| J.P. Durix, 'Power in Leaves of the Banyan Tree |
| Other essays on Albert Wendt |
The predicament of the writer, fighting to establish an identity in language, is all the more apparent when the relationship with English cannot be taken for granted. Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree, written by Samoan writer Albert Wendt, offers a striking instance of a text that attempts to come to terms with several dialects, registers, codes, each of which corresponds ultimately to a different narrative persona.
The work is a collection of short stories, with a longer novella that gives the book its title. The pieces written in a great variety of styles, on different subjects, nevertheless present a strong unity; the sequence corresponds not only to the chronological order of their writing but to the pattern of a man's life, from childhood to maturity, until the last two stories which centre on the death of the protagonist. The novella itself sums up this journey through life. Although the situations and the characters are different each time, the same types keep returning; as in most fictional works that deal with rapid social change, three generations are represented: the grandfather, still firmly rooted in Samoan culture, is first mentioned. Then canes the father, christian and westernized; a successful man with a subdued wife, he reminds one of many such types found in African literature. He is castigated for his hypocrisy by the third generation represented here by two figures, the intellectual son or, in sharp contrast, the no-good trickster. In each story, the action is divided between the old village as a childhood memory, the slum area of the Vaipe, and the ostentatious houses of the rich middle class, a distribution in space typical of the literatures of fast-changing societies.
The plots revolve around similar issues: the clash between a traditional code in which manhood and the honour of the clan are supreme values to be protected at any cost, and the puritanical code of a westernized society. Very often, the cynical lesson of the tale is that to remain powerful in modern society one has to cheat, either openly like the various triumphant crooks, or hypocritically like the fathers who imitate the white man, the palagi.
Beyond the recurrent characters and plots, which after all can be found in much of the 'culture clash' literature, a deeper thematic unity appears at once around some central images: from the first to the last story, metaphors revolve around fire and darkness, with references to black earth, to mud and to lava. Another recurring connected theme is that of decay, especially expressed through maggots.
The thematic unity and the sequential ordering give a strong sense of unity to this cycle of stories. Why then is there such an extraordinary variety of narrative modes? Is it only to achieve a certain surface effect by providing variations on the same theme? There is indeed a constant change in point of view, tense and tone. The distance of the narrator in relation to the story is never the same. Many variants of the English language are proposed. These changes take place not only from one story to the next but also within one story or even one paragraph. Is this brilliant display a virtuoso piece for its own sake or does it correspond to something essential? Is there a progression? Is something achieved at the end of the text?
The first stories, 'A Descent in the Mountain', 'The Cross of Soot', are close in style to Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, being told from the point of view of a young narrator with limited perception, in a neutral tone interrupted at times by intrusive authorial comment (pp. 81, 92 and 95). Then one finds two widely opposed types of English, the abstract language of an educated narrator standing in sharp contrast with the colourful idiom of the protagonist, the Pint-Sized Devil of the title. At the other extreme, the next story, 'Captain Full', is entirely told in a language which sounds like pidgin, a device which is repeated in the last piece, 'Virgin-wise'. At times, the various voices are presented as mutually incompatible, as when the same event is recorded differently by the historian and the popular ballad. The factual transcription of some events does not merge with the lyricism of some passages. At times our judgment is directed by authorial comment, but, at other times, the moral stance is very ambiguous; it is not always easy to detect irony in the tone.
Some stories attempt more complex effects than a binary opposition between traditional sensitivity and western rationality. Some endeavour to reproduce the collective point of view of oral literature: 'The Coming of the Whiteman' opposes this communal voice and inserted comments from various members of the family. 'A Resurrection' contrasts the narrative made by 'we' and extracts from a diary. 'A Declaration of Independence' combines the voice of the Vaipe with that of the court; it gives the local point of view in which lpalagil words and dialogues are ludicrously embedded. The discourse of the novella is even more complex: it starts with the uneducated voice heard before, characterized by transliterations from the Samoan, phrases close to pidgin, a rhythm akin to that of spoken language. But there is added complexity due to the fact that this narrator is meant to be writing about his past from his deathbed. After that introduction, moments from the past brought back to mind are told in the present tense, but in a different voice which is not so close to pidgin as to an Americanized style evocative of Dashiell Hammett or Damon Runyon. This time, it it difficult for the reader to see through the naive locutor with his limited point of view. No more authorial comment, long dialogues without explanations, surprising images, a constant use of ellipsis, all these create a strange elusive type of narrative focus. The deadpan statements, with their lack of connectives, give away little: 'My throat is dry sand. There are stars in the sky. Tomorrow will be fine' (p. 120). It seems that, in the novella, more is hidden about the person of the implied author than is revealed, and this is true of the kaleidoscopic impression given by the book as a whole. What is the point of this protean diversity?
It is obvious that, on a certain level, there is the sheer joy of storytelling: the expert can mesmerize his audience by impersonating a wide range of characters and types, putting on a succession of accents and mannerisms like so many props or bits of costume. Rich comical effects are achieved by the mere contrast between registers. This juggling between different modes of representation, different coding systems, is common in works which deal with cross-cultural situations; it has a certain appeal as it gives a many-faceted image of society where each system of thought appears as partial and relative. But, if the community described here comes out as fragmented, the work itself has a strong unity because the many narrative voices express one approach connected here with the itinerary of one man: through them, a narrator is exploring his own identity.
