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A
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Jean-Pierre Durix
FOREWORD
The world of African or Caribbean literature
written in English is becoming more and more familiar to readers
in the Western world. Yet Polynesia had remained relatively unknown
in this regard until recently. Witi Ihimaera's Pounamu
Pounamu, first published in 1972 started arousing the
interest of British and European critics who realized that the
Pacific area could no longer be ignored in terms of fiction.
Experts may debate for a long time on the validity of using the
word 'Polynesia' for the triangle extending between Hawaii, Easter
Island and New Zealand. Obviously territories separated by such
vast expanses of ocean have developed different civilizations.
Still there remains enough common features, culturally and linguistically
speaking, for the term 'Polynesia' to hold some relevance. Archaeological
evidence shows that people have lived in Samoa since at least
500 B.C. Therefore, contact with Europeans being only two hundred
years old, the mould of traditional society still fashions the
organization and habits of Pacific islanders. Even in New Zealand
where the myth of a monocultural society predominated until twenty
years ago, Maori identity has sought to assert itself more and
more with poets such as Hone Tuwhare and fiction writers like
Patricia Grace and Witi Ihimaera. Because of distribution problems,
these artists have had great difficulty reaching an audience
outside their 'region'. Albert Wendt's Leaves of the Banyan_Tree
has been more fortunate, and deservedly so, since Penguin brought
out the book in 1981. The French Society for Commonwealth Studies
had already recognized the merit of this novelist when it organized
a workshop on him at its annual conference in Lyon in 1981. Some
of the papers included in this collection are the result of the
research done on that occasion.
Born in what is now Western Samoa in
1939, Albert Wendt bears in his name (inherited from a German
ancestor) the symbol of multicultural identity. His parents moved
to New Zealand when he was still young and, after going to high
school in New Plymouth, to Teacher's College at Ardmore, he,finally
obtained an M.A. in history from Victoria University in Wellington.
He taught in a New Zealand school for a while then moved back
to Samoa in 1965 where he subsequently became Principal of Samoa
College. In 1974, he went to Fiji to work in the field of the
creative arts and to lecture in the English department of the
University of the South Pacific in Suva. During that time he
helped young writers to mature and to widen their audience. Back
in Samoa, he experimented with new methods of teaching, using
all the resources of modern technology, to enable the very scattered
islands of the region to have access to high quality education.
At the time of writing, Albert Wendt is about to move back to
Suva to take up a chair of Pacific literature.
The writer's tremendous vitality is
reflected in the wide range of 'genres' he masters: His first
novel, Sons for the Return Home (Longman Paul, Auckland,
1973) follows the evolution of a Samoan family in New Zealand.
Their son goes to college there, befriends a pakeha (Maori
for 'white New Zelander) girl and falls in love with her. Their
relationship epitomizes the conflictual meeting between the two
cultures. The boy's mother cannot face the thought of having
papalagi (Samoan for 'white') grandchildren and suggests
to the girl who has become pregnant that she should have an abortion.
Back in Samoa, the young man discovers
that he is cut off from his own culture and therefore has to
fight his way alone. The fruit that could have been born from
the reunion of the two ethnic groups has withered and little
hope is left for the future. Though written before Sons for
the Return Home, Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree (Longman
Paul, 1974) was published later. It consists of a collection
of stories where a number of petty crooks and tricksters live
side by side with members of traditional village communities.
These pieces show a variety of experiments in the art of narration,
the most daring attempt being the title story in which a writer
dying from TB in hospital is trying to come to terms with his
environment and with the overwhelming presence of destruction.
Pepe, the first-person narrator, becomes a Promethean hero who
veils his despair in jokes and self-irony and who, until the
end, demonstrates his tremendous thirst to live. Inside
Us the Dead (Longman Paul, 1976) includes poems written
between 1961 and 1974. It shows the author at his best, expressing
himself in epic, lyrical, sarcastic or almost metaphysical verse.
Pouliuli, the next novel (Longman Paul, 1977) pursues
the tone of bitter despair already apparent in earlier fiction:
an old village-chief gradually sinks into darkness (Pouliuli)
while his family quarrels over who should
succeed him. In its hallucinatory tone, this work is also a disillusioned
reflection on the functioning of the old institutions. It recalls
King Lear and possesses the same tragic hero with the
old chief who suddenly discovers that all the structures which
used to give meaning to his existence have become empty. As the
man progresses towards madness, the reader is seized with pity
and terror. Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Longman
Paul, 1979) sums up twelve years of artistic creation. This saga
of a Samoan family spreads over several generations and includes
many different characters making up a complete picture of society.
The struggle for power between different chiefs receives the
blessing of the LMS church. The problems of succession and legitimacy
are once again at the centre of the plot which develops along
the lines of a very sophisticated narrative pattern. The novel
gives an indication of some of the directions in which A. Wendt
seems to be moving. The present collection of essays only sets
out to be an introductory exploration. It does not pretend to
be exhaustive. We hope that the variety of our approaches and
reactions will serve to foster more interest in a very rewarding
field. A. Wendt has done us the honour of contributing a story
and we are most grateful for this occasion to bring writer and
critics together.
Jean-Pierre Durix
(University of Dijon)
Albert Wendt
PROSPECTING
©Albert Wendt
(reproduced with the author's permission)
It was mid 1893.
On his next trip into Apia with Barker,
the papalagi trader and his closest friend, Mautu, the pastor
of Satoa, brought home a new pick, a shovel, and a bushknife
which he stored in the cupboard where he kept most of his valuable
possessions. Curious about what he was going to use them for,
Lalaga, his wife, and their four children waited for him to tell
them that night during their usual English lesson. He didn't.
Next morning, which was Tuesday, they
watched what he was going to do. After their meal at mid-morning,
he put on a working lavalava, got out the new implements, and
handed the shovel to Peleipu, his thirteen-year old daughter.
'May I come too?' Arona, his son, asked.
'Yes, may we?' chorused Ruta and Naani,
his youngest daughters.
Mautu shook his head and started towards
Barker's house which was situated across the malae under some
breadfruit trees.
'You're too young!' Peleiupu remarked
to the other children.
'So are you!' replied Ruta. Peleiupu
flicked backed her long mane,
wheeled and followed Mautu, carrying
the shovel, like a rifle, across her shoulder.
She waited on the veranda while Mautu
went in to see Barker. Three of Barker's youngest children, snotty-nosed
and naked, came out and, stopping a few paces away in a group,
scrutinised her. Peleiupu knew them but, as yet, she refused
to befriend any of Barker's children: she considered them too
rude, too forward, altogether too papalagi even though their
mother was Samoan and they couldn't speak English.
'Is that a shovel?' the oldest, a girl
of five, asked. Peleiupu nodded once.
'It is our shovel?' the second
girl asked, her right forefinger drilling into her right nostril.
Peleiupu shook her head once.
'Shit!' exclaimed the youngest, a chubby
male monster who was fingering his penis. Pretending she had
been shocked by his remark, Peleiupu turned her back to them.
'Shit!' the boy repeated. His sisters giggled, then Peleiupu
heard them running off the veranda and around the corner of the
house. She tried not to laugh.
