Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars within a Folk Narrative Space Steven Edmund Winduo One aspect of the fragment’s culture that now clearly requires retheorizing is its literature. At one level the literature of this fossil written in English is marked by a deep-seated schizophrenia or contradiction that one finds in other postcolonial literatures. In purely formalist terms, the contradiction arises from the way in which the colonised is compromised by the generic expectations, discourses, intertextual and aesthetic frames of the coloniser.1
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y unwriting oceania we are involved in reimagining the imagined oceania. So much has been written about oceania that it is easier to use the word without asking what really constitutes the word “Oceania.” In this essay I will consider how “Oceania” is viewed as a contestory space for competing discourses (for instance, colonialist and indigenous) by which it is possible to see where oceania is projected as a palimpsest or as a blank sheet on which numerous inscriptions and descriptions are overwritten. Essentially there are two interconnected ways in which Oceania was brought under European surveillance. One was to treat it as a blank sheet (tabula rasa) and the other was to present it as a palimpsest. Indeed for Pacific people it is not so much the erasure of their cultures, but the overwriting of their cultures with European inscriptions. In other words, European explorer/“discoverers” did not so much erase indigenous self-representations and cultural expressions, but in most instances overwrote them. Even where erasure as a process occurred, it was never complete and uncontested, and this tension has affected the process of representation in the Pacific to the present.2 Tiffin and Lawson see the process of erasure as a transferring of obscurity in “language to the field being described” so that it legitimates the argument: “Only empty spaces can be settled, so the space had to be made empty by ignoring or dehumanizing the inhabitants.”3 Ryan explains that erasure and cartographic practices overwhelmingly New Literary History, 2000, 31: 599–613
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legitimated “the erasure of existing social and geo-cultural formations in preparation for the projection and subsequent emplacement of a new order.”4 The exercise of power is immediately deployed in order that control is exercised, legitimated, and instituted as a geopolitical and cultural entity. Ryan sees in this exercise a “cartographic double movement, or erasure and projection, creating a blank, and filling that blank with a legend (both in the sense of a myth and a cartographical inscription) [that] continued into the eighteenth century” (124). Thus the notion of “oceania” constitutes seemingly binary oppositional narratives: “For obvious reasons of geographic reality, the Oceanic world’s major production, at least as it is seen from the Western standpoint, has been narratives of sea journeying. The Pacific is figured not as a place to live in but an expanse to cross, a void to be filled in with lines of transit: ploughing the sea.”5 Having crossed the expanse of water and filled in lines and shades, the Europeans wrote their experiences in logs and journals as historical statements of geographical and political occupation. In this essay I propose to consider a discursive activity within a structure that already imagines my project. I take an alternative approach to those already authorized by astute readers of Pacific literature.
Trace of Living Cultural Memory The “leaving out” practice of the authorities on Pacific literature baffles me. The practice of “leaving out” the writings and scholarship of Pacific writer scholars creates a trace of what and who were left out. The attitude is often one derived from a historically-determined lack of interest in anything “native” or reactionary. By “leaving out” contributions by Pacific islanders, a trace of what was there in the original space is produced. What was there as an originary is seen as a “living it” experience. Trace is a signifier of what in essence was the word for something which existed before erasure.6 Here I am thinking more along the lines of Benjamin’s illustration of the trace left by a potter after his work as the very site in which various discourses emerge.7 By working through trace, Pacific writer scholars reinstate what has been crossed out, but is visible even in erasure. It is through the trace that Pacific societies are able to reclaim their cultural memory: “The cultural memory is the collection of wisdom, history and tradition that provides us with the basis of cultural action in our nation.”8 The notion of trace is used here to reaffirm some of the isolated critical views of Pacific writer scholars in recent times: “[T]he truly pioneering and prototypical critical works to date have been produced by Pacific writers themselves,” but even the sensitive compiler consciously affirms the
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“leaving out” nature of any such scholarship.9 The “leaving out” practice is an epistemic violence on the Pacific people who have been represented in both literary and intellectual projects sponsored by centers of knowledge production. For example, C. K. Stead, among others with connections to centers of literary production, often decides what and who should be represented, a decision that has obviously come under criticism for its “leaving out” practice.10 By “leaving out” Pacific writer scholars, authorities of Pacific literary culture institutionalized the power to define the new literary order.11 The academic disciplines, from which authorities on Pacific cultural memory survey, study, and make conclusions, observe an implicit rule of thumb: a “leaving out” exercise based on standards and structures that must fall within boundaries of disciplinary knowledge production. Such practices reinforce hegemonic practices. Individual critical knowledge produced by Pacific writer scholars gets squashed under such Eurocentrism. Resistance to the hegemonic structure is possible when construction of meaning is structured according to the rules of selfrepresentation (LI 612).
