New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific 9780367250157, 9780429285530

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New Oceania

For so long figured in European discourses as the antithesis of modernity, the Pacific Islands have remained all but absent from the modernist studies’ critical map. Yet, as the chapters of New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific collectively show, Pacific artists and writers have been as creatively engaged in the construction and representation of modernity as any of their global counterparts. In the second half of the twentieth century, driving a still ongoing process of decolonisation, Pacific Islanders forged an extraordinary cultural and artistic movement. Integrating Indigenous aesthetics, forms, and techniques with a range of other influences—realist novels, avant-garde poetry, anti-colonial discourse, biblical verse, Indian mythology, American television, Bollywood film—Pacific artists developed new creative registers to express the complexity of the region’s transnational modernities. New Oceania presents the first sustained account of the modernist dimensions of this period, while presenting timely reflections on the ideological and methodological limitations of the global modernism rubric. Breaking new critical ground, it brings together scholars from a range of backgrounds to demonstrate the relevance of modernism for Pacific scholars, and the relevance of Pacific literature for modernist scholars. Matthew Hayward is Senior Lecturer in Literature at The University of the South Pacific. Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/ New Zealand.

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature

Ezra Pound and 20th-Century Theories of Language Faith with the Word James Dowthwaite Gombrowicz in Transnational Context Translation, Affect, and Politics Silvia G. Dapía The British Stake in Japanese Modernity Readings in Liberal Tradition and Native Modernism Michael Gardiner Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing Writing in the Wings Graham Wolfe The Nationality of Utopia H. G. Wells, England, and the World State Maxim Shadurski New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific Edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Early-Modern-History/book-series/RREMH

New Oceania Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific Edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-25015-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28553-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of Barbara Hau‘ofa Paul Lyons Teresia Teaiwa

Contents

List of Figures ix List of Contributors x A Note on Language and Spelling xiv Acknowledgementsxv   1 ‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies

1

MAEBH LONG AND MATTHEW HAYWARD

  2 ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania

20

SUDESH MISHRA

  3 ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance

39

JULIA A. BOYD

  4 No Ordinary Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’s First Book of Verse

60

PAUL SHARRAD

  5 ‘Our Own Identity’: Albert Wendt, James Joyce, and the Indigenisation of Influence

81

MATTHEW HAYWARD

  6 Mapping Modernity in Guam: The Unincorporated Ecologies of Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics BONNIE ETHERINGTON

100

viii  Contents   7 Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Soaba’s Wanpis, and Oceanian Literary Modernism

118

PAUL LYONS

  8 Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine

136

MAEBH LONG

  9 ‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’: Te Ao Hou

156

ALICE TE PUNGA SOMERVILLE

10 Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre: Nina Nawalowalo and The Conch

168

DAVID O’DONNELL

11 Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’

190

STANLEY ORR

12 Oceanian Knowing and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove

210

JUNIPER ELLIS

13 On Memory and Modernity: Sudesh Mishra’s Oceania

227

JOHN O’CARROLL

14 Oceania, the Planetary, and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda

245

SUSAN STANFORD FRIEDMAN

Index267

Figures

10.1 Cathy Eno and Sue Manilia in Stages of Change180 10.2 Gloria Konare, Rhian Gatu and June Bofatain Stages of Change185

Contributors

Julia A. Boyd is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where her work is supported by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Her research explores transnational writeractivism and social/environmental justice movements, with additional focuses on literary-legal activism and interdisciplinary curriculum. She is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including two Governor General’s academic medals. Her work on Oceanian and Canadian literatures also appears in Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. Juniper Ellis is a Professor of English at Loyola University, Maryland. Her book, Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin, was published by Columbia University Press in 2008 and won the City Paper award for Best New Book by a Baltimore Author, was listed as ‘required reading’ in the New York Post, and led to lively interviews on NPR stations. Her articles have appeared in journals including PMLA, Mosaic, Ariel, and Arizona Quarterly. A recent essay was published in Tattoos: I Ink, Therefore I Am. She has received Fulbright grants for research in Germany and New Zealand, and other national grants including NEH and Andrew W. Mellon fellowships. Bonnie Etherington is a PhD candidate in literature and a Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University. Her dissertation studies contemporary protest poetry and fiction written by Indigenous authors from Oceania, and her research interests more broadly include literary activism, and environmental and digital humanities. Her first novel, The Earth Cries Out (Vintage NZ, 2017), is set in West Papua, where she spent her childhood. The novel was shortlisted for the 2018 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and long-listed for the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Susan Stanford Friedman is the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She

Contributors xi publishes widely on modernism, narrative theory, migration/diaspora studies, world literature, and feminist theory and women’s writing. Recent books include Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (2015) and the edited volumes Contemporary Revolutions: Turn Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art (2018), and Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, co-edited with Rita Felski (2013). Earlier books include Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1998) and books on H.D., Joyce, and Freud. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. Matthew Hayward is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. He has published on James Joyce, modernism, and Pacific literature in such journals as Modernism/modernity, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and James Joyce Quarterly, and in numerous edited collections, most recently Modernism and Food Studies: Politics, Aesthetics and the Avant-Garde (University of Florida Press, 2019). He is currently working on the monograph Joyce in Business, which reclaims Joyce’s neglected ‘Notes on Business and Commerce’ as a genetic archive for the study of Ulysses. Maebh Long is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Her areas of interest include modernist and contemporary literature in Ireland, Britain, and Oceania, as well as literary theory and continental philosophy. She has published widely on Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien and is the author of Assembling Flann O’Brien (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as the editor of The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2018). She is also a co-investigator of the Oceanian Modernism project, which links modernist studies and post-1960s independence and Indigenous rights literature from the Pacific. Paul Lyons was Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. His publications include American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination (Routledge 2006), and articles and reviews in American Literature, American Literary History,  Studies in American Fiction, Arizona Quarterly, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Boundary 2, Philosophy East & West, Anglistica, and the Contemporary Pacific. He co-edited (with Ty P. Kāwika Tengan) ‘Pacific Currents’, a special issue of American Quarterly (September  2015), and his most recent publications include ‘Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Pronouns’ in Oceans and Ecologies (Taiwan National UP, 2016), ‘Melville and World Literature’, in The Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2018), and ‘Kanaka Maoli Modernism’ in Symploke (2018). Sudesh Mishra is Professor of Literature at The University of the South Pacific. He is the author of the widely cited monograph, Diaspora Criticism (Edinburgh UP, 2006), and his fifth volume of poetry, The

xii  Contributors Lives of Coat Hangers, appeared under the imprint of Otago University Press in 2016. Sudesh is working on a series of papers on the subject of minor history and an article on Fiji’s political cartoonist, Lai, has appeared in The Contemporary Pacific (2016). He recently contributed chapters to books published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. In 2018, he was awarded the Ratu Kamisese Mara Fellowship by Otago University, and in 2019, he shall travel to Christchurch to take up a Canterbury Fellowship. John O’Carroll is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at Charles Sturt University. Before this, he taught at Western Sydney University and The University of the South Pacific. His research interests include Australian and Pacific literature, communications, and the philosophies of postcoloniality and postmodernity. He has published many articles on these topics, some with other writers. He has also published two jointly authored books, one on the philosophy of Australian multiculturalism (with Bob Hodge) and the other on the lives of Roman Catholic priests (with Chris McGillion). David O’Donnell is an Associate Professor in Theatre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. David has published widely on New Zealand and Pacific theatre, and directed many New Zealand plays. He won a Hawai’i State Theatre Council Award for directing Victor Rodger’s My Name is Gary Cooper in Honolulu (2015). With Marc Maufort, he co-edited the book Performing Aotearoa (2007). Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa (2017), which he co-authored with Lisa Warrington, was awarded the 2018 Rob Jordan Book Prize by the Australasian Association for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies. He has been editor of Playmarket’s New Zealand Play Series since 2010. Stanley Orr is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu, where he teaches courses in literature, writing, and screen studies. Orr has published a number of essays in edited volumes, as well as articles in American Quarterly, Jouvert: A  Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres, and other journals. His book Darkly Perfect World: Colonial Adventure, Postmodernism, and American Noir (The Ohio State University Press, 2010) charts a trajectory of the noir ethos from fin de siècle ripping yarns through postmodernist parody and revision. Paul Sharrad is Senior Fellow in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. He has taught and written on Pacific literature for over twenty years and written and edited work on postcolonial writing, including the recent Oxford History of the Novel in English (volume 12), New Literatures Review, and Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature.

Contributors xiii Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Ātiawa, Taranaki) is Associate Professor/Manakura in the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She teaches and researches at the intersections of Indigenous, Pacific, literary and cultural studies. Her first book, Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (University of Minnesota Press) was published in 2012. Her current research project is ‘Writing the New World: Indigenous Texts 1900–1975’, with a focus on Aotearoa, Australia, Fiji, and Hawai’i. She also writes the occasional poem.

A Note on Language and Spelling

Non-English words are typically italicised within English-language texts. However, to follow this convention here would be to render Pacific languages foreign to a book on Pacific texts, so in keeping with established Pacific critical vocabularies, the rule has been disregarded. We have regularised some very few commonly used words and phrases across the volume using standard diacritical marks (e.g. fa‘a-Sāmoa), but have otherwise left orthographical decisions to the authors. When quoting from other sources, we have retained the spelling conventions of the original.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this volume began in conversations in the corridors of The University of the South Pacific’s Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji. These conversations led to a symposium at the university in 2016, for which we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the School of Arts, Language and Media; the Faculty of Arts, Law and Education; and The University of the South Pacific (USP) Research Office. Keitou vakavinavinaka vua na turaga na Tui Suva, na itaukei ni vanua a vakayacori kina na bose. We thank everyone who contributed to the symposium, including Antoinette Kafoa and Ana Didrau, for working tirelessly to take care of guests and organisers across those busy few days. We would particularly like to thank Vanessa Griffen, Pio Manoa, Satendra Nandan, and the late Barbara Hau‘ofa, who shared their knowledge and experience of the creative contexts from which this study arises. Around half of the chapters in this volume began as papers presented at this conference; all are published here for the first time. We could not have published the late Paul Lyons’s paper without the support and aloha of Monica Ghosh, and we extend our sincere gratitude to her. Earlier drafts of the manuscript were read by Douglas Mao, Paul Saint-Amour, and Jessica Berman, who provided invaluable advice and support. We thank them wholeheartedly. We also thank the staff at the Pacific Collection, USP Library, at the University of Waikato Library/ Te Whare Pukapuka o Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato, and at Te Tumu Herenga, the Library of the University of Auckland. Finally, this volume is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Hau‘ofa, Paul Lyons, and Teresia Teaiwa. Each gave much to Pacific scholarship and literature, and we are the less for their passing.

1 ‘The Space Between’: Oceanian Literature and Modernist Studies Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward

In 1987, Raymond Williams challenged the received understanding of modernism, arguing that it presents a ‘highly selected version of the modern which then offers to appropriate the whole of modernity’.1 Although the counter-examples he chooses are European, Williams’s call for an ‘alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century’ has been adopted repeatedly in the decades since, and the new modernist studies have arrived under a range of possible titles—geomodernisms, alternative modernities, new world modernisms, transnational modernisms, weak modernisms, bad modernisms, vernacular modernisms, global modernisms.2 The emphases are different for each formulation, and few perhaps have managed fully to rid themselves of associations with the experimental styles and technological advancements of early-twentieth-century Europe and North America. Collectively, however, these reframings have amply demonstrated that Global South modernisms, previously rejected as ‘epistemologically impossible’, ‘lamentable mimicry’, or the ‘contamination of a more genuine local culture’, in fact present conceptually viable and aesthetically rich modernist traditions.3 Modernist studies now encompass a range of possible modernisms, operating in interconnected yet distinct ways, at different times, in different places. And yet, in this major reorientation of modernist studies, Oceania has remained all but absent from the new critical maps. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s collection Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity (2005) lays vital stress on the variety of modernisms and their integrated yet specific contexts: ‘which modernism, written when and why and from what place—which city, which hillside, which seat on the  1 Raymond Williams, ‘When Was Modernism?’ New Left Review 1, no. 175 (1989): 49–50.  2 See Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48.   3 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World’, New German Critique no. 100 (2007): 198.

2  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward train, which new nation or new colony, and before, after or during which war’ (emphasis in original here and throughout volume).4 However, the modernisms and contexts of Oceania are nowhere to be found: Apia, Mauna Kea, sugarcane trains, the Solomon Islands, and the Bougainville Civil War fail to appear. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (2005) identifies modernisms in India, Africa, Latin America, and China, but Oceania is seen to play no part in their transnational exchanges.5 The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010) ventures into the Pacific, but engages only with antipodean settler modernisms in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.6 Mark Wollaeger’s 700-page collection, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), affords no more than passing reference to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, while wholly ignoring the creative output of the Pacific Islands.7 None of the Cambridge companions to modernism include discussions of Indigenous art and literature from Oceania, and David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar’s Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) mentions the Pacific only as a place to which Zora Neale Hurston did not travel.8 Although none of these volumes claim to present the entirety of global modernist output, the repeated elision of Oceanian literature, art, music, dance, and theatre serves to present the Pacific as a space devoid of creative responses to modernity. Not only does the omission ignore the rich cultural production of a sizeable quarter of the globe, it further entrenches the colonial characterisation of the Pacific Islands as the very antithesis of modernity—‘thousands of miles from civilization’, as W. Somerset Maugham put it, and peopled by ‘creatures of a more primitive nature’;9 or ‘centuries and centuries behind us’, as D. H. Lawrence’s opines, ‘in the life-struggle, the consciousness-struggle, the struggle of the soul into fullness’.10 Uncalculated as current scholarly exclusions may be,

  4 Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, ‘Introduction: The Global Horizon of Modernism’, in Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity, ed. Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1.   5 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).   6 Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).   7 Mark Wollaeger, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).   8 David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 380.   9 W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (1919; New York: Dover, 2006), 145; The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921; New York: Mondial, 2008), 72. 10 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’, in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Michael Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 118.

‘The Space Between’ 3 they cannot but reinforce the sense that Global North concepts of modernism and modernity demand an unmodern Other, with the cultures and productions of the Pacific remaining fixed in the very binaries that the new modernist studies seeks to undermine. Repudiating this critical misrepresentation, New Oceania presents a set of chapters that, individually and collectively, recognise the claims to modernity performed in a range of contemporary Pacific texts and art works. The volume does so by placing modernist studies and Pacific studies in conversation. Pacific studies covers a vast and complex region, working, as Teresia Teaiwa puts it, to ‘honor and respect the layered, oceanic histories of peoples whose descendants today are some of the world’s most misunderstood and misrepresented groups’.11 As an academic discipline, Pacific studies emerged in part from the American interest in area studies in the 1950s, and early incarnations in Hawai‘i, Australia, and New Zealand positioned the Pacific and its peoples as objects of study rather than active participants.12 Pacific scholars have worked hard to wrest back the discourse in the decades since, creating a suitably broad field that is generally more ‘island-centred’ and indigenised. Pacific scholarship has served different functions at different times, working towards preservation, growth, and cultural renaissance, but understanding the relationship between tradition and modernity—including the traditional in the modern, and the modernity in tradition—has remained central.13 Broadly speaking, Pacific studies calls for academic vocabularies, methodologies, and protocols that do not obscure or distort Pacific lives; that understand Pacific knowledges to be integral, dynamic, and responsive to local and global conditions; and that seek to strengthen links between the community and the academic world. For many Oceanian students, in universities inside or outside the region, a Pacific studies course can feel like the first time an academic discipline speaks their languages and comprehends their protocols and etiquette.14 To those familiar with modernism as the writings of an avant-garde European and North American elite, a conversation between modernist and Pacific studies might seem destined to be a monologue that once 11 Teresia K. Teaiwa, ‘Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters: Evidence of Teaching and Learning’, The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 266. 12 Terence Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies’, Pacific Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 115–37. 13 Stewart Firth, ‘Future Directions for Pacific Studies’, The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003): 139–48. 14 See, for example, Konai Helu Thaman, ‘Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education’, The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003): 1–17; Graeme Whimp, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes’, The Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 2 (2008): 397–421; Terence WesleySmith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On’, The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 153–69; Teaiwa, ‘Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters’.

4  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward again reduces Oceania to a backdrop for Western adventure, a muse for European art, or a belated imitator of Northern Hemisphere literature. Developments within modernist studies, however, have loosened the modernist rubric from its strict associations with Europe, or the early twentieth century, or rejections of conventional realism—that is, from a specific region, period, and style—and repurposed it as a frame through which engagements with specific experiences of modernity can be studied, the transnational connections between different nations and groups understood, and the material specificities from which cultural productions arise explored. Interested in rupture, retention, and change, and interpolation and indigenisation, modernist studies presents another way of reading the aesthetic and political, local and transnational, traditional and transitional elements of Oceanian texts. Of course, modernist studies is not an Indigenous discipline, and however well-intentioned its global aspirations, it remains implicated in the colonial legacies Pacific studies has worked so hard to contest. Yet, as Graeme Whimp and Terence Wesley-Smith suggest, Pacific studies already exists ‘in the vā, “the space between, the separation that connects”, navigating choppy waters between rationales, disciplines, knowledges, identities, lands, peoples, and cultures’.15 This interdisciplinarity and adaptability is a strength, and Pacific studies knows how to draw on and indigenise discourses not native to Oceania if and when they are useful—as Steven Edmund Winduo puts it, ‘maintain[ing] cultural independence’ by ‘incorporat[ing] and adapt[ing] other cultural practices’.16 Conversely, Pacific studies has much to offer modernist studies, not just in continuing to undermine the colonial foundations of the discipline, but in its nuanced understanding of the ways in which modernity is enacted and experienced across a vast and varied region. In ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’, Teaiwa refers to Sir Tom Davis, an Indigenous Cook Islander of Rarotongan and European descent. In addition to his achievements as Prime Minister and one of the region’s first novelists, Davis was involved in revitalising ocean canoes and traditional navigation in the Cook Islands, but felt few compulsions to adhere to strictly ‘authentic’ methods. When the building and maintenance of wooden canoes proved difficult, he switched materials, saying: ‘If my ancestors had fiberglass they would have used it’.17 The chapters of New Oceania experiment with the innovations of the new modernist studies to see if it can yield materials that 15 Wesley-Smith, ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On’, 164. 16 Steven Edmund Winduo, ‘Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars Within a Folk Narrative Space’, New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2010): 602. 17 Tom Davis, as quoted by Teresia Teaiwa, ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’, in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 44–45.

‘The Space Between’ 5 are workable for Pacific studies. The collection as a whole presents modernism as a dynamic mode, which plays out in distinct ways across the region, while remaining a broadly common and therefore comparable aesthetic process. Some chapters speak directly of an Oceanian or Oceanic modernism, some see the value of further specificity—Māori modernism, ‘Coolie’ modernism—while others retain a separation between the cultural products of Oceania and other modernisms, but all explore what happens when Pacific studies and modernist studies sail in the same waters. Of course, these waters are often challenging to navigate. If we characterise this cultural production as a modernism, do we recognise—and therefore legitimise—alternative modes of modernity, thereby supporting the ongoing political activism in the region, for Indigenous sovereignty in some parts, and against competing neocolonial interests in others? Or do we repeat colonial and neocolonial manoeuvres, overwriting alternative discourses with a single, authorised, and totalising framework? Does this intermingling open up new routes for Pacific scholars to explore the complex transnational negotiations at work in modern Oceanian cultural production, or does it signal new inlets for a neoliberal and globalising process of cultural appropriation? How deep is the modernist studies commitment to reorientation? Is it merely an inclusionist gesture, institutionalising and incorporating yet another cultural Other, without allowing its fundamental differences to challenge the legitimacy of the dominant model? Or can more expansive and flexible conceptions of modernity and modernism be found, that neither disavow the discursive limitations of modernist studies by mistaking its configuration of other cultural movements as finally ‘true’, nor write out the problematising case for the sake of discursive coherence and convenience? These are complex questions, and New Oceania proceeds with provisional assays rather than totalising claims. It accepts from the start that the conjunction between modernism and Oceania may be more appropriate in some areas than in others, and that what works in one context may not hold for all. Most fundamentally, it recognises that Pacific scholars, students, and thinkers have the agency and versatility to identify and adapt those elements that may be useful—as they have always done. ***** New Oceania proceeds from the recognition that what is typically taken to be the first wave of Pacific literature in English—roughly the 1960s to the late 1980s—emerged from, responded to, and repeatedly reshaped Pacific modernity. This period was one of rapidly reclaimed political sovereignty in the region, and a series of attendant changes mark it as a time of exceptional growth and transformation. Imperial flags had remained firmly planted in the colonised Pacific in the first half of the twentieth century, but in 1962, Western Samoa achieved independence from New Zealand, and

6  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward neighbouring islands gradually followed in a still ongoing process of decolonisation.18 Education systems began to localise, regional institutions were established, traditional ways of life examined, and questions about identity in the modern Pacific explored. New tertiary institutions furthered these explorations: the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) was founded in 1966, The University of the South Pacific (USP) followed in 1968, and other national universities, community colleges, and institutions of technology added to the educational possibilities. Perhaps such transformations could only take place with the energy of a youthful population: in the mid-1970s, approximately seven out of ten Pacific Islanders were younger than 30.19 More and more of these young people became metropolitans. As cities saw the gradual retreat of the expatriate civil service, local graduates took their place, and urban populations began to swell. Urbanisation brought all the pains of modern city life—congested housing, squatter settlements, crime, high rent, and polluted water sources—but also the opportunities for better-paying, white-collar employment, wider social networks, electricity, shops, cinemas, and new forms of entertainment.20 National and regional airlines began to flourish, and from the cities, people moved across and out of the region, creating diasporic populations and dynamic urban spaces. Although access to books was often limited, by 1974, radio was pervasive throughout Oceania,21 and by the end of the 1970s, there were sixty-nine fixed cinemas in the Pacific region (not counting Australia

18 Nauru (1968), Fiji (1970), Tonga (shed its official position of British ‘protected state’ in 1970), Papua New Guinea (1975), the Solomon Islands (1978), Tuvalu (1978), Kiribati (1979), Vanuatu (1980). In 1986, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia became independent, followed by Palau in 1994, all having agreed to a compact of free association with the United States. The Cook Islands and Niue currently retain citizenship links with New Zealand, but became states in free association in 1965 and 1977, respectively, with the Cook Islands recognised as a state under international law by the United Nations in 1992, and Niue in 1994. Hawai‘i became the fiftieth state of the United States of America in 1959, Guam remains an unincorporated and organised territory of the United States, Tokelau is still a dependent territory of Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Pitcairn is the last British Overseas Territory in the Pacific, and West Papua remains a province of Indonesia. Following a close referendum in 2018, French Polynesia is still a French overseas territory. 19 Ian D. Steward, ‘Education in the South Pacific: The Issues’, The South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 3, no. 3 (1975): 47. 20 John Connell and John Lea, Urbanisation in the Island Pacific: Towards Sustainable Development (London: Routledge, 2002); John Connell, ‘Elephants in the Pacific? Pacific Urbanisation and Its Discontents’, Asia Pacific Viewpoint 52, no. 2 (2011). 21 Jim Richstad and Michael McMillan, ‘The Pacific Islands Press’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1974): 470; Miles M. Jackson, ‘Distance Learning and Libraries in the Pacific’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 12, no. 1 (1983): 99; Thomas Davis, ‘Communications and Developing Countries in the Pacific’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 11, no. 2 (1982): 15.

‘The Space Between’ 7 and Aotearoa/New Zealand), with thirty-seven in Fiji alone.22 Many of the Pacific Islands had access to television, and in those that did not, imported videos were hugely popular.23 Yet these rapid developments were by no means universal, even within single nation-states. In Papua New Guinea, for example, all primary-aged children in the East New Britain area were attending school in 1974, compared to 32% in the Eastern Highlands. At the point of independence in 1975, only a third of the population was considered literate.24 And in 1976, roughly half of the villagers attending markets in Port Moresby, Rabaul, and Goroka had never read a newspaper; a third had never been to the cinema; a quarter had never heard the radio.25 It is in this atmosphere of flux and disparate growth that a movement of modern Pacific literature in English was born. While intimations may be found even before the twentieth century, it was in the vibrancy of the 1960s that Pacific Islanders worked to self-consciously fashion a literature of Oceania. Landmark publications such as Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun (1964), Albert Maori Kiki’s Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (1968), Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile (1970), and Witi Ihimaera’s Pounamu, Pounamu (1972) gave visibility to the literary scenes of Aotearoa—where Māori writers had been contributing to the journal Te Ao Hou since the early 1950s—and of Papua New Guinea, where Ulli and Georgina Beier, having played a significant role in the growth of Nigerian modernism, conducted the writing seminars that gave impetus to a new national literature. The Samoan author Albert Wendt’s novel Sons for the Return Home (1973) made waves across the Pacific Islands, while the USP student magazine UNISPAC (launched in 1968) and Mana (which began as a section in Pacific Islands Monthly in 1972) fostered the new levels of regional collaboration and cooperation that were formally inaugurated with the establishment of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) in 1972. Against the colonial depictions of Herman Melville, R. L. Stevenson, and Paul Gauguin, Pacific writers and artists

22 Floyd D. Takeuchi, The Status of Commercial Cinema in the Pacific Islands (Honolulu: Pacific Islands Studies Program, University of Hawai‘i, 1979), 104. 23 Jim Richstad and Michael McMillan, ‘Pacific Islands Mass Communications: Selected Information Sources’, Journal of Broadcasting 21, no. 2 (1977): 216; Pamela Thomas, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Some Social and Political Implications of Television and Video in the Pacific’, in Transport and Communications for Pacific Microstates: Issues in Organisation and Management, ed. Christopher C. Kissling (Suva: The Institute of Pacific Studies of The University of the South Pacific, 1984), 68; Jim Richstad, ‘Television in the Pacific: A  New Surge?’ Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 2 (1984): 19. 24 Lyndon Megarrity, ‘Indigenous Education in Colonial Papua New Guinea: Australian Government Policy 1945–1975’, History of Education Review 34, no. 2 (2005): 16–7. 25 Grant Noble, ‘Radio and Political Socialisation in Papua New Guinea’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 12, no. 2 (1983): 156–7.

8  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward rejected the adventure-yarn clichés of tropical paradises and cannibal isles, and worked to forge an art and literature of Oceania—not as a testing ground for Western desires and anxieties, but as a modern home and a site for creative self-reflection and refashioning. This literature explored the tensions between tradition and modernity, the city and the village, the male and the female, the foreign and the local, the Indigenous, the indentured, and the introduced. These are recognisably modern concerns, and Wendt presented them as such in his manifesto ‘Towards a New Oceania’ (1976), published in the first issue of Mana Review, the transnational literary magazine founded by SPCAS to ‘support the South Pacific writer with continuous dialogue’.26 Wendt declared that ‘[s]elf-expression is a prerequisite of self-respect’, and celebrated the diverse Pacific cultural heritage as a ‘fabulous treasure house of traditional motifs, themes, styles, material which we can use in contemporary forms to express our uniqueness, identity, pain, joy, and our own visions of Oceania and earth’.27 With this belief in the social and political importance of artistic expression, writers in the region—Ihimaera, Tuwhare, Harry Dansey, and Patricia Grace (Aotearoa/New Zealand); Eri and John Kasaipwalova (Papua New Guinea); Subramani, Vanessa Griffen, Jo Nacola, and Satendra Nandan (Fiji); Marjorie Crocombe and Makiuti Tongia (Cook Islands); Wendt and Sano Malifa (Samoa); John Dominis Holt (Hawai‘i); Konai Helu Thaman and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Tonga); Henri Hiro (French Polynesia); John Saunana and Celo Kulagoe (Solomon Islands); and many more—explored questions of identity, language, tradition, modernity, and change. Wendt described this wealth of writing as an ‘artistic renaissance’, and rallied his contemporaries: ‘Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania’.28 The remarkable array of journals, periodicals, and little magazines established at this time bear testament to the creative pride, agency, and ambition that defined this moment. In addition to Te Ao Hou and Mana, there was Sinnet (Fiji), Faikava (Tonga), Waswe? and ’O’o (Solomon Islands), Moana (Samoa), and Ondobondo, Papua New Guinea Writing, and Bikmaus (Papua New Guinea). Born of the possibilities and limitations of the Pacific’s ‘sea of islands’, the mobile, economical, self-sufficient form of the little magazine was the life-blood of protest and self-expression. Its material form provides connections with the little magazines of ‘canonical’ modernism, and, perhaps more importantly, reconnects the Pacific with

26 Subramani, ‘Editor’s Page’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 5. 27 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review 1, no. 1 (1976): 58. 28 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 60, 53.

‘The Space Between’ 9 postcolonial modernisms across the world. The present volume establishes the foundational role of these Indigenous print cultures, with chapters by Maebh Long and Alice Te Punga Somerville looking at the self-determining nature of Pacific modernisms. New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific insists upon the plurality of modernities, and recognises that different communities, countries, and regions produce different modernisms at different times. The distinction between first and second waves of Oceanian literature is well established within Pacific studies, although the dates associated with each vary, and new research continually uncovers writing predating the 1960s.29 The editors see value in distinguishing between the ideologies, aspirations, and approaches of first-wave literature and that which followed, and tend to see the earlier work as comprising an experience and writing of modernity that responds most readily to the modernist rubric, as it presents the first transnational movement of writers in Oceania collectively responding to rapidly changing circumstances, identifying and imbricating new continuities with past forms, and organising to create a body of Oceanian literary work. The so-called first wave has the urgency, optimism, and experimentalism of a new scene, as young writers and artists laboured to fashion a literary tradition from a wide range of local and international sources. But, and such is the value of a collection of multiple voices, the contributors to New Oceania work within a variety of time frames, and many explore modernist connections in contemporary works. They also remind us that different artistic modes have experienced their own modernisms at various points across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and that modernism’s borders, possibilities, and restrictions can be approached in a variety of ways. New Oceania shows that modernism and Oceanian literature can be brought together in two key ways. The most concrete is by tracing the ways in which Pacific writers respond to and adapt European, American, and other modernist works. Educated during the 1950s and 1960s in a heavily colonised region, many of the first generation of Pacific writers encountered these modernist texts through colonial education systems. Formal curricula remained generally conservative at this time, but modernism was already in the air: school books contained work by such writers as Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot, while certain teachers—by recommendation or by ban—encouraged precocious students to explore modernist texts.30 The influence of European

29 See e.g. Steven Winduo, ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “First Wave” ’, 499–510, and Mohit Prasad, ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “Niu Wave” ’, 511–23, in The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950, ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 30 See Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward, ‘ “For I Have Fed on Foreign Bread”: Modernism, Colonial Education and Fijian Literature’, in Modernist Cultures, forthcoming.

10  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward and American modernism can be found throughout the first wave of Pacific literature, sometimes through direct engagement, as with Wendt’s adaptations of William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Yeats, elsewhere through the sometimes indirect appropriation of forms and techniques typically associated with earlier movements. Simon Gikandi has found that across Africa, the Caribbean, and India it was ‘in the language and structure of modernism that a postcolonial experience came to be articulated and imagined in literary form’, arguing that ‘without modernism, postcolonial literature as we know it would perhaps not exist’.31 New Oceania shows that similar processes of adaptation and indigenisation were enacted across the Pacific, as Oceanian writers and artists forged new modes and styles through which to figure the complexity of Pacific modernity. These are not derivative acts, but complex, innovative, and experimental aesthetic practices. Writers made use of familiar, but disparate, sources—Pacific lives and foreign texts—and defamiliarised both, making the literary strange by moulding it to Oceanian concerns, and rendering the homely uncanny by presenting it in writing. Thus, both are seen anew, as Eliot is found in Suva and Ralph Ellison in Port Moresby, while sea walls are explored in vers libre, oral narratives given written flourishes, and village politics recognised as local epics as well as universal tragedies. Indigenising foreign materials requires artists to recognise the new potentials that received forms and styles can have outside of their ‘original’ contexts, and asks writers to inscribe themselves into these materials without betraying Pacific lives and circumstances. It may be that a certain prestige—or stigma—can be derived from associations with canonical literary texts, yet when Pacific writers draw upon these forms, they do so not to supplicate or even repudiate, but in self-reliant acts of creation and elaboration. The second key approach is to consider Pacific literature not in terms of connections with ‘traditional’ modernisms, but under the broader tenets of a global modernism through which writers may emerge as modernist, regardless of any specific influence or aesthetic choices. In Chapter  14, her closing contribution to this volume, Susan Stanford Friedman reiterates her influential argument that modernism as a critical term should be decoupled entirely from its European underpinnings, so that ‘any given modernism’ may be taken as ‘the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity’. In the loosest sense, this makes Oceanian writers modernist simply because they express an Oceanian modernity. While some of our contributors express reservations about Friedman’s broad formulation—Sudesh Mishra, for example, observes that ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ are historically bounded, ‘object-forming’ categories, and argues that it would

31 Simon Gikandi, ‘Preface: Modernism in the World’, Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 420–21.

‘The Space Between’ 11 therefore be ‘anachronistic’ to apply these terms to contexts predating the ‘socio-political event’ that produced them—all agree that Pacific artists are engaged in the writing of a Pacific modernity. Understanding this writing as a modernism proves effective in tracing what Jessica Berman describes as a ‘dynamic set of relationships, practices, problematics, and cultural engagements with modernity’,32 an approach that presents certain advantages in the Pacific context. For instance, it has the potential to unite writers of very different texts and modernities—the transcriber of Vanuatu legend with the Igbo novelist, the Māori lyricist with the Brazilian playwright, the Fijian prose stylist with the Irish satirist. Modernity is marked by a dizzying circulation of material goods and intellectual concerns across national and geographical borders, and modernist studies offers a particularly useful tool with which to follow these webs of connections. The chapters in this collection align loosely between these two key approaches, although contributors undercut ready categorisation. Mishra opens New Oceania in Chapter 2 by identifying stylistic and thematic resonances in the work of Subramani, Wendt, and others as arising from modernist concerns, and finds these to reflect and respond to capitalist alienation—understood as from the start global, even when its material basis in colonial labour remained occluded. Mishra names these writers modernist because they adapt and integrate non-realist modes at the crucial historical moment in which conventional forms of expression are revealed as inadequate to the task of representing modernity. In this sense, Oceanian writings chime with all global modernisms, AngloAmerican included, in their radical adaptation of disjunctive modes to express the disruptions characterising modernity in all its forms. Mishra is, of course, himself a renowned Pacific writer, and John O’Carroll’s Chapter  13 shows that Mishra’s poetic, dramatic, and critical works enact and extend the radical adaptation the Fijian author discerns in his predecessors, assembling images and ideas that are at once concrete and startling in their juxtapositions. O’Carroll observes that the challenge against hierarchies of originality central to the new modernist studies take on a new significance in the Fijian context, where colonially introduced tensions between Indigenous and indentured identity claims have found violent expression in the disruption of the political coups. Noting that the ‘apparently benign colonial history of Fiji is itself mythic’, O’Carroll finds in Mishra a new modernist poetics appropriate to a newly damaged, ‘second wave’ of a specifically Fijian modernity.33

32 Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 32. 33 See, too, John O’Carroll’s ‘Deception, Loss and Modernity in Fiji’, Double Dialogues (2007): n.p.

12  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward If canonical modernism stands as an important reference point for Pacific writers, other contributors show that it should not be marked as a point of origin. Matthew Hayward in Chapter  5 finds that the early novels of Wendt mobilise James Joyce in their portrayal of the artist coming into literary consciousness; in their challenge against the distortions of colonial history; and in their depiction of rebellious young men confronting the mechanisms of colonial power. However, while Hayward argues that particular textual correspondences in one sense demonstrate influence, he pushes back against the straightforwardly causative interpretation of European priority and Pacific imitation, drawing attention to similarities between these authors’ experience of two related colonial modernities—similarities which, he argues, give rise to comparable if uniquely inflected aesthetic moments. David O’Donnell, whose essay on modernism in Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific Island theatre is one of the few works on Oceanian modernism to predate this collection,34 reminds us in Chapter 10 that histories of modernism are impoverished and distorted by the frequent omission of the theatre, particularly in the Pacific context, where the generic distinctions of the Global North do not always hold, and where performance remains a central expressive mode across all levels of society. O’Donnell explores the innovative work of the Fiji-Aotearoa/New Zealand theatre company The Conch, which integrates wide-ranging modernist, naturalist, and symbolist techniques into a theatrical mode that retains a distinctly Pacific form and aesthetic. What emerges from these chapters is that the Pasifika adaptation of European modes and methods is not a capitulation to other, culturally dominant forms, but the active construction of new myths of modernity, made to serve present and future Pacific needs. This makes modernistoriented Oceanian texts correspondents rather than descendants of their better-known Global North counterparts. Stanley Orr illustrates this well in Chapter 11 with his analysis of the American Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl’s teleplay, ‘The Perils of Penrose’ (1961). Written for the American television series James A. Michener’s Adventures in Paradise, Kneubuhl’s teleplay at first sight appears to repeat colonial representations of the Pacific as a premodern site, ripe for exploitation. However, Orr shows that Kneubuhl in fact turns early modernist representations of the Pacific back against themselves, asserting the equal conceptual validity of Indigenous perspectives on colonial contact, and thereby refusing to accept artistic or epistemological marginalisation. Paul Sharrad makes

34 David O’Donnell, ‘Staging Modernity in the “New Oceania”: Modernism in Australian, New Zealand, and Pacific Islands Theatre’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2017), 282–90. See the other essays in the Australia and Oceania section of The Modernist World for further work on modernism and the Pacific.

‘The Space Between’ 13 a similar point in his analysis of the early work of the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare. Taking C. K. Stead’s The New Poetic and Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun, both published in 1964, Sharrad contrasts Stead’s academic reflections on the forms and preoccupations of European modernism in white New Zealand writing with Tuwhare’s performance of a modernist verse that subverts European modernism in a new writing of Māori modernity. Recognising ways in which Indigenous and settler aesthetics and ideologies were pitted against each another, Sharrad explores the different forms that modernism takes in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the varied ways in which influences are bent and changed to form something new. Paul Lyons takes the collection further in this direction in Chapter 7 by tracing an alternative modernist genealogy in the work of the Papua New Guinean novelist Russell Soaba. Reading Soaba’s 1977 novel Wanpis as an instance of the ‘call and response’ emerging in the 1960s between Pasifika and Africana art, literature, and politics, Lyons rejects the lingering practice of treating European modernism as the standard against which other world modernisms must be measured and understood. He shows that this rejection is in fact already staged within Soaba’s novel, through its refusal to accept that modernist art and literature must break from modes and methods that are conventionally seen as pre- or anti-modern. Resisting the oversimplification of imbricated aesthetic influences into false categories of the ‘local’ and the ‘foreign’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘new’, the global modernist rubric is attuned to the way in which writers—whether Pacific, Caribbean or American—incorporate the overwhelmingly vast range of material at play under a global modernity. Juniper Ellis illustrates this point in her Chapter 12 analysis of Sia Figiel’s recent novel Freelove, which presents Samoan ancestors and European poetic and scientific greats as coeval, and positions Oceanian epistemologies as predecessors of European Enlightenment and modernist models of knowledge. Against this global backdrop, the sexual relationship between a student and teacher that forms the novel’s plot emerges as a recovery of repressed, precolonial knowledge. Figiel’s characters enact an Indigenous, Oceanian modernity that overturns European colonial and modernist perceptions of the Pacific. Responding to Subramani’s call for an Oceanic imaginary, Ellis shows that Figiel has delivered an Oceanian sensorium and universe. New Oceania is interested less in the specific forms of ‘newness’ that have been used to privilege European modernism, and more in the way in which modernists of all colours adapt complex and often dissonant cultural impositions and inheritances in order to ‘make it new’. This is one of the underlying principles of the global modernist criticism, but in practice, it has at times remained bound to ‘continentalist’ ideas of progress and development radiating from a limited network of fixed cultural nodes. As Friedman remarks in the chapter that closes this collection,

14  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward Oceanian forms of modernism present the vital components and confluences that have been missing from global modernist studies, where continentalist biases have concealed the radical flux allowed by ‘archipelagic’ thought. Presented as a coda to New Oceania, her chapter extends the collection’s situated focus upon Pacific contexts towards ongoing debates in modernist studies at a global scale. Friedman’s reflections on the movement from continental focuses to archipelagic relationality are given form in Long’s Chapter  8 on the anglophone little magazines associated with UPNG and USP. The small islands of the publishing world, literary magazines enable rapid intellectual exchange, stylistic innovation, and artistic collaboration, and their local focus and transnational movement gave birth, Long argues, to modernism in Oceania. By reading Pacific journals in connection with the magazines of canonical and postcolonial modernisms, Long maps archipelagos of convergence in preoccupations and style across time and space, showing the productive, shifting connections of global modernisms. Bonnie Etherington justifies Friedman further in Chapter 6 by reminding us that modernity is a social process, not an essence, and as such could never simply be imposed from without. Pacific modernities must, like all modernities, be continually enacted, and Etherington’s analysis of Craig Santos Perez’s ‘poetics of Guam’ presents ocean movement and ecologies as both ground and metaphor for a modernity that is fluid in nature, circulating and recirculating in a complex and overdetermined process that erodes static ideas of origins and destinations, cultural primacy, and belatedness. It is this fluidity that makes modernity within the Pacific so diverse and so divisive. Julia A. Boyd in Chapter  3 traces the effects on Oceanian women caused by water and air made radioactive by foreign powers’ nuclear testing. For Boyd, Western depictions of the Pacific as an anti-modern Other are belied by the forced inclusion of the Pacific into a nuclear modernity: between 1946 and 1996, the United States, France, and Britain tested nuclear weapons in Oceania, causing long-term, catastrophic health issues. Her chapter addresses the emergence of a first-wave women’s literature from the interwoven developments of the Pacific women’s movement and the movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific. While much work on this period emphasises the increased agency and freedoms of post-independence Oceania, Boyd explores the gendered implications of a modernity marked by compelled involvement in the oppression embodied in nuclear warheads, and its impact upon both activism and aestheticism from the 1970s to the present. The conception of culture and modernity as multiple, fluid, and dynamic is itself eminently modern, resonating with late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century constructionist theories of identity and culture as process. Indigenous Pacific scholars—pressed by the material necessity of asserting inalienable land rights against colonial and neocolonial

‘The Space Between’ 15 disenfranchisement—have at times been suspicious of this ‘diasporic’ mode of thought, which from one angle arrives as yet another outside concept undermining traditional conceptions of ownership and identity. It is in this fraught context that the value of Te Punga Somerville’s account in Chapter 9 of the Māori concept of te ao hou (often translated as ‘the new world’) stands out. As Te Punga Somerville shows, the experience of dislocation and rupture that characterised European colonisation is not a new experience in the Pacific; the modernity it denotes is not beyond the Māori world’s ability to name for itself; nor is the Global North’s discourse of modernity the Pacific’s primary resource for self-expression and self-comprehension. In sum, the understanding of modernity underpinning the New Oceania volume is not incommensurable with Pacific experiences and traditions. Mobilising an interconnected set of approaches to challenge the Eurocentrism that persists in modernist studies, New Oceania performs its own theory of modernity, tactically adapting a range of discourses and methodologies where useful, while continuing to locate its valuable advances in self-determined, regional epistemologies and practices. ***** The edited collection as a scholarly instrument is currently in abeyance, as literary studies is increasingly atomised into discrete and individually accessible units. New Oceania asserts the value of this polyphonic form, assembling multiple voices and perspectives into a study with broad scope and significance while resisting the false rhetoric of the totalising claim. The perspectival approach is especially apt for the Pacific context this collection approaches. That there arose in the 1960s and 1970s particular groups of Pacific artists and writers who consciously conceived of themselves as Pacific artists and writers is in little doubt. But given the vastness of the region, no one group could represent all. While Wendt in ‘Towards a New Oceania’ acknowledges the dangers of speaking for others and thereby ensuring ‘the maintenance of a status quo in which we enjoy privileged positions’, and while he recognises the complex variety of ‘our cultures’,35 the new Pacific writers he names are all anglophone, mostly from the urban centres of socio-economically dominant Pacific nations (especially Aotearoa/New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji), and all relatively privileged by opportunities of literacy and education that were, and remain, unavailable to many Pacific Islanders. A politics of inclusion and exclusion lingers, and terms remain contested. ‘Oceania’ distinguishes the Pacific Islands (comprising the island groups colonially defined as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, along with Aotearoa/New Zealand and, by some definitions, Australia) from

35 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 58, 52.

16  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward the so-called Pacific Rim (which includes China, Japan, Russia, much of North and South America, Indonesia, and many other nation-states). The term ‘South Pacific’ was once a prevailing designator for the region— particularly among those associated with The University of the South Pacific—and is still occasionally used, although this is a particularly inaccurate denotation, since many of the island groups it names, including Kiribati, Hawai‘i, and Guam, are not in the South Pacific. Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand occupy varying positions within the region, and it is still common to see definitions of Pacific literature that exclude Australia as a settler colony, and sometimes also discount Aotearoa/New Zealand and Hawai‘i on the same basis. On the one hand, this can be seen as a strategic act of self-definition on the part of Pacific Islanders who may feel overshadowed by the socioeconomic influence of their larger neighbours. On the other hand, as scholars such as Te Punga Somerville have pointed out, in excluding the Indigenous peoples of the settler colonies, these self-conceptions not only repeat the act committed by the colonisers themselves, but also forget the foundational role played by Māori and other Indigenous writers and artists in the development of the Pacific literature.36 Descendants of the indentured labourers brought from India to Fiji have also at times been marginalised within Pacific rubrics, and the discourses of Oceania—fighting for independence from colonial powers and for the empowerment of Indigenous peoples—have not always found the terms to engage with the Indo-Fijian population, themselves victims of colonial dispossession. All of the English-language terms designating the region carry imperial baggage, and remain politically loaded, and the problems are all the more pronounced when attempting to define a connected cultural movement. Although we give ‘Oceania’ a primary position, in this volume contributors move between a range of these terms. As a whole the collection works towards inclusion, focussing on Pacific-born writers and artists who have engaged in forming a new regional literature, and whose political and creative commitments were oriented towards the Pacific, regardless of their ethnicity or the grounds of their identification. This, in effect, excludes the direct descendants of the colonial settlers, for whom Europe has often remained the apex of political, social, and cultural activity. The predominantly Indigenous artists and writers discussed in New Oceania do not generally share settler longings and frustrations, and while they may not be immune to the lure of the old colonial cities, these are not the primary sites of their aspirations. Their project was directed inward, to the region, to independence movements and the building of new nations and communities, and to

36 Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

‘The Space Between’ 17 forming non-colonial, Oceanian identities through art and literature. As such, the writings of Oceania describe and shape postcolonial, or anticolonial, modernities, and although the settler works of Australia and New Zealand were also engaged in the attempt to create a nation, it was not against the threat of expulsion, extermination, or erasure, and the nature of their intent and anxieties differ entirely. New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific covers a wide range of writers and artists from many different parts of the Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to Guam, Māori Aotearoa/New Zealand to American Samoa, Fiji to the Solomon Islands. It proceeds from the understanding that any definition of what ‘counts’ as Pacific or Oceanian is partial, and therefore problematic. It is primarily interested in the relationship between Oceanian literature—however so defined—and modernism, itself a thoroughly contested category. The title’s pluralities invite Pacific scholars to extend and challenge its connections as they consider the value of modernism for interpreting other regional movements, from the francophone literature of French Polynesia and elsewhere, to the extensive work conducted in the myriad Indigenous languages of the region. It challenges modernist studies to continue to work against the biases and blind spots it has inherited, and to live up to the aspirations that have driven the global modernist movement in the twenty-first century.

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18  Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward Gikandi, Simon. ‘Preface: Modernism in the World’. Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 419–24. Huyssen, Andreas. ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalising World’. New German Critique no. 100 (2007): 189–207. Jackson, Miles M. ‘Distance Learning and Libraries in the Pacific’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 12, no. 1 (1983): 96–106. Lawrence, D. H. ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’. In Selected Critical Writings, edited by Michael Herbert, 113–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Long, Maebh and Matthew Hayward, ‘ “For I Have Fed on Foreign Bread”: Modernism, Colonial Education and Fijian’. In Modernist Cultures, forthcoming. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies’. PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. Maugham, W. Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. 1919. New York: Dover, 2006. ———. The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands. 1921. New York: Mondial, 2008. Megarrity, Lyndon. ‘Indigenous Education in Colonial Papua New Guinea: Australian Government Policy 1945–1975’. History of Education Review 34, no. 2 (2005): 41–58. Noble, Grant. ‘Radio and Political Socialisation in Papua New Guinea’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 12, no. 2 (1983): 151–64. O’Carroll, John. ‘Deception, Loss and Modernity in Fiji’. Double Dialogues (2007): n.p. O’Donnell, David. ‘Staging Modernity in the “New Oceania”: Modernism in Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Islands Theatre’. In The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 282–90. London: Routledge, 2017. Prasad, Mohit. ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “Niu Wave” ’. In The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte, 511–23. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Richstad, Jim. ‘Television in the Pacific: A New Surge?’ Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 2 (1984): 17–24. Richstad, Jim and Michael McMillan. ‘Pacific Islands Mass Communications: Selected Information Sources’. Journal of Broadcasting 21, no. 2 (1977): 215–33. ———. ‘The Pacific Islands Press’. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1974): 470–77. Ross, Stephen and Allana C. Lindgren, eds., The Modernist World. London: Routledge, 2017. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Steward, Ian D. ‘Education in the South Pacific: The Issues’. The South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 3, no. 3 (1975): 46–56. Subramani. ‘Editor’s Page’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 5. Takeuchi, Floyd D. The Status of Commercial Cinema in the Pacific Islands. Honolulu: Pacific Islands Studies Program, University of Hawai, 1979. Teaiwa, Teresia [K]. ‘The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny’. Theorizing Native Studies, edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 43–55. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

‘The Space Between’ 19 ———. ‘Charting Pacific (Studies) Waters: Evidence of Teaching and Learning’. The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 265–82. Thaman, Konai Helu. ‘Decolonizing Pacific Studies: Indigenous Perspectives, Knowledge, and Wisdom in Higher Education’. The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003): 1–17. Thomas, Pamela. ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Some Social and Political Implications of Television and Video in the Pacific’. In Transport and Communications for Pacific Microstates: Issues in Organisation and Management, edited by Christopher C. Kissling, 61–76. Suva: The Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1984. Wendt, Albert. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. Wesley-Smith, Terence. ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies’. Pacific Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 115–37. ———. ‘Rethinking Pacific Studies Twenty Years On’. The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 153–69. Whimp, Graeme. ‘Interdisciplinarity and Pacific Studies: Roots and Routes’. The Contemporary Pacific 20, no. 2 (2008): 397–421. Williams, Raymond. ‘When Was Modernism?’ New Left Review 1, no. 175 (1989): 48–52. Winduo, Steven [Edmund]. ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “First Wave” ’. In The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte, 499–510. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. ‘Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars within a Folk Narrative Space’. New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2010): 599–613. Wollaeger, Mark. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

2 ‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’: Modernism and Modernity in Oceania Sudesh Mishra Modernism is, of course, impossible without modernity, but the two are by no means peas in a pod. Modernity refers to a socio-political event, planetary in character although uneven in its forms of diffusion, unleashed by bourgeois and colonial forms of surplus accumulation, whereas modernism is an aesthetic movement, commonly though not uniformly identified with early-twentieth-century Europe and North America, that experimented with form and content in response to modernity. It is critical to point out, even at this early stage, that modernity and modernism are discursive categories thoroughly embedded in ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’.1 That these categories initially emerged in Western practices seems, from my perspective, decidedly self-evident. It is certainly possible to assert that some practices that constitute the object of modernity may have gone uncredited, such as the antagonistic contributions of African slaves, Indian indentured servants, and Chinese coolie workers, to its material, cultural, and political project. Moreover, it could be argued that the project of modernity, mounted as it is on post-industrial technologies and ideologies, gained traction because of the surplus capital amassed by Europe during the Mercantilist Era. Reserve capital obtained from the Eastern trade and from the violent plunder of the New World transformed European modes and means of production during the Industrial Revolution. Modernity, it follows, is indebted to the East in a precise material sense. It would be anachronistic, however, to concur with Susan Stanford Friedman’s claim that modernity (and modernism) flourished in nonEuropean contexts (Kabir’s India and Du Fu’s China, for instance) during periods predating the emergence of the object-forming category.2 Doubtless, Kabir’s iconoclastic dohas (couplets) repudiate Hindu and

1 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1992), 49. 2 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 21 Islamic religious orthodoxies, but these latter are hegemonic manifestations of social relations embedded in the feudal-sultanate economic practices of the fifteenth century. Kabir belonged not to a class, but to a caste of weavers. His tools were the handloom and the spinning wheel. Kabir’s stress on social equality is politically far-sighted for sure, but he was an artisan responding to the ritual orthodoxy of high Brahminism and to the exclusivist nobility of court Muslims, and not to the alienating social relations of modernity. He was modern (as opposed to modernist) with regard to the material context of his aesthetic egalitarianism, but the context was never that of the transformed social relations of modernity. Furthermore, Kabir is the name given to a ceaselessly proliferating ‘author function’ decoupled from any biological author.3 The designation is indicative of the non-privatised, non-literary, folk-based aesthetics of the fifteenth century. It is worth remarking, as a point of comparison, that indentured Indians of the nineteenth century were translated out of their castes by the compulsory socialisation aboard coolie ships. They emerged as a class of workers in the outposts of plantation modernity. Their celebrated egalitarianism is, consequently, an outcome of classbased forms of resistance to their colonial-era exploiters. Modernity, then, signifies a space-time value, as manifested in material and conceptual economies, distributed unevenly across the globe. Colonialism has been the most potent instrument for bringing non-European cultures and peoples within the ambit of this modernity. The ideological state apparatuses of modernity include Western forms of economic administration, labour mobility, industrial and militaristic assemblages, surplus-friendly governance, and institutionalised education. This last has played a critical part in shaping the complex—and doubtless, fractured and contradictory—subject positions of the colonised and ex-colonised. Any understanding of such a subject position will entail taking stock of the ‘play of alienation and identification’ so constitutive of postcolonial life-worlds.4 In his poem, ‘Kidnapped’, Ruperake Petaia of Samoa captures this ambivalence whereby an expressed disavowal is only possible through the irony of avowal. The persona declares that, due to his mother’s carelessness, he was ‘[k]idnapped by a band/of Western philosophers’ who, for years, extracted a ransom from his parents in which time he ‘grew whiter/and whiter’ until finally he was handed ‘a piece of paper/ to decorate my walls/certifying my release’.5 The detention centre of the education system, and its imported epistemic structures, gives shape to 3 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (1984; New York: Penguin, 1986), 108. 4 Simon Gikandi, ‘Preface: Modernism in the World’, Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 420. 5 Ruperake Petaia, ‘Kidnapped’, in Some Modern Poetry from Western Samoa, ed. Albert Wendt (Suva: Mana Publications, 1974), 8–9.

22  Sudesh Mishra the kidnapped subject. In a variant strain of the Stockholm Syndrome, this subject is able to articulate his dissent only through the paradoxical dynamic of identification with the imported episteme, as well as estrangement from it, in the ironised—and yet obstinately meaningful—silence of the Indigenous episteme. The certification of release amounts to the colonisation of the mind. The irony acknowledges the double bind, the loaded silence of the Indigenous episteme, but the poem is unable to free itself from a compulsive hybridity. In its recourse to free verse, to colloquialism, to irony and to direct political allusion, the poem announces its modernist genealogy while positioning itself as a postcolonial rejoinder to that genealogy vis-à-vis an imported education system. Such contaminated modernist genealogies, according to Simon Gikandi, prepares the ground for the ‘projection of new desires and ideologies’.6 In his 1976 manifesto entitled ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Albert Wendt expressed a kindred notion when he declared that the ‘quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for a creation of new cultures’.7 Let me now return to the distinction between modernity and modernism. European modernism of the petty bourgeois variety constitutes an aesthetic conversation with the modernity I have defined. The conversation sometimes takes the form of a paean to an accelerated modernity (Futurism), or to the rejection of its repressive rationality (Surrealism), or it engenders ambiguity as with Imagism. The railway station in Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’, for example, becomes the new image of the urban commuter’s spectral transience only when Pound brings it into juxtaposition with the wet petals of an obsolescent Romanticism.8 Modernism, in short, emerged in response to a modernity that was postVictorian and characterised by the effects of large-scale industrialisation, new urban styles and practices, the tyranny of scientific reason, technological inventions, global wars waged with advanced chemicals and weaponry, and the collapse of the imagined organic communities of the past. Modernists detected in their response to modernity pervasive symptoms of dehumanisation, acceleration, alienation, nausea, vertigo, disorder, and ennui. They responded to the material upheavals around them, often with abstruse aloofness and hostility, by dispensing with social realism, finding aesthetic representation itself to be in a state of crisis because of the magnitude of the changes wrought around them. ‘Colour, lines, sounds and movements’, writes Jürgen Habermas, ceased being ‘the cause of representation’, and ‘the media of expression and the techniques

6 Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 24. 7 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 53. 8 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 53.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 23 of production themselves became the aesthetic object’. A consequence of this shift was that the aesthetic object started to reveal ‘the irreconcilable nature of the aesthetic and the social worlds’.9 Art became disengaged from the world and from life-worlds which, ironically, formed the material basis of the disengagement. A new aesthetics of solitude was born in response to the teeming multitudes that populated the estranging city. If it was impossible to speak of art as possessing an aura of authenticity and novelty in the age of mechanical reproduction, aura itself could be turned into the material of art instead of remaining its hidden property.10 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno point out that the modernist stance engendered an idealistic aesthetics informed by a ‘purposefulness without a purpose’, thereby upending ‘the scheme of things to which bourgeois art conforms socially—purposelessness for the purpose declared by the market’.11 Certainly, a purposefulness decoupled from the commodity form was at the heart of most avant-garde experimentation. Newness was to be grasped not as the accidental property of an artwork, but as its subject, its object, and its all-consuming purpose. Even the radical surrealist assault on an ‘autarkical sphere of art’ that aimed to negate the distinction between art and life achieved the opposite effect.12 It led, as Habermas notes, to a self-reflexive aesthetics which ‘gave a new legitimacy, as ends in themselves, to appearance as the medium of fiction, to the transcendence of the artwork over society, to the concentrated and planned character of artistic production as well as the special cognitive status of judgments of taste’.13 For Raymond Williams, the crisis in representation (which, he says, resulted in a selective ideology of inclusions and exclusions) and the consequent espousal of denaturalised signs are profoundly bound up with innovations in the ‘media of cultural production’.14 The inventions of photography, cinema, radio, and television, he contends, propelled this crisis. If modernity rendered historical continuity between the past and the present largely untenable by altering the modes and relations of material production, modernist aesthetics, drawing on the new media that attested to and resulted from the crisis, negotiated the discontinuity

  9 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 1583. 10 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 211–44. 11 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 1126. 12 Habermas, ‘Modernity’, 1583. 13 Habermas, ‘Modernity’, 1584. 14 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 33.

24  Sudesh Mishra in relation to ruins, fragments, and uncertainties, and, indeed, in terms of a fragmenting consciousness. Hence the recourse to free verse, autotelic conceptions of art, disorienting imagery, aleatory devices, collages, radical juxtaposition, compulsive allusion, streams of consciousness, fractured viewpoints (say, of the flâneur), new velocities, temporal derangement, and urbanised tropes and conceits. Habermas has said famously that modernity, as a societal event, refers to a potentiality that remains unexhausted.15 It bears a name, certainly, but this name, since it attempts to encapsulate a still-happening event, eludes the blissful state of plenitude and completion—hence modernity’s partial, disaggregated, and unfinished character. This is precisely why it is important to resist Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris’s disavowal of the ‘singularly transcendent’ dimension of modernity.16 I understand the transcendent designator, modernity, as an aspirational category that incites from the other side, but is empty in that it evades the plenitude of an incontestable definition. Modernity, thus, is a project that may never be finished (albeit, it may be abandoned) because the transcendent category is always already unattainable. Being an aspirational category, however, means that it gives rise to various material manifestations of the transcendent sign. These unfinished manifestations of modernity, far from being temporally relative to each other, which would imply that they belonged to modernity’s past or present or future, are determined by the specificity of their historical context, as well as their topographical placement. In that they are situated manifestations of modernity, they do not submit to temporal calibration vis-à-vis other forms of modernity. They are co-extensive with the time-space of their specific manifestation. Modernity is manifested differently in Oceania precisely because the region has never been subject to the kind of large-scale technology-driven industrialisation one comes across in Europe or Asia.17 Oceania’s tryst with modernity began in the early nineteenth century with the arrival of sandalwood and bêche-de-mer or sea cucumber traders and commercial whalers (and consequently muskets and modern weaponry), followed swiftly by missionaries who brought with them that ubiquitous engine of mechanical reproduction—the printing press. This early encounter prepared the ground for various waves of settlement, the dissemination of

15 Habermas, ‘Modernity’, 1586. 16 Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris, ‘Introduction: Gender, Modernity and Media in Asia-Pacific’, in Gender, Modernity and Media in Asia-Pacific, ed. Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris (London: Routledge, 2014), 5. 17 I follow Epeli Hau‘ofa’s definition of Oceania as ‘a sea of islands’ (as distinct from little ‘islands in the sea’) stretching from New Guinea to Samoa, from Hawai‘i to Rapa Nui. See Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1993), 7.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 25 the written word as a consequence of the rivalry between representatives of the London Missionary Society, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, the Boston Puritans, and the French Catholics, the establishment of industrial types of plantation agriculture, the commerce in blackbirded (a racist neologism for kidnapped) islanders and indentured workers, formal colonisation, and the founding of bustling port cities such as Apia (1850s) and Suva (1880s).18 Even the current delinked or transnational stage of modernity, while generating intermeshed economies and speedy virtual commerce, does not entail common experience, be it globally, nationally or individually. While I agree with Driscoll and Morris that modernity is context-specific and involves ‘a politics of conjunction and disjunction’,19 I prefer Paul Gilroy’s proposition that, in the specific context of the ex-colonised, it implies a state of ‘antagonistic indebtedness’ to the impossible transcendent category.20 As a socio-economic practice defined by an element of antagonistic indebtedness, Oceanian modernity, while sharing a kinship with some postcolonial contexts, is not simply isomorphous with modernity as found in the North or the South. John O’Carroll puts it succinctly when he notes that Oceanian modernity ‘is at once a structure of encounter with the logic of elsewhereness and [. . .] something local and unique. Modern Pacific writers explore what this feels like—creating logics that are at once at home and are other to oneself’.21 For writers in Fiji, Samoa, Niue, or Guam, the moment of discontinuity from the past, experienced as a rupture from known life-worlds, imagined or otherwise, is linked to an incursive modernity exemplified by colonial takeover, religious imposition, regulated plantation economies, transported and kidnapped drudgery, formal education, militarisation in the wake of the Second World War, Western-style administration, and the rise of port cities. Oceania’s writers were certainly exposed to modernist aesthetics during their time abroad or as students in (post)colonial tertiary institutions. Ruperake Petaia, for example, was educated at The University of the South Pacific (USP); Pio Manoa spent time in Australia and taught English at USP; Satendra Nandan studied in India, England, and Australia, graduating from the Australian National University with a PhD on the novels of Patrick White; Vilsoni Hereniko studied in England and completed his PhD at USP; Subramani received his education in New Zealand, Canada, and

18 An account of the interaction between modernity and islanders may be found in Nicholas Thomas, Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 19 Driscoll and Morris, ‘Introduction’, 5. 20 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 191. 21 John O’Carroll, ‘Deception, Loss and Modernity in Fiji’, Double Dialogues, no. 8 (2007–2008), www.doubledialogues.com/article/deception-loss-and-modernity-in-fiji/.

26  Sudesh Mishra Fiji, and went on to become Professor of Pacific Literature at USP; John Pule was brought up in New Zealand; Craig Santos Perez completed a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at the University of Hawai‘i; and Albert Wendt graduated with a postgraduate degree in history from Victoria University in Wellington and ended his career as Professor of English at Auckland University. Their writing, however, also owes a substantial debt to the region’s distinct experience of modernity. Instead of imposing a borrowed modernist aesthetics on their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, Oceania’s writers permitted their experience of a situated modernity to inform their approach to modernist aesthetics. They reversed the high modernist ploy of borrowing from non-European cultures and texts (Africa for the cubists, and China for the imagists) to frame a response to European modernity by, instead, adapting modernist structures to respond to localised manifestations of modernity. The upshot is an art that might be explained in terms of décalage or an aesthetics derived from the experience of the ‘changing core of difference’.22 Just as Eliot’s tropes are anchored to the alienating practices of a metropolitan modernity of the petty bourgeois variety, so Subramani’s stories are embedded in the estranging coolie plantations of colonial modernity. Since they are informed by the discrepant spatio-temporal contexts of a general modernity, forms of alienation as captured by the two writers are inevitably distinct in type, degree and quality, even when ostensibly similar. Subramani comes up with a distinct aesthetics of ‘coolie modernism’ precisely because of his encounter with the effects of post-indentured modernity. This distinctness of Oceania’s modernity is powerfully captured in the cultural and material dialogism—as well as hybridity—that exemplified the early encounter between printer-preachers and Indigenous islanders in relation to the imported technology of the printing press. While the first book in an Indigenous language of Oceania was published in London in 1810, the first printing press was dispatched by the London Missionary Society to Tahiti and reached Moorea (or Eimeo, as it was then known) in 1817.23 It was accompanied by William Ellis, a young printer and missionary. If printing technology was unilaterally introduced to the islands from Europe, the process involved in the production of the region’s first books was a multi-pronged affair involving the material, physical, cultural, and symbolic input of the Indigenous population. Richard Lingenfelter, for instance, reports that the printing ensemble was conveyed to the village of Afareaitu on nine canoes, that the building erected to house the press employed Indigenous workers and had basalt floors consisting

22 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12. 23 Richard E. Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands 1817–1867: A History of the First Half-Century of Printing in the Pacific Islands (Los Angeles: Plantin, 1967), 3–4.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 27 of blocks appropriated from a ruined Polynesian temple, and that King Pomare employed the composing stick to set the types for the alphabet of the spelling book and, later, turned out the first printed sheet to the wonder of his community.24 Gradually, as we read through the account of the first printing press in Oceania, the picture that emerges is that of a dialogically situated modernity whereby books, whether concerned with the scriptures or with local laws and hymns, are co-produced with the input of Indigenous Tahitians.25 We learn that two local printers worked on the production of the second book and that King Pomare, according to Henry Nott’s own testimony, collaborated with him in preparing the Gospel of Luke.26 When not transfixed by the work of mechanical reproduction, the Tahitians contribute their labour power, their linguistic expertise, and Indigenous material to the creation of the books. Tahitian men are assigned the task of working the press while the women are ‘folding and sewing and [. . .] beating up tapa cloth to make boards for the binding’.27 It is in the reproduction of the 3,000 copies of Te Evanelia na Luka (The Gospel of Luke) that we witness the emergence of a modernity peculiar to Oceania. Barring a few leather-bound copies gifted to the royalty, Ellis recounts how he had to rely on Indigenous resources to produce the books: a large quantity of native cloth, made with the bark of a tree, was purchased, and females employed to beat a number of layers or folds together, usually from seven to ten. These were afterwards submitted to the action of a powerful upright screw-press, and when gradually dried, formed a good stiff paste-board. For their covers, the few sheep-skins brought from England were cut into slips for the backs and corners, and a bundle of old newspapers dyed, for covers to the sides. In staining these papers, they were covered with the juice of the stem of the mountain plantain, or fei, [. . .] imparting to the sheet, when dried in the sun, a rich glossy purple colour, which remained as long as the paper lasted.28 This form of situated modernity is the outcome of a hybrid encounter between Western technology (printing press), dialogic knowledge production (Pomare and Nott), Polynesian labour (male and female), imported resources (sheep-skins and newspapers), Indigenous material

24 Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 5–8. 25 Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 22–3. 26 Richard Lovett, The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795–1895, vol. 1 (London: Henry Frowde, 1899), 234; see also Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 11. 27 Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 15. 28 Quoted in Lingenfelter, Presses of the Pacific Islands, 16–7.

28  Sudesh Mishra cultures (tapa cloth drawn from the mulberry tree), and localised dyeing traditions (fei sap). It is perhaps fitting that each copy of this product of a singular modernity is exchanged for commercially valuable coconut oil, thereby entering the commodity form of a general modernity.29 The unique morphology of any situated modernity does not discount its incorporation, via an exchange logic that discovers equivalence in all commodity forms, into the general planetary modernity characterised by practices of surplus accumulation. Similarly, the modernist attributes found in the works of writers such as Vilsoni Hereniko, Pio Manoa, John Pule, Satendra Nandan, and Craig Santos Perez cannot be decoupled from the authors’ exposure to a situated and participatory modernity specifically generated in the context of Oceania. Oceania’s writers are drawn into the familiar constitutive tug of war between a context-specific modernity and a recalcitrant aesthetics of modernism. Sometimes, as in Nandan’s ‘My Father’s Son’, the tension betrays itself in the sardonic tonalities of a voice commenting on ‘pure australian ghee’ being poured ‘from a fiji bitter bottle’ onto the father’s pyre.30 The consciousness of the urbanised son detects modernity’s inexorable drive, motored by the traffic in commodities, as it invades the most sacred of practices, thereby cynically producing the idea of purity, ritual, and the sacred as lost and profane archaisms constitutive of modernity. The ironic standpoint belongs to modernism precisely because the profanities of Fiji Bitter beer and the impurities of Australia (hence the ironising quotation marks in relation to both) intersect with the funerary rites of ancient India in which sanctified ghee is ritualistically presented to the gods. Pule’s modernist consciousness, by contrast, shores up the fragments of his ruined childhood in a novel-length work that is an uneasy collage of letters, prose narration, inserted verses, and the legends of Niue. This consciousness, which shows up in a self-reflexive portrait in Chapter 16 of The Shark That Ate the Sun, is the by-product of state-sponsored slums, sexual molestation, factory work, torching of childhood homes, a mother’s aphasia, and acts of criminal delinquency.31 In ‘Under Nabukalou Bridge’, Pio Manoa’s consciousness adheres closely to the dialectic identified by Theodor Adorno whereby the archaic ‘is a function of the new’ in that it engenders modernity’s primal history and not its pre-history; it is thus ‘everything whose voice has fallen silent because of history’.32 Primal history is constituted alongside the

29 George L. Harding and Bjarne Kroepelien, The Tahitian Imprints of the London Missionary Society, 1810–1834 (Oslo: La Coquille Qui Chante, 1950), 30. 30 Satendra Nandan, Voices in the River: Poems 1974–1984 (Suva: Vision International, 1985), 50. 31 John Pule, The Shark That Ate the Sun (Auckland: Penguin, 1992), 106. 32 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henry Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (1999; Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2003), 38.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 29 modern and marks, for Adorno, the mandatory condition for the latter’s emergence; consequently, it persists in haunting the historical march of modernity. Modernity, in Manoa’s poem, is represented by the whirr and thunder of wheels on the bridge beneath which sits a wizened fisherman. Crowds of spectators, including the persona, pause to gaze at him but they can only be ‘audience to his/Silence’.33 The old man is the primal image of archaic time, characterised by the use-value aspects of subsistence economy, produced in all its remoteness and silence and beneathness by the gaze of modernity. In his quasi-absurdist play titled ‘Monster’, Hereniko resorts to euphemism, jejune puns, games, misdirection, and selective memory to enact a political tussle in a post-apocalyptic arena. The absence of an identifiable context due to the choice of the allegoric form fails to undercut the tension between the play’s absurdist mindset and the wrangle over the goods, spaces, and ideologies of modernity.34 For Perez, who hails from Guam and writes of its conversion into an American military-industrial complex, typographical fragmentation and jarring linguistics insertions attest to radical departures and ghostly traces that betoken new connections. His poetry may be described as mnemonic acts in which appearances and disappearances co-exist. So, for instance, erased obituaries that bring proper nouns back to life share a common space with proper nouns that cannot escape the erased obituaries in which they are entombed. Perez’s principle image is the ‘ta(la)ya’, a throw net, which serves both as a snare and a sieve, catching or letting slip discordant times, languages, genres, syllables, memories, names, technologies, and moralities.35 His brand of modernism constitutes a sustained critique of the organised violence of modernity in which islands are used as pawns in the geopolitical wars waged by empowered nation-states. There is, of course, much more to say about Perez and others, but I should like to now focus on two older writers whose works explore in nuanced detail the constitutive tension between modernity and modernism— namely, Subramani and Albert Wendt. Subramani’s brooding story, ‘Sautu’, is perhaps exemplary in this regard. Set in a cheerless hinterland settlement owing its existence to plantation agriculture that led to indentured forms of labour mobility in the nineteenth century, the story recounts an ex-coolie’s heightened consciousness of his own disintegration in response to an estranging habitat. Dhanpat dwells in derelict Sautu—a village of ‘squalid little huts’ scratched out from ‘a little clearing’ by postindentured workers who continue to toil in leased canefields or for the 33 Pio Manoa, ‘Under Nabukalou Bridge’, Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 2 (1976): 19. 34 Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘The Monster’, in Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, ed. Ian Gaskell (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and Pacific Writing Forum, 2001): 93–111. 35 Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory [Guma] (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2014), 32–3.