The flying-fox, the bat of the title, is considered in Samoa as the representation of man in his duality, both crawling on the ground and flying. Before dying, Tagata adds a third element to this binary image: c
I was born a small man with a big man inside, the flying-fox with an eagle in the gut. All my life I tried to free this eagle so that he can fly high and dazzle the world. (p. 141)
A similar hero, Pili, has three elements in him: 'Pili was born with the Devil in his heart, anger in his brain, and a goat in his loins' (p. 35). The main story has three characters who seem to be just the facets of one man, arguing with himself: Pepesa and the Judge, Pepesa and Tagata do not present successive dialogues, but one long monologue where 'I', It-the judge, and Tagata-which means 'man'- are given a voice. The clue is revealed by the narrator of the novella who warns us before launching into the story of his life: 'Here we go English-style, Vaipe style. My style.! (p. 106)
English-Style
The first voice is that of English culture in general. It is the voice of the educated hero, 'the intellectual nephew' in 'Pint-sized Devil', 'middle-class, Protestant, well-brought up', who self- consciously asserts his detachment from a chaotic social scene: 'Taitolu's evidence, to which I've had to apply the historical training which I was lucky to acquire at university...' (p. 49). This voice explains, comments, analyses, gives retrospective judgments in a trite and abstract manner, as when it tries to describe the grandfather (p. 41). It is at times parodically assertive, but on other occasions seems too aloof and too concerned with objectivity to speak positively. Its statements are corrected, modified: 'attractive to admit the least', 'shall we say', 'if anyone or anything' (p. 41). The caution of the historian ('to my knowledge' p. 48) gives a hesitant turn to the tale unfolded which is strongly opposed to the lyricism of the ballad. The English itself has uncertain roots, part administrative, part 'R.L. Stevenson', part American slang in phrases such as 'gutsy', 'sly-grogging', 'a galloping orgasm', 'thinking smart'.
The hesitancy reflects the ambiguous position of the speaker, both within and without his culture. When using standard English with all the implicit norms it conveys, the narrator finds it impossible to delineate moral dilemmas, to pass a fair judgment on the man who committed an honourable murder. This discovery is made by the hero of the novella who shouts at the judge, his other self: 'You will not understand' (p. 130). As the book progresses, the use of this register becomes self-conscious and ironical: 'Everything was wonderfully and enviously palagi civilized' (p. 195). No longer a neutral mode, correct English sets its speaker apart. It will carry patronizing judgments on the population of the island and, noticeably, the contempt which the intellectual elite reserves for the half-educated:
Then Tautala enters, panting like he is drowning, with the starched palagi clothes and long white socks and brown shoes, with pencils and pens in his shirt pocket. (p. 110)
It is always safer to admire the 'authentic' character of the truly popular who are a safe distance away...
As the book progresses, this voice will specialize, be the voice of church and prison, strongly contrasted with the personal stream of consciousness in 'A Resurrection', opposed to the communal voice in 'Declaration of Independence'. In the novella, the judge expresses himself - or 'Itself, - explicitly in English, and thus fails to establish communication with the hero who is 'fighting his last': ''What is your name?' It asks in English of me. The interpreter starts to interpret. I silence him' (p. 129). The judge's moral pronouncements ring empty, as do the reassuring words of the doctor: he cannot alleviate suffering or prevent decay and, symptomatically, can only stutter.
The 'English-style' corresponds to a 'civilized, palagi' persona, who is able to analyse the 'think-business and plenty-idea' of the last story but is unable to account for human dilemmas in depth, being hopelessly alienated from its roots. As a language, it is lifeless, which is not surprising since, throughout the work, the palagi or the westernized Samoan are both presented as unmanned. In 'The Coming of the Whiteman', 'I am white' (p. 82) means 'I am no longer virile', since the young hero has been unmanned by his stay in New Zealand. In 'Pintsized Devil', the image is transferred to the horses, or to the 'white castrated charger' (p. 50). The doctor who stutters dares not approach girls; the schoolmistress who introduces English to Pepesa is significantly barren. In the case of Tauilo, the connection between proper English and lack of virility is made explicitly:
Especially when he speaks English, which the Sapepe people do not understand. He is an educated man, Tauilo tells everyone. He is a palagi who does not know how to read, some of my aiga say. A nobody who is small between the fat legs, some of them laugh. (p. 108)
School English seems inadequate to cover the whole of experience, and the first words Pepesa learns seem a crude parody of the expressive powers of a language that classifies and divides: in the ten words 'horse, brown, stallion, bright, town, shit, sunlight, speech, female, toilet' (p. 116), are to be found series connected with the main themes, virility, excrement and the Vaipe, light and speech - but it is really as a caricature of discourse.
'English-style' is not enough for the narrator as it implies only a distanced point of view in relation to his culture and to himself. It lacks the vitality which is the mark of the storyteller. In the course of the narrative itself, he becomes aware of the latent contradiction in his wish to be writer and speaker at once, 'to become the second Robert Louis Stevenson, a tusitala or teller of tales ... I (p. 105).
