Pacific Islands

from Wikipedia
The Pacific Ocean contains an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 islands (the exact number has yet to be precisely determined). Those islands lying south of the tropic of Cancer but excluding Australia are traditionally grouped into three divisions: Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Inhabitants are sometimes referred to as Pacific Islanders.

Pacific islands are also sometimes collectively called Oceania 1 (although Oceania is sometimes defined as also including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago),

Melanesia means black islands. These include New Guinea (the largest Pacific island, which is divided into the sovereign nation of Papua New Guinea and the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya), New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands.

Micronesia means small islands. These include the Marianas, Guam, Wake Island, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, and the Federated States of Micronesia. Most of these lie north of the equator.

Polynesia means many islands. These include New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, Rotuma, the Midway Islands, Samoa, American Samoa, Tonga,

This term, the English department at Simon Fraser University is reading and discussing Pacific island literature in the World Literatures course. The readings are:

Wendt, Albert, ed.--Nuama: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980,
Wendt, Whaitiri, Sullivan, eds.--Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English,
Wendt, Albert--The Songmaker's Chair
Kneubuhl, Victoria Nalani--Hawaii Nei: Island Plays
Grace, Patricia--Dogside Story and Baby No-Eyes

All are published by the University of Hawaii Press.

Does anyone know of any other books that highlight these islands?

Well, of course there's James Michener's Hawaii, historical novel that begins with the Big Bang (practically). Much exploration of the missionary (negative) influence on Hawaiian culture. It's been many years since I read it.

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones is set in Papua New Guinea. It's been mentioned in this group before so I won't go into (see the Aug and Sept reading threads)

Tahiti - marvellous series by Celestine Vaite featuring a woman called Materena and her life, family, relationship and children's lives set in contemporary Tahiti. The first is Breadfruit.

An interesting book I found covered much of the mythology and folklore from this region. It's non fiction but fascinating all the same. Pacific Mythology by Jan Knappert.

I was under the impression that Mister Pip was set in Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands.

Moloka'i by Alan Brennert is a fiction story about a young girl who contracts leprosy and is exiled to a quarantined settlement on Molokai, Hawaii.

>I do not know the politics and appreciate after some brief web research just now that both the Solomons and PNG appear to dispute who the Bougainville region belongs to.
If I've offended, my apologies.

I was using the wikipedia reference for Bougainville when I wrote the setting reference to Mister Pip, (which is on my tbr list of NZ writers to read). I should have known better and checked more than one source before posting >4 ryn_books:.

This thread gives me yet another chance to promote the New Zealand Maori writer Patricia Grace (also mentioned by Nickelini in #2). I found one of her books in a second hand shop in Bristol (UK) yesterday, so am very pleased. I would recommend Potiki, but Baby No-Eyes is also very good. The books are steeped in Maori (i.e. polynesian) culture.

I have also read Pouliuli by the Samoan Albert Wendt, which I didn't get along with brilliantly, but I would be prepared to give him another go. Finally, Epeli Hau'ofa is a sort of pan-pacific writer (born in Papua New Guinea, travelled round a bit, ended up in Tonga. His books are comic, perhaps a little too prurient and scatalogically comic to take them too seriously, but they do address serious point about cultural clashes and tradition on some of the Pacific islands. I have read Tales of the Tikongs, which was interesting, but not brilliant.

>6 ryn_books: certainly no offense taken! I actually had only a vague general idea where the book was set while reading it but sent an emergency message off to amandameale to inquire (she had read the book previously). It was she who had read in an interview or review that it was Bougainville and informed me thus:-)

>8 avaland: I learned afterwards that for some, who 'owns' Bougainville is the issue.
It's changed hands several times and is referred to on different sites as either PNG or Solomons or wishing to be independent?

My brief foray into trying to understand what Bougainvillians consider themselves made me wonder if I'd accidentally touched a nerve. Especially if posting from an Australian location...
Very glad no offense was taken.

#6 & #8 Bougainville is one of the Solomon Islands which somehow come under the auspices of Papua New Guinea. There are a variety of cultural groups within PNG and also throughout the Pacific islands. In this context it's not really helpful to think of Bougainville as part of PNG. IMO

I'm reading Melville's Typee right now, which was originally sold as a travel story rather than a fictional work. Fascinating stuff, and a good look into the mind of an enlightened 19th century American confronting Polynesian culture. He takes great pains to look hard and as dispassionately as he can at Polynesian Culture.

I tried doing a tagmash on {fiction, Pacific} to see what would come up:

Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
The naked and the dead by Norman Mailer
Typee by Herman Melville
Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
The island of the day before by Umberto Eco
The thin red line by James Jones
Battle cry by Leon Uris
The Caine mutiny a novel of World War II by Herman Wouk

A number of WWII novels, and interesting enough, but not quite what one might hope to find. Usual problem with Author Touchstones.

I did a somewhat more relevant tagmash {fiction, Pacific islands} and came up with this: (besides Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mister Pip)

The sex lives of cannibals : adrift in the Equatorial Pacificby J. Maarten Troost
Night of error by Desmond Bagley
Blue latitudes : boldly going where Captain Cook has gone before by Tony Horwitz
No Man's Land by Robb White
The Man With the Bird on His Head: The Amazing Fulfillment of a Mysterious Isalnd Prophecy by John Rush
Tales from the south seas by Anne Gittins

I got every Touchstone to work.

To find books by people who actually live in the Pacific, or who come from there, I suggest searching for the individual islands: Samoa, the Cook Islands, and so forth. This turns up books such as Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel of Samoa, and the fiction and poetry of Alistair Campbell who is from the Cook Islands. Whetu Moana, mentioned in >2 Nickelini:, is a good place to start, as is the work of Albert Wendt.

I'd recommend The Bone People by Keri Hulme for New Zealand. I'm new to the group, so I don't know where you stand on fictional islands, but One Big Damn Puzzler by John Harding is a combination of Pacific island-meets-Western culture, Shakespeare, satire/humor and more - a bit broad at times, but ultimately, I felt, well worth the read. Finally, I realize it is a fiction group, but for a broader non-fiction account of several islands, there's also Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania.

There is a nice piece about Patricia Grace receiving the Neustadt Prize this fall on the World Literature Today website:

http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/

click on the link at the top of the website that bears her name. The piece comes up as a pdf.

That is a good article! One Pacific island that hasn't been mentioned yet is Niue: the author I know of from Niue is John Pule, whose The Shark that Ate the Sun and Burn My Head in Heaven are both well worth reading. He's also an acclaimed visual artist. There's an introduction to his work at http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/pulejohn.html

(I know many people limit themselves to the "192 countries" when reading globally, but it seems a shame to miss out on good writing from states that are not on the list of fully independent countries.)