Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

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, arriv...

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...