'When Barker and Mautu came out, Barker
was wearing his black, hobnailed boots. Around his waist was
a cartridge belt. What he called his sun helmet was perched precariously
on his huge mound of hair. Under his left arm was his canvas
satchel in which, Peleiupu knew, he carried his pens, pencils
and paper. His sleek rifle was in his right hand. The great adventurer
that Mautu had told them about, thought Peleiupu.
'Where are we going?' she asked Mautu.
He motioned with his head towards the plantations.
'It might rain,' Barker remarked in
English, gazing briefly up at the dark blue clouds covering the
top of the range.
Shaking his head, Mautu said, in English,
'No, it not rain. It is fine weather.'
Peleiupu's heart skipped with joy: she
understood most of what they had said. Not just words anymore;
now sentences as well. (Barker was teaching her father English,
and he was teaching her and her brother and sisters.)
'Hurry! Hurry!' Barker called in Samoan
to his aiga in the fale behind the house. Two of his wife's brothers,
Moamoa and Tuvanu, came running carrying another pick, bushknives,
and what Peleiupu thought were metal frying pans without handles.
'Where the food?' Barker asked abruptly in Samoan. Both men were
middle-aged and had children. Moamoa scurried back to the fale.
'Fool! Fool!' Barker called after him. 'You can't trust these
people!' Barker said in English to Mautu.
When Moamoa was back with the basket
of food they started off, with Barker and Mautu leading, setting
a stiff marching pace. Peleiupu almost had to run to keep up.
People in the fale they passed greeted
them with invitations to stop and eat. Their group stopped briefly
every time, and Mautu refused their invitation politely. A dog,
fur all abristling, rushed at them with ferocious barks and snapping
fangs. 'Alu! Alu!' Barker barked back at it. The poor creature
cringed away, its tail between its legs.
Alongside the track, that was islanded
with puddles, the vegetation was still sparkling with dew, and
soon their clothes were wet from it. Peleiupu felt strong, invigorated,
alive with anticipation, the adventure unravelling, and smashed
her reflection in the puddles, merrily, with her feet. As they
passed through the dark green crops, trees, creepers, and shrubs,
she imagined they were swimming through a soundless sea world,
where everything was the lush colour of green, led by the courageous
Captain Barker, son of the English Earl, and his loyal native
lieutenant Mautu.
Suddenly, into her daydreaming, Barker's
voice said, 'Gold,' and she glanced up at Barker's back, hoping
to understand more but Barker was speaking too fast.
They veered off the maintrack and crossed
over creeper-covered ground through a plantation of bananas to
the Satoa River.
On the edge of the bank they stood and
surveyed the river and the valley that meandered, like a gigantic
centipede, up through foothills to the center range. The river
was faintly brown with silt as it rippled leisurely through narrow
strips of boulders, rocks, and pebbles sparkling in the sun.
The light breeze brought with it, from the mountains, the odour
of dark, decaying vegetation.
While they watched him, Barker found
a large tree trunk nearby, brushed the creepers off it, sat down,
opened his canvas satchel, took out a board, spread out sheets
of blank paper on it, then, pencil poised in his right hand,
he studied the terrain before them for a long, hushed while.
Quietly, Peleiupu edged over and stood looking down, over his
shoulder at the paper. Mautu stabbed his bushknife into the soil
at his feet and, dangling his legs over the river bank, sat gazing
at the water. Into the cool shape of a clump of bananas, Moamoa
and Tuvany retreated, and from there,observed what Barker was
doing. Already waves of heat were brimming visibly up from the
beds of boulders and stones below.
When the hand clutching the pencil moved
it was like a quick spider drawing with all its legs. Soon black
lines, a whole network of them, covered the page . Peleiupu recognised
it as a map of the river valley and the area around it. She had
once seen a sketch map in Mautu's books.
Barker held it up to Mautu who came
over and, studying it, said, in English, 'Good, good!' Just like
Barker would have said.
'I think we should start here.' Barker
pointed with his pencil at the area of sand and pebbles on his
map, then down at it in the valley. 'Then here on our next visit.'
The next area was a few hundred yards upriver.
Just before they made their way down
into the shallow valley, Barker shook Mautu's hand and, smiling,
said, 'Good luck!' Peleiupu was even more puzzled than before.
The river was shallow where they were,
beds of stones protruded out of the water at midstream. Mautu
took one of the shallow pans and squatted down in the water.
Stabbing the shovel into the pulpy sand, Barker pushed down on
it with his booted foot until the shovel was buried and then,
wrenching up a shovelful of sand, tipped it into Mautu's pan.
Fascinated, Peleiupu, Moamoa and Tuvanu watched.
'I not know how,' Mautu said in English
to Barker.
'Let me!' Barker took the panful of
pebbly sand, lowered it into the water and moved it back and
forth, washing out the sand until only the bits of rock and pebble
were left. He then picked out the bits with his fingers and examined
them. 'Nothing yet,' he said to Mautu. 'Take the other pan.'
Mautu did so. Barker, in his broken Samoan, instructed Moamoa
and Tuvanu to fill the pans with the sandy material whenever
he told them to do so.
Peleiupu crouched down in the water
in her father's shadow and observed every move he was making.
Mautu's eyes were alive with a brightness she hadn't seen there
before. The water was cool around her feet and ankles; periodically
she scooped up handfuls of it and washed her face with it.
Relentlessly the sun pressed down. Neither
men noticed it and, whenever Moamoa and Tuvanu were slow, Barker
hurled orders at them. Even in her father's shadow Peleiupu found
the heat becoming painful, so she lay down in the water, with
only her face and head above it. The cool water tingled on her
body.
They shifted upriver along the water's
edge whenever Barker decided nothing was to be found at a particular
spot.
At noon, Peleiupu whispered to Mautu
that she was hungry. Mautu told her and the other two men to
go into the shade and have some food.
From the healing shade of trees, Peleiupu
munched her food and watched them digging up the sand and sifting
it in their pans, oblivious to the heat shimmering around them
in visible waves like hungryswarms of mosquitoes. They seemed
locked in a time they never wanted to leave.
Mautu was the first to break from the
spell and hurry into the shade. He ate quickly, all the time
watching Barker, finished and scrambled out again.
'Lazy! Lazy!' Barker shouted over to
Moamoa and Tuvanu who got up reluctantly, cursing under their
breath, and went out.
'Gold,' Peleiupu remembered Barker saying
earlier that morning, as she watched. She fell asleep and dreamt
of Mautu looming above her, his chest puffed out, his face beaming
with a golden light, then, digging his hands into the centre
of his chest, he prized open his rib-cage and out of the cavern
of his chest gushed a river of liquid gold in which she splashed
and laughed and laughed.
They got home that evening as Lalaga
was lighting the lamp and, without speaking to their inquisitive
aiga, got some soap and a towel and went and bathed in the communal
pool beside the church. Their whole aiga were in the main fale
ready for the lotu when they returned. Mautu put on a shirt.
Peleiupu brought him the bible.
