Towards a New Oceania

Abstract

These islands rising from wave’s edge —

blue myth brooding in orchid,

fern and banyan, fearful gods

awaiting birth from blood clot

into stone image and chant —

to bind their wounds, bury

their journey’s dead, as I

watched from shadow root, ready

for birth generations after …

(from ‘Inside us the Dead’)

I belong to Oceania — or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile portion of it — and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination. A detached objective analysis I will leave to the sociologist and all the other -ologists who have plagued Oceania since she captivated the imagination of the papalagi, or the white man in his quest for El Dorado, a Southern Continent, and the Noble Savage in a tropical Eden. Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment will not allow me to confine myself to so narrow a vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope — if not to contain her — to grasp some of her shape, plumage and pain.