THE NADAVE SHORT STORY

REMEMBER, PROTEST AND PROCLAIM

MAY 2014

1.

BACKGROUND: A group of people gathered for a planning meeting of four days at the Nadave
Training Centre in Fiji at the end of one season and the beginning of a new one. We came from Rapa
Nui, Guam, West Papua, Bougainville, Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, California, Aotearoa, Vanuatu, Fiji
and Australia. Individuals and representatives of organisations, people of diverse professional and
organisational backgrounds and personal journeys. Yet, we share the one dream for our Ocean, free to
be self-determining. The intention was to tell stories and share experiences on what the Rethinking the
Household of God in the Pacific is asking and to plan the Madang Wansolwara Dance1 scheduled for
September 1st 5th, 2014, a mandate of the Sonaisali October 2013 partners consultation hosted by the
Bread for the World (BfdW). The purpose of this short story is to share with the Sonaisali 2013
consultation partners and friends the affirmations and outcomes of Nadave. So here it goes!

2.

ALTERNATIVE: The alternative is the empire in its many faces and forms.2 What we had and
continues to define and exists with our people is not. The alternative is faceless yet seen in the sorrowful
eyes and scars of struggles of our people for freedom, for honour and dignity, and for legitimacy; it
smiles yet without warmth; it embraces yet without compassion; it sings yet without the harmony of
voices. It suppresses, at times by brute force as had happened in the days of our grandparents and still
today to some of us, but most times by softly killing our people through charming, enchanting and
charismatic words and by its crafty and uncompromising logical and judicial frameworks. It uses our
mothers3 womb, our language, our symbols and traditions to give birth and reproduce4 itself. It forces
us to re-dream our dreams in its way. It operates by being creative in recreating itself in different forms
and contexts. It has an intoxicating idea about our world and us, and has very powerful institutions and
friends in politics, businesses, civil society, religions, academia and the mass media, and loads of money
to produce and reproduce its single idea: the idea that everyone everywhere ought to be the same and
differences are but obstacles to attaining the universal dream of a single truth, reality. This is the story
of the alternative: the end of our human history is universalism, not the celebration of our particularities,
our diversity, the concrete conditions and narratives where we learn to be human and learn who we are.

3.

WANSOLWARA: One people, One Sea. The ocean that connects us as people of the Wansolwara. It is
sacred because it contains the memory of our grandparents and tells us the story about ourselves and
who we are as a people. We will not be portrayed or perceived as victims of the alternative, either by
ourselves or by others. We will affirm who we are and will celebrate it, even in our dark, fair or brown
skins, and in our perfect imperfections5. We will frame our language, create and interpret our art, our
music, our dance, our poetry, our symbols and our rituals to tell and proclaim to us and others who we
are and our place in this universe. We will be writers of our own history6 and will use creativity and
imagination through poetry, art, music and dance, and by being present and practical. These are the

The Dance is used here in relation to Jione Haveas insight that when we dance, we dance on the grounds of our ancestors.
When we dance we dance to awaken their spirits (Day 1, 28.4.2014 minutes). Dance depicts movements and in our moving we
move with the spirit of our grandparents. It is also inspired by the Christian song titled Lord of the Dance by Sydney Carter
(1963) which tells the life story of Jesus protest against imperialism, his fight for justice and human dignity, and his invitation to
others to join him in the dance. His dance proved to be lethal and immortal to him.
2
This understanding of the alternative is credited to John Chitoa (Day 3, 30.4.2014 minutes).
3
Land, its people and the web of relationships is our mother as often meant by the various terms vanua, hanua, fenua, etc.
4
The ideas about the alternative giving birth in our wombs and reproducing itself are credited to Julian Aguon (Day 1, 28.4.2014
minutes).
5
The phrase perfect imperfections is borrowed from the song All of Me by John Legend (2013) but used here to mean the
frailties of our humanity.
6
This is developed from Teresia Teaiwas story about a project on rethinking education aid in which the teachers were urged to
be writers of their own realities (Day 3, 30.4.2014 minutes).