30  Sudesh Mishra sugar mill located on the outskirts.36 The village, which is a by-product of plantation capital, has lost its ‘momentum’ and sticks out like ‘an aberration, a contortion of history on that landscape’ (F 2–3). Composed in the form of a drawn-out epiphany, charting a consciousness that proceeds from reverie to delirium to inflammatory insanity, the narrative is made up of remembered shards and transported objective correlatives (such as brass gods, worn-out photographs, a broken dholak) that attest to a crisis in Dhanpat’s consciousness, and to an intense, and ultimately self-destructive, consciousness of this crisis. Although the story is related in the third person, the narrator’s perspective often converges with the disoriented reflections of the protagonist. This doubling of viewpoint results in a twinned consciousness, which, though not quite conjoined or symmetrical, conveys the sense that Dhanpat’s predicament, and his acute awareness of it, cannot be dislodged from the legacy of colonial modernity in the form of that ambivalent gift—the English language. The doubling of perspective takes on added resonance when we scrutinise the story’s para-text along with its intra-text. Para-textually, the narrator’s point of view is authorised by the ‘legal personality’ of the author,37 Subramani, reared, as we learn elsewhere, on a diet of books ‘thrown away at the European bungalows where my father worked’, and supplemented by an account of his accomplishments in English from universities in New Zealand, Canada, and Fiji (F 141). Intra-textually, Dhanpat’s consciousness of his own disintegration as a wretched subject of plantation modernity to which he is systemically subjected, is bound up with the letters his son, Somu, writes from New Zealand. Dhanpat’s impregnable spirit, which once ‘moved through life with such splendid reassurance’, is undone by his son’s introspective communiqués to the extent that he is ‘confronted [. . .] with truths he had hidden from himself’ (F 7). It is never resolved whether these truths bear any relation to the episodic nightmares concerning his wife’s madness, the apparitions on horseback or her murder at the hands of unknown assailants. If there is a suggestion that sexual violence is an effect of gender disproportion instituted by the plantation system, it remains an insinuation. There is a fifth layer of consciousness we cannot pass over without comment. This consciousness is not the property of the author or the narrator or of any of the characters; rather, it is the intrinsic property of ironic proper nouns such as Sautu and Dhanpat. The Fijian word ‘sautu’

36 Subramani, The Fantasy Eaters (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1988), 2. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as F. 37 Derrida makes the point in ‘Before the Law’ that the ‘legal personality’ of a text, construed as its ‘identity, singularity and unity’, is sanctioned by the conventions and rules determined by the history of legal acts and that this legal personality cannot be detached from the signatory function of the author. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 184–5.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 31 denotes prosperity and plenty, while in Hindi Dhanpat signifies a person of considerable wealth. The story, by contrast, is a remorseless chronicle of squalor, impoverishment, dispossession, and madness. Dhanpat comes to recognise himself as the discarded subject of plantation modernity, with no roots, claims, bonds, or beliefs, and responds by embracing insanity. The consciousness driving the epiphany is an uneasy blend of the third-person narrator, the thoughts of an alienated, unlettered protagonist, the legal personality of a highly-lettered author, the brutal irony contained in monstrous proper names, and the musings of the different characters as half-understood by the main character. In the manner of its protagonist, the story hovers ‘at the edge of new perceptions’ (F 7) without ever achieving them. The consequent madness, enacted in a thwarted attempt at self-immolation, serves as an indictment of plantation modernity by coolie modernism. Subramani adopts a different modernist ploy in the short story, ‘Kala’. It is a ploy that depends on the importation of past aesthetic apparatuses— themselves derived from surmounted social relations—into the context of the later twentieth century. The two exemplary modernist texts in this regard are James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both published in 1922. The latter text, in particular, frames a modernist response to the violent disruption of the integrated global economic order of the belle époque that existed in Europe prior to the First World War. The poem may be described as an aleatory assemblage of textual fragments consisting of cross-cultural intertextual allusions deprived of a systematic supplementary function. By bringing together intertextual allusions that randomly echoed divergent eras, cultures, aesthetics, and values predating the Great War, Eliot attempted to build a framework to integrate the ontological disintegration, ethical equivocality, and economic breakdown that defined the inter-war years, culminating in the Great Depression of 1929–1939. The poem’s success lies precisely in its hyper-conscious failure to achieve such an articulation, thereby attesting to a world where the allusive fragments fail to find supplementary significance and cohesion in the contemporary disorder. The fragments are either eviscerated of their supplementary function vis-à-vis the signifying chain (which itself is fatally ruptured at various points in the text) or become mangled so as to serve the purpose of estranging irony and grotesque parody. If the purpose was to gather fragments from Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Baudelaire, Virgil, Ovid, Marvell, Milton, Spenser, Verlaine, de Nerval, Buddha, St. Augustine, the Upanishads, and the Bible so as to bolster the crumbling architrave of the present with salvaged histories and aesthetics, the result is exactly the opposite inasmuch as the sequestered allusions, being devoid of a supplementary function, throw a sharp light on the disintegrated social relations in which they are anachronistically placed. In endeavouring to circumvent it, the poem paradoxically turns into an account of an epistemic breakdown. The jigsaw pieces of the past

32  Sudesh Mishra fail to fit the present, calling attention to the wrong pieces in the puzzle as well as the gaps that cannot be filled. Similarly, Subramani’s ‘Kala’ draws on the aesthetic archetypes of a bygone era in an attempt to bind together a consciousness on the verge of disintegration. Unlike ‘Sautu’, however, this story is not located in a rural settlement in the immediate aftermath of plantation modernity. Rather, it covers the period after Fiji’s independence from Britain in 1970, and concerns the upwardly mobile descendants of coolie workers who settled in coastal towns and cities. The protagonist, Kala, which name incidentally means art, has a bachelor’s degree from India, while her husband, Sukhen, who has also studied abroad, works for the government in the Foreign Affairs Office. Set in the port city of Suva, the story’s structure, in its meandering arrangement, reproduces Kala’s meandering excursions through the streets which, in turn, take its form from her capricious and perambulating consciousness. Kala’s consciousness, which is hyper-alert in its aesthetic approach to the world, not only plays havoc with sequence so that one is unclear about the story’s precise temporal arrangement, but it also transforms the city into a spectral and unreal arena in which her desire seeks out the object of its sublimation. Kala has an unbearable sexual longing, captured in the form of an adulterous quest through the city streets, for a beloved who escapes her comprehension. Depicted as pest-ridden and in a state of disrepair, Suva’s half-built spaces are employed as objective correlatives to fan Kala’s desire for a figure whose love, in its divine carnality, transcends Sukhen’s ‘sober love’ (F 69) and human limitations. A large part of the story is informed by the dynamic of North Indian viraha songs (songs of longing-in-separation) which are pivotal to the rasalila tradition exemplified by Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, a long poem composed in twelfth-century India. If, for Eliot, Cleopatra’s exalted passion has been reduced to a lewd conversation in a London public house, and the blind prophet, Tiresias, can do no more than attest to the sterile and indifferent coupling of a clerk and a typist, Subramani draws on the rasalila tradition, characterised by the love-play of Radha and Krishna and that of Krishna and the Gopis (herd-girls), to frame Kala’s quest for a passion that, in its unbearable intensity, marries the erotic and the ethereal, thereby transcending the sterility, uncertainty and tedium of mortal love in the postcolonial city. By introducing into the streets of Suva a sacral-sexual archetype derived from the caste-divided social relations of rural India, Subramani captures the maddening contradictions being played out in the emergent class-based consciousness of the educated descendants of indentured workers. On the one hand, Kala believes that she ‘must live for others’ (F 65) in compliance with received Hindu norms, thereby settling for the ‘unexamined life’ (F 66) which, according to Socrates, is not worth living; on the other, she mutinies against repressive cultural and patriarchal expectations in her bid to find work, self-worth, durable passion, and freedom from domesticity.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 33 Subramani admits us into his character’s internal crisis over incompatible versions of self-identification, and by implication incompatible social relations (one not yet fully dead and the other not yet fully born), by turning her into female flâneur. The flâneur is a member of the petty bourgeois class who wanders the marketplace in order to experience jouissance in the commingling of aesthetic and erotic pleasure.38 Kala’s solitary meanderings through the streets and shops of Suva are aesthetic as well as erotic, but driven by a set of conflicting factors which she cannot fully grasp. Most obviously, she ventures out so as to escape domestic confinement, the gendered division of labour, and her husband’s undemonstrative love. Her little transgressions—looking for employment, opening a bank account, sharing laughter with a male worker, telephoning a perfect stranger, poring through a salacious diary—are indicative of the new subject she wants to be, freely immersed in the social relations, commodity spaces, and amorous ideologies of an emergent modernity. Yet, it is the ideological spectre of a different social relations derived from another temporality which haunts her most powerfully in this space of modernity. The shadowy figure she comes across in her private outings is allusively conjoined to the sacral-sexual aesthetics of the rasalila tradition of a peasant-based Indian economy. It is this familiar stranger that is the object of Kala’s ‘erotic mood (śŗňğarasa)’.39 The divinity’s presence in modern Suva is, then, representative of the archaic haunting the new. Kala’s admission that she might be on the brink of madness concerns exactly this form of haunting whereby the subject channels into contradictory forms the ever-receding object of her desire. On the one hand, Kala yearns to be an unbounded and undomesticated subject of bourgeois modernity; on the other, she longs to circumvent modernity and return to the ideology of a surmounted social relations through consummating her restless sexual passion (ratibhāva) for an idealised god. The modernist elements in ‘Kala’ are directly related to this bifurcation in the heroine’s subjectivity whereby the archaic haunts the new even as their relations constitute the différend, defined as an impasse reached in communication due to the presence of incommensurable idioms.40 If the female flâneur is driven to the postcolonial city by a private need to chart her place in modernity, she enters it via the archaic in that the unseasonal

38 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1997), 35–66. 39 Barbara Stoler Miller, introduction to Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 14. My understanding of the rasalila archetype, and its accompanying literary correlates, is derived from Stoler Miller’s excellent introduction. 40 Jean-François Lyotard and Georges Van Den Abbeele, ‘The Différend, the Referent, and the Proper Name’, Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 3–14.

34  Sudesh Mishra rain of Suva is perfectly seasonal in India during June and related to the viraha aesthetic that associates monsoon rains (sawan) to sexual longing-in-separation (vipralambhaśŗňgāra). The downpour is generated by ‘some strange godly intercession’ just before Kala catches sight of the divine beloved, and the crowd milling in the streets is compared to ‘a herd of buffalo’ (F 63), evoking a rural scene that would be familiar to a Gopi on the lookout for Krishna. Kala’s forays into the city are inspired by her failure to reconcile desires that emanate from incompatible social relations. A childhood obsession with the dark god persuades her to marry Sukhen because he is said by her mother to resemble Krishna. The divine figure functions as the Lacanian objet petit a, that is, as the inaccessible object which induces desire.41 Sukhen is the corporeal sign attesting to the disappearance of the objet petit a, thereby setting off an unattainable quest through the shops, cafes, and streets of Suva. Kala chooses to frame the quest in the modern language of feminism when, in truth, she is drawn adulterously to the erotic religious aesthetics of a social relations that has been surmounted. The story itself is alert to the inaccessible status of the objet petit a in life since it directs Kala to a newspaper item on a suicide who claims that she has ‘gone to join her dark lover in Brindaban’ (F 68), Brindaban being Krishna’s rustic habitat. The dead woman’s note triggers Kala’s memory of her grandfather investing her fantasies with the real emotions of ‘a rural lass forsaken by her god’ (F 69). Eventually, through self-scrutiny, she comes to half-comprehend the spectral character of the sacral-sexual objet petit a. The intensity of Kala’s adulterous longing for the dark god (and in this she is comparable to the married Radha) drives a wedge between her and Sukhen, instituting a second dynamic of longingin-separation. Only after Kala confesses to Sukhen the sacral-sexual motivations for her solitary excursions to the city does the story attempt to address the death drive informing an obsessive pursuit of the objet petit a. It is, in fact, Sukhen who exorcises the spectre of the surmounted social relations anachronistically haunting the time of modernity. He is the exemplary existential subject of modernity for whom individuals dwell between a now and a nothing, and what links this ‘now and that nothing is our love’ (F 74). By disavowing love in its non-existential and transcendent form, Sukhen also disavows the possibility of death being a pathway to the objet petit a, and, in so doing, destroys the figure that stands in for the unattainable object of desire. The derelict god is found dead in the rained-on city. With the death of her god, Kala relinquishes the ideology of a surmounted social relations and enters modernity as a secular existential subject.

41 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), 2415.

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 35 In Pouliuli, a novella set in Samoa, Wendt also thinks of insanity as the potential by-product of modernity’s encounter with unassimilable life-worlds. The story begins with Faleasa Osovae waking up one wet morning to discover that he is overcome with revulsion, as expressed in bouts of nausea and vomiting, for everything around him: his spouse and extended family, religion and status, his matai’s authority and obligations, past and present existence, the legacy left by unloving parents, and the manipulations and shibboleths that regulate life in the village. The reader is plunged headlong into a narrative wherein the act of vomiting announces the presence of the repressed other, the one under injunction not to be present, to stay forgotten, as it resurfaces to dislodge the ego’s illusory sense of existential significance and stability.42 If thematically the story starts with the most banal of modernist ploys—the eruption of repressed elements in a character’s waking life—it is offset by the novella’s initial controlled reliance on a realist mode of narration. Osovae’s bouts of vomiting afford him the necessary cover to feign insanity in a bid to free himself from communal bonds and obligations, from the roots and causes of his repressed individuality. However, in chapters that chronicle the eruption of private and public histories straddling the two great wars of the twentieth century, he discovers that his bid for freedom invites indifference from others to the point that he feels worthless. Given that he cannot cope with this indifference, his rebellious solitude, too, turns out to be a type of un-freedom. Wendt frames his character’s quest for existential freedom by holding up to scrutiny inherited life-worlds and the incursive practices of modernity. Osovae’s early encounters with modernity are partly responsible for his disavowal of the fa‘a-Sāmoa, or Samoan Way. When still a boy, he is appraised by a white missionary and travels to Apia, where he discovers cars, commodities, and ice cream, wonders at the miracle of electric light, and is mocked by a girl of mixed blood who embodies Apia’s mysterious and elusive hybridity.43 As a young man in 1942, he finds work in the military-industrial complex, and obtains insight into American largesse and the trauma induced by global wars.44 In the culminating chapters of the story, however, the novella’s realistic architecture begins to crumble in direct response to Osovae’s exposure to a situated yet unassimilable modernity. The centre of the realist narrative will not hold. Apia loses its elusive

42 Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 4. 43 Albert Wendt, Pouliuli (1977; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 41–54. 44 Wendt, Pouliuli, 55–62.

36  Sudesh Mishra glamour because modernity’s representative is a corrupt and mendacious politician. The exemplary site of modernity turns into a scene of self-deception by the deceived.45 Osovae succeeds in unseating the corrupt Malaga, but loses his son to prison in the ensuing bloodshed. The realist third-person narrative has, by this stage, disintegrated to include a symbolic fable about befriending darkness, a surreal tale of a suffering sage who sows stone circles to keep derangement at bay, and two second-person interventions. The first intervention assumes the form of a revelation by Osovae of his betrayal of the visionary sage while the second constitutes Laaumatua’s testimony that Osovae’s insanity, now for real, resembles that of the sage he betrayed. Between the encroachments of an unscrupulous modernity and the demands of the fa‘a-Sāmoa, form and character become unhinged and realism—associated with the ego—yields to the nightmarish idlogic of modernism. In this manner, Samoa’s experience of modernity (exemplified by the entry of Christian evangelism, introduction of colonial educational and governmental structures, establishment of the trading port city, and of the military-industrial complex) gives birth to a fa‘a-Sāmoa modernism in which a fragmented self cannot find anchorage in realism or in the fabulous tapestry of the fāgogo (Samoan yarn-spinning for the edification of children). Neither imported nor Indigenous narratives manage to shore up the fragments of a broken subjectivity. Unlike Wendt’s fa‘a-Sāmoa modernism, Subramani’s coolie modernism is engaged in a related yet different experience of history—one characterised by the estranged lives of post-indentured Indians marooned by colonialism in the outposts of plantation modernity. It is possible by the way of conclusion to assert that Oceanian modernism, though derived from its specific experience of modernity as manifested in the region over the course of two centuries, shows signs of the same tensional and constitutive split between modernism and modernity that informs modernist aesthetics elsewhere. Modernism forever stands in a relationship of crisis to modernity, and this crisis manifests itself on several planes, including that of representation, content, and textual consciousness. In their antagonistic indebtedness to modernity, Oceania’s writers chronicle their dissent in ethical epiphanies and ironies which are inseparable from persistent symptoms of nausea and insanity, and these latter, in turn, inseparable from the metaphoric, typographic, psychic, and mnemonic disintegration of unities, imagined or otherwise.

45 O’Carroll, drawing on the insights of Charles Taylor, makes an ingenious connection between modernist epiphany and deception or self-deception culminating in the revelation of a denunciative ethics (‘Deception, Loss and Modernity’).

‘Kidnapped by a Band of Western Philosophers’ 37

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Edited by Henry Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. 1999. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1997. ———. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Fontana Press, 1992. De Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992. Driscoll, Catherine and Meaghan Morris. ‘Introduction: Gender, Modernity and Media in Asia-Pacific’. In Gender, Modernity and Media in Asia-Pacific, edited by Catherine Driscoll and Meaghan Morris, 1–21. London: Routledge, 2014. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is an Author?’ In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 101–20. 1984. New York: Penguin, 1986. ———. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1992. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Gikandi, Simon. ‘Preface: Modernism in the World’. Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 419–24. ———. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Habermas, Jürgen. ‘Modernity—An Incomplete Project’. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed., 1577–87. New York: Norton, 2010. Harding, George L. and Bjarne Kroepelien. The Tahitian Imprints of the London Missionary Society, 1810–1834. Oslo: La Coquille Qui Chante, 1950. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu and Epeli Hau‘ofa, 2–16. Suva: University of the South Pacific; Beake House, 1993. Hereniko, Vilsoni. ‘The Monster’. In Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, edited by Ian Gaskell, 93–111. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and Pacific Writing Forum, 2001. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed., 1107–27. New York: Norton, 2010. Lingenfelter, Richard E. Presses of the Pacific Islands 1817–1867: A History of the First Half-century of Printing in the Pacific Islands. Los Angeles: Plantin, 1967.

38  Sudesh Mishra Lovett, Richard. The History of the London Missionary Society, 1795–1895. Vol. 1. London: Henry Frowde, 1899. Lyotard, Jean-François and Georges Van Den Abbeele. ‘The Différend, the Referent, and the Proper Name’. Diacritics 14, no. 3 (1984): 3–14. Manoa, Pio. ‘Under Nabukalou Bridge’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 2 (1976): 19. Miller, Barbara Stoler. Introduction to Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, 3–66. Translated by Barbara Stoler Miller. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978. Nandan, Satendra. Voices in the River: Poems 1974–1984. Suva: Vision International, 1985. O’Carroll, John. ‘Deception, Loss and Modernity in Fiji’. Double Dialogues 8 (2007/ 2008). www.doubledialogues.com/article/deception-loss-and-modernity-in-fiji/. Petaia, Ruperake. ‘Kidnapped’. In Some Modern Poetry from Western Samoa, edited by Albert Wendt, 8–9. Suva: Mana Publications, 1974. Pound, Ezra. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. Pule, John. The Shark That Ate the Sun. Auckland: Penguin, 1992. Santos Perez, Craig. From Unincorporated Territory [Guma]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2014. Subramani. The Fantasy Eaters. Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1988. Thomas, Nicholas. Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University, 2010. Wendt, Albert. Pouliuli. 1977. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980. ———. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–69. Williams, Raymond. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited by Tony Pinkney. London: Verso, 1989. Žižek, Slavoj. ‘Courtly Love, or, Woman as Thing’. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by V. B. Leitch, 2nd ed., 2402–27. New York: Norton, 2010.

3 ATOMic Modern: Pacific Women’s Modernities and the Writing of Nuclear Resistance Julia A. Boyd1

In July  2017, Fijian scholar, writer, and activist Vanessa Griffen spoke before the United Nations conference to negotiate the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. All nine nuclear-armed states had ‘conspicuously boycotted’ the talks.2 International headlines were tallying the nuclear-laced barbs volleying between an increasingly bellicose US President Donald Trump and North Korea and Iran, catapulting the threat of nuclear war—perhaps the ultimate expression of apocalyptic global modernity—back into daily conversation. But the treaty promised to pry control over global nuclear ethics away from the world’s nuclear-armed states. If or when it comes into force, it will be the first ‘legally binding instrument to prohibit’ the weapons, bringing them in line with existing bans on biological and chemical weapons.3 At the UN negotiations, Griffen endorsed its equally ‘vital provisions for the people, land, and oceans that have borne the brunt of nuclear testing’,4 articles requiring participating nations to provide environmental remediation and ‘gendersensitive’ health supports for nuclear victims and lands under their jurisdictions, with nuclear states singled out for particular ‘responsibility’.5 These

1 My sincere thanks to Maebh Long, Matthew Hayward, Cheryl Suzack, and Kate Manahan for insightful comments on this chapter. I also gratefully acknowledge the generous Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship supporting my doctoral research. 2 Rick Gladstone, ‘A Treaty Is Reached to Ban Nuclear Arms. Now Comes the Hard Part’, New York Times, 7 July  2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/world/americas/unitednations-nuclear-weapons-prohibition-destruction-global-treaty.html. 3 ‘Background’, United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards Their Total Elimination, United Nations, accessed 14 January  2019, www.un.org/disarmament/tpnw/background.html; John Zarocostas, ‘The UN Adopts Treaty to Ban the Use of Nuclear Weapons’, The Lancet 390, no. 10092 (2017): 349. 4 Vanessa Griffen, Address to the UN Conference to Ban Nuclear Weapons, filmed July 2017 in New York, NY, Vimeo video, 3:04, posted by ICAN, 6 July 2017, https:// vimeo.com/224540494. 5 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, 7 July 2017, U.N.T.C. C.N.476.2017. TREATIES-XXVI.9, at 6–7.

40  Julia A. Boyd measures are especially relevant to Oceania, where American, British, and French tests from 1946–1996 created a cascade of reproductive, health, environmental, economic, and political challenges with consequences for Pacific women and their families that continue to this day. As she has in decades of activist publications, Griffen ‘stress[ed]’ that their regional struggles are not isolated: wherever nuclear tests occur, they have ‘the same’ environmental and health consequences, and ‘a gender dimension, particularly impacting on women and [. . .] on children’.6 These are what she calls ‘the realities of nuclear test victims’: the daily, often-invisible consequences of military colonialism which she prioritises in her writings, but which the world’s nuclear superpowers discount when they disconnect strategic security debates from colonialism and gender.7 The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for stewarding the Ban Treaty on a humanitarian platform, but the agreement still faces an uphill battle for the fifty ratifications it needs to come into force. When 122 UN member states voted to adopt it, the United States, United Kingdom, and France released a joint press statement condemning it as a ‘threat’ to ‘international peace’.8 Nevertheless, along with contributions from activists and nations across Oceania, Griffen’s participation in the ICAN campaign marks another milestone in a Pacific women’s anti-nuclear movement stretching before and through the Oceanic literary renaissance of the 1970s. Like other first-wave authors, Griffen came of age in an Oceania marked by a sharp disjuncture between Pacific struggles for cultural revitalisation and independence, on the one hand, and the ongoing threats posed by past and present nuclear testing in the region, on the other. In the early 1970s, she joined the Against Testing on Moruroa (ATOM) committee before helping found the better-known Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP). With female colleagues across Oceania, she helped organise the Pacific women’s movement through some of its central conferences and publications.9 At the same time, she was

6 Griffen, address. 7 ‘Vanessa Griffen, Fiji, reports on her statement to the UN’, Facebook video post, ICAN Australia, 6 July  2017, www.facebook.com/icanw.au/videos/772754869564249/. See also Rob Nixon’s discussion of nuclear colonialism as ‘slow violence’ in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 8 United States Mission to the United Nations, ‘Joint Press Statement from the Permanent Representatives to the United Nations of the United States, United Kingdom, and France Following the Adoption of a Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons’, news release, 7 July 2017, https://usun.state.gov/remarks/7892. 9 Teresia Teaiwa, ‘On Women and “Indians”: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Militarized Fiji’, in Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, ed. Barbara Sutton, Sandra Morgen, and Julie Novkov (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 131n14.

ATOMic Modern 41 also one of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society’s founders, with short stories published in Mana and anthologised for Fiji English classrooms.10 From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, concurrent members of the anti-nuclear, women’s, and Oceanic literary movements transformed first-wave literature into a space for women’s insights into nuclearised modernity. Defying conventional boundaries between literature and nonfiction print advocacy, they depicted nuclear tests as both an immediate material threat and a synecdoche for the gender-specific consequences of militarised development policy in colonised and newly independent Pacific nations. This chapter approaches the interwoven developments of these three movements through three case studies: Jully Makini’s poems linking domestic violence with nuclear militarisation and cash-and-aid-dependent capitalism; Griffen’s advocacy against the reproductive, economic, and ecological impacts of nuclear tests; and Cita Morei’s leadership in Belau’s anti-nuclear struggle. For women anti-nuclear writers, literary protest demands that both the literary form and activist content of their work be taken on their own terms. As a distinct body within first-wave literature, their texts acknowledge—and, in some cases, resist—the aesthetic and political legacies of European and North American modernism, both by explicitly rewriting the Euro-American canon and by grappling with a broader ‘global’ modernity spawned by nuclear violence.

Gendering the Bomb: Nuclear Modernity and Women’s Protest Literatures in Oceania The political and cultural independence movements which sparked first-wave Oceanic literature emerged alongside the violent incursion of ‘atomic modernity’ into Pacific Islands nations.11 Between 1946 and 1996, the United States, United Kingdom, and France used the Pacific as a ‘laboratory’ for nuclear weapons development, making it one link in a transnational archipelago of nuclear infrastructure crisscrossing Indigenous lands from Oceania to Australia, North America, and the former Soviet Union.12 Although all tests had devastating consequences for exposed communities and civilian and military staff in the Pacific Islands, American and French tests had the most ‘extensive’ impact on

10 Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe, ‘Mana and Creative Regional Cooperation’, The Mana Annual of Creative Writing no. 3 (1977): 6. 11 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations’, in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 238. 12 Valerie Kuletz, ‘The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific Islands’, in The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, ed. Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 127.

42  Julia A. Boyd islanders and their ecosystems.13 The United States ‘detonated sixty-seven atomic and thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands’ from 1946– 1958, followed by further blasts on the Johnston Atoll and Christmas Island in 1962.14 France relocated its nuclear tests to colonised French Polynesia when Algerian independence thwarted its Saharan programme, commencing tests on Fangataufa and Moruroa in 1966. It continued atmospheric and then underground tests beneath the coral atoll and lagoon intermittently until 1996, repressing local protests and earning international condemnation in 1985 when ‘government-sponsored French saboteurs’ bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing one crew member while it was docked in Auckland Harbour en route to Moruroa.15 In the Marshalls and Te Ao Mā‘ohi (French Polynesia), the cultural ‘rupture’ that Susan Stanford Friedman sees as a condition of all modernities meant coerced displacement from ancestral territories; the destruction of local food economies through a combination of irradiation and military waste dumping; and transition to poverty-inducing cash dependency and nutritionally inferior processed food imports.16 Many Marshallese assessed their fallout exposure as deliberate human experimentation (assertions supported by classified documents released in the 1990s), most infamously when changed winds swept fallout from the 1954 Bravo test over residents of the Rongelap and Utirik atolls and surrounding areas.17 Survivors and their descendants subsequently faced catastrophic and ongoing birth defects, cancers, and reproductive and other health challenges.

13 Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90. 14 Barbara Rose Johnston, ‘Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World’, in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan (New York: Routledge, 2015), 140; Stewart Firth and Karin von Strokirch, ‘A Nuclear Pacific’, in The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, ed. Donald Denoon et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 324. 15 Keown, Pacific Islands, 97. While affirming the critical literary-political influence of francophone leaders such as Chantal Spitz (Te Ao Mā‘ohi) and Déwé Gorodé (New Caledonia), this chapter focuses on anglophone writers to respect francophone Oceanic authors’ distinct literary innovations and colonial challenges. 16 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 30. On the consequences of nuclear modernity in the Pacific, see Stewart Firth, Nuclear Playground (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), and Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008). 17 Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages; Michelle Keown, ‘Waves of Destruction: Nuclear Imperialism and Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Indigenous Literatures of the Pacific’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 5 (2018): 585–600.

ATOMic Modern 43 Islanders and the growing international anti-nuclear movement were already protesting nuclear tests in Oceania, but France’s programme created a ‘rallying point’ for large-scale regional organisation, heightening concerns over new contamination, the continuing consequences of US tests, and new threats posed by nuclear waste transport and disposal.18 In May 1970, the Fiji Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) partnered with The University of the South Pacific (USP) Students Association and the Fiji Council of Churches to host a public meeting against French nuclear testing.19 It was just a few months before Fiji gained independence from Britain, and the decolonial cultural creativity of first-wave Oceanic literature was swirling in and beyond Suva. UNISPAC had launched two years before in 1968, and the South Pacific Creative Arts Society would publish its first Mana section in Pacific Islands Monthly two years later, in 1972.20 That initial meeting sparked ATOM, which ‘provided the vanguard’ in Pacific anti-nuclear organising for the next six years, marshalling public awareness through education campaigns and protests, and successfully ‘pressur[ing]’ the Fiji government to support growing regional calls for a Pacific Nuclear Free Zone.21 The movement for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific soon emerged from ATOM’s inaugural conference in April 1975, its demands for a nuclear-free postcolonial modernity building in tandem with first-wave literature and the burgeoning Pacific women’s movement.22 When the first Pacific Women’s Conference convened in Suva later that year, attendees endorsed the earlier conference’s People’s Treaty for a Nuclear Free Pacific and demanded WHO research on the ‘consequences’ of ‘radioactive fallout’ on foetal, child, and adult health.23 Delegates at these first gatherings recognised that protest against the environmental and health effects of nuclear militarisation was inseparable from broader independence struggles against the ‘exploitation and

18 Firth and von Strokirch, ‘Nuclear Pacific’, 355. 19 Walter Johnson and Sione Tupouniua, ‘Against French Nuclear Testing: The A.T.O.M. Committee’, The Journal of Pacific History 11, no. 4 (1976): 213–6. 20 Crocombe, ‘Mana’, 6. 21 Vijay Naidu, ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’, in The Pacific: Peace, Security, and the Nuclear Issue, ed. Ranginui Walker and William Sutherland (London: Zed, 1988), 185. The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga, would finally enter into force in 1986. 22 The coalition officially renamed itself the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP) at its fourth conference in 1983. See Roy H. Smith, The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Moruroa (London: Tauris Academic, 1997), 27. For the Pacific women’s movement, see Vanessa Griffen, ‘All It Requires Is Ourselves’, in Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Anchor Press, 1984), 517–24. 23 Vanessa Griffen, ed., Women Speak Out! A Report of the Pacific Women’s Conference, October 27—November 2 (Suva: Pacific Women’s Conference, 1976), 136, 140.

44  Julia A. Boyd subordination of the indigenous people of the Pacific’.24 In 1947, the year after its first tests at Bikini, the United States took full administrative control over ‘Micronesia’ as a UN-designated ‘Strategic Trust Territory’. This arrangement allowed it to mask what was effectively militarised ‘annexation’ as development assistance.25 Its demands for unimpeded military and nuclear access to the Pacific were shaping independence and self-governance negotiations for the former ‘Trust’ that would stretch through the first-wave period.26 Equally concerning was the emerging politics of aid and foreign investment that saw the United States, France, Japan, and other regional powers trading development assistance for influence with Oceanic governments.27 In response to these risks, the NFIP developed a two-pronged platform demanding both denuclearisation and Oceanic political and economic independence. Although this chapter deals with the early NFIP, it is important to note that the movement’s work remains unfinished. The Republic of the Marshall Islands maintained American military facilities when it gained independence under a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the United States in 1986, an arrangement that continues to this day, and six of the seventeen territories that the UN considers formally colonised are in the Pacific, including French Polynesia.28 Anti-nuclear activism thus emerged as an acute concern in the rising pan-Oceanic cultural movement, confronting writers with a representational paradox with significant bearing on any investigation of anglophone Oceanian modernism.29 Oceania had long been denigrated as the ‘hole in the doughnut’ of the Pacific Rim, both a hypersexualised and feminised space of European exoticism and an ostensibly empty

24 Pacific People’s Charter for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (First International Conference for a Nuclear Free Pacific, April  1975, Suva, Fiji), reprinted in Smith, Nuclear Free, 227. 25 Smith, Nuclear Free, 42–3. The continued division of the Pacific Islands into ‘Micronesia’, ‘Melanesia’, and ‘Polynesia’ is hotly debated for its colonial roots; I use these terms out of necessity when dealing with colonial and neocolonial administrations in Oceania. 26 The Northern Mariana Islands voted to become a commonwealth of the United States in 1975, fully effective in 1986. The Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands gained independence in 1986 after approving COFAs with the United States, as did Belau in 1994. See Smith, Nuclear Free, 37–66, for a detailed discussion of the agreements and the ambiguous sovereignty they afford Micronesian states. 27 See ’Atu Emberson-Bain, ed., Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women (Suva: Marama Publications, 1994). 28 ‘Non-Self-Governing Territories’, United Nations, accessed 6 March  2019, www. un.org/en/decolonization/nonselfgovterritories.shtml. 29 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: USP School of Social and Economic Development, 1993), 131; see also Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60.

ATOMic Modern 45 ‘aqua nullius’.30 These dual tropes simultaneously justified and erased the ‘rupture’ and ‘fragmentation’ wrought by nuclear colonialism, creating a narrative about nuclear modernity that clashed starkly with the reality of Pacific experience. On the one hand, the sexual ‘trivialisation’ of spaces like Bikini as tourist paradises—even in the midst and aftermath of nuclear tests—implicitly negated Marshallese women’s accounts of radiogenic birth defects and miscarriages.31 On the other, depictions of Oceania as anti-modern allowed the United States to represent ‘the atomic bomb’ as a development tool, which one widely quoted Navy press statement described as ‘prosperity and a new promising future’ for displaced Bikinians.32 Both tropes disassociated the bomb from its material consequences, contributing to a sweeping narrative in which America’s military supremacy in the Cold War promised planetary democracy, not another Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These myths of a depoliticised nuclear Pacific emerged at the same time as American cultural agencies were institutionalising ‘emphatically formalist’ literary modernism as a transatlantic cultural weapon against the Soviets.33 As Fredric Jameson, Marina MacKay, Greg Barnhisel, and others suggest, what we now understand as traditionally periodised ‘high modernism’ was codified as a recognisable literary movement in the 1940s and 1950s, when ‘depoliticized’ readings of early twentieth century American, British, and European experimentation created a figurative ‘NATO of the critical imagination’ against Soviet encroachment.34 Contemporary scholarship makes such desiccated readings of the Global North’s modernists ‘almost unrecognizable’ today, particularly in relation to writers like Virginia Woolf who grappled so extensively with the human costs of the First World War.35 But the Cold War interpretation suggests the stakes in Oceanian rewritings of—or disengagement 30 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 13; Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 22. 31 Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Bikinis and Other s/Pacific n/Oceans’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 87. See also Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the “Polynesian Body” ’, in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham: Rowman  & Littlefield, 1999), 249–63; Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 91–114; DeLoughrey, ‘Heliotropes’. 32 Quoted in Firth, Nuclear Playground, 28. 33 Marina MacKay, Modernism, War, and Violence (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 132. 34 MacKay, Modernism, 132; Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (2002; London: Verso, 2012); Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 35 MacKay, Modernism, 133, 50.

46  Julia A. Boyd from—the colonial modernist canon. The ascendant American critical view of ‘modernism’ during the NFIP period held that its stereotypical ‘allusiveness, abstraction, fragmentation and indirectness’ expressed the deep ‘superiority’ of ‘Western’ capitalist ‘freedom and individualism’.36 For first-wave Pacific writers, Jameson’s insistence that ‘[l]ate modernism is a product of the Cold War’ thus reverberates in the entanglement between modernity as a political experience and modernism as a literary form.37 As the Oceanic renaissance expanded alongside the NFIP in the 1970s, nuclear weapons emerged as a haunting presence warning against the world-shattering potential of Pacific modernity without Pacific selfdetermination. The titular poem in Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun (1964)—discussed in Paul Sharrad’s contribution to this collection, Chapter  4—is an anti-nuclear protest. As Sharrad notes elsewhere, Albert Wendt’s 1977 novella Pouliuli focalises the tension between ‘pre-literate’ oral ‘and literate cultures’ in part through the ‘horror’ of nuclear weapons in a ‘world’ that ‘dreams of terror’.38 Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends (1987) is an anti-nuclear satire of militarised economic aid in the Pacific. The whale pod in Witi Ihimaera’s celebrated The Whale Rider (1987) moves off course after French nuclear tests at Moruroa kill seven of their calves.39 These and other publications helped inaugurate what is now an established and growing field of Pacific anti-nuclear literature.40 What remain less publicised, however, are the intimate connections amongst the NFIP, the Pacific women’s movement, and the first wave of literary publications by and for Oceanic women. ‘[S]ome’ of ATOM’s ‘most active members’ hailed from the Fiji YWCA, largely thanks to Amelia Rokotuivuna’s simultaneous organising in the Y, anti-nuclear, and Pacific women’s movements.41 Many of the YWCA’s members in the early 1970s were also USP students, creating a fluid network linking the Oceanic literary renaissance with anti-nuclear protest and women’s

36 Barnhisel, Cold War, 3, 22. 37 Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 165. 38 Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 207; Albert Wendt, Pouliuli (1977; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 145. 39 DeLoughrey, ‘Heliotropes’, 241. 40 Other prominent texts include Chantal T. Spitz, Island of Shattered Dreams, trans. Jean Anderson (Wellington: Huia, 2007), first published in French as L’île des rêves écrasés (1991); Albert Wendt, Black Rainbow (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992); Robert Barclay, Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002); Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017). 41 Nicole George, Situating Women: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012), 49.

ATOMic Modern 47 advocacy.42 Their stances for and against ‘feminism’ as a viable organising strategy differed,43 but writer-activists such as Vanessa Griffen, her sister Arlene Griffen, Momoe Malietoa Von Reiche (Samoa), Grace Mera Molisa (Vanuatu), Déwé Gorodé (New Caledonia), Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga), Jully Makini (Solomon Islands), Vaine-Iriano Rasmussen (Cook Islands), and later Cita Morei and Teresia Teaiwa (Kiribati-American) shared their insistence that gender equity in Oceanic cultures and politics depended not only on challenging the patriarchy they saw as endemic to both colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism, but also the gender-specific consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific. Radiation-induced birth defects were one violence on a continuum of harms linked directly to nuclear and military colonisation. Demands for denuclearisation and independence would fail if they excluded so-called ‘women’s issues’ like gender-equitable access to education and political leadership, women’s struggles as primary food providers in polluted ecosystems, and domestic violence. Their message found transnational support within the international and ‘Third World’ women’s movements;44 however, they also confronted local and international policy landscapes which viewed nuclear security as a gender-neutral issue alien to women’s ostensibly private, domestic concerns. As Amelia Rokotuivuna later recalled, Fiji YWCA members sometimes faced incredulous demands like ‘Why can’t they just concentrate on being young women rather than doing the anti-nuclear campaign?’45 Literature offered a potent tool to answer this question. Women such as Marjorie Crocombe (Cook Islands) were prominent first-wave leaders from its rise in the late 1960s, and women writers featured regularly in venues such as Mana.46 The first major expansion in explicitly ‘ “feminist” or women-centered’ publication expanded in the 1980s, bolstered by the Pacific women’s movement and the UN Decade for Women from 1976–1985.47 At the same time as authors such as Makini

42 Margaret Mishra, ‘A History of Fijian Women’s Activism (1900–2010)’, Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 2 (2012): 125. 43 For summaries of these debates, see Griffen, Women Speak Out! and especially Vanessa Griffen, ed., Women, Development and Empowerment: A Pacific Feminist Perspective (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1989). 44 Teresia Teaiwa, ‘Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania’, in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, ed. Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 322; Griffen, ‘All It Requires Is Ourselves’. 45 Quoted in George, Situating Women, 50. 46 Linda Crowl, ‘Carrying the Bag: Women Writers and Publishers in the Pacific Islands’, Kunapipi 27, no. 2 (2005): 101. 47 Teaiwa, ‘Reading Paul Gauguin’s’, 257; see also Selina Tusitala Marsh, ‘Ancient Banyans, Flying Foxes and White Ginger: The Poetry of Pacific Island Women’, Women’s Studies Journal 13, no. 2 (1997): 118n16.

48  Julia A. Boyd integrated anti-nuclear poetry into their own single-author volumes, the burgeoning of ‘conference proceedings, aid-funded research, and surveys’ also became key platforms for women’s anti-nuclear advocacy.48 Collaborative and multi-genre, they were frequently organised, edited, attended, and contributed to by anglophone and francophone Pacific women whose work spanned ‘poetry’, ‘politics’, and ‘administration’.49 Edited collections and proceedings like Women Speak Out! A  Report of the Pacific Women’s Conference (1976); Women, Development and Empowerment: A  Pacific Feminist Perspective (1989); and Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women (1994) synthesised academic research produced by and for Pacific women with first-person accounts of women’s experiences, frequently paired with literary writings. Test survivors and advocates also documented their testimonies in multiple collections.50 Together, these understudied contributions to the Oceanic anti-nuclear canon shift the centre of disarmament debates into the ‘spaces of everyday living’ where the fallout from atomic modernity played out in women’s lives and leadership.51

‘Development’: Jully Makini Jully Makini’s poetry balances between pan-Oceanic concerns and the experiences of rural and urban women in the Solomon Islands, which achieved independence from Britain in 1978. She published her first volume, Civilized Girl, through the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) in 1981, followed by Praying Parents (1986) and Flotsam and Jetsam (2007). In addition to co-editing the first collection of Solomon Islands women’s writing with the USP’s Solomon Islands Centre, her women’s advocacy work included several years as General Secretary of the Solomon Islands YWCA, and helping establish the National and Honiara Councils of Women.52 She was also a member of the Solomon Islands Peace Committee, a ‘coalition of church and union peace activists’

48 Teaiwa, ‘Reading Paul Gauguin’s’, 257. 49 Crowl, ‘Carrying the Bag’, 92. 50 Zohl dé Ishtar, Daughters of the Pacific (North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1994); Zohl dé Ishtar, ed. Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation (Christchurch: Raven, 1998); Lenora Foerstel, ed., Women’s Voices on the Pacific: The International Pacific Policy Congress (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve, 1991). See also anti-nuclear selections in Susanna George and Vanessa Griffen, Asian and Pacific Women’s Resource and Action Series: Environment (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1992), and Emberson-Bain, Sustainable Development. 51 Davis, Empires’ Edge, 16. 52 Cathy Radford, introduction to Praying Parents: A  Second Collection of Poems, by Jully Sipolo (Honiara: Aruligo Book Centre, 1986), n.p.

ATOMic Modern 49 who were instrumental in motivating the Solomon government’s ban on ‘nuclear-armed or powered’ ships in its waters.53 Civilized Girl prefigures the explicitly anti-nuclear poems in Praying Parents by representing post-independence modernity as an experience of embodied militarisation, both a physical rupture and an ambiguous literary legacy. ‘Spinning’, for example, rewrites Yeats’ proclamation in ‘The Second Coming’ that ‘[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’:54 The world breaks. Help! It’s falling apart. Stop it!55 As the ‘new world’ composed of ‘[w]ars, disease, confusion’ shatters, the speaker appeals to an unnamed power to take it away and return to an earlier time of ‘[p]eace’. But her subsequent struggle to represent this militarised modernity renders any return to a pre- or anti-‘new world’ unviable. By the final stanza, she realises that her ‘swollen head,/This blackened eye,/Represent this new world’.56 By condensing the ‘new world’ into her ‘blackened eye’, the speaker draws a line through multiple violences which begin with regional militarisation and conclude with battery in her own home, fragmentation providing a visual reminder of the false divisions between national and personal security. Her engagement with Irish modernist Yeats remains double-edged—it gestures towards their shared cultural activism against British colonialism, but puts her speaker’s battle against domestic violence on the same footing as public political struggle. By positioning herself as equal to the canon, she subtly refutes a European aesthetic tradition steeped in dehumanising portrayals of Indigenous Pacific women. The years between Makini’s first and second volumes of poetry saw the Solomons negotiating an increasingly adamant but tension-ridden balance amongst its anti-nuclear stance, long-term economic relationship with Japan, and aid dependencies including the nuclear-armed United Kingdom and United States.57 Praying Parents interweaves critiques of postcolonial domestic violence with sometimes bleak commentary on her

53 Michael Hamel-Green, The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty: A Critical Assessment (Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1990), 93. 54 W. B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 91. 55 Jully Sipolo, Civilized Girl: Poems (Suva: SPCAS, 1981), 2. 56 Sipolo, Civilized Girl, 2. 57 Hamel-Green, South Pacific, 94.

50  Julia A. Boyd travels to international peace meetings.58 Positioned on facing pages, the poems ‘Wife Bashing’ and ‘Development’ confront the reader with the hierarchies linking socially sanctioned violence against women with their economic isolation in capitalist development politics. Juxtaposing her ‘black eye and bruises’ against a staccato catalogue of urbanisation’s promises, the exasperated speaker concludes that ‘I want to develop too ! [sic]’.59 Nuclear protest needs to be situated within a broader movement for gender-responsive development and economic justice. As the speaker insists in a later poem: ‘Dismantling nukes’ alone ‘will not bring peace’.60

‘[W]hat’s below doesn’t count’: Vanessa Griffen Like Makini, Griffen’s writings situate the long-term consequences of nuclear colonisation within a broader critique of ‘development agendas that undermine women’s well-being’.61 Griffen first emerged as a key conference organiser, editor, and writer in the 1970s and 1980s. Her early corpus of woman-and-girl-centred writings includes short stories such as ‘Marama’ (1972), ‘The Concert’ (1973), ‘One Saturday Morning’ (1977), and ‘The Visitors’ (1977); edited conference publications; nonfiction articles and collaborative volumes on Pacific feminism and development; and the Pacific women’s health guide, Caring for Ourselves: A Health Handbook for Pacific Women (1983). Nuclear modernity functions in two distinct registers in Griffen’s literary writing. Her anti-nuclear poem ‘White Ashes’ (1992) and related nonfiction elevate women’s embodied experiences of nuclear tests as crucial sources of global knowledge testifying against the humanitarian consequences of nuclear colonisation. Conversely, short stories like ‘Marama’ feature nuclearism as an implicit, oblique presence visible in women’s restricted access to the material economic and environmental resources essential to caring for their families and themselves. First published in 1972, ‘Marama’ was later anthologised for Fiji English classrooms in Francis Manghubai’s Roots/Waka/[Jardh] (1981), and included as a narrative selection in Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Griffen’s narrator depicts a representative ‘Fijian woman’ fishing for her family. She balances herself with ‘tireless, endless patience’ and self-possessed silence until a European couple’s dog comes to sniff her catch.62 Her peace is restored when they leave, but the fish now seem to attract ‘more flies than usual’—the economic and gender disparities

58 Radford, introduction, n.p. 59 Jully Sipolo, Praying Parents: A Second Collection of Poems (Honiara: Aruligo Book Centre, 1986), 12–3. 60 Sipolo, Praying Parents, 17. 61 Teaiwa, ‘On Women and “Indians” ’, 131n14. 62 Vanessa Griffen, ‘Marama’, in Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, ed. ’Atu Emberson-Bain (Suva: Marama Publications, 1994), 173–4.

ATOMic Modern 51 signalled in the encounter rot her ability to feed her family. She returns home, back aching, and finds that the two fish gathered in her day’s labour will not feed the family. So she goes to the tobacco tin for a 50-cent note and sends the eldest child to the store for corned beef and bread. The political intervention in ‘Marama’ hinges on its limited omniscient narration, which thwarts the troping of Pacific women as knowable and sexually available to the colonial gaze.63 Readers witness the Fijian woman’s ‘dignity’ and ‘strong’, straight stance, but the narrator’s respect for the woman’s interiority and verbal silence directs attention—and the burden of responsibility—onto the militarised economics implicit in her declining catch. Both the European couple and the cars driving past fundamentally misperceive her as an anti-modern figure displaced from economic and political consideration, ‘the dark bent shape of a Fijian woman tired after an afternoon’s fishing’. But ‘[t]o the woman’, her physical pain articulates the gender-discriminatory consequences of post-independence development: her back ‘ache[s]’ because ‘she did not fish often now’, and because when she does, ‘the fish were slow in coming’.64 ‘Marama’ is of course a story about fishing, not nuclear tests. But the militarism implicit in the Fijian woman’s experience of economic development links the flies on her declining catch to fish habitats destroyed by nuclear tests, and Marshallese women with ‘no choice but to eat’ foods harvested from irradiated islands.65 By modelling this pan-Pacific coalition via a grandmother’s daily experience, Griffen elevates women’s embodied and non-verbalised experiences as sources of political analysis. This is a quiet literary intervention in her activist context: Griffen published ‘Marama’ during the six-year period when ATOM led Fiji’s anti-nuclear movement, but by 1976, the organisation dissolved under what were perceived as competing ‘environmental’ and ‘anti-colonialist’ objectives, as well as members’ pre-existing women’s movement commitments.66 Warning against a false binary between women’s rights and economic independence, the story renders these goals mutually dependent, not incommensurable. ‘White Ashes’ features in the ‘Environment’ volume of the Asian and Pacific Development Centre’s Women’s Resource and Action Series (1992), as well as in the anti-nuclear contributions to Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth?67 Its title invokes the snow-like ‘radioactive white

63 Subramani, South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation, rev. ed. (1985; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1992), 98. 64 Griffen, ‘Marama’, 174. 65 George and Griffen, Asian and Pacific Women’s, 154; Darlene Keju-Johnson, ‘For the Good of Mankind’, in Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, ed. Zohl dé Ishtar (Christchurch: Raven, 1998), 18. 66 Naidu, ‘Fiji Anti-Nuclear’, 189. 67 Vanessa Griffen, ‘White Ashes’, in Asian and Pacific Women’s Resource and Action Series: Environment, by Susanna George and Vanessa Griffen (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1992), 155.

52  Julia A. Boyd powder’ that fell over Rongelap after the Bravo blast.68 The speaker narrates Bravo from fallout exposure to the birth of her child, deformed as a result of radiation. Balancing precariously between fairytale cadence and fragmented rhetorical questions, she struggles to contextualise her own experience as an internalisation of colonial domination, and then to explain this violence to her suffering child in developmentally appropriate language. The speaker distils the motivation for nuclear tests into a gendered hierarchy of care: ‘men’ are creating a poisonous ‘white cloud’ because ‘what’s below doesn’t count’.69 The ash silently disperses itself through her ‘bones’ and ‘blood’, apparently innocuous until its violence explodes within her own reproductive system: the grey forgotten ghost [. . .] screaming forth evil godmother running riot amongst the tenderness.70 The pseudo-parental relationship signalled in American trusteeship transforms into the haunting ‘ghost’ of an ‘evil godmother’ who corrupts the speaker’s agency as she decries ‘my body’s plan denied’. The poem’s linear trajectory breaks into a stanza in which the child demands both comfort and explanation: ‘oh mother, mother/help me/what am I?’71 Griffen’s speaker does not answer the question directly; as in ‘Marama’, her refusal signals an ethical unwillingness to displace Marshallese women’s own testimonies and advocacy for children born with catastrophic radiation-induced deformities.72 Instead, the poem focalises protest through the speaker’s struggle to account for radiation as a violation of her caregiving power. Bravo’s physical violence magnifies every time her child experiences distress that she cannot alleviate, in every question she cannot answer by assuring the child that their world is just and fair. Griffen thus pushes readers to account for the material consequences of international Cold War politics as they restrict women’s capacities to determine their own life outcomes, especially their power to create conditions of environmental safety in which to raise their children.

68 Firth, Nuclear Playground, 16. 69 Griffen, ‘White Ashes’, 155. 70 Griffen, ‘White Ashes’, 155. 71 Griffen, ‘White Ashes’, 155. 72 I draw ‘refusal’ from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘R-Words: Refusing Research’, in Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, ed. Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014), 223–47.

ATOMic Modern 53

‘[E]verlasting food stamps’: Cita Morei From 1981–1993, Belau (also Palau) emerged as a ‘cause célèbre for international feminist peace activists’ as Belauan women mobilised to defend the nation’s anti-nuclear constitution against a protracted American political and economic pressure campaign.73 When Belau entered independent COFA negotiations with the United States, the famine, bombings, and forced displacement attendant to American-Japanese conflict during the Second World War were sharp in memory. Combined with their knowledge of the Marshallese experience, anti-militarist negotiators were determined to protect against further military, environmental, and social violence on their territory.74 In 1979, Belau approved a protective constitution which not only prevented land expropriation for foreign use, but also stipulated that nuclear and other ‘chemical, gas or biological weapons’ could not be ‘tested, stored, or disposed of within’ Belau’s jurisdiction without approval from 75% of Belauan voters.75 These provisions directly contradicted the COFA, in which the United States required military access in exchange for aid funding. Subsequent American behaviour laid down the line: either remove anti-nuclear material from the constitution or lose the compact. Belauans voted on the COFA eight times over the next decade in a daily landscape polarised by economic duress, internal corruption, the gunshot deaths of two consecutive presidents (one assassination, one deemed suicide), and the violent intimidation of anti-nuclear protesters. As communities fragmented between ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ supporters, the women’s activist organisations Kltal Reng (‘of one heart’) and Otil a Belaud (‘anchor of our land’) led the anti-nuclear resistance through public education, protests, legal actions, and international advocacy.76 Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, the groups framed their demands as an extension of women’s ‘traditional’ roles within Belau’s matrilineal clan system.77 Activist-poet and teacher Morei and her mother Gabriela Ngirmang were two of Otil a Belaud’s best-known leaders and featured ‘prominently’ in ‘antinuclear literature’ in and outside of Oceania.78 Ngirmang, who passed away in 2007, was one of Belau’s highest-ranking women and widely regarded as a mechas (‘respected woman elder’).79 Morei completed her BA in anthropology in the United

73 Teaiwa, ‘Globalizing’, 322. 74 Smith, Nuclear Free, 71. 75 Quoted in Smith, Nuclear Free, 75. 76 Lynn B. Wilson, Speaking to Power: Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific (New York: Routledge, 1995), 181–2. 77 Wilson, Speaking to Power, 183. 78 Teaiwa, ‘Globalizing’, 322. 79 Wilson, Speaking to Power, 58.

54  Julia A. Boyd States and returned to Belau in 1980, building her ‘reputation as a poet’ while raising her children and teaching at high school and community college levels in Koror.80 Morei’s ‘Belau Be Brave . . .’ appears in the 1992 collection, Te Rau Maire [The Fern Leaf]: Poems and Stories of the Pacific.81 The poem situates Belau’s anti-nuclear struggle within its long tradition of ‘Indigenous Palauan resistance’ against foreign ‘beachcombers’, ‘traders’, and foreign ‘diseases’.82 The speaker mobilises shared concern over economic and food security to mediate between women anti-nuclear protesters and the majority of Belauan voters who supported the Compact, convinced by well-publicised promises from the president and government that US subsidies would restore Belau’s economic stability. The need to rebuild coalitional opposition in the wake of violent backlash against Ngirmang and other women protesters looms large in the poem’s demand ‘Belau be brave, our lives are at stake’.83 Morei’s speaker suggests that ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ voters are in fact demanding the same anti-colonial and economic justice project: both the Belauan ‘people’ and the individual speaker share the insight that ‘We were never beggars, We are Providers’. Her rhetorical questions ‘Why do people rave? why do I feel rage?’ aim to unify public protests by insisting that nuclear colonialism is too high a price to pay for the pseudo-independence of aid dependent ‘modernity’: ‘Never sell your seas, your soul/For everlasting food stamps’.84 Belau voted in the COFA in 1993, but Morei vowed, in her post-Compact essay ‘Planting the Mustard Seed of World Peace’, that women’s coalitional leadership ensured their movement’s future.85 Her vision bore fruit when Belau ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in August 2007, followed by the Nuclear Ban Treaty in May 2018. The United States is a signatory to the former, but as of writing, it has ratified neither.

Conclusion Pacific women’s anti-nuclear writings engage with global modernist concerns in the sense that they interrogate nuclear weapons as the apex of

80 Wilson, Speaking to Power, 12. 81 Cite [Cita] Morei, ‘Belau Be Brave .  .  .’, in Te Rau Maire: Poems and Stories of the Pacific, ed. Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe et al. (Rarotonga: Tauranga Vananga; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP; Suva: SPCAS, 1992), 4. 82 Keown, Pacific Islands, 94. 83 Morei, ‘Belau Be Brave’, 4. On the political context, see William J. Butler, George C. Edwards, and Michael D. Kirby, Palau: A Challenge to the Rule of Law in Micronesia (New York: The American Association for the International Commission of Jurists; Geneva: The International Commission of Jurists, 1988). 84 Morei, ‘Belau Be Brave’, 4. 85 Cita Morei, ‘Planting the Mustard Seed of World Peace’, in Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, ed. Zohl dé Ishtar (Christchurch: Raven, 1998), 75–7.

ATOMic Modern 55 neocolonial development policy in Oceania. As Cook Islander rural economist and poet Vaine-Iriano Rasmussen once reasoned, from the perspective of writer-activists in the women’s and anti-nuclear movements, the ‘portfolios of progress’ that ‘line each shore’ of independent Oceanic nations are also ‘fallout effects reflected in/common waves’.86 But taking their activist commitments seriously also means that non-Pacific scholars (like myself) need to restrain ourselves from heartily declaring their work a new ‘modernism’, even when we mean it as a well-intentioned acclamation. We must heed the 1987 Pacific Women’s Workshop’s call to prevent ‘the study of Pacific women and their activities being used for the academic or career advancement’ of non-Oceanic researchers.87 Writers like Makini and Griffen invoke the language of modernity and ‘development’, and representational strategies associated with conventional aesthetic modernisms, to envision a gender-equitable future for the Pacific. But they also preclude unreflective association with a non-Indigenous, non-Pacific literary form, especially one whose traditional canon emanates significantly from the colonial powers responsible for the nuclear colonisation against which they protest. In this sense, the relationship between Pacific women’s anti-nuclear writing and any potential modernism in Oceania lays bare the tension between Pacific revisionings of the American and European canon, on the one hand, and the flexible definitions offered by global modernist scholars such as Jessica Berman and Susan Stanford Friedman, on the other. At the juncture between Pacific and modernist studies, women’s anti-nuclear writing suggests that all ‘cultural engagements with modernity’88 are not necessarily modernisms (although they may be)—they can also be calls for accountability that transcend Eurocentric categorisation in their appeals for readers to take action.

Bibliography Barclay, Robert. Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. Barnhisel, Greg. Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Butler, William J., George C. Edwards, and Michael D. Kirby. Palau: A Challenge to the Rule of Law in Micronesia. New York: The American Association for

86 Vaine Rasmussen, ‘Pacific Status Quo’, in Te Rau Maire: Poems and Stories of the Pacific, ed. Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe et al. (Rarotonga: Tauranga Vananga; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP; Suva: SPCAS, 1992), 12. 87 Griffen, Women, Development, 132. 88 Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7.

56  Julia A. Boyd the International Commission of Jurists; Geneva: The International Commission of Jurists, 1988. Crocombe, Marjorie Tuainekore. ‘Mana and Creative Regional Cooperation’. The Mana Annual of Creative Writing 3 (1977): 5–6. Crowl, Linda. ‘Carrying the Bag: Women Writers and Publishers in the Pacific Islands’. Kunapipi 27, no. 2 (2005): 92–106. Davis, Sasha. The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Dé Ishtar, Zohl. Daughters of the Pacific. North Melbourne: Spinifex, 1994. ———, ed. Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation. Christchurch: Raven, 1998. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. ‘Heliotropes: Solar Ecologies and Pacific Radiations’. In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, 235–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Emberson-Bain, ’Atu, ed. Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women. Suva: Marama Publications, 1994. Firth, Stewart. Nuclear Playground. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987. Firth, Stewart and Karin von Strokirch. ‘A Nuclear Pacific’. In The Cambridge History of the Pacific Islanders, edited by Donald Denoon, Stewart Firth, Jocelyn Linnekin, Malama Meleisea, and Karen Nero, 324–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Foerstel, Lenora, ed. Women’s Voices on the Pacific: The International Pacific Policy Congress. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve, 1991. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. George, Nicole. Situating Women: Gender Politics and Circumstance in Fiji. Canberra: ANU E Press, 2012. George, Susanna and Vanessa Griffen. Asian and Pacific Women’s Resource and Action Series: Environment. Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1992. Gladstone, Rick. ‘A Treaty Is Reached to Ban Nuclear Arms. Now Comes the Hard Part’. New York Times, 7 July 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/world/ americas/united-nations-nuclear-weapons-prohibition-destruction-global-treaty. html. Griffen, Vanessa. Address to the UN Conference to Ban Nuclear Weapons. Filmed July 2017 in New York, NY. Vimeo video, 3:04. Posted by ICAN, 6 July 2017. https://vimeo.com/224540494. ———. ‘All It Requires Is Ourselves’. In Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, 517–24. New York: Anchor, 1984. ———. ‘Marama’. In Sustainable Development or Malignant Growth? Perspectives of Pacific Island Women, edited by ’Atu Emberson-Bain, 173–4. Suva: Marama Publications, 1994. ———. ‘Vanessa Griffen, Fiji, reports on her statement to the UN’. Facebook video post, posted by ICAN Australia, 6 July 2017. www.facebook.com/icanw. au/videos/772754869564249/.

ATOMic Modern 57 ———. ‘White Ashes’. In Asian and Pacific Women’s Resource and Action Series: Environment, by Susanna George and Vanessa Griffen, 155. Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1992. ———, ed. Women, Development and Empowerment: A  Pacific Feminist Perspective. Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1989. ———, ed. Women Speak Out! A  Report of the Pacific Women’s Conference, October 27—November 2. Suva: Pacific Women’s Conference, 1976. Hamel-Green, Michael. The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty: A  Critical Assessment. Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, 1990. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa, 2–17. Suva: USP School of Social and Economic Development, 1993. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. 2002. London: Verso, 2012. Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy. Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Johnson, Walter and Sione Tupouniua. ‘Against French Nuclear Testing: The A.T.O.M. Committee’. The Journal of Pacific History 11, no. 4 (1976): 213–6. Johnston, Barbara Rose. ‘Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World’. In Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, 140–61. New York: Routledge, 2015. Johnston, Barbara Rose and Holly M. Barker. Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008. Keju-Johnson, Darlene. ‘For the Good of Mankind’. In Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, edited by Zohl dé Ishtar, 15–20. Christchurch: Raven, 1998. Keown, Michelle. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. ‘Waves of Destruction: Nuclear Imperialism and Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Indigenous Literatures of the Pacific’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 54, no. 5 (2018): 585–600. Kuletz, Valerie. ‘The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific Islands’. In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, edited by Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, 125–42. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. MacKay, Marina. Modernism, War, and Violence. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. ‘Ancient Banyans, Flying Foxes and White Ginger: The Poetry of Pacific Island Women’. Women’s Studies Journal 13, no. 2 (1997): 95–121. Mishra, Margaret. ‘A History of Fijian Women’s Activism (1900–2010)’. Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 2 (2012): 115–43. Morei, Cite [Cita]. ‘Belau Be Brave . . .’. In Te Rau Maire: Poems and Stories of the Pacific, edited by Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe, Ron Crocombe, Kauraka Kauraka, and Makiuti Tongia, 4. Rarotonga: Tauranga Vananga; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP; Suva: SPCAS, 1992. Morei, Cita. ‘Planting the Mustard Seed of World Peace’. In Pacific Women Speak Out for Independence and Denuclearisation, edited by Zohl dé Ishtar, 75–7. Christchurch: Raven, 1998.

58  Julia A. Boyd Naidu, Vijay. ‘The Fiji Anti-Nuclear Movement: Problems and Prospects’. In The Pacific: Peace, Security, and the Nuclear Issue, edited by Ranginui Walker and William Sutherland, 185–95. London: Zed, 1988. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Radford, Cathy. Introduction to Praying Parents: A Second Collection of Poems, by Jully Sipolo, n.p. Honiara: Aruligo Book Centre, 1986. Rasmussen, Vaine. ‘Pacific Status Quo’. In Te Rau Maire: Poems and Stories of the Pacific, edited by Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe, Ron Crocombe, Kauraka Kauraka, and Makiuti Tongia, 12. Rarotonga: Tauranga Vananga; Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, USP; Suva: SPCAS, 1992. Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Sipolo [Makini], Jully. Civilized Girl: Poems. Suva: SPCAS, 1981. ———. Praying Parents: A Second Collection of Poems. Honiara: Aruligo Book Centre, 1986. Smith, Roy H. The Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement: After Moruroa. London: Tauris Academic, 1997. Spitz, Chantal T. Island of Shattered Dreams. Translated by Jean Anderson. Wellington: Huia, 2007. Subramani. South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation. 1985. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1992. Teaiwa, Teresia. ‘Bikinis and Other s/Pacific n/Oceans’. The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 87–109. ———. ‘Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania’. In Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory, edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco, 318– 32. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. ———. ‘On Women and “Indians”: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Militarized Fiji’. In Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, edited by Barbara Sutton, Sandra Morgen, and Julie Novkov, 111–35. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. ———. ‘Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the “Polynesian Body” ’. In Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, 249–63. Lanham, MD: Rowman  & Littlefield, 1999. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. 7 July 2017, U.N.T.C. C.N.476.2017. TREATIES—XXVI.9. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/2017/07/20170707%20 03-42%20PM/Ch_XXVI_9.pdf. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. ‘R-Words: Refusing Research’. In Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities, edited by Django Paris and Maisha T. Winn, 223–47. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014. United Nations. ‘Background’. United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards

ATOMic Modern 59 their Total Elimination. Accessed 14 January 2019. www.un.org/disarmament/ tpnw/background.html. United States Mission to the United Nations. ‘Joint Press Statement from the Permanent Representatives to the United Nations of the United States, United Kingdom, and France Following the Adoption of a Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons’. News release, United States Mission to the United Nations, 7 July 2017. https://usun.state.gov/remarks/7892. Wendt, Albert. Black Rainbow. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992. ———. Pouliuli. 1977. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980. ———. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. Wilson, Lynn B. Speaking to Power: Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific. New York: Routledge, 1995. Yeats, W. B. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Zarocostas, John. ‘The UN Adopts Treaty to Ban the Use of Nuclear Weapons’. The Lancet 390, no. 10092 (2017): 349.

4 No Ordinary Modernism: Hone Tuwhare’s First Book of Verse Paul Sharrad

Coming out of the years that established Commonwealth Literature studies, Andrew Gurr put forward the idea that much of modernism’s fragmentation and multiplication of perspective arose from the split consciousness of writers from the colonial margins expatriated or returning to the metropolitan centre and experiencing ‘home’ as a foreign place.1 Thus, Yeats and Joyce as Irish, Eliot and Pound as American, Leonard Woolf and Forster returning from time in South Asia, Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as expatriates from the colonies. To this we can add Europe’s ‘plundering’ of the raw vitality of ‘primitive’ art from the Global South that would be reprocessed to give new life to a moribund Global north culture. The Pacific was part of this centripetal movement, with Max Ernst and Jacob Epstein collecting carvings from Papua, and Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse drawing colour and motifs from Tahiti. ‘Value added’ cultural product would then be shipped back to the colonies with a Modernist stamp of authority. The limitations of this entirely plausible argument, extended later by Elleke Boehmer,2 are its concentration on pre-1940s Europe as the central factory of literary modernism, and its avoidance of writing by people who did not belong to the white settler colonial diaspora. Eurocentric ideas of modernity and progress have relegated colonial and minority literatures to a ‘belated’ imitativeness, even as they emerge from ‘new’ countries whose experience of moving into modernity has often been more dramatic and often prior to the artistic movements of transatlantic modernism. More recent scholarship takes into account Indigenous and regional writing that comes from outside of modernist transatlantic spaces and how it brings to literary expression forms that may not on the surface appear modernist, as we might traditionally understand it,

1 Andrew Gurr, Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (Brighton: Harvester, 1981). 2 Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 123–37.

No Ordinary Modernism 61 but nonetheless express a localised modernity or one that correlates with modernist style but derives from innovative mixes with non-European traditions and performs a cultural project at odds with standard definitions of modernism.3 Modernity can be thought of as an ongoing socio-historical process that took on an extreme and rapidly expanding form following the movements of late-eighteenth-century Europe—urbanisation, industrialisation, mobility across space and class. Culturally, it manifests itself as a separating out of self from community, as a break between being a producer and a consumer, and as an experience of rupture from old ways. Modernism is the set of styles and forms adopted by artists (here limited to writers) to express the nature and human experience of such social change and of the psyche that results from it. Modernism (with the capital M) I use to refer to the collection of canonical Euro-American names and artistic modes generally referred to as ‘high’ modernism consolidating itself between the two world wars. In lowercase, the word can be taken as a general descriptor of appearances of modernist style and form anywhere at any time. Just as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbevilles expresses ‘the ache of modernity’ before modernism achieves ‘critical mass’ and definition, so colonised societies can be seen to produce literary work that expresses a modernist sensibility even though (like Hardy’s poetry) the forms and narrative modes may not conform to what we recognise as modernism, post-Joyce et al. At the same time, under the impact of colonial, nationalist, and global-capitalist forces, the newness and disparateness of local life required renovations and modifications of traditional arts reflected in voices and techniques that approximated Western modernism, even when not directly drawing on its examples. The nineteenth-century experience of doubleness, rupture, anomie, and excitement that newness induces (whether it be colonists’ encounters with new lands and peoples or coloniseds’ encounters with new peoples and technologies) carries most of the attributes of the experience of modernity realised perhaps more slowly in Europe until the onset of the First World War. If that war is credited with prompting expressions of ‘the shock of the new’, then we should remember in the New Zealand context that Māori experienced artillery and

3 See Robert Dixon and Veronica Kelly, eds., Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s—1960s (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008); Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel, eds., Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Anouk Lang, ‘Modernist Fiction/Alternative Modernisms’, in The Oxford History of the Novel in English, vol. 12, The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the South Pacific Since 1950, ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 190–204; Charles W. Pollard, New Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

62  Paul Sharrad developed trench warfare forty years earlier, and so might be expected to produce equivalent representations of the impact of modernity. American poet Donald Hall pointed to internal differences across the modernist literary field, even when that field was confined to anglophone writing and to its metropolitan centres. Hall updated the original Michael Roberts edition of The Faber Book of Modern Verse, and with the sardony of the New World ex-colonial, Roberts comments in his ‘Introduction to third edition’ that ‘The English came late to modern art [. . .] . Sometimes I wonder if England ever came to modern art at all’.4 In this chapter, I want to look at two watershed works with origins in New Zealand and see how they relate to the high Modernism that England both absorbed from and exported to the far reaches of Oceania. In particular, I focus on the pioneering Māori poet, Hone Tuwhare, and argue that (a) his first book of poetry was itself an engagement with modernity and used elements of literary modernism, even if his ‘forerunner’ position meant that he was read as popular and Romantic; (b) these elements derive as much from his local minority position as from Euro-American literary influence; and (c) his work, in its circulation within national and regional networks that bypass the mainstream centres of literary modernism, prompts another intervention in the contemporary questioning of standard critical models. 1964 saw the publication of the critical study of English modernist verse, The New Poetic, by C. K. Stead, and the first book of verse by a Māori poet, Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun. Both books enjoy ‘landmark’ status, but come from quite different institutional and cultural spaces. Stead was a white university-educated ‘Kiwi’ (Pākehā), who went on to write poetry and fiction and to dominate literary criticism in New Zealand; Tuwhare was a Māori who left school early to work as a boilermaker. He shifted his communist politics into activism on behalf of Māori retention of land and culture, and created for himself a colloquial poetic voice that travelled widely but mainly circulated in the Pacific. On the face of it, the academic institutionalising of Yeats and Eliot, and the personal expression of a working-class ethnic minority writer, did not have a lot to do with each other, but they were both coming out of a national history of building new local cultures out of and against old inheritances from colonial Europe and local Indigenous tradition. New Zealand literary history was already involved with the story of modernism (and, indeed, of Modernism) because of Katherine Mansfield and her ties to the Bloomsbury set. Though she has been claimed since as a national icon, her expatriation and high modernist style was set in opposition to writing that was produced in New Zealand. Writing on the

4 Michael Roberts, The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), rev. ed. Donald Hall (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 31.

No Ordinary Modernism 63 colonial ‘periphery’ sought to free itself of imitations of European models, to dispense with superficial decorations using local fauna and flora, and to express the particularities of local experience. At different points in time, it also sought to break from the kind of drab realism that Patrick White complained of in Australian writing, though that move into modernist technique could also function as a deeper realism: a better way of conveying the psychic realities of New Zealand life. Allen Curnow had led a new kind of cultural nationalism in his Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1945) and subsequent essays. Curnow’s dominance of literary debate, backed up by the long-lasting centrality of Landfall, Islands and Caxton Press, kept a nationalist-modernist and local-cosmopolitan opposition in place as a central concern of white settler poets.5 Though his later work is claimed for modernism by some, Curnow’s influence discouraged writers from experimenting too much with form, language, and a cosmopolitan outlook until a new generation emerged in the 1970s.6 Stead’s book may have been received at the time as one more commentary within the mainstream of English literary criticism, and Tuwhare’s as an ethnic novelty otherwise derivative of Romantic lyricism, but in terms of New Zealand and Pacific writing, they can be read as signalling a new disruption of the dominant binaries, backed up for New Zealanders by their introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936, revised in 1960), Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960), and Penguin’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962), edited by Donald Hall. Stead’s The New Poetic is ostensibly an academic teasing out of major lines of concern in British poetry of the early twentieth century. It argues that a new poetic mode emerges around the later works of Yeats and Eliot’s The Waste Land. This modernism rejects both populist rhetoricians of ‘truth’ (Kipling) and elitist aesthetes seeking ‘beauty’ (Wilde) because both inherit aspects of Romanticism and Tennysonian Victorian platitudes. Georgians tried to avoid such positions by concentrating on the ‘honest’ details of real life but thereby failed to engage with larger concerns and fell into a soft lyricism;7 Imagists tried to write a tougher verse of organic form, but merely prepared the ground for bigger ideas from Pound and 5 Adrian Roscoe, ‘Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Verse and the Question of Land’, in Re-Siting the Queen’s English, ed. Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 143–56. 6 MacDonald P. Jackson and Elizabeth Caffin, ‘Poetry’, in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 335, 387; Mike Grimshaw, ‘ “My Name Was Christian”: C.K. Stead, Religion, Culture, and National Identity’, Commonwealth 32, no. 2 (2010): 63; Alan Loney, ‘The Influence of American Poetry on Contemporary Practice in New Zealand’, Journal of New Zealand Literature 10 (1992): 92–8; Mark Williams, ‘ “On the Margins”? New Zealand Little Magazines from Freed to And’, Journal of New Zealand Literature 5 (1987): 73–91. 7 C. K. Stead, The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot (Harmondsworth: Pelican, Penguin, 1964), 87. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as NP.

64  Paul Sharrad Eliot (NP 100). Everybody favoured common speech over older ‘poetical’ style, and poets increasingly worked towards expressing a ‘wholeness of sensibility’ (NP 13) that would be objectified as poetic utterance and revealed in ‘texture’ and ‘feeling’ rather than personal authorial emotion or rational ‘structure’ (NP 126, 129). Stead modelled poetical modernism as seeking a closer relationship between poet and poetical experience. This put the reader at a greater distance than previously, but the canonical modernists like Yeats and Eliot progressively developed a ‘system’ in their work that held some hope of letting readers penetrate textual obscurity to discover an ‘undivided sensibility’ attuned to the nature of modern existence (NP 145). Although Stead is writing as a scholar describing patterns in modern poetry, he is also himself a poet and caught up in the debates going on in New Zealand about the place and nature of poetic modernism in a process of decolonising local culture. As such, he has his own interests. Behind his descriptions of British verse lie a few quite prescriptive statements that speak of the writer’s own investment in the new poetic he uncovers: ‘the best poets’ do such and such (NP 14); ‘the finest poems’ are ones in which author, experience and audience are in ‘equilateral’ perfect tension (NP 12); Eliot reaches his peak in The Waste Land (NP 148), but fails to match Yeats at his most mature (NP 118); Eliot’s real contribution is finding a way of expressing a ‘poetic morality’—of asserting a social function for poetry—without succumbing to the simplistic referentiality of poetry as prophecy or sociology (NP 122) or retreating into the airy subjectivism of the symbolists. Eliot manages this through technique (his objective correlative, his texturing of fragments as musical fugues, etc.) and (like Yeats) through immersion in/reconstruction of tradition (NP 133–4). In generating his own aesthetic through analysing Yeats and Eliot, Stead projects Modernism as a European phenomenon, referring to British poetry as ‘our literature’ and to ‘a people and its language’ as a single entity (NP 30, 120). One might also infer a shared hauteur towards the common reader (particularly to the bourgeois ‘middlebrow’ reader) in some of the comments in the book (NP 20–1). Read against this, No Ordinary Sun appears to align itself with most of the things Stead sees Modernism eschewing: personal emotion, political polemic, populist address. The book contains many poems celebrating local nature (‘Song’, ‘Importune the East Wind’, ‘Sea Call’) that appear as updated and relocated Romanticism. Its references to Māori culture (‘Tangi’, ‘Mauri’), to dam construction (‘The Sea to the Mountains, to the River’), and the protest against nuclear testing represented in the title poem link it to social realism and nationalism rather than modernism. The poems clearly allude to real-life situations and are all self-contained, with none of The Waste Land’s cobbling together of fragments of myths and impressionistic vignettes of contemporary

No Ordinary Modernism 65 anomie. On the other hand, there is political protest that shows an international outlook exceeding Curnow’s project, and there are elements in the writing that show an awareness of modernist attitudes and styles. Tuwhare was not writing, like Curnow, to establish a white settler national belonging: as an Indigenous person, he already belonged, but not necessarily to the postcolonial nation. If he was subscribing to a nationalist project, it was (and would be later) to a Māori nationalism. In that context, realism could ‘tell it like it is’, but modernism could also be deployed as a decolonising refusal of white linearity, ethnic stereotypes, and consignment of Indigenous or regional culture to premodern folklorism. As Anouk Lang puts it, ‘radical politics and radical aesthetics [. . .] are not as easily separated in settler-invader nations as they are in established imperial centres of culture’.8 There are times when we are unable fully to read No Ordinary Sun according to Stead’s assessment of Yeats and Eliot. If we follow that Modernist modelling, we have to see Tuwhare as either falling outside of the ‘mainstream’ model of modernist experiment or working with elements of it from a different angle. There is no question, for example, that ‘Song’ reproduces the sound and image of the Psalms or the Song of Songs: The headlands wait your coming And the mute crags lend a pensive Ear to the listless drag of the Sea’s feet.9 This appears as a rather old-fashioned Tennysonian mode of expression, but Tuwhare, like Dylan Thomas perhaps, is immersing himself in tradition (like Stead’s Eliot and Yeats) in order to do something new. The difference is that his tradition is not linked to the Modernists’ Eurocentric culture, and his biblical tradition does not have the same meanings or emotions attached to it, or the same distance between it and the poet, as it would have for either of Stead’s modernists. For Māori, the Old Testament was infused with the kind of immediacy of Dylan Thomas’s Welsh chapel culture and with links to bardic orality. As deployed by nineteenth-century leaders of resistance to settler usurpation of land, it carried a prophetic and political edge. Bringing this ‘old’ language back into poetry could do something altogether new in a settler colony, just as Thomas’s Welsh background injected a new-old expression into English writing.

