Novel Gets Readers Inside Civil War on Bougainville

Mister Pip

Lloyd Jones

Seventy Years of Fighting on a Tiny Island

Some of the most intense fighting of the war occurred on this scrap of land. If we look at the South Pacific "Island Hopping" campaign of WWII (of which Guadalcanal, Saipan, Iwo Jima are only a few) most islands were captured and held by the Japanese, then captured and held by the Allies. When American forces landed on Bougainville, however, soldiers from both nations remained on the island in a years' long for dominance; the Americans remained to defend a vital airfield while the Japanese struggled to destroy it. Unlike other islands in the South Pacific campaign which saw battle briefly then returned to a well-earned peace, Bougainville saw ongoing conflict until the very end of the war. 

 

 Civil War on Bougainville in the 1990's

After the war, the world's attention drifted away from the island and has never yet returned. That doesn't mean, however, that Bougainville has been peaceful. From 1988 onward (though a cease-fire has been in place since 1997) all hell has been breaking loose on the island of Bougainville. Some call it an uprising, some a war of liberation. Mercenaries, rebels, and the New Guinea regular army have been busily burning villages and killing civilians, but little attention has ever been paid by the outside world.

Novel Mister Pip is Rare Glimpse into the Sensual Heart of Modern Bougainville

Lloyd Jones' Novel Mister Pip is a rare literary reference to this all-but-unknown conflict. Mister Pip is both a light-hearted, elegiac read with beautifully-drawn characters, and a window into a tragic history most of us haven't heard. The forest village in which his narrative unfolds has somehow managed to remain willfully innocent of the bloodbath that surrounds them.

The narrator is Matilda, a young villager. Other main characters are her mother Dolores -- a woman who cares deeply but is too afraid of being duped to understand the people around her, and Mr. Watts, the only white man remaining on the island after war has caused anyone who can manage it to flee. When he is coaxed into reopening the school for the local children, he uses Great Expectations as his text.

As rebels and government troops struggle over control of the village, life for the inhabitants goes from bad to worse. In the end, a smoking ruin is left of Matilda's life, and she begins to hope for death. The character Pip from the Dickens novel plays both a part in the destruction of Matilda's community and paradoxically inspires her to go on living after everyone else is dead.

Infused with the sense of what it means to live in the tropics, Jones' writing makes the reader know how it feels to grow up and live at the very edge of human endeavor, tens of thousands of miles from "cultural centers," in one of the last places to be inhabited on the globe.

It won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2007 for Best Book, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

 

Not Europe's Descendants -- Melanesians' Blond Gene is Unique

In the past, visitors to the Solomon Islands have assumed that the number of dark-skinned and dark-eyed natives with blond hair must be have European ancestors somewhere back in their bloodlines.

Popular Theories On The Origins of Blond Melanesians

Many thought perhaps European sailors of the 18th and 19th centuries left enough of their DNA in the islands to produce blonds centuries later...in much the same way blue, green and hazel eyes turn up in Middle Eastern lands visited by Crusaders.

Some speculated that there may have been earlier, ocean-borne Europeans -- Vikings, perhaps, or some even earlier group -- who visited the Solomons in antiquity. Others speculated that there was perhaps a land route that brought the genes for blond hair across Asia and into the islands. The surprising discovery of Caucasian graves in Western China made this seem plausible.

Eager grad students began looking at art and mythology from the islands to see if there were further connections between Europe and Melanesia. So the recent announcement in the journal Science made for a lot of forehead smacking in anthropology departments. Geneticists, however are thrilled.

What Solomon Islanders' DNA Says About Their Origins

In 2009, researcher Sean Myles collected 1,000 DNA samples from local Melanesians. Working with the local chiefs for permission, he traveled from hut to hut, village to village across the Solomon Islands.

Back in the lab Myles and his colleagues discovered that the Melanesians' blond hair comes from a single genetic mutation that is theirs and theirs alone. It is recessive, so both mother and father have to carry the gene for them to have a blond child. Furthermore, this gene acts alone; in Caucasians a group of genes that work together determine hair color.

Looks like those hapless grad students looking for the genetic express from Northern Europe to Melanesia will have to find another thesis topic.

For more information, check out this article on the phenomenon of blond Melanesians from the Body Odd.

Blond Melanesians Have No European Ancestors

Much speculation has been made over the years about why so many Solomon Island natives have blond hair. The result makes for memorable photography of the people of the region. In a recent study, however, geneticists have discovered a gene unrelated to the blond gene in Europeans, is behind the phenomenon:

"The reason why some five to 10 percent of the islanders are blond comes down to simple genetics -- a gene called TYRP1 that natives of the Solomon Islands possess but Europeans do not, said the study in the US journal Science.

"So the human characteristic of blond hair arose independently in equatorial Oceania. That's quite unexpected and fascinating," said lead author Eimear Kenny, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in California."

Check out this article from the Medical Press for more on the story.