The Best Australian Essays 2015 (22 page)

Well into this new century the pygmy and the naked tribesman still make their appearance in Australian fiction, and Highland girls, though no longer dressed in grass skirts, are as prey to the desires and fantasies of young white men as the fictional girls of the exotic south seas were nearly a hundred years ago. This despite the great post-colonial novels of world literature – of which
Visitants
is one. It was a weird disjuncture I observed between the acute awareness of academia and the remarkable obliviousness (it seemed to me) among our few novelists who ventured into PNG territory, sometimes without even going there, or, if they'd been there before, without returning. When a reason was given, it was that it was ‘too dangerous'; that, or the wish to leave the imagination unencumbered as if there was something about Papua New Guinea that despite everything that had happened, could still offer a blank canvas to the outsider writer.

Even the colonial novelist Beatrice Grimshaw, who did at least live in Papua for many years, complained of journalists who came up to Port Moresby, found a ‘cannibal queen' within a mile of Government House, exchanged her story for a twist of tobacco, and caught the next boat home.

The persistence of the uninformed Australian imagination might have surprised me, but it didn't surprise Regis Stella, the writer and critic teaching in the literature department of the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). When I went through Moresby, on subsequent visits after my return in 2004, I'd see him and his colleagues, now my friends, Russell Soaba and Steven Winduo. At first, on my returns, our conversations were not always easy. Regis, a stern critic, was suspicious, and why would he not be, this white woman reappearing after all these years, and with all the resources of an Australian research grant and a publisher, wanting to write about a time that had formed her, while they struggled with meagre resources to produce a literary magazine and publish small anthologies with no grants, no editors, no publishing industry, few bookshops. It would be a while before I felt he could consider me a colleague. He was writing
Imagining the Other
then – it was published in 2007, just five years before he died, much too young, at the beginning of 2012. In it, he argued that the first task of the post-colonial indigenous writer was to understand and refuse the projections that have accumulated over the history not only of colonial, but also – too often – of post-colonial fiction and memoir. It was a distorting lens through which Papua New Guineans had come to see themselves, a distorting lens that perpetuated the misconceptions of others. He was not about to let me forget that ‘we' outsider writers, especially of fiction, too often place ourselves as the point of reference to the known, unquestioning modern, leaving the equally unquestioned residues of the unknown and unknowable non-modern to the Papua New Guinean, especially those living in villages, or other situations ‘we' do not recognise as modern. The uninformed imagination was a habit of mind, Regis pointed out, that was not confined to Australia's writers.

He and Steven Winduo were part of the tiny group of second-generation writers; if anyone knows it's tough, they do. PNG ‘has forgotten its early writers', Winduo has written in a recent essay.
³
Those one-time student writers had moved on to bigger and better things, and once in government, literature was not among their priorities. Perhaps they remembered how those student plays could be used
against
. Writing and publishing was not an easy path in the years after Independence, and certainly not profitable. Which was why, to Regis, Steven and Russell, it was all the more important that the flame be kept alive. A flame
against
the corruptions and inequities we hear a great deal about; a flame
around, through
, and
out from
the hard work and successes we don't hear about: the conservation workers and environmental lawyers; the children's libraries; adult literacy and water collection projects; the work that is containing the spread of HIV.

There was a role, I could see, for
alongside
, and it's not as if there wasn't rich material. But I was stuck somewhere between the failings of a method that had once served me well and the daunting land of fiction I was creeping towards. It's a rigorous form, the novel, far from easy, and there are those who question the relevance for the Pacific of a European form in which Western ideas of subjectivity are deeply imbricated. Regis preferred the short story and the polemic as better suited to Melanesian forms of oral storytelling and rhetoric. But for Steve the novel is a flexible form, with its own language; look what they've done with it in Africa, in South America, in Samoa. Why shouldn't the novel make the transition into Melanesia, isn't it part of the inheritance of world literature? Hadn't I heard of hybridity? And besides, he'd say, look at Russell Soaba, who'd be sitting there, inscrutable and benign, the one writer from those early days who has written his way through the intervening years, and is writing still. I salute him. His novels
Wanpis
and
Maiba
, two great post-Independence novels, should be on every post-colonial literature course in this country, but they are not even published here. Steve and Regis, fine writers both, have published out of Hawaii or University of South Pacific. Or they publish themselves. Australian publishers have long since lost interest in fiction from PNG. It doesn't sell, my publisher told me when I told her I wanted to write the book that would become
The Mountain
.

‘Russell Soaba often reminds me,' Winduo says, ‘that the life of a Papua New Guinean writer is a difficult one because the society itself is a difficult one.'

By the time Dapene and Pauline visited Sydney in 2009 all I had was a shaky draft of a book without a title that was still teetering somewhere between an insistence that was autobiographical and a hope that was not yet fiction. What I was doing with this book didn't strike me then as so different from anything else I'd written. Hadn't I always worked in that contested zone between the fictive, the autobiographical and the historical? Was I not still exploring that rubbing point between the small experience of lived lives and the washing tide of events that catch us up in its momentum? All that was different, I thought, was that this time I was coming at it with characters that were fictional, whereas before I'd come from the other side, so to speak, with figures who had existed in history, or in family, and had left a paper trail, however fractured or incomplete.

‘It's not working,' my publisher said. I could tell by her face. My friend Hilary McPhee, who'd published
Poppy
, agreed. ‘You can't shift it all onto a narrator twenty years older. She sounds like you trying not to be you.'

Around
,
through
,
out of
,
alongside
and
against
. I was nowhere near, trapped in the outer reaches of my own vanities.

3.

