My Poetry Manuscript

A week ago, my mate and Papua New Guinea’s award winning poet, Michael Dom shot me an email.

He asked me: ‘Have you thought of making a submission for a book publication? I know that your blog site and PDF format is easy for sharing but I believe there is value in a published book’.

The Cover as I wanted it

This kind suggestion just provokes me to tell more about my poetry dream.

A highlander, William Mania was my English teacher at Arawa High School in 1997 and he was the figure that had my class into writing poetry. But I never made it top till I was enrolled at the University of Papua New Guinea in 2003. Here, after reading poems and stories by students in the University News bulletin, I got a rough poem into it and it was published. This publication was actually a catalyst of giving me the courage to seat and compose poetry.

When I unofficially withdrew from the university in 2004, I was into writing in the comfort of my Tumpusiong Valley in Panguna, Central Bougainville.

But my style of writing developed in the ‘bush’ where there was not a professional writer beside me. That’s why as they say it my style is 'raw and edgy' as Phil Fitzpatrick once described. But I have to admit that ‘plotting’ is not me; I type as it comes into my mind. Never gone through the painstaking process of proof reading by a friend—since there are no persons interested in good reading around me—and I am an introvert.

But I do have good reasons to write the way I write.

To me, my trouble torn island home Bougainville in the Solomons, need a voice out there. She needs to be heard and felt by the world around her. Her long history of struggle for self determination must be known.

From another angle I see that, with the on-going peace and development process in the post conflict Bougainville, we need to build the spirit of nationalism so that people can turn to accept each other out of the divisions created by the civil war. Writing is one area I see hope in.

I write with hope that my works can create oneness in the mindset of Bougainvilleans for the pacification of hearts and minds.

But so far, I have not reached out to readers across Bougainville. I am getting most of my writings into the many blogs in the internet that my people in Bougainville have no access to.

I had that dream to publish but money seemingly is a problem with me thus I only bombard the internet with my poems, short stories and articles of Bougainville conflict related stuff.

With hope to publish, in 2012 I did create a poetry manuscript titled ‘The Pomong Utau of Dreams’. In the title you could wonder what it is all about. But ‘Pomong’ is actually the hamlet in the Kupe Mountains in the hinterland of Arawa that I grew up in as a child and ‘utau’ is a clay pot in my Nasioi language.

This manuscript is 175 page and hosting 150-plus poems that I have being writing since 1997 (More after 2003).

But after setbacks on my campaign to secure a publisher for a Bougainvillean stuff, I decided to go into blogging to share some of the poems that have had attracted some attention and even some ended up in the anthologies ‘Crocodile Prize 2011 and Crocodile Prize 2012’ of the Papua New Guinea writing competition The Crocodile Prize.

In fact I designed this poetry manuscript in such a way that it could be appealing to all Bougainvilleans starting from the cover page.

But the significant thing about this, is that it is writing from an island that has being going through Pacific’s only bloodiest war after World War 2 and as PNG Attitude puts it, this is writing from a ‘lone Bougainville voice’.