things that the alternative does not understand.7 And we will also recreate and create, retell and narrate,
and reframe and frame these to shame and protest against the alternatives rationale about the universe
and our place in it and the journey of our human history, to its institutions and its friends: that its a folly
and sheer stupidity to reduce the multiplicity of languages, cultures, spiritualties, traditions and
narratives to a single universal truth. It is not the idea of the single that is the object of our wonder in
our Wansolwara. What is remarkable and extraordinary is the multiplicity of the many forms such as the
many kinds of fish, birds and trees, and not the idea of these. We will remember the un-free among us,
those at the Northern, Eastern, Western and Southern corners of our Wansolwara and with their
permission, we will stand with them on their grandparents ground to cry freedom. We will remember
our Wansolwara brothers and sisters who live in the continents. They too have their own stories to tell;
we will dance with them because their stories will enrich the texture and colour of our Wansolwara.
4.

SPIRITUALITY: We will tell our God narrative as our grandparents remembered. The stories of our
spiritualties told through our legends, myths, and through our rituals, symbols, music, art and dance
frame our conversations with and give meaning to who God is in our lives. Our spirituality inspires us
to see the world and God as God would have wanted, not as the alternative would have us believe. God
is not in the divide between the sacred and the profane, the secular and the religious but in both as one.8
Our spirituality is also informed by the stories of our grandparents long gone and the stories of our
people today who were and are persecuted simply for wanting to be free to dream and work towards
what they define as their wellbeing outside the alternatives wishes, to perceive of and to live a life not
framed by the alternative. God speaks to us in the darkness, fairness or brownness9 of our skins, not in
our pretences to be pale and white. Yet, we rejoice in and celebrate the multiplicity of ways in which
God speaks to us and in which we speak of and about God. We will hold on to the texts in our religious
scriptures that emphasise kinship with the one who is different, empathy with the outsider, the courage
that leads our people to extend a hand across boundaries of estrangement or hostility. We will choose
the generous texts of our religious scriptures, our spiritualties and our traditions to be the interpretive
keys to our narrative of affirmations and protests, justice and peace, and welcome and celebrations.

5.

NARRATIVE: We are Wansolwara. We live our lives as narrative quests and it is this that defines us.
We can understand or make sense of our individual stories only by coming to terms with the stories in
which we find ourselves in and are a part. As people of our Wansolwara, we carry with us the tears and
sufferings of our grandparents, and theirs through the generations. The story of our Wansolwara, our
people, is a narrative of decades and centuries of exiles, expulsion, persecution and pogroms, beginning
with the first colonisation of our sea of islands10 to where we are today; where we are told that
development means selling of or exploiting our mother and her seas for the riches within; that it is about
adopting universalist ideals, that it is about endless growth; that it is about having enough is not enough;
that is about not having moral limits to what we can do. For decades and centuries, our grandparents
knew the risks of being persecuted, exiled and identities taken away, sometimes forcefully, but most
times through the charming whispers of the alternative, simply because they dared to be people of the
Wansolwara. These narratives are written into the very fabric of our Wansolwara memory, our identity.
But our Wansolwara story is not without the alternatives realities of injustices, exploitation, violent
oppression and rapes done by our own to our own. We live in the world of the alternative. We see, think
and construct our realities with the frames and lenses of the alternative, and have become its impeccable
protgs in alienating our mother from her children, in condemning her children to a life of poverty and
shame, in the raping of her women and girls, and in reinforcing the alternatives universalist idea of who
we are, its logic for our existence and its measures on the trajectory of our development. This is also
part of our narrative. At the height of our powers, we forget that we are creations, not creators, and in so
doing, we forget that not all can we do, we should do. That maxim remains true today.

This is credited to Santi Hitorangi and Jacki Leota Ete (Day 2, 29.4.2014 minutes).
This is informed by the conversation on the secular and the sacred by Teresia Teaiwa and Jione Havea (Day 2, 29.4.2014
minutes).
9
This is developed from Rosa Moiwends story (Day 1, 28.4.2014) about her fathers painting of the black Christ.
10
The late Professor Epeli Hauofa coined this phrase and developed a protest consciousness and a narrative against the
alternative and its rationale for our world and who we are.
8

6.

