Bislama love poem

Love poem translated into Bishlamar (bislama, bichelamar). There are 200,000 speakers for this official language in Vanuatu (New Hebrides), which is a pidgin of English and French. The early trade was concerned with sea slugs (sea cucumbers), and the early traders often spoke a simplified English.

Sea slugs in Portuguese is bicho de mar, in French bêche de mer, when the English speaker took the word, they changed it into beach la mar, which became the name of the language. There are about a hundred vernacular languages in this archipelago located 540 km northeast of New Caledonia and populated by Melanesians and Polynesians.

In northern Vanuatu, the cult of ancestors and the system of grades that hierarchizes society are the main motivators of art: masks, funerary mannequins made up of various plant materials, overmodelled and fully painted in bright colors, figures of carved ancestors on a wood piece, the trunk of an arborescente fern or on the large wooden drums. This art disappears in the center and the south of the archipelago which have different social structures.

Naghol or nagol (Gol jumping) which takes place on Pentecost Island (discovered by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in 1768), is an ancestral tradition in Vanuatu.

It involves young men, dressed in traditional clothing and a penis sheath (nambas), jumping from different levels of a wooden tower called Gol, with their feet tied by a liana.

The youngest jump from the lowest levels and so on, as for the women, to encourage the jumpers, they watch them while dancing, topless and dressed in plant skirts.

The Gaul jump (Gol) is the ancestor of bungee jumping, since the latter is directly inspired by it.

It takes place between April and May, when the banian liana is still elastic. Beyond that, if it is too dry, it could break under the weight of the jumper. At the foot of the tower, the earth is beaten, so when the head touches the ground, this loose earth prevents accidents.

At the origin of this jump, it is said that a woman mistreated by her husband, fled. As he chased her, she took refuge at the top of a banyan tree.

At the top of the tree, as she called him a coward by inviting him to follow her, he joined her. To escape him she threw herself into the void, but before jumping she tied one of the tree's vines to her ankle.

Her husband, who had not understood her ruse and seeing her get up unharmed, threw himself from the tree in turn and crashed to the ground.

Is this a demonstration of the perfidy of women, even those from Vanuatu.... perhaps not, because the story goes well, that she had many reasons to want to escape a violent husband .

Since then, this jump has been an initiation rite for men who are entering adulthood. They show to women all their bravery. The last jumper jumps from the highest level, and on him depends the harvest of the yams.