Folk Narrative Space I introduce a cultural metaphor, among others (for instance, Maui of a thousand tricks, Tangaloa, Kulubob and Manup), the ogre-killing child as a representative of the Pacific people’s experience.12 The cultural metaphor serves as a narrative space in which the experiences of the Pacific writer scholars are articulated. There is, one might say, an incubating site for Pacific writer scholars’ critical literary practice associated with the notion of tracing discourse-formations. Since language and culture are the canvasses upon which local knowledge is produced, interpretation must take into account the posited agency of the interpreter.13 Ashcroft and others posit that “the ‘world’ as it exists in language is an unfolding reality which owes its relationship to language to the fact that language interprets the world in practice. . . . Language exists, therefore, neither before the fact nor after the fact, but in fact.”14 The critical practice of Pacific writer scholars considers language among other things as invested within various discursive domains. Various elements of literary production, as in Subramani’s work and those of others, are already recognized.15 The influence of folk traditions in literary culture stands out in most Pacific writing. Pacific societies are essentially oral. The intrusion of outside influence inevitably meant that the germination and proliferation of their literatures have had a hybridized provenance: that of orature and Western cultural hegemony.
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Cross-cultural orientations developed between orature and Western cultural practice. These orientations are seemingly antithetical. Ironically, they inform each other by forming a literary seedbed from which writers produce their works. Tiffin argues that “within postcolonial cultures hybridity is fabricated by bringing together European ontology and epistemology” in a dialectical manner to create a unique local identity.16 Other features such as auto/biographical influences, language condition, and everyday metaphors of our social relations are represented in contemporary literary cultures of the Pacific.17 Postcolonial cultures are no longer “insulated” from outside influences, especially that of modernization. Therefore, the only way to maintain cultural independence is to incorporate and adapt other cultural practices into their own to forge an independent identity. The Papua New Guinean writer John Kasaipwalova, in an interview on the representation of social change in his writing, expresses that change is inevitable: “You cannot be static because you are moving. . . . And, at the same time, to move forward you have to come across and explore new ideas and destroy your own preconceived ideas in order to discover and create, otherwise there is no change.”18 Whether we call it intertextual practice, discourse analysis, or critical practice, the overall aim is to establish a strategic practice in contrast to the authoritative discourses. Authoritative representation of the fragments of oceanic cultures are determined by institutional and disciplinary structures. A critical discourse, however, informed by its own limitation, can be a powerful process that encourages discursivity. The interrogating project, according to Gayatri Spivak, involves a collective deconstruction of the episteme that has systematically violated humanity.19 Where multiple discourses and heterogeneity exist, a dialogic process in knowledge production is established.
