Chapter 3. From ‘My Story’ to ‘The Story of Myself’—Colonial Transformations of Personal Narratives among the Motu-Koita of Papua New Guinea

The land on which the city of Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, has developed was traditionally the territory of two intermarried peoples now often collectively called the Motu-Koita, or Motu-Koitabu. The Koita spoke a non-Austronesian language, closely related to that of a group further inland, known as the Koiari, of which they may once have been a part.^[4] The implication of linguistic evidence, oral tradition, and archaeological investigation is that at some stage in the distant past they moved, or were driven by the Koiari, toward the coast.^[5] There they settled, and began to intermarry with the Western Motu. The latter spoke an Austronesian language, and built their houses at the edge of the sea, or sometimes offshore. The Western Motu migrated into the area from places both inland and on the coast^[6] and when Europeans arrived they were settled in a number of villages along about 50 kilometres of the coast, separated from their coastal enemies, the Eastern Motu, by an inlet.^[7]

A number of Koita groups became allied with the Motu villages known as Hanuabada, Tanobada, Tatana, Vabukori and Pari close to where Port Moresby would develop and friendly relations were maintained between the two peoples, though the Motu regarded the Koita as prone to sorcery. Both the Motu and Koita were fearful of the Koiari, whom they regarded as barbaric and possessed of great sorcery skills. Of the seven Motu villages established when Europeans arrived in the 1870s, two—Vabukori and Tatana—claimed different origins from the rest, despite sharing with them a common language and social organisation. Both the Motu and the Koita villages were divided into residential groups with a patrilineal idiom. These groups were, and are, called iduhu, a term popularly translated as ‘clan’, contrary to the caution of anthropologists.^[8]

Traditionally, the Motu-Koita comprehension of their world was mythopoeic. That is, mythic narratives disclosed extra-ordinary potencies beyond what we might regard as commonsense explanations of everyday experience. Here I take Motu-Koita mythopoeia to be an intellectual activity similar to that which dominated ancient Greek thought before myth in that society was largely displaced by philosophy. Hatab suggests that for the Greeks myth was not a ‘detached account’, but a spoken correlate of an acted rite, or a thing done: ‘Myth is therefore non-theoretical in the sense that it is not detached from praxis; it is originally a lived reality’.^[9] This phenomenological interpretation is particularly apt in respect of traditional Motu-Koita society, and in talking of mythopoeia in the Melanesian context I follow an exemplary and succinct formulation by Mimica, to mean a ‘mode of activity of consciousness instrumental in the structuring of experience of the world in which humans are situated’.^[10]

As a brief example of Motu-Koita mythopoeic consciousness, we can consider a figure known as Buasi, the founding ancestor of Tubumaga iduhu, who lived eight generations before the Motu culture hero Kevau Dagora. Archaeological investigation and the comparative examination of oral history suggest Kevau Dagora himself was active about 250 years before the present,^[11] and core male members of the iduhu now known as Idibana Taulamiri in Pari village (near Port Moresby) trace their descent patrilineally to Kevau, and hence to Buasi. Beyond his human lifespan, Buasi continued his existence in serpentine form within a fissure in the rock of the hill called Taurama, overlooking a section of the local coastline. Crews of passing canoes paid obedience to Buasi and fell silent, lest their canoes capsized. The story of Buasi continued to be told through the colonial era, although it is largely forgotten nowadays.^[12] We note the conflation of the past and present in the mythopoeic apprehension of Buasi’s potency. The ancestor was present and efficacious, transcending the mundane abilities of the canoe paddlers, who depended on his benevolence as they negotiated what a foreigner might observe to be a relatively unhazardous stretch of water.

The immanence of ancestors meant that the past was not conceived historically in relationship to the present, but was experienced as part of a lived-present. Moreover, the relationship between members of a mortal community and ancestors could be enhanced by siahu, which can be glossed in English as ‘heat’. Heat was an important constitutive concept in traditional Motu cosmology. Ancestors could be ritually approximated through the creation of conditions of heat, dryness and lightness. One way of achieving this was by intensifying a fire at an irutahuna, a potent central space in, for example, a house, which facilitated enhanced communication between a living assemblage and the phalanx of their ancestors. Men or women could also increase their siahu by chewing ginger in combination with other foods recognised as generating lightness and dryness. Such dietary regimes were instrumental in achieving a state of potency known as helaga, in which the participant became partially separated from communal mortality and closer to the existential status of ancestors. Becoming helaga enabled people to embrace their ancestors’ power to a degree. This last achievement is reflected in the English glosses of siahu in translation, which include ‘power’ and ‘authority’ as well as ‘heat’.

