Transcript
Olivia Taouma was working as Pacific Programmer for Auckland Council when the workshops were organised and says each play shines a light on the lives of Pacific peoples, their culture and identity in New Zealand.
She says the one thing people most wanted was for more arts and books in Pacific languages and Leki Jackson-Bourke and Amanaki Prescott-Faletau's play "Inky Pinky Ponky" is a hit.
OLIVIA TAOUMA: We have a Niuean language play, we have a play that's in Tongan and we have a play that is in English and Samoan and then we have a very young voice play called Inky Pinky Ponky where it mixes Tongan and Samoan and other Pacific languages in that very young and hip high school voice that is very exciting.
She says another play is by Lolo Fonua, called "Sai ē Reunion" that looks at a Tongan teen who has just arrived in New Zealand and is taken under the wing of her cousins, among other themes.
OLIVIA TAOUMA: One of them is situated in Niue where a young New Zealand born goes back to Niue. One of them is about a Tongan girl coming to New Zealand. Another one is about a young fakaleite going to high school and what that is like for her, and then of course we have the gagana, the unmentionable and that talks about language itself and the place of Louise Tu'u's mother.
Louise Tu'u' s play "Gaga: The Unmentionable" explores the writer's mother tongue, Samoan, through the experiences of people like her mother and looks at how people connect through communication and cope with cultural barriers.
LOUISE TU'U: She just brought me to tears when she said that she did four jobs - one full time job and three part time jobs the whole way through her children's lives. Just that hard work of our parents generation but then them getting to see these amazing children growing up and creating stories and having a voice and telling those stories so strongly.
Vela Manusaute says he struggles with English, but authored the play, "My Name is Pilitome", about parents who left Niue in 1976 and never returned but their New Zealand raised son does eventually return.
VELA MANUSAUTE: What an honour to have work be published. Engish is hard. English is my third language but I am just so grateful that we are able to get this work into books for the future generations.
Publisher Tony Murrow says the idea to publish an anthology of plays was a given, considering the quality of the work.
TONY MURROW: It wasn't really that hard. We had some fantastic playwrights who had come along and well its happened quite quickly. The plays were fully formed and we did some massaging of scripts and I think it had been some years in some cases since the playwrights had revisited their works and so we had them proofed by not just the English, but also for the Samoan Niuean and Tongan.
He says Little Island Press has been going for a decade now and average publishing a book once a month but the effort is still worth it.
