MATAKIRA

                                                                 

That day, when you remembered
and ran all the way back
to tell me, we both heard
the crack, and your eyes shone
as you slid down the wall to sit
still at the doorway; and the word
never came out of your mouth. The night
before, Tonua, my love, the dance was good:
how our knees bent and your hair flew

The origin of Malanggan

The woman Kenibu, returning to her village of Lawatbura from the gardens on a late afternoon, was caught unawares by a sudden downpour.

The storm was heavy and visibility to her was poor beyond a metre or so. She sought shelter from the darkening rain under a clump of banana trees. The wait for the rain to stop took a while and soon Kenibu grew tired and drowsy. Within moments she fell asleep.

What Kenibu saw in that involuntary but necessary slumber would affect the entire New Ireland and immediate island land masses for centuries on end. The spirit Wowora had appeared to Kenibu then and gave her all the instructions she would pass on to her people about the significance of what is now known as the sacred Malanggan feast.

These were the instructions given Kenibu by Wowora, the female spirit.

“You will give this information to the men of your village. The images you are going to see now are called malanggans. This image here is to be called tantanua and has to be painted brown from the ginger mix, black from charcoal, white from lime and yellow from the special ginger and fibres of coconut husk. For the eyes use a certain part of a shell. This other image is a malanggan sculpture. That one is the carving of a canoe of the dead. The others here are different types of carvings that are related to different occasions of the malanggan feast.”

And Wowora, the spirit woman, continued:

“Malanggan relates to the dead; to free the dead from your world in order to depart happily to live in another world, the world of the dead. The feast must be held in the following sequences: after the burial the first feast is to be held to farewell the deceased; twelve to eighteen months later another feast called fuguva will be held to burn the dead person’s personal belongings and gardens; and when the soil from his grave has flattened from its original mound observe the final feast of celebrations with songs and dances.”

Concluded Wowora, “The songs and their accompaniment on the bamboo slit gong should resemble the rain beating on the banana leaves sheltering the old woman.”

And then Kenibu woke up. The rain had ceased and the evening looked as pleasant as ever. But then she found herself asking why me, I’m only a woman. She went nevertheless and related all that she had learnt from Wowora the spirit woman to her minmin (sister or female mentor) after which she went on home and hanged herself.

The minmin, following her advice, carried out the first malanggan feast in Kenibu’s honour.

Noah Kagai is the one responsible for that tale on Wowora, the origin of the Malanggan feast. He had gathered together a collection of myths and legends from New Ireland and neighboring little islands and compiled these into a lovely little volume of 109 or so pages. A good number come from the informants he had interviewed or recorded over the years. Contributions are therefore various but collectively New Ireland in origin. The book covers a variety of subject matter, ranging from creation and origin stories a part of which we have glimpsed above to modern day fables of man’s desire to explain and know the environment that surrounds him.

This little booklet doesn’t just cover the mortuary feasts known as the malanggans, but other aspects of New Ireland culture and languages as well. In a way it poses as an ambitious looking literacy enterprise but an important one; important in the sense that its author and compiler/editor proposes to produce more for Papua New Guinea audiences. As storyboard writes this he is aware of five more volumes in the pipeline. And these we must look forward to.

Meantime, this little volume which Noah Kagai calls “Wowora, Origin of Malanggan – Series 1”, already contains a rich storehouse of oral literature with so many little stories. A couple working late in the gardens decides to spend the night at the garden house only to learn during the night that the taro plants can actually communicate with each other. That story should give us clues to why we must respect our flora and fauna. An inquisitive pest of a villager wanting to know how a neighbor does his fishing successfully learns that a good way to catch a lot of fish is to drink a whole lake up. A man who consistently continues to beat his wife up soon learns from the rest of the community what the word “shame” means. Then there are those mysterious women who cleverly cast spells on unsuspecting young men in order to lavish upon the joys of family adventure just to release them some years later in order to come to their own senses without any harm meant and so on.

Such lovely stories one and all. Storyboard’s favorite is the one about two little brothers who live with their grandparents who themselves have no children of their own. Every day the two brothers go out to work the gardens following their grandmother’s instruction. Their grandfather follows them but instead of working with them lazes away in the cool of the bamboo groves only to come home early, lie to his wife that he toiled while the boys loafed and that way gets the best evening meal while the two go without. The gardens mature, the family is blessed enormously. And still the old man lies, gets the best food. The grandmother eventually finds out the truth for herself but in the process of granting the boys retributive justice notices the boys have left never to be heard of again.

