Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject (Pacific Islands Monograph Series)

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Author: Regis Tove Stella

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PIMS 20

STELLA

Pacific Islands Monograph Series 20

Imagining the Other

Imagining the Other The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject REGIS TOVE STELLA

ISBN 978-0-8248-2575-1

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Imagining the Other

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“Mo kept a close watch; it was evident that he valued his charm.” Illustration by R B Stott for Beatrice Grimshaw, The Sorcerer’s Stone (London, 1914), frontispiece.

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Pacific Islands Monograph Series 20

IMAGINING THE OTHER THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PAPUA NEW GUINEAN SUBJECT

REGIS TOVE STELLA

Center for Pacific Islands Studies School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies University of Hawai‘i, Mânoa University of Hawai‘i Press • Honolulu

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© 2007 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09 08 07 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stella, Regis Tove. Imagining the other : the representation of the Papua New Guinean subject / Regis Tove Stella. p. cm. — (Pacific Islands monograph series ; 20) “Center for Pacific Islands Studies, School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies, University of Hawai‘i, Mânoa.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-2575-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-2575-6 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Papuans—Public opinion. 2. Europeans—Attitudes. 3. Indigenous peoples in popular culture—Papua New Guinea. 4. Pacific Islanders—First contact with Europeans—Papua New Guinea. 5. Papua New Guinea—Colonization. 6. Papua New Guinea—History. 7. Europe—Colonies—Oceania. I. University of Hawaii at Manoa. Center for Pacific Islands Studies. II. Title. GN671.N5S775 006 306'.099912—dc22 2006037078 Maps by Manoa Mapworks, Inc. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Book design by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Department Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

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Tadav kaugu vavine Medi ma kamamir ura bul ToMaurice ma Yole. To my wife Medi and our two children ToMaurice and Yole.

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PACIFIC ISLANDS MONOGRAPH SERIES David Hanlon, General Editor Jan Rensel, Manuscript Editor EDITORIAL BOARD David A Chappell Alan Howard Robert C Kiste

Jane Freeman Moulin Karen M Peacock Deborah Waite

The Pacific Islands Monograph Series is a joint effort of the University of Hawai‘i Press and the Center for Pacific Islands Studies, University of Hawai‘i. The series includes works in the humanities and social sciences that focus on the insular Pacific. A list of other volumes in the series follows the index.

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Editor's Note

The field of Pacific studies has been distinguished of late by an increasingly critical analysis of how the Islands have been represented in scholarly and popular expressions. Of particular note are the ways in which these dominant representations are being challenged or contested through a variety of media, and by Islander scholars, artists, writers, performers, poets, and filmmakers, as well as practitioners of critical disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic approaches. Actively encouraging this re-presenting of Oceania by Oceanians, the Center for Pacific Islands Studies has created a visiting artist program that brings writers and artists from the region to the University of Hawai‘i, Mânoa, for a week of dialogue, engagement, presentations, and performances. Over the last four years, the center has hosted John Pule of Niue, Larry Thomas from Fiji, Neil Ieremia and Rosanna Raymond from Aotearoa New Zealand, and Teweiariki Teaero of Kiribati. The center has also joined with two government-sponsored organizations, Fulbright New Zealand and Creative New Zealand, to create a shortterm residency for New Zealand writers of Pacific Islander ancestry on the Mânoa campus. Sima Urale and Tusiata Avia have been the first two recipients of this residency. The artwork now featured on the covers and within the pages of the center’s journal, The Contemporary Pacific, evidences the power of Pacific artists to transform images and understandings of the region. It is in this spirit of vibrant cultural expression that the center’s Pacific Islands Monograph Series, in conjunction with the University of Hawai‘i Press, proudly sponsors the publication of Regis Tove Stella’s Imagining the Other: The Representation of the Papua New Guinean Subject as its twentieth volume. Much has been written about Papua New Guinea over the last century and a half, and too often in ways that legitimated or served colonial interests through highly pejorative, racist descriptions of Papua New Guineans. This is a book about those writings by an accomplished

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Editor’s Note

Papua New Guinean writer and scholar. With special attention to early travel literature, works of fiction, and colonial reports, laws, and legislation, Stella reveals the complex and persistent network of discursive strategies deployed to subjugate the land and its people. In varied but purposeful ways, these European texts rendered Papua New Guineans as savage, primitive, infantile, and highly sexual. One of the many strengths of Stella’s work is its attention to the mix of desire, fear, and repulsion evidenced in these descriptions. There is no attempt to deny or evade the ambivalence, contradictions, and fractures of these dominant discourses. Stella’s analysis, as Robert Nicole has observed, is highly nuanced and moves beyond the simplicity of Manichean politics and a monolithic Orientalism. Against colonialist discourses, Stella examines indigenous representations of place and landscape that reflect a strong sense of self and that are an integral part of local identities. He cites local myths and oral traditions to show that Papua New Guinea was anything but an unclaimed, unnamed land without history. In the works of recent Papua New Guinean writers and artists, the author finds empowerment and self-affirmation through the subversive appropriation or creative refashioning of European literary and artistic techniques. Stella bolsters his argument with reference to the relevant works of theorists such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Stuart Hall. His own writing is clear, precise, and compelling. The end result is an impressive contribution to the intellectual decolonization of Oceania that also advances in significant ways the state of literary and cultural criticism in the region. David Hanlon—

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Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments

xi xiii

Introduction 1 Representation and Indigenous Subjectivity 2 Locating the Subject: The Indigenous Construction of Place 3 Colonizing Location: Representing Colonial Space 4 Colonial Representation and Legal Discourse 5 The Subject as Child 6 The Subject as Savage 7 The Sexualized Native Body 8 Writing Ourselves: Cultural Self-Representation in Contemporary Papua New Guinean Literature 9 Writing Ourselves II: Representing the Post-Independence Papua New Guinea Landscape Conclusion

1 12 29 49 89 100 124 140

Notes Bibliography Index

162 189 205 211 213 235

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Illustrations

Maps The Pacific Islands Papua New Guinea

front endpaper back endpaper

Images “Mo kept a close watch; it was evident that he valued his charm” (from Grimshaw 1914) frontispiece “The capture” (from Crocker 1888) 25 “Punishment of criminals” (from Crocker 1888) 26 “A pleasant bend” (from Nisbet 1888) 50 “Port Moresby” (from Nisbet 1888) 53 “A trading station” (from Nisbet 1888) 60 “Hula” (from Nisbet 1888) 66 “Doc and Harry in the tapu house” (from Macdonald 1907) 76 “The boys join their father” (from Johnstone 1894) 80 “Walter in the hands of the Head-hunters” (from Johnstone 1894) 81 “Walter retorted upon him in his own fashion” (from Johnstone 1894) 83 “To his surprise he went flying halfway across the apartment” (from Macdonald 1907) 125 “Natives on the war-path” (from Nisbet 1888) 137

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Acknowledgments

This book is a slightly expanded version of my doctoral thesis. In writing this book I have garnered many debts. I wish first to thank my former supervisors, Associate Professor Bill Ashcroft and Dr Sue Kossew of the School of English, the University of New South Wales, for their inspirational blend of academic engagement; I have adopted many of their suggestions and some of their formulations. Without their generous encouragement and friendship, the initial grind would have been much more laborious. A number of people gave generously of their time in reading or discussing parts of the work in its various forms. In particular Dr Lynda Schulz sacrificed her time to make sense of many of the arguments in the study. I thank her deeply. I also wish to thank my friends for their unfailing love and inspirational support. Their warm friendship, intellectual vibrancy, and laughter have meant more than I can say. They are too many to name here, but they know who they are. I thank them all. I want to thank Professor David Hanlon and the editorial board of the Pacific Islands Manuscript Series for recognizing the value of the manuscript. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge Dr Jan Rensel for her careful editing, and Brooke Nevitt and Judith Humbert for their assistance in checking references. As we say in Banoni, Dame nau. Gham kota tanimita mo ghughuwasa (Thank you all. You all have a place in my heart).

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Imagining the Other

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Introduction

Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism (1978), maintained that all representations are in some sense misrepresentations: the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth,” which is itself a representation. (1978, 272; italics and parentheses in original)

Because representation is culturally located and politically charged, Said necessarily concluded that representation has never been neutral, and that what is represented is not necessarily the “truth.” But how do representations acquire the status of truth? And why are some representations considered true and others false? Representations are a form of interpretation. Stuart Hall suggested that “interpretations never produce a final moment of absolute truth. Instead, interpretations are always followed by other interpretations, in an endless chain . . . so any notion of a final meaning is always endlessly put off, deferred” (1997b, 42; italics in original). Representation, therefore, offers varying illusions of reality. But while there are competing representations, and each culture has its own representational modes, it is the representations produced by members of politically powerful, dominant groups that become accepted as “true.” When dominant groups control representation, they produce social knowledge, which constitutes the “reality” and identity of those represented. As Mick Gidley contended, “It was in the writing, after all, in the representation itself, that the subject, ‘others’ and their cultures, were not so much even 1

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reconstructed as constructed” (1992, 3; italics in original). Representation monopolized by a dominant group is a silencing act for the “others” who are represented because representation is always connected to power and knowledge. Michel Foucault’s theory of power as linked to knowledge has been widely employed in postcolonial debates over representation. Foucault argued that knowledge connected to power not only takes on the authority of “the truth,” but indeed has the power to make itself true. Truth is something that cultures produce, rather than something that appears in a transcendental way. At their interface, different cultures unconsciously or consciously compete to exclude certain forms of knowledge from consideration as “true.” In the end the dominant cultures prevail. What is significant about the concept of representation in Foucault’s argument is centrality of power struggles in the production of knowledge, which in turn produces the representations regarded as the truth. While Papua New Guineans have always had indigenous forms of representation, including cultural expressions and political institutions, these were subsumed, subjugated, and at worst erased at the interface with European representational modes, to be replaced by new images constructed by the dominant group. Therefore how Papua New Guineans have come to be perceived is a direct result of European representation and construction. Helen Tiffin’s statement that the “day to day realities of colonized peoples were in large part generated for them by the impact of European discourses” encapsulates the struggle over images and representations and how those who in dominant positions of power have manipulated and controlled the production of representation (1987, 17).

Historical Representations of Papua New Guinea By their acts of naming lands they “discovered,” Europeans began to assert control over their representation and incorporate them in their own history. As David Spurr noted: The very process by which one culture subordinates another begins in the act of naming and leaving unnamed, of marking on an unknown territory the lines of division and uniformity, of boundary and continuity. . . . In its broadest sense, it includes the entire system by which one culture comes to interpret, to represent, and finally to dominate another. (1993, 4–5)

The first European to bring Papua New Guinea into European history was Portuguese explorer Jorge de Meneses, who sighted the west coast of the island in 1526 and named it Ilhas dos Papuas, “because they [the inhabitants] be blacke and friseled in their hair” (Antonio Galvano,

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Introduction

3

quoted in Whittaker and others 1975, 184).1 In 1545 the Spanish explorer, Inigi de Retez, changed the name to Nueve Guinea, based on its physical resemblance to Guinea in Africa (Waiko 1993, 17); this name first appeared in Mercator’s world map of 1569. These European explorers were in search of new lands for colonization and trade. Following the Spanish and Portuguese explorers, French and English ships began to explore the waters of the Pacific, many of them leaving their names behind, attached to particular sites such as Bougainville Island, New Britain, and New Ireland, among others. As I argue in this study, the naming of indigenous places reinscribed the landscape with European history. Naming the land went hand-in-hand with creating and perpetrating representations of the people. According to John Waiko, the “first detailed charting of the coast appears to have come from the expedition of another Spanish explorer, Luis Vaez de Torres who, in 1606, navigated the first European ship through the maze of reefs in the shallow of Torres Straits” (1993, 17). In a letter to the King of Spain in 1607, Torres described his voyage along the coast of New Guinea in this way: All this land of New Guinea is peopled with natives, not very white, and naked, except for their private parts, which are covered with a cloth made of the bark of trees, and much painted. They fight with darts, targets, and some stone clubs which are made fine with plumage. Along the coast are many islands and habitations. . . . There were very large islands and there appeared more to the southward; they were inhabited by black people, very corpulent, and naked. . . . We caught in all this land twenty persons of different nations, that with them we might be able to give a better account to Your Majesty. They give much information of other peoples, although as yet they do not make themselves well understood. . . . At the termination of this land we found Mahometans who were clothed with artillery for service, such as falconets and swivel guns and arquebuses. They go conquering the people who are called Papuas, and preach to them the sect of Mahomed. (quoted in Whittaker and others 1975, 191)

This is one of the earliest representations of the indigenous people of the New Guinea. Torres constructed the people as savages in a state of nature. In order to show proof of this to the king, Torres “caught” specimens of these people. While the racial identity of the “Mahometans” is unstated, it is reasonable to assume they were not Spanish, Portuguese, German, or English. Regardless of their race, the fact that their attempts to “convert” the Papuans were made following “conquest,” suggests the violent nature of that enterprise. It was also in 1606 that Torres and Don Diego de Prado y Tovar, sailing west from Peru, landed on Mailu Island. Prado’s account reveals

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the brutal sort of benevolence practiced by the Spaniards toward the indigenous people: When the natives did not respond to their “signs of peace,” the Europeans decided they were “losing time by treating them with further consideration,” Prado reported; “we knelt down and saying a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria, Cierra Espana [the ancient Spanish war-cry], we gave them a Santiago [an attack with an invocation of St James] and in that skirmish some fell dead and we pressed on, shooting them as they fled.” After the slaughter, the besieged natives—about three hundred of them, mostly women—came down the hill. Prado said, “I was sorry to see so many dead children they were carrying in their arms. I selected fourteen boys and girls of from six to ten years and sent them on board. . . . All those we carried off were baptized in Manila to the honour and glory of God” (quoted in Whittaker 1968, 189–190; brackets in original). The indigenous people were slaughtered and their children captured as part of the Europeans’ ruthless endeavor to force them to succumb to colonization. To justify their actions, in their accounts Europeans emphasized the barbarism and savagery of the indigenous people, whom they represented as pagans in need of Christianity’s saving grace. Their objective was to neutralize local resistance by murdering any who put up a fight, and using Christianization to acculturate their offspring to European ways. Similarly, in 1782, the sole, anonymous survivor of the ship Northumberland recorded “in a journal describing his experiences”: The first that was killed was Mr Sayce our Chief Mate the next was poor Mr Neven our fourth mate a worthy good officer there was. Mr Pett a young lad midshipman a lad about twelve or thirteen years of adge this poor boy after they took him out of the boat they carried him ashore on to the beatch there they keep him untill the savadges had taken us all out of the boat as soon as they got us ashore they cut the poor boy through the middle and throwed his bowels into the air out of braverdo. . . . I perceived them a broiling the remains of poor Mr Sayce. . . . The same night they brought me part of the body of Mr Sayce with there uniforms buttons to see whether that I would eat part of it or no. (quoted in Souter 1963, 7; spellings and punctuation as in original)

This incriminating representation of the indigenous people portrays them as callous, savage cannibals, while the murdered Europeans are shown as innocent victims. Certainly the report is gruesome, but it naturally omits any assessment of the motives of the locals, who were undoubtedly responding to perceived or actual aggression by the interlopers. In this respect, point of view is central to the processes and the power of representation.

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Introduction

5

It would be interesting, for instance, had the reactions of the indigenous people been recorded when they witnessed European groups raising flags at various times and places in Papua New Guinea.2 The raising of flags, privately or officially, was a concept foreign to the local people. These first flag raisings served more to warn off other European claimants than to impress the indigenous people, who could not have anticipated the impact of such actions on their lives. As Nhlanhla Maake argued in a different context, “the flag was a symbolic erasure of the indigenous inhabitants from the landscape of both history and myth” (1996, 146). Naming and flag raising were but the first of many steps in the process of erasing indigenous identity and replacing it with representations that better served the interests of the colonizers. The discourses of colonialism were produced in such forms as imaginative literature, travel writing, ethnographic description, historiography, administrative documents, statutes of laws, among others. The general motivation to colonize was grounded on the desire for material profits, and other arguments to justify this motive developed subsequently, as we have seen, for example, in constructing the moral and cultural backwardness of the colonized people, and the need to rescue them and impart to them European ways (JanMohamed 1983, 2–4). Early navigation around the island produced fantastic ideas in the minds of the Europeans, such as the speculation that giants might inhabit the high mountains of the interior. The promotion of these kinds of imaginative fictions coincided with some significant moments of history. For instance, the literary imagining of Papua New Guinea really began with Captain John Moresby’s geographical exploration and survey in 1873; it was also during this year that Edward William Cole published his satirical piece, Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails, Discovered by Mr Jones, the Traveller, In the Interior of New Guinea. The construction of the Papua New Guinean landscape and geography by explorers and navigators paved the way for the political, cultural, and textual constructions that were to follow. It also provided a symbolic landscape that reflected the ambivalence of European discourse, with Papua New Guinea as either a romantic paradise or a hellish, fatal land. Such portrayals attracted adventurers, scientists, gold prospectors, writers, and other adventurers to the country. Through the imposition of colonial rule in 1884 by the two imperial powers, Britain and Germany, the political creation of the Papua New Guinean landscape and place was finally established. Britain, on behalf of Australia, annexed the southern part of the island (British New Guinea, subsequently Papua), and Germany the other portion of it (German New Guinea). James Erskine’s 1884 speech at the proclamation of British New

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Guinea as Protectorate, while vowing to protect the indigenous people, betrays a supercilious and paternalistic attitude: It has become essential for the protection of the lives and properties of the native inhabitants of New Guinea, and for the purpose of preventing the occupation of portions of that country by persons whose proceedings, unsanctioned by any lawful authority, might tend to injustice, strife, and bloodshed, and who, under the pretence of legitimate trade and intercourse, might endanger the liberties and possess themselves of the lands of such native inhabitants, that a British Protectorate should be established over certain portion of such country and the islands adjacent thereto. (quoted in Mayo 1969, 17)

This declaration officially marked the imposition of colonization and all that was associated with it: the hegemony of western epistemology and ontology. In other words, it gave sanction to everything that had marginalized, subordinated, and relegated Papua New Guineans to social and racial inferiority. For Papua New Guineans today, what is memorable and significant about the proclamation was the containment and possession of their landscape, identity, and cultural values. And in actuality, protection was given, not for the local population, but for the European residents against natives and non-British people in general. The first administrator of British New Guinea was William MacGregor, appointed in 1888. But the administrator most identified with the country’s colonial history is Hubert Murray, who served as lieutenant governor for thirty-two years until his death in 1940. Murray’s native policy was a combination of protectionism and paternalism. He was quite adamant in his opposition to the creation of a Papuan intelligentsia, once stating that indigenous people were inherently inferior to Europeans (Dickson 1976, 23). A belief in innate white supremacy not only served as the fundamental basis for colonization, but also pervaded and persisted in the emerging Papuan and New Guinean societies. By far the greatest impact of Christian missionization was in the sphere of education. But initially, because of European views of native limitations, whatever education given to the locals was confined to carpentry, domestic science, and religious instruction. As missionary Charles Abel put it in 1902: You will have seen for yourselves that the Papuan is an indolent man to begin with. He is very good at a spurt; he is very lively when he is up to mischief; but his casual occupations are sometimes not only trifling, as when he is decorating himself, but often very evil. The teaching of the precepts of Jesus Christ necessitates the abandoning of these. (quoted in P Smith 1987, 47)

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Introduction

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Abel’s assessment of the natives demonstrates the stereotypical tropes that were to dominate European representations for the next century. Unlike British New Guinea, German New Guinea began its operations as a company colony. For the first several years, it was operated by a private business firm, the New Guinea Company of Berlin, until 1899 when, after incurring astronomical financial losses, it was returned to the imperial government. German colonial policy clearly stated that the fundamental purpose of imperial power was “to serve the needs of German commercial interests” (Moses 1989, 163). According to Berhnard Dernburg, in a lecture given in Munich on 21 January 1907, German colonization was considered to be for the improvement “of the soil, its resources, the flora and fauna but above all of the inhabitants for the benefit of the economy of the colonising nation which is obliged to give in return its higher culture, its moral concepts and its better methods” (quoted in Moses 1969, 54). The indigenous people were profoundly impacted by the practice of blackbirding, or the “recruitment” of Papua New Guineans to work in the plantations of Queensland, Fiji, and Sâmoa. Papua New Guineans were essentially valued as bodies to be used for labor supply, yet this economic motive was masked by the continuing representation of their need to be “saved.” According to Charles D Rowley’s publication The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921: It was a common German assumption that the welfare of the native could best be promoted by employing him in European-managed enterprise. This claim was put forward as a partial justification of the crude conditions of recruitment and employment which had originated when New Guinea was under the control of Neu Guinea Kompagnie. Emphasis on labour as the means of salvation expressed also the determined paternalism of Europeans revolted by the barbarism of the native cultures. Work, it was argued, must take the place of warfare: the native fully employed as a labourer could not kill or maim as a warrior. (1958, 106, quoted in Jinks and others 1973, 177–178)

By being forced to work, the natives would be both pacified and “civilized.” The colonizers viewed work as a cleansing act with the potential to transform barbarism. German control depended mainly on retaliation. A salient characteristic of German colonization was the organization of punitive expeditions against so-called recalcitrant natives. Between 1884 and 1914, the Germans launched many punitive expeditions, in which hundreds of natives were killed and their properties destroyed. “If New Guineans attacked Germans or [simply] refused to cooperate, they were visited by a punitive expedition which came to kill and burn” (Griffin

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and others 1979, 40). Compared to the British or Australians in New Guinea, the Germans used more force in Papua and killed more people (Griffin and others 1979, 42). The draft report of German New Guinea for 1913–14 states, under the heading “Punitive Expeditions in the Admiralty Islands and South Bougainville”: Armed intervention against the natives also became necessary. . . . In Bougainville the punitive expeditions were directed against the numerous and warlike population of the Buin plain in the southern part of the island. Armed force had to be used against these people on two occasions. The main aim of the second expedition, in which, in addition to the expeditionary troop, the landing detachment of the S.M.S. Cormoran took part, was to demonstrate the armed might of the Government to the natives. (Sack and Clark 1980, 6)

Stewart Firth elaborated on German-style “pacification” in New Guinea: “After the St Matthias islanders killed two German explorers in 1901, for example, the accompanying police troops . . . shot seventeen people” (Firth 1978, 39). Subsequently the Islanders were visited by a naval expedition, undertaken by the SMS Cormoran, which resulted in eightyone killed. Oftentimes the Germans made little effort to seek out individual culprits. This reflects the persistent practice of essentializing native peoples: The guilt of one person was automatically deemed to implicate and incriminate the entire indigenous group (see Albert Memmi’s comments regarding “the mark of the plural” in The Colonizer and the Colonized [1965, 85]). The German colonial government also subjugated indigenous people by means of laws and regulations. According to Edward P Wolfers, “The earliest German criminal regulations for the New Guineans were but unadorned extensions of the domestic German law. . . . Under the 1888 criminal law for New Guineans, the German New Guinea Company was specifically empowered to arrest and penalise New Guineans for transgressions of the law” (1975, 65–66). In sum, compared to the other colonizers, the German administration was less paternalistic and protective, and more brutal and direct where it did intervene in indigenous society. Australia, to which the British had transferred administration of British New Guinea in 1906, finally took over German New Guinea after Germany’s defeat in 1914, with few changes. With the establishment of Australian military administration, most of the civil law and native administration established by German rule was retained and generally the laws and regulations imposed in Papua were transferred to New Guinea. In both Papua and New Guinea, laws were deployed to control the natives. These laws and regulations were created in order to preserve “white prestige” in the colony, simultaneously reinforcing the construction of the indigene as Other.

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World War II brought about important changes, acting a catalyst in the democratization of relations between whites and blacks. Exposure to other peoples and places experienced by those Papua New Guineans recruited by the various armies meant that the postwar period saw some communities and individual leaders advocating massive social, economic, and political changes. The Australian administration responded to the pressures, both internal and external, by laying down the groundwork for eventual self-government. Papua New Guinea became politically independent in 1975.

Definition and Explanation of Terms A number of terms used in this book need explanation and clarification. I employ the phrase “colonial discourse” in the sense Stephen Slemon uses it, as a “system of signifying practices whose work it is to produce and naturalize the hierarchical power structures of the imperial enterprise, and to mobilise those power structures in the management of both colonial and neo-colonial cross-cultural relationships” (1987, 6). It is exactly this discourse that played a major role in the way the indigenous people and their cultures were represented and invented in nonindigenous literature. Throughout the book I refer to Papua New Guinea by employing related nomenclature: “Papua,” “New Guinea,” or (as an adjective) “PNG.” “Papua” by itself specifically refers to the southern portion of the country, initially colonized by Britain (who called it British New Guinea), and subsequently handed over to Australia in 1906. On annexation by Germany, the northern section of the country was called German New Guinea; after 1914 it was referred to simply as New Guinea. Australia administered the combined regions until PNG independence in 1975. In the book I have employed these names somewhat interchangeably to mean the country of Papua New Guinea, unless otherwise indicated. I refer to Papua New Guineans in this study by a number of other names, including “indigenous,” “native,” or “indigene.” I have also used the terms “nonindigenous,” “expatriate,” “white,” and “European” somewhat interchangeably, but they have varying connotations. “Nonindigenous” is the most unambiguous and politically correct term; it is also most widely appropriate in that is has no political overtones and ambiguity. The term “expatriate” could properly refer to both a foreigner living in Papua New Guinea and a PNG native residing outside the country. Furthermore, I realize that the terms “white” or “European” are too broad. In the end, I use these terms essentially to mean the colonizers. In relation to this discussion of terms I would also like to acknowledge one important omission: while John Kolia had been a most prolific writer,

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his works are not considered in this book because he occupies an ambivalent position: he is a nonindigenous, naturalized Papua New Guinean.

Structure of the Book This book examines the concept of representation in the construction of Papua New Guinean subjectivity from the mid-1860s to the contemporary period. Because representation is never neutral and is always a site of (power) struggle, I argue that PNG subjectivity is always ambivalent, unstable, and contested by competing discourses. The theoretical framework of this study consists of an examination of the various tropes, discourses, and discursive strategies of representation employed in the construction and imagining of the Papua New Guinean landscape and subjectivity in both nonindigenous and indigenous writing and orature. Simultaneously, it focuses on how Papua New Guineans have contested and interrogated dominant representations, and how they have endeavored to recoup, restore, and reinscribe their identity, social histories, selfhood, and cultural place within an unequal power relationship. Some of the colonial tropes deployed to represent the PNG subject included the uneducable or incompetent native, the bush kanaka, or (peculiar to Papua New Guinea) the “fuzzy wuzzy angel.” Some of the colonialist discursive strategies explored in this book include the specific legal discourse in place to control indigenous people in colonial Papua New Guinea, as well as more widely employed colonial tropes, such as those of sexual violation, debasement and idealization, and the discourse and image of the native (female) body as sexual fetish. Through the use of such tropes a social hierarchy is produced and indigenous people are relegated and dispossessed as Others. Therefore the study of how Papua New Guineans and their cultures have been constructed and represented in nonindigenous fiction is, at heart, an examination of the relationship between Otherness and the dynamics of power. Simultaneously, however, tropes “also constitute an arena of contestation; each is open to perpetuation, rejection, or subversion” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 137). This is what occurs in postcolonial moments when indigenous people begin to interrogate the assumed authority of colonial discourse. The focus of this study is literature by both nonindigenous and indigenous writers with Papua New Guinea as a fictive subject. The selection of the texts for this study has been dictated by the themes and concerns of the study; some texts that may have been equally important in the discussion, however, had be omitted due to the limitations of the study. In essence, this book is a study of the representation and the construction of PNG subject in colonialist writing and how PNG writers have challenged and interrogated such representations. Chapter 1 fore-

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Introduction

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grounds the theoretical issues of representation and identification. It demonstrates how knowledge is always inextricably linked to power and how concepts and practices of representation assume the authority of “truth” because they are associated with dominant and powerful groups. These themes are reinforced in a number of chapters: Chapter 3 is primarily concerned with the European construction of the PNG landscape. Chapter 4 provides a kind of mooring for chapters 5, 6, and 7; it deals with how legal discourse was deployed to reinforce and sanction the negative representation of the PNG subject. Chapter 5 discusses the representation of the indigene as child, and how colonialist tropes of infantilization constructed Papua New Guineans as children, as politically immature, as incompetent and uneducable. While chapter 6 focuses on the PNG subject as savage, I show how the trope of savagery is always a mirror image of the trope of child. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the (sexualized) native body and suggests that the construction of the native body as an object of both desire and revulsion represents the body as a metaphor for culture, landscape, and as text, and as such has made it a significant site for the denigration of indigenous people. These chapters are countercharged by three other chapters that deal with Papua New Guinean self-representation and responses to their Otherness. Chapter 2 deals with Papua New Guineans’ representation of place and landscape. It begins by asserting that indigenous modes of representing place and landscape have always existed. The chapter centers on the ways in which place and landscape are constructed in stories, myths, folklore, and oral tradition, and how indigenous understanding of place differs from European constructions. Chapters 8 and 9 reinforce chapter 2. These two chapters are concerned with cultural self-representation in contemporary PNG literature. They reveal how indigenous PNG writers have reinscribed and reconstituted their sense of identity and selfhood within mainstream European discourse. I argue that for Papua New Guinean writers, writing is a significant form of empowerment and self-validation. Writing is therefore a form of salvaging a fragmented cultural identity. This book, then, examines various colonial tropes, metaphors, and discourses that in their numerous workings construct and represent Papua New Guineans in ways that have denied them a sense of identity or a political voice, and relegated them to subserviency. These tropes have contributed to misperceptions of indigenous people and helped perpetuate and reinforce racist thinking. At the same time this study shows the impact of shifting global politics on colonial discourse, making room for positive change and images. Colonial representation of indigenous people is always contested. In Papua New Guinea, the reinsertion of identity, selfhood, and cultural place has occurred most powerfully through literature.

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Representation and Indigenous Subjectivity

This chapter examines issues of representation and the construction of indigenous subjectivity in colonial discourse. The struggle over the representation of person and place that has occurred in the erasure and reinscription of the Papua New Guinean subject and landscape serves as a model for the struggle over colonialist representation in general. The question of indigenous subjectivity is examined here through a consideration of some early “fraudulent texts” about Papua New Guinea. These texts are particularly useful for demonstrating the power of discourse and its ramifications in strategies of social control. Any discussion dealing with colonial discourse must take into account the political matrix of culture and history, because unequal relations of power inevitably define a Manichean dualism: the colonial powers’ notions of their own superiority and the concomitant inferiority of the indigenous people. The construction of Papua New Guineans in these early writings as well as in later colonial texts was designed to uphold the Europeans’ system of domination and to justify their exploitation of the native people and lands. The discussion of issues related to representation draws much from the works of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Abdul JanMohamed, and others. While these theorists have examined the notion of representation from different perspectives, they all agree that there can be no absolute, true representation. Representation is always manipulated by those in power, and the field of representation is always a contested space.

Some Issues of Representation The written representation of many indigenous peoples and their cultures had its provenance in colonial discourse, a set of signs and practices that Europeans deployed to make sense of what were for them “new” 12

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landscapes and cultures. This discourse operated through a number of Eurocentric practices, tropes, and discursive strategies to perpetuate a “knowledge” of the indigene that was grounded in European culture. It engaged a Manichean dualism not only to segregate Europeans from non-Europeans but also to justify an imperial domination based on notions of difference and cultural authority. Europeans employed colonial ideology to maintain a dominant relationship and to exclude indigenous people from any possibility of occupying or sharing in the domain of power. How this operated has been discussed extensively by Homi Bhabha (1994), who noted an essential tension or ambivalence in the colonial discursive practice. In their book The Empire Writes Back, authors Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin summarized Bhabha’s view this way: “The dominant discourse constructs Otherness in such a way that it always contains a trace of ambivalence or anxiety about its own authority. In order to maintain authority over the Other in a colonial situation, imperial discourse strives to delineate the Other as radically different from the self, yet at the same time it must maintain sufficient identity with the Other to valorize control over it. The Other can, of course, only be constructed out of the archive of ‘the self,’ yet the self must also articulate the Other as inescapably different” (1989, 103). Similarly, Abdul JanMohamed has pointed out that while imperial ideology differentiates between the two races, this opposition “is accompanied by an equally profound dependency” (1983, 4); I explore this interdependency at length in chapter 5.1 In order to create representations and produce social meanings of such differentiation, knowledge must be, as Michel Foucault pointed out, embedded in power. The production of social and cultural meaning by imperial discourse assumes the authority of “the truth” because it is linked to the possession of power. “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault 1977, 27). Knowledge and power are coterminous and they reinforce each other. Imperial discourse, among other things, advanced and deployed a racialized knowledge to provide moral justification for imperial domination. Such knowledge was inherently partial and unstable, enunciating Europe’s cultural supremacy, privileging its epistemological traditions, and suppressing other forms of knowledge. According to Virginia Dominguez, the production and circulation of racialized knowledge “takes place when differences between human beings are simplified and transformed into Difference, overvaluing particular bodily differences by imbuing them with lasting meaning of social, political, cultural, economic, even psychological significance” (1994, 334). One of the features of this discourse is its “dependence on the concept

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Imagining the Other

of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness” (Bhabha 1994, 66). The logic behind applying such “fixity” to the indigene is simple; as Stuart Hall put it: “If the differences between black and white people are ‘cultural,’ then they are open to modification and change. But if they are ‘natural’ . . . then they are beyond history, permanent and fixed” (1997a, 245). Therefore “naturalization” is a process designed to install difference permanently, characterizing the indigene in unchanging, ahistorical terms, with fixed corporeal, social, and cultural attributes. Colonial discourse also “naturalizes the process of domination: it finds a natural justification for the conquest of nature and of primitive peoples, those ‘children of nature’” (Spurr 1993, 156). While it portrays indigenous people as inferior, this discourse also justifies this identification as preordained. From this perspective, the conquest and domination of non-Europeans are important precursors to “civilizing” them. The indigene can be a “noble savage,” or an ignoble one, or both; it doesn’t matter. Imperial discourse imprisons indigenous people in an ambivalent and subservient position (JanMohamed 1983, 5). The confinement of the native in an ideological cage structured by a set of binary oppositions enabled the European to dominate and control the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual spheres in the colonial world. This binarism was designed not only to consolidate and perpetuate the myth of white supremacy but, more importantly, to rationalize and naturalize it. The Europeans’ underlying ambivalence, noted by Bhabha, yielded conflicting imagery; as Nicholas Thomas wrote, some representations “are debased, some are picturesque, some are seductive, others are threatening; [but] all are evidently distortions that reveal more about the interests and motivations of observers than they do about whoever is notionally represented” (1994, 22). Furthermore, as JanMohamed pointed out, because native people did “not have access to these texts (because of linguistic barriers) and since the European audience [had] no direct contact with the native, imperialist fiction [tended] to be unconcerned with the truth-value of its representation” (1986, 82). Thus these representations led people unfamiliar with the facts to a biased, colonialist reading of Papua New Guineans, and more importantly, induced colonial governments, missions, and others involved in colonization to develop and implement policies that conformed to these portrayals. The importance of Othering in the representational practices of colonial discourse is emphasized in Bhabha’s point: “The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference” (1994, 67). The notion of Otherness “is consequential because of how deeply it is learned and then presupposed and recreated through seemingly innocuous practices” (Dominguez 1994, 333). One of the most

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visible (body) signifiers is the skin. As Bhabha stated: “Skin, as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes, recognized as ‘common knowledge’ in a range of cultural, political and historical discourses, and plays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in colonial societies” (1994, 78). In the simplest of terms, the “difference” of indigenous people by which they can be Othered is foregrounded “in the way in which the superficial differences of the body . . . are read as indelible signs of the ‘natural’ inferiority of their possessors” (Ashcroft and others 1995, 321). Not only were indigenous people’s destinies constituted by the color and pigmentation of their skin, but they were also simultaneously reduced to their physical and innate “essences.” The indigenes’ presumed laziness, childishness, and trickery were seen as coterminous with their physical differences, such as fuzzy hair, black skin, and thick lips—all markers of social inferiority. These stereotypical attributes defined them as non-European. The issue of identification is always locked in the self–other opposition. As Frantz Fanon aptly put it, “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation” (1967, 60). The ominous and powerful gaze of the white man alienates the indigene. An instance of this occurs in Louis Nowra’s novel Palu, one of the texts discussed in chapter 7: “I (Palu) turned and saw (Mister Bacon) staring directly at me. A gaze so powerful and a spirit so overbearing that my hands went limp and the tray fell to the floor” (Nowra 1987, 31). As Fanon put it, “The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority” (1967, 93). The production and circulation of knowledge that maintains the asymmetrical relations of power reinforce this gaze of the white man. As Gail Ching-Liang Low suggested, “the interpellation of the black man as racial body is a ‘captation’ and describes the coming together of fantasy and reality in a mixture of violation and fear that will provide the narrative matrix for subsequent racist confrontations” (1996, 195). Bhabha illustrated this point by engaging Fanon’s example: My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering, the nigger is shivering because he is cold, the little boy is trembling because he is afraid of the nigger, the nigger is shivering with cold, that cold that goes through your bones, the handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks that the nigger is quivering with rage, the little white boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up. (Fanon 1967, 113–114, quoted in Bhabha 1994, 82)

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Imagining the Other

This excerpt reveals the simultaneous fear and desire inherent in the stereotype of difference. The little white boy’s response to the black man is both invitation and repulsion. The body of the colonized has been reconstituted, inscribed “by the colonialist stereotype within which he has now been subsumed” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 54). His racial body has become alienated; it is changed into something he does not recognize; it is abnormal. He has lost his humanity and his beauty, and his reactions to his environment “are reworked in the colonialist discourse as fear” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 55). Indigenous people have been cast as evil or desirable essentially because of their difference from Europeans. The primitive body was represented through literature, for the vicarious experience and “visual consumption by a European narrator in a scopophiliac or voyeuristic process that establishes European authority in matters of commentary and judgement” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 46). David Spurr, in The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), described how European discourses have represented indigenous people as subservient, and how, starting with surveillance, indigenous people were constructed and represented in ambivalent terms, both as idealized and debased. The construction of the indigene, Spurr argued, begins with observation. As he wrote: “The eye treats the body as a landscape: it proceeds systematically from part to part, quantifying and spatializing, noting color and texture, and finally passing an aesthetic judgment which stressed the body’s role as object to be viewed” (1993, 23). Surveillance is then followed by appropriation, as the observers bring the observed (the non-European world) “to their visions of the West” (Spurr 1993, 41). Once the non-European world is brought into “control,” it is then classified, giving it “an ideologically charged meaning” (Spurr 1993, 62). In racialized knowledge, the concept of race, like sex, “is a bodily marker which is readily ‘naturalised’ as a sign of identification or marginalisation” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 60). Hall made the point that we can only properly understand the traumatic character of the colonial experience by recognizing the nexus between domination and representation: The ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalisation. Not only, in Said’s “Orientalist” sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as “Other.” . . . It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that “knowledge,” not only as a matter of imposed will and

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domination, [but] by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm.” (1994, 394–395; italics and hyphenation in original)

Hall’s point here is critical, noting how indigenous people are made to believe their Otherness and inferiority and are thereby made to be submissive to Europeans. Through colonialist discourse, the construction of indigenous people as Other—and therefore as marginal or aberrant compared to the “normal” or the “real”—becomes inculcated as “natural.” Jacques Lacan’s theory, especially regarding spatialized identifications in the “mirror stage,” is a useful one in this discussion. Bhabha, in his thesis on identity, expanded on Lacan’s ideas, insisting “that the process of identification is ambivalent, and that positions in fantasy are always open to the possibility of inversion” (Low 1996, 197). As he argued, “the question of identification is never the affirmation of a pregiven identity, never a self-fulfilling prophesy—it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image. The demand of identification—that is, to be for an Other—entails the representation of the subject in the differentiating order of otherness. Identification . . . is always the return of an image of identity that bears the mark of splitting in the Other place from which it comes” (Bhabha 1994, 45; italics in original). The point advanced by Bhabha here is that identification is not grounded in an “original” identity, because there is no such thing as a pre-given identity. In other words, a person’s identity is based on the production and transmission of an “image” of identity provided by the individual’s social environment. This image of identity is asserted on a kind of continuum and is always relational. Because this identification always occurs in a context of unequal power relations, the subject desiring or assuming an identity is always the Other. However, the crucial perception of postcolonial analysis is that this image and its variants—though it contributes heavily to the self-image of the subject—is open to selection and individual modification. The subject can appropriate, modify, or (less often) reject this image for purposes of self-fashioning. Bhabha’s work accentuates ambivalence, giving it a central role in the process of identification. Ambivalence is apparent when nonwhite people want to identify with what has been aestheticized and considered beautiful, elegant, or desirable by white people, or when anyone seeks to identify with movie stars as a form of escape. The ambivalence with which we judge our body-images creates a fantasy as we attempt to displace ourselves from “lack” or “Otherness,” or to position ourselves in a different self—one that is always deferred, thus ensuring that our desire remains unfulfilled. The “negation of identity” therefore under-

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Imagining the Other

lines the impossibility of realizing an originality. As Bhabha further clarified: “For identification, identity is never an a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality. . . . For the image—as point of identification—marks the site of an ambivalence. Its representation is always spatially split—it makes present something that is absent—and temporary deferred . . . ” (1994, 51 italics in original). Bhabha’s point is that identity is poised in a spatial continuum between “disavowal and designation,” and therefore, the “voyeuristic look enacts the complexity and contradictions of [one’s] desire” for an unattainable totality (1994, 50). In his explanation on the concepts of fear and desire, Bhabha used the instance of the incorporation of traditional elite into colonial administrations: “This sets up the native subject as site of productive power, both subservient and always potentially seditious. What is increased is the visibility of the subject as an object of surveillance, tabulation, enumeration, and indeed, paranoia and fantasy” (1996, 93). The general practice for the colonizing power is to assume that it is superior to the colonized people, perpetuating a Manichean dualism through “knowledge” production. Indigenous people are not only marginalized but are also denied the choice of self-representation. The body is commodified through textual production of various kinds in the context of the white economy of fear and desire, which remains a powerful feature of global culture.

Representation and Reality While representations act to constitute “reality” for the dominant producers and consumers, they proffer varying illusions of reality. As Mike Gidley has argued, “all representations involve what [Howard S Becker (1986)] summmarises as processes of ‘selection,’ ‘translation,’ ‘arrangement,’ and ‘interpretation’” (Gidley 1992, 4). In other words, representation is culturally engaged, and what is represented is dictated by the culture of the representer. Said put it aptly in his discourse on Orientalism, when he posited that “there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation” (1978, 21; italics in original). Said’s point spells out an important aspect of representation: it will never become a true presentation of the original but only a mimesis or imitation, in Aristotelian terms. Olivier Richon also argued that true representation is impossible: “representations refer to other representations and not to the truth of the represented” (1985, 2). As an analogy, he engaged Sigmund Freud’s work on the formation of childhood memories, which showed that “the individual, just as the collective past, is fantasmatically constituted rather

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than remembered . . . there is no guarantee that such memories are accurately remembered. They are mostly falsified, incomplete fragments displaced in space and time” (Richon 1985, 3). Similarly, representation is always a reflection deprived of a fixed origin. In their book about multiculturalism and the media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam pointed out that while “art too is a form of representation . . . a mimesis” (1994, 182), representation is not only aesthetic but also political and religious. In a very general sense, to represent means to enact, play a role, or to serve as a symbol of something else; thus, for instance, “political rule is not usually direct but representative” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 182). What all these kinds of representation have in common “is the semiotic principle that something is ‘standing for’ something else, or that some person or group is speaking on behalf of some other persons or groups” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 183). But representation also operates on a continuum; each representation is a copy of another copy. For instance, in Papua New Guinean cultures, especially in the plastic arts, a carving is a representation of something considered “original.” It is known, however, that what is considered original is not fixed in time and space. A carver will tell you that he had copied the carving from another, and so on. This continuum underlying oral cultures therefore cannot have a fixed origin. The colonialist representation of indigenous people and their surroundings derives from the social, cultural, economic, moral, and political values of the Europeans. The indigene is portrayed and defined “against what the perceiving Europeans understood themselves to be” (Fothergill 1992, 49). Such representations, as Said noted, “rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects” (1978, 22). These latter factors naturalize and stabilize the perception of indigenous people in the context of a political and material vision of reality driven by the dominant group. A crucial strategy of colonization is the generation of “negative” knowledge about the indigenous inhabitants. In representation, Europeans demonstrated their knowledge over those they were representing. As Said wrote, “Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. . . . To have such knowledge of . . . a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it,” and consequently, “to deny autonomy to ‘it’”—in this case, the colonized, the “known” country (1978, 32). Those who are represented have little or no control over their representation, which is dictated by the dominant culture. In his 1992 study Fantasies of the Master Race, Ward Churchill elaborated further on this argument: “It is a given in any colonial situation that the colonizing power presumes that its culture is inherently superior to that of the colonized. Hence it assumes the right . . . to explain

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Imagining the Other

this to its subjects, rendering the colonized ever more accommodating to the ‘material condition’ of their domination by the colonial master, ever more compliant to the inevitability of material exploitation by the colonizer. This has been the clear purpose, historically, of the interpretation of indigenous cultures by their conquerors” (quoted in hooks 1992, 182). An important component of colonial representation is the employment of stereotype. Bhabha’s notion of fixity, or naturalization, mentioned earlier, necessarily underlines all stereotypical representation, which is at once both more and less than a matter of simplifying reality: “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation” (1994, 75; emphasis added). Any group can conceive and perpetrate stereotypical views of any other. However, stereotypes “do not all exercise the same power in the world” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 183). As Shohat and Stam put it, “stereotypes of some communities merely make the target group uncomfortable, but the community has a social power to combat and resist them; stereotypes of other communities participate in a continuum of prejudicial social policy and actual violence against disempowered people, placing [them] in jeopardy” (1994, 183). When Europeans are stereotyped, it does not have a profound and lasting impact upon them; it does not become a stigma or emblematic for life. In contrast, for marginalized groups, stereotyping is a stain, a stigma, an allegory for other vices associated with them.2 “De/formation” as a process of representation means that before a concept becomes politically and culturally charged, it occupies a “gap of silence” in realism. Where different groups compete for representation, it is usually the dominant group that finally asserts its meaning, relegating or silencing other meanings in favor of what is often a stereotype. Further, the stereotypes of oppressed peoples are often extrapolated from perceived or assumed shortcomings being applied to entire groups. As Shohat and Stam wrote: “Since what [Albert] Memmi calls the “mark of the plural” projects colonized people as ‘all the same,’ any negative behavior by any member of the oppressed community is instantly generalized as typical, as pointing to a perpetual backsliding toward some presumed negative essence” (1994, 183). Memmi’s “mark of the plural” is essentially grounded in the allegorical aspect of representation. The powerless or marginalized group is targeted for being aberrant or deviant from what is considered “normal.” And the “normal”—the human race—is the white community. For the normal, furthermore, representation is never regarded as allegorical. Just as Said and Richon have dismissed the possibility of any “true” representation, the process of representing has never been neutral; it

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has always been politicized and contested. Its meaning has always been culturally defined, mediated through a set of cultural assumptions, beliefs, and “truths.” Said argues that because factors other than “truth” contribute to the definition and meaning of representation, all representations are partial and unstable. The edited versions of reality produced within particular cultural contexts only become “truths” within the context in which they are produced. Outside that context, they are subject to various competing cultural forces. In the end, they succumb to the dominant culture, and only those retained in its archive are considered “true.”

The Power of Discourse: Representation and the “Fraudulent Texts” Certain early works of fiction with Papua New Guinean settings illustrate very clearly the above problematic of the conception and constitution of “reality.” While these fictional works have been revealed as hoaxes or “fraudulent texts,” they still demonstrate the ambivalence of colonial discourse and support the proposition that representation is less a function of absolute verisimilitude than of relations of power between competing representations. When representations compete, the dominant ones become “true.” There are a number of so-called “fraudulent texts” about Papua New Guinea. Nigel Krauth identifies two: Captain John A Lawson’s Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea (1873), and the Reverend Henry Crocker’s Adventures in New Guinea: The Narrative of Louis Tregance, A French Sailor, Nine Years in Captivity Among the Orangwoks, A Tribe in the Interior of New Guinea (1876).3 Another putative eyewitness story, Edward William Cole’s Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails; Discovered by Mr. Jones, the Traveller, In the Interior of New Guinea (1982 [1873]), also falls into this category. In early descriptions of Papua New Guinea, the distinction between “fact” and “fiction” was not as important as the rules of the discourse of the exotic. Although these fraudulent texts reported things that did not and could not happen, they nevertheless conform very well to the assumptions and discursive structures through which colonial representation takes place. Colonial discourse produced and circulated knowledge and imagery that regularly depicted Papua New Guineans as inferior and subordinate, portraying them in positions of subjection, savagery, and powerlessness in accordance with the widespread operation of the discourse. It is arguable that Papua New Guinea as we know it today is an invention of the West, based on the binary and unequal distinction between Europe and its Others (see Barker and others 1985), by which Europeans were able to displace indigenous people and superimpose their cultural values, privileging an imperial “reality.”

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Imagining the Other

While meaning does not inhere in things, but is produced, when meaning is associated with powerful groups, it becomes discursively established. Discourse then not only becomes the source of (cultural) meanings and a naturalizer of meanings, but it also establishes itself as the oasis of authority and hegemony for the production of such meanings. Discourse privileges certain worldviews and sociocultural meanings, practices, and attitudes. In the colonial context, the dominant discourse authorizes and naturalizes the representation and identity formation of indigenous people for its own ends. Thus the imagining of indigenous people is both a representation and—as Shohat and Stam say about film—an “utterance, an act of contextualized interlocution between socially situated producers and receivers” (1994, 180). In Lawson’s and Crocker’s works, the problem of constituting “reality” is brought to the foreground. Captain Lawson’s book had a great impact on both the literary and scientific worlds. It particularly fooled the scientific community by fraudulently cataloguing Lawson’s supposed discovery of “unique” flora and fauna in the country. The book narrates a purported journey into the interior of Papua New Guinea during which the author claimed to have climbed the world’s highest mountain (37,783 feet), which he named Mount Hercules, and observed the world’s largest collection of flora and fauna, including species of monkey, scorpion, buffalo, tiger, spider, goat, and deer. He also asserted that he had come across the tallest trees in the world, with one species measuring 337 feet in height. Captain Lawson maintained he had discovered uninhabited tracts of desert as well as rice and maize fields and a lake 1,800 square miles in area, studded with islands, which he named Lake Alexandra. The local people he said he had encountered were of two races. Those who occupied the coastal fringes of the island Lawson reported to be “repulsive looking” (1973, 5), and those in the interior of the country, whom others had identified as more “civilized,” he described as pygmies, not hostile but welcoming to Europeans, and “inveterate cock-fighters” (1873, 66). Lawson’s colorful fantasy of Papua New Guinea’s landscape and its inhabitants, while obviously a “misrepresentation,” nevertheless enacts the basic representational principles of colonial discourse, which, as Spurr has argued, “requires the constant reproduction of these images in various forms . . . both as a justification for European intervention and as the necessary iteration of a fundamental difference between colonizer and colonized” (1993, 78). The idealization of the Papua New Guinean landscape through the writer’s transference of alien fauna and flora is an attempt to make discursive sense of the unknown. The overall effect of applying external aesthetics in this manner, Spurr noted, was “to homogenize the Western experience of the Third World [and] to neutralize the disturbing aspects of social reality” (1993, 51).

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Lawson’s book was considered to be authoritative on Papua New Guinea’s geography for some time and became a basis for a number of scientific expeditions to the country. The work commanded respect and authority because it constituted what was considered “new” and unchallenged knowledge. At this time Papua New Guinea’s interior was virtually unknown to outsiders; it was a blank space, a darkness. Lawson’s representation of the country constituted a first presentation or a presence. The problem was, however, that his book was a work of imagination, in which he engaged the license to “fake” in order to enhance the vicarious experience of European readers. Such fraudulent representation is also characteristic of the Reverend Henry Crocker’s work. Like Captain Lawson’s, Crocker’s book depicts a civilized Papua New Guinean interior inhabited by a group he called the Orangwoks. This people he described as having a well-established political system, ruled by a king and his council of priests. They funded their nation through gold-mining operations. The flora and fauna were similar to those described by Lawson. Crocker’s coastal fringes (like Lawson’s) were inhabited by tribes, described as dark and cannibalistic, who retained the litany of negative attributes that Europeans stereotypically associated with darker races. The Orangwoks were fairer in skin color than the coastal dwellers, and therefore managed to attain some level of civilization. Representation is always the domain of those in power. The depictions of the Papua New Guinean landscape and the inhabitants illustrated the representers’ background. Stories about venturing into “new” lands also construct cultural superiority and imperial power, as demonstrated by the works considered here; as detailed in chapter 3, these places were not only denied their own history but were rendered available for European inscription. So pervasive and powerful were the strategies of colonial representation that in most instances even works of imagination were taken literally and at face value. The colonial inscription of the “blank space” (in this case, Papua New Guinea) is therefore a construction of a constellation of images that externalizes the writers’ private visions and more significantly the imperial aims and objectives: to colonize. The rhetorical strategies deployed to rationalize and legitimize colonization ranged from idealization to debasement, as later chapters of this book explore. While these two writers both imagined the Papua New Guinean landscape to be covered with abundant species of flora and fauna, they also shared a very different (and ambivalent) opinion about the people. Although they each found one race civilized, the inhabitants were stigmatized. Lawson described the coastal dwellers this way: “The Papuans were very repulsive looking men, having coarse and ugly features, exceedingly short, squat bodies, black matted and dirty hair, and a lithe,

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Imagining the Other

monkeyish manner” (1873, 5). But otherwise, the flora and fauna take precedence in Lawson’s work and the indigenous people are almost invisible. Crocker portrayed the Orangwoks in somewhat romantic terms: The Orangwoks—judging from our guards, and I found that they were good specimens of the tribe generally—were short, not more than five feet in height, some of them as little as four feet six. They were fairer than the coast natives, and had straight hair. . . . An Orangwok reminded me of a Malay, and yet he was something like a negro too, but very much superior to the ordinary Papuan. (1876, 72–73)

Crocker’s Orangwoks are a little higher in the social scale because they are fairer and have straight hair. These physical features, which slightly elevate their social status, in effect authorize them to demonstrate some degree of civilization. However, as “good specimens” they also fall in the category of fauna; physical attributes are their defining factor. Papua New Guinea as a primitive space becomes a symbol of an available space. Through their writings, these authors conveyed “a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre” (Spurr 1993, 15). The writings were acts of colonization because they made possible further exploration of the country, by providing a frame of reference, however fantastic, within which further exploration could take place. Such is the power of writing, through which the strange, the unknown, the difference is made to disappear under conventional definitions (Chiara 1996, 230). The earlier argument about representation as a “de/formation,” or as a simulacrum or shadowy image of a potential but deferred presence, closely follows Bhabha’s view of stereotype as a major discursive strategy of representation (1994, 66–84). As pointed out earlier, for Bhabha, stereotype is the “primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse, for both colonizer and colonized” (1994, 75). It is a site for both a “desire for the originality” and the registering and the disavowal of differences. Papua New Guinea became a colonized space in which desire and disavowal were enacted and engaged by colonial writers like Lawson and Crocker. Within the two writers’ texts are constant reproductions of ambivalent images, presenting an exemplary and widely discussed rhetoric of colonialism. Edward Cole’s 1873 satirical piece, along with an 1874 article by Marcus Clarke titled “Gipsies of the Sea, or The Islands of Gold” (republished in 1982), also performed such colonizing work (see chapter 3 for a more detailed examination of these writings). Cole’s account represented the inhabitants of the interior of Papua New Guinea as in a process of evolution and development. Their possession of tails was a “natural” symbol of their uncivilized state. According to the Cole’s

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“The capture.” Illustration by J H Wilson for Henry Crocker, Adventures in New Guinea (London, 1888), facing page 50.

