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Vanuatu’s Growing Body of Literature: Why Women’s Voices Matter

2022; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2022.0008

1945-8134

Mikaela Nyman,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

Vanuatu’s Growing Body of LiteratureWhy Women’s Voices Matter Mikaela Nyman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution POET KALI REGENVANU AT THE MARKET IN PORT VILA Vanuatu’s fortieth independence anniversary in 2020 sparked an unprecedented literary wave of new writing. Harnessing the colonizers’ languages, as well as elevating the national lingua franca Bislama, writers are tackling the complex issue of ensuring contemporary fiction, poetry, and historical narratives of Vanuatu contain women’s perspectives too. [End Page 10] “Where is the Ni-Vanuatu Girl?” asks Carol Aru’s 2004 poem that, by chance, reached an international audience courtesy of BBC Scotland. With its Poetry Postcards series, the BBC wished to showcase the Commonwealth’s cultural diversity ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Aru was the only living ni-Vanuatu poet whose work BBC Scotland could find online, on the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. In the BBC recording, Aru talks about the loss of tradition, customary stories, and language in Ambae in Vanuatu. Her poem blends English with words and song in Duidui, one of Vanuatu’s more than one hundred indigenous languages, in an act of documenting cultural expressions and remembrance. Many of Vanuatu’s vernacular languages are threatened by extinction simply because there are so few indigenous speakers, compounded by the fact that not all languages exist in written form. In his introduction to Some Modern Poetry from Vanuatu (1983)—originally published as Some Modern Poetry from the New Hebrides (1975)—Albert Wendt noted: “Most of the literature written by Pacific writers was barely three years old when this collection was written in 1974. It then contained nearly all the poetry which had been written by young Vanuatu poets.” Of the twelve poets, three were women and one of them was Mildred Sope, who, when I interviewed her in 2018, recalled writing her widely anthologized poem “Chusum/Choice” in Wendt’s class at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. At the time she was pursuing a teaching degree. In 1975 Sope became the first ni-Vanuatu teacher at the British Secondary School in Port Vila, renamed Malapoa College after independence in 1980. Wendt included lines from Sope’s poem “Motherland” in his groundbreaking 1976 essay, “Towards a New Oceania.” Wendt’s essay has become a foundational text for Pacific studies, as Graeme Whimp notes, above all “for its insistence that, while we draw deeply on memory and rememberings, we are not in the business of presentation or sterile revival, least of all the recreation of some ideal traditional identity. Our task, that essay reminds us, is to live as creatively as possible in the present” (“A Search for the New Oceania,” in The Contemporary Pacific). So how can writers and their allies not only live creatively in the present but also ensure Indigenous writing is distributed more widely? Anthologies may hold the answer. Distinguished Pacific scholar writer Albert Wendt and Māori scholar writer Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Ātiawa) have both highlighted the importance of anthologies for Pacific Island nations. Not only as a means for writers to be published but as a repository of texts that become sites of contestation and articulations of a region—writing that would otherwise have gone unpublished—thereby turning ad hoc writing, over time, into a body of national literature and Pacific literature. A significant number of Oceania’s writers have only ever been published in anthologies, which does not make their contributions any less than those published in single-author publications. Anthologies and their editors likewise nurture connections between writers, making writers visible to one another, and in doing so they support a fledgling writing community. ________ Sope’s contemporary Grace Mera Molisa (1946–2002) is without doubt Vanuatu’s most renowned poet. Molisa was a prolific writer and outspoken advocate for women in her poetry and as a politician. Selina Tusitala Marsh of Sāmoan, Tuvaluan, English, and French descent—New Zealand’s Poet Laureate, 2017– 2019, and the Commonwealth Poet Laureate 2016—is one of the foremost scholars on Molisa’s poetry, which often deploys black stone as a key metaphor, anchoring it firmly in Vanuatu. Very little literary writing from...