Rokonadravu wins Commonwealth award
Fijian writer Mary Rokonadravu has done it again. Ms Rokonadravu has been awarded the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the second time.
She entered the competition four times and was shortlisted in 2015, 2017, and 2022.
She submitted her story for the first time in 2015 and won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Pacific region.
This year, she grabbed the prize for her story – The Nightwatch.
“Firstly, The Nightwatch was not an easy story to write. It took me two days to write, then it sat for about three years before I relooked it for submission to a competition,” Ms Rokonadravu said.
“The win is reaffirming. Writing, particularly the prose form, is a very lonely exercise because the engagement or the journey is between oneself and the blank page and the computer or laptop screen, so the regional win is a reminder that one is linked to a community of writers across the world.
“The feedback from my own country has been heartwarming from young people on social media and in messages.”
While unfolding what her short story was about, Ms Rokonadravu said: “When one begins a story, it is rare to already know what it is going to be about.
“You may begin a story with a certain intent but writing it may take it in a completely different direction. This probability of unexpectedness is the best part of writing for me.
“I like the sense of ‘not knowing’, the clinical realisation that the writing of a story is in itself a listening, learning, and a commitment to removing oneself from the telling of the story and to let it speak.”
Ms Rokonadravu said The Nightwatch was an inspiration from visual art and a response to a very painful part of society.
She said The Nightwatch was inspired by the Dutch painter Rembrandt’s work of the same title painted in 1642 that depicted the civic guard that at that time took turns watching over the capital Amsterdam.
“The painting has a much longer title but over the last 400 years, people have given it the title The Nightwatch.”
Ms Rokonadravu added the thread of inspiration became about the danger of religious fundamentalism, specifically Christian fundamentalism.
“What do we become as a society and as a people when we are reluctant to or are no longer able to critique bad turns and corruption in our faith?
“The world has embraced Christianity for more than two thousand years, but we lack the intent and the courage to seek exploration of what it is as a vehicle driving our values system and modes of politics and economics.
“I’m referring to the West and its spheres of historical legacy and influence.
“Even if you are not Christian the world you participate in is largely seeded and grown from its legacy of imperialism and colonialism.”
Background
She describes herself as someone from a mixed Fijian heritage – descending from indentured Indian, indigenous Fijian, and settler European heritage.
She was adopted by a Tamil South Indian family in Fiji and that was her grounding, she says.
She was raised on a copra estate on Koro Island and educated in Levuka.
“I have written since I was a child.
In a broad sense everything around me is an inspiration to write,” Ms Rokonadravu said.
“But as an artist, my soul place is from childhood and that is what I constantly find myself returning to for stories.
In a big way, our childhood is what defines life and our perceptions and worldview.
“We constantly superimpose this in all things we encounter in the world. For me, it was the injustices I witnessed as a child that drove my writing to a subterranean level.
“The rest is what I experience in the now and making the page marry the two.”