Siahu, in the sense of authority, was also a legitimating force when telling a sivarai (story),^[13] insofar as genealogical connections to specific ancestors legitimated narratives of the past, which might include, for example, stories of the movement of ancestors from place to place establishing or abandoning villages or gardens, fighting battles, killing or being killed and buried. It is in this light that we should understand the Motu-Koita relationship to land, for example. For siahu is the word used when talking about what English speakers call land-rights. Through narratives about their ancestors, speakers would iterate their siahu, or that of their iduhu, to inhabit, or use, or pursue various activities at, the places to which they referred. In other words, their siahu derived from their ancestors’ presence and actions at a given place. As mythopoeia, these narratives were not articulated as truth claims, nor were they subject to proof in any European legal or philosophical sense. They ‘belonged’ to the people who told them by virtue of their genealogy, and thereby their content was not challenged by other individuals or groups. Sivarai of the past, particularly those asserting ‘land-rights’ exemplify the way the Motu-Koita phenomenologically viewed the environment as constituted by places which were given meaning for the living by the activities of ancestors.

These briefly-sketched aspects of the traditional worldview of the Motu-Koita indicate the significance of relatedness as an aspect of people’s being. Not only was genealogical connectedness a source of authority, but a temporary increase in the intensity of a person’s relationship with ancestors (the attainment of degrees of helaga) was at the same time a lessening of his or her relationship with the community. The importance of relatedness can also be seen in, for example, Motu use of teknonymy and other encompassing terms of address. Familiar people were not normally addressed by name, but in terms of a relationship to someone else—‘mother/father of x’, ‘husband/wife of y’, ‘my sibling’, ‘my father’s sister’ and so on. Their social being was in fact acknowledged through explicitly relating them to others. This is demonstrated mythopoeically in the partial social negation, during his youth, of the culture hero Kevau Dagora, who was mentioned earlier. Kevau Dagora was yet unborn when his father was killed in the massacre of Taurama village. His pregnant mother Konio was the only survivor of that massacre, fleeing to her brother’s village, where Kevau Dagora grew up not knowing who his father was. He was mocked by other children for not belonging to a place, or having a father. When he went hunting, other children took the game he killed (a further negation of Kevau). Kevau Dagora eventually overcame this negation, after learning the story of the Taurama massacre, in an episode during which he killed one of his tormentors and declared himself. His utterance varies according to versions of the story—in some he uses the name of his father, in others his father’s iduhu name or an invocation of Taurama, his ancestral home.^[14] The variation discloses a commonality; in each account Kevau consolidates his social being through the elaboration of his relatedness beyond his own mother.

A further point of note in this narrative is the very name Kevau is given, in relation to his slaughtered father. Children were commonly named in the first instance by prefixing a name to the ‘first’ name of their father—thus the son or daughter of a man called ‘Kevau x—’ would be named ‘y— Kevau’. In the case of Kevau Dagora, however, genealogies ascribe to him the whole name of his father (that is, there is a ‘Kevau Dagora No. 1’ and a ‘Kevau Dagora No. 2’). In this narrative, then, Kevau’s natal relationship to his already deceased father is articulated through the shared relationship with the woman Konio (‘Kevau adavana’ = ‘married of Kevau’ and ‘Kevau sinana’ = ‘mother of Kevau’), and his emergence as a new iduhu head and war leader replacing, rather than simply succeeding, his father through the avenging of the Taurama massacre.

In combination, the foregoing insights into the lack of historical separation of the past and present, and the primacy of relatedness, indicate that the autonomous self, as commonly understood in Western society, was not possible in Motu-Koita society. To elaborate this I draw on the terminology of Maurice Leenhardt, who attempted to represent Melanesian understandings of what Westerners consider to be the person, based on his study of New Caledonia in the early 1900s.^[15] Without capitulating to the evolutionist cast of his representation, I find value in Leenhardt’s distinctions between three kinds of human beings, which he designated, in French, personnage, personne and individu. The last of these terms can be translated as ‘individual’, and denoted for Leenhardt the Western notion of the autonomous, ego-oriented entity, imbued with temporal continuity.^[16] In the standard English translation of Leenhardt’s Do Kamo, Gulati renders personnage as ‘personage’,^[17] but I prefer to use the term ‘persona’. In contrast to the individual, the persona is constituted by and dependent upon relationships, is intrinsic to the mythopoeic experience of the world, and cannot exist outside of these conditions.^[18] Between the two is the personne, or ‘person’, neither mythopoeically structured, nor fully individuated. The relationship between the Leenhardtian ‘person’ and ‘individual’, understood by him as a modality of a problematic evolution from archaic persona to rational individual, could be recast in terms of more recent anthropological discussion of the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘person’.^[19] My preoccupation here, though, is with the persona, the ‘participatory’ entity, which, among the Canaques of Leenhardt’s ethnology, was known as the kamo:

The kamo, the Canaque persona, is not defined by his or her body, but is sustained by a set of relationships with similar entities. To a predominant degree, the persona’s being is experienced as participation, not as an independent existence. Leenhardt gives a handy example of this in the negative instance, a Canaque cursed and driven out of his society, who feels himself in ‘perdition’. Deprived of any relationship through which to find himself, he cannot even assert his being through speech, because he no longer corresponds to any persona. Without a participatory relationship and a corresponding name he has no existence.^[21] ‘Persona’ is, then, a particularly apt term for the mode of being Leenhardt is attempting to portray, being derived from the Latin terms per (‘through’), and sonare (‘to sound’), giving the compound personare, ‘to sound through’.

