| Chapter : | Introduction: “Our Sea of Islands”: Intermingling with Japan |
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The poem is contained in Te Rau Maire (the fern leaf), an anthology of contemporary Pacific literature sponsored by the 1992 Rarotonga Festival of Pacific Arts. It argues cultural survival:
come and gone; we were not alone,
Family and friends bound us as one.
We survived.
…
your dignity, your pride
will take in its stride
with your sons and daughters yet to come.
We must survive. (4)
In terms of such a counter discourse from islanders’ viewpoints, her work synchronizes postcolonial consciousness with other Island writings dealing with the same topic, such as Teresia Teaiwa's “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans.” On the other hand, the poem praises Lee Boo as a “nobleman” whose creed contemporary Palauans have lost. It borrows the image of the noble-savage from the West to portray the Palauan Ibedul's (a chief of Koror) son, who accompanied Captain Henry Wilson and his men to London in 1784. Compared with Ikezawa's 1993 work rewriting the image of Lee Boo (see chapter 2), Morei's poem (as with Mariquita) remains to be decolonized/demystified, even though Ikezawa and the Micronesian characters in his novels cannot be such agents of the islanders as Morei, Teaiwa, and Mariquita.
My aim in making such comparisons of Japanese and Pacific Islander texts is to connect postcolonial representations of the Pacific from Japan with those from the Pacific Islands in order to examine trans-Pacific cultural movements involved with Japan. In doing so, this book illuminates the Pacific as a locale of diverse subjects striving together under imperialist regimes.