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“Punishment of criminals.” Illustration by J H Wilson for Henry Crocker, Adventures in New Guinea (London, 1888), frontispiece.

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white protagonist, “they were a species of gorilla, remarkably approaching the human form” (1982, 5). Clarke’s Papua New Guinea, like that of Crocker, was a civilized one, a “modern Eldorado of the white adventurer’s extravagant dream” (Krauth ed 1982, 12). The exotic attraction of Clarke’s Papua New Guinea is indicated in the following extract: The interior of the vast island-continent which stretches away to the eastward is a fertile land more civilised than ancient Mexico, more wild in religious extravagance than was ancient Egypt, more rich in metals than was the “Ophir” of Solomon. (1982, 21)

Clarke’s idealization of the country as an Eldorado highlights the deep slippage between the familiar and the unfamiliar. His textualization inscribes a sense of knowledge onto the blank space of the unknown. Mexico and Egypt were known ancient civilizations. His mention of the two places within his text gives Papua New Guinea a sense of the manageable exotic while it reinforces his construction of the landscape as a place suitable for colonization. But these works share a horror of the barbaric, which is seen as an inextricable part of the social map of primitive societies. For example, in Crocker’s work, the protagonist, Louis Tregance, is spared his life after being captured by the Orangwoks because he can serve as a compendium of useful “new” knowledge for the natives. He is also a harbinger of Christianity and progress. As a white man he is a custodian of the most important colonial tools, writing and literacy. His constitution in these terms therefore can be read as elevating him above the Orangwoks. While the Orangwoks are delineated as somewhat civilized, their polity and dispensation of justice is portrayed as barbaric: In about an hour from our leaving the valley, I was startled by hearing a cry for help, the sound coming, as it seemed to me, from directly over my head. On looking upward I was horrified to see an unfortunate wretch fastened to a tall tree by means of ropes, and near him was a small snake about eight feet long. The snake was standing erect, and hissing at the unfortunate man, who was beating his hands wildly, and trying to avoid the fangs of the serpent. . . . In another half-mile we saw a number of birds hovering over a tree, and on our reaching it saw another unfortunate creature chained in its upper branches. He was vainly trying to defend himself from the attacks of an immense eagle which sailed backwards and forwards, every now and then descending upon the poor wretch and striking him with its powerful talons. (Crocker 1876, 120–121)

Tying criminals to tree branches and leaving them to the mercy of beasts of prey is profoundly primitive and uncivilized. This “animalistic” justice undermines the level of civilization attributed to the Orangwoks.

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Imagining the Other

This deceptive strategy of constructing the Other in terms that both idealize and debase “becomes, within the hermeneutics of domination, sorely overcharged with allegorical meaning” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 183), and is one of the inherent paradoxes of imperial discourse. The point about representation is that it overrides the allegorical for the dominated group because it “is seen as synecdochically summing up a vast but putatively homogeneous community,” whereas this is not the case with representations of the dominant group, which are seen as “naturally” diverse (Shohat and Stam 1994, 183). As Richard Dyer put it, “At the level of racial representation, . . . whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race” (1997, 3). Further, he noted: “In a visual culture—that is, one that gives primacy to the visible as source of knowledge, control and contact with the world—social groups must be visibly recognisable and representable, since this is a major currency of communication and power” (Dyer 1997, 44). White dominance is reinforced in the textualization of the represented images. The idealization of the landscapes in these works as pristine and utopian, inhabited by many species of exotic flora and fauna brings the country into European orbit of imagination and hence, by extension, into its orbit of potential governance. It is a method for colonial discourse to secure the place for exploitation. By surrendering a “new” landscape to European ways of knowing, the unknown became known. Representation is always a product of a particular discourse, but, in the end, those representations associated with powerful groups are the ones that become accepted as “true.” Whether representations are in fact true or false does not matter. What matters is that they construct knowledge about particular cultures, peoples, and landscapes. They construct what Said has called a “textual attitude,” that is, a reliance on texts to guide relations in the world (1978, 92–94). The “fraudulent texts” about Papua New Guinea exist at the point of critical tension between discourse and reality. While they do not concur with any verifiable depiction of the environment or people of the country, they demonstrate the power of certain representations, those that emerge from the presuppositions of European consciousness, to occupy the status of truth.

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2

Locating the Subject: The Indigenous Construction of Place

For indigenous people the representation of place is essentially a discourse of landownership. The definition of the term “landownership” for Papua New Guineans must encompass the complexity of their relationship with their natural and social environment. In the understanding of indigenous people, “land” and “place” cannot be separated. Land/place is regarded as an extension of the indigenous self and an integral component of the indigenous identity—a sense of belonging through which identity itself is constructed. Land/place is the center of indigenous constructions of social histories, of personal and interpersonal experiences. So in addition to ownership of place as such, for Papua New Guineans, landownership connotes identity, belonging, and social existence. In contrast, Europeans have, since the eighteenth century, understood place essentially as property. Space is transformed into place because of its economic value, and its strategic and political significance. The spiritual and metaphysical importance of place, while never entirely absent from European perceptions, has gradually been overtaken by political and economic considerations. For Papua New Guineans, land and place are subject to the control of the past, which is embodied in the oral tradition. But the indigenous discourse of place has been subsumed and erased by the dominant European model through the agency of powerful colonial discourse.

Transforming Space into Indigenous Place For virtually all the diverse cultural and linguistic groups in Papua New Guinea, place is both a location and an embodiment and extension of the peoples’ cultural and historical experience. While Papua New Guineans had no name for the whole country, nevertheless they had local names for the particular places they occupied. Each group had its own language, its own territory, and its own world. 29

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Imagining the Other

Physical occupation is often preceded by a psychological and emotional occupation. In his seminal work, Paul Carter demonstrated how space is transformed into place through the act of naming and the intention of settling there (1987, 293). “Place” is given birth by occupation; space is rendered “conceptually and culturally visible” through the process of naming (P Carter 1987, 128). Then, through multiple, lived relationships, places acquire meaning. Erica Carter and her coauthors similarly pointed out that it is places, not spaces, that ground identifications, and that space only becomes place when it is named. Space is made “placeful,” they argued, by “being named: as the flows of power and negotiations of social relations are rendered in the concrete form of architecture; and also, of course, by embodying the symbolic and imaginary investment of a population. Place is space to which meaning has been ascribed” (E Carter and others 1993, xii). Prior to being named and settled, space is indistinguishable from the vast cosmos. Naming and first or “pioneer” settlement is recorded in oral tradition, in the repertoire of songs and dances, in the plastic arts and in folklore. When an individual or a group of people ventures ashore and decides to make a home at a particular part of the island, their occupation of that space and their activities there transform it into a culturally defined place. For Paul Carter, space is a text imbued with histories and cultures once it is inscribed and interpreted. In indigenous experience, place develops from space. As Edward S Casey put it, “space” is “a neutral, pre-given medium, a tabula rasa onto which the particularities of culture and history come to be inscribed, with place as the presumed result” (1996, 14). In his study of the Foi people of Papua New Guinea, James F Weiner substantiated this: “A society’s place names schematically image a people’s intentional transformation of their habitat from a sheer physical terrain into a pattern of historically experienced and constituted space and time. . . . The bestowing of place names constitutes Foi existential space out of a blank environment” (Weiner 1991, 32, quoted in Casey 1996, 14). The need to transform a physical terrain into place where lived relationships are experienced suggests that “space” is a neutral container for human activities, and “place” signifies “those physical domains which have been invested with significant meaning or identity . . . When physical settings acquire meaning for us, we customarily talk about their having attained a ‘sense of place’” (Etlin 1997, 307). It also suggests that “there is some empty and innocent spatial spread, waiting, as it were, for cultural configurations to render it placeful” (Casey 1996, 14). Geographic space is appropriated through people’s interaction with each other and with their environment, and it is through these interactions that landscapes are historicized, mapped, and given meaning.

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The act of settling and dwelling therefore gives meaning to the notion of place, not vice versa. The concept of landscape is created through the desire to order the universe and take control of it. This is actualized through subjugating it to the people’s own systems of knowledge. As Casey argued: “There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place, and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it. Knowledge of place is not, then, subsequent to perception . . . but is ingredient in perception itself. Such knowledge, genuinely local knowledge, is itself experiential in the manner of . . . ‘lived experience’ rather than of . . . the already elapsed experience that is the object of analytical or abstract knowledge. . . . Local knowledge is at one with lived experience if it is indeed true that this knowledge is of the localities in which the knowing subject lives. To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in” (1996, 18). Casey’s point here is that, in order to know a particular place, one must be present in that location. People know a particular place by occupying it and experiencing living within that place. Their sense of place becomes most visible in group interactions. Keith H Basso noted that “relationships to places are lived most often in the company of other people, and it is on these communal occasions—when places are sensed together—that native views of the physical world become accessible to strangers” (1996, 56–57, italics in original). For indigenous Papua New Guineans, the experience of place and landscape revolves around landownership and the ability to manage and control it. There is no such thing as vacant or uninhabited land. Every tract of land that Papua New Guineans know about is in some way “owned.” Owning a tract of land does not necessarily mean that it is physically inhabited. Land/place, in the conception of indigenous people, is never empty. All space is place—named, occupied, or identified with someone. In most instances, land has been acquired by settlement, prior occupancy, or conquest. The term “pioneer settlement” may refer to land that has been physically settled as well as to land that has been claimed but not settled. A virgin forest, for example, though lacking any obvious signs of human habitation, may be important as a hunting ground or a sacred site. Thus land and place for Papua New Guineans is always potentially owned. Perhaps most importantly for indigenous people, place is not only a physical space but also a metaphysical one. Papua New Guineans have both a physical and a psychological attachment to their land that transcends the purely economic and legal arrangements of the superimposed European culture. Place is transacted and inhabited physically, spiritually, and metaphysically. Papua New Guineans share the same space as spirits and ancestors, and land may be spiritually occupied and

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Imagining the Other

traditionally owned without being physically settled. For instance, indigenous people have strong affiliations and attachments to places that their ancestors once inhabited, because the spirits of the ancestors still reside there and events important to their lives took place there. Such places were deemed sacred because the bodies of ancestors were buried or their charred bones were deposited there. The construction of place and the complex relationship that Papua New Guineans have with it is very pronounced in contemporary indigenous literature. By entering the textual sphere that had previously appeared to be the exclusive domain of Europeans, Papua New Guineans have appropriated some of the representational power of that discourse. In literary texts, Papua New Guinean writers today not only reaffirm their relationship with the landscape but also undermine the western construction of colonial space. In John Waiko’s play The Unexpected Hawk, the government, to gain easier access to villages and to provide centralized services, orders the villagers to move to a new location. The argument against the decision arises from the indigenous people’s relationship to their land/place: Councillor (with emotion): We cannot move this village. This is our land. Claimed by the forefathers of Babena, Sirida and Tatari. Our fathers lived and died here. Their sweat and blood fell on this land. Their sweat and blood are the strength and wealth of this land, and we want our own sweat and our blood to be spilled here for our children. We cannot give our strength to other villages and other people’s land. 1st Man: We make our gardens on our own land, we hunt in our own hunting grounds, where spirits and ancestors know us well. Our fathers owned this land, this village and the spirits before we were born. We can never move to the big village. If we move, our ancestors will turn against us, and we will lose all our land, hunting grounds and gardens. If our ancestors are against us, they’ll let us die, one by one. (Waiko 1971, 24)

The characters of the councillor and 1st man represent indigenous knowledge (about place) and therefore present an alter/native understanding of the ownership of place. For a Papua New Guinean “his basic attitude to what is his land remains substantially unchanged throughout life, independent of any transactions and exchanges which have taken place. His land is the place where he was born, . . . and where, in most instances, he may die. . . . it is the place where his ancestors preceded him and to which they may return” (Burton-Bradley 1974, 32). The crucial point for Papua New Guineans is that the representation of place is inextricably linked to the reality of permanent habitation, including occupation by ancestors and spirits. This is the point that the

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councillor and the 1st man accentuate. In these ways place is an extension of the indigenous self. An important leitmotif in contemporary Papua New Guinea literature is the recovery of the relationship with the past. The invocation of the past is an integral component of the process of reaffirming the attachment to place. The past is integral to the way in which landscape is imagined and historicized. This extract from Apisai Enos’s poem retrospectively celebrates the landscape through the invocation of the past: New Guinea! Land of proud warriors of courage land of ancestral spirits entangled in myths and incarnations land of haus tambaran, dukduk and eravo land of kovave masks and gope boards land of hiri, kula ring and fire dance land of a thousand faces and facets I hardly know you! New Guinea, dazzling with diversity wild, rugged, yet tender. New Guinea, whispering with love murmuring, dove-like and gentle. Land of swaying palms frangipani orchids hibiscus rockmosses and water lilies beautiful like a bride with a veil of bird of paradise plumes . . . (Apisai Enos, “New Guinea”)

While this poem is a celebration of a past landscape remembered in the present, it is also much more complex. Enos is also celebrating an imagined past of the place, constructed out of what is conceived as a European-created, chaotic present. Within the context of a present contaminated by modernization, an unsullied past Papua New Guinean landscape is constructed. This imaginative exercise is important to Papua New Guineans in a recuperative sense. It has its basis in the idea that colonization has displaced and dislocated Papua New Guineans and severed them from their past, resulting in a loss of indigenous identity. Equally significant in the poem is Enos’s repetitive invocation of the place-name (New Guinea). This establishes a nexus between name/ place as personal/collective appellation and the concept of identity and national formation.

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Imagining the Other

Perhaps Utula Samana best summed up the attachment Papua New Guineans have to the landscape: “In terms of Melanesian attitudes land is not an economic item: it is a form of social being. When you die you go back to your land; you are buried back in your land. There is a spiritual bond between the Melanesian people and the land; land is your identity. So it is important that the language of land is not land as a commodity but land as a total concept of human existence. Land is a physical environment as well as fulfilling a spiritual and a psychological function” (1988, 17). Land is an integral component of indigenous identity with great cultural, spiritual, and social significance. Clashes between the indigenous people and the colonial administration over land often resulted from the latter’s incomprehension of the strength and complexity of Papua New Guineans’ relationship with the land. Land is generally inalienable because it is owned not by one person but corporately, by the group, thereby maintaining its spiritual and metaphysical significance. A tract of land, whether swamp or desert, whether considered economically valueless or productive, will still be owned, that is, imbued with a group’s deeply felt attachment, growing out of a longtime familiarity and, in a sense, “personality.” It is not an overstatement to say that land is the most important element in the lives of Papua New Guineans. Three students at the University of Papua New Guinea in 1973 put it this way: “Land is everything to our people. As they say, ‘Land is our life. Land is our physical life—food and sustenance. Land is our social life; it is marriage; it is status; it is security; it is politics; in fact it is our only world.’” (Dove and others 1974, 183) Land is regarded as an extension of the indigenous self, as that which gives life to and sustains the indigenous lived experience. Indigenous people transform space into place, “into a culturally defined landscape,” by naming it and thus incorporating it into their own spiritual and mythic history. There are, however, instances when people are displaced from their land through warfare and invasion. The defeated group moves on, seeking refuge with other groups, while the conquering enemy reappropriates the conquered place by renaming its features. These new names, in most instances, celebrate their victory or allude to the history of their settlement. Stories narrating the history of their habitation are then created to legitimize their ownership. A pervasive allegorical motif in contemporary PNG literature is the construction of houses. Building and rebuilding houses expresses the desire in the postcolonial subject for self-definition, because a person without a house is rootless and displaced. Even when physically displaced and dislocated, people are still metaphysically, spiritually, and experientially attached to their places. Although they may be physically absent and may never again return, they remain there in spirit. By merely

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thinking about one’s place, one inhabits that place metaphysically and spiritually. While this habitation of place is partial, the point is that the whole project of constructing and representing place is always invoked from partial memories, cultural fragments, and remains—symbols that then constitute and transform space into cultural place. The image of a house therefore provides a prominent symbolic anchor and a sense of permanence for one’s identity, serving as a form of empowerment. It provides important grounding for belonging; the construction of houses is a recuperative strategy supporting stable relationships and family and traditional ties. The test of a house is its durability, realized in the ability of the owner to rebuild it every time it needs maintenance and repair, thereby reinforcing its lasting value as a symbol of permanence, place, selfhood, and indigenous identity. A good example of the above argument can be found in Russell Soaba’s 1985 novel Maiba, which aptly employs the house as an allegory for belonging and cultural identity amid the onslaught of change in postcolonial Papua New Guinea: Mr. Wawaya ambles over and lightly taps the veranda of his house. It is his home. He has built it with his two hands. He loves his house, his village. He was born in it, he will never walk out on it, and he hopes to die in it. (Soaba 1985, 17)

Maiba is a postcolonial novel concerned with contemporary political structure and leadership against a backdrop of tradition. Doboro Thomas and his gang represent contemporary political structure and leadership, while Mr Wawaya and Maiba represent tradition. The silence of the latter two characters about the chaos and disorder in the village created by Doboro Thomas and his henchmen symbolizes the passivity of tradition caught up in the onslaught of postindependence tribulations. The house symbolizes a sense of indigenous belonging and identity that is continuously threatened by the instability of postcolonial politics and tensions. In the understanding of local people, place, apart from its practical quotidian purposes, is also a space in which both humans and spirits coexist and interact, especially in sacred and important historical sites. A sacred place could be a burial site, a shrine, or, typically, a cave or a hill associated with some event in the past. For the indigenous people, a place encompasses everything found on the tract of land as well as the events that have taken place there. Places are complex constructions of social histories, personal and interpersonal experiences, and selective memory. Miriam Kahn’s work on the Wamira people in Papua New Guinea provides a deeper insight into the complex construction of indigenous place. Drawing also on the writings of Miles Richardson and of Andrew Strathern, Kahn described the Wamira people’s conceptualization of their landscape and place:

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Imagining the Other

The Wamiran landscape resounds for Wamirans with narratives of collective history and personal experience. It provides tangible forms for the mooring of memory. What looks like a river, a hill, or a group of stones may, in fact, resonate meaningfully to Wamirans as a type of moral landscape conveying messages about human frailties, foibles, and responsibilities. Meaning attached to the landscape unfolds in language, names, stories, myths, and rituals. These meanings crystallize into shared symbols and ultimately link people to a sense of common history and individual identity. Place becomes “something both fixed and fleeting, something you can walk on and something you can speak, a curious and uneasy product of experience and symbol.” (Richardson 1984, 1) Places capture the complex emotional, behavioral, and moral relationships between people and their territory. They represent people, their actions, and their interactions and as such become malleable memorials for negotiating and renegotiating human relationships. Places and their stories also become metaphors that are heavily relied upon during social discourse about relationships. They serve as a kind of “veiled speech” (Strathern 1975) through which harsh realities can be softened by oblique reference in order to preserve harmonious social relations. (Kahn 1996, 168–169)

For the people of Wamira, the landscape holds collective experience and history. Many of the landmarks have cultural and spiritual significance. It is this cultural, mythic, and spiritual meaning that gives the Wamira people a sense of shared history and identity. For them, place embodies their complex emotional and moral attachments to the environment. Because of this connectedness, places and the cultural artifacts become metaphors for the negotiation of human relationships. As Peter Sack has noted, “in the midst of all this change land is the only thing that remains permanent. Land, underneath its changing surface, is eternal. It is the beginning and the end of history” (1974, 200). Land is the unchanging foundation of Papua New Guinean society.

Gonna, Kuki, and Rekana as Concepts for Representing Place The indigenous representation of place can be elucidated by examining concepts used by the Banoni people who live on the shores of Empress Augusta Bay, Bougainville Island. The Banoni concepts are gonna (existence/occupation of place), kuki (knowledge), and rekana (philosophy of existence, which includes natural law, customs and traditions, norms and values, and the processes of reasoning and conceptualization). These three concepts, while they are part of the Banoni people’s cosmology, are not unique. They are also found in other

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indigenous cultures, as foundational to existence and, in particular, the construction of place. Kuki refers to knowledge in general. Rekana refers to customs and traditions, and the processes of conceptualization and reasoning. Gonna refers to existence, particularly the inhabiting of place. Gonna essentially revolves around gomono (land) and is made meaningful through a number of practices. In the first instance, gonna is actualized through dwelling or pioneer settlement. Inhabiting a place involves an act of group and individual socialization within a culturally defined landscape. It also involves the performance of numerous tasks and functions determined by the needs of the landscape. Two of the foremost cultural engagements with land are the naming of place and the creation of oral tradition: naming, which occurs with settlement or even precedes it, defines place, while oral tradition records, regulates, and legitimizes the inhabitation of place. A clan or tribe inhabits a particular place because, according to kuki and rekana, they own that place or tract of land. It is their land, which has been handed down through their ancestors. They engage oral tradition to prove their ownership; through the explication of oral tradition and other forms of records (including the plastic arts), their pona is shown and substantiated. Pona is another an important concept within the Banoni definition of place. It literally means ash(es), remains of a fireplace. In many instances, the term pona is used metaphorically and philosophically to refer to a group’s claim to place. Simultaneously, pona could refer to physical sites (cultural signifiers). Sometimes when there is a dispute over gomono (land), people ask, “Ghem pona wai?” (literally, Where are the remains of your fireplace?) meaning, “Give evidence of your ownership of a tract of land.” Metaphorically, pona could also mean a sacred or historical site. In general, pona means any tangible evidence that supports a group’s claim to place and landscape. Ownership and occupation of place is determined by kuki and rekana but more particularly by gonna mana bangana (how the ancestors lived). A group or clan, when called on to prove its claim to ownership of land, must be able to recount how its ancestors came to own the place in question. This involves narrativizing genealogies and recounting journeys made by the ancestors. These concepts in turn validate gonna. If a clan cannot recount its kuki—and specifically, rekana na gonna (specific knowledge about landownership and occupation of place)—they are referred to in Banoni as namowenese (displaced people). Although there is no such thing as a landless person according to Papua New Guinea culture, displacement can occur, as mentioned earlier, when people are driven out of their land by a conquering army, or by natural disasters such as famine and volcanic eruptions. However, their displacement is only temporary because eventually a group with more than enough

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Imagining the Other

land will generally cede them user rights to portions of their land and resources. In time, through complex relationships and negotiations, they may “own” the land. Papua New Guineans cannot conceive of existence without the definition provided by place-bound history. Kuki and rekana are engaged daily to regulate people’s lives, elaborating their past, without which they would have no existence. One’s past, embodied in oral tradition, gives one identity, a sense of belonging, and control over the land. Gonna gives meaning to the lives of people by linking place and the community—whether village, clan, or tribe—in which people experience relationships and act out their daily lives. Place is also constructed as a communal landscape through myths and common histories that provide a community with sources of identity and proof of their rights. The authority that empowers and authenticates the habitation and control of place is vested in oral tradition. As Basso put it: “Relationships to places may also find expression through the agencies of myth, prayer, music, dance, art, architecture, and, in many communities, recurrent forms of religious and political ritual” (1996, 57). Some branches of kuki and rekana are embodied in oral traditions, such as proverbs. Oral cultures rely on these “texts” as quintessential pieces of evidence from past lives that authorize their occupation of place and regulate the relationships and activities of daily life. Not only does oral tradition bear hegemonic authority; it also serves as a map, through a group’s histories and memories, to guide and give meaning to their existence and their dealings with each other. In traditional societies, whenever there was a need for knowledge, oral tradition was called on to justify a group’s claim and give evidence of identity. This was a group’s way of exercising control. Therefore knowledge about one’s past was a basis for power and political maneuvering. Once acquired, however, these stories must be constantly engaged, or they will be lost. In Papua New Guinea oral tradition continues to play the important role of aiding and justifying claims to land. As Klaus Neumann said, “Land is controlled through the control of the past. The past is controlled through the disposal of a certain fund of knowledge” (1992, 149). It is vital that people know and retain the knowledge of their past as evidence of their sense of identity and belonging to place. The retrieval of this information occurs through narrative, which confirms and strengthens a people’s gonna. What may appear to be monotonous and repetitive references to place-names in such stories are actually functioning as the equivalent of a title deed for landownership (see, eg, Oliver 1955, 112), as well as a map, or a social and cultural history. Rather than compartmentalizing knowledge into history, geography, social science, and religion, the oral story integrates them all.

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Myths perhaps are the most sacred of these narratives. For indigenous people, myth is revered because it narrates the meaning of existence. It is powerful and meaningful because it is the empowering force behind their social, moral, creative and spiritual life. In this sense myths are functional; their continual transmission is assured because of the important role they play in society. This was summed up by Bronislaw Malinowski: “Myth fulfils in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom” (1971, 19, quoted in Uriam 1995, 66). Malinowski’s definition of the function of myth in traditional cultures is an important one. Myth can be said to be the central fabric of traditional societies, underlining and defining the existence of human civilization in these cultures. Myths provide the moorings for indigenous people, without which people are directionless as well as rootless. Myths render both imaginative and psychological underpinnings to Papua New Guinean ontology. The praise poetry of the Mekeo people of Papua New Guinea provides an example of humankind’s endeavor to impose meaning on their social existence. The Mekeo’s belief in the creator/god Aia gives them a sense of purpose in life. In the following traditional praise poem, translated by Allan Natachee, the Mekeo celebrate Aia, the creator of “our earth . . . our home”: Water all over All all over Darkness all over All all over Aia sitting seated Aia living alive Aia sitting seated Sitting forever Aia living alive Living forever Aia without beginning Aia without end…. Aia creator of our earth Aia creator of our home Creator of earth Creator creating

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Creator of home Creator creating. (Allan Natachee, translator, “The Cycle of A’aisa”)

According to Joseph Campbell’s The Mask of God, “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (quoted in Amadio 1993, 11). Together with other oral traditions, Nadine Amadio noted, myth “is a life-force that combats the futility and potentially suicidal emptiness of a purely materialistic society” (1993, 11). For Papua New Guineans, myth and other oral traditions help to impose order on life particularly through life stages. As Amadio elaborated: “It is perhaps to the larger scale ‘rites of passage’ that myth brings most meaning. A human being must be guided through the major events of life: from birth and growing to responsibility, change, maturity, and impending death. Myth is the guide to these stages of growth, renewal and decay” (1993, 11–12). Thus, myths have a vital function. In explicating the whole passage of people’s lives, they provide answers to fundamental questions about the human condition and social existence. In Papua New Guinea many stories fall into the category of creation myth, and many of these share a similar storyline. What may differ are the names of the eponymous creators and the locations in which the creations take place. In many instances the creators of the landscape are culture heroes; in others, they are deities. Among the Tolais of East New Britain, for example, it is Tokabinana who shaped the landscape; in Karkar Island, it is Kulubob; and among the Siwai of Bougainville, it is Tantanu. Often the supreme being delegates duties to others deities or culture heroes; for example, one may be responsible for food, another for water, and so on. Normally, these culture heroes and deities finally come to rest in those places, which are often signified by certain cultural markers and considered sacred and taboo. In oral cultures, creation myths deal with the discovery or creation of items and practices that have important social, cultural, and spiritual significance for humankind. One important function of myth is that it provides evidence of people’s origins and therefore of their connection to place. Myths themselves are considered sacred in most cultures because they are the basis of people’s ontology. Besides answering questions about natural formations, topology, and geography, and forces of nature such as volcanic eruptions, myths explicate questions about human existence.

The Discourse of Naming In indigenous cultures, space is transformed into place in a number of ways. The most important means of taking control of the landscape is by

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naming. Naming provides the equivalent of a title deed, imbues power and identity to that which is named, gives the named place a presence, confers a reality, and allows it to be known. Names can take on certain aspects of the surroundings or remind people of stories and events. Sometimes they are mnemonic devices that serve as keys to unlocking the histories attached to particular places. As Lamont Lindstrom has stated, knowledge about land “regulates and validates topological information, place names and boundaries, names of persons and name-sets, kinship and genealogy, histories of land tenure—all the principles in terms of which a person must assert his or her local identity and personal rights to a particular place” (1990, 49). Lindstrom’s statement, while it refers particularly to Vanuatu, has relevance to Papua New Guineans as well. It is common among indigenous peoples in the South Pacific to hold in high esteem people who are knowledgeable about land tenure. When someone is said to be knowledgeable about land matters, it also means he or she is a custodian of other knowledges. Being familiar with land tenure and oral history in a community implies that the person is knowledgeable about the affairs of the community at large. In his important study of the naming practices of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, Steven Feld quoted James Weiner’s conclusion for the neighboring Foi people, that “place names act as mnemonics for the historical actions of humans that make places singular and significant” (Weiner 1991, 45, quoted in Feld 1996, 109). Place-names, therefore, are significant as guides and social markers to important oral tradition. Feld continued: Some placenames serve forcefully as shorthands, encapsulating stories about historical or mythical events whose magnitudes vary from mundane to cosmic. Some Bosavi places, for example, are named in relation to mythic origins or events responsible for establishing taboos. Others are directly constructed as primal sources of spiritual or supernatural power, and stories are attached to these placenames to indicate why the place is avoided in sight or visitation or why certain actions, words, or motions are avoided there, sometimes lest they create resentments or offend mythocosmic beings. Some of these matters are revealed in stories that are invariably well known or quite esoteric; others are exposed through the kinds of talks and revelations specific to spirit-medium seances. (1996, 109–110)

For the Kaluli, place-names act as reminders for important human actions. They are sometimes metaphoric, containing narratives that allude to historical or mythical events. These narratives are often engaged, for example, when there is a need to prove land claims. At the

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simplest level, the structure of the name itself points towards layers of referential possibilities. For instance, Feld reported that “the placename Hinibululo:wo . . . is formed from hini + bulu + lo:wo:, literally, ‘earthquake’” + “‘broke open’” + nominal, meaning ‘place where earthquake broke open the ground there’” (1996, 110). Typically, place-names potentially refer “to biographical or historical stories that have complexly varied personal or regional resonances,” while others yet are “referentially descriptive of a land formation alone” (Feld 1996, 111). Some place-names are archaic, their meanings lost in time. For indigenous people, naming is symbolic and associative. A placename may recall an event that connects and bonds certain groups of people to a particular place. The name may refer to a particular incident. For instance, in my area there is a place called Mawagero. The name means, literally, “place of return.” The associated meaning is that at some time in the past an important person on an important mission or journey had turned back from this spot. Names can also be inclusive or exclusive. They can sanction which groups of people can lay claims to a particular place and which groups cannot. For Papua New Guineans, naming bears a direct relation between signifier and signified. This means that names have direct cultural references or allusions and are culturally associative and symbolic, so that naming is a cultural rather than a political act. Many place-names take on pronominal prefixes. For instance, in Banoni, toponyms have the pronominal prefixes mo or ma. Mo denotes locative positioning on, in, or at. Ma denotes specific place and connotes a sense of geographical belonging. Thus, for example, we have Motopena, meaning literally “on or at the head/point or apex,” and Makaruku, meaning “place of possums.” Ma as a prefix also denotes ownership or possession of place. Similarly, in the Tolai society, many names of places also have a pronominal prefix, Vuna, indicating locative positioning. So for example, Vunapope, the headquarters of the Catholic Archdiocese of Rabaul, means literally “place of the pope”; Vunapukpuk, “place of crocodile”; and Vunamami, “place of taro.” These names often have social, cultural, and religious significance. People know which group has claim to these named places, even if the name has no link to that group. Further, as Feld found for the Kaluli, the invocation of placenames creates a strong sense of “presence” of the place, “Because they are fundamental to the description and expression of experiential realities, these names are deeply linked to the embodied sensation of places. . . . placenames . . . are central to implementing sensation through ways in which verbal invocation brings place into heightened conceptual presence, whether or not a place named is simultaneously experienced in physical proximity. Naming strengthens the naturalness

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of place, the tacitness of its sensately felt dimensions in thought and action” (Feld 1996, 113) People construct place through language so that place becomes an integral part of their lived experiences and relationships. The narratives through which the identity of place is established are not static, but may be adapted to new experiences, and may incorporate important new events. For example, there is a place in my area called Kaghuwasawa na mono. The name literally means “place where Mono Islanders rested.” This name refers to a tiny fragment of a story that must have been important to the lives of the place’s inhabitants at some time. The naming of a community also accrues with continued habitation and activity within a locality over time. For the Kaluli people, for example, identification is associated with locality: “The identity of each longhouse community is not primarily associated with the clan membership of the people who inhabit the aa [longhouse]. Rather, over a period of time the community becomes bound up with the area it moves about in and comes to be referred to by the name of the locality. Thus, for example, lineages of Gæsumisi and Wabisi whose communities’ successive longhouses have been located in the vicinity of Bægolo Ridge are called Bægolo people” (Schieffelin 1976, 41). Place-names also provide agreed-on points of reference: on a mundane level, they provide information necessary for people to give directions, exchange geographical information, and differentiate between one location and another (P Carter 1987, 46). Some place-names are names of ancestors, some the names of plants or animals. These names served as cultural maps of the community until the discourse of European mapping rendered them as fictions, or worse, simply erased them (Wendt 1991, 188). The act of naming also imbues a place or a certain object with power. As Walter J Ong stated, “Oral peoples commonly think of names . . . as conveying power over things. . . . names do give human beings power over what they name” (1988, 33). The belief in the power of words is demonstrated in many ways. In many Papua New Guinean cultures, when people go fishing or hunting they chant or pray to the spirits and ancestors to make them successful. When conducting most activities in indigenous cultures, such as planting a new garden, certain words or phrases are uttered. In performing witchcraft a sorcerer must first utter or chant words without which the sorcery will not be effective. Here is an example of a magic chant to divert rain, from the Highlands of Papua New Guinea: Kurri er . . . . . . . . . . . . er Karri er . . . . . . . . . . . . . er Gilne ne . . . . . . . . . . . . ne

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Mang ne . . . . . . . . . . . . ne Shame on you! I’ll cut you with my axe I’ll cut you with my axe I’ll kick you with my foot I’ll kick you with my foot I’ll hit you with a stone I’ll hit you with a stone I’ll punch you with my fist I’ll punch you with my fist I’ll cut you to little pieces I’ll flatten you, I’ll hit you flat nothing of you will remain I really mean to finish you I’ll gather you in my pots I’ll boil and drink you As for the rest of you I’ll collect and burn you to charcoal I really mean business Don’t come any closer. (P Arnold Mek, translator, “Magic Chant to Divert Rain”)

The power of oral discourse, however, has often lost out to the power of written discourse, which has wider and more enduring currency. Ong explained, “Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit. When an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it” (1988, 11). Through the discourse of naming, indigenous people forge a powerful relationship between place, language, and identity. In Papua New Guinea societies, the naming of individual people is linked to land, property, and rights. Names are not given randomly; the giving of names following strict customary procedures. A person is named from the repertoire of names belonging to each clan or tribe, and each person’s name is simultaneously a personal appellation and a title to property including land, certain tribal lore, and rights. In naming a person, the family or relatives try to name him or her after some recognized ancestor or relative. This enables the person to take on some of the social attributes and qualities of the namesake. This naming after qualities or attributes applies to geographical features, inscribing physical locality into ownership. For the Bosavi people, the naming of place creates a connection between land and water. As Schieffelin wrote: “most places in the forest are named after the stream that gives the land its contours in that vicinity. . . . The waters, as they

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turn and fall, generate new localities for every new configuration of the land. The name of a locality carries, in effect, its own geographical coordinates, which place it in determinate relation to the brooks and streams that flow through the forest” (1976, 30). For the Bosavi people, place-names are dictated mainly by their surroundings. Because the Bosavi reside in the vicinity of many streams and rivers, place-names both take on the names of streams and reflect the importance of these streams in daily existence. The flow of these waters creates a new configuration of land for the people.

Cultural Signifiers: Tsigiana and Landmarks Another important aspect of indigenous construction of place and landscape is that of totems and sacred places. Group membership is conceptualized on the basis of the group having a common totem or tsigiana (sacred place). Each clan or tribe has a sacred site where their totems are believed to reside. A clan’s claim to place is often dictated by the location of their tsigiana, which contains creative energy giving the clan a common spiritual affiliation to the site. These sites also serve as a setting for a group’s religious rituals, such as the naming of a newborn member. Approaching the sacred site of others is forbidden, as the spiritual power emanating from it may cause death. Often when people recount stories to support their claim to a particular place, the fact that their tsigiana is located there is often enough to confirm their ownership and right to exist there. Other landmarks also act as cultural signifiers denoting the historical ownership of place by certain groups of people. The landmarks could be anything from a bizarre rock to a certain tree, a pond or a certain hill, a burial site or the remains of a hut. These cultural markers symbolize a past incident or event of significance to certain groups of people. Whether the event is mythical or historical is not relevant. On the surface, a statement such as “That’s where such a person rested” or “That’s the remains of my great grandfather’s hut,” may sound trivial and unimportant to an outsider, but it has profound implications for the ownership of land and the occupation of place. Landmarks act as signposts to the reading, comprehension, and often habitation of place. Although they are only a small component in the catalogue of signifiers available to Papua New Guineans as indices to settlement of place and landownership, landmarks are instruments of power because they empower the presence and reality of place. The indigenous construction of place is also manifested in songs and the plastic arts. People compose and perform songs that trace the origin or the genealogy of a tribe. These songs are replete with names of places, ancestors, and objects alluding to particular historical or mythi-

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cal locations in the group’s past. Many of these songs are narratives that serve as evidence of the permanence of the tribe’s claim to place. Here is an example of a traditional tsigul (a form of music sung during special occasions) from Banoni, in which place-names are prominent. (In most instances such songs are much longer): Nanuwa Nekana Nanuwa Nekana Gharega na Koiare mo ghe ram Nanuwa Nekana

At a place called Nekana At a place called Nekana In the mountains of Koiare It is my home At a place called Nekana

The significance of songs such as this one is that they not only construct place and declare ownership but they also celebrate the landscape and people’s relationship to place. Such songs provide a nexus and bond between people and their landscape. They also express the longing and desire for place that one calls home. Feld has demonstrated how through songs and singing (what he termed “acoustemology”) the Kaluli represent place relations and identity: The aesthetic power and pleasure of Kaluli songs emerges in good part through their textual poesis of placename paths. Composed and performed by guests in ritual contexts to evoke tears from their hosts over memories of persons and places left behind, these songs can also be sung during work, leisure, and everyday activities by women and men as they move through and pass time in forest locales. In both ritual and everyday context, the songs are always reflective and contemplative, qualities enhanced in each instance by construction of a poetic cartography whose paradigmatic parallelism of path making and naming reveals how places are laminated to memories, biographies, and feelings. (1996, 114)

Songs and singing confirm the emotional importance place occupies in the peoples’ memory. The invention of place is also prominent in the plastic arts. Often, certain ancestral figures are carved to commemorate a tribe’s ancestors. This makes permanent their claim to a place. When a land dispute arises between two parties, these carvings are used to assist the claimants. Sepik storyboards are a good example; these basically record myths of origin, genealogies, or other important events that have shaped the lives of people. The telling of the stories cannot be done by any person other than persons associated with them and authorized by the concerned group who own the storyboards. So far I have been discussing the ways in which precolonial Papua New Guinean people constructed place. But these dense and evocative texts had to be erased in turn for colonial inscription to take place.

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Two cardinal propositions can be deduced from the analysis of stories in the invention of the landscape and place. First, stories are pragmatic, in the sense that they provide narratives of important events. These stories provide a nexus between people’s past and their contemporary daily lives, giving deep meaning to their existence. From this viewpoint, because the stories form an important repertoire of the people’s construction of place and also form the basis of their cosmology, they fulfill a functional aspect of place construction and representation. These stories could be referred to as verbalizations of place. Second, indigenous oral traditions imagine the landscape. From this perspective, they share some similarities with the European imaginative writings of Edward Cole, Marcus Clarke, Hume Nisbet, and Louis Becke, and others. Indigenous stories also have fabulous characters like the crocodile man, the snake who transformed into a beautiful woman, various spirits, and so forth. From the perspective of the local people, however, this fabulous aspect of these stories is subordinate to their historical and social significance. Robert Lane recorded the Raga people’s conceptions of the land and their relationship to it with his informants’ illustrations paraphrased in parentheses: 1. It is inappropriate to speak of land “ownership.” Land is rather one component in a total system in which people are another component. (“We are of Raga, we are Raga, this ground is Raga.”) 2. Ideally, land is inalienable. (“These are my children, I cannot buy or sell them.”) 3. Reciprocity, basic to social relations, applies to relations with land. (“This ground is like our roof. If we do not care for it, it will not shelter us and we will die out.”) (Lane 1971, 249)

In sum, the landscape is an integral component of indigenous culture and therefore must be treated with dignity. Place and landscape is given prominence in indigenous cultures because peoples’ lives revolve around it. The Papua New Guinean discourse of place and landscape involves a dense text of practical, historical, and mythical discourse. Indigenous peoples’ relationship to place is both physical and metaphysical, deeply involved in their cultural identity. The inhabiting of place is practical and requires knowledge and information vested in the oral tradition and in other art forms, including music and the plastic arts. Furthermore, the construction and representation of the Papua New Guinean landscape by indigenous people is vested in their oral tradition and their spiritual relationship to the land. These two are inextricable, as oral tradition plays a paramount role in the transformation of

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space into place, because through it, place is made permanent and the construction of the landscape and place is authorized, sustained, and realized. For the local people, the invention of place means inhabiting the land. For them, place is a physical space, a spiritual space, and a metaphysical space, where people, plants, animals, other beings, and spirits coexist and interact. Names conferred on places, people, and objects imbue them with their personality and signature, thus establishing them and giving them permanence. By the same token, in constructing place, indigenous people define their identity, authenticity, individuality, and authority. Certain words, especially names, have great power for Papua New Guineans. So when places are defined through naming, the signifier and the signified are necessarily culturally related. Finally, oral traditions are the basis of the people’s daily lifeways. In most instances, the stories tell of significant events that give permanence to place and justify claims to it. For the Banoni people, oral tradition is the major repository for gonna, kuki, and rekana, just as it authorizes and supports the occupation of place, knowledge, and philosophy of existence of other Papua New Guineans. Oral tradition regulates and maintains existence for indigenous people. However, because the major mode of discourse in these cultures is oral, it is vulnerable to the more powerful written discourse, which has subsumed it and superimposed its own reality.

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3

Colonizing Location: Representing Colonial Space

This chapter discusses European representation of colonial Papua New Guinea space. It argues that imperial engagement with Papua New Guinean society is, on one significant level, a struggle over the representation of place. The previous discussion of indigenous representations of place provides us with a model for the operation of colonial representation in general. For in nearly all cases, indigenous representations are erased and overwritten by a dominant colonial representation. In his influential thesis about how naming functions in turning aboriginal space into colonial place in Australia, Paul Carter described the erasure of indigenous constructions of place and the imposition of colonialist place on a space that was construed as empty (1987). The same palimpsestic process applies to the incursion of colonial discourse on colonized space throughout the world, and it is particularly obvious in Papua New Guinea. The unequal relations of power operating in the colonial occupation of the country meant that the colonialist construction of place inevitably led to the writing over of any preexisting culturally constructed place. But this erasure was never complete and uncontested, and this tension affects the processes of representation in Papua New Guinea to the present day. Landscape and place were immediately represented in ambivalent terms by colonialist discourse: mysterious, exotic, romantic, and idyllic on the one hand, and harsh, inhospitable, untamed, corrupted, and fatal on the other. This ambivalent construction vacillated between idealization and demonization, stemming from European fear of the unfamiliar. Anne McClintock noted that the cannibal trope was central in symbolizing European trepidations about the unknown: “As in many imperial scenes, the fear of engulfment expresses itself most acutely in the cannibal trope. In this familiar trope, the fear of being engulfed by the unknown is projected onto colonized peoples as their determination to devour the intruder whole” (1995, 27; italics in original). Thus, 49

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“A pleasant bend.” Illustration by Hume Nisbet, The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (London, 1888), facing page 227.

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the indigenous people were cast in the European view as the ultimate degradation: cannibals. As McClintock explained, “With the word cannibal, cartographers attempted to ward off the threat of the unknown by naming it” (1995, 27). Extending the phobia, the primitiveness of the place and landscape was portrayed as leading white men to madness and savagery. Louis Becke, for instance, wrote that “the great danger in New Guinea was the barbarous land’s corruptive power over the civilized man’s normally superior morality” (Krauth ed 1982, 56). For Europeans, then, the penetration of the Papua New Guinean landscape meant an inevitable exposure to the corrupting and disorienting power of the country and its savagery. This sinister and threatening power became, understandably, a dominant theme in white writing, particularly during the Second World War. But paradoxically, the inhospitable, corrupting landscape also offered itself as the ideal place for white adventure, a wilderness in which boys of the empire could become men. Elleke Boehmer posited that from the earliest days of European exploration, perspectives on other cultures and peoples “continued to be directed through the prisms of inherited tropes: Utopia, or the lawless wilderness; the Noble Savage or the unregenerate Primitive” (1995, 44–45). This ambivalent landscape provided a space for constituting, confirming, and empowering white masculinity and manliness. The process by which indigenous inhabitants and their landscape were constructed as repulsive and yet desirable is a major paradox of colonialist representation.

“Overwriting” the Indigenous Representation of Place and Landscape Colonial space was brought under European surveillance by being treated either as a tabula rasa (blank sheet) or as a palimpsest (a tablet or parchment reused after earlier writing has been erased). The latter view was particularly apt for colonial Papua New Guinea, which, because of its geographical difficulties, language difficulties, and unsuitability for European settlement, became a surface to be overwritten by colonial inscriptions. A primary function of European descriptions of the Papua New Guinean landscape was to suppress any sense of indigenous people’s presence. Where their presence was acknowledged at all, it was debased by terms such as “bush kanaka,” “hausboi,” and “manki masta.” Simon Ryan underlined one of the processes through which landscape was constructed by European explorers: “one of the powerful myths of exploration is that knowledge-gathering takes place through the explorer’s seeing ‘new’ land for the first time. In this myth the explorer accurately describes new land that he sees. But far from being

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a fresh and innocent transcription of the natural world, the discursive construction in the journals of what is seen by the explorers is generated by already existing cultural formations” (1996, 54). Ryan’s point—echoing Paul Carter, who argued that landscapes were invented through the white explorers’ naming and mapping of geographical features they perceived (1987, 51–53)—reveals how landscape was constructed by European discourse. Explorers blatantly ignored or erased preexisting indigenous names and, more profoundly, their associated cultural values and traditions. (Re)naming is an act of imperial incorporation—a unilateral redefinition of the environments previously named, claimed, and inhabited. Hawaiian activist and academic Haunani-Kay Trask has argued that, for indigenous peoples, the colonialist acts of naming constituted theft of lands already settled by others and imbued with a human history (1993, 136). Although it was a re-discovery, the European explorers’ “discovery” became permanent, backed as it was by powerful discourses, including scientific epistemology (social Darwinism), guns, and literacy. As Paul Carter put it: “For by the act of place-naming, space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a space with a history. And, by the same token, the namer inscribes his passage permanently on the world, making a metaphorical word-place which others may one day inhabit and by which, in the meantime, he asserts his own place in history” (1987, xxiv). Most importantly, in the process of colonial place naming, preexisting indigenous names, and therefore histories, were silenced and subverted. To name places was to invent them, to cast them in a new cultural and political frame. In many cases, therefore, the imposed European place-names are culturally detached. Many examples of this process can be found in contemporary Papua New Guinea. For instance, one of the islands off Bougainville has the traditional name of Mono. It was subsequently renamed Treasury Island by Europeans, and today this island appears on maps with the European name. While the traditional name has local cultural and social significance, the European name has a significance directly related to colonial history. In many other instances, European naming ignorantly lumped together places that had more than one indigenous name. Port Moresby, for example, encompasses local names like Idubada, Koke, and Ela. In cases where local names have been retained, they have been anglicized. Ela Beach in Port Moresby is a case in point. The local pronunciation of Ela is “Era,” but the name had subsequently been anglicized, with an “l” replacing the “r.” The underlying point is that the renaming of local places with European names was part of the process of imperial claiming of colonial lands and the establishment of imperial authority over these places.

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“Port Moresby.” Illustration by Hume Nisbet, The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (London, 1888), facing page 269.

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Early colonization has left its mark wherever it was imposed through the act of naming. In today’s Papua New Guinea, one finds a litany of nomenclature, remnants of early colonization, in names such as “New Britain,” “New Ireland,” “Port Moresby,” “Milne Bay,” “Fly River,” “Fairfax Harbour,” “Hunter Street,” and “Sir Hubert Murray Stadium.” Mary Louise Pratt wrote about how the act of naming brought together religious and geographical projects, “as emissaries claimed the world by baptizing landmarks and geographical formations with Euro-Christian names” (1992, 33). The Saint Matthias Group of islands off the New Ireland Province, Espiritu Santo and Pentecost in Vanuatu, and Santa Cruz and San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands not only make “knowable” physical spaces, but also relate them to “known” European histories (and religious personalities), imposing a particular spirituality and nationality on them in the process. Tony Birch asserted that the essential reason why Europeans attach little value to names is that they see themselves as unchallengeable. Again, quoting Paul Carter (1987, 2, xiv), Birch wrote: “This is because ‘we,’ feeling imperially secure, and ignorant of the presence of another culture and history, see ‘not a historical space’ that may be contested, and may contain multiple histories, but a ‘historical fact . . . as if it was always there.’ The cultures of indigenous people are relegated to ‘prehistory’ and the ‘ancient,’ allowing only for meta-historical myths, located outside the boundaries of ‘historical facts,’ which support imperial domination” (Birch 1996, 176). Birch highlighted the arrogance of Europeans when dealing with nonindigenous people. Non-Europeans are considered inferior and therefore are not engaged with on a basis of equality. The fact that lands were already settled by indigenous people is erased when they are rediscovered by Europeans. As Ryan argued, “For discovery to be possible, all knowledge of the land must be denied, including prior [indigenous] knowledge” (1996, 23). Boehmer argued further that the descriptions provided by explorers, navigators, travelers, and others gave “reality” to these unknown lands, however incomplete or biased such descriptions may have been. These descriptions formed a basis, as “factual accounts,” for European constructions of “history” (see discussion in Boehmer 1995, 49–50). Furthermore, as Pratt noted, descriptions of scientific explorations became “a source of some of the most powerful ideational and ideological apparatuses through which Europeans citizenries related themselves to other parts of the world” (1992, 23). In fact, it was the initial “observations” and the impressions of early Europeans, whether they were explorers, writers, or naturalists, that made the most fundamental and lasting impression on the European imagination. Conversely, the European “discoverers” ignored indigenous meaning, because they

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could not make sense of it. They could not know the Others—the landscape and its inhabitants—because they were outside their conceptual and linguistic horizons; the explorers had no language with which to represent places and experiences that were new to them. To compensate for difficulties in representation, the landscapes were made to resemble “already known pictures,” that is, “the ‘new’ landscapes are never seen as new but as versions of previously known ones” (Ryan 1996, 62; italics in original). According to Bernard Smith, the naturalists who accompanied Captain Cook in his voyages of exploration in the Pacific, Joseph Banks and Daniel Carl Solander, found it difficult to use existing botanical classifications in documenting the natural world they found. For example, on the Endeavor voyage, “Solander described all the new plants collected and attempted to classify them, but the vast amount of new and strange material created major problems in classification. His notebooks abound with erasures and cancellations of specific and generic names first allotted to the specimens collected” (B Smith 1989, 18). Despite attempts to translate unfamiliar landscapes, “the original ‘script’ of that unfamiliarity was doomed to remain inaccessible” (Boehmer 1995, 93). In many instances, the alien landscapes were overwhelmingly enigmatic. They seemed devoid of any sense of civilization, humanness, or meaning: a blank. As Ryan put it, “the textualisation of the landscape by the explorers reifies space as a blank text, ready to be inscribed on by the impending colonial process” (1996, 123; italics in original). Inscription was a way of bringing these alien landscapes into knowability and existence. The essential component in rendering alien landscapes visible and hence knowable is the language of colonial discourse. As the authors of The Empire Writes Back pointed out: “One of the main features of imperial oppression is the control over language. . . . Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’ and ‘reality’ become established” (Ashcroft and others 1989, 7). The languages of imperial discourse and discovery were written languages, unlike the languages of indigenous cultures. As the medium of colonial power, the colonialist languages marginalized the languages of the indigenous people. In Papua New Guinea during the early periods of colonization, the only sanctioned languages in schools were English for Papua and German for German New Guinea. School pupils who were caught speaking their local languages were punished severely. If language is a bearer of culture, as Ngu ˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o has argued, then English and the other languages of the dominating powers were important means of suppressing local culture and imparting colonial culture on the indigenous population:

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the encounter between English and most so-called Third World languages did not occur under conditions of independence and equality. English, French, and Portuguese came to the Third World to announce the arrival of the Bible and the sword. They came clamouring for gold, black gold in chains, or gold that shines as sweat in factories and plantations. If it was the gun which made possible the mining of this gold and which effected the political captivity of their owners, it was language which held captive their cultures, their values, and hence their minds. The latter was attempted in two ways, both of which are part of the same process. The first was to suppress the languages of the captive nations. The culture and the history carried by these languages were thereby thrown onto the rubbish heap and left to perish. . . . Our languages were suppressed so that we, the captives, would not have our own mirrors in which to observe ourselves and our enemies. The second mode of captivation was that of elevating the language of the conqueror. (1993, 31–32)

In Ngu ˜ gı˜’s view, the imperial languages were essentially colonial implements, employed to subjugate the indigenous people in a number of ways, including religious proselytism and economic, social, political, and cultural control. Ngu ˜ gı˜ has characterized the extent of this control of the indigene as the “colonization of the mind” (1986, 1993). The English language in particular has had a profound impact on indigenous cultures, installing new modes of inscription and cultural frames of reference. The power of the written word and the emphasis on its superiority over indigenous languages soon erased the histories of those whose cultures were oral. Oral tradition as the basis of indigenous peoples’ cultures was subsumed and erased by the colonial written culture, whose records in their material form were then preserved in libraries and archives. We employ language to define and construct our world and also to analyze and understand it. Language does not merely link meanings to sounds or merely communicate meaning. It defines and designs meanings, and more powerfully, it constructs beliefs, epistemologies, culture, and power. A group of texts can be used together to create whole new worlds of knowledge and meaning, especially when these texts have the support of important social institutions. If there is reality beyond language, it is one that we are not always able to comprehend. However, this does not mean that there is but one way of knowing or interpreting reality. Again, the point made by Ashcroft and his coauthors is worth noting: “the ‘world’ as it exists ‘in’ language is an unfolding reality which owes its relationship to language to the fact that language interprets the world in practice. . . . Language exists, therefore, neither before the fact

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nor after the fact but in the fact” (1989, 44). While this may be true for every culture, written cultures tend to dominate cultures that are oral in the sense that José Rabasa has argued (in discussing Mercator’s Atlas): “The written solidifies locations while supplying meaning to the visual. . . . Inscriptions precede and determine the visibility of the contour, but they also flesh out the abstract frame” (1995, 361). Because of their writing culture, European explorers had the upper hand in the process of discovery and subsequent colonization. Their written language gave permanence to the act and process of imperial inscription. They were able to record, translate, and “civilize” the environment by textualizing it into European codes, making it widely knowable. Because indigenous representation of place and landscape was oral in nature, both in transmission and its repository, it was quickly dominated, subsumed, and erased. Thus we can say that Papua New Guinea, as it is generally thought of today, is an invention of the West— meaning that when Europeans first came to the country, they had to create a conceptual framework in order to make sense of the landscape and to record their discovery. They recognized no history or civilization prior to their actions. Records of the contacts between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples have always been asymmetrical, as far as whose accounts are most accessible. Oral accounts of the events have been handed down within specific societies and, given the diverse social groups that “owned” Papua New Guinea, there are a plethora of accounts, which are difficult to access except through the writings of others. And so, all most people have is the European side of these encounters, which is often highly biased. While it is true that every culture constructs its own understanding of reality according to the conceptual frameworks available to its members, it is almost impossible to access the reaction from the non-European point of view at the time of “first contact” because of the indigenous cultures’ oral transmissions of such encounters and the mediation of the accounts by the changing societies over time. Abdul JanMohamed has stated that literacy and writing, by recording particular facts, “will not allow memory, the major mode of temporal mediation in oral cultures, to eliminate facts that are not consonant with or useful for contemporary needs” (1983, 280). While his point is acceptable in general terms, perhaps the point that needs to be accentuated is that because of the different cultural, political, economic, and social needs of European cultures and indigenous cultures, what might be considered useful in one culture may not be so in another. This is even true today, where usefulness can differ for some so-called developing countries compared to other, developed countries. Whether there are, in fact, societies that have remained immune to globalization, as may be the case in remote parts of Papua New Guinea, I argue that

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global culture remains open to local inflections, which demonstrate the agency of the subjects in those societies. JanMohamed has posited that literacy “also destroys the immediacy of personal experience and the deeper socialization of the world and consequently the totalizing nature of oral cultures” (1983, 280). On this point I acquiesce. The writing culture has depersonalized and denied many of the experiences that defined oral cultures.