To return to the Motu-Koita, the culture hero Kevau Dagora is in every sense a persona. In the narratives he is initially in ‘perdition’, as his social being is denied by others, until he finds himself by establishing the relationship to his father, to his iduhu, and to Taurama and declares himself. Consequently in the remainder of the narrative he is, as Leenhardt might put it, a living Motu-Koita ensemble in the qualities he displays and in his achievements. But importantly, the narrator of such stories is also a persona, using his or her relationship to Kevau Dagora to establish authority, both to tell the story, and to maintain a practical engagement with the places which the narrative traverses. The narrator declares himself or herself in this mythopoeic fashion. The obverse of this dependence on relationships is a lack of acknowledgement of a self which can exist autonomously outside the mythopoeic context. That is, traditional Motu-Koita did not acknowledge themselves as the autonomous, ego-oriented entities, imbued with temporal continuity, which we might call individuals. Consequently, they could not have an autobiographical consciousness.

An indication of this traditional lack of autobiographical consciousness among the Motu-Koita is found, paradoxically, in the ‘autobiographical’ reminiscences of Ahuia Ova, written in collaboration with the anthropologist F.E. Williams and published in 1939. Ahuia Ova was prominent in his day, the early colonial period. He was a major informant of C.G. Seligman, who published an ethnology of the Koita,^[22] an informant of Malinowski during the latter’s short time in Port Moresby,^[23] and enjoyed some patronage from the Governor, Sir Hubert Murray. Williams was partly motivated to record Ahuia’s biography by Radin’s apparent success with a native American.^[24] Certainly the finished product contained a significant amount of biographical material and, as Williams observed, was evidence of considerable hubris,^[25] but its form was the result of guidance, ‘some encouragement’, a syllabus and pre-arranged table of contents provided by Williams, significant editing of the manuscript dictated by Ahuia, and substantive rearrangement to achieve the conventional autobiographical structure desired by Williams.^[26] The anthropologist expressed ‘some disappointment’ at the quality and quantity of the finished product, compared to Radin’s achievements, and clearly had expectations of what an autobiography should contain which were unfulfilled by Ahuia, whom Williams said was ‘more at home in relating legends than in writing personal history’.^[27] Indeed, Williams tells us that ‘A few quite irrelevant passages have been dropped, and some long-winded ones summarised in square brackets’.^[28]

Less interference was involved in another celebrated document, ‘Kori Taboro’s story’ dictated to a literate Papuan in the 1940s and published both in English and in Motu.^[29] Kori Taboro was a prominent Koita woman in Port Moresby, a diviner, mistakenly represented by some as a sorcerer,^[30] and witness to early government and missionary activity in the area. Some phraseological liberties were taken in the translation, but the substance of Kori’s story was preserved, and she appears to have told her story in her own way. Moreover, G.A.V. Stanley, the European at whose house the story was narrated, forbade any questioning of her during the telling. This document is a marked contrast to Ahuia Ova’s reminiscences, in that Kori Taboro gives very little autobiographical information. She gives her birthplace and genealogy^[31] and testifies to being a child when the missionary W.G. Lawes began translating the Bible into Motu.^[32] This information, though, is used only to legitimate and orient her narrative, about migrations, warfare, missionary and other colonially related activities (which are themselves mythologised in the account). Kori Taboro, in other words, refers to herself only to indicate her relationship to the persons whose actions she describes and thereby her siahu, her authority to tell the sivarai.

The Motu title of Kori Taboro’s story, Kori Taboro Ena Sivarai, also indicates its lack of autobiographical consciousness. Two types of possession, alienable and inalienable, are marked in the Motu language. Kori Taboro Ena Sivarai, unlike its English translation ‘Kori Taboro’s Story’, is unequivocal in meaning. It is specifically ‘the story told by Kori Taboro’. To indicate a story about Kori Taboro, a different phrase, Kori Taboro Sivaraina, would be required, and the speaker would be someone other than Kori Taboro. Sivaraina (sivarai with a possessive suffix) is the inalienable case, the story and its subject are inseparable, as with the story above about Kevau Dagora. Such a construction cannot sensibly occur with the speaker as the object, such as lau sivaraigu, ‘the story of me’. In order to use the inalienable construction in a reflexive manner, Kori Taboro would have to tell a story about her participation in an event (e.g., lau Mosbi nala sivaraina, ‘story about my trip to Moresby’). In conformity with the mythopoeic conception of the persona, Kori Taboro cannot represent herself as an entity with its own life history.