Revisiting Russell Soaba’s first & timeless novel ‘Wanpis’
11 March 2014
I RECENTLY got hold of the 2012 UPNG reprint of Russell Soaba’s first novel Wanpis. The original was published by the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies and Kristen Press in 1977.
For those not familiar with Tok Pisin, the title refers to someone who is lonely or alone, like an orphan.
I lent my battered old copy of the original to someone years ago and they never returned it.
Mind you, I had to order a copy of the reprint from Masalai Press in the USA. My emails to the UPNG Bookshop went unanswered and the couple of times that I dropped in there I found the doors locked.
Bad timing on my part, perhaps, but discouraging, nevertheless.
I believe that people trying to get hold of Michael Dom’s new book of poetry are having similar problems. Amazon can’t seem to rouse anyone there either.
Anyway, back to Wanpis.
The thing that struck me about reading it for the second time was its timeless relevance. I could have been reading something written this year.
That, I suppose, is the sign of a great book. I’ve been wading through ancient Graham Greenes (a legacy from the late David Wall), Ernest Hemingways and John Le Carres lately and they have had the same effect.
The underlying story in Wanpis is very simple. A group of students graduate from high school. Some of them get jobs and others go to university. They graduate and marry. Idealism gives way to reality. Some of them sell out to the establishment. One of them gets beaten up by rascals and slowly dies in hospital. Nothing unusual about any of that.
What is unusual, and what makes this novel so interesting, is what is going on in the heads of the key characters. This is where the novel stands out from all the Papua New Guinean literature that preceded it.
The novel is also unashamedly aimed at Papua New Guinean readers. Something its predecessors were not. They were largely political and designed to upset expatriate sensibilities and provoke a reaction from fellow countrymen and women. In a sense Wanpis was the first novel written wholly for Papua New Guineans.
Wanpis is about identity, but there is also an angst that is quintessentially Papua New Guinean on display. The same sort of angst that existed in 1977 is recognisable in Papua New Guinea today. In short, the novel is what one might call “deep”.
It is also tentative. It reminded me of a shy animal waiting in the shadows. There are no solutions and there are no epiphanies as it threads its wary path. One is constantly wondering when someone will trip over and come crashing down. And this includes the author.
You can almost see Russell Soaba feeling his way through alien terrain, stumbling here, pulling himself up there and peeking behind corners everywhere.
Wanpis is replete with that strange grammar and confusion of tenses that disturbs the expatriate reader but which has become a hallmark of many modern Papua New Guinean writers. Perhaps the best most recent examples can be found in Leonard Fong Roka’s writing. I wonder if he has read Wanpis.
I don’t know how Russell Soaba regards Wanpis these days. I suspect he thinks of it as one would an early and unruly child – slightly embarrassing but overwhelmingly proud.
I also don’t know how the reprint was produced. It is littered with illogical typos that could probably have been removed with a little judicious editing. I guess it was retyped or scanned.
If you are going to be a serious university publisher UPNG Press you need to lift your game in this department.
That said it is a great book that reveals the Papua New Guinean soul. And I use the term ‘great’ unreservedly.
If you can lay your hands on a copy read it. If you’ve already read it, read it again.
Wanpis by Russell Soaba, UPNG Press/Anuki Country Press, 175pp, 2012. ISBN:9789980869593, K45.00 from the UPNG Bookshop. Amazon has used copies available from $US44.99 here
An interesting idea from Michael Dom: that Melanesians also formulate their thoughts, and thereby conceptualise speech and writing, in a different manner.
Michael's probably on to something quite interesting.
I spent about 40 years working among Aboriginal people, beginning in the 1970s when there were still a tribal people living in the bush in Central Australia.
The accepted concept of what is now known as the Dreaming or Creation Period in Aboriginal cosmology is that it relates to the ancient past, which is totally wrong.
The Dreaming actually exists then, now and into the future, all at the same time.
If elders point out a place that features in a Dreaming songline, such as a tall hill or a waterhole, they don't say this is where so and so happened, they say this is where so and so IS happening right now.
The landscape is not dead or inert, it is alive and pulsing in real time.
I last time saw the sawn up pieces of the lintel for PNG's parliament house in a backroom of the National Museum where Andrew Moutu had stashed them.
I doubt whether James Marape would be amenable to putting it back but maybe PNG will one day have a prime minister who understands its significance.
Posted by: Philip Fitzpatrick | 30 September 2021 at 02:53 PM
Thanks for the link back to this article Keith.
Yes, a great book.
And my means of qualifying this: when I think about this book it is as if I am trying to recall people I have met and their adventures of which I was privy to the details, although the memory may often be vague, I somehow know the characters and feel them to be true experiences.
I am going to be reading this book again.
And about the mixed up tenses, Phil, my suspicion is that we Melanesian's have a hangover there not merely assigned to a 'poor conception of English grammar' - there's that fucked up post-colonial notion - but rather that not only do we view time differently (as some have argued elsewhere), but also formulate our thoughts, and thereby conceptualise our speech in a different manner.
I suspect that we tend to draw our thoughts and thus speak in the singular and the collective, in the present and the past simultaneously.
This also makes much of our speech contextual, depending on the time, place, scenario or event and who is present.
English grammar has corrected this tendency in the learned because schooling has educated much of our natural tendency right out of us.
It may also be evidenced linguistically with the placement of subject, object, noun, verb and etc. within sentence structures, but that's all beyond my knowledge.
I believe this natural tendency is more deeply linked to Melanesian spirituality, where there is no contradiction between the material world, the mythological past and the realm of the mysterious - call them masalai, tambaran, sanguma, tewel etc.
(That's why Theo Zurenuoc, and those of his religious ilk and ignorance, was scared shitless enough to destroy the lintel. He was not worthy enough to understand that fear of lintel carvings at the Haus Tambaran's entrance was necessary for a leader to respect the words and deeds conducted beneath the gaze of the ancestral faces.)
Posted by: Michael Dom | 30 September 2021 at 09:48 AM