Tag Archives: Solomon Islands

Book of the month: Julian Maka’a

May 29, 2025 By in Book of the month, Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

This book came on my radar through fellow international bibliophile Suroor Alikhan, who kindly hosted me at an online event organised by the Hyderabad Literary Festival last year. A few weeks ago, she contacted me saying that she had found a website that she thought I’d be interested in, featuring a list of more than 100 books by Pacific Islanders.

I was intrigued. The Pacific Island nations were among the most difficult countries to source stories from during my 2012 quest to read a book from every country. And although the criteria of the list’s compiler were a little different from mine – she included a number of titles by writers with Pacific Island heritage (including herself) – there were many fascinating-sounding works.

The book I’ve picked to feature – Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a from the Solomon Islands – didn’t strike me as the most satisfying of those I read from the list, but I found it interesting for several reasons.

The Solomon Islands are hard to source stories from: back in 2012, the best option I could find was The Alternative, a 1980s boarding school novel. So I was curious about what this much more recent short story collection would be like.

My interest was also piqued by Maka’a’s statement on the back cover that the collection – which he self-published in 2012, 27 years after his first collection was brought out by the University of the South Pacific – draws on various aspects of his professional life, including efforts to build staff understanding about sexual reproductive health in his capacity as the manager of Wantok FM, part of the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation. This is reflected in frank descriptions of the treatment of and stigmas around sexually transmitted diseases in several of the earlier pieces.

As with many of the books I read ‘from’ Pacific Island nations in 2012, the collection seems written with a consciousness of needing to represent its nation. ‘The themes and general messages [of the stories] are different and varied,’ writes Maka’a, ‘but the one thing that is common is they reflect what life is like in Solomon Islands’.

To an outsider like me, this manifests itself most tellingly in the glimpses into local beliefs and customs, presented most richly in the title story, in which a legend about a philandering man ritually killed for breaking taboos haunts the narrator.

The emphasis on education, so apparent in The Alternative, is also strong in Maka’a’s work. The most ambitious piece in the collection, a three-part story called ‘Is This Fair?’ centres on a teenage pregnancy at a boarding school and makes clear the sacrifices that the nation’s geography and economic situation demand of families keen to give their children opportunities. Some eight thousand students drop out of education every year, we learn, and just getting to school at the start of term often requires many stomach-churning hours in a boat.

As is so often the case in books from elsewhere, it is the assumptions and things taken for granted that prove most intriguing. One of the central characters in ‘Is This Fair?’, for example, seems not to bat an eyelid at the notion that her parents will decide her career path, as set out in a letter her mother sends her:

‘In her brief letter which she wrote in language and pijin, she explained that she and dad always discussed about me. About the future that I would give them from my education – benefits to cut a long story short. She said they had differences in the job I should take up after I graduate in form five. My mother said she wanted me to become a nurse – that way I would help her when she gets sick or even my father. My father on the other hand wanted me to be a teacher.’

For all its interest, however, this book is a challenging and occasionally bewildering read. My knee-jerk reaction is to pin this on the fact that it has probably not been through the editorial processes of many traditionally published books in mainstream anglophone literature, with the result that there are structural idiosyncrasies, and spelling and grammatical oddities that are sometimes distracting. There seem to be some inconsistencies in the character names between the different parts of ‘I Am Fair?’ that make it hard to follow. There is also an abruptness to certain emotional shifts and transitions that risk interrupting the flow of the story.

But I’m also aware that what I read as errors or idiosyncrasies may in many cases not be considered as such by readers in the Solomon Islands. There, a different form of English is used, one in which certain formulations and word uses that sound odd to me may be customary. Similarly, shifts between registers and emotional states that jar for me may simply reflect different norms or storytelling traditions beyond my experience feeding into this book.

Regardless of how I read it, what remains is a sense of urgency. A desire to communicate. A hand stretched out from this place we in the UK rarely hear of, seeking connection and the chance to convey something. This is me, this book says. This is us. This is where we are.

Is Anyone Out There? And Other Stories by Julian Maka’a (Xlibris, 2012)

Solomon Islands: between two worlds

July 3, 2012 By in Oceania, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This was another recommendation from The Modern Novel  – and a welcome one too, given that the list entry for the Solomon Islands was ominously blank. There just seemed to be nothing out there from this tiny archipelago hovering some way above Australia in the big, blue Pacific.

So when my copy of John Saunana’s 1980 novel The Alternative arrived from a bookseller in Spain, I was interested to see that when it was published it had been held up as the great white hope of literature in the region. ‘At a time when contemporary Solomon Islands writing is growing in scope and depth, this novel will stand as a signal achievement, as a challenge to other Solomon Islands writers,’ proclaims the blurb, while the flyleaf boasts the support of a range of illustrious organisations.

I couldn’t help wondering where the fruits of this apparent late 20th century burgeoning of Solomon Islands writing had got to. As far as I’d been able to find out, those looking for written work in English from this Commonwealth nation would find very little alternative to, er, The Alternative.

Exploring the effects of colonialism, the novel tells the story of Maduru, an intelligent boy forced to inhabit two universes. Singled out for education at an exclusive, British-style boarding school, dubbed the ‘Eton of the Pacific’, he finds himself pulled between the culture he was born into and the one that has been imposed on his island home. At last, as British decolonisation sets in and old certainties begin to crumble, he is forced to choose between his place in the world and his sense of self.

The novel is strong on its depiction of the way colonialism seeps into and warps an individual’s sense of identity. Portraying Maduru’s moments of wishing to be white and his contempt for the ‘bush kanakas’ in his home village, as well as his internalisation of Western attitudes, Saunana is skilled at showing how subjection spreads its roots through everyday life. Perhaps the most powerful example of this comes in the early chapters, when Maduru, indignant at being cast as the Virgin Mary in a school play, rebels against his teachers in his mind: ‘if I were Samson I’d tear you to pieces like the lion, and pull down this chapel like the Temple and kill everybody in it,’ he thinks, unaware that his choice of imagery betrays exactly how deep into his consciousness Western culture has sunk.

Saunana’s anger at the injustice and discrimination of the colonial regime comes across clearly too. At times, this takes the form of highlighting the absurd reality of living in a ‘colonial relic’, subject to decisions taken by penpushers in a drab, rainy country on the other side of the world. Elsewhere, it is expressed more extremely, as when the headmaster, driven to distraction by Maduru’s unionisation of the student body to get a teacher removed, gives vent to a rant about ‘this God-forsaken place’, which lays his prejudices bare. There is also the interesting decision to put some of the later dialogue in Maduru’s mother tongue, excluding English language readers from understanding the full meaning.

Without doubt, this is a novel of its time. Some of the attitudes, in particular Maduru’s unashamed sexism, read oddly in 21st century London.

There are also some pacing problems in the narrative. Saunana has a strange habit of spending the last pages of a chapter building a dilemma for his hero, only to diffuse it and sweep it away in the final paragraph, leaving the reader nonplussed. Digressions – some delightful, some downright odd – are rife and there are moments of hyperbole, which teeter on the verge of the ridiculous in the school context, although they work better if understood as metaphors for a wider national struggle.

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating, strange and engrossing book. Anyone with an interest in colonial and post-colonial literature will find much to chew on here.

And if you do know what happened to all those other Solomon Islands writers of the early eighties, leave a comment and let me know  – it’d be great to hear of any more works out there.

The Alternative by John Saunana (University of the South Pacific, 1980)