Weaving Stories

For me as a writer and scholar living and working in PNG, I am always weaving the narratives of journeys and inter-island connections in my work and scholarship. I talk about the constructions of cultures and peoples of the Pacific in their literary and cultural production.

The life of a writer-scholar is woven around the narratives we weave about ourselves. It sounds more like the life of a silk worm weaving its own world from its own silk. Sometime I have to wear the mask of a writer and see the world through its eyeholes. Sometimes I wear the scholar’s hat to talk about cultural discourse and literary imagining.

 

My discussions anchor in the notion of text that sometimes my students get tired of listening to me talk about it. This process of writing and reading text is considered a socially productive force: “It is all and any of the means of production and reproduction of real life” (Williams 1977: 91).

The production of text and the act of reading involves “a certain mode of social cooperation and the application and development of a certain body of social knowledge” (Williams 1977: 91).

In essence the productive forces enable the “production of this specific social co-operation or of this specific social knowledge” to become convertible to social capital (Williams 1977: 91). I am of course making reference to the literary and cultural production of text that describes the Pacific as we know today.

This is the conceptual framework I use to frame Indigenous writing to situate them within the Pacific cultures helps us to read Pacific Islands writing from within our own perspective. Literary texts play a key role in definitions of various selves constructed in this way.  

Individual voices are always in dialogue with others. The dialogic self in these engagements takes on board the full Indigenous worldviews and epistemology as in Unaisi Nabobo-Baba’s discussion of “Vulagei Fijian worldview”, which involves seeing with the eyes, heart, and soul… to give meaning and interpretation to the realities of the people” (Nabobo-Baba 2006: 37).

Using these points of reference, for example, the discussion of the Fijian cosmos is more clearer in terms of mediations made between thoughts, beliefs, spaces, and ways of knowing the world around as demonstrated in another research that was carried out in Fiji: “First, we were in the “place and space” of a people, a tribal people whose indigenous knowledge systems spans centuries in Fiji. As we asked our research questions and sough to engage in talonoa sessions (dialogues, conversations, sometimes multi logues) with teachers, head teachers, principals and the people of Udu and Vanua Levu, we were moving between “worlds”” (Nabobo-Baba, Naisilisili, Bogitini, Lebaivalu Baba, and Lingam 2012: xi).

These researchers in Oceania have used such platforms to reframe Indigenous knowledge of the self and the diverse systems of Indigenous knowledge and ways of viewing them.

The consistent view is that the production of social knowledge is promoting a better understanding of the self within the ‘culturescape’ of the Pacific. Our discussion on constitutive landscapes must take into account the various disjunctures in their formation as well.

 “There is a deeper change, itself driven by the disjunctures between all the landscapes ... and constituted by their continuously fluid and uncertain interplay, which concerns the relationship between production and consumption in today’s global economy” (Appudarai 1990: 306).

From this angle we can see the various disjunctures are made visible in their formation of the various selves in the multiple culturescape of Oceania.

These are sometimes referred to as “ethnoscapes”. There are no rigid boundaries around these ethnoscapes. The “edges blur when cultural forms, grounded in distinct traditions, interact. This interaction often results in a recognition, that we are all traveling through the networks of a world bearing the tension between our particular inheritance and potentially common culturescapes; that we all, in some sense, live in border conditions” (Chambers 1994: 14; Garlough 2008: 63).

The boundaries that are constitutive of the ethnoscapes are apparent in diaspora narratives.

These landscapes are the building blocks of an imagined world:  “that is, the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (Appadurai 1989; Appadurai 1990: 296-7).

 In addition the experience of cohabitation within nation boundaries across difference cultures, periods, and spaces constitute the border conditions of ‘culturescape’, define the formation of the self within a given geo-political space.

So what is the relevance of this to PNG? Our writers are storytellers who weave our experiences in their books, for others to read about us as well as for us to read about ourselves. In that space of weaving our writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and artists speak to one another as well as with others. It is a world of stories woven together with unique designs and experiences.