Wowora: Origin of Malanggan by Noah Kagai is an important publication thanks not only to Noah himself but to the New Ireland Provincial Government who had taken up the duty of meeting the print costs. For once the Government of Papua New Guinea, either at the national or provincial level, is recognizing the need there is to properly fund such important cultural programs. We expect the other provincial government authorities throughout the country to do the same. This is a long term exercise, it is good for us, and it must be supported at all costs.

In all, the important aspect of this New Ireland publication is the malanggan feast. All attributes to it go to women. Yet ironically and as Noah Kagai points out, “There are similarities with the myths of Wowora, Origin of Malanggan to the Origin of Tubuan: their origins, reasons and thoughts were discovered by women. Today, the Tantanua singsings, carvings, buai singsings and Tubuans are rituals observed by men as sole custodians and their complexities are completely sacred and are secluded from outsiders and women.”

The publication is available at the UPNG Bookshop.

They do not worry

                 Look at the birds flying around:

they do not sew seeds, gather a harvest

                                                                   
and put it in barns;

yet your Father in heaven takes care of them!

                                                   
                        Matthew 6:26 

Too much sugar and alcohol

                                                             

Talk about having “the poetic licence to write”.

For writers that slogan can lead to a lot of trouble in a lifetime.

Those troubles begin with success stories and develop into creating new rules and laws for oneself and then, on the pretext of avoiding the paparazzi, succumbing finally to the dismal after effects of severe self-imposed seclusion or exile if not self-inflicted pangs of sugar and alcohol. 

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But that is precisely what every aspiring writer wants to become, eventually.

Give a Papua New Guinea writer a million US dollars in prize money and what do we have? A very lonely individual who’s escaped God knows what in his home country and he’s in Europe or South America somewhere having forgotten all about his tribes and clans and relatives.

Turn the coin and you are looking at the life of a celebrity in a larger culture like the US, for example. Notice how striking the similarities are. The equation remains as simple as can be: first, the desire to write; second, the will to become famous, rich and secure; and finally, the inevitable downhill regress.

Question to ask now is: “Is Papua New Guinea really free of these pitfalls that come to us from other cultures?” Thank God not one single Papua New Guinean writer has become a millionaire yet.  If that happened our entire perspective of the world outside would be different.

But going through that mathematical equation again points to certain factors that we must be aware of as writers.

First, there is the general rule of having “the poetic licence to write.” This means, simply, that we can break as many rules as we like in order to write, publish and become rich and famous. We cannot do so by following each rule in writing step by step. That can prove time-consuming for some.

But the enormous pitfall to this rushes up suddenly to meet us the moment we start breaking rules. In poetry, for example, we see this uncanny habit as not sticking to the rules of rhyme, rhythm and precision. Each line of poetry ought to be carefully planned and executed so that you could put those same words into song and sing them quite easily. Breaking rules denotes writing what is regarded as “free verse” or “free style.” Alleluia, that’s where some of the troubles begin. And off we go, breaking as many rules as we can, and who cares what professor so and so in English says about grammar. The important thing is that we see our names in print, we become well known, and of course we have a fat bank account. Alleluia again, because we give ourselves that “poetic licence” to do so.

The pitfall to this is the amount of material reward we get.

And the worst consequence of it all is when we break rules in order to create new ones for ourselves. We become the master of our own craft. And we can remain on top of the world for as long as we take great care of ourselves physically. Creating own rules denotes inventing new ethics and morals and a writer has the talent and ability to do that. What the society does is willingly or otherwise follow the whims of that writer.

And then we look at the second facet of this idea of breaking rules and creating new ones. Here, we look closely at what fame and fortune can do to us. The more followers we have the more money there is added as profit to our sense of creativity. So we celebrate. And in the process of celebrating we wake up one morning to discover that we have consumed too much. Too much sugar and alcohol? Exactly our point here.