Philip Roth, a writer I greatly admire, has said that it takes a crisis for a novel to find its shape. For me with
The Mountain
that crisis began with Pauline's question,
where is your ground?
Then, four months later, in November 2009, within days of the Ömie exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Victoria, their sponsor David Baker died suddenly – by which I mean overnight, without warning. As a result, his sponsorship of the Ömie ended, and students whose fees he was paying, not only there but across PNG, could no longer continue at school. This, to say the least, added to the destabilisation of my own sense of ground and changed a great deal about the way I continued my own relationships in PNG. Never again would I be the observer who could watch, make notes with her clean, writerly hands, then go home and fret about a novel. What was going to happen to Ömie Artists? That alone was a big enough question. What would become of the children whose school fees he was paying in the fjords of Cape Nelson? What would happen in those resilient, vulnerable villages if they could no longer get their students past year 8 – when the fees are too high for village families – with the loggers already within sight in Collingwood Bay? I could speak for an hour about what was involved in all these questions, and what I learned of the politics of Aid and Development – and of the logging, much of it illegal, which now affects more than 5 million hectares of customary land.
⁴
This is not incidental, nor a crude political plug. I had spent time with an elder at Uiaku, just along from the fjord villages, where the landowners had won a long court case against the loggers, only to have them return in another guise. I've been back since, and I know the cost, in every sense of the word, to that man, to that community.

It was not only in the villages that my relationships changed. In Port Moresby the talk with my writer colleagues at UPNG also changed as I struggled with these non-writerly questions. Russell and Steven and Regis were wise interlocutors, and I thank them for it, and for the comradeship that grew between us. Write that novel, was the message I took from them. Every voice is needed.
Hybridity
, Steve said again, aren't we all, in our different ways, existential
hapkas
, and he gave me that enabling word from Tok Pisin, which has shrugged off its negative connotations of half-caste to embrace complex cultural identities. And all the while, there was Russell Soaba still writing, producing a blog, teaching students that their stories, and the stories of their place, and of events they see around them,
matter
, that poetry matters, and so does the novel.
Witness
was the word Regis Stella used, and I came to see it applied (in some small measure) to me as well as to the writers there whom he was addressing.

When Janet Malcolm, another writer I admire, faced a crisis of a very different kind in her writing life, she said that it took her ‘out of a sheltered place and threw [her] into bracingly icy water. What more could a writer want?'
⁵
Icy is hardly the word for anything to do with PNG, and no writer would want the death of a friend. But she has a point.

I returned to my desk in the Australian winter of 2010 with very different mental settings. The memories to which my vanities had been in thrall slid back; the present had claimed me, and it mattered. The effect was indeed bracing. I sat down and rewrote in the third person the manuscript that was not yet called
The Mountain
. Martha, no longer narrator, lost a lot of her story, most of her point of view, dropped in age by twenty years and became a character in the ensemble of characters that at last found room to stretch and breathe – and, yes, to look at each other, and look back. Ensemble, that was the word that came to me:
they
, all of them, not
me
, not ‘I'. Milton sighed a sigh of relief.

As to the result, well, it's out there in the world, and though I probably know its faults and failures better than anyone, it's not my job to lay them out. What I will say is that out of that period of radical doubt, the ground of my writing changed.
The Mountain
is a novel – at last I can say that – a character-based novel that gives voice to the predicaments underlying all I'd experienced, or seen, or known in that magnificent, heartbreaking country. It is as personal as anything I have written since
Poppy
, but it is not autobiographical. The ghost of people I have known may hover above it, but it is not biographical. With
The Mountain
I crossed the borderline from a form that might be called literary non-fiction, or life writing, into the terrain of the novel. While this move into ‘imagination' did not disavow the ‘informed' – on the contrary, to write of the post-colonial without having trod the post-colonial ground strikes me as ever less defensible – it did shift and change my understanding of the relationship of the words that once went together so sonorously: ‘the informed imagination'.

4.

Fiction writers often talk of empathy as the task, even the technique of fiction. Hilary Mantel talks of getting behind her characters' eyes, and every writer who deals in lives and characters will know what she means. But Mantel also warns that we cannot proceed on the assumption that historical characters (in her case) are like ‘us'; we can't hop behind ‘their' eyes and look out with ‘our' eyes. When she uses the term ‘informed imagination' of her Thomas Cromwell novels, it is a way of saying that the research she must do as a novelist is no less onerous than the research a historian might do. While the formal demands of writing history or fiction can be, and are, very different, when it comes to writing lives, the writer of fiction and of non-fiction is faced with a similar paradox. If she is to bring life –
lifeness
– to the page, then she must, in a sense, get behind eyes that are radically different from hers, and that's the paradox. She must do, or appear to do, what is not possible.

When it comes to the argument over history and fiction, the limits and nature of historical imagination that unfolded here while I was struggling with
The Mountain
, I don't want to reprise a debate that has been divisive and painful, other than to say that through it I came to understand that the ‘informed imagination' does not only mean qualifying ‘informed' with ‘imagination' as I had done; it also requires us to bring an informed intelligence to the nature – and limitation – of imagination itself. It would have been a grave error on my part to think that ‘I' could sit in a village in PNG and ‘imagine' myself into a village person. What would it be like for someone like me to be a village woman? Well if I were a village woman, I would not be the ‘I' that writes this from the asphalted world of escalators. Even the briefest acquaintance with psychoanalysis alerts us to the deep structures of subjectivity laid down from infancy, so that while we might all bleed, our sense of ourselves and our understanding of self in relation to others and society can differ radically. This is a matter much debated by anthropologists.