Awards Eligibility 2017

Hello Fox Fans. I just discovered it’s a think to let our readers know what titles we have had out in 2017 that could be considered for awards.

Novels
Fool if you Think it’s over by Jo Thomas, the 3rd Elkie Bernstein Book, a fantasy series
Starfang by Joyce Chng, the first in an SF series 
The Hobgoblin’s Herald by Andrew Aston, fantasy genre
Into the Blight by Jonathan Ward also fantasy genre 
The Girl in the Fort by Tracy Fahey, fantasy, fairytales, (fennec)
Skytown by K.C. Shaw, fantasy, adventure

Novellas/Novelletes
Ghoulsome Graveyard by G. Clark Hellery fantasy, horror (fennec)
Got Ghosts by Fiona Glass, horror, romance, 

Anthologies
Tales of the Mouse and Minotaur edited by Adele Wearing, mixed genre
Respectable Horror, edited by K.A. Laity, horror, chills,
Pacific Monsters edited by Margret Helgadottir, horror, art,

Collections
Multiverse by Jan Siegel and guests, poetry

Debuts
The Hobgoblin’s Herald by Andrew Aston, fantasy genre
Into the Blight by Jonathan Ward also fantasy genre

Young Adult
The Girl in the Fort by Tracy Fahey, fantasy, fairytales, (fennec)
Skytown by K.C. Shaw, fantasy, adventure

Middle Grade
The Girl in the Fort by Tracy Fahey, fantasy, fairytales,  (fennec)
Ghoulsome Graveyard by G. Clark Hellery fantasy, horror (fennec)

Artwork
Any of our titles. We always include artists details on the book page.

HEMA
I don’t know if there are awards for fencing non fictions translations, but we released two in 2017.
Treatise on Fencing, Docciolini transaltion by Piermarco Terminiello & Steven Reich (Vulpes)
La Scherma : The Art of Fencing translation by P. Terminiello, C. Stewart & P. Marshall (Vulpes)

Publisher/Small or Indie Press
Fox Spirit is an entirely indie press, with no affiliations to larger publishers. A small team works around their day jobs to bring you the best books we can, and stories we believe in. 

Awards
Some of the awards we look at.
This is Horror
Starburst Brave New Worlds
British Fantasy Society
Clarke Awards
Gemmell Awards 
Shirley Jackson Awards 

This year with Pacific Monsters we are also looking at The Sir Julius Vogel Awards 

Monster Tales : Margrét Helgadóttir

Links to the Pacific Monsters blog posts are available on the book’s page.

Pacific Monsters

by Margrét Helgadóttir

Pacific Monsters is out and one year of work is completed.

Pacific Monsters is the fourth volume of Fox Spirit Books of Monsters, a seven-volume series with titles published annually from 2014 to 2020. As editor it is a fun challenge to work on a book series stretching over so many years. At the same time as I have to concentrate on each book production – it takes about a year from when I start to research and plan the book until it is published – I need to bring out the word about the other volumes and work on the series as a whole. The to-do-list never seems to become shorter.

I love it!

It feels like I am on an adventurous journey around the world. I am so grateful to Adele Wearing and Fox Spirit Books for wanting to publish this series. The books is a world tour exploring old myths, folklore and monsters tales continent by continent. One of the greatest blessings with working on this series is the opportunity to meet authors and the artists from around the world, and to have glimpses of the multitude of cultures and monster folklore within and between all the continents.

For those not familiar with the book series, one of the goals is to show all the talented artists and authors from around the world, probably many you haven’t heard about. I spend much time researching each book. I strive to have diversity in the series and the voices and topics represented. I want to have a wide-stretched geographical representation, and I encourage the authors to tell their monster tales using many genres, like horror, fantasy, science fiction, post-apocalyptic, YA, crime, and the more literary. It is amazing to see how many of the authors challenge themselves and use genres new to them, and how many of them manage to put old myths and legends about ancient monsters into a contemporary setting.

This tells me that not all of the monsters have lost their meaning and place in this world.

I am fascinated by how humans of all times, regardless of geography, culture or demography, have created monsters. No matter where you are in the world, monsters have been something to blame when bad things happen or a way to explain things like thunder and lightning. Many monsters also challenge our thoughts and fears of what will happen when we die, or the relationship between humans and animals in the wilderness.

One mission with the book series is to give the monsters a renaissance as real and scary monsters, a comeback so to speak. I have started to think that despite all the monsters crawling around our world, all the important roles they fulfil, can’t they be allowed to be just scary monsters? Can’t we just allow them to put terror in our hearts?  Do we have to categorize them all and try to make meaning of them all? These are questions I will ponder further.

It might seem that the monsters today are either forgotten or watered down and overused in the popular media. Also, only a few of them dominate the scene—vampires, werewolves, ghouls, demons, zombies—and they are almost all from Western popular culture.  Another mission with the book series is to bring all of the world’s glorious and terrifying creatures out in the open.

Some monsters are universal. You will always find the shape-shifters, the flesh-eating walking dead and the great monsters of the lakes and sea. But what is important to one culture might not be so vital to another. A signifier in the third volume, Asian Monsters, is the close link between spirits and ghosts and Asian folklore. This is very different from the second volume, African Monsters, where the stories were more about place and origin, about immigration and going home—maybe a strong witness of how much soil means to the African authors.

In Pacific Monsters we present you 14 tales of beasties from Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, and Pacific islands like Hawaii and Guam, told by authors who are either from, have lived in, or have another strong connection to this wide stretching region. I had been warned and sadly it turned out they were right; the search for authors able and willing to contribute from the Pacific islands have been extremely difficult. It is thus with regret that we can’t give you more stories from authors on the islands. I feel however that we are still bringing you enough stories to give you a small hint about the immense folklore and diversity of monster tales in the Pacific region.

When I edited Pacific Monsters, I was struck by the strangest feeling of being at the end of the world, isolated, where the sun arrives first and you are surrounded by the vast ocean, the stars and the weirdest and breathtaking wildlife and fauna.

A large amount of the monsters the authors chose to write about, reside in water. One reason is of course the endless Pacific Ocean, being both a threat and a blessing from ancient times, and the Antarctic Ocean, a world of extremities. But, even a few of the stories from Australia, even though they take place in the bush, the monsters still dwell in fluid environments—billabongs, lakes, rivers, swamps. There are some monsters here I have truly fallen in love with, they are so hideous and horrible, they don’t sparkle or want to be our friend. They are the truest monsters.

I hope you will like this volume as much as I have while working on it.

Monster Tales : Tihema Baker

My Identity

by Tihema Baker

Ko Tainui te waka

Ko Tararua te maunga

Ko Ōtaki te awa

Ko Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga, ko Te Āti Awa ki Whakarongotai, ko Ngāti Toa Rangatira ngā iwi

Ko Tihema Baker tōku ingoa.

This is my pepeha – my identity. It includes the vessel that brought my ancestors to Aotearoa New Zealand, to the mountains and river that geographically ground me, and the nations I belong to. For the Māori peoples of Aotearoa, identity is inextricably tied to whakapapa (genealogy), which demonstrates our worldview: we are the sum of everything that came before. It’s a profound recognition of the past and understanding of how it shapes the future. Everything that transpired, everything that aligned, everything that fell into place and resulted in our existence defines us. From the emergence of raw potential from the void, right up to the mothers who gave birth to us. By stating my pepeha, I am introducing myself as definitively as I can as Māori.

If you were to meet me face-to-face, however, it’s unlikely you would think I’m Māori. To most, I look white, or what we would call Pākehā; my skin is the freckly type that burns within a few minutes of summer sun, my hair is fair, my eyes are blue. Undoubtedly, if you met me on the street, you would assume I was white.

It’s a symptom of the world we live in, which insists on defining people by their skin colour or physical attributes. This directly contradicts that Māori worldview that identity has absolutely nothing to do with skin colour. I am the sum of everything that came before me. And if that means I am Māori, then I am Māori. There is no other qualifier.

That worldview doesn’t sit so well in a western, colonised society built on the exact premise that people are defined by their skin colour. Sure, today in New Zealand we don’t have laws that directly prejudice brown-skinned Māori (for the most part), and we don’t have overt displays of white supremacy (for the most part). But the remnants of a society built on racial profiling still infect our lives.

Like so many Māori children, I suffered through an education where teachers mangled my Māori name in almost every way imaginable. As an adult, I suffer through the same in professional environments, often having to correct colleagues on something as simple as calling me what I wish to be called. But there’s a unique element to this that comes exclusively with being a “white Māori”; having to justify being Māori to everyone else.

My mum recalls taking me as a toddler to the doctor, where the receptionist asked why she hadn’t given me a “nice” name like “Reuben”. Just a few weeks ago I caught an elevator with a woman who works at the same place I do and she asked, “How come you have a Māori name?” When I told her what I thought would have been the obvious answer – that I am Māori – she responded, “But you have red hair,” like the two are somehow mutually exclusive. Before I knew it, my well-trained, instinctive response churned itself out, “Well, my mum’s Australian and…”

This is how my ability to engage socially has been conditioned by a lifetime of pre-empting the quizzical looks, the interrogation on how Māori I really am, the automatic “othering” that occurs the moment I introduce myself. I am programmed to explain myself, to contextualise my appearance so it makes sense to other people, to whom a white face with a brown name does not compute. As a human being biologically wired to seek acceptance by others, I often unconsciously just compromise my own sense of identity for their benefit. And I’m not even innocent of this ignorance myself; my own instinctive defence of my whiteness – that “my mum’s Australian” – is a glaring oversight of Australia’s own indigenous peoples. 

And that’s the irony; this “othering” isn’t only committed by Pākehā. I remember, at 6 years old, being pushed by a Māori girl for being a Pākehā who had stolen her land. When I defiantly told her I was from Ngāti Raukawa, she refused to believe me based on how white I was. At 8 years old a Māori relief teacher read my name from the roll, looked over her glasses at me and said, “You’re not Māori, are you?” Again, those experiences weren’t just limited to my childhood; I played a game of netball just yesterday and introduced myself to a new Māori teammate who, when I gave him my name, looked me up and down and said, “Not the name I was expecting.”

I could rattle off examples of these micro-aggressions all day, but I think the picture is clear. This is the bizarre space I occupy as an apparent “white Māori”; possessing too brown a name to fit in with Pākehā but too white-skinned to fit in with Māori.

Frustratingly, these attitudes extend to my writing too. When I was first in talks with my publisher, which specialises in Māori literature, about my novel, I was asked if either of the two main characters were Māori and, if not, why not? I hadn’t really thought about it; I had described one of them as having fair hair and skin only because I vainly wanted him to look like me. Just because I hadn’t explicitly jammed in somewhere that he was Māori didn’t mean he wasn’t. It just meant his appearance wasn’t an indicator of him being Māori or not.

As a Māori writer, this expectation – that my writing should “look” Māori – has been incredibly challenging to break through. People are surprised when they find my novel doesn’t reflect their view of what “Māori literature” is; I’ve had friends tell me they assumed my novel was written entirely in Māori for no other reason than I am Māori. Basically, my novel is about teenagers with superpowers, inspired by comic books, superhero movies, and Harry Potter – it’s about as nerdy and un-Māori in “look” a book could get. But it’s what I enjoy. That’s why I wrote it.

This just doesn’t add up in a lot of people’s heads. They can’t fathom a Māori writer producing a YA sci-fi novel, instead expecting something about Māori gods or taniwhā. It undermines all the aspects of my identity as Māori that shaped the book and therefore absolutely make it – like everything I write – a piece of Māori literature; my novel explores fundamental Māori concepts like life-force and spirit, the complex relationship between older and younger siblings, among others. They’re just not explicitly labelled as such. And they shouldn’t have to be; just like I shouldn’t have to reconcile my identity as Māori with my white skin so it makes sense to others, I shouldn’t have to tokenise my writing with as many Māori references as possible for it to be accepted as Māori literature. In line with that Māori worldview, my book is the result of everything that influenced it, all my experiences that moulded the words I put on the page. If those were the experiences of a Māori person, then the literature is unequivocally Māori too. 

Of course, not all Pākehā and Māori have these views. I have been fortunate throughout my life to be surrounded by Pākehā and Māori who simply accept me for who I am, and who protect me when I get tired of sticking up for myself. I must also acknowledge that my skin colour often affords me privilege that others do not have. I do not get stopped by police while driving or walking through the streets. I receive smiles from strangers, am asked for directions or assistance, when my brown friends and family are avoided. I’ve also never been killed or blamed for terrorism based on my skin colour. Who knows how many other scenarios I have been advantaged in due solely to my white skin – probably more than I’ll ever know. And that’s not even beginning to scratch the surface of my privilege as a white man; even if I was brown I still wouldn’t face as much prejudice in New Zealand as a brown Māori woman does. I acknowledge that. This is just an account of my experiences as a Māori with white skin, in a colonised society built upon the distinction of skin colour. It’s one I’m not sure has been explored in literature often.

So I decided to write about it because it’s a theme I touch on in my story “Children of the Mist.” There’s a passage that describes the narrator’s experience having to justify his white appearance to other Māori. At first read it probably seems quite out of place; a monologue that delves much deeper into the narrator’s psyche than any other passage in the story. Mechanically, it serves an important function in the story’s overall conclusion, but it’s also an example of a specific story element inspired by my lived experience. I thought it would be interesting to delve into, because in reading my story – and any other, for that matter – you are not just reading a text that exists independent of anything else. You are reading a text inspired by history, by opinion, by experience. You are reading the sum of everything that came before.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou katoa.

 

Monster Tales : Rue Karney

Finding the Words

by Rue Karney

When editor Margret Helgadottir first asked me to contribute to the Pacific Monsters anthology I faced a dilemma. Margret asked for a monster that came from Australian history and culture. But as a non-Indigenous person living in a country steeped in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, I needed to invent a monster that reflected this country and its existing First Nations’ peoples while not stepping into cultural appropriation.

My first thought was to write about a mass murderer — a monstrous human. Margret gently vetoed that idea because it was outside the aims of the anthology. Nevertheless I wanted to come up with a way to portray the violent men who made it their mission to kill, maim and destroy in their quest to steal land from those who had cared for it for more than sixty thousand years. These men, and there were many of them, were the mass murderers I wanted to write about. My challenge was to take their actions and create a believable monster within a story that accurately reflected their deeds but also contributed towards a conversation around the truth of Australia’s frontier wars.

Australia’s First Nations peoples have never ceded this land. In the 150 or so years after Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay, an event that started the colonisation of Australia, there were hundreds of battles as the white invaders drove the Indigenous peoples off their country. There are several excellent books on this part of Australia’s recent history but as I live in the state of Queensland I took Timothy Bottoms’ The Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times as my guide.

In his book, Bottoms provides the statistic that, conservatively, the figure of Aboriginal peoples killed in Queensland in the frontier wars is around 48,000. These men, women and children were killed because they were fighting for their own land, land that the Europeans stole from them. Bottoms quotes multiple original sources that detail attacks that occurred across Queensland including shootings, poisonings, rape, bashings and other horrific violence. There are no words to describe the horror of these atrocities that led to this devastating figure. Yet, that was the goal I set myself as a fiction writer approaching the task of writing a story for Pacific Monsters: I had to find the words.

I had a conversation with a close friend, an Aboriginal woman who grew up in the far north of Queensland around Cape York, about a particularly brutal man who was responsible for several massacres. This man’s name brands the country up there. A major river is named after him, as is a national park. Streets are named after him. A hotel is named after him, and to this day there are First Nations’ peoples who refuse to set foot in it. My friend told me that, such was the horror of this man, there is a legend that when he died he was buried upside down to make sure he could never return and terrorise the land again.

Here was my monster. A violent man, guilty of mass murder, who returned from the dead but because he was buried upside down he could only walk on his hands. Thanks to Bottoms’ research, I had first-hand accounts of the type of atrocities my monster, and others like him, committed. My next challenge was to build the story around him. And for that I needed a name for my central character.

I can’t recall what name I used when I began my first rough drafts of the story but I do know that nothing came together until I settled on the name Providence Slaughter. Her name is intentionally literal because it marries the two key aspects of the story — death and wisdom. Providence is a woman ignorant of her own ancestry and so ignorant of her family’s involvement in this horrendous part of Australia’s history. In writing her story, I wanted to bring this history to light in a way that her character would not only accept its truth but also do something with the knowledge.

Providence must reconcile the truth of her past with her present situation. She is disconnected from the land, as many non-Indigenous Australians are, in part because of her inability to recognise and accept past wrongs. The monster in my story is her past and her present just as the frontier wars that took place in Australia are our nation’s past and our present.

This is probably the most political story I have written because, despite the overwhelming evidence, the truth of the frontier wars is something some Australians find too unpalatable to accept. Yet the ramifications of the actions taken by white invaders continue to echo in today’s political, cultural, economic and social landscape. Young Aboriginal men in Australia are more likely to end up in jail than in university. The life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women is around a decade lower than that of non-Indigenous Australians. First Nations peoples are six times more likely to suicide than non-Indigenous Australians. These statistics are the result of inter-generational trauma; trauma that cannot start to be healed until Australia owns its bloody recent history and starts to make amends.

My monster story is not going to make a dent in these horrifying facts. But it tells the truth of the frontier wars, and the more stories out there telling this truth, the closer Australian society will be able to shift towards acceptance.

Rue Karney https://www.facebook.com/RueKarney/

Monster Tales : Octavia Cade

Wishful Monsters
By Octavia Cade

Monsters are strange things.
We’re fascinated by them. There’s whole industries devoted to bringing them to life, to packaging them up in consumable form so that we can be briefly entertained by fright. And it’s fun because it is brief. I can enjoy spending two hours watching a zombie horror film precisely because zombies don’t actually exist. If my life revolved around fending them off, I’d not be turning towards them for my leisure hours. I’d be refilling the flame-thrower and any moments I could snatch for escapism would tend to the absolutely harmless.

We generally don’t want the monsters to be real. But sometimes it’s just so disappointing when they’re not.
Especially when we hold the burden of having removed them ourselves. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend turns an individual amongst monsters into the monster those monsters fear, and on a species level Matheson isn’t far wrong. Extinction took a lot of monsters from this world long before humans came alone, but we’ve certainly done our best to slaughter the rest.

This can best be seen in the lands where humans are not. And, for longer than anywhere else, New Zealand was that land. The last major land mass to be colonised, absent of any native mammal but small bats, it was for millennia a land belonging to birds. Flightless, many of them, and some not. The most dangerous was the largest eagle to ever exist – Haast’s eagle. It died out when humans killed its food to line their own stomachs.

That food was my Pacific monster. The tallest bird ever known, the giant moa. Females were as much as 3.7 metres in height, and all of them were flightless.
All we have left of it are bones. Bones, and stories…

Every so often the rumours start back up. That down in the remote, unexplored back blocks of Fiordland the moa survives. Perhaps not the giant moa, which would be genuinely hard to miss, but one of the smaller species of the genus. There’s sightings, a blurry photo or two. Tracks in the earth.

When my Pacific Monsters story was being edited, Margrét commented on the character who’d just found a moa footprint. Wouldn’t she wonder what it was?
There isn’t a person in this country who would see a three toed footprint that size and not think – not hope – that it was a moa. We’re a young country. We take our monsters where we can get them.
Do I think they’re still out there? Honestly, no. Do I want them to be? Oh, so much.

Jurassic Park

It’s wishful thinking, I know. Imagination layering itself over science, and with just enough hook to cling to, because, Jurassic Park-like, there is an astronomical outside chance that discovery of ancient DNA might be enough to bring them back.
But what would we do with them if we did? If we found them, alive still, in the dark and distant corners of the bush?
I’d like to think we’d be happy. That, as a nation, we’d pull of the mother of all conservation efforts, exceeding even that of the black robin – a native bird pulled back from the brink when once there were only seven individuals remaining.

But then I remember the context of monsters, and how the moa met a monster new-come to their shores… and it was us.
They didn’t survive the human race.
If they’re still out there, I hope they stay far, far away. That they’re rumours forever, because some monsters survive best in wishful thinking.

All I Want for Christmas Is Books

Well, and coffee, and time at home with my family of cats and Mr Fox. Books are always high on the list though. 

I thought it was about that time of year that we remind you that Fox Spirit titles make amazing gifts.

For the swordsperson in your life, we have translations of the Italian Masters in our Vulpes line.

We have novels for those who like to commit and novellas for those who only want to commit briefly. 

If you aren’t sure what they are into try one of our many splendid anthologies or collections including the stocking sized Fox Pockets. 

We even offer poetry and non fiction prose along with titles for YA and younger readers.

Our titles are hard to pin to a single genres, so we gave up on that entirely, so if the bibliophile in your life is bored of the same old tropes, try something a little bit foxy.

If we can’t tempt you with our wares, then we humbly ask that you consider small press purchases, there are many good ones, or sign up your loved ones to explore the indies with Ninja Book Box.

We also recommend the lovely Lounge Books if you are looking for inspiration on what to gift.

Launch Day : Multiverse

We are delighted to bring you only our second volume of poetry, Multiverse by Jan Siegel and guests.

Pat Cadigan, Helen Lederer, Clare Potts and Julian Bell all feature in this delightful collection that tours literature and SFF with original poems and a few homages. 

Jan was on First Dates celebrity in October which is well worth a watch, but we at Fox Spirit are first and foremost fans of her writing. You can find Jan in our own Mouse and Minotaur and of course she is the author of the Devil’s Apprentice and Prospero’s Children among other titles. It is a real pleasure to be publishing her poetry collection. 

The cover illustration is by John Howe while the design and layout are by Vincent Holland-Keen.

You can read Upon a Dark and Stormy Night in it’s entirety here, but for now I leave you with the opening lines to The Barman

‘Once upon a midnight dreary – when I fancied a daiquiri

            After some launch far from cheery in a neighbourhood bookstore,

            To the Groucho then I staggered with a visage pale and haggard

            And I thrust aside each laggard

                                    Lagging round the open door,

            ’Twas a fool and not a blackguard came between me and the door,

            Just a fool I am quite sure.’

Monster Tales : Michael Lujan Bevacqua

The Taotaomo’na of Guam

by Michael Lujan Bevacqua

The Chamorro people of Guam have an interesting saying about our ancestral spirits. We say that they came before us, but they also wait ahead of us. It might seem contradictory in a way, but it makes sense in Chamorro cosmology, as exemplified by the most commonly used term that we use for the spirits of our ancestors, taotaomo’na.

The word taotaomo’na can refer to anything from malevolent spirits, to watchful ghosts, to demons, to magical animals and shape-changers. These spirits will haunt or frequent certain areas, usually the jungle, abandoned areas, cemeteries or even family homes. They are closely associated with the nunu or the banyan tree, which can look particularly menacing in the twilight. They can play tricks on hunters and fishermen and also steal children away from inattentive parents.

Despite the various forms that a taotaomo’na may take in the beliefs of Chamorros and others in contemporary Guam, what unites these variations is the notion that they are ultimately the spirits of the ancestors of the Chamorro people of before, and therefore they represent a force for balance, a memory for the land. There are stories of taotaomo’na tricking and cursing those who behave in loud or destructive ways in the jungle. They can also act as harbingers, warning omens of some tragedy that may soon befall a family. Because of this, even though there is a great deal of fear with regards to the taotaomo’na, there is also respect.

For example it is common in Guam today, that prior to entering the jungle you ask these spirits permission. A common version of this is “Guella yan Guello, kao siña yu’ maloffan gi tano’-miyu? Anggen måtto hamyo gi tano’-måmi siña maloffan ha’ sin mamaisen.” This translates to: “Grandmother and Grandfather, can I pass through your land? When you visit our land you can pass without asking.”

Guam jungle image from shutterstock.

The contradiction that contemporary people in Guam experience around the taotaomo’na can be tied the island’s history of colonialism. In the 17th century, Spanish missionaries came to Guam with the intent of forcing Catholicism on the Chamorro people. There was sporadic resistance for three decades, with tens of thousands of Chamorros dying from fighting and disease.

Chamorros at the time of Western contact, had a religion focused around ancestor veneration. In life each person carried an ånte or soul, but upon passing into death the soul transformed into an aniti, the term used for the spirit of an ancestor. The plural term for them was manganiti, and Chamorros believed the unseen world around was filled with the manganiti, who would protect them or punish them.

Chamorros would keep the skulls of revered relatives in their homes and the leg bones of great warriors would be carved into bones and daggers. The thinking being that when you went into battle, the spirit of your father would fight with you. The skulls were known, according to one account, as maranan uchan, which translates to “a miracle of rain.” It is because the skull acted as a spiritual anchor, and with it you could request of your ancestors that they protect the family, provide a good harvest or drive fish towards your nets.

Living a good life, acting honorably with your family, taking care of them, respecting your elders and being courageous in battle were all things that made the manganiti happy and encouraged them to bless a clan with protection and success. Behaving in cowardly, selfish and disrespectful ways would likely lead the manganiti to withhold their aid and letting tragedy upon tragedy befall the family.

The Spanish, after silencing all active resistance, sought to cement their political control, with ideological control as well. They sought for generations to break the connection that Chamorros had with their ancestral spirits. They tried to replace them, giving Chamorros a pantheon of saints, who could provide the same favors and protection as their ancestors. They tried to replace the strong matrilineal symbols of Chamorro culture, with an array of Mary figures. Over a century they slowly pushed the beliefs of Chamorros to the point where they began to see these ancestral spirits as malicious and malevolent beings, that would haunt, trick and curse.

If you turn to Chamorro dictionaries today, you’ll find the effect of the Catholic Church’s ideological onslaught in the entries for aniti, in the following terms: devil, Satan, hellish fiend, demon, evil spirit. The term has become heavily stigmatized, and so many Chamorros today refuse to use it because of the heavy negative connotations. But this does not mean that Chamorros lose their connection to their ancestral spirits, but there is a change in terminology. After more than a century of Spanish colonization, in the 19th century Chamorros start using the term taotaomo’na.

While Chamorros as a people eventually accepted Catholicism, the connection to their ancestors was not cut, but modified. Although Chamorros did begin to feel a greater distance from the taotaomo’na, they nonetheless retained a respect. They did not develop a zealous hatred for the spirits as the Catholic priests had wanted, but rather respected their place on the island, which was now largely relegated to the jungle and natural settings. This is why people on Guam continue to ask permission prior to entering the jungle, because so long as you act with appropriate decorum, not only will the taotaomo’na not trick or menace you, but you may receive their protection as well.

Returning to the opening thought for this article, the idea that Chamorro ancestors are both in front of us and behind us, we find this in the term taotaomo’na but also in this history of both colonization and resilience. The term first emerges to represent the epistemological and cultural break between Chamorros and their ancestors that the Spanish had in some ways accomplished. Chamorros began to refer to their ancestors as taotaomo’na or “the people of before,” meaning the people of before colonization and the civilizing of the Spanish. But in the contemporary moment, where Chamorros have been carrying out a decades-long cultural renaissance, where they are seeking to reconnect to their ancient ancestors, the other meaning of the term is becoming ascendant. This has manifested today in terms of dance and chant groups that are meant to reflect ancient motifs and be homages to Chamorro ancestors. It has also lead to efforts to preserve the Chamorro language, which has endured despite hundreds of years of colonization and attempts to eradicate it. You can also find it in how colonial heroes, explorers and missionaries celebrated during the Spanish era, are now being replaced by Chamorro resistance figures who fought Chamorro subjugation. In so many ways, the things that colonizers have sought to silence or erase from the island, are being embraced and celebrated again.

And it is because of this element that we can see the other meaning of the word taotaomo’na, namely “those who wait ahead of us. “ In this way my comic in the Pacific Monsters anthology represents another way in which Chamorros today are seeking to reconnect and establish a healthy and respectful relationship to the spirits of our ancestors. Centuries of colonization drove our people to see the spirits of our ancestors as agents of the Catholic devil, and in many ways disconnected us from the very land of our homeland. But with changes in our consciousness, they are no longer distantly behind us, but rather wait before us. They are no longer chained in negativity by Catholicism, but once again important guides who travel with us on life’s journey.

 

Monster Tales : Michael Grey

Pacific Monsters

Michael Grey

The modern world sucks.

No wait, I have a point, bear with me.

Now, I may be showing my age but I was partly raised by my elderly aunt and uncle, and in the 80s on rainy Saturday afternoons (there’s few other kinds in Yorkshire outside summer), it was TV time.  After wrestling (Kendo Nagasaki was my favourite) and maybe the A Team if it was on, we’d get to the black and white films. My uncle loved the westerns, but they were never my thing. No, but give me a good Jason and the Argonauts, or even better, anything to do wit 19th century pirates and you couldn’t prize me away from that television for all the M.A.S.K. toys in the world.

I’ve thought a lot in the time since at why I loved those particular films since, and others set in what’s often called – if you’re being diplomatic – simpler times, and it always comes down to a unifying factor – the unknown. I grew up watching films and television programmes (think more Tin Tin than A-Team at this point) where there were still parts of the worlds considered unexplored, where a ‘Here Be Dragons’ scrawled on a map had to be taken seriously, because there’s might be a bloody dragon there.

And that’s why the modern world sucks. Because there are so few unknowns anymore. But one of those unknowns is the sea, and that’s why I jumped at the chance to contribute a story to Fox Spirit’s Pacific Monsters because it allowed me to tell a story about the kinds of monsters once thought to inhabit the less frequented corners of the world. Only, in this case, it just might.

For anyone who follows these things, more and more information about our oceans is being discovered. One those facts which keeps rearing its head is the ‘we know less about our oceans than we do about the moon’ and I love that. But that’s all oceans. What about the least-visited ocean? What percentage of that is explored?

The story the ningen hits all my interest points. Tales have been told about their (it’s, there?) existence for well over a century, there’s some (dodgy… yeah, let’s admit it, dodgy) photographic evidence (stop laughing, I said it was dodgy), and, best of all, it’s every so slightly and tantalisingly – maybe – plausible.

Dodgy Photo (mostly they lead to even dodgier youtube footage.

When I went to write ‘Grind’ for the collection I went a bit beyond my usual scope of research (IE, watching youtube videos and shouting “cool!” at the screen) and found one of those weird-arse conspiracy theory channels which in this case linked everything to the bible. While I’m sure these channels are filled with the kind of people who not only think fluoride has mind control properties, but also makes your skin glow, this one channels did link a particular bible passage to the potential existence of the ningen, and made a good enough linke between the two that I couldn’t help but include it in Grind. I won’t say what ti is, that, dear reader, is for you to discover and decide yourself.

And on that note – Pacific Monsters is out from November 30th at all good book shops and some dodgy ones too.

http://michaelgrey.com.au/pacific-monsters

 

 

Monster Tales : Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

All My Relations: Shark Stories

by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

The ocean is a dangerous place, and despite our touristic reputation as some sort of paradise, the seas around Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina (the Hawaiian Islands) are no different. Sometimes when you are bobbing around on the surface of the ocean, whether surfing or swimming, you get the eery feeling that something is there in the dark depths, that you are still part of the food chain.

And it’s true. Manō, or sharks, actually abound in our waters. If you ever want to lose sleep, take a look at the tiger shark tracking website and see how many are swimming around, and those are just the ones that have been tagged. The spot I surf at has had two attacks and multiple sightings in the last month alone. It makes us cautious, but it doesn’t keep most of us out of the water. For Hawaiians, the call of the ocean is too strong, and we have a long history with sharks.

Tiger shark image from http://www.pacioos.hawaii.edu/projects/sharks/ where you can also see distribution maps

Some of our more well-known moʻolelo (story/history/account) regarding manō feature sharks who can become men, and those men often wear cloaks or capes of leaves or feathers to hide the shark jaw that is between their shoulder blades. One famous shark would meet travelers along the path to the sea and then warn them that the ocean there is particularly shark-infested, and if they did not heed his warning, he would take a shortcut to the beach and devour them once they went into the water.

The Hawaiian-language newspapers of the nineteenth century have accounts of Hawaiian sailors returning to shore holding onto the fins of sharks. There are also accounts of fisherman and divers fighting off aggressive sharks with the Hawaiian martial art known as lua. There is even the story of a dog jumping in the water and biting a shark. And before you begin to think that the Hawaiian sharks are just more laid back, the newspapers have traditional accounts of people being killed by sharks as well. An elder I used to hang out with from Niʻihau even said that when they would catch sharks to dry for food, you could always tell the maneaters because their meat would melt in the sun and not be good eating. Recounting all of this is merely to say that sharks are a common part of Hawaiian culture, both contemporarily and traditionally.

But luckily, according to our traditional moʻolelo, the people of Oʻahu, the island I live on, are protected from man-eating manō by the shark goddess Kaʻahupāhau and her brother Kahiʻukā who live in Puʻuloa, the area some know as Pearl Harbor today. This protection came about after Kaʻahupāhau killed a haughty chiefess named Papio in a fit of rage after Papio mistreated one of Kaʻahupāhau’s family attendants over the tribute of a lei being prepared for the goddess. The chiefess’s blood still stains the sands of Keoneʻula in ʻEwa until this day, but after killing her Kaʻahupāhau felt remorse for her hasty act and declared that everyone would be safe in her waters from that day forward.

That declaration was tested, however, by other man-eating sharks who came from the other islands to fight Kaʻahaupāhau and Kahiʻukā. Kepanilā was the most daunting maneater; his name meant Sun Blocker because he was so large that if he swam above you, you would only see darkness. If he had taken part in the war, Kaʻahupāhau’s side may not have been victorious because of his strength and ferocity, but he was so large that he ran aground in the channel between the islands and could not make it to the battle on Oʻahu. But even without Kepanilā, it was a terrible battle, and sharks switched between different forms to get the best advantage, but Kaʻahupāhau became an unbreakable net, ensnaring the maneaters and tossing them upon the shore to be killed by her human allies.

Kaʻahupāhau ended up victorious and defeated the maneaters, ensuring that her proclamation of safety in the waters around Oʻahu remained in force. Some say that that proclamation came to an end, however, in 1913 with the collapse of the Pearl Harbor drydock. The stated reason is underground pressure, but there are many accounts aserting that when construction was taking place, the elderly kahu (attendant/guardian) of Kaʻahupāhau warned the Navy to stop construction because they were building on the home of Kaʻahupāhau. They laughed him off. Some say that after the drydock collapsed, a large stone-lined cave was found below with the remains of a large shark inside of it.

If you have been to Hawaiʻi, you can feel the power of our moʻolelo written on the land. Our winds and rains still bear the names that they have for hundreds of years. Our place names tell stories of our ancestors and our gods, and it is likely that Kaʻahupāhau and the sharks from our old moʻolelo still roam the seas around Ko Hawaiʻi Pae ʻĀina and transform into human form to waylay unwary travelers. There is a lot of power in our old moʻolelo, but we are creating new moʻolelo all the time. And remember, every time you are floating in the dark depths of the vast ocean, what we call Moananuiākea, and you get the eerie feeling that a shadow made up of teeth and speed is swimming below you, stalking you from just out of your sight, be comforted that this is your chance to take part in a brand new shark story.