Kunapipi XXVI:2

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER
Ocean of Stars — Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature in English

Paul Sharrad’s recently released book on Albert Wendt, the first monograph on the outstanding literary figure of the Pacific region, is not only an ambitious but a profoundly successful scholarly study that deserves our attention. It enters the critical discourse on the ‘new’ literatures in English as a timely reminder of the importance of a regional literature and of Wendt’s literary and critical contribution to this discourse, both widely neglected among critics from beyond the Pacific. Having been engaged with Pacific writing for many years, Sharrad’s receptive, accurate and thoroughly informed critical analyses in Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (2003) offer the reader a balanced appraisal of the writer’s achievement. At the same time the book invites examination of Sharrad’s arguments and insights and affords the opportunity to comment upon Wendt’s most recent works that are not included here, as well as on publications of other Pacific writers to whom Sharrad does not necessarily refer. This twofold approach, I suggest, will contribute to our understanding both of Wendt’s literary achievement and the diverse mosaic of Pacific writing. Here though, I am well aware of the terminological problems ‘Pacific’ writing has encountered, differing geographical, ethnic and cultural parameters having been variously used to categorise the most widely dispersed corpus of literary texts among the ‘new’ literatures in English. Wendt’s own position as the editor of Lali: A Pacific Anthology (1980), Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980 (1995), and most recently (with Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan) of Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (2003) is in itself indicative of the ongoing discourse on naming a regional literature by simultaneously drawing demarcating boundary lines of inclusion and exclusion that stretch or shrink, as the case my be, the locale of ‘Pacific’ writing within the vast oceanic region extending from Hawaii to Aotearoa / New Zealand and from Papua New Guinea to Easter Island.

Giving expression to the writer’s life-time experience in Samoa, Fiji and Aotearoa / New Zealand over a period of more than half a century, Wendt’s poems, stories and novels as much as his critical writing represent the heterogeneity and multiplicity of the Pacific expanse, which in Sharrad’s words has imbued him with an ‘ever-expanding vision of Oceania, including New Zealand, as his adoptive home’ — and importantly, with a vision that rejects ‘a limiting view of tradition that would insulate local identity from the complex interactions of global modernity’ (vii). It is precisely this awareness of the correlation of the local and the global that underpins Sharrad’s study of Wendt’s work published between 1955 — when his first story ‘Drowning’ was included in a New Zealand annual school magazine — and 1999 which saw the release of The Best of Albert Wendt’s Short Stories. Indeed, the interaction of the local and the global, which I have referred to elsewhere as a transformative process towards the glocal,1 plays an important role in his more recent writing, including the poetry collection The Book of the Black Star (2002) and the novel The Mango’s Kiss (2003).