Wantok Meri by Peter Warren (review)

In contemporary Papua New Guinea, rural women still carry the majority of the daily load, literally and figuratively. The traditional division of labor prevails across great swaths of the country, regardless of social structure and location. That is to say, both urban and rural women, whether from matrilineal, patrilineal, or cognatic societies, are expected to cook, look after children, clean the house and do laundry, manage the finances, and so forth, while men, who formerly had political and military responsibilities in the wider community, struggle to make their way in modernity. At the same time, since Papua New Guinea became independent of Australia in 1975, the nation has slowly become more stratified, roughly between a middle-class, an urban working- and under-class, and subsistence-based villagers, who have also begun to show inequalities in various kinds of capital accumulation. However, stratification in urban settings is gendered in ways that are surprising and novel, given the cultural background of the country. The middle class, in other words, includes both men and women.

Among the many great accomplishments of Wantok Meri, Peter Warren and Richard Savage’s fascinating new documentary, is how it portrays and gives voice to a stratified selection of Papua New Guinean women who live, for the most part, in and around Goroka town in the Eastern Highlands and in the coastal city of Lae.

As the film begins, we see expansive images of dense forests and men dancing in full regalia. Meanwhile, in voice-overs spoken in English, middle-class women attest to the beauty and great natural wealth of the country, as well as to its tribal diversity. Calling for change in terms of gender roles, they also bitterly protest that men spend too much time on their mobile phones and fail to take responsibility for their wives and children. We see men sitting idly or playing darts while women sell crafts or hike across town to fill containers with water from a spring. The government fails to provide basic services, a businesswoman complains, to under- and working-class people in both urban and rural settings.

A cock crows, and in a pre-dawn scene set within a family’s house in the Highlands, a woman named Betty lights kindling to start cooking breakfast for two school-age kids whom she encourages in Tok Pisin to wake up. Her husband, Nelson, appears, apparently having slept elsewhere, and orders his wife to go to their garden to fetch sweet potatoes to cook for the children. After the family sips their tea, Betty takes the kids and goes off to harvest carrots, a big bag full of which she hauls home on her back, and then onto a bus to go sell in the town market. Later in the day, she returns home to prepare dinner for about five or so children and her husband. A daughter blesses the meal. Betty allows to the camera that she has to work hard, buying food, paying bills, and saving for school fees. But, she adds, the family is a happy one.

Images of urban modernity trudge across the screen: We see campaign posters from the 2017 national elections, big trade stores, and crowded streets through which pedestrians, trucks, and buses plod along. Men vend betel nuts from street corners or, not having enough money to buy lunch, politely try to haggle for a cheaper price. Men are also seen lining up to sell big, white bags full of coffee beans—or aimlessly bike around town. As women make their ways with toddlers or other loads on their backs, we hear from Sarah Haoda Todd, who owns a cleaning company, a restaurant, and a salon in Lae town and employs two hundred women. Todd, together with several other insightful middle-class women—a school inspector, a handicrafts manager who is also a manager of a Goroka hotel, a pediatric nurse, and a police woman in Goroka, among others—narrate the movie. Reflecting on the causes of domestic violence; denouncing...