A digital poetic regeneration of archival multilingual Rotuman texts

PhD candidate Mere Taito is believed to be the first person to hand in a thesis written on early 20^th century multilingual Rotuman texts. Mere, a Rotuman poet and author, completed her research through Otago’s English and Linguistics Programme. She speaks with internal communications advisor Koren Allpress during Rotuman Language Week.

An unlikely source of inspiration

In 2016 one of Mere’s nephews, Oscar, told her he hated poetry because it had “no pictures”. She says his words haunted her, but in a constructive way.

It was also around this time that conversations about Fäeag Rotuạm ta’s (the Rotuman language) vitality were circulating on mainstream media and social media, focusing on the language’s status of “death”, “critical endangerment”, and “brink of extinction”.

“These conversations bothered me a lot because they were very simplistic, sensational, somewhat embracing a 'sky is falling' mentality which to some extent, sidelined existing language regenerative work of our communities,” she says.

“Language attrition and loss are not the only stories about language communities in the diaspora that we can tell.”

These conversations along with Oscar’s dislike of poetry “fuelled a change” in her poetic writing practice.

“I started to experiment with online authoring software such as Canva Pro to create visual poems and also think about how visual and digitally-authored poetry could display Fäeag Rotuạm ta features in interesting ways.”

In about 2020, Mere was introduced to Professor Alice Te Punga Somerville’s (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) Marsden-funded project entitled Writing the New World, which has looked at tracing the geneaology of published Pacific literary texts between the period after colonial contact and the time of Albert Wendt’s writing.

Alice’s project encouraged Mere to think about Rotuman texts that were produced prior to the texts of foundational writers, such as Professor Vilisoni Hereniko (University of Hawai’i) and the late Elisapeti Inia, and how these early texts could support Fäeag Rotuạm ta regeneration.

Mere read four early 20^th century Rotuman texts and merged her experimentation with digital visual poetic writing to counter the pervasive “critical endangerment”  conversations on the vitality of Fäeag Rotuạm ta.

Each of these events – Oscar’s comment, the conversations around the supposed “death” of Fäeag Rotuạm ta and Alice’s project - combined to form the basis for Mere’s PhD research entitled Kavei se täe! – a genealogy of Rotuman texts: Reading early 20^th century Rotuman publications; Writing multilingual archival digital visual poetry.

Together, Otago's Professor Jacob Edmond and Alice (now based at the University of British Columbia) would become Mere’s “dream team” of supervisors.

Creating links between history and now

Engaging with multilingual texts like Rogorogo (1913-1914: a newsletter), Tales of a Lonely Island (1937-1938: a collection of Rotuman stories), My Own Story, and The Aborigines of the North (autobiographical texts written by Mere’s grandfather, Fuata Taito and published in 1949) is a way to remember, acknowledge, connect with and learn Rotuman literary and intellectual history, Mere says.

“The texts also testify to the linguistic agility and storytelling skills of Rotuman writers like Titifanua, Rima, Konau, and Taito who either partially or fully authored these texts.

“The multilingual and cultural abundance (“abundance” is an understatement!) of these texts and their suitability for creative digital engagement is also an exciting and joyful intellectual pairing that offers a way out of the popular yet frustrating language death conversations about Fäeag Rotuạm ta persistently circulating on mainstream and social media.”

When Mere was studying these texts, she noted all were mission texts written by men serving the Methodist church in early to mid-20^th century in Rotuma and Fiji. All except for one – Rogorogo – was published in Australia.

“Together, these texts offer complex and evocative stories of early to mid-20^th century life and cultural practices on the island, the growing pains of Christianity, pre-Christian Rotuman spirituality, and the transnational habits of Rotuman islanders during the height of the First and Second World War,” Mere says.

She was thrilled to find that archival mission texts have “incredible potential” for contemporary digital and poetic engagement, saying their relevance extends beyond theology/ theologians and history/historians.

“Rogorogo is written in pre-standard Rotuman orthography but this was not a deterrence to transmedia and creative digital engagement, which strongly suggest that “non-standardised” (a concept problematic in itself!) texts are still valuable in contemporary language regenerative work. Engage with them!”

Going digital

Winning a Digital Fellowship Programme from Creative Australia and Creative New Zealand in 2024 gave Mere access to a digital mentor, Agata Oleksiak, Instructional/Digital Designer and Consultant from Complete Learning.

Agata helped Mere warm to the idea of using Articulate Rise which is an authoring tool popular in corporate and organisational microlearning. Initially Mere says she didn’t think it was suitable for developing digital poetry, but after much “tinkering and tutu-ing” she saw its potential as a repository where all 54 individual poems of ‘Kaveia Tạn Kạl Ta: Mark the Round Water’ could be displayed as a cohesive collection.

In total, Mere used six different digital authoring tools to develop the collection.

Finding a permanent home for the digital collection is a work in progress.

“Watch this space!”

Mere says there is more work to be done with the texts Rogorogo, Tales of a Lonely Island, My Own Story and The Aborigines of the North.

“I hope that a future Rotuman literary/creative scholar will one day come along and find new ways to engage with these rich archival multilingual texts. How exciting!”

Kōrero by Koren Allpress, internal communications advisor