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Albert Wendt (1939-) |
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Samoan novelist, poet, and educator, who has promoted creative writing across the Pacific. Albert Wendt is probably the best-known writer in the South Pacific. Although his works are deeply rooted in the heritage of the Oceanic culture, they also reflect the common experience of people everywhere. Among Wendt's major works is Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), an epic spanning three generations and a modern classic work of Pacific literature. "His father and Toasa had grown up together. They had spanned fifty years before his father died in 1928. In his memories of them Tauilopepe could never quite separate one from the other. They had both brought him up, nurturing him as one father, yet they were so different: Toasa full of laughter and vigour; Tauilopepe Laau, his father, aloof and silent, almost unapproachably cold. He had thought of them as making one complete human being — Toasa the flesh and bone and his father the calculating mind, the real power behind their leadership of Sapepe. But when his father died Toasa absorbed unto himself the being of his father, as it were." (Leaves of the Banyan Tree by Albert Wendt, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994, p. 7; first published in New Zealand by Longman Paul Limited 1979) Albert Wendt was born and raised in Apia, Western Samoa. He was of mixed German and
Polynesian ancestry. Wendt's father was a plumber, and a musician, who gave
up his music for trying to get his children through school. "Our older
relatives told us that our father used to drink and party a lot during
his dance band days. . . . Not longer after he became a deacon, he
stopped drinking altogether and preched against it from the pulpit." (Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater: A Writer’s Early Life by Albert Wendt, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015, p. 28) In his childhood Wendt was fascinated by his grandmother Mele's storytelling – stories, poems, chants,
legends and myths of his own people. At home he learned to read and write Samoan
"using the missionary alphabet and the Bible". Although he could read and write
English, he could not speak it much. Due to his German surname he was able to enrol in Leifi'ifi
Scool, reverved for the children of the New Zealand administrators and
Europeans. Wendt won a government scholarship to study in New Zealand.
His mother Luisa died when he was at boarding school; he couldn't
attend her tangi (a Māori funeral). While studying at New Plymouth
Boys' High School, Wendt began writing for himself and contributed to the
school magazine. He was encouraged by the example of Robert Louis Stevenson,
who spent the last years of his life on Wendt's native island. Wendt
developed a habit of waking up at about 3 a.m., he studied or wrote
until 5 or 6 and then slept again. Wendt studied at Ardmore Teacher´s College near Auckland and at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he gained an M.A. in history. Before returning in 1965 to Western Samoa with his wife Jenny Whyte, a teacher, Wendt worked for a while as a schoolteacher in New Zealand. In 1969 Wendt became principal of Samoa College, running the school for years. Several of his poems, which were later collected in Inside us the Dead (1976), appeared first in New Zealand's foremost arts and literary journal, Landfall, and Pacific Islands Monthly. In the beginning of the 1970s, he wrote two plays, Comes the Revolution, for the First South Pacific Arts Festival, Suva, Fiji, and The Contact, performed at the Schools’ Drama Festival, Apia, Samoa. In 1974 he moved to Fiji, where he was appointed as senior lecturer at the University of the South Pacific. While teaching he wrote Sons for the Return Home (1973),
an autobiographical tale about an cross-racial romance.
The protagonist, an unnamed young man from Samoa at university
in New Zealand, cites Hoch Minh, Mao and Che Guevara, the heroes of Wendt's university
studies. He was the first of a number of Wendt's existentialist ("Camusian") heroes,
a truth seeker who fails. But it's not the girls story who has an
abortion; the boy hits her, the pakeha girl has no place in the
Polynesian mythology. Wendt himself has describet the plot as "corny". Sons was praised for it tight narration and Wendt himself
claimed that he would remove only nine adverbs if he had to edit it again. In Fiji's
Parliament the book was denounced as "pornographic" and unsuitable for high-school
students.
Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974), a novella, depicted the colorful,
degraded world of street Samoan English. These early works have both been made
into feature films. Pouliuli
(1977) is the tragedy of an old village Lear-like chieftain, Faleasa Osovae, haunted by his past, and forced to encounter
Western ways. While in Fiji Wendt published such essays as 'Toward a New Oseania' and 'In a Stone Castle in the South Seas,' in which he examined Pacific literature and his own role as a writer. He has acknowledged the influence of both Albert Camus and William Faulkner upon his writing. Camus' The Outsider (1942) was one of his favorites to re-read. In 1977 Wendt returned home to set up the University of the South Pacific Center in Samoa. He worked closely with Mana, a literature magazine, and edited in 1975 collections of poems from Fiji, Western Samoa, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the Salomons. After Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), which took about 12
years to finish, Wendt did not want to write any more. This epic saga
of Westerns Samoan life is considered a classic of Pacific literature.
