"Ancient banyans, flying foxes and white ginger": five Pacific women writers

Abstract

This thesis investigates the work of five significant 'first generation' Pacific Islands women poets writing in English in the later decades of the twentieth century: Jully Makini (Solomon Islands), Grace Mera Molisa (Vanuatu), Haunani-Kay Trask (Hawai'i), Konai Helu Thaman (Tonga), and Momoe Malietoa Von Reiche (Samoa). The Introduction, consisting of two chapters, outlines the issues involved in approaching the imaginative work of Pacific Islands writers and offers a three-stage historical account of the development of Pacific literature written in English. Part One, in three chapters, provides a detailed exploration of the contexts – theoretical, political, cultural and aesthetic - which, it argues, are essential to an inward understanding of Pacific women's writing. Part One includes discussion of the relevance of Pacific at generally, and of the tradition of orature, and engages throughout with Western colonialist misrepresentations of Pacific Islands creativity while offering a detailed account of emergent indigenous readings of art and literature. It also focuses on the relevance of feminist approaches to Pacific Islands women's writing, and (drawing on ‘black' women's writing and theorizing elsewhere, in which race and gender are convergent, inseparable issues) argues the need for an 'indigenised' feminism which gives full weight to the culturally specific history and experience of women in the Pacific. Part Two, consisting of seven chapters, offers detailed readings of the lives and poetry of the five selected women poets. These chapters include close readings of particular poems, aiming to demonstrate the kinds of complexity and richness which contextual approaches make possible, as well as offering detailed accounts of the ways in which the careers of each poet engage with the particular social, political and historical experiences of their countries, providing unique insights. These discussions give priority to the authors' own voices, from personal interviews, and from other writings in which they express their views about their aims and their understandings of the indigenous worlds they inhabit. Particular emphasis is placed, in this first full scale investigation of Pacific women's poetry, on the central importance of distinctive, indigenous, organising metaphors in the work of each poet, which carry complex political and personal meanings. These metaphors not only provide windows into what is culturally unique in each writer's achievement, but indicate the experiences they share with their fellow women writers throughout the pacific.