Textual Construction of Place In his book The Rhetoric of Empire (1993), David Spurr proposed that writing is an act of colonization. The first step is looking, being a witness (Spurr 1993, 13). Then begins the process of inscribing words on what is considered to be a blank sheet, a void, to historicize it and give it meaning. Spurr argued, “When we speak of the role of the eye in establishing knowledge of the world and authority over space, we are referring to a fundamental characteristic of Western thinking”; this “makes possible an understanding of the non-Western world as an object of study, an area for development, a field of action” (1993, 25). Following Hegel, Spurr noted that by fixing reality, writing creates “the objective self-image of a people necessary for the creation of new institutions” (1993, 98). Piling words on a subject implies that one has knowledge about the subject. As Said put it, to have knowledge about something is to have authority over that something (1978, 32). One of the primary (if not always overt) objectives of nonindigenous literature is to support the colonial enterprise, especially the sociopolitical apparatus put in place in the colony. Nonindigenous literature ensures that the unequal relationship between the colonizer and the colonized is maintained through the production of negative knowledge about the colonized. It “offers the spectacle of a society reproducing itself, ceaselessly representing to itself its own history and beliefs, repeatedly asserting its invincibility” (Boehmer 1995, 67). Often the world of nonindigenous literature is a world of white people, almost devoid of indigenous characters. It is a world in which colonial rule is part of the order of things. “Colonialist texts are littered with images of nameless threat and trauma: of inertia and impossible immensity, of places of engulfing darkness and overwhelming enigma, recalcitrant peoples, unbreachable jungles, vast wastelands, huge and shapeless crowds” (Boehmer 1995, 94). This is a process Gayatri Spivak has termed “Othering” (1985). Through the process of the gaze and surveillance, the landscape and its inhabitants are invested with meaning, which is usually subordinating and demeaning (Spurr 1993, 18). The aestheticization of the landscape and the people is a way of Othering, as it involves “distantiation, transformation,

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privilege, displacement, consumption, and alienation” (Spurr 1993, 59). These processes imbue the country with certain social reality, maintaining a European stranglehold over non-European landscapes and their peoples by construing them and bringing them into social definition. Early nonindigenous literature was very much integral to British imperialism and included a political agenda that tended to valorize the assumed superiority of the Europeans. Martin Green described the adventure tale genre as the energizing battery for English imperialism, and suggested further that this genre “charged England’s will with the energy to go out into the world and explore, conquer, and rule” (Green 1979, 3, quoted in Brantlinger 1988, 11). During the nineteenth century Britain was trying to protect itself against domestic class conflict and, in Patrick Brantlinger’s words, “the corrosive effects of popular reform and democratization”; the shift toward racially driven themes was a way of deflecting problems at home while at the same time maintaining “fantasies of aristocratic authority at home and abroad” (1988, 35). Therefore from the 1870s onward, around the time of the “scramble for Africa,” colonialist writers concerned themselves with themes that endeavored to maintain and restore the supremacy of Europeans. As Brantlinger put it: “In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes of domestic conflict” (1988, 12). Outsiders learned about Papua New Guinea landscape and people mainly through such texts. In the very early stages, around the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was through the descriptions of explorers and navigators, logbook entries, and reports to geographical societies that the islands took geographical and ideological shape in the minds of outsiders. These exercises of writing and inscription projected a new reality on to a formerly unacknowledged landscape and people. This new reality, textualizing the indigene as Other, was “produced and reproduced through ideological, institutional, interactive, and linguistic practices that support a particular construction of difference” (Dominguez 1994, 334). In spite of any pretence at proffering objective or universal insights about the landscape, these writings were based on particular doctrines relating to the interests of particular groups. Such stories became “an active agency constructing and perpetuating a view of the world in which British imperialism was an integral part of the cultural and psychological formation of each new generation of readers” (Richards 1989, 3). When we consider the striking continuity between supposedly “factual” texts by explorers, travelers, and geographers, and the fiction of nineteenth-century writers, we begin to understand the relevance of

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“A trading station.” Illustration by Hume Nisbet, The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (London, 1888), facing page 23.

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Foucault’s concept of discourse as a securely bounded area of social knowledge. As we saw when we examined the “fraudulent” texts about PNG exploration in chapter 1, the distinction between fact and fiction in the construction of colonial space is not as important as the rules of inclusion and exclusion that characterize the discourse. Both fictional and factual writing propound the preconceptions, biases, ideas, and values of the metropolitan centers, all of which are tightly controlled by the discourse of imperialism, the civilizing mission, and Eurocentrism. At the same time, such writing was central to the shaping of colonial myths and identities, as are clearly found in early nonindigenous literature on Papua New Guinea. The discursive construction of colonialist mythology, supported by the power of its writing and publishing technologies, constructed the primitive and alien space of colonized Papua New Guinea in terms of images that have been difficult to dislodge. The descriptions of the country in explorers’ diaries and logbooks, heightened by the “cult of discovery” in Britain, sparked a public appetite for stories set in new lands. The earliest nonindigenous fiction set in Papua New Guinea was published in the 1860s when the country, especially the interior, was still relatively unknown. As Nigel Krauth noted, “Fiction too was required to respond to the fervour for discovery, to allow those confined to Victorian drawing-rooms a vicarious participation in the widening of the Empire’s horizon” (1982b, 13). The project of representing and (re)naming the primitive landscape meant rendering the people virtually invisible in all but the most stereotyped images, and obliterating their culture, social practices, and history. Many of the earliest writings about Papua New Guinea (and even later ones) exemplify this argument. Obvious examples are Edward Cole’s Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails (1873), Henry Crocker’s Adventures in New Guinea (1888), both discussed in chapter 1, as well as Louis Becke’s Yorke the Adventurer (1901), and more recent works such as Bamber Gascoigne’s Murgatreud’s Empire (1972) and Jean Bedford’s A Lease of Summer (1990). Several major themes characterize the representation of the Papua New Guinean landscape: first, it is romanticized as idyllic and Edenic; second, it is inhospitable, harsh, and threatening; third, its primitiveness is viewed as leading white men to madness and savagery; and finally, despite the foregoing, it is considered an ideal location for adventure, a place in which imperial boys become men. Like the Papua New Guinean landscape, which many early writers portrayed as pristine and uncontaminated, the inhabitants of the country were also at times idealized; although they were rarely characterized as “noble savages,” they were sometimes depicted as living in an Edenic state of purity and simplicity. The noble savage myth has its origin in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that the original humans, or “savages” as he sometimes called them, lived in a “state of

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nature . . . with few needs, and, in consequence, few passions” (Cranston 1991, 296). They lived by instinct, happily, freely, and without moral problems, unlike the Europeans in civilized society. Rousseau argued that civilized men encountered many problems because of their many wants and needs, which were brought about by their participation in civilized society. As he put it, “As soon as men began to value one another, and the idea of consideration had got a footing in the mind, everyone put in his claim to it, and it became impossible to refuse it to any with impunity” (Rousseau 1913, 197–198). In contrast, indigenous people were represented “in terms of natural species . . . as part of the natural world” (Spurr 1993, 156–157). If we were to subscribe to Rousseau’s definition of the noble savage, Polynesians might fit well into the category, because often when Europeans encountered them they were passive in their reception of these outsiders. Although to a large extent, Papua New Guineans also practiced peaceful nonaggression, those who were aggressive in such encounters could not be considered noble savages. The production of knowledge about primitive and exotic places was an invitation to imperial powers to extend their control over them. The idyllic natural state represented what Europe had lost: the premodern simplicity of Nature itself, ideal, pure, and unsullied. As we saw in chapter 1, the Papua New Guinean landscape was idealized by many of the early nonindigenous writers. G Manville Fenn did likewise in his 1885 narrative, Bunyip Land: It was a glorious walk past quiet bends of the river that were as still as ponds, and full of red and white lotus plants which shot up their lovely blossoms from amidst their floating liliaceous leaves. Trees in places overhung the water, and great wreaths of blossoms or leaves of dazzling green were reflected on the surface. Insect life was abundant: burnished beetles and lovely coloured butterflies flitting from flower to flower. Birds, too, especially waders and great creatures that I took to be pelicans, were busy in the shallows, where now and then a great crocodile wallowed through the mud, evidently roused by our approach, for though we saw several of these creatures, not one gave the slightest sign of a disposition to attack. (1885, 119–120)

Fenn’s landscape is pristine and uncontaminated. This primitive space is almost untouched by humans, an untamed, dreamlike wilderness. At the same time, it is fraught with danger from the wildlife, although in this case the threat of crocodile attack is avoided. In many instances when the Papua New Guinean landscape is depicted as beautiful and exotic, it is empty of people. This is because the general perception of the people as savages challenges the Edenic view of the landscape. This treatment is not universal, but it occurs commonly enough to demon-

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strate the very strong link between attitudes toward the landscape and perceptions about its human occupants. A similar description of the landscape is found in Theodore Bevan’s 1890 account Toil, Travel, and Discovery in British New Guinea. Bevan was one of the first Europeans to venture up the Fly River. His description of the landscape can be said to be “picturesque.” Describing nonEuropean landscapes in the picturesque mode was a widespread practice in the Victorian period, and its purpose was to eliminate the threatening aspects of alien landscapes. Simon Ryan explained: “The ‘picturesque’ works to delimit the continuity of the universe, to produce a frame which makes a text of the landscape so that it may be read and compared to the ideal. Framing landscape, and labelling it picturesque, combats its threatening vastness and unfamiliarity and demonstrates the triumphant portability of visual taste; it also defers the opening of the aesthetic process to native adaptations” (1996, 60). The construction of a scene as picturesque in the main acts as bait to attract European settlers to the place. The aestheticization of the landscape is always juxtaposed with a familiar conceptual framework. Thus the unfamiliar can be made part of Europeans’ cultural knowledge and circulation. Bevan’s depiction of Papua New Guinea fits this mold, suggesting the promise of paradise cast in European terms. According to Bevan, the country was reputed to be: a land of gold, yet where a fig of tobacco would buy more than a nugget of the precious metal had power to purchase; . . . a land containing fertilising streams, and millions of acres of glorious grass capable of fattening multitudes of cattle, yet where neither flocks nor herds are known; . . . a great rich summer land “where the skies drop continual fatness,” yet but sparsely inhabited by a few inferior coloured races, engaged in the sanguinary work of mutual extermination. (1890, 3)

Bevan’s picturesque vocabulary frames a pastoral landscape, which is subtly juxtaposed to the primitivity of the natives. At the same time, the indigenous savagery is knitted cleverly into the passage to invoke their unworthiness as inheritors of the land, thereby highlighting the economic potential of the country and its availability to European settlers. As an attempt to attract European settlement, the portrait of the landscape is more an appraisal than a description, and later in the passage it becomes clear that if the land was attractive it was simultaneously “ripe for transformation into wealth.” Like most of the travel books on Papua New Guinea, Bevan’s account romanticizes a pastoral scene and employs the trope of the island paradise. From the beginning, a litany of ambivalent images confronts readers. In the first instance, Bevan was preoccupied with the landscape; the opening pages of the book are littered with descriptions of

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the landscape, almost devoid of people. The writing continues in the picturesque mode: The very name of New Guinea in those days conjured up to my eager mind a vision of some garden of the Hesperides—or shall we say New Fortunate Islands?—a vague, vast wonderland, where, in one form or another, the adventures of the Arthurian age might be eclipsed in this prosaic nineteenth century. . . . While sailing along the fine bold coast (characterized by lofty headlands, interspersed with lovely little coves and deep, deliciouslooking bays) I, for the first time, beheld rich groves of the feathery coco-nut palm, overshadowing native villages which nestled at the foot of grassy, round-topped, swelling hills, and could feast my eyes on a wealth of tropical form and colouring never before imagined, not even in my most vivid dreams of the isles of the Southern Seas. A truly beautiful picture, with the sun shining upon it there; a right fair home for an ever-vexed race. (1890, 6, 8–9)

The use of words from Greek mythology and those evoking the romantic and idyllic, like “gardens of the Hesperides,” “wonderland,” “deliciouslooking bays,” “vivid dreams,” “lovely little coves,” “a truly beautiful picture,” paints the landscape as picturesque and Edenic, a primal and pastoral site, ready for occupation. Bevan’s proprietorial attitude is very clear in the last sentence. The subtext is the invitation to Europeans to exploit this uninhabited land. Even if it was inhabited, the locals obviously did not know how to make use of land, that is, how to turn it into agricultural use. Bevan’s depiction of the indigenous people as savages disqualifies them from consideration as possible owners of the land (see discussion in Ryan 1996, 158–160). Bevan’s primary concern in carrying out exploration work in the Fly River was similar to that of earlier European explorers: My object was an essentially practical one, viz. not only to be the first to work on scenes hidden from other eyes, and to discover what none had seen before, but also to find ready means of access to the “higher levels,” where a climate suitable for European settlement alone might likely be found. (1890, 187)

Apparent in the statement is the proprietary interest behind his exploration of the country. Bevan, like other European explorers, saw himself as an authority and a conveyor of knowledge, discovering “new” places, imposing reality on a hitherto uninscribed environment. He did not discover anything new—but, like most European explorers, he superimposed white history on an already inhabited and claimed landscape. Hume Nisbet was possibly the only early colonial writer to depict Papua New Guineans as well as their environment in a positive light.

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His distrust of the civilizing process led him to the untenable thesis that traditional cultures can always remain unsullied. He failed to comprehend that cultures are continuously in a state of flux. His opposition to those he saw as agents for corrupting Papua New Guinea culture and lifestyle was based on a somewhat patronizing assumption of the idyllic nature of local life, which led him to construct the landscape in Edenic terms. In the preface to his 1888 novel Land of the Hibiscus Blossom: A Yarn of the Papuan Gulf, Nisbet wrote: Looking on the savages of New Guinea from a material standpoint, I think that they are much more comfortable as they now are than are our English poor—indeed, than many of our English middle-classes who are fighting so madly for an existence, while they, the natives, bask away luxuriously on their coral-fringed and sunny strands. (1888, ix)

Nisbet was unequivocal about the destructive nature of western civilization; he romanticized the country and presented traditional cultures in an unadulterated and pristine state. In the preface to his novel, he quoted Professor John Ruskin, who believed “that what the savage gains from religion and civilization is not equivalent to his own benefits when left alone” (Nisbet 1888, ix). This view, echoing Rousseau’s ideas, envisaged indigenous people as living freely and innocently without European interference. Nisbet aestheticized the local people and presented their lifestyle and culture as idyllic, but this idealization was clearly integral to the process of “contamination” by colonial discourse of which he was inevitably a part. Nisbet could not conceptualize the landscape in any other way than through the visual frame and the language of the European discourse within which he constructed his representations. His depiction of Hula village repeatedly compares the place with the beauty of Europe, a strategy seen earlier in the example from Bevan’s travel writing. Hula, the native town, on the sea, where houses stand out from the shore on their tall piles, and the highways are, like the highways of Venice, blue ocean. On shore the Sistu tribe resides, surrounded by orchards and lovely gardens, with the lofty mountains of the mainland soaring up to the clouds and hiding the vast aerial mysteries of yet unexplored Owen Stanley ranges. . . . It is a rest-day at Hula, and they are enjoying the glory of the sun, cooled by the strong sea-breeze, in the way they like best—wrestling, sailing their large and small vessels about, practising with the bow or spear, running races, smoking, telling tales, or making love to the girls who are cutting up the taro, yams, and bananas for the modest mid-day meal. (Nisbet 1888, 55–56)

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“Hula.” Illustration by Hume Nisbet, The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (London, 1888), facing page 55.

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This pastoral description portrays the village of Hula as a microcosm of an idealized Papua New Guinean character, beautiful and unspoiled. Here the inhabitants are not portrayed as savages unable to overcome their natural disposition to cannibalism, lying, and warfare. This portrayal is clearly consonant with Rousseau’s idea of the noble savage, paraphrased by Maurice William Cranston: “In the state of nature man is good; but there is no question of his being virtuous or vicious. He is happy, free, innocent, and that is all” (1991, 298). This construct has always accompanied western colonial expansion and remains an essential part of the dominating European discourse, the flip side of the “wild man” archetype. In Nisbet’s Rousseauan idyll, the white man is an intruder into the landscape who disturbs the “unsullied purity” of Papua New Guinea. The harmony of the idealized environment and the inhabitants are thrown into chaotic disorder by new intruders: the white men. Nisbet viewed the relationship between the environment and its inhabitants as procedural, an order that would be broken when alien influences intruded. Therefore, although Nisbet’s novel still perpetuates the idea of the idyll and remains conceptually consistent with dominant tropes of European discourse, his patronizing idealism might be said, to some extent, to counter arguments that seek to justify domination as necessary for European protection. Lewis Lett and Charles D Rowley, one writing during the Second World War and the other just prior to independence, depicted the landscape in quite the opposite way from Nisbet, as inhospitable, untamed, and harsh. Lett, a longtime resident of Papua New Guinea, saw the country as mysterious and dangerous. Lett’s descriptions contrast with earlier portrayals of the landscape as paradise, strongly suggesting a process of demonization and a sense of apprehension: Whether one approaches Papua eastward from the Torres Straits or northward from Cairns, the first impression is the same. . . . It is not the clear, intangible blue of the mountains in New South Wales and Victoria, but a darker, denser shade that hints of mystery and hidden danger. . . . Papua is a hard country, in whatever aspect one may regard it. . . . It is a cruel country in the obstacles that it presents to travel and transport; it is cruel in the manner in which it flaunts promises in men’s faces and withholds all reward for utmost effort and personal sacrifice, cruel in the rarity of its cultivable lands and the ephemeral richness of its soil, and perhaps most cruel of all in the nature of its inhabitants. . . . There was a thrill in the sight of them. Many times before I had seen hills rising from the sea, the distant, cloud-like announcement

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of land, in all the continents, and from all the oceans. But never had I seen a line of hills that gave out such sinister threat, such suggestion of actively malign power as did these. (1944, 1–3)

For Lett, the country was paradoxically inviting and promising, yet almost impossibly challenging, and tantalizingly unfamiliar. A recurrent feature of his and other such writings is the comparison between the known and the unknown; Lett, for example, contrasted the mountains he encountered in Papua New Guinea with those he knew in Australia as a way of framing the perceived savageness and threatening mystery of the country. Like Lett, Rowley depicted the country as a threatening space, wild and untamed. Through their images, these two writers highlighted Papua New Guinea’s Otherness and difference from the Australian landscape. This is how Charles Rowley described the landscape in The New Guinea Villager, first published in 1966: After being in New Guinea for a while, I am overwhelmed on returning by the grandeur of sheer space. In Australia one may, as perhaps in no other country, look out through clear air to the very horizon. But in New Guinea the denser atmosphere, and in many places steep land slopes, the ranges behind ranges towering so much higher than those in Australia; the rain forest; the kunai grass, which may stand well over a man’s head, limits one’s vision, so that the physical environment seems to bear down upon one. . . . This is very different from the parts of Australia where most people live, and where so much has been done to tame nature. The conditions for this do not exist in New Guinea. The machines which function so well in the temperate zones rust, grow fungus, and break down in the wet tropics unless they receive very special care. The same kind of thing happens to people. The bodily mechanism which produces a cooling bath of sweat in the humid heat breaks down when one seeks solace in alcohol, which increases body temperature. (1972, 12)

The implication in the above passage is that the country is available for taming, however difficult that might be. The fact that the author was a former professor at the University of Papua New Guinea and the fact that this book was first published in the 1960s combine to underline how persistent and compelling are the discursive features that have governed expatriate descriptions of the country for over a century. Rowley’s passage also ignores the indigenous inhabitants in a way that confirms the country’s designation as tabula rasa. Like a parent whose responsibility is to socially inscribe the child’s consciousness, the European sets out to tame the primitive space. But the technology

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of that taming, “the machines which function so well in the temperate zones,” are as vulnerable as the whites themselves to the hostile climate and environment, revealing a gap between the European expectations of “development” and the capacity to fulfil them. Yet this portrayal of the Papua New Guinean landscape as overwhelming simultaneously paves the way for its colonization, its control, “improvement,” and “civilization.” This not only means developing its economic potential but also imposing European political and cultural institutions. While both Lett and Rowley touched on the dangers inherent in the PNG landscape, Rowley went further, presenting it as diseased. He repeatedly pointed up the vulnerability of its inhabitants, who, like the machines, become victims of the “uncivilized” climate. One must develop a tough skin to avoid involvement in the human tragedies of the tropical world. Malaria is a very common killer of New Guineans and the indirect cause of early death. Hookworm flourishes. There are common and often fatal diseases of the digestive system, leprosy, filariasis, yaws, “grilli,” a repulsive infection of the skin which turns it from glossy brown to dead-white scurf flakes. (Rowley 1972, 12–13)

It is a very short leap from perceiving vulnerability to tropical diseases to representing the landscape itself as diseased, the environment itself a source of contamination for the Europeans.

Ambivalent Representations of an Imagined Land The first three nonindigenous writers to write fiction set in Papua New Guinea were Edward William Cole, Marcus Clarke, and the Reverend Henry Crocker (H C M Watson). These three writers had never set foot on Papua New Guinea soil, and at the time of their writing, the country was virtually unknown to Europeans; “the island . . . sat, a virtual blank on the map to the north of Australia, its coastline only partially charted, its interior a mystery” (Krauth ed 1982, xiii). This absence of knowledge on the part of outsiders allowed the early writers to exercise their imaginations freely, without any necessary regard for distinctions between fact and fiction. Krauth noted this: “Not surprisingly, the first images of New Guinea in Australian literature were the products of fancy. The imagined interior created by Cole, Clarke, and Crocker/ Watson, were bizarre distortions of unvisited New Guinea’s reality, but were nevertheless shaped by Australian cultural preoccupations at that time” (Krauth ed 1982, xiii). The fiction of such writers was based on imagination grounded in the ideological, cultural, and social preoccupations of their societies, and formed by the discourse of the exotic. Cole’s satirical Account of

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a Race of Human Beings with Tails is a case in point. Narrated in the third person, in a journalistic style with frequent authorial intrusions, it reports a race of human beings possessing tails, discovered by a Mr Jones in the interior of Papua New Guinea. The story begins with an invocation of science and the first page reads like a science journal. There is no dialogue involved. What is apparent is the imposing image of the omnipresent and omnipotent protagonist, Mr Jones, who typifies what Boehmer called the “elevated [European] observer,” acting as “an arch-investigator in relation to whom the whole world was an object of scrutiny” (1995, 72). Through his eyes, Cole parodied the non-European characters: Mr. Jones found a community of men walking upon two legs but bent forward, with a considerable amount of hair on their bodies, long arms, claw-like fingers, and real tangible tails, more or less long. . . . When he first beheld them at a distance, he concluded by their form, attitude, and motions that they were a species of gorilla, remarkably approaching the human form. (1873, 5)

While Cole’s story is a classic example of early European perceptions of native peoples relegated to a subhuman category, the strangeness of the environment in which these people are situated is equally important. This is perhaps the significance of the story: the discovery of a race of human beings with tails is connected with the kind of landscape in which they had been found. The environment in the interior of Papua New Guinea is unusual, enigmatic, and weird. The environment is constructed as Other in the European perception with a causal link to the strange group of people discovered there. The strangeness of place is therefore constructed alongside the strangeness of the inhabitants, a process of Othering in Cole’s writing that is embedded in the racist thinking of imperial discourse. One of the many racist views of the 1800s was that blacks formed a different species. Social Darwinism, while holding the view that all races had a common origin, maintained that there were social categories of races: higher and lower, progressive and nonprogressive. Brantlinger reported that “Darwin himself speculated about the apparently inevitable extinction of primitive races in the encounter with higher ones” (1988, 187). Social Darwinism and scientific, evolutionistic ideas of racial distinction, development, and extinction were inherently part of the justificatory discourses of imperialism, including these nineteenthcentury writings about Papua New Guinea. For Cole, the PNG landscape was an uncivilized environment inhabited by subhuman species, and there was no place for civilized humans. Cole’s fantastic construction can be attributed to early enigmatic perceptions of its unknown and unknowable qualities. It fits well within

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JanMohamed’s definition of colonialist literature as “an exploration and a representation of a world at the boundaries of ‘civilization,’ a world that has not (yet) been domesticated by European signification or codified in detail by its ideology” (1986, 83; quotation marks and parentheses in original). Clarke’s 1874 story “Gipsies of the Sea, or The Islands of Gold” is another fanciful portrayal of the country, but one exemplifying an ambivalent tension that is absent in Cole’s account. According to Krauth, “Gipsies” embodies a “mixture of Aztec splendour and Dyak barbarity” (Krauth ed 1982, 12). The narrative opens as “the schooner swung with flapping sails in the dangerous waters of the Papuan sea” (Clarke 1982, 13). From the opening the reader is confronted with negative and threatening adjectives: “dangerous,” “impenetrable,” “barbaric,” “savage monsters,” “unappeasable ferocity.” Yet, despite the negativity of the descriptions, there is an underlying desire for a new El Dorado in that mysterious Papua, an ambivalent place, glittering with gold, yet peopled by primitives. The story is essentially concerned with the mystery of the PNG interior. For it to remain a mystery, however, would diminish claims of entitlement by the European explorers clamoring to conquer it. Twentieth-century fictional depictions continued the ambivalent mix, representing the country as both repellent and desirable. In the “Prelude” to Gilbert Munro Turnbull’s novel Portrait of A Savage (1943), we find a strikingly ambivalent and unstable balance between opposing reactions: It is a harsh land of reeking swamps and sombre jungles; of grim and sullen mountain ranges and frightful valleys and sweeping plains; a tormented land under a perpetual quake of fear, ensorcerized by demons, ruled by the powers of darkness, dominated by the unseen. It is an enchanted land of incredible blue-veiled distances, of turquoise skies cloudless over sparkling seas that laugh as a woman laughs who shares something with you. It is a sordid and cruel land, rich and colourful, crude and infinitely varied; a syren [sic] of a land, an alluring wanton, a frowsy jade unspeakably repulsive; a mysterious land, beckoning and inscrutable; an evil land that white men curse with bitter emphasis when they live in it; yet ache for with an abysmal nostalgia when they leave it. It is a mirage of the Stone Age, a shadow of the past projected upon the present; a puzzle, a problem which not administrator, anthropologist or missionary has been able to explain. New Guinea! (1943, 11)

Such contradictions become hard to rationalize: equal parts revulsion (“harsh land of reeking swamps,” “sombre jungles,” “grim and sullen

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mountain ranges,” “frightful valleys,” “a tormented land under a perpetual quake of fear,” “ensorcerized by demons”) and desire (“enchanted land of incredible blue-veiled distances of turquoise skies cloudless over sparkling seas that laugh as a woman laughs who shares something with you,” “rich and colourful,” “a syren of a land,” and so forth). In Turnbull’s endeavor to portray the landscape as desirable, he feminizes it by evoking the ambivalent metaphor of the temptress. From one viewpoint, this accurately portrays the inherent unknowability of the landscape from a European perspective and reveals an ignorance of traditional land usage. From another perspective, this disjunction can be seen as typical of the kind of ambivalence that Bhabha found inherent in colonial discourse: “it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed” (1994, 66; italics in original). The ambivalence that is always threatening to colonial discourse, that slippage which always threatens to disrupt the certainty of colonial power, is paradoxically and simultaneously controlled and suppressed by the ambivalence of colonial representations of colonized space as both idyllic and dangerous. This is demonstrated by the varying representations of the Pacific islands by Cook’s artists on his three voyages: one artist delineates the islands as paradise, as the land of free love and easy living, while the other figures the same islands as the abode of savages and cannibals. Even more complex is the representation of explored or colonized space as both idyllic and dangerous within one discourse. Ambivalence also characterizes the way in which colonial discourse depicts the privileged position of the colonizer in relation to the colonized subject, a position that may be exploitative and nurturing (or represent itself as nurturing) at the same time (see Ashcroft 2001). In addition, the colonialist writers exercised privilege in relying on a considerable amount of guesswork and presented the most ludicrous imaginings of the country (Winduo 1991, 15). Marcus Clarke’s main preoccupation in “Gipsies of the Sea,” for instance, was not only the pioneering spirit of the white man but also the mystery surrounding a land that, presumably, had sat virtually unexplored for thousands of years. As a backdrop for his white characters to carry out their reckless adventures, the country had to be portrayed in a highly distorted fashion. Papua New Guinea became a colorful setting for an imperial myth of masculinity and self-aggrandizement overcoming the terror of raw nature. For the European explorer, the act of discovering may even be an act of “giving birth” to new lands and peoples, a metaphor found in Robert Nicole’s essay “Orientalising the South Pacific” (1993). Here

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the explorers’ ships are portrayed as “male reproductive technologies” in which men sailed through “all sorts of canals to finally give birth and deliver the ignorant foetus from the darkness of the womb into the light of a white male-dominated outside world” (Nicole 1993, 123). In many respects, this procreative dimension of exploration is pervasive in colonial discourse. In one sense this is quite valid, for colonial representations “gave birth” to a colonial reality at the margins of empire, responding to the images of darkness, danger, and primitivism that had characterized the representation of the non-European world since the beginning of mapmaking. That these images bore little resemblance to, and took no account of, the ways in which the indigenous peoples represented themselves indicates the extent to which representation is itself a function of the circulation and exercise of power. Literary responses that developed out of subsequent expeditions consolidated what early explorers—and indeed, the centuries-old discourse of Eurocentrism— had set in motion. As Boehmer noted, citing Paul Carter: “Symbolic gestures . . . brought a geography into being, [and] created a humanly viable landscape” (Boehmer 1995, 17). As argued earlier, codes and cultural baggage imported from Europe were imposed on alien cultures and natives who did not match them. Such descriptions of Papua New Guinea became, in the reading, a functioning knowledge of the country. The European construction of the PNG landscape operated to legitimate the project of expansion and exploitation. To “evoke their encounter with worlds that were difficult to describe and to rule, Europeans relied on (often stereotyped) images of threat and allure” (Boehmer 1995, 22; parentheses in original). In the act of “discovery,” Europeans relegated the native peoples (the initial inhabitants of the lands) to inferior status and their lands were labeled as vacant, without history and civilization. By installing and giving names to places, the European explorers were “thieving,” claiming lands that had been already claimed, occupied, defined, and historicized by the original inhabitants.

The Primitive Environment as the Realm of Madness and Savagery For all its character as a tabula rasa ready to be “discovered,” “developed,” and “civilized,” the primitive PNG environment was also dangerous, poised to lure civilized man into madness. Underlying Cole’s “discovery” of people with tails in the country is the assumed link between place and its human occupants and, particularly, the deleterious influence of the jungle on civilized people. The theme of white men “going native” is common in early nonindigenous literature. Europeans found that their savage impulses were

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“never far from their civilized surfaces, [and] the potential for being ‘defiled,’—for going native . . . —led [them] again and again to displace [these] impulses onto Africans” (as well as onto other nonwhite peoples) (Brantlinger 1986, 214–215). Once Europeans came into contact with native peoples, they feared they would be infected by what they perceived as the natives’ social and moral degeneracy. This, combined with the myth of darkness, became a mirror, at once reflecting the “heroic and saintly self-images” of Europeans and “casting the ghostly shadows of guilt and regression” (Brantlinger 1986, 217). The theme has been a central aspect of colonialist representation since Joseph Conrad’s turn-of-the-last-century novel Heart of Darkness. In this novel, the character of Kurtz becomes the embodiment of the evil possibilities of the human psyche. Not only does the African jungle crush his philanthropic ideals, but it is here, at the very heart of the primeval darkness, that the darkness of the human soul is revealed. Kurtz is the archetypal demonstration of the dangers of going native, for the discovery of “the horror,” universal though it is meant to appear, is a direct result of the contaminating effects of the primitive jungle. For all his opposition to colonialism, particularly of the Belgian variety, Conrad could not escape his view of Africa as constructed by the discourse of colonialism’s “rational” worldview. Louis Becke dealt with this theme in relation to Papua New Guinea. His view of the landscape and the people was, in many instances, incredibly violent; Becke saw the country as potentially fatal to the European’s normally superior disposition, intelligence, and morality (Krauth ed 1982, 56). In Becke’s story “Dr Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant” (1982 [1897]), the protagonist, a white doctor, settles in one of the islands and becomes involved in buying human skulls. The story knits a vision of savagery with the combined corruptive power of the landscape and the inhabitants. Becke’s point was that once the European is snared in the web of the primitive environment, he inherits the savage instinct of the natives. To other Europeans, Dr Schwalbe is a naturalist involved in the study of turtles. But that research has eventually led him to trade in human skulls. The horror of Dr Schwalbe’s activity is revealed through Rogers, a sailor who witnesses the doctor’s “human skull-buying venture”: the burden . . . was carefully brought into the house, and the seaman watched the process of untying the bundle with interest—then he drew back in horror as a grinning mummy was revealed with its knees drawn nearly up to its chin and kept in position there by a thin piece of coir cinnet [sic]. . . .

Some two or three [natives] now entered, and the sailor saw that one of them carried a gore-stained basket of cocoanut leaf.

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This his German friend opened, and took out a fresh-severed human head! Grasping it by the reddish-brown woolly hair, the investigator of turtles’ morality took it to the door to obtain a better light, and examined the thing carefully. His scrutiny seemed to be satisfactory, for, placing it in a large enamelled dish on the long table, he opened a trade box and gave the vendor some tobacco, powder, musket-balls, and fish-hooks. “What in God’s name are you going to do with it?” asked Rogers in horror-stricken tones. (Becke 1982, 65–67) The “fresh-severed human head,” a symbol of savagery associated with natives, is also a sign of the white man’s moral degeneracy and madness, caused by the corrupting environment. This is a clear example of the widespread “going native” theme in colonial literature: the white man is made bestial by a primitive human and physical environment. Rogers, the epitome of the sane white man, is completely horrified by the actions of Dr Schwalbe, and, by extension, exemplifies the polar opposite of the natives’ lack of human dignity and moral values, which allows them to sell the skulls of their loved ones. The madness and savagery that engulf Dr Schwalbe are only experienced within the local surroundings, and the obvious cure is to leave the place and return to Europe. But Dr Schwalbe is not allowed to return to the “light” because he is seen as a betrayer of white ideals. He dies at sea while bound for Europe to sell his collection: A year later or so afterward Denison read in a colonial paper that the distinguished German naturalist, Dr Ludwig Schwalbe, had left the Bismarck Islands for Singapore in a small schooner, on May 2nd, 18—. About ten days later she was found floating, bottom upward, off the Admiralty Group, near New Guinea. “The unfortunate gentleman had with him an interesting and valuable ethnographical collection, the labour of ten years.” (Becke 1982, 68)

The death of Dr Schwalbe and the loss of his collection of human skulls seems to be the result of divine retribution and implicitly suggests that such bizarre acts do not have a place in civilized society. Rather they are relegated to the margins of discourses of civilization, where aberration, crime, and abnormality construed as madness are positioned. Robert M Macdonald took up the theme of madness in his two novels, The Great White Chief (1907) and Danger Mountain (1911). In the first, Tom becomes the new chief of a native tribe after he defeats the native chief in a fighting contest. As soon as he becomes chief, he goes mad. He immediately rouses the natives to “kill all the white devils!”

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“Doc and Harry in the tapu house.” Illustration by W Rainey for Robert M Macdonald, The Great White Chief (London, 1907), facing page 198.

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(Macdonald 1907, 7). When a group of his white friends eventually finds him, years later, Tom is involved in tribal warfare against an enemy tribe and is highly visible in the fray: “Hither and thither the tall white Mamoose moved, directing his warriors with his cane, and supremely indifferent to the great danger his figure, dress and lack of weapons attracted” (Macdonald 1907, 241). Tom’s friends finally rescue him from this cult of madness and savagery. One of the prominent features of his madness is loss of memory. He does not recognize his white friends, nor does he remember anything about his white past. The only way his friends can save him from his madness is to strike him unconscious. As he slowly regains consciousness, he also regains his memory of the white part of himself. By being struck unconscious he is both chastised and redeemed from the corruptive power of the landscape. In regaining his white identity, his madness is reinscribed as Other, outside his reconstructed subjectivity. One crucial feature of madness and loss of identity in these novels is the loss of the colonizing language by those who have either gone native or been lost in the jungle. In Macdonald’s Danger Mountain, and in G Manville Fenn’s Bunyip Land (1885), madness is symbolized by the loss of the English language—a loss that emphasizes the peculiarly powerful function of language in colonialism itself. In Danger Mountain, the London ornithologist Brown, when discovered, has almost forgotten English (Macdonald 1911, 133), while in Bunyip Land (discussed further in the next section), the captive white men are presented as (temporarily) having lost the power of articulation. As the Bunyip Land narrator states, “We tried several times over to get our friend to speak, but the result was only a voluble burst of words in a tongue we could not comprehend” (Fenn 1885, 321). In this novel, Carstairs (senior) and Francis cannot express themselves in English after their rescue. Rather, they speak in the savages’ language, signaling their degeneracy and powerlessness as madness. As Francis says: “I want to help you, but my head—I forget—I cannot speak sometimes—I cannot think. It is all dark here—in my mind” (Fenn 1885, 319). For Carstairs, too, it seems as though his long captivity has made him think like the savages among whom he has suffered, and his bodily anguish has resulted in complete prostration (Fenn 1885, 376). The white men’s extended residence in a strange environment, among savages, has not only made them forget their language but also corrupted them. Coming back to their own kind returns to them the powers of articulation and sensibility. Loss of language, one of the powerful tools of culture, amounts to the defeat of civilization by the corruptive powers of the jungle. It is only by imperial rescue, which allegorically enacts the deliverance of the primitive place from darkness, that the values of imperial dominance can be restored.

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The Colonized Space as Ideal Location for Adventure: Where Imperial Boys Become Men While in colonialist literature Papua New Guinea is constructed as untamed, inhospitable, and cruel, it is, ironically, also an ideal location for European adventure, a place in which imperial boys can become men. The very danger of the primitive place, a danger actualized most potently when Europeans succumb to the temptation to “go native,” can become the occasion of heroism if their grip on the fundamental manly values of imperialism is maintained. As John Martin put it, “Masculinity was shaped by the ideology of empire throughout the English diaspora” (1996, 200). The hostile landscape provides a testing ground for European boys to assert the strength of their character and spirit and realize this manliness. While over time boys’ adventure tales reflected the changing nature of imperialism and Empire, the concept of manliness remained constant (Richards 1989, 6). “The ideals of manliness involved physical prowess, courage, endurance, chivalry, and patriotism. These ideals were embraced in by political movements like ‘Young England’ and Christian socialism propagated by youth organisations like the Boy’s Brigade” (Richards 1989, 6). Because these tales constituted part of the education of the next generation, successors to the Empire, they were treated seriously: “As the Empire’s horizons expanded, a concern to instil in the younger generation an awareness of the personal qualities and social values responsible for such expansion expressed itself through the genre” (Krauth 1982b, 50). Juvenile literature was not merely a product of the imperial enterprise but was integral to the formation of colonial attitudes in the minds of readers. Because the texts were read by young people, the prejudices inherent in them became difficult to dislodge, because they were carried at an emotional and symbolic level. Juvenile fiction focused mainly on the adventure genre. To venture into “new” lands was not only an act of exploration and discovery but also a demonstration of superiority and power. This implies introducing European codes and conventions into the “new” lands and exercising authority over non-Europeans. Because there was very little demarcation between fact and fiction, in most instances the works of imagination were taken at face value. So these early works of fiction, while they reflected the enterprise of broader European societies, also helped to shape and construct the country and the people they described to the outside world. There were nine boys’ adventure tales written with Papua New Guinea as fictional setting between 1870 and 1900. Three of the prominent writers in this genre were G Manville Fenn, David Johnstone, and Robert M Macdonald. In all these works, the story involves boys leaving

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the comfort of their homes on an adventure to an unknown country, imagined as full of all kinds of perils and danger. The publication of the stories “was motivated by a widespread philanthropy directed to the betterment of boy” (Martin 1996, 200). In Bunyip Land, Joe Carstairs goes in search of his father, a botanist who traveled to Papua New Guinea more than two years earlier and had not been heard from since. Joe’s resourcefulness, chivalry, and intelligence enable him and his friends to escape the many dangers they encounter in the jungle. They are taken captive by locals when they make their landing in the country (Fenn 1885, 77), but are subsequently freed. Jack Penny, another youth, is almost caught by a crocodile but escapes; the natives shoot arrows at the boys but they fend them off. Joe is captured a second time, coincidentally by the very people who are holding his father prisoner. In the end he escapes and his father is rescued from the natives. The theme of the story is summed up in this statement: That’s like what you read in books and papers about boys of fifteen, and sixteen, and seventeen. They’re wonderful chaps, who take young women in their arms and then jump on horseback with ’em and gallop at full speed. (Fenn 1885, 333)

The main purpose of such juvenile adventure stories was to teach boys the virtues of manliness: bravery, intelligence, chivalry, and other qualities, which become revealed in a journey into the unknown. Savage cannibals, cavernous mountains, difficult terrains, wild creatures, mystery and the fear and anxiety generated by the unknown, in short, all the stereotypes of colonialist discourse, become the setting for manly growth. The trope of the gun and weapons becomes another important symbol for manliness in David Johnstone’s tale In The Land of the Golden Plume (1894). In order for the two brothers Walter and Frank to become men, they must prove themselves in the art of handling weapons. Their first opportunity begins at home in Australia when they defend their settlement against Aboriginal attack. Right from the beginning, the lives of the boys are associated with guns. This conjures up the combative spirit and depicts them as defenders of the white race: “Here I am father!” cried that young warrior, showing his flushed and eager face—and not forgetting, even in his excitement, to display a revolver with all the pride of one who has just used it to some purpose. (Johnstone 1894, 15)

The revolver stands for all the qualities that make a man, a Freudian image too obvious for comment. The training of the boys to be independent, brave, and courageous continues during their voyage to Papua

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“The boys join their father.” Illustration by W S Stacey for David Johnstone, In the Land of the Golden Plume (London, 1894), frontispiece.

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“Walter in the hands of the Head-hunters.” Illustration by W S Stacey for David Johnstone, In the Land of the Golden Plume (London, 1894), facing page 178.

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New Guinea. Walter and Frank locate their father who has become involved in defending a coastal village against an inland enemy, the Tugeris. The coastal village had made him its leader. Despite being outnumbered by the enemy, Mr Dennison and his warriors, with assistance from Walter and Frank, fight the invading natives off. As the fight begins, Walter shouts, “Quick! we have our chance at last!” and picks up his rifle and loads it as he runs. Frank, too, has excitedly promised his father, “And now I’m going to help you lick those niggers, sir!” (Johnstone 1894, 90, 88) Through the confrontation with hostile natives, the white males assert the heroic qualities of toughness and resourcefulness against all odds. The indigenous people and the environment, on the other hand, are portrayed as menacing and thus needing to be ruthlessly suppressed. When Walter is captured by the Tugeris, he arrogantly tells the chief: “I know that Vali, like a brave chief, wants to kill me. To what end? He may kill me, but does he think that these white men will not hear of it? Let him listen. If he kills me, be sure that, as certainly as night follows day, these white men will fall upon his tribe; they will kill all his people; they will burn the villages and leave not a hut in the valley. These are not idle words. What is his magic to theirs?” (Johnstone 1894, 251)

Walter has served his apprenticeship very well in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. The two boys have become capable in the use of weapons. Thus, Walter knows the power of being a “mature” white man. Their training in the use of guns is a rite of passage from being boys to men. Their father’s final statement about their future closely follows the path delineated for the lives of imperial boys: “Walter will go to Oxford, of course—Frank too, if he wants. But I imagine he’d rather prefer Sandhurst. He had always a hankering after soldiering, and his Papuan experiences haven’t cured him.” (Johnstone 1894, 311)

In many of these writings the map is an important metaphor for exploration, signifying concepts of discovery, order, meaning, and space. In Bunyip Land, Nurse Brown tells Joe Carstairs, “You’re always running your finger over that map thing, my dear” (Fenn 1885, 9)—her observation highlighting the connections between the map, adventure, and discovery. McClintock highlighted the importance of maps: “Map-making became the servant of colonial plunder, for the knowledge constituted by the map both preceded and legitimized the conquest of territory. The map is a technology of knowledge that professes to capture the truth about a place in pure, scientific form, operating under the guise of scientific exactitude and promising to retrieve and reproduce nature exactly as it is. As such, it is also a technology of possession, promising

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“Walter retorted upon him in his own fashion.” Illustration by W S Stacey for David Johnstone, In the Land of the Golden Plume (London, 1894), facing page 236.

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that those with the capacity to make such perfect representations must also have the right of territorial control” (1995, 27–28). Mapping in colonial discourse represents the power of legitimization and signifies subjugation by knowledge. In Macdonald’s Danger Mountain, the main character, a boy affectionately called Dandy Dick, gradually acquires the qualities of courage and manliness, not only through demonstrating his ability to use a gun, but also through his skill in using a sextant. He says: “I borrowed your sextant half an hour ago and worked out our position to be forty-two miles nor’east”—The men looked up from their various occupations in surprise. A man who could handle a sextant was something special in New Guinea—at least on the goldfields. (Macdonald 1911, 33)

The sextant, like the map, symbolizes imperial knowledge of the landscape, the power of the gaze and the technology through which that gaze constructs a version of reality. It represents the activities of scientific investigation accompanying colonial penetration of the country. Dandy also saves a white character, the “Captain,” from being murdered, by shooting the native who was about to kill him (Macdonald 1911, 44), thus demonstrating his leadership skills and qualities. In the end he fights a native chief and is in turn made chief by the natives, signaling his manhood by effectively acquiring a position of power over the natives. As another of the Europeans, Macalister, salutes the young man, he says: “youth is more developed now, boys, than it was in our days, and Dandy, boy though he is in years, is equal to the best man in Papua in either brains, physical powers, or skill. Hurray for Dandy, boys, the hero of New Guinea, and as good a fellow as ever drew trigger!” (Macdonald 1911, 317)

The landscape and its “savages” are subsumed to the trope of reaching manhood, having facilitated the development and harnessing of the boy’s leadership qualities. The boys’ adventure tales had a didactic function. While the dangerous and sinister landscape of the country provided an ideal location for the training of young boys to become men, the books provided and promoted the imperial spirit in boys. Young readers of these books vicariously experienced the adventures on both an emotional and a symbolic level. In Australia, juvenile fiction combined aspects of Christianity, manliness, and sports. According to John Martin: “In an effort to induce boys to becoming practicing Christians, godliness and manliness were combined. At the end of the nineteenth century, athleticism grew out of muscular Christianity and began to replace it. Manliness

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was expressed through moral behaviour, manly love and sporting ability, rather than by spirituality, godly love and good health” (1996, 202). As Martin pointed out in this passage, boys were expected to cultivate not only physical traits of manliness, but also religious, moral, and psychological aspects. Setting stories in challenging places like Papua New Guinea, landscapes assumed to be afflicted with perils and danger, coincided with the British imperialist and expansionist agenda.

