Up Front

with the Publisher

FOR a number of years after World War 11, PlM’s pages in cluded a regular smattering of Island flavoured poetry and fiction, almost all of it submitted by expatriate Islands residents with a literary bent.

But as the postwar Island develop ment boom grew apace, and PlM’s space was under pressure, this kind of material was squeezed out until eventually we decided to give it no room at all. There were other, more literary-orientated magazines avail able to expatriate writers of fiction and poetry.

Then in 1972, Marjorie Crocombe of Suva, a Cook Islander herself, drew my attention to the fact that during the years we had dropped expatriate fiction, a widely-dispersed body of indigenous writers were de veloping who would be encouraged by having their material published regularly in a special PIM section and being able to compare their works with each other.

Thus were born the MANA pages of PIM.

MANA appeared in March, 1973: the organ of the newly-organised South Pacific Creative Arts Society, which had, and has, an editorial committee drawn from writers in many Pacific Islands. Marjorie, MANA’s editor, said then that she hoped the monthly publication of the material in PIM would influence Islanders to write, and furthermore, “to have courage to submit what they write for publication”.

PIM also agreed to assist with the publication each year, in a MANA annual, of all the material printed in the monthly MANA sections, to gether with some additional new material. When the third MANA annual comes out soon, something like 250 pages of drawings, poetry, short stories and folk tales will have been published in the last three years. To Marjorie has fallen the onerous task of getting all this material together, but her reward, she says, has been in seeing the de velopment of confidence by young Pacific writers over this period.

There will be no more MANA pages in PIM. Three years have been

enough to prove Marjorie’s view that only encouragement was needed for Island writers to develop their own momentum. They don’t need to be reserved a special section in PIM. They can compete on equal terms, and in future PIM will in clude a regular leavening of Island short story writers and poets in its pages. I invite them to submit their material direct to the editor.

Meanwhile, MANA will continue to see the light of day in the form of the MANA Review, to be pub lished in Suva twice a year by the South Pacific Creative Arts Society, and also to contain, among other good things, critical essays on South Pacific fiction, poetry and language.

The society, c/- P.O Box 5038, Suva, will have it available for a subscrip tion rate of 5F4.00 for one year.

And now, since this is our Easter issue of PIM, I’m going to take the opportunity to reprint one of my favourite poems from MANA, by Western Samoan writer Eti Sa’aga and first published in 1973. It’s called Him Fella Saviour.

Him Fella Saviour up in the tree wanting to come down.

Another fella spear-carrier fun ma™g standing on the ground.

All the time Him Fella Saviour make sad noise, While his momma cry begging mercy with sad voice Then earth-shaker come, stopping all the fun.

Making all the noisy people Talk little but run.

But Him Fella Saviour just hang there on his tree, looking red, And according to some untrue reports, real dead.