8 Lang, ‘Modernist Fiction’, 192, 194. 9 Hone Tuwhare, No Ordinary Sun, 3rd ed. (1964; Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1977), 12. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as NO.

66  Paul Sharrad As a first Māori work, No Ordinary Sun was initially reviewed for its handling of Māori topics. Pākehā read what could be assimilated into nationalist myths of modern harmony, and emphasised themes of nostalgia and grief for lost rural roots—the safely receding romance of past glory.10 Tuwhare’s lyric impulse and lively voice was hailed by poet James K. Baxter as an unusually direct ‘emotional honesty’, hinting at his ‘untutored’ non-modernist worker directness of speech.11 Much of the commentary on Tuwhare’s early work concentrates on his links with Māori culture,12 or his socialist politics.13 Putting The New Poetic together with No Ordinary Sun allows us to move the poetry out of such critical containment and ask how Tuwhare uses his informing contexts in poetic expression, and how that resonates (or not) with the modernist aesthetic being defined and promoted by another influential New Zealand poet-critic. Seen from Stead’s standpoint in The New Poetic, Hone Tuwhare’s book of verse might have been new in a New Zealand context (as the first published collection in English by a Māori), but it looks anything but modern. It speaks directly to the reader in a primarily lyrical register, thereby seeming closer to Georgian verse or Kipling’s popularism (Tuwhare’s book was a standout best seller). Its poems regularly personify nature in a Romantic manner. There is a good deal of apostrophising (‘O voiceless land, let me echo your desolation’, NO 23) that, coupled with ‘olde worlde’ diction and syntax, makes many of the poems seem straight out of early Victorian anthologies: ‘Ere Gods were shaped [. . . ]/still/did this man’s tribe store’, NO 24). Some of this derives from the self-taught writer picking up old books circulating in libraries and popular ideas about what poetry should sound like. These elements steadily disappear from Tuwhare’s work. We can already hear the colloquial voice of later work and see the absence of ‘poetical’ inversions of syntax in the poems added in the 1977 third edition (‘Spring Song’, Sun-rise’, Cross-eyed’, and ‘Letter/Poem to Josephine Cooper’,

10 Elizabeth Caffin, ‘Poetry 1945–90’, in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 411; Jackson and Caffin, ‘Poetry’, 340–1. 11 Quoted in Jackson and Caffin, ‘Poetry’, 341. 12 Hone Tuwhare, ‘Interview with Hone Tuwhare’, by Bill Manhire, in In the Same Room, ed. Elizabeth Alley and Mark Williams (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992), 175–98; Hone Tuwhare, ‘The Most Happy Fellow: 1969 Interview with Hone Tuwhare’, by Bill Manhire, Ka Mate ka Ora, no. 6 (September 2008): 141–6; Robert Sullivan, ‘Hone Tuwhare: An Extraordinary Poet’, Kunapipi 30, no. 1 (2008): 8–17; Robert Sullivan, ‘Hone Tuwhare and Keri Hulme: Close Reading as Indigenous Wayfinding’, Journal of New Zealand Literature 34, no. 2 (2016): 104–24. 13 Michelle Keown, ‘ “Art for Me Is Not a Hothouse Flower”: Hone Tuwhare’s Socialist Poetics’, Ka Mate Ka Ora no. 6 (2008): 21–3.

No Ordinary Modernism 67 for example) and a modern simplicity of local speech can be heard even in the 1964 poems: The girl in the park Does not care: her body swaying To the dark-edged chant Of storms. (‘The Girl in the Park’, NO 32) Best not to leave a mark behind for good or ill [. . .] Terminals railway stations aren’t people’s palaces exactly (‘Where Shall I Wander’, NO 39) High-toned ‘poeticising’ is mainly confined to poems dealing with Māori cultural tradition (‘Mauri’), religious subjects (‘A Disciple Dreams’) and formal oratory (‘Tangi’). Tuwhare did not see himself as an intellectual, and the seeds of his boisterous humour and later very colloquial tone can be detected in his first book, suggesting more personal emotion than impersonal evocation of modernist ‘feeling’. In its title poem (a protest against nuclear testing), Tuwhare also clearly adopts what Stead had declared Wilde, Yeats, and Eliot to eschew: ‘the prophetic strain’ of the bardic Blakean kind (NP 132). Nonetheless, No Ordinary Sun can be read in terms of Stead’s new poetic—up to a point. There is no doubt that some poems are ‘apprentice’ works trying to build a style that is still too close to its sources of inspiration. Tuwhare’s initial experiments with poetry were often those of a craftsman tinkering with technical nuts and bolts. He borrowed a book of instructions on writing sonnets and then discovered a more natural and modern expression when R. A. K. Mason suggested he adopt an everyday speaking voice and write free verse.14 In the work that survives to be collected in the first book, we can see the influence of Stead’s kind of modernist writing, though. If there is a personal sentimentality in recalling a now lost rural community (‘Not by Wind Ravaged’, ‘Wai-o-Rore’), we can see that other evocations of Māori tradition are set at a modernist impersonal distance by being both quotation and translation (‘Lament’), by being voiced through a fictive

14 Janet Hunt, Hone Tuwhare: A  Biography (Auckland: Random House, 1998), 43; Tuwhare, ‘Interview’, in In the Same Room, 188, 193.

68  Paul Sharrad persona (‘Old Man Chanting in the Dark’) and via carefully crafted reportage (‘The Old Place’). Tuwhare also embarks on a Yeatsian project of shaping elements of Polynesian myth into his own poetic ‘system’. Without making specific reference to Tane, Tangaroa, Tawhiri-matea, Tu, Rangi, and Papa, Tuwhare uses these gods to create his own drama of vital energies in constant contending motion. Sun, sea, earth, tree, wind all surround and permeate the situations Tuwhare’s characters inhabit: Tree earth and sky reel to the noontide beat of sun (‘Time and the Child’, NO 9) There let the waves lave pleasuring the body’s senses, and the sun’s feet shall twinkle and flex to the sea-egg’s needling, and the paua’s stout kiss shall drain a rock’s heart to the sandbar’s booming. (‘Sea Call’, NO 37) This drama in nature is not merely some old Romantic pathetic fallacy being trotted out; it stems from a Māori experience of the world as animate. Injecting that vitalism into anglophone poetry is also a gesture of cultural politics. It is in ‘A Burnt Offering to your Greenstone Eyes, Tangaroa’ that we can detect the characteristics of the mature Tuwhare voice: the combination of mythic drama couched in high literary diction and debunking humour (the joke that throwing his mortal ashes into the ocean will cause a god to gag) based on a personal assertiveness and colloquial register. The ironic juxtaposition is not entirely separate from Eliot’s mix of myth and music hall in The Waste Land, though it also arises from Tuwhare’s blending of his early reading (the Song of Songs can be clearly heard in ‘Thine own Hands have Fashioned’ and Hopkins is frequently echoed in the jostle of the collection’s sound effects) with his increasing exposure to American writers from Whitman to Carlos Williams and e e cumming.15

15 Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, 80, 90.

No Ordinary Modernism 69 The pared-back simplicity of his ‘Prelude?’ echoes a poem like William Carlos Williams’s ‘Death’:16 Suddenly He felt tired Lay down And died. [. . .] Gave no heed Nor feather turned To the shocked cry Heart-wails The shattered tea-cup And milk Spilling on the floor. (NO 38) Williams also has titles that include ‘proletarian’ and ‘poor’—a recommendation to someone coming to poetry with communist sympathies— and the American’s imagistic concentration and simple diction was a mode of modernism amenable to socialist realism, just as his enjambments and irregular stresses underpinned seemingly ‘flat’ declaratives with the kind of rhythmic effects that Tuwhare had imbibed from other sources. Even in the very early poems, we hear the construction of an uninhibited persona celebrating sexual desire and accepting the mortality that goes with such a commitment to the senses. Echoes of Dylan Thomas may be heard at times—an influenced acknowledged by Tuwhare:17 And I laid siege to lips that were at once as hard and soft as butterscotch and caramels; felt again the merest butterfly fingertipping my face. In your eyes the wit and sparkle Of the moon’s play on sea. (‘The City’, NO 20) The point here is that this personal voice, apparently separating Tuwhare from modernist impersonality, is a construct. The inclusion of a

16 William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (New York: New Directions, 1985), 78–9. 17 Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, 26.

70  Paul Sharrad ‘Monologue’ from a factory worker alongside chants by old Māori voices shows that Tuwhare is adopting Yeatsian masks. ‘A Disciple Dreams’ shows us the poet working through the voice of a character, not unlike Yeats’s dreaming Aengus. The devotee in his stone cell seems to recall being present at the miracle of the loaves and fishes, but despite the miracle worker’s power, nature disrupts the occasion, a storm shattering the loaves, wind tearing the words out of the prophet’s mouth, and the heavens spitting venom on the faces of the faithful. The disciple wakes from his dream in tears, but seems a tougher figure than his idealist master. The poet dramatises the passion of the disciple, but is positioned outside of the religious frame. If this looks like an ironical ‘Journey of the Magi’, it was written before Tuwhare had encountered Eliot,18 and is also implicitly tied to a colonised wrestling with the modernity of Christianity. There is a political undertow in much of Tuwhare’s writing that speaks of a particular experience of the modern that sets it to one side of Modernist models. This is manifest in ‘Mauri’, a poem that honours a core concept of Māori spirituality but sees it as threatened by colonialist culture, both religious—‘an angered one/all-seeing triple-faced’ god of the missionaries—and technological—‘another sun’ that turns things to clouds of ash (NO 24). Like Yeats, the imagists, and Eliot, Tuwhare works with musical cadence rather than strict metre. We cannot read his poems without hearing them: they rollick with assonance and alliteration: listened to the sound of hail nick on glass and iron roof. Heard the rain applauding: the lilt and swell fading to the wind’s flirt over the gaunt flank of the land. (‘That Morning Early’, NO 10) He may not draw his inspiration for this from the same sources as the Modernists, but Tuwhare does work his sounds into characteristically modern free verse, with irregularities of line length and stress patterns. If he experiments with historical reconstructions that have a rhetorical effect similar to Pound’s Provençal and Chinese poems (here recreations of Māori oratory: ‘Lament’ and ‘Old Man Chanting in the Dark’), he also moves towards a more personal and less verbally elaborate, if still actively musical, style. Tuwhare’s tone is, however, not a Walter de la Mare kind of lyricism: it comes from both biblical cadence and Māori

18 Tuwhare, ‘The Most Happy Fellow’, 146.

No Ordinary Modernism 71 oratory and song.19 It has more drive behind it. Tuwhare would read his poems aloud, to himself or down the phone to his friends, injecting ‘jumps’ that stemmed from the syncopations of haka chants, but which also had the same effect as Hopkins’s sprung rhythms.20 What we have is a ‘vernacular’ modernism owing much of its art to Indigenous Pacific traditions and not to the high Modernist canon. If the poems rely on lyrical drive, they anchor feelings on imagery. In fact, despite Tuwhare’s ideological attachments and his protest poetry, there is very little discursive presentation of ideas, and no overt didacticism. ‘Time and the Child’ amounts to an allegory familiar from medieval paintings onwards, but only the one word in the title gives the abstract application to an otherwise materially present scene of lightly comical drama. An innocent child laughs at an old man and follows behind his deaf resolute trudging. Something more significant is indicated in the man, whose ‘eyes burn to a distant point // where all roads converge’ (NO 9). The burning suggests fierce passion and fixed purpose, and links the man to forces of nature. The human episode is framed by a burning sun, which beats like the beat of the old man’s stick. The poem takes on a timeless iconic quality akin to an imagist piece. The poet does not speak: the image does its own work; the coda is no logical conclusion, more a structural echo and suggestion of the ongoing cycle of life as ‘buds pop and flare’. We can faintly discern a trace of Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ and his emblem engravings. Tuwhare, in fact, demonstrated his imagist tendencies when he re-evaluated poems during readings of earlier work: ‘I think there’s a bad line in there—“green pathos”—bullshit’. We can hear an echo of Pound’s call for the hard image and rejection of vague ‘emotional slither’.21 Some of Tuwhare’s inspiration came from American writers approved by the Left Book Club: John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. It was Wolfe whose ‘you can’t go home again’ sprawling memoirfiction appealed, because the words ‘sang’ to him.22 Prose aspiring to musical form is espoused as a modernist ideal by Forster at the close of Aspects of the Novel, and any memorialising in Tuwhare owes something to the emotive music of Wolfe’s modern evocation of moving to the city rather than either Proust’s self-absorbed remembrance or Yeats’s cold creation of an ideal poetic Irishman from Connemara. Tuwhare’s retrospect is ‘hot’ and of the present. Remembering his northland childhood is to think of his urban adulthood and the condition of Māori reformulating

19 Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, 64–5; Tuwhare, ‘Interview’, in In the Same Room, 179. 20 Tuwhare, ‘Interview’, in In the Same Room, 188. 21 Bill Lennox, ‘Introduction’, in Hone Tuwhare, Shape-Shifter, ed. Hone Tuwhare (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 1997), 12. 22 Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, 42; Tuwhare, ‘Interview’, in In the Same Room, 183.

72  Paul Sharrad modes of community and identity. The poems blend Romantic and modernist elements, but are modern in their own way. It is perhaps indicative of Tuwhare’s engagement with modernism that he deleted his most polemical poem, ‘O Africa’, after the first edition, though this may also have occurred because its specific reference to South Africa’s Soweto massacre limited its appeal to later readers. He did, however, keep a political piece as both title and poem across all editions. No Ordinary Sun is a protest against nuclear testing that is both universal in its concern and specifically connected to historical explosions in the Pacific region. These began with US and British testing between 1946 and 1962, and extended for three decades beyond the time of the poem’s writing, thanks to French testing in the Eastern Pacific. Tuwhare, in this one poem, becomes a progenitor of both anti-colonial and anti-nuclear literary writing across the Pacific region. Much of that protest poetry is straightforward declamatory rhetoric. Tuwhare’s pioneering work, however, implies its stand against nuclear weapons by focussing on the image of a dying tree. We have to infer from some of the images of clouds (and from the poet’s forceful delivery in public readings) what the un-ordinary sun is. There is a degree of modernist obscurity here. The ambiguity is a reflection of the writer’s position in society. As a boilermaker working on the railways and then on hydroelectric projects, Tuwhare was part of New Zealand’s postwar modernisation, but his communist leanings make him critical of such capitalist ventures; as a worker he is part of the white settler-dominated national effort, but as a Māori he is to one side of it. As a writer growing into poetry through the Curnow era, he is constrained to a nationalistrealist project, but his socialist reading is international in scope. In ‘The Sea, to the Mountains, to the River’, depicting a dynamic universal struggle amongst the elements of nature contrasted to an historical clash between nature and postwar development projects, Tuwhare does not resort either to Soviet-style futurist paeans to industrial progress or to subaltern preaching against capitalist hubris; his dam-building machines and explosions are framed by a bigger drama of the earthly elements. There is critique implied in the ‘fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue’ and in the ‘steel crucifixes’ that the ‘exulting men’ erect (NO 14), but the ongoing struggle is between the beckoning sea and the ‘unmoved/ [. . .] austere mountains [that] ponder/a silence as profound as stars’ (NO 15). The ending carries a silent echo of the Māori prophet Te Whiti—‘The land abides’—whether as a general sense of Māori connection to land or as a specific and politically charged allusion. Literary innovations from the colonies—whether by settlers or indigenes—have usually been received as merely new: novel in the sense of curiosities that are old (being repetitions of European modes), but also fresh (dressed up in exotic settings or language). In the case of Indigenous writing, ‘firsts’ are often ‘anthropologised’ by critics. The books are

No Ordinary Modernism 73 socio-historically significant for being new, but the contents are mined for signs of cultural specificity (myth, orality) that are then taken as making the work not new—simply a ‘translation’ of the old into a new package. Hone Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun has frequently been read as derivative of both European and Māori tradition, and thus as a work that is not, in literary terms, radically modern. Now it is true that Tuwhare has declared his debts to both the Bible and Māori cultural tradition, but he also presents himself as Marxist rather than Christian, and as separated in his early years from traditional life and Māori language. What he writes comes from a modern space of assembling multiple influences, most of them parts rather than wholes, into a meaningful construct. The resulting style might sound at times old-fashioned, but the process and creative stance is not that far removed from what Stead identifies in his Modernist poets. Moreover, the inclusion of ‘premodern’ elements in writing, and in literary writing in English in particular, can be a modernist device in the context of Māori culture. Reference to biblical material and poetic style might appear to be outdated echoes of Milton and Blake from the point of view of a traditional English Literature scholar, but the Bible is a modern technology when seen in terms of Māori history. The sense of an individual seeking their own salvation is a modernist subjectivity created by missionary efforts, just as the syncretic religions of Ratana and Ringatu are modernist ‘texts’ responding to the shock of civilisational conflict rather than retrogressive repetitions of old religious forms. The high tone of the Psalms might echo the ancient styles of traditional Māori oratory and the oral recitation that informed early British verse, but in the hands of a Māori poet writing in the 1960s and in English, it is a neither one nor the other, but a device declaring newness and difference—from both the white settler poetic voice and the traditional Māori voice. The high tone clashes with the daily experiences recorded by the poet and the mundane secular world, implicitly pointing to the doubleness of the modern subject and the ambivalence of any position in modern postcolonised culture. In colonial or non-mainstream expression, a technique or feeling that appears to belong to a particular ‘school’ or ‘movement’ may in fact derive from an entirely different source and perform a quite distinct function.23 Tuwhare’s lyricism, his poems of lament for a lost time, could comfortably be accommodated by white readers, but they held a significance that tacitly called into question an easy acceptance of (white/ anglo) modernity. By writing, and writing in English, Tuwhare is bringing two technologies of colonial modernity to Māori expression, and by using Māori allusion and the resonance of oratorical prose and prophetic

23 David Carter, ‘Modernism in Australian Literature’, World Literature Written in English 42, no. 1 (1984): 158–69.

74  Paul Sharrad tradition, he is also importing newness into the world of anglophone/ settler verse. The ceremonial aspect of a Māori funeral (‘Tangi’) may look like the formal sentiments of a poetic elegy, but the relationship to audience and to poetry is not exactly the same, because the concepts of individual loss and the rupture of death are blended with communal feeling and the continuity of ancestral spirits. (We can think of how Witi Ihimaera uses this difference later to shape his ‘modernist’ rearrangements of time and space in his first novel, Tangi.) Remembrance of the rural community of Tuwhare’s northland childhood is not a sentimentalism of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ by a middle-class writer mooning over the loss of some quaint folkloric highlands warrior, peasant worker, or medieval castle. Occasionally there are conventional ubi sunt? poems of remembrance (as with ‘Friend’), but most are not imbued with such individualised feeling. Personal memory is also implicitly public and political. The description of the meeting house Wai-o-Rore conveys the stark reality of rustic poverty: Corrugated rust-smitten cook and eating place doorless lean-away earth closet (‘Wai-o-Rore’, NO 42) The building collapses into the ground without any direct expression of personal emotion. In fact, it is the city that attracts a sentimental expression from the poetic persona—‘O let us return again to the forsaken city’—even though when there he is: Pursued by lurch and lurid screech of tram, and cheeky blare of horns [. . .] Hoarse rattle of chains and the anguished bell: ferry-boat hoot (‘The City’, NO 20) Tuwhare messes with a simplistic temporality of old ways displaced by the promise and strain of modernity, nostalgia for the former being replaced by joyous or ironical acceptance of a place in the future. He positions ‘The Old Place’ and ‘Wai-o-Rore’ after ‘The City’, in which the ‘golden’ promise of urbanisation is at once a site of young romance and industrial menace. Such ambivalence is not unfamiliar from Eliot’s city scenes of smoky apartment living, but here the mix and the attitude are different. In ‘The Old Place’, there is an insistent repetition of ‘no one comes’, ‘no one’ (NO 21). This begins to turn on itself, making us aware that if the past is passively subsiding into wind, sky, and earth, there is

No Ordinary Modernism 75 still a cream lorry and a morning paper van, and the poet is ‘returning’ to look over the old place, as we do too, reading over his shoulder. Victorian sentiment and Georgian lyrical ‘feeling’ are held in check by a matter-of fact tone, although regret is implied by the refrain. The poem, with quiet irony, injects a note of protest in one italicised stanza that declares the unprotesting surrender to natural process of ‘iron and barbed wire’— signs of modernity in the colonial context. Overall, it can be read as a Yeatsian artifice with a Prufrockian participant-observer stance, but its modernism is endemic in the reality of the writer, not acquired only through emulation of canonical texts. Like Yeats, who spoke of ‘writing for my own race’ and wrestled with separating an oral folk tradition from narrow provincialism, Tuwhare (deliberately or not) wrote out of a feeling for oral tradition, and with a sense of a community of workers in general and an extended Māori family in particular. Some of his poems may have seemed obscure to his readers when his book first appeared, as Yeats’s mythic references did to his audience at large, but Tuwhare’s reliance on the more common elements of Māori mythology and his more direct connection to readers and society meant that he bypassed the esoteric side of Yeats’s modernist creation. Tuwhare does not draw upon Māori mythology to create a modernist work that is its own being; he is not seeking a Yeatsian Byzantine artifice, nor a Waste Land that is its own assemblage of mythic fragments as a textual bulwark against civilisational ruin. There is certainly a modern ironic distance implied in linking mythic tradition to modern situations, but Tuwhare is not personally divorced from the material he manipulates: his myths serve in part to sacralise the poetic dramatisation of animated nature. This gives weight to political attack on abuses of global ecology. The myths also operate as an assertion of Indigenous cultural survival. A  modern consciousness pulls together cultural tradition, modernist technique, and populist activism to push art through beauty into truth, beyond the personal and obscure into the public and comprehensible. Tuwhare’s textual persona certainly fits with the modern challenge to conventional 1950s and 1960s New Zealand poetry made by other younger poets, but it does not ever fully take on the modernist artifice of impersonality operating in disguise that Stead sees in his study of the Moderns. The persona increasingly appears to be the poet’s own presence. Such transparency is itself a construct, and can include a modern ironical attitude to subject matter, but the relationship to readers is a closer one than high Modernism constructed. It carries later aspects of confessional verse (Lowell’s ‘my mind’s not right’) without the solipsism. It also has something of the directness of Pablo Neruda’s later verse—Tuwhare read both Lorca and Neruda early on.24 In terms of Stead’s critical model that triangulates poet, poem, and reader, the poet-reader side is always

24 Tuwhare, ‘The Most Happy Fellow’, 144.

76  Paul Sharrad shorter for Tuwhare than the longer line Stead traces in the obscurity of Yeats and Eliot. The Pacific sense of self being vested in community reaches back into modernism to correct its emphasis on the ‘silence, exile and cunning’ of the individual poet sitting alone in his tower constructing a set of images that will evoke resonances of an experience. Tuwhare’s verse tells us that we can be modern in terms of voice, of language choice, of seeking after a well-crafted—well-carved—poem,25 of performing a persona, but that the work (as with Māoritanga) always exists in the service of humanity and speaks to readers as part of the social world in which the poet is also a citizen and community member.26 If Eliot’s ‘escape from the self’ is ‘an escape further into the self’ (NP 127), then Tuwhare’s poetic self-exposure is a more extroverted attempt to connect with others that is both personal, working class, and Māori. Unlike Eliot’s characters, Tuwhare is not the gentleman flâneur processing impressions of Western decline as the unsavoury smells of working-class food eaten in sordid apartments; he is the worker in the apartment, sometimes quite willing to celebrate the improvement of social conditions thanks to modern technology, but also more inclined to notice and criticise the working conditions that produce it. He is also much more aware of the land and communities displaced by such labour and the settler state directing it, even if in his first poems he is circumspect in doing so. Modernist ideas about the autonomy of the artwork are challenged by Tuwhare. Wallace Stevens’s poem, ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’, is also about the sun rising and ‘was like/A new knowledge of reality’.27 Tuwhare’s sun is also a new knowledge of reality, and is evoked in the same sensory imagery. But it is not a poem expressing the idea of forsaking secondary thought to create the image as primary reality, or to invest reality in outside things themselves. It is a modern engagement with a new kind of outside sun that is ‘the thing itself’, but which (like Pound’s First World War) carries all kinds of ideas radically questioning old assumptions about society, civilisation and now, human survival. Unlike Pound’s Eurocentric ‘election of his sepulchre’,28 Tuwhare’s vision also carries implicit ideas about the late-colonial Global North disregarding the colonised Global South, seeing it only as worthwhile in its capacity to be exploited by world powers. Once we see some of these possible differences in Tuwhare’s entry into modern poetry, we can start to question how No Ordinary Sun speaks

25 Tia Barrett, ‘Hone Tuwhare: The Carver Poet’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 7, no. 2 (1985): 48–54; Tuwhare, ‘Interview, in In the Same Room, 194. 26 Keown, ‘Art’, 21–3. 27 Wallace Stevens, ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’, in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), rev. ed. Donald Hall (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 137. 28 Ezra Pound, ‘Pour L’election de son sepulchre’, in The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), rev. ed. Donald Hall (London: Faber & Faber, 1960), 81–4.

No Ordinary Modernism 77 back to Stead’s book. Clearly it allows the bardic/prophetic mode that is simultaneously rooted in biblical and Māori myth-making to be part of a modern sensibility.29 In fact, it points up Stead’s underplayed admission that Yeats returned to a kind of bardic role in ‘speaking for his race’ in his later work, and gives an extra edge to Stead’s concern to allow Eliot’s verse a social function (NP 114). As a worker-poet and a Māori, Tuwhare also calls into question the necessity of impersonal modernist obscurity. In doing the modernist thing of plugging into tradition, Tuwhare reminds us that he is part of a community in a way that the ‘exiled’ modernist poet is not. He may be (his people may be) ‘exiled’ into urban labour and pākehā society, but he is at home and so is his culture. Indeed, Tuwhare’s work asks of Stead’s book, ‘whose tradition?’ and of Eliot, ‘which people, which language?’ He ‘preserves and refreshes’ the English language as Eliot would have it, but does so from an implicit multi-perspective that is in fact as modernist as a Picasso portrait, though it may not seem to show the same surface technique.30 If we are to insist upon European points of comparison, Tuwhare’s modernism is, in fact, closer to Thomas’s Anglo-Welsh modernism than it is to the Yeats-Eliot model set out by Stead. Increasingly, the poetic persona (fuelled in part by J. K. Baxter’s New Zealand example) drove into a bardic performance of self that injected a prophetic challenge into both popular and literary arenas. The play across two languages and two cultures also informed the newness of an apparently straightforward expression, allowing some subtle masking and tactical shifting, all nonetheless rooted in a powerful sense of the forces of nature and of folk/ oral tradition. This may conform to what has been labelled a ‘minor literature’, but it is still an important intervention in the literature of its time and place, and it is a particularly Polynesian kind of modernism that had an impact beyond its immediate unexpected success in New Zealand. Tuwhare’s pioneering poems emerged under different conditions than most Pacific poetry that followed. He was part of a then heavily white settler literary culture that did not pertain anywhere else in Oceania except for Hawai‘i (unless we include Indigenous writing in Australia). This simultaneously gave him a standpoint within print culture networks and subjected his voice to dominant anglophone expectations. The younger voices of anti-colonial protest emerging in the 1970s Pacific were, by comparison, scattered and small groups of educated elites without a significant local readership. Tuwhare’s socialist sense of solidarity also prevented the kind of Camusian alienation that informed a modernist

29 Tuwhare, ‘Interview’, in In the Same Room, 191. 30 Anne Collett, ‘Hone Tuwhare at the Interface of Poetic Traditions’, Asiatic 6, no. 2 (2012): 45–56; Sullivan, ‘Hone Tuwhare and Keri Hulme’, 104–24.

78  Paul Sharrad practice amongst other Pacific contemporaries such as Albert Wendt. So, even within the one Pacific region, there are differences of timing and practice in relation to Modernism. However, Tuwhare also quickly entered into the circuits of Oceania literature. His engagement with the core mythology of Polynesian culture puts him in close relationship to poets from other islands, and his first book made him a father figure for many young writers. When the regional arts group at The University of the South Pacific, Suva, launched its widely influential literary magazine Mana in 1976, Albert Went quoted Tuwhare in his seminal essay ‘Towards a New Oceania’.31 Tuwhare had earlier told editor Phoebe Meikle that Wendt was working on a book of stories, and she organised the publication of those and Sons for the Return Home.32 The two writers were friends (Wendt’s ‘A Sequence’ in his Photographs describes the two of them cruising Waikiki), and there is a clear correlation between Tuwhare’s progressive cultivation of an informal demotic voice and shifts in Wendt’s poetry. Tuwhare’s No Ordinary Sun led to Ralph Hotere’s series of anti-nuclear prints that in turn inspired Wendt’s Black Rainbow. His collected poems were published in a Pacific series by the University of Hawai‘i Press. There can be no question that European Modernism drew upon colonial cultures to define and regenerate the art of its metropolitan centres. It is also true that artists from the colonies (and minorities within Euro-American nations) used their own experiences of cultural and often physical dislocation to inform the modernism of ‘the centre’. This is what most discussions of postcolonial modernism focus on, and with that, centre upon the standard chronology of Modernism as running from 1890– 1940. However, a truly global view of modernisms has to step outside of that time frame and must look beyond centre-periphery (provincialcosmopolitan) exchanges to consider modernisms that operate locally.33 These may either employ recognisably modernist characteristics to do different cultural work, or may express an engagement with the contemporary through techniques that do not on face value and according to the standard models appear to be modernist. Tuwhare’s early work is a prime example of how the experience of modernity can differently engage with literary modernism, and how a local and regional literary network can develop a modernist practice without being dominated by Paris, London, and New York.

31 Albert Wendt, ‘Toward a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. 32 Albert Wendt, ‘An Interview with Albert Wendt’, by John Beston and Rose Marie Beston, World Literature Written in English 16, no. 1 (1977): 151–62. 33 Melba Cuddy-Keane, ‘Global Modernisms’, in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, ed. David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (London: Blackwell, 2006), 558–64.

No Ordinary Modernism 79

Bibliography Barrett, Tia. ‘Hone Tuwhare: The Carver Poet’. Commonwealth Essays & Studies 7, no. 2 (1985): 48–54. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Caffin, Elizabeth. ‘Poetry 1945–90’. In The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, edited by Terry Sturm, 385–445. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Carter, David. ‘Modernism in Australian Literature’. World Literature Written in English 42, no. 1 (1984): 158–69. Collett, Anne. ‘Hone Tuwhare at the Interface of Poetic Traditions’. Asiatic 6, no. 2 (2012): 45–56. Cuddy-Keane, Melba. ‘Global Modernisms’. In A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar, 558–64. London: Blackwell, 2006. Dixon, Robert and Veronica Kelly, eds. Impact of the Modern: Vernacular Modernities in Australia 1870s—1960s. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2008. Doyle, Laura and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism and Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Grimshaw, Mike. ‘ “My Name Was Christian”: C. K. Stead, Religion, Culture and National Identity’. Commonwealth 32, no. 2 (2010): 61–73. Gurr, Andrew. Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature. Brighton: Harvester, 1981. Hunt, Janet. Hone Tuwhare: A Biography. Auckland: Random House, 1998. Jackson, MacDonald P. and Elizabeth Caffin. ‘Poetry’. In The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, edited by Terry Sturm, 335–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Keown, Michelle. ‘ “Art for Me is Not a Hothouse Flower”: Hone Tuwhare’s Socialist Poetics’. Ka Mate Ka Ora, no. 6 (2008): 21–3. Lang, Anouk. ‘Modernist Fiction/Alternative Modernisms’. In The Oxford History of the Novel in English. Vol. 12, The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad and Gerry Turcotte, 190–204. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Lennox, Bill. ‘Introduction’. In Hone Tuwhare, Shape-Shifter, edited by Hone Tuwhare, 10–13. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 1997. Loney, Alan. ‘The Influence of American Poetry on Contemporary Practice in New Zealand’. Journal of New Zealand Literature 10 (1992): 92–8. Pollard, Charles W. New Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pound, Ezra. ‘Pour L’election de son sepulchre’, in The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 1936, edited by Donald Hall (London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Roberts, Michael. The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 1936, edited by Donald Hall. London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Roscoe, Adrian. ‘Never a Soul at Home: New Zealand Verse and the Question of Land’. In Re-Siting the Queen’s English, edited by Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin, 143–56. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Stead, C. K. The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot. Harmondsworth: Pelican, Penguin, 1964.

80  Paul Sharrad Stevens, Wallace. ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’, in The Faber Book of Modern Verse. 1936, edited by Donald Hall (London: Faber & Faber, 1960. Sullivan, Robert. ‘Hone Tuwhare: An Extraordinary Poet’. Kunapipi 30, no. 1 (2008): 8–17. ———. ‘Hone Tuwhare and Keri Hulme: Close Reading as Indigenous Wayfinding’. Journal of New Zealand Literature 34, no. 2 (2016): 104–24. Tuwhare, Hone. ‘Interview with Hone Tuwhare’. By Bill Manhire. In In the Same Room, edited by Elizabeth Alley and Mark Williams, 175–98. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992. ———. ‘The Most Happy Fellow: 1969 Interview with Hone Tuwhare’. By Bill Manhire. Ka Mate ka Ora, no. 6 (2008): 141–6. ———. No Ordinary Sun. 1964. 3rd ed. Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1977. Wendt, Albert. ‘An Interview with Albert Wendt. By John Beston and Rose Marie Beston’. World Literature Written in English 16, no. 1 (1977): 151–62. ———. ‘Toward a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. Williams, Mark. ‘ “On the Margins?” New Zealand Little Magazines from Freed to And’. Journal of New Zealand Literature 5 (1987): 73–91. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson. New York: New Directions, 1985.

5 ‘Our Own Identity’: Albert Wendt, James Joyce, and the Indigenisation of Influence Matthew Hayward

In the story ‘Ranfor’, from the 2012 collection Ancestry, Albert Wendt presents a classroom scene in which a group of postgraduates discuss the literary representation of sexuality. The students have a range of interests, one writing a thesis on Patricia Grace, another obsessed with Henry Miller, a third studying the poetry of James K. Baxter, another ‘a James Joyce addict’.1 They present a corresponding range of views, but it is the latter who, ‘voice rich with irony’, gets the distinctively Wendtian speech, arguing for the ‘basic truth that lust and sex and sex and sex are at the core of how we view reality’. This is described as ‘Joyce’s ancestry’, echoing the collection’s title and drawing the Irish author into Wendt’s exploration of the different connections—sexual, cultural, artistic—linking people across the book’s multiple Pacific settings. The concept of ancestry or genealogy—gafa—is crucial to the Samoan understanding of identity, as another character in the collection explains: ‘her grandmother had believed that every one and every thing was connected through gafa/genealogy right back to the atua, and that gafa was intelligent, and when you maliu-ed—moved on—you became part of that intelligence and the inheritance of your descendants’.2 This chapter explores one line of Wendt’s artistic gafa, tracing his literary relationship with Joyce, and arguing that it goes back further than his pattern of direct allusion might suggest. Explicit references to Joyce’s writing do not appear until the middle stage of Wendt’s half-century-long career. The novel Black Rainbow (1992) names both Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), and later describes the author’s life of ‘exile’; The Adventures of Vela, started in the mid-1980s but finally published in 2009, presents a snow scene that is connected to the end of ‘The Dead’ (1914); ‘Ranfor’ goes on to cite other elements, such as the ‘Joycean stream of

1 Albert Wendt, Ancestry (Suva: University of the South Pacific Press, 2012), 254. 2 Wendt, Ancestry, 29.

82  Matthew Hayward consciousness’.3 In a 1992 essay, however, Wendt cites Joyce alongside Albert Camus, W. B. Yeats, and others as one of the influential writers he encountered while schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand,4 and while there are no direct references in the early novels—Sons for the Return Home (1973), Pouliuli (1977) and Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979)—I suggest that they also bear traces of Wendt’s reading of Joyce. Specifically, I argue that Wendt develops narrative and structural techniques from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and incidental phrases and motifs from Ulysses. It is possible to speculate on the biographical grounds of these texts’ appeal. For instance, Wendt has written at length of the formative—in some respects traumatic—experience of his education in a colonially modelled boarding school, so it may not be a coincidence that all of the Ulysses echoes are from the ‘Nestor’ episode, which is set, like the first chapter of Portrait, in a colonial school.5 In the final section of this chapter, I argue that Wendt’s interest in Joyce stems in part from his experience of a related colonial modernity. More important, however, are the ends to which Wendt puts these sources: to portray the artist coming into literary consciousness, to challenge the distortions of colonial history, and to confront the social mechanisms of colonial power. While the correspondences are in each case arguable, I  find the consistency of the source material, and patterns in Wendt’s methods of adaptation, to indicate a more enduring relationship between the two authors than has been observed in Wendt scholarship. Certainly, I do not wish to take the argument too far. Readers of Wendt will find references to an immense range of writers: Chinua Achebe and Jorge Luis Borges, Camus and Harry Dansey, Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner, Patricia Grace and Vilsoni Hereniko, and so on, through to W. B. Yeats and Yevgeny Zamyatin. But while the breadth of Wendt’s reading and reference is frequently noted, there have been few detailed analyses of the ways in which his intertextual engagements function.6 Focussing on

3 Albert Wendt, Black Rainbow (1992; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 82–3, 92; Albert Wendt, The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009), 201; Wendt, Ancestry, 255. 4 Albert Wendt, ‘Discovering the Outsider’, in Camus’s ‘L’Etranger’: Fifty Years On, ed. Adele King (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 48. 5 Albert Wendt, Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A Writer’s Early Life (Wellington: BWB, 2015), 89–116. 6 The exception is Camus, whose influence upon Wendt has been studied in some detail. See Fa‘alafua L. Auva‘a, ‘The Cultural Perspective of Albert Wendt’s Novel Pouliuli’ (PhD diss., Utah State University, 1997); Evelyn Ellerman, ‘Intertextuality in the Fiction of Camus and Wendt’, in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends: Selected Conference Papers, ed. Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody, vol. 1 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989); Michelle Keown, ‘The Samoan Sisyphus: Camus and Colonialism in Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37, no. 1 (2002).

‘Our Own Identity’ 83 a single case, I argue that tracing these connections improves our understanding of the complex ways in which Wendt negotiated a vast array of influences in his contribution towards a modern Samoan literature. At the same time, however, I also reflect on what is at stake in making these connections at all. Emphasising Wendt’s connections with European antecedents risks deemphasising his connections with Samoan and other Pacific texts and traditions, and while Wendt insists that the two are not mutually exclusive, he also insists that they are not equal, given the long history of outside agencies claiming Pacific space and material for a falsely neutral global modernity. Finding defence against critical appropriation in Wendt’s idea of indigenisation, I  end by considering ways in which Wendt converts outside influences into self-determining drivers of cultural growth and adaptation, adding to the ‘inheritance’ of his literary ‘descendants’.

‘Silence, Solitude, Courage’: Sons for the Return Home If not quite the first Pacific novel, Sons for the Return Home is surely among the first to outwardly reflect upon its literary artifice. The loosely autobiographical narrative follows an unnamed Samoan boy brought to study in New Zealand. Though his foreign education is meant to elevate the family standing, he is raised to distrust the papālagi (European) culture in which he lives, and to revere and retain the principles of the fa‘aSāmoa (Samoan tradition, way of life), ready for their eventual return. The tradition is broken when the boy falls in love with a white New Zealander; their turbulent and sexually liberating relationship falls apart when the girl aborts her pregnancy and emigrates. At last returning to Samoa, the boy, irreversibly changed by his experience, does not feel at home in the country he knows chiefly through his family’s romanticised accounts. He violently breaks with his mother, physically rejecting a fundamental base of the fa‘a-Sāmoa, and the novel ends with the boy literally between cultures, aboard the plane that will return him to New Zealand, with ‘nothing to regret; nothing to look forward to’.7 Wendt has described the plot as ‘corny’, and while the sexually explicit treatment of interracial relationships provoked the New Zealand literary establishment on publication,8 the novel continues to be marketed conventionally as a ‘story of star-crossed lovers’, to quote the blurb on the 1996 University of Hawai‘i Press edition. However, the familiar framing conceals subtle provocations of style and form. From the end of

7 Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home (1973; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 217. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as S. 8 Paul Sharrad, Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003), 41, 43.

84  Matthew Hayward Chapter 7, Wendt begins to include fragments of verse that each relate in some way to the preceding chapter, but which are not explained within the realist logic of the text. They begin unobtrusively: at the end of a chapter describing the couple’s increasing romantic involvement comes the simple couplet: ‘I love you./I love you too’ (S 24). But, breaking from the straightforward reporting of speech and action, they have an increasingly self-reflexive dimension as the novel proceeds, wresting linguistic details from the narrative and placing them in deceptively complex and self-interrogative refrains. These verses are not explained within the text, and they are not attributed to any particular consciousness. Confined to the ends of the chapters, and distinguished in italics, they perhaps do not interfere greatly with the more conventional narratives they follow. Nevertheless, even in this early work, we see Wendt’s preoccupation with the relationship between the telling and the told—a preoccupation that strongly characterises his later, more obviously experimental work. In the final, two-page chapter, this self-reflexivity comes to the fore. The boy is on the plane back to New Zealand, and we are perhaps here given some naturalistic explanation for the ‘epigraphs’: ‘His satchel was under the seat. He pulled it up, unzipped it, and searched through his papers for the seven poems he had written about her. As he read them she came alive again. Then he tore up each poem carefully’ (S 216–17). There are exactly seven poetic codas in the novel, so perhaps these are the poems, or torn-up fragments of poems, that the boy has written. Wendt moves towards his reflection on the formal structure of the novel, which reaches its climax in the final paragraph of the book: [h]e took out his pen, and on the cover of the slick Technicolor tourist brochure which he found in the plastic bag of airline gifts that the smiling hostess had given him, he wrote in large letters: ‘And Hine-nui-te-Po woke up and found him in there. And she crossed her legs and thus ended man’s quest for immortality’. (S 217) What he writes is in fact a passage from Chapter  19, the centrepiece of the novel. In this chapter, the boy asks the girl if she has ‘read any Polynesian mythology’ (S 99), and goes on to tell the story of ‘Maui, the legendary Maori hero’ (S 99), who challenges the gods and is crushed to death inside the vagina of the goddess Hine-nui-te-Po. At the end of an otherwise fairly straightforward novel comes an unexpected mise-en-abyme: we see the boy begin to write the story that forms the heart of the novel that contains him. It is significant that he begins to write it on the tourist brochure, enacting Wendt’s oft-stated aim to paint a more realistic portrait of the culture distorted in colonial fantasies of a pure, primitive Samoa. Yet if the depiction is more realistic in content, it is here that Wendt moves away from the realist mode of telling. The

‘Our Own Identity’ 85 more ambitious, self-reflexive elements of the novel, up to now muted, crescendo in the novel’s staging of its own construction. For so long the object of the narrative, the artist asserts himself as subject, freed to write himself and his reality into being—the would-be artist within the narrative, the postcolonial artist through the work. The European antecedent for this narrative manoeuvre is, of course, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which ends with Stephen Dedalus invoking the ‘old artificer’ after whom he is named as he flies from Dublin to write the novel that creates him, just as the boy invokes Maui.9 It is no surprise, therefore, to find allusions to Joyce’s novel in Sons for the Return Home. There are a number of parallels: the exchange between the boy and his mother regarding his religious revolt (S 35), for instance, recalls similar scenes in Portrait (e.g. PA 253). But when the boy’s inheritance of his grandfather’s rebellious individualism is attributed to his ‘silence, solitude, courage’ (S 188), the connection is plain: it is an obvious modification of Stephen’s famous tactic for artistic freedom— ‘silence, exile and cunning’ (PA 251).

‘The Tale, Like Any Other’: Pouliuli Pouliuli opens with the elderly protagonist Faleasa claiming ‘silence’ as an ‘effective weapon’ in his ‘battle for survival as a free man’,10 and the military metaphor confirms Wendt’s reading of Portrait, echoing Stephen’s avowal of a life lived ‘freely [. . .] using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning’ (PA 251, emphases added). Set exclusively in Samoa, Pouliuli truly returns home, depicting a small village community whose values founded on alofa (love) and interconnectedness have been undermined by the drive towards individual power, achieved through the dominant institutions of Church, chiefdom, and politics, and expressed through the conspicuous consumption of European goods. In this respect, the novel extends the critique presented in the final chapters of Sons, where the boy’s departure from Samoa is precipitated by his disgust at the family’s betrayal of Samoan ideals in their building of a papālagi house. However, while Sons for the Return Home can resolve this crisis only in individualist terms—the boy’s flight, or the birth of a literary consciousness that will remain outside of the culture it depicts—Pouliuli enacts a more complex resolution, in which Faleasa’s defeat is offset by the creation of a written narrative that reclaims something of the communality expressed in Samoan oral modes.

  9 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Viking, 1964), 257. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as PA. 10 Albert Wendt, Pouliuli (1977; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 12, 10. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as P.

86  Matthew Hayward This oral principle is established in various ways, through technique— the narrating of key events at a remove, retold by orally focalised characters; the whispers of a communal storyteller, reflecting on shared village values—and through plot, with the novel’s catastrophes initiated and fulfilled through communally enacted strategies of gossip, rumour, and tale. Yet Wendt complicates this oralising approach by again scattering fragments from written texts across the narrative, and while in Sons, he seems to attribute these fragments to the writerly acts of the protagonist, in Pouliuli he breaks with the naturalistic illusion, including phrases from texts by Camus, V. S. Naipaul, Yeats, and, yes, Joyce. And whereas ‘silence’ registers a major reverberation from Portrait, other phrases echo, in each case faintly, the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses. By the end of the first chapter, the rumours that Faleasa’s friend Laaumatua has spread as part of their elaborate manipulation of ‘āiga (extended family) and village have started to take effect: ‘[t]hat week an exciting tale [. . .] circulated [. . .] . The tale, like any other, grew in complexity, size, and inventiveness as it spread from imagination to imagination’ (P 18). A tale, like any other: this is a phrase used in ‘Nestor’, where Stephen—now back in Dublin, having failed in his bid for freedom— thinks of history as ‘a tale like any other too often heard’.11 No doubt, this correspondence is slight, and by itself should be seen as a coincidence. Yet when we read of another story that Faleasa has passed round to bring down one of his rivals, the description again carries a Joycean trace: ‘the rumour [. . .] divided and multiplied in the contented but by then blazing imaginations of the Malaeluans until they reached the infinite possibilities of true mythology’ (P 87). The infinite possibilities: this too echoes the ‘Nestor’ passage, where Stephen goes on to reflect on the way in which an imperial history has closed out other potential realities: ‘[t]ime has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted’ (U 2.49–51; emphasis added). Such correspondences may be coincidental, even in pairs. However, aside from the fact that both are from the same passage in ‘Nestor’, there is thematic correlation between the usages. In Ulysses, both phrases relate to the way in which an imperial version of history has overwritten the opportunities for resistance now lost to the past. Pouliuli inverts the formula, presenting a colonised people enacting oral potentials for resistance—mobilised by Wendt against just the written, imperial version of history recalled by Stephen in ‘Nestor’. Wendt sets up this contest most directly in Chapter 10, where Faleasa’s exploration of the Pili and

11 James Joyce, Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior (1921; New York: Garland, 1984), 2.46–7, emphasis added. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as U, by page and line number.

‘Our Own Identity’ 87 Pouliuli myth for ‘truths about his present reality’ (P 94) is organised alongside his recollection of an old man fatally disfigured by his faith in the colonial ‘written word’ (P 104). Brought up by English missionary parents and colonially educated in English and German, the old man was ‘the first Samoan sent abroad to be trained for the ministry’ (P 110). He is said to have suffered some kind of breakdown on his return, having been found marching up and down in a German army uniform before turning against the Church, ‘accusing them and his dead parents of having stolen his soul and replaced it with the crippled soul of a papalagi’ (P 111). The character stands as an allegory for the debilitating effects of colonialism. He is without village or family—the most important markers of identity in Samoan society—and despite his thrust against the Church, remains in thrall to the colonial ideology of Christian salvation: the old man explained that the papalagi missionaries, by bringing the magic of the written word to Samoa, had rescued their people from the brutal nightmare swamp in which their collective memory was rooted [. . .], had turned their people’s attention [. . .] to the humane light of the world. (P 104–5) And yet, for all his colonial faith in a teleological narrative of civilisation and salvation, the old man remains in anguish, weeping as he asks: how much longer will the word be able to contain, describe and exorcise the horror being born out of the world’s collective memory? How much time is left before the light is sucked up by the bleeding ground and the air without the word drives us to silence? (P 105) There are several echoes of the ‘Nestor’ passage here. The old man’s description of the past as a ‘brutal nightmare swamp’ recalls Stephen’s famous description of history as ‘a nightmare from which I  am trying to awake’ (U 2.377). His prophetic reference to the ‘world’s collective memory’ and ‘the light [. . .] sucked up by the bleeding ground and the air without the word’ echoes Stephen’s reflection on the ‘daughters of memory’, and his apocalyptic vision of ‘the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame’ (U 2.7–10). And the old man’s assertion that the colonially literate can ‘store’ and ‘imprison [. . .] their memories in written form’ (P 104) inverts Stephen’s idea that the past is ‘branded’, ‘fettered’ and ‘lodged’ by an imperial history (U 2.50). If the defiance of Sons invokes the Stephen of Portrait, who writes himself into freedom and self-expression, the more pessimistic Pouliuli turns to the Stephen of the early chapters of Ulysses, back in a colonial school after all, trapped by the dictates of the past.

88  Matthew Hayward Aside from its school setting, ‘Nestor’ may have resonated with Wendt at a discursive level. Joyce designated ‘History’ as the ‘art’ of the ‘Nestor’ episode,12 critiquing the way in which this monolithic imperial discourse both occludes the ‘infinite possibilities’ of other potential courses of history and justifies a contingent colonial present in teleological terms—‘[a]ll human history’ moving ‘towards one great goal’ (U 2.380–1). Wendt trained as a historian at Victoria University, but became increasingly critical of the imperial biases of the discipline, and was by this stage of his career explicitly arguing that Pacific Islanders should use literature to correct the misrepresentations of colonial accounts.13 In Pouliuli he wrestles, like Stephen, with the problem of how to use an imposed language to challenge the violence countersigned by a written colonial history. Stephen is all but overwhelmed by this problem in Ulysses, but in ‘Nestor’ he initiates acts of subaltern resistance in which the misprisions of imperial history are subverted by the imaginative reconstructions of the colonial artist—in other words, the model presented by Ulysses as a whole. There is also an important development in Wendt’s intertextuality. In Sons, a structural device is turned towards the representation of the novel’s own existence as a literary text. Although this self-construction is based upon the conceit of an oral myth, Sons remains very much a written novel. In Pouliuli, this is less the case. As I have argued elsewhere, Wendt’s allusions in the novel to other literary texts should be seen not as the written basis of this written narrative, but as collateral textual material incorporated into an oralised or oralising mode.14 We have a movement from intertextuality that serves textuality, to intertextuality that serves orality. And yet, in Pouliuli, the abiding tone is one of defeat. For all its appeal to the ‘infinite possibilities of true mythology’, the destructive social situation it laments remains ultimately unchanged by the oral principle the novel invokes, and Faleasa is fixed in the same frozen pose as the allegorical old man. It is not until Wendt’s last 1970s novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, that the oral and written principles are integrated. And once again, within the integration, Joyce plays a part.

Modernising Myths: Leaves of the Banyan Tree Almost a decade in the writing, Leaves of the Banyan Tree is the most complex of Wendt’s early works. Divided into three books, it opens with

12 Richard Ellmann, appendix, ‘Ulysses’ on the Liffey (1972; London: Faber, 1974), 184. 13 Albert Wendt, ‘Samoa’s Albert Wendt: Poet and Author’, interview by Marjorie Crocombe, Mana Annual of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society no. 1 (1973): 46. 14 Matthew Hayward, ‘Indigenizing Intertextuality: Literacy and Orality in Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli’, Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 2 (2018).

‘Our Own Identity’ 89 a third-person narrative tracking the thoughts and actions of Tauilopepe, a powerful village matai (‘āiga head) who adopts the colonial and capitalist vision of Samoan modernity in his drive towards ‘God, Money and Success’.15 Book two shifts perspective completely, with Tauilopepe’s son, Pepe, lying on his deathbed, telling the story of his short and rebellious life. It remains in the first person throughout, and is presented as Pepe’s attempt at a ‘novel about the self’ (L 160)—a novel, then, within the novel. Book three resumes after Pepe’s death, again in the third person, and again tethered to Tauilopepe, but this time freer in its subjective range, circling a number of other characters. Leaves of the Banyan Tree is more overtly intertextual than Wendt’s earlier novels, with familiar references to Camus and Yeats joined by explicit references to Robert Louis Stevenson, Borges, D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Norman Mailer, and others. Joyce is nowhere named, but in the middle section of the novel, there is a structural presence that shapes the direction of the narrative. Like Sons, and like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, book two can be read as the story of an artist writing himself into existence. Yet whereas Sons engages Joyce’s novel in its final staging of the writerly resolve of the protagonist, book two of Leaves draws in the figure of the heroic young man opposing the oppressive institutions of his colonial modernity: school, then family, then religion. As in Portrait, school is the site of the protagonist’s first contest with authority, and the ex-soldier headmaster of Pepe’s high school, Mr Peddle, functions through the same complex of militarism, sports, and colonial ideology as Joyce’s Mr  Deasy. In ‘Nestor’, Deasy admonishes Stephen for his irresponsibility: ‘[b]ecause you don’t save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don’t know yet what money is. Money is power’ (U 2.236–7). Peddle’s advice to Pepe is similarly patronising and sententious: ‘if you want to stand with the modern people like us you have to work hard’ (L 183). Both men speak from a position of power and with the assumption of cultural superiority, the Unionist Deasy over the Catholic Stephen—‘[y]ou fenians’ (U 2.272)—and the New Zealander Peddle over the Pacific Islander Pepe: ‘you Samoan!’ (L 184). Stephen challenges his headmaster’s racist comments about Catholics and Jews, who Mr Deasy asserts have ‘sinned against the light’ (2.361); ‘[w]ho has not?’ (U 2.373), Stephen calmly replies. When Mr Peddle recites racist stereotypes about Samoans—that they are carefree, that they are unmodern, that they cannot drink alcohol without getting violent—Pepe too resists; told that he must pay for a small misdemeanour, he retorts: ‘[l]ike my people paid and are still paying? [. . .] Like black men and Chinamen are paying all over the world’ (L 184).

15 Albert Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 84. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as L.

90  Matthew Hayward Pepe next renounces family ties, pushing back not just against his domineering father, but also, like Stephen, against a mother whose genuine love and solicitude risks binding the young man to the order he is resolved to break. When Stephen turns away from his mother, he notes in his diary: ‘[s]he prays now [. . .] that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is’ (L 257). Pepe’s mother acts in much the same way: ‘she prays [. . .] . Look after Pepe while he is away in that strange home and school. Teach him to love’ (L 171). Pepe breaks finally by robbing his father’s store and burning the Protestant church, denouncing his father’s hypocrisy, and sending his mother away from his cell when she comes to visit. The trial that follows forms the dramatic core of book two, and a number of critics have noted echoes of Camus, picking up Wendt’s early statement that ‘[t]he trial in  [.  .  .] “Flying-Fox” is deliberately patterned on the trial in The Stranger’.16 Michelle Keown examines these Camusian connections in some detail in her essay ‘The Samoan Sisyphus’, but her passing description of Pepe as ‘the indigenous-artist-as-a-young man’ also registers his parallels with Joyce’s young protagonist.17 While Stephen does not go so far as arson, Pepe’s act and subsequent defiance of the judge’s inquisition—‘I do not know what a Christian is’ (L 201)—is only a more overt declaration of Stephen’s non serviam and rejection of compromising belief systems: ‘I don’t know what your words mean’ (PA 244). Stephen’s silence is replaced by Pepe’s public revolt, and his exile by imprisonment. But in each text, we see an apostate heroism that exposes and ultimately rejects the instruments of power, school, church, and home. Integrating structures from Portrait and details from ‘Nestor’, Leaves of the Banyan Tree places an orally driven narrative within a writerly novel, synthesising the approaches Wendt developed in Sons and Pouliuli. Seeking Joycean echoes in Wendt’s 1970s novels reveals a cluster of possible correspondences, at the level of phrase, characterisation, plot, and structure. Where Wendt’s later references include ‘The Dead’, the ‘Penelope’ episode of Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, in the earlier works all traces lead to Portrait and the ‘Nestor’ episode, and all relate to Stephen Dedalus, whose rebellion against colonial, religious, and nationalist constraints made him something of a ‘hero’, in Derek Walcott’s words, for postcolonial writers.18 There is broad thematic consistency in Wendt’s usage of these elements: each of them are adapted towards anti-colonial ends. Yet they are adapted in distinct ways at each stage of Wendt’s early

16 Albert Wendt, interview by John Beston and Rose Marie Beston, World Literature Written in English 16, no. 1 (1977): 157. 17 Keown, ‘The Samoan Sisyphus’, 54. 18 Derek Walcott, Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hammer (Boulder, CO: Three Continents, 1993), 31.

‘Our Own Identity’ 91 development as a novelist. Sons for the Return Home echoes Portrait in Wendt’s representation of the growth of an independent literary consciousness through the self-reflexive construction of the novel. In Pouliuli, phrases from ‘Nestor’ are drawn into Wendt’s critique of the authority of the imperial word, and the potentials for a written text to contest a constraining colonial history. Both are brought together in Leaves of the Banyan Tree, with Pepe’s anti-colonial rebellion staged through his intellectual and verbal challenges against constraining authority figures, each of whom have rough analogues in both Portrait and ‘Nestor’. Across these varied experiments in adaptation and form can be seen Wendt’s abiding use of Pacific mythology as a structuring apparatus, evident from his earliest works, and developing in sophistication throughout the 1970s. In Sons for the Return Home, the Maui and Hine-nui-te-Po myth remains largely collateral to the novel’s main drama, with its generative potential remaining at a narrative level: the myth provides the impetus for narrativisation, but is not obviously enacted within the plot itself. In Pouliuli, the protagonist again turns to myth for ‘truths about his present reality’ (P 94), and while some early reviewers questioned the ‘point’ of this mythical material, Sharrad is right to observe that it makes more sense within Samoan narrative traditions, and Wendt’s integration of the myth alongside other stories within the story reflects his growing confidence in constructing an orally focussed novel that answers to Indigenous aesthetic pulls.19 It is again in Leaves that Wendt unifies these approaches: the Pepesa myth at once offers a model of inspiration for the central character, a point of connection between the modern hero and the precolonial past, and a blueprint for the events of the novel. Within the fictional world, the hero Pepe has been named after the legendary Pepesa, who ‘challenges all the gods and gets away with it, [. . .] a man feared by the gods because of his courage and cunning and humour’ (L 172). Pepesa’s campaign against his divine father presents a mythic parallel for Pepe’s own filial rebellion, and in the climax of book two he invokes his gafa in court as provocation against colonial and Christian law: ‘[m]y name is Pepesa, son of Pepe and the gods of Sapepe [. . .] . After the Sapepe hero who challenged all the gods and won’ (L 199). While Pepe consciously models himself on his mythical namesake, his friends also fall into mythically determined roles of which they cannot be aware. For instance, when Pepe’s friend Tagata, nicknamed the ‘Flying-Fox’, leads away the police so that Pepe can rob his father’s store, he unwittingly fulfils the Pepesa myth, where the hero’s friends imitate flying-foxes to distract his father’s guards, allowing him to raid

19 Chris Tiffin, review of Pouliuli, by Albert Wendt, Mana: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 3, no. 1 (1978): 141; Sharrad, Albert Wendt, 109.

92  Matthew Hayward the god’s palace. Knowingly or otherwise, this development—from myth as referent in the earlier novels, to myth as structuring device in Leaves—mirrors Joyce’s shift in approach from Portrait to Ulysses. In the former, there is a naturalistic justification, with Stephen’s selfcomparisons against his ‘[o]ld father’ Daedalus prompted by his unlikely name (PA 257). In Ulysses, this mythical drive is expanded into complex and expansive parallels, with a host of Dubliners unwittingly echoing the events of their classical avatars. The adaptation of myth is of course a mainstay of European and American modernism, and Wendt would have found examples of the practice in many of his cited influences, from Camus to Yeats to Thomas Mann—hence Sharrad’s easy identification of what he calls ‘modernist mythologising’ in Wendt’s work.20 Yet his approach also derives from local wellsprings. Wendt at times downplayed this aspect of his work, telling Vilsoni Hereniko that ‘most of the mythology in my novels is made up [laughs], or borrowed from other cultures’, and his impatience with foreign critical fetishisations of a ‘pure’ Samoan artist unreflectively expressing an ‘authentic’ Samoan mythology is understandable.21 However, his disavowal should also be taken with ‘fifteen grains of Epsom salts’ (L 159), for while the myths he works into his texts have no doubt been remodelled and even invented, their ‘grammar’—the way in which they function within the text—remains closer to Pacific analogues than to European modernist approaches. As Wendt pointed out from the start, his formative aesthetic grounding came in his childhood experience of the oral Samoan fāgogo, which blended local myths and legends with such diverse material as biblical stories, Aesop’s fables, and Grimm’s fairy tales.22 With this attribution in mind, Wendt’s use of a particular myth, and for that matter, his introduction of details from Joyce, Camus, or any other European text, appears in a new light. Taking the fāgogo rather than the European novel as the starting point gives priority to an Indigenous core structure, flexible enough to incorporate new material from both the inside and the outside. It is the model Wendt proposes for Pacific literature as a whole.

Indigenising Artists, Cannibalising Critics Aspects of the text that from one perspective appear introduced or incidental may from another be generative and central. But with literary

20 Sharrad, Albert Wendt, 246. For an early discussion of his influences, see Wendt, interview with Beston, 158. 21 Albert Wendt, ‘Following in Her Footsteps’, interview by Vilsoni Hereniko, Manoa 5, no. 1 (1993): 54. 22 Wendt, ‘Samoa’s Albert Wendt’, 45.

‘Our Own Identity’ 93 critical apparatuses typically remaining outside of the region, these perspectives are not equal, nor equally valid. As Hereniko and Sig Schwarz point out, critics ‘trained in European or American universities are taught to look for certain elements’ when approaching the text, and so tend to privilege these points when they find them, fixing Indigenous literature in a ‘centrist, linear reading of art history in which formal innovation is elevated and subject matter deemphasized’.23 Fundamentally, Hereniko argues, such critics ‘fail to fully comprehend the political nature of most writing by colonized peoples, in the Pacific and beyond’.24 If we are to persist, then, in tracing textual connections with European antecedents, we must ask not only, ‘which ones?’ but also, ‘to what end?’ Many of the examples I have presented begin with verbal echoes, and on one level Wendt may simply have enjoyed the sounds of particular words and phrases, regardless of their provenance: Joyce, of all writers, would insist upon the right of the author to such pleasures. But when the phrases are so consistently drawn into political sequences, we must ask, why Joyce, and not Kipling? Why Camus and not Proust? While Wendt could be disparaging about his literary activity in early interviews,25 he tasked himself with nothing less than the creation of a new national literature—‘a craft that would change the planet’, as he would later ironically reflect.26 It is easy to see why the Irish author might appeal. Joyce’s depiction of the artist in defiant, heroic terms, escaping the nightmare of colonial history to ‘forge the uncreated conscience’ of his ‘race’ (PA 257); his devoted portrayal of the home country throughout his ‘exile’; his ‘pioneer’ challenge against what Wendt called ‘the hypocritical public morality of our societies’27; his sophisticated critique of the British coloniser and rejection of romanticised images of the Irish: all of these are likely to have appealed to the young Wendt, who proceeds in comparable terms and with a similar agenda. In short, Wendt found in Joyce a textual negotiation of a related colonial experience. After all, this is how he describes his relationship with Camus. Acknowledging the importance of Camus’s writing—his ‘testament’, as he put it in a 1992 essay—Wendt relates not just to the text, but also to the colonial context, stating that ‘[l]ike Albert Camus, I am of two worlds’, and openly identifying with the Algerian author’s ‘exile’.28

23 Vilsoni Hereniko and Sig Schwarz, ‘Four Writers and One Critic’, in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 57. 24 Hereniko and Schwarz, ‘Four Writers and One Critic’, 57. 25 E.g. Wendt, interview with Beston, 154. 26 Albert Wendt, ‘The Writer as Fiction’, Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 8, no. 1 (1983): 42. 27 Albert Wendt, Ola (1991; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 39. 28 Wendt, ‘Discovering the Outsider’, 49, 48.

94  Matthew Hayward We may surmise that he thought of Joyce in similar terms. In Black Rainbow, published the same year as the Camus essay, Wendt describes Joyce as having ‘escaped his labyrinth, Dublin, by living in exile’.29 (The labyrinth metaphor develops Wendt’s description of the Icarus and Daedalus myth in the previous sentence, confirming his particular association with Stephen Dedalus.) It is not just the work, but the way in which the work arises from the exiled author’s relationship to the ‘labyrinth’ of colonial modernity—Wendt’s Samoa, Camus’s Algeria, Joyce’s Ireland. And though there are departures between these colonial modernities that must not be elided, not least in that the Irish were also implicated in the colonisation of the Pacific, Wendt reads for continuities between their decolonising literatures. As he puts it in his introduction to the anthology Nuanua (1995), Pacific literature arose as part of the ‘process of decolonisation and the cultural revival that was taking place in our region, inspired by and learning from the anti-colonial struggles in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean, and India’. It is in this context that Wendt situates literary influence: ‘as our anti-colonial political movements were inspired by other anti-colonial movements, our literature was inspired by and learned from the post-colonial literatures that emerged out of those movements’.30 Wendt was thinking in these terms as early as the 1970s, explicitly comparing the Samoans to the Irish in terms of a shared anti-colonial resistance: ‘we’re always fighting, playing for independence. We have our own identity in spite of conquest’.31 ‘Our own identity’—this is the crucial point, as Wendt goes on to explain in the Nuanua introduction: ‘[w]e have indigenised much that was colonial or foreign to suit ourselves, creating new blends and forms. We have even indigenised Western art forms, including the novel’.32 Placing the ‘colonial or foreign’ at the periphery of the Pacific world centre, Wendt counters models that would situate the Pacific at the outer edge of modernity—whether culturally, as with the anthropological tradition epitomised by Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929); politically, as with the nuclear colonial practices Julia A. Boyd discusses in Chapter 3 of this volume; or discursively, as with any of the knowledge systems whose claims to neutrality are belied by sites of power that remain in and of the Global North. This concept of indigenisation allows for the critical acknowledgement of correspondences with other texts and literatures, while asserting agency in the act of creation. Traces of these texts

29 Wendt, Black Rainbow, 92. 30 Albert Wendt, ed., Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995), 2–3. 31 Wendt, interview with Beston, 154. 32 Wendt, Nuanua, 3.

‘Our Own Identity’ 95 appear not as the finished result of a general indebtedness, but as modules in dynamic and self-driven processes, repurposed by writers working in their own situated modernities. Above all, indigenisation asserts selfdetermination and ownership, principles upon which decolonisation in the Pacific are fundamentally affirmed. In a broader context, indigenisation may help explain why a given author’s influence can manifest so distinctly in different settings. Critics continue to identify Joyce’s impact upon writers all over the world. In each case, however, the author has adapted different elements, from the ‘proliferation of allusions’ Charles W. Pollard identifies in Walcott (St. Lucia), to the ‘systematized chaos’ and non-linearity Leila Baradaran Jamili and Bahman Zarrinjooee discern in Sadeq Hedayat (Iran), to the emphasis upon materiality, focalisation, and sound that Jessica Berman finds in Mulk Raj Anand (India).33 Far from passively adopting a finished aesthetic standard, each has adapted particular techniques and tactics towards their own context—each, as Wendt claims for the Pacific context, to suit themselves. And in case the chronological priority of canonical European modernism be taken to imply its inceptive precedence in the unmediated creation of new and original forms, Wendt recalls that this ‘new’ art also depended upon foreign contact, maintaining that it is only a critical double standard that allows adaptation to appear a specifically postcolonial activity: ‘when Picasso developed cubism, which was a mixture of what he borrowed from African art and Polynesian art, that was not called a “hybrid” development but a new development’.34 Writing in the context of 1990s postcolonial studies, Wendt here anticipates some of the major advances of modernist studies in the new millennium. While canonical modernism may still be taught as a self-generating aesthetics of innovation, scholars continue to find ways in which it hinged upon the appropriation and adaptation of foreign forms, from the Chinese elements co-opted by Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, to the Polynesian modes utilised by Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. The concept of indigenisation has some parallels with Édouard Glissant’s idea of creolisation (discussed by Susan Stanford Friedman in Chapter 14 of this volume), the ‘unceasing process of transformation’ that creates ‘[c]omposite peoples’—all peoples for Glissant, once the myth of ‘ “pure”

33 Charles W. Pollard, ‘Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism’, Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 2 (2001): 205; Leila Baradaran Jamili and Bahman Zarrinjooee, ‘An Artistic Metempsychosis: James Joyce’s and Sadeq Hedayat’s Nonlinear and Chaotic Imagination’, in Joycean Legacies, ed. Martha C. Carpentier (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 230–57, 233; Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 90–135. 34 Albert Wendt, ‘An Interview with Albert Wendt’, by Michel Christie, Alizés, no. 16 (1998), http://oracle-reunion.pagesperso-orange.fr/documents/an_interview_.html.

96  Matthew Hayward cultures’ is stripped away.35 But the two are not interchangeable.36 With its experiential basis in the deracinated context of the Caribbean, creolisation emphasises the way in which cultural adaptation innovates, producing forms that are—to again quote Walcott—‘perpetually making it new’.37 Of course, Wendt too is concerned with ‘new blends and forms’: it is the very premise of ‘Towards a New Oceania’. However, indigenisation emphasises not newness itself, but the way in which the new can be integrated into the structures and traditions that have guided Pacific lives for generations. And while the act of integration produces new modes of living, this is a newness that maintains connections with Indigenous traditions—‘new cultures’, insists Wendt, that are ‘based firmly on our own pasts’.38 While creolisation is highly suspicious of ‘genealogical descent’ as a marker of identity,39 indigenisation prioritises lineage, ‘every one and every thing connected through gafa/genealogy’.40 Providing and articulating unification through time, and privileging continuity over rupture, this is a living and adaptive process of interrelation, not the reactive break that ‘modernism’ can sometimes be taken to denote. Ultimately, Wendt grounds questions of cultural and literary development in a Pacific that is always the site and centre of its own modernity. This does not preclude the study of connections with outside literatures: Wendt’s critical situation of Pacific literature in relation to other colonial and postcolonial movements encourages the tracing of such connections in his own works, and his dense intertextuality provides many opportunities for doing so. The Pacific grounding does, however, refuse to give over fully to outside systems—including global modernist studies—and while it would be disingenuous to renounce the critical movement that underpins this chapter, I should like to end with some methodological provisos. First, while working at a ‘global scale’ inevitably requires some level of generalisation, we must resist, with Aarthi Vadde, ‘conflating select writers with entire movements’.41 Vadde is referring to the synecdoche that would allow Joyce, say, to stand in for European modernism as a whole, quoting Mark Wollaeger’s comment that Sei Itō, though influenced by Joyce, was ‘not influenced by a monolithic Western agent named “modernism” nor did he imitate one’.42 As it happens, I would argue that Wendt was in fact influenced by modernism in a monolithic sense, not because 35 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 142, 140. 36 Vicente M. Diaz, ‘Creolization and Indigeneity’, American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006): 576–8. 37 Walcott, Critical Perspectives, 55. 38 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 53. 39 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 140. 40 Wendt, Ancestry, 29. 41 Aarthi Vadde, ‘Scalability’, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 2, no. 4 (2018), https:// doi.org/10.26597/mod.0035. 42 Mark Wollaeger, ‘The Global/Comparative Turn in Modernist Studies: Two Points Bearing on Praxis’, English Language Notes 49, no. 1 (2011): 156; qtd. Vadde, ‘Scalability’.