'Vaipe-Style'
The joy in the language will be found in the Vaipe voice, Vaipe being that river-cum-sewer which gives its name to the popular part of town. A great distance away from the detachment of the intellectual, the isolated position of the member of the elite, is the community, expressing itself as one. A. Wendt uses the same devices as some African writers faced with the paradoxical task of rendering the oral culture of a community in an individual written text. Sometimes the narrative is explicitly attributed to a 'we', 'we heard' (p. 65), or, more indirectly, the whole group is given as a point of reference: 'Everybody in the Vaipe' (p. 72), 'All the witnesses agreed' (p. 65). At times, the narrator seems to be only handing down generally accepted facts: 'so I've been told', 'my father tells me','some Vaipe elders' ... (p. 68). Rich effects are created when this popular voice intrudes with its comments in the administrative jargon:
Late that afternoon, 4 p.m. on 15th February, 1952; the Court, which was Judge Macarthy, otherwise known as 'The Fly-Shitted-Faced Devil' because of his uncountable freckles, found Mrs Nofoa Paovale guilty of murder and sentenced her to be hanged. (p. 86)
The Vaipe voice is the voice of the uneducated, often self-consciously so. The locutor admits he is 'an ignorant fool' (p. 37), or comments: 'I do not know the English for this' (p. 118), 'You see I did not have much formal education' (p. 105). Early in the book, the style rings nearly as a parody of that attitude: 'I just simple man who no think deep too much' (p. 20).
Many phrases appear as mere transliterations from the mother tongue, such as to 'make fire' for 'to make love'. Being so anchored in Samoan reality, 'Vaipe-style' is studded with untranslated expressions which need a glossary at the end of the book - always a sign of defeat for the author who is torn between his desire to retain the authentic flavour of his region and to be understood in the rest of the English-speaking world. A more radical solution to create the illusion of this popular voice is the transcription of a kind of pidgin, evocative of Samoan plantation pidgin. It is not a new device to produce isolated instances, mostly in the dialogues, in order to give spice and colour to the language of uneducated characters, and Nigerian writers, for instance, have made great use of the West-Coast pidgin in their novels. Here Wendt experiments when he narrates the story of Captain Full and the last piece, 'Virgin-wise', in this idiom. These two texts consistently use a mode of speaking which is more diffuse in the rest of the book and, in particular, gives the novella its stylistic flavour, although the device there is far less obtrusive.
This language has the characteristics of a transcribed form of pidgin [1]: the syntax is simplified, with nothing to mark the plural. Ther is a simple system of pronouns, an absence of articles and pronouns and practically no prepositions. The tense system is typical, with expression such as 'we go see'. One also finds a constant use of metaphors which enrich the lexis and reduplication ('short short than other'). For the reader, the flavour is that of authentic pidgin , a simplified code, with its easily recognisable phrases ('alltime I look see'). Like all pidgins, it is the language of relaxed bantering, the easy-going dialect people use when they do not strive to follow the rules of correct English. In the mouth of Captain Full especially, this crude and incongruous mode seems very appropriate for jokes, bragging and sex. The dialect itself can create comic effects, as when the young boy has been approached by a G.I: 'He wants to make fire with other he' (p. 23).
But this idiom, just as much as standard English, has its limitations, especially if it is to carry the full weight of the narrative. The first obvious one is that it is not a transcription of popular speech such as can be found with Achebe, who faithfully records the rhythms and phrases of a pidgin he knows well. Wendt proposes here a stylised recreation of a pidgin, rather than a linguistic document. In many passages, the effort shows: abstract words and complex syntactic turns make their way into the text in contradiction with the coherent grammar of pidgin. In 'Captain Full', one can say that the medium suffers under the strain of expressing the author's views as well as those of the character: 'You best stay clear of him', 'She break strain', 'I find release' (p. 30). In 'Virgin-wise', the language appears even more artificial, a kind of pastiche of the real thing: 'too dead cause all in head', 'plenty ideal (p. 146). As a poetic creation, it is interesting, very effective at times but it is in no way a direct representation of a popular mode of expression.
Why then go to all this trouble? Why give the narrator-hero of the novella this strange idiom with its simplified syntax, its faulty constructions? Its value lies first in the way it contrasts with educated English. If 'English-style' is the cold medium of the unmanned palagi and of the written text, of the 'good sons', 'all meek and mild and spineless' (p. 42), all these popular modes represent the vitality of the Vaipe world and its main value, virility. In using this language, Wendt attempts to go to the sources of oral culture where the art of speaking well and of telling stories is considered as a manly achievement. This power starts with the revered grandfather, 'verbally brilliant' (p. 38), then is found with Captain Full of Talk Talk, 'just like a volcano he talk', then in Pili 'who could have talked the pants off an angel or the devil into becoming God' (p. 52). Tagata and Simi prove their bravery at school by 'giving a talk' to save the hero, and later Tagata, 'a professional gunfighter at conversation' (p. 134), seduces a girl for him. The power of the teller of tales, the tusitala, lies in the joy of spoken language, as opposed to the hard solitary task of writing things which are 'impossible to pin on paper' (p. 64).
