Ani's Portrait: My String Bag Back Home

FNWF2024 Award Winner. The Judges said: "To type your 65,000 word manuscript on the only available device: your smart phone. To type a story with a complex and intricate structure, telling the intimate and cultural details of daily life in a village. That questions the invasion of colonisation, and defines the effect on the human landscape of communal cultural remembrance across generations.

This book is a deep intellectual dive into village life in Papua New Guinea.

The unspoken atrocities hovering.

Where indigenous people like the Bebeli of New Brittain are marginalised and constantly pushed towards erasure of identity, even today.

Told by women, who speak truth to each other. Old and deep all knowing truth.

And to ultimately proclaim: "I am my own woman. That is who I am. I am tired of the label black, brown, coloured glaze, niggard woman. I am only human walking on this earth one time in my life time. That, that is who I am. I don't know why I need to explain that over and over again. Trying to assert myself in this God forsaken land like some bad black odour in this world. This continuous justification is not my vocation nor my calling but I am forever put there on the spot by my appearance."

This book will be remembered as a Masterpiece."