‘Our Own Identity’ 97 he repeatedly cites modernist authors as primary influences, but because he experienced a mid-twentieth-century colonial education system that was already beginning to reify ‘modernism’ as a literary movement, if not yet under that name. But the principle is valid—and cuts both ways. Wendt has played an immeasurable role in the development of Pacific literature, both as a body of work and as a field of study. Yet in either sense, Pacific literature is as vast and varied as the region itself, and while Wendt and a number of his contemporaries certainly engaged with European modernist texts, it does not follow that a monolithic agent named ‘Pacific literature’ was directly influenced by European modernism. Second, granted that connections with some European modernist texts exist in some texts by Pacific authors, it would be false to claim disinterest in identifying them, if the starting position is a ‘planetary’ literary system with discursive roots in the Global North. If the new modernist studies has reminded us of anything, it is that ‘modernism’ is not the object, but the system of classification, and that this system encodes a politics of inclusion and exclusion—along formal lines of genre, style, and so on, but also along social lines, of nationality, gender, sexuality, and race. It is right that modernist scholars should continue to interrogate and deconceal the politics encoded within the discipline. But to believe in modernist studies as a master discourse that can somehow transcend its discursive premises is at best utopian, and can at worst be seen to repeat the act of imperial overwriting that Pacific writers have worked so hard to resist. The drive towards inclusivity is important. But there is a painful and enduring history of classificatory imposition in the Pacific region, and it is well to remember that outside identifications may be as alienating as they are inviting in a region where people still live with the effects of colonial disenfranchisement, and still fight for the validity and sovereignty of their ‘own identity’. And so I leave the final word to Hereniko: ‘If the critic feels moved to write about the work of an indigenous writer, it is important that the critic does not behave like an “overseas expert” and “cannibalize” that work’.43

Bibliography Auva‘a, Fa‘alafua L. ‘The Cultural Perspective of Albert Wendt’s Novel Pouliuli’. PhD diss., Utah State University, 1997. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Diaz, Vicente M. ‘Creolization and Indigeneity’. American Ethnologist 33, no. 4 (2006): 576–8. Ellmann, Richard. ‘Ulysses’ on the Liffey. 1972. London: Faber, 1974. Ellerman, Evelyn. ‘Intertextuality in the Fiction of Camus and Wendt’. In Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends: Selected Conference

43 Hereniko and Schwarz, ‘Four Writers and One Critic’, 62.

98  Matthew Hayward Papers, edited by Cornelia N. Moore and Raymond A. Moody. vol. 1, 43–50. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Hayward, Matthew. ‘Indigenizing Intertextuality: Literacy and Orality in Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli’. Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 2 (2018): 96–111. Hereniko, Vilsoni and Sig Schwarz. ‘Four Writers and One Critic’. In Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, 55–64. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Jamili, Leila Baradaran and Bahman Zarrinjooee. ‘An Artistic Metempsychosis: James Joyce’s and Sadeq Hedayat’s Nonlinear and Chaotic Imagination’. In Joycean Legacies, edited by Martha C. Carpentier, 230–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. New York: Viking, 1964. ———. Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. 1921. New York: Garland, 1984. Keown, Michelle. ‘The Samoan Sisyphus: Camus and Colonialism in Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37, no. 1 (2002): 49–64. Pollard, Charles W. ‘Traveling with Joyce: Derek Walcott’s Discrepant Cosmopolitan Modernism’. Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 2 (2001): 197–216. Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003. Tiffin, Chris. ‘Review of Pouliuli, by Albert Wendt’. Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 3, no. 1 (1978): 140–2. Vadde, Aarthi. ‘Scalability’. Modernism/modernity Print Plus 2, no. 4 (2018). Walcott, Derek. Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, edited by Robert D. Hammer. Boulder, CO: Three Continents, 1993. Wendt, Albert. The Adventures of Vela. Wellington: Huia, 2009. ———. Ancestry. Wellington: Huia, 2012. ———. Black Rainbow. 1992. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995. ———. ‘Discovering the Outsider’. In Camus’s ‘L’Etranger’: Fifty Years On, edited by Adele King, 48–50. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992. ———. ‘Following in Her Footsteps’. Interview by Vilsoni Hereniko. Manoa 5, no. 1 (1993): 51–9. ———. ‘An Interview with Albert Wendt’. By Michel Christie. Alizés, no. 16 (1998). http://oracle-reunion.pagesperso-orange.fr/documents/an_interview_. html. ———. Interview by John Beston and Rose Marie Beston. World Literature Written in English 16, no. 1 (1977): 151–62. ———. Leaves of the Banyan Tree. 1979; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. ———, ed., Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English since 1980. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. ———. Ola. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995. ———. Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A  Writer’s Early Life. Wellington: BWB, 2015. ———. Pouliuli. 1977. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980.

‘Our Own Identity’ 99 ———. ‘Samoa’s Albert Wendt: Poet and Author’. Interview by Marjorie Crocombe. Mana Annual of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society 1 (1973): 45–7. ———. Sons for the Return Home. 1973. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996. ———. ‘The Writer as Fiction’. Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 8, no. 1 (1983): 40–6. Wollaeger, Mark. ‘The Global/Comparative Turn in Modernist Studies: Two Points Bearing on Praxis’. English Language Notes 49, no. 1 (2011): 153–6.

6 Mapping Modernity in Guam: The Unincorporated Ecologies of Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics Bonnie Etherington

In Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s first collection, From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha], his poem ‘from Achiote’ begins by listing twentythree different names for the plant achiote—from Indigenous Central and South American names to Spanish, Japanese, and others. Beside this list is a visual representation of achiote seed pods and an encyclopaedia-like description of achiote that begins with its origins in ‘central and south america and the caribbean’,1 its early uses by Mayans, how it migrated across the Pacific by way of the Spanish, and how, today, ‘you can find achiote powder in the ethnic food aisle of some grocery stores’.2 The list of names for ‘achiote’ not only emphasises the mobility of the achiote plant, but also shows how, while the different names all refer to the same plant, the achiote does not mean the same thing in every linguistic space or context. For Spanish colonialists, it signified ‘an attractive pink flower’, that ‘made it a popular hedge plant in colonial gardens’ (H 18). For the Chamorro in their homeland Guåhan, or Guam, it was used ‘to heal wounds’ and diseases (H 23). By tracking these different significations, codifications, translations, and revisions of translations as they move across space, time, and contexts in this poem, Perez uses the image of the achiote as a world in microcosm—a mobile, flexible world, for the Indigenous Chamorro people in Guam as well as for other Indigenous peoples across the Pacific. That is, Perez takes a plant and its fruit that stores confine to an ‘ethnic food aisle’ and marks it instead as a dynamic, flexible, adaptive, and transnational entity (H 17). These are the qualities that Perez also ascribes to a distinct perspective of Pacific modernity across his now four-book From Unincorporated Territory poetic series. In this series, Perez pushes against US and European narratives of modernity which place Indigenous lands and peoples outside

1 Perez frequently does not capitalise proper nouns. I  have retained his typographical choices as they are in his text. 2 Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha] (Kāne‘ohe, HI: Tinfish, 2008), 17. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as H.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 101 the modern, temporally and geographically. In contrast, Perez uses the ocean as the basis for a more flexible understanding of modernity that emphasises process—particularly processes of participation, adaptation, and relation. Critically, this concept of modernity centres Chamorro, and more broadly Indigenous Oceanian, knowledge systems, histories, and transoceanic connections. Guam has been subject to imperialist incursions and used as a strategic base for multiple military forces for centuries. The US colonisation of Guam began on 21 June 1898, during the Spanish-American War. Spanish contact began in 1521, with Spanish colonisation of the Chamorro people, spearheaded by Jesuit missionaries, accelerating in earnest in the seventeenth century. Japan occupied the island from 1941–1944, until the United States regained control in the region. Since the Second World War, Guam has remained under US control as an unincorporated territory. As Perez explains, this ‘unincorporated’ status was established by the Insular Cases rulings of 1901 after the Spanish-American War, in which the US Supreme Court ‘ruled that the United States can hold a territory as a colonial possession without ever incorporating the territory into the United States or granting sovereignty to the territory’ (H 9). This ruling applied at the time to the territories of Guam, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It is this legal status that provided the guise necessary for the United States to colonise Guam and those other island territories, removing their traditional sovereignties without granting the right to become full members of the US nation-state, while also attempting to bracket these colonial efforts out of the claims of empire associated with European imperial powers. The complexities, idiosyncrasies, and paradoxes of this legal status and the US occupation of Guam are central in Perez’s From Unincorporated Territory series. In Perez’s second book, [Saina], a line reads: ‘we belong to more than a map of remote scars’.3 This line refers back to one in Perez’s first book, [Hacha], in which he quotes ‘[i]slands scars of the water’, from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (H 53). At a literal level, ‘we’ in this line refers to the Chamorro people of Guam, including Perez himself. But if this ‘we’ is read in relation to the series’ ecology as a whole, it becomes a much more expansive and inclusive pronoun, encompassing pasts, presents, and futures that gesture towards, but also beyond the wider Pacific Islands, to the ‘new Oceania’ envisaged by Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa. Wendt’s 1976 article ‘Towards a New Oceania’, an ur-text for Oceania (Pacific)

3 Craig Santos Perez, From Unincorporated Territory [Saina] (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), 117. I  cite by page rather than line number, because many of the poems share names and there are also multiple prose and cartographic poems. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as S.

102  Bonnie Etherington studies, maps a vision of an Oceania that takes the place of the colonially termed ‘Pacific Islands’ and which prioritises Indigenous histories and creative expressions. Hau‘ofa’s 1998 essay, ‘The Ocean in Us’, springs from Wendt’s work, arguing that the ‘present regionalism’ of the Pacific Islands is ‘a direct creation of colonialism’ imposed on the islands and their peoples by multiple forces, including the United States.4 Hau‘ofa calls for a new, internally created regionalism that will go beyond the Pacific Islands, acknowledging the flows of diaspora, and be made up of ‘human beings with a common heritage and commitment [. . .] a world of people connected to each other’.5 This world, Oceania, for Hau‘ofa, is still necessarily diverse in order to ‘struggle against the homogenising forces of the global juggernaut’, but he identifies its ‘single common heritage’ as the ocean.6 Perez places his poems in dialogue with this concept of Oceania throughout his series, using it to critique US imperialism, as scholars such as Paul Lai and Valerie Solar Woodward point out.7 The fact that Perez refers to Césaire, an anti-colonial writer from Martinique, as well as other writers associated with decolonial movements, also connects Perez’s poetics to responses to colonialism worldwide. Alongside these emphases, I read Perez’s poems as negotiating what it means to be ‘modern’. Efforts to look at Oceanian literatures through a transnational lens often remain focussed on centre-periphery relationships between the islands of Oceania and the Global North, while also confining Indigeneity to the ‘local’ side of a global/local binary. I will show, however, that Perez’s poetics of unincorporation map out modernity in Hau‘ofa’s vein, in ways that affirm Guam’s planetary connectivities and webs of influence (flowing inwards and outwards), while also refusing to let representations of Guam (and those who identify as Chamorro) be contained in a homogenising reduction of a globalised melting pot. I argue that Perez’s poetics express modernity as process, rather than conforming to notions of modernity as temporally and geopolitically centred in the United States or Europe. In this way, my reading follows on from Arjun Appadurai, who pushes for theories of global modernities that do not represent modernity as finished, unified, or singular. Appadurai breaks with and makes more complex the boundaries between what we read as ‘modern’ society and what we read as ‘traditional’ by

4 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 398. 5 Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, 401–2. 6 Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, 393, 405. 7 Paul Lai, ‘Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam’, Journal of Transnational American Studies 3, no. 2 (2011): 20; Valerie Solar Woodward, ‘ “I Guess They Didn’t Want Us Asking Too Many Questions”: Reading American Empire in Guam’, The Contemporary Pacific 25, no. 1 (2013): 68.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 103 theorising the ‘global modern’ as defined by our current moment of media and migration, rather than by a particular set of socio-cultural norms and practices.8 Appadurai’s view of modernity is characterised by a system of flows—a view compatible with and prefigured by Hau‘ofa’s vision of Oceania connected by flows of people, vessels, and ideas. By drawing on Hau‘ofa’s vision for the ways he expresses his own visions of modernity, Perez theorises a fluid, Oceanian modernity that also encourages readers to reconfigure their notions of the modern and modernism, approaching these concepts in more expansive ways. In this way, my reading of Perez’s poetic modernist ecologies—that is, the ways his poetics express modernity—is also compatible with Susan Stanford Friedman’s call to shift away from depending on Global North ‘framework[s]’ as the reference points or origins by which all modernities and modernisms are read, and think of them in networked and mobile terms.9 I  argue that Perez enters into these conversations by refusing narratives in which islands and Indigenous peoples are static and are the sites upon which modernity is written. He writes the ocean as a specifically Indigenous place—and the dynamic basis for the processes of modernity he imagines. With many intertextual references, including direct quotations, Perez indicates throughout his books that he is in conversation with American and European authors customarily described as modernist, such as T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Rainier Maria Rilke. For example, in an epigraph beginning his third section in [Hacha], Perez quotes Stein’s ‘A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass’, a poem whose linguistic ruptures do not seem distant from Perez’s own experiments with deconstruction (H 40). However, Perez also quotes many other writers and thinkers, and perhaps most significantly, he shows that he is aware of and conversant with earlier writers of what we might call Oceanian modernity, such as Hau‘ofa and Wendt. Perez builds on their work, treating his series as an extension and expansion of the ‘New Oceania’. In this way, Perez’s series works to show that Indigenous Chamorro identities and landscapes are not merely reactive or alternate to Global North conceptions of modernity, and not preoccupied with speaking to canonical modernisms, but are involved in the continual production of the modern. Even though his poems encounter and are entangled with capitalism and globalisation, which are conditions primarily associated with Global North modernities, they ultimately depend on Chamorro and Oceanian networks and ecologies as the basis for their expressions of modernity, gesturing to ways of mapping modernity that exceed and precede systems of imperialism and globalised capital.

8 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 11. 9 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 16.

104  Bonnie Etherington Central to the mobile, flexible modernity that Perez’s poetics map out, and the reading practices those poetics encourage, is an emphasis on adaptation to, rather than incorporation of, global imperialist and capitalist conditions. For Perez, adaptation serves as a form of persistence as well as resistance. In this way, his poems resist discourses that turn Guam—and other Oceanian spaces—into globalised property, while also challenging hyper-localising discourses that could turn these spaces into isolated, static worlds. Perez’s series thus goes beyond articulating one half of colonised/coloniser or global/local binaries, and becomes ‘more than a map of remote scars’ that simply tallies Guam’s past and present traumas under the burden of imperialism. In Perez’s poems, ocean movement and ecologies help us think through land and linguistic movement and ecologies, ensuring that no environmental or poetic space in his writings comes across as ‘neutral’ or static. These spaces can be read as hyper-relational, adaptive, and grounded in particular heritages, as well as affected by particular traumas, while looking to persistent Oceanian futures.

Excerpted Acts of Relation Near the beginning of [Hacha], Perez includes several definitions of the term ‘excerpt’: ‘1432, from L. excerptus: “pluck out, excerpt”, from ex- “out” + carpere “pluck, gather, harvest”’ (H 12). Perez associates ‘excerpt’ with his own writing practices, including but not limited to his frequent use of full or partial square brackets to separate words in his poems, especially Chamorro words. He also associates ‘excerpt’ with Guam’s position as a US territory kept outside of, or excerpted from, the US nation. These dual emphases on textuality and place ask us to engage in reading practices that call attention to the materiality of his poetics as well as resituate place and linguistic specificity within those practices. In this way, Perez uses his series to ‘write from’ and ‘write Oceanic’, as he describes it elsewhere.10 He defines what it means to ‘write Oceanic’ as imagining: the blank page as an excerpt of the ocean [. . .] . The blank page [. . .] is never truly blank [. . .] . Each word is an island. The visible part of the word is its textual body; the invisible part of the word is the submerged mountain of meaning.11

10 Craig Santos Perez, ‘On Writing from the New Oceania’, Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, accessed 24 November  2016, http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2016/11/on-writing114-craig-santos-perez.html. 11 Perez, ‘On Writing from the New Oceania’.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 105 In Perez’s theory of an Oceanic or Oceanian poetics, stories are ‘vessels’, archipelagos move and expand, and his writing strategies and reading practices are predicated on both Oceania and the textual as vastly interconnected, dynamic bodies or systems that are affected by what is below the surface, as well as what is above, despite attempts to isolate them through empire.12 Consequently, Perez imagines and constructs modernity in Oceanian terms, suggesting that writing and reading practices that attend to Oceanian ecological processes and modes of intellectual engagement are necessary for mapping modernity. What this Oceanian modernity looks like is embedded in the particular linguistic and formal qualities of Perez’s poetics, as well as the reading practices those qualities encourage. While, of course, such experiments with language and form can be associated with the work of American and European modernists, Perez’s poems do not use them to define modernity, but instead speak to and with them in ways that signal the complex, transnational, transoceanic entanglements of his work, highlighting the ‘global mobility’ of his poetics, as Jahan Ramazani might say, and how it converses with a broad range of influences, while also continually destabilising any effort to fix his own expressions into a US or European modernist framework of reference.13 His project emphasises the heritage and work of creating a transpacific, conversational Oceanian community, in the same way that Wendt and Hau‘ofa imagined this community. That is, the transnationalism of Perez’s poetics particularly emphasises Oceania. In his essay ‘Our Sea of Islands’, Hau‘ofa points out that Oceanian peoples participate in acts of ‘world enlargement’ that went on well before European ‘discovery’ of the islands, and that are distinctly transoceanic in nature, going beyond economic interpretations of network and exchange.14 ‘There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands” ’, Hau‘ofa argues.15 ‘Islands in a far sea’ corresponds to a Global North, imperialist and neocolonial vision of ‘the Pacific Islands’, similar to the effect of ‘a map of remote scars’, while ‘sea of islands’ conjures up what Hau‘ofa calls ‘a world of social networks’ overlying specific Indigenous identities, rather than replacing or homogenising them.16 Likewise, Perez’s poetics do not homogenise the many Indigenous peoples and places of Oceania, but instead represent Oceanian processes of relation as appropriate for and integral to his vision and reframing of Pacific modernity.

12 Perez, ‘On Writing from the New Oceania’. 13 Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3. 14 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in We Are the Ocean (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 30. 15 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 30. 16 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 41.

106  Bonnie Etherington Excerption, therefore, describes a form of relation that both engages with this vision of modernity and also signals Perez’s emphasis on Guam’s origins and its complex present—beyond colonised/coloniser, global/ local, and modern/traditional binaries. The title of the series itself gestures towards this interpretation. As Perez states in [Hacha], ‘from indicates a particular time or place as a starting point [. . .] from imagines a source, a cause, an agent, or an instrument; from marks separation, removal, or exclusion’ (H 12). In other words, ‘from’ indicates a link between the implied subject of this phrase and its object, ‘unincorporated territory’, but it also indicates distance between the two. ‘Unincorporated’, other than referring to Guam’s legal status as a US territory, also connotes the economic affiliations that accompany ‘corporation’. If a corporation acts as a single entity, then Perez’s poetics may then act outside of this entity: they are excluded from the corporate body, but the word choice here suggests there are also some elements of agency afforded through differentiation from the body—while, of course, not negating or reducing the inequalities, limits, and traumas imposed by such exclusion. By signalling this inclusion-yet-exclusion in the title, Perez highlights Guam’s connections to US imperialism and US-centric conceptions of modernity, but at the same time does not constrain the series’ acts of resistance to only speaking back to a dominant power. The series is From Unincorporated Territory, not simply ‘unincorporated territory’. This, writes Perez, means that the poems can ‘establish an “excerpted space” via the transient, processional, and migratory allowances of the page’ (H 12). To return to the definition of ‘excerpt’ that Perez includes in [Hacha], ‘pluck’ and ‘harvest’ suggest an act of uprooting or severance in the act of excerption, and a kind of decontextualisation, but simultaneously, Perez shows that there are possibilities for re-rooting and recontextualisation as well—not through the tools of colonialism and US hegemony but through the Chamorro and Oceanian intellectual heritages and technologies he draws from (H 12). Thus, his poetics explicitly perform and spell out a vision of modernity as a process of adaptation, but always rooted in diverse Oceanian traditions. Many poems and linked sets of poems in Perez’s series repeat the ‘from  [.  .  .]’ formula, continually asking the reader to recall and refer back to different origins and sources—imperial as well as ancestral, environmental, and textual. This title formula and Perez’s definition of ‘excerpted’ both connote separation (something is ‘taken out’), and also suggest a ‘tether’ (as Chadwick Allen might say) to a larger whole, in the same way that ‘unincorporated’ makes one think of the territory that does not incorporate the other territory.17 But Perez also uses the

17 Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), xiv.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 107 notion of ‘excerpt’ and ‘unincorporated’ to explore opportunities for the kind of creative ‘world enlargement’ Hau‘ofa envisioned.18 These representations use ‘excerpted space’ to navigate alternatives to being subsumed under neoliberal hegemonic modernity that itself depends on incorporation. That is, they ‘gather’ or ‘harvest’ from a multiplicity of influences that may be refashioned into different wholes, and navigate dynamic approaches to Chamorro modernity in ways that go beyond centre-periphery relationships.

Sakman Poetics: Navigating Modernity The sakman, a Chamorro sailing vessel, is central to navigating the ‘excerpted space’ of ‘New Oceania’ in Perez’s poems, and critical to his visions of Chamorro modernity. This vessel, particularly foregrounded in Perez’s [Saina], acts as both an expression of past loss that affects the Chamorro present and as a strategy for facing the present and future through mobility and connection. The sakman, Perez writes, were ‘known as the fastest sailing vessels in the world’ (S 14). They were valued as open water vessels, rather than vessels that remained close to shore. This feature, explains Perez, is partially why the Spanish banned them in the late seventeenth century, leading to not only the loss of the vessels but also the loss of knowledge associated with their creation and navigation. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey has pointed out, canoes in Oceania act as ‘corporeal metaphor[s] of people’s genealogy, history, and sovereignty’.19 Before their destruction in Guam, sakman marked the Chamorro people as people of the open water, navigators. However, the Spanish ban enforced in material terms a colonial discourse of Guam as isolated and remote, and its people and their cultures as static and sedentary. While the US military did not continue this ban upon their arrival in Guam, neither did they dispel the perception of Guam as isolated, because a discourse of an isolated, remote, and technologically poor Guam helps justify a US imperialist presence in the region, under the guise of ‘modernisation’ and defence purposes. It is precisely these kinds of imperial impositions of ideas, technologies, and structures deemed modern that Perez pushes against. He instead advocates for an Oceanian modernity that emphasises relational processes, represented through the image of the sakman. The sakman emphasises adaptation—with difference—to, rather than incorporation of, global imperialist and capitalist conditions or conceptions of modernity, corresponding to what Gerald Vizenor calls

18 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 30. 19 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 22.

108  Bonnie Etherington ‘survivance’.20 The way Perez asks us to read his series foregrounds this emphasis on adaptation, and is also linked to the material conditions that keep Guam ‘unincorporated’. Perez writes that in 2007 the first sakman for centuries was built in Guam, and then launched in 2008. It was called ‘saina’ (S 15). ‘Saina’, according to The Chamorro Dictionary, can mean ‘Lord’, ‘parent’, or ‘elder’.21 Perez defines the term as ‘parents elders spirits ancestors’, but he also associates it with ‘root’ and ‘mast’, suggesting that he links parental/ancestral/religious heritage with both grounded growth (root) and stable movement (mast) (S 15, 18, 48). Perez thus links the loss of the sakman through colonialism to loss of heritage, knowledge, movement, and autonomy, which according to his poems, once defined the material conditions that produced the Chamorro people. In response to this loss, Perez sets his poetics up as creating another kind of sakman—a linguistic and artistic force that attempts to navigate and reencounter particular material conditions of being Chamorro under US imperialism and global capitalism. He achieves this effect in part through the inclusion of multiple languages across his poems. For readers who not only understand the Chamorro (or Spanish, or Japanese, etc.), but also understand the idiomatic nuances of the words, the inclusion of them, translated or not, offers ‘excerpted’ space for those readers where they are included more intimately in the text’s conversation than other readers. However, few readers will be familiar with all of the languages in these pages. Near the beginning of [Hacha], Perez states that part of the purpose of this series is ‘re-territorialising the Chamorro language’ (H 12). The term ‘re-territorialising’ recalls Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. For Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialisation refers to the dislodging effects of capitalism and globalism on hierarchical categories of subjectivity, but also on our relationship to place or territory.22 Reterritorialisation refers to the way in which categories, including places, and identities are re-placed or restructured, usually simultaneously along with deterritorialisation. Deleuze and Guattari associate both deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation with capitalist modernity’s commodifying effects. But for Perez, ‘re-territorialising’ appears to be a strategy that deliberately resists commodification and

20 ‘Native survivance is an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent’. Gerald Vizenor, ‘Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice’, in Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1. 21 ‘Saina’, The Chamorro Dictionary, accessed 18 February  2019, www.chamoru.info/ dictionary/display.php?action=view&id=9595&from=action=search|by=S. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Mapping Modernity in Guam 109 stasis—particularly the commodification of Guam and Chamorro linguistic and cultural specificities into a US-centred system of globalised exchange. Namely, Perez’s use of language gestures towards possibilities of modernity that acknowledge the processes of deterritorialisation, but at the same time do not imagine commodification as the only outcome of reterritorialisation. Even if Perez’s use of language in the collection cannot always escape processes of reification and commodification, he is firmly focussed on demonstrating it as adaptable, navigational, as a step on the way to reclaiming (‘re-territorialising’) language from commodification by reinscribing it as active cultural production. Thus, part of ‘re-territorialising’ across the books in the From Unincorporated Territory series means sometimes providing a translation for a Chamorro word near it, sometimes providing the translation later in a different poem, or even in another book, and sometimes not providing a translation at all or leaving us with just a partial translation. Lai argues that this technique means that ‘the reader must become a detective, tracing flows of meaning’.23 This technique recalls the language play of Global North modernists such as Stein, who uses such strategies to highlight the reader’s own processes of meaning making. Perez, though, employs this technique not just to demonstrate his dexterity and fluency with linguistic strategies most often ascribed to Global North modernists, but also as a way of repatriating those strategies as Oceanian, or Pacific, in nature. He takes approaches that readers may be most familiar with in a European modernist context, and invites readers to see them instead in an Oceanian Indigenous context. Additionally, the translingual aspects of his poetics represent the linguistic effects of colonialism, while critiquing languages such as English and Spanish that are so often held up as pathways to modernisation for colonised peoples. In the context of Perez’s language excerpts, the fact that ‘saina’ has multiple translations and associations, not only in Perez’s work but also in the dictionary, suggests that there is something unrepresentable in the term, at least in English, therefore forcing readers to confront that unrepresentability on the page, instead of subsuming it into English as a static object without attending to the processes that territorialise it, and other Chamorro words, into English. Therefore, the text, no matter a reader’s linguistic proficiencies, demands encounter with these words in other-than-linguistic ways, as dynamic processes or ecologies, rather than as objects that can be trademarked, traded, and assigned exchange value. This emphasis on language and translation, in combination with the forms of the poems, invite readers to track a word and its resonances across Perez’s books, while also resisting singular interpretation—just as a sakman might have several different possible directions in which it can

23 Lai, ‘Discontiguous’, 14.

110  Bonnie Etherington sail, bearing in mind, of course, some directions might be more possible than others.

Reterritorialising Language, Reterritorialising Modernity In a ‘from aerial roots’ section of [Saina], Perez writes ‘in spanish “hacha” could mean a large candle, torch, or ax—the gachai, a chamorro traditional stone-tipped adze used to cut and carve wood, is said to sail from the spanish world “hacha”’ (S 59). On this same page, Perez describes trying to explain to his grandmother that ‘hacha’ means ‘one’, or at least used to in Chamorro. No, she tells him: ‘uno is one i never heard of hacha’ (S 59). Here, the word ‘hacha’ takes on multiple lives, with multiple destinations. It may or may not have Spanish roots, and it may or may not have multiple meanings, and another Spanish word may or may not have erased one of its meanings from common Chamorro use. Of course, for readers of Perez’s series as a whole, it also conjures up his first collection, where he defines it as ‘one’ and waits until the second book to complicate this definition. Perez does not encourage us to read ‘hacha’ or other words in his series such as ‘achiote’ as divorced from their histories, because the poetic ecology in which these words appear underscores their dynamism and their extensions, but also their limits and vulnerabilities, their flexibility, and their communities of associations. These communities of associations make visible Guam’s histories of colonisation, and do not let readers overlook the social, political, and cultural forces that underlie and are embedded in any act of translation. At the same time, Perez’s multilingual inclusions mark Chamorro Indigeneity, modernity, and language not as static, awaiting erasure and dislocation by imperial forces, but as telling stories of modernity that do not necessarily conform to Global North representations. Perez says that, ‘in the ocean of English words, the Chamorro words in this collection remain insular, struggling to emerge within their own “excerpted space” ’ (H 12). Perez’s poems certainly highlight the struggle of the Chamorro language under processes of linguistic imperialism as well as capitalism, but they also show how we might trace their meanings outside of the collection’s pages, across histories and contexts. By showing how the Chamorro terms shift in connotation as a result of colonialism and other influences, Perez suggests that every act of reading or translating these words is already a kind of (re)territorialisation. But because translations are represented as in process rather than definitive in this series, and are affected by uneven power dynamics, Perez’s use of Chamorro words is also a strategy that resists the regionalising impulse of categorising his text as merely an example of Indigenous systems struggling under US imperialism and concepts of modernity. Instead, Perez’s strategies of linguistic reterritorialisation set up Indigenous Chamorro systems as infinitely more flexible and fluid.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 111 To illustrate these strategies, I  return to the image of the sakman, which dominates Perez’s second book. A  Chamorro non-profit organisation, Tradition About Seafaring Islands (TASI), created the sakman that was launched in 2008. An article in the Marianas Business Journal describes TASI as ‘dedicated to perpetuating the seafaring lifestyle of the Chamorro culture’.24 For Perez, this reclamation of a particular aspect of Chamorro heritage is critical and laudable but he also adds his own interpretation of what reclaiming or rebuilding sakman can look like. As the collection progresses, Perez associates ‘sakman’ with language or the tongue, while including fragments of the sakman’s long history in Guam. Perez writes: [pápakes: ‘saina’ i say how does the sakman cut waves— how do i cast my cut tongue from the tonguetide— ‘saina’ i say how to ballast my voice against the bearable— (S 70) Here, the speaker’s ‘voice’ is the thing that needs ballast, just as the sakman might need ballast for stability on the water. The speaker appeals to ‘saina’ for that ballast, implying that it will come from heritage. And, just as a sakman might ‘cut’ through waves, so the speaker asks how his tongue might be freed from the tide to sail through waves. Language acts as a kind of sakman here: as a kind of technology intrinsic to the ‘genealogy, history, sovereignty’ of the Chamorro people.25 Through these associations, we might read Perez’s treatment of language in the collection as an attempt not only to decolonise particular words and linguistic structures, but also as a navigation strategy when faced with ever-shifting conditions. Like a boat must adjust to the ocean’s conditions, so language, for Perez, is the adaptive, malleable, heritage-driven, autonomy-focussed medium of exploring possibilities of Chamorro modernity and existence in the midst of empire and capitalism’s violent conditions. This is not to say that Perez associates all language with the sakman, ‘saina’, or the ocean. He writes, ‘i know that i am not between two languages [. . .] one language controls me and the other is a lost ocean [. . .] not code, but compositions of history, story, genealogy, sound, change, meaning, practices’ (S 111). At a basic level, we might read the former language as the language of the coloniser (in this case, English),

24 ‘Spotlight: Tradition About Seafaring Islands’, Marianas Business Journal (4 May 2015), https://mbjguam.com/2015/05/04/tradition-about-seafaring-islands/. 25 DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, 22.

112  Bonnie Etherington and the latter as Chamorro. But I think it is also accurate to think of Perez navigating two different conceptions of language, or uses of language here: first, the kind of language that reifies and/or commodifies, renders peoples, cultures, and spaces static; and, second, language that is mobile, flexible, that composes stories, songs, poetry, and, as Perez puts it, ‘practices’. We might also associate these two conceptions of language with two conceptions of modernity: the first, associated with imperialism and capitalism, is enmeshed in Global North modernity, the second suggests that modernity in a Chamorro or Oceanian frame of reference is predicated on process and practice, on mobility and flexibility. ‘[O]utrigger balancing/does not rely on force/but on ability/to draw water’, we learn of the sakman’s technical composition, implying that its agility in the water depends in large part on how deep it sits in the water (S 20). That is, a sakman displaces little water thanks to its outrigger, and thus can manoeuvre close to shore as well as out in the open ocean, given the right conditions. Similarly, the series suggests that the excerpted space of Guam or Perez’s acts of writing, like a sakman, may likewise use properties of displacement for creative and relational acts that do not deny or mitigate the traumas of colonialism or neoliberalism, but also do not negate the adaptive, dynamic possibilities of Chamorro modernity (H 12).

Conclusion: Towards Oceanian Modernity The watery and the aerial are often brought together in [Saina], both represented as vast systems that can be navigated as well as used for navigation. Perez’s ‘from aerial roots’ sections make it clear that both are intrinsic to Chamorro heritage. The apparent oxymoron in the name of these sections compels thinking about both the aerial and the rooted as systems of transmission: the former of communication and breath, the latter of growth and nourishment. ‘ “Sakman” ’, the speaker says, ‘i say/ it say it/ navigates the air’ (S 34). The speaker associates the aerial here with breath, which he suggests might be ‘our only commonwealth’ (S 34). ‘Commonwealth’ connotes community, but broken into two halves it also suggests capital that is common or public. If breath becomes language, and language is represented as intrinsic to Chamorro roots, its source of nourishment, in Perez’s series, then it is also portrayed here as linguistic capital. More than that, when linked to the materiality of the sakman, it also becomes a source of sustenance, resources, and cultural and economic capital. This, of course, does not make the Chamorro language invulnerable to violence or trauma. Perez consistently represents Guam and Chamorro as in danger of being appropriated or mistranslated by outside entities in order to make the island’s products legible to the global market. But, the inverse of this vulnerability, for Perez, is the Chamorro language’s manoeuvrability, represented by the sakman’s own manoeuvrability—facilitated at least

Mapping Modernity in Guam 113 in part by an acute sensitivity to the environment as well as the environment’s movement itself. The multiple, wide-ranging quotations and fragments of quotations placed throughout the series create a kind of ‘hyper-space’ effect that embeds a sense of the uncontainable and un-commodifiable, as well as an emphasis on connectivity, into the landscapes (environmental and linguistic) of the poems. These quotations come not only from writers, like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Alfred Arteaga, but also from the Bible, government documents, and oral histories, and some sections are written in what sounds like an encyclopaedic register or legalese. At one level this suggests, as Lai puts it, that Perez ‘refuses to choose just one identity  [.  .  .] because his contemporary Chamorro body has been constituted from and transected by a range of influences, both indigenous and foreign’.26 That is, this strategy is one way that Perez’s body of work resists Euro-American territorialisation. At another level, these links and references, including between books and poems in the series, give Perez’s poetics overtly flexible, mobile, ever-expanding borders. As the poems participate in intertextual ‘conversations’ with these references, so the space of these poems is opened up to myriad possibilities: not in a way that deterritorialises, in terms of how Deleuze and Guattari imagine, but in a way that is deeply embedded in the dynamics of place—specifically the place of Oceania.27 The pages of Perez’s series do not limit the types of ‘conversations’ begun in them (argumentative, friendly, loving, etc.), because he explicitly invites readers to trace their links beyond the text. Teresa Shewry notes that representations of or gestures towards the future written by Oceanian authors are often ‘conversational in form, speaking with rather than simply about others. They associate hope with difference as well as with conversations that are enlivened by such differences’.28 Conversations, of course, convey a communal space where, ideally, dialogue is possible. While Shewry sees how ‘hope’ for the future can be gestured towards in these conversations, she also warns us to ‘remember here that conversations do not always inspire hope’.29 Just as Perez shows us the harmful and hopeful effects of transnationalism through such relational 26 Lai, ‘Discontiguous’, 2. 27 Sometimes Perez includes literal hyperlinks. For example, in one poem he asks readers to visit specific websites protesting the US military occupation of Guam (H 83). In his later books, he makes use of hashtags. 28 Teresa Shewry, Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 24. 29 Shewry, Hope at Sea, 111. Shewry also goes on to say that ‘living well with the ocean is a continual experiment, as one mode of engagement—a conversation, an outright refusal—may be provocative or critical in one context, yet empty or oppressive in another. Likewise, rather than see the connections that people forge through the ocean only in terms of the violence and inequalities that they so often mean, we might also see the struggles for survival, justice, and repair that are entangled with them’ (112–3).

114  Bonnie Etherington objects as the sakman, the relationships between different intertextual elements also may produce varied effects. This accounts for the diversity of Perez’s intertextual references, but also the difficulty of his position, writing as an Indigenous Chamorro living in diaspora, when readers might interpret his poetics as ‘merely’ reactive to particular kinds of globalisation. Perez uses his experiment of Oceanian community on the page, however, to make it ‘possible to imagine globalisation as something more than monotonous abundance’, as Néstor García Canclini has proposed.30 (178). In [Saina], Perez writes: they then

sang all their known they invented

songs new ones (S 97)

Perez links ‘they’ in this poem to the people of Guam, but also leaves it untethered from a specific collective identity, and therefore open for attachment to other ‘theys’, potentially forming solidarities across Indigenous communities, as Hau‘ofa hoped for. Adaptation through the creation of new songs is crucial in this poem, but not as a kind of assimilation. Songs are often predicated on community, and adaptation here is about creating spaces of ‘cultural and sociopolitical intermediation’ (as Canclini puts it) that provide alternatives to other spaces of cultural and socio-political intermediation.31 It is the varied, flexible, intertextual, hypertextual form of Perez’s poetics that allows for this kind of imagined space to emerge, anticipating potential conversations across Indigenous and other marginalised peoples rather than from a colonised periphery back to an imperial centre. That is, Perez’s conception or map of modernity in these poems is not one that is derived from the imperial centre, but is something imagined as inherently Chamorro, while also connected to other Oceanian modernities. In this way, Perez’s gestures towards Oceania are flexible and inclusive, while still acknowledging the barriers and tensions that can be involved in making community and modernity under particular material and hegemonic conditions. Perez’s experiment in community is consistent in its multilingualism, hypertextuality, and collective pronouns, and the modernity it imagines

30 Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, trans. George Yúdice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 178. 31 Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 14.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 115 might be called translocal, transoceanic, or trans-Indigenous.32 As a sakman travels across the Pacific Ocean to form transoceanic connections, so language, for Perez, can travel and make connections as well. He also, however, frustrates the process of bringing this kind of community together by making readers work to make connections, tracing the passage of specific terms and quotations across different poems or books, and even outside the books. This signals that it is possible to have such a modernity predicated on particular communal solidarities and forms of coalition, and even gives us strategies and resources for ‘navigating’ this kind of modernity through his poems—literally, see, for example, in [Hacha], ‘a list of references to navigate this poem’ (H 71). But his poems also do not let us forget the difficulties and the labour necessary for achieving such community or such mobility between different spaces, physical or imagined. ‘We can cross // any body/of water if we believe in/our own breath’, writes Perez, emphasising the image of language as sakman (S 48). Therefore, Perez’s experiments with language across the series develop a kind of ‘faith’ in the ongoing adaptability (the survivability and persistence) of the ‘breath’ (language), while acknowledging its limitations. The poem ‘:oceania compositions:’, hidden from [Saina]’s ‘map of contents’ under a ‘from sourcings’ heading, perhaps makes the correlations between language, the ocean, the page, the sakman, and the communities and modernities that can grow from them most explicit. Here, Perez repeatedly asserts that the page is not blank, saying, ‘no page is ever terra nullius’, insinuating that the ocean, too, is not terra nullius (S 65). In this poem, Perez’s previous emphases on spoken language are correlated with written language because ‘each page infused with myths legends talk story’ (S 65). Against these descriptions of the page are portrayals of Indigenous peoples from around the world interspersed with descriptions of a sakman at sea: ‘indigenous peoples in the himalayas’, Perez’s speaker tells us, have used the ‘aerial roots’ of the banyan tree to create ‘living bridges’ (S 65). Directly under these lines he says, ‘when sailed the outrigger faces wind even when turning’ (S 65). Here, the ‘living bridges’ image conjures up mobility (a bridge is used to travel across), flexibility (it is made up of a living, changing organism), and community (bridges connote connection). In addition, Perez explicitly associates the ‘bridges’ with forming trans-Indigenous connections and solidarities, because, directly before, the speaker describes Aztecs and Mayans using the banyan tree for ‘codices’. The banyan tree is used here for pages and bridges, which are both images of communication and connection, despite their different forms.

32 I take the term ‘trans-Indigenous’ from Allen, who first theorised it as a methodology for discussing Indigenous relationships in a way that is ‘together (yet) distinct’ (TransIndigenous, xiii).

116  Bonnie Etherington But the image of the sakman sailing into the wind does not let us forget the effort needed to form these connections and communications either. Perez acknowledges in [Saina] that sometimes voicing this poetry and voicing Oceania necessitates manoeuvrability and loss: ‘[we]/carry our stories overseas to the place called “voice”/and call // to know our allowance of water’, he writes (S 126). Perez as a poet writing in diaspora shows how sometimes the label of ‘voice’ is not afforded to Indigenous peoples until they inscribe those voices in ‘places’ (including languages) where the dominant discourse or conception of modernity recognises them as ‘voice’ that can be then commodified and marketed as ethnic difference. Perez’s dynamic linguistic strategies across these poems, though, refuse commodification, while also inviting readers to participate in acts of community with his poems, offering strategies to navigate through particular globalised spaces, and mapping modernity as process—as Oceanian process—as he goes.33 Both land and poetic sites are constituted by and imbricated in the watery spaces of Oceania, for Perez. ‘Poetry, too’, he writes, ‘consists of textual land surfaces and the surrounding deep geographies of silence, space, and meaning’ (S 126). Here, poetry is portrayed as land, and elsewhere in the collection, lungs or breath become the sea, with language as the sakman that cuts through water, arriving at the land of poetry where one can put down roots and flourish. Sakman, too is ‘sometimes the only weapon’, and this weapon, in both [Hacha] and [Saina], culminates in a Chamorro ending, not English: ‘hanom hanom hanom’ (S 130; H 96). This line is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s ‘shantih shantih shantih’ at the end of The Waste Land. For Eliot, the Sanskrit he uses acts as a way to speak ‘peace’ in a way that is ‘uncontaminated’ by its English connotations in between the World Wars. In contrast, Perez’s series dismisses notions of ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’ writing or experiences of modernity, and instead his line re-places, or reterritorialises, this reference in a specifically Oceanian context.34 ‘Hanom’, we learn in [Hacha], means ‘water’, so these books also end with the water, which, for Perez, is the basis of his poetry and of the processes of modernity his poetics envision (H 96).

Bibliography Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Canclini, Néstor Garcia. Imagined Globalization. Translated by George Yúdice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

33 His cartographic visual poems and use of punctuation also contribute to these strategies, which require another chapter to explore further. 34 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. Valerie Eliot (1922; San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 146.

Mapping Modernity in Guam 117 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound edited by Valeria Eliot. 1922. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1971. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. ‘The Ocean in Us’. The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 392–410. ———. ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In We Are the Ocean, 27–40. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Lai, Paul. ‘Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam’. Journal of Transnational American Studies 3, no. 2 (2011): 1–28. Perez, Craig Santos. From Unincorporated Territory [Hacha]. Kane‘ohe, HI: Tinfish, 2008. ———. From Unincorporated Territory [Saina]. Richmond, CA: Omnidawn, 2010. ———. ‘On Writing from the New Oceania’. Ottawa Poetry Newsletter, 24 November  2016. http://ottawapoetry.blogspot.com/2016/11/on-writing-114craig-santos-perez.html. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. ‘Saina’. The Chamorro Dictionary. Accessed 18 February 2019. www.chamoru. info/dictionary/display.php?action=view&id=9595&from=action=earch|by=S. Shewry, Teresa. Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015. ‘Spotlight: Tradition About Seafaring Islands’. Marianas Business Journal (4 May 2015). https://mbjguam.com/2015/05/04/tradition-about-seafaring-islands/. Vizenor, Gerald. ‘Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice’. In Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 1–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Woodward, Valerie Solar. ‘ “I  Guess They Didn’t Want Us Asking Too Many Questions”: Reading American Empire in Guam’. The Contemporary Pacific 25, no. 1 (2013): 67–91.

7 Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses: Ellison’s Invisible Man, Soaba’s Wanpis, and Oceanian Literary Modernism Paul Lyons James St. Nativeson—the dedicated young artist in Russell Soaba’s first novel, Wanpis (1977)—appears to have been fated to become an Oceanian revenant. Unwilling to betray himself by following cultural scripts written for the first wave of postcolonial Oceanian writers, and consigned to a bureaucratic desk, he is crushed underfoot by ‘drunken labourers’ at the moment of Papua New Guinean independence. In his creatively independent spirit and aesthetics St. Nativeson might be said to resemble Soaba, one of the foremost writers of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose major works include the allegorical novel Maiba (1985) and the poetry collection Kwamra: A Season of Harvest (2000), along with many poems, stories, essays, and statements on PNG Arts. Though Soaba’s St. Nativeson left only ‘random notes’ for a novel meant to ‘startle the Third Black World’, he keeps returning in PNG criticism and literature as a ‘forerunner of free thought’.1 For instance, Steven Winduo describes his own Lomo’ha, the returning ancestral figure of Lomo’ha I  am, In Spirits Voice I  call, as James St. Nativeson ‘resurrected’.2 In a series of poems in Kwamra, including ‘The Return of Nativeson’, Soaba portrays St. Nativeson in terms of anticipated but deferred returns. St. Nativeson is seer, parable, warning, a fact of history who undergoes injustices that are forgotten even as they are ongoing, and whose anonymity, in the circling temporalities of Oceanian literatures, may figure desultory futures: literatures that fail to connect with audiences in time; authors who fail to pull together fragmented elements of vision; nations that fail to support or mourn their artists; an ‘Oceanian modernism’ whose dynamic aesthetic and philosophical promises may go unrealised or remain invisible, at home and abroad.

1 Russell Soaba, Wanpis (Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1977), 115, 104–5. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as W. 2 Steven Edmund Winduo, Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in Papua New Guinea (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2012), 81.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 119 If Wanpis appears in a received modernist sense to be a portrait of the alienated artist as a young man—or of a group of artists, or the ‘emergent’ literature of a society (and a region) faced with becoming ‘a stranger to itself’3—it is so in distinctive and complexly Papua New Guinean and Oceanian terms. My assumption here is that Oceanian modernism(s), in forms as varied as the region, written by authors from vastly different political contexts, are engaged in a collective project of working free of any Eurocentric understanding of dialectics that would keep Oceanian artistic and textual practices tethered to neocolonial versions of modernism, in which terms of visibility and legibility in the distributive institutions of literature remain externally controlled. The coalescing of Pasifika ‘literature’ involves an immanent critique of all gatekeepers who would go on defining what qualifies as modernist-enough responses to modernity to gain sectoral validity. In terms of the emergence of a regional literature—concerned with breakdowns and fragmentations in the cultural continuities and regional interconnections that preceded colonial modernity—the formal engagement with Euro-American modernisms that are predicated on a rejection of their inherited traditions is inherently layered and complex. Engagement with Euro-American modernisms are thus often selfconsciously mediated, fluid, or ironised. In their worlding dimensions, Pasifika texts perform innovative and mutually affirming responses to the calls to consciousness voiced by other Indigenous and Africana modernities, which are often affined in their exploration of decolonial and boundary-breaking modernist aesthetics that aim to prefigure new faces of freedom. To the degree that concerns about genealogical relations, kinship, and reciprocity remain at the core of the literatures of Oceania—and imply the durability and renewability of ‘older Native globalizations’4— an underlying theme might be described as an Oceanian modernist attempt to reset cultural expression to Oceanian time and archipelagic space. If, as in a work like John Brannigan’s Archipelagic Modernism, a ‘connective, relational’ approach among sites of British and Irish modernist expression is now working to replace the imperial logics often embedded in island nation-state-centred modernisms,5 in Pasifika contexts, a sense of regional connectivity is seen as an organic, precolonial fact that Oceanian modernism foregrounds. As Damon Salesa argues, the resurgent attention to non-linear time and archipelagic space reveals 3 Zak Tiamon, ‘Russell Soaba’s Wanpis’, Ondobondo 2 (1983): 29–30. 4 Vicente M. Diaz, ‘Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian Sea-Faring, Archipelagic Thinking, and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity’, Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (2011): 21–32. 5 John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890– 1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 146.

120  Paul Lyons how quotidian Indigenous ways are as ‘articulate’ with ‘great forces at work in the present—(post)colonialism, development, globalization, commercialization’—as they are with the ‘deep and resonant past’.6 One charge for postcolonial writers, as Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze argues in reference to modern African fiction, is to engage in ‘existential repair’ of trajectories that were interrupted by a ‘foreign reality’.7 For AfricanaPasifika peoples, repair happens in an atmosphere that prizes affinities across time and space, and that eschews notions of unidirectional influence. To speak of Oceanian modernism in this context is to reorder and reconceptualise the control terms in and through which Indigenous aesthetic expression attempts to (re)take place and reconfigure space, within and against terms that threaten to delimit or distort an evolving Indigenous response to new political and material scenes. In attuning to connective notes among Africana and Pasifika texts, and to the consciousness that Soaba’s Wanpis develops as a critically self-conscious and exploratory Oceanian modernism, one might thus listen for the conversations within which the book situates itself. The name James St. Nativeson, with which the poet has ‘christened’ (W 20) himself in place of his given, Christian name, Jimi Damebo, activates one series of codes and philosophical coordinates. ‘James’ + ‘Nativeson’ evokes the black modernist novelists James Baldwin and Richard Wright, whose voices echo, with Ralph Ellison’s, through the novel. In combining ‘James’ and ‘Nativeson’, Soaba might be heard as well to call up Baldwin’s critique of Wright’s Native Son (1940) in Notes from a Native Son (1955), which, like Ellison’s critique of protest fiction, sees Wright as having fallen into representational traps that preclude the depiction of black people as ‘intelligent [. . .] creative or dedicated’.8 The name Nativeson is not meant to mask identity so much as to put on maiba about what it means to write with integrity under a political independence compromised by neocolonialism. Soaba defines ‘maiba’ as an Anuki ‘form of communication that expresses truths through parables and riddles. A maiba subscribed by the encoder registers in the consciousness of the decoder firstly as a riddle, then this riddle must be unraveled down to a deeper truth’. In Soaba’s formulation, maiba is simultaneously one of the devices by which the author is ‘living the pulse and beat of our languages within the flesh of the English language itself’.9

6 Damon Salesa, ‘The Pacific in Indigenous Time’, in Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, ed. David Armitage and Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 31. 7 Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 192, 219. 8 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 120. 9 Russell Soaba, Kwamra: A Season of Harvest (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2000), vii, ix.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 121 Against assuming a ‘white mask’ or annihilated name, the pseudonym ‘St. Nativeson’ resolves to work toward an imaginative modernism that includes Africana and Pasifika traditions, in which expressive masks (and verbal clusters) may afford protection, convey communally legible aesthetic meanings, reflect outlooks and traditional perspectives. In a striking poem, ‘Through His Eyes’, Soaba describes an artist who has gone abroad, and whose father has died in his absence, going to the village cemetery to dig ‘in search of reality’. After he exhumes and breaks the skull of his father to ‘wear its fore-half as a mask’, he enjoins the reader to ‘try it/look thru these eye-holes/see the old painting/view the world/in the way the dead had done’.10 If assumed names are masks in Wanpis, they are worn by characters in existential protest.11 As ‘Anonymous’, the narrator, describes it: ‘I too had, in protest, erased my names in my birth certificate. We wanted to be independent’ (W 4). Anonymous is not the absence of a name so much as the naming of expanding absences as threats to continuity—covered-over place names, chiefly names, peoples that haunt the cracks of history and go unnoticed or are left as ‘waste’ (W 61) along the highway to modernity, as well as losses of languages, habitats, species. At stake for Pasifika literatures are culturally sourced notions of independence in modernity that fold together personal, cultural, aesthetic, ecological, philosophical, and political dimensions. Such layerings of mobile and fluid subjectivities resonate with the foundational problematic of departure and repatriation in the widening Africana modernist contexts that crisscross Oceanian formations. In the Africana context, this can be seen in Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land and Amiri Baraka’s ‘Return of the Native’, which portrays Harlem as a ‘violent and transforming’ site: ‘Harlem/is cruel modernism’.12 In the Oceanian context, the courtroom scene in Wright’s Native Son echoes through the ‘Trial of the Native Son’ chapter of Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree: in both texts, the society that puts the ‘native son’ on trial is itself arraigned, its organising assumptions and principles opened out for the reader’s judgement. Africana modernist references echo through other Pasifika titles, such as Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1973), or Haunani-Kay Trask’s gender-restoring title, From a Native Daughter (1993), or Mahealani Dudoit’s ‘My Father’s Garden’, which

10 Soaba, Kwamra, 29. 11 In conceiving of names as masks, I draw on Soaba and on Steven Edmund Winduo, The Unpainted Mask (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2010). I draw also on Ellison’s idea that ‘we must learn to wear our names [. . .] they must become our masks and our shields and the containers of all the values and traditions which we [. . .] imagine as being the meaning of our familial past’—and of traditions of ‘deflect[ing] racial provocation’ (Ellison, Shadow and Act, 148, 111). 12 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Black Magic Poetry: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), 108.

122  Paul Lyons evokes Alice Walker’s ‘In My Mother’s Garden’. Such imaginative returns of the native to find what Wendt describes as ‘our dead [. . .] woven into our souls’ are at once circlings in consciousness, enacted through spatial movement, and reclamations of voided subjectivities through elevations ‘in and of language’.13 While in African American texts, ‘native son’ includes a sense of having the inborn right to have legal rights, in Pasifika texts it marks who is Indigenous and who is not. Thus, these titles at once engage Africana resistance to anti-blackness, affirm Black Power, and invoke the political priority and suppressed rights of the ‘native’ in an occupied country. That one declares oneself ‘Nativeson’ takes as given ground the invasive presence of non-natives and the preoccupations at work in externally maintained aesthetic categorisations. The name St. Nativeson situates Wanpis within Afro-modernist redirections of Western existentialist frames toward vernacular and pragmatic traditions of critiquing social concepts, such as liberal formulations of freedom. Native sons and daughters in Oceanian modernism also position themselves in relation to philosophies of existence reaffirmed as already functioning and debated within precolonial Africana and Indigenous frameworks. Contemporary Africana existentialist thought, as Lewis R. Gordon engages it in Existentia Africana, involves being ‘simultaneously one identity and its outsider’ and striving to articulate Africana philosophies from modernism’s underside, or from positionalities that Eurocentric modernism has ontologically blocked.14 In PNG—a country with so many small language and multilingual communities—Apisai Enos argues that almost every writer is forced outside of their thought system, or works through multiple languages and creoles, with languages and thought-systems often existentially threatened.15 The repositioning of the native as settler or newcomer within new linguistic and socio-cultural spatialities, who revitalises native expressive categories through overlays of language that mark threatened places in time, differs foundationally from the European critique of presence. Soaba’s Wanpis concerns natives as outsiders within a society thought of as outside ‘world’ literary culture. Black existentialism underscores the ways in which concepts built around the dream of a universal subject-hood, outside of cultural memory and the wounded ontologies in its wake, serve as neither a philosophically

13 Albert Wendt, ‘Toward a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 50; Fred Moten, ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’, South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 760. 14 Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York; London: Routledge, 2000), 42, 1. 15 Apisai Enos, ‘Niugini Literature: A  View from the Editor’, Kovave 4, no. 1 (1972): 46–9.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 123 viable nor a desirable entry or endpoint. Pasifika existentialism likewise turns away from Eurocentric modernist terms of recognition that might distort its production and reception. For Baldwin, it is in and against this experience of being ‘bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization’, and through ‘legend, myth, coercion’ that the subject faces an ‘inner void’ that demands ‘forever, a new act of creation’.16 To want to step outside of felt determinants differs from never having been considered outside of history or as abject within it. St. Nativeson, as the novel performs him, cannot yet be heard within the new PNG, let alone in an outside where, to become visible, he would have to participate in some form of colonial mimicry, or simulated neo-tribalism, or tropes like that of ‘the angry indigene’.17 Situated within these epistemic coordinates, Wanpis protests against forms of protest that Soaba considers justified but delimiting, suggesting that they eventuate in immature art at once promoted by and condescended to by liberal allies. For Soaba, this was one problem with Ulli Beier’s preconceptions—based on experiences in Nigeria and a model of nation-building, anti-colonial, ethnographic literature—about what firstwave PNG literature should be and do. In conversation with the Australian critic Kirsty Powell (to whom Wanpis is dedicated), Soaba described Beier as more concerned with the: speeding [. . .] to an earlier recognition (even if it would mean introducing anti-colonial plots and themes to achieve this), rather than the question of what motifs there were for the Niuginian writers (who must at this stage accept that they are merely the avant-gardes to what might become known as Niuginian literature) to invent, to think about, and to turn them to definite forms of originality.18 Soaba implies that Beier’s approach, for all its entrepreneurial skill in putting PNG writing on the postcolonial literary map, fell into what Frantz Fanon found objectionable in Jean Paul Sartre’s essay ‘Orphée Noir’ in Leopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (1948). For Fanon, Sartre had proposed a dialectic that ultimately advocated black assimilation into a world subject: ‘I am not a potentiality of something’, Fanon responded, ‘I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside of me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out

16 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 20. 17 Regis Tove Stella, Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 184. 18 Kirsty Powell, ‘The First Papua New Guinean Playwrights and Their Plays’ (PhD diss, University of Papua New Guinea, 1975), 47.

124  Paul Lyons as a lack’.19 Beier’s journal Black Orpheus: African and Afro-American Literature, which he co-founded, co-edited, and funded, took its title from Sartre’s essay. Beier promoted cultural exchange between Africa and the Pacific, proposing detailed programmes, and suggesting that Africans and African Americans might become a significant audience for Pasifika writing.20 Beier recalls how initially ‘African literature became an inspiration to many Papua New Guinean writers, because they identified with many of the cultural anxieties and political issues which African authors [. . .] were concerned with’.21 He promoted African American literature and art in PNG as well, primarily for its militancy against ‘white values’, including aesthetic ideals, but not without the reifying suggestion of an authentic folk self that only needed expression.22 Ellison, while aiming for a version of universalism, and crediting canonical modernist authors (Hemingway, Eliot, Joyce) with directing his return to folk narrative and vernacular sources, clearly opposes any injunction ‘to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I  strive toward colorlessness?’23 ***** The foregoing suggests that thinking about Oceanian literary modernities might benefit from more attention to historical, imaginative, and philosophical connections and conversations within and among Africana and Pasifika thought and creative expression. The point is not that PNG or Oceanian literary modernism aspired to be Afromodernisms, but that the resonances among Pasifika and Africana arts have been much richer imaginatively and philosophically than have been discussed. At their connecting points, agential alternatives appear, amending conceptions of European thought as the inescapable reference point for a ‘Janus-faced’ black modernity. Discussions about call and response among Africana and Pasifika modernist art—which evoke oral and acoustic cultural dimensions—need not use Eurocentric modernist features as comparators, or be constituted in and through their relations with Euro-American modernisms, however much engagements with these traditions may be self-consciously or even appreciatively bound and looped into the texts. Though Africana and Pasifika literatures

19 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967), 135. 20 Ulli Beier, Annex V: Proposal for Exchanges Between Africa and the Pacific. Advisory Committee for the Study of Oceanic Cultures Report (Paris: UNESCO, 1977), 12. 21 Ulli Beier, Decolonizing the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74 (Canberra: Pandanus, 2005), 138. 22 Beier, Decolonizing the Mind, 5–6. 23 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; New York: Vintage International, 1995), 577. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as I.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 125 have at different times been positioned by the world literary system as anti-modern, each rejects the premise that work cannot at once express deeply vertical continuities—call-and-response relations with ancestors and ancestral knowledge—and be horizontally linked with modern art. Noting references to Africana texts in first-wave Pasifika texts is hardly new: nearly every narrative of the emergence of Pacific literature notes its connections to third-world anti-imperialism and a global black consciousness movement. Unfortunately, this narrative threatens, as Dipesh Chakrabarty warns in another context, to become its own kind of controlling narrative, within which Pasifika literatures might appear as copies. The spectre of derivativeness is no doubt one reason why there are so few sustained discussions of relations among Africana and Pasifika literatures.24 A call-and-response framework tends to what lights up when literatures meet, whether they are contemporaneous, intergenerational, or cross-cultural; it side-steps the pitfalls of comparativism, and the flatness of regarding Africana-Pasifika relations primarily in terms of the latter’s appropriation of anti-colonial tactics and expression of ‘black’ anger. A  call-and-response approach avoids seeing Pasifika literatures as simply parallel to or analogous with other literatures emerging from colonialism—or as a serial to them, as implied in James Clifford’s discussion of ‘indigenitude’ as a reiteration of the ‘negritude’ movement.25 It pushes back against monologic narratives of Oceanian literary emergence, in which, independence achieved, relationships among Africana and Pasifika writers end, and Pasifika literature must break free, in the process suffering a period of decline. And it resists arguments implying that Africana-Pasifika relationships were always more instrumental than vital, philosophical, aesthetic, and ongoing, and that the literature itself was constituted by what it fought against.26 Soaba emphasises that positioning one’s writing as primarily against anti-blackness—which it is clearly surrounded by—delimits the scope of philosophical struggles of freedom and meaning to terms brought and maintained by the foreigner. At its nadir, this produces an afro-pessimism 24 For important exceptions, see Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); and Robbie Shilliam, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 25 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 16. 26 For examples of such arguments, see Nigel Krauth, ‘“Unfolding Like Petals”: The Developing Definitions of the Writer’s Role in Modern Papua New Guinean Literature’, in Readings in Pacific Literature, ed. Paul Sharrad (Wollongong: New Literatures Research Centre, 1993), 54; and Trevor James, ‘Black Literature in the Pacific: The Spider and the Bee’, in Connections: Essays on Black Literatures, ed. Emmanuel Sampath Nelson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), 72.

126  Paul Lyons that Fred Moten tropes as ‘Blackness and Nothingness’. Sartre’s committed choice is attenuated in the forms of cancelled options or subjectivities among what Soaba describes in Wanpis as those ‘born without a choice’ (W 20). Even the ability to opt out of or renounce privilege would tend to confirm it. Contemplative authors are conscripted, however much they reject the prescribed responses to the crimes committed against their minds. Anonymous is all too aware of writing from occupied spaces: to a friend’s apologetic suggestion with respect to an Australian with an unhappy conscience that ‘these Australians must be feeling the same things we would feel if we were living in their society’, Anonymous answers with uncharacteristic exasperation: ‘What do you mean—if we were living in their society? We are already living in their society!’ (W 72). Were the situations simply reversible or transposable, his existential situation would be different. In relation to a racialised modernity, Oceanian modernist thought often suggests the existential difference that following its own versions of existentialism makes, in ways that precede the dynamic in which absurdity resulted from the world never having been meant to make sense for the colonial subject. Wendt’s ways of looking at the void are not Sartre’s, as Sartre’s Vase is not pō (dark, night) or vā (the charged and gestative spaces of relations); one imperative of criticism, for Wendt, is precisely to respect people ‘who may view the Void differently’—different philosophical orientations, and cultural motifs, produce space and relations themselves differently.27 To speak of vā in the context of Pasifika existentialism is not to refer to emptiness but to a philosophical approach to relations among persons and things ‘that must be nursed and nurtured’.28 As Albert Refiti argues, the Indigenous words translated as ‘void’ do not signify ‘void’ in English dictionary senses, but a ‘context in which the work of creation can begin’.29 For Soaba, one might maintain a non-contradiction between existentialism and the belief that ‘when we look at the wombs of our beginnings with [. . .] intellectual hunger we must know that we have arrived, that we are home’.30 Existential themes in Pasifika texts—for all the frequent allusions to and juxtapositions with Sartre and Camus—are culturally sourced cords that stretch across black abysses of time, ancestral masks that evoke connections even as they express what might appear to be a ‘classical’ modernist dislocation.

27 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 58. 28 Albert Wendt, The Adventures of Vela (Wellington: Huia, 2009), 10. 29 Albert L. Refiti, ‘Mavae and Tofiga: Spatial Exposition of the Samoan Cosmogony and Architecture’ (PhD diss., Auckland University of Technology, 2014), 78. 30 Russell Soaba, ‘The Writer’s Place in a Difficult Society’, in Unfolding Petals: Readings in Modern Papua New Guinean Literature, ed. Regis Tove Stella (Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2012), 70.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 127 One central plotline of the modernist aspect of Oceanian literatures is thus to recast questions seemingly brought by colonial modernity, so that, at one level, the existentialist-modernist characters—who are never so much outside of culture as ‘in the breaks’ of (neo)coloniality—rediscover what traditionalists in the books already knew: ‘I yam what I am’ (I 266), as Ellison puns. That loving an Africana staple comes as revelation taps into the absurdity that pervades Ellison’s Invisible Man: ‘life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd’ (I 579). In Sons for the Return Home, Wendt writes that ‘[a]bsurdity in life was at the core of all Polynesian myths’. For Wendt, to be in the Void is to be in Pouliuli’s mouth31; ‘Live with your head in the lion’s mouth’, the Grandfather says in Invisible Man (I 16). Existentialisms are read and re-represented in these novels as conceptual positions already within Africana and Pasifika philosophy. The call-and-response relations among Invisible Man and Wanpis are thus both part of a larger sense of cultural connection and angled by Soaba in ways that foreground the predicaments of invisibility and anonymity, which both works show to be resource-rich positionalities as well, often sublated within projects critically approached as autoethnographic protest literatures. ‘In our moments of invisibility, in our deepest sense of anonymity’, Soaba writes, ‘we know we have arrived. We feel complete, we become one with Ralph Ellison’.32 Reading Soaba and Ellison together thematises conditions of (in)visibility/anonymity in general and specifically regional senses: Pasifika texts within an anti-black world republic of letters, and even a canon of postcolonial literatures in which Pasifika texts hardly figured; for an Africana-Pasifika relation that was only being discussed in terms of protest; and for discussions of blackness internal to Oceania that go on being elided. As Audre Lorde wrote, there is a ‘fight’ for the ‘very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness’, for ‘we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings’. For Lorde, this requires ‘a reclaiming of that language that has been made to work against us’.33 That the relationship of Soaba’s text to Ellison’s seems to have been missed redoubles central themes of Wanpis. There has been a kind of Ellisonian invisibility—invisibility as ‘simply because people refuse to see me’ (I 3)—that points to critical investments. When something is both a

31 Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home (1973; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996), 99; Albert Wendt, Pouliuli (1977; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 97. Subsequent references to these editions will be signalled within the text as S and P, respectively. 32 Russell Soaba, ‘Roominations: Our Ten Best Novels of All Seasons’, Soaba’s Storyboard (blog), 12 February  2015, http://soabasstoryboard.blogspot.com/2015/02/10-bestnovels-in-english_12.html. 33 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 42–43.

128  Paul Lyons given and not articulated, the reasons may be pickled within the story. As with the relations between Wanpis and Invisible Man, perhaps, sustained thinking about Africana-Oceanian imaginative connections, as one productive window into the region’s modernism, would at the least complicate the notion of a counter-cultural relation to European modernism, in which Pasifika-Africana literatures can hardly be linked outside of their common existential opposition to anti-blackness. At stake seems the (in)visibility of Pacific literatures within postcolonial and world literatures as institutional spaces, and of Pacific literatures within Asia-Pacific constructions, and further of the minoritising of Melanesian literatures within the institutions of Pacific literature. ‘Brother, you know the score’, a visiting African professor tells a Pasifika audience member in Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home, when challenged on the dynamics of antiblack racism within Pasifika cultures as having taken on a (post)colonial life of their own.34 Ignoring the call-and-response relation of Soaba and Ellison’s experimental, mixed-form texts in these contexts cuts off Soaba’s animating conversation, not just with Invisible Man, but with the Africana modernist traditions that Ellison advocated as better dignifying the struggle of ‘invisible’ people. By extension one might question the implicit critique of Soaba as, like Ellison, apolitical, aestheticist, or even reactionary—written for the outsider’s gaze—and bear in mind that for Ellison, definitionally, a ‘hibernation is a covert preparation for an overt action’ (I 13). ***** Soaba’s pronounced call-and-response relation to Invisible Man runs across the text, in numerous thematic, scenic, and verbal echoes, through Wanpis’s architecture and method, and through the angles of his engagement with the political thinkers of his own time and place and the role of the artist. Both texts document migrations from small town or agricultural to hemmed-in urban spaces, as quintessentially modernist journeys, travelling through a cross-section of their societies, mixing allegory, parable, and vernacular signifying practices, and suggesting beyond their novelistic frames an expanding diaspora. Both, from an ironic and retrospective view, track the progress of the unnamed narrator’s mind through phases of consciousness, spiralling ‘vertically downward’ in what is potentially part of ‘a process of rising’.35 Soaba’s engagements with the concepts of prominent thinkers in his society, unnamed but thinly veiled—including Bernard Narakobi, Leo Hannett, and John Kasaipwalova—in that sense echo Ellison’s responses

34 Wendt, Sons for the Return Home, 98. 35 Ellis, Shadow and Act, 57.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 129 to Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey, who are generally recognisable but not named within his philosophical engagements. Like Ellison, Soaba aimed to ‘create a narrator who could think as well as act’, to ‘give him a consciousness in which serious philosophical questions could be raised’ (I xxi-xxii), and to take him through a range of political positions. This is in keeping with what might be called the plot of public transformation in black intellectual autobiography, where (as in Amiri Baraka, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X) the hero embodies and performs an Afro-modern/Oceanian-modern journey of awakening consciousness. This involves at the same time, material situatedness as a principal novelistic responsibility, and in Ellison’s terms giving the protagonist ‘a range of diction that could play upon the richness of our readily shared vernacular speech’ that would address ‘various levels of society’ (I xxii). In suggesting that these levels are ‘spoken for’, as the famous last line of Invisible Man suggests—‘who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ (I 581)—Ellison implies a mode in which ‘speaking for’ (as a representative of) can connect with ‘speaking for’ (in expressive support of fellow sufferers). One reading of the line is that Ellison addresses white readers, on the ‘lower frequencies’, since they will not hear him above ground yet; he must ‘speak for’ them so that they can know themselves. Soaba responds to Ellison and the existentialist questions Invisible Man raises in trickster tones, in and through Tok Pisin terms that engage the structures of thrown-openness as an Oceanian existentialist issue, with reversals of its own. In Soaba’s formulation, existential thought was already part of his cultural/philosophical outlook, and needed only to be rearticulated in a postcolonial context: ‘It felt that I was reading the French existentialist [. . .] not only to learn a new idea, a new philosophy, but to also re-live what had already been my past, my inheritance as it were’.36 Of Sartre, St. Nativeson says ‘quite frankly, the Frenchman’s just paining himself writing of me; I am the reality of his unintended intensions’ (W 114). Anonymous in Wanpis can develop his ‘very personal views of existentialism’ as ‘fundamentally Papua New Guinean’.37 Steven Winduo and others have discussed how the characters in Wanpis embody the Tok Pisin terms lusman (loser, loner, individualist), ‘split-egg nostalgic’ (urban native who romanticises the village, and is ambivalent [split] between longing for the village and looking forward), and wanpis (detached and alienated but called to responsibility). Wanpis opens with an introduction to the novel’s terms of lusman being. Anonymous and

36 Russell Soaba, ‘Russell Soaba: An Interview’, by Kirpal Singh, Westerly 2 (1984): 55–6. 37 Soaba, ‘Russell Soaba’, 56; William McGaw, ‘Russell Soaba’s Wanpis: The Role of the Writer in Papua New Guinea’, in Readings in Pacific Literature, ed. Paul Sharrad (Wollongong: New Literatures Research Centre, 1993), 76.

130  Paul Lyons his roommate, who has named himself Just Call Me Joe after a line in a Western film, realise that they have allowed the moment when they should have been tribally initiated to pass (‘my ears weren’t pierced. Which meant that I had not been initiated in the village’, W 5); the time when they should have received tribal knowledge has passed without them knowing it while they were in school; they have not been conscious enough, existentially, to make an informed choice. This detail, which suggests the interpretive challenges faced by uninitiated readers of Wanpis, has profound cultural implications. Further, as the child of an absent colonial agent and an Anuki mother, Enita, who has passed away, Soaba’s narrator is not eligible to own land. It is in part the riddle of his predicament that he protests. (Wanpis frequently presents topoi that take riddlelike structures: my father is white and absent; my dead mother haunts my memory; where am I culturally?). He will remain anonymous until he understands his responsibilities. The catch is a society in which social responsibility increasingly means joining a soul-killing bureaucracy in the name of an ostensibly independent yet neocolonially compromised state. St. Nativeson, who cannot afford university, winds up as a clerk in this system, which seems set up to direct talented young people away from playing creative roles in imagining the new nation; the native elite is rather to substitute for the departed colonist. In keeping with the multiple contradictions of Wanpis, Anonymous’s birth-certificate name is finally revealed, bearing a colonial and biblical stamp: he has been named ‘Abel’, presumably after the Australian missionary Charles Abel. Soaba works scene by scene through the major conceptual options of the time, layering folk tales, trickster myths, and maiba into allegories or feverish dream-logic passages along roads marked by ‘thick dividing line[s]’ (W 61), which, as with Ellison’s divided road, are only ‘halfconsciously  [.  .  .] followed’ (I 46). In Wanpis, leaving the school, Anonymous experiences ‘the paradox of [his] whole life, ‘running wild into the webs of the free world, escaping one net of confusion just to be caught in another, just to return [. . .] a few years later in a completely distorted state of mind’ (W 50). Ellison and Soaba ironise in particular the educational system, within which the naïve, well-meaning, talented protagonists have been held in thrall. What they could not see about themselves in each case drives the action, as the novels wind back from blindspot to blindspot to the problem: white ‘Fathers’ have set themselves up to direct black children on how to guide their people humbly along a gradualist path toward integration and post-independence: ‘Don’t ever speak in your dialect again, unless it’s a weekend’, the children are ordered (W 13), with echoes of Fanon. Like Ellison, Soaba plots an about face against the ‘White Fatherism’ that claims to ‘know how things are, will be, must be’ (W 52), seen as reduplicated in the attitudes of political leaders toward black spokesmen (‘who are you anyway, the great white father?’, Invisible Man asks the Brotherhood’s leader, I 473). That the ‘Father’ in Wanpis is named

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 131 George W. Jefferson activates the US context as analogous to the colonial one along the axis of race/nation, reinforcing black American claims to internal colonisation, and suggesting how Founders write themselves into the national narrative. The benefactors claim to be coupling their ‘destiny’ (W 8–9) to ‘the destiny of your people’ (I 32)—‘your people were somehow connected with my destiny’ (W 41, cf. I 95)—while doing everything to socially engineer outcomes in which the protagonists will identify with and speak for ‘false democracy that is completely white’ (W 64). All Saints’, the school in Wanpis, is literally laid out in the shape of a cross over a silent valley, figuring the mission impulse planted on the land. While the campus remains lush and green, nearby valleys are drying out. Without crops, the villagers who saved the school’s founder, Archibald Goldsworth, during the Second World War, go hungry. Yet they generously give their few coconuts to the hand-picked children of the region who are being educated into a new comprador elite, with the headman’s blessing, although he lacks the money to send his own son to the school. If the elite come from villages being dried out by philanthropists (who have ‘come to help the poor villager’, W 55), and will be accountable as educated natives to the village, what is it that they can actually provide? As in Invisible Man, the protagonist only belatedly understands the implication of his sense of self becoming conflated with the school’s mission: ‘Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and now I was losing it’ (I 99); Anonymous recalls All Saints’ ‘as green and silent’; to leave means ‘losing all the refuge and confidence [he] had depended on’ (W 12, 25). In Wanpis, the boys, unable to ‘grow home again’, look for new forms of the group affiliations that they are accustomed to. At the university, having at first ‘difficulty in deciding what group to conform to, or in what group I  would know that I  was myself and not somebody else’, Anonymous and J. C. M. Joe ‘both found [them]selves enthusiastic members of the University’s Black Power movement’ (W 45). Like Invisible Man, Anonymous writes speeches for the group, and allows his words to be appropriated for a rally called ‘Looking into Ourselves’, although the Black Power Party seems unaware of exactly what his speech was aiming for in arguing that the black man needs life (W 85). Anonymous can only watch as his words return to him, acknowledging the ‘poetic sway of negritude’, but unable to remain both within it and outside it that his philosophy of consciousness requires. In Wanpis, Soaba does not so much address Black Power as a series of policies, as articulated in Leo Hannett’s ‘Niugini Black Power’, or the call, ‘Black man know thyself, and act accordingly’,38 because he finds the campus movement’s practice of liberation compromised by

38 Leo J. Hannett, ‘Nuigini Black Power’, in Racism, the Australian Experience: A Study of Race Prejudice in Australia, ed. Frank S. Stevens (Sydney: Taplinger, 1972), 51.