If proper English sterilises, dissimulates - 'I hide behind a mask of atheistic cynicism' (p. 40) - Vaipe-style destroys it from the inside. The syntactic freedom, the amusing metaphors, the very coarseness of the tone have a corrosive power. Vaipe-style is irreverent, poetic, disruptive of established values. It is the voice of the robust rogues of the stories: Captain Full who says 'I AM THE STRONGEST MAN ALIVE', Pili, the Pint-Sized Devil on a Thoroughbred, 'the dwarf with the big weapon', the satyr. Their laughter has challenge in it, not only in the face of a hypocritical society but in the face of death: 'I hope that when I kick the air finally they will come into my room and find my weapon laughing at them' (p. 132). A striking metaphor sums up the part played by this coarse bantering mode which is the Vaipe voice:
A flood of lava everywhere. But in some places you see small plants growing through cracks in the lava, like funny stories breaking through your stony mind. (p. 132)
If 'Vaipe-style' however has more authenticity than 'English-style' in the book, it finally has no more authority. After the direct and slightly patronising admiration for the rogue as a raw diamond - 'the only man I ever admired and respected' - an ironical distance is created at times from the stereotype of the 'Polynesian noble savage with the mighty club' (p. 133). The machismo of the rogues has its reverse side which is their brutal attitude towards the weak. Their constant concern for their virile honour, to be proved by sexual prowess, leads to violence and death. Tagata's laughter debunks all conventions, 'it is all a lie' (p. 139), but his rebellion in words has no purpose and appears self-defeating. His final comment is 'Life is ridiculous' (p. 141) so that the virile storyteller, the popular joker, can offer nothing but pessimism and the vision of an absurd world.
The Vaipe voice is the language of idealized virility, but its heroes are ultimately presented as defeated: the men who have the gift of talking and 'the mighty club' are tiny and, in the last resort, ineffectual. Captain Full dies rotten and weakened by his excesses and Tagata hangs himself. The negative facet of Vaipe culture is expressed in a metaphor. In the same way as slum culture, although very much alive, is a degradation of the original Samoan culture, as the pidginlike Vaipe-style is a degradation of English with only traces of Samoan, so the mud of the river resembles only superficially the fertile mud of the village 'that oozed through his fingers, refusing to be tamed into shape' (p. 7). The Vaipe is a 'black stream' but it is also called 'dead water' (p. 108). It is smelly and full of excrement. Its mud is not a source of life but part of a cycle of derision and death:
a small hole on the bank of the Vaipe and into this hole dump this dwarf carcass of mine. Then fill it fast with Vaipe mud before it stinks our most excellent Vaipe neighbourhood. Plant on it taro and I swear on the lava that the taro will grow like nobody's business, because I am excellent manure. When the taro is ready, give it to the market people. I am sure, as I am sure I am dead, that they will all die from greedy diarrhoea. (p. 142)
This is a fitting death for the Vaipe identity, 'the goat in the loin', the living antithesis to the church-going persona.
'My style'
.
The popular voice, for all its vitality, is not the whole answer. Its rebellion against external cultural domination is short-termed and ineffectual. A deeper, more radically new identity has to be found which may include both the intellectual anger of the analytical mind and virile pride, the isolation and responsibility of the elite and the warm communal spirit of the Vaipe people. This identity is conquered through language, the language of the 'self' that gradually takes shape in the book, echoing and transcending the different voices. Like the other two voices, the voice of the 'self' has its own range of metaphors and gradually delineates the contours of a new persona, 'the devil in the heart'. 'English-style, Vaipe-style' are united by a comma; 'My style' is framed in by two full stops. The work moves forward, tightly organised, in a painful search for a personal voice that would not be endlessly fragmented like present-day Samoa, that would not always end up at a certain ironical distance from the narrator or the text, in the way the English and the Vaipe voices do.
What is the 'I' that hides 'behind a mask of atheistic cynicism'? From the first story, it is identified with the 'bitter dark' (p. 3) as a sole term of reference. The narrator wants to 'expel the dark from himself' (p. 2). All the middle stories show men busy enjoying sex, and the transliterated expression 'make fire' acquires full meaning. In the pleasure of the moment, the dark core of self is illuminated: 'I am giving her the seed and the fire explodes in my eyes' (p. 137). But fertility and light, thus briefly mentioned, are not dominant images. At first, the narrator stands on the brink, both attracted and frightened by the darkness in others, that black core in Pili which only the grandmother could understand. Then the book moves towards a recognition of that self: 'I have the darkness and my self' (p. 131).
This discovery of self is made through a new language. It comes to life very firmly in the last two stories of the cycle, in a way that integrates and unifies the other voices, 'my style' being the result of the dialectic tension between English-style and Vaipe-style. The characteristics of the new voice are its linguistic freedom, the contrapuntal effect of the two voices, of written and oral registers, and finally a metaphorical mode of expression which is very close to poetry.
The Vaipe voice has liberated English from its formal constraints. A coherent personal idiom is gradually created, where the narrator can speak of 'his (my) life', telling with both passion and distance how his father 'sent his son (me) to school' (p. 167). The use of tenses can now express a different logic from that of the anglicised mind: 'Before this I am never attracted' (p. 113), 'I was/am no hero'. From the simplified system of pronouns which in pidgin was a limitation and a source of comedy - land then I kneel down on she' (p. 136) - there emerges a dialogue between 'I' and self in which the link is never taken for granted: 'I, Pepesa, has travelled...', 'It is a novel about me'. The 'self' becomes an entity in a way which the syntax underlines: 'I introduce the self' (p. 112), 'only the self for company' (p. 110) are comparable to the 'je est un autre' in Mallarmé, the 'I am that he' in Julius Caesar. Taking as a pattern the pidgin's rare use of possessive adjectives, the language creates a distance between 'I' and the body: 'I nod the head',-, 'I shake the head' (p. 124), 'I hear the self' (P. 130), By degrees, the prose is simplified in that manner till one finds it easy to follow the constructions in 'Virgin-wise' or the reduction to the bare essentials in the voice of the dying man: 'It is alive. This body' (p.143).