The Landscape of War: Representation of Place in World War II Representation of the PNG landscape as, on the one hand, a hostile, inhospitable, and untamed region that threatened madness or death, and on the other, a setting that promoted heroism and growth into manhood, come together in European fiction of the Second World War. Here the tensions between environmental hostility and personal heroism reach a climax. In war writing, the landscape is, understandably, freighted with an avalanche of hostile images. It has lost the glitter of romance and idealization characteristic of early white writing. The landscape in war literature is menacing because of the appalling conditions and circumstances of the war. Australian soldiers were confronted with an unfamiliar place, viscid, virulent, ominous, and torrential. Unlike earlier representations of the landscape as capable of leading Europeans to madness and savagery, in European war writing Papua New Guinea is represented as a hellish, fatal land, an extension of the enemy. This is understandable, because for both the Australians and the Japanese, deaths and casualties from disease far exceeded those from fighting itself. Because of the difficulty, impenetrability, and discomfort of the terrain, the Australians found themselves fighting two enemies, the Japanese and the landscape. Osmar White described the unfamiliarity of the country in these terms: When World War II spread to New Guinea in 1942, very few people knew much about the region in which the first real trial of strength between Japan and the Western democracies was to take place. That terrain, which had through the ages remained a neutral division between two great areas of the earth’s surface, was still largely terra incognita to the twentieth century. To most of the men destined to fight in and for them, those dark, fiercely inhospitable islands were as remote as the mountains of the moon. (1992 [1945], 10)

This extract reiterates one of the central underpinnings of colonial discourse, in which place and landscape are viewed as foreign and unknown. As White stated, the country “was still largely terra incognita to the twentieth century,” and the islands of Papua New Guinea “were

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as remote as the mountains of the moon.” The first enemy that both sides of the PNG war campaign had to confront and conquer was the landscape, as Nigel Krauth asserted: “Japanese and Allied generals notwithstanding, the highest authority dictating the war’s progress was New Guinea itself. The privations attributable to terrain, jungle and climate were so great for Australian soldiers that the fight with the Japanese seemed incidental. The more significant battle for survival was between the individual soldier and the surrounding landscape” (1982b, 200). Papua New Guinea’s geography, coupled with the climate, dictated the war, and not the generals of the two sides. The depiction of the environment as hell, and therefore as aberration, stemmed largely from a prevalence of tropical diseases such as malaria, dysentery, typhus, hookworm, skin diseases, and others that ravaged many of the soldiers. These diseases were depicted as an extension of the surroundings in which they fought, the jungle itself being presented as morbific. Together with the landscape, these diseases militated against the Australian soldiers’ endeavor to flush out the Japanese. In most of the war writing under consideration, the writers were preoccupied with the individual soldier’s attempt to survive the suffocating, physically confining, intimidating jungle. In Burton Graham’s novel Each New Dawn (1944), the native villages and their residents are part of the menacing jungle. They are depicted as disorderly, desolate, and deadly: The village straggled in a solemn stillness, dilapidated, unfriendly, against a dull, reddish sky. Beyond its squalid outline, a patch of pink cloud, raggedly edged with white and grey, hung heavily, like the premonition that was in my mind. Everywhere, there was evidence of outrage, slaughter, looting, sordid and horrible. Blood had been spilt. The frightful genie of pagan worship seemed to brood over all like a black, threatening cloud, casting a spell on everything around us. (Graham 1944, 124)

Graham’s description is very bleak. The village is depicted as filthy and threatening, its landscape suffused in malignant violence. The portrayal of the village in its deadly silence against a reddish sky metonymically evokes a sense of impending tragedy for the Europeans. The village and community are appropriated into the discourse of the novel to contain, and act as a vehicle for, overwhelming fear and anxiety. The local culture is simultaneously represented as threatened by the landscape and a source of threat, through its mystery and “magic,” so that both landscape and community become the source of immanent disaster, displacing the vulnerability of the soldiers onto the Other. In Christopher Wood’s North to Rabaul (1979), the harsh environment and the climate are associated as projecting a miasma of death and decay, with the evil potency of the landscape as enemy:

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You don’t walk in this country—you climb or you crawl. Most of the time you’re fighting the climate rather than the Japs. Your finger can rot off before it gets the chance to pull a trigger. I mean, look around you. How many men in this ward are suffering from bullet wounds? Three out of ten? What about the rest? Bacillary dysentery, malaria and pneumonia, I’d guess. (1979, 22–23)

Like Wood, White depicted the climate and landscape as treacherous, but he extended the danger to include the atmosphere as well: New Guinea air is as treacherous as New Guinea ground. Throughout the trip, the transport never felt as if it were fully under the pilot’s control. It skated, skidded, staggered, slithered, rocketed its way through air that was as rough and solid seeming as an angry sea. (1992 [1945], 183)

Every aspect of the physical landscape was conceived as threatening. As more soldiers succumb to the environment than to bullet wounds, White saw mateship as essential in conquering the inhospitable country. Friendship and support cushioned some of the physical and psychological effects of fighting. At the same time, it was through brotherhood that soldiers had some chance of defeating the enemy. In this way, the threatening landscape worked positively to affirm the qualities of comradeship that the author presents as indicative of the Australian. But to do so Papua New Guinea had to serve as the negative presence, as it has done for so long in the colonialist imagination. This chapter has demonstrated how European literature represented indigenous landscape and place. The ambivalent construction and representation of the PNG landscape reveals the Europeans’ unfamiliarity with it, and more significantly, their endeavor to define and gain control of the country. In their effort to make the unfamiliar knowable, Europeans had to create a conceptual framework for it, which had to be the opposite of their self-definitions. This inevitably justified and legitimized colonization. Through these tropes, the country as an idea became the subject of colonial discourse, and as a landmass became the battleground for colonial supremacy. This invention of the PNG landscape was consonant with Europe’s endeavor to legitimize expansion and exploitation. Much of the representation of the country was textual, but as argued, this was also cultural and political. The Papua New Guinea of the imagination developed into the Papua New Guinea of “imperious imagination” (Winduo 1991, 10). As Paul Carter put it, “travelling was not primarily a physical activity: it was an epistemological strategy, a mode of knowing” (1987, 69). For anyone to travel was, at the same time, for that person to know about the landscape. Traveling was a means of transforming space into

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knowable place. For Europeans, their discovery of Papua New Guinea meant simply that European eyes had never before been beheld it, but it simultaneously, and powerfully, undermined indigenous inscription of place and landscape. The so-called European discovery of the landscape was in fact a rediscovery, because of course the land had already been discovered, claimed, and inhabited. However, aided by powerful discourses, the imperial powers scripted and superimposed their cultural values and reality on the previous reality. Early nonindigenous writers pursued the same vein in their writings. Their works contained either fanciful representations of the place or bizarre distortions of it. Their writings were very much influenced by the same discourses that influenced the explorers and early colonialists. In many instances, the argument that prevailed in these writings was that the strange, weird environment had a dialogic relationship with the savagery and barbarity of its inhabitants.

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4

Colonial Representation and Legal Discourse

This chapter discusses how Papua New Guineans have been depicted in colonial legal discourse. While colonialism deploys numerous representational strategies, legal discourse was crucial in Papua New Guinea in geographically and socially segregating the races. An examination of some of the laws and regulations instituted under colonial rule demonstrates how a politically and socially divided society, with its prejudices, discriminatory practices, and racialist attitudes, was established and maintained. Specific laws and regulations represented Papua New Guineans as inherently inferior, requiring the guidance of Europeans. At the same time, such laws sought to legitimize colonialism’s definition of indigenous people as childlike and primitive, with a propensity for crime. The portrayal of indigenous people as children, in particular, meant that they could not possibly own land. The proclamation of New Guinea as protectorate, for instance, “surrendered” all native lands to the colonial government, and Ordinance 2 of 1888 prohibited any native from selling land or conducting any other land transactions (Jinks and others 1973, 54). Legal discourse thus sanctioned colonial domination and justified Europeans as the new owners of the country. The proclamations of British New Guinea and German New Guinea as protectorates, and subsequently as possessions, were the first acts of political and legal annexation by the two imperial powers. These proclamations underlined the notion of the land as tabula rasa, uninscribed, without history, and, in effect, without adult inhabitants. The annexations legally and politically established the hierarchy of races as analogous to the relationship of father and child, with the father figure’s “protection” of his children confirming paternal power, wisdom, and authority. This is clearly illustrated in the 6 November 1884 proclamation of Commodore James Erskine, establishing a British Protectorate over southeastern New Guinea:

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Whereas it has become essential, for the protection of the lives and properties of the native inhabitants of New Guinea, and for the purpose of preventing the occupation of portions of that country by persons whose proceedings, unsanctioned by any lawful authority, might tend to injustice, strife, and bloodshed, and who, under the pretence of legitimate trade and intercourse, might endanger the liberties and possess themselves of the lands of such native inhabitants, that a British Protectorate should be established over a certain portion of such country and the islands adjacent thereto. . . . I . . . hereby . . . declare and proclaim the establishment of such Protectorate. (quoted in Jinks and others 1973, 39)

Two important points become apparent in this proclamation speech: First, the idea of protecting the indigenous people and their properties implies that they are children and therefore vulnerable to mistreatment or undesirable influences. Second, claims to portions of the country by the two imperial powers effectively extinguished indigenous landownership. This illegal annexation was legitimized by the assumption that indigenous people, regarded as children and primitives, were incapable of developing and managing the country. They had to be guided, protected, and educated. Protectorate status paved the way for the institution and enactment of other laws and regulations to support the colonizers’ claims to the country. From the outset, the social and political dichotomization of the races in colonial Papua New Guinea was reinforced by legal discourse. Papua New Guinea exemplified Frantz Fanon’s idea of a bifurcated society. In the towns, from the beginning, the white and the native residential areas were segregated. Indigenous people were physically and socially excluded from white areas except as servants. Port Moresby was an Australian town in almost every feature and maintained close links with Queensland. This racial exclusivity and segregation of colonial towns, as well as the reluctance to acknowledge prior habitation, are consistent with the typically Manichean, binary assumptions of colonial discourse. The establishment of towns in Papua New Guinea closely followed colonial social patterns. Segregation along racial lines was strictly maintained by laws, regulations, and institutions that were put in place to uphold the “Manichean deep structure,” characteristic of colonial societies. As Amirah Inglis pointed out, “Much more than in Australian towns, the residents of Port Moresby were united simply by being white. Other distinctions faded in significance” (1974, 37). In other words, political or religious affiliations, for example, were inconsequential. The assertion of such binarism in geographical space broadly reinforced the idea of the Papua New Guineans as socially inferior.

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In his important study on race relations and colonial rule in Papua New Guinea, Edward P Wolfers demonstrated how legal discourse reinforced colonialist notions that represented Europeans as superior and indigenous people as inferior (1975). In order to safeguard and maintain the colonial social structure, the very first task required of colonial rulers was to create laws to cement certain racial relationships. These laws, initially produced as written texts, were unintelligible to indigenous people in two ways: in that the laws themselves were culturally alien, and in that the people they were meant to “protect” and control were nonliterate. A further drawback for the Papua New Guineans in understanding the laws and regulations was the linguistic medium in which they were enacted and translated. In almost all instances, the local people could neither speak nor read English, and the Europeans did not speak or read local languages. The establishment of English as the dominant language in the enactment of the law is clear from the start. Section 51 of the Native Regulations Ordinance read: For all the purposes of these regulations, except where it may be expressly enacted to the contrary, any words that require or have to be spoken on any occasion and by any person may be spoken in the English language. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 3300)

This statement is remarkably reminiscent of a notorious abuse of colonial power discussed by Stephen J Greenblatt (1990): the infamous Requerimiento, enacted by the Spanish colonizers of South America in 1513. The unreflective certainty of linguistic authority found in such laws has been repeated many times in the history of European invasion and colonization, but never more strikingly than in the Requerimiento, which was composed by the Spanish conquistadors to be read aloud to the Indian inhabitants of the New World—in Spanish. If obedience was not immediate, they were told: We shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault. (quoted in Greenblatt 1990, 29)

Not satisfied with simply reading this directive to the inhabitants in a language they did not understand, the Spanish proceeded to validate the authority of the Requerimiento by the power of writing:

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And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition. (quoted in Greenblatt 1990, 29)

Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, a legendary sixteenth-century critic of the Spanish occupation, wrote that he “didn’t know whether to laugh or cry” at this absurdity (Las Casas 1971, 196, quoted in Greenblatt, 1990, 29). As Greenblatt stated, “A strange blend of ritual, cynicism, legal fiction, and perverse idealism, the Requerimiento contains at its core the conviction that there is no serious language barrier between the Indians and the Europeans” (1990, 29). Yet, although it may seem obtuse, it served to perform a much more subtle and insidious operation. After all, the invaders could hardly have been unaware that the Indians spoke a different language from them. Rather, the Requerimiento demonstrated the unquestioned and overarching assertion of power, which the colonizer held to be embodied in his language itself. Linked to the power embodied in a language that the victims cannot understand is a perfect and unambiguous inversion of justice, based on nothing more than the authorization of the written text. The Papua New Guinean example may seem less outrageous but operates on the same principle of authority invested in language, justifying any exercise of legal power. Clearly the enactment of laws in Papua New Guinea disregarded the capacity of indigenous people to understand them. The fact that the laws were in a foreign language (English) confirmed the social insignificance of local people and reinforced perceptions of them as unable to govern themselves. In this instance, legal discourse effectively deferred the growth of political consciousness among Papua New Guineans: “Much of the protective and discriminatory legislation played an important part in inhibiting the emergence of those social settings . . . which have stimulated national political organisation and activity elsewhere in the colonial world” (Wolfers 1975, 8). Political consciousness for Papua New Guineans only developed much later. Understanding the colonial structures in Papua New Guinea requires a comprehension of the prevailing patterns of interracial relations that maintained distinctions in social and political power. In essence, the economic, political, and social institutions and laws reflected the binary reality of colonial power. The enactment of law was the means through which assumptions of white superiority were asserted, as Wolfers stated: “the primary aim of all colonial administrations in Papua and New Guinea until the 1960s was neither ‘development’ nor ‘preparation’ for self government, but control” (1975, 5). In such a Manichean context, the assumed stability of white control had to be defined against

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its perceived Other—a racial drama that was enacted daily in racially segregated towns. In order to legalize and preserve white prestige, the colonial governments created laws, from the profound to the most trivial, to maintain and control social and racial dichotomies. These laws became powerful European tools for the subjugation of natives and the construction of their subjectivity. As texts, they symbolized European knowledge and dominance over non-Europeans: “Once the relations of domination and subordination [were] clearly established, every black person [was] a servant of some sort and every white person a master or mistress at some level” (Bulbeck 1992, 164). This view was clearly held by the Royal Commission into Papua in 1906, which stated: No matter how little a particular white man may deserve the respect of the native, it is still necessary in the interests of all white men that the native should not be in a position where respect for the ruling race will be jeopardised. (quoted in Bulbeck 1992, 164)

The Royal Commission, as representative of colonial government, reiterated the binary structures of its authority, articulating that regardless of an individual white man’s moral right, he had to command the respect and honor of natives. In other words, because each white man represented the white race and white culture in colonial Papua New Guinea, a self-justifying superiority and its legal sanction enabled many Europeans who committed hideous crimes against the natives to go unpunished (see, eg, Nelson 1989, 30). Statements such as that of the Royal Commission were formative in the construction of indigenous subjectivity in Papua New Guinea, with the binaries being confirmed through simultaneous reinforcement by legal discourse. The laws and regulations can broadly be grouped into three somewhat overlapping categories: the discourse of segregation, the discourse of contamination, and the discourse of sexual violation. I discuss the last category in chapter 7. The discourse of segregation was manifested in laws that banned indigenous Papua New Guineans from entering colonial towns. Even those who were legally permitted to enter the towns and “live” there had little or no freedom to move about or perform cultural practices. Regulation 73 of the Native Regulations of 1906 banned natives in British New Guinea (Papua) from leaving their quarters or creating noise after 9 p.m. (1) Any native engaged under the Ordinances for the time being relating to native labour who is away from the quarters assigned to him at any time after 9 p.m. and before daylight of the following morning without the written consent of his employer or

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other sufficient excuse shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding ten shillings, or in default of payment to imprisonment for any period not exceeding One month, or to imprisonment in the first instance for any period not exceeding One month. (2) All noise, shouting, beating of drums and dancing shall cease in the towns and villages at 9 o’clock each night unless the Magistrate grants permission to the people to dance after that hour. Any native disobeying this regulation shall on conviction be liable to a fine not exceeding Ten shillings or in default of payment to imprisonment for any period not exceeding One month, or to imprisonment in the first instance for any period not exceeding One month. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 3305)

The curfew laws, which controlled indigenous people’s movements from 9 p.m. every night, were primarily designed to ban natives from crossing the geographic, social, and racial boundaries that existed in colonial towns. Simultaneously, because the indigenous people were often deemed to be subhuman and savage, their cultural expressions such as singing, drumming, and dancing were considered to require strict regulation and indictable if conducted outside set times. The discourse of segregation was also maintained for assumed health reasons, as I discuss later in considering the discourse of contamination. In 1926 it was declared illegal for locals “other than a contract labourer, or a mission or government employee, to come within five miles of Port Moresby . . . or to any other gazetted area” (Wolfers 1975, 50). Later, local employees were also excluded from the town premises unless required by their employers to perform domestic chores. In 1930 the colonial administrator, Hubert Murray, “even agreed to a proposal put forward by a group of expatriate residents that a fence be built across the main peninsula on which Port Moresby was built to cut the town off from the area in which the indigenous labourers were quartered” (Wolfers 1975, 51). As the European population increased (especially the numbers of European women), other legal restrictions were deemed necessary and were implemented to control Papua New Guineans from crossing into the white areas. In order to justify the restrictions, colonial legal discourse constructed a particular kind of subhuman, savage native psyche, with a propensity for violence, reliant on instinct and superstition, and incapable of rational thought, much less self-government. Native Regulation 74 of 1906, for example, made it unlawful for a Papua New Guinean to be found on other premises other than his or her domiciling address: 74. (1) Any native who, without lawful or reasonable excuse, is found on any premises other than those of his employer (if any)

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within the town of Port Moresby between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. shall be guilty of an offence, and shall be liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding One pound and in default of payment of such fine to imprisonment for any period not exceeding Two months, or to imprisonment in the first instance for any period not exceeding Two months. The term “premises” for the purposes of this regulation includes all lands, wharves, jetties, houses, and building of any description, roads, streets, and highways. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 3305)

A closer examination of such texts reveals the colonialist justificatory discourse in which stereotypical representations of indigenous people take precedence. Native Regulation 74 depicts natives as prone to crime and therefore requiring constant surveillance. On reflection, this regulation says more about the identity of the colonialists, as revealed in the white agenda and interests to which indigenous people became prisoners. The confinement of Papua New Guineans to their quarters from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. also rested on the assumption that natives’ minds were subject to the despotism of their bodies. In acts of exclusion and control, legal discourse determined indigenous behavior within the European-dominated space, extending control to the behaviors, movements, and bodies of the local people. They were banned by law from loitering in towns. Native Regulation 95 read: No native shall in the Town of Port Moresby—or in any other Town to which the Lieutenant-Governor shall extend the provisions of this regulation by order in Council published in the Gazette— (a) loiter upon any footway to the inconvenience of passers by; or (b) wilfully obstruct or impede the passing of persons along any carriageway or footway. A breach of this regulation shall render the offender liable on conviction to a penalty not exceeding Ten shillings or in default of payment to imprisonment for any period not exceeding One month or to imprisonment in the first instance for any period not exceeding One month. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 3316)

Taken together with Native Regulation 74, this effectively banned Papua New Guineans from entering the white-controlled towns. Regulation 95 further prescribed respect for Europeans by indigenous people, in terms of keeping social and racial distance. Legal discourse in colonial Papua New Guinea penetrated the physical boundaries in its control of indigenous people’s behavior. In traditional Papua New Guinean cultures, the term “loitering” did not exist; it was considered that everyone was at a certain place for a purpose, traditional life being dictated

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by the concept of community. The idea of “loitering,” constructed by European discourse, was meaningless to Papua New Guineans when this law came into being. The curfew impinged on every aspect of indigenous lives. By imposing laws and regulations to control their movements within the town areas as well as their migration into towns, European colonials signaled their growing anxieties about local people. Restricting the movement of local people, especially at night, was intended to contain and control the possibility of violence and crime. The imposition of curfew and segregation laws resulted primarily from a fear of the “Black Peril,” a notion that emerged among Europeans as the number of white women increased in Port Moresby, and following reports and rumors about black men attempting to sexually harass or rape them. Thus laws restricting the movement of indigenous people at night were clearly “the result of fear, of anxiety aroused at the prospect of dark-skinned prowlers and peeping eyes, lurking unseen in the night” (Wolfers 1975, 56). At the same time, they were legal reactions of a colonial society that did not want to be contaminated by a race of people it considered inferior. Equally important in the construction of indigenous subjectivity under colonial occupation, the discourse of contamination is manifested in the metaphors of disease, dirt, and potential sexual violation. Like other European colonies, Papua New Guinea was viewed as a human wasteland, needing disinfection. The indigenous bodies that polluted the landscape required control and reformation. Papua New Guineans were considered unhygienic with unclean habits. This concept of contamination was an important marker of social and racial boundaries. Discourses of segregation and contamination combine in laws such as those prescribing that local people were not to “use garden seats and other conveniences provided for the public” (Wolfers 1975, 79). One of the more obvious laws informed by the discourse of contamination and segregation is number 11 of The Places of Public Entertainment Ordinance of 1915: Places of public entertainment to which Europeans and natives are admitted shall be provided with separate means of ingress, accommodation, and egress for Europeans and natives, placed and constructed to the satisfaction of the Director of Public Works. The Government Secretary or his appointees could prohibit the attendance of any Papuans at any place of public entertainment altogether, or at any given performance therein. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 1854)

This law was enacted particularly to protect Europeans from the threat of contamination by natives. Such bodily control both legitimated and sym-

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bolized social, racial, and political control. From this perspective, Papua New Guinean bodies were construed and portrayed as the negation of not only health but also discipline and civilization. Thus the role of colonialism and its administrative control drew on a presumably humanitarian, moral charter to civilize through cleansing, disinfecting, and educating the natives in morality, cleanliness, and general hygiene. As a further example of laws maintaining a “healthy” distance between the races, the Labour Ordinance of 1922 required natives to build their huts “at least one hundred yards from any road or street, and fifty feet from any European dwelling” (Wolfers 1975, 97). As the social, political, and legal control of indigenous people came to be viewed as a way to train, educate, and guide the childlike Papua New Guineans in the ways of the white men, European habits became idealized and prescribed as the norm. To maintain this norm, segregation between the two races had to be constantly enforced, particularly at the level of bodily contamination. Locals were barred from swimming pools or other places where Europeans bathed; for instance, in 1915, indigenous people were forbidden “to trespass in the Port Moresby swimming baths or their adjacent premises” (Wolfers 1975, 52). The perceived threat of contamination from indigenous people extended to the Native Regulations Ordinance, in which numbers 100 to 116 concerned native health and hygiene. The discourse of contamination is deeply grounded in myths surrounding whiteness and blackness in western society. Richard Dyer listed a range of moral and aesthetic values, compiled by Kenneth Gergen, associated with the color white, including: “triumph, light, innocence, joy, divine power, purity, regeneration, happiness, gaiety, peace, chastity, truth, modesty, femininity, and delicacy” (Gergen 1967, 397, quoted in Dyer 1997, 73). Clearly, blackness (and by extension, black skin) represents the absence, lack, or opposite of these qualities; Dyer noted, “Non-white people are associated in various ways with the dirt that comes out of the body, notably in the repeated racist perception that they smell” (1997, 75–76). These moral and aesthetic values privileging whiteness clearly informed colonial legal discourse, confirming the discourse of contamination. Another set of legal texts suggested that the indigenous people should be made by law to remain “authentic” and “native” while not offending European standards of “modesty.” For example, from 1920, “all Papuans, both male and female, were forbidden to wear clothes on the upper part of the body” (Wolfers 1975, 47). In 1934, they “were forbidden to ride bicycles in Rabaul” (Wolfers 1975, 98). The Native Regulation outlawing the wearing of clothes on the upper part of the body read in Pidgin English thus:

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114. Boy no can put im singlets all same shirt long skin belong im, das all spose boy he like put im shirt long go lotu he must catch im paper long Kiap first time. (quoted in Jinks and others 1973, 262)

The triviality of this regulation is obvious in its attempt to construct the native both as aesthetically “authentic,” and as primitive, childlike, and in need of “protection” from themselves. The regulation applied only to shirts, and not to shorts, laplaps, and skirts worn on the lower part of the body. It was justified in Native Regulation 97 (1) as follows: Clothes are good to wear if they are kept clean and if they are taken off when they are wet, and dried before they are put on again. Otherwise they are bad, for they cause sickness and death. Some natives know how to keep their clothes clean and do not wear them when they are wet, but many others are foolish and wear them when they are very dirty, and keep them on, and even sleep in them, when they are wet. To protect these foolish men and women it is necessary to make a law about the wearing of clothes. (Papua New Guinea 1948, 3316)

The regulation on clothing was “an ambivalent attempt to make the Papuans more modest in their dress, while also preventing the primitive from aping the more civilised” (Wolfers 1975, 56). Perhaps more than any other set of laws, the regulation of native authenticity demonstrates the representational strategies by which colonial discourse operates. Portraying the indigenous people as “different,” “unclean,” but essentially “native,” laws surrounding their segregation, contamination, and authenticity provided clear material tactics for maintaining that representation as real. The danger presented by locals imitating Europeans could also be viewed from Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the concept of mimicry. For Bhabha, the menace of mimicry is “the repetition of partial presence, which . . . articulates those disturbances of cultural, racial and historical difference that menace the narcissistic demand of colonial authority” (1994, 88; italics in original). As Bhabha also wrote, “Almost the same but not white: the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction” (1994, 89; italics in original). From this perspective, the purpose behind such regulations become apparent: to establish the “authorized versions of otherness.” Too great a mimicry “alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as ‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects” (Bhabha 1994, 88). The legal proscriptions operating in Papua New Guinea suggest that the “menace” of mimicry was perceived as an ever-present yet controllable danger. Colonial laws operated not only to install the representation of Otherness, but also to reduce the possibility of any disruptive ambivalence.

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The issues of representation and identification in particular, as Bhabha has theorized, are not grounded in any original, essential identity. Identity is always relational, based on images of others, and this is true of indigenous subjectivity in Papua New Guinea. As with the so-called “fraudulent” texts discussed in chapter 1, the legal discourse of colonial Papua New Guinea demonstrates that construction and representation of indigenous identity is based in power relations, though which colonial authority is coercively maintained in questions of “truth” and “reality.” A number of significant points emerge from this examination of legal representation. Firstly, legal discourse supported the social, racial, and political dichotomization of colonial Papua New Guinea; it was the ultimate instrument deployed to maintain the European–Native divide. It also helped to create and reinforce a catalogue of stereotypical native identities, together with a new representation of the native psyche, which was assumed to lack the ability for rational or abstract thought. Rather, the indigene’s consciousness was constructed as instinctual with a propensity for superstition. The colonial laws and regulations governing segregation, contamination, authenticity (and, as discussed in chapter 7, sexual violation) had clear social consequences. They legalized the social dichotomy of the two races, but even more importantly, they maintained and controlled the subjugation of indigenous people.

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5

The Subject as Child

The strategy of infantilization is common in colonial discourse and is associated closely with the concept of the primitive and the subject status of the races of empire. Through these representations and associated tropes such as the uneducable native and “fuzzy wuzzy angel,” colonial authority as “parent,” “teacher,” and “ruler” is maintained. Descriptions such as “bush kanaka,” “manki masta,” “houseboy,” or simply “boy,” which may seem fairly benign, have operated to render Papua New Guineans inferior and subservient. The child is always a mirror image of the savage, and colonial discourse has always constructed indigenes as both savages and children as a way of resolving the contradictory nature of imperial rule. Thus, the child trope could well be considered side by side with the trope of savage, but for the sake of clarity I deal with these in different chapters. This chapter demonstrates how indigenous people have been infantilized through European efforts to maintain a power advantage in asymmetrical social relationships. Despite shifts in global ideology and politics, the residues of colonial discourse remain embedded in current ideas about indigenous people. Even in contemporary nonindigenous fiction, the trope of infantilization persists. As this chapter shows, the persistence of the “dependency myth” illustrates a shift from an overtly racist depiction of local people to a more covert one: the idea that despite their country’s independence, Papua New Guineans cannot manage their own affairs without the help of Europeans to guide them. According to Bill Ashcroft, “The child became important to the discourse of empire because the invention of childhood itself in European society was coterminous with the invention of that other notion of supreme importance to imperialism: race” (2001, 37; italics in original). Ashcroft revealed an important link between the trope of the child and imperialism. The image of the primitive subject as a child 100

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allowed imperial discourse to resolve an immense and potentially disabling contradiction between its professed aim to “civilize” the natives and its actions in exploiting them. The nature of the colonizing mission requires the language of infantilization because it has been formulated as philanthropy, “where the redemption and salvation of humanity involved the ‘higher cultures’ having a ‘sacred trust’ to educate and morally uplift the natives” (Lattas 1996, 141). European colonial discourse promulgated the idea that Papua New Guineans needed the colonizing power of Britain and subsequently Australia to deliver them from their state of “childlike savagery.” As Ashcroft pointed out, “it was the cross-fertilization between the concepts of childhood and primitivism that enabled these terms to emerge as mutually important concepts in imperial discourse” (2001, 37). Colonial discourse justifies two purposes of colonial rule: first, bringing civilization to the Papua New Guineans, and second, producing indigenous subjects. The indigene must be seen to be living in an uncivilized state so that the technologies of power can be fully deployed; thus, “Colonialism comes to be formulated as a process of caring for the other, holding them in trust for their own reformative benefit” (Lattas 1996, 146).

The Trope of Infantilization In Papua New Guinea, language formed an integral part of the “epistemic violence” of colonial subjugation. Indigenous people were referred to in discriminatory terms such as “boy,” “manki masta” (literally, boy-master), “houseboy,” or “bush kanaka,” terms that perpetuated the master-servant relationship and the hierarchical structuring of racial groups. While Europeans represented indigenous people as children, a European man was to be referred to as “Masta” (master) or “Taubada” (in Motu, important/big man) and a European woman as “Misis” (madam) or “Sinabada” (in Motu, important/big woman). Such binarism was characteristic of broader social and racial relations existing in colonial Papua New Guinea. “The sort of behaviour that was expected of natives included . . . addressing all Europeans respectfully (‘Masta,’ ‘Misis,’ ‘Kiap’) and observing a whole etiquette of caste behaviour (standing up when spoken to etc)” (Fink and Grosart 1963, 3–4, quoted in Jinks and others 1973, 286). In a 1969 book, Peter Hastings cited several cases of such discrimination; one example involved a member of parliament: “Mr Oala-Oala Rarua, member for Moresby Regional, and an Assistant Ministerial Member, recounts that it was not so long ago that he was told to wait in a butcher’s shop until others (Europeans) had been served and was referred to in front of them as ‘boy’” (1969, 105–106).


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Similarly, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have argued: “The trope of infantilization . . . projects the colonized as embodying an earlier stage of individual human or broad cultural development. Renan speaks of the ‘everlasting infancy of [the] non-perfectible races’ [1891, 153]. Scientific racists tried to ‘prove’ that Black adults were anatomically and intellectually identical to White children [Gould 1981, 40]. . . . The racist habit of calling colonized men ‘boys,’ like the speech tic whereby some hautes bourgeoises lapse into baby talk when they address Black people, is the linguistic marker of this attitude” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 139–140). While it was acceptable for white people to call out “Come here, boy!” to their native “houseboys,” in many cases Papua New Guineans were severely reprimanded for failing to address Europeans in appropriate terms. A number of Papua New Guinean writers have written about this issue, including Kumalau Tawali. His 1971 play Manki Masta focuses on the indigenous character, Poro, who, because he needs to pay the native tax, works as a house servant (manki masta) to an Australian family. The master-servant relationship pervades the scripted behavior and manners as well as the dialogue, being evoked most strongly through the linguistic markers of “boy” and “masta”: Mr Jones: What do you want boy? . . . Poro (hesitates): Masta, me . . . me want work for houseboy for you. Mr Jones (smiling): You want to work as my houseboy, do you? Poro: Yessa, masta. . . . Mrs Jones: You know how hard it is to teach those black people. Sometimes I wonder whether they have any brains at all. They are simple-minded. They act like children. You tell them one thing and five minutes later they have forgotten all about it. (Tawali 1971, 3)

The linguistic markers “masta” and “boy” indicate the dialectic social and racial relationship; the employment of pejorative terms of address for Papua New Guineans enables the Europeans to constitute their sense of themselves in contrast. The white man required the Otherness of the indigene for his social standing in colonial society. Abdul JanMohamed stressed this interdependency: “For while he sees the native as the quintessence of evil and therefore avoids all contact because he fears contamination, he is at the same time absolutely dependent upon the colonized people not only for his privileged social and material status but also for his sense of moral superiority and, therefore, ultimately for his very identity” (1983, 4). JanMohamed’s argument underlines the process whereby Europeans set themselves above indigenous people. The use of hierarchical terms like “manki masta,” “bush kanaka,” “houseboy,” or simply “boy” helped to sustain the unequal relationship between the two groups. The con-


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struction of Papua New Guineans as children meant that only through the Europeans’ “careful process of cultivation which involves the capitulation of the will to rational order and discipline” could the indigenous people eventually be “raised up” to the stage of adulthood (Eves 1996, 101). At the same time, for Papua New Guinean men (especially those who worked as European servants), the kinds of work they had to perform undermined certain masculine attributes, authority, and power. In traditional societies, cleaning, washing clothes, and cooking were often considered feminine tasks. The gender implications of colonial discourse combined with imposed behaviors thus operated very subtly within Papua New Guinean society, while elevating European men in particular to a paternal role. Paternalism is an excess of colonial authority. The notion of paternalism alludes to a social order in which formal familial authority resides with the father (Kleinig 1983, 4). The colonial administration saw itself as playing the role of parent to Papua New Guineans. The government regulated peoples’ lives and limited their responsibilities, asserting that it was for their benefit; “individual freedom [was] abrogated in the name of benevolence” (Kleinig 1983, 5). The locals were viewed as children, whose savagery and other inherent cultural, corporeal, and social traits impeded their progress and development. The trope of infantilization and consequent paternalism allowed the Australian government to believe, as Amirah Inglis put it, “that they were adopting ‘savages’ who were in their babyhood as far as civilisation and development were concerned” (1974, 1). The notion was that these people could be socially, morally, and intellectually uplifted by the efforts of “higher cultures” to protect and civilize them. Shohat and Stam expanded on the political and social implications of such a paternalistic view: “The infantilization trope also posits the political immaturity of colonized or formerly colonized people. . . . The in loco parentis ideology of paternalistic gradualism assumed the necessity of White trusteeship. As diplomatic synonyms for ‘childlike,’ terms like ‘underdevelopment’ project the infantilizing trope on a global scale. The Third World toddler, even when the project of a thousand years of civilization, is not yet in control of its body/psyche, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the more ‘adult’ and ‘advanced’ societies, gently pulling it into modern times” (1994, 140). The shift from overtly degrading images to paternalistic ones was a result of the colonial governments’ assumptions about their civilizing functions. Paternalistic attitudes masked the fact that these images could be as pernicious as those blatantly portraying the locals as savages, or even as cannibals. Paternalistic attitudes extended throughout all the institutions and discourses of colonialism, including Christianity. According to Richard


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Eves, the Church extended the trope of infantilization to include “nakedness.” The perceived “nakedness” of Papua New Guineans became one more reason for the presence of the white man: to civilize and bring salvation. One of the redemptive strategies was the “reconstitution” of the indigenous body and hence the re-creation of indigenous subjectivity. Eves argued that reconstituting bodies was “particularly significant to the colonial project and to colonial evangelist rhetoric and practice” and was “a critical intervention, where power was exercised over colonial subjects, encouraging the formation of a new Christian identity.” Transforming the undisciplined indigenous body into a disciplined one “acts as a marker both of conversion and of the move from ‘savage’ to ‘civilized’.” This discourse sought not only to instill a Christian moral conscience but also to make the native body physically healthy: “clothed, clean, neat and orderly, this body incorporated appropriate habits, comportment and gestures indicative of a disciplined Christian, whose interior morality was consistent with his or her outer body” (Eves 1996, 85, 86). Though the Church was seen as liberal and sympathetic toward the natives, its paternalism is clear. In missionary discourse, Papua New Guineans were portrayed as children because they had not received the Christian light; they lacked a Christian moral conscience and were living an immoral way of life. In the June 1939 issue of the Review, P N W Strong, Anglican Bishop of New Guinea, wrote: The Papuans are a child race, and, like children, they have a charm of their own; but they are children who to-day are growing up and coming into contact with a new experience of life. Their natural interests are being intersected by inroads from modern civilisation. . . . You can no more leave him alone than you can leave children always in the child stage. As with children, so with Papuans, they need those who will show them love and understanding. That is just what the New Guinea Mission is trying to do for the child-like people of Papua. (quoted in Dickson 1976, 39; italics in original)

Thus Christian conversion was considered a means of protection under the guiding hand of the mission. Christian virtue was viewed by missionaries as a measure of the intellectual ability as well as the social and moral status of the local people. Bishop Strong’s view was that although Papua New Guineans were not beyond redemption, they would need time to acquire Christian character. In contrast, Archbishop Alain de Boismenu, who spent most of his life among the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea, was of the opinion that the natives could not be “redeemed” from their inferior, childlike status. In a statement delivered to the Australasian Catholic Congress of 1904, he declared:


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Though the Papuan is physically far superior to many other coloured races, and is not so corrupt in morals as is commonly believed, nevertheless, for the want of manliness and firmness of character, he must be classed near to the lowest types. He is whimsical and fickle as a child; he must be watched, coaxed, led like a child; his mind must often be made up for him. . . . What a far-seeing missionary, Father J B Aubry, wrote with regard to another, and a better endowed, race appears only too true of the Papuan: “There is wanting in this people the raw material that was found in the ancestral tribes of Christian Europe. Whoever knows them well will find it impossible to conceive that faith will ever raise them to as high a degree of Christian life, of spiritual fruitfulness, of true civilisation, as the former attained; nor is it to be hoped they will ever be able to fill the missionary ranks with recruits from their own midst, far less to provide apostles for other countries.” The Papuan race is unquestionably of an inferior nature. It has lived too long a prey to original sin. And though it certainly can be Christianised, yet the most we can expect is a Christianity of limited vigour and perfection, that must always depend for its existence on the charity of those nations whom God has reserved the honour and burden of the apostleship. (quoted in Griffin 1978, xxvii)

While Archbishop de Boismenu’s view seems to align generally with that of Bishop Strong, the archbishop’s statement betrays a definite sense of superiority and expresses his doubts regarding the efficacy of Christianizing Papua New Guineans. In his opinion the people would always remain sub-Christians, dependent on Europeans, “whom God has reserved the honour and burden of the apostleship.”

Educating the Colonial Child: Education Policy and Its Contradictions One significant material effect of the trope of the child in Papua New Guinea has been confusion in the development of an education policy. As the subject of education, the child (both the literal child and the colonial subject as metaphoric child) must also, paradoxically, be kept marginal and untaught. Hubert Murray, who was lieutenant governor of Papua for thirty-two years (from 1909 to 1940), stated in 1912: I do not think that we should attempt to give the Papuan anything in the nature of a higher education. . . . He is inferior to the European, and, if we wish to avoid trouble, we should never forget this, and should never look upon him as a social or political equal. (quoted in Dickson 1976, 23)


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Clearly, the repeated reinscription of the colonial subject as child resolves the contradiction in imperial discourse between the professed intention to educate and the actual intention to keep colonial subjects in their proper place. Again, a point made by Ashcroft is pertinent: “for imperialism, the idea of literacy and education, even where these were imposed on already literate societies, represented a defining separation between the civilized and the barbarous nations. We can see in the gap between childhood and adulthood created by the emergence of literacy in post-medieval culture a precise corollary of the gap between the imperial centre and the illiterate, barbarous, childlike races of the empire. The strategies of surveillance, correction and instruction which lie at the heart of the child’s education transfer effortlessly into the disciplinary enterprise of empire” (2001, 39). D J Dickson argued, “The inadequacies of the Papuan educational system reflected the limited expectations of those who designed it and those whom it served” (1976, 40–41). But the earliest aims of education in Papua New Guinea tended to meet the requirements of those who provided it more than of those who received it. Western education was inseparable from the broader field of native policy. The metaphor of the “childlike races of empire” pervaded colonial policy regarding literacy and education, which were crucial tools in the imperial expansion of Europe. Because education was an integral part of the civilizing process, its purposes included “the spreading of a respect for law, . . . the maintenance of order, and the imprinting of European moral values” (Essai 1961, 167). Chilla Bulbeck noted Ruth First’s suggestion that “colonial education was not a preparation for independence, it was a training in the authoritarian command of white rule” (First 1983, cited in Bulbeck 1992, 180). Although in many ways Lieutenant Governor Murray felt sympathetic toward Papua New Guineans, he couldn’t break through the color prejudice prevalent among Europeans. While the colonial governments accentuated the importance of education as a tool of civilization, they were generally reluctant to provide schools. For a long time there was no official education policy in either Papua or New Guinea. Education of the indigenous people was left to the missions. Besides improving conditions in the villages, mission education was geared toward enabling the pupils to read Scriptures and participate more fully in church, but it was also circumscribed by the notion of indigene-as-child. As Eves noted: “This recognition is evident in the missionaries’ use of agricultural and paternalistic metaphors, which also intersected with notions of racial hierarchy. Thus, the missionary view of the creation of Christian character was seen as occurring through the careful tending of the immature heathen child-race until it reached Christian maturity” (1996, 99). In practice, missionary education combined the building of Christian character with training


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in agricultural methods and carpentry for boys and domestic science for girls. This type of training correlated with the missionary assumption that through practical training the natives could be civilized. Although Murray saw the need to educate Papua New Guineans as part of the civilizing process, the kind of education he had in mind was essentially elementary and in line with what the missions were providing. When the commonwealth government was reluctant to accept financial responsibility for Murray’s education plan, he introduced a native tax to fund native education, an impost that seemed to perpetuate their subjugation to the colonizing powers. In the annual report for the Territory of Papua for 1937–1938, Murray argued that he was “opposed to the creation of a Papuan intelligentsia and would rather aim at the diffusion of an elementary education, with a knowledge of English, over as wide an area as possible” (quoted in Dickson 1976, 36). This argument underlines the racial/social divide that was prevalent in Papua New Guinea. The topic of the education of indigenous people was fiercely debated. Almost all Europeans agreed that industrial education was more beneficial to the indigenous people than less practical forms. Staniforth Smith, who was elected to the Senate in the first Australian Commonwealth Parliament, wrote in a 1906 report on native education: The most dangerous symptom in the life of the Papuan native is his ever increasing lethargy, which unless checked will lead to mental and physical deterioration. A native, who has obtained a school education is less inclined to manual work than his unsophisticated brother; he is inclined to class himself with the white man, and as the latter never undertakes manual work, such as is done by natives, the tendency is for the educated native to look down on this class of labour. (quoted in Jinks and others 1973, 91–92)

Smith’s argument is spurious. Overall, the comment seems to be based on the fear that once Papua New Guineans obtained western education, they would no longer be subservient and manageable. His remarks suggest that benign neglect of indigenous education would postpone any resistance to white domination or indeed delay the indigenous people’s gaining “access to the means whereby they can evaluate the white rulers in their own terms” (Bulbeck 1992, 180). While these arguments mainly referred to Papua, attitudes to education in German New Guinea were similar. That the responsibility for indigenous education was left to the missions is evidence of government reluctance to support it in both colonies. As Dickson noted: “The fact remains, however, that in spite of the educational policies of the countries governing New Guinea, and whether or not missions desired a greater role for the government in


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education, the missions carried the burden with almost no government assistance to 1920” (1976, 22). The paternalistic attitude, expressed as a need to protect natives from harmful experiences, interfered with attempts to promote more advanced educational opportunities. A proposal to send Papuan Medical Orderlies to Sydney for training created controversy in the colony. J G Nielson, the “unofficial” member who represented the settler population in the Legislative Council, questioned the proposal: It was always understood that natives would not be allowed to go to Australia under any consideration, except perhaps those taken there by some mission for educational purposes. The mission may be in a position to safeguard the natives from coming into contact with undesirable people. . . . The students who were sent to Sydney last year seem to have created quite a lot of talk by their having alleged contact with undesirable ladies. Attention has been drawn to it, not so much to the natives but to the people in Sydney responsible for the contact. Of course, no one can blame the natives. It is not their fault, but the fact remains that they get to know far more than it is desirable for them to know. (P Smith 1987, 68–69)

This is a fascinating demonstration of the general confusion of the “civilizing” discourse of colonials. While their expressed desire is the protection of the natives, the fear that the natives might discover “far more than it is desirable for them to know” could refer to what they might learn from the “undesirable ladies”—or from their wider experience of Australian society generally. The latter interpretation especially would indicate the investment the settler population had in an uneducated, or minimally educated, subservient population. Even the curriculum made available to indigenous pupils reflected the structures of power between the two races. The 1928 Papuan Junior Reader, for example (a collaborative work between missionaries and government school inspectors), was blatantly paternalistic in tone. It praised the work of the civilizing mission and condemned the traditional life of the people: We will speak of Papua. The people are not all one people. And they speak many different languages. Before white men came and lived here, people of one part were always fighting with people from other parts. The natives of Papua were very savage in those days. They could not go from home for long. They killed people with spears, bows and arrows, and stone clubs. They used stone axes and adzes for making houses and canoes and cutting down trees. There was no law and order. Now the government keeps law and order and punishes those


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who do wrong. We can go anywhere in our canoes now, and we are safe. We can walk inland and the people will give us food. We can sell our things to other natives and they can sell their things to us. We can leave our mothers and sisters and brothers and they will not be afraid. We work for the white man on boats and plantations, and we are paid well with money. (1928, quoted in P Smith 1987, 70–71)

This passage clearly illustrates the Manichean binarism characteristic of colonial discourse. Children were taught from the beginning to valorize white institutions and culture and to condemn their own as barbaric. They were taught, subtly, that their past was “one long night of savagery” (to use Chinua Achebe’s phrase), their people were murderers, savages, and primitives, and that the presence of the white man had brought positive changes and new freedoms. Higher education in Papua New Guinea was not considered until 1962, when the United Nations Visiting Mission expressed criticism “of the rate of development in the country in such areas as education and demanded the introduction of crash programs with the objective of training an indigenous elite” (Bacchus 1987, 25). Later a World Bank Report also recommended a shift in educational policy. But in June 1939, when “the Australian representative was severely criticised by the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations for the slow rate of growth in education he was able to point to ‘the deciding factor’ which was the capacity of the New Guineans to absorb knowledge and become educated, ‘a capacity which was still very low and which explained both the slow progress in education proper and the absence of any considerable number of natives in government employ’” (quoted in P Smith 1989, 303–304). Thus the assumed low intelligence of Papua New Guineans was presented as a reason for the delay in education. The following year, in 1963, the Australian government “appointed a Commission of Higher Education to enquire into and report on the means for further developing tertiary education to meet the present and prospect needs of the Territory” (Bacchus 1987, 25). As a result of this commission, the University of Papua New Guinea, the PNG University of Technology, and the Goroka Teachers’ College were established. There were still attempts to denigrate these tertiary institutions, however. K S Inglis, in a 1968 article in the UPNG News, reported that the popular journal Black and White had targeted the university staff and students by saying: Meanwhile, there will evolve in the Territory a clique of half-baked idiots who, by virtue of their attendance of a university whose degrees mean nothing, will set themselves up as intellectual and social leaders of their own people. (Inglis 1968, 4, quoted in Griffin 1976, 102)


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According to James Griffin, Europeans who expressed these racist views did so because they could not face the prospect of “their potential hausbois being better educated than themselves” (1976, 102). At the same time, there was a general fear among Europeans of being displaced from their employment and businesses. Always behind the trope of the uneducable native lurks the view that Papua New Guineans are children. As Ashcroft argued: “Neither the child nor the colonial subject can have access to meaning outside the process of civilization and education which bring them into being, even when that meaning is one of an idyllic pre-formed, pre-industrial innocence. Until they are ‘inscribed’ by being brought into inscription, introduced to literacy and education, they cannot be ‘read’ in any meaningful way. The child, then, signifying a blank slate, an innocent of nature, a subject of exotic possibility and moral instruction, as well as a barbarous and unsettling primitive, suggests an almost endlessly protean capacity for inscription and meaning” (2001, 41–42; italics in original). According to the colonial trope of the child, education provides the European with the opportunity to “inscribe,” or construct, the indigene.

The Trope of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel One such inscription is found in the term “fuzzy wuzzy angel,” popularized by European Second World War journalists as a description of Papua New Guineans who assisted the Allied soldiers in the war against the Japanese. While the term reflects the great gratitude felt by Australian soldiers, particularly those on the Kokoda Trail, it is nevertheless belittling and consistent with the discourse of paternalism that largely characterized colonial administrative policy. During the Second World War, the overtly unequal relationships between Europeans and indigenous people were complicated by the assistance the locals provided to Australians. The contradictory nature of this relationship is manifested in the trope of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angel, made famous by Sapper H “Bert” Beros in the poem of the same name ([1944], 10): Many a mother in Australia, When a busy day is done, Sends a prayer to the Almighty For the keeping of her son, Asking that an angel guide him And bring him safely back— Now we see those prayers are answered On the Owen Stanley Track.


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For they haven’t any halos, Only holes slashed in their ears, And their faces worked by tattoos, With scratch pins in their hair. Bringing back the badly wounded, Just as steady as a hearse, Using leaves to keep the rain off And as gentle as a nurse. Slow and careful in bad places On the awful mountain track, The look upon their faces Would make you think that Christ was black. ... May the mothers of Australia When they offer up a prayer, Mention these impromptu angels With their fuzzy wuzzy hair. (Sapper H “Bert” Beros, “The Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”)

Although the term was previously used to describe Sudanese soldiers or other black people, Beros installed it in World War II vocabulary. The phrase itself conveys ambivalence, with “fuzzy wuzzy” alluding to physical attributes, especially the hair texture of native peoples, and “Angel” connoting innocence, beauty, and kindness. The poet evokes the natives’ good deeds—“Bringing back the badly wounded / Just as steady as a hearse / . . . / And as gentle as a nurse / . . . / The look upon their faces / Would make you think that Christ was black”—while simultaneously representing their bodies as Other and different—“Only holes slashed in their ears / . . . / With scratch pins in their hair. / . . . / With their fuzzy wuzzy hair.” The job the natives perform is, by implication, not comparable to soldiering; they are merely carriers of the wounded. This poem was important because it helped to educate many Australians back home about the role played by Papua New Guineans in the war, and, more significantly, because it portrayed a new image of the local people by lauding their benevolent deeds. However, their physical appearance was denigrated; the body of the native as text remained imbued with lasting tropes of difference. Unlike the white soldiers, whose dead are accounted for and whose names are listed and memorialized, the natives remain anonymous in life, and in death, they disappear forever. Their presence is therefore a “negative presence.” When Papua New Guineans found themselves fighting in the front line with white soldiers, they were not regarded as equals. The war taught the two races friendship, but this friendship was on the white soldiers’ terms.


