Another World

Last week, in my lecture for the course Literature and Politics, I read the poem “Different Histories” to the 50 plus students. It was an important poem I had written when I was an undergraduate student, just learning to write and the thoughts that went into the poem have become more real to as I explained the return to the place of my birth in the month of January, 2019.

Uncle Thomas Pomala, Michael Fischer, Thorsten Trimmpop, and Daniel Hui @ Songo in Forest, Ulighembi 2019

I made an unplanned visit to the forest place in the Prince Alexander Mountain range where my umbilical cord lies buried. On a fine day, the 8^th of January 2019 I drove up to Ulighembi Village in a hired 5 doors Toyota Landcruiser. 

Accompanying me were three friends who flew all the way from the USA and Singapore. Thorsten Trimpop, the award winning filmmaker based in Chicago, the anthropologist, Michael Fischer based in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui, arrived in Papua New Guinea to collaborate with me on a film on flutes and the bird of paradise.  Our collaboration began out of nowhere, though it was Thorsten who invited me to be a co-writer of the film.

The best part of the collaboration is that I get to work with Michael Fischer because I studied his work as a graduate student in 1994 at the University of Minnesota. How often do you get a legendary scholar like Michael come to your country, hometown, and village? Incredible experience of a lifetime, I’d say.

In Ulighembi we met up with my cousins, Camillus Suwaliha and Andrew Hasai, before others like uncles, Thomas Pomala and Micheal Manai. They were expecting my arrival with my friends. Word was sent prior to our arrival in the village.

As soon as we arrived Thorsten started film the natural environment and the elusive cry of the Manui or the Bird of Paradise. We followed the Bird of Paradise into the forest where more filming of birds in their natural habitats were made.

It was a pleasant walk through the primary forest where I found peace and serenity. I had been living the cities of neon lights and cobble stone for so long that returning to my forest homeland was just pleasant.

Uncle Michael Manai on his flute 2019

In the middle of the forest I asked Uncle Michael to play his flute in a bush shelter near a creek where someone had made sago sometime back. Thorsten filmed Uncle Michael playing his flute in the forest shelter. It was amazing to stage and direct a film moment in the middle of the forest.

We walked on an arrived at a clearing in the forest. It is the flying fox trap belonging to one of my cousins.  We rested to catch our breath an air before deciding that the journey is complete if we make it to old site where I was born and raised.

Michael took the opposite direct to my uncle Alex’s home where he would wait for us.

Determined we tracked on to my birth place of Buk’nholi and Jong’kwinumbo. No one lives in these hamlets anymore. Both places are filled with secondary forest.

In our walk to the two childhood homes birds and spirits of the forest were in welcoming mood. Birds played and sang in merriment in the forest. It was immediately registered in my mind that the spirit world of my childhood was awakened with the news of my arrival.

Close to the village I told that a sago palm I had planted as a child had grown and provided food for my family on my mother’s side.

I also walked passed the track that I used a lot as a child to go to the forest with my mother and father. I remembered I had cut one of my finger with a knife one day.  It was the very spot I had thought of when I composed a poem “Different Histories”, which is wonderful poem that eventually got published in the anthology Nuanua: pacific writing in English since 1980 edited by Albert Wendt.

Different Histories

I once returned to the place of my blessed cord

Buried in the black earth.

I stood silent at the wonder of those

Birds that flew day in and out of their nests

Below the blue sky which drops to earth somewhere.

I remembered those years of my childhood

Papa in front with his piece of firewood

Me in the centre

And Mama at the rear loaded

With string bags of wood, food and water.

Each day I returned home earlier than Papa and Mama

To find the evenings of fund and games frolicking

In the cool evening breeze.

But watching the sky again

I realize the clouds have moved

So has my childhood Buk’nholi life

Which has drifted

Into a different world.

Making different histories

My people no longer to me

Are the people of my childhood’s history

My Papa and Mama are no longer to me

The protectors of my life

My home no longer to me

My place of being

But a mere reference of my whole history

Relatives on the forest walk

Appreciating this poem I had written in the 1980s was so invigorating. The birds were the welcoming party of a son who had gone on a long journey away from the forest home. This is one of the first poems I had written as a young writer.

We arrived at the plateau between Buk’nholi and Jonkwinumbo hamlets. My father Gregory who had also walked with me there spoke against going into the village sites because it was no complete forest.

We rested as a young cousin climbed one of the coconuts belonging to my mother’s family. We quenched our thirst with the young green coconut juice.

Out of now where my father said I should tell Thorsten the story about how he me my mother. He pointed to the exact spot.  I laughed about it because I know about their meeting and the subsequent consequence of their eloping. It was a topic that is spoken about in a joking way though the time my father took my mother away from her family created a show-down of muscles between my father’s side and my mother’s side. Another story of its own that I had tried to capture in the short story “The Drums of Night” published in my collection The Unpainted Mask (2010) and later in Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought (2007), a Minnesota USA based magazine.

Before making the return trip I spoke into the air thanking everyone both spirit of the land, air, and ancestors for welcoming me back to the place where I was born. I acknowledge the place for giving birth to me and seeing me grow up to be what I am. It was a moment of spiritual connection for me. I felt them watching and listening to me.

I remembered one of my teachers and my grandfather Fehim’boli Ramasua whom I lasted visited him in Jongkwinumbo during a research trip.  I had written a poem about him also in the 1980s, which was published in my first collection of poetry, Lomo’ha I am in Spirit’s Voice I Call (1991):

Fe’himboli, the Teacher I know

On my last return I saw

Your lame and frigid body

Overheated by burning wood

Thrown awkwardly into a bed

Age has beaten our lives

And destroyed precious moments

Betrayed old man

I have betrayed you

Not because I wanted to

I was forced to betray

Fe’himboli, a frail voice

My knowledge of my childhood

With you at Jonkuinumbo,

I remember we would hunt together

With me on your tireless shoulders

Through hostile jungles in dark

Horror filled and moonless nights

Betrayed old man

I have betrayed you

Not because I wanted to

I was forced to betray

Being away in my youth

Deprived me of your classes

On our ancestor’s traditions and values

I returned to record your wise words

In my conscientious years, but

By then you were no longer

Able to command energy to speak

The poem was written in the late 1980s on my last trip to the village before I stayed away from returning to Buk’nholi and Jonkwinumbo hamlets.

Boram Bay, Wewak East Sepik Province 2019

What a return home experience it had been with memories and spaces I left opening up into another world. After travelling all over the world here I am return to the land where my umbilical cord lies buried.