Pacific poetry ping pong

The collaboration’s title Talanoa Fogafala represents the time when a Samoan family settles on their sleeping mats and starts to tell stories, says Associate Professor Carol Mutch from the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland.

She says the idea began as a chance conversation between herself and senior lecturer Leua Latai from the National University of Samoa (NUS).

“We agreed that some Samoan academics would share their poems with their New Zealand counterparts”, she says, “and when they arrived, a group of poets brought together by myself and Associate Dean Pasifika, Jacoba Matapo, read and responded to them with poems of our own.”

The partnered poems were then returned to Samoa where fine arts students from NUS illustrated them with traditional and contemporary artworks.

Dr Mutch says everyone involved was so delighted with the results they looked for a way to publish the collection in book form.

Fortunately the Oceania Comparative and International Education Society agreed to cover the cost of publication and Talanoa Fogafala was pre-launched at a small ceremony hosted by Pasifika Success at the Faculty of Education and Social Work.

The book had a more formal launch at the National University of Samoa recently, attended by Dr Mutch and a range of staff, students and dignitaries, including the acting New Zealand High Commissioner Huw Thomas.

The university’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Fui Leápai Tuúa Ilaoa Asofou Soó, praised the poets for sharing their thoughts in such a personal but eloquent manner, and also recognised the talent of the young artists who brought the poems to life.

In response to Leua Latai’s poem, Where I’m from, Claudia Rozas Gómez from the School of Critical Studies wrote of her Chilean homeland:

La Pampa
(A response to ‘Where I’m from’)

I went to the desert and
heard the wind talk;
memory let loose upon
my other skin.

The chattering and
the heaving,
like charged fingers
pressed against my chest

and I was able to breathe
again.

Claudia Rozas Gómez

A limited number of copies of Talanoa Fogafala  are available at UBIQ, the University bookshop in the Student Quad on City Campus.