Interview with Regis Stella

Interview with Regis Stella

by Evelyn Ellerman

(assisted byDrusilla Modjeska)

at the “Papua New Guinea Then and Now”Conference

Sydney, Australia, 2002

DM.Where did your interest in literature and writing begin?

RS. I grew up in a society which was very much oral and where the roots were oral literature. And I used to listen to my mother and grandmother telling us stories, folk tales; and, you know, when we kids sit down and listen to the stories especially in the evenings, in moonlight, we get caught up. We fly our way to imaginary homelands. And so when I went to school I had this rich background: the context of stories, legends. In primary school -- my first six years of schooling was in the village -- I was still within that context. The first time I left home was when I went to high school.

DM.Was primary education in English or in your language?

RS.It was in English. But then it was a village school, so that after school we just went home.

EE.Was it a mission school, Regis?

RS.Yes, it was run by the Catholic Church in Bougainville. So perhaps that’s what motivated me into literature, into history, oral studies and all that stuff because of my background. So when I went to University, one of my teachers was Dr. Chakravarti. He was very much into folklore, oral literature.

EE.Who was in the literature department teaching when you then? This was in the early 80s.

RS. Early 80s, yes. There was Chakravarti. We had another Indian, Kalyan Chatterjee. He was also there but Chakravarti was much into teaching oral traditions. I had the opportunity of going back to my community to try to document some of these traditions, oral traditions. So I guess that’s what got me into literature, into writing as such. And at the same time at the University, we were reading books from Africa and from the West Indies. It was a time of coloured political awakening; we had independence already but that theme was still there, that feeling…

EE.Regis, I’ve had a look at the curriculum that was taught in the Literature Department over a number of years and was struck by the number of African writers there. Who do you remember reading when you were at UPNG, the writers who struck you?

RS. We had people like ChinuaAchebe, Taban lo Liyong,Wole Soyinka: all those people. From the West Indies we had V.S. Naipaul and SamSelvon.

EE.Did you take any Mongo Beti at all?

RS.Oh, yes we did. We did. Because most of the courses that we took were actually focused on African, West Indies and the Pacific.

EE. I think Steve [Winduo] was at school with you, was he not? Who else was at school with you?

RS.There were quite a number of students who went together, especially colleagues at the University but two of us, Steven and myself, did a major in literature. We had people coming in, taking courses in literature as their electives but then doing something else. Yeah.

EE.And so you and Steve were the two who were the most interested in literature.

RS.Yes, literature.

EE.Did collecting the oral history information feel natural to you, since you were at home until high school? Did you feel you were learning something from it or did it feel like an academic exercise?

RS.Yeah, I think, although I was brought up within that context, and I was doing my research, I was also learning new things from the people from the community. It was not a one way thing, it was both ways.

EE. How have you translated that experience you had as a student into your teaching? And how long have you been teaching on staff at the UPNG?

RS.For the last twelve years I have been teaching. I think when I teach, especially courses dealing with PNG studies, cultural studies, I fall back onto my experience. So students are aware that I am not only talking theoretically, but also have an experience, a practical experience in what I am talking about. So, I think students are very much interested when they know that you are teaching because you have read books and you still have that attachment, that experience. It it makes them more interested.

DM.What’s their own experience? What kind of ties back to their own oral traditions do they have?

RS.About half of the students still have that connection, villages, community. The other half were born in the cities, urban areas. So they don’t have much contact. It’s changing fast.

DM.Do you still do oral history projects with them of the same sort that you did when you were a student?

RS.Ah! No. No. When I was a student, the University had funding for us to actually leave Port Moresby, go back to our provinces etc. with a tape recorder. And then come back and now they can’t do that.So when we do, say, oral literature, and go out to research, we actually visit the urban villages around Port Moresby.

DM.That’s interesting. So then what do you find there? Is there a new kind of oral culture growing up out of the old traditional one? Presumably there would be people from all different areas.

RS. Yeah. So, one of the things that the students tend to ask is whether this person is actually telling us something that is traditional. But then again we point out that this is a different context in which you won’t really find something that is traditional but simply things change. So that what the person is telling you is a mixture of both traditional and something that, you know, has just started within the urban area.