A Structure of Viewing It must be kept in mind that “the lack of a sizable and home-grown” critical tradition and criticism “has meant that the process of importation leaves much room for electic borrowings and academic abstractions” to theorize Pacific literary culture.20 In the following I use a structure of viewing derived from a Papua New Guinean folklore motif, to signify the importance of Pacific writer scholars. The narrative structure is based on the story of the ogre-killing child: “The theme of the ogre-killing child is common in the western and northern regions and the Massim district of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands and the New Hebridian islands of Tanna [Vanuatu]
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and Malaita. It is apparently absent in Fiji and New Caledonia. Wherever it is told the various motifs associated with the story are remarkably persistent.”21 In some Pacific islands the ogre-killing child is about culture heroes who saved a village from being destroyed by a monster. The narrative of the ogre-killing child under oppression from a destructive agency emerges every now and then in Pacific literary culture. For example, in Russell Soaba and Albert Wendt’s work, this cultural metaphor appears as Maiba and Ola, the Pacific protagonists who are testaments to a whole range of social, cultural, and political discourses. The ogre-killing child narrative reflects Pacific islanders’ experiences, their struggles, strategies, and conditions of survival. By looking closely at the novelistic discourse of Ola, for example, we see Wendt bringing together random notes, various fragments, and historical anecdotes to give Ola an identity that is both Samoan and Pacific. Maiba, on the other hand, communicates truth through parables. Soaba brings together various cultural and historical discourses that shape Maiba within a dialogic environment. Just as Maiba resists the externally influenced new order and violence, the writer too is confronted with the ambivalence of writing in a difficult society (WP 86–91). Similarly Hau’ofa uses the element of laughter to parody Pacific cultures and social conditions in Kisses in the Nederends. Hau’ofa’s work appropriates various cultural knowledge, both introduced and traditional, as remedial measures against maladies of modern societies. As representatives of Pacific literature, these three novels achieve what Bakhtin describes as novelistic discourse which shows “a primordial struggle between cultures and languages.”22 Indeed, Pacific writer scholars also wrestle with the dichotomies between rural and urban, island and center, traditional and modern, oral traditions and literary culture, and most importantly, that of being a writer scholar simultaneously. By looking at the movements between place, attitude, and decisions of Maiba and Ola to return home temporarily, as their predecessor in Sons for the Return Home, has done, we can answer some of the more critical questions. Do they have anything radically different to say other than fulfilling the structural expectation in which they are constructed? Does their silence work at legitimating exploitation of their people? Maiba does resist Doboro Thomas’s authority in the face of confrontation and violence. Perhaps Ola’s recognition of the condition of personal responsibility is fully realized by her pilgrimages to Israel with her father. The condition of this possible realization needs not be a physical return. Having the idea to return home can be expressed in spiritual and metaphysical terms. It is no surprise, then, to witness this inability to return to the past/home/ land translated as ambivalence in many Pacific literatures, mediating between language and culture, oral and written traditions.
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The Ogre-Killing Child Structure The ogre-killing child narrative structure is well documented in Papua New Guinea. The structure of this story is fixed, but the narrative itself changes from one society to another. The story is built upon the core motif of a child brought up by a mother on an abandoned island where the ogre reigns. The basic structure is given below: The ogre appears; He creates havoc; The resistance of people fails; They decide to flee; They leave behind a woman; A child (twins, or two brothers in some versions) is born; The child feels lonely and learns why; He and his mother live in fear; Determined to kill the ogre, he trains himself (occasionally instructions come from the mother); The encounter begins; The ogre is killed, and The message is sent to the people who return to their homeland.23
There are four levels of signification in the ogre-killing child narrative structure. The first centers around the ogre who signifies destruction, disruption, violence, threat, and imposed order. More than likely, the association with colonial aggression, intrusion, presence, dominance, and epistemological violence is represented at this level. The ogre or the monster signifies dominant discourses as a destructive element in the lives of the Pacific people: “In certain variants the origin of the ogre is explained, while in others he just makes his presence felt through natural disturbances, creating earthquakes, storms, thunders; or through destruction of cultural items and the products of human efforts like fences and gardens” (17–20). What is critical here are the writings of the
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Pacific writer scholars against the dominance of hegemonic practices, as exemplified by the practice of erasure in authorized discourses on Pacific literature. The second level consists of the abandonment of the villagers to a safe place: the displacement of people, the dislocation, the fleeing, the exile and homelessness as a constant experience. At this level the collective fear of homelessness determines their action to shift residence. In a variant of the ogre-killing child from Buka, the monster Burjangio is a spirit pig. In certain times of the year Burjangio arrives in the village to kill people. His arrival is accompanied by earthquake. The villagers flee the islands to somewhere safer.24 In some sense we could view this as the unwriting of what has been there, but is erased through a repressive hypothesis associated with the dominant Western cultures. Perhaps the shifting position of the Pacific writer scholars is necessary in order to leave a trace of themselves, their culture, and their traditions with which to retrace their identity. The third level consists of hope, struggle, and the productive quality of the mother, land, place, and homeland. Spiritual and physical attachment to place and land are intrinsic in Pacific cultures. The nurturing and responsibility of the motherland allow continuity and progress. The struggle to survive is best signified by the single, abandoned mother’s will to persist despite the threat to that existence. In the Mekeo version told by Leotine Ovia, the woman and her child live in a cave. The child grows up without knowing about the outside world. The child comes to know about the outside world through his mother who explains to him about the world above them. His