Table of Contents
In this chapter I focus on the autobiographical notes and oral accounts by John Kikang, and how I have used these sources in writing a version of his life. My interlocutor came from a village in the heartland of the Ngaing, a people who inhabit the Rai Coast hinterland in Papua New Guinea’s province of Madang. Kikang was over 70 years old when, in February 1997, he died in the village of his birth. Throughout his life Kikang had valued the ideals of progress and development. His narratives and writings tell of identifications and initiatives aligned to Western discourses and practices, particularly those of Australian government officers and Christian missionaries. He portrayed himself as someone who played a leading role in modernising his home region and was proud that his personal efforts as a pioneer of modernity were recognised and remembered in his village. I argue that Kikang’s desire to record his individual history cannot be detached from this process of modernisation. I see my task as narrating Kikang’s life story in a way answering to his notions of modernity.
I owe the term ‘life story’ to Peacock and Holland,[1] who used it to bring together two different dimensions in the study of biographies. ‘Life’ represents an approach that seeks via narratives to access historical, cultural and/or psychic facts. The spotlight here is on a reality standing outside the narrative; the narrative as such receives little attention. ‘Story’, on the other hand, foregrounds the narrative itself and its power to create reality in the act of narrating. Peacock and Holland see life stories as participating in a variety of processes:
[life stories] do indeed offer a window—though not a perfectly transparent one—on historical periods, cultural practices, and psychic events. And their content and telling no doubt do vary by audience. The communicative purposes, the effort to promote understanding yet sometimes to defend and hide, played out in the production of a life story, do result in narration tuned to, but not totally dominated by, immediate social conditions and communicative intent.[2]
I talk of Kikang’s ‘life story’ with both approaches in mind. In order to illuminate the construction of my account of Kikang’s life, I have drawn on the idea of ‘mimesis’.
Following Gebauer and Wulf, I conceive ‘mimesis’ as embracing equally imitation and change, acquisition and articulation. Mimesis thus designates the interplay of internalisation, interpretation and re-enactment. Gebauer and Wulf talk of the subject’s capacity to incorporate the outer world into the inner world, thereby creating references and identifications for subsequent use in social performances.[3] Through such mimetic processes of referencing and performing, certainties are created, attachments are generated, and realities are construed. ‘Mimesis construes anew already construed worlds.’[4]
My account of Kikang’s life is based on his journal entries and oral narratives, themselves the product of diverse mimetic processes. Kikang’s representations refer to prior processes of internalisation, interpretation and re-enactment of discourses and practices from the world of the whites, such as allowed him to identify as a pioneer of modernity. His long years away from home working with Europeans changed how he saw his home region; compared with the world of the whites, his home region came to represent one thing: backwardness. Therefore, a leitmotiv in Kikang’s self-representations was first the vision, then a concrete commitment, to re-structuring his home region, with a view to implanting the economic, political and religious modernity he had come to know in the capitalist and Christian colonial system. Kikang saw himself as a go-between, adept at organising exchanges between the rural countryside and the world of white modernity—yet also, on a spiritual level, as enabling exchanges between the real world of the Here and Now and the realms of the dead, or the Beyond.[5]
Mobility was crucial for Kikang’s mimetic practice. Two forms of mobility need to be distinguished. One is the physical movement of a living person in the Here and Now. Thus the young Kikang left his homeland on the Rai Coast and spent many years in the white colonial world. After returning, he mainly worked for Australian administrative officers, who commissioned him to oversee agricultural projects. His other form of mobility was based on the indigenous belief that a portion of the self, namely a person’s spirit-being (asabeiyang or ananuang), is able to detach itself from the body.[6] When its owner is asleep and dreaming, the spirit-being can have out-of-body experiences. Kikang spoke of dream-journeys that he took to the world of the dead, who, according to his representations, now lived as whites in a Western and largely urban landscape, in material prosperity free from care. In these spaces inhabited by the dead he saw the very modernity that, he believed, still awaited creation in the local world of the living.[7] Through his journeys into these different zones of whiteness, and his interactions with the whites, Kikang acquired cultural experiences, habitual imprints and new forms of power-knowledge, all central to his self-perception and masculine identity, his agency and authority.[8]
When I attempt to fashion from Kikang’s notes and oral accounts a life story that tallies with his identifications and initiatives, ‘mimesis’ describes my practice too. For what else do I explore but a mimetic process when I describe how I tell Kikang’s life and change it in the telling? In this chapter, I begin by sketching how our collaboration came about and introduce the two chief sources for Kikang’s life story: a) transcripts from tape recordings of our conversations, and b) Kikang’s own autobiographical notes. Then I reflect on my decision to tell Kikang’s story in chronological order and, finally, discuss my reasons for including in the text excerpts from our conversations.
