Papua New Guinea

Editors Robert Shapard and Frank Stewart.
Guest Editors Darlaine Māhealani Dudoit and David M. Roskies.

The spring 1990 issue features new fiction, poetry and oral narratives from Papua New Guinea, brought together by two guest editors: Darlaine Māhealani Dudoit and David M. Roskies. With more than 800 languages, the literature and oral traditions of Papua New Guinea are more than we could hope to represent comprehensively. Instead, we have made selections, primarily in English, which we think invite comparison with American writing, particularly with our offering of American fiction.

American social, political, and philosophical issues are embraced in this issue in the fiction of Ian Macmillan and the satire of Ursule Molinaro, and in the remarkable, true tale of Reverend Thich Thong Hai, interviewed by Perle Besserman. Also in this issue are war stories by Tim O’Brien, a chapbook titled Butcher Scraps by Faye Kicknosway, poetry by Cole Swensen and Norman Dubie, as well as new work by poets from Hawai‘i and from across America.

The art consists of a portfolio of Hawai‘i photographs by New Englander David Ulrich, who remarks on his vision of the Hawaiian islands in “Hawai‘i: Landscape of Transformation.”

About the editors: David M. Roskies currently heads the Department of Language and Literature at the University of Papua New Guinea.

Darlaine Māhealani MuiLan Dudoit is the managing editor of MĀNOA. Born and raised in Hawai’i, she is of Chinese-Hawaiian-English-Irish-Portuguese-French ancestry.

Extracts

“When Okonkwo committed suicide
We refused to touch the body
That was impure. Left it to
The Vultures and Crows
Carry on with the Pacification Rites,
And we drove on to the hills of Taworakawa
And Rewai, where sidelong lofty glances
Were cast at the now emptied fields,
And at men that groped along the veins of
Rivers that flow back” 
—from “Pacification Rites” by Russell Soaba

“Although the mad governor of South Merdeka had been dead for over 40 years—he had hanged himself when he was finally apprehended; hanging allegedly tenderized the flesh; his tenderized corpse had been fed to the flesh-eating animals in the South Merdeka zoo, in mock application of his rehabilitation program—the stigma of cannibalism continued to brand his state, & all those who lived there. Or came from there. Especially if they were old enough to have voted him into office, & to have lived during the decade & a half when he passed the legislation that forced people to ‘Eat Their Own.’” 
—from “Merdeka Forever” by Ursule Molinaro

200 pp., spring 1990 (2:1), $20
ISSN 1045-7909
JSTOR