PNG writing adopts its own expression
24 December 2024
PHILIP FITZPATRICK
TUMBY BAY - After reading a review of Marlene Potoura’s new book, Remembering, Father and Me, I was prompted to go back to Leonard Fong Roka’s Brokenville, his memoir of the crisis years in Bougainville.
I was not so much interested in making comparisons with Marlene’s experience but to identify commonalities in their experiences and the way in which they presented them.
At the back of my mind was another book, a work of fiction called Mister Pip by New Zealand author Lloyd Jones which was highly lauded and made into a film starring Hugh Laurie.
In that book a village girl creates an imaginary world which fuses the Victorian London of Great Expectations with the environment and people she knows in her village as a way of coping with the crisis.
I was curious about how the stark realities described by Marlene and Leonard stood up against the surreal dramatisation of Lloyd’s book.
My instinct was that for pure readability Lloyd would trump both Marlene and Leonard.
To my surprise, that wasn’t what I found. Remembering, Father and Me and Brokenville stand up very well against Lloyd’s book and in some respects, such as emotional clout, are superior.
What both Leonard and Marlene’s books represent are fine examples of, for want of a better description, the Crocodile School of literature.
That is, a presentation of the realities of Papua New Guinean life in a new and particularly Papua New Guinean way.
This style of literature, I believe, largely evolved out of the short stories, essays and poetry submitted to the Crocodile Prize for Literature roughly between 2010 and 2017 and is quite distinct to anything that came before it.
Before that time Papua New Guinea writing tended to be overly literary and indebted to literary styles from outside the country, particularly Africa.
What the Crocodile Prize did was imbue Papua New Guinean writing with its own unique styles derived from its own lived grass roots experiences.
In short, it let the wood smoke from the village fires into the mix.
Just as Marlene and Leonard have done and which Lloyd could not do.
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