Straight after their meal, during which
Mautu ate as if he was caught utterly in his own thoughts, Mautu
went to where he usually slept, drew the curtain behind him,
and they soon heard him snoring heavily.
Peleiupu, anticipating her mother, gave
her a vivid, matter-of-fact description of what she called 'their
expedition' but omitted speculation that Barker and Mautu were
prospecting for gold.
'What can they be looking for?' Lalaga
asked, more to herself than Peleiupu who shrugged her shoulders.
Lalaga left.
When her brother and sisters and the
other young people in their aiga gathered eagerly around her,
Peleiupu retold her story, this time with extravagant embellishments,
dramatic flourishes, hilariously accurate imitations of Barker's
Samoan, and deliberately misleading guesses as to what the two
men were searching for. One, perhaps they were mapping the course
of the Satoa River. Two, perhaps because both men were scientific
they were just working out the types of sand, rocks, mud and
pebbles found in the valley. Three, perhaps they were excavating
for the sites o ancient villages, hoping to find priceless artifacts.
Four, perhaps - and this was the remotest possibility of all
- they were acting out an adventure they had read in one of Barker's
books.
Tired from the expedition, she stumbled
into a deep sleep soon after telling her tale.
The other children lay awake late into
the night envying her and speculating among themselves, in whispers,
concerning what Barker and Mautu were up to.
By the morning meal, everyone in Satoa
was talking about the expedition. At this point, with everyone
hungrily awaiting the unravelling of the mystery, no one advanced
the possibility that perhaps both men had gone mad or were chasing
mirages as described in the Holy Book, the very thing that Peleiupu
was protecting her father against by not mentioning gold.
For Peleiupu, two impatient days had
to be tolerated before their next expedition upriver' (a phrase
she had read in a book). During that time, Mautu spent the afternoons
with Barber going over the sketch map and marking in large red
X's their next diggings. For the first time, Mautu told her to
stay home and help Lalaga. Hurt by this, she was a sullen, easily-angered,
resentful helper, and she had frequent quarrels with the other
children and especially Arona who, as the only son, resented
her for being a favoured companion to their father. Arduous upriver
expeditions were for boys not girls, he complained to Lalaga
who, when alone in bed with a silent Mautu that night, explained
that it was time he took his only son with him and not
Peleiupu. 'We shall see,' he said absent-mindedly and was immediately
lost in his thoughts again.
'Your children, apart from Peleiupu,
do not exist for you!' she complained.
'What did you say?'
She slapped the mats she was lying on,
and, trying to keep her voice down, said, 'Never mind!'
'You are angry with me?' he asked gently.
'No!' she snapped. Then quietly she
asked, 'What is happening to you? What are you searching for?
You speculate, you dream, you pursue figments of Barker's imagination
and what you read in those books!'
'I pursue God's mystery. His depth.
His secrets. I want to understand Him.' It was stated simply
with total belief.
'It canlead you to heresy. Have you
thought of that?'
'How can it be when I know that God
is Everything, including the wonders and dreams and fantasies
and visions of the Imagination and Mind?' With that shewas lost,
she could not grasp his meaning.
'And this - this unreal search for gold?'
'Did Peleiupu tell you that?'
'No, your clever, loyal daughter tried
to put me off your track.'
'But what is so unreal about,it? No
one has tried to see if there is gold here, have they?'
Caught again by his logic, she felt
like shouting. 'But everyone says there is no gold here!'
'But where is the actual proof?' When
she didn't reply, he caressed her shoulder and said, 'I love
you and our children more than my own life'
'Soon you will be lost from my understanding,'
she said, almost in tears. 'Please stop this search for gold
before our people think you've gone...' She couldn't say it.
'Yes?' he asked. She refused to say
it.
While it was still dark on Friday morning,
with a chilly wind weaving in from the sea, he woke Peleiupu
and Arona, and they dressed without waking the others, and, carrying
a basket of food and their implements, went to Barker's house.
The dew-covered grass prickled under their feet.
Barker and a yawning Moamoa and a half-asleep
Tuvanu were waiting on the veranda. Without talking they were
soon into the solemn shadows and the breathing silence of the
plantations.
That day, the sun pursued them again.
They covered about half a-mile of river bank, stopping, digging,
sifting panfuls of sandy material then shifting further inland.
Barker and Mautu, oblivious to everything else, confined their
talking to intermittent instructions to Moamoa and Tuvanu; the
two children were like shadows, always beside them, saying nothing,
watching.
At mid-morning, Peleiupu noticed that
the still air immediately around them was tainted with Barker's
flying-fox smell which worsened as he sweated and as they moved
into the humid dampness of the bush which, at the start of the
foothills, groped right down to the water's edge.
They found nothing that day.
At the toonai at his home on Sunday,
some of the village elders questioned him politely, obliquely,
about his search. Lightheartedly he told them that they had found
nothing yet. No one asked what they were looking for: they had
heard rumours, started by Moamoa and Tuvanu, that precious metals
were being prospected for.
Lalaga refused to ask him about it,
while Peleiupu, now the veteran explorer, let Arona explain to
the other children what had happened so far. The slow Arona stuck,
in his story, to the bare facts and details.
The following week, they went out three
times. Moamoa and Tuvanu, tired from the work and Barber's abuse,
didn't appear the last time, a Friday, so the still eager Peleiupu
and Arona carried the implements and food.
After a heavy night's rain, the ground
under the bush at the river's edge was soft and stank of decay;
their feet sank into it up to the ankles. The undergrowth was
denser, more tangled, and they had to cut a track through it.
Around them the sad air was a blue sea of steam through which
swam rapacious swarms of mosquitoes that Peliupu and Arona fought
off with small leafy branches. The river banks shot up sharply
into rugged escarpments, hills, and ridges all smothered with
virgin bush which made them feel they were being watched.
As they worked there was little conversation.
There was only the rushing sound of the now swiftly flowing water
and the occasionally lost cries of birds. Around them Peleiupu
sensed the bush world growing, growing.
Late in the afternoon, wet and tired,
the skins on their hands and faces wrinkled with the cold, they
retreated from the bush and headed for home, locked into themselves,
and Peleiupu wondered if her father and Barker were going to
give up.
That weekend, the Satoans, encouraged
by Moamoa's and Tuvanu's funny comments about the expedition,
started joking about it behind Mautu's back.:All the young people
in Satoa, however, maintained their faith in the search.
On Monday morning, with the barely-visible
drizzle whirling around them as they tramped up the valley, Peleiupu
sensed a more dogged determination in the two men.
The bush still steamed with an inescapable
darkness, and, as they entered it, it closed around them. Little
light. They worked.
They went twice more that week. Still
nothing. The drizzle continued. The terrain became more rugged,
wilder, more difficult to pen etrate. The mosquitoes fought for
their blood.
Another week then Arona's shovel stabbed,
a few inches into the water-logged ground, and struck a solid
but hollow object. He pressed down on the shovel with his large
foot. The shovel refused to sink down any further. He scraped
the mud off the object. Through the weeping scar in the mud,
an opaque whiteness shone. He scraped off more mud.
'What is it?' Peleiupu asked.
'Don't know,' he replied.
