Two women two worlds

Whole Earth, Winter, 2002 by Audrey McCollum

The ethnosphere is shrinking. Cultures, languages, and ancient traditions decline and disappear on almost a daily basis, often without our knowing. We often mourn that loss, and yet people from traditional societies want and deserve a share of the global economy. The old and the new are in frequent conflict, which raises the question of whether there is room in the world for ancient cultures to survive. In the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and at a very personal level, Audrey McCollum explores one answer.--DB

It was April, 1999 and Papua New Guinea's international airport was pure turmoil. Sunburned engineers questing for oil and gold in the highlands jostled dark-skinned women with bilums (netbags) suspended from their heads; the bilums bulged with produce, and sometimes a baby too. Suave men in business suits strode by sinewy elders, some with as-gras--bunches of cordyline leaves--hanging from their belts below shabby Western-style jackets. Modernity and antiquity mingled uneasily in this small Pacific nation where some indigenous people had seen their first white face only after the end of World War II.

In a surge of sweating bodies, my husband, Bob, and I were swept onto a smaller plane bound for Mt. Hagen, the capital of Western Highlands Province. From there we were driven through the Wahgi Valley toward the village of Minj for a reunion with Pirip Kuru, a feisty indigenous activist who shared a homestead with her large, close-knit family. I was bringing copies of my new book, in which she was the central character.

Pirip's struggles to lead traditional women into the modern world had engaged my attention for sixteen years. Through her, I had been asking whether a feminist activist from an ancient culture that included the subjugation of women could preserve that endangered culture and organize women to achieve greater equality and power? Or does her activism hasten the demise of the traditional culture?

We first met in 1983 during my second trip to Papua New Guinea (PNG). Keenly interested in gender relations, I had asked around for a highland woman I could interview. I was introduced to Pirip, a well respected activist. An English-speaking school teacher served as our interpreter. English was then the official language and Pirip understood it, but she spoke only Melanesian pidgin along with her tribal language--one of over 800 languages identified in PNG. Many, perhaps most, were still alive.

It took twelve years before she allowed me into her private realms of thought and emotion. I returned seven times, and between us a bond grew, including elements of maternal care and sisterhood, transcending the cultural and geographic distance between New England and Papua New Guinea. Between visits we corresponded, with Pirip's friends and family serving as scribes. More recently we had talked to each other on tape.

In 1999, Pirip was fiftyish (births were not recorded when she was born), just over five feet tall and full-figured. She wore the loose smock and wrapped skirt favored by missionaries, but her broad fleshy nose, cheekbones, and high forehead were patterned with traditional blue tattooing. Her wiry black hair was cropped short, and a furrow ran across the crown as though it had been dented by years of bearing heavily laden bilums (among her agrarian people, the Kuma, there were no beasts of burden except women).

The balance of gender power in PNG was unstable, and Pirip's core feminist aim was to help women gain access to the spreading cash economy. Education, transportation, Western health care, and the right to make choices independent of men were increasingly linked to cash.

In the late 1970s, Pirip had established a center in which members of her association could assemble and work. Some men feared their wives' membership would threaten male dominance, and they reinforced their opposition with beatings. Yet many women were defying the resistance and joining hands.

A sign outside the largest of her compound's four buildings, proclaimed "South Wahgi Women's Center." Groups met in a traditional, grass-roofed house with patterned siding woven from strips of pandanus (screw pine) each Tuesday.

A grant from the New Zealand government had financed small, time-limited loans to enable women to set up cash-producing enterprises. As president of the South Wahgi Women's Association, Pirip supervised these projects, which included raising pigs or poultry; selling betel nuts or second-hand clothing; operating trade stores stocked with tinned goods, white rice, biscuits, candy, cigarettes, and soft drinks; or growing white potatoes to supply hotels with french fries--a mixture of traditional and introduced commerce.

Pirip's male kin had built her a trade store. With her own cash she had bought clothing, a kerosene stove, utensils, and simple furnishings for the house she slept in with two sons, following the Kuma tradition that husbands and wives did not share sleeping quarters because of male fear of contamination by the sexual woman. (Intercourse was a speedy contact carried out in the bush). Kuru slept in a men's house or with other relatives.