So nice are these writing People

Leonard Fong Roka

Worst to me is my tight-lip culture. I never freely utter a word in the midst of people I am not familiar with unless told to do so by someone in authority or chair of the meeting.

Myself and novelist Francis Nii

I silently hate myself for this. And this is exactly what I did at Port Moresby’s Australian High Commission for the Papua New Guinea Society of Writers, Editors and Publishers’ 2012 Annual General Meeting and Writers’ Forum.

I uttered not a word! Not at all, a social being, I guess.

But from my perfect world I met great writing men and women from all over Papua New Guinea. Men and women who know me and I know them only by name and not physically. I was proud to be in the company of figures like authors Russell Soaba and Francis Nii; bloggers Nou Vada, Martyn Namorong and Emmanuel Narakobi and Australian writer and big time Crocodile Prize editor, Phil Fitzpatrick whilst our Keith Jackson was not present.

Whilst in the midst of Australians and other Papua New Guineans with a common interest that is literature, spills did reached my wriggling ears that the ‘high walking Papua New Guinean’ employees of the Australian High Commission exist with plastered lips; utter a word of no Australian national interest and you are fired! A fellow Highlander, whispered to me as a local girl poked the concrete with high-heels passed us.

But, there we were, Australians and Papua New Guineans who are brothers in the name of the ‘ink’ or in this day and age, the ‘keyboard’. Politics does not come into play in our side of the world; or otherwise, it is suppressed there somewhere.

So cool was I in a perfect world of writers. More than anything else, I did sell off who I was in character or attitude to my fellow men and women. Many just threw light to that. They said, Mr. LFR, reading you and your world we think you were somewhat physically an imposing being. But, you really a small man with a big mouth…haha!

PNG writers having lunch at Australian High Commission

Simbu writers, Kela Kapkora Sil Bolkin, Francis Nii and Jimmy Drekore were my good pokers. They were are perfect band and often getting me into thinking why Simbu is doing cool in the art of writing. Collective effort there is, I see in these well written men.

Despite the fact publishing a book in Papua New Guinea is in deep shit (costly and profitless), we still love our art of writing.

Thus, ‘Writing’ binds us in communion so perfect that even the eye cannot force a line in between us weather Phil Fitzpatrick is Australian; Francis Nii is Simbu and I am a Bougainville.