132  Paul Lyons its pressures to conform and by what seem reactive agendas. As such, his critique resembles Ellison’s critique of the Brotherhood in Invisible Man, whose leadership can react to Invisible Man’s speech only in terms of its energy in arousing audiences (‘the speech was wild [. . .] it was incorrect’, I 349), or in terms of its adhesion to fixed positions on such topics as ‘The Woman Question’. The Black Power Movement in Wanpis is in a sense the Brotherhood rotated into racial terms, with its own ideological scripts: ‘Once at a beer party in one of the professor’s residencies a senior Black Power member punched me for making statements that were “proven contradictory” to the movement’s “wellthought out policies” ’ (W 80). Neither author sees genuine freedom—personal or collective— as emerging from being told what to say, or in speaking without reciprocating and interactive audiences. And neither has faith that violent uprisings provoked by charismatic orators will help the ‘squalorstricken villages’ or alleviate the ‘tribal confusion plaguing the city’ and its ‘custom-stripped’ urban natives. Soaba’s Anonymous, rather, sees the milling crowds under the sun as being burnt ‘into a charcoal of national unity’ (W 104), a consolidation that burns away the sap and distinctive grains of its own cultures. For both Ellison and Soaba, that is, the prior condition of authentic modernist consciousness—personal, cultural, political, communal, regional, national, transnational—is a willingness of individuals to hazard their own humanity, without which people will continue to be dispossessed in the name of their own well-being, whether by philanthropic social engineers, labour movements, ‘Big Men’, or ethno-nationalists urging tradition in ways that they themselves would not follow. In the end, as Invisible Man says while witnessing the eviction of an old couple, people without resources for inhabiting their own cultural memory may be ‘dispossessed of even [their] dislike of being dispossessed’ (I 277). It would be misguided, given such descriptive clarity in class analysis throughout the book, and its depiction of barbarism against black people, to argue that Invisible Man or Wanpis represent a ‘classically’ modernist retreat into existentialist abstraction and aesthetics. As in Invisible Man, the critique and social analysis is built into the fabric of the novel, not declaimed as its reason for being. Racialised and gendered labour and social striation is figured as a daily traffic jam on the road to modernity in Wanpis: ‘Asians in white Toyotas’, ‘black faces in enormous lorries’, ‘whites in brand new Datsuns and Mercedes with their black girls’, all being ‘manufactured, shaped, moulded by the very vehicles they drove’ (W 81). Yet the philosophical questions remain in Invisible Man and Wanpis of how the narrators can justify their own thought as independent, know that it is their thought, freely chosen, adequate to their reality, authentic in its connectivities, and capable of responsible agency among and toward the societies that have constituted them.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 133 I think of Soaba, in this foundational Papua New Guinean novel whose action is ‘pre’ and ‘post’ (‘pre-post-erous’) in looking at independence and creative sovereignty, as responding to the call of the drunk-on-literature professor in Invisible Man, Woodbridge, as he signifies on James Joyce by comparing Stephen’s problem to that of the modernist black intelligentsia: ‘Stephen’s problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face. Our task is that of making ourselves as individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record’ (I 354). As Wanpis looks through painted and unpainted masks, it emphasises the problematic of speaking for the emerging Nation or its literatures. For many, ‘a writer’s duty is to provide national consciousness’ (W 164), but as John Kasaipwalova argued in a 1971 address, doing so ‘presupposes that we know what national consciousness is supposed to be and [that] we’re going to write in order to push it down the necks of people’.39 Against the futures being arranged for an Indigenous elite, Soaba speaks of and through St. Nativeson of the senses in which being conscious of individual identity enables connections that create peoples, who form societies and nations. Within such a creative project, even the existentialist-modernist Pasifika writers who most assert autonomy or imaginative freedom in facing the void, within and beyond the battered reefs of Oceania, will not be as isolated from their communities, histories, and regional values as they may feel themselves to be. At the sites where Pasifika being has been thrown into question, in and through the languages which denied islanders existential fullness, and which are now essential for reaching larger audiences, artist figures engage in forms of call and response to invoke and raise the spirits of those colonial history made absent. In the streets that introduced language is itself rearticulated, and in its syntaxes and idioms, one reads both shards of broken traditions and materials gathered up again for new Oceania. For Soaba, this is not Sartre’s existentialism—what Eze calls bourgeois despair for ‘a category powerful enough to guarantee  [.  .  .] sovereignty over existence’, or Senghor’s attempt at ‘rhythmic alignment of consciousness with the structure of [black] existence’40—but Pasifika music, sounded in response to multiple engagements with modernity. To create in interlinked maiba a meditative text about discordance between national independence and artistic freedom, in dialogue with a core text of African American modernism about fashioning identity in an antiblack world, is to approach double consciousness from a point of view in which, if it has not been wholly superseded, has at least been identified for what it is. The commitment to philosophy, to remaking Africana and

39 Quoted in Powell, ‘The First Papua New Guinean Playwrights’, 379. 40 Eze, On Reason, 221–2.

134  Paul Lyons native worlds within modernity, turns not so much against but away from the Goldsworths of the world, who will go on minting value in their own image and passing it off as universal currency. And St. Nativeson, as suggested at the outset, will keep on returning, bearing out the possibility, as Regis Tove Stella argued, that St. Nativeson had, strategically, only ‘faked his death’.41

Bibliography Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Beier, Ulli. Decolonizing the Mind: The Impact of the University on Culture and Identity in Papua New Guinea, 1971–74. Canberra: Pandanus, 2005. ———. Annex V: Proposal for Exchanges Between Africa and the Pacific. Advisory Committee for the Study of Oceanic Cultures Report. Paris: UNESCO, 1977. Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincialising Europe: Historical Thought and Postcolonial Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Roots and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Diaz, Vicente M. ‘Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recovery: Austronesian SeaFaring, Archipelagic Thinking, and the Re-Mapping of Indigeneity’. Pacific Asia Inquiry 2, no. 1 (2011): 21–32. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952; New York: Vintage International, 1995. ———. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Enos, Apisai. ‘Niugini Literature: A  View from the Editor’. Kovave 4, no. 1 (1972): 46–9. Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi. On Reason: Rationality in a World of Cultural Conflict and Racism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967. Gordon, Lewis R. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hannett, Leo J. ‘Niugini Black Power’. In Racism, the Australian Experience. A  Study of Race Prejudice in Australia, edited by Frank S. Stevens, 41–51. Sydney: Taplinger, 1972. James, Trevor. ‘Black Literature in the Pacific: The Spider and the Bee’. In Connections: Essays on Black Literatures, edited by Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, 61–74. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988.

41 Regis [Tove] Stella, ‘Reluctant Voyages into Otherness: Practice and Appraisal in Papua New Guinean Literature’, in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 224.

Africana Calls, Pasifika Responses 135 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Black Magic Poetry: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Krauth, Nigel. ‘“Unfolding Like Petals”: The Developing Definitions of the Writer’s Role in Modern Papua New Guinean Literature’. In Readings in Pacific Literature, edited by Paul Sharrad, 52–62. Wollongong: New Literatures Research Centre, 1993. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984. McGaw, William. ‘Russell Soaba’s Wanpis: The Role of the Writer in Papua New Guinea’. In Readings in Pacific Literature, edited by Paul Sharrad, 74–80. Wollongong: New Literatures Research Centre, 1993. Moten, Fred. ‘Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)’. South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 737–80. Powell, Kirsty. ‘The First Papua New Guinean Playwrights and Their Plays’. PhD diss., University of Papua New Guinea, 1975. Refiti, Albert L. ‘Mavae and Tofiga: Spatial Exposition of the Samoan Cosmogony and Architecture’. PhD diss., Auckland University of Technology, 2014. Salesa, Damon. ‘The Pacific in Indigenous Time’. In Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People, edited by David Armitage and Alison Bashford, 31–52. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Shilliam, Robbie. The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Soaba, Russell. Kwamra: A  Season of Harvest. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2000. ———. ‘Russell Soaba: An Interview’. By Kirpal Singh, Westerly 2 (1984): 49–56. ———. Soaba’s Storyboard (blog). http://soabasstoryboard.blogspot.com/. ———. Wanpis. Boroko: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, 1977. ———. ‘The Writer’s Place in a Difficult Society’, In Unfolding Petals: Readings in Modern Papua New Guinean Literatures, edited by Regis Tove Stella, 69–72. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2012. Stella, Regis Tove. Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. ———. ‘Reluctant Voyages into Otherness: Practice and Appraisal in Papua New Guinean Literature’. In Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, 221–30. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Tiamon, Zak. ‘Russell Soaba’s Wanpis’. Ondobondo 2 (1983): 29–30. Wendt, Albert. The Adventures of Vela. Wellington: Huia, 2009. ———. Pouliuli. 1977. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980. ———. Sons for the Return Home. 1973. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1996. ———. ‘Toward a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. Winduo, Steven Edmund. Transitions and Transformations: Literature, Politics and Culture in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2012. ———. The Unpainted Mask. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2010.

8 Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine Maebh Long

Writing in The English Journal in 1930, Ezra Pound argued that it was in ‘fugitive periodicals of “small circulation”’ that the ‘history of contemporary letters’ could be found.1 In 1938 this assertion was echoed by T. S. Eliot, whose ‘Last Words’ in The Criterion reminded readers that it is ‘the small and obscure papers and reviews, those who are hardly read by anyone but their own contributors, that will keep critical thought alive, and encourage authors of original talent’.2 Outside of Europe, editors of literary magazines concurred; in 1950, A. J. Seymour, editor of the Trinidadian Kyk-over-al from 1945–1961, emphasised literary magazines’ vital roles in birthing talent by describing them as ‘the nursery of literature’.3 A little later, Rajat Neogy, editor of Transition in Uganda between 1961 and 1968, would sharply underscore magazines’ innovative influence by praising their ability to ‘herald change, to forecast what new turn the culture and the society it represents are about to take’.4 For modernists, be they canonical contributors to the London-Paris-New York scene, or those whose explorations of modernity took place at different times and in different places, periodicals played an indispensable role in propagating literary movements. These publications, now most commonly studied as ‘little magazines’, embodied, in compact form, the trends, fashions, rivalries, and preoccupations of modernisms across the world. Providing writers and artists with the space in which to experiment, learn, and interact, little magazines’ significance as ‘centres of aesthetic debate and as clearing houses of ideas’ made them integral to modernist movements of hugely varied kinds.5 For Shari and Bernard

1 Ezra Pound, ‘Small Magazines’, The English Journal 19, no. 9 (1930): 701–2. 2 T. S. Eliot, ‘Last Words’, The Criterion 18, no. 71 (1939): 274. 3 A. J. Seymour, ‘Little Reviews’, Kyk-over-al 2, no. 10 (1950): 204. 4 Rajat Neogy, ‘Do Magazines Culture?’ Transition 75/76 (1997) (first published Transition 24, 1966): 22. 5 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, ‘Movements, Magazines and Manifestos: The Succession from Naturalism’, in Modernism: 1890–1930, ed. Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1978), 204.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 137 Benstock, these magazines are ‘modernism in miniature’,6 but I argue, with Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, that ‘[m]odernism began in the magazines, and the magazines in which it began were—all of them— shaped by modernity’.7 Although there are as many differences between the content, cost, popularity, longevity, print runs, politics, and editorial policies of little magazines as there are similarities, the little magazine is most commonly represented as an experimental publication, usually short-lived and barely financially afloat, with aesthetic interests and qualities of appeal to a limited audience.8 Those little magazines associated with the modernity of postcolonial nations tend to have the further goal ‘of questioning issues of identity, of attempting not just to uncover new talent or to set the artistic tone, but to define the culture of a new nation’.9 The low costs of little magazines mean that their editors are usually free of the dictates of large, often international, publishing houses, and can operate relatively independently, publishing content that appeals to local contexts and agendas. The little magazine does not have to print what will definitely sell; it can take chances on material, and gamble on the popularity or importance of texts. Regular issues mean that content is fresh and often innovative, and can present a range of aesthetic forms, voices, and genres. Pages abound with the urge to write new countries and new identities into being, while forging links between precolonial pasts and postcolonial presents. The writers featured in the little magazines of Oceania were no different, and used this form to create identity, foster independence, and nurture new literary forms in a decolonising Pacific. This chapter studies the self-actualisation and self-exploration found in the anglophone little magazines that were associated—at times loosely— with the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) and The University of the South Pacific (USP), focussing on those published between the 1960s and the late 1980s, a period often referred to as the first generation or

6 Shari Benstock and Bernard Benstock, ‘The Role of Little Magazines in the Emergence of Modernism’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 20, no. 4 (1991): 72. 7 Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman, Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 43. 8 See, for example, Faith Binckes, Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Eric Bulson, Little Magazine: World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, eds. Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 9 Frank Shovlin, ‘From Revolution to Republic: Magazines, Modernism and Modernity in Ireland’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 736.

138  Maebh Long first wave of Pacific writing.10 The magazines of this time present immediate creative and discursive responses to contemporary concerns and ambitions interspersed with governmental, literary, and commercial advertisements. They are tangible artefacts of Pacific Islands’ modernity, as in addition to creative and political interventions, they provide a record of the goods being sold, the technologies available, the form the sale of commodities took, and how governments informed communities of change: Papua New Guinea Writing, for example, offers insights into the ways the newly introduced metric system was explained to the public. Few would counter the claim that these magazines are the product and progenitor of Oceanian modernity, but this chapter also considers them equally the product and progenitor of an Oceanian modernism. In so doing, this chapter recognises the uniqueness of the modernity of this period in this geopolitical region, as well as the need for an aesthetic category of ‘Oceanian’ modernism—one distinct, for example, from the modernism of the Caribbean, or the postcolonial modernisms of African nations. That uniqueness noted, it also recognises sufficient shared experiences and challenges to situate this period in Oceania within an interconnected modernist world map, seeing it as resonant with the experiences of modernity from Nigeria to Ireland, and the creation of modernisms from India to France. As such, this chapter understands the ambitions, successes, and failures of Oceanian magazines as embroiled with the interests and agendas of modernist magazines from around the world, be they those associated with high modernism, middlebrow modernism, or postcolonial modernism. The magazines of Oceania are modernist because they are writings of modernity, but they are also modernist because they perform a geopolitically and culturally specific version of the formal, thematic, and material preoccupations associated with twentieth-century modernisms and modernist magazines across the world. The wealth of material produced in the Oceanian magazines of this period makes it impossible, in this chapter, to engage in detail with all aspects of their contribution to literary and political scenes. Instead, I present a reading of the magazines that is primarily materialist, looking at what their costs and their lifespans, as well as their ambitions and anxieties, can tell us about Oceanian modernism/modernity. ***** 10 Steven Winduo, ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “First Wave”’, in The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Since 1950, ed. Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 499–510. See too Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 139 To tell the story of the modernist magazines of Oceania is to tell the story of two universities. Prior to the 1960s, the number of graduates from each Pacific Island country tended to number in single digits,11 but by the mid-1970s, these numbers had increased dramatically. In 1966, UPNG was founded, and two years later USP opened its doors, growing to include the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, the Solomon Islands, Western Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. In their early days, both institutions struggled with questions of purpose and identity, and in particular with the difficulty of reconciling the region’s need for a skilled workforce with the desire to produce intellectuals who could decolonise political, economic, and scholastic infrastructures in the islands.12 But, despite the universities’ frequent lack of formal commitment to the arts,13 concerns that graduates were trained rather than educated,14 and many writers’ frequent suspicion that formal education stultified creative talent,15 the new educational bodies—at times, despite themselves—provided a space in which students and scholars could come together to critically and creatively engage with the political questions of the region. In 1967, Ulli Beier, who ten years earlier had founded the influential Nigerian modernist magazine Black Orpheus, began work at the University of Papua New Guinea and started a writing workshop, while his wife, Georgina Beier, promoted the artistic scene. From this writing workshop the little magazine Kovave was formed, with its pilot issue in June 1969 marking it as ‘New Guinea’s first literary magazine’, a publication that would serve as a ‘progress report on the state of creative writing in Papua and New Guinea’.16 Prior to the establishment of the universities, publication opportunities for most Pacific Island writers were extremely limited, and restricted

11 Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea, ‘Achievements, Problems and Prospects: The Future of University Education in the South Pacific’, in Pacific Universities: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, ed. Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1988), 342. 12 See Tupeni Baba, Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea, ‘The Development of Higher Education in the Pacific Islands’, in Pacific Universities: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, ed. Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1988). 13 Raymond Pillai argues that it was only because SPCAS was formed that USP felt obliged to take creative writing seriously, and hire Albert Wendt. See ‘Prose Fiction in Fiji: A Question of Direction’, Mana 4, no. 2 (1979): 1. 14 See the wonderful letter of protest penned by Betty Schultz et al., ‘Individual Development vs National Development. Creativity vs. Utility’, UNISPAC 4, no. 3 (1971): 21. 15 See, for example, Marjorie Crocombe, ‘Mana and Regional Cooperation’, Third Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1977): 5. 16 Ulli Beier, ‘Editorial’, Kovave Pilot (1968): 4.

140  Maebh Long either to newspapers that could be persuaded to include some poetry, or college publications. Ulli Beier encouraged and assisted Albert Maori Kiki in writing and publishing his autobiography Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (1968), and Vincent Eri, a student of Beier’s, published The Crocodile in 1970. But Kovave was able to provide space for many writers to experiment with shorter forms, find their voice by playing with different styles, and publish in English or Tok Pisin. Spurred on by this strong beginning, the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) was founded in 1972 by a group of writers that included Marjorie Crocombe (Cook Islands) and Vanessa Griffen, Jo Nacola, Raymond Pillai, and Satendra Nandan (Fiji). SPCAS began to publish the Mana pages of creative writing in the Pacific Islands Monthly, which grew to Mana annuals in 1974, and became the independent Mana magazine in 1976. As the Fijian literary magazine Sinnet would later explain, ‘while Mana would publish works from writers in the Pacific, each country in the Pacific would work towards having its own Journal to publish the local writing in English as well as in the vernacular’.17 And so Sinnet (Fiji), Faikava (Tonga), Waswe? (Solomon Islands), Moana (Samoa),18 and Papua New Guinea Writing (Papua New Guinea) were born. Table 8.1 provides an overview of the ‘major’ little magazines. The names of the region’s little magazines are clear indications of the editors’ aspirations for the publications, as they symbolise unity, power, growth, and questioning, and offset editors’ anxieties about the Pacific literary scene, anxieties made manifest in early editorials that abound with tentative desires to ‘encourage’.19 It was not long before the editors and contributors reflected the titles’ buoyancy. In 1974, in the editorial of the second Mana annual, Crocombe writes: ‘[t]he canoe is afloat. [. . .] Hidden talents are being developed, ideas are being expressed, confidence is growing’.20 By 1976, Subramani, writing the editorial in the first issue of the Mana Review, felt sufficiently confident to proclaim that ‘[t]he struggle for a South Pacific Literature has more or less been won’.21 The magazines’ editorial boards are a catalogue of names that would dominate Pacific writing. Vincent Eri was on Kovave’s editorial team, along with Russell Soaba and Arthur Jawodimbari. Epeli Hau‘ofa was

17 Editorial, Sinnet 1, no. 1 (1980): 4. 18 This chapter addresses magazines with content in English, and Moana (1978–1987) published only in Samoan. 19 For example, Beier, ‘Editorial’, Kovave Pilot, 4; Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe, ‘Mana: Annual of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society’, The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1973): 1. 20 Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe, ‘Introducing Mana 1974’, The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1974): 1. 21 Subramani, ‘Editor’s Page’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 5.

A male initiation ceremony in Orokolo

Power, authority

A Binandere word meaning ‘festival, sing-sing, and feasting’

Faikava

Kovave

Mana

Ondobondo

Country

Languages

1972–1978 PNG (Literature Bureau)

Papua New Began as New Guinea Writing Guinea Writing

Tok Pisin, English

1985–1986 PNG (PNG Writers’ Hiri Motu, Tok Union) Pisin, English

Tok Pisin, English

English

Tok Pisin, English

Tongan, English

The Papua New Guinea Writer

1982–1987 PNG (UPNG associations)

1976–2003 Regional

1969–1975 PNG (UPNG associations)

1978–1983 Tonga (USP associations)

Meaning of Name Dates

People gathered around the kava bowl

Name

Table 8.1  Oceanian Magazines. Content

Short stories, poetry, drama, folklore, articles, critical essays, reviews, interviews, festival news, letters

Short stories, poetry, drama, articles, critical essays, reviews

Short stories, poetry, drama, excerpts from novels, reviews, interviews

Short stories, poetry, drama, folklore, critical essays, reviews, interviews, festival news, reports, bibliographies

Short stories, poetry, drama, folklore, critical essays, reviews

Short stories, poetry including translations with annotations, critical essays

Price*

$1.00

K2.50 per issue

K1.00 per issue

$5.00

$2.00

$3.00

Issues

(Continued)

Quarterly

Biannual

Biannual

Biannual

Biannual

Biannual

Abbreviation of The 1968–1989 USP countries, but University of the predominantly South Pacific Fiji

Why?

UNISPAC

Waswe?

English

Fijian, Hindi, English

Languages

Price*

Short stories, poetry, folklore/custom stories, articles, fotonovellas, reviews, interviews, USP information, reports

Short stories, poetry, drama, folklore, articles, critical essays, reviews, interviews, letters

Quarterly

Issues

$1.15

Monthly, then every two months

Unpriced Every at two launch, months but 10c per issue by 1971

Short stories, poetry, excerpts $1.50 from novels

Content

* Prices are listed in the currencies used in each country at the time, and unless otherwise stated reflect the first subscription price listed. All increased in price over time, although Papua New Guinea Writing reduced its prices in 1973, following plummeting subscription rates.

1978–1982 Solomon Islands Pijin, Senga, (USP associations) Kahua, English

1980–1983 Fiji (USP associations)

The braided cord used for making mats

Sinnet

Country

Meaning of Name Dates

Name

Table 8.1 Continued

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 143 one of the editors of Faikava, and Subramani was the editor of the early years of Mana, with Wendt, Crocombe, Pio Manoa, and Vilsoni Hereniko editing later issues. As befits publications born of new academic spaces, the major contributors to these magazines were students and academics, ‘writer scholars’ who could navigate between creative and scholarly works.22 Many used their knowledge of each form to decolonise both: working creatively to form Pacific epistemologies in academic work, and infusing creative practice with the knowledge of academic positions. The universities themselves also had their own magazines; Ondobondo was edited by the Department of Language and Literature at UPNG, UNISPAC was the USP magazine, and many of the religious and ethnic groups in USP had magazines that published creative writing. For the vast majority of now-canonical Pacific authors, these literary magazines provided their first place of publication, and offered the space in which they could develop their skills. Many of these authors went on to become important politicians and educators, or vocal contributors to civil society, and not only shaped a body of work this chapter considers modernist, but were instrumental in the formation of an Oceanian modernity.23 The literary magazines of Oceania emphasised creative work, and included poetry, short stories, theatrical scripts, reviews, letters, and some critical essays focussed on art and literature. There were other publications, of course; newspapers, newsletters, and commercial magazines such as the settler-focussed Pacific Islands Monthly, which ran from 1930–2000 with monthly sales of about 12,000 copies,24 or New Nation, an English-language youth magazine from Papua New Guinea that ran from August  1977–February  1983, and at peak had a circulation of 60,000.25 There were also periodicals whose focus was more academic. ’O’o, for example, was issued from the Solomon Islands sporadically between 1980 and 1989, but was a journal of academic research. The independent Mana publication saw its first year as the Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature, but in 1977 it became simply Mana, and its creative content began to exceed its critical essays. Gigibori: a Magazine of Papua New Guinea Cultures (1985–1986) was research-focussed, and while Bikmaus: a Journal of Papua New Guinean Affairs, Ideas and the Arts (1980–1987) was designed to replace Papua

22 Steven Winduo, ‘Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars Within a Folk Narrative Space’, New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2000): 599–613. 23 The first Papua New Guinean to write a book, Sir Albert Maori Kiki, became the first PNG Minister for Defence and Foreign Affairs, and Vincent Eri, the first PNG novelist, became the first PNG High commissioner to Australia. 24 Marjorie Crocombe, ‘Communicating Creatively: The South Pacific Creative Arts Society 1972–1986’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 71. 25 Kevin Walcot, ‘Perspectives on Publishing, Literacy and Development’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 1 (1984): 28–30.

144  Maebh Long New Guinea Writing, it was closer to an academic journal that included literature than a literary journal that contained criticism.26 Although it has received insufficient attention, the rise of Oceanian critical journals is also a vital part of the history of Oceanian modernity. The comparative brevity of the magazines’ runs can be readily related to the material conditions of publishing in Oceania, as the region’s vast number of languages, often spoken by limited numbers of people, coupled with low economic bases, made markets small. Added to this were production costs and transportation difficulties, and a lack of experience among many of the editors and contributors.27 Yet, lest we think that the little magazines map out the old picture of the Pacific as comprising insignificant islands in a hazardous sea, it is important to remember that these difficulties are as symptomatic of the little magazine as they are of large developing regions. The little magazine may be a mobile form, but it still is subject to the whims of customs officials; dictated to by paper, printing, and changing staff costs; frequently purchased in small numbers; and rarely able to see out too many years. Malcolm Cowley, writing about his experience with the American modernist magazine Broom, outlines the typical progression of the little magazine: The first issue consists, let us say, of sixty-four pages, with half tone illustrations, printed on coated paper. The second issue has sixtyfour pages, illustrated with line cuts. The third has only forty-eight pages; the fourth has thirty-two, without illustrations; the fifth never appears.28 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible describe little magazines as tending to share two main features: ‘a vexed relationship to a larger, “mainstream” public and an equally vexed relationship to money’.29 Oceanian magazines were no exception to these trends, particularly the latter, as vexatious relationships with most aspects of production and sales abounded. Showing slightly lower production values than the PNG magazines, which were larger in size and more professionally produced, the 26 Bikmaus’s high number of international contributors, whose pieces often took an ethnographic or anthropologic perspective, renders it rather different from the other magazines of interest, as they primarily published those connected by birth to Oceania. 27 See Jim Richstad, ‘Publishing in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands: An Overview’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 1 (1984): 7–10; and Ron Crocombe, ‘Book Distribution in the Pacific Islands’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 28–42. 28 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 188. 29 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, ‘Little Magazines and Modernism: An Introduction’, American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography 15, no. 1 (2005): 3.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 145 little magazines associated with USP depended heavily on local resources. The first issue of Faikava, for example, was typed in the Translation Services Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Nuku‘alofa, while the rest were typed using the USP Centre’s typewriters, and printed by Tonga’s government printer. Produced cheaply, they also sold relatively cheaply. None of the magazines could survive on subscriptions alone: Mana was possible due to the funding from the Australian Government Fund for the Preservation and Development of Pacific Culture received by SPCAS, and this same fund, together with grants from USP, enabled Sinnet to be. Faikava was funded by USP and the Australian High Commissioner, and thanked anonymous donors. UNISPAC survived by using general advertisements, Kovave contained advertisements from publishers, and Papua New Guinea Writing confirmed that its professional appearance and high-quality paper was thanks to the sale of advertising space. A notice in 1973 explained that the subscription fees covered less than a third of the production costs, and thanked advertisers such as Oxford University Press, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Overland Magazine, and businesses in PNG and abroad for their support.30 As deeply rooted in local circumstances as these magazines were, they are also records of the transnational flows of capital and commodities, and position Oceania within a complex, interwoven modernity. Early readings of the modernist magazines of Europe and America tended to depict them as labours of love governed by coterie interests, and thereby positioned them within the realm of an idealistic ‘high modernism’ far above the crass financial considerations of market demands. But by the mid-1970s, scholars had recognised the premeditated manufacture of modernist schools: outlining Pound’s creation of the imagist movement, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane depict Pound as a ‘master-tactician of literary politics’ who understood that ‘the avantgarde functioned best, made its mark, when it performed as a campaign, or when its writers operated as a cadre’.31 Recent work, such as that of Mark Morrison, rejects the picture of aesthetically committed but fiscally inept editor-artists, and notes that many of the little magazines adapted the techniques of commercial, mainstream magazines, including their use of advertising space, to propagate and popularise modernism.32 The little magazines of Oceania are no exception to this, and by sourcing funding, playing on the appeal of letters pages and responses, or placing advertisements for commercial products as well as announcements about other literary endeavours, they generated supplementary income much as their

30 ‘Thanks to Our Advertisers’, Papua New Guinea Writing (1973): 24. 31 Bradbury and McFarlane, ‘Movements, Magazines and Manifestos’, 193. 32 Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

146  Maebh Long modernist counterparts in Europe and North America did. Added to this were tendencies to broaden market bases by employing a combination of literary and artistic forms, encouraging submissions through writing competitions and workshops, and mixing English with vernaculars and Pidgin. Through these techniques, the editors quite deliberately and consciously promulgated a writing of Pacific modernity. As the range of modernism increases, it grows weaker as a concept, and has borders and content that are mutable and fluid.33 Modernist studies today no longer concentrate on experimental rejections of realism, as their broader reach recognises that the experimental manifests differently in different contexts, and in general realism is no longer figured as antithetical to the modernist. The avant-garde, we must remember, means ‘vanguard’ or advance party.34 The little magazine across the world was a forerunner, spearheading change, charting the course, and was capable of being radical and new in numerous ways. For avant-garde practices across the world to be restricted to the form taken by the advance parties of Europe or North America in the early twentieth century impoverishes the term. Modernist magazines across the world created communities of writers and fostered scenes of exploration and experimentation that took diverse forms, and depended on vastly different contexts. The writers of Oceania were creating new voices, styles, and modes of expression, and this is a radically experimental act. While the prose style most commonly used in the magazines was what European aesthetic traditions might call realist, it was an uncanny, defamiliarised realism, one made strange and new by the ‘roughened verbal textures and often startling juxtapositions’35 of unfamiliar associations, idiosyncrasies, and contexts that—much as a fragmented text of European modernism might do in its place—enabled readers in the Pacific Islands and beyond to see their literature and world differently. So much of what was presented in these magazines was fresh: forays into transmitting oral legends in writing; blending the literary techniques of the English canon with local situations and styles; exploring how African modernisms could be used in Pacific ways; adorning the pages with Oceanian art; placing stories in English beside poetry in Pidgin or an Indigenous language; counterbalancing traditional tales with advertisements for motorbikes or word processors. As assemblages these magazines exhibit modernism’s old trait of chaotic, multifaceted interaction, but each individual piece also documents modern Oceania’s growing pains. 33 See the special issue on ‘Weak Theory’ in Modernism/modernity 25, no. 3 (2018), and responses to the special issue on M/m Print Plus, https://modernismmodernity.org/ forums/posts/responses-special-issue-weak-theory-part-i. 34 Fredrick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 3. 35 Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002): 608.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 147 That the movement this chapter posits as an Oceanian modernism was not one with specific aesthetic principles, held up in stark opposition to the explicit aesthetic commitments of an opposing school, does not limit the innovation of Oceanian texts, nor diminish the radical nature of writings that worked to shake off, subvert, or appropriate pervasive foreign impositions and representations. The writers in these Pacific magazines were engaged in creating new languages from ones already spoken, and new literary traditions from a radical assemblage of local and foreign forms. They rejected and embraced literary histories, and transcribed and adapted oral myths. They reformed and subverted aesthetic traditions. They wrote of fears of cultural death from colonial impositions, and corporal death from nuclear eradication, while describing plans for rebirth under flags of independence and agency. They portrayed a modernity of bure and bus stand, sugar cane and tinned fish, churches and nightclubs, taro patches and universities, and turned the craft of writing into the art of weaving the local and foreign into something new. In 1922, in an article on Carl Sandburg in The Dial, Cowley argued that Sandburg ‘writes American [. . .] like a language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fascinating meaning. It is a language, in fact, which never existed before’.36 This sense of writing a language anew was similarly articulated in the call made by Apisai Enos, a Papua New Guinean poet and editor of Kovave, for a ‘Niuginian English’. Arguing that a country of 720 languages needed a common tongue on which to rest a new literary tradition, and recognising the value of English as a lingua franca, he called strongly for the creation of a different English, one that contained local metaphors, expressions, and idioms, and incorporated tradition without rendering it stagnant. This was a radical vision of a language and literature that could create unity without uniformity: ‘The task of creating our contemporary literature is a difficult one, not because it will require a national consciousness or the emergence of a new truly national literature, but because it will require the mastery of a new technology’; that is, a new, indigenised English for modern PNG.37 Although modernist magazines were to be the vanguard of a literary movement, in countries interrupted by colonialism, this advance front was also strongly committed to retaining elements of the past. Oceanian magazines share many of the preoccupations of postcolonial modernist publications with nationalism and legacy. As Beier wrote in the first editorial of Black Orpheus, ‘it is on the heritage of the past, that the literature of the future must be based’.38 Writing from Uganda in 1966,

36 Malcom Cowley, ‘Two American Poets’, The Dial 73, no. 5 (1922): 566. 37 Apisai Enos, ‘Niugini Literature: A View from the Editor’, Kovave 4, no. 1 (1972): 49. 38 Ulli Beier, ‘Editorial’, Black Orpheus, no. 1 (1957): 4.

148  Maebh Long Neogy expanded upon this idea, arguing that the little magazine has a vital responsibility to: record what has previously gone unnoticed. It has to print what was previously only spoken. Obvious examples would be the transcription of folk songs and myths. It has therefore the dual role of conserver as well as initiator in the cultural context of the country in which it is operating.39 The little magazine strives to be a publication of the present, but one of a contemporary that constantly reforges links with the past to create a new future. It should go without saying, of course, that this is not only symptomatic of the postcolonial magazine. As John Middleton Murray wrote in Rhythm, ‘no art breaks with the past. It forces a path to the future’.40 Despite this, narratives embedded in the past can inhabit difficult positions in literary scenes eager to write local and regional modernities into being. In 1970, Don Maynard, editor at the time of Papua New Guinea Writing but also a judge on the short story panel of the national writing competition, lamented that ‘the majority of the 220 stories [submitted] were really folk-tales—stories of “tumbuana”—and while they were often very well told [. . .] they were not proper “short stories”’.41 In an 1980 issue of Waswe?, Crocombe also noted that ‘[t]here has been a tendency for people in the South Pacific [. . .] to focus on legends. I like legends [. . .] but if we can move to describing through stories and poems, life as it is now, the problems and difficulties, we will have moved a lot further ahead’.42 The experimentalism required to create material for these magazines did not come easily, as education systems in Oceania frequently presented literature as something that happened far away, and encouraging potential writers to envision their own lives as literary source material was sometimes difficult. Furthermore, despite the fact that magazines were not designed for permanence and longevity, they nonetheless bore the weight of publication, and for many budding writers, this meant that their submissions should be of equal stature. As a result, folklore, which had cultural power, was often submitted to editors, and as noted above, was received with mixed feelings. Crocombe’s call to be emboldened to write tales of the present was a call for fresh, demanding reflections, which lack the security of folklore and require the crafting of a new narrative or poetic voice, thereby furthering the fashioning of a modern

39 Neogy, ‘Do Magazines Culture?’ 21. 40 John Middleton Murray, ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm 1, no. 1 (1911): 11. 41 Don Maynard, ‘Results of the Literary Competition’, New Guinea Writing, no. 2 (1970): 4. 42 Marjorie Crocombe, ‘Writers’ Workshop a Success’, interview, Waswe? no. 17 (1980): 4.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 149 Oceanian literary scene. However, it should also be remembered that as soon as a legend is rewritten and published in a contemporary context, it is reborn as an item of the contemporary. Modernity is a time in which the pasts and presents of multiple communities across multiple locations come into contact, and modernist magazines across the world tell, in varied ways, the stories of these temporal interminglings. The new, innovative, and political will always have a troubled relationship with the mainstream, and the writers and artists associated with Oceanian little magazines were as counter-cultural as any involved in modernist magazines across the world. This means, of course, that they were typically atypical when compared to that mythical beast, the average citizen. As students, academics, and civil servants, the majority of those who wrote were privileged, in that they were mainly the beneficiaries of formal education, frequently to high secondary or tertiary level. Some had travelled outside of the region, and most spoke English as well as their national languages. Although the letters pages give us evidence that Papua New Guinea Writing was used as an educational resource in schools, and while material from Mana was reprinted in educational publications and anthologies in the wider Pacific—frequently without permission43—many of the other little magazines would have been read by few in excess of their contributors. The difficult relation with a public whose educational and financial levels deprioritised reading for pleasure, coupled with cultural spaces that ordinarily did not foster individual reading acts, meant the little magazines had a frustrated relationship with the wider public. The movement in tone and optimism between the first and third editorials in Faikava is a case in point. The editorial in the first issue of Faikava begins by lamenting the fact that although the ‘tradition of verbal creativity, or what we may call the literary tradition’ had been long established in Tonga, and even though the introduction of Christianity and new technologies had provided writers with a wider repertoire of images, rather than a depleted one, the role of the creative had declined in Tonga. The editors—Futa Helu, Epeli Hau‘ofa, Thomas Schneider, and Konai Helu Thaman—associate this with the loss of the patronage provided by the old political system, and argue that on the whole literature has remained oral. They write: [t]his virtual absence of a written literature is a major factor in the strong tendency for the arts in Tonga to show an unreflecting imitation of old, established forms, images and topics; and many creative talents have been wasted. There is no regular publication which would promote in artists and audience alike a conscious and analytic

43 Marjorie Crocombe, ‘SPCAS Material Reprinted by Other Organisations’, Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 80–93.

150  Maebh Long awareness of the national literary tradition, of contemporary writing here and elsewhere, or of the many possibilities inherent in literature.44 Faikava was born to remedy this lack, and foster talent, community, and new literary engagement. However, by the third issue in 1979 the editors’ initial optimism had waned, and the representation of Tonga as a place of untapped potential fades behind their frustration with what they perceive as Tongan indifference to reading. In the editorial, written for this issue by Futa Helu, Tongan society is described as ‘not yet fully literate’, because in a ‘fully literate society’ emphasis is laid on communication, which presupposes a communicator and a communicatee, with the latter gaining enjoyment but assuming a more passive role in the sense that he does not himself communicate. In Tongan society, however, the emphasis is more on participation, which can very easily get out of hand and spoil the show for some people, especially those who do not appreciate this dimension of the culture. Concerned with the growth of a literary magazine in societies not predisposed to the quiet perusal of a book, they promote education as a tool through which to increase ‘literacy and individualism’, and express optimism that Faikava will meet the needs of this growing group, as it will be able to record, preserve, and disseminate the ‘factual and emotional experience of a well-defined group of people’.45 The literary magazine, understood as a collaborative process that produces a volume of many voices, would no doubt have been thought to help transcend the communication/participation gap, but the act of reading nonetheless requires a certain normalisation of solitary pursuits. In ‘A Message’ Eliot writes that ‘what we need is the magazine which will boldly assume the existence of a public interested in serious literature, and eager to be kept in touch with current literature and with criticism of that literature by the most exacting standards’.46 But, as Faikava shows, many of the Oceanian little magazines could not assume the existence of such a public, but had instead to create one. This is by no means localised to the modernist magazines of the Pacific. T. P.’s Weekly, for example, was launched in Ireland in 1902 to educate working-class readers about literary topics, and published Conrad and Pound. The American little

44 Editorial, Faikava, no. 1 (1978): 1. 45 Editorial, Faikava, no. 3 (1979): 1. 46 T. S. Eliot, ‘A Message’, London Magazine (January 1954): 16.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 151 magazine Poetry published a wide range of verse to encourage engagement, Black Orpheus in Nigeria had a wide policy of supporting talent, and Tropiques, founded in the 1940s in Martinique by René Ménil and Aimé Cesaire, promoted general self-expression.47 Although postcolonial little magazines frequently had small readerships, they were rarely antagonistic to a mainstream literary market, as if there was one it was extremely small. Instead, they took on the role of midwives, and acted as counter-cultural forces designed to develop readerships. The pages of the magazines are filled with debates about the type of Pacific writing that should be most strongly encouraged—from formally challenging and sophisticated conceptual pieces to undemanding fiction that would nurture a reading public. From ‘art for art’s sake’, that is, to Wendt’s ‘art is for man’s sake’.48 However, in 1972, Enos argued that most literature in PNG was not art at all, but protest writing that works to ‘reaffirm people’s views, rather than create new ideas, new perceptions and realities’.49 How, he asked, could a Niuginian contemporary literature that is also an artistic form be fashioned, without leaving behind those for whom written forms were still foreign and challenging? These tensions between tradition and innovation, the political and the aesthetic, were common concerns within the magazines. In Kovave, Beier frequently made clear his suspicion that a Westernised education system stifled Pacific talent; in a piece on art in New Guinea, he praises the highland artist Akis’s ‘poetic vision of the forest’ as being ‘unburdened by rigid conventions and uninhibited by Western education’.50 Finding a new voice is a deeply difficult act, particularly in a postcolonial context, but the articulation of Beier’s disquiet brings it dangerously close to a fetishisation of a ‘pure’ aesthetic form, predicated on a desire for authenticity that weighs far more heavily on writers and artists in colonised countries than it did on European or American modernists. While the modernity of a colonial power involves a nostalgia for times past,51 postcolonial nations have to undergo a far more complex negotiation with their history. For many Pacific writers, literature not only helped to create an Oceanian modernity, but could offer readers a means of understanding it. This was a common aim in modernist magazines, particularly in postcolonial countries, as they knew that not only was the future of a literary

47 Emilio Jorge Rodríquez, ‘An Overview on Caribbean Literary Magazines: Their Liberating Function’, Caribbean Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1985): 86. 48 Albert Wendt, ‘Samoa’s Albert Wendt: Poet and Author’, interview by Marjorie Crocombe, The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1973): 47. 49 Enos, ‘Niugini Literature’, 47. 50 Ulli Beier, ‘Akis and Kauwagi: Two Highland Artists’, Kovave 1, no. 1 (1969): 46. 51 Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

152  Maebh Long movement at stake, but the social, political and economic future of a nation or region. Thus, for example, in the Caribbean the early issues of BIM were engaged in constructing the national project, and Irish magazines in the years before and after independence ‘refused the polarization of literature and politics into opposed discourses’, as they ‘believed that the struggle for a new national identity was best served by combining imaginative creativity with a keen sense of social commitment’.52 When Jo Nacola, a Fijian playwright, gave a speech in the Solomon Islands in 1980, he stressed that writers in Pacific countries were ‘those who pointed the way ahead to people who were often confused by the speed and suddenness of change’.53 Similarly, Vincent Eri in Papua New Guinea argued that writers had ‘tremendous responsibility’ because they ‘help mould the thinking of the community’.54 The writer was seen to offer a form through which the rapid, disorienting pace of change in the Pacific could be presented; a form that could act simultaneously as a panacea to and a heuristic of modernity. The importance of innovative and imaginative responses to modernity were repeatedly stressed. In a passionate article, Mostyn Habu, the Director of the USP Centre in the Solomon Islands, lamented the ways in which modern life had desacralised creativity: [a creative response is] the kind of response which turns chaos into order, and hopelessness into hope. It is the ability which helps a carver to turn a piece of unwanted wood into something of beauty and value [. . .] . It is also the same response which helped our ancestors to survive and to sail the waters of the Pacific: to act out the varied and colourful history of our past. [. . .] Our fathers were skilful makers of fishing nets—now we buy them from Hong Kong. [. . .] Our fathers danced the rhythms of the birds, fishes, and sounds of their environment—now we dance away frustrations with loud music and the help of Castlemaine Breweries. [. . .] We talk about nation-building. How can we build a nation with a people who have lost the ability to create something new and worthwhile out of nothing?55 Habu calls for a body of work that can undo the strictures of modernity, in which commodities and conveniences lay waste to the individuality of a culture. He calls for an Oceanian modernism: a creative response that writes an Oceanian modernity into being.

52 Richard Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 250. 53 ‘The Weekend Writers’, Waswe? no. 18 (1980): 13. 54 Vincent Eri, ‘Speech from Writers’ Day’, Papua New Guinea Writing, no. 12 (1973): 13. 55 Mostyn Habu, ‘Creative Response’, Waswe?, no. 6 (1978): 8.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 153 Within the pages of the little magazines of Oceania, Pacific Island modernity—in all its guises—was explored, as new forms were engaged with, new aesthetics produced, and a modernism created. Oceania’s little magazines were not simply short-lived periodicals, or journals documenting a nascent literary scene. They are not merely chapbooks of communities born from increased mobility, growing cities, and educational institutions, or reviews of increased movement, rupture, and change. They are not solely postcolonial publications stemming from independence and Indigenous rights movements, serials aided by the ownership of technologies and means of production, or pamphlets documenting national and international inspirations and influences. They are not just collections of the innovative, the experimental, the traditional, and the Indigenous, or the weaving together of ranges of voices and perspectives. They are, instead and of course, all of these things, which combine to be formative and exemplary of an embryonic modernism/modernity in Oceania. They are modernist because they wrote a modernity into being, giving it a rhetoric, a vision, purpose, and an imaginary. They are also modernist because their form and content combine local preoccupations, languages, and voices with interests and agendas that link the Oceanian publications to modernist magazines across the world, creating clusters with canonical and postcolonial publications. Oceanian magazines, true to form, burnt brightly and died quickly, but they were the life of literary and creative scenes. Their readership was often small in number, and while they frequently struggled to get the right number or right kind of contributions, those that did read and contribute shaped social, cultural, political, and literary futures in the Pacific. As Wendt wrote: literature is both a mirror and a map of the mind and soul, the here and now. And because we need to know about where we are living now, every culture needs a map. It is a necessity for the survival of any people. And it has to be their literature.56

Bibliography Baba, Tupeni, Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea, ‘The Development of Higher Education in the Pacific Islands’. In Pacific Universities: Achievements, Problems, Prospects, edited by Ron Crocombe and Malama Meleisea, 20–29. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1988. Benstock, Shari and Bernard Benstock. ‘The Role of Little Magazines in the Emergence of Modernism’. Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin 20, no. 4 (1991): 68–87.

56 Albert Wendt, response, Mana 3, no. 1 (1978): 13–14.

154  Maebh Long Beier, Ulli. ‘Akis and Kauwagi: Two Highland Artists’. Kovave 1, no. 1 (1969): 45–46. ———. ‘Editorial’. Black Orpheus, no. 1 (1957): 4. ———. ‘Editorial’, Kovave Pilot (1968): 4. Binckes, Faith. Modernism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane, eds. Modernism: 1890–1930. London: Penguin, 1978. Bulson, Eric. Little Magazine: World Form. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Churchill, Suzanne W. and Adam McKible. ‘Little Magazines and Modernism: An Introduction’. American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography 15, no. 1 (2005): 1–5. ———, eds. Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Cowley, Malcolm. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951. ———. ‘Two American Poets’. The Dial 73, no. 5 (1922): 563–67. Crocombe, Marjorie [Tuainekore]. ‘Communicating Creatively: The South Pacific Creative Arts Society 1972–1986’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 70–93. ———. ‘Introducing Mana 1974’. The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1974): 1. ———. ‘Mana and Regional Cooperation’. Third Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1977): 5–6. ———. ‘Mana: Annual of the South Pacific Creative Arts Society’. The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1973): 1. ———. ‘SPCAS Material Reprinted by Other Organisations’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 80–93. ———. ‘Writers’ Workshop a Success’ Interview’. Waswe? no. 17 (1980): 4. Crocombe, Ron. ‘Book Distribution in the Pacific Islands’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 14, no. 2 (1985): 28–42. Crocombe, Ron and Malama Meleisea, eds. Pacific Universities: Achievements, Problems, Prospects. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 1988. Eliot, T. S. ‘A Message’. London Magazine, January 1954, 15–16. ———. ‘Last Words’. The Criterion 18, no. 71 (1939): 269–75. Enos, Apisai. ‘Niugini Literature: A  View from the Editor’. Kovave 4, no. 1 (1972): 46–49. Eri, Vincent. ‘Speech from Writers’ Day’. Papua New Guinea Writing, no. 12 (1973): 13. Felski, Rita. ‘Introduction’. New Literary History 33, no. 4 (2002): 607–22. Habu, Mostyn. ‘Creative Response’. Waswe? no. 6 (1978): 8. Hoffman, Fredrick J. Charles, Allen and Carolyn, F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946. Kearney, Richard. Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Keown, Michelle. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Maynard, Don. ‘Results of the Literary Competition’. New Guinea Writing, no. 2 (1970): 4.

Oceanian Modernism and the Little Magazine 155 Morrison, Mark S. The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception 1905–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Murray, John Middleton. ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm 1, no. 1 (1911): 9–12. Neogy, Rajat. ‘Do Magazines Culture?’ Transition 75/76 (1997): 16–22. Outka, Elizabeth. Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism and the Commodified Authentic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pillai, Raymond. ‘Prose Fiction in Fiji: A Question of Direction’. Mana 4, no. 2 (1979): 1–10. Pound, Ezra. ‘Small Magazines’. The English Journal 19, no. 9 (1930): 689–704. Richstad, Jim. ‘Publishing in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands: An Overview’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 1 (1984): 7–10. Rodríquez, Emilio Jorge. ‘An Overview on Caribbean Literary Magazines: Their Liberating Function’. Caribbean Quarterly 31, no. 1 (1985): 83–92. Scholes, Robert and Clifford Wulfman. Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Schultz, Betty et al. ‘Individual Development vs National Development. Creativity vs. Utility’. UNISPAC 4, no. 3 (1971): 21. Seymour, A. J. ‘Little Reviews’. Kyk-over-al 2, no. 10 (1950): 204–8. Shovlin, Frank. ‘From Revolution to Republic: Magazines, Modernism and Modernity in Ireland’. In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 1, Britain and Ireland, 1880–1955, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 735–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Subramani, Chandrasekhar. ‘Editor’s Page’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 5. Walcot, Kevin. ‘Perspectives on Publishing, Literacy and Development’. Pacific Islands Communication Journal 13, no. 1 (1984): 11–40. Wendt, Albert. ‘Samoa’s Albert Wendt: Poet and Author’. Interview by Marjorie Crocombe. The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (1973): 45–7. ———. Response. Mana 3, no. 1 (1978): 13–14. Winduo, Steven. ‘Indigenous Pacific Fiction in English: The “First Wave” ’. In The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte, 499–510. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ———. ‘Unwriting Oceania: The Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars within a Folk Narrative Space’. New Literary History 31, no. 3 (2000): 599–613.

9 ‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’: Te Ao Hou Alice Te Punga Somerville1

The word ‘modern’ in a Māori dictionary directs you to the word ‘hou’, which also means ‘new’. ‘Ao’ is a term used to describe a world or land— it’s the ‘ao’ in ‘Aotearoa’ that refers to the ‘land’ in its conventional translation of ‘land of the long white cloud’. ‘Te’ is the definite article. ‘Te ao hou’ was, and continues to be, used widely in a range of contexts during the stretch of years from the 1950s to the 1970s that people interested in writing and art often describe as the period of Māori modernism. Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum and art gallery, used the phrase to title a major recent exhibition (‘Te Ao Hou | Modern Māori Art’) of the ‘new Māori art’ of the late 1940s to early 1970s. Providing context for a work included in that exhibition, Te Papa’s website notes: ‘Pioneering Māori painters and sculptors distanced themselves from customary art forms such as whakairo (carving), and explored the styles and techniques of international modern art’,2 and in a 2014 exhibition catalogue for Te Papa’s second mount of the exhibition she titled ‘Mana modernism’, Māori scholar Deirdre Brown writes about ‘te ao hou, the new world of Māori modernism’.3 ‘Te ao hou’ as a concept provides a way of thinking about cultural/aesthetic change during a time of physical, geographic, cultural, economic, and artistic upheaval. In the mid-twentieth century, the notion of a new world was not itself new. In 1954, a recollection by esteemed and recently deceased Māori 1 The ideas in this chapter were first shared at the ‘Oceanic Modernism’ conference at USP in Suva in early 2016. I would like to acknowledge and thank the convenors of that gathering (Matthew, Maebh, Sudesh) and those who worked behind the scenes to keep us fed and looked after. I also acknowledge the vanua of Suva and the people of Suvavou the traditional custodians of the land on which we met for that conference, as well as the three Matanitu of Kubuna, Burebasaga, and Tovata. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Paul Lyons. 2 ‘Te Kooti at Ruatahuna’, Te Papa, accessed 26 March 2019, https://collections.tepapa. govt.nz/object/702581. 3 Deirdre Brown, ‘Mana Modernism: Deirdre Brown on the Second Season of Te Ao Hou | Modern Māori Art’, Off the Wall no. 4 (2014): 2, http://arts.tepapa.govt.nz/ off-the-wall/7457/mana-modernism.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 157 scholar and statesman Te Rangihiroa (Sir Peter Buck) was republished in a state magazine. Recalling a conversation at the very opening of the twentieth century, Te Rangihiroa writes: ‘[o]ver 50 years ago, an old man said, ‘We old people are not clear of the age of stone, te ao hou is for you young people’.4 ‘Te Ao Hou’ is connected positively here with ‘you young people’, and is contrasted with an ‘age of stone’ belonging to a previous generation. In the Māori version published alongside Te Rangihiroa’s article, the phrase provided in English as ‘the age of stone’ appears as ‘te Ao Maori’, a difference which rather strikingly and clearly distinguishes between a ‘Māori’ world and a ‘new’ one. By the time this recollection was published, however, those who had been identified by the old man as ‘you young people’ had become the elders whose passing marked the end of another ‘ao Māori’ and, accordingly, another ‘ao hou’. So, ‘te ao hou’ is not singular: the concept is cyclical, or perhaps generational, rather than linear or exceptionalist. As with other forms of modernism, and other modernist forms, that have emerged and re-emerged around Oceania, the mid-twentieth century is productively understood both as a new world and as a world that is not new at all.

‘Te Ao Hou’ In 1975, Henare Dewes published a poem in English of three stanzas titled ‘Te Ao Hou’.5 Explicitly engaging the process of modernity (which is to say, change specifically tied to the ‘modern’), the poem critiques its inextricability from capitalism, display, decay, and hope. Neither an apology for transformation nor a mournful dirge for things lost in days gone by, the poem considers the possibilities, stakes, risks, and precedents of cultural change. From the first lines, the poem responds to changes that have already taken place. Its opening launches straight into an attack, or accusation, or perhaps testimony, directly addressing an unnamed ‘you’: ‘Your people cry out for knowledge/[. . .] While you recline in obesity’ (T 40). The ‘we’ of the poem ‘know not where to find/Te Whare a Tane’. While the physical body of the poem’s addressee bears the effects of past excesses (‘reclin[ing] in obesity’), traditional structures are also compromised by neglect over time: ‘the baskets of food are almost empty’, ‘stockades crumble’, and ‘the Tautiaki salutes the company/of wind and rain, and lowly beasts’ (T 40). Tautiaki are external features of a traditional building, which in this case has been abandoned and is missing its human community. From its opening stanza, then, the poem describes a yearning for

4 Peter Buck, ‘Te Ao Hou’, Te Ao Hou no. 7 (1954): 14. 5 Henare Dewes, ‘Te Ao Hou’, Te Ao Hou no. 76 (1975): 40. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as T.

158  Alice Te Punga Somerville things that are no longer readily available and for a past state in which resources and connections were plentiful.6 The second stanza describes ongoing and present forms of cultural change (‘your traditions being swept aside/by the flood of life’) and the continuation of disengagement: ‘you shrug and turn away/with eyes blurred’ (T 40). The transformation described here does not result in loss as much as relocation: rather than traditions being swept ‘away’, they end up in different sites: ‘that which you hold sacred/gesticulates from behind the windows/of a Pakeha shop’. Cultural values and specific material culture have been repositioned within a colonial site of commerce. Although the opening line of the first stanza prioritised voice and sound (‘Your people cry out’), this middle stanza focuses on sight and the visual. The ‘You’ turns away, and blurs their eyes, to avoid watching the traditions being swept away, or seeing sacred things silently ‘gesticulat[ing]’ from behind glass. Cultural labour is tied to commodification rather than to traditional purposes and circuits of exchange, as demonstrated by the ‘Manaia carved for dollars and cents’. And yet, when it comes to the ‘sacred’, commodification cannot ever be complete: here the Manaia is tragic and distant (‘behind the windows/of a Pakeha shop’) and yet retains both life and agency (‘bows his head in shame’). The word ‘modern’ itself finally appears twice in the third stanza, which opens: ‘Let not “the garment of Tu”/become a moth-ball of modern neglect’. Later, there is a caution ‘lest your calabash overflow/with the fat of modern living’ (T 40). Both uses of ‘modern’ are negative, associating the term with a lack of attention (‘modern neglect’) and a lack of restraint (‘fat of modern living’). However, this final stanza has a different tone than the previous two. It admonishes, but also actively encourages, starting with the caution about avoiding neglect before shifting to italics in the next line—‘Whakatika!’—a command to make things correct or right, after which the listener is instructed to ‘take up your paddles’ and ‘cast your dart Ki Te Reo Maori’. Both of these (paddles and darts) draw on specific knowledge that is focussed on achieving a specific result. The skill and experience required for both actions means that one would not charge people to take up paddles or cast darts if they did not retain

6 We can read this poem in the context of the corpus of published Māori poetry in English by ‘modern poets’. Looking across their collective work, there is a discernible series of poems about decay, especially of material culture (carvings) as a metaphor of broader decay/disintegration, but also of regeneration, repair, and return. The best known of these are Katerina Mataira’s ‘Restoring the ancestral house’, Apirana Taylor’s ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’, and Hone Tuwhare’s ‘The old place’. I have written about this feature of some Māori poetry in ‘Nau mai, hoki mai: Approaching the ancestral house’, in Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, ed. Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nalani McDougall, and Georganne Nordstrom (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 71–88.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 159 capability to execute these tasks. And so, the poem allows for an internal contradiction: the people who yearn for knowledge (and paddles and darts) may already in fact possess them. Additionally, they both contribute metaphorically to cultural refocus and ‘making things right’. The historical and ancestral migrations of Māori people from tropical Oceania, and the ongoing use of watercraft around Aotearoa’s salty limits as well as fresh waterways, means the idea of ‘tak[ing] up [. . .] paddles’ is an act of regeneration, repetition, and embodiment of ancestral activities. Paddling is always a collective act in Māori watercraft, and the plural ‘paddles’ clarifies that more than one person is being addressed here. The call to ‘cast your dart’ gestures to the traditional activity in which darts were aimed at a specific site and, like any other game of darts, accuracy and skill are central to the outcome. However, a unique element of this Māori game was that the point was not to hit a target directly, but to cause the dart to ricochet off a mound in a particular direction as far as possible.7 The idea of ‘ricochet’ contains elements of risk, skill, reaction, and trajectory: it is necessarily about a shift in direction, but one which is tied to particular purpose and calculation, and one in which a deliberate harnessing of change can amplify rather than restrict movement. This provides an alternative way to think about the direction, control, and even purpose of change in a context of rapid cultural shifts described in the poem as the ‘modern’. The target of the dart is clear (‘Ki te Reo Maori’—to the Māori language), but this opens up at least two readings of the line. Perhaps the dart should be aimed directly at the language, and this particular ‘mound’ will enable a subsequent desired effect to be achieved, but equally it seems possible that there are other mounds off which one must cause one’s dart to ricochet in order to reach (or mimic the flight of) the Māori language. The language is thus both target and consequence of the command ‘whakatika!’ How does an engagement with modernity look when the purpose is ricochet rather than direct hit or direct miss? Brendan Hokowhitu has pointed out the metaphoric, spiritual, physical, and genealogical dimensions of dart throwing in the Māori world; these were never merely leisure activities, but have always been used for pedagogic, preparation, and community-building purposes.8 What might the idea of ricochet add to the way we understand the dynamic, dispersed, and variable actions of what might otherwise appear as chaos to those for whom the point of darts is to stick into a particular

7 Peter Buck/Te Rangihiroa, The Coming of the Māori (Wellington: Maori Purposes Fund Board, 1949), 242. 8 Brendan Hokowhitu, ‘Authenticating Māori Physicality: Translations of “Games” and “Pastimes” by Early Travellers and Missionaries to New Zealand’, International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 10 (2008): 1355–73.

160  Alice Te Punga Somerville point on a flat surface? What, indeed, might the notion of ricochet contribute to the methods by which we read Indigenous texts or think about Indigenous responses to colonialism? On one hand, certainly, Dewes overtly links modernity to moral and cultural decline. And at the same time, there is both remedy and hope in this third stanza. We could say the poem describes ‘Te Ao Hou’ as simultaneously catastrophic and negotiable. But Dewes does not leave the new world there. The phrase ‘ “garment of Tu” ’ in the first line of this stanza is in inverted commas, suggesting a reference to another text, and indeed it is possible to trace its resonance to a phrase in the oriori (lullaby/chant) ‘Po! Po!’: ‘Ko te kakahu no Tu’, translated variously as ‘the cloak of Tu’ and ‘the garment of Tu’.9 And here we find an additional context for reading Dewes’s poem, within the traditional literary compositions of his specific tribal background. ‘Po! Po!’ describes the arrival of kumara (sweet potato) to Aotearoa, and describes the whakapapa or genealogy of the kumara as well as the specific and deliberate historic retrieval of kumara from the Americas (indeed, the ‘New World’, as it is known by Europe). We might notice that kumara are a little bit like Māori people: simultaneously autochthonous, with genealogical relationships positioning us in specific ancestral, ecological, and spiritual sites, and migratory, having arrived from across the ocean. Other readings of Dewes’s poem are possible when we note that kumara is itself a widely used metaphor for knowledge. Additionally, of course, we find the kumara travels beyond Aotearoa: the plant and the cognates of its name are found all around Oceania. Significantly, the arrival of kumara is a prior moment of intense change, intercultural negotiation, and inter-continental connection, but unlike capitalism and colonialism, it enters the Māori world as a result of Māori agency. Reading Dewes’s poem alongside ‘Po! Po!’ makes visible other echoes: the structure of the poem parallels the oriori, which starts with a description of intense hunger (‘my son is crying for food’)10 very similar to the opening line of ‘Te Ao Hou’ (‘Your people cry out for knowledge’). Further, the ‘fat’ in the ‘fat of modern living’, which feels undesirable on first reading of the poem, points towards (ricochets off?) a reference to ‘fat’ in the similarly closing lines of the traditional text. In the Dewes poem, the listener is cautioned to ‘hold tight your Maoritanga/lest your calabash overflow/with the fat of modern living’. On its own, this could suggest that Māoritanga (Maoriness/the Māori world) can protect one (and therefore is the opposite of) ‘modern living’, which is linked to sloth and excess  9 Nepia Mahuika, ‘Kōrero Tuku Iho: Reconfiguring Oral History and Oral Tradition’ (PhD diss., University of Waikato, 2012), 341; ‘A Famous Oriori from Tauranga [sic]’, Te Ao Hou, no. 53 (1965): 20. The latter translation is a slightly abridged version of the translation in Apirana Ngata and Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Ngā Mōteatea: he maramara rere nō ngā waka maha, Part Two (Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1961), 153–6. 10 All translations in this paragraph are derived from ‘A Famous Oriori from Tauranga [sic]’.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 161 (‘fat’). However, ‘Po! Po!’ finishes with the line ‘Te Putunga o te hinu, e tama!’ which has been translated as ‘[a]nd the calabashes overflow with fat, my son!’ In the oriori, ‘fat’ is not related to ‘obesity’ or decline but to a season of plenty. This makes possible a reading of Dewes’s poem that does not necessarily critique the presence of hunger, or indeed the ‘fat of modern living’, but raises the question of whether capitalist (and specifically touristic) commodification/consumption can feed. The ‘modern’ in the 1975 poem appears to have deleterious effects until one glimpses through to the oriori behind it, which reframes a present-day predicament through a prior instance of cultural change that occurred as a result of the incorporation of something new. Dewes’s poem suggests a layering of relationships between Māori and the ‘modern’ that outstrips a simple Venn diagram in which there is an overlap between two circles: ‘Māori’ and ‘modernism’. Even as it calls for a tightening of hands to ‘traditions being swept aside’, and even as it contains structural, thematic, and conceptual echoes from the much earlier text, ‘Te Ao Hou’ itself is certainly written in the poetic style (and language) of what has elsewhere in its site of first publication been described as ‘modern poetry’. When we read Dewes’s poem ‘Te Ao Hou’ on its own, we can make interesting claims about its engagements with modernism—but when we read it alongside the vast range of other published writing by Māori people in the mid-twentieth century, we can see ‘Te Ao Hou’ as yet another example of a text that affirms, celebrates, and draws on a longstanding tradition of creative and intellectual work. Which brings us to Te Ao Hou. Te Ao Hou The poem ‘Te Ao Hou’ was first published in the magazine Te Ao Hou, a multi-genre, often bilingual, magazine published by the New Zealand government (specifically, the Maori Purposes Fund Board of the Department of Maori Affairs) between 1952 and 1975 (seventy-six issues over that period). Edited by an appointee of the Department of Maori Affairs, it was supposed to be a vehicle by which the government could communicate directly with Māori people about policy but also, importantly, about how to transition from tradition into modernity. Te Ao Hou appeared right in the centre of massive change and sought to influence that change. Despite the careful opening of the magazine back in 1952, including the first editor Erik Schwimmer’s famous suggestion the magazine would function as a ‘marae11 on paper’,12 the magazine was abruptly shut down in 1975. The

11 A marae is a ceremonial communal meeting place; the term and concept appears around Polynesia as marae/malae. In this context, a ‘marae on paper’ emphasises the intention for the magazine to provide a space to gather, drawing on customary protocols and networks; more broadly, it suggests such an ‘on paper’ format can be a continuation of, rather than departure from, Māori life. 12 Te Ao Hou, no. 1 (1952): 1.

162  Alice Te Punga Somerville last issue, in which Dewes’s poem was published, reads as if there would be another issue following in due course, but it turns out there was not. The New Zealand government, like other settler governments of the time, had a deliberate strategy of modernity related to Indigenous people—it was deeply committed to bringing about a period of massive domestic migration and cultural change after the Second World War. In the magazine, there is particular emphasis on the migration of rural and provincial Māori people to the cities, including work opportunities and hostels set up for young Māori people who migrated to Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch. It also highlights examples of Māori individuals and entities that were being ‘successfully’ modern—which often but not always meant urban and/or capitalist, although there are also articles about the risks of life in the city. There were instructional articles for Māori about cooking, gardening, childrearing, and how to run meetings (one wonders how Māori had managed to survive without such instruction); there were also articles about legislation, education, and trades training, and that big word ‘development’ (which is still a big word today when talking about government plans for Oceanic communities). Although none of Te Ao Hou’s editors were Māori, Māori people quickly warmed to the magazine and published writing in all kinds of critical, journalistic, and creative genres, from the earliest issues to the last. Modernity and modernism feel interchangeable in Te Ao Hou. Te Ao Hou the magazine is fully searchable in its digital form on the National Library of New Zealand website, and when you search for the word ‘modern’, you find it throughout the issues, often to describe something that is contemporary or not traditional. The Bank of New Zealand, for example, runs an advertisement several times which describes the bank as ‘a modern pataka’ (a pataka being a storehouse), and there are discussions of ‘modern marae’ as opposed to traditional ones. In a 1955 article, Baroness von Trapp (yes, she of Sound of Music fame) discusses how ‘modern’ life needs Māori and music (and ideally Māori music).13 In 1958, this use of ‘modern’ as the opposite of (or at least parallel to) ‘traditional’ is emphasised in a discussion of the centenary of the Kīngitanga (King movement): [o]ne must say however, that the Ngaruawahia gathering could hardly be described as over-conservative. With a mannequin parade and an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by modern  Maori artists. Kingitanga showed itself very much prepared to enrich the lives of the people in every way open to them, whether traditional or modern.14

13 ‘Baroness von Trapp Tells Te Ao Hou Her Ideas on Maori Art in the Modern World’, Te Ao Hou, no. 13 (1955): 18. 14 ‘Centenary of the King Movement’, Te Ao Hou no. 23 (1968): 1.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 163 Dewes’s poem ranks highly in any such search because of its use of ‘modern’ in two places. Te Ao Hou was the first publishing venue for many Māori creative and critical writers, and in 1958, the first publications of poems in the new language and new style by Rowley Habib and Hone Tuwhare are published under the title ‘Verse by Modern Maori poets’.15 If modernism is both driven by and discernible as a departure from traditional forms in the context of rapid cultural transformation, the relationship between these ‘modern’ texts and traditional texts like ‘Po! Po!’ raises a question about the identification of such departures. When one is not aware of ‘Po! Po!’, ‘Te Ao Hou’ feels thoroughly modern, both in its poetics and in the sense that it can be read alongside other ‘modern’ texts by writers around the postcolonial world (especially, but not only, in Oceania). This raises a methodological conundrum. An important critical move within recent Pacific and Indigenous literary studies has been to trace creative and intellectual genealogies from traditional to contemporary literary forms, partly to avoid reading literary works in English of the past few decades (mostly) as signs of cultural loss. At what point, however, might this (Pacific, Indigenous) project of genealogising undermine the ability to declare texts such as Dewes’s to be sufficiently modern? Writing about John Dominis Holt’s work in the Hawaiian context, Paul Lyons grapples with the idea that departure is central to modernism by posing its limits for a discussion of Kanaka Maoli texts: ‘The experience of rupture that is one recurrent features of modernisms [. . .] turns in Maoli modernist contexts into suturing movements’.16 Lyons’s concept of ‘suturing’, with its acknowledgement of separation but focus on connection, provides a way to think about Māori modernisms through rather than despite resonances or inheritances we might notice between traditional and modern texts. But, to ask the next question, is the line between a textual modernism marked by departure from, or even suturing to, a traditional form reliant more on the text’s own relationship to prior traditions, or the ignorance of the scholar describing it? Despite ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ being contrasted as described previously, in Te Ao Hou, traditional Māori poetry and what the magazine

15 Detailing the range and scope of the creative work in Te Ao Hou (both literature and visual arts) is beyond the scope of this chapter, but has been treated elsewhere by myself and several others. See Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative (Durham: Duke, 2002); Chadwick Allen, ‘Rere kē/ Moving Differently: Indigenizing Methodologies for Comparative Indigenous Literary Studies’, Studies in American Indian Literature 19, no. 4 (2007): 1–26; Alice Te Punga Somerville, ‘Te Ao Hou: te pataka’, in Cambridge History of New Zealand Literature, ed. Mark Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 182–94; and Lydia Wevers, ‘Short Fiction by Maori Writers,’ Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 16, no. 2 (1994): 26–33. A great deal more work has been done by art historians in relation to the notion of modernism and the arts of this time period, compared to the amount of critical work on writing. 16 Paul Lyons, ‘John Dominis Holt’s Kanaka Maoli Modernism’, symplokē 26, no. 1–2 (2018): 95.

164  Alice Te Punga Somerville describes as ‘modern’ Māori poetry is not set in competition. Indeed, one of the features of Te Ao Hou was the prolific publication of articles in which different Māori scholars and experts wrote critically about various traditional Māori texts and, in the case of a six-part series on Puhiwahine, a biography of a famous composer/poet. The oriori ‘Po! Po!’ had itself been treated to such a detailed explication in 1965, a decade before ‘Te Ao Hou’ appeared.17 The present distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ texts might partly be a result of the single-author publications and collections that bloomed in and beyond the mid-1970s, which meant that English language creative writers who were first published in Te Ao Hou have been taken up (albeit selectively) into classrooms, research projects, literary festivals, anthologies, and bookshops, and in pathways that veer far from their earlier publication alongside other kinds of Māori-authored texts in the magazine. When we return to the pages of Te Ao Hou, we see the review, publication, translation, and discussion of Māori texts across both languages and from all times (ancient, traditional, recent, ‘modern’). ‘Te Ao Hou’ sits alongside the new works of other English-language writers, but also alongside articles about (and reproductions of work by) artists now identified as the central figures of Māori modernism. In terms of literary criticism, the study of Māori language texts has been parcelled off to Departments of Māori Studies and their institutional inheritors, whereas the study of English language texts (at least in theory, if not often practice) tends to belong to English. This, of course, is where methodological questions become institutional questions. It might be instructive to reflect on the proportion of contemporary Māori readers (and contemporary literary scholars) whose facility and familiarity with traditional literary forms makes the reading together of the various strands of Māori literature feel productive or even possible. Or, to put it another way, one wonders what kind of scholarship the multi-genre, bilingual magazine Te Ao Hou might inspire: what might be possible if we worked across linguistic, disciplinary, aesthetic, and formal and institutional borders? As a periodical, Te Ao Hou is both singular and familiar. Unlike other multi-genre magazines published by settler states, Indigenous people gained access to publication and reading in ways that rendered the magazine very different from, for example, Dawn (later New Dawn), published in Australia by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board over the exact same stretch of dates as Te Ao Hou: 1952–1975. And yet, in other ways, it can sit alongside so many other periodical publications around and beyond Oceania, from the short-lived but foundational ‘Mana’ section edited by Marjorie Crocombe in Pacific Islands Monthly in the early 1970s through to solely literary magazines like Kovave, Faikava, and

17 ‘A Famous Oriori from Tauranga’.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 165 Mana. It is useful to think about Te Ao Hou in the context of these broader networks, not only because individual writers and editors and texts circulated more globally than we might assume, but because these wider contexts can help us see specific poems, periodicals, sites, and concepts more carefully than if we treat them in isolation.

Ricochet: Māori Modernisms, Oceanic Modernisms The game of darts as it has been played in Aotearoa has similarities with ricochet-focussed games played around Oceania. As with so many other resonances around the region, there are specificities unique to each of the places where such games occur, as well as striking and necessarily longstanding similarities that have been maintained across the region for generations. Māori people, like so many others in Oceania, responded to the massive cultural transformations of the twentieth century (and indeed, the period before then) in a wide range of ways, including the publication of new forms of English-language poetry. We can think about this diverse response to circumstances as chaotic and inaccurate (whether accuracy in this context is defined as wholly assimilated or wholly separate), or we can focus on the various trajectories and particular landing sites as being less important than the act of response in the first place. If the story of kumara tells us anything, it is that Māori have a range of connections across the region; this seems unremarkable to some, but to others who focus on late-twentieth-century political configurations, the presence of Aotearoa (and sometimes Hawai‘i) in conversations about Oceania is at best peripheral and at worst out of place.18 Rather than a focus on Māori modernisms becoming parochial or Aotearoa-centric, we find at every step of this chapter there are gestures to the broader region. Perhaps the ‘suturing’ movements which Lyons describes as ‘reactivating approaches toward wholeness’ are not only genealogical in a temporal sense;19 perhaps, in this region stitched together by ancient networks of migration and connection, they also ‘suture’ genealogies across Oceania. In a 1962 article about sports called ‘Maoris play by “Maori rules” ’, published in Te Ao Hou, Kara Puketapu writes: [i]n this issue I want to throw a whole lot of ideas into the melting pot and let them stew. Perhaps you will have the answers immediately, perhaps not—the aim being a better appreciation of Maoris in sport—or should one say, of sport in Maori life.20

18 I have written about this at length in Once Were Pacific: Māori connections to Oceania (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 19 Lyons, ‘John Dominis Holt’s Kanaka Maoli Modernism’, 95. 20 Kara Puketapu, ‘Maoris Play by “Maori Rules” ’, Te Ao Hou no. 40 (1962): 55.

