Author(s): Richard Moyle

Pacific Islands | Secondhand | Rare or Scarce

Secondhand.

This modest anthology of fables represents the first publication in the language of Taku, a Polynesian outlier situated off the east coast of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. The island's small size and remoteness have left it largely untouched by Western influences, and a forty-year-old ban on Christian missionaries and churches has allowed the population of 450 to continue unhindered a variety of traditional practices long disconintued on neighbouring atolls, and indeed within Polynesia itself. Taku's language is Samoic and, in common with Samoa itself and other island groups within West Polynesia, Taku's oral tradition includes a category of fables told princibipally for domestic entertainment in a family setting. These stories incorporate one or more short songs which the narrator sings at crucial moments in the plots. The plots of several stories and the names of their principal characters are common to several Polynesian groups, but on Taku the fables are given an extra sense of realism by being localised on the island itself. The numbers of these stories, which are called kkai, are quite low and this anthology represents the contemporary repertoire.

Near fine copy.