APWN and Contemporary Writing from the Pacific

Important links have been forged between the Pacific Writing Forum and APWN since my attendance at the Beyond Borders conference in November 2005. A small delegation from APWN led by berni janssen was able to come to Fiji and take part in the Pacific Epistemologies Conference in Suva in 2006. Through the APWN website writers from the Pacific have been able to put their works out there in the optic fiber land for instant consumption. The period following the visit by berni, Judith Rodriquez, Helen Chan and Zohl de Ishtar unfortunately has been one of immense pressure and more recently of change that has not been conducive to carrying out some of our plans.

The world at the Fiji backyard, primarily Australia and New Zealand have been able to come out with the usual rhetoric of democracy et al but the hurt of the people at these events and perhaps equally important the events that were allowed to happen leading to the coup in Fiji are as always less visible. For the most part the military takeover in Fiji has come and gone without any institutionalized military crackdown on writers or writing. It is significant to note that while some local journalists and dissidents were under military interrogation and some of the latter came away with allegations of torture that there has not been any academic or writers coming out in any substantial individual or group protest against the takeover.

This was not the case in the 1987 military coups where there was an immediate and sustained protest from academics and writers, with many paying with a few hours or days of imprisonment or for some others severe beatings and torture. The Pacific Writing Forum has continued to operate in this period and came out with two significant publications. The proceedings from the Pacific Epistemologies Conference was published along with Saraga (roughly translated as an exclamatory “Oh Really!” as an anthology of creative writing from the Pacific. An edition of this important addition to writing from the Pacific will be made available on APWN as a digital copy.

PWF is committed to more publications in the coming year. Satendra Nandan an academic and writer with links to PEN in Australia among his many other credentials will have his next volume of poems published as a joint publication of PWF and Ivy Press from Canberra.  PWF will also publish a new collection of works from the Pacific and its Diaspora edited by Jennifer Web and Kavita Nandan in 2007. David Whish-Wilson and Som Prakash are editing the 2007 edition of the literary journal Dreadlocks and submissions are still open and can be sent to editors via email; (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

The introduction to Saraga! in some ways brings out aims of the Pacific Writing Forum as does its contents. We look forward to our association with APWN through the Contemporary Writing from Pacific link to furthering the writing and creative processes from the region. We need the words and the texts to keep on coming in order to represent ourselves and others around us in ways other than our representation in small news columns and tiny sound bytes that do not tell all of our stories.