Their father looked down. He took Arona's
shovel and dug around the object. Suddenly he stopped.
'What is it?' asked Peleiupu. Mautu
started covering the object with soil again but Barker reached
over, grasped the shovel handle, and stopped him.
With his boot, Barker pushed the mud
aside, reached down into the shallow hole with both hands, grasped
the object, and pulled it up. The children cringed back. It was
a human skull. In the blue light, it looked so nakedly white.
It was veined with black mud.
With his hand, Barker brushed all the
dirt off it. 'Wonder how it got here?' he asked, poking his fingers
into the skullls eye sockets.
'We go now!' Mautu said to him in English.
The children gathered the implements, quickly.
Barker, without saying anything, started
digging up the ground around where the skull had lain. Peleiupu
could feel her father's mounting anger as he stood there watching
Barker. Bit by bit, as Barker dug, the broken human skeleton
was revealed.
Panting heavily from the exertion, Barker
asked, 'It's so far inland, how did it get here?'
Mautu refused to answer. 'Let's go home,'
he instructed his childre
'But it's early!' insisted Barker. 'There's
nothing to be afraid of either.'
'The message, it is clear,' Mautu said
in English. 'There is nothing here. Not now!'
'But the mystery, don't you sense the
mystery? How come he is here There may be others as well!'
'We leave it alone!' Mautu said. It
was an order.
For a moment Barker hesitated, then,
dismissing Mautu with a curt nod, started exploring the nearby
ground, with decisive stabs of his shovel.
Mautu wheeled and started for home.
his children followed him.
Behind them, caught in the blue tangle
of bush, they could hear Barker foraging like a hungry boar.
Even when, miles later, they were free of the bush, they could
see Barker in their minds, black with wet and sweat, his muscular
body pulsating with inquisitive blood, his eyes focused hypnotically
on the ground, his arms pounding the shovel into th softness,
searching for the bones, the skeletons.
At home, they didn't tell anyone about
their terrible find.
After the evening meal, during which
Mautu ate little, Mautu disappeared into the wet darkness.
'Barker won't find any more, will he?'
Arona whispered to Peleiupu when they weretrying to sleep.
'No,' she reassured him. Around them
the dark was filled with aitu and other fearful phantoms,
'I'm - I'm scared!' he murmured.
'Mautu will make sure it's all right!'
she said. He shifted closer to her. 'Go to sleep now,' she whispered.
They woke early but Mautu had left already.
They ran to Barker's house. He was gone too.
It drizzled again all day. Everything
smelled of mould and dampness. Even the sun refused to leave
its bed of black cloud. While Peleiupu and Arona worked around
their home and, in the afternoon, attended the mother's classes,
they waited anxiously for Mautu to appear out of the rain.
Miserably wet and grim-faced, he came,
bathed, conducted the lotu, ate quickly, and then disappeared
into his side of the fale behind the curtain. Peleiupu went to
ask if they were having an English lesson that night. She peeped
through the gap in the curtain. He was sitting cross-legged,
arms folded across his chest, eyes shut firmly, praying silently.
In the gloom, she saw the bright aura of almost overpowering
sadness surrounding him like a second skin.
Lalaga called her and Arona, when the
other children were in the mosquito nets.
'What happened yesterday?' she asked
them.
Nothing,' replied Peleiupu, gazing straight
into her mother's face.
'Arona?' Lalaga demanded. Arona, who
had been sitting with bowed head, glanced up at Peleiupu. 'Arona?'
repeated Lalaga. Arona bowed his head again and picked at the
edge of the mat he was sitting on. 'Your father is in pain. I
must know why!'
'Perhaps it was something that happened
today,' Peleiupu offered.
'I am waiting!' Lalaga said. 'Arona,
do you love your father?' Arona nodded almost imperceptibly.
'Then you must tell me.'
Arona looked at Peleiupu. She nodded
once, finally.
'A skull,' he said, without looking
at Lalaga.
'We found a skull and his bones,' said
Peleiupu.
'Where?'
'Way up river. Arona found it with his
shovel. Barker dug it up. Then the rest of the skeleton,' said
Peleiupu.
'Mautu did not want Barker to dig it
up,' Arona continued slowly.
'Mautu was angry when Barker refused
to stop, and he brought us
back. Barker continued to dig for more
bones.'
'You must not tell anyone else about
it,' she instructed them. They nodded. She reached over and caressed
Arona's shoulder. 'There is no need to be afraid.'
Later when Lalaga went to bed she knew
that Mautu was only pretending to be asleep but she decided not
to question him. She lay down, beside him.
In her dreams, she heard his desperate
cry for help. Waking, she found him sitting beside her in the
darkness. His muted weeping was an incessant low stirring into
which she reached, found his face, and held it between her warm
hands. His tears washed over the backs of her fingers.
'They are here all around me,' he murmured.
'They filled my sleep with their cries, their disquiet, their
awful dying!' He paused and, when she took her hands away, he
wiped his face with a corner of his sleeping sheet.
'We searched for gold and found them!'
'So there is more than one?' she asked.
'Yes. We spent all day yesterday clearing
the ground and finding them clinging even to the roots of the
trees as if they hadn't wanted to die!'
'An old burial place?'
'If only it was that, I would be less
disturbed. They were all killed, slaughtered!'
'What are you going to do?' she was
satisfied that his gruesome discovery had shocked him back to
the realities she knew, and she hoped he would remain there.
There are more to be dug up..Once we
have done that, we will bring
them down and give them a Christian
burial.'
'We must tell our village and they will
help you.'
'Not yet,' he said. 'When we discover
all of them, I will tell Satoa and we will all go up and bring
them down and bury them beside church.'
'How did they die?'
'Barker says it was a battle.
Up at the top of the nearest hill under
the vegetation we have found remnants of an ancient village.
Barker thinks the village was invaded, conquered, burnt to the
ground, and most of its inhabitants killed an left there.'
'But is there a story of that in Satoan
history
'Not that I know of. It must have happened
a long time ago and quickly forgotten. Or that unfortunate village
was destroyed even before the original Satoa village was founded.'
At dawn when Peleiupu and Arona got.up
to go with Mautu, Lalaga told them not to. They obeyed her when
they saw the weight of pain in their father.
Everyday for a week, Barker and Mautu
went up into the hills. Mautu's hair was suddenly freckled with
grey, his physical fragility became more pronounced, his conversations
were no longer laced with that spark, he moved like a
creature caught in a self-destructive dream. Conscious of the
sadness they saw,each day in'their pastor, the Satoans stopped
joking about the expedition. Their pastor (misled by that
insane papalagi) in his incredible search for gold had discovered
a new.pain, and they were waiting for him to reveal it to them.
The-following week, Barker and Mautu
went up twice. The second time, on a Thursday, Mautu insisted
with Lalaga that Peleiupu and Arona accompany him.
'But why?' she asked.
'Arona found the first person. Peleiupu
was there too. Now they must come,and see the rest of them before
we bring them down.'
'I still don't understand!' she insisted.
'Our children are still too young to be near - near those
things!'
'They must learn what death is; they
must see the people. They will not frighten them.'
