Savannah Flames: Papua New Guinean Journal of Literature, Languages and Culture, Volume 5 (review)

The beautiful cover of Savannah Flames anticipates the variety of offerings inside. The journal includes a range of prose and poetry, interviews and reviews, creative and critical work. For me, however, the distinctions between the genres blur; I see poetry in the prose and stories in the poetry. Regis Stella admits in the interview with Aundo Aitau that the major influence on his writing was "listening to myths, legends, stories, songs, and other traditional aspects ofculture" (7). This ancient method of enculturation continues to inspire storytellers from our region, and much of the creative writing in this collection retains that oral flow and flavor.

Vincent Warakai's critical essay onSia Figiel's work is a provocative foray into the deliberately outrageous sexual politics of the Samoan author, and refers to the Margaret Mead– Derek Freeman controversy, adding toa "story" started over a hundred years ago.

The short prose pieces in the collection reveal very different worlds for readers who reside outside of Papua New Guinea, reminding us that the home of Savannah Flames is a place of myriad communities: linguistic, social, cultural, geographical, artistic, and political. Especially different is the acceptance of the unknowable, the spiritual, the mystical, and the unexplained; the world is not divided into the living and the dead, the present and the past, the real and the imagined or dreamed. In many of the stories it is accepted that there are different planes, different realities, and there can be movement between them.

In "The Child" by Sandon P Kikala, we meet Nepara, a spirit child who is discovered by the wayside. At first, the villagers want the finder "to throw the child away" (100), but they later accept him, until a woman goes missing. Nepara is blamed for her ­disappearance and the men of the ­village decide to kill him. Before this can happen, though, the child is spirited away by forces unseen; he departs just as mysteriously as he arrives. This story is told as matter-of-fact, as if suddenly finding a child and just as suddenly having it disappear, although not an everyday occurrence, is part of life. The mysterious and unusual are accepted, though not always to be trusted.

"Lost at Sea" by Yana Elius tells the story of survival at sea, reminding us of the many remarkable stories from a people who know the sea intimately and travel over it as most of us travel across the land. We are given precise dates and times, exact distances, weights, horsepower, and ages of the children on the boat. There is asense of verisimilitude, heightening the reality, but tight control is maintained on the emotions of the characters and the readers. The story reads like a report, a journalistic piece. Again, as in the previous story, occurrences similar to this happen on a ­regular basis; they are noteworthy but not exceptional.

"Talangat" by Denise Lokinap is about a university graduate, Tallie, who is shocked and deeply hurt by her lover's rejection when he is informed of her pregnancy. Although forced to give up the life she had worked so hard to attain, like many women before her, Tallie learns that becoming a mother does not mean the end of the world. Estalla Cheung's "Freedom before Dawn," on the other hand, shows that some men are turning their backs on the traditional custom of arranged marriage. The husband chosen for Tingsoi gives her the gift of freedom, enabling her to pursue studies at university.

Some of the poetry in the anthology is interesting and evocative, but some poems are difficult to connect with. The effect, at times, is of writers trying too hard to produce "poetry," rather than truthfully expressing an emotion or describing a scene. Many of the poems, although personal, lack intimacy. There...