The uneducated narrator of the novella is not making a mistake but expressing a poetical truth when he speaks about this 'novel about the self'. The schoolmistress ignored his name and refused him an identity. By rebelling against the English of the judge and all it stands for, he has found his name again:
'My name is Pepesa, son of Sapepe and the gods of Sapepe,' I declare in Samoan. The congregation talk in surprise. They know I am fighting at last, putting on a good show like in the movies. (p. 128)
His identity is in refusal, once he has accepted in himself the rebellious voice of the Vaipe. The trial scene in the novella is the climax of the whole book, a moment of self-revelation achieved through language. It has the quality of a nightmare, its tribunal is a church, its audience a congregation, and its faceless judge a disturbing image of the self. He is 'It' and compels the self to declare its true identity publicly. He is the superego to whom a justification is needed in the painful act of putting pen to paper, 'the judge, the confessor' of the self. But the self finally defeats this mirror image who talks in the name of order: its theme is also blackness, with the 'black dress', the 'black human hair', but it is chased away by the laughter of the Vaipe self: 'my smile chasing him'.
The instant of recognition comes with the refusal of English and of the Christian culture it vehiculates. As a counterpart, the hero accepts his isolation once and for all:
A sky of stone, a river of stone, a silence as deep as the grave door, between them and people like me. I can do nothing to change that. Nothing. (p. 132)
But the challenging attitude will not end with the nihilistic pessimism of Tagata who doubts even the meaning of words: 'It is all a lie'. The new self can find its identity in a heroic attitude which claims total responsibility for its actions and for the past. In the moral vacuum created by contradictory cultures, it admits no law other than its own. The defiant stance of Milton's Satan, the 'devil in the heart' of Pili, is here taken to its logical conclusion: 'I have only my darkness and my self living in my world, therefore ... I am my god' (p. 131).
From this moment of revelation, poetry is best suited to account for the inner certitude which is independent from the previous social images of self. The Vaipe self has helped to reject the guilt imposed from the outside, especially the guilt linked with sex. And, in a way, this reminds us of Joyce. The 'enjoyment of it will be sublimated into words: in 'Captain Full' there was more joy in watching the act of love but there remained some guilt in this voyeurism (p. 27). In this last story, the joy of love and desire comes in acknowledging its power and beauty through words. A poetic language in prose has been created, which is more effective than the jokey pidgin of'Captain Full':
So reader I now grey, wrinkle like over-ripe mango and got no real-flesh worry me. I got Virgin-wise. She never leave me. She in my soul. And she grown on me like second head. But I safe. Don't care if she be Hine-nui-te-Po cause soon I in there die, die in she like Maui. Who care-all has to die. (p. 148)
'My style' has been found at the end of a long journey, as the narrator of the novella writes down in his confession: 'I, Pepesa, has travelled towards myself and my end. 'This new voice is also marked with death and darkness, not so much the mud and maggots of the Vaipe voic as the very rich image of lava, ambivalent in that it represents both fire and sterility, both the pride of origin and the sense of an ending. At the conclusion of the novella, after the dialogue of 'Trial of a Native Son', comes the despairing comment from Tagata that the blackness of lava is silence:
That we are all equal in silence, in the nothing, in lava. I did not want to leave the lava fields, but ... but then you cannot stay there forever because you will die of thirst and hunger if you stay. There is no water, no food, just lava. All is lava. (p. 132)
But, in his testament, 'Last Will and Testament of the Flying-fox', can be found a message that will help Pepesa:
I went back, Pepe. Back to the lava fields, and it has brought me up from hell again. Lava is the only true thing left. It cannot change. The rock from whom we came, and it is with us at the back of our souls... It is there I found the self again. And the courage to accept all that has happened! (p. 140)
The search for the voice that will express the self is difficult as it requires courage to face isolation and death. It is a challenge to express with poetical directness the 'bitter blackness' that lies at the core of the being. But it also unites the richness of the English language and the Vaipe values: 'Never mind, we tried to be true to our selves. That is all I think any man with a club can do' (p. 141). The paradoxical conclusion of the novella is a reformulation of Tagata's poetic vision:
The maggots are impatient. Soon they will break out from
my flesh like bubbles as beautiful as diamonds.
All is well in Lava, so spake the Flying-fox. (p. 144)
The stories, especially the early ones, can be read as the flowers that grow like funny tales on the lava, but the essential unity of the writing self is found in the angry, proud rejection of light, when it courageously and truthfully faces the inner core of darkness. In their variety, the stories have moved towards a unity in which 'the anger in the mind, the devil in the heart, the goat in the loin' speak with one voice. Together, the judge, Tagata and Pepesa have helped to transcend the duality of the symbol of the Flying-fox, liberating 'the eagle in the gut': 'All my life I tried to free this eagle so that he can fly high and dazzle the world' (p. 141).
'English-style, Vaipe-style. My style'.
Jacqueline BARDOLPH University of Nice.
All references are made to the 1974 Longman Paul edition of Flying- Fox in a Freedom Tree.