knowledge of the world above them is based on his mother’s stories. The mother is very careful not to mention anything that would put their lives at risk.25 The idea of drawing from traditional knowledge systems (such as myths, metaphors, and models) enhances the power of the Pacific writer scholars to develop new strategies and formulations. Suspicion, repressed consciousness, and a highly structured behavior are revealed at this level. The negative consciousness and the consequences of it are also represented. The sanctioned knowledge and controlled behavior are presented as necessary conditions of survival. Paradoxically, it is the mother’s repressed consciousness that provides the backdrop in which the son imagines the outside world. Though imagined vicariously, the child recognizes the need to fulfill his destiny. What is already presupposed is a journey out of the mother’s world and into other worlds, traveling outside, securing knowledge, before challenging the foe. We could see this as an allegory on the intellectual struggles of the Pacific writer scholars. Positive action determines progress as signified by the fourth level in
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this structure. Words alone do not go far. One has to learn to live practically, by acquiring knowledge, skills, and growth to liberate the consciousness by resisting domination. The empowerment of the people is based on their understanding of where they are and what they must do. The young boy learns to use bows and arrows. He also learns about the threat of the outside world. The survival skills are learned rigorously. In the Buka version the two brothers are taught archery and fighting techniques by their mother. Their mother informs them about the risks involved before they confront the ogre. The strategies used have to be effective in destroying the monster. Pacific writer scholars need to have various critical strategies in order to critique discourses about them as small islands people. At this level of confrontation and erasure the monster is killed. The people return to their homeland without the fear of threat or violence from outside. But what exactly is being redefined? Some think of identity, while others think of place, people, and cultures as being transformed through deconstruction of the structures that categorize them.26 In Pacific as in other areas of the world, social spaces, for example, are constantly being contested, renegotiated, and secured through the intellectual ability of the subjects. In this case, the various stories, in many ways, reflect the experiences of localized political struggles in Pacific societies.
Parallel Cultural Histories The Pacific writer scholars’ responsibility is signified by the ogrekilling child structure. Has the agenda of resistance of colonialism in the literary culture been subdued by subtle criticisms? The question is answered if we recall Raymond Williams’s attempt to critique his scholarly position and the literary culture in which his Welsh life is described. Between the country and city, life in industrial Europe of the 1880s was a panoply of contradictions, tensions, and foibles. Yet within it a certain ambivalence directed the critical literary scholarship of Williams: “This country life then has many meanings: in feeling and activity; in reason and in time.”27 Indeed what is required is a “structure of feeling” to constitute all these experiences. Though the structure is easily represented by the novel, the cultural motifs too are capable of producing a structure. Is it possible to pursue interpretative analysis of the Pacific literary culture without confrontation? Confrontation itself is a necessary procedure in delineating suspicions about colonization. There is much at stake here where Western societies are used as a blueprint of a future to be democratically formulated: “Sometimes narratives about primitive societies become allegories of modernization
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that resist seeing themselves or presenting themselves as allegories.”28 Pacific societies are still subjected to Western influence so that even in contemporary times the indigenous mind is still colonized by Western ways and modes of thinking. What is conventional is not to be questioned as it leads to confrontation that is often unwanted. The consequence is negative labeling and further disenfranchisement. This is a forced systematic violence on indigenous minds and lives: “So it is not enough just to reiterate that colonialism whether British or German, French or American, Christian or unchristian reduced many of us to a state of passivity, undermined our confidence and self-respect, and made many of us ashamed of our cultures, inducing in us the feeling that only the foreign was right and proper and worthwhile.”29 Pacific writer scholars often struggle to unwrite the dominant discourses about them, but such unwriting is often described as nostalgic, revisionist, or naive, lacking in critical philosophical insight for deconstructing the described, narrativized, and historicized condition of entrapment. The relationship between the Pacific writer scholars and the modern urban societies is clearly represented in some of the contemporary works. We see this clearly in the works of Nora Vagi Brash and Nash Sorariba, in which the struggle between the traditional expectation and modern introduced ways are recipes for disintegration, fragmentation, alienation, and disaster leading to violence and extreme social problems.30 The Fijian writer Joseph Veramu, for example, represented the urban violence and dangerous activities of urban youths in Suva, a situation that is experienced in many Pacific societies.31 The Papua New Guinean short story writer Nash Sorariba represents similar experiences in his country.32 The urbanized conditions force citizens to reconsider their identity as members of traditional societies. Clearly there is a sense of divided loyalty in which “many people are caught between traditional and modern societies, and in some cases people have difficulty in coping with the demands and obligations of the receding society, and the demands and expectation of the emerging society.”33 The difficulty of assembling different experiences into one is like saying it is possible to narrativize different Palestinian experiences into one homogenous experience.34 Pacific writer scholars combine modern intellectual concepts with cultural knowledge of their societies. Often Pacific writer scholars are writing parallel histories of their culture, knowledge systems, and practices. The different knowledge systems that make up the imagined oceanic cultures are acknowledged. But this imagined oceania must first be emptied of its content if it is to be filled with the cultural content that is of value to the Pacific people. The cultural content may consist of Pacific folklore motifs, cultural metaphors, utterances, and responses to modernity that make up texts. In
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order for this to take place I have introduced the ogre-killing child narrative structure within which the “living it” experiences of the Pacific writer scholars are formulated.