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Contemporary Writing and the Dependency Myth The dependency myth is deeply implicated in the trope of infantilization. Because of the changing circumstances in global politics, the once overt discriminatory colonialist practices became subtler. Although by the 1960s independence was clearly inevitable, the underlying attitudes remained the same or were in some respects exacerbated. During the Cold War in particular, the West needed to keep Papua New Guinea stable, as a buffer to communist incursion. The belief that indigenous people were incapable of sustaining western democracy also led to a fear that an independent dictatorial regime could emerge. Although the dependency myth was most obviously enacted in the political machinery of Australia’s UN Trusteeship, and has continued after independence in its aid relations, some of the most interesting and subtlest examples of the dependency discourse emerge in fiction about Papua New Guinea since the Second World War. In much of this fiction, the native protagonists (or antagonists) are portrayed as commencing their (allegorical) journeys out of a period of white paternalistic hibernation. The parent-child trope not only emphasizes the white belief in the inability of the natives to govern themselves, but it also attests to the fear of the indigene’s dismantling the Manichean binaries of colonial society. The narrative world in these texts is also a bifurcated one. In Ian Downs’s novel The Stolen Land (1970), and Louis Nowra’s Palu (1987), the major indigenous characters, prior to their political ascendancy, are immersed in white institutions. In The Stolen Land, after he attends school in Australia through white endowment and patronage, Joseph Makati is taken on by Michael Hardie, a white planter. Hardie gives Makati his start in politics and becomes his main political adviser. The title character in Palu and her friend Emoti (whom Palu affectionately calls Emo) go through similar experiences; in the end, it is a white teacher, Mister Andrews, who launches Emoti’s political career. In The Stolen Land, Joseph Makati clearly views Michael Hardie as paternal: His descriptions of Hardie came from his own imagination in which the visual influences of religious art blended in his mind with atavistic faith to produce a new father-figure upon whom he would be able to call for special assistance in the days ahead. (Downs 1970, 4)

Makati is disempowered through his representation as a child in relation to the white Hardie. Homi Bhabha has noted that the reproduction of such stereotypical images is necessary for the white man to maintain power: “As a form of splitting and multiple belief, the stereo-


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type requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes. The process by which the metaphoric “masking” is inscribed on a lack which must then be concealed gives the stereotype both its fixity and its phantasmatic quality—the same old stories of the Negro’s animality, the Coolie’s inscrutability or the stupidity of the Irish must be told (compulsively) again and afresh, and are differently gratifying and terrifying each time” (1994, 77; italics in original). Bhabha’s cardinal argument here points to the repetitive nature of stereotype. That is, its power rests on the continual and repeated production of difference. Yet this repetition masks a paradox: “This fundamentally conflictual co-articulation of the stereotype simultaneously recognizes and denies difference” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 52). When black people are alienated through this process, they are made to acknowledge their inferiority. But because discrimination against them is made natural through its concealment, they are unable to intervene in its production: “The difference of the object of discrimination is at once visible and natural—colour as the cultural/political sign of inferiority or degeneracy, skin as its natural ‘identity’ "(Bhabha 1994, 80; italics in original). The creation of the white man in paternal terms not only infantilizes the indigene but also produces a counter-empowering effect. In Palu, another white character, Mister Bacon, is elevated in contrast to his native workers: To have all those people working for him made him all the more powerful. You know it, don’t you, how the more people who serve you, the more powerful you seem to be, and the more powerful you seem to be, the more powerful you are. . . . Even in the house everyone spoke of him as if he were a god. (Nowra 1987, 29–30)

Mister Bacon is seen as powerful, and even if the power is sometimes illusionary, it is based primarily in the fact that he is a white businessman. Mister Bacon’s position therefore becomes a source of envy for Palu, a domain of power that indigenous people only dream of inhabiting. It is from this perspective of the indigene as a child, innocent and immature, that the stage is set for the discourse that describes and inscribes natives as incapable of governance and thus unable to sustain a politically independent country. This perception is further accentuated in the fictional texts by the prominent roles given to the white men as dispensers of knowledge, especially political knowledge. In The Stolen Land, Michael Hardie continually supports Joseph Makati’s political career, as he would tend a child or a coffee plant in his plantation:


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Joseph followed the tall white figure into the house. . . . “You should be waking them up. That’s what you have been educated to do . . . You have a job here for your own people. . . . The sooner you get into politics the better.” . . . “Let’s get down to laying this thing out so that we can start your war with a good sound operational plan.” He pushed a notebook across the office desk. “Start writing” he told Joseph. . . . “Chances are you will have self-government thrust upon you before your people are ready to digest it, and they will vomit it up in a shambles of incompetence.” (Downs 1970, 26, 28, 30)

Note that Hardie is described here as “the tall white figure.” His paternal role comes through as he not only calls on Makati to be politically conscious but also aggressively urges him to begin the process of political brainstorming immediately. Underlying his advice to Makati is his doubt of the readiness of Papua New Guineans for political independence, presented in concrete, bodily terms in the last part of the quotation: “Chances are you will have self-government thrust upon you before your people are ready to digest it, and they will vomit it up in a shambles of incompetence.” It also might be inferred that Hardie’s push for Makati to be politically aware is self-interested. Through his crash program for Makati, Hardie could be attempting to maintain indirect control of the country’s destiny. In Palu, Andrews plays a role similar to Hardie’s: Mr Andrews often invited us to his house and he and Emo would talk and talk and talk. . . . “Emoti,” he said, “you are a man to lead your people eventually. Once independence comes nothing will change. Your people will still ape the white man.” . . . He was forever lecturing Emo on what to read and how to interpret. Emo could barely get a word in edgewise. (Nowra 1987, 71–72)

Andrews bases Emoti’s politicization on socialist principles. He urges Emoti to be critical, always to question. Yet he undermines his own support of this politicization process when he informs Emoti, “Once independence comes nothing will change.” Despite the socialist overtones of these two passages, a number of important arguments militate against reading them at face value. While the white men’s role vis-à-vis these indigenous protagonists can be construed as positive, awakening them to the inevitability of selfgovernment, the underlying assumption that the natives cannot govern themselves still maintains its hold. Even if the natives internalize the political “indoctrination” (which they do), the white argument asserts that they will go astray and out of control once left alone by Europeans. Because Hardie and Andrews are thought to have communist affilia-


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tions, their role exacerbates fears that the country will be infiltrated and taken over by communists. Therefore, in spite of the white man’s advocacy for political action, the native still remains a child (a confused child at that). Thus, such representations of European support, while presented in positive terms, actually promote disabling effects. The dependency myth is conveyed through related allegories in these novels. In Palu, white paranoia is manifested when Emoti, who becomes the president, ultimately becomes a dictator. In The Stolen Land, the ultimate political destiny toward which Joseph Makati and his cohorts would steer the emerging nation, given the influence of people with communist affiliations, inspires white fear. In Chris and Louise Harkness’s 1992 novel Take Necessary Action, white fear of the “Yellow Peril” is more overt. The work questions the ability of Papua New Guinea, as an independent nation, to overcome the possibility of an invasion from the East. It assumes that communists are perpetrating the chaos in the country: but all I can say is that we are on to a matter of vital political significance. I have it on good authority that there’s a band of infiltrators from another area setting up camp at the northern base of Mt. Kamup. These indigenous conspirators have desperate need of a local man with knowledge of our District. Yes—it’s happening in other Districts as well. . . . My guess is that it’s trouble-makers from another country possibly communists, stirring everybody up when it is known that Independence is so near. (Harkness and Harkness 1992, 42, 150–151)

Because the emerging violence is thought to be connected with the imminent political independence, the conclusion is that people with other political agendas are involved, implying that those with ulterior motives (ie, communists) are behind the upsurge in violence. Such paranoia is not confined to Papua New Guinea alone, for it is seen as merely a buffer zone to Australia. This bolsters the assumption that Papua New Guineans are not ready for independence. Through the linear structure of a metaphorical journey from childhood to adulthood, these novels depict the stages of a nation’s development from political innocence to political maturity. However, the endings of both texts are structured so that maturity is always deferred; for instance, in Palu the journey ends in a dictatorship. The native, it is assumed, will always remain a child and will always need the guidance, counsel, and correction of white people. Even if the natives are finally left alone to control their own political future, they are bound to fail and revert to their former state of savagery. The indigenous people are simply not capable of handling western political systems because their


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societies did not evolve such government systems and they do not have the knowledge to operate such a system. White phobia is openly exhibited in most of these texts. It becomes the engine that advances the plots toward their individual resolutions, as illustrated in these two examples, from Palu and The Stolen Land, respectively: Even the concept of independence was hard to grasp. What would happen afterwards? What did it actually mean? Could our own people govern themselves? Many whites, fearing bloodshed and chaos, were leaving the country. Emo hated the thought that independence would prove that his own people were incapable of governing themselves. (Nowra 1987, 79–80) The non-native community had been understandably shaken by the Makati campaign and Joseph in the minds of some was thought to be plainly Communist—if only because he seemed to be ranged against the existing way of things—while others accused him of trying to be a black “Messiah”. . . . The susceptibility of the people to almost any kind of emotional persuasion seemed alarming and gave rise to fear and a feeling of insecurity amongst the expatriate community. (Downs 1970, 104–105)

For Emoti, in the first passage, the concept of independence is “hard to grasp,” clearly because independence is alien to Papua New Guineans. His skepticism—“Could our own people govern themselves?”—is grounded in the Manichean binary of colonialist discourse. It is this ambivalence that gets him stranded in a politically untenable situation. In The Stolen Land, Joseph Makati is viewed with suspicion by the expatriate community because of his brilliance and knowledge of political issues. In the colonialist mind, indigenous people cannot conceptualize in abstract terms because they are still backward. Further, what Makati is preaching is viewed in terms of assumptions about natives’ emotionalism, suggesting that once his speeches are communicated to the people, they will be controlled by their emotions rather than by reason. Both passages convey the belief that the concept of independence is unknown political terrain for Papua New Guineans. This sense of intellectual vacancy and political immaturity of Papua New Guineans is bluntly raised in Jean Bedford’s 1990 novel, A Lease of Summer: “No, I mean it.” Ralph, the maths lecturer from the Teachers’ College puts his hand on her arm. “They’re rock apes. He gets his speeches written for him by a white man, believe me. They’re all the tools of some white who reckons he’ll need the influence later . . . ”


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“But surely—he has a Masters’ degree from Harvard. You’re not saying someone wrote his thesis for him, are you?” “He couldn’t have done it himself, that’s for sure. Ornaments, that’s what they are, these educated natives. I’ve taught them for twenty years, I know. They’re incapable of learning anything apart from the basics.” (Bedford 1990, 6)

Another reason for European anxiety is that the colony created wealth for many of the colonial officials, white planters and others in private enterprise. Their relative affluence and privilege would likely be disrupted by changes in the political status quo. Their desire to maintain this wealth was inverted and reworked into the myth of the cargo cult, in which the natives’ desire to be the masters of their own destiny is represented as an indigenous fantasy that the white man is “stealing” and withholding cargo sent to them by their ancestors. The cargo cult myth is held up as another example of the natives’ erratic and neurotic behavior, and is present in many of the novels under examination. In The Stolen Land, Joseph Makati is temporarily associated with cargo cult by the villagers: The talk around the evening fires in hundreds of hamlets dwelt upon this huge young man at the District Office and rumours gained momentum because Ferei [an indigenous policeman] saw to it that there was also an exciting message. The message was exciting for the people because it involved a new secret influence. An omen that was different. They were accustomed to the unfulfilled promises of those who predicted wealth that would arrive in a variety of ways. Like the ancestral wire of magnetic quality that somehow lowered endless stream of food and valuable goods down to earth. (Downs 1970, 64)

The constellation of images of the natives, denigrated as children, as stupid and emotional, as lacking knowledge, and their traditions and cultures as savage, are prominent. Because these “evils” are presumed to be inherent in the indigenous people, they are reflected in whatever they do. In Palu, such negative representations are foregrounded at independence, translating and manifesting Europeans’ anxiety and paranoia: Emo danced with abandon I had never seen before. People were excited to the point of frenzy. . . . Much later that night we headed off into the city with some friends, crying out, “The city is ours!” In the Chinese districts youths were smashing shop windows. . . . we joined in, picking up stones and rocks from the road and breaking all the windows in the street. . . . Some policemen arrived. They were drunk on independence too and


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immediately joined in our attack on the stores that had overcharged us. We broke into the shops, rampaging through them, breaking, smashing and looting. . . . In the morning the whites drove past, their faces expressing condescension at our drunken state and also fear. It was the first time I had even seen whites openly showing their fear of blacks. . . . Now we were in control, we had the power and they were afraid of what we would do with that power. (Nowra 1987, 85–86)

Independence becomes an occasion of violence, uncontrollable frenzy, racial disharmony, and lawlessness. For the native people, the meaning of independence diverges from the European definition as the chaos and anarchy the Europeans predicted finally comes true. Even the policemen who are supposed to uphold law and order are intoxicated by the phenomenon of independence. Again, the underlying message is that the natives were better off under white rule, and that if they are given power, they will abuse it. What is most evident in these examples is the belief in the indigene as “evil.” According to Frantz Fanon: As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. Native society is not simply described as a society lacking in values. It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values. He is, let us dare to admit, the enemy values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. He is the corrosive element, destroying all that comes near him; he is the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty or morality; he is the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces. (1966, 33–34)

Fanon’s thesis explains the ideological assertion behind white phobia, through which Europeans displace onto the indigenous Other an insensibility to any ethical system. As the Other, the native represents all that is outside the boundaries of white identity and civilization. Because of the anxiety engendered by the fear of evil, the indigene is constantly under European surveillance. While Emoti in Palu ultimately takes control of his country’s destiny, he is also represented as a dictator who erratically and callously murders his own people in order to retain power: After hearing of the plot [on the part of some Highland members of parliament to overthrow the government] Emo promised a “Himalaya of corpses.” He did not act for a week but then one morning he van-


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ished into his angel room and not long afterwards I heard gunshots. I thought my ears were deceiving me; surely the gunfire wasn’t coming from inside Parliament House itself? . . . I rushed outside and ran . . . [the] soldiers . . . yelled at me, telling me the situation was too dangerous. I paid no attention and ran on, not wanting to believe that such a barbaric act was happening in the very place of government itself. When I arrived the fighting was over. A Highlander was lying on the steps, his head blown off. A Night Man [very dark-skinned from far inland] member of parliament dipped his handkerchief into the splattering of brains. . . . Soldiers were carrying out the bodies of other slain members of parliament. (Nowra 1987, 193–194)

Emoti’s dictatorship is partly grounded in his traditional culture. His “angel room” (a personal retreat where he keeps a collection of angel statues) serves as a metonym for traditional culture: the murder of his political enemies is waged after Emoti seeks sanctuary there, thus creating a causal link between traditional culture and violence. President Emoti’s dictatorship, his fear of losing power, and the ensuing ethnic violence are all associated with traditional culture. In the novel Take Necessary Action, fear and anxiety translate immediately to action, the evacuation of all Europeans from the country. Violence is seen as ever present but elusive, lurking in the background. The infiltrators are nameless, surreal agent provocateurs whose task is to agitate the locals against the whites. As in the other texts, native violence and the fear it generates are associated with approaching independence, its eventual explosiveness prompting the evacuation of Europeans. Papua New Guineans are depicted as unable to stop this violence, blindly joining it, thus reaffirming their ignorance and savagery. The scene before Steward’s eyes was not at all pleasant. A pig, or the remains of it, lay on the floor just near the Board table. It obviously had been garotted with the piece of wire that then had been thrown carelessly across the floor. Its sightless eyes were bulging. (Harkness and Harkness 1992, 71)

This scene had an accompanying note, which read (in my translation from the pidgin): The pig is no good—it is dead—Suppose the men and women of District Office aren’t any good they must die the same as the pig—do you understand—the time is coming when another man must take over from the District Commissioner, from the House of Assembly, from the Government in Australia. (Harkness and Harkness 1992, 71)

This representation of threat and barbarity resonate with the trope of primitiveness and savagery, which is once again associated with politi-


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cal fortunes. The unpredictable and violent destiny of the country is expressed in the thoughts of John Rhodes, a patrol officer: First self-government bringing rapidly growing unrest among the indigenous and expatriate population and now, at their back door, Independence and what . . . bloodshed? A complete exodus of all Europeans! . . . Who else would worm their way into New Guinea with false promises and new ideas? Again he [John Rhodes] shuddered and pulled the wheel sharply over to get around a large hole in the road. (Harkness and Harkness 1992, 27)

The anxiety and skepticism expressed by Rhodes, similar to that in Palu and The Stolen Land, evoke a major concern in Take Necessary Action: that of the “Yellow Peril,” the possibility of communist infiltration and takeover of the country. Together with European anxieties about political independence, the fear of communist takeover betrays a lack of intimate knowledge and understanding of the indigenous people. The binary assumptions of colonial discourse pervading these novels allow room for no representation other than that of ruler and subject. Thus the assumption is that the country, because of the indigenous people’s primitiveness and savagery, will be infiltrated by another nonindigenous ideology, simply replacing European colonialism with communism. In the Harknesses’ novel, the threat and potential violence manifested in the image of the dead pig is soon actualized. As Independence Day approaches, Europeans suspect that native violence throughout the country is being masterminded by outside forces believed to have entered the country, but presented as anonymous and shadowy, an “unknown factor”: From far and wide over the Territory, the problem was the same— wanton destruction was caused—cars stolen and raced off and when out of petrol, were simply left by the side of the roads where they stopped—often the doors left open, the windows down and loose items stripped. Hausbois moved into houses as they no longer considered “boi hauses” good enough—there was rioting and revelry the full length of the country and there was little to be done to halt this disaster. Something—the unknown factor—was stirring them up—inciting them like a disturbed hornet’s nest—to such misbehaviour—leading them to believe that this was the long awaited Cargo Cult at last. All these things, houses, cars, possessions had been left for them to misuse in any possible way. They did not pause for common sense—for orderly fashion—but simply ransacked everything in their paths. Beautiful island homes now became no more than lavish pig sties. (Harkness and Harkness 1992, 237)


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In addition to the wanton destruction, violence, rioting, and general chaos, the example of house boys moving into expatriate homes is important but paradoxical: while signifying the indigenous reinhabitation of the country, the representation is derogatory, as the accompanying destructiveness and mayhem suggest the natives’ incapacity to manage the country. Such representations of indigenous primitiveness serve to belittle traditional cultures, thus reinforcing paternalistic attitudes and practices. The traditional world of Palu is denigrated to the extent that magic, sorcery, and mythology are redefined and reinvented by white discourse to legitimize the Europeans’ negative attributes. Through the fabulation of a world haunted by magic and mystery, the author creates an archive of knowledge and discourse that maintains an assumed identity and representation, inevitably and predictably culminating in an ending besieged by chaos and anarchy. The misconception seems to be that everything that constitutes traditional culture is necessarily bad. In Palu, after Emoti becomes president, he reverts to embracing traditional culture, which he earlier despised. This is necessitated by his tribe’s wish for Emoti to be their new chief after the death of his father. Part of the ritual of becoming a chief involves cannibalism: His father was dug up and cut into pieces which were then given to the villagers as relics to protect them from evil spirits. A small piece of his father’s skin was fed to Emo and in eating it he absorbed the best qualities of his father. (Nowra 1987, 176)

While presented as a ritual of inheritance, in the context of the savagery and violence of Emoti’s other actions in the narrative, the discourse of cannibalism can be read as another example of his primitivism, so that his becoming a dictator is to some degree attributed to his backwardness. Through the ritual, a sense of his past, which he had rejected, is recovered and becomes part of him. The trope of cannibalism therefore becomes both a negating activity in conflict with western civilization and a point of identification with tradition. This suggests that the reappropriation of (an earlier rejected) traditional identity is part of an “emerging” identity constructed in response to historical events: “He no longer talked disparagingly of ‘primitives’ and he began to refer to our past as something that must be incorporated into our culture” (Nowra 1987, 177). Yet cannibalism remains a site of intense contestation between local and colonial discourse. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “In the first chapter of the history that the others have compiled for me, the foundation of cannibalism has been made eminently plain in order that I may not lose sight of it. My chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or thinner genes representing cannibalism” (1967, 120).


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In European colonial discourses of civilization, progress, and development, it is assumed that indigenous people have a natural tendency toward cannibalism. Throughout Palu, traditional culture is presented as hampering progress and development, so that Emoti’s embrace of it results in his madness and chaos. Very soon after independence, European anxieties are proven justified, by a scene of doom and despair. In a year the population of the capital doubled and the city began to overflow with thousands of the lost and disillusioned. They wandered the streets, aimless and rootless, hoping against hope, . . . To ease the pain of broken dreams and being unable to return home to the villages for fear of losing face, the men turned to drink and violence and the women sold themselves. (Nowra 1987, 87)

The constellation of images of disillusionment, violence, broken dreams, and prostitution evident in this passage, points to a lack of foresight, vision, planning, and control on the path of indigenous government of President Emoti. The “prophetic” doomsday view is rooted in the perception that the indigenous people are incapable of going it alone, and that they need the guidance of Australia. This scenario remains current in discussions about the South Pacific. As Greg Fry recently wrote: “This new doomsdayism depicts a region that is failing to become part of the Pacific century. In the dramatic imagery associated with this conception, the South Pacific is the ‘hole in the Asia-Pacific doughnut’ or ‘the eye in the Asia-Pacific cyclone.’ It draws attention to what is seen as a series of grim trends: a history of failure in development as measured by growth in gross domestic product; ‘soaring’ populations; unsustainable exploitation of resources; the marginalization of island economies in a changing global trading order; and a ‘fatal farewell’ by old and powerful aid donors following the end of the cold war” (1997, 305–306). The perception of the South Pacific region in these terms by an Australian writer is a continuation of the images I have been discussing, concentrating on the political economies where configurations of power are now enacted. This doomsday scenario is blamed on the leaders’ inability to make sound political and economic judgements and decisions. The representation of the Papua New Guinean subject as child has continued to impose a social structure with the two races as extreme opposites. While the indigenous people were idealized as living in harmony with nature, this construction of innocence denied them the qualities of intelligence, sophistication, and knowledge—all the attributes that make a whole person, or rather, a white person. The trope of infantilization was expanded with other, concomitant themes, such as the fuzzy wuzzy angel and the uneducable native. As world politics have


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shifted, colonialist ideologies, beliefs, and assumptions about indigenous people have also subtly altered. In Papua New Guinea, an apparent result of this shift is the dependency myth, a belief that indigenous people are incapable of running their own affairs. As this chapter has shown, the dependency myth is deeply rooted in the trope of infantilization. These tropes construct the indigenous people in ways that relegate them to the level of children, lacking adult knowledge and in constant need of the civilizing guidance and direction of the western powers.


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6

The Subject as Savage

This chapter discusses the representation of the Papua New Guinean as savage. Besides interrelating with the trope of the PNG subject as child (the focus of chapter 5), the savage trope involves notions of primitivity and debasement. As Gail Ching-Liang Low asserted: “The segregation of native reality from colonial reality is based on a temporal separation which ascribes to the former a primitivity beyond the pale of contemporary definitions of humanity” (1996, 72). As discussed in chapter 3, representing the colonial landscape as primitive was the Europeans’ way of hiding their unfamiliarity with it, while asserting the white man’s superiority over both the landscape and its inhabitants. According to David Spurr, debasement refers to a constellation of negative images such as abjection, misery, filth, and defilement, which serve as “the sign of the other, so that the physical suffering of indigenous peoples can be associated with their moral and intellectual degradation” (1993, 77–78). Further, Spurr posited, “The principles of exclusion, boundary, and difference which enter into the debasement of the primitive are connected to the fear that the white race could lose itself in the darker ones” (1993, 82). The fear of white men “going native,” an ambivalent trope, includes both debasement and displaced desire. “In Western writing,” said Spurr, “the debasement of the Other often suggests a prohibition designed to protect the boundaries of Western cultural value against the forces of this destructive desire” (1993, 79). Debasement arises both “from fear and the recognition of difference . . . [and] from a desire for and identification with the Other which must be resisted” (Spurr 1993, 80). In addition, Spurr argued, the discourse of negation is a “rhetorical strategy . . . by which Western writing conceives of the Other as absence, emptiness, nothingness, or death” (1993, 92). Thus “going native” implies a kind of annihilation. In essence, the tropes of savagery and debasement are used to encompass non-European landscapes and inhabitants within European systems of knowledge and 124


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“To his surprise he went flying halfway across the apartment.” Illustration by W Rainey for Robert M Macdonald, The Great White Chief (London, 1907), facing page 295.


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power. They are inscribed as Other and as sites of displacement for unwanted desire by means of a justificatory colonialist discourse.

The Trope of Savagery As Andrew Sinclair noted, the English word “savage”—derived from French and Latin—referred basically to a forest, “gloomy and horrible. As an adjective, ‘savage’ was then used to describe the nature of wild beasts of the forest, untamed and ferocious” (1977, 1). Gradually this initial forest reference was extended to human temperament, gestures, and manners, meaning cruel and aggressive, like the wild beasts that lived in forests. Because of their own ignorance of other cultures and lifestyles, Europeans often applied the term to non-Europeans. One of the yardsticks used by Europeans to define non-Europeans as savages was the supposed absence of language, because “it is language that finally distinguishes a man from a beast and one civilization from another” (Sinclair 1977, 18). Non-Europeans were considered to have no language; rather, their communications were thought to be effected through a mixture of gestures, sign language, and animalistic howls. Their comparative nakedness was the other major marker employed by Europeans to define indigenous people as savages. Nakedness, as indicator of both innocence and evil, signified to Europeans the absence of civilization. Christopher Columbus, for example, on his second voyage to the West Indies, reported that the inhabitants of the islands were savages because his men encountered naked people; furthermore, they found baskets of human remains in some of the villages (Sinclair 1977, 33). Over time, the use of the term “savage” has come to connote additional negative characteristics including racial Otherness, unfamiliar landscapes, lack of a centralized polity, cannibalism, and paganism. Colonial discourse ranked cultures relative to the “normal,” that is, the European. As Margaret Jolly put it, “expressions of approval or revulsion varied with how far a population were seen to approach ‘civilization,’ understood as the condition of contemporary Europeans” (1992, 334). These rankings were influenced at least in part by European responses to the varying physical characteristics of indigenous people, in accordance with European ideals of beauty. However, anthropological discourse provided a justification for placing PNG and other Melanesian societies at the lowest end of the spectrum, as barbarian, savage, and primitive. Because Polynesian social structures were more hierarchical, they were considered to be closer to those of European societies. Bernard Smith contrasted two kinds of primitives: “hard primitives” (such as the Mâori and the Australian Aborigines) and “soft primitives,” (exemplified by the Tahitians) (1989, 5, 42). Smith’s distinction could also be represented by the paired concepts of


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the Ignoble Savage and the Noble Savage. Although these stereotypes have shifted over time and place and in accordance with the broader changes in world politics, they essentially retain the connotations of “the savage” established by early colonialist discourse. The ways natives encountered Europeans played a profound role in the construction of indigenous people as savages. Melanesians were depicted as bestial because they “always met Europeans with defiance and hostility” (N Thomas 1997, 148). In most accounts, the dominant perception of Melanesians is negative—dark and ugly bodies, crude clothing, and a savage polity. These negative perceptions contrast markedly with the many positive judgments of Polynesian appearance and social order—light-skinned, well-proportioned, and beautiful bodies, and almost European-like polities. Although there were significant exceptions, meetings with Polynesians were comparatively cordial and subdued. As Nicholas Thomas reported: “There was thus a convenient congruence between the advancement of the different peoples and their sense of appropriate behavior toward foreigners, specially Europeans” (1997, 148). Those groups considered savage were described as bestial in accounts: “Colonialist/racist discourse renders the colonized as wild beasts in their unrestrained libidinousness, their lack of proper dress, their mud huts resembling nests and lairs. A colonial zeugma yoked ‘savages and wild animals’ as feral creatures ranging over ‘empty lands’” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 137).1 Such representations of indigenous people in animalistic terms consigned them to the natural as opposed to the civilized world. Depictions of indigenous people and landscapes in terms of darkness indicated the absence of humanity and enlightenment, and associated them with the animal kingdom. At the same time, portraying indigenous people in this way rationalized the European presence. Lewis Lett, who worked as a colonial government employee in Port Moresby, subscribed to the notion that Papua New Guineans were bestial. In contrast to many missionaries’ depictions of Papua New Guineans as children, Lett described them as subhuman in his book The Papuan Achievement: And that reputation strengthened the inclination among newcomers to regard them as creatures of a lower order, as of course they are; and also creatures without intelligence, without morality, and without any human attributes except that of form. Many hundreds of us have arrived in Papua during the present century and, after a casual survey of the conditions, have condemned the Papuan native as a contemptible thing for exploitation, and have concerned a superior scorn of a government whose treatment of natives is all wrong, and that refuses to recognize the urgent need for their complete subjugation to our individual interests. (1944, 2–3)


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Having defined the natives in animalistic terms, Lett felt that their only worth was in their bodies as units of production. To make best use of these units, the natives had to be subjugated completely to the white man’s interests. In her book From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands, Beatrice Grimshaw described the Melanesians in similar tropes: [Among] the dark, wicked cannibal groups of the Solomons, Banks [Papua New Guinea], and New Hebrides [Vanuatu], where life is more like a nightmare than a dream, murder stalks openly in broad daylight, the people are nearer to monkeys than to human beings in aspect, and music and dancing are little practised, and in the rudest possible state. (1907, 14)

In Grimshaw’s view, the people of Melanesia were savages with very little appreciation of arts and very little conception of aesthetics. The arts in Western societies were among the paramount markers of civilization and their assumed absence in Melanesia gave further evidence that the people were uncivilized. Grimshaw clearly felt that their race disqualified the Melanesians from any higher social and cultural status. Her depictions of Papua New Guineans extend beyond childishness and stupidity to brutish villainy and “wicked” cannibalism. The New New Guinea provides an extraordinary compilation of stereotypes: It is extraordinarily difficult to take him for what he is really worth, and to realise that this silly, painted, prancing creature with the hysterical giggle and the childish manner is actually a dangerous brute at bottom, and that he would desire nothing better than to knock you on the head and eat you. (Grimshaw 1910, 224)

In colonialist discourse, the child is the benign face of the savage; the child demands the exertion of strictness and discipline so that the savage may be kept at bay. Savagery is always just below the surface and may burst forth at any time: “With a long howl like a wild beast he leaped back into the dance and into savagery again at once” (Grimshaw 1910, 52). Grimshaw’s writings conflate many attributes used as reasons for colonial intervention: the natives’ decadence, unhygienic lifestyle, polygamous relationship, immorality, as well as savagery. In spite of being “naturalized” as part of the flora and fauna, the indigenous people are denied the capacity of knowledge of that environment, as in this example from Grimshaw’s The New New Guinea (1910): [The savage’s] knowledge of herbs passes over nineteen-twentieths of the useful plants of his country, and only includes the remaining fraction because some of them are good to eat or paint your face with, and others to poison your enemy. His medicine is sorcery, pure and simple. He shuts out every breath of air from his hut if he can manage


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to do so, and washes only when he is caught out in the rain. . . . His life is a tissue of murder, fraud, and oppression, and his pleasing wife (one of a large number, regular and irregular), never enjoys a moment’s pleasure, amusement, or peace during the whole of her miserable life if he can help it. (1910, 117–118)

For Grimshaw, knowledge was European and not a province of indigenous people. What Grimshaw overlooked was that European knowledge of the natural environment is, in most instances, based on the local peoples’ knowledge. In addition, European knowledge of the environment differs from that of the natives because of different interests. For indigenous people, the environment is part of a particular world order. Because the natives depend on the environment for sustenance, they are not only concerned “with medicine as sorcery” as Grimshaw claimed, but with much broader knowledge of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well as of sacred things and their place. For indigenous people knowledge of environmental order is of paramount significance; without such knowledge they would face chaos and destruction. Yet colonial discourse presents the indigenous connection with the environment as “savage,” effectively confining it to the realm of instinct. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam wrote, “Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural” (1994, 138). Grimshaw’s negative depiction of the natives as frauds, murderers, and oppressors enabled her to rationalize her denial of the indigenous people’s possession of knowledge of the environment. At the same time, the message underlying her writings was that this lack of knowledge required correction, which could best occur through colonization and western-style civilization. This was further justified by defining nonindigenous people as savages in terms of their political organization. In most instances Papua New Guinean (and indeed Melanesian) societies were viewed, according to a developmental model, as having “savage” laws, and considered to be diametrically opposed to the governance systems of both Europeans and Polynesians. In one of the earliest representations of the Melanesian people, J S C Dumont d’Urville, the French navigator and explorer who named the three regions of the Pacific, demonstrated this tendency to categorize New Guineans by their skin color and the character of their political organizations: These blacks are almost always grouped in very fragile tribes, the chiefs of which exercise arbitrary power, often in a manner as tyrannical as that of many petty African despots. More degraded towards the state of barbarism than the Polynesians or Micronesians, one encoun-


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ters neither a form of government nor laws nor established religious ceremonies amongst them. All their institutions appear still to be in their infancy; their dispositions and intelligence are also generally inferior to those of the tan race. (Dumont d’Urville 1832, quoted in N Thomas 1997, 145)

Dumont d’Urville’s discourse presents the colonial tropes of savagery, depravity, and infantilization. His inability to comprehend indigenous society prevented him from recognizing the social order: Unlike Polynesian societies, which were hierarchical, Melanesian polities were communally organized, with leadership operating essentially through consultation and consensus. Even before a permanent European settlement was established, stories about Papua New Guineans as savages, unable to think in abstract terms, with a reputation for bloodthirstiness, were already in circulation. These stereotypes justified their being kept in a state of subservience and confirmed their suitability for manual labor. Papua New Guineans were taken, often against their will, to work on sugarcane plantations in Queensland and on the German plantations in Samoa and Fiji. “Blackbirding,” as Europeans euphemistically referred to it, depended only on “the material value of the body as labor supply” (Spurr 1993, 22). Some Europeans rationalized “recruiting” Papua New Guineans to work in the plantations by framing it as “rescuing” them from savagery and the brutal life of their own communities. In reality, by removing the men from their communities, blackbirders stripped them of their manhood and authority. At the same time, those left behind (mostly women, children, and old people) were denied the presence of men who worked the land, provided for the family, and defended the tribe from its enemies. European recruiters of Papua New Guinean plantation workers treated them as if they were animals, especially in the methods of recruitment. When blackbirders had exhausted humane means of recruiting, they employed other, more dubious means of “catching the natives,” including setting traps. One of the cruelest and most callous blackbirders was the Irish physician James Murray, who used techniques that clearly classed indigenous people as subhuman. James A Michener and A Grove Day included an account of Murray’s methods in their 1957 book Rascals in Paradise: The doctor was one of the first to use the trick of having his men reverse their collars, carry black books under their arms and go ashore disguised as missionaries. When the congregation was assembled to hear the word of God, the good doctor flashed his guns, drove the islanders into his boats and bolted them under his ship’s hatches. When this device no longer worked, he had his crew lash stout ropes to cannon butts, anchors and other heavy objects. Then, by


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displaying trade goods, he lured dozens of native canoes to the side of his ship, whereupon his sailors dropped the anchors and cannons plumb through the canoes, destroying them. . . . Meanwhile, boat crews sped among the capsized natives and dragged them in as prime bodies for the canefields. If a man was clearly wounded from the falling iron, so that he would be of little use as a field hand, he was allowed to drown, or was even struck over the head with an oar so that he might not swim back to shore. . . . One morning a tough crew member casually asked Dr Murray: “What would people say to my killing twelve niggers before breakfast?” “My word!” the doctor laughed. “That’s the way to pop them off.” The crew took revolvers and shot the natives in the dark hold. Whenever a black head could be spotted, a bullet was sent through it. (1957, 226–227)

The dominant trope in this passage is that of an indigenous body devoid of humanity and dignity, considered only for its material value. Based on the fundamental assumption of the subhuman state of Papua New Guineans, blackbirding represents a significant material example of the outcomes of racist discourse.

The Trope of Debasement The commodification of the bodies of Papua New Guineans represents a significant example of the widespread colonialist strategy of debasement. The debasement of indigenous people, as Spurr pointed out, rests on the belief that “primitive” landscapes and people are contaminating and degrading, particularly if white people are tempted to “go native” (1993, 82). As suggested in chapter 3, the paranoia surrounding the notion of “going native”’ is possibly best represented in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1984 [1902]), which constitutes in many respects a canonical western representation of the primitive darkness of Africa. The image of the “dark continent” is a discursive topos (a conventional rhetorical theme) not only about non-European places but also about the repressed and unconscious nature of Europe. Underlying the novel are stark Manichean binaries: Europe versus Africa, London versus the Congo, light versus darkness, civilized versus savage. By “going native,” the character of Kurtz demonstrates the white man’s betrayal of the civilizing ideals of Europe. The idea of Europeans being subsumed by unknown landscapes suggests repression of the destructiveness of the European colonialist psyche. Kurtz, as the epitome of colonial ideals, is destroyed by the darkness of Africa. The power ascribed to the African landscape is, however, couched only in terms of its dark incomprehensibility; it is exclusively a destructive power.


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Conrad’s depiction of the African landscape and its inhabitants is a perfect backdrop to Kurtz’s degradation by Africa. Marlow’s journey inland to the Central Station to locate Kurtz is also represented as a journey through darkness. He steams up a twisting river and encounters sand banks, murderous natives, thick jungle, cold, fog, disease, and death, all closing in on him. Marlow, the narrator, depicts the landscape this way: Going up the river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. . . . We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. . . . We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. (Conrad 1984, 66, 68)

Africa is portrayed as a prehistoric land, that is, without history and empty, void of meaning, and therefore Other. Lost in its darkness are the ideals of the European civilizing mission. But Kurtz becomes an integral part of the very darkness he was meant to banish from the continent. The corruptive power of the landscape consumes Kurtz, physically and mentally; the darkness blinds his sense of mission. He becomes a savage by residing with savages and engaging in “unspeakable rites.” The African landscape and the inhabitants are reduced to a threatening symbol, a sinister presence that is extremely difficult for the Europeans to comprehend or represent. Marlow’s description of the Africans engages and reveals the ambivalent nature of this threat: and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. (Conrad 1984, 69)

Colonial discourse seeks to repress any relationship between Africans and Europeans as fellow humans—hence Marlow’s discomfort at this point of recognition; while he simultaneously confronts, and is attracted to, his “kinship” with them, he immediately reverts to images of savagery and rejection. Many Kurtz-like Europeans (both real and imaginary) “went native” elsewhere, including the Pacific. Louis Becke’s short story, “Dr Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant” (1982 [1897]), shares similar themes with Heart of Darkness. Like Mr Kurtz, Dr Schwalbe also goes native: a swarm of black-skinned, woolly-haired savages rushed to and fro about the beach launching their canoes, with that silent activity pecu-


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liar to some of the Melanesian tribes. . . . Farther away to the northern point, and apart from the village, stood a large house, enclosed by a high stockade of cocoanut logs. This was the white man’s dwelling, and soon the people on the brig saw a figure of a man dressed in European clothes issue from the door, [and] walk out to a tall flagpole that stood in the centre of the great stockade. (Becke 1982, 59)

Against the backdrop of the natives—represented only as a set of stereotypical physical attributes deemed “savage,” and as a mindless, animalistic “swarm”—stands the imposing image of the white man, his living area fenced to keep out marauding natives. In its center, the tall flagpole is an unmistakable symbol of colonizing power and authority. This representation of place, with its inscription of the European’s power as central and authoritative, highlights the colonizer/colonized relationship and underlines the binary of civilized/savage. One of the most visible forms of debasement occurs when physical attributes are employed as social markers of the Other. Bronwen Douglas argued that Europeans’ delineation of indigenous people “universalized a particular Eurocentric aesthetic” with a covert “quasiracist subtext” in which an “essentialized set of supposedly ‘Negro’ features served as a purportedly objective baseline for evaluating and comparing non-white people’s looks” (1999, 71). This is what Michael Taussig called “the degree zero provided by the black man” (1993, 143). Europeans’ construction of the native people as savage was predicated on preconceived ideas, which in turn were grounded in a set of complex responses aroused by physical appearances and indigenous actions. In Louis Becke’s novel Yorke the Adventurer (1901), for instance, one is confronted with stereotypical terms associated with non-Europeans, such as the derogatory categories “niggers” and “cannibals,” and negative descriptors like “treacherous” and “infectious.” But debasement in colonial discourse goes beyond simplistic stereotypes. It is a complex notion, linking stereotypical representation of individuals with sociopolitical conditions. According to Spurr, “the qualities assigned to the individual savage—dishonesty, suspicion, superstition, lack of self-discipline—are reflected more generally in [uncivilized] societies . . . [and] social problems in health and sanitation, unemployment, or population growth come to be associated with individual filth, indolence, and sexual promiscuity” (1993, 76) A specific example from Becke’s novel illustrates this point. The barbarity of the natives in this passage enacts the trope of debasement and barbarity, emphasizing by cumulative excess the brutality of the murders: I got alongside, clambered up over the waist [of the ship], and saw a sight I shall never forget—every one of my poor shipmates had been ruthlessly slaughtered, and their mutilated bodies, stripped of every


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bit of clothing, were lying about the deck. A very brief examination showed me that every one of them was dead—in fact, their heads had been beaten to pulp, and each body was pierced through and through with spear wounds and hacked and chopped about with tomahawks; while the deck was just a puddle of blood, mixed with sticks of tobacco, pieces of print, knives, and all sorts of trade goods. (Becke 1901, 20)

In this scene of excessive savagery, the natives are not only depicted as ruthless murders but as thieves who steal “every piece of clothing.” The dead bodies of the shipmates have been pierced and mutilated as signifiers of the European “self,” emphasizing the horror of the savages’ moral depravity. What the white hero Yorke sees goes beyond the boundaries of reason, indelibly reinscribing the distinction between self and Other. As we have seen elsewhere, the Otherness of the native includes representations of environment as Other. In Yorke the Adventurer, the element of excess in the savage landscape is symbolically represented by the hurricane. While it illustrates the fatal power of the environment (and, by extension, the natives), it also suggests a void surrounding the two white characters. This emptiness symbolizes the power of darkness and evil. The temporary absence of their ship, which represents civilization, light, and meaning, situates the two Europeans within the orbit of a negative presence. They temporarily share the space of the Other, which is the void. The hurricane is described: All that night the wind blew with terrific violence, and the noise of the surf thrashing upon the coral barriers of the island was something indescribable. At about midnight, just after a lull succeeded by a heavy fall of rain, the wind hauled round two or three points to the southward, and, if possible, blew with still greater violence. The crashing of trees mingling with the demoniacal shriek of the hurricane was enough to disturb the mind of the bravest. . . . The ocean for many hundreds of miles around us was full of dangers, for it was unsurveyed, and risky even to a ship in good weather. Many of the islands, shoals and reefs marked on the charts had no existence, but still more were placed in wrong positions. (Becke 1901, 45–46)

The sea surrounding the two sailors is unsurveyed. Suddenly the two Europeans find themselves in a void, an unmapped space without a history. As Spurr posited, “The absence of history is in fact a double absence—of history as written text and of history as movement toward a destiny” (1993, 98). Here the place is savage and excessive because


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it is outside colonial discourse, the trope of savagery relegating both indigene and place beyond the comprehension of European (written and mapped) discourse. The trope of the empty landscape, vacant of meaning, as discussed in chapter 2, has been a salient image in much early nonindigenous fiction. While an empty landscape can be represented as idealized, untouched, and virgin, such a representation denies it history and constructs it as available space. Shohat and Stam have argued that the myth of the virgin land is also the myth of the empty land, involving both a gender and a racial dispossession (1994, 141–143). The image of an empty landscape is therefore, paradoxically, an image of both desirability and repulsion. For instance, this is how G Manville Fenn describes the landscape in Bunyip Land: As we proceeded further into the interior, wild creatures grew more abundant, and we saw fewer traces of man having traversed these regions. As I noted the various objects I could not help feeling how my father must have revelled in exploring such a naturalist’s paradise as this, and I grew more hopeful as the idea gained ground in my mind that very likely he was busy in the interior still pursing his researches. (1885, 131)

Fenn’s portrayal of the landscape as empty, without indigenous history, perpetuates the notion of colonized space as a tabula rasa. The narrator’s father therefore is presented as the first white person to historicize the landscape. As a naturalist, he historicized the environment through the process of naming plants and cataloguing them into European’s system of knowledge. While the environment is aestheticized, there is also a sense of distantiation: the beauty and exoticism of the landscape is interwoven with its emptiness, disorder, and lack of history. The local people are “erased” from the landscape to make it available for its inscription by the imperial powers. The evil of the indigenous landscape and people is vividly transparent in Beatrice Grimshaw’s writings. Grimshaw was credited with extending the “literary vulgarisation and dehumanisation of coloured peoples” to Papua New Guinea (Gardiner 1977, 17). She ranked Melanesians at the bottom of the evolutionary scale and, despite spending many years in Papua New Guinea, she strongly deplored white-black relationships. An organizing theme in many of her works, both fiction and nonfiction, was the necessity of maintaining the purity of the white race. In some works, she is very direct about her racial prejudices. For instance, in her novel White Savage Simon (1919), the corrupting effect of the landscape and its inhabitants is responsible for Simon’s peculiar and uncivilized actions: he once climbed a flagpole like a monkey (18), and he catches


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birds, Papuan style, by taking them from the tree as they roost (32). These tendencies, however, are counterbalanced by his European traits and characteristics. For instance, his European-like bravery, endurance, and prowess enable him to rescue Ms Almeri (67), and the Dimdim girl, Grace Gordon. As Simon informs Rothery, “Can’t you see that the rescuing of this girl [Grace] is simply a sacred duty to one’s race?” (191). Other statements clearly express the Grimshaw’s core concern with the preservation of the white race. As Simon states outright: “I respect my race. I will not throw back the course of evolution. I will have no son or daughter a hundred thousand years behind me” (23); and: “I was different. White Australian to the roots of my soul, I would not give my name nor the mothering and care of my children to a woman with one dark drop in her veins” (197). These are direct attacks on interracial intercourse, underlining “a textual attitude” consistent with the ideological assumptions and prejudices of the author. The disparagement of the indigenous body also becomes a form of control: as Spurr noted, “In classic colonial discourse, the body of the primitive becomes as much the object of examination, commentary, and valorization as the landscape of the primitive . . . the desire to emphasize racial and cultural difference as a means of establishing superiority takes place alongside the desire to efface difference and to gather the colonized into the fold of an all-embracing civilization” (Spurr 1993, 22, 32). The kind of discriminatory discourse that Grimshaw advanced centralizes the primitive body as “the essential defining characteristic of primitive peoples” (Spurr 1993, 22). In Grimshaw’s The Sorcerer’s Stone (1914), as Flint and Marquis journey through the country, they describe a group of indigenes as follows: They were an unpleasant crew: their foreheads sloped enormously, making them look scarcely human: their hair was trained in greasy curls that fell far back, and increased the beast-like angle of the face. Their black and white eyes looked steadily at us out of brown faces, and the look was that of savage men, near, yet ten thousand aeons of evolution distant. (Grimshaw 1914, 162)

Debasement and savagery is patent in this description and reduce the natives’ identity to a physical sign of degeneracy and inferiority. The most extreme debasement found in nonindigenous literature occurs in depictions of the murder of natives by white people. Because the natives are considered worthless in human terms, the fact that Europeans are represented as murderers is secondary to the perception that indigenous people are animals. In Hume Nisbet’s novel Land of the Hibiscus Blossom: A Yarn of the Papuan Gulf (1888), Professor Killmann and Niggeree epitomize the valorization of negation:


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“Natives on the war-path.” Illustration by Hume Nisbet, The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (London, 1888), facing page 122.


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[Professor Killmann] was the man of all men whom Niggeree respected most, for he never spared an enemy, holding men’s lives as lightly as the lives of the insects he slaughtered and preserved. . . . There were dark tales afloat concerning [Killmann’s] actions, and it was said that his name, coupled with that of Niggeree, was enough to send the natives flying in a panic of fear into the jungle; they told how he pitched dynamite charges wantonly into approaching canoes, without waiting to learn their intentions, how he had shot down natives for the sake of their beads, and once when his Chinese cook had asked permission to go ashore to hunt for eggs, he had merely replied, “Go if you like,” but that as soon as the poor fellow had been landed, he had given orders to steam away, and leave him behind. (1888, 118–119)

In Nisbet’s novel, Killmann’s callous disregard for the lives of non-whites is extreme, but its moral implications are displaced as Killmann is portrayed as having been maddened by the landscape, thus reducing his culpability. The other white character, Niggeree, commits similar atrocities in what must be regarded as “natural” behavior for the debased primitive. This is how he boasts about his decimation of a village: Up and down the village we ran, firing the houses, so as to give us more light to do our work, and the moon being now full up though thin-like and worn to half its size, they hadn’t a chance to get away. . . . Whenever I saw a nigger—man, woman or kid—I put it to death. Some of the kids we took up, not being worth a cut, and pitched them into the fires, where they roasted, screeching like wild cats. (Nisbet 1888, 85–86)

The callousness of the two white characters relies on the discourse of negation in which the Other is conceived of lacking in language. The strategy of negation operates on two principles, explained by David Spurr in this way: “first, negation serves to reject the ambiguous object for which language and experience provide no adequate framework of interpretation; second, . . . negation acts as a kind of provisional erasure, clearing a space for the expansion of the colonial imagination and for the pursuit of desire” (1993, 92–93). In most nonindigenous writing, the natives are represented as inarticulate or mute. They simply provide the backdrop to European actions and thoughts. The display of brutality by Killmann and Niggeree represents not just debasement but complete negation. Their killing of natives can be read as completely erasing not only the people but also the history of the landscape as ordered by the indigenous inhabitants. In a 1930 publication titled Anthropology and the Government of Subject Races, Hubert Murray, the lieutenant governor of Papua, argued “that


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the natives were incapable of self-government because they had ‘little or no idea of nationality or patriotism.’ This was because they had but ‘a rudimentary notion of subordinating individual interests to those of the general body’” (Murray 1930, 104, quoted in Lattas 1996, 154). Murray’s argument here points to the tropes of savagery and debasement, in which indigenous people were regarded as incapable of higher knowledge. At the same time, the trope of savagery is part of the European social catalog of evolutionary thought, which legitimized imperialism. Patrick Brantlinger noted that the proposition “that man evolved through distinct social stages—from savagery to barbarism to civilization—led to a self-congratulatory anthropology that actively promoted belief in the inferiority—indeed, the bestiality of the African [ie, black peoples]” (1986, 203). Brantlinger’s central argument is that this evolutionary assumption also supported the colonization of natives as a process to tame and bring them to civilization. Indigenous people were thought to “require the presence of a white man to render them human” (Low 1996, 76). This means, broadly, that Europeans had first to relegate indigenous people to the category of savages in order to colonize them. The trope of savagery, like the other tropes, works to exclude that which is designated “savage” from European notions of humanity. When indigenous people are treated in this way, it also alludes to their connection with a primitive landscape and all the negative attributes associated with it, including degeneracy, filth, and defilement. As Spurr put it, “the logic of colonial discourse careers wildly from one position to its opposite: a colonized people is held in contempt for their lack of civility, loved for their willingness to acquire it, and ridiculed when they acquired too much” (1993, 85–86). Construing the PNG subject as savage, then, ensured that the indigenes were locked in positions of subjection. Papua New Guineans were denied the domain of power through their textual construction as children, savages, and cannibals, and as lacking morality and intelligence. Their relegation provided a justification for their domination.


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7

The Sexualized Native Body

This chapter is concerned with the sexualization of the Papua New Guinean body in the European imagination. The construction of the native body as an object of both desire and revulsion suggests that the body may be seen as a potent metaphor for culture. The ambivalence of colonialist representation pivots on the contradictory tropes of debasement and idealization. Where the primitive body is generally seen as savage and debased, colonialist attitudes toward the bodies of indigenous women in particular are imbued with ambivalence. And although the sexual danger of black males to white women is apparently more clear-cut, here too both desire and repulsion are at work. The chapter is divided into three sections: “The Discourse of Sexual Violation,” “The Native Female Body,” and “Interracial Relationships and Sexuality.” The first section examines the 1926 White Women’s Protection Ordinance and discusses its origins in perceptions of local European residents. This piece of legislation not only construed indigenous women as sexless and invisible but also constructed Papua New Guinean men as rapists or potential rapists with uncontrollable, animalistic, sexual lust for white women. The second section of the chapter focuses on the native female body as a locus of both desire and revulsion. Many depictions of the eroticized native female body evoke the myth of the noble savage, but desire is mitigated by the perceived danger of contamination. The final section concerns black/white relationships and sexuality in a rapidly changing Papua New Guinea. The interracial relationship also becomes a site of struggle between white progressive ideas on race relations on the one hand, and the racist conservatism of European cultural values, ideologies, and assumptions on the other. Within this struggle, understanding and tolerance are gradually dawning; yet equally overt in the texts under examination is the representation of the black body as sexual fetish. In the end, this

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chapter proposes that depictions of the native body in colonial discourse have served as a method for confirming European dominance. Traditional philosophical understandings of the body have tended to concentrate on the centrality of mind, the psyche, and consciousness in conceptions of the subject. In recent times, however, this has shifted; the body has become a contestatory ground for a number of groups, including feminists and indigenous people. New ways of theorizing the body have emerged to subvert and reconfigure traditional understandings of the body and constructions of subjectivity. Elizabeth Grosz has characterized the indigenous body as a blank sheet on which competing and layering representations constitute it in historical and racial terms. Exploring this inscriptive metaphor, Grosz wrote: the tools of body engraving—social, surgical, epistemic, disciplinary—all mark, indeed constitute, bodies in culturally specific ways; the writing instruments—pen, stylus, spur, laser beam, clothing, diet, exercise—function to incise the body’s blank page. These writing tools use various inks with different degrees of permanence, and they create textual traces that are capable of being written over, retraced, redefined, written in contradictory ways, creating out of the body text a palimpsest, a historical chronicle of prior and later traces, some of which have been effaced, others of which have been emphasized, producing the body as a text which is as complicated and indeterminate as any literary manuscript. (1994, 117)

Through such inscriptions the native body was constituted and represented in specifically European ways so that it was viewed as unnatural, evil, immoral, and savage. Colonialist discourse constructed the indigenous body in specifically European ways so that it became emblematic of the vices associated with indigenous people. As Grosz contended, “Bodies are fictionalized, that is, positioned by various cultural narratives and discourses, which are themselves embodiments of culturally established canons, norms and representational forms” (1994, 118). The indigenous body was positioned within the European cultural values and belief systems, which constituted their own social narratives and self-representations. Thus, for instance, the native female body became not only a fetish but also a metaphor for the landscape indigenous people inhabited. In his “glossary of Anglo-African slang,” Charles Allen included “sleeping dictionary” (1979, 164), a term used by British colonial officers as a euphemism for their African mistresses. David Spurr unpacked this metaphor and elaborated on the association between the female sexuality and the African landscape: “The metaphor suggests an entire


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series of unstated connections between the sexual and lexical. It suggests, for example, that the African woman is a text to be opened and closed at will, and whose contents allow entry into the mysteries of African language; that this language, and by extension African culture, is itself both contained within and revealed by the female body; that sexual knowledge of her body is knowledge of Africa itself” (1993, 171). Referring particularly to Francis Bacon’s worldview, but in commentary that sheds light on the European perspective more generally, Anne McClintock noted that the correlation between the African landscape and native female sexuality suggested that a “vision of a world-knowledge dominated by Europe was animated not only by an imperial geography of power but also by a gendered erotics of knowledge”; this non-European landscape was “feminized and spatially spread for male exploitation, then reassembled and deployed in the interests of massive imperial power” (1995, 23). The body is a metaphor for culture and, as text, has been a significant site for the representation and denigration of indigenous people, both male and female. The feminization of the landscape is pervasive in early imperial literature and travel writing. The landscape is often compared to a female’s body, which is seen at the point of discovery as a virgin to be deflowered. The representation of the landscape as vacant and therefore available makes it ready for inscription: “Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason. Within colonial narratives, the eroticizing of ‘virgin’ space also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights, and white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void” (McClintock 1995, 30). We find in the landscape of the body a repetition of that process outlined by Paul Carter (1987), by which colonized land is constituted as empty space on which its identity as a colonized place can by inscribed by the processes of mapping and naming. The primitive body represents that primal sphere of erotic identity, at once seductive and dangerous, and it is on this body that the palimpsest of colonial erasures and rewritings is sedimented. The whole project of feminizing the landscape, as Spurr put it, “has its sources in fantasies of seduction, in imaginary scenes representing the fulfillment of sexual desire” (1993, 173). However, in colonialist discourse, desire for the native always coexists with repulsion. As McClintock noted, “By the nineteenth century, popular lore had firmly established Africa as the quintessential zone of sexual aberration and anomaly” (1995, 22). Conceptions of Papua New Guineans grew out of these colonialist roots: “Images of


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Black Africa were to become particularly associated with the western Pacific” (Rigby 1997, 71).

The Discourse of Sexual Violation Bronislaw Malinowski’s writings about the Trobriand Islanders, especially about their sex life, were among the most influential in shaping European perceptions of Papua New Guineans. Not only did he affirm early European assumptions about primitive sexual practices, but his writings also continue to serve as a reference point for tourist brochures and documentaries today. In particular, his 1929 book The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanesia became a basis of western understanding of native sexuality in colonial Papua New Guinea. For example, Malinowski’s statement “The Trobrianders are very free and easy in their sexual relations” (1929, 51), although made within a certain context, was subsequently taken literally and out of context. Gunter Senft reported that the image of “The Island of Love,” which Malinowski had detailed in his book, is still invoked by outsiders; Senft detailed how writers for the American Playboy magazine appropriated the idea of the “sex paradise” in the Trobriands, using it to lure readers to their publication (1998, 124). Many of the points Malinowski raised were based on a misinterpretation of a culture he superficially understood. An instance of this is found in his discussion of orgiastic festivals: There is, or, at least, used to be till the missionaries came, one kayasa,1 which centred round erotic dalliance satisfied in public and that very thoroughly. This kayasa was never practised in the northern and central parts of the district, but only by a few villages in the extreme south end of the island of Vakuta. It was called kamali, a dialectic variation of the word kimali, the erotic scratching, which symbolizes the erotic approach, as does kissing with us. It is a general rule in all districts of the Trobriands that, when a boy and girl are strongly attracted to each other, and especially before their passion is satisfied, the girl is allowed to inflict considerable bodily pain on her lover by scratching, beating, thrashing, or even wounding with a sharp instrument. However severely he is handled, such treatment is accepted in good part by the boy, as a sign of love and a symptom of temperament in his sweetheart. . . . Sexual acts would be carried out in the public on the central place; married people would participate in the orgy, man or wife behaving without restraint, even though within hail of each other. This licence would be carried so far that copulation would take place within sight


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of the luleta (sister, man speaking; brother, woman speaking): the person with regard to whom the strictest sexual taboos are always observed. (Malinowski 1929, 256–258)

This passage demonstrates the ease with which a “noble savage” ideology, which celebrates the natural sexual freedom of the natives, may drift into prurience. Yet Malinowski himself admitted that he did not witness these things but learned of them from “reliable” informants. But local informants might misunderstand an anthropologist’s line of questioning or refuse to discuss certain social and cultural practices and issues considered taboo or sacred. Their responses might thus be unreliable or distorted, possibly signifying resistance to the Europeans’ investigations. Nonetheless, in colonial discourse Malinowski’s study on the sexual life of natives was accepted as factual and generalizable, and thus it served to perpetuate the notion of an indigenous “savage,” “bestial,” and violent sexuality, particularly in the image of the woman inflicting wounds on her lover. According to Sander L Gilman, the sexuality of indigenous people became “an icon for deviant sexuality” in European discourse (1986, 228). Gilman cited eighteenth-century race theorist George Louis Leclerc Buffon, who “commented on the lasciviousness, apelike sexual appetite of the black, introducing a commonplace of early travel literature into a ‘scientific’ context. [Buffon] stated that this animal-like sexual appetite went so far as to lead black women to copulate with apes. The black female thus comes to serve as an icon for black [deviant] sexuality in general” (Gilman 1986, 231). Because native women were seen to epitomize sexual deviancy, aberration, and excess, their bodies were represented in European discourse as being impervious to sexual violation. In the late nineteenth century, the well-known anthropologist and psychologist Guillaume Ferrero associated prostitution with “primitive” (and, by extension, indigenous) societies. Ferrero argued that adultery and virginity had no meaning for black people and that “the poverty of their mental universe can be seen in the fact that they have but one word for ‘girl, woman, or wife’ (Ferrero 1892, quoted in Gilman 1986, 248). Ferrero’s comments reinforced the racial bias that constructed native bodies and behaviors as lustful. The discourse concerning sexual violation among natives supported by the writings of Malinowski and others served to fuel fears that sexual violence would be committed by local men against European women. These ideas led to the enactment of the White Women’s Protection Ordinance of 1926 (see, eg, A Inglis 1974; Wolfers 1975), which was a product of paranoia and hysteria among the white population in Port Moresby, and was strongly informed by the trope of contamination.


