For too many weeks I had been wrecking my mind trying to unravel what I said about the character Rudolf.

In my novel Sweet Garaiina Apo I wrote that Rudolf’s parents tried to ‘walk’ their wealth down the Papuan coast hoping to emulate the Goroka technique for finding a bride.

I didn’t further elaborate, but it did provide the initial impetus for crafting Rudolf’s story.

However, there was another story that stimulated my penning of Farmer.

In November 2016 PNG Attitude published an essay, Fading Links, by Raymond Sigimet.

In his entry for the Crocodile Prize, Raymond wrote about the Goroka custom of ‘sindaunim meri’, a ceremonial act recognising that a bride had decided to take up house in the Groom’s village.

He rightly echoed the Okiufa elders lamenting that the young generation was fast-losing traditional cultural practises. 

Raymond is from an Arapesh community, many mountains and rivers away from the Sepik, and he was writing about an Apo-Goroka tradition, providing a comparison with the similar Arapesh cultural practise of ‘lusim hahn’.

The piece was a good write up. But there were nuances in the Apo-Goroka procedure that only a practitioner would capture, and he missed them.

Raymond was relating an experience he’d observed in the Alekano language group neighbouring Goroka town.

While there are many similarities between lusim hahn (Arapesh) and sindaunim meri (Alekano), the practises differ very much in reality.

Am I sounding like a scratched record as I echo the sentiment, ‘We must tell our stories our way.’

So when I read Raymond’s essay, I felt the challenge rising in me to tell the Goroka story as it should be told by a Goroka person. I wondered if I could be the person to tell the story and detail the whole process our way.

That was my initial spur to begin writing about the Tokano marital process in the trilogy.

My Tokano and the Alekano practises are the same. Our languages are slightly different as seen in the words Tokano and Alekano. They mean the same thing (‘bring it’) but are written and pronounced differently.

In writing about marital practises, the trilogy could have been bland and boring. With 860 languages and cultural practices in Papua New Guinea, who amongst us would want to read about another’s cultural practises?

Do I need to convince you, dear reader, that stories matter? I write that fully aware that you have your own cultural practises.

But given the opportunity to read a story about my cultural practises perhaps you will reinforce your faith that stories matter.

A lack of stories can break the dignity of a people. When languages die, stories die. And when stories die, eventually culture dies. And, without culture, who are we?

My hope is that, in telling this Apo-Goroka story in my trilogy, I may also repair any broken dignity.

I echo Ms Adichie’s sentiments quoted here as a foreword, and my writing in the trilogy about our Goroka customs and practises can be read forever and retained as an important part of our identity.

It is practises such as these that make each of us Papua New Guineans a culturally unique person.

Accordingly, I urge readers to compare aspects of our processes to their own cultural practises.

The danger is that, if these practises are not detailed in a written form, they will be lost forever or changed beyond recognition. The spoken word can be very powerful but it can also be changed in the telling or some important detail can be lost.

I have been mindful of this and in my trilogy, whilst I have tried to capture the finer details, It may be possible that I have lost some of them.

So a caveat here. There are some details such as in sindaunim meri happen after the bride is delivered to the village and her folks come to build her a garden.

In the trilogy I would have walked you through the whole marital process.  In this story, it is started by the mother, but it could be by the father or even the groom, bringing on the girl to a house in the village for the sindaunim meri ceremony when the community recognises that a girl has ‘carried her legs over in marriage’ to start the marital process.

Here, I try to immerse the reader in a funny incident involving one of our forefathers - a lesson to be taught and learned, a small tidbit to laugh about, a new play on words, a banal commentary, an episode to cry over, a ‘was it really like’ this situation, and a whole lot more.

The result is a 200,000 word trilogy. And, instead of an anthropological study of a cultural practise, you would have actually been immersed in one the Tokano processes for bringing on a wife. You are guaranteed to come away with tears, laughter, maybe even anger, depending on who you are.

A lot has changed in this modern era, and marital practises are changing. There are lots of knots being tied under the coffee trees. The youngsters just need to begin the process and make it their story.

And, as stories matter, I wish all of you happy readings of the Farmer trilogy.

Mita ghoiha kupii! And the women say Oou, Oou!

A FARMER BRINGS ON A WIFE

Book 1          Book 2          Book 3