Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

An essay that has been well sought after and downloaded is the essay "Reconstituting Oceanic Folktales", published in the University of Hawaii online publication: Scholarspace. It is one of those rare essays I have written and published as an online publication. I include excerpt from the essay here. Indigenous communities in Oceania have always used folktales to explain their social, psychological, political, and cultural environment. This tradition continues today in the cultural productions of many Pacific writers, artists, and filmmakers. Their “texts” are often saturated with social and political discourses that challenge ideology, tradition, and power. I explore how scholars in various discursive traditions have used folktales as structures for viewing culture, society and events, and I do so in order to re-view folktales within an indigenous cultural production in Oceania. Folktales as Social Cultural Texts   If we are to see folktales as “text” then we

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