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According to European discourse, sexual relations between a black man and a white woman “imply an intimate contamination of the master race that no other liaison does” (Bulbeck 1992, 198). This anxiety also resulted in “‘boy-proof’ sleeping rooms, enclosed by heavy chicken wire [being] installed at government expense in all houses where white women resided” (S W Reed 1943, 251, cited in Bulbeck 1992, 208–209). But the law seems to have resulted more from the fears and insecurities of Europeans projected on the Papuans, than from actual cases of rape; according to Wolfers, when first enacted, “the White Women’s Protection Ordinance was a product of the anxieties and fantasies of colonial rule” (1975, 58). Several reasons account for the anxiety that gave rise to the enactment of this law, a major one being the myth of “the overwhelming, desperate longing black men have to sexually violate the bodies of white women” (Cranny-Francis 1995, 47). Another related reason was the white man’s anxiety about the so-called “Black Peril,” that is, miscegenation, which was seen to threaten white purity and represented a point of extreme vulnerability for the binary constructions of racist and colonial discourse. In addition, as McClintock pointed out, “fears of miscegenation in the colonies bred an anxious, vituperative discourse on white women’s dangerous proclivity for black men” (1995, 113), a psychological projection of the European paranoia about the corrupting powers of the natives. A letter from Papua’s Lieutenant Governor Sir Hubert Murray, for instance, pointed to “the carelessness of white women themselves, who do not seem to realize that a native is a man with a man’s passions, and commonly very little self-control” (West 1970, 119, quoted in Wolfers 1975, 57). Richard Dyer wrote about the assumed importance of white purity and sexuality this way: “There are special anxieties surrounding the whiteness of white women vis-à-vis sexuality. As the literal bearers of children, and because they are held primarily responsible for their initial raising, women are the indispensable means by which the group—the race—is in every sense reproduced” (1997, 29). As bearers of white children the women became a central, bodily manifestation of racial and cultural procreation, and any sexual contact with men other than white men was viewed as contaminating. Since the arrival of white women in Papua New Guinea, indigenous men were represented as a threat to their sexuality and therefore to the white race. Rape became a site of both fear and demonization. Chilla Bulbeck noted Heath Dillard’s suggestion that “sexual relations with the women of the dominated group was ‘a form of insulting inferiors and demonstrating prowess,’ ‘a legitimate form of aggression and an expression of superiority’” (Dillard 1976, 87, quoted in Bulbeck 1992, 199–200), that is, they could be viewed as undermining the European race, social standing, and authority. From a different perspective, Dyer


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argued, “Rape can then be seen as a way of registering, and demonising rather than heeding, the threat of non-white resistance and empowerment” (1997, 26).2 The White Women’s Protection Ordinance was “extremely harsh and discriminatory by the standards of the time” and was not matched by any legislation carrying such penalties in any Australian state (A Inglis 1974, vii). The ordinance stated in part: 3. Any person who commits or attempts to commit the crime of rape upon any European woman or girl shall be guilty of a crime and being convicted thereof shall be liable to the punishment of death. 4. Any person who unlawfully and indecently assaults a European woman or girl shall be guilty of a crime and being convicted thereof shall be liable to imprisonment with or without hard labour for life with or without whipping which may be inflicted once twice or thrice. (A Inglis 1974, 71)

It is notable that this legislation excluded Papua New Guinean women. According to Bulbeck, the ordinance “did not punish the rape of ‘native’ women because ‘ordinary native women’ put no value on their chastity while ‘a respectable white woman’ did” (Bulbeck 1992, 192). Furthermore, the prescribed penalty for both attempted rape and rape of a European female carried the same penalty—death. The very harshness betrayed the anxiety of colonial discourse regarding miscegenation. White anxiety about the “Black Peril” was also the result of lack of knowledge of indigenous people. Lilian Overell fell victim to the hysteria generated by ignorance. In an episode at a hotel, she recounted that she came to fear her “bedroom boy, an elderly native . . . who had been in the service of the late German Governor”; she admitted thinking to herself: “I was afraid he might want to lay hands on me!” (1923, 7). The hysteria took on a life of its own, until it seemed that everything she encountered turned into a native. The fear was so overbearing that she began to hallucinate: I went to bed the first night assuring myself that I was perfectly all right—considering the manager, his wife and children were just below. But, when I turned off the light and saw through the open windows four black figures jumping over the balcony railing, I nearly died of fright. It was a moonlight night and their figures were clearly silhouetted against the sky. With an effort I controlled myself and turned on the light. The horrible figures had disappeared. I ventured out on to the balcony, but there was only a fantastic carving there.


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I went back into the room and turned off the light, and again those diabolical shapes appeared. This time I went out boldly and found the weird carvings—with the aid of a fertile imagination—had assumed this terrifying form. (Overell 1923, 29)

Overell’s account is a good example of how unfounded fear and anxiety is the “signifying negative to the semiotic of Otherness” (to employ Gail Low’s phrase [1996, 54]); moreover it illustrates the assumption that indigenous men are potential rapists of white women. Overell’s imagining that four black men were prowling on her balcony demonstrates the fear lodged in the minds of Europeans by their lack of intimate understanding of the local people. Such representations were formative in the construction of the Ordinance, which was invented to act as a tool of sexual surveillance of indigenous men. These attitudes toward indigenous sexuality resonate historically and culturally in the interracial relations of Papua New Guinean society.

The Native Female Body David Spurr’s engagement of Foucault’s phrase “the hysterization of women’s bodies” is an important one in the discussion of the native female body. Spurr explained that “hysterization is the process whereby the feminine body is ‘thoroughly saturated with sexuality,’ in such a way as to define a set of specifically feminine biological and moral responsibilities” (1993, 170). Through this process, he argued, a woman’s body is simultaneously reduced and sexualized. Whereas Spurr employed this notion to explore the construction of colonized world in feminized tropes, in which the landscape is viewed and represented with “qualities conventionally assigned to the female body” (1993, 170), I have reviewed representations of the sexualized native body itself in nonindigenous fiction on Papua New Guinea, which focus mainly on the female and rarely on the male body. The image of the native female body as a locus of desire and attraction is particularly pervasive in two Second World War works: Christopher Wood’s North to Rabaul (1979) and Peter Pinney’s The Glass Cannon: A Bougainville Diary (1990). Wood’s idealization of the native female character Sula presents her as a text for visual consumption. Sula is raped by the Japanese but manages to escape and join the Allied commando team, which had infiltrated Rabaul. She traverses the “sacrosanct” male domain of soldiering by fighting and handling a gun as skillfully as the other male soldiers. Sula’s sexuality, coupled with fighting skill, both heightens the prurient thrill that popular western culture attaches to such combinations and maximizes the ambivalence, in that she is both


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sexualized and a warrior. Sula’s first act of bravery occurs when she unwittingly saves an American officer, Carter, from being killed by a Japanese soldier: Toyoda rubbed one of his bloody hands in the sand and grasped the grenade securely. He prized up the firing device and put his finger in the loop. One last effort and his life could end with some honor. His finger tightened against the metal—something appeared beneath his chin. A knife . . . ? He looked up and saw the girl. Most of all he saw her eyes. He was still looking at them as the knife began to slit his throat. (Wood 1979, 71)

The sexual attractiveness of Sula’s body distracts the Japanese soldier; his gaze on Sula becomes fatal, emphasizing her sexual attractiveness and bewitching danger. Her feminine beauty and dangerous skill with male weaponry produces a kind of ambivalence that is pervasive in colonialist stereotyping. In this discourse, her power, once it has satisfied their gaze, is disallowed. Hudson, the team leader, silences doubts about her suitability by pointing out her usefulness: Look at the pluses—she’s a native and she knows the area and speaks the language. We’re dividing into two parties but we’ve only got Joe if we need an interpreter and somebody who knows their way around.” “If we send her in with Joe, she can bring one of the canoes out,” Carter added. “She swims like a fish, she’s got more guts in her little finger than most guys I know have in their whole bodies.” “And being a woman and native,” Hudson said, “means that once we get ashore she’s going to fade into the background much more easily.” (Wood 1979, 80–81)

Here the ambivalence is clear; the indigenous woman, though masculinized, “fades into the background” after her use has been fulfilled. This “use” includes images of strength: for example, Sula not only hides Carter from the enemy, she acts as a scout and fights her way out as they escape from the Japanese: “Sula shot two men point-blank, clubbed a third who jumped at her before she could take aim” (Wood 1979, 263). Yet any defiance of the stereotyped image of feminine weakness is undermined by the text’s colonial discourse of the primitive. In nonindigenous fiction on Papua New Guinea, and in particular, white war writing, the native body becomes a dual site for desire and repulsion. Although desire is most often situated in the native female body, the war context is also a site for homosexual desire. In his 1952 novel The Ridge and the River, for example, T A G Hungerford eroticized the native male carriers:


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Behind them was a long line of cargo-boongs, each with a heavy load hanging in a sago-fibre sling across his back. Their thin laplaps, dirty blue and red and green, clung to the splendid muscles of their thighs and buttocks, some of them peeled green betel-nut from the clusters they carried in string bags across their shoulders and chewed slowly. (1952, 2)

The native carriers, represented as “boongs” (a pejorative applied to Australian Aborigines) wearing “dirty” laplaps, also have “splendid” thigh and buttock muscles; their bodies are overvalued with homoerotic meanings, becoming a site of desire. The construction of Papua New Guineans in this way paralleled the shifting relationship between Papua New Guineans and Australian soldiers in the broader society, in which the colonial social structure collapsed. In the texts under discussion the female indigenous body, primarily a site of desire, is represented as sexually provocative and tempting. Juxtaposed here are two passages from North to Rabaul (Wood 1979) and The Glass Cannon: A Bougainville Diary 1944–45 (Pinney 1990), respectively, describing the native female in terms of primitive exoticism, constructed by the perception of the European male: He turned—and coming toward him was a dugout canoe skimming down the waves. Kneeling in its stern was Sula, who plied her paddle to come alongside. It was unreal . . . she looked like a Gauguin painting, bare breasts, a single cowrie shell dangling between them, a pig’s-tusk bracelet curved around her upper hand. Her khaki lap-lap had been replaced by a grass skirt. (Wood 1979, 102; ellipses and italics in original) There are five good-looking marys in the Angau camp. Four are just better class bitumen blondes; young and giggling hopefuls with pleasant faces and shapely tits and blooming great plates of meat with spatulate toes like tree frogs, and deep cracks around the hardened yellow heels. But the fifth—ooh mama! She is nothing short of stupendous: the stuff that dreams are made of. An erotic Tahitian fantasy, as unexpected in these tribal wilds as a peacock in a pigpen. Her skin is creamed and cared for, her eyebrows shaped, her nipples pinked, her hair shining and groomed and perfumed and usually set off with a flower. Her body is shaped for the bed, rather than for burdens, and her feet are small, the toenails manicured and painted. Painted with what? Where would she get nail polish? One of the mysteries of the bush. Her face is enchanting— an overlay of endearing innocence with underlying flashes of unexpected naughtiness, provocative and shy. (Pinney 1990, 167)


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Both writers evoke images of the “noble savage” pervasive in eighteenth-century writing and artwork about the Pacific. Sula’s image here is eroticized and aestheticized by Wood: she is beautiful, the body draped in a grass skirt but the breasts revealed. At the same time, the body is primitivized: “bare breasts,” “cowrie shell,” “pig’s-tusk bracelet,” and “grass skirt” are all images of savagery and eroticism. In The Glass Cannon, Peter Pinney constructed the native women erotically and crudely: “shapely tits,” “blooming great plates of meat,” “an erotic Tahitian fantasy,” “body shaped for the bed” and so on. His female figures, while idealized and exaggerated, are not active participants in the war like Wood’s Sula. Pinney’s females are refugees driven off their land by an alien war, but they are described only in terms of their sexual attractiveness or lack of it. Like Wood, he makes comparisons with Polynesian women who, because of their appropriation into western art, become stereotypical “noble savages” in their exoticism and sexuality. As Bernard Smith wrote, “The noble savage . . . is always closely related to his natural setting, for he was, in a sense, a personification of the eighteenth-century belief in the nobility and simplicity of Nature” (1989, 42). In these representations, however, the ideal of the primitive is also negation of their actual roles, for it constructs them in terms of their degree of (western) sophistication. Pinney and Wood were the first of the war writers to include native female characters, however minor. Other war writers had concentrated on white soldiers at war against the Japanese, against the environment, against tropical diseases, and against physical and psychological states of his mind, but Pinney and Wood ventured into other spheres, somewhat reflecting actual circumstances. While not engaged on the frontline, many women in Papua New Guinea, especially in the New Guinea islands, played active and significant roles in assisting the Allied Forces during the war, taking as much risk as their men did. On numerous occasions, native women rescued, hid, fed, and cared for wounded soldiers. Women in my area also worked as informers, telling Allied Forces the location of the Japanese; and they lied to Japanese soldiers about the location of the Allied units. Yet these positive roles are not addressed in nonindigenous texts, where representations of women were erotically overdetermined. In his 1963 novel The Rats in New Guinea, Lawson Glassop often presented indigenous women negatively, essentially as sexual objects, but dirty and unclean: “There aren’t many boong bints, as you call them, around but if you meet up with any you’ll need a scrubbing brush and a piece of soap.” “What for?”


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“It’s an old island custom, they reckon. Every planter is supposed to have had that equipment. It was almost on issue. You push her into a river and throw the brush and soap in after her. Then when she’s clean—well—.” (1963, 61)

The tension between desire and repulsion emerges in the issue of cleanliness. Glassop’s writing advances the myth of the native female sexuality as dirty and unclean. The soap and the scrubbing brush are powerful metaphors for the process of white cleaning. Anne McClintock wrote that “imperialism found in soap an exemplary mediating form.” As she elaborated: “The emergent middle class values—monogamy (‘clean’ sex, which has value), industrial capital (‘clean’ money, which has value), Christianity (‘being washed in the blood of the lamb’), class control (‘cleansing the great unwashed’) and the imperial civilizing mission (‘washing and clothing the savage’)—could all be marvellously embodied in a single household commodity” (McClintock 1995, 208). The symbolism of soap is freighted with powerful images associated with both cleanliness and contamination; it is associated with hygiene and therefore fights disease. As Gilman noted, “Black females do not merely represent the sexualized female, they also represent the female as the source of corruption and disease” (1986, 250). In Glassop’s novel, indigenous sexuality is associated with contamination and pollution. Although the native female body is a site of desire, it is also unclean, brush and soap becoming a rite of passage to the native female’s sexuality.

Interracial Relationships and Sexuality For many European writers in the latter half of the twentieth century, the underlying theme of interracial sexual relationships is an important statement about political and personal relationships. While these writers explore the unsettling question of political, social, and personal coexistence in an independent Papua New Guinea, they also deal with mutual understanding and respect between whites and blacks. In addressing with these issues, however, some writers persist in idealizing and eroticizing the natives. Despite the repeal of the White Women’s Protection Ordinance in 1958, white female sexuality remained an important issue for a long time thereafter, due to continued assumed differences between white and indigenous sexuality. The trope of savagery continued to inform perceptions of indigenous sexuality. Unlike the other parts of the South Pacific, especially Polynesia, where the noble savage myth pervaded indigenous representations, Papua New Guineans were gen-


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erally described as “cannibal” savages, emphasizing their uninhibited sexuality. Even the native women and Massim Islanders, who were regarded as similar to the Polynesians, were seen as sexually “unrestrained and dangerous in contrast to the controlled sexuality of the civilized white” (A Reed 1997, 49; see also Malinowski 1929). Sir Hubert Murray emphasized this in the 1926–27 territorial report for Papua to the government of Australia, remarking, “self restraint has not been developed to anything like the same extent, and sexual matters loom very large in their lives” (quoted in A Reed 1997, 49). In contrast, noted Adam Reed, Europeans “privileged themselves on the basis of their own sexual repression. In their eyes sexuality was a defining quality of the individual, something mysterious, potent, and essential that affected all behavior and lay at the root of being. Desires emanated from deep inside and, if left unchecked, could reduced a person to savagery; thus there was a need to channel these potentially dangerous energies” (1997, 49). For Europeans the unrepressed sexuality of the natives seemed to be a consequence of their undisciplined nature. The discourse of unrestraint emphasizes displaced European sexual repression, making the colonies “a site for the ‘revenge of the repressed,’ an open terrain for European male ejaculations curtailed in the West” (Stoler 1997, 33). However, those whites who did indulge in sexual relations with indigenous women were often condemned by missionaries as deviant and considered as “low whites” (A Reed 1997, 50), reinforcing European attitudes toward interracial sexuality. European writings reflect the widespread assumption that indigenous sexual behavior is uninhibited, aggressive, and animalistic. This is provocatively described in Louis Nowra’s novel Palu (1987): Once, during one of my wanderings, I caught sight of my father in the garden when my mother was in the menstruation hut. He was naked and rubbing his erect penis until its milk spurted out onto the soil. . . . At night he did not wait for me to go to sleep before forcing my mother to drain his penis. He became abusive and rough during sex and took to calling my mother’s vagina “a dead moon.” One night when my mother was sucking his penis, my father looked over at me and smiled mysteriously, as if to say, “We are bonded together you and I and whatever we do, we do together. We both hate the dead moon sucking my manhood.” The smile scared me because it seemed so crazy. I sensed he was possessed by a bat. His eyes were shiny and demonic like a bat’s. Then it struck me; my father was paying the cost for having allowed me to break tribal taboos. (Nowra 1987, 15, 23)


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While on one level this depicts pathological behavior, on another it represents the traditional world in a degrading and demeaning way— chaotic, without order, and consumed by madness and superstition. It is such a traditional past, full of negative perceptions, that eventually contaminates the future of President Emoti in the novel. Palu, for example, is believed to have the powers of a witch because her mother copulated with a python (Nowra 1987, 11). This may be regarded as a misrepresentation of indigenous mythology. Nowra has created new myths and stories and utilized them to maintain and sustain racial and sexual dichotomy. Taken out of their proper matrix, the myths and stories contribute to a demeaning representation of the indigene. Often, in Palu, and to some degree in Ian Downs’s novel The Stolen Land (1970) and Nourma Abbotsmith’s White Girl, Brown Skin (1969), interracial relationships, especially between a white man and a native woman, are superficial. For the white man, it is the enactment of his fantasy, desiring a native body. Additionally, for the indigenous woman it is a fulfillment of the desire for what she lacks. Ann Stoler discussed the extent and implications of such relationships: “But sexual desires were structured by desires and discourses that were never about sex alone. Desires to ‘pass’ as white, to have one’s progeny be eligible for higher education, or the sentiment that Frantz Fanon attributes to the man of color who desires to ‘marry white culture. . . . grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine’ [1967, 63] all suggest that sexual desire in colonial and postcolonial contexts has been a crucial transfer point of power, tangled with racial exclusions in complicated ways (Stoler 1997, 43–44). Sexual desire is also about power relations, a metaphoric entry to the domain of white structures of power, which remain exclusively the privilege of white patrons. Stoler’s argument clearly articulates the complexity of “lack” and desire in the indigene. “Lack” and desire have not only racial but also political, social, and economic underpinnings. At the same time, “lack” has implications for one’s progeny, for, in the postcolonial context, the indigene’s desire is to emancipate oneself from a heritage of black negativity. Fundamentally, however, indigenous alienation and desire will always be deferred, due to the dichotomous nature of the culture. In many contemporary novels, sexual relations allude to imperial domination, particularly in terms of power relations. The novel Palu provides a very clear example about alienation, power, and desire. The native female heroine, Palu, feels alienation and inadequacy when she comes face to face with a white girl: She was wearing a frock almost like mine and I knew instantly . . . that she was the attractive one. . . . And it struck me that I was the fraud. My


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short curly hair, black skin that could show no make-up, thick nose and lips were hideous. With the awful realisation of how ugly I was came even greater sense of horror—I must seem to her an embarrassing and pathetic parody of European ideals of beauty. The girl tried to be nice to me as a Western upbringing had taught her to be (why don’t you sneer at me so I can jump on you and claw your face, tear your dress, blacken you with bruises). Throughout dinner I felt dead as if my brain had dissolved and all that was left was this silly golliwog fumbling with cutlery and choking on fish bones. (Nowra 1987, 49; italics in original)

Palu sees herself against the image of the white girl and feels alienated from her body. The physical features of the white girl make Palu want to rid herself of her own individuality and “annihilate (her) own presence.” But no matter how much Palu may wish to inhabit that same zone as the white girl, she can never fully assume her identity. The truth about her mimicry is revealed to Palu when she is confronted by the “original” version (white girl). In his groundbreaking book The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Paul Schilder canvassed the point about our body-image being always relational: “there is from the beginning a very close connection between the body-image of ourselves and the body-image of others. We take parts of the body-images of others into others, and push parts of our body-images into others. We may push our own body-images completely into others, or in some way there may be continuous interplay of parts or wholes . . . the social relation of the body-images is not fixed ‘gestalt’” (1970, 235, 241, quoted in Low 1996, 195). Schilder’s argument explains the “exchange of looks” between Palu and the white girl. Through the process of identification Palu sees the white girl as an embodiment of all that she lacks. This lack can be seen in terms of a loss of identity, both a confusion and identification between self and other. In a chapter titled “The Fact of Blackness” in his 1967 book Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon recounted an incident (which I quote in chapter 1) when a child reacts with fear on seeing a Negro man, who represents all that the child is not; Fanon retreats, thinking, “What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” (1967, 112). This intensity echoes Palu’s moment of confrontation with the white girl, “a site of fantasy and desire,” which reveals her difference and allows her, in Bhabha’s words, to “postulate a series of equivalences, samenesses, identities, between the objects of the surrounding world” (1994, 77). In this incident, Palu recognizes her “Otherness” and difference: “My world was destroyed. My soul was desolated. I knew myself to


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be comic, ugly and stupid” (Nowra 1987, 49). Her endeavor to recuperate her identity results in her sexual union with Mister Bacon. Sexual relationships define Palu’s sense of identity. Initially her sexual encounters are highly charged, their earthiness and the emphasis on bodily union aligning her with her “traditional” self through Emoti: I rubbed my cheeks against his, pressing them into the bones of his face. Our frenzy grew and we rubbed our faces hard against each other, faster and more violently, rubbing so hard that I could feel blood emerging from my chaffed skin and mingling with his. We rubbed cheeks and bit off each other’s eyelashes until we were exhausted and then, with our faces smeared with blood and puffy with lust we made love. (Nowra 1987, 64)

Here union between the two is achieved by full identification of the two, focusing on their faces, the site of identification through “blood.” In contrast, her sexual union with Mister Bacon represents her desire for whiteness: As he kissed me down my neck and licked my breasts I felt an intense joy I had never experienced before. Wauru and I had barely touched, we had been animals on heat. Mister Bacon was different, even in the way he made love—the missionary position, which meant that I could stare at him. (Nowra 1987, 50)

Here the experience is related in terms of the power structures of a “civilizing” colonial discourse, most obviously in the “missionary position,” which they adopt in their lovemaking. To some extent Palu retains her power by appropriating the gaze of white colonial discourse, conventionally directed to the indigenous female, reversing it as she stares at her white lover. But the discourse of power, asserted by the physical positioning, renders the text’s use of the gaze highly ambivalent, her desire for whiteness confirming Palu’s submission, at this point, to paternalism and the unequal power relations. In The Stolen Land, desire for the black body is demonstrated in admiration for Joseph Makati’s sporting prowess and musical talent. In Australia, where he attends school, this fetishization combines both desire and rejection. He is seen as exotic: “something of a celebrity as an athlete and very popular at parties because he could play a guitar with a lazy sexuality that young women enjoyed” (Downs 1970, 6). Initially he is aware of an “absence” of race from social intercourse in which he is fetishized: “He had begun to feel conscious of his difference and suspicious of those who did not in some way acknowledge that he was black” (Downs 1970, 6). Soon, however, this space of desire becomes the site where his difference is confirmed publicly in overtly racial terms.


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He had become involved with a girl called Kathrine Christensen, an understanding Nordic blonde who had just begun to study anthropology. . . . One evening, near the end of the holiday, he crossed an empty floor to ask this girl to dance. She ignored him and he stood stupidly in front of her while she talked to someone else. The hurt slowly came into his eyes as he realised he was being rejected. The hurt was mainly to his Melanesian pride because Joseph felt the rejection had been public. . . . “No Joe,” she had said. “Not any more. Save it for the black girls.” (Downs 1970, 6–7)

Makati’s public humiliation is reminiscent of Fanon’s black body, which is returned by the white gaze, metaphorically illustrating his exclusion from the domain of power. Other nonindigenous texts use interracial relationships as a site of exploration for increasingly complex ambivalences of power and desire in political and social contexts, particularly within the politics of independence. In Keith Pickard’s novel Bilong Boi (1969), white/black sexual relationships are examined in the context of white prejudice to consider the possibility of a racially tolerant society. Darius Thompson and Corinne, for instance, create conflict in the status quo by indulging in interracial sexual relations with natives. Darius takes on a village girl, Waup, who had been his father’s house girl and concubine. It is Corinne, however, who demonstrates the ambivalence of colonial desire. In one instance, she screams when she discovers a native (her house boy) watching her. While she desires the native male body, she simultaneously fears it. Her ambivalence demonstrates the conflict between a conditioned and an “other” response, metonymically registering collective white ambivalence toward encountering the “otherness” faced in political and social change, which is outside colonial discourse: She [Corinne] stared uncomprehendingly for a moment before she screamed. She wondered afterwards why she had screamed at all; she was not the screaming type, but at the time it seemed the only thing to do: silence would have, somehow, implied complicity. The boy did not move. The beam of light from the room etched his face and shoulders through the flywire—the small, almost invisible squares of the mesh making him look like a portrait on canvas. He was evidently paralysed, his glistening brown skin taut over the muscles, his mouth half open showing the dull red of betel nut between his white teeth. He gazed at her fixedly and she, like an illuminated pallid puppet, screamed in the bright light. (Pickard 1969, 158)

This description highlights the desire of Corinne’s gaze; but in a community where resentment of indigenous people is enacted daily,


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Corinne had to scream in order to eradicate any fear of complicity from the white community. When Corinne later secretly indulges in sex with her house boy, Tokram, her desire for the black body is overwhelmingly powerful, although the outcome, borne of fear, is the same. Having been overcome with desire, when she realizes they have been discovered by a group of white friends she cries, “He raped me. Oh, he raped me. He raped me” (Pickard 1969, 263). Despite Corinne’s obvious desire for the native body, this desire is restrained largely by the collective prejudice of the white community, resulting in her betrayal of her native lover. For a white woman to have sex with a black man was the ultimate sacrilege in the eyes of the white population. This is what Corinne commits. However, Tokram is more than merely a sexual fetish to fulfil Corinne’s sexual desire. On a symbolic level he is the way to crossculturality and the white man’s coming to terms with the indigene. In the earlier representations of the native body, such sexual unions were viewed in negative terms, as a pollution and a contamination of the white race. While there is that residue of the fear of the “Black Peril” and hysteria in Bilong Boi, this interracial sexual union is a positive one; it underlines a vision of a racially tolerant society and the political coming of age of Papua New Guinea. Although Corinne expresses some sense of horror and hysteria, there is an overwhelming sense of desire, the ambivalence between fear and desire effectively constructing the stereotype of interracial sexuality. The undermining of the male indigene is repeated in Jean Bedford’s 1990 novel A Lease of Summer, in which the native woman, Claudia, is depicted in idealized terms against her husband’s debasement. This trope is logistically asserted, so that it follows an ideological underpinning; Claudia’s sex life with the husband is represented as unfulfilled, and eventually a white lecturer, Ralph, who apparently thinks lowly of natives, fills that vacancy. The point here is that, the native body is best conquered and inscribed by outsiders. The white/black sexual union between Claudia and Ralph is further asserted in terms of power relations; Ralph as lecturer and Claudia as student demonstrates this explicitly. Thus racial and social structures of power are reinforced in interracial sexual relations, rather than proposing “new” ways of relating. The tenacity of colonial discourse transcends individual relationships. In the incident in Bilong Boi discussed above, the social situation of power favors Corinne because she is a white woman. In these representations the male indigene is disempowered. The sexual encounters between white women and black men are delineated as savage, and any demonstration of the black man’s power proves illusory. The white woman still retains power by virtue of her whiteness. Helen, the female heroine in A Lease of Summer, has sexual relations with Sam Logus, a local economist:


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It is rough again, exhilarating. Sam clamps his hand over her mouth to muffle the cries as she comes. She bites him, hard, and sees his smile tighten to the grimace of orgasm. They fall apart, exhausted, panting, their bodies joined all down one side like Siamese twins with their mingled perspiration. Helen has a momentary wild fantasy of having Sam’s baby, of going to live in his village with him. She bends over him, staring. (Bedford 1990, 82)

The fantasy of having a mixed-race baby indicates the political and social discourse on cross-cultural understanding. For Sam, this sexual union makes him embrace the “secluded” power enclave, however temporary. Yet the point made by Fanon is worth recalling: “one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is the penis. . . . The white man is convinced that the Negro is a beast; if it is not the length of the penis, then it is the sexual potency that impresses him” (Fanon 1967, 170; italics in original). Fanon’s point here is that Europeans view the black man in phallocentric terms, reflecting his sexual potency, portrayed as unrestrained, animalistic, and unquenchable. However, while both Helen and Sam are cognizant of each other essentially in sexual terms, as sexual fetishes, the point is also made that through these sexual encounters possibilities for mutual relationships, respect, and understanding are mapped. These white/black sexual unions also allegorize the visibility of the indigenous people and the erosion of the racial divide. In Bilong Boi, the possibility of mutual understanding, both personal and political, is finally asserted when Corinne gives birth to a black baby: “Yes, the baby is black. It is a black baby. It is not Bill’s at all. It is the native’s” (Pickard 1969, 277–278). This is an important gesture about the country’s political future. Miscegenation is no longer such a “dirty” word. Darius, Corinne, and the baby begin a new life, symbolic of the growing mutuality and acceptance of indigenous as equal to nonindigenous. The birth of the baby symbolizes the bearing of a new dawn of racial tolerance. The discourse of idealization and eroticization looms large in Abbotsmith’s 1969 novel White Girl, Brown Skin, in which Mark, an Australian lawyer, becomes sexually involved with La’aka, an educated, indigenous Australian woman. The underlying theme here is the desire for interracial acceptance and mutuality, and the difficulty of achieving that where colonial discourse and white prejudice persist. In his desire to be intimate with the country, the white protagonist sees it as exotic. La’aka, Paul, and Veleke, the major indigenous characters, represent the emerging new nation. For Mark, the desire for the native female body (metaphorically, the country) is prompted by a need to posses it. But La’aka is initially blunt with him:


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“What about me would interest you? My body?” She glanced briefly down at her bosom, straining beautifully youthful against the white stuff of her dress, its cleft like a dark spear pointing downwards. “That’s what most Europeans are interested in first of all about a native-born girl.” (Abbotsmith 1969, 5)

La’aka reveals the fantasy of white desire. The native female body becomes a contestatory space for the dramatization of the experiences and fantasies of desire, fear, and alienation. La’aka also represents “that ‘otherness’ which is at once an object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (Bhabha 1994, 67). Mark sees La’aka in idealized and exotic terms: Sitting upright, her legs slanted and demurely crossed at the ankles, in provocative contrast to their lovely brown length and barely concealed thighs, she had, he thought, a newly minted look. Was this essential innocence in a mad world, he wondered. She could not be progenitally near to the primitive and not have strong, fundamental instincts. Her appearance, always under control, gave no hint of it. . . . She was the most luscious girl he had ever seen so nearly naked. . . . Mark had a mad impulse to tear off the two pale pink strips of futile fabric that seemed to him only to vulgarize the lovely body. Shaken with desire, he rolled over on his face and rested his head on his arms. He reached for one of her hands and turning it palm upwards, kissed and held it against his lips. (Abbotsmith 1969, 58, 62)

Mark’s perception of La’aka’s body and therefore her sexuality in a combination of appropriating, idealizing, and exoticizing terms points to the desire for the native body. She is lovely, and her body is proportionally perfect. At the same time it highlights her difference, both racial and sexual. As Bhabha put it: “Such an articulation becomes crucial if it is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power” (1994, 67). Through his gaze and knowledge, Mark evokes an image of La’aka that is idealistic and erotic. On a political level La’aka is a symbol of the country and it is through her female sexuality that Mark symbolically gains access to the country. Yet while Mark has a desire for the native body, he still holds deep-seated prejudices. These prejudices are, however, contained and temporarily disabled by his desire. As bell hooks has argued: “To . . . seek an encounter with the Other, does not require that one relinquish forever one’s mainstream positionality. When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an


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alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with the Other” (1992, 23). On overhearing the conversation of some young men regarding their intention to “shop” for as many girls from other racial or ethnic categories as possible, hooks reflected further: “The direct objective was not simply to sexually possess the Other; it was to be changed in some way by the encounter. ‘Naturally,’ the presence of the Other, the body of the Other, was seen as existing to serve the ends of white male desires” (1992, 24). hooks’s point is that to establish relationship with the indigene does not mean that one has to abandon one’s racial or social position. But in order for white desires to be served, both for the “other” and for “change” in themselves, the non-European culture and the practitioners of that culture become servants. In White Girl, Brown Skin, this is constructed later in the narrative, after Mark is beaten unconscious and La’aka is raped by natives; La’aka discusses the situation with Paul: “Paul, there was no doubt. There is no doubt now in my mind about how Mark thinks of us . . . deep in his heart. If it’d done by white men . . . that would’ve been bad, but to be assaulted by black men! You could hear the horror of it, above everything else. It was the worst . . . the most degrading thing that could have happened to me. . . . ” [Paul] was silent for a few moments then he said gently, . . . “He was thinking of you as a white woman . . . he’s always thought of you as, well,” he added lamely, “as what you used to say about yourself . . . a white girl in a brown skin.” (Abbotsmith 1969, 203)

La’aka’s recounting of how Mark reacted when they were attacked by natives reveals the vulnerability of black/white relationship. The relationship between Mark and La’aka is an allegory of the possibility of racial coexistence and mutuality, which cannot be achieved because of inherent prejudices on both sides of the racial dichotomy. Like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Mark screams about the black horror, the grasping black hands as they knock him down. But even before this incident, the unequal relations between the two races are ironically demonstrated by Toi Toi, Mark’s native house boy. Toi Toi refuses to serve La’aka at Mark’s house. As La’aka tells Mark, “Toi Toi has always seen his people in subordinate positions. He had to accept that. For them, colour means inferiority” (Abbotsmith 1969, 87). Toi Toi’s refusal to serve La’aka then stems from what he had seen and learned: that all black people are inferior to Europeans. The incident demonstrates a native’s internalized prejudice as a conditioned response due to his exposure to colonial structures.


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The issue of interracial relationships and the trope of the sexualized native body is a significant ambivalent site of both desire and repulsion. While the native body is desired, especially by European men, it is simultaneously considered dangerous, diseased, or dirty. Coupled with this, native sexuality is considered lascivious, animal-like, and aberrant. As Gilman noted: “In the nineteenth century, the black female was widely perceived as possessing not only a ‘primitive’ sexual appetite but also the external signs of this temperament—‘primitive’ genitalia” (1986, 232). Such views were not confined to the native female body. The sexual violation laws, especially the White Women’s Protection Ordinance, were based on the assumption that native men are rapists or potential rapists. Simultaneously, native women’s sexuality was disregarded. The anxiety and fear pervasive among the white community in colonial Papua New Guinea had its provenance in their lack of intimate knowledge about the indigenous people, and representations of Papua New Guineans reflected this ignorance. However, the shifting world politics also brought about ideological changes. As this review of some later twentieth-century works has demonstrated, through the discourse of interracial relationship and sexuality, we can now envision possibilities of mutual understanding and respect, cross-culturality, and a vision of a racially tolerant society.


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8

Writing Ourselves: Cultural SelfRepresentation in Contemporary Papua New Guinean Literature

For all the power and universality of colonial strategies of representation, the representation of Papua New Guineans has not been unilateral. Indigenous people have not been passive recipients but rather have constantly engaged the images of place and subjectivity provided by colonial discourse, along with the technologies, such as writing, painting, electronic media, and music, by which those images have often been perpetuated. This chapter proposes that Papua New Guinean writers have represented themselves and their cultures through the discursive practices of compartmentalization, appropriation, and interpolation. It is largely through these strategies that indigenous people have inserted themselves into mainstream discourse—reinscribing, restoring, reconstituting, and reasserting their cultural identity and sense of place. While the methods of appropriation and interpolation are widespread and important strategies in postcolonial literatures, compartmentalization is less well known. I propose it here as a discursive practice through which Papua New Guineans initially resisted colonialism and maintained their cultural expressions and practices. On the broader plane, this chapter posits that the provenance and growth of contemporary Papua New Guinean literary culture has been a vigorous and important counterdiscursive response to colonialism. While much of this chapter is concerned with cultural self-representation in Papua New Guinean literature from 1968 to 1974, this does not mean that cultural self-representation in Papua New Guinea is limited to written forms of expression. Indeed, Papua New Guineans’ responses to colonialism have been manifested in numerous and varied ways, including the plastic arts and other artistic and cultural forms, some of which I discuss in this chapter. While Papua New Guinean literary culture began to flower at the same time as other social, political, and economic developments in the 162


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country, indigenous literature has proved to be an important means of empowerment and self-validation—and perhaps the best medium to subvert and appropriate dominant European discourses and to carve out a political and cultural space in the global reality of European modernity. This analysis examines different ways in which Papua New Guineans in general, and writers in particular, have represented themselves and their cultures, and investigates the tension between the individual and the social in their writing and other artistic and cultural manifestations. As has been demonstrated, nonindigenous portrayals of Papua New Guineans have been largely negative or distorted. Although we must avoid the idea of a “true” representation, it has nevertheless been necessary for indigenous writers to contest these negative representations, and they have done this most imaginatively through literature. In many respects, this chapter is an extension of chapter 2. While that chapter focuses on the precolonial oral representation of landscape and place as a focus of identity and sense of belonging, this chapter concentrates on the postcolonial salvaging, reconstituting, and reinscribing of that oral representation, primarily through the medium of writing. Papua New Guinean writers must not be viewed solely as advancing their personal sensibilities and points of view, but as giving voice to the aspirations of a community. The chapter is divided into a number of sections. First, it situates Papua New Guinean literature within the larger frame of postcolonial discourse. Second, it focuses on language as an important site of intervention in Papua New Guinean writing. Third, it discusses the uses of compartmentalization, appropriation, and interpolation by writers to represent local cultural practices and expressions. Fourth, it discusses how Papua New Guineans have portrayed themselves, particularly through autobiography, an important genre in postcolonial writing for dealing simultaneously with issues of cultural and political exposure, identity, and representation. Finally, this chapter focuses on the trope of the angry indigene to show how Papua New Guinean writers have reacted to colonialism.

Papua New Guinean Literature and Postcolonial Contexts The postcolonial world is the site of a continuing contest between colonialist discourse and the colonized subjects it represents. As Alan Lawson and Chris Tiffin have explained, one of the major tasks of postcolonial discourse has been to “identify, valorize, and empower what colonialist discourses label as the barbarous, the primitive, the provincial. Thus, ‘difference,’ which in colonialist discourse connotes a remove from normative European practice, and hence functions as a marker of subordination, is for post-colonial analysis the correspondent


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marker of identity, voice, and hence empowerment” (1994, 230). Again, as Homi Bhabha noted, the notion of difference as employed in colonialist discourse depended “on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness” (1994, 66). In contrast, difference in postcolonial discourse becomes one of the major bases for the empowerment, rearticulation, and reinscription of an indigenous political agenda. Postcolonialism is a project of interrogating Empire. Helen Tiffin has argued, “The operation of post-colonial counter-discourse is dynamic, not static: it does not seek to subvert the dominant with a view to taking its place, but to, in Wilson Harris’s formulation [1985, 127], evolve textual strategies which continually ‘consume’ their ‘own biases’ at the same time as they expose and erode those of the dominant discourse” (H Tiffin 1987, 18; italics in Tiffin). While postcolonialism as counter-discourse has a political and literary agenda to contest European assumptions, epistemology, and ontology, it does not replace colonialist discourse by a process of reversal. Rather, postcolonialism brings into being a discourse of oppositionality, exposing the biases of the dominant discourse and dismantling them. By and large, European hegemony has meant the denial of colonized peoples’ identity and the suppression of any autonomous power of articulation. This denial has had a paradoxically liberating effect on the people by awakening their political consciousness and provoking them to agitate for decolonization and eventual political independence. By sowing the seeds of dissent and disillusionment among the indigenous people, imperialism has also sown the seeds of its own destruction. Since the inception of postcolonialism as counter-discourse, theories of black representation and cultural production, and of colonial discourse and postcolonial counter-discourse, have been embroiled in debates about the assumed normative European power structures. For postcolonial writers, taking part in these debates is part of a broad task of dismantling the corollary of the unequal colonial social and power structures that had relegated them to positions of powerlessness and denied them identity and selfhood. It is in the postcolonial space, at what Mary Louise Pratt has called “contact zones” (1992, 6–7), that the contestation takes place. These contact zones have also become the power bases of colonial resistance. I like to call this space a “cultural purgatory” (in an empowering rather than a pejorative sense), which eventually becomes, for the indigene, a psychological and metaphysical space. It is a kind of a shuttle station where indigenous people become politically aroused and where, eventually, the European imposed vision/version of “reality” is derailed. While Papua New Guinea is essentially an oral society, the intrusion of colonial influences has inevitably meant the hybridization of its cultural practices. This cultural hybridity is important from the indig-


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enous perspective because it demonstrates an accommodation of their cultural values within the European framework. As a consequence of its interface with orature on the one hand and western cultural practices on the other, Papua New Guinean literature has come to be grounded in a cross-cultural framework. This means that while these orientations are seemingly antithetical, ironically they inform each other and simultaneously form a literary seedbed from which writers produce their works and construct cultural and national formations. Helen Tiffin’s argument is worth recalling here: “Post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridised, involving a dialectical relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the impulse to create or recreate independent local identity” (1987, 17). Indigenous people can no longer be considered only passive recipients of outside cultures and influences. They have succeeded in reinscribing their identities and place within a once prohibited arena. The continuing infiltration from other cultures ensures the incorporation and adaptation of other cultural practices into their own, thus forging a dynamic new identity.

Language as a Site of Intervention in Papua New Guinean Writing Language plays a central function in constructing subjectivity; at the same time, it is an important contestatory space in postcolonial writing. The denial of Papua New Guineans’ subjectivity and power of articulation was effectively imposed and maintained through the control of language. The delay in establishing formal education for Papua New Guineans had multiple repercussions in terms of allowing colonial discourse to frame the society. While the delay meant the denial of access to dominant western forms of self-representation, even when education was eventually provided, the colonialist regulation of educational practice worked to channel indigenous subjects into proscribed and inferior subject positions. Thus, for postcolonial resistance, the primary site of empowerment and affirmation has to be self-representation through language (and the arts in general). Linguistic articulation, whether through the utilization of local languages or through the adaptation of the language of the empire, is the point of the colonial subject’s intervention into the dominant discourse. For Papua New Guinean writers the issue of language is inevitably a contentious one. In a country of over 800 languages, spoken by approximately four million people, the choice of which language to use in writing becomes politically fraught. Coupled with the high illiteracy rate and the absence of a strong culture of reading among the educated elite, writing in a language other than English means writing to a very small readership. Some languages are spoken by only about


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1,000 speakers, with perhaps two-thirds or more of these speakers illiterate. For the educated elite, reading means reading in English, although some writers have employed Tok Pisin and Motu. These two major PNG languages have been privileged by the government’s language policy as official languages of Parliament. For many Papua New Guinean writers and artists, language choice is inevitably political. In a 1992 interview, William Takaku, director of the PNG National Theatre Company, said that writing in a language other than his own was “a political issue. Political in the sense that it is a decision that you are not a party of as a writer or as a person here. First of all, you are forced to accept that you can only communicate in English. That’s political” (quoted in Gorle 1993, 129). Takaku also said that “choicelessness” regarding the use of English was a continuation of neo-colonialism. His strategy with the National Theatre Company is therefore to make use of Tok Pisin and a range of vernacular languages. Steven Winduo, on the other hand, is more flexible and open to language appropriation. He remarked, also in a 1992 interview: “Writing in English is a political issue in the sense that I’m using that language to bring the other languages to that level also. . . . When you see one of my texts, you’ll see that it’s all constructed in English, but within that construction there are other languages. They . . . play a very significant role in that these are parts that make up the whole discourse, the whole text. It’s not as if English is playing a dominant role, it plays an accommodating role, perhaps diffusing other languages. I’m using it more as a channel for these other languages” (quoted in Gorle 1993, 130). Winduo’s work inserts and reinscribes indigenous cultural experiences into mainstream discourse, appropriating English as “english” (with a small “e”). Maryanne Dever has argued that because language frequently becomes a site for the expression of epistemological and ontological difference, it loses its claim to absolute representation. She pointed out that “for any new literature the relationship between language and meaning represents an on-going problematic, part of a new society’s search for identity and self-definition” (1988, 34). As difference is always at the center of any dialectical processes, Dever’s work suggests crossculturality as the only alternative in forging a postcolonial identity.

Writing Ourselves: Compartmentalization, Appropriation, and Interpolation as Strategies of Cultural Representation The history of Papua New Guinean literature, at least in the western sense, is relatively short compared to that of other Third World countries. Its belated provenance can be attributed to a number of factors, most saliently that of the dialectic between the colonizing power’s


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reluctance to relinquish hegemonic control, and the need for the empowerment of local people and the reinstatement of indigenous control. In broad terms, the colonial agenda throughout the colonized world was to control the economic, cultural, and political arenas for the benefit of empire. The general strategy of colonization either rendered the indigene invisible, thus making the landscape a blank sheet (tabula rasa), or relegated local people to a subhuman category to justify the argument that they were in need of civilization and thus of European invasion and colonization. Contemporary Papua New Guinean literature inhabits a space of western textual practice. By entering this textual terrain Papua New Guineans have been able to negotiate and interrogate the imperial enterprise that had oppressed them. Modern Papua New Guinean literature germinated and took root when writing was found to be a significant medium for empowering Papua New Guineans to reassert and validate their identity. It also emerged as a powerful weapon in resisting and challenging colonialism and exposing the biases of imperial discourse. While for many Third World countries the late 1960s was a period of colonial denouement, for Papua New Guinea and the South Pacific region in general it was a period of heightened tension, due to the agitation for decolonization. The birthplace of Papua New Guinean literature was essentially the University of Papua New Guinea. Such tertiary institutions were the seedbeds of political and social consciousness. The 1960s was a period when the tidal wave of decolonization in the colonies swept everyone with a fervent sense of nationalism. Pre-independence Papua New Guinean writing grew out of this social ferment. Young students at the university saw writing in English as presenting the kind of empowered voice of resistance that literature has offered throughout the postcolonial world. A great deal of pre-independence Papua New Guinean literature indicates the writers’ forthrightness and outspokenness about the pressing issues that confronted their nation. Much of the writing of this period is protest literature, full of antagonism toward colonialism. Ulli Beier encouraged Papua New Guinean writers to utilize writing, “mainly as a political weapon” (1980, xii), to fulfill their “duties toward themselves and the world” (1973, xiii). The poem “Volcano” by Lynda Thomas (first published in 1971) is a good example of this kind of writing: Our throats are dry and tasteless our hands weak and feeble our bodies are boneless Wake up sleepers! They use us like playgrounds enjoy us like night clubs


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handle us like machines they step on us like dirt regard us like flowers of the devil The master is like a mountain: the higher it gets, the colder But master, we are the rocks beneath on which you stand. Without us You are no longer a mountain. How long shall we carry your weight? It is hot in your cell we want to be free if you don’t give way we’ll force our way through you like a volcano. (Lynda Thomas, “Volcano”)

Rather than representing a “payback” mentality, as Nigel Krauth suggested (1982b, 276), I see this more as invoking, in Helen Tiffin’s words, “an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of them” (1987, 17). Thus, while Beier is viewed by many as the “midwife” of contemporary Papua New Guinean literature, it must be emphasized that Papua New Guineans chose to engage in western textual practice as a preferred medium to articulate their concerns about their exploitation and subjugation and to affirm their cultural heritage. Beier’s influence was concomitant with the general stimulus provided by other academics such as Taban lo Liyong, Elton Brash, and Prithvindra Chakravarti. Three counter-discursive concepts are of cardinal importance in the reconstitution of indigenous identity and cultural place. Compartmentalization is one discursive practice by which Papua New Guineans resisted colonial intrusion. By compartmentalizing European and local representations in different language and cultural registers, local people appropriated English without traditional cultural meanings being completely subsumed and erased. Compartmentalization can be regarded as the first act of resistance by indigenous people in a primarily oral culture.1 Rather than totally rejecting European meanings, indigenous people use compartmentalization to preserve their cultural practices and expressions, while intervening in European master discourses. Although the strategy is complex, I provide three simple examples to illustrate the process. In the first instance, the toponyms Europeans ascribed to certain places were used by the locals only when dealing with Europeans and outsiders; among themselves, they reverted to local names. For example,


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for the place Europeans named “Gazelle Harbour” in Bougainville, the local place-name is Mameku. Depending on who is being addressed, locals say either Gazelle Harbour (to Europeans) or Mameku (to locals); the names coexist but in different cultural and language registers. The use of different place-names in different circumstances and contexts was a maneuver by local people to reject and resist the encroachment of westernization and retain the sense of control, belonging, and identity in relation to landscape and place. For indigenous people, as argued in chapter 2, naming is essentially a process of asserting ownership and control of place and landscape. The second example of the process occurred during censuses. When asked their names by the kiap (patrol officer), people would often give a name that they considered unimportant (such as a nickname, termed pupuareko in Banoni), while withholding their real or secret cultural names. Papua New Guineans often have several names, the most important one usually being secret. The main reason for withholding secret or actual, and therefore important (cultural, social, and spiritual) names is to prevent their corruption or contamination by the strange ways of the white man. For example, my aunt’s real name is Natoke but her pupuareko name is Suabena (meaning to paddle across). She would give her pupuareko name to the census officials rather than her real name. The local people believed that once the census officials heard and wrote down a real or secret name, the power invested in the name would be lost and with it the person’s sense of identification with the environment. A third example of compartmentalization occurred in the practice of Christian worship. When Christianity was first brought to Papua New Guineans, the local people juxtaposed Christian worship with traditional religious worship. Thus, when a missionary conducted church services, the people attended and worshipped the Christian god. When the missionary left, they reverted to traditional worship. The two practices did not collide; people subtly dichotomized them into different registers, thereby lessening and containing the potential disruption of alien practices. The process of compartmentalization most often occurs in primarily oral cultures like Papua New Guinea. Two other processes, appropriation and interpolation, occur within both oral and written language cultures. They indicate a level of agency and resistance from within the dominant discourse, including the capacity to transform it. A writer who appropriates the language of a dominant society (such as English) to write about the dominated society (here Papua New Guinea) in effect “faces two directions, wishing to reconstitute experience through the act of writing which uses the tools of one culture or society and yet seeks to remain faithful to the experience of another,” as


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Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin have explained in The Empire Writes Back (1989, 60–61). As these authors have noted, the writer-as-cultural-translator uses a number of tools to foreground cultural distinctiveness, including the use of glosses, untranslated words, interlanguage, syntactic fusion, code-switching, and vernacular transcription. Providing glosses for indigenous terms implies cultural difference but sometimes also inadvertently points up the inadequacy of translation; leaving words untranslated also signals cultural distinctiveness but puts the burden on the reader to engage with the frame in which these words have meaning. The term “interlanguage” refers to the linguistic system used by second-language learners, in which utterances that are not standard in the dominant language should be seen as genuine and creative rather than mistaken versions of the original. Syntactic fusions are linguistic adaptations of the rhythms and textures of vernacular speech to standard orthography. Code-switching is perhaps the most common method of interweaving two or more dialectical forms, revealing societal complexity, including class and cultural differences as well as communication between groups (Ashcroft and others 1989, 59–77). Ashcroft and his coauthors further stated: “Appropriation is the process by which the language is taken and made to ‘bear the burden’ of one’s own cultural experience, or, as Raja Rao puts it, ‘to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’ (Rao 1938, vii). Language is adopted as a tool and utilized in various ways to express widely differing cultural experiences” (Ashcroft and others 1989, 38–39). This example from Vincent Eri’s novel The Crocodile (1970) illustrates the process of appropriation of English terminology and textual space to communicate indigenous traditional values and perceptions: The victim was an old man. . . . He had been married once but his liquid brought forth no sons and daughters. His wife had died some years ago. . . . “You see how important it is to get married and have children,” Suaea warned. “When one is young one has many friends. But when the skin shrivels up and the mind becomes forgetful, it is one’s own children, children from one’s own liquid, who will bother to wipe away the mucus or do the menial tasks such as making fire or carrying water. See what has happened to old Ivurisa. He had no children upon whom he could rely to boil his drinking and washing water or to cook food for him.” (1970, 24)

Because in traditional Papua New Guinean cultures generally, words that deal with the genitalia are considered taboo, the English word


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“liquid” is used in place of a culturally sanctioned term for sperm. Alternate words are employed as metonyms. The passage also presents important local beliefs with regard to procreation, thus appropriating the English text for indigenous discourse. Nora Vagi Brash’s play Taurama (1985) employs appropriation strategies such as untranslated words, syntactic fusion, and code switching, as in this extract from act 1, scene 1: Dika: Oh my child, for what reason? Inae, natugu dahaka dainai? Am I dead? So that my child gets this treatment that isn’t fit for a diseased dog. What are you pacing for Goada? Have you no strength. Your sister’s disgrace is on you. How could he do such an evil act and when she’s pregnant?