The third and final facet of all this is the decline to nonentity and total oblivion. If we have not been careful with our lives, our talents and successes, our wealth and moment of fame, then the fall from grace becomes inevitable. Self-doubt, lack of acknowledgement, belief and trust in a deity of individual choice that redeems, forgives and saves – these become the order of our day.

Storyboard sometimes feels saddened by events that surround this last point. We can, as writers, become so famous and rich that nothing else besides may matter. We may command others to do things to our bidding. And when we do someone a bad turn there is no need to apologize. We make ourselves become invincible that way. And invincible things often turn out to be self-destructive; so much so there is no turning back. He who pays calls the tune, goes the old proverb. So we call the tune, we party, we drink and make ourselves merry. Too much sugar and alcohol, eh? We succumb to our own downfall at will.

There is, however, a way out of this. And that is when we regard our own moments of creativity seriously. All our sense of creativity is awe-inspired, and it comes not from within but from outside. We are no longer the custodians of our own creativity. We become vessels through which some external power needs to express itself. And if we take all our writing as such in totality then it is true we are safe.

A writer in society is like a captain of a sailing vessel. He must consciously be aware of how to sail that ship despite rough waters. Last week we read about the plight of those on mv Rabaul Queen. Storyboard could not help associating that experience with his own life, which had been unsparingly cruel and punishing, along with the quieter, calmer experiences of those Anglicans of long ago who sailed these same waters where the disaster struck.

Bishop David Hand, in his autobiography, Modawa, wrote about his own experience on this particular stretch of water.

“...in my trawler St Lawrence, which Bishop Strong had spared for me through the Papuan mission, we took two days and two nights to do the normally 13-hour run from Arawe to Dregerhafen in March in a mountainous sea with visibility nil. Everybody aboard was flat out except my magnificent and dependable Stan Wesley, our skipper, who held the wheel himself for almost all the way. As we cruised into the calm water of Dreger Harbour I said, “God bless you, Stan. Were you frightened?” And he said, “No, Father Bishop. I had committed the boat into the hands of God and his holy angels, so I knew all would be well.”

The southerly drift of the Solomon Sea rebounds from East Cape and the Rabaraba/Cape Vogel Basin causing a formidable apex just off the coast of northern Momase. One has to read the anger of the waves with humility there in order to surf through. Bishop David’s skipper was from the Wereura Rabaraba area where the sea is quite often deep blue and serene looking, but perilously vicious in February and March.

Some of the beautiful things

A couple at the Waigani campus reading Dinaw Mengestu's novel, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears".

“Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears, where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”

Those lines come from Dante’s Inferno. A part of those the Ethiopian writer, Dinaw Mengestu, uses to compose a beautiful novel there is about forced migrations of a group or groups of humanity from one end of the globe to the other. “The beautiful things that heaven bears” therefore becomes the title of that novel.

It is a good novel in that it far surpasses the sentiments of Diaspora in third world literature, albeit post and neo-colonial literature. The setting then becomes the force of reckoning in modern day fiction of any genre, any class or description. Washington, DC, then, of all places, becomes the setting of this novel. And it is well that it should be, for out of such experiences one never knows, the next president of the United States could be a Papua New Guinean.

Three Africans, forced out of their respective countries through revolutions and dictatorships, find themselves in Washington, DC, trying to make do with whatever it is that is left of their lives. Yet each day to them is like a journey undertaken by the persona in Dante’s classic, Inferno – which is tantamount to saying, yeah, I been there, but look again in the other direction and tell me what you see.

Of course, the allusion there should not imply that America is such a beautiful place to be. As one of the characters of the novel says, “This country is like a little bastard child. You can’t be angry when it doesn’t give you what you want.” Thenceforth, their new country is viewed as a place of choicelessness where “you have to praise it when it comes close, otherwise it’ll turn around and bite you in the ass.”

So the three Africans, Kenneth the Kenyan, Sepha Stephanos the Ethiopian (and the protagonist/narrator of the novel) and Joseph or Joe the Congo, set about rebuilding their lives as “children of the revolution” involuntarily marooned in America. They have to make America their home and that is what they all set out to do.