EE.Do you find that people are beginning to look at traditional in a different way, then? Is there still very much a sense of a clear division between the way people used to live and the way people live now, when they are telling their stories? For instance, do they or do you find blends, where old stories now have new elements in them? Do you find that happening?

RS. Yeah. But, you know when we take students to do field work, some of them are not conscious of the fact that what this person is telling is a mixture of new and old. Especially, when we take students to visit urban villages around Port Moresby. Some of them think, that what this person is saying, is telling us, is traditional. But, of course, some of them are conscious that this is not really traditional. Yeah this is a mixture, a blend of traditional and something that people are reading.

DM.So then you work with the blend? So you work with the blend that comes out of it?

RS.Yeah. Because, I think it’s inevitable that changes are taking place everywhere. So, we do work with the blend but it is what people tell us. Yeah. But then in the background you must, you try to distinguish between what people tell you in the rural setting and what people tell you in the urban setting.

DM.What does your own writing draw on?

RS.Okay. I actually started working on plays. My first plays are basically adaptations of myths and legends, dramatizing them for the stage. But then I moved away from the plays; I started looking at short stories. My short stories are basically concerned with social and political problems that confront the country. So it’s very much, very much functional in that sense. That I am basically looking at what’s happening contemporarily in the PNG landscape.

EE.Do you prefer the short story now? Is that the main form of writing you use?

RS. Yes, yes. I started writing plays and then I moved to short stories, although I tried my hand writing a novel which came out in ’99 but I prefer short stories.

EE.How do you find the publication opportunities?It has always been difficult for writers in PNG to find publishers and the literary journals have been up and down.

RS.Publishing still is a big problem in PNG. We have literary journals that come and go.This is one reason why I publish overseas in Fiji with the Institute of Pacific Studies because it is quite difficult for Papua New Guineans to have their work published in their own country. Perhaps because the publishers see that this is not, commercially viable given the small readership population in PNG. We have about 60 percent illiteracy rate.

DM. Did you find plays were better from that point of view, that they could reach a wider audience?

RS.Yes, yes. I think with plays and drama you can reach many many people because people can tell what’s happening.

EE. What kind of the venue would a playwright have these days in PNG?

RS.We have facilities at the University which started when the first group of Papua New Guinean writers started writing. But these things are now rundown facilities, so it is quite difficult. We have facilities especially outside, especially in schools which we use to stage plays. We have the Port Moresby theatre group which has their own facilities. But within the University, we have facilities but they are run down.

EE.Is there still a drama group at the University or has the production of plays moved outside of the University to other areas in Port Moresby?

RS.They have actually moved out of the University.

EE. There was a lot of strong activity at Goroka Teachers College at one time as well. How’s that going?

RS.I think, Goroka is still doing it. I heard Michael Mel saying something about putting on productions at Goroka University. Last year, the UPNG did away with the Theatre Art studies.So, we have this big building called Ulli Beier building and they were using it as a dance music performance base. But, when they did away with the Theatre Arts school, we no longer had people going into acting and putting on plays.

DM.So then none of that’s being done now!

RS. No.

DM. So what happened to the building?

RS.The building has been taken over by other schools like the School of Postgraduate Studies. It was initially built to facilitate the Humanities, especially Theatre Arts and Music.

EE. So younger writers, these days, have to do largely what you had to do and look for publishers elsewhere. And there’s nothing solid inside the country that you can rely on. Are there no mission presses where you can send a secular piece of writing to publish at all?

RS. We have Kristen Pres in Madang. It is run by the Lutheran Church, I think, and over the years, it has published some work by Papua New Guineans. We also have the Divine World University Press which is a relatively new university press. It has done work for Papua New Guinean writers.

EE.But the distribution channels, I guess that’s the problem.

RS.Yes, that’s the problem. Yeah, in terms of marketing, in terms of selling.

EE.At one time, the University of Queensland Press was quite active, the Jacaranda Press in Beier’s time, and since then as well. Is there any interest at all in Australia for writing from PNG to your knowledge?

RS.I have not personally explored the relationship that they had in the past with Queensland Press.

DM.What’s your feeling as the next generation looking back on the work that Beier did? Was there a model of trying to take account of indigenous culture?

