The Ogre!

Credit:  Ondobondo magazine

I learnt about the ogre in my course on Oral Literature and Traditions under the tutelage of the venerable Indian scholar, Prithvindra Chakravarti.  

I was introduced to the ogre killing child story that is prevalent in many Melanesian societies of the southwestern Pacific, particularly in the western and northern regions and the Massim district of PNG, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, Tanna in Vanuatu, and Malaita. It is absent in Fiji and New Caldonia. 

 

The two well documented versions are from Mekeo and Buka. In the Buka version the monster Burjangio is a spirit pig who arrives in a village bringing with it massive earthquakes that destroy a village.

 

The word “ogre” has its first use in the French language, through the French writer, Charles Perrault, in 1697. Charles Perrault, (1628–1703), French writer is remembered for his Mother Goose Tales 

 (1697), containing such fairy tales as ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Puss in Boots’, and ‘Cinderella’. It has, since then found its currency in contemporary usage, especially in folklore to mean a man eating giant or cruel /terrifying person. 

 

An extended meaning refers to powerful forces and dominant agencies causing damages to the way the things are in their natural state. 

 

In later years as a literary scholar I became fascinated with the ogre-killing-child story as a thematic structure. It may have resonated with my own childhood experiences or because of the historical experiences of being born in a colonial environment and making a transition into the Independence era. 

 

Perhaps it was the fascination with the struggle against a common fore and the sweet victory over it? 

 

I investigated it as a structure of feeling in Indigenous literary criticism, especially in my essay “Unwriting Oceania: Repositioning of the Pacific Writer Scholars within a Folk Narrative Space” published in New Literary History 31: 3 (2000): 599-613.

 

If the ogre remained in the stories and folklore I would not be writing this piece. 

 

The ogre has escaped the fables and folklore into our everyday lives. It has  grown into a monstrous beast sucking up the energy and sources of our livelihood. It has become a menacing presence in our place of work and play. It has outgrown itself, replacing good for bad, respect for distaste, and threatening to swallow up all the children in our society. We were never prepared for the ruin that the ogre has brought into our midst.

 

We are left vulnerable to this ogre that escaped our oral literature and traditions to become manifest as a real living concrete thing. All we worked hard for and lived for are at stake before this man eating giant.

 

I fear the future of our children is in peril. No one is brave enough or skilled enough to take down the ogre. It has outgrown itself to a menacing giant beast of destruction. 

 

It has taken over even the sacred places of our ancestors. It no longer has any competitors. It has taken up scales, and grown tusks that outgrown its natural features. It pretends to sleep in silence, but on the smell of humans it comes alive and metamorphose into a beast of destruction.

 

The fences are no longer there to keep it out. All fence keepers have succumbed to the roar of this giant ogre. 

 

The onslaught and impending destruction from this beast with different names is no fantasy. Whatever its names are we know it leaves nothing safe on its path. Only destruction after destruction. 

 

I have to rethink our description of the ogre. We are no longer dealing with the ogre as a concept but as a manifested ball of energy that is gaining momentum in its destructive power. 

 

The ogre is no longer in our stories. It has escaped the fables and legends of our fore fathers. It is with us, watching us, seizing every opportunity it can to dart its venom of spite and melancholy with the aim of complete dominance and destruction.

 

Our incantations to take down this ogre seems powerless. 

 

Be warned that the  ogre spares no one!