RESPONSIBILITY: How can we let go of that pain and the shame when these are written into our
very soul, the soul of our Wansolwara? And yet we must. We will confess and repent, and we will
forgive, but we will remember and not forget that what was done to our Wansolwara grandparents by
the alternative, we will not wish it upon ourselves, our people, our children and the stranger. We have a
duty to the future, no less than to the past to our children as well as to our grandparents. The duty we
owe our grandparents who were persecuted, suppressed and whose identities were stolen because of
what they believed about life and God is to build a world in which our children and their children are no
longer persecuted, suppressed, live in poverty and shame, and identities crushed because of what they
believe. This, our duty to our Wansolwara, will not be comfortable and it should never be because it
will ask that we honour the past, not by repeating it but by learning from it by refusing to add pain to
pain and grief to grief.11 We will remember our grandparents who wept bitter tears at the raping of our
Wansolwara by the alternative and we will remember our children, living and unborn, because we owe
them the sunrise12 and the rainbow13. A sunrise and a rainbow that will bring a grateful smile to our
grandparents in their resting, hope to our children with our actions, and leave to our unborn a legacy of
freedom bought with our tears and a spirit of never again. That is why we must answer hatred with love
as it is the only radical thing left in this world14, violence with peace, and bitterness with generosity of
spirit. And we will constantly keep an eye on the alternative because we remember.

7.

MADANG 2014 DANCE: We will tell one story in our Wansolwara dance and we will embrace the
different artistic dance movements and harmonic singing voices within. We will celebrate who we are
even while we remember the pain, tears and abandoned promises in our narrative. We will dance with
the church and invite others to join in the Wansolwara dance. We will dance with pride and courage for
justice, solidarity and freedom, and our dance will be in protest. Madang is the beginning of our
Wansolwara dance, and it will feature the cry for freedom of those who are not yet free from the yoke of
colonial oppression in our Wansolwara. The Madang dance will be so delicately potent and gracefully
compelling that no longer will our Wansolwara be a fly over15. It will be a vibrant dance space and a
refuge for the weary, the lost, the poor, the oppressed, the stranger, the late comers to the dance, and
even the cynics and sceptics. Madang will be a dance to remember and the dance will go on.

8.

APPRECIATIONS: Gratitude to the following for their very insightful story-telling: Jonathan Osorio
and his four member team of facilitators; Chief Selwyn from Vanuatu; Rosa Moiwend from West
Papua; Jacki Leota Ete, Josaia Osborne and Robert Nicole from the University of the South Pacific;
Michael Mel from the University of Goroka, Papua New Guinea; Teresia Teaiwa from the Victoria
University of Wellington, Aotearoa; Jione Havea from Charles Stutt University in Australia; Mary Rose
Palei and John Chitoa from Bougainville; Julian Aguon from Guam; Santi Hitorangi from Rapa Nui,
and Arnie Saiki from California. Lastly, gratitude to the Pacific Conference of Churches (PCC), Pacific
Network on Globalisation (PANG), Bismarck Ramu Group (BRG), and the Social Empowerment and
Education Programme Inc. (SEEP) for planning and organising the Nadave story-telling.

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11

The impromptu drama performed by Jione Havea in Day 3 (30.4.2014 minutes) where he started to tape Rosa Moiwends eyes,
mouth, hands, and legs, and whose action dared the rest of the meeting participants to respond, is the basis for this assertion.
12
The idea of the sunrise depicting our duty to the next generations is credited to Michael Mel (Day 2, 29.4.2014 minutes).
13
The rainbow is credited to Rosa Moiwends story of sighting a rainbow outside the window of the airplane at a time when she
needed assurance about where she was going. It reminded her of her fathers story about the spirit of her ancestors appearing as a
rainbow indicating assurance, solidarity and glad tidings in her endeavours, wherever she maybe (Day 1, 28.4.2014 minutes).
Coincidentally, Teresia Teaiwa and Jonathan Osorio spotted a rainbow on their way back from their early morning walk on the
morning of departure from Nadave. They called out to the others to see it; it was a beautiful rainbow with its colours patterned
diagonally across the rays of the morning sun; it made us wondered.
14
Julian Aguon (Day 3, 30.4.2014 minutes)
15
This is developed from Jione Haveas idea to reverse the trend of people flying over the Wansolwara as if there is nothing
worth seeing below (Day 3, 30.4.2014 minutes).