Black Stone

by Grace Mera Molisa

Vanuatuan poetry

Genres: Poetry, 20th Century

68 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Grace Mera Molisa is considered one of the major authors in Vanuatu. She has played an important political role in the women's movement for emancipation and independence. She is also considered one of the most revered intellectuals of her time.

She was born in 1946 in Ambae island, Vanuatu. She has since died in January 2002 in Port Vila. In 1977 she was the first ni-Vanuatu to obtain a Bachelor of Arts at the University of the South Pacific.

She has written a number of poems regarding women's issues and other social and political issues to which she is well known for.

Reviews

[Harry Rutherford · Rating 2 out of 5]

One for the Around The World challenge. Wikipedia only mentions one writer from Vanuatu: Grace Mera Molisa. There was a copy of Black Stone, her first book of poems, for sale on AbeBooks, so I thought I'd give it a punt.

This is political poetry: Black Stone was published in 1983, just three years after Vanuatu gained independence, and the main dynamics of the book are anti-colonialism and feminism.

If the aim of the challenge is to get some sense of different places around the world, then this book isn't ideal. It largely deals with politics in the abstract, and aside from a few place-names it would be difficult to guess where it was written. I have no more idea of the landscape or everyday life of Vanuatu than I did before I read it. But then I don't think I'm the target audience.

I'm not terribly excited by it as poetry either; most of it reads as political prose broken up rather arbitrarily into short lines. This is from a poem called Newspaper Mania:

The medium
of Newsprint
can make
and break
Governments
and men
in dictating
and shaping
public opinion
by subtle
and invisible
Dictatorship.

There are occasionally hints of something more interesting, though; from the same poem, I think this has a fine acid touch to it:

Metropolitan
journalists
flock to Port Vila
crawling the bars
sniffing the farts
of other
transient scavengers
and go away
experts
on Vanuatu politics.

Despite few good moments, the book mainly reads to me as social activism rather than poetry. Not that I have anything against social activism.

[Minosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about Grace Mera Molisa not from a “read every country around the world” challenge (as most people reviewing her books on goodread seem to have done) but as mentioned at a panel on Blackness and Indigeneity at NAISA as a foundational Melanesian writer who should be more well-known in Oceanic and Indigenous studies. And boy am I glad I was able to get a hold of a copy. Everyone else on here is like “this is political poetry” and like, yes ok sure? It’s also INCREDIBLY powerful in speaking to Black Indigenous Ni-Vanuatu women’s issues in a really sharp, often wry way. Her one-word lines kind of remind me of the style of M. Carmen Lane, who coincidentally is another Black Indigenous author who deserves more attention. If you are into Indigenous studies and Indigenous women’s poetry I highly recommend this book.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Around the World Reading Challenge: VANUATU
===
I struggled to find options for this country and was super excited when I found out my library was able to get access to this volume of poetry, as it seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, I just didn't totally love it. It's a very political volume, which I have zero issues with and actually quite appreciated for the nature of this challenge, but the structure of the poems felt a bit obvious and simplistic to me at times, which I think is solely down to my own preferences when it comes to poetry. I just don't think this one was quite for me, though I did appreciate the overall message being conveyed.

[Marina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Je comprends le valeur politique de ces poèmes et j'ai bien aimé la musicalité, toutefois je n'ai pas vraiment apprecié le livre. Dommage! Mais c'est bon d'avoir lu un livre écrit par une écrivaine ni-vanuatu et provénant lui-même (le livre, je veux dire) de Nouvelle-Calédonie.

*

Per Vanuatu ho trovato questo piccolo libriccino di poesie di Grace Mera Molisa, autrice ni-vanuatu morta pochi anni fa. Il libro l’ho trovato in francese, ma vedo ora che su Abebooks c’è anche in inglese. Non ho ben capito se l’originale fosse in inglese, come credo, o in bislama, la lingua di Vanuatu, ma fatto sta che io l’ho letto in traduzione. È un libriccino bizzarro proveniente da una casa editrice della Nuova Caledonia (vedete che perle si trovano su Amazon!), da cui non mi separerò mai proprio a causa della sua provenienza, anche se non mi è piaciuto.

Capisco infatti il valore politico che sta dietro le poesie di Molisa, ne apprezzo anche la musicalità, ma non hanno toccato le mie corde, non mi hanno lasciato molto. Poi, forse perché pubblicato da una casa editrice melanesiana, manca un apparato critico che sarebbe servito a comprendere meglio le poesie: forse ai lettori destinatari di questo libro il retroscena era noto. Comunque, ho fatto un giro su internet e qualcosa ho capito.

Vanuatu è stata per lungo tempo sotto dominio congiunto inglese e francese, in quello che si chiamava Condominio (l’autrice ne parla, e pensavo fosse una metafora, invece si chiama proprio così). Molisa perciò parla molto dei mali della colonizzazione, e non solo di quella. Vanuatu ha raggiunto l’indipendenza nel 1980.

La cosa agghiacciante è che agli abitanti di Vanuatu non venne concessa né la cittadinanza inglese né quella francese, rendendoli dunque apolidi per legge. Ecco dunque spiegata una delle poesie più belle di Molisa, che vi trascrivo di seguito, e mi scuso con chi non parla il francese.

Moi
le natif
l’aborigène
l’autochtone
l’héritier issu de la terre
légalement
sans état

Impossibile capire una poesia del genere se non si è a conoscenza dell’aberrazione politica che ho riportato sopra. Per questo dico che un apparato critico sarebbe stato indispensabile.

Molisa si scaglia inoltre contro il turismo, reo di aver portato a Vanuatu gente che va lì come se andasse allo zoo, e contro la diseguaglianza fra uomo e donna, quest’ultima sempre sottomessa al primo. I temi sono dunque interessanti, ma le poesie non mi hanno colpito, a livello stilistico. Forse è anche perché con gli anni la mia passione per la poesia è venuta meno.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to research Vanuatu’s colonial and post-colonial history for a better understanding, but Marsh’s 2014 essay “Black Stone Poetry: Vanuatu’s Grace Mera Molisa” was excellent to facilitate that. (For further reading, see Marsh’s 2004 paper.) From my own reading experience, Molisa’s poetry builds an interesting contrast to Solomon Island’s Saunana.

I was most intrigued by the ‘black stone’ imagery, and consequently the titular poem. The changing nature of volcanic rock as a symbol for Vanuatu’s social, political, and historic past juxtaposed to the black stone as a symbol for cultural values that entwine the landscape and the intangible heritage was striking.

[emoly · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read blackstone as a foundational source for my research in an assignment - however, i found this collection to be a beautifully insightful and intersectional dissection of colonialism and female oppression in a post-colonial Vanuatuan era. while the prose and style of writing was not a proclivity of mine, molisa unflinchingly voices her confrontation of political oppression in an underrepresented society.