Eyes of the Ocean

Eyes of the Ocean is Syaman Rapongan's literary autobiography, both a powerful story of survival in a settler state and a masterful portrait of the Indigenous artist as a young man.

About the author

Syaman Rapongan is an acclaimed author who grew up on Pongso no Tao or Orchid Island. After spending more than a decade studying and working in Taiwan, he returned to his home in 1989, joining the local Indigenous social movement and protesting a nuclear waste facility, and turned to literature in the 1990s. He has also made documentary films, founded a workshop on oceanic ethnography, and crossed the Pacific Ocean in a canoe.

Darryl Sterk is associate professor of translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He has translated works by a number of Taiwanese writers, including Wu Ming-Yi's The Stolen Bicycle (2017) and Kevin Chen's Ghost Town (2022).

Product details

• Authors: Syaman Rapongan
• Assisted by: Simon Scott (Introduction), Sterk Darryl (Translation)
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 26.08.2025
• EAN: 9780231219808
• ISBN: 978-0-231-21980-8
• No. of pages: 272
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Non-fiction book > Dictionaries, reference works > Foreign-language dictionaries; FICTION / General, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Asian / Chinese, Relating to indigenous peoples, Anthologies: general, The Americas, Fiction: general and literary, Relating to Native American people, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Indigenous, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Indigenous