166  Alice Te Punga Somerville The final move is significant: it refuses to simply sketch the Māori version or form of a larger (non-Māori) entity, in favour of considering what that entity means in the context of the Māori world. For the purpose of this chapter, I have followed his lead but replaced the word ‘sports’ with ‘modernism’: ‘the aim being a better appreciation of Maoris in [modernism]—or should one say, of [modernism] in Maori life’. This inversion nudges me to consider the relationship between Māori (or Oceania) and modernism as reciprocal or perhaps even co-constitutive, and yet certainly not exhaustive. Rather than asking, ‘what does Māori modernism tell us about modernism?’ we might ask, ‘what does Māori modernism tell us about Māori?’ Conceptually, ‘te ao hou’ is one way that Māori people have made sense of massive cultural change, especially that brought about in relation to a specific project of modernity. That the phrase was the title of a government magazine does not derail its longer origin from within the Māori world. As the old man used it to speak with Te Rangihiroa and his peers, the concept does not by itself contain resignation or criticism (if anything, it is an acknowledgement). In turn, Dewes’s poem uses the term as its title but also clearly references another, much older, composition that speaks of the arrival of kumara and the changes that brought about generations before the arrival of Europeans. The concept of ‘te ao hou’ and the bringing of kumara to Aotearoa are both cases of people making sense of change not through a representation of rupture or departure but through the mobilisation of the discursive power of precedent. The ‘modern’ in Māori life does not, therefore, require the casting off of the old. Like modernism in other sites and other communities, the modern is productively understood as a re-engagement rather than a departure. Modernism is generational, and Māori modernists—artistic, literary— consciously drew on earlier versions of Māori worlds even as they rendered them anew. Modernity—and the specific features and elements of modernism that it produced in some mid-twentieth-century creative work—tells us things about Māori: about the valuing of adaptability, about the search for nourishment for the hungry, about the Oceanic stretch of our connections, and about rebalance in the context of the new. Of the hou. Of te ao hou.

Bibliography ‘A Famous Oriori from Tauranga [sic]’. Te Ao Hou, no. 53 (1965): 19–21. Allen, Chadwick. Blood Narrative. Durham: Duke, 2002. ———. ‘Rere Kē/Moving Differently: Indigenizing Methodologies for Comparative Indigenous Literary Studies.’ Studies in American Indian Literature 19, no. 4 (2007): 1–26. ‘Baroness von Trapp Tells Te Ao Hou Her Ideas on Maori Art in the Modern World’. Te Ao Hou, no. 13. (1955): 18.

‘[Modernism] in Māori Life’ 167 Brown, Deirdre. ‘Mana Modernism: Deirdre Brown on the Second Season of Te Ao Hou | Modern Māori Art’. Off the Wall, no. 4 (2014): 1–6. http://arts. tepapa.govt.nz/off-the-wall/7457/mana-modernism. Buck, Peter. ‘Te Ao Hou’. Te Ao Hou, no. 7 (1954): 14. Buck, Peter (Te Rangihiroa). The Coming of the Māori. Wellington: Maori Purposes Fund Board, 1949. ———‘Centenary of the King Movement’. Te Ao Hou, no. 23 (1968): 1. Dewes, Henare. ‘Te Ao Hou’. Te Ao Hou, no. 76 (1975): 40. Hokowhitu, Brendan. ‘Authenticating Māori Physicality: Translations of “Games” and “Pastimes” by Early Travellers and Missionaries to New Zealand’. International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 10 (2008): 1355–73. Lyons, Paul. ‘John Dominis Holt’s Kanaka Maoli Modernism’. Symplokē 26, no. 1–2 (2018): 93–108. Mahuika, Nepia. ‘Kōrero Tuku Iho: Reconfiguring Oral History and Oral Tradition’. PhD diss., University of Waikato, 2012. Ngata, Apirana and Pei Te Hurinui Jones, Ngā Mōteatea: The maramara rere nō ngā waka maha, Part Two. Wellington: Polynesian Society, 1961. Puketapu, Kara. ‘Maoris Play by “Maori Rules” ’. Te Ao Hou, no. 40 (1962): 55. Schwimmer, Erik. Te Ao Hou, no. 1 (1952): 1–2. Te Papa. ‘Te Kooti at Ruatahuna’. Accessed 26 March 2019. https://collections. tepapa.govt.nz/object/702581. Te Punga Somerville, Alice. ‘Nau mai, hoki mai: Approaching the ancestral house’. In Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific, edited by Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy Nalani McDougall, Georganne Nordstrom, 71–88. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. ———. Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. ———. ‘Te Ao Hou: te pataka’. In Cambridge History of New Zealand Literature, edited by Mark Williams, 182–94. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Wevers, Lydia. ‘Short Fiction by Maori Writers.’ Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 16, no. 2 (1994): 26–33.

10 Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre: Nina Nawalowalo and The Conch David O’Donnell

Modernism in the theatre is usually defined in terms of the canonical European plays of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, from the naturalist plays of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov to Bertolt Brecht’s radical rejection of theatrical illusion in his epic theatre. Although the aesthetic methods of early modernist movements like naturalism and symbolism seemed to be in conflict with each other, as Dan Rebellato observes, they ‘were, in many ways, contemporaries, in dialogue with each other, sharing theatre spaces, audiences and writers’.1 Claire Warden notes that naturalism and symbolism ‘both issue from the same impulse to strip theatre back to its essence in order to perform truth’.2 The truth that the theatrical modernists sought to stage was that of the era of modernity, a creative reaction to the industrialisation of European society and culture, and to what Rebellato describes as ‘the distinctive spirit of the modern age’.3 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr suggests that chronological studies of theatrical modernism do not convey: the complexity of often simultaneous and deeply contrasting strands of modernist activity in the theatre. [. . .] Playwrights like Ibsen and [August] Strindberg experimented with many different genres and styles of dramaturgy, and their best work is often an amalgam of modes.4 Shepherd-Barr argues that the live, embodied, interactive, public, crosscultural, and interdisciplinary nature of theatre plays ‘a vital role’ in the

1 Dan Rebellato, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, ed. Maggie B. Gale, John F. Deeney, and Dan Rebelatto (London: Routledge, 2010), 20. 2 Claire Warden, ‘Modernism and European Drama/Theatre’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 358. 3 Rebellato, ‘Introduction’, 6. 4 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, ‘Staging Modernism: A New Drama’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 125.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 169 mission of modernist art, which is often concerned with ‘the experience of the self, the alienated subject, the disintegration and fragmentation of accepted forms’.5 Even as theatre historians seek to explain and reconcile the aesthetic contradictions in European modernism, there has been a shift to expand the parameters of modernist theatre beyond the canonical works. Shepherd-Barr questions the Eurocentrism of modernist studies, suggesting that ‘the regional boundaries of canonical modernism need to be radically expanded’.6 The shift towards a more global understanding of modernism has particular resonance for the postcolonial Pacific region. Susan Stanford Friedman extrapolates on the close connections between the project of Western modernity and European colonialism to argue that ‘we must not close the curtain on modernism before the creative agencies in the colonies and newly emergent nations have their chance to perform’.7 Friedman’s theatrical metaphor seems to invite the full inclusion of theatrical performance in new, globalised definitions of modernism, and acknowledges that artists working in a postcolonial context are likely to be influenced by European modernism, even as they critique and resist dominant forms of representation. In a discussion of recent theatre from New Zealand and Tahiti, Diana Looser recognises a ‘communion with Pacific indigeneity’ which creates ‘Oceanic modernities, forged from the ruptures of imperial expansion but also evolving variously in contexts of postcolonial independence, indigenous self-determination movements, and variegated diasporic networks’.8 Looser’s research opens the way to consider an Oceanic modernist theatre, which blends traditional and modern, local and international, Pacific arts and the themes of canonical modernism. This chapter uses the New Zealand-based theatre company The Conch as a case history to explore definitions of theatrical modernism and how these have been adapted into new forms in Oceania. I  argue that The Conch’s artistic director, Nina Nawalowalo, has developed a distinctively Oceanian performance style by merging influences from her Fijian heritage with contemporary theatre techniques. Nawalowalo’s work has been performed throughout New Zealand and the Solomons, as well as in Fiji, Guam, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Australia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In 2014, she won an Outstanding Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.9 As I write in 2019, The Conch

5 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, Modernist Cultures 1, no. 1 (2005): 65. 6 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, 60. 7 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 427. 8 Diana Looser, ‘Theatrical Crossings, Pacific Visions: Gauguin, Meryon, and the Staging of Oceanian Modernities’, Recherche Littéraire/ Literary Research no. 34 (2018): 13. 9 This award was for directing the children’s show Duck, Death and the Tulip.

170  David O’Donnell has received further festival commissions and is continuing to work on performance projects with various communities in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. This chapter is informed by theories of European modernism, by scholarship in Pacific arts, and by discussions and interviews with Nawalowalo and her artistic collaborator and husband, Tom McCrory.

Modernity and Oceania Oceania covers a huge geographical area with dozens of distinct cultural groups, dominated economically by the larger Westernised nations Australia and New Zealand. The evolution of theatre in Oceania is inevitably embroiled in the complex fallout from colonisation by European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Australian art critic Robert Hughes dubbed the late nineteenth century ‘the cradle of modernism’, aligning the technological advances of mass industrialisation with radical change in the visual arts, which Hughes famously dubbed ‘the shock of the new’.10 The late nineteenth century also coincides with the large-scale migration of European settlers into the Pacific region. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes, ‘the systematic colonization of indigenous peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are all facets of the modernist project’.11 Smith acknowledges that the social, political, and technological forces of European modernity impacted radically on Pacific peoples, especially emphasising that colonisation led to the commodification of Indigenous knowledge. This included the practices and artefacts of Indigenous performance. Just as many Indigenous artworks from Oceania were expatriated and reinstalled in European museums, there was a well-documented practice of Indigenous peoples being exhibited and made to perform as an exotic spectacle for European audiences. For example, Christopher Balme records that ‘[i]n 1910 a troupe of Samoan performers spent almost a month in the Frankfurt zoo performing dances and songs, cavorting on specially constructed water-slides and paddling their imported canoes’.12 Shepherd-Barr’s statement that modern art reflects ‘the human condition in the throes of modernity’ takes on a particular significance in the context of Oceanic art.13 If, as Smith argues, this colonial exploitation of Indigenous performance is inherently linked to the project of modernity, then modernist performance can become a particularly appropriate form to deconstruct, contest, and re-evaluate such practices. Looser argues that the ‘New’—that is, postcolonial—Pacific ‘is

10 Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 11. 11 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), 62. 12 Christopher B. Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 122. 13 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, 63.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 171 enmeshed and engaged with, but also challenges, hegemonic forms of European and American modernity’.14 As we shall see, Nawalowalo’s theatre work reverses and reclaims this history of commodification and exploitation through her performance aesthetic, which blends traditional and contemporary performance forms with the animation of cultural artefacts. I suggest that Nawalowalo’s practice moves towards a distinctive form of Oceanian modernism. Live theatre is a particularly potent artform in debates about Oceanian modernism, because performance was historically central to daily life in the Pacific. Balme argues that ‘the first encounters between Pacific Islanders and Europeans were marked by various manifestations of theatricality’,15 such as Indigenous rituals and ceremonies, dances, and the playing of musical instruments. Citing the international recognition of Pacific dances such as the hula, Balme argues that ‘no region in the world has been more closely associated with performance than the Pacific’.16 One of the most distinctive aspects of contemporary theatre in Oceania is the playwriting and performance work by Indigenous artists. Balme suggests that ‘[w]hile Hawai‘i remains the undisputed touristic centre of the Pacific, the theatrical centre from the point of view of the growing theatre and performing arts movement is New Zealand’.17 Balme notes that a formative influence on the internationally renowned Samoan choreographer Lemi Ponifasio was his training in the experimental Japanese dance form Butoh.18 Butoh founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo were strongly influenced by European modernism, notably by German Expressionism and Neue Tanz.19 There is, therefore, a direct genealogical link from European modernist dance and theatre from the 1920s and 1930s, via Japan, to this prominent New Zealand-based choreographer whose work incorporates many Polynesian aesthetic and spiritual elements. Balme suggests that Pacific theatre ‘is clearly reformulating what has traditionally been seen as a situation of lack and loss into a new cultural space with considerable creative and recuperative potential’.20 Rotuman playwright and scholar Vilsoni Hereniko writes that criticism of Pacific literature written by outsiders has ‘tended to be judgmental in tone, with a primary focus on the text and the ways in which it is similar to or different from other works in European literature’.21

14 Looser, ‘Theatrical Crossings’, 14. 15 Balme, Pacific Performances, 47. 16 Balme, Pacific Performances, xii. 17 Balme, Pacific Performances, 191. 18 Balme, Pacific Performances, 213. 19 Sondra Fraleigh and Tamah Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo (New York: Routledge, 2006), 14. 20 Balme, Pacific Performances, 216. 21 Quoted in Nicholas J. Goetzfridt, Indigenous Literature of Oceania: A Survey of Criticism and Interpretation (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995), ix.

172  David O’Donnell Hereniko’s argument raises the difficult question of whether it is culturally appropriate to discuss Indigenous Pacific art using the European terms modernity and modernism. Another leading Pacific writer/ scholar, Albert Wendt, however, acknowledges that Oceanic cultures and artists are connected and ‘corrupted’ in a postcolonial, globalised world. Wendt sees the ‘super-soulless’ and ‘nightmarish’ hotels that proliferate in the Pacific as symbols of modernity: ‘bourgeois values  [.  .  .] reveal themselves in the new tourist hotels constructed of dead materials which echo the spiritual, creative and emotional emptiness in modern man’.22 Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls attention to the ways in which modernist art drew inspiration from Indigenous art from colonised cultures: ‘Modernism is more than a representation of fragments from the cultural archive in new contexts. “Discoveries” about and from the “new” world expanded and challenged ideas that the West held about itself’.23 Pablo Picasso, one of the artists most synonymous with European modernism, was fascinated by ‘primitive art’ and collected Oceanic art, as well as art from Africa and Asia. This influence can clearly be seen in some of his painting and sculpture, as illustrated by the 2017 ‘Picasso Primitif’ exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, where Oceanic art from Picasso’s personal collection was displayed alongside his own works to highlight the similarities.24 The historical project of modernity, the modernist art movement, and art practices in Oceania have become inextricably linked, as Wendt recognises: Are not the life-styles of our towns simply developments of our traditional life-styles [. . .] . Why is it that many of us condemn urban life-styles [. . .] as being ‘foreign’ and therefore ‘evil’ forces contaminating/corrupting the ‘purity of our true cultures’ (whatever this means)  [.  .  .]  . Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free from the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts.25 Wendt’s vision for Indigenous artists to engage with the new realities of modernity, globalisation, and urbanisation has been realised since the 1970s in much of the theatre created by New Zealand Māori and Pacific Islanders. This work builds on decades of engagement with modernist 22 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 56–57. 23 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 62. 24 Musée du Quai Branly, ‘Picasso Primitif’, accessed 22 March 2019, www.quaibranly.fr/en/ exhibitions-and-events/at-the-museum/exhibitions/event-details/e/picasso-primitif-36915/. 25 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 52–60.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 173 artforms by theatre practitioners in the Pacific region. For example, the American Samoan writer John Kneubuhl studied with the celebrated modernist playwright Thornton Wilder at Yale University in the 1940s and went on to a distinguished career writing for theatre, film, and television in Hawai‘i and the mainland United States. The modernist influences in Kneubuhl’s plays can be seen in his use of metaphor, themes of spiritual and cultural alienation, and a commitment to heightened theatricality.26 However, his plays also engaged deeply with Pacific history, cultures, dance forms, and languages.

Developing a Modernist Oceanic Aesthetic: The Conch The Conch was founded in 2002 by Nina Nawalowalo, a New Zealander of Fijian and English parentage, and Englishman Tom McCrory. In 1985, Nawalowalo moved from Wellington to London, where she immersed herself in contemporary European theatre techniques, learning skills in mime, movement, mask, and magic, which would later enable her to build a career as one of New Zealand’s leading physical theatre directors. She trained with some of the most prominent exponents of these forms, including mime and physical theatre teacher Desmond Jones, magician Richard McDougall, and Philippe Gaulier, the French master of mime, mask, and clowning. Like Lemi Ponifasio’s experiences with Butoh in Japan, her training directly connects her with major European modernist theatre practitioners. Nawalowalo explains that her desire to train with leading European practitioners was linked to her Pacific heritage and the need to connect with authentic traditions: ‘I’m a believer in going to the heart of tradition. It’s important to know the source of what you’re exploring’.27 She was strongly influenced by Pacific notions of genealogy as being central to identity in seeking a ‘line of knowledge’ in her training.28 Nawalowalo observes that in the study of mask, it is essential to know the history of each mask and which culture it comes from. Her mime teacher, Desmond Jones, studied with a master of the previous generation, the corporeal mime Etienne DeCroux, and Gaulier studied under Jacques Lecoq, who made the body of the performer central to actor training. Simon Murray sees Lecoq as one of the key figures of European modernism, along with Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Copeau, and Brecht.29 Murray frames Lecoq’s work

26 Jackie Pualani Johnson, ‘Afterword: A Portrait of John Kneubuhl’, in Think of a Garden and Other Plays, ed. John Kneubuhl (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 256–7. 27 Nina Nawalowalo and Tom McCrory, in discussion with the author, Wellington, 17 February 2017. 28 Nawalowalo and McCrory, discussion. 29 Simon Murray, Jacques Lecoq (New York: Routledge, 2003), 6.

174  David O’Donnell with a discussion of the performing body, arguing that the body ‘and its ability to generate “presence” and/or to “represent” authentically has been the most significant challenge for Western theatre makers over the last three decades’.30 Nawalowalo’s work with The Conch has been grounded in the body and the representation of Pacific bodies. This work was seeded in London, where she worked in a context wherein the aesthetic influences of European theatrical modernists such as Antonin Artaud, Brecht, and Lecoq would become mainstream through the work of high-profile physical theatre companies like Théâtre de Complicité, DV8, and Kneehigh. However, her training as a magician is also key to the development of her distinctive directing style, which combines theatrical illusion with physical theatre.31 In London, Nawalowalo met McCrory, a Lecoq-trained movement specialist. On her return to New Zealand, Nawalowalo began to explore her Fijian heritage to create an innovative blend of Pacific arts with the European modernism she had encountered in the United Kingdom. In The Conch’s first physical theatre work, Vula (2002), devised and directed by Nawalowalo, three Pacific women performed stylised movement on a stage flooded with water, inspired by the daily rituals of Fijian women working in the lagoon. This aestheticising of the value of women’s work recalls Albert Wendt’s vision of the ‘Post-Colonial body’ as ‘a Body “becoming,” defining itself, clearing a space for itself among and alongside other bodies’.32 The Conch’s work can be defined as physical theatre, because the body is central both to the creative process and to the finished performance. Alan Filewood defines physical theatre as that ‘in which the bodies of the actors create the text in the moment of performance’, and considers the new emphasis on the performing body as one of the manifestations of modernist theatre in Canada and the United States from the 1930s onwards.33 Filewood’s definition highlights the extent to which the performative representation of the body has become a modernist technique. This central emphasis on the body is apparent in Vula, which had no written text, and was devised by the director and the performers working closely through physical experimentation and improvisation. Although Vula’s watery imagery was literally drenched with Pacific symbolism in the clothing and props, it also utilised several of the conventions of canonical theatrical modernism, including abstraction,

30 Murray, Jacques Lecoq, 6. 31 Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell, Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2017), 142. 32 Albert Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’, SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Language and Literary Studies no. 62 (2009): 98. 33 Alan Filewood, ‘Theatrical Modernism: Canada and the United States’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 560.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 175 defamiliarisation, and the use of technology to create theatrical illusion and lighting effects. The use of abstraction is one of the most distinctive aspects of canonical modernist performance. In discussing New Zealand contemporary dance, Marianne Schultz argues that modern dance was ‘both modernist in its use of abstract, expressive movement and modern in its reference to a break with the past’.34 In Vula, Nawalowalo took traditional Pacific dance forms and abstracted them, taking distinct elements of the dance and presenting them separately, or focussing on a part of the body moving in a beam of light. In reviewing Vula, dance critic Jenny Stevenson commented, ‘Using a vocabulary of movement that deconstructs the Pacific dance form with its softly beguiling hands, swaying hips and poses of statuesque beauty, Nawalowalo creates sequences of Butoh-like intensity’.35 By abstracting Pacific dance, Nawalowalo achieved a distancing effect similar to Brecht’s defamiliarisation technique (Verfremdungseffekt), which enabled us to see the movement (sometimes literally) in a new light. The production included performance of the traditional meke (Fijian dance) which ‘are chanted verses with dance accompaniment’ performed by both men and women at celebratory occasions.36 Sachiko Miller describes the meke as ‘a traditional dance that passes on knowledge and genealogies’ and notes that ‘the lyrics and movements were filled with ancient knowledge and information’.37 At one moment in Vula, one of the performers danced the meke, then the other women appeared and then disappeared again as if by magic.38 Such moments bring the spiritual and cultural significance of the ancient dance together with a playful contemporary mood that connects the past and present, the traditional and contemporary, in a dynamic act of empowerment of Pacific women. The extensive use of magical illusions in Nawalowalo’s work can be seen as a product of the impact of modernity on Western theatre. The technological inventions of nineteenth-century modernity such as gas and electric lighting led to innovations in staging and lighting which were well established before modernism took hold. As Michael R. Booth observes, ‘the pictorial skills of the scene painter were combined with those of

34 Marianne Schultz, ‘Tracing the Steps of Modern and Contemporary Dance in TwentiethCentury New Zealand’, in Moving Oceans: Celebrating Dance in the South Pacific, ed. Ralph Buck and Nicholas Rowe (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 70. 35 Jenny Stevenson, ‘Dancing to Light of a Pacific Moon’, Dominion Post, 20 September 2002, n.p. 36 Steven Hooper, Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 2016), 209. 37 Sachiko Miller, ‘Treasuring the Meke in a Modern Fiji’, in Moving Oceans: Celebrating Dance in the South Pacific, ed. Ralph Buck and Nicholas Rowe (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 119, 123. 38 Warrington and O’Donnell, Floating Islanders, 146.

176  David O’Donnell the carpenter, the machinist, and the gasman to create the strong visual images that dominated the nineteenth-century theatre’.39 Such imagery included magical illusions such as John Henry Pepper’s ghost effect, first used in his adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain in 1862.40 The illusion was ‘a simple but spectacular three-dimensional specter that appeared to walk through solid objects before fading away’ and was created by ‘a combination of painted backdrops, lighting effects and mirrors’, manipulated in conjunction with a concealed actor.41 While Pepper’s ghost was created prior to the development of canonical modernist theatre, the improvements in nineteenthcentury theatre technology made possible by modernity directly led to modernist experimental theatre in the twentieth century. German expressionism, for example, relied heavily on theatrical lighting for its stylised effects. Magical illusions continue to be central to many commercial theatre productions in the present, such as those created by British illusionist Paul Kieve for Matilda the Musical (2010) and Groundhog Day (2017). Kieve was one of Nawalowalo’s key collaborators in creating her work Masi (2012). Nawalowalo’s development of this long history of stage illusion intersects with current debates on the role of magic in modernist studies. Citing Stephen Ross, Leigh Wilson notes that it is now ‘accepted knowledge’ that European modernists were concerned with the occult, ‘[a]ttending séances, toying with telepathy, extra-sensory perception, metempsychosis, clairvoyance, dematerialization and so on’.42 Wilson draws a parallel between magic, which she defines as ‘that which attempts to animate matter’, and the aesthetic experiments of the modernists.43 Through her study of a range of literary modernists including James Joyce and Ezra Pound, Wilson argues that their experimental quest to ‘challenge representational practices in order to re-make the world, can only work conceptually if it uses, relies on and has at its heart an idea of magic’.44 As we have seen, modernist theatre has inherited a legacy of magical illusion from the experiments made possible by nineteenth-century advances in theatre technology. Nawalowalo partners such illusions with Indigenous physical theatre to aestheticise women’s daily work rituals and to reshape perceptions of Pacific women. Shepherd-Barr sees canonical modernist

39 Michael R. Booth, ‘Nineteenth Century Theatre’, in The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 301. 40 Helen Groth, ‘Reading Victorian Illusions: Dickens’s Haunted Man and Dr. Peppers’ “Ghost” ’, Victorian Studies 50, no. 1 (2007): 55. 41 Groth, ‘Reading Victorian Illusions’, 55. 42 Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 10. 43 Wilson, Modernism and Magic, 44, 12. 44 Wilson, Modernism and Magic, 12.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 177 theatre as a series of ‘radical experiments in staging, which challenged the role of the actor, the audience, the director, the designer, indeed almost everything people thought they knew about the theatre as an art form’.45 In Vula, Nawalowalo uses this modernist challenge both as an aesthetic provocation and as a core theme of the work, reshaping perceptions of Pacific women and valuing their function in keeping Pacific Island economies functioning through their daily labour. The aesthetic decision to convey this world through magic illusions interacting with the body accords with the ambition of canonical European modernist theatre to create new forms of representation and to transform society. Women washing clothes and fishing in a Fijian lagoon is aestheticised through abstracted movement and magical illusions, becoming a metaphor for female empowerment in Oceania. As Wilson comments, magic is particularly powerful in art because it ‘takes metaphor seriously by literalising it in order to create and transform’.46 As with all of The Conch’s subsequent work, stage lighting in Vula was central to creating the magical effects. The symbolic use of lighting is one of the defining aspects of European modernist theatre, as seen in the experiments of Richard Wagner, Adolphe Appia, and Edward Gordon Craig. In 1907, British critic Arthur Symons wrote of Craig’s stage designs that: [c]olour cooperates with line in effects of rich and yet delicate vagueness; there are always the long, straight lines, the sense of height and space, the bare surfaces, the subtle, significant shadows, out of which Mr Craig has long since learned to evoke stage pictures more beautiful and more suggestive than any that have been seen on the stage in our time.47 In Vula, the illusions were created by a combination of precisely focussed lighting and the animation or manipulation of objects to create the illusion of a supernatural phenomenon, such as performers appearing then disappearing. In Nawalowalo’s work, such effects are created by performers known as animators or puppeteers, who are dressed in black so they are invisible to the audience. The scenic setting in Vula was entirely black, enabling Nawalowalo to direct scenes wherein magical illusions were made possible by low lighting levels against the black background. The minimalism of the setting enabled the constant transformation of the

45 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Staging Modernism’, 124. 46 Wilson, Modernism and Magic, 14. 47 Arthur Symons, ‘A New Art of the Stage’, in The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, ed. Maggie B. Gale, John F. Deeney, and Dan Rebellato (London: Routledge, 2010), 149.

178  David O’Donnell space and the revelation of rich imagery. The unseen puppeteers manipulated large woven screens, bags, fans, brooms, and bamboo sticks, creating images suggesting boats on the lagoon, the leaping of fish or the gliding of stingrays. Screens sailed across the water, revealing as if by magic new scenes and objects. Symons wrote of Craig that ‘he conceives his setting as the poet conceives his drama’.48 The same could be said of Nawalowalo’s direction, as she rehearses in dark spaces using lighting as an inherent part of the devising process, directing in space as well as time, shaping the mise-en-scène of each image as precisely as the structure of the work overall.49 Subsequent to Vula, The Conch has toured international arts festivals with physical theatre productions that foreground the performing body in concert with striking scenographic imagery. The Conch’s 2012 production Masi was inspired by Nawalowalo’s personal family story, blending imagery of her parents’ bicultural romance in the 1950s with the qualities of traditional Fijian masi cloth, which is hand-crafted from the bark of young mulberry trees and decorated with pattered designs.50 In the production, masi cloths covered the proscenium arch and were animated in the same way as the screens in Vula to facilitate transitions, transformations, and illusions. The tactile qualities of this organic material were contrasted with projections of black and white family photographs taken by renowned photographer Ans Westra. This juxtaposition effectively evoked a contrast between customary art-making and one of the most distinctive forms of modernist art. Irene Gammel and Cathy Waszczuk observe that photography was one of several technological innovations which ‘decisively altered the modern experience, inaugurating profound shifts in perceptual abilities and providing new ways to see, hear and think’.51 In Masi, the contrasting complexions of Nawalowalo’s English mother and Fijian father are reflected in the black and white photography, in their games of chess, and in the dark patterns on the white masi. She uses actors playing her parents to reanimate the static photographs, contrasting the absence of her parents with the vivid, highly physical presence of the performers, including a Fijian chant soloist, masi craftswoman, and a full Fijian dance troupe. The production playfully creates interactions between ‘traditional’ and modernist art, while simultaneously

48 Symons, ‘A New Art’, 149. 49 Nawalowalo and McCrory, discussion. 50 For an extended discussion of Masi, see Lisa Warrington and David O’Donnell, ‘Unfolding the Cloth: Patterns of Landscape and Identity in The Conch’s Masi’, in Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Performance, ed. Birgit Dawes and Marc Maufort (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2014), 199–217. 51 Irene Gammel and Cathy Waszczuk, ‘ “A  Rare Moment of Crisis”: Modernist Intellectual Currents in Europe’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 307.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 179 developing its own original aesthetic. As Prita Meier writes of Indigenous artists in Africa, one key strategy of African modernists is ‘re-imagined “vernacular” or “native” forms’.52 The performance recontextualises a distinctively Oceanic art practice as modernist art. While Vula and Masi were celebratory spectacles, The Conch’s more recent work explores difficult questions regarding gender and the relationship between the family and society. As Friedman observes, ‘the geography of mobility and interculturality’ of postcolonial societies ‘often involve[s] violence and conquest as well as reciprocal exchange, inequality and exploitation as well as mutual benefits, and abjection and humiliation as well as pride and dignity’.53 Stages of Change directly confronts these difficult spaces by focussing on gender and family violence in the Pacific.

Modernist Abstraction in Community-Based Theatre: Stages of Change Stages of Change (2013–2014) was a two-year project in the Solomon Islands funded by the British Council and the European Union. Nawalowalo and McCrory devised a stage production, in collaboration with women who are survivors of family violence. The workshop process and production aimed to give women more agency and to end violence against women. Leonidas Tezapsidis, the European Union’s ambassador to the Solomon Islands, states that open discussion on violence against women has ‘traditionally been taboo in certain communities, particularly in rural areas of the Solomon Islands’.54 The project’s ambitious goals, including promoting gender equality and changing people’s attitudes towards domestic violence can also be seen to reflect a canonical modernist agenda, which Wilson describes as ‘an attempt (even if sometimes a failed one) to expand possibilities, an attempt to present the possibility that the world could be other than it is’.55 As well as performing throughout the Solomon Islands, the production toured to Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and the European Parliament in Brussels. Shepherd-Barr argues that one reason for the lack of attention to theatre in modernist studies is that ‘the ephemeral nature of performance, with no artefact to consult, has downgraded its importance’.56 This

52 Prita Meier, ‘Modernism in Africanist Art History: The Making of a New Discipline’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 221. 53 Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism’, 428. 54 Kate Burry and Connie Grouse, Voices Against Violence (Auckland: British Council New Zealand, 2015), 1. 55 Wilson, Modernism and Magic, 12. 56 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, 62.

180  David O’Donnell ephemerality is exemplified in Vula and Masi, neither of which has a script, featuring very little spoken dialogue and therefore lacking concrete textual evidence to legitimate their existence as modernist artworks. In contrast to The Conch’s earlier works, the Stages of Change project has produced artefacts: a documentary film of the same name and a bilingual book, Voices Against Violence, containing the transcribed stories of the performers along with production photographs. Undoubtedly, the film and book make the project more accessible for study, as well as providing evidence to advance the social goals of the project. While the book contains many disturbing and moving accounts of the abuse suffered by the women, Nawalowalo and McCrory made the decision to create a show with no spoken language. The trauma suffered by the women was conveyed solely through symbolic imagery. For example, there is a scene where the chorus of women recoil in unison as if they have been slapped. The women, dressed in matching t-shirts and trousers, move in precise formation, presenting an image of female strength and solidarity that comments on and contests the histories of these women as victims. As in Vula, everyday objects commonly used in the Pacific, such as fans and sasas (brooms), are animated through magical illusions to suggest natural imagery like fish or the bush. Shepherd-Barr notes that one of the techniques most often associated with canonical modernism is the

Figure 10.1  Cathy Eno (front) and Sue Manilia (back) in Stages of Change. Source: Photograph courtesy of The Conch. Photographer: Faanati Mamea.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 181 use of utilitarian and found objects as art.57 Utilising her training as a magician, Nawalowalo commonly animates found objects, aestheticising them and giving them new meanings. In Masi, she represented her father’s death by way of a magical illusion which sees his coffin covered with masi, then rising above the ground and disappearing before the audience’s eyes. Anne D’Alleva comments on the active agency of Pacific artworks, which may permit ‘spirits or ancestors to be contacted and made active in this world, leaders to be inaugurated, individuals to move from childhood to adulthood or from the world of the living to the world of the dead’.58 She argues that in the Pacific, ‘art not only reflects a culture’s beliefs and ways of life but also shapes important cultural values as well as community and individual experience’.59 In Stages of Change, the manipulation of everyday domestic tools transforms them into aesthetic objects, ritualising them, breaking down the artificial distinction between utilitarian items and artworks. They symbolise the relationship between domestic tasks performed by the women and the natural world, highlighting the unnatural interruption of male violence into this harmonious ecosystem. White fabric screens emerge from the wings, to be manipulated by the performers to conceal and reveal performers and objects. The production makes use of candlelight and shadows to create imagery suggesting domestic violence without overtly showing it. In one sequence the screens are backlit with an actor behind each screen, their shadows presenting images of women going about their daily work. The sequence ends abruptly with one of the women being slapped in shadow, highlighting the tragic rupture of domestic violence in their everyday lives. How effective is the use of these abstract modernist techniques to Pacific audiences unfamiliar with Western theatre? During the 1930s, European modernists debated the merits of realism or abstraction as the best methods of connecting with mass audiences. Georg Lukács, for example, argued for social realism as the most valid form of representing society to the proletariat, while Bertolt Brecht rejected realism as an expression of bourgeois conformity, arguing that social change could only be achieved through art that distances the familiar, disrupting narrative expectations to prompt critical engagement in its audiences.60 In ‘Against Georg Lukács’, Brecht writes, ‘Reality changes; in order to

57 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, 62. 58 Anne D’Alleva, Arts of the Pacific Islands (New York: Abrams, 1998), 18. 59 D’Alleva, Arts of the Pacific Islands, 18. 60 Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 387–91.

182  David O’Donnell represent it, modes of representation must also change’.61 Brecht argues that aesthetic innovation is welcomed by working-class audiences, stating, ‘I am speaking from experience when I  say that one need not be afraid to produce daring, unusual things for the proletariat so long as they deal with its real situation’.62 While Brecht’s theories were formed in a radically different context, his ideas regarding the relationship between politics, aesthetics, and communication with a broad audience remain relevant to The Conch’s work. While Brecht sought to inspire audiences to critique capitalism and other repressive systems of power in early twentieth-century Europe, Nawalowalo asks twenty-first-century Pacific audiences to question an entrenched gender imbalance which victimises women. Nicholas Thomas comments that gender was and is ‘the most significant principle of differentiation’ in Pacific societies, and refers to a ‘theft or eclipse of female power’ which often appears in ritual art.63 The Conch’s work addresses this gender imbalance as Brecht addressed social and economic imbalances of his era. There is an ironic reversal in The Conch’s use of abstraction in the Pacific context. While Brecht advocated abstraction as a counter to bourgeois realism, a jarring encounter with the unfamiliar, in the Pacific, the abstraction of Indigenous artforms is likely much more familiar to local audiences than the more illustrative techniques of modernist physical theatre—such as the choreographed slap enacted by the chorus in unison. This reversal of the defamilarisation technique highlights a fracturing of different cultural expectations, and this experimentation can be seen as modernist in itself. Yet the principle of juxtaposition of different forms of representation within the same work remains the same. In Stages of Change, the blending of modernist aesthetics with Indigenous cultural performance by Nawalowalo and McCrory appears to have been highly effective in communicating its political agenda. Their creative choices reflect the eclecticism of Brechtian aesthetics. For example, the soundtrack featured music by minimalist composers Arvo Pärt and Phillip Glass, whose work is more commonly associated with the opera houses of the largest Western cities, yet was highly appreciated by the Stages of Change performers and audiences.64 In a project whose title explicitly seeks social change through live theatre, The Conch created a work which, though stylised, successfully connected with audiences. As Balme demonstrates, dance and ritual performance are central to many social transactions in Pacific communities.

61 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Against Georg Lukács’, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Stuart Hood (London: Verso, 1994), 82. 62 Brecht, ‘Against Georg Lukács’, 84. 63 Nicholas Thomas, Oceanic Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 31. 64 Nawalowalo and McCrory, discussion.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 183 In Stages of Change—as in Masi—The Conch incorporates customary dances and songs from the Solomons, blending these with movementbased performance and the defamiliarising techniques of European modernism. This juxtaposition between familiar cultural performances and the symbolic movement and lighting was successful in achieving critical distance in its audiences. After each show, the women introduced themselves to the audience and led a question-and-answer session that produced rich discussion about the issues raised. RONA:  In

PNG  [.  .  .] [s]ome cried; we even had men who cried.  [.  .  .] Some of them said to us: ‘This is one thing we’ve been keeping quiet about, this violence, but it really is something big’. And during a performance to some youths here, one young boy stood up and told us he was really moved. He said watching the scene where we do the slaps really affected him and he said, ‘I don’t think I will do that to my wife [. . .] here is a lesson for all us males to learn. To not continue with violence’.65

Although Stages of Change was a non-verbal performance, it was framed so as to promote discussion and debate. Breaking down the barrier between performers and audiences is also a hallmark of modernist experimentation, and from this perspective, the post-show discussions are part of the performance, not separate from it. The discussions also reflect Pacific traditions of debate and discussion such as talanoa, which Timote Vaioleti describes as ‘a conversation, a talk, an exchange of ideas or thinking, whether formal or informal. It is almost always carried out face-to-face’.66 In the post-show discussions, it appears that the lack of narration or conventional storytelling was no barrier to audiences understanding the themes of the work. Rona’s testimony illustrates that the work was successful both in creating a strong emotional response and in provoking critical thought.

Modernism and ‘Finding Your Own Voice’ Stages of Change reflects one aspect of the modernist agenda by harnessing the transformative potential of art to heal trauma. Laura Doyle notes that the experimentation of modernism has often been interpreted as responding to the trauma of the First World War,67 and the theme of 65 Burry and Grouse, Voices Against Violence, 73. 66 Timote M. Vaioleti, ‘Talanoa Research Methodology: A Developing Position on Pacific Research’, Waikato Journal of Education no. 12 (2006): 23. 67 Laura Doyle, ‘Colonial Encounters’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 249.

184  David O’Donnell trauma resounds throughout the history of modernism. The relevance and impact of the work’s themes is significantly enhanced by the onstage presence of the actual women who have suffered the abuse. The newly learned theatrical skills of the women in Stages of Change empower them to speak out publicly about their traumas in ways not previously available to them. Nawalowalo highlights the potential of theatre for personal development for those lacking the power and skills to make positive changes in their lives: ‘[h]aving the confidence to stand on stage is the doorway to finding your voice’.68 Sue, one of the performers, states: [a]t first I was scared. In Malaita [province], women don’t stand on stage and preach for women; only men do it. [. . .] But the training we had gave me the confidence I needed, and it made me think, because sometimes we don’t think of stance and things like that  [.  .  .] and now I can feel changes in my body. I move differently.69 Sue’s statement reinforces that the performance itself has created a new form of gender equity—expressed in terms of the right to speak in public—that did not previously exist in her society. Furthermore, the change has impacted personally on her own body. The same body that was the subject of abuse has become a performing body, an empowered body that has achieved a physical presence and autonomy through performance. In a scene from Stages of Change, the women enter wearing the traditional costume from their provinces. This reflected Nawalowalo’s belief in basing her artistic process on a respect for tradition, and was a powerful visual assertion of the women’s personal mana, based in their specific cultural identity.70 Stages of Change does not present a solution to the problem of domestic violence, but the invitation for the audience to discuss the issues brought up following the performance recalls Brecht’s famous epilogue to The Good Woman of Setzuan: we must act for social change if we wish to have a happy ending: ‘It is for you to find a way, my friends,/To help good men arrive at happy ends./You write the happy ending to the play!/There must, there must, there’s got to be a way’.71 Nawalowalo’s work may also be read in the context of the gender politics of modernism. Shepherd-Barr comments on the ‘often-neglected’ contributions that women have made to modernist theatre: ‘[i]t may be a long time before the modernist canon includes them, so predominant 68 Nina Nawalowalo, ‘Commentary’, in Stages of Change (New Zealand: British Council; European Union, 2015), DVD. 69 Burry and Grouse, Voices Against Violence, 44. 70 Nawalowalo and McCrory, discussion. 71 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Good Woman of Setzuan’, in Parables for the Theatre: Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht, trans. Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 109.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 185

Figure 10.2 Gloria Konare (front), Rhian Gatu (centre) and June Bofata (back) in Stages of Change. Source: Photograph courtesy of The Conch. Photographer: Faanati Mamea.

are the male modernists like Picasso, [Henri] Matisse, Stravinsky, Joyce and Eliot’.72 Vula was notably feminist in foregrounding and celebrating the daily work rituals of Fijian women. The all-female cast of Stages of Change highlights gender dynamics in Pacific communities, as well as the problem of domestic abuse. Nawalowalo’s work can be seen as continuing in a line of female theatrical modernists such as playwrights Elizabeth Robins and Susan Glaspell, who, as Shepherd-Barr argues, brought themes ‘rarely seen on the stage such as infanticide, breast cancer, abortion, domestic abuse, and the search for an authentically female language, often in formally innovative ways’.73 Nawalowalo’s feminism includes a commitment to skill sharing and artistic development, providing the Solomon Islands women with further opportunities to develop as artists and making their work and cultures more visible beyond their region. In 2016, Nawalowalo brought three of the Stages of Change performers from the Solomons to New Zealand to perform in a new work, Marama, which premiered in the Auckland Arts Festival. Marama deals with the environmental impact of deforestation

72 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’, 60. 73 Shepherd-Barr, ‘Staging Modernism’, 137.

186  David O’Donnell in the Pacific Islands, and again uses an all-female cast with very little spoken language, conveying its dialectics through visual imagery, movement, music, and soundscape. The exclusion of Pacific modernism from modernist studies is apparent in the 1,182-page The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, published in 2010, which has no reference to the Pacific Islands apart from a brief chapter on ‘Antipodean modernisms’ in Australia and New Zealand. In this chapter, Prudence Black and Stephen Muecke admit they have had to ‘adapt’ the definition of modernism in order to accommodate ‘indigenous Antipodean modernisms’.74 They argue: [t]o accept indigenous modernism and modernity means refusing the idea of aspiration to that modernity some time in the future. It is concomitant with a cultural citizenship that does not preclude cultural difference, and the emphasis on modernities in the plural means abandoning two sorts of colonialist temporal disjunctions indicated earlier: first the colonials who had to catch up to Europe, then the indigenous peoples who had to catch up to the colonials.75 As an Indigenous Pacific theatre artist, Nawalowalo has more than ‘caught up’; she has made a virtue of what Black and Muecke, ‘Antipodean Modernisms’, 975. By finding points of connection between her Fijian heritage and her modernist theatre training, Nawalowalo identifies and exploits points of correspondence—the abstraction of the meke, the symbolism of a stylised chorus sequence, the magical appearance and disappearance of a dancer dressed in the traditional clothing of her village. These become mobilised in the construction of something new—a local modernism that engages fully with the Pacific modernity that Albert Wendt wrote of in the 1970s. Since 2002, The Conch has produced a significant body of work that has had an impact throughout the Pacific. It demonstrates a shapeshifting ability to move between different specialist areas, from mainstream theatre venues and international arts festivals to community-based theatre for social change in the Pacific Islands. Through a commitment to experimentation which highlights the performing body in the context of technology and magical illusion, Nawalowalo and McCrory produce transformative theatre that contests the history of commodification and exploitation of Pacific peoples by the West, and provides political

74 Prudence Black and Stephen Muecke, ‘Antipodean Modernisms: Australia and New Zealand’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 975. 75 Black and Muecke, ‘Antipodean Modernisms’, 975.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 187 empowerment for Pacific women. Their work exemplifies what Susan Stanford Friedman calls the ‘emergent modernities’ of the postcolonial world,76 blending Indigenous cultural practices and performance traditions with international modernist techniques, challenging previous forms of representation, and engaging with major social and political questions in contemporary Oceania.

Bibliography Balme, Christopher B. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Black, Prudence and Stephen Muecke. ‘Antipodean Modernisms: Australia and New Zealand’. In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 961–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Booth, Michael R. ‘Nineteenth Century Theatre’. In The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, edited by John Russell Brown, 299–340. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Brecht, Bertolt. ‘Against Georg Lukács’, translated by Stuart Hood, 68–85. In Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1994. ———. ‘The Good Woman of Setzuan’. Translated by Eric Bentley, 19–109. In Parables for the Theatre: Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Burry, Kate and Connie Grouse. Voices Against Violence. Auckland: British Council New Zealand, 2015. Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. D’Alleva, Anne. Arts of the Pacific Islands. New York: Abrams, 1998. Doyle, Laura. ‘Colonial Encounters’. In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 249–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Filewood, Alan. ‘Theatrical Modernism: Canada and the United States’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 555–62. London: Routledge, 2015. Fraleigh, Sondra and Tamah Nakamura. Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. New York: Routledge, 2006. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’. Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43. Gammel, Irene and Cathy Waszczuk. ‘ “A Rare Moment of Crisis”: Modernist Intellectual Currents in Europe’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 301–10. London: Routledge, 2015. Goetzfridt, Nicholas J. Indigenous Literature of Oceania: A Survey of Criticism and Interpretation. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995. Groth, Helen. ‘Reading Victorian Illusions: Dickens’s Haunted Man and Dr. Peppers’ “Ghost” ’. Victorian Studies 50, no. 1 (2007): 43–65.

76 Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism’, 427.

188  David O’Donnell Hooper, Steven. Fiji: Art and Life in the Pacific. Norwich: University of East Anglia, 2016. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Johnson, Jackie Pualani. ‘Afterword: A Portrait of John Kneubuhl’. In Think of a Garden and Other Plays, by John Kneubuhl, 251–66. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997. Looser, Diana. ‘Theatrical Crossings, Pacific Visions: Gauguin, Meryon, and the Staging of Oceanian Modernities’. Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research, no. 34 (2018): 7–42. Meier, Prita. ‘Modernism in Africanist Art History: The Making of a New Discipline’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 214–23. London: Routledge, 2015. Miller, Sachiko. ‘Treasuring the Meke in a Modern Fiji’. In Moving Oceans: Celebrating Dance in the South Pacific, edited by Ralph Buck and Nicholas Rowe, 119–31. New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. Murray, Simon. Jacques Lecoq. London: Routledge, 2003. Musée du Quai Branly. ‘Picasso Primitif’. Accessed 22 March  2019. www. quaibranly.fr/en/exhibitions-and-events/at-the-museum/exhibitions/ event-details/e/picasso-primitif-36915/. Rebellato, Dan. ‘Introduction’. To The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale, John F. Deeney and Dan Rebelatto, 6–24. London: Routledge, 2010. Schultz, Marianne. ‘Tracing the Steps of Modern and Contemporary Dance in Twentieth-century New Zealand’. In Moving Oceans: Celebrating Dance in the South Pacific, edited by Ralph Buck and Nicholas Rowe, 69–90. New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. ‘Modernism and Theatrical Performance’. Modernist Cultures 1, no. 1 (2005): 59–68. ———. ‘Staging Modernism: A New Drama’. In The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 122–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012. Stages of Change. New Zealand, British Council; European Union, 2015. DVD. Stevenson, Jenny. ‘Dancing to Light of a Pacific Moon’. Dominion Post, 20 September 2002. Symons, Arthur. ‘A New Art of the Stage’. In The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale, John F. Deeney, and Dan Rebellato, 147–52. London: Routledge, 2010. Thomas, Nicholas. Oceanic Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Vaioleti, Timote M. ‘Talanoa Research Methodology: A Developing Position on Pacific Research’. Waikato Journal of Education, no. 12 (2006): 21–34. Warden, Claire. ‘Modernism and European Drama/Theatre’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 356–64. London: Routledge, 2015.

Emergent Modernities in Pacific Theatre 189 Warrington, Lisa and David O’Donnell. Floating Islanders: Pasifika Theatre in Aotearoa. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2017. ———. ‘Unfolding the Cloth: Patterns of Landscape and Identity in The Conch’s Masi’. In Enacting Nature: Ecocritical Perspectives on Indigenous Performance, edited by Birgit Dawes and Marc Maufort, 199–217. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2014. Wendt, Albert. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60. ———. ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’. SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Language and Literary Studies, no. 62 (2009): 83–103. Wilson, Leigh. Modernism and Magic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

11 Diving-Dress Gods: Modernism, Cargoism, and the Fale Aitu Tradition in John Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’ Stanley Orr Introduction: ‘A Gentle but Troubled Soul Who Really Knew the Territory’ Although it may be too much to pronounce Oceania the birthplace of modernism, the Pacific Ocean and its islands nurtured this movement in its Victorian infancy. For proto-modernist Herman Melville, Pacific whaling experiences inspired fictions that challenged the mass cultural conventions of the romance genre.1 Melville feared that Typee (1846) would be given to children with their gingerbread.2 In Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), however, D. H. Lawrence reads this Marquesas adventure as a memoir of modernist agonism played out against Polynesia: ‘[i]t was no good to him, the relaxation of the non-moral tropics. He didn’t really want Eden. He wanted to fight [. . .]. His soul was in revolt, writhing for ever in revolt’.3 Commenting on Ahab in Moby-Dick (1851), Lawrence declares, ‘[i]n this Pacific the fights go on’.4 Like Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson took up the South Sea romance, which he deemed ‘a sugar candy sham epic’,5 as a vehicle for the modernist project of experimenting with literary form and disturbing readerly assumptions about Oceania. As Barry Menikoff suggests, Stevenson intended The Beach of Falesá (1892), a story about two English traders battling for Samoan territory, as a stylistically and thematically challenging text that would ‘undermine the imperial ethos of England’ and even ‘the very idea of Europeans in the Pacific’. But the subversive impact of

1 See David M. Ball, False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 2 Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 119. 3 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 129. 4 Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 355. 5 Quoted in Barry Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’: A Study in Victorian Publishing, with the Original Text (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 12.

Diving-Dress Gods 191 Falesá was drastically curtailed by ‘the evasive and hesitant practices of publishers’ and the ‘squeamishness of periodical editors’.6 Both Melville and Stevenson in some fashion experienced the Pacific adventures they dramatised; but this form reached its apotheosis (or perdition) with Paul Gauguin. In contrast to Lawrence’s Melville, Gauguin embraced ‘going native’ in Polynesia as an escape from the strictures of Enlightenment Europe. With paintings such as la Orana Maria (1891) and the adventurous memoir Noa Noa (1893), Gauguin inaugurated modernist primitivism.7 In their respective works, Melville, Stevenson, and Gauguin forged a unique aesthetic by working within and against the popular story of Pacific adventure. Like Melville’s whalers or Stevenson’s copra traders, these artists found in the Pacific raw materials for avant-garde aesthetics. In doing so, however, they anticipated the ‘Oceanian modernism’ by which cosmopolitan Indigenous artists yoked formal innovation, oppositionality, and thematics of alienation with native elements of Pacific Island cultures. What we term Oceanian modernism begins with John Kneubuhl (1920–1992), whose life and art exemplify this aesthetic. Raised in the village of Leone, American Samoa, Kneubuhl was the son of Atalina Pritchard, the descendant of British missionaries and Samoan ali‘i (nobility), and the American entrepreneur Benjamin Franklin Kneubuhl. Reading Latin and Shakespeare as a youth, Kneubuhl also became immersed in the fa‘a-Sāmoa (Samoan Way) through interactions with friends and relatives. In 1933, Kneubuhl was sent to Honolulu’s Punahou School and thence to Yale, where he enjoyed the mentorship of Walter Pritchard Eaton, Thornton Wilder, Elmer Rice, and other luminaries in Workshop 47. During the Second World War, Kneubuhl attended the Navy Japanese Language School at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and served with Naval Intelligence in the Pacific. After the war, Kneubuhl joined the staff of the Honolulu Community Theatre, writing a number of groundbreaking dramas such as The Harp in the Willows (1946) and This City Is Haunted (1947). In 1950, Kneubuhl wrote and directed Damien—a biopic considered the first feature film to be authored by a Polynesian.8 Even as he was concluding work on Damien, Kneubuhl relocated to Los Angeles, where he worked for some twenty years as a freelance television writer. These peregrinations between Pacific Islands and the continental United States are frequently part of Pacific writers’ lives, and can be thought part and parcel of Oceanian modernism. As Paul Lyons notes, 6 Menikoff, Robert Louis Stevenson, 5. 7 See Paul Poplawski, Encyclopaedia of Literary Modernism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 321. 8 See Victoria N. Kneubuhl, ‘John Alexander Kneubuhl and His Contribution to the Arts in the Pacific’, in Damien: Teacher Resource Guide (Honolulu: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, 1991), 29–30.

192  Stanley Orr Kneubuhl, along with Kanaka Maoli John Dominis Holt, partook of a ‘cosmopolitan nationalism formed, as with many Africana and Indigenous modernists, through departure to and return from metropolitan centers’.9 Kneubuhl returned to Samoa in 1968 and resumed theatrical writing with Mele Kanikau: A  Pageant (1975), followed by A Play: A  Play in 1990 and Think of a Garden, which premiered on the day of his death in 1992. Received as masterworks, these plays perform the central element of Oceanian modernism—integration of modernist aesthetics with Indigenous traditions of the Pacific.10 Recalling his first experience of A Play: A  Play, Kneubuhl’s self-reflexive drama about a native Hawaiian literatus who encounters the goddess Pele, Vilsoni Hereniko confides, I had never seen a play fuse traditional and modern ideas and techniques in a manner so confident and so outrageous. He was a playwright and director who was master of the avant-garde as well as the comedic traditions of ancient Samoa.11 In his review of Think of a Garden and Other Plays, Murray Edmond similarly argues that Kneubuhl ‘manages to create a confluence of colonized experience and modernist theatre’: ‘[l]oss is also both cause and subject of western modernism, which Kneubuhl would have learned directly from two masters at Yale, Hindemith in music, and Thornton Wilder in drama’.12 Celebrating Kneubuhl as ‘the spiritual father of Pacific island theatre’, Christopher Balme sees in Think of a Garden an intertwining of ‘autobiography, political history, Samoan mythology, and

 9 Paul Lyons, ‘John Dominis Holt’s Kanaka Maoli Modernism’, Symploke 26, no. 1 (2018): 98. See too Peter Brunt’s ‘Dwelling in Travel: Indigeneity, Cosmopolitanism and Island Modernism’, abstract, AAPS News, Australian Association for Pacific Studies, 3 November 2016, http://pacificstudies.org.au/?p=777. Brunt refers here to visual artists, but his point holds true for writers such as Kneubuhl. 10 David O’Donnell points to Wendt’s ‘Towards a New Oceania’ as a landmark essay on ‘blending international modernist influences with Indigenous ways of art-making’. O’Donnell goes on to argue that ‘Wendt’s vision was reflected in the career of John Kneubuhl, born in American Samoa to a high-born Samoan mother and an American father’. O’Donnell, ‘Staging Modernity in the “New Oceania”: Modernism in Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Islands Theatre’, in The Modernist World, ed. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (London: Routledge, 2015), 282–90. 11 Vilsoni Hereniko, Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma (Honolulu: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 1995), vii. 12 Murray Edmond, review of Think of Garden and Other Plays, by John Kneubuhl, The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 481. Otto Heim has also suggested that Kneubuhl’s time at Yale ‘helped him find an early voice in a certain existentialist form of writing that allowed him to express himself as the outsider he felt himself to be on the American scene’. Heim, ‘Samoan Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History’, Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 12, no. 1 (2018): 36.

Diving-Dress Gods 193 family conflict’ with the formal ‘imprint of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, as the action is framed by a narrator and negotiates continual interchanges between the past and the present’.13 With his cosmopolitan island upbringing and metropolitan education, Kneubuhl stands at the intersection of canonical modernism and postcolonial literature as he weaves avant-garde techniques with Indigenous Pacific traditions. What sets Kneubuhl apart from other Oceanian modernists, however, is his complex relationship with metropolitan culture industries. Contributing to series such as Fireside Theatre, Medic, Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, Star Trek, and the original Hawaii Five-O, Kneubuhl established himself as a sought-after freelance television writer in Hollywood. And yet his screenwriting receives little of the acclaim lavished upon his stage plays. In this chapter, I  analyse ‘The Perils of Penrose’, a 1961 teleplay that Kneubuhl contributed to the television series James A. Michener’s Adventures in Paradise (1959–1962). This densely allusive text exemplifies the ways in which Kneubuhl approached his television writing with the same Oceanian modernism that informs his stage plays; deploying a form of ‘cultural retrieval’ far different from Gauguin’s primitivism,14 he directs the conventions of the fale aitu, a Samoan comedic drama genre, toward his own critical recasting of the Pacific colonial romance. More particularly, Kneubuhl evokes and ironises a Pacific adventure motif— the ‘diving-dress god’ formula stories ranging from H. G. Wells’s ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’ (1898) through John Russell’s ‘The Lost God’ (1921) to Les Crutchfield’s 1948 Escape radio adaptation of the Wells story. These ripping yarns in turn exploit the discourse of ‘cargoism’. Western representations of Melanesia have long been dominated by fascination with ‘cargo cults’: millenarian religious movements that incorporate mimetic representations of Western technology in a ritual effort to acquire wealth (‘cargo’). Whether in terms of Wells’s cynicism, Russell’s neoromanticism, or Crutchfield’s colonial Gothic, diving-dress god stories cast Melanesian cargoists as a foil for the protagonist. Invoking these fictions, Kneubuhl’s ‘The Perils of Penrose’ exposes the Western adventurer as a cultist obsessed with the cargo that might be looted from Indigenous culture. As Kneubuhl observes in his 1989 interview with John Enright, ‘my television career [. . .] from ’49 to ’68, covers the growth of television, and I was in on every important [. . .] kind of series, from live television, to the height of [. . .] dead television’.15 With the latter phrase, Kneubuhl

13 Christopher B. Balme, Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 194. 14 Graham Huggan, ‘Opting Out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the Post-Colonial Text’, Kunapipi 11, no. 1 (1989): 28. 15 John Kneubuhl, Oral History Interview with John Alexander Kneubuhl, Samoan Playwright, Linguist, Historian, by John Enright (1989), transcribed by Marisa DeWees (American Samoa: n.p., 2002), 134. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as I.

194  Stanley Orr shares a bit of a joke with Enright, but the appellation ‘dead television’ does underscore one dimension of Kneubuhl’s ambivalent relationship with screenwriting. As Otto Heim observes, Kneubuhl’s estrangement as a Polynesian on the American scene would deepen throughout his time in Hollywood.16 Like many other modern writers sojourning in Los Angeles (among them, his mentor Elmer Rice), Kneubuhl perceived film and television as media dumbed down by commodification. He refers to soap operas as ‘trashy work’ (I 117) and derides Hollywood cinematic conventions (I 138). After many years of labouring under such expectations, Kneubuhl began to feel that his work had become ‘an empty nothing’ (I 119). Suffering a psychological crisis in his late thirties, Kneubuhl declared independence from Hollywood: there came a time when I  said, I’ve had it, the middle class  [.  .  .] morality, ethics, stereotypes, clichés, that television feeds on [. . .] is not for me anymore, and I couldn’t write it and would not write it. And so, what do I write? I’m a half-caste kid from Samoa, go home and write that. I was raised in Hawaii, go home and write, be Hawaiian, go home and write that. (I 132) In 1968, Kneubuhl and his wife Dotsy left California for Samoa. Organising his scripts, Kneubuhl decided that this archive symbolised ‘Hollywood and television’, the entity that he was trying to escape: ‘I poured twenty years worth of work [. . .] on the grass and threw kerosene on top, and set them all on fire [. . .] they all burnt up beautifully, made a wonderful fire, and for the first time I was really free’ (I 133). With this liberatory gesture, Kneubuhl turned to the theatre and to educational reform in Oceania. Accounts of Kneubuhl’s life and art tend to focus on his years as a stage dramatist in Oceania, thereby eliding the importance of his 1949–1968 screenwriting career. Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, for example, glosses over Kneubuhl’s Hollywood years as a ‘successful but dissatisfying career writing for television’, a moment in which ‘the Amerika Samoa literary stream meanders up to the continent, where it goes underground for almost twenty years’.17 The latter characterisation is perhaps more enabling than the former, insofar as it suggests that Kneubuhl’s screen dramas form part of a continuum that also includes his stage plays. Indeed, throughout his conversation with Enright, Kneubuhl goes beyond cultural hierarchy to elaborate his craft of TV writing. Harnessing tensions

16 Heim, ‘Samoan Ghost Stories’, 36. 17 Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, ‘Amerika Samoa: Writing Home’, in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, ed. James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 593, 591.

Diving-Dress Gods 195 between aesthetic freedom and discipline, which he learned under the mentorship of Thornton Wilder, Kneubuhl invested his television writing with the unique Oceanian modernism that pervades his theatrical work. While decrying the conventions of mass culture, he affirms of his TV writing, ‘I’ve always gone against the grain simply because the grain is a cliché’ (I 120). The most celebrated examples of Kneubuhl’s innovative screen dramas may be found in The Wild Wild West (1965–1969), for which Kneubuhl created Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn).18 Characterising Loveless as a ‘half-Mexican dwarf with an anti-colonial axe to grind and a fiendish intellect’, Sarina Pearson associates the villain with Kneubuhl’s ‘afakasi experience, as well as representations of dwarves as liminal figures in Samoan fiction and film.19 The Loveless episodes therefore exemplify the ways in which Kneubuhl’s aesthetic changes shape or ‘goes underground’, to return to Sinavaiana’s trope. Such is also the case with the episodes that Kneubuhl contributed to Adventures in Paradise, a series created by James Michener for Twentieth Century Fox. The programme’s frame narrative finds Captain Adam Troy (Gardner McKay) sailing the South Pacific aboard his schooner Tiki, shuttling passengers and cargo in order to raise money for a Texas ranch. For Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Adventures in Paradise distils Western exoticism and colonialist fantasy;20 William Froug, a producer for Adventures in Paradise, inscribes Kneubuhl into this milieu, recalling him as ‘the son of a shipwrecked American sailor who had been marooned on American Samoa and had married the island princess’.21 Stereotypes aside, Froug remembers Kneubuhl as ‘One of our most remarkable writers [. . .] , a gentle but troubled soul who really knew the territory. As a consequence, he wrote some of our best scripts’.22 Kneubuhl contributed six episodes to Adventures in Paradise, smallscreen dramas that often place literary modernism into dialogue with Oceanian thematics and motifs.23 This is nowhere more clear than in ‘The

18 I also address two of Kneubuhl’s contributions to The Wild Wild West in the essay ‘ “Welcome to the Fabled South”: John Kneubuhl’s Global Southern Gothic, 1959–1966’, in Small Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive, ed. Lisa Hinrichsen, Gina Caison, and Stephanie Rountree (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 203–20. 19 Sarina Pearson, ‘Hollywood Westerns and the Pacific: John Kneubuhl and The Wild Wild West’, Transformations, no. 24 (2014): 14. With respect to the term “’afakasi,” Pearson suggests that “Kneubuhl himself was of mixed ancestry which is often referred to by Samoans as “half-caste” or ’afakasi”(5). 20 Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 20. 21 William Froug, How I Escaped from Gilligan’s Island: And Other Misadventures of a Hollywood Writer-Producer (Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2005), 110. 22 Froug, How I Escaped, 110. 23 I analyse the Adventures in Paradise episodes ‘The Pit of Silence’ and ‘Prisoner in Paradise’ in Orr, ‘Welcome to the Fabled South’, 205–8.

196  Stanley Orr Perils of Penrose’. Armed with a questionable treasure map and a leaky, obsolete diving-dress, Trader Penrose (George Tobias) here persuades Capt. Adam Troy (Gardner McKay) and first mate Clay Baker (James Holden) to undertake a pearling expedition on the island of Nuku (in the vicinity of Nauru). This venture goes awry when an isolated colony of Trobriand Islanders deifies the suited-up Penrose. To make matters worse, a ruthless British adventurer (Murray Matheson), posing as High Priest among the islanders, plans to maroon Penrose in the apotheotic diving-dress and make off with a load of pearls plundered from the islanders’ burial caves. By the conclusion of the episode, Troy and his crew manage to foil the High Priest’s scheme, leaving this scoundrel himself sewed up as the diving-dress god now subject to the islanders’ wrath. With a title that recalls The Perils of Pauline (1914), this episode might appear a seriocomic romance altogether consistent with the Adventures in Paradise frame narrative. Like Melville and Stevenson, however, Kneubuhl ironises the South Sea romance through avant-garde innovations; he does so by writing from Indigenous as well as metropolitan traditions. From the outset of the narrative, Kneubuhl signals an intention to evoke and interpret his adventurous pretexts through the satiric conventions of the fale aitu.

‘In There! A Tupaupau. So Terrible!’ ‘The Perils of Penrose’ begins with a set piece at Bali Miki Penrose, the trader’s hotel in Papeete. The somnolent island tableau is disturbed when Sondi runs screaming to Adam: ‘In there! A  tupaupau. So terrible!’.24 ‘Tupaupau’ is, of course, the Tahitian word for ghost, but I would suggest that this manifestation derives from Samoa rather than Tahiti. When Adam and Clay investigate Sondi’s strange claim, they are indeed greeted with a bizarre apparition, as noted in the scene description: [i]n the subdued light, we do see something at the other side of the curtain: a strange figure with a conical head, and with skin that hangs loosely all about its cumbersome body [. . .] it is Penrose in an old, old diving suit and helmet. (PP 2) The rig is part of Penrose’s longstanding ambition to harvest pearls on Nuku, which is marked on a suspicious map gotten from old-timer Capt.

24 ‘The Perils of Penrose’, 5 October 1960, ‘Adventures in Paradise’ Series, Final Draft, William Froug Papers (Collection 150), Performing Arts Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, 1. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as PP.

Diving-Dress Gods 197 Whitman. Pressing Troy and Baker to undertake the expedition, Penrose douses himself with water as proof of the diving suit’s integrity; but the outfit takes on more water than it repels. However sceptical, Troy agrees to the venture, enticed by the promise of riches that will enable him to pay off loans against his schooner. The humorous sequence that begins ‘The Perils of Penrose’ not only introduces the tone and premise of the episode, but also foreshadows the notion that Penrose (or, more accurately, the diving-dress itself) will be taken as a supernatural entity. Moreover, the opening sequence may be seen to elicit the Samoan fale aitu that Kneubuhl acknowledged as a primary influence upon his work. In his conversation with Enright, Kneubuhl confides that he saw ‘innumerable faleaitus’ as a boy in Samoa. These dramatic performances, he explains, evolved from the po‘ula (‘teasing night’) ritual in which men and women would gather in the fale aitu (‘house of the spirits’) for suggestive dancing and joking that culminated when one of the participants would exclaim, ‘I see the ghost, he is coming’, and ‘possessed’ by the libidinous ‘spirit’, the couples would rush out into the dark to consummate sexual relations (I 55–68). This ritual evolved into drama—itinerant fale aitu troupes that travel from village to village performing comic, often subversive sketches. Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl describes the ‘satirical and irreverent’ fale aitu performance: The fa‘aluma [ritual clown] is given the privilege of ridiculing even the highest chief, and he is accorded this privilege because he is thought to be possessed by a ghost or spirit (aitu). He then represents that wild and chaotic side of existence lurking beneath the surface of everyday village life.25 Sinavaiana likewise suggests that fale aitu sketches often muster ‘caricature, hyperbole, and satire’ against the status quo: ‘In the sketches, normative status roles are reversed: the high are made low and the world momentarily “turned upside down”, as found in carnival traditions elsewhere’. Whether poking fun at government officials or illuminating the ‘brutal inanities’ of the Western medical establishment, fale aitu dramas provide a means of encountering conflicts that cannot be directly addressed.26 Kneubuhl admits, ‘I write the kind of play I write because of the faleaitu’ (I 58). A number of scholars have identified the fale aitu as a major pretext for his dramas Mele Kanikau: A  Pageant

25 Victoria N. Kneubuhl, ‘Traditional Performance in Samoan Culture: Two Forms’, Asian Theatre Journal 4, no. 2 (1987): 171. 26 Caroline Sinavaiana, ‘Comic Theater in Samoa as Indigenous Media’, Pacific Studies 15, no. 4 (1992): 202.

198  Stanley Orr and A Play: A Play. Michelle Johansson, for example, uses the trope of the ’kie (Tongan fine mat) to describe Kneubuhl’s ‘fusing [of] modernist Western performance practice with elements of the Fale Aitu [. . .] tradition he witnessed in his American Samoan village as a child. He presents on the stage plural identities fraught with contradictions and paradoxes embedded in the discourse of postcolonial drama and philosophies of existentialism’.27 We should also note, however, that Kneubuhl incorporated fale aitu conventions into his television dramas. ‘The Isaiah Quickfox Story’ (Wagon Train, 1965), for example, finds a Native American trickster staging a ghostly spectacle in Southwestern cavern (‘Cave of the Spirits’) for an exposure of settler violence against his people.28 Like ‘The Isaiah Quickfox Story’, ‘The Perils of Penrose’ embraces the fale aitu tradition through direct allusions as well as an ironic and critical approach to its subject matter. Given this context, Sondi’s identification of the suited-up Penrose as a ‘tupaupau’—a ghost—appears not so much a joke about superstitious islanders as the heralding of a satiric drama inspired by the fale aitu. This reading is corroborated by the episode’s main setting—the island of Nuku. While the word nuku and its cognates appear across the Pacific with the meaning ‘earth’, ‘land’, and ‘island’,29 the word also recalls another comedic sketch tradition: the Nuku religious pageant of the Cook Islands. Relating the Cook Islands form to the fale aitu and the Fijian meke, Subramani describes the Nuku as ‘an elaborate dramatic performance that often includes hilarious and bawdy songs though it tells a story with a moral’.30 Hereniko identifies this pageant as a prime site of Oceanian clowning that integrates biblical and historical subject matter with ‘exaggeration and other humorous antics’.31

‘They Think He’s a God!’ These allusions to Oceanian clowning traditions set the stage for Kneubuhl’s ironic recastings of the diving-dress god story. Troy, Baker, and

27 Michelle Johansson, ‘Cultural Crisis in Postcolonial Pacific Theatre: John Kneubuhl’s Mele Kanikau: A Pageant’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 10, no. 2 (2014): 111. 28 Stanley Orr, ‘  “Strangers in Our Own Land”: John Kneubuhl, Modern Drama, and Hawai‘i Five-O’, Beyond the Page: Pacific Currents | American Quarterly, American Studies Association, www.americanquarterly.org/content/pacific-currents. 29 I would like to thank Paul Geraghty (University of the South Pacific) for expert consultation on this matter. 30 Subramani, South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1992), 63. 31 Hereniko, Woven Gods, 147.

Diving-Dress Gods 199 Penrose make Nuku and begin their pearling operation. In keeping with his buffoonery in the opening sequence, Penrose, in mended diving-dress, descends to the bottom of a Nuku lagoon and begins to gather clams rather than pearl-bearing oysters. But this comedic routine gives way to a more harrowing development—when Penrose gets into trouble, Troy and Baker dive to the rescue; surfacing, they find themselves surrounded by hostile ‘natives’. Just as they are about to be killed, at the direction of a High Priest figure, Penrose emerges from the lagoon—his air supply cut off, Penrose has walked ashore. The mesmerised islanders, led by the High Priest, bow before Penrose: ‘They think he’s a god!’ exclaims Adam (PP 16). The devotees convey Penrose to their village, where he is honoured with a feast that he cannot enjoy without revealing his true identity. Penrose’s diving suit must remain intact, or the entire party will be massacred. It ultimately becomes clear that the islanders plan to install Penrose as an idol in an old schooner captured and dragged ashore years before. With this movement, Kneubuhl evokes the ‘diving-dress god’ formula that begins with ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’. Wells’s 1898 ur-text is a downbeat adventure story of the kind perfected by Stevenson and Louis Becke. Often set in Oceania, these tales, as Robert Dixon suggests, represent ‘the formal as well as ideological fragmentation of the adventure tale, and with it the grand narratives of imperial history [. . .] [into] moments of gossip, or the telling of secrets or shameful anecdotes’.32 The narrator passes on his conversation with a profane ‘sunburnt man’ who relates his experiences as a god among the natives of New Caledonia.33 Within this tale, three survivors of the sunken vessel Ocean Pioneer race salvagers for a chance to recover 50,000 pounds of gold dust. The narrator descends via diving-dress, affectionately named ‘Jimmy Goggles’, into the wreck only to find himself marooned on the ocean floor when the locals attack their vessel, The Pride of Banya. Breathing compressed air, he walks ashore and is greeted by supplicant islanders: They started a kind of bowing dance about me [. . .] . You’d hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you’re familiar with savages, but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me straight to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed old black stone there.34

32 Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 185. 33 This situation of the story’s setting is based upon multiple references to the place-name ‘Banya’, which is the name of two islands in New Caledonia. 34 H. G. Wells, ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’, Cosmopolitan (November 1898): 110.

200  Stanley Orr Thus situated, the narrator serves four months as an ‘extraordinarily successful’ deity: [t]hey won a battle with another tribe—I got a lot of offerings I didn’t want through it—they had wonderful fishing, and their crop of pourra was exceptional fine. And they counted the capture of the brig among the benefits I brought ’em.35 This dispensation concludes when he is denounced by an itinerant missionary, a redhead whom he dubs ‘rusty’. Having failed to retrieve the gold dust, the narrator slinks away, consoling himself, ‘the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because they thought it was him had driven their luck away’.36 With this chilling conclusion, Wells joins Stevenson and Becke in exploring the devolution of the adventure story into what Patrick Brantlinger terms ‘botched romances’ and imperial Gothic.37 An admirer of Wells, John Russell rendered the first adaptation of ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’ in his magazine story ‘The Lost God’. Russell’s variation, set in Papua, concerns the exploits of Irish adventurer James O’Shaughnessy Albro. The narrator, a member of a rescue party in search of a lost pearl schooner, finds Albro’s tale (written on bark with a soft-nosed bullet) in a deserted Papuan village near Barange Bay. The crew has been massacred by islanders as Albro, in diving-dress, harvests pearls on the lagoon floor. Prevented from surfacing, Albro walks ashore and is received as a god. Amidst the veneration, Albro pens his account, unable to free himself from the diving-dress. He implies that the natives have intimated some kind of treasure or cache hidden in the hills; when rescuers find Albro’s rent diving-dress, they presume that he has cajoled a Papuan witch doctor, nicknamed ‘old Gum Eye’, into taking him to this new El Dorado. ‘Was he dreaming even then of empire?’ the narrator wonders —‘Had he had a glimpse into the meaning of Papua that struck fire to his roving and restless soul?’38 This recuperation of the colonial adventurer persists into George Abbott’s 1930 Hollywood adaptation The Sea God,39 which likewise concerns a hunt for Melanesian pearls. But it is a radio drama rather than a movie that appears to serve as Kneubuhl’s immediate pretext for ‘The Perils of Penrose’. In Crutchfield’s adaptation for Escape, George Herbert (Paul Frees) follows much the same course as Herbert George

35 Wells, “Jimmy Goggles’, 113. 36 Wells, “Jimmy Goggles’, 113. 37 Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 239. 38 John Russell, ‘The Lost God’, in Where the Pavement Ends (New York: Knopf, 1923), 55. 39 See also The Navigator, dir. Buster Keaton, Metro-Goldwyn, 1924.