It won the 1980 New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award. Wendt mixes
in the story personal metaphysics with mythic symbols arising from
Samoa's landscape and Polynesian traditions. Tauilopepe, the
grandfather, struggles to acquire wealth, power, and prestige. His
rebellious son, Pepe, dies of tuberculosis and leaves behind a son,
Lalolagi. He is taken away from his mother by Tauilopepe and sent to a
New Zealand boarding school. Lalolagi rejects the Samoan language in
favor of English, and falls in with businessmen to exploit the
independent country's resources. The book provides a powerfully written
account of the psychological effects of colonialism before and after
the country's independence from New Zealand. Wendt sees the possibility
of achieving liberation in the traumatic fusion of cultures through an
existentialist individualism. He once said that one of the reasons he
write is to correct the inacurate pictures of Samoans created by
Western explorers and anthropologis like Margaret Mead. ('Editor's Note' by Vilsoni Hereniko, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, 1994, p. vii) Wendt was awarded the first chair in Pacific literature at
University of the South Pacific in Suva. In 1992, he was awarded a
Senate Certificate by the Senate of the Sixteenth Legislature of the
State of Hawaii in reconition of his talents as a writer and his
contribution to the Pacific and world literature. Wendt was appointed
Professor of English at the University of Auckland in 1988 and in 2004
he took
up the Citizen's Chair at the
University of Hawai'i. In 2001 he was made Companion of the Order of
New Zealand for his services to literature in 2001. After returning from Hawai'i Wendt retired from academic life.
Since 1991/1992 his partner has been the Māori literature scholar Reina
Whaitiri. Their villa in Ponsonby, Auckland, New Zealand, had
previously been the home of Michel Joseph Savage, the first Labour
Prime Minister of New Zealand, and Bryan Williams, a legendary Rugby
Union Player of Samoan descent. Although corruption, exploitation, and greed – the ills of globalization –
were central in Wendt's work in the 1990s, he also began to
employ postmodern techniques of storytelling. Ola (1991) has
direct quotations from a range of Wendt's other books, from prose pieces to poetry. Like the author, Olamaiileoti Monroe has a mixed-race background. Through her experiences and cultural confrontations during her travels, Wendt reveas prevailing racism and sexism. According to Wendt, a racist language was not used only by politicians and business leaders, but former academics and so-called pundits and journalists. The Black Rainbow (1992), depicting a totalirarian government called the Tribunal, borrowed from science fiction and detective novels.
The title of this dystopia is taken from Ralp Hotere's Black Rainbow / Muroroa litograph protesting nuclear testing in the Pacific. Also Robert Zemeckis' comedy film Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988), which combines live-action and animation, was a source of
inspiration. The Tribunal tries to erase all history that conflicts
with the official narrative of the past. While Wendt draws on traditional Polynesian culture, he takes
the view that its disintegration under European influences has given
the artist a new freedom to develop a personal style. He made no
difference between autobiography and fiction. "All people, individuals,
once we write them down, become substitutes, constructions of the author." ('The Techniques of Storytelling: An Interview with Albert Wendt' by Juniper Ellis, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 28, No. 3, July 1997, p. 87) His world is inhabited by real
and semi-mythological beings, he uses European literature and history as well
as images from Polynesian myths. An image that constantly recurs is Wendt's totemic owl.
Most of the poems in Photograps (1995) deal with the author's life and extended family or Aiga. The Songmaker’s Chair (2004), a full-length play, was about generational conflict within an immigrant family. Wendt's vision of the patriarch of the family, Peseola Olaga, sitting in his favorite chair beside a radio, was based on his own father. The Adventures of Vela (2009), a novel-in-verse, was shorlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize; it won won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the Asia Pacific Region. For further reading: The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses, and Modernism by Maebh Long and Matthew Hayward (2024); Samoans in Postcolonial Literature by Johnny Victor Toma (thesis, 2023); 'Singing the Spiral of Time: Albert Wendt's The Adventures of Vela' by Bill Ashcroft, in Postcolonial Past & Present: Negotiating Literary and Cultural Geographies: Essays for Paul Sharrad, edited by Anne Collett, Leigh Dale (2018); The Novel in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the South Pacific since 1950, edited by Coral Ann Howells, Paul Sharrad, and Gerry Turcotte (2017); Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body by Michelle Keown (2004); Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void, by Paul Sharrad (2003); 'Wendt, Albert,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 4, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); 'Burning on’, interview with Albert Wendt, in New Zealand Books (Aug 1999); Review of The Best of Albert Wendt's Short Stories by Albert Wendt, in Dominion (24 Jul 1999); The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998); '"The Techniques of Storytelling": An Interview with Albert Wendt', by Juniper Ellis, in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 28:3 (1997); 'A Tribute to the fa´a Samoa' by Valerie O'Rourke, in World Literature Today (1992); Comparative Literature East and West, edited by Cornelia N. Moore (1989); 'Albert Wendt and the Far-Samoa,' in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim (1986); 'Order, Disorder, and Rage in the Islands: The Novels of V.S. Naipaul and Albert Wendt' by M. S. Martin, in Perspectives on Comparative Literature (1984) Selected bibliography:
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