Dreadlocks: In Oceania (review)

Dreadlocks: In Oceania, volume 1, 1997, edited by Sudesh Mishra and Elizabeth Guy. Suva: Department of Language and Literature, University of the South Pacific. No ISBN, 199 pages, illustrations. US$10.

In 1994 I edited my first issue of the Australian journal Meanjin. It was a special issue on the Pacific and, looking back on it now, there are undoubtedly things I would do differently a second time around. One thing that has stayed with me, however, as a high point of that issue was a series of interviews conducted by Gillian Gorle with William Takaku, then director of the National Theatre Company of Papua New Guinea, John Kasaipwalova, the well-known Trobriand poet, and Steven Winduo, a younger poet from the Sepik region. Among the questions Gillian put to each of these writers was: "What are your views about English as a medium of expression?"

William Takaku described the loss of linguistic diversity in Papua New Guinea as a tragedy. He argued that while the use of English was clearly only going to increase, it was also going to destroy the country's literary potential in the process. "The expressions [of our mother tongues] are much more . . . ," he said, obviously searching for a word. "In English they will come out inside-out or back-to-front, they won't make sense." Then there was the problem of audience. Takaku described his audience as being in the villages. "So how can I use English?" he asked.

John Kasaipwalova, on the other hand, had this to say: "It's exciting. I would put it this way--it's a tool. Our own traditional languages are beautiful tools, but they're stone axes. Suddenly you're given a tool that is a bulldozer. . . . It has the potential of reaching out to a massive audience." The problem, as he saw it, was "being able to know that the words you use do justice to what you want to express, whether they are the right ones, because that is not your native language."

And then there was Steven Winduo, who as a member of the younger generation, educated in New Zealand and the United States, found himself with a different set of problems. "I've probably avoided this question," he replied, "because when I answer it I become hypocritical in a way. You see . . . to me, writing in English is like writing in my own language." While acknowledging that there was a need for him to "do something for my own dialect and my own people," Winduo felt that it was even more important for him to reach out--beyond the village, beyond the country, even beyond the region. "To me as a writer coming from a Third World postcolonial society, writing in English is a political thing to do."

I revisit this discussion at some length because I think it reflects the major dilemma confronting both Pacific writers and reviewers of writing from the Pacific. Whom does one write for and how, therefore, does one write? It is not always a matter of English versus another language; it can equally be a matter of what kind of English one uses: colloquial, academic, mixed with words in other tongues. It is certainly a matter of audience, in any case. Writing is an act of communication with an imagined someone at the other end, someone who will have the right amount of knowledge, who will understand the references, get the jokes, appreciate the subtleties. The question for Pacific writers is who do they think that someone is, what community does he or she belong to--the village, the region, the postcolonial community, the entire English-speaking world?

Different writers will answer this question differently. But it is perhaps valid to ask it of editors as well. I think it's a question worth putting to Sudesh Mishra and Elizabeth Guy, editors of the inaugural issue of Dreadlocks: In Oceania, a journal of critical and creative writing published in 1997 by the Department of Literature...