Robert A. Hall, Pidgin and Creole Languages, Cornell UP
(Ithaca, 1966)
Loreto Todd, Pidgins and creoles, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
(London, 1974)
Paul Muhlhausler, Growth and Structure of the Lexicon of New
Guinea Pidgin, Australian National University (Canberra, 1979)
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Written and revised many times over a period of twelve years, Leaves of the Banyan Tree [2]appears as the major novel in Albert Wendt's career. Despite the promises contained in Sons for the Return Home, the first book remains unsatisfactory because, at times, too self-indulgent. On the contrary, Leaves has the beauty, the clarity and the ease of a work which has been polished so much that it seems to have been written in a transparent and continuous creative drive.
Peter Alcock [3] may deplore the lack of humanity in the chapter entitled 'God, Money and Success', finding fault with the author's apparently dry and bitter satirical tone. In my opinion, this objection does not really hold since the novel contains several levels of narration which must be related and taken into account before one passes final judgement. My reading will necessarily be biassed and non-Polynesian, which does not mean that I am not aware of a different voice - or rather of different voices - expressing themselves. The recognition of difference does not imply the assumption of a false Samoan-oriented point of view (which I could not possibly pretend to assume) or the blatantly Eurocentric point of view of the critic who smoothes out all cultural differences with his 'universal' eye. I will not endorse an interpretation opposing Albert Wendt's 'commitment' and his art since I do not quite see where the committed aspect of the work is, unless it has to do with a fierce desire to be true to himself, not 'in spite of' but through the contradicting forces woven into the plot. Therefore one cannot merely oppose, as P. Alcock does, Book Two and the rest of the novel. The third-person narrator of Book One and Three can no doubt pretend to be omniscient, in which case one may fall into the trap of believing all the criticism of contemporary Samoan society that they contain. Yet this type of interpretation precisely forgets that the art of fiction relies on the power of make-believe. Albert Wendt's clever narrative certainly encourages the reader to think that he is simply mocking a society he seems to hate for its hypocrisy. But the story is mediated through different characters and narrators who often pretend not to be there and yet who leave their marks in the story. The most deceitful of all is the would-be 'omniscient' narrator whom some readers would like to trust entirely. His interventions may pass for 'objective' observations and statements. Yet, when we see how carefully the writer uses different angles of vision which do not always complement one another, we can no longer consider the novel as simply a brilliant piece of social criticism.
On the surface, all characters are obsessed with competition and a desire to acquire more power. In the last line of the novel, the narrator leaves the reader on a final remark concerning Galupo: 'And he laughed for the power and the glory was his. Now.' (p. 413). The craftiest character seems to have won, since he has 'inherited' most of Tauilopepe's fortune and estate, thus making him the virtually supreme ruler of his part of the country. Power here is to be taken in the sense that he can lay down his own law and make his 'subjects' do whatever he orders. Described in this light, Galupo's power is a form of tyranny. Yet he does not use force or direct coercion to maintain his privileges. On the contrary, following Tauilopepe's example, he showers everybody with gifts and privileges. So we have a first level of meaning which will have to be examined in detail. But Leaves of the Banyan Tree is also an indirect reflexion on the power of the writer to create a world which, even though it aims at being as close to reality as possible, still remains autonomous, obeys its own rules (and also transgresses them on occasion) and is endowed with enough complexity and sincerity to allow the readers to suspend their disbelief willingly. Albert Wendt's power resides in his ability to fashion a fictitious universe which appears credible as a documentary and yet whose logic is sometimes radically questioned by deeper levels of meaning which the narrative explores in an entirely original manner. Ambiguity may be questioned under the pretext that the writer has failed to make his point clear. But does an artist need to work with clarity of purpose? Is it not one of art's greatest privileges to fashion and organize a perception, but in such a way as to leave openings, multiple directions and various possible meanings. Art places the readers face to face with their own limits. Fiction creates a world but only to express its inability to really complete the task. An outstanding novelist is acutely aware of man's inadequacy to cope with such essential problems as the definition of one's self and the unavoidable question of death. The thirst for power often remains an easy way out of these interrogations common to all men. Yet Albert Wendt examines these with a totally new approach which we must now try to define.
The author describes a structure of social and material power which combines traditional and imported elements: Tauilopepe is the head of an aiga (extended family) and an important chief (matai) whose prestige grows as the novel develops. His authority rests on his ability to provide for the members of his aiga, to bring them prosperity and peace. In exchange for these essential services, the men can be asked to perform special duties on the matai's plantations while receiving only their food. Early in the story, the narrator suggests that an essential element of this system has been perverted, mostly because of the intrusion of materialistic greed which followed the gradual spreading of European ideas. Malo, Tauilopepe's rival, both in terms of local prestige and because he is his mistress's husband, embodies this corruption of the Samoan way of life with his desire to accumulate riches for himself. The author suggests that perhaps, in the original structures of his society, the constant rivalry between the matai who always had to justify their position and shower gifts and blessings on the members of their aiga later on proved a favourable ground for the development of a capitalistic structure. In this regard, the city too has a pernicious influence on the village where most of the action takes place. Wendt mentions the importance of alofa, the bond of love which was supposed to be the cement of the community only to suggest that it has become an empty concept, a ghost which entrepreneurial chiefs conjure up whenever they try to confiscate the mechanisms of traditional society for their own benefits.
