World Blong Yumi

With this poem I explore the many nuanced considerations of geography, geopolitics, community, insiderness and outsiderness that grapple with each other and influence each other throughout the multilayered space that is the Blue Pacific Continent. I unfold a narrative that works through a moment by moment attentiveness that does not – cannot – grasp the whole. It’s told by a persona that recognises that scholarly omniscience comes at the cost of embedded agency and connection, and so refuses that singular perspective and invites a kind of complicity from the reader. We are watching ourselves through a screen or representation. But are we really just figures on some screen, ever distanced from the immediacy of life, cajoled to see it in a certain way through a narrow choice of gazes and actions, anthropological, quizzical, touristic and/or complicit? The poem offers a string of place-specific images and characters, tourists, yachties, industrialists, government representatives and, yes, even locals interacting across the big sea landscape resource that is the Pacific Ocean. The title, in pidgin, comes from graffiti on a wall in downtown Port Vila.