CRAZE FOE WRITING

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 151, 23 December 1929, Page 17

CRAZE FOE WRITING

SAVAGES AS NOVELISTS

The spread of civilisation! All over the South Seas these days you will find wireless, gramophones, and what-not; and I hear, writes Jack M'Laren in the "Daily Hail," that New Guinea, a mighty stronghold of savagery, is to have a native newspaper, with a story-section and all!

As a little education at a mission or' a school will often drive the natives to writing, the editor will not go short of stories; but if they are like some their authors have shown me they will be queer indeed.

One such began with a quarrel between two natives for the possession of a woman, went on to describe the villagers taking sides and becoming involved in an orgy of clubbing and spear-throwing, and ended with the woman rejecting both suitors and running off with a third—which seems to indicate the author had an ironical twist of mind.

His English was peculiar. Here is one sentence:

"So plenty of them people not stand up any more, but lie down on the ground, because their heads all broke with die clubs."

He wanted to know could I get the story published for him in "the white man's country."

Another primitive author was a Caroline Islander who wrote a kind of parable, full of expletives, furiously accusing the Japanese Government, which administers the Caroline group under the mandate, of interfering disastrously with the natives' old-established customs. He asked me to correct it for him, but on deleting the expletives I found there was scarcely anything left. Still another of these peculiar authors was an ex-mission native I came across in the Solomon Islands. He was attempting to write a novel!

His manuscript, which was written chiefly with pieces of sharpened charcoal, comprised all manner of odd scraps of paper, some of them the backs of meat-tin labels. It made a huge pile in the corner of his thatched house. From bits of it he showed and read to me I gathered it was a story of natives and the sea, and that the villain was a white man. He was very proud of his story; and sitting there on a mat on the rough plank lioor of his house listening to him declaiming in pidgin-English what he considered were dramatic passages was one of the most curious experiences of mv life. •

He was regarded with considerable disfavour m the village, however, it being believed that his writing had something to do with witchcraft; and in the end his h°use mysteriously caught fire and the whole ot the manuscript was burnt I have every reason to believe it was done on purpose.