“Living It” Experience The slow but increasing intellectual production of Pacific Island scholarship suggests a move in the direction of filling out the gap between the hegemonic practice of “leaving out” and the localized struggle of “living it” knowledge. The task of unwriting oceania is in the hands of the Pacific writer scholars. The question now is whether a need for such scholarship existed then or exists now, considering the dominance of orientalizing scholarship instituted within centers of knowledge production. Some Pacific writer scholars have benefited intellectually by being linked to area studies institutions in and outside of the region. Without recommending intellectual influence from these centers, are there alternative strategies of articulating the Pacific experience that are unaffected? Scattered in various journals and anthologies are some of the Pacific writer scholars’ articles that are unnoticed as a result of their obscure existence. Needless to say, most of these critical literary productions are in fragments, some as interviews and others with a specific focus within national boundaries. Few of these critical literary articles have a regional focus. The unwriting of oceania allows the value of knowledge to transform the negative consciousness of the Pacific people to a positive one. A matrix is allowed to develop here as “the effective prototype of all those splitting of beliefs which man will henceforth be capable of in the most varied domains, of all the infinitely complex unconscious and occasionally conscious, interactions which he will allow himself between believing and not-believing.”35 For the Pacific writer scholars this split suggests conditions of unwriting oceania that are already authorized by the modern discursive practice. New alignments encourage new positions of articulation of Pacific cultures based on the folk narrative structures and the structures of feeling imposed by the modern novelistic discourses appropriated by Pacific writer scholars.36 In Homi Bhabha’s words, a “non-repressive form of knowledge that allows for the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division” is likely to develop.37 This position is best articulated by Vilsoni Hereniko when confronted with the question of which self to privilege in writing about female clowning on Rotuma. He answers that all creative and disciplined
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selves converge in the production of a knowledge that is based on a Pacific culture in modern times.38 In thinking about the multiple selves as necessary fragments of an agency involved in knowledge production it is easy to see that a dialogic encounter develops within a hybridized narrative structure. In a hybridized narrative structure, the various fragments of culture, language, and society are evoked as necessary differences, albeit as a discourse of the repressed: “Indeed, evoking such differences are, we might say, common places in the politics of discriminations, and hence also in the many contemporary struggles for identity.”39 It is precisely this difference that is described as the condition of alterity needing critical articulation. Nonetheless, the systemic differentiation made by colonialism was instrumental in creating the differences that are now legitimated by authorizing discourses. The question of sovereignty, for example, solved through independence, merely scratches the surface of political nationalism. While politicians dance to the new euphoria, the intellectuals, including writers and artists, delve deeper into the political unconscious of what it is that they still struggle against, as the poem “Dancing Yet to the Dimdim’s Beat” suggests.40 Indeed, the founding conditions of the split consciousness remains deeply embedded in postcolonial conditions from which writers and intellectuals continually struggle to liberate themselves. These conditions are continuously being written about, described, and constructed, sometimes blatantly, other times in exaggerated ways, so that the struggle is to unwrite these discourses and simultaneously disrupt their hegemony. The Pacific writers aware of their struggles insist on a strategy that is both discursive and redemptive, though not completely free from nostalgia or revisionism. This recognition of difference informs the strategies of the Pacific writer scholars in unwriting the notion of oceania as a monolithic idea of cultures and peoples.41
Conclusion South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation signaled the direction of literary scholarship. Subramani’s survey restored confidence in the literary culture of the Pacific. A regionally viewed literature progresses much more than a nationally viewed literature. In some sense this feeling stood out as the strength in the growth of Pacific literary culture, though appropriately enough the University of South Pacific, the South Pacific Creative Arts Society, and the Institute of Pacific Studies maintain consistency in their publishing programs. Furthermore, Pacific writer scholars had the opportunities to shift residence from their island