Kenneth becomes a successful used car dealer, Joe the Congo retains his old job as a waiter at a posh hotel spot where he is audience to the inner workings of government through several state dinners or lunches followed by leftover meals and drinks to take home at the end of day, and Sepha Stephanos decides to set up a grocery store at a convenient central spot known as General Logan’s Circle. It is at this grocery shop that the three meet some evenings to share nostalgic sentiments about their sad continent, strewn with decades of sporadic dictatorship regimes that seem endless and chaotic.

Life goes on as most good novels can allow, the narrative becoming all the more grandeur in description and sentiment until what we a looking at is a masterpiece so well planned and executed. Not only is Dante mentioned in this novel but other names as well such as Dostoyevsky, Emerson, Tocqueville and Dickinson.

In addition to these three Africans there are characters such as Judith and her biracial daughter Naomi who move in to Stephanos’ neighbourhood to claim a rundown mansion and turn into a Great Gatsby looking castle. It is Judith and her daughter Naomi who bring a lot of changes to an otherwise dismal middle-aged life of Stephanos. A kind of relationship develops there and for a moment we tend to see some promises of enlightenment, intellectual or otherwise, for all parties concerned. But it is a good kind of relationship eventually. Stephanos in teaching Naomi to read books, for example, surprises himself in getting into the inner psychology of The Brothers Karamazov deliberately borrowed from a local library by the eleven year-old Naomi. The mother, herself the estranged wife of a black professor, shrugs the deal off like a wounded matador and that sort of strengthens the relationship a bit.

When the other two Africans learn of their continental brother’s involvement with a white woman and her daughter all sorts of racial politics spring up. But our protagonist seems to keep everything under his control due to his background of a good middle class New England education (for he did migrate to America when he was sixteen). Towards the end of the novel we do learn one thing: that this is what good contemporary works of fiction should be.

The climax of the novel comes at around Christmas time. The festive mood is captivating. Everyone wants to buy presents for everyone and everyone else. Stephanos decides to close shop early and sends Naomi away from their afternoon reading lessons with a note to Judith saying he has a few surprises for them by dinner time.

So off goes our protagonist on a Christmas shopping spree with whatever was earned that day from the till. His list included a journal for Naomi, a perfume for his mum including a shirt for his little brother in Ethiopia and a precious rare old hardcover copy of Dickinson’s poetry for Judith. By fall of evening when he returns to start wrapping up the gifts Stephanos finds a note on the porch which reads: “Dear Sepha, Thank you for the letter. It was very nice of you to think of us. Unfortunately, Naomi and I are leaving early this evening to spend the holiday with my sister and her family in Connecticut. I’m sure we will see you again shortly after we return. I hope you have a merry Christmas. I’m sorry. Best, JM.”

Rather than let his heart sink, Stephanos sets about measuring and cutting the gift wrapping paper for the journal, shirt, rare book and perfume. Then there’s the problem of getting the measurements right, or wrong, some sizes too big, others too small, goodness me, this wouldn’t make a good sight for Kenneth and Joseph the Congo, eh? In the end our protagonist gives up, but not without some moment of consolation, at least. A prostitute drops by and gets shooed away with the perfume, despite her complaints that perfumes give her a headache. “That’s okay. Just give it to someone you know.” The shirt (brother’s gift) and Emily Dickinson (now mum’s gift) finally reach their destination in Ethiopia, to which response mum simply sighs of that famous existential New England poetry: “Betam asazinya. It is sad. But it’s wonderful at the same time.”

This article has been specially written for those who might not have had a good Christmas and New Year break due to, like in Port Moresby for example, the cruel weather which denied a lot of us a good afternoon barbeque out in the sun with family and friends. It is also dedicated to those who are anxious to put everything else behind them and move on. The novel is deep. “But it’s wonderful at the same time.”

Redeeming poetry

One of the valuable aspects of poetry is its ability to redeem. Then there are other qualities to it as well; such as its ability to uncover truth in as gentle a manner as possible so that the end result of it all comes to the human senses when it serves its ultimate purpose of healing a society. Poetry is meant to unravel, to redeem and to heal – not the other way around.

But there is something else about poetry that makes it appear so dangerously simple looking – indeed so simple looking that we feel we can easily explain it. We use the adverb “dangerously” here because the moment we explain poetry, the moment we feel we have understood that poetry, we have unknowingly committed ourselves to an error in judgement. Our version of a poem might not mean the intended message of its author.

