A Feast of Literature

Pacific writers gather in London.

By Nicolas Rothwell

FAR from the South Pacific, the region’s best-known writers and literatures were sunk in debate on the future of Pacific letters last month at a conference arranged by the Commonwealth Institute in wintry London.

In the last event of its ‘Pacific Way’ season, the Institute assembled a group of internationally known writers from eight Commonwealth nations of the Pacific for a series of lectures, round-table discussions and presenta tions on the special problems that con front the region as it develops its own distinctive literary voice.

Among those present were Fijian short-story writer Subramani; a group of prominent New Zealand Maori au

thors, including Georgina Kamiria

Kirby of the Maori Women’s Develop ment Fund; Nora Vagi Brash of Papua New Guinea; and Tonga’s star novelist Epeli Hau’ofa though some of the invited guests, such as Vanuatu’s Grace Molisa, unfortunately could not attend. Other nations repre sented included the Solomon Islands, with Rexford Orotaloa; Western Samoa, with Tunumafona Apelu Aiavoa: and the Cook Islands, with Kauraka Kauraka.

At times the conference veered into contentious terrain, as the organisers had doubtless envisaged: a flyer distri buted by the Commonwealth Institute to whet the appetites of the jaded British press noted in titillating style that “each writer has experienced the dramatic and sometimes unwelcome changes occurring within South Pacific

societies today”.

Among the events arranged in con nection with the conference was the launch of the new collection of short stories by Subramani, titled The Fan tasy Eaters an appropriate highlight since the author himself, doubling in his role as leading academic expert on Pacific literature, gave a moving, allu sive keynote address that addressed this very topic: the destruction of fan tasies in the region.

His chief literary conclusion was that Tonga’s Epeli Hau’ofa, his col league from the University of the South Pacific and former deputy pri vate secretary to the King of Tonga, should be considered “possibly the Rabelais of the Pacific”.

But in his broader considerations on

regional politics and society Subrama

ni touched on the strange relation that exists, even in the Pacific, between fic tion and contemporary history: at once seeming to castigate Pacific wri ters for their lack of boldness and to

commiserate with them for their situa tion, he traced the “self-conscious, in

vented origins of regional writing”

and highlighted the link between poli tical upheavals and literary output going so far as to claim that writing in Vanuatu was given an impetus by the independence movement and has vir tually come to a standstill since the achievement of sovereignty.

“The innocence of the Pacific no longer exists,” he declaimed sadly, be fore launching into a sustained, soph isticated analysis of the Fiji coups that will win him few friends in Suva. “The disappointing fact that the reality we have known and valued may be a con struction was shown forth in one is land state, Fiji, where in a period of nine months government changed six times. Each time a new set of players appeared, with their own ioea of

ordering reality, taking the people

through a range of emotions jubila tion, nightmare, fear, and a terrible waiting for the ending. We witnessed how quickly political events can ‘de familiarise’ the world, in a way only certain kinds of fiction can.”

Subramani went on to suggest a new task for Pacific writers; the construc

tion of alternative realities, and the

dismantling of the unitary ideologies

that now dominate the region ideologies such as those of the ‘Pacific Way’ or the ‘Melanesian Way’. His re marks, he explained, were meant to be

provocative rather than derogatory,

out he made plain his dissatisfaction with the fact that today both politics and literature share a belief that there is just one primary reality “to which the Pacific must return”.

While not all writers at the confer ence would have endorsed Subrama ni’s overriding conviction that “things are not what they seem” and that a “certain form of post-modernist fiction may be the most appropriate” for the

fast-changing, multi-layered region,

there was some consensus that a new phase in Pacific writing is dawning. In

her introductory remarks Georgina

Kirby explained her own view that there were three Pacifies the old, the Pakeha, and the new creation formed from the mingling of the pre vious two. In the shaping of this amal gam, she suggested, today’s writers had a vital role in play.

She concluded with the wish that Pacific writers should continue to be a “unsettling” effect on the region’s peo f)le a hope that was certainly fulfill ed by the troubled sentiments ex

pressed during the conference’s

keynote session. □