Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

  A recent publication Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change included a chapter written by John C. Ryan, entitled "Islands Within Islands: Climate Change and the Deep Time Narratives of the Southern Beech. Ryan cited two of my poetry collection: 1) Lomo'ha I am in Spirit's Voices I Call (1991) and Hembemba: Rivers of the Forest (2000). I enjoyed the analysis, which I share here on my blog:  

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