is drowning in the sea. When something is broken, “Hem i bagarup.” Say it out loud: “Him, he’s buggered up.”
    The jargon developed further between 1863 and 1911, when more than fifty thousand Ni-Vanuatu were sent to work on plantations in Australia, Fiji, and Samoa. Those workers who spoke the same language were separated so they couldn’t organize against their employers. Separating the wantoks (“one-talks,” or common-language speakers) was easy: there were more than a hundred distinct languages in the New Hebrides alone. Workers had no choice but to speak to each other using the only words they had in common—English and French—though they used Melanesian grammar and syntax. Then they took the new language home with them.
    Bislama may have been the bane of arbiters of grammar, but it gave the Ni-Vanuatu the common tongue they needed to achieve independence. Government documents may be written in English or French, but parliamentary debates are conducted in Bislama.
    Everything is a fala (fellow), even a tree, a shark, or a girl. A boy who admired a girl told me, “ Hem i wan gudfala gel. Mi likem hem tumas. ” Then I understood that tumas did not mean “too much” but “a hell of a lot.”
    Things are defined by their relationship with other things. The word blong (belong) is everywhere—but the word long is a preposition, not an adjective. So if you ask a Ni-Vanuatu when colonial rule ended, he will tell you, “ Kantri blong mifala, hem i winim independens long 1980. ” That was the same year the New Testament was translated into Bislama and people began reading the gud nius blong Jisas Krais. If you ask a woman where she is going, she might say, “ Mi go nao blong swim long sanbij, ” and you would know she was now off to the