Again she couldn't comprehend him.
The area where they had found the first
skeleton was now a fairly large clearing basking in bright sunlight.
All the undergrowth had,been cleared away; some of the trees
had been cut down, chopped into short pieces, and stacked by
the water. In the clearing, among the boulders, was a scatter
of shallow graves, about sixty in all. In them, lying in grotesque
postures, were the glittering skeletons. Many of them were badly
broken, shattered, scattered; many skulls and bones were missing;
some of the graves were occupied by more than one skeleton.
'Don't be frightened,' Mautu encouraged
Peleiupu and Arona. 'After being with them for this length of
time, I know they won't harm us?' He walked round the graves.
'Come and see them.'
Barker, who was standing back, called
in Samoan: 'Go, they only harmless bones!' Peleiupu saw her father
wince with Barker's remark. 'I not know why your father tell
me help him dig up all that useless bones!' Barker looked away
hurriedly when Mautu glared at him, sat down on a log, and started
scraping the mud off his boots.
'Come on,' Mautu invited his children.
Arona moved protectively against Peleiupu as they walked into
the midst of the people. 'It's all right!' she whispered,
trying to control her own trembling. They both refused to look
down at the skeletons, feeling as if they were at a great height
and would tumble to their death if they looked down.
'Look, no harm!' Mautu called, holding
up one of the skulls.
Gold, Peleiupu heard Barker repeat in
her head. Gold. Gold. Gold. She gazed down and the heap of bones
in the grave in front of her looked golden in the sunlight. All
around a golden luminosity was bursting up from the mouths of
the graves, and inside her the bones transformed themselves into
huge pua blossoms, and she was floating through a garden
of white magic flowers.
She broke from her delicious wandering
when Arona said, 'Mautu is right. They will not harm us.'
'No, they are our friends,' she said.
After their inspection, Mautu motioned
to them to follow him. A narrow track, which Barker and Mautu
had cut, led uphill from the clearing and disappeared into the
bush.
The slope was steep and slippery and
they had to hold onto nearby branches as they clambered up the
hill. Disturbed by their noise, gnats butterflies, and other
insects fluttered up from the undergrowth.
The top of the hill was covered by huge
trees matted together at their heads by creepers and lianas which
allowed little light to penetrate to the ground.
'This is where they lived,' Mautu said,
pointing at the creeper-covered mounds that lay under the trees
and spread out ahead into the vegetation. 'Those were the paepae
of their fale. That is all that is left. It was a fairly large
village.'
'But why did they live up here?' asked
Peleiupu.
'It was always safer to build your village
in a well-protected place. Up here the people could see who was
coming. They built a pallisade around their village. The river
was their source of water.'
'What was it called?' she asked.
'I don't know. Perhaps an old person
in Satoa can tell us.' Their voices sounded unreal in the enclosed
vegetation. 'Are you still frightened?' Mautu asked Arona who
shook his head and smiled. 'You will remember them and their
village for the rest of your lives, carrying them as part of
your dead, in your blood.'
Right then, Barker broke noisily through
the undergrowth, and, confronting Mautu with hit face red with
exertion and sweat pouring off him, said, in English, 'And what,
my pastor friend, are you going to do with all our mountain of
bones and skulls?'
'You never going to understand, eh?'
Mautu asked sadly in English. 'No, he not understand!' Peleiupu
heard herself say in English. Surprised, she glanced up at Mautu,
then at Barker, who were both gazing, in wonderful amazement,
at her because it was the first time she had ever spoken English
to them.
'Graveyards and dead villages produce
wonderful surprises!' Barker laughed..
'Yes, the Dead can open the-minds of
innocent children to wisdom,' Mautu said in Samoan and with pride.
Later as they made their way down,Arona
asked Peleiupu what she had said in English. That Barker would
never understand, she replied.
'Understand what?' he asked.
'What Mautu told us about the Dead and
how important they are.'
'I didn't understand Mautu either,'
Arona sighed. 'I'm too young!'
'Someday you too will understand,' she
consoled him but immediately experienced a twinge of guilt for
deliberately lying to him that she had understood.
'I want ... I want so much!' he exclaimed.
'So much what?'
'Everything! To know everything!'
'But no one can do that!'
'Someday I will!'' His determination
made her experience a more abundant love for him. 'I want to
be grown up, now!'
By the river, as they wandered once
again among the graves, they experienced no fear, as though they
had left it up on the hill in the village snared in the choking
tentacles of the bush. Arona even stopped at one of the graves,
sat at the edge and dangled his feet down until they were only
a few inches above the skull. His feet looked like large fish
hooks seeking the mouth of the skull. Peleiupu sat down beside
him and remembered how the graves, the bones, had burst with
a golden light.
That Friday and Saturday the young men
of Mautu's school dug a series of graves beside the church. Most
of the men of Satoa, when they heard about it, joined the work.
At the Sunday morning service, Mautu described, from the pulpit,
his expedition and what he and Barker had discovered. He asked
that their village give 'the people' (his phrase) a Christian
burial. The Church buzzed with questions. None of them knew anything
about the village on the hill.
Sao, the tuua of Satoa, called a meeting
of the matai at his fale on Monday morning; and after weighty
discussion concerning the burying of so many strangers in their
village, they organised a party to go up to the hills, with Mautu
on Tuesday, and bring down 'the people'.
The large party was led by Sao and Mautu
who wore ties and their white Sunday suits. All the other elders
and their wives were in their Sunday wear too. The untitled men,
who were to carry 'the people', wore only black lavalava. No
children were allowed to go.
They reached the graves just before
midday. Immediately, Mautu conducted a service. A hymn was sung;
he read from the Bible; then prayed. Standing at the perimeter
of the clearing in their best clothes and caught in the bright
stillness of the hills and mountains, they seemed incongruous,
strangers visiting another village for the first time.
After Mautu's prayer, the old man moved
into the shadow while the women worked in groups oiling the bones
with coconut oil and wrapping them up in tapa cloth, as was the
custom. No one spoke. No one was afraid.
When all 'the people' were clothed,
as it were, in tapa, the young men picked them up and, carrying
them on their shoulders, followed Mautu and the elders down towards
Satoa. Beside them the river rippled and swerved and danced and
fingered its way towards the sea.
Awaiting them around the graves beside
the church were the rest of Satoa.
Again no one spoke. A hush lay over
the village.
The young men lined 'the people', eighty
bundles, in a row below the church steps. Gradually, like a rising
tide, the old women started the customary funeral wailing, and
their sound was that of the mourning sea. Many of the people
wept. Peleiupu and Arona, who were standing beside Lalaga, cried
silently.
His white suit shimmering in the noonday
sun, Mautu stood on the church steps. 'Let us sing Hymn 134:
'God be with us now in our sorrow'. The powerful singing broke
up the crystal-clear sky and sent the heat retreating into the
shade.
'Lord, we gather here today to send
to you people we never knew!' prayed Mautu, as he prayed, Peleiupu
saw thin lines of tears trickling down his cheeks, and she wept
some more.
