My friend Dennis Kikira was shortlisted this year, but he didn’t get through either. We’ll both be trying again in 2024.

You may not have seen the First Nations Writers Festival Facebook notation about me and the fact that judges to competitions do not want to read our entries in our first or second language. It is a sad reality but that is the unavoidable fact. 

Tribal groups in First Nations have their own Tok Ples [mother tongue] and, as new dominant Creole languages come into play (Tok Pisin, Polis Motu, Bislama etc), our Tok Ples are going to die.

Let me repeat that, our Tok Ples are going to die.

For PNG that is 860 languages, some with dialects. For example, my own Tokano Tok Ples has four dialects with one in which many of our words where the ‘rr’ sound are substituted for the ‘ll’ sound.

To lose 860 plus languages is going to be catastrophic. As Tok Pisin replaces Tok Ples in everyday deliberations and English dominates in schools and workplaces, Tok Ples will die a natural death by non-usage.

Our Tok Ples are going to die unless we do something.

That's why I call out to all persons with an interest in Tok Ples to pull out their mobile phones and start recording Tok Ples in whatever format it may be - story form, as stories would be told in the Tok Ples, or general daily conversation.

We unfortunately do not have enough writers who are interested to record and write down our languages.

If we can have copies of our Tok Ples captured electronically, perhaps someone in the future can find the time to sit down and write these words.

Of course our Tok Ples are not just words. They are storehouses of history and of cultural practises showing us how to do thing, like how songs are sung.

Many things of value will be lost if these languages are lost because we no longer speak them and have never recorded them.

I note that a lot of children now have copies of village songs on paper which they practice to sing at school cultural days. This is a good thing, but there should be more than that.

My attempt to get everyone to start gathering and writing our stories has been for me to write stories in the three languages that I can speak with ease. How can I write in three languages?

Easy – I write my stories in one language first. It can be either Tok Ples, Tok Pisin or English. Next I do a paragraph by paragraph translation into another language. Then I do the same for the third language.

For me, because English has rules of grammar, it is easier to first write in English. 

However, if I am taking a story from a village person, I try to write it the way the speaker told it to me.

For the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, I submitted the story ‘Plis Noken Pul Tait Wara Long Mi’ [Please Don’t Flood Me] in two versions: English and Tok Pisin.

I’m delighted that you have agreed to publish ‘Plis Noken Pul Tait Wara Long Mi’ in the way that I sent it to you - in the combined Tok Pisin-English version.

I am keeping back the Tok Ples version, which will be included along with the other two versions in my next anthology that I hope to publish towards the end of the year. 

I would like readers from Papua New Guinea and other First Nations that read PNG Attitude and Ples Singsing to copy or follow what I do to capture stories in Tok Ples. You can do it.

I gave a similarly formatted story, Kaukau Blues, to the First Nations Writers Festival and received the approval and enthusiastic feedback of the judges. I’ll also be including Kaukau Blues in my next anthology.

The bilingual short story, ‘Plis Noken Pul Tait Wara Long Mi’ (‘Please Don’t Flood Me’), will be published in PNG Attitude soon.