Sista, Stanap Strong!: A Vanuatu Women's Anthology ed. by Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (review)

This anthology of Vanuatu women's writing was curated to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Vanuatu's independence. It is a welcome gift. Launched in Vanuatu and New Zealand in June 2021, the book engages thirty-seven authors across several genres—poetry, short stories, memoirs, essays, songs—writing mainly in English, occasionally in Bislama, and uniquely in two Tannese languages. It straddles generations, from a twenty-year-old to an octogenarian. While most authors are ni-Vanuatu women, several have diverse ancestries, several live overseas, and several authors born overseas have made Vanuatu their home. Some had previously been published; some are published here for the first time.

The exquisite cover art by Juliette Pita, Victory Dance/Victri Danis, depicts an animated female coconut palm—her protuberant eyes, her expansive fronds, her fruits falling to fertile ground, where women pray, weave textiles, and generate new life. The back cover proclaims: "The writers in this anthology have chosen to harness the coloniser's language, English, for their own purposes. They are writing against racism, colonialism, misogyny and sexism. Writing across bloodlines and linguistic boundaries. Professing their love for ancestors, offspring and language."

There is much love in this volume—of place, of family, of men, of kastom (customs, ways of the place), and of the joys of everyday life. But there is also hurt and anger—about the wounds of colonialism, the loss of kastom and language, the harms of domestic violence, men's "use and abuse" of kava, and the exclusion of women from public positions, particularly in Parliament.

Early stories and poems reimagine the horrors of blackbirding—coercion and kidnapping, hard labor, and white overseers' violence in the plantations of Queensland—"the bitterness of sugar cane" (19–24). An exquisite poem by Frances C Koya Vaka'uta poignantly remembers a beautiful young girl from Pele Island, trafficked to be the wife of an Irish settler in Kadavu, Fiji. Her history is misted in archival uncertainties, but her genealogy is consummately restored, "pressing skin to bark" (27). Her name, Leiniaru, articulates her descent from coastal casuarinas. A later story by Nicole Colmar tells of another beautiful young girl, Josephine, barely thirteen, sailing from her beloved parents to share an "octagonal house" on east Santo with French settler Jean Mi. Although he paid her bride-price, she was his "daughter, lover, keeper, hostess, yet not quite wife, there being no children" (64). The estate later passed to a British settler, Teddy Hughes, and so did Josephine. Teddy and Josephine's descendants remember how the house, once the venue for grand parties during World War II, disintegrated to dust. Yet colonialism persists in novel forms—"they came, they saw they labelled" independent Vanuatu as a "fragile state," an "unfinished state," part of a wider "arc of instability" (176).

Most authors celebrate the attainment of independence in 1980. Yet Nellie Nipina Olul recalls her fear about the future after the tufala gavman (the dual government) of France and Britain departed (164). Mildred Sope rather recalls how she introduced the future leaders of the Vanua'aku Pati, Father Walter Lini and Barak Sope, while she and Barak were students at the University of the South Pacific in Suva. Mildred married Barak and helped establish the women's wing of the party.

Yet, in several poems and essays, the attainment of independence is characterized as freedom for men but not for women. Echoing earlier poetic provocations by the late Grace Mera Molisa, many authors lament that women are seen as "never never ready" (165). Mary Jack Kaviamu, a Tannese woman who wanted to stand for Parliament, documents the vilification she experienced from men and women alike and how husbands tried to coerce wives' voting choices (138–143). Kali Regenvanu suggests that representations of Vanuatu as a "paradise," or even as the happiest place on earth, conceal women's misery; she deplores the...