Early in my fieldwork among the Ngaing, several of my interlocutors pointed out John Kikang’s achievements. They portrayed him as politically influential and instrumental in introducing both coffee cultivation and Catholic Christianity to the region following World War II. In the national archives in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, I came across several reports by Australian administrative officers who depicted a restless, disciplined Kikang, a man with an entrepreneurial spirit, energetically promoting vegetable marketing, coffee cultivation and other economic projects, and outstanding as village headman: ‘Kikang is regarded as the most progressive Luluai in the Saidor Sub-District. His village looks a picture, and they have running water … [He] is a tireless worker and a deeply religious man’.[9] His economic initiatives and his loyal cooperation with the local authorities won him standing with the Australian administration. The head of the Department of Native Affairs advised officials in Saidor: ‘You should use Kikang as much as possible to spread progressive ideas in the area’.[10]
Upon returning to the village, I told Kikang what I had learnt in the archives; I asked him about this or that historical detail and expressed an interest in his career generally. Then I broached the idea of recording his entire life story. He was communicative—indeed he seemed honoured by my interest—and he agreed to let me tape his reflections on the past. His long years of working together and identifying with white people in Papua New Guinea certainly helps to explain his cooperativeness. He could see in our conversations, perhaps, a renewal of the recognition he had once received for his convictions, ideas, and initiatives.
We agreed on a series of interviews, usually meeting at my house in the evening. Often Kikang would arrive wearing a jacket, long trousers and, on occasion, dark shoes. Our conversations—conducted exclusively in Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea—were recorded on tape and eventually ran to more than 30 hours. The verbatim transcripts of the interviews form the primary source for my account of Kikang’s life story. I see my chief tasks as translating the interviews, selecting salient passages, undertaking any necessary editing (for clarity or to reduce repetition), ordering the material chronologically and breaking it up into chapters. I take my bearings from the structure Kikang himself provided in his remarks and writings. In ordering the interviews, I wanted to keep as closely as possible to Kikang’s own narratives. I organised them into a continuous body of text running to 12 chapters. References to historical sources—such as missionary documents or patrol reports by Australian administrative officers—are found in the introduction, but have chiefly been relegated to footnotes in the actual narrative. The timeline of events forms the background against which this life story plays out. As I will discuss in more detail, this chronological ordering, oriented to Western conventions of linearity, accords with Kikang’s own express wish.
Kikang’s written notes comprise the second narrative format of importance for my construction of his story. When I began interviewing him, I had no idea that for years he had kept a written record of episodes and events that mattered to him. He began bringing photographs, medals, documents and sketches to our sessions. Then one day he came along with two journals he had once kept.
The first of these was an ‘Australian Diary’ from the year 1958 with various entries for the period between 1960 and 1983. Some entries take the form of registers giving the place, year and number of coffee bushes planted in the region; others are tables listing his personal income and expenditures; others again list the amounts of church collections, as well as donations and membership fees for local associations; there was a clan and family register for his own village setting out dates of birth; reports from board members on local self-administration bodies; also notes that Kikang had made on his political, economic and religious activities; and finally, notes on his personal achievements.
The second journal, written in a school exercise-book, contains entries from the 1980s. Here too are tables listing personal income and expenditures, but most of the space is devoted to writings of a spiritual nature. Kikang writes of events on the local Christian scene, his dreams and visions, his religious insights and initiatives, Jesus and Maria, his encounters with the spirits of the dead, the nature of the Beyond. On the journal’s back cover Kikang had inscribed the telling words: ‘SANTU BOK 1983’ (‘Holy Book 1983’).
