A Tidepool Blenny’s Visions of Modernity in John Waromi’s West Papua

Abstract

American territoriality in the Pacific is entangled with how the United States, to borrow David Palumbo-Liu’s words, manages modernity in different locations. The United States manages modernity in places such as New Guinea by keeping it out of the realm of what people in the United States conceive of as modernity. This article demonstrates how the novel Anggadi Tupa: Harvesting the Storm (2014, trans. 2019), by West Papuan author John Waromi, disrupts anthropocentric and United States-centric histories of war and modernity in the Pacific. “Anggadi tupa,” in the Ambai language, refers to coconuts that float to the shore, often after a storm, according to Waromi. These coconuts are harvested—many are eaten, and the rest are planted so that more coconuts grow. However, in Waromi’s novel other objects wash up or are unearthed, well after another kind of “storm”: the Pacific War. Humans use leftover Japanese and United States munitions, with dynamite, to blow up reefs and collect the bodies of fish off Papua’s northern shore. I argue that Waromi’s novel, told primarily from the perspective of a tidepool blenny (a fish), brings together the impacts of multiple forms of slow environmental violence in which munitions dumping operates as one part. Through his “fisheye” lens, the novel prioritizes Ambai understandings of the world and asserts perspectives that centre Indigenous Papuan approaches to greed and contamination—approaches that build on and theorise modes of collaboration that depend on multi-being ways of living not defined by the demands and discourses of “progressive” modernity and territoriality.