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Solomon Islands is a country consisting of six major islands and over 900 smaller islands in Melanesia, part of Oceania, to the northeast of Australia. It is directly adjacent to Papua New Guinea to the northwest, Australia to the southwest, New Caledonia and Vanuatu to the southeast, Fiji, Wallis and Futuna, and Tuvalu to the east, and Nauru and the Federated States of Micronesia to the north. It has a total area of 30,407 square kilometres, and a population of 734,887 according to the official estimates for mid 2023. Its capital, Honiara, is located on the largest island, Guadalcanal. The country takes its name from the wider area of the Solomon Islands (archipelago), which is a collection of Melanesian islands that also includes the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, but excludes the Santa Cruz Islands.
The culture of the Solomon Islands reflects the extent of the differentiation and diversity among the groups living within the Solomon Islands archipelago, which lies within Melanesia in the Pacific Ocean, with the peoples distinguished by island, language, topography, and geography. The cultural area includes the nation state of Solomon Islands and the Bougainville Island, which is a part of Papua New Guinea.
The Melanesian Brotherhood is an Anglican religious community of men in simple vows based primarily in the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea.
Malaita is the primary island of Malaita Province in Solomon Islands. Malaita is the most populous island of the Solomon Islands, with a population of 161,832 as of 2021, or more than a third of the entire national population. It is also the second largest island in the country by area, after Guadalcanal.
Sia Figiel is an American contemporary Samoan novelist, poet, and painter.
Albert Tuaopepe Wendt is a Samoan poet and writer who lives in New Zealand. He is one of the most influential writers in Oceania. His notable works include Sons for the Return Home, published in 1973, and Leaves of the Banyan Tree, published in 1979. As an academic he has taught at universities in Samoa, Fiji, Hawaii and New Zealand, and from 1988 to 2008 was the professor of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland.
The Oroha are a Melanesian people inhabiting several villages on the southern end of Small Malaita in the Solomon Islands. They typically speak the Oroha language, use Pijin as a lingua franca, can commonly read Sa'a, and learn English in school.
Oceanianliterature developed in isolation from the rest of the world and in a unique geographical environment. This allowed the development of a unique literature to thrive. Oceanian literature was heavily influenced by religion and ritual. This can be seen by the large amount of religious symbolism featured in it.
The Archbishop of Melanesia is the spiritual head of the Church of the Province of Melanesia, which is a province of the Anglican Communion in the South Pacific region, covering the nations of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. From 1861 until the inauguration of Church of the Province of Melanesia in 1975, the Bishop of Melanesia was the head of the Diocese of Melanesia.
Laulasi island is an artificial island in the Langa Langa Lagoon, South of Auki on the island of Malaita in the Solomon Islands. It is believed that hostilities among the inlanders of Malaita forced some people into the lagoon where over time they built their islands on sandbars after diving for coral. The religion of the island was based on prayers and offerings to the ghosts of dead ancestors, mediated by priests who kept their skulls and relics in tabu houses. Some ancestors were incarnated as sharks which protected their descendants. Langalanga is also the main source of the shell money now made in Solomon Islands.
Langa Langa Lagoon or Akwalaafu is a natural lagoon on the West coast of Malaita near the provincial capital Auki within the Solomon Islands. The lagoon is 21 km in length and just under 1 km wide. The "lagoon people" or "salt water people" live on small artificial islands built up on sand bars over time where they were forced to flee from the headhunters of mainland Malaita.
Samoan literature can be divided into oral and written literatures, in the Samoan language and in English or English translation, and is from the Samoa Islands of independent Samoa and American Samoa, and Samoan writers in diaspora. Samoan as a written language emerged after 1830 when Tahitian and English missionaries from the London Missionary Society, working with Samoan chiefly orators, developed a Latin script based Samoan written language. Before this, there were logologo and tatau but no phonetic written form.
The literature of Vanuatu, understood in the strict sense of written literature, began in the 1960s.
Solomon Islands literature began in the 1960s.
Honiara is the capital and largest city of Solomon Islands, situated on the northwestern coast of Guadalcanal. As of 2021, it had a population of 92,344 people. The city is served by Honiara International Airport and the seaport of Point Cruz, and lies along the Kukum Highway.
John (Jack) Renton (1848–1878), also known as The White Headhunter, was a Scottish seaman from Orkney. In 1868, he was among four or five deserters from the American ship Renard, which specialised in the trade of guano. He and the other deserters travelled in a small boat for 2,000 miles, and eventually landed at Maana'oba (Manaoba), a small island off the north-east coast of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands. He became a slave of a bigman named Kabbou for 8 years, in which he learnt the Lau language, participated in the island's culture, and became a headhunter. While on Malaita, he befriended a local warrior, Kwaisulia, and taught him English. He is the only European to have been a headhunter and was the first European to live for a long period on Malaita.
Kwaisulia was a prominent tradesman, strongman and blackbirder on the island of Malaita in the late nineteenth century, who for several decades held political control over the north of the island.
Subramani is a Fijian author, essayist, and literary critic. According to The Literary Encyclopedia, he is "one of Fiji's leading prose fiction writers, essayists, and critics". His essays have dealt with multiculturalism, education, and cinema. Subramani writes fiction and non-fiction in English and Fiji Hindi, and has combined writing with university administration. He has served in all three universities in Fiji and has been a Dean, Pro Vice Chancellor and Acting Vice Chancellor. He has established himself as a novelist, short story writer, essayist and a literary critic. He has written on education, language, the university, cinema and civil society. In his fiction, as a bilingual writer, and working from the intersection of two languages, he been able to depict, in the words of the Samoan novelist, Sia Figiel, the "struggles of Fijian society and present us with a haunting salusalu of melancholy, despair, anguish, madness, terror, loss interlaced with moments of satire and humour that encapsulates the history and experience of men and women and children caught up in the violent shadow of colonialism".
John "Jock" Cromar (1859/1860–1942) was a Scottish-Australian seaman and author, who wrote the book Jock of the Islands, a supposed retelling of his experiences in Melanesia during the late 19th century. Described by Charles Morris Woodford as a "derelict of the labor trade", Cromar was for several decades active in the recruiting industry in the Solomon Islands.
John Selwyn Saunana, OBE was a Solomon Islands writer and politician best known for the novel The Alternative, the first novel ever published by a Solomon Islander.
References
- 1 2 3 Simms, Norman Toby (1991). Writers from the South Pacific: A Bio-Bibliographic Critical Encyclopedia. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. p. 124. ISBN 0-89410-594-9 . Retrieved 2024-01-06.
- 1 2 3 Lal, Brij V.; Fortune, Kate, eds. (2000). The Pacific Islands: An Encyclopedia. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-2265-X . Retrieved 2024-01-06.
- ↑ Simms, Norman Toby (1986). Silence and Invisibility: A Study of the Literatures of the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press. p. 207. ISBN 0-89410-362-8 . Retrieved 2024-01-06.
- ↑ O'Brien, Robert Viking (July 1996). "A Melanesian Novel of Historical Emergence: Rexford T. Orotaloa's Two Times Resurrection" (PDF). Ariel: A Review of International English Literature (27): 65–76. Retrieved 2024-01-06.
- ↑ Oxenham, Stephen (Autumn 1986). "Review: Two Times Resurrection by Rexford T. Orotaloa". World Literature Today. 60 (4): 690. Retrieved 2024-01-06.
- ↑ Wendt, Albert, ed. (1995). Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1731-1 . Retrieved 2024-01-06.