Diving-Dress Gods 201 Wells’s nameless sunburnt protagonist. The salvage dive in Melanesia gives way to an attack and the diving-dress god plotline. At this point in the story, however, George is greeted by ‘a tall native painted up like a circus clown’: GEORGE:  Depart unworthy mortal ’fore I smite you with lightning. MAMALA:  Oh, relax. I’ve been some time around plantations in Papua.

Learn thing or two I did, including English language. Christopher! What the devil you doing here? advantage my simple brethren—something else I  learned at Papua. My name  [.  .  .]  [is] Mamala. I  am high priest, witch doctor, call it whatever you want.40

GEORGE:  Jumpin’ MAMALA:  Taking

Mamala (Luis Van Rooten) keeps his colleagues ‘feeling joyful-like’ through plunder and cannibalism. George agrees to play the diving-dress god, with Mamala’s help, while the pair try to salvage the gold dust. When George suspects a double-cross, he dupes Mamala into assuming the diving-dress in order to have him exposed by the ‘nosey’ missionary Bender (Parley Baer). After Mamala is discovered and killed by the local men, the destitute George flees, leaving Bender to don Jimmy Goggles: ‘[f]rom then on he had a crowd around every time he’d open his mouth. As far as I know, old Jimmy Goggles may still be down there somewhere  [.  .  .] doing business  [.  .  .]  ’.41 The diving-dress god motif obviously evokes colonialist fantasies in which a white man comes to be worshipped as a god among ‘primitive’ people—a mythos that became associated with Melanesia through Indigenous reception of anthropologist Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay and the beginnings of the ‘cargo cult’ phenomenon.42

‘I Say, Would You Have Any Lighter Fluid on You?’ Writing in 1907, W. L. Cattelle posits diving-dress as a trope for the way in which ‘the habits and prejudices of thousands of years will be forced by commercial pressure to submit themselves to modern appliances, and the picturesque nakedness of the swarthy orient will soon be hidden under the ugly but useful dress of civilization’.43 As such, diving gear emerges a

40 Les Crutchfield, ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’, Escape, 7 March 1948. 41 Crutchfield, ‘Jimmy Goggles’. 42 See George W. Stocking, Jr. ‘Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the Dreamtime of Anthropology’, in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 9–74. 43 W. R. Cattelle, The Pearl: Its Story, Its Charm, and Its Value (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1907), 194–5.

202  Stanley Orr species of ‘cargo’—a term used in parts of Melanesia for modern wealth, resources, and technology. Beginning with the early-twentieth-century ‘Vailala Madness’ in Papua, and even earlier nineteenth-century movements, cargo cults reached worldwide notoriety in the years following the Second World War, when Melanesians began to fashion sacred objects based on American military technology and iconography. Alongside this cultural syncretism, cargo cults are also associated with a belief in the return of departed ancestors and with prophetic leaders who advocate a rejection of traditional lifeways.44 But cargo cults remain distinct from the ‘cargoism’ generated by Westerners, which, according to Lamont Lindstrom, fall into three genres. Named for the novel of growth and education, bildungsroman cargo narratives cast Melanesians as well-meaning children in need of a ‘good white man’, who uses island culting to ‘bring wisdom  [.  .  .] and manufactured goods to the people’.45 Carnivalesque narratives find in the cult not materialistic cargo, but rather liberating practices such as trance, dance, love, and communitarianism. Cargo horror, on the other hand, emerges from the pessimistic elements of the bildungsroman and the carnivalesque: ‘[t]he horror of cargo is that it fails to satisfy [. . .] . And cargo culting has unforeseen and terrible consequences—the destruction of village lifeways’.46 Set in Melanesia, long recognised as the epicentre of cargo cult activity,47 diving-dress god stories read as prototypical cargo narratives suspended between horror and the bildungsroman. For both Wells and Crutchfield, ‘natives’ are static figures marooned by insular culting; but the narrator himself is hardly more enlightened as he risks life and limb to retrieve lost cargo. Russell moves through bildungsroman and horror (the fear of becoming trapped in a diving-dress) to finally celebrate Albro’s quest for riches and his cultic means of pursuing this cargo. Crutchfield’s Mamala, on the other hand, is all but named as a cargo cult prophet who manipulates his ‘simple brethren’ by means of knowledge gained from experience with the Papua plantations. According to Lindstrom, such figures are ‘local pretenders’ who must be edged aside by the ‘moral European’48—in this case, the missionary who assumes diving-dress in order to guide the islanders into a bildungsroman.

44 Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium’, in Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique, ed. Holger Jebens (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 15. 45 Lindstrom, ‘Cargo Cult’, 25. 46 Lindstrom, ‘Cargo Cult’, 30. 47 Vanessa Smith, Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 88. 48 Lindstrom, ‘Cargo Cult’, 25.

Diving-Dress Gods 203 In ‘The Perils of Penrose’, Kneubuhl demonstrates clear engagement with The Sea God and the Escape radio adaptation, ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’, written by Crutchfield.49 The Sea God would have acquainted Kneubuhl with the basic diving-dress god ground-plot, including the Melanesian pearling venture and its apocryphal source. Crutchfield, on the other hand, supplies the more complicated witch doctor/high priest, which becomes a key site of revision for Kneubuhl. Indeed, Kneubuhl gathers and repositions all of these narrative elements under the satiric auspices of the fale aitu. During his captivity in ‘The Perils of Penrose’, Adam is granted an audience with the High Priest. Like George in Crutchfield’s radio drama, he is stunned to learn that the witch doctor is not what he seems: ‘I say, would you have any lighter fluid on you?’ the High Priest asks in a ‘veddy Mayfair’ accent: ADAM:  (unable to believe his ears) You speak English! HIGH PRIEST:  Naturally . . . because I am English, actually.

I came from British Samoa. Years ago [. . .] with three others. They were killed instantly. I happened to have a cigarette lighter, and a torch; what you Americans call a flashlight, I believe [. . .] . You see, I could create fire and light, at will [. . .] . Magic [. . .] . But the magic’s run out now, I’m afraid; sooner or later, they’ll discover the fact [. . .] . Do you have a little fluid on your boat? (PP 23, 25)

When Adam demurs, the High Priest responds: Pity [. . .] . Well [. . .] All we can hope is that your god isn’t discovered to be mortal [. . .] . For in that case, it will have to be my unfortunate duty to kill you—all three of you [. . .] Religious duties can be quite irksome at times, don’t you see [. . .] ? (PP 25) This darkly humorous exchange parallels that in which Mamala reveals himself to George Herbert; but it is also a moment that highlights Kneubuhl’s ironic revisions to the diving-dress god formula. With Murray Mattheson’s High Priest, Kneubuhl collapses three characters present in Crutchfield’s ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’: the masquerading witch doctor, the well-spoken missionary, and the sociopathic adventurer. Recalling

49 Interestingly, both Kneubuhl and Crutchfield worked as writers for the TV Western series Gunsmoke and The Virginian.

204  Stanley Orr George Herbert’s (and Mamala’s) amorality, the High Priest at one point admits, [i]t’s simply that I’m quite lazy. I just don’t have the stamina for any sort of consistency—moral or otherwise. I realize it’s quite dishonorable and illogical—but don’t you see, in my profession, there’s really no room for honour or logic [. . .] . I’d so much rather stay alive. (PP 29) With his articulate and offhand cynicism, the High Priest contributes to the comedic dimension of the episode. In keeping with fale aitu conventions, however, serious cultural and ideological thematics pervade the comedy stylings. Kneubuhl here illuminates Oceania as a ‘contact zone’ that attracts ruthless fortune-hunters, many of whom exploit the benefits of education and cultural privilege.50 One might recall the nefarious art speculators in ‘A Touch of Genius’ (Adventures in Paradise, 1961) or the grave-robbing Dr. Pelham in The Harp and the Willows, who uses his medical interests and glassware hobby as a cover for a lucrative traffic in Hawaiian remains: If there were [glass here to collect], I wouldn’t have to collect mummified remains of ancient Hawaiian warriors. But since there aren’t, I  must. And, of course, it seems a shame that a doctor should be interested only in living bodies. So much could be done with the dead, if it weren’t for rather silly sentimentality.51 The High Priest’s pretentious diction and tone, not to mention his utter callousness, recall that of Dr. Pelham; but these two characters share another more ominous attribute in their desecration of Indigenous graves. The High Priest leads Adam and Clay on an arduous mountain trek to reveal a burial cave laden with idols, their features encrusted with pearls that mimic tattooing (PP 36). The High Priest has been extracting the pearls and waiting for a chance to decamp with his treasure. As he admits, ‘I’ve learned one thing: when gods show up in the world of men, the prayers are answered—and I’m out of work. You see, by coming, you’ve destroyed my very reason for being [. . .] . It’s deucedly awkward, actually’ (PP 37). Ordering a local murdered as a show of force, the High Priest threatens Adam and Clay with death if they refuse to help him with the remaining idols. Kneubuhl hereby dramatises the notion that Melanesian culture itself may be transmuted into cargo for the

50 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. See also 136–137. 51 John Kneubuhl, The Harp and the Willows, typescript (Honolulu: n.p., 1976), 27.

Diving-Dress Gods 205 Western cultists.52 In the midst of this operation, the Chief’s son is killed, provoking the islanders to seek revenge on the diving-dress god. With the final movements of the episode, Adam, Clay, and Penrose wrestle the High Priest, ultimately marooning him in the diving-dress, at the mercy of Indigenous warriors. Following a skirmish, the crew of the Tiki sail away, with only a kettle of clam chowder to show for their trouble.

Conclusions: ‘Heavy Cargo’ At one point in the script directions, Kneubuhl refers to the pearl-encrusted idols as ‘heavy cargo’ (PP 49) to be hauled out of the burial caves. While it might be stretching the point to attribute much significance to this peripheral phraseology, cargoism does persist as an important context for ‘The Perils of Penrose’. In 1960, when Kneubuhl was writing ‘The Perils of Penrose’, Kenelm Burridge’s Mambu: A Melanesian Millennium was published and the ‘Cargo Cult’ episode of David Attenborough’s series The People of Paradise aired on the BBC Television Service. Amidst all of this attention to religious practices of New Guinea and Tanna, Kneubuhl took pains to get the Tiki into a Melanesian setting: he invents the pretext of Adam’s ‘phosphate deal’ (PP 4) in Nauru, and then lands the crew on a supposedly uninhabited island; as the High Priest informs Adam, the Nuku natives are in fact descended from an errant Trobriand Island fishing party. Having established a Melanesian setting, Kneubuhl engages the diving-dress god motif, underscoring the syncretic tendencies of his Trobrianders. As in the earlier iterations, the diving-dress god is a tragicomic figure and hinge-point between Melanesian and European cargoism. With the introduction of the High Priest, however, Kneubuhl shifts cargo culting almost entirely to the white adventurer who replaces an Indigenous prophet; but here is no ‘moral European’ of the cargo bildungsroman. To the contrary, the High Priest is a scoundrel who uses lighter fluid and a flashlight to establish a cult, among the islanders, in pursuit of his own cargo—the pearl-encrusted idols. As embodied in the Chief’s son, a sincere but doomed acolyte,53 the Trobrianders suffer a horrific fate as a result of their faith in the High Priest and his diving-dress god. Although Adam might serve as an alternate for the post of ‘good white man’ (insofar as he decries the grave-robbing scheme), this protagonist

52 Lindstrom, ‘Cargo Cult’, 29. 53 The Chief’s son should be recognized as a significant character. From Adam’s first encounter with the islanders, the Chief’s son is noted as an attendant of the High Priest, who reveals to Adam that this scion aspires to follow in his footsteps. In the midst of removing the idols from the burial cave, the Chief’s son saves Clay from falling to his death; the two smile at each other. In his eagerness to help the High Priest’s scheme, which he believes a sacred calling, the Chief’s son himself suffers the fatal plunge. Kneubuhl hereby undertakes the most complex and sympathetic treatment of an Indigenous character in any of the diving-dress god stories.

206  Stanley Orr cannot help the islanders and ends up lobbing homemade grenades at them in order to make an escape. The many strands that comprise ‘The Perils of Penrose’ are woven together in the episode’s climax as Adam and his shipmates contend with the High Priest over the diving-dress. From the outset, Kneubuhl highlights the diving-dress itself as a ritual clown of Oceanian (most particularly, fale aitu) tradition. According to Hereniko, these ritual clowns embody multiple contradictions—low/high, male/female, tragedy/comedy, spirit/ human: ‘The lead comedian in a fale aitu sketch is usually an untitled male who adopts the persona of an aitu, spirit associated with chaos, wilderness, danger, and darkness’.54 Taking on this role, Penrose becomes a parody of the heroic colonial entrepreneur; he puts on airs of wealth and power in undertaking the hazardous pearling venture, but he also constantly tears his costume and only reluctantly bumbles through the role of god. In the midst of his ordeal, however, Penrose remains transfixed by the sight of the bejewelled idols; not even the prospect of imminent death can disturb the hypnotic effect of Melanesian cargo. Wearing a mask to conceal his identity, the High Priest constitutes another clownish figure in whom Kneubuhl apposes volatile binaries— European/Melanesian, sacred/profane, civility/hostility, life/death. The climactic scuffle unites these two clowns into a single figure. Directing Adam to step into the suit, the High Priest intones, ‘You will be the god [. . .] ’ (PP 54); but the hero knocks him unconscious. Resonating with the conventions of cargo horror, this monstrous figure then undergoes a grisly apotheosis as Penrose binds him in the diving-dress to await the wrath of the islanders. In keeping with his opening allusions to the fale aitu drama, Kneubuhl has unfolded a satiric tale that brings together slapstick comedy with graphic violence to send up Western stereotypes of Oceania. Although ‘The Perils of Penrose’ now seems an obscure text, this production yields a great deal of insight into Kneubuhl’s ground-breaking contributions to Oceanian modernism. Like Melville and Stevenson, Kneubuhl took up the South Sea romance genre as a site of contention between mass culture and avant-garde experimentation. Just as Stevenson’s editors mitigated his attempts to unsettle readerly expectations, Kneubuhl wrote ‘The Perils of Penrose’ and other Adventures in Paradise episodes, under the gaze of producers such as Roy V. Huggins, who was appointed head of Twentieth Century Fox TV production in 1960. Froug recalls a conversation in which Huggins demanded higher ratings through a return to adventure clichés: ‘I want natives with war paint, I want tribal warfare, battles, more war paint, spears, slaughter, blood and thunder, action [. . .] . Action and more action, war paint, spears. No more sleepy lagoon stories’.55 In ‘The Perils of Penrose’, Kneubuhl fulfilled this

54 Hereniko, Woven Gods, 161. 55 Froug, How I Escaped, 116.

Diving-Dress Gods 207 mandate, though in a highly unconventional way. Invoking the fale aitu through explicit allusions to the ancient ritual (telling references to ghosts and spirits), he proceeds with an ironic recasting of the diving-dress god story and its attendant cargoism—one in which the adventurer becomes a schlemiel and the ‘savage’ witch doctor a ruthless European opportunist. Given this movement, ‘The Perils of Penrose’ exemplifies the way in which Kneubuhl wrote against the grain of the ‘ethics, stereotypes, clichés, that television feeds on’ long before he left Hollywood for the Oceanian stage. In its evocation of the fale aitu, however, ‘The Perils of Penrose’ also reveals Kneubuhl himself as a kind of itinerant fa‘aluma who, like the fale aitu master Petelo, ‘steals material from palangi skits’ (I 72). Making his way from Samoa through Hawai‘i to the continental United States, Kneubuhl not only imbibed the modernist ethos, but treated American audiences to small-screen dramas that defamiliarised and parodied Western imaginaries of Oceania and other American borderlands.

Bibliography Ball, David M. False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Balme, Christopher B. Pacific Performances: Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Brunt, Peter. ‘Dwelling in Travel: Indigeneity, Cosmopolitanism and Island Modernism’. Abstract. AAPS News. Australian Association for Pacific Studies (AAPS), 3 November 2016, pacificstudies.org.au/?p=777. Cattelle, W. R. The Pearl: Its Story, Its Charm, and Its Value. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1907. Crutchfield, Les. ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’. Escape. 7 March 1948. Dixon, Robert. Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Edmond, Murray. Review of Think of Garden and Other Plays, by John Kneubuhl. The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 480–83. Froug, William. How I  Escaped from Gilligan’s Island: And Other Misadventures of a Hollywood Writer-Producer. Madison, WI: Popular Press, 2005. Hamamoto, Darrell Y. Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Heim, Otto. ‘Samoan Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History’. Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 12, no. 1 (2018): 35–47. Hereniko, Vilsoni. Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma. Honolulu: Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 1995. Huggan, Graham. ‘Opting out of the (Critical) Common Market: Creolization and the Post-Colonial Text’. Kunapipi 11, no. 1 (1989): 27–40. Johansson, Michelle. ‘Cultural Crisis in Postcolonial Pacific Theatre: John Kneubuhl’s Mele Kanikau: A  Pageant’. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples 10, no. 2 (2014): 110–22.

208  Stanley Orr Kneubuhl, John. The Harp and the Willows, typescript. Honolulu: n.p., 1976, 27. ———. Oral History Interview with John Alexander Kneubuhl, Samoan Playwright, Linguist, Historian. By John Enright (1989), transcribed by Marisa DeWees. American Samoa: n.p., 2002. ———. ‘The Perils of Penrose’. 5 October 1960. ‘Adventures in Paradise’ Series, Final Draft. William Froug Papers (Collection 150). Performing Arts Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. ———. ‘The Perils of Penrose’. Adventures in Paradise. Directed by Boris Sagal. ABC, 1961. Kneubuhl, Victoria N. ‘John Alexander Kneubuhl and His Contribution to the Arts in the Pacific’. In Damien: Teacher Resource Guide, 29–30. Honolulu: Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, 1991. ———. ‘Traditional Performance in Samoan Culture: Two Forms’. Asian Theatre Journal 4, no. 2 (1987): 166–76. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. Edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Lindstrom, Lamont. ‘Cargo Cult at the Third Millennium’. In Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique, edited by Holger Jebens, 15–35. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004. Lyons, Paul. ‘John Dominis Holt’s Kanaka Maoli Modernism’. Symploke 26, no. 1 (2018): 93–108. Menikoff, Barry. Robert Louis Stevenson and ‘The Beach of Falesá’: A Study in Victorian Publishing, with the Original Text. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. The Navigator. Dir. Buster Keaton. Metro-Goldwyn, 1924. O’Donnell, David. ‘Staging Modernity in the “New Oceania”: Modernism in Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Islands Theatre’. In The Modernist World, edited by Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren, 282–90. London: Routledge, 2017. Orr, Stanley. ‘ “Strangers in Our Own Land”: John Kneubuhl, Modern Drama, and  Hawai‘i Five-O’. Beyond the Page: Pacific Currents | American Quarterly, American Studies Association, www.americanquarterly.org/content/ pacific-currents. ———. ‘ “Welcome to the Fabled South”: John Kneubuhl’s Global Southern Gothic, 1959–1966’. In Small Screen Souths: Interrogating the Televisual Archive, edited by Lisa Hinrichsen, Gina Caison, and Stephanie Rountree, 203–20. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pearson, Sarina. ‘Hollywood Westerns and the Pacific: John Kneubuhl and the Wild West’. Transformations 24 (2014): 1–20. Poplawski, Paul. Encyclopaedia of Literary Modernism. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Russell, John. ‘The Lost God’. In Where the Pavement Ends, 33–58. New York: Knopf, 1923.

Diving-Dress Gods 209 Sanborn, Geoffrey. The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Sinavaiana, Caroline. ‘Comic Theater in Samoa as Indigenous Media’. Pacific Studies 15, no. 4 (1992): 199–209. Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Caroline. ‘Amerika Samoa: Writing Home’. In The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, edited by James H. Cox and Daniel Heath Justice, 589–603. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Smith, Vanessa. Literary Culture and the Pacific: Nineteenth-Century Textual Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Stocking, George W., Jr. ‘Maclay, Kubary, Malinowski: Archetypes from the Dreamtime of Anthropology’. In Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, edited by George W. Stocking Jr., 9–74. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Subramani. South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies of the University of the South Pacific, 1992. Wells, H. G. ‘Jimmy Goggles the God’. Cosmopolitan (November 1898): 105–13.

12 Oceanian Knowing and Decolonial Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove Juniper Ellis

In Sia Figiel’s most recent novel, Freelove (2016), Oceania is not added into existing epistemologies, but offers its own striking ways of knowing. Freelove presents Samoan conceptions of gender, sexuality, mathematics, and science in a radical Indigenous and decolonial manner, unsettling the belief that imported forms of education and religion bring light to a putative pre-European-contact darkness. Figiel fronts Samoan ways of knowing, shifting from European- or US-centred views of Oceania as ‘a passive receptacle of observation’.1 The practices and understandings that underlie the central love affair of the novel, set in mid-1980s Samoa, disrupt models of tradition and modernity, both within and beyond the region. This presentation displaces Europe and North America as primary points of origin, revealing a much longer Oceanian genealogy for modernity and for experimental aesthetic forms that may be considered modernist. The novel thus sets aside the ‘unexamined centre/periphery framework that locates the creative agency of modernity in the West’2 and helps challenge the coloniality that is ‘the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Western civilization from the Renaissance to today’.3 For Figiel, the creative agency of modernity is Indigenous, decolonial, and provocative in every way. Figiel presents a new map of knowingness, drawing critically on Samoan and Oceanian pasts to present what has been termed in Indigenous North American contexts a resurgence or new emergence.4 Her project is cognate with vital decolonial projects offered by writers and

1 Paul Sharrad, ‘Imagining the Pacific’, Meanjin 49, no. 4 (1990): 597. 2 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 428. 3 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. 4 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 156; Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2011), 51–2.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  211 scholars in Indigenous contexts around the globe. Figiel exemplifies in fiction an accomplishment also described and demonstrated recently by Vicente Diaz in his work on Indigenous discursive flourish: [a] form of being predicated on simultaneity and range rather than on the colonial logic of mutual exclusivity, indigeneity offers a way to remap how we understand not just nativeness but all the big categories of human existence that have been built on the systemic negation or belittling of nativeness.5 By attending to the vastness of nativeness, Figiel challenges existing understandings internal and external to Samoa. When the novel opens in mid-1980s Samoa in Nu‘uolemanusa (Village of the Sacred Owl), there are only three TVs in the village, one of which entices villagers to view shows: ‘everyone and their dog and cat and lizard would be crowded in to see and taste the new blue light’.6 Part one of the novel is presented from the first-person perspective of the self-described 17½-year-old science and mathematics student and Star Trek fanatic Inosia Alofafua Afatasi, shortened to Sia like the author’s own first name. Sia opens the novel by thinking beyond the restricted roles played even in the projected future by women on the Starship Enterprise in the 1966–1969 series, and offers as an alternative, Indigenised vision: ‘the limitless possibilities’ of ‘Samoan girls and women as captains navigating beyond the Milky Way galaxy as they might have done on canoes in ancient and future times’ (F 22. Prospective pasts as well as futures offer a corrective to imported and Indigenous gender roles, allowing Samoan girls and women to take command over exploring expeditions, much as she is about to do. In the opening pages, readers learn that Sia loves Iaoge, in spite of the incest, polygamy, and student-teacher scandal such love could be said to entail. She unsettles a strict village understanding of contemporary Samoan sexuality by drawing boldly on her favourite television show, with its opening voice-over, ‘Space: the final frontier’, to introduce a ‘similar voyage of [her] own’ across ‘the forbidden world of incest. The final frontier’ (F 26). Sia focuses her narrative initially upon the incest in question, which disturbs contemporary Samoan boundaries: her potential lover is the son of the village pastor, and as the pastor and his wife serve as spiritual parents to the village, this makes their son her spiritual brother. Such a relationship would violate taboos and the feagaiga or 5 Vicente Diaz, ‘In the Wake of Matå‘pang’s Canoe: The Cultural and Political Possibilities of Indigenous Discursive Flourish’, in Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 137. 6 Sia Figiel, Freelove (Honolulu: Lo‘ihi Press, 2016), 25. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as F.

212  Juniper Ellis brother/sister covenant, and could result in their families’ banishment, which Figiel describes as ‘being ripped away from the land where your placenta is buried, which essentially means that you are dead’.7 Throughout the novel, Figiel draws on twenty years of research (I 233, 224) to establish that ancestral understandings and practices of sexuality surpass imported missionary understandings of gender and sexuality, and exceed the bounds of contemporary village expectations. Sexuality was once celebrated as sacred, a continuation of the song lines and genealogies that connected individuals to the gods. In the history Figiel unveils, missionary teachings created internal fear, social judgement, and severe restrictions around sexuality, associations now ironically considered to be Samoan (F 152–3). In an interview with Vilsoni Hereniko, she declares, ‘[w]hat makes me sad sometimes is how Samoans see current missionized ways of being as Indigenous’ (I 233). Throughout the novel, and particularly in her presentations of Indigenous ways of knowing, both intellectual and sexual, she offers a key example of the ‘kaleidoscope of Oceanic cultures’ called for by Subramani in ‘The Oceanic Imaginary’, one that encourages ‘tracing diverse and complex forms of knowledge—philosophies, cartographies, languages, genealogies, and repressed knowledges’.8 Figiel’s celebration of Indigenous sexuality is a further recovery of repressed knowledges, reaching back into a past before the missionaries arrived, to sacred Poula nights. Clowning and sexuality go together, not just for the couple at the centre of her novel, who joke about sexuality in a very frank manner, but for ancestors who did the same. Poula nights involved women ‘showing off their genitalia to incite desire toward copulation which was seen as a way to increase one’s mana and social station’. Genitalia were sacred. ‘They ensured that the song lines would remain strong and be continued. That the lines that criss-cross on our palms, the lines of life and of the continuity of life, remain strong and life-giving’ (F 153). Sexuality is here a creative power, a life-giving, breath-bringing, generative energy. Figiel also establishes the priority, in time, space, and episteme, of decolonial conceptions of mathematics and science. As the story opens, Sia is close to completing high school and her favourite instructor is her mathematics and science teacher, Mr Viliamu, who teaches his students that Oceanian people have known their responsibility to nature ‘since Fatu ma le Eleele, the original man and woman who were made by Taga‘aloalagi’. He offers a Samoan origin for mathematics and science, explaining that their people, from the beginning, practiced and witnessed scientific concepts and processes but had their own ways of calling them. Which is why he insisted on teaching 7 Sia Figiel, ‘An Interview with Sia Figiel’, by Vilsoni Hereniko, in  Sia Figiel, Freelove (Honolulu: Lo‘ihi Press, 2016), 230. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as I. 8 Subramani, ‘The Oceanic Imaginary’, The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 1 (2001): 151.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  213 us in both English and Samoan. So that the concepts and processes our ancestors practiced, that we now teach in a classroom as Science, are never to be forgotten. (F 56) Sia considers such teachings ‘mind-blowing’, overturning the fact that she has ‘always been told that what is written in the books is palagi knowledge. Outside knowledge. Foreign knowledge. Which implies somehow that it is superior to our own ways of understanding’ (F 56). In this view, ‘Science’ and ‘Mathematics’ as taught in a classroom and in textbooks become the new arrival, now artificially separated from their prior context amidst the whole life of Samoan cultures. Rather than emphasising imported ways of knowing, he tells his students, ‘[u]nderstand that Science and Mathematics are all around us, just like the spirit of our ancestors who practiced and understood them’ (F 66). Science and mathematics are ‘found in the perfect shape of a fale or a va‘atele [house or canoe] and other types of canoes or in the straight lines of the malu or the pe‘a [female and male tattoo patterns, respectively] that hold our collective memory’ (F 66). Figiel offers a new teaching, celebrating dynamic Indigenous practices and approaches to knowing. On the first day of class, this teacher asks his students for a daily commitment to know nature as their ancestors did, to recognise that the veins in a leaf are the essence of life, connecting them with nourishment, healing, science, and spirituality, announcing that their ancestors knew science and mathematics on a daily basis: ‘Samoans understood science long ago and practiced it with great precision’ he declares (F 65–6). He connects these practices to those of ‘other ancient civilizations’: ‘the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Africans, the Chinese, the Mongolians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Indians and our brothers and sisters throughout the Pacific Ocean’ (F 66). Figiel is here presenting what David Hanlon discerns in Vicente Diaz’s study of Oceanian seafaring: ‘an Indigenous Deep Time in which there was not only a consciousness of other places but also engagements with those other places and their peoples—an Indigenous World history, if you will’.9 For Sia, who loves science, this approach allows her to know herself from within in a new way. When studying clouds, for instance, she notices that different layers of cloud types correspond to her own human moods, feelings, and emotions. What Figiel presents is living science, embodied, felt, aware, self-observed science. She is chiming a note that resonates with native Hawaiian theories of knowledge: Lisa Kahaleole Hall and Leilani Holmes both discuss the way knowledge creates worlds, becomes embodied in the knower’s life, requires one to ‘interrogate one’s practices

9 David Hanlon, ‘Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World’, The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 301–2.

214  Juniper Ellis and responsibilities to the knowledge that continually emerges’.10 Samoan and Oceanian anti-colonial modernism, demonstrating a vital commitment to new modes of expression and understanding, have been present all along. Figiel puts into practice a move called for by Subramani in ‘The Oceanic Imaginary’. By emphasising Pacific ways of knowing, he declares, ‘Oceania would be able to break out of the distorting, deforming organization of Eurocentric historiography and modernist projects that view the west as their centre’.11 Subramani’s use of ‘modernist’ here refers beyond literary modernism to the Enlightenment aims of Global North modernity, which were imbricated with colonialism. Disciplinary boundaries blur in the Oceanian project Subramani calls for, which, much as Freelove demonstrates, ‘would juxtapose the popular, commonsensical, and personal with the scientific’.12 When placed front and centre, Oceanian ways of knowing ‘would at once involve the critique of oppressive systems of thinking—Enlightenment’s assumptions about modernization as well as Oceania’s patriarchal conventions and invented traditions— and entail an exploration into “Oceania’s library” (the knowledge its people possess)’.13 Subramani proposes an ‘Oceanic Imaginary’. With her bold depiction of Indigenous intellect and sexuality, Figiel delivers not just an Oceanian imaginary, but an Oceanian sensorium—an Oceanian universe. Although Sia opens the story by emphasising incest, that is not why the two lovers are attracted to one another. They are primarily driven by desire to expand the bounds of knowing. Iaoge is married to mathematics and science, so becoming involved with Sia will make him a polygamist (F 83). Their sexual drive is presented as a function of this larger desire to know. In between five almost non-stop rounds of passionate sex by the side of a lake, the lovers discuss Euler’s Identity, also known as Euler’s Equation. The equation demonstrates the connection between the most fundamental numbers in mathematics. Ioage describes the way this complex and beautiful mathematics reveals native knowing: ‘we arrive back where we start’; even in ‘the labyrinth of complexity, the answer is right there under our noses’. He declares, ‘it’s the one equation that lifts my spirits and make me appreciate our interconnectedness in numbers, and as people both living and dead’ (F 86, 87).

10 Lisa Kahaleole Hall, ‘Navigating Our Own “Sea of Islands”: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism’, Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 32; Leilani Holmes, Ancestry of Experience: A Journey into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012): 174. 11 Subramani, ‘Oceanic’, 151. 12 Subramani, ‘Oceanic’, 151. 13 Subramani, ‘Oceanic’, 151.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  215 Sia goes on to study physics and astronomy for her undergraduate degree, and launches her graduate studies in fusion. ‘I want to further understand how our ancestors were able to calculate everything in time before compasses and other technology’, she declares (F 210). She is investigating plasma science, the thermonuclear fusion processes by which energy is generated in the stars and sun. In so doing, she is carrying forth her own ancestral genealogies: she descends from Alofafua, who adored and had sex with the sun, leading to ‘an almost celestial aura’ still visible around the women of her line (F 49). For the lovers, like mathematics and science, sexuality is also sacred and ancestral: for them, it serves as a doorway to always remaining inwardly connected with one another while moving forward confidently in their separate ways (F 167). The sexual language they speak is ‘an ancient sacred language’ older than words, a language of ‘mutual respect’ that is ‘intimate and sensual’, known by the ancestors. In Sia’s words, this sacred sexual relationship ‘sealed him to me and me to him and connected us beyond infinity’ (F 108). It is also a language they must discover for themselves, tearing away the veils that have been placed upon sexuality by missionised ideas: ‘We’ve forgotten how to love, freely. How to make love with any meaning’, Iaoge tells her (F 198). ‘Your touch has erased all concepts of original sin from my very Christian memory’, she declares (F 194–5). The novel redefines and makes clear what the real sin is: What is sin but the inherent belief that one’s culture and way of life is superior to another’s? That one’s God is the only God? That you can deliberately annihilate a people’s history and wipe it completely from memory, replacing it with guilt and shame and terror while you stand there at a podium dressed in white, telling them about the sins of the body. (F 197–8) ‘And they have the audacity’, Iaoge continues, ‘to say that our ways of having sex are dirty and sinful’ (F 198). In this dramatic revisioning of contemporary Christian Samoa, the ones who introduced the concept of sin are the inherent sinners. Reclaiming sexual ways of knowing becomes a specifically decolonial act. Prior to the arrival of Christianity, Samoan villages had their own gods. In the new understanding of history claimed by these lovers, Sia and Iaoge reframe the significance of their village’s name: Nu‘uolemanusa (Village of the Sacred Owl). To prove their sincerity in adopting Christian beliefs, missionaries compelled Samoan converts to eat their gods. But the novel refuses this attempt at erasing continuity, reading the results in an entirely different way. Even as their ancestors drank the owl eggs, supposedly a sign that missionaries had killed the ancient god, ‘the Owl

216  Juniper Ellis circled the village one last time and started to cry one last cry before S(H)e entered the body of each man, woman and child, its now new home’ (F 158). Rather than proving missionary triumph over the ostensible times of former darkness, the owl now lives in the bodies of every village member. The name Sia and Iaoge give the child they conceive is thus defiantly decolonial. She is Taeao‘oleaigalulusa, Morning of the Eating of the Sacred Owl. She embodies ancestral spirituality and carries the still living owl god within her body and her name. They also claim the future for her, declaring that she will be ‘the first Samoan in Space’, and referring to her as their ‘spacegirl’ (F 146, 205). Such names operate on many levels. In her first novel, Where We Once Belonged (1996), Figiel initiates the decolonial moves that she expands in Freelove, itself published thirty years after the affair takes place. Mr  Ioane Viliamu, for instance, bears a name that carries deep irony when read in conjunction with a statement in her first novel. There, a character declares, ‘the centre of Apia is the Ioane Viliamu building. The Ioane Viliamu building because it’s the highest building in Apia (and in Samoa), the strongest building in Apia (and in Samoa), and the holiest, too’, having been ‘built by the followers of the London Missionary Society in memory of John Williams, the missionary palagi (or “breaker of the sky”)’ who saved ‘the whole of Samoa from the terrible darkness they were living in’.14 Freelove’s Mr Ioane Viliamu, on the other hand, is the teacher who liberates his students from colonial understandings of themselves, their culture, and their past. He is also Iaoge, in the colloquial form of his name, who proclaims the beauty of longstanding practices of sexual passion and refuses missionary concepts of sin. So far, so liberatory. A few elements in the novel, however, complicate the free, passionate, intellectual, and sexual relationship at the story’s heart. The sexual consummation of the relationship is limited to one afternoon in the forest, not only because they are spiritual siblings, but also because he is her high school teacher, and she is still his student. Before the narrative proper begins, the novel presents his end-of-year report card for her, created six weeks after the passionate forest rendezvous. As a closing assessment, the teacher declares, ‘she has taught me more than she’ll ever know’ (F 20). A vocabulary list for English Class Form 6, which also is presented before the narrative, serves as a teaser for the novel; Figiel invites discomfort, highlighting in bold type such words as trimester, forbidden, hymen blood, conceal, affair, apology, incestuous. Not highlighted but also present in the vocabulary list are such words as retribution,

14 Sia Figiel, Where We Once Belonged (Auckland: Pasifika Press, 1996), 67.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  217 offender, traumatic, manipulate. Part Two of the book, much briefer than Part One, consists of letters between the two lovers. Through her undergraduate studies and even into her graduate years, the letters show no indication that Sia second-guesses her choice to have sex with her teacher, and in an interview, Figiel indicates that she sees the two as ‘rooted in their own culture and language and values’, ‘smart and sensitive and loving and deep. Characters I’d like to know and invite to dinner myself’ (I 228). ‘Mr Ioane Viliamu’, she declares, ‘is a righteous dude’ (I 223). Still, the novel hints that Iaoge, who is in his thirties at the time of their affair, recognises his position as potentially exploitive: ‘I’m not some pervert who became a teacher to look at or fa‘atilotilo towards young girls like you’, he declares (F 94). Sia sees herself as demonstrating agency: she educates him about the importance of not ignoring her when he speaks to other men in her presence (F 81); she helps him heal a traumatic sexual memory from his time in New Zealand (the negatively charged words in the vocabulary list may refer to the way his cousin, who could not have children, manipulated Iaoge into impregnating his cousin’s white girlfriend, [F 141]). Sia insists upon conceiving a child during their time together in the forest, and he assents, this time voluntarily participating from the outset while knowing that she will not be able to name him as father publicly. She graduates and travels to the United States to live with her sister while attending university; when she is cast out by her sister for refusing to name the father, Sia demonstrates determination, not regret. She and Iaoge write letters that address one another as Day and Night, explicitly presenting their ongoing passion and love as a rebuttal of missionary-framed history. In lieu of an ascribed pre-Christian darkness, replaced by Gospel light, they claim Indigenous knowing: ‘the Samoan mind has a different way of looking at the movements of Pouliuli, Darkness to Malamalama, Light. Light is not superior to the Dark. Neither is Dark superior to Light. Like symbiosis, they co-exist’ (F 158). Figiel’s presentation is congruent with other Indigenous and decolonial writers who choose love while repudiating a painful coloniality still active in the present. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, writing in a Nishnaabeg context in North America, claims for her characters Islands of Decolonial Love (2015), placing at the beginning of her collection of stories and songs an epigraph by Junot Díaz: ‘the kind of love that I was interested in, that my characters long for intuitively, is the only kind of love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial violence. I am speaking about decolonial love’.15

15 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015).

218  Juniper Ellis Figiel’s novel enacts a move called for by Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka: ‘consider that which is most painful, most difficult—and go from there’.16 Such movement involves: dreaming beyond, reaching for the incredible third and fourth and further dimensions, the worlds stacked on this one, the multiple heavens, the upturned bowls and parallel dimensions that we have traditionally had no fear of frequenting. It was through the frequenting, the doing—the practice—that our power came.17 In the novel, Sia, claiming similar power and territory, connects Star Trek’s ‘Guardian of Forever’, ‘whose job is to be the doorway to any time and space’ with ‘the old Samoans [who] did that in their dreams, where they would wander Pulotu [the world where spirits live] and the galaxies’ (F 166, 167). After their affair, Iaoge remains in Samoa; for herself and the star child, Sia moves out into the world and the universe. As this discussion indicates, Figiel presents a sweeping challenge to ways of knowing and being that belittle nativeness, confronting categories that organise imported and Indigenous understandings of global space, history, the contemporary world, and the future. She also revises images and stereotypes created and propagated by outsiders regarding Samoan and Oceanian women’s sexuality. Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, Paul Gauguin, and Herman Melville are among those whom she identifies as having ‘gravely misunderstood’ the free love, or Alofafua, that is her current book’s focus (I 221, 237). From Figiel’s decolonial perspective, Mead overlooks the strict, missionised expectations around women’s sexuality and presents Samoan women as freely available sexually, offering that portrait in the service of a modern American sexual liberation. Freeman, who rebutted Mead’s idealised images by replacing them with a vision of ostensible Samoan aggression and violence, also uses Samoa as a backdrop for his own understanding and framework. Such depictions reverberate into the present in Figiel’s most recent novel and in her first novel, in which young high school women declare, Mead was a palagi [literally a ‘skybreaker,’ a visitor] woman who wrote a book on Samoan girls doing ‘it’ a lot [. . .] and they were loving and loved ‘it’ too. Freeman was a palagi man who said that Mead, the palagi woman, was wrong about Samoan girls doing ‘it’

16 Lea Lani Kinikini Kauvaka, ‘Berths and Anchorages: Pacific Cultural Studies from Oceania’, The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 145. 17 Kauvaka, ‘Berths and Anchorages’, 145.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  219 a lot [. . .] and that Samoans are jealous, hateful, murderous people who do not know how to do ‘it’. The young women dismiss both conclusions, anticipating Freelove’s focus on epistemologies: ‘How did the palagi woman know?’, ‘And what about the palagi man?’ they ask. ‘How does he know?’.18 Figiel presents contemporary Samoan women who define their own sexuality and knowing, freeing themselves from others’ images, including contemporary expectations focussing on purity. When Freelove opens, Sia is almost parodically virginal, unaware of her own beauty and having seen her own naked body only once, reflected in a river when she went to wash clothes. When she and Iaoge begin their journey to their final frontier, Sia is wearing her sister’s treasured ‘Like a Virgin’ t-shirt from Madonna’s 1985 tour. She is innocent; for her, there is no need to reclaim the fresh, first touch of sexuality. Iaoge later connects Sia with the mythic origin of thirst-quenching coconuts. In Figiel’s version of the story, an eel sacrifices himself for a beautiful young woman, and from his self-offering, the first coconut tree grows overnight. In such light, even beverages receive decolonial reconsideration: Sia drinks a Coca-Cola in the capital city of Apia and then wishes she had chosen a coconut instead because it is more hydrating and satisfying. Alofafua, Sia’s radiant ancestor, has a name that translates as ‘to love unconditionally, to love freely’; Figiel presents the definition in a glossary that precedes the narrative, fronting the focus on Samoan concepts by translating them into English, rather than the other way around. Alofafua is the character Sia’s middle name. The book’s title, Freelove, signals a fresh view of freedom, love, and women’s ability to choose both. The title also ironically refutes Mead’s presentation of Samoan women’s sexuality, building upon Figiel’s earlier novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), in which a white American university student fantasises about Mead’s ‘free-loving island’, with the free-loving islanders famous for supposedly ‘doing the nasty from evening till dawn under coconut palms with no worry in the world whatsoever!’19 Placing the glossary at the book’s opening also helps explain the significance of the way Mr Viliamu teaches his class by speaking first in Samoan, then English. Samoan language and concepts have priority, helping students connect with their own landscapes: geographical, natural, spiritual, and emotional. Figiel has noted elsewhere that ‘[i]t is important for Samoans and other Pacific people to realize that their language is being

18 Figiel, Where We Once Belonged, 204. 19 Sia Figiel, They Who Do Not Grieve (1999; New York: Kaya Press, 2003), 15.

220  Juniper Ellis prioritized in an English context’.20 Figiel expands our understandings of Pacific literature, too. Much as Teresia Teaiwa calls for, Figiel deliberately does not mystify literature and writing as alien to the Pacific,21 imported by European missionaries and flowering only relatively recently into what has been hailed as the first wave of Pacific literatures in the 1960s to late 1980s; especially in the decolonial classroom scenes referred to previously in this discussion, she shows that Samoan narratives and science are already present, long predating European alphabets, in carving and tattoo, weaving and stories, genealogies and spirituality. In her novel, sexuality is another form of sacred expression. Melville and Gauguin are some of the visitors to the region who miss  the pre-existing sacred depth of sexual languages. To extend Hereniko’s insights into this dynamic, presented in his review of the film Moana (2016), in such presentations, Pacific women are somehow at once ‘always a virgin’ in ‘a hotbed of unbridled sexuality’ and also freely available and waiting for American and European men to relieve them of their virginity.22 Such presentations sideline Pacific men, depicting them as passive and non-sexual so that Pacific women are on standby for white visitors.23 Figiel disrupts the implicit binary understandings of gender and sexuality conveyed in such images, and Iaoge’s almost exaggerated virility rebuts literary, artistic, and filmic sidelining of Pacific male sexuality. Freelove also plays off of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1984). Figiel cites Duras as an inspiration, particularly the way Duras’s characters meet while crossing the Mekong River on a ferry (I 226). Sia is waiting at a bus stop when ‘Mr’, as she then calls him, pulls up in his red pickup truck and asks if she would like a ride. They are both travelling from their village to the capital city of Apia. Both writers depict characters who are drawn to one another while in motion, and both show the formative impact of a young woman’s first sexual experience with an older man. Publishing a bit more than thirty years after Duras, and from a decolonial perspective, Figiel rewrites significant elements of the earlier work. Duras’s young female protagonist, a relatively poor young French girl, enjoys the sex during the year-and-a-half affair with a wealthy Chinese man, but does not believe at the time that it is love. Duras focuses on white female colonial desire in French Indochina, and her protagonist’s

20 Quoted in Michelle Keown, Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171. 21 Teresia Teaiwa, ‘What Remains to Be Seen: Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature’, PMLA 125, No. 3 (2010): 734. 22 Vilsoni Hereniko, review of Moana, Walt Disney, The Contemporary Pacific 30, no. 1 (2018): 221. 23 Hereniko, review of Moana, 221.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  221 sexual power is inextricable from her racial privilege.24 Sia and Iaoge, on the other hand, love one another, unite ancestral lines, and refuse colonial understandings of sexuality and power. Decolonial love in Figiel’s presentation involves not just refusing missionised history in the present, but also breaking silences around the sexual act. When Figiel’s lovers first have sex, the student teaches the teacher: Sia speaks up and tells him, ‘It hurts Ioage. It hurts’ (F 115). He stops, listens, responds. The lovers’ graphic conversations about sex occur against a contemporary backdrop in which sex is not spoken about in such direct ways. Figiel expands what it is possible to say: in an interview with Hereniko, she declares, ‘[t]he silences surrounding female sexuality not only in our lives but especially in literature compelled me’ toward a commitment ‘to break silences from the inside/out which is not only a form of liberating the self but of decolonizing the mind simultaneously’ (I 223). In doing so, her work, she tells Hereniko, ‘is but a continuity of that idea of Indigenous sovereignty’ explored by Pacific writers who refuse to be confined by the ‘seat of empire’ and its definitions of culture, literature, and ways of knowing (I 238). She unseats empire by exploring what Salman Rushdie describes as ‘how newness enters the world’—‘change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining’.25 When Figiel’s lovers refuse contemporary restrictions on sexuality, they are presenting in their minds and bodies an Indigenous demonstration of Ezra Pound’s call to ‘Make it new!’ Figiel is also offering a contemporary new Oceania, one anticipated by Albert Wendt forty years previously in his essay ‘Towards a New Oceania’ (1976), wherein he derides colonial education and missionary distortions of Oceanian history, at the same time refusing to idealise precolonial pasts or endorse static ideas of culture, especially those propagated by visitors to the region or Oceanian elites motivated by self-interest.26 In Figiel’s Samoa, as in Wendt’s, newness has been emerging all along. Modernity and modernism are just some of the names that expressiveness has taken lately. Ancestors and the owl god are alive, present, and dynamic, helping her contemporary characters change their understandings of reality. In sharing such an approach, she employs what James Clifford, discussing Indigenous ‘structuring patterns—for transformation, for continuity through change’, describes as the existence of ‘temporally deep stories’ that ‘narrate an Indigenous longue dureé reaching

24 Karen Ruddy, ‘The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover’, Feminist Review, no. 82 (2006): 77–78. 25 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin, 1991), 394. 26 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60.

222  Juniper Ellis before and after colonization’.27 Concepts from the Global North are themselves recent arrivals, dwarfed by the ongoing presence of a decoloniality that proclaims in Oceania the underlying logic of the foundation and unfolding of Indigenous civilisations. Figiel’s lovers consistently practice ‘epistemic disobedience’,28 which Mignolo identifies as key to delinking from coloniality and its models of modernity. Like Epeli Hau‘ofa, Figiel challenges the belittling view of Oceania as small isolated bits of land scattered in a vast sea. In Hau‘ofa’s words, ‘[n]ineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today’.29 But confinement, past or present, is less totalising than conquerors would like to believe, Hau‘ofa declares, putting recent history into perspective: ‘[c]onquerors come, conquerors go, the ocean remains’.30 Still, epistemic disobedience is necessary because of what Ngũgĩ wa Thion’go, in his consideration of African literatures, describes as a cultural bomb exploded by imperialism. ‘The effect of a cultural bomb’, he declares, ‘is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’.31 Figiel’s work helps reverse the effects of this cultural bomb. Her emphasis upon Oceanian names, languages, environments, struggles, unities, and epistemologies by extension also makes possible a reconsideration of who owns the past. As Yvonna S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin call for in their consideration of critical Indigenous methodologies, she overturns the old model that ‘who owned the past, in practice, was virtually whomever could dig it up and get it out of the country’.32 She returns the past to Samoans and Oceanians who think and choose for themselves, as they have always done—a phrase and approach that harmonises with the ‘radical resurgent present’ of other Indigenous communities who, in Leanne Simpson’s phrase from her book title, refuse colonial frameworks and create sovereignty As We Have Always Done.33 27 James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42. 28 Mignolo, Darker Side of Western Modernity, 139. 29 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 155. 30 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, 155. 31 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 3. 32 Yvonna S. Lincoln and Norman K. Denzin, ‘The Lions Speak’, in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, ed. Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 566. 33 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 10.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  223 Figiel helps launch a vital awareness of what is already present in the region, extending what it is possible to imagine and say, and offering an ongoing bravura invitation also shared by Hau‘ofa in his essay, ‘Our Place Within: Foundations for a Creative Oceania’. Addressing artists, writers, and scholars from Oceania, Hau‘ofa proclaims, ‘think of what does not exist and bring it to life’.34 Taking this approach brings fresh vision and knowingness, a different map of reality. In such an approach, Hau‘ofa declares, ‘[w]e have discovered that we actually have a great deal more resources available in our environments and in ourselves than we have been led to believe’.35 Decolonial in showing a history that is active and alive, Figiel’s work is Oceanian in reach and temporality. Recall Sia’s opening claiming of ‘the limitless possibilities among Samoan girls and women as captains navigating beyond the Milky Way galaxy as they might have done on canoes in ancient and future times’ (F 22). Indigenous simultaneity reaches into and makes present ancient and future times, collapsing a colonial reliance upon linearity and dispossession. A Samoan vessel sails beyond the galaxy mapped even in the strange new worlds of futuristic science fiction expeditions, into a horizon in which Samoan girls and women navigate their own expeditions, as Sia has done. Figiel’s presentation of simultaneity revises existing temporal models in a manner implicitly called for by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other, when he suggests that: the expansive, aggressive, and oppressive societies which we collectively and inaccurately call the West needed Space to occupy. More profoundly and problematically, they required Time to accommodate the schemes of a one-way history: progress, development, modernity (and their negative mirror images: stagnation, underdevelopment, tradition). In short geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics.36 Figiel shatters the negative mirror images Fabian identifies and shows the multiple pathways time travels and has always travelled in Oceania. From the perspective of the Indigenous decolonial modernism she helps create, Western patterns of modernity themselves may be belated, ‘a leap in the open air of the present as history’, always trying to catch up

34 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Place Within’, in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), 92. 35 Hau‘ofa, ‘Our Place Within’, 91. 36 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 144.

224  Juniper Ellis to Indigenous simultaneity.37 She demonstrates Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s observation that ‘Western patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities’,38 and challenges a longstanding assumption that ‘the West is modern, the modern is the West. By this logic, other societies can enter history, grasp the future, only at the price of their destruction’.39 Figiel refuses this logic. Her Samoan characters have already entered history and grasped the future. Here, mathematics and science flow through the leaves of a tree and the palms of her characters’ hands, beyond textbooks and conceptual walls, beyond current models of modernity as a narrative that tells how science is understood.40 She overturns the Enlightenment claim for the ‘scientific superiority of the present over antiquity’.41 With aplomb, her book performs an important move called for by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar in his consideration of alternative modernities: ‘Destabilize the universalist idioms, historicize the contexts, and pluralize the experiences of modernity’.42 Her characters’ passion to know intellectually and bodily beyond classroom and missionised frontiers expands the epistemologies that are available in Oceania, and enlarges views of modernity and modernism.

Bibliography Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Diaz, Vicente. ‘In the Wake of Matå‘pang’s Canoe: The Cultural and Political Possibilities of Indigenous Discursive Flourish’. In Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, 119–37. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. During, Simon. ‘Waiting for the Post: Some Relations Between Modernity, Colonization, and Writing’. Ariel 20, no. 4 (1989): 31–61. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. ‘Multiple Modernities’. In Multiple Modernities, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 1–29. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002.

37 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 7. 38 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities’, in Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 2–3. 39 Simon During, ‘Waiting for the Post: Some Relations Between Modernity, Colonization, and Writing’, Ariel 20, no. 4 (1989): 31. 40 Renato Ortiz, ‘From Incomplete Modernity to World Modernity’, in Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 249. 41 Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, 6. 42 Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, 15.

Knowing and Love in Sia Figiel’s Freelove  225 Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Figiel, Sia. Freelove. Honolulu: Lo‘ihi Press, 2016. ———. ‘An Interview with Sia Figiel’. By Vilsoni Hereniko. In Freelove, edited by Sia Figiel, 220–39. Honolulu: Lo‘ihi Press, 2016. ———. They Who Do Not Grieve. 1999. New York: Kaya Press, 2003. ———. Where We Once Belonged. Auckland: Pasifika Press, 1996. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’. Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. ‘On Alternative Modernities’. In Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. ‘Navigating Our Own “Sea of Islands”: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism’. Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 15–38. Hanlon, David. ‘Losing Oceania to the Pacific and the World’. The Contemporary Pacific 29, no. 2 (2017): 286–318. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. ‘Our Place Within’. In We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, 80–93. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. ———. ‘Our Sea of Islands’. The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 148–61. Hereniko, Vilsoni. Review of Moana, Walt Disney. The Contemporary Pacific 30, no. 1 (2018): 216–24. Holmes, Leilani. Ancestry of Experience: A  Journey into Hawaiian Ways of Knowing. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. Kauvaka, Lea Lani Kinikini. ‘Berths and Anchorages: Pacific Cultural Studies from Oceania’. The Contemporary Pacific 28, no. 1 (2016): 130–51. Keown, Michelle. Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lincoln, Yvonna S. and Norman K. Denzin. ‘The Lions Speak’. In Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 563–71. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Ortiz, Renato. ‘From Incomplete Modernity to World Modernity’. In Multiple Modernities, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 249–60. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002. Ruddy, Karen. ‘The Ambivalence of Colonial Desire in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover’. Feminist Review, no. 82 (2006): 76–95. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. New York: Penguin, 1991. Sharrad, Paul. ‘Imagining the Pacific’. Meanjin 49, no. 4 (1990): 597–606. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. ———. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2011. ———. Islands of Decolonial Love. Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2015. Subramani. ‘The Oceanic Imaginary’. The Contemporary Pacific 13, no. 1 (2001): 149–62.

226  Juniper Ellis Teaiwa, Teresia. ‘What Remains to Be Seen: Reclaiming the Visual Roots of Pacific Literature’. PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 730–6. Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Currey, 1986. Wendt, Albert. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–60.

13 On Memory and Modernity: Sudesh Mishra’s Oceania John O’Carroll

This chapter analyses the creative work of one of Fiji’s leading writers: the poet, playwright, and critic, Sudesh Mishra. His writing offers a unique lens through which to articulate the nature, and the embedded histories, of an Oceanian modernism. Oceanian modernism is not yet a recognised formation, and is itself a claim of sorts. The nature of any such claim is fraught with difficulties, not least of which is the question of whether or not there is value in making it. Mishra’s creative work opens the seam of older and newer modernisms, but in staking its own claims to Oceania, his approach makes the prospect of an Oceanian modernism possible. Sudesh Mishra is a prominent poet, both in Fiji and abroad. He is also a leading academic figure in South Pacific literature, and in diaspora studies, in which he has an international reputation. Born in Fiji in 1962, he grew up on the main island of Viti Levu. He spent formative years also in Australia, both before and after the 1987 military coups in Fiji. These coups, as we shall see, are important in the trajectory of Mishra’s work, and influenced some of his most distinctive styles of creative writing. This chapter focuses on his creative work, paying particular attention to his poetry. Apart from publications in journals, he has published five volumes of verse, Rahu (1987), Tandava (1992), Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller (1994), Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (2002), and The Lives of Coat Hangers (2016). He has also published two plays, Ferringhi (2001), and The International Dateline (2001), both of which are significant as aesthetic experiments, and as political interventions (with the former play staged in late 1993). Mishra was born into a still-colonial Fiji. Because independence was not gained by revolution, there was much socio-political and cultural persistence. The rise of the modern Fijian state retained aspects of colonial-era racialised polities and class divisions. In this regard, too, there remained ongoing multiple ancestral narratives, be it the European/ Indigenous version of Fijian history, with its civics lessons about Ratu Cakobau or Ratu Sukuna, or the equally powerful realities of settlers and diasporas. These dimensions of Fijian modernity form part of the content of his work. Equally, the lens of Indo-Fijian history mediated personal

228  John O’Carroll and family memories of diasporic survival, of multiple histories and faiths, against a twentieth-century backdrop of live and recorded music, as well as Hindi-language film. These politically administered cultural divisions, whether local, national or international, with their ready-made formulae on what Fijian history and culture ‘meant’, were opened to question as Fiji became a newly independent nation. Like many other once-colonised states, the new nation’s early years were riddled with contradictory legacies, and also characterised by optimism. From independence until 1987, the nation was ruled by an apparently unshakeable Alliance Party government, led by Ratu Kamisese Mara. Mara’s party had been expected to take power—it had led the country in the transitional government established before independence. If Mara’s standing in history was undermined by his later behaviour in response to his own election loss, the historian Brij Lal is surely correct to talk of the early promise of ‘the warm afterglow of the peaceful transition to independence’, even if, as he says, the most startling feature of the 1972 election result was not Mara’s victory, but the ‘extent of racial polarization’.1 And then there were the coups. The military coups in 1987 in Fiji were followed by two more, one in 2000, and one in 2006. While the country is currently an uneasy democracy, its leader, Voreqe (‘Frank’) Bainimarama, himself led the most recent coup. For Mishra, the 1987 coups were highly personally disruptive (he left the country for a time afterwards), and led him to direct both critical and creative energy to understanding—and combatting—what had taken place. At this time, he had been studying modernism in postcolonial India, questioning its value both as a received tradition, and as a potential idiom of postcolonial creativity. Before the coups, he had been experimenting with modernist forms in Rahu; the epigraph to the entire collection is from Indian modernist, Nissim Ezekiel.2 But after the coups, and in ways that are quite distinct in his three major volumes thereafter (Tandava, Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying, and The Lives of Coat Hangers), he developed an aesthetic adequate to the demands of the new displaced realities of the new Oceania. In the later works, a new emphasis on memory emerged, and, with it, a new modernist aesthetic. Mishra’s Oceanian modernism entwines a distinct aesthetic with a demand for historical remembering. In what follows, I explore Mishra’s sometimes angry local demands alongside lyrical political personal memories, and concerns with the dispossessed elsewhere. I  proceed with the following things in mind. First, Mishra’s work displays many features of a received

1 Brij Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992), 218. 2 Sudesh Mishra, Rahu (Suva: Vision, 1987), vii.

On Memory and Modernity 229 modernism. But they do not quite operate as we might expect, and the properties of a new modernism need to be assayed as and when they appear as dimensions of his work. Deliberate stylistic echoes of classical modernism are evident in many of his poems. And if Mishra seeks to remember earlier forms deliberately, so too—second—is there a re-constitutive remembering process in the concerns of the poems. The poems impose not just formal demands on their readers, but also, demands on memory and on politics. Third, the verse sometimes takes the form of personal poems, many of which, while lyrical in form, dwell on location and labour. Fourth, in some of his late works, Mishra’s modernism becomes general, or at least worldconscious. The poet from Oceania has the right and the responsibility to address issues and peoples beyond.

Defining Modernism The world of modernist studies has developed considerably even in the decade since Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz outlined the ‘new modernist studies’ as something comprising an ‘expanded’ modernity.3 Strangely, one of the more important contributions to the field took the form of an apparent rebuttal. Jameson responded to the prospect of an array of new modernisms with his book, A Singular Modernity: An Ontology of the Present (2002). It is apparently organised around four ‘maxims’, the last of which shows Jameson holding to account aspects of his earlier book, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1999). He remarks contemptuously on a certain ‘reminting of the modern, its repackaging  [.  .  .] for renewed sales in the intellectual market-place’.4 For him, this ‘is certainly not the result of any honest philological and historiographic interest in the recent past’. On the contrary, he suggests that the proliferation of ‘alternative modernities’ is by a ‘formula’ such that ‘[t]here can be a Latin-American kind or an Indian kind or an African kind’.5 Doubtless, he would add an Oceanian kind to that list, as well. Despite this, Jameson’s book is often cited in support of versions of new modernism.6 For most critics (be they in the field of sociology or the arts), modernism is to be distinguished from modernity, and it is worth making some initial observations about the usefulness of these words. Both terms have a long and confused history of usage, with part of the issue concerning the

3 Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737. 4 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 94. 5 Jameson, Singular Modernity, 7. 6 See, for instance, Mark Digiacomo, ‘The Assertion of Coevalness: African Literature and Modernist Studies’, Modernism/Modernity 24, no. 2 (2017): 248.

230  John O’Carroll forms of the words (with modernist studies sometimes meaning either, or both, kinds of study). Even modernity, which has temporality embedded in its very meaning, is a surprisingly elastic term. For example, some who date modernity from the sixteenth century or even earlier do so precisely because they are inquiring into things which are not central to Jameson’s version of the fields: the very idea of history, the nature of imperialism, or of entrenched racism.7 Nor, as we shall see, is the situation with modernism any simpler. Modernism, once seen as merely a series of formally innovative articulations of underlying conditions in the early part of the twentieth century, now looks doubly unclear. It no longer makes sense to locate modernism in ‘Europe’ or even the ‘West’; nor is it simply a period of aesthetic innovation in the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism is larger than this. Yet we need to be cautious about any simplistic ‘reminting’ of modernism, even as we discuss the prospect of an Oceanian modernism. To stake a claim for any modernism requires close attention to the specificities of any given project. In this respect (to stay with Jamesonian terms a little longer), an ‘honest’ historiographic impulse is a striking feature of Mishra’s art, and it often takes the form of a representation of personally lived experience. Theorists offering larger scale correlates struggle to capture this complexity. Hence, Jamesonian modernism concerns ‘ideologised’ time at a massive scale, with narratives relating events, but events being constructed in time. For that reason, as Benedict Anderson puts it, narrated events actually constitute historical time through things like newspapers playing the role of the national daily ‘novel’.8 Fiji has its own versions of these narrativised events. While there is not time to tease these out, we can say that Fiji’s inherited narratives— the colonially racialised essentialism, the hierarchically adapted chiefly system—were written into the first constitutions themselves. Such bigscale narrative time, however, also plays out in people’s personal lives. It is true that Mishra’s verse sometimes inscribes leader-figures, such as the deposed Timoci Bavadra (but even this is cast as the poet writing a personal reflection). More often, though, his verse tells lives in small scale contexts, lives as they are lived in other words. In a short note introducing his play, The International Dateline, for instance, he writes: [a]s a diasporic subject exposed to multiple dislocations, I  have been aware of the links between time, memory, and schizophrenia.

7 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 7; Stephen Castles, ‘The Racisms of Globalisation’, in The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia, ed. Ellie Vasta and Stephen Castles (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 18–9; David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 3. 8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 24–5.

On Memory and Modernity 231 Temporal shifts (which are inevitably territorial) do end up impinging on memory (what we remember and how we do the remembering) which, in turn, has implications for identity.9 The way lives are lived matters, and if Mishra’s acts of memory are modernist, they are also representations of lived remembering. These acts of modernist remembering are often cast in the lyric mode, offering an Oceanian idiom of knowing and material remembrance.

Place and Time Many ‘new modernists’ are, like Jameson, attentive to the issues of lived experience of expropriation. Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms proposes a very general version of a global modernism and an insistent attention to the issue of location and lived circumstance. She argues a case not just for ‘expanding the frameworks of modernist studies’, but also viewing it as an ethical project involving a new diversity, treating modernity as ‘recurrent’.10 In my view, the geographical generality she posits is valid (for reasons we shall see shortly), but there are limits to how far back in time a useful claim should be made (irrespective of whether it could be made, in theory). But Friedman is attentive to location. As a narrative category, modernity is never just a temporal thing; it always happens—or happened— somewhere. In this respect, Jameson’s suggestion that modernism of the traditional kind arose in America bears a different kind of scrutiny. Initially, we can situate it alongside Anderson’s argument that nations and nationalism arose in colonial contexts, particularly the Americas. Friedman too contends that ‘postcolonial writers  [.  .  .] not be read as belated or derivative versions  [.  .  . repurposing] texts from Britain but also blending these with revisionings of textual traditions from Indian or Arab cultures’.11 This view finds support in Homi Bhabha’s retrieval of Frantz Fanon in the following terms: I claim a generality for Fanon’s argument because he talks not simply of the historicity of the black man, as much as he writes in ‘The Fact of Blackness’ about the temporality of modernity within which the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be authorized. It is Fanon’s temporality of emergence—his sense of the belatedness of the black man— that does not simply make the question of ontology inappropriate for  9 Sudesh Mishra, The International Dateline, in Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, ed. Ian Gaskell (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and Pacific Writing Forum, 2001), 452. 10 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 2–4. 11 Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 187–88.

232  John O’Carroll black identity, but somehow impossible for the very understanding of humanity in the world of modernity.12 Even if things happened first there, they would not have been counted as part of the very sweep of history itself, let alone its leading movements in the arts. Like Friedman, Mark Digiacomo argues that contrary to received wisdom, modernism happened everywhere at the same time. But it happened differently. Digiacomo suggests that denial of temporality to the West African cultures he surveys misses the historical-cultural role they played in the rise of modernism of any kind.13 None of this, of course, is to refuse the specificity of the various European, and AngloSaxon, modernisms. But it reminds us that we need to reframe our ideas about the nature of this aesthetic, as well as widening our account of its genesis. Temporal priority is embedded in discussions of modernism. What Laura Doyle calls the practice of ‘designating originals’ is a highly embedded historical practice.14 Challenging it is provocative. In Fiji, where a complex colonial history has led to hierarchies of apparent favour of indigeneity, albeit in the context of capitalism, firstness is even more complex—it concerns the colonial designation of Indigenous firstness. In Mishra’s play Ferringhi (which means, roughly, the ‘outsider’), a wandering storyteller stumbles into a circle of kava-drinkers who have forgotten their own roles in history and in the coups. The triggering of memory takes many forms. In one scene, the character of Crusher (a late-colonial capitalist figure) offers these paternalistic words concerning the wealth from a proposed mine: ‘Of course the indigenous race must have, er, certain inalienable rights and privileges over the more recent immigrants. It is only fair. After all, they were here first: it’s common sense isn’t it? Like queuing for food. First come first served’.15 The objections the characters raise seem light-hearted, but the jokes about someone being more in need, or some not needing so much, are rooted in a trenchant critique of injustice. Modernity’s temporalisations construct divisions, and enforce them via cultural norms. By laying bare the exploitative nature of the structure, Mishra signals that the apparently benign colonial history of Fiji is itself mythic—and persistent. Mishra’s poetic works also treat racialisation in Fiji as a colonial legacy. They vividly recall the contexts of an other Fiji, one which ruptures

12 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 236–7. 13 Digiacomo, ‘The Assertion of Coevalness’, 249. 14 Laura Doyle, ‘Modernist Studies and Inter-Imperiality in the Longue Durée’, in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, ed. Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2. 15 Sudesh Mishra, Ferringhi, in Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, ed. Ian Gaskell (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, 2001), 350.

On Memory and Modernity 233 the cosy narrative of a ‘better’ past, of gilded memories of friendly ceremonial ‘natives’ and of colonial propriety and benign administration. The still-widely read American author, James A. Michener, had written a series of ‘essays’ presenting this version of the Pacific in his book, Return to Paradise. Mishra’s early poem, ‘Mynah’, comments directly on this world, demanding it be remembered: Michener went to Moce, Inside the bure shelved his bitterness. Moce sympathised over a basin of kava. Later Michener wrote: ‘Moce is noble, relaxed, Has no inclination to compete. Mynah, on the other hand, Hates me, hates Moce, hates himself [. . .] ’.16 Mishra’s names are well chosen: ‘Mynah’ recalls Michener’s openly contemptuous association of the name of the introduced bird with the entire Fiji Indian population, while ‘Moce’ is named after a Fijian word, one that is often heard—usually meaning ‘goodbye’, but even more tellingly, also ‘sleep’.

Oceanian Modernity Articulated Why Oceania? It, too, had—and has—a time. The name was already colonial and colonising. In 1992, the year before Tandava was published, Mishra was among a number of us invited by Epeli Hau‘ofa to respond in writing to a paper he had written. In that paper, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, and its immediate successor, ‘The Ocean in Us’, Hau‘ofa overturned, at least rhetorically, the colonial legacy of the name, and the view of Pacific states as small and dependent.17 Hau‘ofa thereby reframed Albert Wendt’s earlier call for ‘a new Oceania’. Wendt’s article was mainly focussed on promoting (as opposed to conserving) living Pacific cultures, contending that anyone saying people ought to behave in accordance with ‘a certain prescribed way (and that the prescribed way has not changed since time immemorial) is being racist, callously totalitarian, and stupid’.18 Wendt’s analysis was part of the context of early independent Fiji, at once seeing the ‘wounds’ of colonisation but focussed on the needs (especially educationally) of an emergent Oceania.19 16 Mishra, Rahu, 45. 17 Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). 18 Albert Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, Mana Review: A  South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 53. 19 Wendt, ‘Towards a New Oceania’, 54.

234  John O’Carroll But Hau‘ofa was responding to a new demand. Instead of the thenwidespread view of the Pacific as peripheral and dependent, Hau‘ofa claimed Oceania as an envisioned vastness. Mishra, responding to Hau‘ofa’s brilliant lyricism, wrote in his essay, ironically entitled ‘Om’, that [i]t is as if Hau‘ofa hears, for the first time, the beauty and the plenitude contained in these syllables [Oceania]. I too feel and am moved by the syllables. Not so long ago, however, Oceania (as logos, as place) was the site for those Western and elite discourses which both Hau‘ofa and I detest, and in some ways, it remains a dumping site for such discourses. Hau‘ofa calls for a decontamination; I join my voice to his appeal. But let the traces of the old contamination remain precisely because they contain the history of our belittlement.20 In offering a qualified affirming response to the challenge of a new Oceania, Mishra questions how well such a notion could describe relations of power for Pacific peoples and diasporas, remarking that ‘no matter how adaptable and mobile Pacific peoples may be, it is too simplistic to say that we have more than a theoretical control over our destiny’.21 An Oceanian modernism is not an easy articulation of the world: Mishra wants the prickly memories to remain. Mishra repeatedly seeks ‘modernist’ forms of articulation suitable to these prickly realities, of these lived modernities. Evoking the memory of colonial reach and control, one of the first poems in Tandava is titled ‘Feejee’, the old name reminding us, like ‘Oceania’, of colonial history. The reuse of this word, like Hau‘ofa’s symbolic retrieval of ‘Oceania’ from the detritus of colonial history, is an apparent instance of modernism at work. Where Hau‘ofa operates by wrenching it free and poeticising it lyrically in prose, Mishra’s appropriation is savagely ironic. ‘Feejee’, he writes, Exists to give cartographers malignant tumours; Sometimes they leave it out, sometimes they don’t. Just bits of flyshit on the blue.22 The ‘piddling archipelago’ dominated by nationalistic ‘yahoos’ is out of sight, and easily overwhelmed by corrupted adventurers. In this context, 20 Sudesh Mishra, ‘Om’, in A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands, ed. Epeli Hau‘ofa, Eric Waddell, and Vijay Naidu (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1993), 21. 21 Mishra, ‘Om’, 22. 22 Sudesh Mishra, Tandava (Melbourne: Meanjin, 1992), 10. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as T.

On Memory and Modernity 235 as we are told in ‘A Wishing Well in Suva’, a ‘Ratu is consigning/All wilderness to woodchips/Over a hopsy lunch with a lumber/Baron from Malaysia’23—and no one notices. Mishra’s Oceania disturbs this globalised despoliation—and reminds readers of the deeper history of trajectories and exclusions.

Coup-culture Articulated The coups brought forth an astonishingly new poetic voice. As artist, Mishra’s always formidable aesthetic capacities, particularly his startling genre choices and juxtapositions, his use of multiple vocabularies and linguistic registers, his sonic experimentation, and his willingness to test cultural and political limits, emerged in an initially vehement way. In Tandava, the ruptured paradise is evoked even via the account of nature itself, which is described in terms befitting a cowed population and a triumphant militarism: The dulcet swagger of the ocean; Kowtowing palms and seraphic gulls; And a medieval coin that gloats At shoals of asphyxiated sardines. (T 15) The natural features gain the attributes of the coup-makers and the peoples they control. The postcard scene of beaches, reefs, palm trees, and oceans is not to be celebrated. The ‘medieval coin’ refers at once to the power of money, and moneyed class in the new post-coup Fiji, but also to an older legacy. The money may be current, but its genesis lies once more in a colonial past. The coin, also, is personified, and until recently, Fijian currency had a picture of the British monarch on it, designating its place in the British Commonwealth. In this regard, the poem evokes the peculiar attachment of many landed Fijians to British colonial history, and the sense of chiefly affiliation with it. The sonnets which close the collection mingle sorrow and anger with a fierce condemnation of all that has just happened. Nor are there any rural idylls or pastoral scenes of working farmers proffered to offset this view. Mishra does not spare those who, sharing the fate, do nothing to resist it. In poem VI of the ‘Feejee’ sequence, Michener’s ‘mynahs’ are rewritten, as the poem lashes out at opportunism. A passivised population does not take a stand, and instead, he writes, ‘lurch agape on/The putrid fence of political expediency’ (T 14). The setting is rural, and in this poem too, we see brilliant visual imagery of squalls 23 Sudesh Mishra, Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying (Dunedin: Otago, 2002), 48.

236  John O’Carroll of wind pushing down on the grasses of the farm, evoking a predator hunting its prey; likewise, the fence-posts claiming ownership darken the land so that they too resemble the grasping teeth of some sort of predator: Paws of wind pounce through river-sedge; Stumps like prehensile teeth stake out A farm’s cigar-stained mouth. (T 14) And in a sudden shift of scene, at the poem’s end, we are told that ‘The farm-gun/Spits terror as boors spit phlegm/On asphalt’ (T 14). The peculiar brilliance of the poem lies in its assemblage of images and ideas, at once concrete and yet startling in their juxtapositions—a new modernist poetics, in other words, appropriate to a newly damaged Oceanian modernity. The lyrical voice is also intensified. A  particularly poignantly ironic note is struck in his poem about Krishna Datt, a Fiji Indian minister in the Bavadra government. In ‘Detainee II’, the jailed politician is remembered by his presumably Indigenous Fijian guard: The guard speaks: ‘Was a pupil of yours, Mr Datt, Grammar ’74’. Hobnailed boots retreat. Who’d have foretold that I could teach so much? (T 22) But the lesson, this time, is not ordinary civics or history. It is of a threatened Oceania, the notion of which we now can address: it is a challenge, once more, to learn lessons, however cruelly ironic, and (recalling education’s social role), once again, to remember.

