Kunapipi XXVI:2

PAUL SHARRAD
Trees, Rainbows and Stars: The Recent Work of Albert Wendt

Albert Wendt is the leading literary figure of the Pacific — that is, Oceania (not the Asian and American rim that the media usually mean by ‘Pacific’) Born in Samoa in 1939, Wendt has worked as a student, teacher and writer in Samoa, Fiji and New Zealand, and currently holds the chair of New Zealand literature at the University of Auckland. He has written stories, novels, poetry and essays over the last thirty years, all to do with the effects of colonial incursions on Island cultures and the possibilities of imagining a new complex future that will accord respect to tradition and claim a place in global modernity. As part of this project, he has drawn on the Samoan oral literature of his birthplace, on writers like Camus, Borges, Naipaul, Faulkner and Yeats, on Hollywood movies, science fiction, New Zealand society and elements of Tao and Zen. His work has been an exciting exploration of different forms and voices, and a continuous wrestling with the role of the artist at the edge of community but speaking to it (and in the postcolonial context, for it) and against the abuses of economic, political and culturally dominating power structures.

Roughly, the work as a whole falls into three groups. It is only roughly because Wendt can work on a novel for an awfully long time while chopping out fragments for publication as stories, writing separate stories, starting bits of a projected novel and building up a collection of poems. Firstly, in the seventies he produced an anti-colonial analysis of the corruptions of modern life in Samoa around the same time as a lot of decolonising protest writing was appearing across the Pacific. (Some of it came out with assistance from Wendt, who has encouraged young writers and produced many anthologies of Pacific poems and stories, culminating in his landmark collection, Lali.) This period of Wendt’s output includes the first novel to be published by a Pacific Islander, Sons for the Return Home (1973), a collection of short stories about the semi-schooled roguish fringe of Apia, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974), a book of poems, Inside us the Dead (1976), a novella, Pouliuli (1977), and a saga of one family’s move from traditional village community to modern city capitalism, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979). In this period, Wendt also wrote his definitive essay on emergent Pacific writing, ‘Towards a New Oceania’ (1976), in which he sets out his project of correcting colonialist images of the Pacific and critiquing the ‘mimic men’ (he mentions his reading of Naipaul) who sell out traditional ways for private gain, leaving a culturally bankrupt society and neo-colonial dependency in their wake. The artist, though he or she as a dissident individual could be cut off from communal values, has a prophetic duty and positive recreative role to play in imagining a complexly connected, culturally confident and self-determining contemporary Pacific world. The figure representing this stage of work is the banyan tree: it is a community of branches still rooted still in tradition but sending out new aerial roots as part of modern and increasingly mobile Pacific life.