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homelands to the metropolitan centers in Australia, New Zealand, and the US. The moving out of the island homelands proves to be more productive than homeland life for the Pacific writer scholars, as is indicated by Oilei Bomboki in Hau’ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends. One has to redeem oneself where there is a feeling of alienation, loss, and displacement.42 This existential condition is represented by Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home and Soaba’s Wanpis. Pacific literature needs to be complimented by a current critical scholarship developed by Pacific writer scholars. The articulation of their experiences is a necessary process of securing what has been erased. An example of the kind of critical reading I have in mind is Vijay Mishra’s reading of Satendra Nandan’s work and those of other IndoFijian writers.43 Sharrad hints that the responsibility to do criticism from within lies in the hands of the contemporary Pacific writer scholars.44 The responsibility, however, is limited to institutionalized answering spaces. Where answering spaces are institutionalized there is sanction and boundary markers that discipline knowledge production, factors that limit Pacific writer scholars’ efforts to advance critical discursive activities. Disciplined knowledge production has its consequences, both as an exclusionary practice and direct violation of humanity. I am reminded of the West Papuan folklorist Arnold Ap whose suspicious death near the Free Port mine is linked to the Indonesian authorities’ sanction on any development of a Melanesian cultural consciousness. This was a case of disciplinary knowledge production linked to the policing of state apparatuses: “The link between Ap’s occupation and assassination is not at all accidental. For museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political.”45 More articulate are perhaps the Hawaiian Haunani-Kay Trask and other Hawaiians against American colonization of their land.46 In Micronesia we also see the work of Laura Marie Toress Souder-Jaffery leading the way in defining Micronesian women’s identity.47 The link between institutionalized space and sanctioned political action is replicated in area studies instituted within centers of power. Needless to say, these area studies exist as the economically and politically instituted centers of knowledge production. Nonetheless, it is argued “the very nature of Pacific writing as it juggles orality and literacy, two or more languages, community dissemination and authorship, third world issues amid global neocolonialism and so on, ought to make it amenable to contemporary literary theorists.”48 The urgency for Pacific writing is to develop its own critical works. There has to be “an expression of cultural freedom and responsibility, a sense for human justice,” a view expressed by Richard Hamasaki in the early 1980s to remind Pacific writers and scholars to aggressively pursue.49 In Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980, Wendt posits
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that there already are complex and heterogeneous influences in Pacific literature.50 The urgency now is for a critical tradition done from within Pacific literature to take it a step further from where it is now. It is no surprise, then, that a small number of Pacific writer scholars are intervening by articulating their cultural experiences, their social discourses, and are insisting on interpretation from within their own cultural contexts.51 Pacific writer scholars mediate between traditional and introduced cultures. It is impossible to exclude either one since they compliment, contradict, and challenge one another. This is the precise moment that Pacific literature is articulating itself. What is promising is that Pacific writer scholars are advancing from creative literature to critical studies on Pacific cultures and societies. University of Papua New Guinea NOTES 1 Vijay Mishra, “Little India,” Meanjin 49.4 (1990), 612; hereafter cited in text as LI. 2 Thanks to Regis Stella, who pointed this out to me in the early stages of this paper. 3 Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, “Introduction,” De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London, 1994), p. 5. 4 Simon Ryan, “Inscribing the Emptiness: Cartography, Exploration and the Construction of Australia” in De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality, p. 116; hereafter cited in text. 5 Paul Sharrad, “Imagining the Pacific,” Meanjin 49.4 (1990), 598. 6 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 61. 7 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 83–110. 8 Tialetagi Poumau, “Western Samoa: Reclaiming Our Cultural Memory,” Tu Galala: Social Change in the Pacific, ed. David Robbie (Wellington, N.Z., 1992), pp. 195–202. 