Religion penetrates daily life to such an extent that material power necessarily implies an alliance with spiritual forces. Tauilopepe and Filipo, the pastor, exemplify the worst kind of Calvinism which suffers from all the excesses mentioned by Weber: [4] God is supposed to show his favour to a human being by making him successful in his earthly enterprises. This alleged celestial help leads some of the less scrupulous characters to underrate the precept that says one should love one's neighbour. When Tauilopepe is given an opportunity to preach in church, he chooses to talk on 'God, Money and Success'. The temple of God is a place where social preeminence is consecrated and sacralized: those who have given the largest amount of money are assured of a private pew and special treatment. The church becomes an instrument of personal prestige in the case of Tauilopepe who suddenly decides that the one in Sapepe is no longer worthy of the community. He sacrifices all other enterprises to his obsession. Consequently the village spends all its resources, loses several people who suffer fatal accidents during the construction. But the aim is eventually reached. Filopo can celebrate services in a majestic edifice and Tauilopepe can look at 'his' church with pride.
Such people as Filipo use the pulpit to rave against their adversaries. He confiscates the word of God for his own benefit. The narrator delights in exposing the blatant contradictions between what the pastor preaches and the way in which he actually behaves: Filipo preaches temperance and ends his life as an alcoholic. So does Tauilopepe. Sex is considered as a major source of sin and yet most men indulge in extra-marital escapades. Tauilopepe's financial success starts when he becomes the lover of Moa, Malo's wife, who gives him far more for the produce she buys from him at the local store which she manages. Tauilopepe merely provides his sexual services to a young woman who, being married to an older man, is starved of carnal satisfaction. Gradually Tauilopepe increases his wealth and prestige until he can vie with Malo, financially speaking. Then he uses the influence he has on Moa to convince her to abandon her husband and run away to town, turning Malo to ridicule, a deadly weapon in Samoa. Thus, far from owing his wealth only to God and to his deservedly rewarded virtue, Tauilopepe is shown to gather the fruit of sin and cynicism. One can notice that his cleverness in the field started early since he was expelled from theological college for embezzling public funds and procuring a girl for a mechanic who, in exchange, would let him play with the car he was responsible for. The material success with which he is blessed can then hardly be attributed only to God's recognition of his virtue. The shamelessness of this new bourgeoisie is summed up in a remark which Ashton, Tauilopepe's lawyer and investment adviser, makes to the matai:
laws were made to be used by the powerful; everyone wanted something for nothing, that was the basis of all human transactions; men like them had the right to manipulate the weak in the interest of building a wealthy, God-fearing nation. (p. 342)
God is used as a pretext to sacralize the seizure of power by a small group of people who have proved their 'strength' and therefore have the 'duty' to lead the 'weak'.
Albert Wendt gives an idea of the role traditional religion fulfilled before the advent of Christianity. It appears that the aim of the old faith was mostly to protect men from the wrath of supernatural forces which could bring disasters to the world. The novel shows an old reflex at work, transposed into the formulation of the Christian faith, when an elderly woman interprets the hurricane which has destroyed the island and Tauilopepe's plantation with it - as a manifestation of God's wrath. She declares: 'We have sinned' (p. 350). Now it seems that, for such people as Tauilopepe and Malo, religion is reduced to an instrument for their own power. When Tauilopepe has succeeded in obtaining Malo's banishment from the village, he comes back to introduce the Book of Mormons which he no doubt sees as an antidote against his rival's complete identification with the London Missionary Society Church. Galupo, the mysterious outsider who gradually takes over Tauilopepe's position, takes great care to behave as a devout and practising Christian.
In the traditional religion, men respected the powers of the unknown. On the contrary, now, their realm is reduced to practically nothing. The supernatural is evoked only when it can become an instrument for the material enrichment of men. In Wendt's description of Samoa, the forest of the interior is always linked with gods and ancestors. Yet Tauilopepe recklessly clears it and desecrates what consequently becomes 'Leaves of the Banyan Tree', his favourite plantation. This element plays a similar part to the house which Mr Biswas always dreams of building for himself in V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. Yet here the plantation also integrates the presence of the old world symbolized by the huge tree which refuses to be felled despite the efforts of the men hired to clear the land. Wendt suggests that the process of deterioration is visible in the use that is made of the land which used to be respected and is now only a property to be possessed and exploited before one's rival has the same idea, since, comforted by the puritan ideology of work, the rival capitalists argue that it would be a sin to leave the land idle. The presence of the supernatural is reified, and all this in the name of religion. The author implies that the deeply rooted respect for the unknown which characterized pre-European times contrasts sharply with the prevailing materialism which is thinly covered by a varnish of religious rhetoric. The power of life and regeneration which belonged to the land has been enslaved by a new law which proclaims that everything is for sale and that the earth is only required to enable its owner to make money. Whereas the old religion was a factor of cohesion, the new one encourages ruthless competition and causes the breakdown of solidarity and mutual help.
