Oceanic literature
Oceanic literature, the traditional oral and written literatures of the indigenous people of Oceania, in particular of Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and Australia. While this article addresses the influence of Western literary forms, it does not address the adoption of purely Western styles; see also Australian literature and New Zealand literature for more on the oral traditions of these two countries and for a discussion of the traditions derived from English literature.
The role of the author
Creativity in many parts of the Pacific is perceived in terms of mana, a word of Pacific origin that is commonly used in Melanesian and Polynesian languages to express the power or force that is believed to be concentrated in objects or persons. This includes creative energy, which is thought to emanate from supernatural sources. Even though creativity is believed to have divine origins, mana is never considered the exclusive possession of supernatural beings. It is available to chiefs because of their closeness to supernatural powers, and ordinary people are considered able to increase their creativity by performing appropriate rituals or by studying and acquiring skills. Outstanding creative individuals are believed to have mana in greater abundance than ordinary individuals, but every individual has the potential for some form of creativity.
Each individual may express his creativity in different ways, however, and three broad categories of literary artists are differentiated. In Polynesia the traditional artist was the priest-poet, who served both as a priest or magician and as an entertainer. The priest-poets were in the employment of chiefs and had well-defined functions. They sometimes formed a distinct hereditary caste; in other cases they were drawn from chiefly clans and were occasionally even high chiefs themselves. The priest-poets became obsolete as the traditional chiefdoms gave way to Western colonization and nationhood, but in most parts of the Pacific there are still what has been called “freelance,” or “unattached,” practitioners. These include wandering poets and minstrels who, unlike the priest-poets, do not go through any formal rigid training and do not claim to have special mana. They learn their trade by listening to other artists. Sometimes their function is socially recognized and they receive payment for their performances. As in most cultures, amateur artists, occasional versifiers, choral singers, and family storytellers also contribute to oral literature.
This classification of artists as professional, freelance, or amateur emphasizes the significance of individual talent in both Oceanic oral and written literature. Because the names of individual composers or poets do not feature prominently in oral literature, this circumstance has led to the popular belief that oral literature is communally created. While there are several instances of communal or group involvement in the creation of certain kinds of oral literature, the centre of all creative activity is a chief composer who bears ultimate responsibility for the creation. In Return to the Islands (1957), Sir Arthur Grimble vividly relates how oral poems were composed in Kiribati. He describes the first stirring of poetry as a “divine spark of inspiration,” which gives the poet his mana. This mana, in turn, causes the poet to remove himself from society into his “‘house of song,’ wherein he will sit in travail with a poem that is yet unborn.” After the poem is formed in the poet’s mind, he calls together some of his close friends and recites the “rough draft” of his poem. Grimble observes,
It is the business of his friends to interrupt, criticise, interject suggestions, applaud, or howl down, according to their taste. Very often, they do howl him down, too, for they are themselves poets. On the other hand, if the poem, in their opinion, shows beauty, they are indefatigable in abetting its perfection. . . . When all their wit and wisdom has been poured out upon him, they depart. He remains alone again—probably for several days—to reflect upon their advice, accept, reject, accommodate, improve, as his genius dictates.
Although the author of a written work is easier to identify and recognize, the role of such writers in Oceania is more difficult to define. Written literature depends greatly on readership, and in much of Oceania the writer’s language (usually English) and major genres (e.g., novel, short story) are not indigenous to the region. Consequently, written literature from the Pacific is better known internationally than in Oceania itself. The level of literacy in English—especially in Papua New Guinea, where several hundred languages are spoken—is not high. Interest in local literatures is generally confined to the emerging educated elite in the urban centres. For the majority of people throughout Oceania, traditional oral literatures, such as storytelling and dance and musical performances, still satisfy their aesthetic needs. (See also music and dance, Oceanic.)
Oral traditions
Western understanding of the content of Oceanic oral literature is limited. Nevertheless, a few general comments about traditional forms, types, and themes can be made. First, because the purpose of literature is to communicate, it demands an audience. In the case of an oral literature, communication depends first on memory, and this usually means that such memory aids as rhythm and stock formulas and phrases are an important element of all texts. The majority of Oceanic texts closely follow traditional forms and appear to be committed to memory; they are communicated in a strictly unvarying manner. This is, however, only approximately the case, because the various techniques of formalization can allow for a rather fluid text. The tradition can be made evident at the lexical level, with the possibility of a great freedom of syntax. It only prevents prosodic elements from taking on primary importance.
The literary occasions of the Oceanian peoples are, as in other cultures, reflected in sacred literature, political literature, and frivolous—even erotic—texts. This division, however, should not be taken to represent an attempt at classification; any such pigeonholing would be inconvenient indeed, because such a large number of texts straddle two categories. But there are certainly two poles between which the various forms of literary expression can be placed. On the one hand, there is a body of works that appeals to Western readers and is made accessible to them by its use of the poetic image. On the other hand, there are many texts, often brief, in which each word is frequently a complete image. This kind of text is part and parcel of the culture that has produced it and requires a veritable arsenal of commentaries of others to interpret the key words and to unravel its significance to nonnative readers. Texts are, basically, of two kinds: recitatives and public orations. Recitatives—the songs or chants that accompany dances (whether the performers be standing or seated), funeral chants, songs that accompany children’s games, and those with an erotic significance—are formally rigid; they may be expanded but not transformed. Public orations, in which the elements are formally but roughly organized, give the speaker the right to vary the presentation within certain limits established for this literary genre. Such discourses, which can aptly be delivered as a high-level political oration and as a funeral eulogy or remembrance speech, can also, in a simpler form, commemorate such a birth, a marriage, or another life stage.