9 Arlene Griffen, “Indigenous Literature of Oceania: A Survey of Criticism and Interpretation, by Nicholas J. Goetzfriedt,” Contemporary Pacific, 9.1 (1997), 284–86. 10 In 1994, C. K. Stead compiled The Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories. This anthology has since attracted much controversy and criticism for its deliberate leaving out. Such an offense to the Pacific peoples will not be forgiven; see Mark Williams, “C. K. Stead and the New Literary Order,” Meanjin, 53.4 (Summer 1994), 695–703; Vilsoni Hereniko and Sig Schwarz, “Four Writers and One Critic,” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, Md., 1998), pp. 55–64; Sudesh Mishra, “An Unsteady Anthology,” Dreadlocks in Oceania, ed. Sudesh Mishra and Elizabeth Guy, 1 (1997), 189–94. 11 Norman Simms, Silence and Invisibility: A Study of the Literature of the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand (Washington, D.C., 1986) and Writers from the South Pacific: A BioBibliographical Encyclopedia (Washington, D.C., 1991). Though Simms had the right intention in making available a much-needed bibliographical encyclopedia on Pacific literature, the factual errors and omissions leave much to be desired. 12 More on Maui can be read in Katherine Luomala, Maui-of a Thousand Tricks: His Oceanic and European Biographers, (Honolulu, 1949); on Kulubob and Manup in David
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Lipset, Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary (Cambridge, 1997); Donald Kalpokas, “A Man-eating Ogre,” Third Mana Annual of Creative Writing, 43.2 (1974), 23, 43. 13 Otto Nekitel, Voice of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow: Language, Culture and Identity (New Delhi, 1998); Nicholas Faraclas, “The Movement of Critical Literacy in Papua New Guinea” in Critical and Developmental Literacy, ed. Otto Nekitel, Steven Winduo, and Sakarepe Kamene (Port Moresby, 1995), pp. 29–40. 14 Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffith, The Empire Writes Back: Postcolonial Theory and Practice (London, 1989), p. 44. 15 Subramani, South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation (Suva, South Pacific Islands, 1985); Peggy Fairbairn-Dunlop, “Samoan Writing: The Search for the Written Fagogo,” Readings in Pacific Literature, ed. Paul Sharrad (Wollongong, Australia, 1993), pp. 136–60; Vilsoni Hereniko, “Representations of Cultural Identities,” Mana, 12 (1997), 78–113; Pamela Kacimaiwai, “Distorted Images: The Role of the Historical Past in Indo-Fijian Writing,” Mana, 9.1 (1993), 58–63; Russell Soaba, “The Writer’s Place in a Difficult Society,” Mana, 10.2 (1994), 86–91, hereafter cited in text as WP; Regis Stella, “Beyond Domestic Chores: Female Characterization in Nora Vagi Brash’s Plays,” New Literatures Review, 19 (1990), 46–53; Steven Edmund Winduo, “Papua New Guinea Writing: The Growth of a Literary Culture,” Manoa, 2.1 (1990), 37–44. 16 Helen Tiffin, “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourses,” Kunapipi, 3 (1987), 17–33. 17 Steven Edmund Winduo, “Cultural Invasion, Negative Knowledge, Self-Expression and the Prose Narratives of Papua New Guinea,” (master’s thesis, University of Canterbury, N.Z., 1991); Albert Wendt, “Novelists and Historians and the Art of Remembering,” Class and Culture in the Pacific, ed. Anthony Hooper et al. (Suva, Fiji, 1987), pp. 78–91; Subramani, Altering Imagination (Suva, Fiji, 1995); Teresia Teaiwa, “Yagona/Yagonu: Roots and Routes of a Displaced Native,” Dreadlocks in Oceania, ed. Mishra and Guy, 7–13. 18 John Kasaipwalova, “Singing With a Straitjacket On: Three Writers from Papua New Guinea Talk to Gillian Gorle,” Meanjin, 53.4 (Summer 1994), 642. 19 Gayatri Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogue, ed. Sarah Harasym (London, 1990). 20 Sharrad, “Introduction,” Readings in Pacific Literature , pp. 4–5. 21 Roslyn Poignant, Oceanic Mythology: The Myths of Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia and Australia (London, 1967), p. 94. 22 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, 1981). 23 Privinthra Chakravarti, “The Ogre Killing Child: A Major Theme of Papua New Guinean Folklore” in Language and Literature: A Course Reader, comp. D. M. Roskies, Adeola James, and Bernard Minol (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1990), pp. 17–20; hereafter cited in text. 24 M. Hapoto, “The Story of the Burjangio, the Buka Monster,” Language and Literature: A Course Reader, p. 26. 25 Leontine Ovia, “The Mekeo Story of the Ogre Killing Child,” Language and Literature: A Course Reader, p. 23. 26 Regis Stella, “My Umbilical Cord Lies Buried Here: Representing Place in PNG Literature,” Savannah Flames: A Literary Journal of Papua New Guinea, 3.1 (1999), 71–90; Teresia Teaiwa, “Scholarship from a Lazy Native,” Moana: Pacific Islander Student Publication, 4 (Spring 1999), 12–14. 27 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973), pp. 3–4. 28 Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1990), p. 244.
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29 Albert Wendt, Lali : A Pacific Anthology (Auckland, N.Z., 1980), p. xv. 30 Brash uses satire effectively to parody the dilemma of modernized urban living of Papua New Guineans; see Nora Vagi Brash, Which Way Big Man (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1996). 31 Joseph Veramu, Moving Through the Streets (Suva, 1997). 32 Nash Sorariba, A Medal Without Honour (Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1997). 33 John Waiko, A Short History of Papua New Guinea (Melbourne, 1993), p. 246. 34 Edward Said, “On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation With Salman Rushdie,” New Left Review, 160 (1986), 63–80; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 261. 35 C. Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London, 1982), p. 70, quoted in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 81. 36 Vilsoni Hereniko, “Representations of Cultural Identities,” Mana, 12.2 (1997), 78– 113. 37 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 80–81. 38 Vilsoni Hereniko, Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma (Suva, 1995). 39 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, 1993), p. 33; see also Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other is Writing of History, tr. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley, 1988). 40 Vincent Warakai, “Dancing Yet to the Dimdim’s Beat,” Ondobondo, 4 (1984), front cover. 41 See A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Island, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, 1993), which is a collection of essays by various staff members of the University of the South Pacific responding to Epeli Hau’ofa’s essay “Our Sea of Islands” published in the same volume. Hau’ofa’s essay can be read together with Albert Wendt’s “Towards a New Oceania,” Mana, 1 (January 1976), 49–60; see also Houston Wood, “Preparing to Retheorize the Texts of Oceania,” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, 1998), pp. 381– 97. 42 Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Writer as Outsider,” New Literatures Review, 20 (1990), 41; Zak Tiamon, “Russell Soaba’s Wanpis,” Ondobondo, 2 (1983), 29–30. 43 Mishra, “Little India,” 608–18; “Indo-Fijian Fiction: Toward and Interpretation,” WLWE, 16 (1978), 395–408; Vilsoni Hereniko, “Representation of Cultural Identity,” Mana, 12.1 (1997), 78–113. 44 Paul Sharrad, “Introduction,” Readings in Pacific Literature, pp. 4–5. 45 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, 1983), p. 178. 46 Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (Monroe, Me., 1993); “Fighting the Battle of Double Colonization: The View of a Hawai’ian Feminist,” Renaissance in the Pacific: Ethnies, Human Rights and Tribal Peoples 4.8– 10, (1989), 61–67. 47 Laura Marie Torres Souder-Jaffery, Daughters of the Island: Contemporary Chamorro Women Organizers on Guam (Mangilao, Guam, 1987). 48 Sharrad, “Introduction,” Readings in Pacific Literature, pp. 4–5. A recent publication on literature of the Pacific attests to a developing scholarship within the Pacific rim. A selection of essays and interviews on Pacific writing is collected in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. 49 Richard Hamasaki, A Pacific Collection: Seaweeds and Constructions, 7 (1984), viii. 50 Albert Wendt, “Introduction,” Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980, ed. Albert Wendt (Auckland, 1995), p. 2. 51 See Regis Stella, “Reluctant Voyages into Otherness: Practice and Appraisal in Papua New Guinean Literature,” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, pp. 221–30; Selina Tusitala Marsh, “Theory ‘versus’ Pacific Islands Writing: Toward a Tama ‘ita’i Criticism in the Works of Three Pacific Islands Woman Poets,” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, pp. 337–56.