Another hymn, then Mautu's sermon. 'The
dignity of Satoa, from the youngest to the most noble, we are
gathered here today to mourn the death of brothers and sisters
who died before Christ's Message reached our shores. We never
knew them but up in the wilderness they have been waiting for
us to come and find them with love, to rescue them from the Darkness
in which they were dwelling, to save their wandering souls and
send them peaceful to God ...' His meaning was a steady healing
feel that cooled them in the heat. Once again he was their
pastor with the spark, the fire, to make them believe, and who,
in his foolish but God-determined search for gold had lost the
fire until he had discovered 'the people' who had brought him
back to them. And many more of them wept. '... In one of the
kingdoms of South America there lives to this day a creature
called the Webbed-right. It has no body and yet it can become
anything it wants. It lives in the air above the highest peak
of the Andes and watches over all the creatures in the Kingdom.
Every year before the season of Death, usually associated with
Winter when ice and snow kill everything, this wonderful Creature
pierces its throat and, assuming the shape of an eagle, flies
over the barren land and, crying the cry of a newborn lamb, its
rich blood gushes from the wound in its throat and on entering
the soil makes it strong enough to endure the winter and, in
spring, burst forth again with new life.
This creature, people of Satoa, is like
our God who, With His blood, saves us every year, every minute
of our lives, so that we can save others in their winter. Today
we are saving, for our God, the souls of our sisters and brothers
who have endured a winter in the wilderness. They died a pagan
death in the Days of Darkness. Today we convert their souls to
Christianity. Today we mourn their death and, at the same time,
celebrate their waking to God's brilliant Light and Love...'
He went on to soothe their sorrow.
In groups, the men took 'the people'
and lowered them gently into their graves. Then Mautu said, 'Dust
to dust, earth to earth,' and they scattered the rich grains
of earth over 'the people'.
They sang hymns while the men filled
the graves.
After everyone had gone home, Peleiupu
and Arona and Ruta and Naani and a small group of their friends
lingered in the shade of the pua trees beside the graves.
'They were killed, weren't they?' Ruta
asked Arona who, in turn, looked at Peleiupu who nodded.
'In a war?' Naomi asked. Peleiupu nodded
again. The mounds of earth were drying quickly in the heat.
'Their aitu will haunt our village!'
Naani remarked.
'No,' said Peleiupu. 'Because we have
saved them, they will not harm us.'
'Are you sure?' Ruta asked.
'I am sure!' Peleiupu said, turning
to go.
As they followed Peleiupu, Arona said:
'Barker didn't come?'
'No, he didn't come,' replied Peleiupu.
'Why not?' asked Naani.
'You ask too many questions!' she said.
'Yes, she's always asking about this
and that and this and that!'
said Ruta.
'So are you!' Naani accused her. Immediately
an argument erupted between them. Peleiupu ran off; Arona followed
her; their friends dispersed too, leaving Naani and Ruta to the
twitching heat and sun.
From their fale the next day, at mid
morning, they observed Barker and his wife and children and their
whole aiga arriving at the graveyard, with shovels and picks
and baskets of river stones and pebbles. They started piling
the stones and pebbles onto the graves, neatly. Mautu went out
to them.
'So you not believe in our bones, eh?'
Mautu asked Barker in English.
'I never said that!' Barker replied.
Mautu chuckled. 'I suppose being human beings like us they needed
to be buried decently.' He paused, then turning and focusing
his smile on Mautu, said: 'And, after all, we found them
and are therefore equally responsible for them. You can
say we are now their family!' They laughed together for a long
while, and the others were puzzled by it. 'You can even say we
struck gold!' And their laughter continued to echo around the
graves and ripple through the church and dance out across the
malae and dive mischievously into every Satoa home and brought
all the Satoans running, skipping, hobbling, scuttling to the
graves of their people.
And while the old people and Mautu and
Barker sat joking in the shade, everyone else built up the graves
with the sleek, black stones and pebbles that the young people
brought in baskets from the river.
Mautu's aiga and other nearby aiga made
umu and cooked a delicious variety of food, and, when the work
on the graves was finished, they invited everyone into Mautu's
home and they ate heartily and laughed uproariously at Barker's
and Mautu's exaggerated stories about their futile, mad, ridiculous
prospecting for gold up-river, up-valley.
It was the first time Barker had been
in Mautu's home.
As the sun was setting, after Barker
and all the Satoans had left with their infectious laughter,
Peleiupu cut some branches from the pua trees and started planting
them between some of the graves. Arona observed her for a while,
then dug up some shrubs and flowers from around their fale, took
them and, without saying anything to Peleiupu, replanted them
around the central grave. Ruta and Naomi and a frisky gaggle
of friends got more plants from the neighbouring area and planted
them around some of the other graves. Yet more children came
with more flowers, shrubs and plants.
And the same darkness that fell on the
deserted village on the hill in the wilderness fell protectively
over a noisy, mushrooming garden of children.
Albert WENDT
Carole Durix
NETWORKS
AND ITINERARIES IN ALBERT WENDT'S POETRY
According to Albert Wendt, the artist
is a person isolated from his fellow-men by his unique but multifarious
vision of life which is incompatible with the faa-samoa
in that it rejects the collective acceptance of its rigid, structuring
hierarchy. Nevertheless, the individual cannot escape its influence.
Wendt himself is obsessed by the past and its heritage, a past
that is all the more fascinating because of its intangible nature.
In his poetry various levels of the
past are examined: the mythic era, the ancestral realm of the
dead, the colonial and post-colonial epoch. In each period Polynesian
man was faced with conflicting ideals and aims and was subjected
to the various currents of power that struggled for supremacy
in society. This power was set largely within the compass of
the known geographical environment which, for Polynesians, has
always been so vast that wide areas were relatively unexplored.
Wendt's poetry elegantly and concisely
expresses the play between the institutions within the familiar
circle of community life and the rapport of this community with
the wider realities encompassed in the universe. Certain networks
of metaphors emerge on close examination of his texts which seem
to have a more general connative role to play in respect of these
layers of time whilst others are developed,by means of association
- either aural or visual - within the prosody of his writing.
These cut across the successive eras in the form of meanders
that merge, mingle and then separate, following the ebb and flow
of time and space, of life and death.
Albert Wendt is fascinated by circular
figures which seem to express his preoccupation with isolation,
aspiration, perfection and exclusion - all unattainable in their
absolute state. Such qualities obviously belong to a wider context
than Samoa although most of his poems stem from the Samoan experience.
These circular patterns are not only to be found in the metaphors:
eye, rock, reef,egg, shell and womb but also in the lay-out of
his works which, at times,seem to be enclosed upon themselves.
The world of the artist encircles him
in a series of impenetrable barriers which bar movement and limit
freedom. The title poem, 'Inside us the Dead', provides the greatest
number of examples: the protagonist universe is walled in by
'the sky's impregnable shell' or again by 'the turtle shell of
the sky'. The invincible nature of such enclosure has the claustrophobic
effect which the author further explores in his use of the eye
image. In my opinion the ruthless sun is itself captive of the
sky and in its captured state becomes the implacable and watchful
eye of the outsider that observes the world and its manoeuvres.