As Ashcroft and his coauthors pointed out, “post-colonial writing abrogates the privileged centrality of ‘English’ by using language to signify difference while employing a sameness, which allows it to be understood. It does this by employing language variance, the ‘part’ of a wider cultural whole, which assists in the work of language seizure whilst being neither transmuted nor overwhelmed by its adopted vehicle. . . . The variance itself becomes the metonym, the part which stands for the whole” (1989, 51–52). Using the various appropriation strategies, writers establish otherness and difference and at the same time take some measure of political control of discourse. But as Ashcroft has argued elsewhere, “The postcolonial writer may appropriate the language, but he or she must interpolate that text into the western-dominated systems of publishing, distribution and readership for the strategy to have any effect” (1995, 177; emphasis added). In the process of reinscribing and writing back to the imperial center, the colonized people insert their cultural experiences and practices into the mainstream, adopting and adapting a space within the dominant discourse so that it becomes part of their cultural experience. “By appropriating the imperial language, its discursive forms, its modes of representation, post-colonial societies are able, as things stand, to intervene more readily in the dominant discourse, to interpolate their own cultural realities, or use that dominant language to describe those realities to a wide audience of readers” (Ashcroft 2000). Appropriation is thus concomitant with the interpolation of indigenous cultural practices into dominant western discourse. What makes these strategies important in Papua New Guinean literature is that through them, indigenous identity, its history and sense of belonging, and its cultural values are recovered and reinscribed in the mainstream European discourse that had subsumed them in the first instance.


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Other Arts as Sites of Intervention While the major point of intervention for postcolonial writing is language, there are also other points of entry. I am thinking here of the other arts, for instance, music, dancing, and the plastic arts in general. I want to briefly discuss the mediums of music and the plastic arts. Music is one of the art forms that most obviously illustrates the process of appropriation. Indeed, music is a form that can comfortably host different musical practices and expressions. Allan Thomas has observed that Pacific musics are acculturated, that is, made up of both indigenous and western forms. “They are in some sense a ‘pidgin’ musical language—simplifying, recombining and developing elements of both parent systems” (1981, 183–184). Although different musics are appropriated, they are blended in such as way that indigenous musicality is retained. In Papua New Guinea as in any other society, a continuous seeping and infiltration from nonindigenous cultures (including their music) precludes the absolute retention of “pure” traditional ways. The only option for nonwestern societies to maintain their cultures and musics is to appropriate and modify the alien cultures so that they become expressions of their own experience. Jun’ichiro Suwa’s discussion of stringband music of the Madang Province of Papua New Guinea shows how western musical instruments (acoustic guitars) are employed by the Madang people to accompany mourning songs (sore singsing), such as the following wag ta (canoe) song (Suwa 2000, 7): Wag ta Dirimal Ilon iyo wade bi a mesi mesi iyo wade. A canoe sails along the reefs of Dirimal. Auntie, here it goes, trailing the waves.

The reference to a canoe in this wag ta song is significant because in Madang “the imagery of a sailing canoe is used as a circumlocution to refer to someone’s death: ‘the canoe has just sailed away,’ ‘the canoe is gone,’ ‘here the canoe goes seaward,’ etc. Also, before coffins were introduced to the area, an old canoe was used to carry the corpse to the burial site” (Suwa 2000, 7).


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Mourning songs are part of Papua New Guinean traditional cultures, and the wag ta is always sung in the local language; the alien element here is the western musical instrument used for accompaniment—the acoustic guitar. Other examples abound of western music being adapted and blended with traditional music while a sense of belonging and identity is forged and, simultaneously, cultural difference is underlined. For instance, among the Unea Islanders of West New Britain Province, the song genre leleki, once associated with spirit worship, has now been incorporated into the liturgy of the Catholic Church, which once condemned it as demonic and pagan (Gima 2000). The role of the plastic arts as manifestations of cultural identity, appropriating nonindigenous forms to combine with traditional elements, has been less discussed. Yet the plastic arts remain one of the best mediums in which indigenous people express and define their sense of belonging and place within a matrix of change. Like many indigenous societies in Papua New Guinea, the plastic arts, and especially architecture that evokes traditions, serve as focal points for memories about the past, or “talismans of continuity.” 2 The plastic arts impart a sense of belonging and place while serving as powerful expressions of identity. Carvings and paintings, for instance, tell us who we are and remind members of society of shared values and cultural practices. Indeed, such art objects, as well as larger artifacts including buildings, townscapes, or cityscapes, become extensions of the self, as Richard Etlin noted: “This importance accorded to the past as found in the tangible remains . . . is one aspect of the way people develop a sense of identity through identification with things” (1997, 315). For Papua New Guineans the arts are viewed as being imbued with ancestors and spirits. The conceptualization of the arts in this way communicates cultural difference as well as sacred and ritual knowledge of a particular community. Traditional architecture, such as the Sepik haus tambaran (spirit house), is a prominent feature of most Papua New Guinean cultures. In fact the Papua New Guinea National Parliament building had been modeled on the haus tambaran, which also incorporates artistic representations from many other PNG cultures. This building is “an amalgam of modern architectural and construction techniques with traditional Papua New Guinea building styles and art” (Simons and Stevenson 1990, 34). As Susan Cochrane Simons and Hugh Stevenson have noted: Many of the art forms, symbols and overall design aesthetic of the [PNG National Parliament] building are adapted from, or inspired by, traditional arts but are executed in modern media. . . .


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The art integrated into the building’s design, construction and embellishment epitomises the structure of the contemporary arts of Papua New Guinea. Within its framework it features cultural references to each of the nineteen provinces, 1000 tribal groups and 750 languages which exist within Papua New Guinea and, through its design, brings them together in a statement of national unity. (1990, 34–35)

The PNG National Parliament is indeed an impressive and spectacular building, yoking together art forms from different parts of Papua New Guinea in its design to underline a cultural and political statement that signifies the emergence of a new postcolonial voice. Furthermore, the haus tambaran is traditionally the center of decision making at the village level. The PNG National Parliament building pays tribute to that role while serving as a symbol of a new nationhood. Thus modern architectural methods have been appropriated to express important indigenous meanings.

Reinscribing Culture: Orature in PNG Literature The first group of Papua New Guinean writers challenged the existing attitudes of outsiders and raised local people’s consciousness of their oppression and unique heritage. They reinscribed the fragmented indigenous identities that had been subverted by European cultural values. Therefore their writing must not simply be viewed as a simple response to colonialism, but as complex and multifaceted representations. Papua New Guinean literary production is generated by the need to reassert its heritage in the midst of imperial enterprise. Thus, writing by Papua New Guinean authors is always political in some way. It is an endeavor to articulate their problematic position as artists and intellectuals in a rapidly changing environment and at the same time to agitate for reforms. It emerges from a politicized, educated generation fulfilling the role of social and political commentators in society. Literature, as a form of consciousness, is thus intimately interwoven with the social, political, and cultural matrix of the society that produces it. By reinscribing parts of their cultures into mainstream structures and language, indigenous texts are interpolated into the once sacrosanct domain of European culture. The importance of indigenous tradition, culture, and identity for Papua New Guineans, and particularly shared custom (kastom), is highlighted through the incorporation of orature into textual discourse. Oral literature has always been an integral part of traditional Papua New Guinea cultures in rendering myths, legends, chants, poetry, song and dance, and drama. The incorporation of this discourse in writing


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“opens up new possibilities, gives voice to the unspoken, unwritten text and through the eyes of the narrator both the oral and the written culture are transformed into a meaningful discourse” (Winduo 1991, 15). Thus oral discourse is elevated from its marginal position into the colonial space through the utilization of the elements of myths and legends. These elements of oral discourse bridge what Ashcroft has termed “the gulf of silence” (1989a, 63, 71; 1989b, 5), the space that cannot be traversed by either discourse except in hybridized form. The traditional genre that has been most widely developed in Papua New Guinean literature is drama. Plays are an oral form and are collective, as actors and audience participate in a kind of “dialogue,” both real and imagined. Drama is an integral part of Papua New Guinean traditional culture. Almost all occasions and ceremonies, including births, courtship, and funerals, are accompanied by drama performances. Arthur Jawodimbari’s play The Sun (first published in 1970), which as Ganga Powell noted is “an adaptation of a traditional legend to a modern dramatic form” (1987, 11), is an example of the use of orature and its inscription into the dominant discourse. In the play, the incorporation of a legend validates the people’s cultural values and connection to place, while at the same time the use of orature provides cultural authority. The legend tells how the sun came to be in the sky: The sun, as property of one man, Tunana, is kept in his lime pot. It only shines in the village of Towara, while the rest of the world is engulfed in darkness. One day, Tunana’s brother-in-law offends him by offering him stones instead of food. Mistakenly, Tunana invites his friends to share the “food” with him. His friends accuse him of deliberately offering them stones; ashamed, he leaves the village of Towara, taking the sun with him. In Towara the suffering becomes unbearable and Tunana’s sister offers to go in search of him. When she locates Tunana in his host village of Jinaga, she begs him to go back with her. Tunana succumbs to her sister’s pleading and returns, accompanied by people from Jinaga, bearing food. After feeding the Towara villagers, he decides to return to Jinaga. As Tunana tells his sister: “I will leave you—but the sun shall shine on all. No man is big enough to keep the sun as prisoner. Today, I’ll break my lime pot and set him free. Released from bondage the sun shall roam the sky, removed from human reach.” (Jawodimbari 1980, 127)

Like many stories in Papua New Guinea, the legend of the sun represents the ideals of communality and sharing in indigenous cultures. In indigenous society, social interaction takes into consideration the fact that the stability of the community hinges on the extended family system. Ideally, within these systems, there is no room for selfishness or individualism; disputes are resolved through negotiation, compromise,


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and consensus. The world of indigenous people is fluid, its balance between order and chaos maintained through social cohesiveness. As the sun, shared by all, is a metaphor for this social symmetry, the play evokes and reinforces important cultural values. The adaptation of the legend, and the appropriation of the dramatic form of a written play (in English), contributes to the recovery of cultural identity and history as national narrative. Such stories construct a sense of place and belonging in a restorative way, inscribing Papua New Guinean identity by “re-placing” the legend textually into English. While myths and legends function to enable people in oral cultures to construct their sense of belonging, appropriating the written form gives additional authority and permanence to this identity and cultural perception, and interpolating them into the “spaces” of the dominant discourse is empowering. Compartmentalization and appropriation also feature in the novel The Crocodile (Eri 1970). Eri, like Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart (1959), presents us with a society at the verge of disintegration. Like most colonial societies during the early years of colonization, this PNG society undergoes external invasion and conquest, as well as cultural confrontation and conflict. A profound grief over these events is evident, for example, in the thoughts of Sevese Ovou, the father of Hoiri, the novel’s central character: No one was more troubled than Sevese. He wished Hoiri had never come into this world. He cursed the government and blamed Tamate [the Reverend James Chalmers, of the London Missionary Society] for carrying the Word of God to the village, opening up the way for the patrol officers to be ordering his people around. (Eri 1970, 72)

The fragmentation of the culture is one of the major messages of the novel. Notably, however, laments over the passing of the traditional world are expressed using the nontraditional language—English—and a nonindigenous form—the novel. The novel focuses on the crocodile of its title. Apart from its literal meaning, the sign “crocodile” operates semantically on two levels. On the one hand, the crocodile is a metaphor for the destructive forces of change, causing the disintegration of traditional society. On another level, the crocodile alludes symbolically to practices in traditional cultures that outsiders consider stifling and evil, such as magic and sorcery. The story chronicles the development and observations of an individual consciousness (Hoiri’s) while at the same time it maps the development of a country (Papua New Guinea). Moveave village serves a microcosm of Papua New Guinean traditional culture. The novel presents the traditional culture and the society’s metamorphosis as it encounters westernization. Most importantly, traditional cultural belief


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is asserted throughout the work, as in the following examples. First, Hoiri’s aunt Suaea tries to explain a kind of sorcery to him: “There are some men well known in this village. It is they who carry out the groundwork. They collect the dirt of the person who is to die. Sometimes they cut off a piece from the person’s dress. Fresh clean ginger is used. They make sure that their own dirt doesn’t get on the ginger or else they are as liable to die.” (Eri 1970, 10)

Later, Sevese responds to his son Hoiri’s questioning about the death of his mother: “When your mother died, her body was buried. Her spirit did not leave us. She has been visiting the places where she went fishing and gardening. Every evening, as the sun sets behind the treetops, she changes to her human form and weeps for us. It is at one of these times that we, the living, can find out from the dead the cause of their death.” (Eri 1970, 11)

These passages demonstrate the compartmentalization of two systems of belief as well as the appropriation of written (English) language to convey oral indigenous authority. In its representation of magic and the coexistence of the spirit of the dead and human existence, the text presents a belief system that is “other” to European thought and discourse. The novel also represents numerous other aspects of traditional culture, for example, the Hiri Trade between the Gulf people and the Motuans (Eri 1970, 25–36), and the art of traditional weather forecasting (Eri 1970, 34). The destructive qualities of the magical “crocodile” as a site of metaphoric and symbolic difference are demonstrated when the crocodile captures Mitoro, Hoiri’s wife. While it is culturally valid for Moveave people to understand that it is no ordinary crocodile that has taken Mitoro, the notion of metaphoricity is distinct from the crocodile’s material existence in western perception. The use of this cultural variable, in which literal and metaphoric crocodile are somehow the same, demonstrates the complexity of indigenous cultural discourse. I quote a long passage here to demonstrate the complexity of the metaphoric signification: A moving object, faintly visible, attracted Hoiri’s attention. The object was moving upstream in a west-east direction. Gentle ripples rolled away from a ball-like object that formed the bow, a sure sign that a marine creature was a crocodile. . . . “Yes, this is no ordinary crocodile,” Hoiri said to himself when he saw the crocodile make an about-turn and head towards him. He heard a whistle, presumably in reply to his, come from the direction of the crocodile. He did not reply, fearing he might give himself away


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the second time. Still the crocodile kept coming straight towards him. The edge of the water was no more than a foot away from where Hoiri stood. Finding itself in shallow water, the reptile raised itself on its legs and hands. The object that had seemed no more than a yard in length a few seconds ago had suddenly transformed itself into a huge dug-out canoe. With slow steps the horrifying creature advanced, then it stopped. . . . The coconut palm, which he had leaned on for stability and comfort now, shielded him from the hideous beast. He knew that someone was alighting from the tail end of the crocodile: the splashes his feet made in the water were unmistakable. The head of the crocodile was on dry land, so Hoiri could not tell whether anyone was alighting from that end. His eyes were fixed on the splashing footsteps that were moving towards him. He placed his spear loosely against the trunk, ready to use when he needed it. When the footsteps had come quite close, Hoiri lunged at the invisible being with all his might. There was a scream that almost drowned Hoiri’s battle-cry. His axe had struck fast into some invisible object and before he could retrieve it for a second blow it had disappeared into the night. Hoiri jumped aside from the tail of the crocodile to avoid having all the bones in his body broken. He hurled his spear, and it struck deep behind the crocodile’s right shoulder. One after another, his arrows penetrated the sinewy flesh. (Eri 1970, 112–113)

In this passage, sorcerers have turned themselves into a reptile to make themselves invisible and kill their victim. The “otherness” of this metamorphosis presents a point of extreme difference from European discourse, which would define this conception as superstition or magic. But the novel conveys this cultural belief in magic and metamorphosis, incorporating it without explanatory comment into the English text. Moreover, the absence of western skepticism in the representation of this belief, especially in Hoiri’s mind, exemplifies the power of compartmentalization. The text emphasizes the uniqueness of traditional culture and alter/ native meanings and identities, a reversed dominance, which, represented in English, allows western discourse to “consume its own biases” (Harris 1985, 127). Supporting this strategy of re-presenting Papua New Guinean culture, the colonial officials in the novel are portrayed as ignorant and arrogant, insensitive to traditional culture and customs. Colonialism is personified by the figure of the kiap, Mr. Smith, who simply cannot negotiate cross-culturally: “I don’t know about you people. You keep crying for weeks after a man has been buried. Once he’s dead his usefulness is finished. As far as I’m concerned the work of the Government must go on. Don’t


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you see that the work I’m doing is to develop your country and make you people civilized?” (Eri 1970, 71)

The patrol officer is callous and wholly unsympathetic to an indigenous cultural belief system in which spirits of the dead are respected, as they continue to play an important role in the quotidian lives of the living. Smith’s patronizing discourse of “development” negates the importance of the cultural framework. Here we find an example of the function of representation as contestation. It is arguable whether this description stereotypes the kiap as a totally insensitive and indifferent exploiter. But exaggerated or not, it demonstrates the power of appropriation to take control of representation on behalf of the hitherto “voiceless.” It also raises the question of whether we are justified in expecting verisimilitude in fictional description. For we are not concerned here with “true” representation, but with the means of representation themselves, which appropriate power from the dominant culture. Thus, by using English and entering western publishing systems, alter/native narratives in English by writers like Eri have been interpolated into the dominant discourse. These first Papua New Guinean writers have engaged in creating a new literary culture, mediating between oral and written cultures, drawing on models and structures of discourse from their own traditional cultures as well as from the newly acquired textual tradition.

Writing Ourselves: Autobiography and Self-Representation One of the genres commonly utilized by the first Papua New Guinean writers is autobiography. The autobiographical genre is doubly important in postcolonial discourse: as representations of subjectivity, they record the author’s life, often in terms of a symbolic journey, from village life to entry into the hitherto unknown white man’s world. As interpolations of agency, these (often personal) narratives function counter-discursively to colonial representations of the indigene. As Beier pointed out, “It was clearly felt, that by talking about their own lives, Papua New Guineans could be authentic and authoritative in destroying the intricate maze of myth woven by white writers” (1974, 3). At the same time, these texts serve as allegories of the political development of the country and of national identity and history. Frederic Jameson has argued for reading these texts exclusively as allegories: “What all third-world cultural productions have in common . . . and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in the first world [is that] all third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories” (Jameson 1986, 65, quoted in Slemon 1987, 8). This argument


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is generally true of pre-independence Papua New Guinean literature. On the other hand, autobiographical discourse acts intertextually with discourses of national history, through the authors’ recollections of their private lives and those of others. Georges Gusdorf pointed out the historically constitutive nature of autobiographical representation: “The author of an autobiography gives himself the job of narrating his own history; what he sets out to do is to reassemble the scattered elements of his life and to regroup them in a comprehensive sketch. The historian of himself wishes to produce his own portrait, but while the painter captures only a moment of external appearance, the autobiographer strains toward a complete and coherent expression of his entire destiny. . . . Autobiography . . . requires a man to take a distance with regard to himself in order to reconstitute himself in the focus of his special unity and identity across time” (1980, 35). Autobiography is therefore about the private self, the recollection of significant aspects of one’s life located within a perceived historical time frame.3 Albert Maori Kiki’s autobiography, titled Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (1968), was a landmark. “In his quiet, unassuming way, Kiki was the first New Guinean to tell the world [what] it was like to grow up in a remote and isolated New Guinean forest; what it was like for a ten year old boy suddenly to be dragged into a mission school; what it was like to be insulted and bullied by Europeans; what it was like to acquire a strange and alien education; and what it was like to wake up to the modern realities of New Guinea and to take part in the shaping of the country’s fate” (Beier 1973, xii). In this autobiographical text, the recurring trope of initiation signifies both cultural difference and the process of entry into indigenous culture. As a child, Kiki underwent at least four initiation rites of passage to power and manhood. In traditional societies, the uninitiated subject is considered as lacking in power and knowledge, while initiation invests the subject with power, knowledge, and authority. The concept of initiation is also a symbol of empowerment for the indigene and indigenous culture. Its textual representation signifies the entry of indigenous voice, culture, and subjectivity into written textual practice and literary production. From Kiki’s description of his first two initiations: The more secret things were learned during the boys’ initiation ceremonies. I was barely seven when I was taken off to a place known as Kapa, in the bush, where I went through my first initiation. My mother’s people believed that a very young boy can absorb power more easily. . . . At Kapa I learned about Maruka Akore and the origin of the clan. . . . The second initiation took place at puberty. Its climax was the wearing of the mask. I can remember the large Kova mask, a painted cane


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structure, being put over my head, and resting on my shoulders. . . . As I rushed through the village, my relatives paid homage to the mask. My mother threw herself on the ground. (Kiki 1968, 17–18)

As pointed out in these passages, cultural beliefs that are otherwise secret are only learned during initiation. The persons undergoing initiation rites are separated from the rest of the community for fear of contamination or the revealing of cultural secrets to unauthorized persons, for instance, women and uninitiated males. It is during such rites that the initiated absorb power. In Siump Kavani’s story “The Drop-Out,” the author finds out that by choosing formal education, he becomes ineligible for initiation: I once again joined my age group, to prepare myself to be a man. But then one day I made the most important decision of my life. That was the day I sneaked out of the house to join the schoolboys. . . . That day I was not really rebelling against my elders. I thought that I was merely going to enjoy the strange pleasure of being a schoolboy for a little while. I did not really expect any lasting benefits from the experience. (1974, 61)

For Kavani, failure to fulfill initiation meant both the loss of identity and exclusion from his community. He realized that “without initiation I would never be considered a man amongst my own people and that I had in fact become a drop-out” (1974, 62). In Sana (1975), his autobiography, Michael Somare described how, despite his heavy commitments as chief minister, he was determined to undergo initiation to complete his political role. For him, the importance of the ritual lay in mediating between traditional culture and western political leadership. To the European understanding and definition of leader, he added the appropriate elements of Papua New Guinean cultural identity, symbolically reaffirming his traditional attachment to community: I was now, more than ever, determined to go through with the ceremony. As chief minister, it was particularly important that I should not separate myself from my people. It was now essential that I establish my identity at home and that I receive the wisdom and strength that my elders were willing to pass on to me from my forefathers. (Somare 1975, 33)

The initiation was an allegory for Somare’s power in terms of both traditional and political structures. During that final initiation, his uncle Saub told him:


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“Now you have left your mother’s womb. You have come to this place to receive power. With this power you must go out and lead— lead in initiation, lead in fight, lead in peacemaking. The strength now has been given to you.” (Somare 1975, 35)

For Somare, traditional initiation was fundamentally important in his dual role as leader of a modern nation and a traditional one. The political assertion of national and individual identity also characterizes Kiki’s autobiography, which parallels the political development of Papua New Guinea, representing the awakening and political consciousness of Papua New Guineans. Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime deals with a crucial period in Papua New Guinea, the beginnings of decolonization, and initiation is an allegory for the political maturation of the indigene in the western sense. A period of study in Fiji was another period of political and social orientation for Kiki, as he also learned about trade unions and the possibilities they could provide: All this excited me a great deal. . . . It had not occurred to me before that one could seriously try to do something about it [the condition of the workers, low wages, etc.]. The more I saw of them the more convinced I became that we had to start organising ourselves at home. (Kiki 1968, 77–78)

The arrival of Kiki’s book interrogated dominant images and challenged the distorted relationship between “whites and blacks, New Guineans and Papuans, highlanders and coastals, administration and villagers, Christianity and paganism” (Winduo 1991, 54). The text is primarily political, addressing the need for social and political change. Kiki’s view was that one person alone cannot effect change in society, but that it requires people with similar concerns, a common vision, and a sense of patriotism. This perspective would lead to the founding of the Kerema Welfare Association and, more importantly, the first political party, the Pangu Pati. This book narrates the growing sense of nationalism and unification of the country: Those who wish to deny us independence keep telling us about a number of problems we shall not be able to deal with as an independent nation. They say there is tension between Papua and New Guinea, tension between highlands and coastal people, and that we shall never be able to unite. They say we shall abandon democratic procedure, which is being taught to us so carefully now, and we shall introduce one-party government. Some think we shall become communists. Some say the army will stage a coup and introduce military dictatorship. Some say we have trouble with our Chinese minority or with mixed-race people. Others fear we will kick out the Australian plant-


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ers. Most of them feel the country will collapse economically because Australian aid will dry up after independence. (Kiki 1968, 183)

This section interrogates the “dependency myth” discussed in chapter 5, and Kiki’s counter-argument reveals his developing political consciousness. The story of his personal life and growing awareness of his subjugation and the prejudices that marginalized him are an allegory for the politics of decolonization in the author’s country. Kiki’s 1968 autobiography “reminded younger New Guineans not only of their own capabilities but of their duties toward themselves and the world” (Beier 1973, xiii). Soon other autobiographies appeared, consolidating this important genre of Papua New Guinean writing in English. These texts commonly narrate periods of childhood in the village, first contacts with Europeans who wield strange and enormous powers, their entry into the formal education system, employment in the colonial bureaucracy and the problems they encounter. Many of these works recount and celebrate the village life and culture. Leo Hannet, in the story “Rainmaker’s Child,” recounted his childhood on Nissan Island with fondness and affection: The most popular game though was hide and seek, which we played with the girls. This would invariably lead to children’s sex games and even intercourse which was tolerated by adults. There was complete freedom among children. (1974, 48)

In this story Hannet’s childhood is presented as innocent and carefree, but in another piece, titled “Disillusionment with the Priesthood,” he described his growing resentment with his religious vocation. Education enabled Hannet, like other young elites in the colonies, to become cognizant of the discriminatory practices of Europeans. As Hannet discovered, the missionaries were not above such practices: It was in Rabaul that my disillusionment with the Church first began. In Rabaul we became more conscious of the enormous difference in the standard of living between priests and pupils. . . . What really upset me in Rabaul was the discovery that the priests themselves were not free from racial prejudices. At the time there were two cinemas in Rabaul, one for natives and one for Europeans. The Fathers, trying to be liberal, I suppose, occasionally took some of the light-skinned students to the European cinema: the Gilbertese, some Papuans and one or two Tolais. We Solomon Islanders were told that we were too black! (1973, 43)

This realization marked the beginning of Hannet’s political awakening. Once Papua New Guineans became conscious of their exploitation, they agitated to overhaul the system and obtain independence. Hannet’s


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two stories are national allegories, which are counter-discursive. In the latter story, exposing the priests’ inherent prejudices, Hannet interrogated the normative European discourse. Often such works mourn the loss of the innocence and romance of village life. There has been the tendency to judge this as a nostalgic quest for the unsullied past, but this is not necessarily the case. Rather, these texts argue strongly that the representation of cultural pasts underline and accentuate indigenous cultures as having their own structures and aesthetics. The representation of the past is part of the process of the recovery of indigenous and national identity, interpolating the postcolonial “I” into mainstream cultural production. In the act of writing, which is essentially political, these writers negotiate competing issues of politics and self-representation. Through their writing, they enter the domains of knowledge and therefore of power.

The Trope of the Angry Indigene The early playwrights provided some of the strongest political voices to challenge colonial discourse. Their texts focus on political assertiveness and resistance, counteracting received representations by reversing them. Europeans are represented in ways that highlight their insensitivity, ignorance, and arrogance toward the cultural and social concerns of Papua New Guineans. Like the other genres, these writings serve to reinscribe Papua New Guinean “difference” and political consciousness and interpolate them into western discourse. Their anticolonialism inverts the colonialist image, which portrayed them as children and politically naive; instead they are revealed as politically conscious and sensitive to their subjection and oppression. The Ungrateful Daughter by Leo Hannet is an example of the trope of the angry Papua New Guinean (1971). The play presents the contesting discourses of postcolonial politics allegorically through its characters and their interactions. An Australian couple, Mr and Mrs Carney, have adopted a Papua New Guinean girl, Ebonita, and want her to marry an Australian businessman, Sidney Smith. As Kirsty Powell observed, the character of Ebonita symbolizes Papua New Guinea “colonised at no wish of her own, governed and educated in the Australian way, out of the coloniser’s conviction that Australian ways are best and Papua New Guinean ways merely barbarous” (1978, 104). In the beginning, Ebonita is very obedient to her adopted parents. Only later does she begin to question and challenge the validity of her parents’ advice, as an allegory of the awakening political consciousness of Papua New Guinea. Ebonita seeks advice from members of the “midnight club,” a group of indigenous people meeting secretly. The old man, Tohatsi, urges her to break free from her foster parents and promises the group’s support:


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Tohatsi: Ebonita, you are the pride, the most beautiful feather in our clan. We shall not desert you. Have no fear. If you defy them, we shall be with you. If they fight you, we shall protect you. Choose the time for your revolt wisely. In the meantime, swallow your words. A leaking pot will soon break. (Hannet 1971, 39)

Krauth compared the midnight club to the “black power movement” (1982b, 227), but the club also importantly represents traditional culture as the point of resistance against the dominant discourse, the signifier of traditional identity connoting the growing cognizance of black identity in the country. As Krauth further pointed out, “The woman’s crisis involved the choice between the race to which her brown body belonged and that to which her white-influenced mind appeared to belong” (1982b, 277). This is how Hannet explained the politicization that engendered the play: The Ungrateful Daughter is very much a play wherein I attempted to put out everything from my chest re political, social, cultural, and economic as well as religious views on New Guinea which I found hard to express openly through [the journal] Dialogue. . . . In some ways Ebonita there is me soliloquizing to the whole world about my pentup feelings about New Guinea’s identity and search for true independence. (written personal communication, 6 Oct 1972, quoted in Kirsty Powell 1978, 103)

Hannet’s play depicts the indigenous people not as passive receptors of European domination but as active players in its renunciation and interrogation. In most contemporary Papua New Guinean writing, the indigene is portrayed as knowledgeable, politically aware, and heroic in the struggle against colonialism. These works are extremely direct in their exposure and condemnation of discrimination, indifference, intolerance, and injustice. As William McGaw suggested, “The role of such literature, with its raw clashes of the oppressors and the oppressed, is to exorcise the sense of injury and shame that colonization has ingrained in the country’s original inhabitants. Its purpose is to rediscover pride” (1983, 11). Papua New Guinean writers have employed literature to raise their voices in protest against imperial power. Many of the works that came out prior to political independence are within the category of resistance. For instance, a number of Papua New Guinean writers have used the metaphor of a volcano in their writings to illustrate anticolonial sentiments. John Kasaipwalova’s 1971 poem “The Reluctant Flame” is a powerful example, demonstrating the counter-discursive nature of Papua New Guinean literature. The poem, as Krauth observed, emphasizes the “regenerative potential” of an indigenous uprising, by elaborating on “the vibrant lava” which would “burn


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anew the world” and “fertilize this barren soil” (1982b, 280). Listen to the protest of Kasaipwalova: I tremble in fear, the cold westerly chills my flesh and bones Memory of past warmth swims in my heart like stones What is this chill, where is that flame to warm and melt me? The chill is killing the flame, it is everywhere Chill you’re a bastard, I hate you as a panther hates a motherfucker Every turn of my head sees your tentacles strangling innocent kanakas You have trampled the whole world over Here your boot is on our necks, your spear into our intestines Your history and your size makes me cry violently for air to breathe. . . . reluctant flame open your volcano take your pulse and your fuel burn burn burn burn burn let your flames vibrate their drums burn burn burn burn burn burn away my weighty ice burn into my heart a dancing flame. (John Kasaipwalova, “The Reluctant Flame”)

In this poem, as in the other allegorical writings in this section, there are two levels of representation. On the one level, the Papua New Guinean is depicted as an agitated and rebellious person who has woken up to political imprisonment and subjugation. The text also metaphorically represents the subjectivity and inner sentiments of the indigenous people. In the poem, the chill, in contrast to the heat of the volcanic fire of resistance and pent-up frustration, is a metaphor of colonialism and European values whose oppressive force bears on them. Significantly, the cold affects not only the people but also the local landscape, both represented by the volcano, its force and fire lying dormant because of the “cold westerly chill.” Kumalau Tawali’s influential poem “The Bush Kanaka Speaks,” which was first published in 1971, expresses sharp and witty anticolonial defiance. According to Gillian Gorle, the poem “depicts the colonial administrator as a totally flat character, no more than a rigid and angry cardboard cutout, while the villagers possess human qualities such as wisdom, adaptability, and a sense of humor” (1995, 91). But this assessment is somewhat limiting. While it exposes the biases of European thinking, the crux of the poem is the misunderstandings and misperceptions that exist between two differing cultural systems, as in this extract:


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The Kiap shouts at us forcing the veins to stand out in his neck nearly forcing the excreta out of his bottom he says: you are dirty. He says we live in dirty houses, Has he ever lived in one? Has he enjoyed the sea breeze blowing through the windows? and the cool shade under the pandanus thatch? Let him keep his iron roof, shining in the sun, cooking his inside, bleaching his skin white (Kumalau Tawali, “The Bush Kanaka Speaks”)

The poem articulates oppositionality and interrogates the assumptions of Europeans about native cultures. It breaks through the margins and inscribes anticolonialist views into mainstream agenda through a series of challenging, rhetorical questions. The poem is therefore an important attempt by the hitherto muted Papua New Guineans to speak and challenge the myths of colonial discourse and reclaim a voice within the imperial enterprise. This assertive voice is symptomatic of the trope of the angry indigene, which dominates pre-independence Papua New Guinean resistance literature.4 Papua New Guinean literature is interpolated into the dominant discourse, primarily as political pronouncements linked to the political climate of that time as well as constructions of Papua New Guinean identities. As Beier stated, “Writing was not considered as an intellectual entertainment or as a sophisticated exercise, but rather as an urgent task that had to be fulfilled” (1973, xiii). In responding to the forces of colonialism, writers also took to task the imaginings of their country by outside writers. Through the activity of writing, Papua New Guinean writers told “their side of the story,” defining a space for themselves within the broad matrix of colonial history. These writers not only desired to render a more accurate portrayal of the indigene, but also recognized the possibilities of revising the history that had misrepresented them. In other words, Papua New Guinean authors “wrote themselves” in order to rewrite history. Having their works published is an essential component of interpolation, for the published text publicly inserts the constructed self/nation into national, political, and postcolonial discourse. While appropriation is the strategy employed by postcolonial writers, “seizing the language of the center and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized space” (Ashcroft and others 1989, 38), it is through the process of interpolation—publishing and disseminating texts—that postcolonial writers intervene into master discourses of various kinds,


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such as history, literature, philosophy—indeed, into any hegemonic form of cultural production (Ashcroft 1995, 177). An unpublished writing is similar to a muted person whose power of articulation is minimal. Publication is a daunting task in a country like Papua New Guinea, with its very small readership, yet a necessary one if the Papua New Guinean artist is to textually validate cultural experience. The rendering of oral narratives in contemporary written form is an important interpolating strategy, as powerful institutions such as publishing, education, and marketing are co-opted to enhance the process of indigenous self-representation. But even more powerful is the performance of dance drama or folk opera. These are both important, popular, and widely disseminated forms of cultural representation, and all the poets and novelists of the literary renaissance of the 1970s experimented with drama that incorporated these traditional forms. Folk opera or dance drama involve the deployment of traditional themes and images, including myths, legends, and oral histories, incorporated into the performance and thus appropriating the western genre in a way that focuses traditional cultural perspectives. Contemporary Papua New Guinean literature is essentially counterdiscursive. While it exposes the biases of European discourse it simultaneously inscribes a new political agenda, one representing Papua New Guineans in a new light: as people equal in intelligence, knowledge, and political consciousness. Through the processes of compartmentalization, appropriation, and interpolation, these writers reconstitute and recover their sense of agency and cultural identity.


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9

Writing Ourselves II: Representing the Post-Independence Papua New Guinea Landscape

This chapter argues that, while maintaining a correspondence with themes and concerns expressed before national independence, the indigenous imaginings of Papua New Guinea since 1970 have become more complex. Indeed, PNG self-representation has traversed new sociopolitical and cultural boundaries. Like the literatures of other formerly colonized countries, postindependence PNG writings are strongly informed by the experience of colonialism and its aftermath. Contemporary PNG have to a great extent taken on the task of assessing the country’s changing sociopolitical, cultural, and economic landscape and destiny. Focused on the multiple ills the people are confronting, many of the works express a kind of teleological pessimism, that is, a sense of disorder rather than preordained design or purpose, predicated on and within the overall frame of colonial and postcolonial experience. PNG literature is primarily concerned with the implications and consequences of the new configurations of power; it simultaneously provides a site of exposure and warning. In this chapter, I discuss some of these issues through a number of broadly defined and often overlapping themes including, among others, disillusionment and disenchantment, national confusion, identity, political irresponsibility, alienation and displacement. I also highlight the continuing importance of orature as a cardinal and integral component of postindependence PNG writing. I explore these concerns through a number of significant PNG texts, including, among others, Russell Soaba’s novel Maiba (1985); Nora Vagi Brash’s play Which Way, Big Man? (1980); some of Nash G Sorariba’s short stories, including his collection Medal Without Honour (1997); and Wiri Yakaipoko’s novel The Blue Logic: Something from the Dark Side of Port Moresby (2000). Through these texts I show how these writers are interrogating the postindependence PNG situation and how they are dealing with a cornucopia of issues that affect them. While there are often divergent and debatable 189


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interpretations of contemporary PNG society, there is also much common ground and even apparent collusion among the perspectives of indigenous and nonindigenous writers. Although this chapter occupies the final position in this book, it is not intended to speak with any sort of finality. In a 1997 article, Greg Fry discussed changing Australian images of the South Pacific, including Papua New Guinea. In Fry’s analysis, the contemporary Australian view of the South Pacific countries has shifted (though not exclusively) from earlier depictions as either paradise or hell to scenarios reflecting what he called a new “doomsdayism.” The doomsday imagery has its provenance in “the heartland of ‘rational’ thinking—the intersection worlds of the bureaucrat, the politician, the foreign affairs journalist, and the academic economist” (Fry 1997, 305). This view is saturated with a conflation of western social, political, cultural, and economic meanings that expand its significance far beyond its immediate, localized meaning. This new standpoint expresses and influences national predilections and national character at the same time as it plays a cardinal and salient part in the Australian aesthetics of perception. Fry noted, “In the dramatic imagery associated with this conception, the South Pacific is the ‘hole in the Asia-Pacific doughnut’ or ‘the eye in the Asia-Pacific cyclone’” (1997, 305). This suggests that the South Pacific has become an economic, political, and strategic backwater in the New World Order. The new negative depiction of the region “draws attention to what is seen as a series of grim trends: a history of failure in development as measured by growth domestic product; ‘soaring’ populations; unsustainable exploitation of resources; the marginalization of island economies in a hanging global trading order”; and declining aid from former, powerful donors (Fry 1997, 305–306). These representations are grounded primarily in economic rationalism. According to Fry, “The images are embedded in a forthright salvationist message that describes a region in danger of ‘falling off the map’” (1997, 305). This contemporary portrayal of Pacific Islands is mainly dictated by western economic notions and practices. On the other hand, the traditional (paradise/hell) representation, which is still embraced by the Australian popular culture, focuses mainly on cultural practices and variables. I engage Fry’s work here to illustrate two significant points that prevail throughout this book. First, while outsider representations of Papua New Guinea continue to be generated, attention has shifted from depictions based on the culture to perceptions arising from the sociopolitical and economic landscape. I am mindful of the fact that earlier representations of Papua New Guineans, while essentially cultural, were reinforced by the colonial political and legal systems. Second, contemporary outsider representations of the PNG economic and sociopoliti-


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cal conditions have gained the support of some Papua New Guinean writers because they are based on academically substantiated views. While the kinds of “knowledge” that these outsider representations evoke and imbed in the minds of outsiders play a significant role in shaping outsider attitudes and behaviors toward indigenous peoples, Fry has argued that the primary effect of the new doomsday images is to force economic discipline on the governments of the Pacific, because of the Australian government’s role and position as the major aid donor. Indeed, in recent times, outside aid and financial institutions have reproached Papua New Guinea (and other Pacific Island states) for failing to shift their development and economic policies more toward sustainable development. Fry’s argument is supported by postindependence PNG writers’ assessments of the country. The commonality of views expressed in recent literature such as the examples highlighted in this chapter suggests an ongoing collusion between outsider and insider perceptions and representations of Papua New Guinea. When outsider and insider perspectives align and reinforce each other, literature and the mass media act as powerful mechanisms in shaping the perceptions that define Papua New Guinea. While these two institutions perform important roles in exposing and externalizing deep-seated corruption, they have also created images that are sometimes fallacious, socially and politically damaging, and at times pernicious. Many postindependence writings are sociopolitical commentaries about the fate and destiny of Papua New Guinea. The assessment of many PNG writers is that the country is going through one of the most turbulent and shameful periods of its political history. For many indigenous people the takeover of the reigns of power by fellow indigenes in 1970 was seen as a dawn of a new era. Soon thereafter, however, they realized that their much-admired leaders were little more than political pawns with black skins. Independent Papua New Guinea has increasingly been plagued by the neocolonial ills of economic disorder, social malaise, and government corruption. As early as 1985, in his novel Maiba, novelist Russell Soaba portrayed Papua New Guinea as “a society caught in the tension between greed and materialism, cultural betrayal and historical nostalgia, social control and social reconstruction” (Ashcroft 1987, 86). In their diagnoses of the deterioration of the sociopolitical and economic conditions, both literary and practical critics have recently compared Papua New Guinea to a fast-sinking ship caught in an ocean of corruption, economic chaos, political turmoil, and social inferno. A salient characteristic of Soaba’s writing is the disturbing nature of many of his images. Soaba’s fictional stage is presented as ugly and on the brink of violence. A sense of alienation and displacement always


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surrounds his characters. Soaba’s Maiba is a cautionary tale about the disintegration of traditional authority under the influence of changing social values, as well as about the manipulation and usurpation of power. These evils are portrayed in the deception deployed by the character Doboro Thomas and his gang of thugs as they strive to maintain that power. Maiba, the novel’s protagonist (and by extension Makawana society), serves as an allegory of postindependence Papua New Guinea. Maiba’s father, the late Chief Komeroana Magura, was the traditional ruler of Makawana Village until his death, when the leadership was seized by Doboro Thomas, the village orator. Soaba’s depiction of Maiba as alienated and displaced alludes to a number of significant contentions, including the fact that all cultures and sociopolitical systems have flaws, whether they are inherent in the system, in personalities, or in quality of leadership. Thus Maiba, as an allegory of the country, is presented in such a way as to mirror and capture the broader politics of PNG postcoloniality. The portrayal of Maiba (whose full name is Yawasa Maibina) in ways that make her a site of negative curiosity and pity attest to the notion of a flawed personality and political system: From the day of her birth to the time she had first started walking four years later, Yawasa Maibina was paralyzed from the buttocks down. (Soaba 1985, 5)

This symbolizes Papua New Guinea’s sense of national confusion and seeming inability to shape and sustain her own political destiny. However, it is these negative attributes that later give Maiba the positive attitude and assertiveness to stand on her own feet. A sense of helplessness resonates throughout this early passage: Returning home from school along these roads upon such evenings the other children jeered at Maiba, addressing her as “Satan’s daughter” or “Number eleven” because of the two vertical droopings of thick mucous from her nostrils, and the bigger boys from the high school teased her even to the point of encouraging and finally forcing a primary school boy of Maiba’s age to seize her roughly, push her onto the sharp rocky earth and attempt to make love to her. (Soaba 1985, 3)

Certainly Soaba was attempting to canvass the complexity of the forces widespread in the construction of modern Papua New Guinea society in his allegorical characterization of Maiba as an orphaned, ugly, dirty female, “cursed by a history of ill-fortune which attends all those who associate with her” (Ashcroft 1987, 87). Like the emergent nation, she is marginalized, isolated, and unable even to return to the past


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that Makawana had formerly enjoyed. Maiba’s sense of helplessness and marginalization is concomitant with the assertion that nations are always in flux, acting alone to define their political future. But under colonial rule, of course, the colonized is especially marginalized from the mantles of power and decision making. Eventually Maiba must rise up and break free from her alienation. The burial of her old garments highlights and symbolizes a new beginning for Maiba: Maiba began digging into the sand with her claws. As it was nearing late evening, she was conscious of the villagers making their way to the village along the beach from their gardens. Her actual reason for digging vigorously at the sand was to make a hole in which she could bury her old garments. The garments, a torn skirt, a blood-stained pair of panties and a tattered blouse, could not be washed in order to be worn again. Burying her old clothes was, to her, shedding her former skin for a new one. (Soaba 1985, 19)

The metaphor of shedding old garments is an allusion to gaining postcolonial political consciousness and independence. Maiba is depicted as awakening from a complex paralysis. Maiba’s turning point serves to foreshadow the recovery of her sensibility, as it is redolent of becoming aware of her isolation and alienation. However, she alone cannot engender profound change; her strength is with the Makawana villagers, who stand by her when she finally challenges Doboro Thomas. Maiba is held hostage by the unscrupulous Thomas and his gang of thugs. Once the respected village orator (ancient voice) of Makawana, Thomas is supposed to be the voice of conscience, a sociopolitical and cultural barometer. Using his respected position, but operating under foreign influence, he seizes and displaces the traditional leadership (the Wawaya dynasty). A boy refers to him as “a white man under a black skin” (Soaba 1985, 77)—a damning indictment applied to indigenous people who are strongly influenced by western ideas and modes. The new village leadership is described as one that was installed forcefully and is therefore illegitimate. In order to cling to power and maintain control, Thomas has to continuously give empty promises to the people: The old orator has promised them a new kingdom greater than the Wawaya-Magura dynasty and the men fell for the yarn eagerly. He promised them Elder Yaraga’s trade store and the wealth and food which that small house would bring to the new kingdom and they believed that too. There would be plenty to eat and drink, he explained; there would be young virgins like Christine in abundance for every man in Makawana, and the bottles that these villagers and


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peasants held in their hands tilted and the beer gurgled into their mouths with approval. “We are with you all the way, Doboro Thomas,” cried the peasants in their drunkenness at the early hours of dawn, when the rest of Makawana was asleep. By this hour this Sunday morning, they have become Doboro Thomas’ army that is marching down the hill. (Soaba 1985, 103)

With his insatiable greed for power, Thomas is both a dictator and a betrayer of the traditional moral values. The novel portrays a traditional PNG society trying to redefine itself within a matrix of rapid change and shifting global politics and relationships. Thomas’s attempt to take over the mantle of leadership alludes to the moral and political corruption that is a social map of many postcolonial countries. In the end the corrupt leadership is overturned by people’s power. Maiba openly and ironically challenges Thomas to kill the people, given all the evil he and his henchman have done: Maiba guides Christine out to the open and faces Doboro Thomas. . . . “Kill us now, Doboro Thomas,” shouts Maiba. “Yes, kill us now,” the students join angrily while flocking about Maiba. “Kill us now Doboro Thomas, and be content within.” . . . “You have sent your policemen or soldiers, or whatever Koboni and his friend are, to cause suffering in my father’s and uncle’s households, Doboro Thomas,” comes Maiba’s voice. “You have led two peaceful villagers into becoming model monsters while in fact they are capable of containing whatever monstrosities they have in them, at least for the safety of the other people of Makawana. You have mesmerized the mother of our household into becoming a common bearer of men’s burden under your roof. You have even planned and finally succeeded in eliminating the last member of the chiefly families in Makawana’s history. You have molested a child who stands before your eyes here; you have taken over Elder Yaraga’s trade store as a self-imposed accountant; you have bribed my cousin and Peroveta with no one else’s money but Elder Yaraga’s; and above all, you have made yourself a chief when you know very well that in all Makawana’s history your ancestors have been nothing more than subsistence farmers who served no one else but my family. . . . And now that you have killed my uncle, I command you, if you are a good leader, to order your soldiers or policemen who will obey you—yes, obey you—to kill us.” (Soaba 1985, 107–108)

The novel’s underlying message is that Papua New Guinea can still find their way out of this quagmire of national betrayal and confusion: what Frantz Fanon has termed, “the farce of national independence” (1963, 67). At some stage the nation’s destiny must be reshaped. The passage


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attests to the hope that new visionaries will appear to guide the nation away from a self-destructive path. Maiba is not only an interesting novel but also a significant one because its suggestive zone of meaning and interpretation represents so broadly and profoundly the postindependence PNG experience. The novel charts a theme prevalent in postindependence PNG writing, which is very much concerned with where the country is heading and how the changes are affecting the people. It is highly allegorical with many open possibilities, reflecting the real complexity of a country undergoing the afterbirth pains of independence. There is much uncertainty and turbulence, and the political destiny of the country is unpredictable. In the end, what remains permanent despite all the changes is the commitment to place as home. This is represented in Maiba by the lasting symbol of the “house,” representing permanence/place: Mr. Wawaya ambles over and lightly taps the veranda of his house. It is his home. He has built it with his two hands. He loves his house, his village. He was born in it, he will never walk out on it, and he hopes to die in it. (Soaba 1985, 17)

The house is a symbolic anchor, a sense of permanence for both one’s place and one’s identity. A person depends on one’s house for a kind of security, a safe knowledge of where one belongs. Like many other postcolonial countries, Papua New Guinea is currently working through an extremely difficult period in its history. A critical appraisal of the events that have shaped and continue to affect the country’s destiny must acknowledge the experience of colonialism as key in engendering problems that have placed Papua New Guinean writers and members of the elite continually on the alert. The country’s political leadership and apparatus is dominated by immature politicking and a propensity for greed and corruption. Many leaders engage in defrauding and embezzling from state institutions and the national coffers. In the process they prevent equitable prosperity for all. In order to consolidate and strengthen their positions, politicians and the leadership hierarchy are involved in nepotism and cronyism in the bureaucracy. The politicians in this country continue to harvest where they have not planted. It is common knowledge that many politicians and their cohorts are deceiving their own people through misappropriation of the national wealth and the mismanagement of the economy. But the manipulation of government institutions and legal processes to cling to or gain power at the expense of deteriorating economic, political, and social conditions, along with spiraling internal and external debt, is not confined to Papua New Guinea; these problems and experiences constitute the social map of postcolonial societies throughout the world.


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Widespread decadence is also the subject of Wiri Yakaipoko’s novel The Blue Logic: Something from the Dark Side of Port Moresby (2000). The Blue Logic presents a picture that is even gloomier than that depicted in Maiba. Yakaipoko’s fictive stage is nefarious, unfriendly, tumultuous, and rife with images of gang violence, including bribery, robbery, and murder. The novel examines the theme of disillusionment among the youth who are “rejects” from the education system and whose families cannot afford to support them. Finding themselves at the fringes of society, they end up joining gangs and turning to criminal activities for their survival. But a discussion among gang members reveals their disgust with the country’s leaders and politicians, who have betrayed the people’s trust through their corrupt dealings: To make [it] more clear, the lawmakers are criminals themselves. Criminals in the sense that they have bought their way into the parliament house—one way or the other. Well in the bible, the holy book that has the 10 fundamental principles. . . . It says that leaders are appointed by God and we are to obey and follow what they say, right? (Yakaipoko 2000, 76)

This novel represents the country as under siege by both the politicians and the youth gangs who must commit crimes in order to survive. One young man, Joseph, is murdered by other gang members because he reported them to the police. As two of the gang members hold him tightly, Joseph struggles and gasps out his dying words: “Pli-sssh, O mama—sor I de.” Joseph was gasping for words and his body was contracting spasms and his lungs were struggling for his last breaths till his body rapidly grew numb and lifeless. (Yakaipoko 2000, 75)

Some of the dark and chaotic side of the capital, Port Moresby, is revealed to readers through the protagonist, Jules, who is a musician. Jules is caught in the middle, between his friends and relatives who are members of a criminal gang, and the police. The author has painted a dreary landscape and is very forthcoming about exposing the malignant social ills confronting the country. But like other PNG writers Yakaipoko is not only a barometer of society but also an educator. In this regard the words of Satendra Nandan are welcome: “The treachery of the few won’t go away unless the artist can transform and transcend the nature of immediate reality” (1994, 43). The fact is that postindependence Papua New Guinea is still politically, economically, and socially ensnared in a vicious, neocolonialist circle. This is captured vividly in Vincent Warakai’s poem “Dancing yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat” (1984). Listen to the haunting voice of Warakai:


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We are dancing Yes, but without leaping For the fetters of dominance still persist Yes, still insist On dominating Holding us down We have been dancing Yes, but not for our own tune For we are not immune Yes, for our truly, our own truly Music of life is eroding Yes, the mystic tune holds Us spellbound Our independence abused. . . . We have been dancing Yes, our anklets and Amulets now are Yes, grinding into our skin No longer are they a decor Yes, they are our chains. . . . (Vincent Warakai, “Dancing yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat”)

This poem emphasizes the fact that despite political independence we Papua New Guineans are still under siege by the forces that began to suppress us from the time that Europeans first invaded our shores. Warakai’s salient message is that Papua New Guineans are still dancing to foreign impulses and tunes; our country has not yet released itself from the continuous stranglehold of colonialism and neocolonialism. Many of the literary works that deal with the assessment of PNG social, economic, and political conditions and the prognosis for change share the common view that the culture of corruption in Papua New Guinea faces today is largely of our own creation. Despite numerous warnings that the country must take stringent measures to keep afloat, our leaders have not taken heed but continue to lack political scruples. Therefore, to some extent, outsider perceptions of Papua New Guinea are derived from well-founded observations and inferences. Many of the short stories in Nash G Sorariba’s 1997 collection A Medal without Honour are social commentaries and critiques of the aftermath of independence dealing with the themes of disenchantment and disillusionment. In “Nogat Wantok—Nogat Wok” (1997a), the protagonist, Ivan Sagadi, who is a university graduate, blames his misfortune and lack of employment opportunity on the unrealistic expectations the


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education system imposes on Papua New Guineans at the same time as the practice of wantokism (nepotism) means people are recruited not because they are qualified but because they are relations or wantoks. As usual [the teachers] tutored him well and gave him so many dreams from the beginning. They would get him to read every English fairy-tale, that always ended up with “happily ever after,” to keep him smiling. (Sorariba 1997a, 22)

Sagadi confronts reality after he completes his university education. He writes many letters to employers but all he gets are countless rejections. In the end, Sagadi returns to his village to work on the land. Sorariba views nepotism as part of the postindependence PNG political landscape. The story “Nogat Wantok—Nogat Wok” reveals that independence has not produced the goods and expectations that Papua New Guineans expected; on the contrary, it has brought in much turmoil and hardship. This theme is similar to that of another Sorariba story, “Waiting For Botol” (1997b), as well as one of my own, “Pagaraso” (Stella 1994). Each of these expresses the view that Papua New Guineans are indeed worse off than they were prior to national independence. In “Waiting for Botol,” the elderly protagonist, Simi, resides in one of the slums in Port Moresby and earns his living by collecting bottles: Dead tired, he would stop, bent under the weight of a dirty bag containing empty Coke and Fanta bottles and then run a little with the hasty short steps of an excited child. The rapid flat feet which had never known the comfort of shoes or slippers, would trudge on tirelessly. Empty bottles could earn his evening meal. . . . There are many like him, men, women and children. Empty bottles [are] the currency of Moresby’s underworld society. The society [is] made up of illiterate squatter dwellers. It keeps their hearts beating and bellies quiet. Those whose existence is never acknowledged by the rulers of the country. The illegitimate children of Independence. (Sorariba 1997b, 84–85)

The promises of a better life and future after political independence raised false hopes among many Papua New Guineans. Many people left the comfort of their villages for urban areas, only to be disappointed. Indeed, for some the only means of survival is collecting and selling empty bottles. In my short story “Pagaraso,” the protagonist lives on the fringes of the city and earns a living by selling fish in the city market. For twenty years he has struggled daily to support his family. After a young man steals his bilum (string bag) and a dog takes his fish, he cries in desperation, “You have robbed me, all of you . . . ” (Stella 1994, 77).