RS.I think the pre-independence writing period was more active, was more involved than what we have now. A number of people have accused Ulli Beier of creating what they call a “dependency syndrome,” that he nurtured, put too much on the Papua New Guineans. And, when he left there was a vacuum. But I’m not quite sure whether that’s the right attempt to describe Ulli Beier. He did a lot; if you compare the pre-independence period and the post-independence period, you see that there was much more in the pre-independence period.

DM.And there was a lot of money for it. You could get funding quite quickly in those days. What do you think about the sort of writing he was encouraging people to do?

RS. I think they had something to write about; most of the writing that came up under Ulli Beier’s guidance were basically political statements about what was happening to Papua New Guineans. So there was a grand theme that Papua New Guineans were writing about.

DM.So they were writing against the times. So something like John Kasaipwalova’s Reluctant Flame? Just a wonderful poem. Would you see that as having had an influence on you and your writing? Because your writing also speaks about the colonial, the interface of the experience between white and black. All those kind of fraught small occasions.

RS.Yes, I think you’re right. I have been influenceda lot by the first group of Papua New Guinean writers, reading their work, studying their work. And the other thing, you know, once we were politically independent, the thing was still there -- the whole idea of being colonised was still there. It’s still there with us.

EE.Would you have read those works at university as part of your courses?

RS.Yeah, yeah, we read many of the works by the first Papua New Guinean writers.

EE. ”Wanpis?” Maybe Maiba, but that was written later.

RS.That was in 1979. Yes, yes. Wanpis, Reluctant Flame, TheCrocodile,Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime by Maori Kiki.

DM.What role did autobiography and memoirs play?

RS. Most of those first Papua New Guinean writers grew up both in the traditional and during the colonial period. I think that autobiographies and memoirs were important because when they were writing about their life stories, they were actually writing about their displacement and something to do with reclaiming their identity. So autobiography is seen by us, by me, as important in that sense because it was writing about self at the same time writing about the broader Papua New Guinean society, like Albert Maori Kiki’s Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime. Although this is a life story about Maori Kiki, it also talks about political development in the PNG. So in that sense, an autobiography was important.

DM.What was the audience for this life writing? Was it local? Perhaps, werethey trying also to speak to a colonial audience as well? And, if they are trying to write for two audiences, then how does that affect the writing?

RS.Okay, from reading such works, I personally think that they were writing to both audiences like the colonial masters and Papua New Guineans. For example, if you look at Vincent Eri’s The Crocodile, within the novel you have indigenous beliefs inserted into the text. So, in that sense, if somebody -- a Papua New Guinean or a person from the Gulf province, where Vincent comes from -- reads it, it’s about his own society. So, if you see a lot of people growing up in an urban area, when they read such novels, they get a glimpse of what their society was like, previously. I think they were writing for both outsiders and insiders.

EE.Can I ask you a question, Regis, about the literature competitions, the national literature competitions because I know you’ve been involved in one way or another with them in the past. Those competitions started a long time ago in the 60s and it seems to me from what I know, that they’ve had this huge popularity: people from all over the country submit. Now, many of those people are not people who have had the advantage of a university education, and even though there’s a high rate of illiteracy in the country, there still seems to be a high degree of participation in those competitions. I’m just wondering from your own experience with them, if you can give me some sense of the importance you feel that those competitions have.

RS. Yeah. The National Literature Competition did a lot in terms of encouraging grassroots writing, because one of the things that happens or happened in PNG is that people see literature or writing as an elitist occupation. Because it was centred within the University and other similar institutions, the National literature Competition worked against that idea of literature as elitist, because it was open to all, to everyone. And the other thing about the National Literature Competition is that it gave everyone an opportunity to try and express themselves, because expression is part and parcel of PNG traditional societies. But, in terms of literature, it gave everyone an opportunity to write. Some of the works that were submitted were published, but many of them were not published: they were in broken English, but at the same time people had the opportunity to write. But it was done away with about five years ago because the Institute decided to do away with the person who was in charge of the literature section. So….

EE.Was that Jack [Lahui]?

RS.Yeah.The Institute of PNG Studies was incorporated together with the National Research Institute. So, because of that they had to prioritize somethings and do away with other things which they thought were not important.