Making Beginnings: Johnny Frisbie and Pacific Literature

Abstract

the American civil rights movement. Frequently quoted examples from Papua New Guinea are Vincent Eri's novel The Crocodile (1970) and the long poem Reluctant Flame by John Kasaipwalova (1971).' There was, however, a longer tradition of literacy among the earlier colonized regions of Polynesia. In Tahiti, the language was transcribed and used on royal and missionary printing presses from 1817.2 Tongans were reading statutes, bibles, textbooks, and newspapers in their own tongue by the 1870s.3 David Malo published his collection of Hawaiian traditions Mo'olelo Hawai'i in 1869.4 Nor was this an entirely top down cultural change: Maori carried out family, legal, political, and commercial business in written vernacular before state schooling assimilated everyone to English; Hawaiians had their own newspapers with active letters sections, and we have the 1833-1896 record of Ta'unga's travels from his correspondence with the missionary home base in Rarotonga.5 Indigenous textual production was, however, overshadowed by Western knowledge, modernizing pragmatism, and puritan Christianity. Literature was aligned with the pagan, the foreign, and the passe, so that even as David Malo sought to preserve stories and cultural practices, his material was packaged as historical information rather than literature. Pacific cultural expression, under the impact of print literacy, was defined largely as oppositional oral tradition.6 From within the dominant colonized perspective it was something to be eradicated or something that was not there at all. Such an attitude was strongly reinforced by white writing about the Pacific. For a start, serious outsider study of the Pacific was predominantly cast in a scientific rather than a cultural mode. Moreover, though Western human sciences recognized the existence of other cultures by studying them, they treated them as mere raw material to be discovered, analyzed, and extracted for the enrichment of real intellectual activity.