A central feature of Kikang’s autobiographical writings and oral narratives is the linkage between the two worlds of the living and the dead. Dream-journeys are, therefore, no less significantly implicated in how he constitutes his modern self than are his real-world journeys to, and identifications with, the world of the whites in a colonial and post-colonial Papua New Guinea. Kikang would cite both kinds of mobility when claiming for himself authority and agency as a pioneer of modernity. Travelling provided him with the opportunity to tap into novel power-knowledge from the other world, whether it came from the whites or from the dead. In his writings and narratives, Kikang made the other world of the whites and the dead the central reference-point of his mimetic practice. By taking his bearings from discourses and practices from the other world, he was able to constitute whiteness, power-knowledge and modernity as core components of the local world and the indigenous self.^[19] Rural home region and urban centres of modernity, blackness and whiteness, the world of the living and the world of the dead—instead of treating these as mutually exclusive domains, Kikang chose to ‘infold’ them, by which I mean that he construed each as containing traces of the other. What Kikang’s writings and oral narratives make clear is that he constituted his personal identity as a process in which difference and sameness constrain, even as they pervade, each other.

So when we focus on (auto-)biographies in the Pacific region, what value, then, should we ascribe to constructions and experiences of sameness and difference? In terms of the role played by otherness in articulating identity, are idiosyncratic features discernible in Oceania? Might it not be that alterity—in its historically and culturally specific modes of articulation—is a distinctive characteristic of biographies in the Pacific region?

I construe Kikang’s representations of his life as products of mimetic processes of transculturation embodied in his person. The account given here of his life is an attempt to comprehend these. His writings and what he told me himself have been my primary sources. Three principles have guided me in constructing Kikang’s life story. First, I articulate his written notes with his oral narratives so as to set up reciprocal points of reference, all the while preserving each format’s autonomy. In other words, they should be recognisable in their difference, despite being referenced to each other. Second, Kikang’s efforts to create for himself a chronologically ordered, individual life story struck me as noteworthy. If I dwell on his initiatives in this direction, it is because they correspond, in my opinion, to his mimetic practice and his notions of modernity. At the same time, Kikang invariably links this chronological order to parallel time-spaces. In Kikang’s imaginative world, the borders between spaces and times are rather more porous than is the case in the dominant Western discourse. It is interesting to note how he evades, at least in part, the modern idea of time with its radical separation of past, present and future^[20] —as when he receives messages from Christ, or commutes between the worlds of the living and the dead, or reconstructs his date of birth via his dream-journeys. In particular, it was Kikang’s explanations of the exchanges between the time-spaces of the living and the dead that persuaded me to incorporate dialogue as a third principle in attempting to construe his life story. His representations concerning these matters were largely prompted by the questions I put to him. It therefore occurred to me that reproducing our dialogues was an excellent way to recall our co-construction of his life story; further, that I could render it comprehensible with the help of selected passages. At the start of this chapter, I stated my conviction that reflection on how we tell Pacific lives and change these in the telling should be seen as reflection on mimetic processes. The literary critic Arne Melberg has pointed out that ‘Mimesis is never a homogeneous term, and if its basic movement is towards similarity it is always open to the opposite’.^[21] Thus mimesis designates a way of articulating similarity and difference.