My late Kandre, Vincent Warakai, a robust scholar and intellectual, left a lasting impression on me as a Papua New Guinean with this poem “Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat”, which was first published in Ondobondo, a literary magazine of the Literature Department of UPNG in the 1980s, when I studied Literature as a degree program. The poem was later republished in Albert Wendt’s Nuanua: pacific writing in English since 1980s, making it one of the most powerful pieces to have been written by a Papua New Guinean since Independence. Below is the poem:
Dancing Yet to the Dim Dim’s Beat
We have been dancing
Yes, our anklets and
Amulets now are
Yes, grinding into our skin
No longer are they a décor
Yes, they are our chains
We have been dancing
Yes, but the euphoria has died
It is now the dull drumming
Yes, of the flat drums
Thud dada thud da thud dada thud
Yes, it is signaling, not the bliss
But the impending crisis.
It is the period young Papua New Guineans took up the urging to participate in the dancing, b