Poetry is neither didactic nor explanatory. It remains as it is. And it is meant to be overly complex and mysterious. Only the eye of the beholder knows it essence as beauty, as truth. Poetry is, therefore, felt and known – not explained or taught.

The art of feeling and knowing poetry can best be likened to attending a ceremony when young people are in the process of being graduated at their respective schools. In some foreign schools, for example, such ceremonies are read out in Latin. Of course no one knows what is being read then, but the most important thing is going through such a ceremony with a feeling of trepidation. So much anxiety is involved here; but again so much anticipation.

Then, of course, the hour of feeling and knowing arrives.  

President Ruth Simmons. Her popularity reached far beyond the shores of New England and extended as far as Papua New Guinea, especially in the world of academia.

Ruth Simmons, first African-American President of an Ivy League school (Brown University, Rhode Island, USA) does that very well comes commencement (or graduation) around June of each year at that school. After having read parts of the ceremony in Latin she leans over at her graduating youngsters and beams: “In case you are curious about what just happened, I’ve awarded you your degree.” And so the hats and hoods fly, the cloaks flutter, hugs abound, much rolling over and over and drumming and dancing upon the college green. They know what it was they were working so hard for the previous four years and they can feel it. Thus, the sacred essence of feeling and knowing poetry.

It is true poetry deals exclusively with human emotions. “Poetry is a spontaneous flow of powerful feeling,” declares one master of poetry. “Poetry is a science of words,” says another. And again, another, “Poetry is an imitation of reality.” But whatever it does, finally, declares quite another, there must be a certain “objective correlative” about it. So in essence there is always a reason that enables a person to write poetry.

The above are the basics of what are considered good poetry. Then there are the instances of bad writing such as when good poetry itself begins taking another direction. Such poetries fall under so many categories, but we can limit them here to protest, satire, caricatures and lampoons.

All these still constitute poetry but the sad aspect of them is that they last only in so far as the successive generations remember them. For example, the eternal poetic utterance: “Death, where is thy sting.” While many of us would associate that with Shakespeare the phrase actually comes from the Bible. Or, to look at another example, “to be or not to be, that is the question.” That poetic utterance, though first spoken some 700 hundred years ago, is still being used today. Question: Do we know what it means? Answer: We don’t have to. And that is what poetry really is, or ought to be.

But the poetry that seeks to teach, to explain, to reprimand, to rebuke or to even express a disappointment is hardly remembered by successive generations. That type of poetry is likely to suffer the severe scrutiny of an attentive literary critic. This is the guy who finally tells us if our writing is good or bad. And if we are wise we must believe him.

Now there have been so many poems appearing in the writers’ forum, but it is not storyboard’s business to accredit and assess them as poetry – as such observations usually come by upon invitation of each of the contributors to the forum. But there is one poem we would like to critique here, for just the reason of its pretentious stance of looking great. That poem is View of the Day by Deborah Kayuwa, represented as follows:

She came down to the beach

When they told her

And saw the familiar figure

Sitting still, looking out

To sea and the distant horizon

A moment of hesitation

Then the sure-footed steps towards

The figure; she sat down beside him

And took the half-smoked cigarette

From his fingers and smoked with him

The effect of nicotine helping a little

Her sisters came and placed thumbs

Over his eyes to shut them

For this had been the man who kept her

Vigilant 24 hours a day to answer

All her children’s needs, yet she

Could not take him into her family

She replaced the cigarette in his fingers

Fumes rising and sailing by

As they led her away, from the ocean

 And the motionless figure

For a moment she thought

She would pause, look back

But walked on

Although the poem may look classical it lacks depth in the sense that both poet and persona do not correspond perfectly as truthful sounding entities. On the part of the poet one suspects a member of a certain class in society not happy with his/her upbringing, suddenly caught up in some personal liaison he/she cannot get out of easily and that the only moment of liberation foreseen is re-assimilation. On the part of the persona, well, well, could it be possible that one might be in love with something that is dead? How can a dead man smoke and watch the long expanse of sea before him for a long time. But we can only admire the persona’s decision to walk away from the beach scene. Final evaluation? According to storyboard this is not at all a good poem. The author needs to enrol in more of Soaba’s literature classes.