The themes of Oceanic literature differ little from those found in other literatures of the world: love and death, defiance and hatred, nostalgia for the past, and the pleasure of the moment. Nature provides the necessary imagery. Nevertheless, Oceanic literature differs considerably from that of other cultures. Although it presents a familiar mental universe, it does so in what is often an allusive manner that demands an intimate knowledge of local place-names, local political geography, and land division before its full meaning can be understood: the owl, for example, is symbolic of a given place, the lizard of another, and the sea eagle associated with a third.
Melanesia
Melanesian oral literatures are better known to contemporary scholarship than are Polynesian because they were less accessible to Western anthropologists and scholars, and, as a result, the literature was not distorted. Because of this, they are of great interest, although they are only just being recovered. Researchers have amassed a body of astonishingly rich oral literature and have been able to establish just what the function of each text was in the life of the society they studied. The results of their work have obliged scholars to reexamine their conceptions of the oral literary tradition. It has emerged that not even words, symbols, or places have any fixed significance: the vocabulary is at once coherent and diversified, for it is used in a way that takes into account the momentary interest of the parties present.
The traditional speech
A traditional speech may be “hurled” by a speaker to a crowd, which typically responds with a muffled cry at the end of each “sentence.” It is the quality of accord reached between the crowd and the speaker that comprises the “new content” of the familiar, traditional speech (henceforth becoming part of its tradition), while the accord also conveys what other cultures would call the “message”—the new stage in a rising political career, perhaps, or a declaration denoting peace between combatants or the beginning of a war. Anyone analyzing the speech itself has to search for and consider carefully all the possible interpretations and temporal conditions it might have. The traditional form of the speech is respected all the more because it allows this variation of content—within acceptable limits—to be conveyed by nuances that may easily escape observers from other cultures.
The form of the speech also presents a somewhat thorny problem. On the surface, it is a simple enumeration of the local groups and their symbols (that is, the portion of the land that is theirs, together with its animals, plants, weather conditions, and so on). The recitation of these physical realities is an affirmation of their very society, and they are stated one after the other, linked by some stock connecting phrase. Each listed item is given its precise geographic location; of special importance are the names of special places where authority is exercised or where rites are practiced. The whole constitutes a world vision, or system, in which the individual society and its members have their place. The native audience is perfectly familiar with the spatial affirmation of their society contained in the speech, and, from the dry enumeration of its components, they are able to supply for themselves a history of alliances and wars and to remodel the traditional text until it fits the conditions of the present. The orator’s delivery, the nuances he maintains or introduces into the speech, are a sign of his success.
The myth
Another kind of oral literature, less easily defined, is the one commonly understood as myth (a term borrowed from Western Classical culture). Involved here are all formalized recitatives, straightforwardly delivered, whose apparent aim is to give the account of a rite, for example, or to describe the situation of some group of family lineage (perhaps in connection with land ownership or political status) or to tell of the origin of human culture. The recitative may involve as little as 10 lines, or it may take three hours to narrate. In any given local culture, the rules that govern the way in which the text’s content is formalized and those that govern the way in which it is recited are consistent. The symbolic vocabulary, formally identical with that used in public speeches, carries elaborate but acknowledged references. A text may be established on the basis of a single symbol, but, in general, the symbolic pattern is so complex that other cultures have great difficulty in understanding it. Indeed, it is only possible to decipher its meaning if the cultural significance of every place mentioned in the text is understood, if it is known what creature or being is worshiped where and to the benefit of which group, and often only if the itineraries that are the subject of a majority of the myths are entirely familiar to the interpreter, so that the old place-names—and thus their meaning—referred to in the text can be identified.
Polynesia and Micronesia
Polynesian and Micronesian oral literatures are similar in structure, but they vary in detail from island to island. Little is known about the Micronesian texts, however, and work on the interpretation of Polynesian oral literature has been hindered. Authentic oral texts were not collected when the opportunity was at hand, and it is now often too late to do so because the traditions—especially of religion—that maintained them have not survived. The few studies of Polynesian and Micronesian oral literatures that have been published have generally analyzed simplistic summaries rather than authentic texts. Nevertheless, they give a glimpse of how widespread certain legendary cycles were. The most frequently recurring legend, from a geographic point of view, is that of the trickster figure Maui-tiki-tiki, who was a fisherman of the islands and who discovered fire. He can be recognized, on the fringes of the Polynesian area, as the god of the first fruits of the yam harvest. He was sometimes revered under a symbolic manifestation or sometimes as a less abstract figure.
The few scraps of knowledge available about the indigenous literatures of Australia and Micronesia, as well as those of Polynesia, indicate that the figures of their great mythological cycles were simultaneously general symbols and local divinities. The people saw no contradiction in this double manifestation: great cultural heroes were naturally assigned to a specific place when an individual within that culture would establish a reverential dialogue with any one of them.
Jean Guiart The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica