Bougainville - Intersection of Papua New Guinea and Iron & Wine
Just one of those things: I’m reading about Bougainville Province and their fight for autonomy from Papua New Guinea. Then I took a break to look up some Iron & Wine lyrics, for the song “Passing Afternoon.” The song goes, “She chose a yard to burn / But the ground remembers her / Wooden spoons, her children stir her bougainvillea blooms.”
Both the province and the creeping flowers were named after a French explorer, Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Bougainville dreamt of utopian paradise, away from civilization, free like the noble savages of the islands he explored.
The Iron & Wine song hauntingly takes to ask the story of a woman remembering her past loves, when life was free. Perhaps there is some hearkening back to the innocent utopia of Bougainville, as her “children stir her bougainvillea blooms” and she loses her wedding ring “somewhere near her misplaced jar of bougainvillea seeds.”
Bougainville Province, on the other hand, has less of an idyllic memory—what with war and revolution watering its recent history. Though there is irony in a Wikipedia quote where the Americans, while attacking Japanese troops in the province during WWII, left the enemy entrenched, “to whither on the vine” through starvation and disease. Perhaps on bougainvillea vines (though not native to Bougainville), or just listening non-stop to Iron & Wine (which didn’t exist during WWII).
November 12th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
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