Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice ed. by Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice ed. by Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal Alexander Mawyer (bio) Jack Corbett and Brij V. Lal, editors. Political Life Writing in the Pacific: Reflections on Practice. Australia National UP, 2015, xi + 167 pp. ISBN 978-1925022605, AUS $38.00. The common quip that all politics are local is surely as true across Oceania's lifeworlds as elsewhere. Political phenomena occur in and through the lives of particular persons in the crispness of their heres and nows. For those not present to places and moments in which something emerged and became impactful, much of the political evanesces into the past and out of sight, below the threshold of awareness, scarcely available for reflection. This oversight can be as true for the architectonic developments of major political events as for the modest ebb and flow of experiences of power in the quick of the everyday. Moreover, given the limits of memory and the erosions of passing time, even key and keen observers to relatively recent histories can find that important moments, including ones in which they participated, have taken on an uncanny quality as having happened elsewhere and elsewhen. Even one's own lived experiences are not always easy to summon into view with time's passing, if they ever were. Resulting from a 2012 workshop held at the Australia National University on the need to address evident gaps in political life writing across Pacific Islands states and territories, Political Life Writing in the Pacific is an important follow up to the 2008 publication Telling Pacific Lives: Prisms of Process, also coedited by Lal and published by ANU Press. Together the two volumes carve out a remarkable, complementary discussion of authorship, voice, the function and politics of political writing, currents in social memory in Oceania's contexts, the never-pure of politics (including politics of liberation, empowerment, and cultural vitalization), and the challenges of embracing or resisting hagiography of key figures in Pacific pasts. Like the earlier volume, Political Life Writing in the Pacific makes a notable contribution in its reminder of the transience and ephemerality of individual lives and the ebb and flow of power in private and domestic settings, in broad public circulation, and in the charged institutions and halls of state. Virtually all of the individual chapters collected here contribute directly to Chris Ballard's poignant call for active cultivation of "oceanic historicities," perceiving and articulating the actualities of the historical past through ways of knowing and being rooted [End Page 687] in Pacific Islands communities. As the contributors note in twelve uneven but universally stimulating chapters, in a region crosscut by colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial political histories—across thousands of islands and a complex arena of national and state boundaries—writings about global and regional powers often overshadow the political histories of greater and lesser actors across Pacific Island worlds. Addressing the silences around Oceanian political actors remains a pressing need. That silence sometimes borders on erasure may be especially true for political figures not as visible as heads of state, fathers of nations, or leaders of revolutionary or independence movements. At the same time, across many Pacific Island contexts, even key figures and historical titans are, for whatever reasons, still not well attended to by biographers or other observers. And because of the passing of senior generations, the life stories behind the actions and decisions of the region's political actors during the second half of the tumultuous twentieth century are at risk of being lost. As with many edited collections, there are surely several ways to read with and against the grain of the individual contributions. For me, the pieces roughly sorted into four interleaved but ultimately distinct conversations. Strongly engaged with currents visible in Jack Corbett's excellent introduction "Practising Political Life Writing in the Pacific," which would serve scholars, political actors, or others thinking of throwing their hat into the life writing ring as a wildly productive starting point, are Christopher Chevalier's "Understanding Solomon," Brij V. Lal's "'End of a Phase of History,'" Deryck Scarr's "Random Thoughts of an Occasional Practitioner," and Nicole Haley's "Writing Influential Lives." These...