Reading across cultures: two stories from Papua New Guinea on arranged marriages
Daniela Cavallaro
Abstract
I had the opportunity to read several literary texts by PNG writers centered on the issue of arranged marriages that challenged my understanding of it. I was especially intrigued, however, by two very different stories by Sally-Ann Bagita, a writer from the Central province, who published a considerable number of stories and poems in the 1970s and 80s, first in Papua New Guinea Writing and later in The Times of Papua New Guinea, a magazine of which she also became editor. These two stories, which I will discuss in this article, on the one hand seem to critique the tradition of arranged marriage, as I would have expected. On the other hand, however, they also appear to reveal that the problems are not so much in the custom itself, as in the modern, Westernized understanding of it.
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