In his ‘Holy Book’, Kikang set down his thoughts in Tok Pisin, adding the date of entry; and was careful to adopt a business-like, official tone, always referring to himself in the third person. Many entries were rounded off with: ‘Kikang wrote this’ or ‘John has written’. The model for Kikang’s entries may have been the notes Australian patrol officers entered in the ‘village register’. In his years of service as village headman, Kikang had to keep just such a register; during my fieldwork, he still had it in his possession, the entries dating from 1956 to 1978. Here is an example of an entry made by an Australian officer:
9/6/61
Tax/Census Patrol. Stayed here for 3 nights. 1 ¼ hours walk from Waibol. Had a meeting with nearby village officials on general progress and economic development. Complaints re pigs spoiling gardens. Owners warned and Luluai told to take action. A good village.
{Signature A.D.O.}
For comparison’s sake, here is a brief entry taken from Kikang’s ‘Holy Book 1983’:
March 28/3/88
Bishop Noser came by helicopter and spoke with J. Kikang on what was the best way. And after the two had decided which way was best, he went back.
J. Kikang wrote this.
Interestingly, though Kikang imitates the report-writing style of administrative officers, Kikang’s subject is (often) his dreams and visions. Thus the passage above tells of Kikang’s encounter with the former Archbishop of Madang, Adolph Alexander Noser, who had died some time beforehand. Noser communicated by dream to Kikang how the souls of the dead were in future to be transported away from the locality. The dream was founded on Kikang’s insight that the Catholic Church had modernised transportation for dead souls, having switched from ships to helicopters.
Kikang’s two journals are heavy-going in a variety of ways. For a start, they are in a bad state of preservation: many pages are either loose or fragmentary; several have been torn out, and others have probably simply gone missing. Then both journals contain passages that are barely decipherable. Further, Kikang used a Tok Pisin orthography of his own devising, which I had to ‘translate’ into the standard version of Melanesian Pidgin after Francis Mihalic.[11] Although Kikang dated all his entries, they were rarely arranged in any systematic chronological order. Kikang placed his entries anywhere in the journal as yet unwritten upon. To this mosaic of entries, Kikang added narratives of past events and experiences, these being assigned a year presumably from memory.
It is, therefore, only right to ask how these autobiographical records should be handled. To me, Kikang’s writings are valuable historical documents bearing on a specific time of transition. Kikang’s primary socialisation was in an oral culture. After leaving his village, he received a rudimentary formal schooling. His journals show how he related to reading and writing. They bear witness to a mimetic practice. Kikang appropriated this ‘technology’ because he saw he could fashion from it an autobiographical tool. Reading and writing let him actualise in himself his idea of a modern self.
So I have opted for two forms of representation. First, I shall combine a selection of journal entries with Kikang’s own oral accounts. I have decided to place the latter at points in the text where journal entry and oral narrative directly bear on each other. Translated entries from the journal have been placed in grey-shaded boxes to set them off from the rest of the text. Thus the reader will be able to see that these entries are not part of the interview transcripts. Journal entries and oral representations thus run on parallel tracks, yet interrelate. This modus operandi however requires a number of passages from the journals to be relocated within the chronological framework of Kikang’s narratives. Second, so as to compensate for the dislocation of the original journal material, I have decided to give readers access to the two journals in an appendix. There the edited Tok Pisin versions of Kikang’s notes may be inspected in the original arrangement—albeit without the tables listing personal income and expenditures and without personal data from the village register about the inhabitants of Sibog.
In my account of Kikang’s story, I want his life to be told as far as possible in his own words, therfore my account most resembles books such as Ongka by Andrew Strathern[12] or Elota’s Story by Roger Keesing.[13] If I insert journal entries into the narrative flow, it is not only because I deem this necessary, but also because nothing less will bring out the fragmentary and protean nature of his story.[14]