Comic Modernism: ‘Reflection’ of Another Kind One mode of ‘new’ modernism involves doubling, what Homi Bhabha analyses in theoretical terms as mimicry. Bhabha points out that ‘[t]he discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference’.24 Mishra’s comic poem, ‘The Loving Song of R. J. Tangaya’, mimics Nissim Ezekiel, using the vernacular version of English which Ezekiel deployed in ‘Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa, T. S’.25 Ezekiel, of

24 Bhabha, Culture, 86. 25 Nissim Ezekiel, ‘Goodbye Party for Miss  Pushpa, T. S.’, in Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, ed. R. Parthasarathy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37–8.

On Memory and Modernity 237 course, already comically mimics Eliot. So now, in a game of mirrors, Mishra’s poem echoes both Eliot and Ezekiel: Aré do not be asking ‘What is it?’ Let us be avoiding Bombay shit. In the room women coming and going Talking of Swami Satya Govind. (T 59) This comic-doubling-ironic aperture is an essential aspect of Mishra’s own response to classical modernism, using its formal potential. But consider what the poem is actually about. Where Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ concerns a middle-aged white man wandering through city streets, feeling somewhat alienated both by his advancing age and the impersonal street talk which no longer involves him, Mishra’s poem is about a jovial pair wandering in and out of pubs and restaurants of uncertain quality. Eliot’s stunning opening lines, evoking a smoggy London twilight (‘Let us go then, you and I,/When the evening is spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized on a table’26), find this echo: ‘Let us be going then, me and Baljit,/When the evening is spreadeagling the sky/Like Mrs Gandhi etherized by Sikhs’ (T 15). But the humour itself relates a history, too. It concerns a legacy of sometimes violent Indian politics, a jumble of restaurants in Fiji and Australia, the Australian poet Les Murray, and the context of post-coup emigration: ‘That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all’. You can’t do this to me. I am pukkah Australian citizen. I am watching footy. I am having beer gut, I am calling sheilas sheilas, and I am hollowing my mind. (T 61) The last line, again echoing Eliot, has a certain resonance—at once comical and terrible, it evokes the migrant experience of loss, of cultural emptiness, and of vulnerability for those seeking to assimilate into another society. It is true that the dominant mood of ‘Tangaya’ is as much parodic as it is ironic, but its world is very far from the affectations of Eliot’s disaffected middle-class, middle-aged white man, and if the effect is comic, the concerns underpinning it are not. Mishra’s familiarity with modernism runs rather deeper than T. S. Eliot and jibing at ‘Prufrock’. Mishra formally studied the modernists and wrote a PhD thesis and a subsequent book, Preparing Faces, tracing their

26 T. S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (London: The Egoist, 1917), 9.

238  John O’Carroll influence in Indian postwar poetry. In that book, he dwelt in detail on the way Eliot, in his major poems, was able to blend street talk with an ‘objectified ironic mask’.27 Irony mattered to the European modernists, and also to Mishra. In ‘Irony’, the opening poem of Tandava, though, we find also the irony of the artist who cloaks the significance of the artwork, creating a sort of code for the safety of artist and audience alike: The antlered clown is after all Licensed by kings to walk the stilts, And enjoys a better perspective for that. Here then is my harvest of fog and mist; You see the heath, for I grip it in my fist. (T 9) The stilt-walker looks down on the crowd, but is seen as the jester. The poems in Tandava are rarely simply ironic, but this opening poem suggests the value the author himself attached to this sensibility. It is true that Mishra’s stylistic choices and voices could be used to situate his work in relation to a variety of modernist contexts. Coups are not the unique preserve of the Pacific. Yet they each have specificities, and even in Fiji, the nature of the coups by Rabuka, Speight, and Bainimarama were each very different. But in each case, there was for a time a need for ‘masks’. Commenting on modernity in general, Henri Lefebvre saw ironic masking as a response to a social world controlled by ‘men of violence, army chiefs, generals, political soldiers and Party men’, and that ‘modern societies, have a transitional character.28 This variety of irony motivates some of Mishra’s most obviously ‘high modernist’ writings, with their fractured and hieratic style and deployment of quasi-religious vocabularies. But his combination of a highly formal modernism with a biting attack on a corrupted polity makes special sense against the mythologies of paradise which haunt the Pacific.

Lyrics of Location The lyric form is not a characteristically modern idiom—in its long world history since antiquity, it found a pervasive home in Romanticism—but there are most certainly modern and new modernist forms. Mishra’s are distinctly inflected with the depiction of hard physical labour, and of often harsh or impoverished locatedness. Mishra’s verse collections all include

27 Sudesh Mishra, Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English (Adelaide: University of the South Pacific; Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1995), 37. 28 Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 1995), 15.

On Memory and Modernity 239 highly lyrical poems. In Rahu, we find poems about labour and the history of sugar (‘Canecutting’ and ‘Canefields’), as well as about the socially alienated. In ‘The Bagman’, he describes a man with ‘bagweighed hand’ who: saunters in the attic of his mind Furnishing it with myrtles And shrubs of every kind.29 This man, though, is truly excluded, and the poet insists too that we ‘[s]ee him cringe in fear of children/Who proffer love in stones’.30 In Tandava, again there are lyrics, one on childhood (‘Kitchen Philosophy’), another dwelling in almost Romantic nostalgia on the ‘continents of oil and grease’ in a garage workshop (‘The Mechanic’, T 51). And his Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller resembles, in its careful way, the nineteenthcentury travelogue, but this time turned to bite-sized vignettes not just of Indian scenes, but of work.31 As powerful as all these figures in verse are, it is Mishra’s later work which welds the lyrical form most convincingly onto a new modernist Oceanian frame, again conceived in terms of labour remembered. In his beautiful poem, ‘About Aaji’ (Grandma), with its choric opening and closing lines, we see unsung work recognised in verse: Enough in life to carry the village with you, To call a stranger son and a son stranger [. . .] Enough in life to carry the village with you. Enough in death for the village to carry you.32 In all of Mishra’s verse collections, memories of domesticity are evident, and in all, labour is remembered. The particular memories of indentured industrialised plantation colonial culture frequently intersect with the history since. No other modernism faces the challenge and promise of the vastness of Oceania, and Mishra’s response to this is decisive: it always happens somewhere. Labour is also remembered along with domestic technologies. In ‘The Brass Singer’ and ‘The Primus Stove’, the poet offers a poetics of labour meshed with an Ellul-style technics whereby (in the first case) the machine does not operate without human labour: ‘Do you recall’, the poet asks an apparent ghost-of-the-future version of himself, ‘how her right foot kneaded/the brass treadle/of a superannuated sewing 29 Mishra, Rahu, 50. 30 Mishra, Rahu, 50. 31 Sudesh Mishra, Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller (Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1994). 32 Sudesh Mishra, The Lives of Coat Hangers (Dunedin: Otago, 2016), 57. Subsequent references to this edition will be signalled within the text as L.

240  John O’Carroll machine?’ (L 51). This recollection of labour on an already-outdated machine is also labour projected as remembered. Perhaps the most experimentally ambitious of Mishra’s lyrics is one which creates a mythic singular figure of memory. In ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying’, Mishra evokes the entire diaspora in a single consciousness-thread of ‘reincarnations’. This allows him— at least metaphorically—to explore the materialities of indentured transplantation, of girmit33 contracts, of settlement, of faith and culture, and of descendants all told as if from one point of view. The attempt to find groundedness and to escape the ‘levitating illness’ (a simultaneous sideswipe at, and deployment of, the levitating guru figure) appears to begin when yaqona is shared: i sprang a taste for yagona and shared mine with no less a foe than ratu viriviri, together we’d sit on a pandanus mat in the twilight of our decrepitude and he’d point to the flame tree and say sekoula and i’d point to the same tree and say gulmohur [. . .] and i’d wonder if the names from my past were altering his present in the way that the names of his present had altering my past [. . .] that year we—grower, harvester and mill-worker—struck against the company and the sahibs sent in the native sepoys in frowning khakis to break up the hartaal.34 This new kind of modernist memory offers no repose: ‘i thought the city by its nature belonged to all its citizens, but they came on the may of their unforgetting to claim for themselves the city we had all made, kaindia and kaiviti and kaivalagi’.35 This meshing of experimental prose-lyric form and of traumatic content again renders Mishra’s version of modernism as memory-demand: this time that people remember histories, as a way of avoiding scapegoating and misattributions of blame.

Worldliness The Pacific is not a world apart, and exists in connection with a wider world. That world impinges distinctly, all the same. Cinema in Fiji is

33 The girmit system emerged after the formal abolition of slavery. A girmit is a contractual agreement under whose (generally onerous) terms Indians were transported for a fixed period of time to work on sugar plantations in Fiji and in other British colonies before either being returned home or staying on in the country to which they were transported. Those who were cajoled or coerced into such agreements were indentured workers, known as girmitiyas. The practice of indenture was of course more widespread even than this. It also affected the Pacific islanders themselves (the so-called ‘Blackbirding’ process is an example: this racist term describes the practice of kidnapping Pacific islanders to work on sugar plantations in northern Australia). 34 Mishra, Diaspora, 75–76. 35 Mishra, Diaspora, 78.

On Memory and Modernity 241 not just Hollywood, but also a longstanding twentieth-century history of Hindi film. Mishra has written essays on aspects of Hindi cinema, but one of his most powerful analyses is to be found in his recent poem, ‘Devdas’. Devdas is an extremely important film in early modernist film history. In any Indian context, the name itself evokes a complex narrative of wealth, of personal failure, of patriarchy, and of death. Initially a novella by Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, it became the basis of a string of films, from the highly aestheticised films by Guru Dutt (notably Kaagaz ke Phool) to recent remakes of the original story. Devdas was originally a Bengali-language novel, then silent film, then Bengali- and Hindi-language films. While the Hindi-language, Barua-directed version starring Kundan Saigal was a masterpiece of the 1930s, the defining version of the text was Dilip Kumar’s depiction of the troubled ‘protagonist’ two decades later.36 Devdas films are often disturbing, leaving the audience with the sense that the central character deserves sympathy despite all the things he has done. The narrative itself is a difficult modernist one, with a ‘protagonist’ created to be condemned: Devdas is a contemptible figure, a privileged youth from a landed estate who wastes his life as a drunkard in the city. He fails not just one woman but two, one in his home territory, and the other in the city. He stands up neither for his love nor against his father. Yet Devdas is a pathetic figure whose very abjection touched the complexities of the Indian experience of modernity both before independence—and immediately after. In his poem, ‘Devdas’, Mishra dwells not on the pathos we may feel for the central character, but on his failure. Where the films tend to dwell on the final traumatic journey of the dying Devdas as he seeks to return to Paro, his love, Mishra points out that she has been waiting a long time: She has opened the windows, and The road to her door Is bright as an open book. Still there’s no sign of you. (L 79) In life, as in death, Devdas falls short: he lets everyone down. The flat observation sounds like a judgement, but perhaps it is merely an observation. Mishra once more reminds us that the choices for the rich are still easier than for those of the people Devdas lets down. Moreover, anyone reading the poem knows the conclusion of every major version of the films: a terrifyingly patriarchal scene in which the external doors slam shut on Paro as she seeks to flee the house into which she married, fleeing

36 For all the qualities of the leading actor’s performance, Vijay Mishra is right to note that the second film paid ‘slavish homage’ to the earlier film. Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002), 29.

242  John O’Carroll in the hope of just once more laying eyes on her love. Modernity, in many of Mishra’s works, is a prison of labour, especially for women. Mishra frequently writes of those outside Oceania. This, too, is part of any Oceanian modernism—a world not only impinges on our world, but we are also part of that wider world, and share in its pain. Nor is Mishra’s response to the plight of the dispossessed any less vehement than in relation to those closer to home. He strikes an openly critical note in his ‘Still Life in Gaza’, as he offers a political critique of the dispossession of a diaspora whose circumstances are distinct from his own, that of the Palestinians: Through a hole in my soul I’ve eaten stars. Now star-struck I vomit stars I’m Palestine.37 The attack on Israeli militarism strikes a jarring note in Fiji, a nation which has participated with almost evangelical zeal in peacekeeping missions to the Sinai. Mishra, in this poem, signals another order of colonisation, one which takes place in a wider modernity, and whose appropriation is particularly intense and complete. This modernism of articulation, this connectedness with those oppressed, supports Friedman’s vision of a postcolonial modernism which is laterally interconnected. The disjunctions of postcolonial modernity offer powerful experiential links, and— from having seen the poet read his verse—this particular poem with its incantatory refrains (‘remember?’ and ‘I’m Palestine’) is one of his most powerful performance pieces. The intensity of engagement with the wider world is especially prominent in The Lives of Coat Hangers. In ‘Lorca’, for instance, we find a rare form of modernist objectivity deployed against aspects of modernism itself. ‘Lorca’ is a short, sonnet-like account of Federico Garcia Lorca’s execution in the Spanish civil war. It offers a vigil of an apparent re-enactment. The murderers take him out ‘again’ and in a way which ‘echoes the primal scene of his murder’ (L 29). In this re-enactment, however, unlike the filmic and staged depictions of Lorca’s shocking death, nature does not rise up in sympathy. The moon is not out, the olive trees do not cry out ‘for mercy’, and when a cicada makes noise, it is not one suggesting protest, but rather, it ‘insinuates nothing’. The murderers load, take aim, and, in the final line of the poem, ‘demand lessons in poetry’ (L 29). The reversal in this last line matters: after all, regimes of Franco’s ilk are the ones which seek to give lessons to artists, not receive them.

37 Mishra, Diaspora, 51.

On Memory and Modernity 243

Demands on Memory Mishra’s Oceanian modernism disturbs, demands, and haunts. His is a uniquely—perhaps obsessively so—art of actively exhortational remembering, and of transformation. His modernism may not be what comes to mind when the Pacific or Oceania are first mentioned, yet his way of seeing makes transformative sense of it. We have seen that Mishra frequently makes traditional modernism’s temporalising and rupturing practices into a problem, into a demand on memory, or more precisely, as in the play Ferringhi, a demand to remember. These appear as struggles in his work, but they do not exist in isolation from the world of Oceania in which they appear. Rather, they are part of that modernity itself. With their many brilliant results in drama, in verse, and in criticism, they work as a kind of hinge (to use one of his critical metaphors) of articulation between the events, the nature, the brute facts of modernity, and a mode of expression (not just diction or style, but genre itself) adequate to bear them—Oceanian modernism, in other words. By devising lyrical idioms of modernist remembering, he actively joins up fractured sites and realities, both temporally and spatially. In so doing, we find the distinctiveness of his achievement, and thereby potentially a critically restitutive vision of Oceania (and of modernism itself). Mishra’s contribution to Oceanian modernism is, I have argued, considerable and transformative. While I have not traced it here, Mishra’s criticism insists on the link between material realities and cultural analysis. As a poet and playwright, however, Mishra has reinvented and renewed many varieties of the modernist idiom. His work ‘remembers’ cultural assumptions in postcolonial Fiji, and in his politically charged lyrics, he writes with deep compassion for those whose lives have been buried and forgotten. His work thereby lets us grasp the promise of a difficult Oceanian modernism, one which limits any overly confident idealisation of modernism, particularly one which would unthinkingly include it as part of a wider general field, let alone one which could be defined simply by an array of formal features. His achievement as an artist is by any measure remarkable—and in its prickly yet haunting rendering of Oceania, establishes also the prospect of an Oceanian modernism adequate to those realities.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Castles, Stephen. ‘The Racisms of Globalisation’. In The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia, edited by Ellie Vasta and Stephen Castles, 17–45. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996.

244  John O’Carroll De Certeau, Michel. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Digiacomo, Mark. ‘The Assertion of Coevalness: African Literature and Modernist Studies’. Modernism/modernity 24, no. 2 (2017): 245–62. Doyle, Laura. ‘Modernist Studies and Inter-Imperiality in the Longue Durée’. In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger with Matt Eatough, 669–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Eliot, T. S. Prufrock and Other Observations. London: The Egoist, 1917. Ezekiel, Nissim. ‘Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa, T. S.’. In Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarathy, 37–38. 1976. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Goldberg, David Theo. Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. Lal, Brij. Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1992. Lefebvre, Henri. Introduction to Modernity. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, 1995. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca, L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies’. PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. Mishra, Sudesh. Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying. Dunedin: Otago, 2002. ———. Ferringhi. In Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, edited by Ian Gaskell, 332–91. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and Pacific Writing Forum, 2001. ———. The International Dateline. In Beyond Ceremony: An Anthology of Drama from Fiji, edited by Ian Gaskell, 451–510. Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies and Pacific Writing Forum, 2001. ———. The Lives of Coat Hangers. Dunedin: Otago, 2016. ———. Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1994. ———. ‘Om’. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Epeli Hau‘ofa, Eric Waddell and Vijay Naidu, 20–22. Suva: University of the South Pacific; Beake House, 1993. ———. Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English. Adelaide: University of the South Pacific; Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, 1995. ———. Rahu. Suva: Vision, 1987. ———. Tandava. Melbourne: Meanjin, 1992. Mishra, Vijay. Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wendt, Albert. ‘Towards a New Oceania’. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 49–69.

14 Oceania, the Planetary, and the New Modernist Studies: A Coda Susan Stanford Friedman

Oceania and the modernisms explored in this path-breaking volume expose prevailing metropolitan and continentalist assumptions about modernity, and offer a new approach to what I chose to call ‘planetary modernisms’ in my efforts to propose a new paradigm beyond the Eurocentric one for modernity. This volume, growing out of the conference I attended on ‘Oceanic Modernism’ at The University of the South Pacific in Fiji in 2016, led me to rethink fundamentally the work I  had been doing for Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (2015). In this coda to the volume, I  will reflect on how seeing the new modernist studies (and my prior work in the transforming field) through the lens of Oceania performs yet another paradigm shift in the field. Identifying some of the tensions I have observed in the linked fields of oceanic, island, and archipelagic studies, I want to highlight the powerful contributions this volume makes to the new modernist studies in general.

The Planetary In Planetary Modernisms, I chose the word planetary instead of the more common transnational or global to gesture at the spatial expansions of the field. I now think that choice was prescient, for reasons I did not fully understand at the time, for the planet’s surface is, in fact, about 71% water, with 95.6% of that water being oceanic.1 The term transnational enfolds issues of nationalism, and the term global is thoroughly embroiled in debates about globalisation. The word planetary opens doors I could not myself go through—doors like the oceanic and archipelagic, doors that this volume does go through. But before following in the footsteps of the chapters in this volume, it is worth reviewing, just for a time, the

1 ‘How Much Water Is There on Earth?’, accessed 21 July  2019, https://www.usgs.gov/ special-topic/water-science-school/. . ./how-much-water-there-earth

246  Susan Stanford Friedman state of modernist studies as it undergoes the kinds of transformations that potentially make room for the modernisms of Oceania. My choice to invoke planetarity for modernist studies in 2010 deliberately challenged the prevailing meaning of modernism, which so often begins with and so often remains a descriptor of the arts and ideas of the great European and North American metropolitan centres of the early twentieth century. Too often, modernity has been synonymous with the metropole, typically the cities from which the commercial, political, and military empires of the post-1500 world have been ruled—from Amsterdam, London, and Paris; to Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome; and more recently, to New York and Washington, DC. Too often, the world history of modernity is continental, forgetting its oceans and islands. Too often, modernity is assumed to be the innovation of ‘the West’, spread to the rest of a backward world doomed to catch up in a process of belated modernisation, which in the minds of many slides inexorably into the category of Westernisation. Too often, to be modern is to be Western, a category that is an ideological construct rather than a geographical one. Within this framework, modernism has a default position in which the aesthetics of the early twentieth century in Paris, London, Rome, and New York function as the benchmark against which other modernisms are measured. ‘Other’ modernisms, ‘alternative’ modernisms, ‘minor’ modernisms, ‘marginal’ modernisms, ‘peripheral’ modernisms, ‘vernacular’ modernisms, ‘divergent’ modernisms—all play second fiddle to the dominant chords of early-twentieth-century modernisms of the West, especially the experimental modes of what is often called ‘high modernism’. The question for this volume is how to think about yet another ‘other’ modernism, the modernisms of Oceania and of oceans and archipelagos more generally, and how to position them in relation to planetary landscapes of modernity and modernism across time without reproducing the logic of Eurocentrism. You might ask; what is the problem with adding another modernism to the pluralist pot? Has not the ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies—so identified by Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz in their 2008 PMLA overview of the field—corrected the field’s Western bias? Geomodernisms, edited by Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel in 2004, along with Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s Geographies of Modernism in 2005, and Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics in 2009 redefined the spatial parameters of modernism. Mark Wollaeger’s massive Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms appeared in 2012, and monographs of comparative or other modernisms are now coming out with some regularity. Introductions to global modernist studies like Laura Winkiel’s Modernism: The Basics (2017) now exist alongside more Eurocentric introductions like Pericles Lewis’s The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007). The Modernist Latitudes series at Columbia University Press expressly invites books on world literatures,

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 247 and the Bloomsbury Academic Press series on New Modernisms now includes Sean Latham and Gayle Rogers’s Modernism: Evolution of an Idea (2015), and Peter Kalliney’s Modernism in a Global Context (2016). As a sign of our contemporary modernity—the fast, vast changes of the twenty-first century—the new fields of transnational and global modernisms appear to be booming, leaving lots of room, then, for the newest kid on the block; the modernisms of Oceania, micro-states, small islands, and archipelagos. These other modernisms frequently explore the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial societies far from the metropolitan centres of the West. I cannot help, however, sounding a cautionary note, one based on the many signs of resistance I have seen to the transnational turn in modernist studies. Not everyone is turning. In fact, some have argued prominently against global and temporal expansions of the field. In the 2014 issue of PMLA, for example, David James and Urmila Seshagiri argue for a return to earlier meanings of modernism as an aesthetic style in the early twentieth century centred in the culture capitals of the West, boundaries that give both philosophical and pragmatic coherence to the field.2 In Disciplining Modernism, a volume whose contributors responded to my 2001 essay ‘Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism’, Stephen Ross, a recent president of the Modernist Studies Association, suggests that the expansion of modernism recapitulates an imperialist gesture foundational to Western modernity itself, one that reflects the academic tendency for fields to gobble up other fields. With some ambivalence, he appears to recommend a retreat to the earlier boundaries of the field.3 Short overviews of modernism keep appearing; typically, these snapshots revert to the conventional parameters of the field and express caution about expanding its borders so far that the term modernism loses all specificity. Until recently, the Modernist Studies Association description of its aims remained unchanged since its founding in 1998: ‘The Modernist Studies Association is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the late nineteenth- through the mid-twentieth century’. The programme for the annual MSA conference is broader in scope and includes a number of presentations on ‘other’ modernisms, including contemporary ones, but these remain sparsely attended—like isolated small islands loosely attached to the continental mass of most panels, which remain focussed on the familiar canons of European and North American modernisms of the early twentieth century.

2 David James and Urmila Seshagiri, ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution’, PMLA 129, no. 2 (2014): 87–100. 3 Stephen Ross, ‘Uncanny Modernism; or, Analysis Interminable’, in Disciplining Modernism, ed. Pamela L. Caughie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

248  Susan Stanford Friedman In short, the promise of the transnational turn in modernist studies has yet to be fully realised—for quite understandable philosophical, political, and practical reasons related to the delineation of any coherent field of study. What does this mean for the modernisms of Oceania, for all the innovative work reflected in this volume, and for all the ‘other’ modernisms that are appearing on the horizons of the field—modernisms outside the conventional fifty-year temporal and European/North American frame? As a feminist critic in the 1970s, I learned to distrust an additive approach; we said back then in those formative days of women’s studies, ‘you can’t just add women to the pot and stir; you have to change the whole pot’. Adapting Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1963), we argued for a paradigm shift in the structures of knowledge that had omitted, trivialised, or misrepresented women’s history, lives, dreams, and imaginings. Such a paradigm shift held out not only the transformation of knowledge about the gender system but also the potential of a knowledge revolution that would contribute to social justice on a broad scale. Parallel and intersecting movements were occurring and continuing to be formed in the development of black studies, race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial studies, gay and sexuality studies, queer studies, disability studies, environmental studies, and, most recently, transgender studies. For modernist studies, I have been making a parallel political argument for a major paradigm shift in the field. I like messy borders; I embrace the incoherence of a field—if such untidiness captures real contradictions and tensions that have the potential to create new modes of thought, with significant effects in the world beyond the purely aesthetic or philosophical. I  am not alone in seeing the creative potential of fluid borders, as evidenced in Paul Saint-Amour’s special issue of Modernism/modernity on Weak Theory.4 While I  do not like the term ‘weak’ to characterise theories of modernism/modernity that move outside the conventional borders of the field, I appreciate the challenge to the familiar periodisation of modernism, the bookends of 1890–1940. To close off modernism in 1940, I have argued, is like trying to hear one hand clapping: it marginalises the role of colonialism in the formation of Euro-American modernisms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.5 Even more damaging, it excludes the modernisms of those emerging out of colonialism: the arts of the Caribbean and Africa, of the Middle East and India, of East and Southeast Asia, and, as this volume attests, of Oceania.

4 Paul Saint-Amour, ed., ‘Weak Theory’, special issue, Modernism/Modernity 25, no. 3 (2018). 5 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies’, Modernism/modernity 12, no. 3 (2006): 425–43.

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 249 I use the term planetary to suggest the paradigm shift that I  believe is essential for establishing the fluid spatial and temporal borderlands for modernism necessary for moving outside the conventional EuroAmerican boundaries of the field. Planetary, a term that Édouard Glissant uses often in Poétique de la Relation (1990, trans. 1997 as Poetics of Relation), opens up a sense of time and place that is both expansive and localised; it suggests an epistemology in which the scales of space and time have the flexibility to zoom out and zoom in—to move between what Ferdinand Braudel called the longue durée and the courte durée, between the broad canvas of world history and the specifics of the local and the textual. Planetary also gestures at the earth as a place of matter, sea, and climate, and of an array of species of which the human is only one. It invites consideration of the ecologies of the human and non-human, their distinctiveness, their networks, and their interactions. oceanic and archipelagic modernisms—as this volume attests—work at the frontiers of the planetary.

Rethinking Modernity The foundation of the paradigm shift I advocate is what I have called an interrogation of the slash: that is, the connection/disconnection between modernity and modernism written into the title of the field’s leading journal: Modernism/modernity. How are the arts and philosophies and ideas of modernism linked to, yet distinct from, the historical conditions of modernity? The seeds of this connection were sown in the 1970s by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, in their introduction to their seminal volume, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, in which they defined modernism as the ‘scenario of our chaos’.6 I have expanded on their approach by suggesting that modernism is not merely an aesthetic response to or reflection of modernity, but rather a constitutive component of it. In my view, any given modernism is the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity, a sector of a rapidly changing society that helps articulate those ruptures, often with a critical and prophetic edge. It embodies the epistemological and representational crises that accompany the vortex of fast-moving changes that run the full spectrum of societal arenas, from the economic and political, to the cultural and technological. A planetary approach to modernism, then, requires a planetary rethinking of modernity. Modernity is not one, in spite of what Fredric Jameson argues in The Singular Modernity (2002). It is not even dual, as Immanuel Wallerstein posits in his centre/periphery model in World-Systems Analysis (2007).

6 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930 (1976; London: Penguin, 1991), 27.

250  Susan Stanford Friedman Modernity is many, multiple, recurrent, and interlocking in planetary scales of time and space, as I have argued in Planetary Modernisms. The paradigm shift I espouse refuses the familiar metanarrative of modernity as the invention of the West that the backward Rest lags behind and comes inevitably to imitate. This metanarrative, built on a notion of European exceptionalism, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an ideological rationalisation for expanding European and later North American power, especially the imperial power of growing economic and political empires. It variously defines modernity as a combination of phenomena forming first in ‘the West’ post-1500, typically including capitalism, the nation-state and its surveilling bureaucracies, industrialism, individualism, rationalism, and the rise of secularism alongside the scientific revolution. Whether invoked from the right—as Samuel Huntington does in The Clash of Civilizations (1996)—from the left, as Jameson and Wallerstein do, or from a seemingly neutral standpoint, as Stuart Hall and Anthony Giddens do in their introductions to the concept—this metanarrative of modernity identifies it as a European invention, a product of its specific dynamism and innovative genius. Herein lies the origin of that ideological construct of ‘the West’ itself. The West is the teleological construct of a linear view of history, a periodisation that begins with the ancient, moves to the classical, then the medieval, and finally the modern and postmodern—a periodisation in which Europe, then North America, are the apotheosis—for some, of ‘progress’, for others, like Wallerstein, of an evil virus—but whether for good or bad, always at the centre. That such periods are misleading, for the histories of the rest of the world has not deterred standard periodisations of linear history. Why, for instance, is the vast Abbassid Empire centred in Baghdad from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries called ‘medieval’, especially when it brought many of the innovations of Asia to the relative backwaters of Europe, as Janet Abu-Lughod argued in 1989 in Beyond European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350? A planetary rethinking of modernity—essential for expanding the boundaries of modernist studies—requires, in my view, a much longer durée than that of Braudel, Wallerstein, or Jameson, each of whom dates the origins of the modern world from about 1500, the age of the socalled European ‘discoveries’. This is not an idea I came to easily. Like Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (2000), I was determined to provincialise Europe by studying the way in which colonised peoples interacted with European hegemonies of thought and action in the recent past. But purely by chance—literally by the accident of Borders bookstore’s spatial arrangements of new books—I picked up Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, about the Mongol Empire, the largest land empire in human history, one that radically reshaped Europe and Asia from the thirteenth century until the early fifteenth century, when its extraordinary systems of rapid mobility

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 251 brought the Bubonic Plague to Europe. The Mongol Empire shattered the frameworks of modernity in which I was immersed and began for me the lengthy process of rethinking modernity in the context of world history in the very long durée. Phenomena long associated with European exceptionalism developed under Mongol rule—for example, the concept of ‘universal law’ to which even the khan was subject; religious toleration; the development of paper currency, credit, and shares; a system of meritocracy; the formation of standard measurements and calendar; schools of astronomy and history writing; military technologies including gunpowder; forbidding the kidnapping of women for marriage; outlawing public spectacles of torture; the development of a class of professionals who moved around the empire; the rapid movement of information; even the vision of a universal language, an Esperanto that Genghis Khan, himself illiterate, dreamed of but never accomplished.7 That these formations, often dubbed Pax Mongolica, developed so quickly in the wake of Mongol conquest (much of which was violently brutal and rapid, and happened as the Inquisition began in Europe long before the rise of Italian, Dutch, and British capitalism) completely upended my sense of periodisation. If nomadic Central Asia was ‘modern’ before Europe, what then was modernity? These questions led me to the growing body of world historians of the very longue durée—from Abu-Lughod and André Gunder Frank, to E. M. Blaut, John Hobson, and Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper8— all of whom challenge the notion of European exceptionalism, although with different emphases and expertise. These historians, among many others, seldom invoke the concept of modernity itself, but they provided me with the tools I  needed to rethink modernity. For them, history is not linear, a metanarrative of progress; it is not built along binarist lines of centre and periphery; civilisation does not begin in Mesopotamia and move ever northwestward. Rather, it is polycentric and networked, connecting vast regions of the world through trade and conquest, thereby instituting exchange and hybridisation of cultures and societies as the norm, not the exception. Often, they focus on the great fulcral cities of world history, crossroads of many cultures and key points on continental trade routes like the Silk Roads across Central Asia and the caravans

7 Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Three Rivers, 2004). 8 André Gunder Frank, ‘The Modern World System Revisited: Rereading Braudel and Wallerstein’, in Civilizations and World Systems, ed. Stephen K. Sanderson (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1995); J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: Guilford, 1993); John H. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, eds., Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

252  Susan Stanford Friedman across Africa—Constantinople/Istanbul, Baghdad, Alexandria, Venice, Samarkind, Timbuktu. But the story of water—rivers, canals, seas, and oceans—figures centrally as technologies of mobility steadily advanced in human history. The new oceanic studies joins this world history in the longue durée by mapping the transcontinental exchanges enabled by the Indian Ocean, long before the Atlantic trade routes empowered a rising Europe in the centuries after 1500. The question I have brought to these world histories of encounter and transculturation in the landscapes of shifting empires is how they might assist in breaking the ideological hold of the grand metanarrative of Western modernity and thus the still-dominant Euro-American framework for modernism. What the revisionist histories of the Mongol Empire taught me was to look for moments in history of massive and rapid change across all sectors of society—change often initiated by bloody conquest and wars, as the borders of empires expanded and contracted over time. Where, I  asked, were the breakthroughs in technology, mobility, and knowledge that brought different peoples and societies into contact, rupturing past epistemologies and practices and intensifying the ordinary processes of cultural hybridisation? If Paul Gilroy could claim in The Black Atlantic (1992) that enslaved Africans subjected to the brutalities of the Middle Passage and European conquest of the Americas were the ‘first modern subjects’, not those of the French or British Enlightenment, then why should not we look for even earlier modern subjects experiencing the disorientation and alienation of rapid change, especially through the violence of imperial conquest? If African Americans could use the negativities of their particular modernities as a source for creative survival and innovative expressivities, why not those in other parts of the world, before the rise of Europe in the post-1500 world? To test these radical propositions for rethinking modernity, I decided to set up two great empires of the pre-1500 world in opposition—one sedentary, the Tang Dynasty of China, from the seventh to the tenth centuries; the other, nomadic, the Mongol Empire of the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries. Each, I  argued, produced rapid and radical ruptures across all sectors of society, combining dystopic disorientation and utopic flowerings, all the more intensified by the extraordinary speed and conjunctures of change. Each were transformative societies, greatly enriched by the intercultural contacts and hybridisations they enabled. To locate such different modernities in Asia broke the mould of the Eurocentric metanarrative of modernity; to see parallels between sedentary and nomadic modernities before 1500 challenged the conventional periodisation of history. To enlarge the spatial scale of modernity—that is, to encompass the planet—I discovered that I needed to increase the temporal scale of modernity—that is, to engage with a very longue durée. What this longue durée allowed was the dissolution of the singular and binarist models of modernity, both of which constitute foundational elements of the metanarrative of modernity as the invention of the West. Concepts

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 253 of plural modernities as other, minor, alternative, marginal, peripheral, divergent—and so forth—end up reinforcing binaries. Embedded in the very term other is the centre; in alternative, the main. Rethinking modernity on a planetary scale, in contrast, opens up the possibility of multiple, polycentric, conjunctural, and recurrent modernities—possibilities that I believe are central to prevent a reinstatement of a Eurocentric ideology of modernity.

Continentalism and Archipelagic Thinking The conference on ‘Oceanic Modernism’ in Fiji forced me to rethink what I had argued in Planetary Modernisms. By focussing on land-based modernities—continental histories of the Mongol and Tang empires—I ignored the seas, or at least understood these seas merely as routes of connection between fulcral cities or steppe-based mobilities. Why had I read, carefully marked up, and then completely forgotten Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen’s The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (1997), which opens with a cogent critique of continentalism as a prevailing ideology of geography? What difference would it have made, I wonder, if I had drawn sustained examples from archipelagos or from land/sea interconnections as the basis for rethinking modernity? These questions bring to mind one of the first comments that set me on the revisionist path about modernity I have taken. In the late 1990s, my colleague Maria Lepowsky, a feminist anthropologist of Papua New Guinea, asked a question in our interdisciplinary border and transcultural studies group: why, she wondered, were the long-ago seafaring peoples of Oceania not considered a significant form of ‘modernity’? Their movement from island to island was an early instance of continual mobility producing an intense interculturalism and cultural hybridity in the context of complex trade and political networks. Lepowsky was engaging in what later scholars have called ‘island thinking’, an archipelagic epistemology. Reading some recent works in island, archipelagic, and oceanic studies, I am struck, however, by how important island thinking has been for my work, even though my continentalist focus obscured the pervasiveness of archipelagic thought in my rethinking of modernity.9 Perhaps the single most important theorist in Planetary Modernisms is Édouard Glissant, particularly his Poetics of Relation and his essay ‘The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World’. He uses the linguistic and cultural concepts of creolité, first as a way to characterise the Caribbean but secondly as a 9 These fields are overlapping and distinctive; for oceanic studies in particular, see ‘Oceanic Studies: Theories and Methodologies’, special issue PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 657–736; Kären Wigen and Jessica Harland-Jacobs, eds., ‘Oceans Connect’, special issue, Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999); Kären Wigen, ‘Introduction’, in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).

254  Susan Stanford Friedman framework for discussing what he variously called ‘worldness’, ‘planetary’, and ‘archipelagic’ approaches to modernity and the global interconnectedness of cultures and histories. Glissant regards each site of cultural production as its own centre, as a nodal point within a vast network of other centres. His poetics of relation is above all a theory of planetary circulations, constant mobility and fluidity, changing landscapes and seascapes of interconnection. Not in any sense a theory of happy hybridity, however, Glissant’s poetics of relation follows the pathlines of power and terror as he considers the divergent effects of modernity on different groups of people. The Poetics of Relation begins, it should be remembered, with the lyrical sequence, ‘The Open Boat’, which narrates the Middle Passage, the ‘crossing’ of ‘land-sea’ on ‘the planet Earth’, ending with the image of those ‘straight from the belly of the slave ship into the violet belly of the ocean depths’, only to be followed by the ‘panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, and finally the alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed’.10 Expanding beyond the Middle Passage, Glissant’s revisionist history and theory of modernity argues that ‘contact among cultures’ is never unidirectional. Rather, this contact ‘is one of the givens of modernity. [. . .] I call creolization the meeting, the interference, shock, harmonies, and disharmonies between the cultures of the world, in the realized totality of the world’.11 The shock and trauma of enslavement; the exhilaration of creativity—both the dystopic and utopic—are elements in Glissant’s poetics of relation. While the concept of the very longue durée led me to see modernity as an ever-recurrent phenomenon across time and the planet, Glissant helped me understand how to think about synchronous modernities, particularly those of colonialism—the multiple modernities in different parts of the world that are nonetheless interconnected: Picasso’s use of masks from Africa and Oceania in Les demoiselles d’Avignon represents the modernism of a Spanish artist in Paris, utterly stimulated by the art of colonised others, even though he did not recognise their work as ‘art’. Rather than being ‘primitive’, the art he adapted was itself part of a different, but interlinked modernity: the experience of colonised modernity in Africa and Oceania. The conditions and effects of modernity around the planet at the same moment in time differ; but the local is tied to the translocal; or, in other terms, the global is in the local and the local is in the global: a phenomenon that some call ‘glocalisation’. Upon reflection, I can see that other modes of island or archipelagic thinking influenced me without my awareness, and that the concepts I adapted might well reflect an island epistemology. Ferdinand Ortiz, the

10 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 7. 11 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 62–3.

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 255 Cuban anthropologist who theorised transculturation in his 1940 book Contrapunteo, focussed on sugar and tobacco in Cuba. As an early theory of cultural hybridity or creolisation in the Caribbean, transculturation is a process of synthesis that assumes that colonial encounters change both coloniser and colonised.12 They are mutually constructed, each through the other, an idea that Simon Gikandi later developed with particular complexity in Maps of Englishness (1996), a book enabled by his book on Caribbean modernism, Writing in Limbo (1992). Transculturation suggests that influence is not unidirectional—from so-called ‘advanced’ to ‘backward’ or ‘primitive’ societies. Key concepts of archipelagic and island epistemologies of thinkers like Glissant and Ortiz also shifted my thinking about the modernisms that accompany planetary modernities, although I was unaware of this influence as my primary examples of these modernisms were primarily continental. To identify planetary modernisms, I posited that we regard any given modernism as the aesthetic, expressive, or representational dimension of any given modernity. To fulfil the promise of the planetary, we need, I  argued, to abandon the concept of modernism as a particular style or period of the arts—for example, the experimentalist styles of early-twentieth-century Europe and North America. As much as I value the innovations that writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner brought to the novel, I do not consider their fictions to be the benchmarks against which novels written in the post-1950 societies of the semicolonial or newly postcolonial world must be judged. In other words, I consider Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1967) or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) be to modernist, not because each engages with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) or because both experiment with narrative points of view. Rather, I consider them to be modernist for their own times and places because they engage with the specific colonial and postcolonial modernities of their spatial/ temporal location in ways that challenge representational modes of their own cultures and world cultures of the novel more generally, even as their forms blend elements of Indian and Arab aesthetic traditions with Western ones. In short, they exhibit Glissant’s poetics of relation and contribute to a global process that Ortiz termed transculturation. As I look back at what I wrote in Planetary Modernisms, I can see in hindsight the import of ‘island thinking’ on my rethinking of modernism, even though I did not understand it as such. Before I worked through the modernisms of Du Fu or Kabir, Tayeb Salih, Rabindranath Tagore and his sister Swarmakumari Devi, and Arundhati Roy, I zoomed in on the long poems of Aimé Césaire and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as instances of a different, diasporic modernism, where the impulse was not to ‘make

12 Ferdinando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940; La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963).

256  Susan Stanford Friedman it new’ so much as to engage in a return to home/homeland, a return of the diasporic that reflects both the routes of travel and the roots of beginning, that enables rebirth.13 Just think about it: Césaire, the coiner of the term Négritude in his 1939 poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; and Cha, the Korean exile in America whose Dictée (1981) enacts the recovery of a female-centred history of Korea amidst a transcultural blending of Greek, French, American, and Korean cultural fragments. Paris is important to both writers, but not in terms of a centre/periphery framework. Rather, each poet’s return home is filtered through linguistic and cultural engagements with French and France—not as the centre of culture, the endpoint of quest, but as a stage in the revisioning of home, of beginnings. What I did not theorise directly is the way in which the distinctive modernisms of Césaire and Cha might reflect ‘island thinking’ on the one hand, and ‘peninsular’ thinking on the other. Césaire began his poem on the island of Martinska off the coast of Yugoslavia, as prelude to his permanent return home to Martinique, which remained his base for aesthetic and political innovation. His gendered metaphorics of the island as masculine Négritude (in both its abject and reborn modes) and the sea as feminine is consistent with Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s notion of the gendered dimension of island thinking.14 Reading his poem in this way raises the question for me of whether a peninsular mode of thought might be said to govern Cha’s poem—peninsulas as small places of in between—neither continents nor islands; bordered by the sea but attached to the land. What impact might this topography have had on Cha’s rejection of essentialist nationalism, embrace of an imaginary maternal home, and performance of a transculturation of transcontinental borderlands? I do not have answers to these questions, and I would avoid overly simplistic geographical determinisms, but I have become convinced that rethinking planetary modernisms in the context of all the land/sea formations of the earth would be fruitful.

Modernism and the New Archipelagic Studies New Oceania: Modernisms and the Modernities in the Pacific confronts directly what I have only circled around, reflecting on my past continentalist framework and yet the pervasive influences of archipelagic, island, and oceanic studies on my past formulations of planetary modernisms. Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long, along with the contributors to New Oceania, insist not only on the inclusion of the neglected modernities and 13 Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Modernism in a Transnational Landscape: Spatial Poetics, Postcolonialism, and Gender in Césaire’s Cahier/Notebook and Cha’s Dictée’, Paideuma 32, no. 1–3 (2003): 39–74. 14 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘Island Writing, Creole Cultures’, in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literatures, vol. 2, ed. Ato Quayson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 802–32.

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 257 modernisms of Oceania within the field at large, but also suggest new questions that the field in general needs to ask. The book follows in the wake of Epeli Hau‘ofa’s paradigm-shifting essay, ‘Our Sea of Islands’ (1993) and the volume of his essays that followed, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (2008). As a Tongan anthropologist born in Papua New Guinea and founder of the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at The University of the South Pacific in Fiji, Hau‘ofa recounts how discouraged his students felt by his presentation of then-current development theory, which characterised the Pacific Islands as always already behind the West, destined for hopelessness, isolation, and a belated, forever incomplete, modernity. Their despair generated his ‘road to Damascus’ epiphany: But if we look at the myths, legends, and oral traditions, indeed the cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania, it becomes evident that they did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions. Their universe comprised not only land surfaces but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld [. . .] and the heavens above. [. . .] Their world was anything but tiny.15 ‘There is a world of difference’, he concluded, ‘between viewing the Pacific as “islands in a far sea” and as “a sea of islands” ’.16 The vast travels of Pacific Islanders continue in the form of the Pacific Island diasporas, complemented by all the peoples—including Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese—who have migrated into Oceania, often under extreme and violent conditions of indenture. His revelation sparked one of my own on how to think planetarily about plural, polycentric, networked, and recurrent modernities and modernisms. Oceania in his view is both a vast, distinctive region on the planet and also interconnected with other parts of the globe. The chapters in New Oceania examine these dual dimensions: the distinctiveness of writing in the explosion in the arts in the postcolonial period, from about the 1960s and on; and the ways in which this writing engaged with the modernities and modernisms of the West. Moreover, they explore resonances between the arts and politics of the new Oceania and other archipelagos like the Caribbean, as well as other counter-hegemonic modernisms such as the African American. New Oceania is not an isolated phenomenon, as I have learned. Overlapping, interdisciplinary fields variously named island studies, archipelagic studies, and oceanic studies have been producing important journals, special issues, edited volumes, and monographs for several decades, work that has just recently begun to intersect substantially with

15 Epeli Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 31. 16 Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean, 31.

258  Susan Stanford Friedman modernist studies, as New Oceania insists on doing.17 This collection is positioned within the expanding seas of discourse about islands, archipelagos, and oceans. The volume, in conjunction with the broader fields to which it contributes, raises a few general issues that I would like to sketch out here as generative for modernist studies more generally: first, the contradictory pulls between discourses of fixity and fluidity in archipelagic or island thinking; second, the relationship of archipelagic studies to postcolonial studies; third, the tension between Indigenous and Western aesthetics; and finally, the status of archipelagic epistemologies for scholars in modernist studies. Fixity and Fluidity In the scholarship on islands and oceans, there is some tension between the affirmation of islands and oceans as inherently fluid, networked, and creole versus the felt need to identify the distinctiveness of the island’s locality, its particularity, even its national identity, especially for those newly emergent postcolonial micro/island-states. For example, Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim in their introduction to their 2001 special issue of Ariel on the ‘Cultures and Literatures of MicroStates’ emphasise how the ‘historical and material realities of inter-island exchanges and communication generate rich theoretical and conceptual potential’.18 But one of their contributors, Curwen Best, argues against emphasis on fluidity and for the importance of identifying the distinctive qualities of the new nation-states in the Caribbean.19 By way of example, he notes a specifically Barbadian aesthetics—different not only from

17 Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) foregrounds Britain’s status as an island, as its empire shrank with the liberation of its colonies, a political geography reflected in British modernism of the 1930s and 1940s. John Brannigan’s Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) rethinks the centre of anglophone modernism through the lens of the archipelago instead of the metropole. More general island studies like John R. Gillis’s Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Marc Shell’s Islandology: Geography, Rhetoric, Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014) are transhistorical, with a focus primarily on the meanings of islands in the European imaginary. Like DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017) is an important departure because it puts the literatures of Caribbean and Pacific islands in conversation with each other as key components of American studies, not its peripheries. 18 Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘Introduction’, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 1 (2001): 9. 19 Curwen Best, ‘Barbadian Aesthetics: Towards a Conceptulaization’, Ariel 32, no. 1 (2001): 197–215.

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 259 Britain, but also from the other island cultures of the Caribbean, let alone islands in general. In contrast, Glissant, in an interview, argues against nationalist essentialism for its potential to lead into atavistic movements for ethnic purity: ‘This is the difficulty’, he says: ‘to develop an island-region, must this island-region become nationalistic? This would be the worst possible thing’. He notes that ‘[w]e have shifted from believing in identity as a single root to hoping for identity as a rhizome  [.  .  .] or as a form of relation.  [.  .  .] There are people who are afraid of this’.20 This tension between fixity and mobility, the particular and the global, at times echoes the too-often bitter debates between so-called identity politics and postmodernism. Drawing on both Oceania and the Caribbean, DeLoughrey works with this tension in Routes and Roots (2007), promoting the homonym she adapts from James Clifford to suggest a necessarily dialogic relationship between identity as part of an inherited tradition (roots) and identity as ever-changing and fluid (routes). Islands and Postcolonial Studies The issue of micro-states and island nations slides imperceptibly into a certain tension between postcolonial studies and the newer fields of island and oceanic studies. For sure, the history of small islands cannot be told without the history of various conquests, colonialisms, imperialisms, and militarisms. But as a field, postcolonial studies evolved with a heavy focus on European and American empires, often reinstating in its very critique the metanarrative of the West as the inventor of modernity, which then spread belatedly to the Rest. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s aim to ‘provincialize Europe’ is laudable, but his book is caught in the binary logic of Western modernity and the belated response in the colonies. Within his framework, the relation of Indian migration to Fiji, for example, has no role. Competing Chinese and Japanese imperialisms in Southeast Asia and the Pacific remain invisible. In Alternative Modernities (2001), Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar aims to legitimate other modernisms, but like so many conventional histories, he begins his discussion of modernism with Baudelaire, whose particular ironic flânerie functions as benchmark against which other modernisms are understood. The contradiction facing island and oceanic studies is how to take into account the histories of powerful Western colonial powers without precluding the analysis of other networks, other poetics of relation, outside the binary of dominant West and belated Rest. This problem is

20 Andrea Schwieger Hiepko, ‘Europe and the Antilles: An Interview with Edouard Glissant’, trans. Julin Everett, in The Creolization of Theory, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 257, 259.

260  Susan Stanford Friedman particularly acute when the colonised or postcolonial cultures have themselves internalised a binary system which equates backwardness with their own cultures, the West with modernity, and modernisation with Westernisation. No matter how inaccurate that view might be, it often has a powerful hold on those living outside the Western centres of power. New Oceania handles its relationship to postcolonial studies quite adroitly in several ways. First, some of the chapters emphasise ways in which Oceanian writers are in dialogue with European modernists like Joyce and T. S. Eliot, both engaging with and distancing themselves from their modernist precursors by rooting their work in the histories and cultures of the Pacific Islands (e.g., Sudesh Mishra, Chapter 2; Paul Sharrad, Chapter 4; Matthew Hayward, Chapter 5). The little magazines of Oceania repeat the pattern of early-twentieth-century little magazines at the same time as they forge distinctive aesthetics reflecting postcolonial realities (Maebh Long, Chapter  8). Second, the postcolonial period of Oceania overlaps with the postwar militarisation of the Pacific Islands, especially with the nuclear testing done by the United States. This ‘atomic modernity’, as Julia A. Boyd demonstrates in Chapter  3, generated an explicitly feminist postcolonial resistance poetics, emphasising the environmental disasters of ‘our sea of islands’, to invoke Hau‘ofa again. The postcolonial modernity and modernism of Oceania both echo and depart from those of India, Africa, and even the Caribbean. Archipelagos and Archipelagic Thinking What Elaine Stratford calls ‘thinking with the archipelago’ develops out of island studies, but exists in tension with its potential for more general theoretical application. ‘The idea of the archipelago’, she writes in her 2013 introduction to a special issue of Islands Studies Journal, ‘suggests relations built on connection, assemblage, mobility, and multiplicity’.21 In their introduction to Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (2020), Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel draw on the literatures and arts of archipelagos (especially the Caribbean and Oceania) to develop an epistemology with global implications for reading cultural mobilities and interconnections throughout time and space.22 Archipelagic thinking, for them, is indeed planetary, as it was without my really understanding it as such in Planetary Modernisms.

21 Elaine Stratford, ‘The Idea of the Archipelago: Contemplating Island Relations’, Island Studies Journal 8, no. 1 (2013): 3. 22 Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martinez-San Miguel, eds., Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (Lanham, MD: Rowman Littlefield, 2020).

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 261 At stake is whether this archipelagic model is applicable only to islands, or whether it might be the avant-garde of a new way of understanding broad-scale intercultural contact. In her discussion of Antonio BenítezRojo’s social theory in The Repeating Island (1992) and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, Guillermina De Ferrari worries that the specificity of the Caribbean might be lost if these concepts are made generalisable.23 Is the creolité or the métissage of the Caribbean watered down beyond recognition by becoming a theory of universal cultural encounter? Will the broad-scale use of archipelago thinking, in other words, marginalise island cultures all over again? This potential for island thinking to permeate cultural studies more generally exists in tension with the need for island studies to develop its own specific lines of inquiry. I can see, for example, that the theme of isolation appears perhaps as frequently in island studies as issues of connection—isolation from the mainland, isolation from metropolitan culture, isolation even from other islands. Isolation can breed insularity instead of cosmopolitan diversities. Françoise Lionnet, for example, writes hauntingly of a photograph of a young man in Mauritius, wearing the outfit of a Parisian, using clothes, posture, and look to perform a longing for the world beyond his island. This is not the flânerie of Baudelaire’s modern poet, but the isolation of a modern youth who feels cut off and far away from where he wants to be.24 I wonder to what extent Derek Walcott retells The Odyssey in island terms as a form of breaking that island isolation. Perhaps the same could be said of Joyce’s layering of his urban island modernity with thick layers of engagement with British and, especially, continental cultures. Indigenous Modernisms and Oceania One characteristic of any modernity, I  have claimed, is the tug of war between traditionalising and modernising forces.25 How does this logic work in island cultures, I wonder? How are the discourses of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ deployed, and how do they relate to the histories and politics of indigeneity? Of course, no peoples are fully Indigenous; the human species has always been on the move, as studies in deep time continually reveal. But some peoples came before others; some of these ‘first peoples’ got wiped out by later migrants; others experienced themselves and their cultures as displaced and replaced. Long before Europeans invaded the Pacific Islands, this pattern of conquest and blended cultures 23 Guillermina de Ferrari, Vulnerable States: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 24 Françoise Lionnet, ‘Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives? Globalized Oceans and Insular Identities’, Profession (2011): 23–43. 25 Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 33–34, 237–38, 322–4.

262  Susan Stanford Friedman existed, but the European and American colonialisms in the Pacific created a dominant ideology of a powerful Western modernity swallowing up a backward Indigenous traditionalism. Oceanian indigeneity differs significantly from that of the Caribbean, where most of the early inhabitants of the islands were wiped out with the invasion of the Europeans, slaves from Africa, indentured servants from South Asia, and the influx of immigrants from many parts of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout Oceania Indigenous peoples and cultures survived European and American invasions, however much they were damaged and changed by them. New Oceania emphasises the centrality of indigeneity as an issue for Oceanian modernist studies, a move that comes just as the Modernist Studies Association is experiencing a plethora of proposals for panels on indigeneity, spearheaded especially by Stephen Ross. In Chapter  1 of this volume, Hayward and Long promote the concept of a ‘situated modernity’, and for Oceania, this involves recognition of the ongoing connection between Indigenous forms and the new Oceanian modernism. Rather than regard Indigenous culture as modernity’s Other, as it was in the eyes of many Westerners, from Melville to Gauguin, the literatures of Oceanian modernism weave oral, visual, and mythic elements of Indigenous cultures with the new urbanisation on the islands, the Oceanian diaspora, and the connections of Oceania with other parts of the world. In ‘Papua New Guinea Literature at the Crossroads’, for example, Regis Stella argues for just such a blend of orality and ancient practices with the literate, a mix akin to that of many ethnic literatures in the United States.26 Selina Tusitala Marsh, a Pacific Island poet and current Poet Laureate of New Zealand/Aotearoa, puns on the word niu, the Malayo-Polynesian cognate word for coconut, to argue that this ‘tree of life’ in Oceania is the foundation for an Oceania poetics to ‘make it niu’, a Pacific Island version of Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum ‘make it new’.27 New Oceania foregrounds the centrality of Indigenous cultural forms in the production of hybrid Oceanian modernisms. David O’Donnell, for example, argues in Chapter 10 that Nina Nawalowalo’s New Zealand-based theatre company The Conch weaves Indigenous performance modes, languages, practices, fabrics, and foods with some stylised theatrical modes she learned in London. O’Donnell’s contribution to New Oceania shows how Indigenous forms ‘make it niu’, belying the 26 Regis Stella, ‘Papua New Guinea Literature at the Crossroads: Islands, Languages, and Cultures’, Ariel 32, no. 1 (2001): 138–52. 27 Selina Tusitala Marsh, ‘Making It Niu: Blacking Out Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way’, in Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018), 70, 77–81.

Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 263 notion that tradition is fixed and unchanging, closed off from the present and the future.28 In the contemporary context of climate change and the rising of the oceans, indigeneity plays yet another role in Oceania. The ‘sea of islands’ required Indigenous people of the Pacific Islands to develop sophisticated strategies of navigation based on sensitivities to land/sea/sky relationality. Archipelagic thinking is intimately connected to environmental thinking, and the atomic modernity of Oceania that has so affected the food sources and health of the region is now layered with the effects of the rising seas, a case that DeLoughrey makes eloquently in ‘Heavy Water: Waste and Atlantic Modernity’.29

Conclusion To conclude, I  return to the relationship between the new Oceanian modernist studies and a planetary modernist studies more generally. It is not enough, I have suggested, that we add the post-1950 modernisms of islands, archipelagos, and oceans to the modernisms of early twentiethcentury Europe and North America. An additive approach to modernist studies leaves standing the pull of the Eurocentric paradigm, the conventions of the convenient. Yes, it is easier to teach modernism by starting with Picasso and Joyce, Woolf and Eliot, even Conrad and Forster, and then adding a text here or there from elsewhere—like isolated islands in a sea of mainstream literatures. But the effects of such beginnings are subtly pernicious. I ask instead for a major paradigm shift that begins with a rethinking of modernity, one that recognises multiple, polycentric, relational, and recurrent modernities across the very long durée of time and fully planetary scope of space. Only then can we read the modernisms of islands, archipelagos, and oceans without reinscribing the binaries of centre/periphery that associate innovation with the colonising metropoles of the West and belated imitation with the Rest. At the risk of erasing the specificity of island cultures, I align the planetary modernisms I have theorised with the archipelagic poetics of global relations and creolisation that Glissant advocates in his concept of ‘worldness’. New Oceania makes a major contribution to this kind of planetary modernist studies.

28 See also Sina Va‘ai, Literary Representations in Western Polynesia: Colonialism and Indigeneity (To‘omatagi: National University of Samoa, 1999). 29 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, ‘Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity’, PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 703–12.

264  Susan Stanford Friedman

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Oceania, the Planetary, New Modernist Studies 265 Gillis, John R. Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. ———. ‘The Unforeseeable Diversity of the World’. In Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenges of Globalization, edited by Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, translated by Haun Saussy, 278–95. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart and Bram Gieben, eds. Formations of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Hiepko, Andrea Schwieger. ‘Europe and the Antilles: An Interview with Edouard Glissant’. Translated by Julin Everett. In The Creolization of Theory, edited by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, 255–61. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Ho, Elaine Yee, Lin and Shirley, Geok-Lin Lim. ‘Introduction’. Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32, no. 1 (2001): 7–17. Hobson, John H. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ‘How Much Water Is There on Earth?’ Accessed 21 July 2019. https://www.usgs. gov/special-topic/water-science-school/. . ./how-much-water-there-earth Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso, 2002. James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution’. PMLA 129, no. 2 (2014): 87–100. Kalliney, Peter. Modernism in a Global Context. New York: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016. Latham, Sean and Gayle Rogers. Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015. Lewis, Martin W. and Kären E. Wigen. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lionnet, Françoise. ‘Cosmopolitan or Creole Lives? Globalized Oceans and Insular Identities’. Profession (2011): 23–43. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. ‘Making It Nui: Blacking Out Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way’. In Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art, edited by Susan Stanford Friedman, 71–99. London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018. Mao, Douglas and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘The New Modernist Studies’. PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–48. ‘Oceanic Studies: Theories and Methodologies’. Special Issue, PMLA 125, no. 3 (2010): 657–736. Ortiz, Ferdinando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. 1940. La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1963.

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Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. ‘About Aaji’ (Mishra) 239 Adorno, Theodor 23, 28 Adventures in Paradise (TV series) 195 – 6 Africana-Pasifika relationships 118 – 34 afro-pessimism 125 – 6 Against Testing on Moruroa (ATOM) 40, 43, 46, 51 Alliance Party government 228 ancestry and identity 81 – 2 Anderson, Benedict 230 anti-colonialism 47, 214 anti-nuclear activism see women of nuclear testing Appadurai, Arjun 102 – 3 As We Have Always Done (Simpson) 222 atomic modernism see women of nuclear testing avant-garde experimentation 23 Balme, Christopher 170 – 1, 182 Baxter, James K. 66 ‘Beach of Falesá, The’ (Stevenson) 190 – 1 Beier, Ulli 7, 123 – 4, 139 – 40, 147, 151 Beier, Georgina 7, 139 Bhabha, Homi 231 – 2 biblical material in verse 73 bildungsroman 202 BIM magazine 152 Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy) 252 black existentialism 122 – 3 Black Orpheus magazine 139, 147, 151

Booth, Michael R. 175 – 6 Brecht, Bertolt 181 – 2 Broom magazine 144 Brown, Deirdre 156 Butoh dance form 171 call-and-response texts 128 – 9 Camus, Albert 10, 77, 82, 86, 89 – 90, 92 – 4, 126 cargo cult activity 202 carnivalesque narratives 202 Chamorro people 100 – 16 Christian Samoa 215 Civilized Girl (Malini) 48 – 9 Clifford, James 125 Cold War 45 – 6 colonialism 8, 21, 36, 40, 45 – 9, 54, 87, 102, 108 – 10, 160, 248, 262 commodification of Guam 109 Compact of Free Association (COFA) 44, 53 Conch theatre 169 – 70, 173 – 87 Conrad, Joseph 9, 150, 255, 263 continentalism 253 – 6 coups/coup culture 235 – 6 creolisation 95 – 6 Crocombe, Marjorie 8, 47, 140, 143, 148 – 9, 164 cubism 95 Curnow, Allen 63 – 5 D’Alleva, Anne 181 ‘Death’ (Williams) 68 – 9 decolonial movements 102, 210 – 24 defamiliarisation technique 175 De Ferrari, Guillermina 261 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth 107, 259

268 Index denuclearisation 47 Devdas (films) 241 ‘Devdas’ (Mishra) 241 – 2 Dewes, Henare 156 – 5 ‘Diaspora and the Difficult Art of Dying’ (Mishra) 240 Diaz, Vicente 211, 213 ‘diving-dress god’ formula: as commercial trope 201 – 5; ‘heavy cargo’ reference 205 – 7; introduction to 190 – 7 dohas (couplets) 20 – 1 Duras, Marguerite 220 Eliot, T. S. 62, 64, 136, 150, 237 – 8 Ellis, William 26 Ellison, Ralph 124, 127 – 33 English Journal, The, magazine 136 Eri, Vincent 7 – 8, 140, 143, 152 Eurocentrism 15, 169 European exceptionalism 251 Existentia Africana (Gordon) 122 existentialism 122 – 3, 126, 133 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi 120 Faikava magazine 8, 140, 141 – 2, 143, 145, 149 – 50, 164 Fanon, Frantz 231 – 2 Faulkner, William 10, 82, 255 feminist culture 47, 50, 53, 185 Figiel, Sia 210 – 24 Fiji 7, 11 – 12, 15 – 17, 30 – 1, 43, 50 – 1, 227 – 43 Fiji Council of Churches 43 Filewood, Alan 174 fixity and fluidity 258 – 9 Forster, E. M. 60, 71, 263 Freelove (Figiel) 210 – 24 Friedman, Susan Stanford 42, 169, 231 From Unincorporated Territory (Perez) 100 – 16 Gauguin, Paul 7, 60, 95, 191, 193, 218, 220, 262 gender equity in Oceanic cultures 47 German Expressionism 171 Gilroy, Paul 25, 252 Gitagovinda (Jayadeva) 32 Glissant, Édouard 95, 249, 253 – 4, 255, 259, 261, 263 globalisation 103, 114, 172, 245 global/local binaries 106 Global North 3, 97, 102, 214, 222

Global South 1, 60, 76 Gordon, Lewis R. 122 Grace, Patricia 8, 81 – 2 Griffen, Vanesa 39, 40 – 1, 50 – 2, 140 Guam 100 – 16 Habermas, Jürgen 22 – 3, 24 Habu, Mostyn 152 Hall, Lisa Kahaleole 213 – 14 Hardy, Thomas 61 Hau‘ofa, Epeli 8, 24, 46, 101 – 103, 105, 107, 114, 140, 149, 222 – 223, 233 – 4, 257, 260 Hereniko, Vilsoni 25, 28 – 29, 82, 92 – 93, 97, 143, 171 – 2, 192, 198, 206, 212, 220 – 221 Hindu religious orthodoxies 20 Holmes, Leilani 213 – 14 Holt, John Dominis 8, 163, 192 Horkheimer, Max 23 Hotere, Ralph 78 Hughes, Robert 170 idealistic aesthetics 23 Ihimaera, Witi 7 – 8, 46, 74 imperialism 103 – 4, 107 – 8 indenture 11, 16, 21, 29, 32, 240, 257 Indigenisation 4, 10, 83, 94 – 6 indigenitude 125 Indigenous episteme 22 Indigenous literary influences: critics of 92 – 7; introduction to 22, 81 – 3; Oceanian knowing 210 – 24; Oceanian modernisms 261 – 3; Wendt, Albert 7, 8, 29, 35 – 6, 81 – 97, 172 – 3 Industrial Revolution 20 International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) 40 International Dateline, The (Mishra) 230 – 1 Invisible Man (Ellison) 127 – 33 Islamic religious orthodoxies 21 Jameson, Frederic 45, 46, 229 Jayadeva 32 Joyce, James 12, 31, 60 – 1, 81 – 2, 85 – 6, 88 – 90, 92 – 6, 124, 133, 176, 185, 255, 260 – 261, 263 ‘Kala’ (Subramani) 31 – 4 Kanaka Maoli texts 163 Kasaipwalova, John 8, 128, 133 Kauvaka, Lea Lani Kinikini 218

Index  269 Kazuo, Ohno 171 Kiki, Albert Maori 7, 140 Kisses in the Nederends (Hau‘ofa) 46 Kltal Reng 53 Kneubuhl, John 12, 173, 191 – 207 Kovave magazine 139 – 140, 141 – 2, 145,147, 151, 164 Lawrence, D. H. 2, 89, 190 – 1 Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Wendt) 88 – 92 Lecoq, Jacques 173 – 4 little magazines 136 – 53, 141 – 2 London Missionary Society 25, 26 longue durée 252 – 3, 254 ‘Lorca’ (Mishra) 242 Loveless, Miguelito 195 Lover, The (Duras) 220 ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The’ (Eliot) 237 – 8 ‘Loving Song of R. J. Tangaya, The’ (Mishra) 236 – 7 Malini, Jully 48 – 50 Mana magazine 7 – 8 41, 43, 47, 78, 140, 141 – 2, 143, 145, 149, 165, Manoa, Pio 25, 28 – 9, 143 Mansfield, Katherine 9, 60, 62 Mara, Ratu Kamisese 228 ‘Marama’ (Griffen) 50 – 2 Masi (2012) 178 – 9 Maugham, W. Somerset 2 Maynard, Don 148 McCrory, Tom 170, 173 – 174, 179 – 180, 182, 186 Melville, Herman 7, 190 – 1, 196, 206, 218, 220, 262 Memoirs of a Reluctant Traveller (Mishra) 239 military colonisation 47 military coups 228, 235 – 6 Miller, Sachiko 175 Mishra, Sudesh: comic modernism 236 – 8; coups/coup culture 235 – 6; introduction to 227 – 9; lyrics of location 238 – 40; memory demands and 243; modernism, defined 229 – 31; Oceanian modernity and 233 – 5; place and time considerations 231 – 3; worldliness literature 240 – 2 Moana (film) 220 modern abstraction in community theatre 179 – 83, 180

modernism: alternative 246; comic 236 – 8; coolie 20, 36; divergent 246; Euro-American 113, 119, 124, 252; European 13, 95, 169; high 246; mana 156; marginal 246; Māori 13, 46, 60 – 78, 156 – 7; minor 246; mythological 88 – 92; peripheral 246; planetary 245 – 9; ‘traditional’ 10; vernacular 246 Modernist Latitudes series 246 – 7 Modernist Studies Association 247, 262 modern/traditional binaries 106 ‘Monster’ (Hereniko) 29 Morei, Cita 41, 47, 53 – 4 Murray, John Middleton 148 Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography, The (Lewis, Wigen) 253 Nacola, Jo 8, 140, 152 Naipaul, V. S. 86 Nandan, Satendra 8, 25, 28, 140 nativeness 211 Nawalowalo, Nina 169 – 71, 173 – 87, 262 ‘negritude’ movement 125 Neogy, Rajat 136, 148 Neue Tanz 171 new Archipelagic studies 256 – 63 New Poetic, The (Stead) 63, 66 Ngirmang, Gabriela 53 – 4 No Ordinary Sun (Tuwhare) 7, 46, 64, 66 – 8, 72 – 3 Nott, Henry 27 nuclear colonialism 45, 50, 54 – 5 Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement (NFIP) 40, 44 ‘:oceania compositions:’ (Perez) 115 Oceanian knowing 210 – 24 Oceanian modernism/modernity in literature: AfricanaPasifika relationships 118 – 34; continentalism and 253 – 6; evolution of theatre 170 – 3; fixity and fluidity 258 – 9; Indigenous literary influences 261 – 3; little magazines 136 – 53, 141 – 2; memory and 233 – 5; modernism, defined 229 – 31; modernity, defined 230, 249 – 50; mythological modernism 88 – 92; new Archipelagic studies 256 – 63; overview of 1 – 17, 20 – 36,

270 Index 40; planetary modernisms 245 – 9; postcolonial studies 259 – 60; as protest against nuclear bombs 41 – 8; rethinking of 249 – 53; summary of 263 older Native globalisations 119 Ondobondo magazine 8, 141 – 2, 143 oral principles 85 – 6 Ortiz, Ferdinand 254 – 5 Otil a Belaud 53 Pacific Islands Monthly magazine 140, 143 Pacific women’s movement 46 – 8 Pacific Women’s Workshop 55 Papua New Guinea (PNG) 118 – 34, 136 – 53, 141 – 2 Papua New Guinea Writing magazine 8, 138, 140, 141 – 2, 145, 148 – 9 Pasifika existentialism 123 Pax Mongolica 251 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (Curnow) 63 People’s Treaty for a Nuclear Free Pacific 43 Perez, Craig Santos: excerpted acts 104 – 7; introduction to 14, 100 – 4; Oceanian modernity and 26, 28, 29, 112 – 16; re-territorialising, defined 108 – 9, 110 – 12; sakman poetics 107 – 10 ‘Perils of Penrose, The’ (TV episode) 196 – 201 Petaia, Ruperake 21, 25 Picasso, Pablo 77, 95, 172, 185, 254, 263 Planetary Modernisms (Friedman) 231, 245 – 63 A Play: A Play (Kneubuhl) 192 Poetics of Relation, The (Glissant) 254 poetry: anti-nuclear poetry 48; English-language poetry 165; introduction to 14; of Malini, Jully 48 – 50; sakman poetics 107 – 10; of Tuwhare, Hone 13, 46, 60 – 78 Poetry magazine 151 political intervention, as literary theme 51 Pollard, Charles W. 95 Polynesian mythology 78 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce) 82, 85, 89 postcolonial studies 259 – 60

Pouliuli (Wendt) 35 – 6, 85 – 8, 91 Pound, Ezra 22, 60, 63, 70 – 1, 76, 95, 136, 145, 150, 176, 221, 262 Praying Parents (Malini) 48 – 50 protest literature against nuclear bombs 41 – 8 Puketapu, Kara 165 – 6 Pule, John 26, 28 racialised modernity 126, 232 – 3 Rahu (Mishra) 239 Rainbow Warrior bombing 42 re-territorialising, defined 108 – 9, 110 – 12 Rhys, Jean 60 Roberts, Michael 62 Rushdie, Salman 221 sakman poetics 107 – 10 Salesa, Damon 119 – 20 Samoan knowing 210 – 24 Samoan oral modes 85 Sandburg, Carl 147 ‘Sautu’ (Subramani) 29 – 31 self-definition of Pacific Islanders 16 self-reflexivity 84 – 5 sexual themes in Samoan literature 212, 215, 218 – 19 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten 168 – 9, 176 – 7, 179 – 80, 184 – 5 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 217, 222 Singular Modernity: An Ontology of the Present, A (Jameson) 229 Sinnet magazine 8, 140, 141 – 2, 145 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 170, 172 Soaba, Russell 13, 118 – 34 Socrates 32 Sons for the Return Home (Wendt) 7, 83 – 5, 89, 91, 127 South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS) 7 – 8, 41, 43, 48, 140, 145 Stages of Change (2013–2014) 179 – 85, 180, 185 Stead, C.K. 13, 62 – 7, 73, 75 – 7 Stevenson, Robert Louis 7, 89, 190 – 1, 196, 199 – 200, 206 Subramani 8, 11, 13, 25 – 6, 29 – 34, 140, 143,198, 212, 214, Symons, Arthur 177 – 8 Tandava (Mishra) 239 Tatsumi, Hijikata 171

Index  271 Teaiwa, Teresia 3 – 4, 47, 220 ‘Te Ao Hou’ (Dewes) 157 – 65 Te Ao Hou magazine 8, 156 – 65 te ao hou (Māori concept) 15, 156 – 65 Te Evanelia na Luka (The Gospel of Luke) 27 Te Rangihiroa (Sir Peter Buck) 157 Tess of the d’Urbevilles (Hardy) 61 Tezapsidis, Leonidas 179 Thaman, Konai Helu 8, 47, 149, theatre modernity: Conch theatre 169 – 70, 173 – 87; evolution of 170 – 3; introduction to 168 – 70; modern abstraction in community theatre 179 – 83, 180 They Who Do Not Grieve (Figiel) 219 Think of a Garden and Other Plays (Kneubuhl) 192 – 3 ‘Towards a New Oceania’ (Wendt) 8, 15, 22, 78, 96, 101, 192, 221 Thomas, Dylan 65, 69, 77 Tradition About Seafaring Islands (TASI) 111 transculturation 252, 255 – 6 transnationalism 113 – 14, 248 Trump, Donald 39 Tuwhare, Hone 7 – 8, 13, 46, 60 – 78, 163 Ulysses (Joyce) 82, 86 – 7 ‘Under Nabukalou Bridge’ (Manoa) 28 – 9 UNISPAC magazine 7, 43, 141 – 2, 143, 145 University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) 6, 14, 137, 139, 141 – 2, 143 University of the South Pacific, The (USP) 6 – 7, 14, 16, 25 – 6, 46, 48, 78, 137, 139, 141 – 2, 143, 145, 152

University of the South Pacific (USP) Students Association 43 urbanisation 6, 50, 61, 74, 172, 262 US colonization of Guam 101 Vula (2002) 174 – 5, 177 – 80 Wanpis (Soaba) 118 – 34 Waswe magazine 8, 140, 141 – 2, 148, Weak Theory 248 Wendt, Albert 7 – 8, 10 – 12, 15, 22, 26, 29, 35 – 6, 46, 78, 81 – 97, 101 – 5, 121 – 2, 126 – 8, 143, 151, 153, 172, 174, 186, 221, 233 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society 25 Wesley-Smith, Terence 4 Whale Rider, The (Ihimaera) 46 Where We Once Belonged (Figiel) 216 Whimp, Graeme 4 ‘White Ashes’ (Griffen) 51 – 2 Williams, Raymond 1, 23 – 4 Williams, William Carlos 68 – 9 Winduo, Steven Edmund 4, 118, 129 woman-and-girl-centred writings 50 – 52 women of nuclear testing: Griffen, Vanesa 39, 40 – 1, 50 – 2; introduction to 14, 39 – 41; Malini, Jully 48 – 50; Morei, Cita 41, 53 – 4; protest literature against nuclear bombs 41 – 8; summary of 54 – 5 Woolf, Virginia 45, 60, 255, 263 Yeats, William Butler 9 – 10, 49, 60, 62 – 8, 70 – 1, 75 – 7, 82, 86, 89, 92 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), Fiji 43, 46 – 7