This geographical eye appears constant, vigilant and unchanging
at the centre of the universe and of humanity, whether this centre
be the primeval origin from which all developed or the primordial
vision of original man seeking his own identity.
my polynesian fathers
who escaped the sun's wars, seeking
these islands by prophetic stars,
emerged from the sea's eye like
turtle
scuttling to beach their eggs
in fecund sand,
('Inside us the Dead.', p. 7)
The circular image is also echoed in
the choice of creatures evoked. Again and again we meet the turtle,
the sea anemone and the star-fish all three being compact and
multi-faced animals.
The mythical ancestors who survived
the migration crawled out of the sea onto the 'circular' terrain
of an island, surrounded by a circular reef that confined a circular
lagoon. Indeed, they were probably in desperate need of the security
of an enclosed environment in order to regenerate their vision
which had been 'burnt out in the storm'. Again the reef refers
back to the eye image since the forefathers landed to forget
...
the reason why they pierced the
muscle
of the hurricane into reef's retina,
('Inside us the Dead', p.8)
The finding of the new sanctuary however
did not turn out to be the paradise they had hoped, for it did
not provide a complete answer either to society's problems of
power and hierarchy or to the individuals quest for identity.
Consequently, it is hardly surprising that this new secure environment
is often described in terms of putrefaction, laceration and bleeding.
The coral bleeds under a leprous or waxen moon the baracuda hunts
and devours in the dark depths of,..
the vision of our dead prophets
in a decade of betrayal.
('To my Son on the Tenth Anniversary of our Country's Independence',
p.38)
The search for ultimate perfection must
end in deception and the crumbling destruction of the well-founded
hopes is inevitable. This fall into desuetude is represented
in the imaginary by the decay and foul decomposition of the lagoon
of life. Yet the coral remains intact; it defends the individual
from the further onslaughts of the outside world in the same
way as 'the reef around their world' (Leaves of the Banyan
Tree, p.31). It appears as the concrete representation of
the abstract notion of supernatural perfection, towards which,
each human strives and in so doing, accomplishes the constant
quest for personal integrity and identity. Hence there is ...
No sanctuary
from the sun-black seed
inside and self's cell --
('Inside us the Dead.', p.8)
The unique quality of the individual's
personality is set apart by the momentary hiatus of the 'and'
preceding the final and independent grouping of the 'self's cell'
whilst the continuous progress of each person's inner aspiration
is suggested by the regular rhythm of the recurring sibilant
's'. A visual and aural network is, in this way, constructed,
for, while one should not attempt to oversimplify richness of
a poetic work by classification or over categorisation, echoes
remain in the reader's mind and the association of the terms:
sanctuary, sun, seed, inside, self's
cell are fixed and reflect the poet's preoccupation with
personal integrity when confronted with the metaphysical interrogations
of his world.
Both the independence and the isolation
of this round image of the eye/ball are further taken up in the
sections entitled 'Traders' and 'The ball thrown up' of 'Inside
us the Dead'. In the former, the poet explores the various possibilities
of a glass eye that possesses that immutable quality so inherent
in the stereotyped colonialist - a sterile eye with an equally
and future - for, although it perceives the exploding stars,
it is itself incapable of true feeling - its ruthlessness is
reflected in the many facets of its double- the cold crystal
eye/ball of Europe which illuminates both the individual's and
the mother country's ambitions for wealth, luxury and fortune
and also the unknown future of these colonialist aspirations
and their final futile results. His grandfather is.
burdened with the failure of Europe,
heir to the cold crystal eye.
('Inside us the Dead', p. 11)
In contrast, the ball in 'The ball thrown
up' seems to represent the more praiseworthy aspirations of the
writer's brother; his ball which derives its dynamism from the
natural riches of the earth defies the natural laws of the universe.
His ambition to escape the world of his origins failed in spite
of the infallible equations of his science, he aimed at the impossible
and after failing to connect his two worlds, that of life and
the imaginary, after failing to defy the absolute laws of nature,
science and gravity in the form of the moon and the sun, he himself
is enclosed in his own destiny - enclosed in ...
an oak box polished to see
your face in, designed
to lock gravity in.
('Inside us the Dead', p.13)
Since his aims could be no more than
a mirage of reality - reality avenges itself in the final victory
of death. Death is however a dual term, for, being an integral
element of the cycle of life it also provides the essential link
with the endless new beginning of existence.
car buckling in, like
a cannibal flower, to womb
him in
death
(Inside us the Dead, p. 13)
The patterns of the repeated plosives
'c b c' and 'c b' both occur in the expression of ideas concerning
an enclosed space, which, as it contracts, brings about death
and leads the victim to the tomb. Wendt, however, avoids the
finality of such an end by using the verb 'to womb' which phonetically
echoes the 'tomb' that the reader would probably have inserted.
This term opens up the destiny of man-into the rotation of the
cycles womb/tomb, birth/death, destruction/renewal. Conversely,
the gradual reduction of the length of the lines materialises
for the reader the narrowing scope of man's choice as he faces
his end.
Wendt depicts life as a constant struggle
for survival where opposing forces measure their strength by
a subtle system of balance where the control of power fluctuates
between the different poles. Man inevitably conspires to escape
fran the domination of a certain authority but he cannot avoid
the far-reaching effects of this influence on his innermost self
so that finally, his instinct for evasion is overwhelmed by a
desire to destroy his oppressor and, to a greater degree, to
usurp his position in order to wield those same instruments of
power in much the same way.
The ideal of freedom is epitomised in
the cycle of aspiration and the achievement of such aims is shown
to be impossible. The final lines of 'The ball thrown up' 'assemble
a succession of round images tending towards ideals of fusion
...
a cat uncurling to lap
the milk sky,
the wheel spinning
spun the white dew
of prophecy: the ball
coming down
to stone
(breaking).
('Inside us the Dead', p. 14)
The dynamic force of the wheel 'spinning'
in its own vortex is arrested by the verbal variation 'spun'
which tends to open a way out of the network into a spiral of
new horizons. The inevitable disintegration of these seemingly
self-sufficient units is emphasised by the slowing down of the
rhythm until the final break between life and death, ideal and
reality is concretized by the brackets.
Although this study has centred on 'Inside
us the Dead' other instances of the foregrounding of the eye/ball/circle/hardness/coldness
network are numerous. In 'No Islands in the Sun, Just Misters'
the colonial struggle and the predicament of the Pacific islands
[1]
is doubly illustrated by the use of such parallels and the repetition
of the author's thesis that Samoa never has and never will have
a perfect paradisiacal environment and that there is discordance
between the realities of the past and those of the present.
There are no islands in the sun.
Only my perceptive daughter asking,
'Hey, Dad, how come you're a Mister?'
('No Islands in the Sun, Just Misters',
p.51)
The idea of vision as fixed and sure
is enhanced by the parallel of the 'stoney-eyed boy' and the'bullet-proofed
Mister'. The ambivalence of attitude between the anger of the
former and the immobility of the latter cannot be ignored. Indeed,
the images of rock/eye are often interchangeable.
a river hisses over rocks
as smooth as the skins of your eyes.