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Concomitant with the themes of disillusionment and disenchantment, which relentlessly represent the PNG sociopolitical landscape as disheartening for the majority of Papua New Guineans, are related themes such as the quest for national identity. This is salient in Nora Vagi Brash’s play Which Way, Big Man? (1980). This play outlines the problematic issue of identity within a context of hybridized Papua New Guinea. The main characters, Gou Haia and his wife Sinob Haia, are a well-to-do, modern PNG couple. Mr Gou Haia is soon elevated to the position of Director of the Department of National Identity. The primary conflict is cultural: Gou’s father wants to hold a traditional feast to honor his son’s elevation, whereas Gou opts for a cocktail party. While this is seemingly a minor disagreement, the deeper meaning hints at the question of national identity for Papua New Guineans within a matrix of diverse cultures. Gou: Father, I have been promoted. I’m to be the Director of the Department of National Identity. Do you understand? . . . Yes! Tonight, Sinob and I are having a party to celebrate. Father: Aah! Mi hamamas tru long dispela tok. Na yu baim pik bilong wokim dispela sing-sing? Gou: No Papa! It’s not a sing-sing! It’s . . . well—a party, where people come to drink, eat biscuits, olives, peanuts, and talk. Then maybe dance a little bit. In town this is called a “cocktail party” . . . Father: Son, na bilong wanam yu no salem pas i kam long ples? Na mama na line bilong yu kisim plenti kai kai. Mi kilim plenti pik na kisim buai. Mi hamamas tru long mekim bikpela pati blong yu! Gou: Tenk yu tru papa! but . . . I . . . I must now do things in the way of the town. This is the way things are done here. It would not be right if we had a feast here in town. Father: Ah! Pikinini bilong mi! Oloman bilong peles bai oli lap long yu, sopos yu no wokim sing-sing. Ol bai i tinkim yumi rabis man. (Brash 1980, scene 5).

This dialogue underlines the central dilemma of (national) identity in Papua New Guinea. The issue is complicated by that fact that Papua New Guinea is culturally diverse. For Papua New Guineans in general, the experience of identity and a sense of belonging are realized in micro social groups. As John Nongorr, prominent law professor at the University of Papua New Guinea, has pointed out, “Papua New Guineans still operate at traditional levels of loyalty. They co-operate with their family members as the basic level, then their tribe, then their clan and that is where their loyalty stops. The state of Papua New Guinea is seen as an outsider, something very remote from them” (quoted in Shulz 1997, 31). In other words, it is difficult to have a clear definition of national identity in Papua New Guinea given the fluid nature of the


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concept as well as the many cultures that make up the country. Brash’s play, however, specifically focuses on the issue of identity from the perspective of the elite; Which Way, Big Man? leaves us with no resolution but open possibilities. The point is that moral and social values provide the basis for the ways that Papua New Guinean writers represent the country. Because PNG literary artists have been concerned with how politicians have been running the country since independence, much of their writing is a statement about the PNG political experience: the unstable political climate, irresponsible governance, and the general lack of accountability and management of the country’s economy and resources. PNG writers are engaged in creating a new vision, one that spotlights the decayed underbelly of a society that has lost its direction. So far, I have been discussing the themes dealing with the postindependence sociopolitical and economic ills: alienation, disillusionment, and the problematic notion of identity. PNG writers are, however, exploring other concerns that are often subsumed by the more conspicuous ones. Sorariba’s 1994 short story “A Refugee in Paradise” examines Papua New Guinea’s political relationship with Indonesia as countries, in contrast to the relationship that has existed from time immemorial between the Melanesian peoples of the two countries. The main characters in the story are a Papua New Guinean man and his West Papuan wife and child. After living apart some seven years, they meet again clandestinely in a Catholic Bishop’s home in the PNG side of the border. They were prohibited from reuniting as a family because they are from two different countries: I had let my tears flow freely onto this woman’s hair. We would not see each other again, because we were segregated by political customs. . . . Yes, it is hard to believe that the colonial forces have so intimidated and divided us under their rule . . . and in whichever side you get caught, in that quarter you will remain—with a curse, the curse of self-exile. . . . we were caught in such a quagmire because we were declared to be of different nationalities under different governing systems. Our countries could never understand each other, despite the sharing of a common border. We were expected to regard each other as foreigners, but we are of the same race and cultural background. (Sorariba 1994, 110, 115–116)

This story then presents the political difficulty encountered by the West Papuan wife and child in their endeavor to join their PNG husband and father across the border in Papua New Guinea. The significant question is, which is the ultimate value: political considerations or


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moral and humanistic ones? This story shares a similar theme with John Kasaipwalova’s 1984 play My Brother, My Enemy, in which a constellation of cultural, social, and political issues are intertwined. The main issue in this play is that the then PNG government’s foreign policy of “friends to all and enemy to none,” while seeming to be politically correct, is ambivalently flawed, because it neglects cultural, social, and humanitarian considerations. As in the story “A Refugee in Paradise,” the principal conflict in Kasaipwalova’s play is between relatives on either side of a political boundary: the PNG minister of foreign affairs and his first cousin, a West Papuan rebel leader who is captured by the PNG forces and jailed in Bomana Central Prison. The minister must then struggle to reconcile his political responsibility with his customary social obligations. One notable feature of postindependence PNG writing is that it presents the country’s sociopolitical landscape as gloomy and dreary. Indeed, it is important for PNG writers to utilize the creative muse and channel their energy into unmasking the various ills of society. Papua New Guinea’s reality is clogged with a morass of selfishness and dishonesty, along with the debris of political, social, and economic greed. Thus it is paramount for writers to maintain their public watch and serve as conscience in the increasingly unquiet waters of PNG postindependence politics. But this is only possible if the artists and writers are able to recognize the country’s sociopolitical and economic realities, and demonstrate this recognition by capturing, recording, and bearing witness to these conditions. In addition, it is necessary for writers to develop a sixth sense, a kind of shamanistic vision and prophetic voice. As 1986 Nobel Prize Laureate Wole Soyinka said of poetry, literature (like the other arts) “engages the present, but simultaneously envisages the social harvest of struggle” (1976, 74). Another concern that has been somewhat neglected in recent discussions of contemporary PNG literature is the incorporation of oral traditions. A close reading of this literature, however, reveals the positive presence of orature as one of the key defining variables of this genre. Oral tradition has had (and continues to have) a colossal impact on contemporary PNG literature. May Paipaira’s 1984 short story “Yapune” incorporates a traditional Anuki belief about a female witch called Yapune, whom people engage to cause harm to others. The author has used magic realism to weave this cultural belief into a modern story. The nameless male protagonist is punished for abandoning his relationship with a village girl named Kawabura and getting involved with Wendy, an Australian woman. On his way to pick up Wendy one day, he reports: I saw a figure standing in the middle of the road. It was a woman dressed in a meri blouse and laplap. She wasn’t crossing the street


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quickly, as she was limping. Her right leg seemed to be dragging behind her. To avoid hitting her, I swung the car to the right and then to the left, and before I knew it, I had lost control, and I hit the nearest thing in front of me. It all happened so fast. I realise now that it was a trick and Yapune was behind it all. Yapune was a name I had heard so often in the village. She was not one woman, but many, and she appeared in many different forms, both human and non-human. (Paipaira 1994, 53)

Yapune symbolizes the expressions and practices in traditional cultures that are considered smothering and evil, such as magic and sorcery; by extension it also represents the ruinous powers of the tradition. But by writing about the cultural belief in Yapune, Paipaira has inserted cultural views and cultural variables into the dominant discourse. In Nora Vagi Brash’s play Taurama (1985), we witness the dramatization and appropriation of a Motuan myth. This play revolves around the character of Kevau Dagora, the only survivor of a massacre at Taurama, an ancestral Motuan village. He is initially treated as a foreigner by the Motu people but through his courage and reconciliation he eventually gains their acceptance. He then marries the daughter of the woman who caused the massacre and finally peace is restored. Significantly, the play knits together some key aspects of the Motuan culture and society, including the idea of bride price, the traditional sexual division of labor, and the belief in spirits. In most Papua New Guinean cultures, the spirits share the same space with humans, and the spirits perform an important role in the affairs of humans. As one of characters (identified only as “woman”) utters near the end of act 1, scene 1: “Enough, the people may be dead, but their spirits are around. Do not disturb them now.”

The spirits can also communicate with people, as the Ghosts’ chorus does, in act 2, scene 5: “We are unavenged. We are they, who roam the naked beach of Taurama. Help us find our way home where the sun rests. We cry for you to avenge us. We groan for peace. Help us find it.”

While validating various traditional experiences and belief systems, Taurama simultaneously demonstrates recuperation and restoration of some of the indigenous history that had been displaced by European colonialism. Other recent PNG works reflect contemporary experience without directly or necessarily colluding with the dark economic and political picture suggested by nonindigenous writers. “Boroko Saturday Morning,” a humorous 1982 short story by Jerry Daniels, gives us a


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fragmentary glimpse of a busy Boroko city and the kind of daily trivialities in which people are engaged: We saw one nice car, you know, these Range Rovers. I said, “Boys, you wanna lift, that’s my car.” Joe said, “Oh I’m sorry boys I put my car in the garage yesterday that’s why you people have to walk on your legs.” “Nothing,” said Tom, “people like you go in helicopters made of sago leaf.” Kote said, “Shit! pilot o.” (Daniels 1982, 16)

What makes this story humorous is the expressive language. Although writing in English, Daniels has used vernacular syntax to capture the nuances and idiosyncrasies of local-style interaction. As Ashcroft and others have argued, “The linguistic adaptation signifies both the difference and the tension of difference, for it is out of this tension that much of the political energy of the cross-cultural text is generated” (1989, 69). The subject of Jeff Teine’s 1987 story “Life in the Bottle” is the excessive consumption of alcohol. Dega, the main character, spends all his pay on beer and goes home to his family empty-handed. Everyone in the house is hungry, including Dega. His wife tries her best to make ends meet. In the end Dega is arrested for being drunk and loitering outside the premier’s residence. Teine’s story strikes a chord familiar to most Papua New Guineans. Excessive consumption of alcohol has caused many problems for Papua New Guineans, including domestic violence, murder, tribal fights, family breakups, and so on. Alcohol is also a powerful symbol saturated with meanings of western excess and therefore detrimental to indigenous people in multiple ways. Many PNG literary artists view art as not only a normal but also an essential human social activity. From their perspective, art is necessary not only for aesthetic fulfillment but also as a means to mirror the realities and conditions of their communities and society as a whole. Because they are concerned with a visionary projection of society, they must commit themselves to their work with egalitarian discipline. They realize that noncommittal attitudes can asphyxiate the creative process and make them no longer able to perform the role of educators and barometers of society. Indeed, most Papua New Guinean writers have represented the postindependence PNG sociopolitical landscape as a gloomy wasteland. This negative imagery reflects the inability on the part of the indigenous elite and leadership to steer the nation out of the quagmire of political irresponsibility and economic mismanagement. Postindependence PNG writing is a literature of crisis—dealing with a multitude of sociopolitical and economic ills. Writers are exposing and alerting Papua New Guineans to the political and social pandemonium


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in a country whose political future is uncertain and bleak. But as we have seen, within this postindependence framework PNG writers are addressing other important concerns in which the political overtones are not as salient, including the incorporation of indigenous tradition, history, and orature, and the country’s search for national identity. On the broader plane, Papua New Guinea today is sailing in uncharted waters, and a prime concern of literary artists is to provide advice before it sinks. At the same time they must be able to articulate the essence of the PNG psyche and capture the “‘territoriality’ of the authentic” (Griffiths 1994, 71). Our world has been full of intellectual corruption, hypocrisy, and political treachery. These ills have become integral to our political landscape. Therefore one of the fundamental roles of the Papua New Guinean artist is that of visionary. In an interview in the Guardian, Wole Soyinka once stated, “As a writer, I have a special responsibility, because I can smell the reactionary sperm years before the rape of a nation takes place” (quoted in Hunt 1980, 114). Soyinka sees himself as a shaman and an ombudsman for society. He believes that artists must be conscious and committed, and that they must serve as watchdogs, keeping abreast of social and political realities and developments in their countries. The representations of the sociopolitical landscape by contemporary PNG writers such as those discussed in this chapter demonstrate their concerns about the many issues that confront Papua New Guinea. Literary artists are never alone; they have a collective responsibility in their communities. They are seers and visionaries. Perhaps their work can bring some sense to those who are in positions of power and to those who are not able to see the trouble the country is heading toward. Papua New Guinean writers have mostly represented the postindependence PNG landscape as brutalized, trapped in a cocoon of postcolonial tribulations, much of which is the work of Papua New Guinean leaders and elite. As Soaba and the others have darkly and somberly reflected in their works, the PNG predicament is largely the consequence of corrupt political leadership and greed for power. This is one of the salient faces of neocolonialism. As many writers have shown, PNG independence so far has been a sham, since a sense of dependency is still firmly entrenched in the country’s sociopolitical and economic life.


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Conclusion

As this study has shown, postcolonial representation is a site of continuing struggle between competing discourses grounded in different ideologies, preconceptions, and philosophies. Colonialist discourse demonstrated its ubiquitous coercive power in all forms of representative practice, with the same tropes occurring in both fictional and “factual” texts. Nonindigenous writers were very much influenced by the sociopolitical apparatus of their societies as these were manifested in the dominant discourse. They often embraced the preconceptions and biases of imperial culture, which relegated non-Europeans to positions of powerlessness. Representation does not exist outside discourse, which, as Foucault conceived it, is not simply talk, language, or writing, but a strongly bounded system of social knowledge. Colonialist discourse produces both imperial and colonized subjects, and this production is perpetrated through the practices of writers, often without their awareness. Such discourse maintained its power because it circulated around certain tropes that became so common, and were used so unreflectively, that they came to direct representation almost unconsciously. These tropes are widespread in colonialist discourse throughout the world because they hinge on the previously unquestioned assumption of superiority generated from European conviction of a duty to civilize the savage hordes of the nonwestern world. The specific tropes examined in this book, tropes by which Papua New Guinea and its people became habitually represented, are versions of a global Othering by which the Empire created its subjects, and hence, justified its right to rule. This study embraces the view that literature, itself a social product, also produces society, because of the large part it plays in political conduct and ideas. Ngu ˜ gı˜ wa Thiong’o asserted, “Every writer is a writer in politics. The only question is what and whose politics?” (1981, xii).

205


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Likewise, Fredric Jameson pointed out that since all literature is the product of “the political unconscious,” it “must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community” (1981, 70). At the same time, as Jeffrey Richards has argued, literature “functions as a ritual, cementing the ideas and beliefs of society [and] enforcing social norms” (1989, 1). Fiction and other forms of literature are important mechanisms through which society indoctrinates its members in its prevailing ideas, prejudices, and aspirations. It is this baggage of cultural, social, epistemological, ontological, and political conceptions that persuades members to valorize their society’s biases. Thus writers are never neutral with regard to the forces within which they operate, and the imagination seldom escapes the political direction of social discourse. This can be seen in the imaginative writings produced by both colonialist and indigenous writers. But whereas Papua New Guinea and its people have been “produced” by colonialist tropes of representation, indigenous people have resisted these representations and reinscribed their identity through counter-discursive strategies such as compartmentalization, appropriation, and interpolation. The textual imagining and representation of Papua New Guinea had its provenance in colonialist discourse. I have shown how indigenous subjectivity was constructed and represented through strategies such as infantilization and sexualization, and tropes of the savage and the uneducable native. These constructions were reinforced in colonial society through legal discourse, in particular the discourses of contamination, segregation, and sexual violation. Legal discourse therefore ensured that the colonial social structure was maintained and the natives were controlled. At the same time, the Papua New Guinean landscape was being delineated and constructed in a constellation of negative or, at best, ambivalent images. For some writers the indigenous country was exotic, but for many it was a primitive landscape that led white men into madness. While it was depicted as a hellish and fatal land, it also served as an ideal location for imaginary white adventure, where imperial boys could become men. These tropes, images, and metaphors propounded and perpetuated a Manichean structure in which colonial society was bifurcated. As Abdul JanMohamed argued, such a binary structure of society “is an economic, social, political, racial, and moral elaboration and distortion of a fundamental ontological opposition between self and other” (1983, 264). The examination of the ways in which Papua New Guineans and their environment have been captured and textualized in nonindigenous literature points up a classic example of how power constructs Otherness. By studying the constructions of the non-European Other by the European self, we learn as much (or more) about the writers as


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about the subjects of their writing. Crucially, the patterns of representation that emerge from nonindigenous colonialist writings are inherently paradoxical, including both debasement and idealization of the native person and landscape. The perceptions in the texts discussed in this book were shaped and influenced by European preconceptions and biases about indigenous people. So we find reproduced in these works a collective image of Papua New Guineans and their environment that indigenous Papua New Guineans consider culturally and racially spurious, inherently vulgar, and thoroughly dehumanizing. In these writings, indigenous people are characterized as savage, cannibalistic, dirty, lazy, lying, superstitious, venal, and uncivilized, while the landscape is depicted on the one hand as pristine and uncontaminated, and on the other hand as eerie, sinister, and inhospitable. These ambivalent representations, while they are essentially the result of a lack of intimate knowledge and understanding, are also embodiments of the writers’ own psychic fears. Through such tropes and strategies, colonialist discourse has constructed “knowledge” of Papua New Guinea and Papua New Guineans. As I demonstrated in chapter 2, Papua New Guineans originally represented and constructed their place and selfhood through orature. For Papua New Guineans, place is an extension of the indigenous self, and the representation of place is essentially a discourse on landownership. Place is the center of indigenous constructions of social histories, identity, personal experiences. These understandings, however, were subsumed, and at worst “erased,” by invading Europeans, through the agency of powerful imperial discourses, primarily because of the oral nature of indigenous representations. Early colonialist writings such as the “fraudulent texts” along with the “scientific texts” emerging from geographic exploration and discovery were an integral part of outsiders’ construction of Papua New Guinean identity. In fact, these writings often reinforced each other, as they were part of the same discourse. Just as Papua New Guinea was being accepted as geographic signifier, it was, as Maria Todorova said about the Balkans, “already becoming saturated with a social and cultural meaning that expanded its signified far beyond its immediate and concrete meaning” (1997, 21). While scientific geographical exploration exposed the fraudulent nature of fictional texts, the biased preconceptions that formed them were sustained by other colonialist discourse and remained instrumental in shaping public opinion and confirming extant prejudices. The important fact about representations of Papua New Guinea is that, whether they were “fraudulent” or “scientific,” they still operated within the discourse of European imperialism, and very often used the same discursive tropes. Historically, of course, this


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colonialist discourse had an extremely powerful, negative effect on the self-understanding of Papua New Guineans. The residue of this disempowerment has continued to haunt the national psyche long after political liberation and independence. But as this study has demonstrated, there have indeed been changes and shifts in the imaginings and portrayals of Papua New Guineans and their landscape; the images of Papua New Guineans produced by early nonindigenous writers are fundamentally different from their images in contemporary nonindigenous fiction. Preindependence texts in particular are primarily concerned with the politics of the movement toward Papua New Guinean independence. A number of these texts attest to the fear, anxiety, and paranoia about whether indigenous people are capable of managing their own affairs and sustaining political independence. Simultaneously, through the theme of interracial sexuality and relationships, nonindigenous writers have endeavored to portray the ambivalence of growing mutual relationships and cross-culturality between races. Postindependence indigenous texts represent PNG people and society in even more complexity, bearing witness to current problems, while incorporating and honoring indigenous orature, as well as depicting local styles of interaction (and even humor) in daily life. Many of the colonialist images, especially those that depicted the indigenous people and the environment in the vilest and most vulgar terms, have succumbed to the tides of history. This has more to do with changes in the European self than in the Other, and also reflects changes in the relationship between them. More broadly, changing global politics and new political and social structures and awareness have affected the internal dynamics of societies (especially norms, values, and personal and interpersonal behavior), and have paved the way for increasing mutual understanding and the dismantling of preconceptions and biases. While certainly European readers were not merely passive recipients of such representations, constant and consistent bombardment of these images, without any significant alternatives, undoubtedly had an effect in shaping how they thought of the Papua New Guinea. The alternative voice was not heard until much later, because for a long time the indigenous people were denied higher education and political participation. It was not until the mid 1960s, at the urging of the United Nations, that Australia began a process of decolonization. The establishment of tertiary institutions was a major step in opening up opportunities for Papua New Guineans. PNG indigenous literature has become one of the most important political tools for interrogating and challenging the biased assumptions and representations, and constructing an alternative image of the country. Contemporary Papua


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Conclusion

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New Guinean literature has been counter-discursive as local writers represent their cultures and identity in novels, short stories, poetry, and plays. Through processes of compartmentalization, appropriation, and interpolation, indigenous writers have entered and intervened in the dominant discourse and wrested from nonindigenous writers the privilege and power of discourse to reinscribe their cultural practices and experiences.


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Notes

Introduction 1. “Papua” is from a Malay word meaning “frizzy haired” (Moore and others 1984, iii). 2. In the introduction to Colonial Intrusion: Papua New Guinea 1884, the following list of European flag-raisings is given: Torres did it in 1606 in the name of the King of Spain. Captain John Hayes hoisted the first British flag on the mainland of New Guinea in 1793, on the western half of the island, now Irian Jaya. Lieutenant Charles Yule of HMS Bramble hoisted the British flag at Cape Possession in Papua in 1846. Baron Miklouho-Maclay hoisted the Russian Imperial flag over his grass hut at Astrolabe Bay in 1871. Captain John Moresby ran the Union Jack up a decapitated coconut tree on Hayter (Sariba) Island in China Strait in April 1873. Luigi d’Albertis proudly flew the flag of the Royal House of Savoy on Yule Island in 1874. The Marquis de Rays’s colonists flew the French flag, briefly, on New Ireland in 1880. The Union Jack was ceremonially unfurled three times from Reverend Lawes’s front verandah in Port Moresby in 1883 and 1884. The German Imperial flag fluttered officially for the first time in New Guinea on Matupit and Duke of York Islands in 1884. (Moore and others 1984, iii)

1: Representation and Indigenous Subjectivity 1. JanMohamed’s and Edward Said’s perspectives differ from that of Bhabha, whose work “rests on two assumptions—the unity of the ‘colonial subject’ and the ‘ambivalence’ of colonial discourse”; in asserting the unity of the “colonial subject (both coloniser and colonised),” Bhabha has rejected Said’s “suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser” (JanMohamed 1986, 78). While I do not wish to engage in this particular debate, the point remains that discussion of colonial discourse must of necessity take into account its material practice in particular political and historical contexts.

211 211


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212

Notes to Pages 20–187

2. I do not mean to assume equality among European cultures. The stereotyping of less powerful societies by the more powerful can occur just as readily within Europe. Nevertheless the principle is the same: the relations of power are crucial in the exercise of stereotype. 3. In his study of the work of “Captain J A Lawson,” Krauth found that the name is probably a pseudonym of E W Ermit, who was leader of a Melbourne newspaper expedition to Papua New Guinea. Krauth also reported that “the Reverend Henry Crocker” is a pseudonym of a Tasmanian migrant to New Zealand, the Rev Henry Crocker Marriott Watson (Krauth 1982b).

6: The Subject as Savage 1. A zeugma is the use of a word, usually a verb, in relation to two or more other words in such a way that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one.

7: The Sexualized Native Body 1. Malinowski wrote that kayasa was a “generic name for such periods of competitive obligatory dancing, amusement, or other activity” (1929, 252). 2. A complicating factor in the discourse of sexual violation is that it does not necessarily protect women, functioning within the politics of both race and gender. Amirah Inglis asserted that white women were used as “pawns in the campaign against Murray” (1974, 42). Murray, according to Jan Roberts, “repeatedly claimed most so-called sexual assaults were ‘not of a serious nature’ and due to ‘hysteria and imagination’” (1996, 83).

8: Writing Ourselves: Cultural Self-Representation in Contemporary Papua New Guinean Literature 1. Because compartmentalization is best realized in oral cultures, other postcolonial theories of textual discourse do not address this process, which is as important as the other resistant practices of interpolation and appropriation. 2. The phrase “talismans of continuity” was coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton in The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981). Richard Etlin employed this notion in his 1997 article. 3. However, autobiography must not be viewed as simply a repetition of the past, but as much as possible as a presence in spirit of a world forever gone (Gusdorf 1980, 35). 4. Other writings that emerged in this period are not so direct in their treatment of the political agenda. These texts articulate the impact of alien influences on traditional cultures, and frequently the reactions of indigenous people toward these are ambivalent, signifying the complexity of postcolonial discourse and identifications.


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Index Chapter

no. Chapter Title FM/BM title

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abbotsmith, Nourma, 153, 158–160 Abel, Charles, 6–7 Account of a Race of Human Beings with Tails (Cole), 5, 21, 24, 27, 61, 69–71 Achebe, Chinua, 109, 176 adventure genre, 78–85 Adventures in New Guinea: The Narrative of Louis Tregance (Crocker), 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 61 Africa, 74, 131–132, 141–143 alcoholism, 203 alienation, 153–154, 189, 191–192, 193, 200 allegories. See national allegories Allen, Charles, 141 Amadio, Nadine, 40 ambivalence: about authority, 13; about Papua New Guineans, 14, 15–16, 17–18, 24, 27–28, 111, 207; colonial representation of landscape, 5, 49, 51, 64–65, 69–73, 87, 206; fear and desire, 18; “going native” theme, 73–77, 124, 131–133; sexual desire and revulsion, 140, 147–151, 156–157, 161 angry indigene trope, 184–188 annexation, 89–90 Anthropology and the Government of Subject Races (Murray), 138–139 appropriation, 162; of dramatic form, 176; of English language, 169–171, 177; of musical forms, 172–173 architecture, 173–174

Ashcroft, Bill, 13, 15, 55, 56–57, 72, 100–101, 106, 110, 170, 171, 175, 187–188, 191, 192, 203 Aubry, J B, 105 Australia: doomsday imagery of the South Pacific, 190–191; Papua New Guinea descriptions compared to, 67, 68; Papua New Guineans traveling to, 108; soldiers in Papua New Guinea (World War II), 85–87, 110–111; transfer of administration, 8, 9 The Australians in German New Guinea 1914–1921 (Rowley), 7 autobiographies, 179–184 Bacchus, M Kazim, 109 Banks, Joseph, 55 Banoni people, 36–39, 46 barbarity. See debasement; savagery Basso, Keith H, 31, 38 Becke, Louis, 51, 61, 74–75, 132–133, 133–134 Becker, Howard S, 18 Bedford, Jean, 61, 116–117, 157–158 Beier, Ulli, 167, 168, 179, 180, 183, 187 Beros, Sapper H “Bert,” 110–111 Bevan, Theodore, 63–64 Bhabha, Homi, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 24, 72, 98–99, 112–113, 154, 159, 164 Bilong Boi (Pickard), 156–157, 158 Birch, Tony, 54 blackbirding (“recruitment”), 7, 130–131 blackness, value associations, 97 Black Peril, 96, 145, 146, 157 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 154

235


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236 The Blue Logic (Yakaipoko), 189, 196 Boehmer, Elleke, 51, 54, 55, 58, 70, 73 Boismenu, Alain de, 104–105 “Boroko Saturday Morning” (Daniels), 202–203 Bosavi people, 44–45 boy, use of term, 100, 101 boys becoming men, 78–85 Brantlinger, Patrick, 59, 70, 74, 139 Brash, Nora Vagi, 189, 199, 202 British New Guinea, 5–7, 89 Buffon, George Louis Leclerc, 144 Bulbeck, Chilla, 93, 106, 107, 145, 146 Bunyip Land (Fenn), 62, 77, 79, 82, 84, 135 bush kanaka, 10, 100, 101 “The Bush Kanaka Speaks” (Tawali), 186–187 Campbell, Joseph, 40 cannibalism, 4, 49, 51, 121 canoe songs, 172–173 cargo cult myth, 117 Carter, Erica, 30 Carter, Paul, 30, 43, 49, 52, 54, 73, 87, 142 Casey, Edward S, 30 chants, 43–44 children, Papua New Guineans as, 100–111; Christianity, 103–105; education policy and, 105–110; fuzzy wuzzy angel trope, 110–111; infantilization, 100–105; savagery of, 128; terms of address, 100, 101–103. See also dependency myth; paternalism Christianity: compartmentalization and, 169; and education, 106–107; as justification for colonization, 4, 6–7; muscular, 84–85; paternalism, 103–105 Churchill, Ward, 19–20 Clarke, Marcus, 24, 27, 69, 71–72 clothing, 97–98, 104, 126 code-switching, 170 Cold War, 112 Cole, Edward William, 5, 21, 24, 27, 61, 69–71 colonial discourse, definition, 9 colonizers, definition, 9 Columbus, Christopher, 126 communism, 112, 114–115, 120


Index compartmentalization, 162, 168–169, 176–179 Conrad, Joseph, 74, 131–132, 160 contamination, 96–97, 144–145, 151. See also “going native” theme Cook’s voyages, 55, 72 Cormoran, SMS, 8 corruption, 151, 194, 195, 197–198 Cranny-Francis, Anne, 113, 145 Cranston, Maurice William, 62, 67 creation myths, 39–40 Crocker, Henry, 21, 23, 24, 61, 69 The Crocodile (Eri), 170, 176–179 cultural hybridity, 164–165 curfew laws, 93–94, 95, 96 dance drama, 188 dancing, 172 “Dancing yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat” (Warakai), 196–197 Danger Mountain (Macdonald), 75, 77, 84 Daniels, Jerry, 202–203 Day, A Grove, 130–131 debasement, 124, 131–136; based on physical appearance, 133–134, 135–136; and fear of going native, 131–133; in Yorke the Adventurer (Becke), 133–134 dependency myth, 100, 112–123; interrogation of, 183; in A Lease of Summer (Bedford), 116–117; in Palu (Nowra), 15, 112, 113, 114–116, 117–119, 121–122; in The Stolen Land (Downs), 112–115, 116, 117; in Take Necessary Action (Harkness and Harkness), 115, 119–121 Dernburg, Berhnard, 7 Dever, Maryanne, 166 Dickson, D J, 104, 106, 107–108 differentiation, 13–17 Dillard, Heath, 145 “discovery,” 51–55, 87–88 disease metaphor, 96, 151, 161 disenchantment, 197–199 disillusionment, 196, 197–199 “Disillusionment with the Priesthood” (Hannet), 183–184 displacement, 37–38, 189, 191–192 Dominguez, Virginia, 13, 14, 59 doomsday imagery, 190–191 Downs, Ian, 112–115, 116, 117, 153, 155–156

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Index drama, 175, 188 “Dr Ludwig Schwalbe, South Sea Savant” (Becke), 74–75, 132–133 “The Drop-Out” (Kavani), 181 Dumont d’Urville, J S C, 129–130 Dyer, Richard, 28, 97, 145–146 Each New Dawn (Graham), 86 economic conditions. See Papua New Guinean literature, postindependence economic and sociopolitical conditions education, 6–7, 105–110, 165 The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin), 13, 55, 170 English language: imposition of, 55–56; in legal discourse, 91–92; madness from loss of, 77; Papua New Guinean writers’ use of, 165–166, 169–171 Enos, Apisai, 33 Eri, Vincent, 170, 176–179 Erskine, James, 5–6, 89–90 Essai, Brian, 106 Etlin, Richard, 30, 173 Eves, Richard, 103–104, 106 explorers, 51–55, 59, 61 Fanon, Frantz, 15, 90, 118, 121, 153, 154, 158, 194 Fantasies of the Master Race (Churchill), 19–20 Feld, Steven, 41, 42–43, 46 Fenn, G Manville, 62, 77, 78, 79, 82, 84, 135 Ferrero, Guillaume, 144 Fink, R A, 101 fireplace remains, 37 First, Ruth, 106 Firth, Stewart, 8 fixity, 14, 20 flag raisings, 5 Foi people, 30, 41 folk opera, 188 foreign policy, 200–201 Foucault, Michel, 2, 13, 61, 205 fraudulent texts, 21–28, 207 Freud, Sigmund, 18–19 From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (Grimshaw), 128 Fry, Greg, 122, 190–191 fuzzy wuzzy angel trope, 10, 110–111


237 Gardiner, Susan, 135 Gascoigne, Bamber, 61 Gergen, Kenneth, 97 German New Guinea, 5, 7–8, 55, 89, 107 Gidley, Mick, 1–2, 18 Gilman, Sander L, 144 Gima, Clement, 173 “Gipsies of the Sea, or The Islands of Gold” (Clarke), 24, 27, 71 The Glass Cannon: A Bougainville Diary 1944–45 (Pinney), 147, 149–150 Glassop, Lawson, 150–151 “going native” theme, 73–77, 124, 131–133 gomona, 37 gonna, 36–39 gonna mana bangana, 37 Gorle, Gillian, 166, 186 Goroka Teachers’ College, 109 Gould, Stephen Jay, 102 Graham, Burton, 86 The Great White Chief (Macdonald), 75, 76, 77, 125 Green, Martin, 59 Greenblatt, Stephen J, 91, 92 Griffin, James, 7–8, 105, 109–110 Griffiths, Gareth, 13, 15, 55, 56–57, 170, 171, 187–188, 203, 204 Grimshaw, Beatrice, frontispiece, 128–129, 135–136 Grosart, I, 101 Grosz, Elizabeth, 141 guns and weapons, 79, 82 Gusdorf, Georges, 180 Hall, Stuart, 1, 14, 16–17 Hannet, Leo, 183, 184–185 Harkness, Chris and Louise, 115, 119–121 Harris, Wilson, 178 Hastings, Peter, 101 haus tambaran (spirit house), 173–174 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 74, 131–132, 160 homosexuality, 148–149 hooks, bell, 20, 159, 160 houseboy, 100, 101 house construction allegory, 34–35 house symbolism, 195 Hungerford, T A G, 148–149 Hunt, Albert, 204 hysterization, 147

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238 idealization: of landscape, 22, 27, 28, 49, 65, 207; of native person, 10, 140, 158, 207 identification, 11, 15–18, 99, 154–155, 173 identity, national, 199–200 The Image and Appearance of the Human Body (Schilder), 154–155 independence, 9, 182–184, 189. See also dependency myth Indonesia, 200 infantilization, 100–105. See also children, Papua New Guineans as inferiority, 6, 15, 21, 89, 90–91, 100, 160 Inglis, Amirah, 90, 103, 146 Inglis, K S, 109 initiation rites, 180–182 interlanguage, 170 interpolation, 162, 171, 174, 179, 187–188 In the Land of the Golden Plume (Johnstone), 79, 80, 81, 82 Jameson, Frederic, 179, 206 JanMohamed, Abdul, 5, 12, 13, 14, 57, 58, 71, 102, 206 Jawodimbari, Arthur, 175 Jinks, Brian, 7, 89, 90, 98, 101, 107 Johnstone, David, 78, 79–82, 83 Jolly, Margaret, 126 juvenile literature, 78–85 Kahn, Miriam, 35–36 Kaluli people, 41–42, 43, 46 Kasaipwalova, John, 185–186, 201 Kavani, Siump, 181 kayasa, 143–144 Kerema Welfare Association, 182 Kiki, Albert Maori, 180–181, 182–183 Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime (Kiki), 180–181, 182–183 Kleinig, John, 103 knowledge: kuki, 38–39; of natural environment, 128–129; of place, 31, 41; power and, 2, 13, 19, 28; and supremacy, 58–59 Kolia, John, 9–10 Krauth, Nigel, 21, 27, 51, 61, 69, 71, 74, 78, 86, 168, 185–186 kuki, 36–39 laborers (blackbirding), 7, 130–131 Lacan, Jacques, 17


Index landmarks, 45 The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom (Nisbet), 50, 53, 60, 65, 66, 67, 136–138 landownership, 29, 31, 37, 38 Lane, Robert, 47 language: employment of, 56–57; and laws, 91–92; loss of, and madness, 77; native, 55–56, 165–166; negation and, 138; Papua New Guinean writers’ use of English, 165–166, 169–171; savagery and, 126 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 92 Lattas, Andrew, 101, 139 laws and regulations, 5, 89–99; on clothing, 97–98; contamination and, 96–97; on cultural expression, 94; curfew laws, 93–94, 95, 96; German New Guinea, 8; language and, 91–92; mimicry menace, 98–99; segregation, 90–91, 93–96 Lawson, Alan, 163–164 Lawson, John A, 21, 22–23, 23–24 A Lease of Summer (Bedford), 61, 116–117, 157–158 legal discourse. See laws and regulations leleki, 173 Lett, Lewis, 67–68, 127–128 “Life in the Bottle” (Teine), 203 Lindstrom, Lamont, 41 literacy, 57–58, 106 Low, Gail, 15, 17, 124, 147 Macdonald, Robert M, 75–77, 78, 84, 125 MacGregor, William, 6 Madang people, 172 madness, primitive landscape and, 73–77 magic and sorcery, 43, 121, 176–179, 201–202 “Magic Chant to Divert Rain” (Mek, translator), 43–44 Maiba (Soaba), 35, 189, 191–195 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 39, 143–144, 152 manki masta, 100, 101 ma (pronomial prefix), 42 maps as metaphors, 82, 84 Martin, John, 78, 79, 84–85 The Mask of God (Campbell), 40 master-servant relationship, 101–102, 103 McClintock, Anne, 49, 51, 82, 142, 145, 151 McGaw, William, 185

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Index A Medal without Honour (Sorariba), 189, 197–198 Mek, P Arnold, 44 Mekeo people, 39–40 Melanesians, 126–127, 128, 129–130, 135–136 Memmi, Albert, 8, 20 Meneses, Jorge de, 2 Michener, James A, 130–131 mimicry, 98–99 miscegenation, 145, 158 Mono island (Treasury Island), 52 mo (pronomial prefix), 42 Moresby, John, 5 Motu, 166 Motu people, 202 Murgatreud’s Empire (Gascoigne), 61 Murray, Hubert, 6, 94, 105, 106, 107, 138–139, 145, 152 Murray, James, 130–131 muscular Christianity, 84–85 music, 45–46, 172–173 My Brother, My Enemy (Kasaipwalova), 201 nakedness, 3, 104, 126 naming: compartmentalization and, 168–169; as cultural act, 37, 42; explorers and, 51–55; individuals, 44, 169; Papua New Guinea, 2–3; transforming space into place, 30–31, 40–45; as translation of the unknown, 54–55 namowenese, 37–38 Nandan, Satendra, 196 national allegories, 179–180, 186, 191–195 national confusion, 191–192, 194–195 national identity, 199–200 nationalism, 182–183 Native Regulations, 91, 93–96, 98 naturalization, 14, 16–17, 20 negation, 136–138 Nelson, Hank, 93 nepotism (wantokism), 198 Neumann, Klaus, 38 The New New Guinea (Grimshaw), 128–129 New Guinea, 2–3, 9 “New Guinea” (Enos), 33 Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, 55, 205 Nicole, Robert, 72–73


239 Nielson, J G, 108 Nisbet, Hume, 50, 53, 60, 64–65, 66, 67, 136–138 noble savage myth, 61–62, 65, 67, 127, 144, 150 “Nogat Wantok–Nogat Wok” (Sorariba), 197–198 Nongorr, John, 199 nonindigenous, definition, 9 North to Rabaul (Wood), 86–87, 147–148, 149–150 Northumberland, 4 Nowra, Louis, 15, 112, 113, 114–116, 117–119, 121–122, 152–155 observation, 16, 54–55, 58 Ong, Walter J, 43, 44 oral cultures: compartmentalization and, 168–169; cultural hybridity, 164–165; place and, 38–30, 41–45, 46–48; written cultures versus, 44, 57–58 orature, 174–179, 201–202 “Orientalising the South Pacific” (Nicole), 72–73 Orientalism (Said), 1 Overell, Lilian, 146–147 “Pagaraso” (Stella), 198 Paipaira, May, 201–202 Palu (Nowra), 15, 112, 113, 114–116, 117–119, 121–122, 152–155 Pangu Pati, 182 Papua, definition, 9 The Papuan Achievement (Lett), 127–128 Papua New Guinea: “discovery” of, 51–55, 87–88; independence, 9, 182–184, 189; naming, 2–3; postindependence, 189–191, 195; protectorate status, 89–90 Papua New Guinea National Parliament building, 173–174 Papua New Guinean literature, 162–188; alcoholism in, 203; anticolonialism and anger in, 184–188; appropriation and, 162, 169–171, 176, 177; autobiographies, 179–184; compartmentalization and, 162, 168–169, 176–179; humor in, 202–203; incorporation of orature, 174–179, 201–202; interpolation, 162, 171, 174, 179, 187–188; postcolonial context of, 163–165;

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240 protest and resistance in, 167–168, 185–186; use of English, 165–166 Papua New Guinean literature, postindependence economic and sociopolitical conditions, 189–204; alienation, 189, 191–192, 193, 200; corruption, 194, 195, 197–198; disillusionment, 196, 197–199; displacement, 191–192; doomsday imagery, 190–191; foreign policy, 200–201; national confusion, 191–192, 194–195; national identity, 199–200; sociopolitical landscape as gloomy and dreary, 201, 203–204 Papua New Guineans: as children (see children, Papua New Guineans as); debasement of, 131–136; as evil, 118; idealization of, 10, 140, 158, 207; as incompetent and uneducable natives, 10; as inferior, 6, 15, 21, 89, 90–91, 91, 100, 160; as labor source, 7, 130–131; noble savage myth, 61–62, 65, 67; as savages (see savagery); servant role, 101–102, 103; sexualization of (see sexuality); as source of contamination, 96–97, 144–145, 151; as uneducable, 10, 100, 109–110, 206 Papua New Guinea University of Technology, 109 Papuan Junior Reader, 108–109 paternalism, 6, 89–90, 103, 104, 108–109 Pickard, Keith, 156–157, 158 picturesque mode, 63–64 Pinney, Peter, 147, 149–150 place and landscape, colonial representations: ambivalence about, 5, 49, 51, 64–65, 69–73, 87, 206; availability of, 63, 64, 68, 142; as contaminating, 131–132; as corrupting influence, 51, 73–77, 135–136; erasure of indigenous constructions, 29, 51, 54, 87–88, 90, 135; exploration and first contact, 51–58, 87–88; feminization of, 141–143; idealization of, 22, 27, 28, 49, 51, 61–67, 207; importance of language, 55–58; as inhospitable and dangerous, 51, 67–69, 84–85, 85–87, 134–135; in juvenile literature, 78–85; naming and renaming, 52, 54–55; picturesque


Index mode, 63–64; as property, 29; in war writing, 85–87 place and landscape, indigenous representations, 29–48; Banoni concepts of gonna, kuki and rekana, 36–39; house construction allegory, 34–35; knowledge of place, 31; landmarks, 45; landownership, 29, 31, 32–33, 34, 37, 38; naming, 30, 37; in plastic arts, 45–46; psychological/spiritual attachment, 31–35; relationship with the past, 33, 35–36, 37–40; in songs and music, 45–46; in stories, 46–47; versus space, 29–31 Places of Public Entertainment Ordinance (1915), 96 plastic arts, 45–46, 173–174 Playboy, 143 Polynesians, 126–127, 129–130, 151 pona, 37 Port Moresby, 52, 53, 90, 94, 196 Portrait of A Savage (Turnbull), 71 postcolonialism, 163–165 postindependence, 189–191, 195 Powell, Ganga, 175 Powell, Kirsty, 184, 185 Prado y Tovar, Don Diego, 3–4 praise poetry, 39–40 Pratt, Mary Louise, 54, 164 primitiveness, 16, 51, 100–101, 119–122, 126–127. See also savagery pronomial prefixes, 42 protectorate status, 89–90 publication, 187–188 punitive expeditions, 7–8 pupuareko, 169 Rabasa, José, 57 Raga people, 47 “Rainmaker’s Child” (Hannet), 183 Rao, Raja, 170 Rascals in Paradise (Michener and Day), 130–131 The Rats in New Guinea (Glassop), 150–151 reality: “fraudulent texts,” 21–28; representations and, 18–21 Reed, Adam, 152 Reed, Stephen Windsor, 145 “A Refugee in Paradise” (Sorariba), 200–201

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Index rekana, 36–39 “The Reluctant Flame” (Kasaipwalova), 185–186 Renan, Ernest, 102 representation, 1–2, 205 Requerimiento, 91–92 Retez, Inigi de, 3 The Rhetoric of Empire (Spurr), 16, 58 Richards, Jeffrey, 59, 78, 206 Richardson, Miles, 35–36 Richon, Olivier, 19, 20–21 The Ridge and the River (Hungerford), 148–149 Rigby, Nigel, 142–143 rites of passage, 180–182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61–62, 67 Rowley, Charles D, 7, 67, 68–69 Royal Commission, 93 Ryan, Simon, 51, 54, 55, 63, 64 Sack, Peter, 36 sacred places, 45 Said, Edward, 1, 12, 18, 20–21, 58 Samana, Utula, 34 Sana (Somare), 181–182 savagery, 124–131. See also debasement; definition and use of term, 126–130; infantilization trope and, 100, 103, 104, 128; as justification for colonization, 4, 139; knowledge of the environment and, 128–129; and landscape, 51, 67–69, 84–85, 85–87, 134–135; language and, 126; and opposition to independence, 119–122; political and social organization and, 129–130, 139; and sexuality, 151; and strategy of negation, 136–138; suitability for manual labor and, 130–131; use of animalistic terminology, 127–128 Schieffelin, Edward, 43, 44–45 Schilder, Paul, 154 segregation, 90–91, 93–96 Sepik storyboards, 46 servant-master relationship, 101–102, 103 sextants, 84 sexuality, 140–161; ambivalence (desire and revulsion), 140, 147–151, 156–157, 161; body image and, 153–155; contamination and, 144–145, 151; deviant, 143–144; fears of miscegenation, 145, 158;


241 fears of rape and the White Women’s Protection Ordinance (1926), 140, 144–147, 151; feminization of landscape, 141–142; homosexual desire, 148–149; idealization and eroticization, 158–160; in Palu (Nowra), 152–155; as path to racial tolerance, 151, 156–157, 158, 160; and power relations, 153–160; repressed and unrepressed, 143–144, 152–153; savagery and, 152–153; superficiality of relationships, 153 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanesia (Malinowski), 143–144 Shohat, Ella, 10, 19, 20, 22, 28, 102, 103, 127, 129, 135 Shulz, Lynda, 199 Simons, Susan Cochrane, 173–174 Sinclair, Andrew, 126 Slemon, Stephen, 9, 179 Smith, Bernard, 55, 126–127, 150 Smith, Peter, 6, 108, 109 Smith, Staniforth, 107 Soaba, Russell, 35, 189, 191–195, 204 soap symbolism, 150–151 Social Darwinism, 70 Solander, Daniel Carl, 55 Somare, Michael, 181–182 songs. See music Sorariba, Nash G, 189, 197–198, 200–201 The Sorcerer’s Stone (Grimshaw), frontispiece, 136 sorcery. See magic and sorcery Soyinka, Wole, 201, 204 space versus place, 29–31, 87–88 Spanish colonizers, 91–92 Spanish explorers, 3–4 Spivak, Gayatri, 58–59 Spurr, David, 2, 14, 16, 22, 24, 58–59, 62, 124, 130, 131, 133, 134–135, 136, 138, 139, 141–142, 147 Stam, Robert, 10, 19, 20, 22, 28, 102, 103, 127, 129, 135 Stella, Regis, 198 stereotypes, 15, 20, 24, 95, 112–113, 133. See also specific stereotypes Stevenson, Hugh, 173–174 The Stolen Land (Downs), 112–115, 116, 117, 153, 155–156 Stoler, Ann, 152, 153 stories, 46–47, 175–176 Strathern, Andrew, 35–36

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242

Index

Strong, P N W, 104, 105 The Sun (Jawodimbari), 175 superiority/supremacy, 6, 12–20, 18, 28, 59, 91–93 Suwa, Jun’ichiro, 172 syntactic fusions, 170

University of Papua New Guinea, 109, 167

Takaku, William, 166 Take Necessary Action (Harkness and Harkness), 115, 119–121 Taurama (Brash), 202 Taussig, Michael, 133 Tawali, Kumalau, 102, 186–187 Teine, Jeff, 203 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 176 Thomas, Allan, 172 Thomas, Lynda, 167–168 Thomas, Nicholas, 14, 127, 130 Tiffin, Chris, 163–164 Tiffin, Helen, 2, 13, 15, 55, 56–57, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 187–188, 203 Todorova, Maria, 207 Toil, Travel, and Discovery in British New Guinea (Bevan), 63–64 Tok Pisin, 166 Tolai people, 42 Torres, Luis Vaez de, 3 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 52 travel writing, 5, 63 Treasury Island (Mono), 52 Trobriand Islanders, 143–144 truth, representations and, 1–2, 18–19, 20–21 tsigiana, 45 tsigul, 46 Turnbull, Gilbert Munro, 71, 72

wag ta (canoe) songs, 172–173 Waiko, John, 3, 32–33 “Waiting for Botol” (Sorariba), 198 Wamira people, 35–36 Wanderings in the Interior of New Guinea (Lawson), 21, 22–23, 23–24 wantokism (nepotism), 198 Warakai, Vincent, 196–197 Weiner, James F, 30, 41 Wendt, Albert, 43 West Papua, 200–201 Which Way, Big Man? (Brash), 189, 199 White, Osmar, 85–86, 87 White Girl, Brown Skin (Abbotsmith), 153, 158–160 whiteness, value associations, 97 White Savage Simon (Grimshaw), 135–136 white supremacy. See superiority/ supremacy White Women’s Protection Ordinance (1926), 140, 144–147, 151 Winduo, Steven, 72, 87, 166, 175, 182 Wolfers, Edward P, 8, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 144, 145 Wood, Christopher, 86–87, 147–148, 149–150 World War II, 9, 85–87, 110–111, 147–150 writing cultures, 57–58, 58–62, 167

uneducable natives, 10, 100, 109–110, 206 The Unexpected Hawk (Waiko), 32–33 The Ungrateful Daughter (Hannet), 184–185

Yakaipoko, Wiri, 189, 196 “Yapune” (Paipaira), 201–202 yellow peril, 115, 120 Yorke the Adventurer (Becke), 61, 133–134


volcano metaphor, 167–168, 185–186 “Volcano” (Thomas), 167–168 Vuna (pronomial prefix), 42

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other volumes in the pacific islands monograph series

1 The First Taint of Civilization: A History of the Caroline and Marshall Islands in Pre-Colonial Days, 1521–1885, by Francis X Hezel, SJ, 1983 2 Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule, by K R Howe, 1984 3 Wealth of the Solomons: A History of a Pacific Archipelago, 1800–1978, by Judith A Bennett, 1987 4 Nan’yò: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945, by Mark R Peattie, 1988 5 Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890, by David Hanlon, 1988 6 Missionary Lives: Papua, 1874–1914, by Diane Langmore, 1989 7 Tungaru Traditions: Writings on the Atoll Culture of the Gilbert Islands, by Arthur F Grimble, edited by H E Maude, 1989 8 The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II, edited by Geoffrey M White and Lamont Lindstrom, 1989 9 Bellona Island Beliefs and Rituals, by Torben Monberg, 1991 10 Not the Way It Really Was: Constructing the Tolai Past, by Klaus Neumann, 1992 11 Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century, by Brij V Lal, 1992 12 Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma, by Vilsoni Hereniko, 1995 13 Strangers in Their Own Land: A Century of Colonial Rule in the Caroline and Marshall Islands, by Francix X Hezel, 1995 14 Guardians of Marovo Lagoon: Practice, Place, and Politics in Maritime Melanesia, by Edvard Hviding, 1996 15 My Gun, My Brother: The World of the Papua New Guinea Colonial Police, 1920–1960, by August Ibrum Kituai, 1998 16 The People Trade: Pacific Island Laborers and New Caledonia, 1865–1930, by Dorothy Shineberg, 1999 17 Law and Order in a Weak State: Crime and Politics in Papua New Guinea, by Sinclair Dinnen, 2001 18 An Honorable Accord: The Covenant between the Northern Mariana Islands and the United States, by Howard P Willens and Deanne C Siemer, 2001 19 Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898–1941, by Anne Perez Hattori, 2004


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About the Author Regis Tove Stella is from the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, and has a PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia. He is director of the Melanesian Institute of Arts and Communications and a faculty member in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Papua New Guinea. Dr Stella’s teaching and research interests include postcolonial and cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and creative writing.


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5/1/07 3:42:50 PM


5/1/07 3:42:52 PM

Production Notes for Stella Imagining the Other Cover and Interior designed by University of Hawai‘i Press Production Department in New Baskerville, with display type in Palatino Composition by Lucille C. Aono Printing and binding by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Printed on 55# Glatfelter Offset D37, 360 ppi


5/1/07 3:42:54 PM

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