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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 Oceanic culture, they also reflect the common
experience of people everywhere.
 Inside
us the dead,
like sweet-honeyed tamarind pods
That will burst in tomorrow's sun,
or plankton fossils in coral
alive at full moon dragging virile tides over coy reefs
into yesterday's lagoons.
(from 'Inside Us the Dead' in Lali, 1980)
Albert Wendt was born in Apia, Western Samoa, of mixed German and
Polynesian ancestry. In his childhood Wendt was fascinated by his
grandmother Mele's storytelling - stories, poems, chants, legends
and myths of his own people. He won a government scholarship to
study in New Zealand, and attended high school in New Plymouth,
where he began writing for himself. In his writing aspirations he
was encouraged by the example of Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent
the last years of his life on Wendt´s native island.
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, a white New Zealander, Wendt worked for a while as a schoolteacher
in New Zealand. He became principal of Samoa College and in 1974
he moved to Fiji, where he worked at the University of the South
Pacific.
While teaching he wrote Sons for the Return Home (1973),
an autobiographical work about a cross-racial romance. The protagonist,
an unnamed young man from Samoa at university in New Zealand, is
the first of a number of Wendt's existentialist heroes. Flying
Fox in a Freedom Tree (1974) depicts the colourful, degraded
world of street Samoan English. Inside Us the Dead (1976)
is an ironic self-examination. Pouliuli (1977) is the tragedy
of an old village chieftain, sickened by materialist greed, haunted
by his past, and forced to encounter Western ways. In Fiji Wendt
published such essays as "Toward a New Oseania" and "In a Stone
Castle in the South Seas" in which he examines Pacific literature,
and his own role as a writer.
In 1977 Wendt returned home to set up the University of the South
Pacific Centre in Samoa. He worked closely with Mana, a literature
magazine and in 1975 edited collections of poems from Fiji, Western
Samoa, the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), and the Salomons.
Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), Wendt's epic saga of Western
Samoan life, won the New Zealand Wattie Book of the Year Award,
and is considered a classic of Pacific literature. In the story
Wendt mixes personal metaphysics with mythic symbols arising from
the Samoan 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, who is taken away from his mother by Tauilopepe and sent
to a New Zealand boarding school. Lalolagi rejects the Samoan language
in favour 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.
Wendt was awarded the first chair in Pacific literature at University
of the South Pacific in Suva. In 1988 he took up a professorship
of Pacific studies at the University of Auckland. In 1999 Wendt
was visiting Professor of Asian and Pacific Studies at the University
of Hawaii.
In the 1990s Wendt examined the effects of globalisation. Ola
(1991) reveals prevailing racism and sexism, and opposes modern
selfishness with the traditional moral values. According to Wendt,
a racist language is used not only by politicians and business leaders,
but former academics and so-called pundits and journalists. Black
Rainbow (1992) is an attack on French nuclear testing in the
Pacific. The political fable uses the framework of the science fiction
/ detective genre.
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. Wendt's world
is inhabited by real and semi-mythological beings; he uses European
literature and history as well as images from Polynesian myths.
He has also acknowledges the influence of both Camus and Faulkner
on his writing. Wendt's work reacts against the idealized and distorted
images Western writers create of his culture. Among his major themes
is racism against Maoris and other ethnic minorities.
For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature
in the 20th Century, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 4);
- Searching for Identity by Alexander Mart (1995); "A Tribute
to the fa´a Samoa by Valerie O'Rourke (1992, in World Literature
Today); Comparative Literature East and West, ed. by Cornelia
N. Moore (1989); "Albert Wendt and the Faa-Samoa". In Essays on
Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, ed. by Bock, 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 (1984,
in Perspectives on Comparative Literature) - See also:
Return to Exile: Locating Home by Juniper Ellis (in Jouvert: a
journal of postcolonial studies, volume 2, issue 2, 1998
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