Stand and watch, stranger.
('Stranger on the Plateau', p.5)
The stranger, observer or outsider,
call him what you will, is supposed to have objectivity: Wendt
considers himself to be a man of two worlds, [2] two cultures and this
endows him with a distanced view of both societies. He wishes
to achieve a type of freedom which is totally self-sufficient,
a standpoint which undergoes no exterior influence. The result
is possibly to be found in his poem, 'A Dream After Reading Jung'
where the writer endeavours to get out of the prison of his own
body to contemplate his inner self. This observation of the unknown
is characterised by the black water: whenever the author attempts
to cross the borders of the definable he is faced with darkness.
The duality in this poem is admirably emphasised in the prosody
of the following lines:.
The whip of black water
over river stone's un-
blinking eye...
('A Dream After Reading Jung', p.54)
The run-on, 'un-blinking'doubles up
the image and provides the introductory assonant term for the
'in' and the 'ing' of the following line to echo, thus stressing
by these phonemes the interior nature of the creature observed.
This inner self is reduced to a kind of non-entity, a foetus
floating in the void of a world without relationships.
Out of the blackness of these surroundings
stripped of social meaning emerges 'the angel of silence ...
furred wings beating' (p.54), a constant companion of the imagination
of Albert Wendt. This nocturnal creature appears to represent
those 'con-men' [3] that the poet seems to so admire. The title,
Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree uses the same image as does
one of the poems in this collection. Galupo in Leaves of the
Banyan Tree embodies the idea of a fleeting essence which
is omnipresent, ready to turn to his own advantage any weakness
that appears in the social fabric of the community.
The poem, 'Flying-Fox' is especially
interesting as a demonstration of this symbol of power elucidated
in Wendt's prose writings. Its very name conjures up both its
cunning and its indefinable nature with all the connotations
of darkness, death and the unknown. The Flying-Fox is more a
figment of the imagination than a real animal. Yet its destruction
of the narrator's crops with its 'razor sharp teeth' is very
real as is the latter's intended revenge. By devouring the perpetrator
of his ills he not only avenges his wrongs but also ingests the
qualities of his enemy thus adding superhuman powers to his own.
This twofold expression of dissection/devouring
is developed throughout the continuum of time whether it be the
time of the gods, the colonial period with the missionary invasion
or the present time when the danger of absorption by American
ideas and ideals is constant. The concrete past has been gnawed
away by mythic idealisation, the gods no longer live among men
but are confined to the unattainable heights of the hills - they
have no substance and in Wendt's poetry they are, what I might
call 'living' voids. Wendt feels the need to reconstruct this
'shattered past' to find a semblance of identity but his tentatives
are reduced to 'incantations and masks' ('A History Lesson about
Japan'). Nevertheless he recognises that it is the constant endeavouring
to assimilate this past into the present which, in the end, constitutes
the basis of the whole man.
The colonialist assimilated the Samoans
to such an extent that the indigenous people who have undertaken
responsibility in modern times are, in fact, little different
from the colonisers. Wendt vividly evokes the predicament where
he himself does not pretend to be entirely innocent as we have
already seen in the irony of 'No Islands in the Sun, Just Misters'.
In the majority of the poems belonging
to the post-colonial era we find the themes of modern man betraying
the past by his submission, acceptance of and connivance with
the oppressor; this betrayal is all the more insidious in the
atmosphere of superficial diplomacy which is used to conceal
some of the unpleasant realities of life. This gradual suffocation
of ideals is expressed by the ironical praise of the value of
this new society in terms of choking, drowning and dilution.
Noose of silver bow-tie
and mafia sunglasses shuts
out healing sun,hides precariously
the decay of a whisky respectability.
(Our nation's dreams drown in
the insatiable cocktail glass.)
('To My Son on the Tenth Anniversary of our Country's Independence',
p.38)
This dilution is also rendered all the
more dangerous by the gently cradling rhythms of repeated comforting
words or the complacent use of language.
Our genteel age is the diplomatic
night of the civilised savage, of
mutant claw and hiss, the sphinx
smile of the new merchant barbarian.
new merchant barbarian.
('To My Son on the Tenth Anniversary of our Country's Independence'
, p. 39)
The prosody of 'Why Can't They Stop'
emphasises by accumulation and crescendo the strategies of the
'institutions' which try to seal their communities into a humdrum
daily life where nothing is ever questioned. No capital letters
punctuate the writing, some words are endlessly repeated until
they finally fuse into one monotonous sound that threatens to
distort the original structure by an uncontrolled overflowing
of lines. This list of virtues that collectively go into the
making of a 'somebody' of success - whom presumably everyone
knows is closely related to the fat vampire sucking the life-blood
of its victim. The soothing murmur of the beginning of the poem
is finally replaced by the one word staccato enumeration of the
notables of the aiga that explodes into absolute derision
a derision [4] particularly eloquent because of its lack of
punctuation; the 'can't' of the title of the poem is reduced
to 'cant', the hypocritical, insincere, pious talk of a certain
class of people.
why
cant
they
stop
break-
ing
wind
('Why Can't They Stop', p. 45)
Wendt frequently invests his hope in
the future, in youth, in the angry young man whose anger is as
hot and purifying as the sun. Anger appears as the only instrument
of action that remains uncorrupted and therefore must be consciously
nurtured so as to save society from itself. In 'He Never Once
Lost His Way.' the poet develops this theme around the 'compass
of anger' or again when he, addresses his 'polynesian viking
son' he admits his own shortcomings and temptations to become
a fiapalagi.
I'm afraid to know the depth
of your terror. (I too have
betrayed you.) Stay angry -
your only lifejacket in
the nightmare to unweave.
('To My Son on the Tenth Anniversary of our Country's Independence',
p.39)
In spite of his deploring the human
state, Albert Wendt as a poet does climb to the heights above
the petty world of intrigue, balance of power and
old men shaping
their fears in fickle sand.
('Stranger on the Plateau', p. 5)
The lava fields to which he so frequently
refers are not totally black - even in the very beautiful poem
'Lava Field and Road, Savii' where, to use Wendt's own term,
the aridity and desolation is 'honed down' [5] to the barest minimum.
The blackness of the unknown is omnipresent. It is a world where
all has been destroyed as in Hiroshima; no comfort is to be found
in nature, no hope in voices - only the wilderness of a desert
doomed to remain sterile for centuries. '
From this world at its darkest, Wendt,
by the force of his imagination manages to rise above human failing
and despair. If he temporarily loses his way in the company of
men, in his writing he conciliates life and death,.youth and
age, power and submission, aridity and flamboyance, past and
present, and,'in'their rapprochement, he creates a new and-reconciliated
itinerary for a man of two worlds, the Pacific poet who knows...
That the journey to self
is towards the innermost
galaxy of the heart,
a generation's trek across
the lava plains of the mind
under the leopard sun of the eye.
Return to the world of men,
the frail mountain orchid
in your hand.
('Stranger on the Plateau', pp. 5-6)
Carole Durix Université de Dijon
NOTES
All references are to the collection
Inside Us the Dead, Longman Paul (Auckland, 1976).
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