Financial and social preeminence seem incomplete if they are not associated with the power of men over women. To prove that they are great and courageous, the men must display their ability to seduce girls. The more difficult the enterprise proves to be the greater the respect that the bold lover will gain in the eyes of the beholders. Such acts of daring have no significance if they are not meant primarily to impress others. On this level there seems to exist a basic and unsolved conflict between the demand of the church for chastity and society's insistence on the courage of the male in his sexual conquests. Little seems to be made of the woman's acceptance or rejection of the assailant. The characters who represent the capitalistic class consider women only as instruments to be enjoyed and submitted to their often perverse whims: When Tauilopepe makes love to Moa, the narrator describes their intercourse as a furious fight in which sadistic and masochistic instincts dominate:
The pain was excruciating when it came and continued to burst up her spine as he stabbed and stabbed at her from behind ... and she was all around him, absorbing every twist and turn of his punishing flesh. (p. 147)
The male sexual organ is a weapon which.wounds the partner, who, strangely enough, seems to enjoy this violent rape. [5] Yet, for Tauilopepe, Moa's pleasure is only secondary to his desire to dominate her and make her be the instrument of his control over her husband; he uses his body to force her to abandon Malo and thus leave him, Tauilopepe, alone to rule over the village. What will become of the woman later when she has run away into town with her bus-driver does not concern him.
The main purpose of love-making seems to be to make men 'feel great'. The narrator describes a dream in which Tauilopepe imagines that he is seducing Susana, the wife of his son who has recently died. Through his conquest of her he overcomes the sense of inferiority which he felt in relation to Pepe's tremendous vitality and non- conformist daring. The old man is only satisfied when Susana has assured him that he is 'bigger' and 'better' than his 'rival' of a son. [6] Any deep relationship between a man and a woman is excluded from such narcissistic exchanges. The author points out the dryness and squalor of such intercourse with Lupe, Tauilopepe's wife,who says to her husband:
'Don't come to me because you want to use me to lose your fears and anger about everything,' she whispered... 'You're my wife,' he muttered, his face buried in the softness of her neck. Her body was like unforgiving stone. (p. 11)
This type of power and domination goes hand in hand with the threat of sterility: [7] Lupe loses her child at birth because Tauilopepe is too busy in his plantation to come to her and too proud to ask for Malo's truck to rush her to the hospital in town. Pepe, who should normally inherit his title and position, dies prematurely leaving Tauilopepe with only Lalolagi, Pepe's worthless son, or Galupo, the crafty secret 'heir' to turn to. [8]
In order to make up for this inability to possess more than material power, Tauilopepe blatantly uses the law as best suits him. He takes advantage of his matai position to confiscate the communal resources: he borrows the council bulldozer free and clears the forest to plant his own fields. His breaking up of the Samoan club when he is on one of his drinking expeditions in Apia goes unsanctioned because of his social prestige and influence (see pp. 395-6). But he remains an amateur by comparison with the skill of Galupo, the outsider who gradually convinces Tauilopepe that he is his true heir and that he only can continue his work as an empire builder. He has best understood that a basic rule in the Samoan game of power is that one must never let other people become aware of one's weaknesses. So he can blackmail Tauilopepe into relinquishing much of his prerogatives to him simply by threatening to reveal that he is the old man's illegitimate son who has seen through all the tricks of the matai and knows which people he used as supports for his shady deals. Galupo's cleverness consists in suggesting that he knows everything and in arousing Tauilopepe's guilty conscience. The crafty schemer uses the same technique with Ashton after his 'father''death when he convinces the lawyer to write out a new will in his favour under the threat of disclosing to the public how much money Ashton has stolen from his customer.
The acquisition of power leads to the elimination of competitors and to the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small group of people. Traditional institutions such as councils are reduced to puppet shows where the rich pull all the strings. The unanimity which used to be necessary for any communal decision to become executory has been replaced by the apparently democratic system of voting. But the choice of the electors is entirely conditioned by the client-patron relationship which binds them to a particular matai so that traditional rules and 'modern, democratic' principles of government are perverted by the con-men who take advantage of the universal principle of 'you pay my debt and I'll support you'. [9] This situation tends to make the narrator cynical about what happens in Samoa. Yet he also shows the whole process as a destructive cycle in which all the vital forces of the man who aspires to power are swallowed up by sterility and guilt . Over all the plot hovers the presence of a debt which no one can repay and which is the manifestation of the ruling and supreme law which not even the cleverest schemer can escape. This debt takes many different forms: Tauilopepe cannot cancel his bill at.Malo's store, even when he manages to have his rival banned from the village. The Malo title is later re-claimed by Galupo who finally succeeds in circumventing Tauilopepe. The old man thinks he can cheat Galupo into serving his own purpose:
Tauilopepe had to learn more about Galupo, who was the time, the hands, the mind and cunning he needed to rebuild Leaves of the Banyan Tree, the man he could use to continue his line until Lalolagi, his only legal heir, came of age and the debt he owed Pepe was paid (p. 357).
But the debt obviously proves to be unpayable in the terms that Tauilopepe had imagined. Wendt invites the reader to draw a parallel between this situation and the fate of the mythic ancestor who was defeated by a similar irony: Pepesa had a favourite daughter called Sina whom he loved inordinately. His father, the god Tane, who did not know that Pepesa was his son, desired Sina and took her away to his home in the Ninth Heaven. Pepesa journeyed to the Ninth Heaven in the form of a flying-fox and found Tane whom he clubbed to death. But he failed to convince Sina to come back with him. In fury, Pepesa struck her child dead and Sina killed herself. If we read this myth in relation to the main plot of the novel, we notice the essential role which irony plays in both cases, an irony which relies mostly on the characters' blindness and tragic flaws. When they think that they control the situation most, they are absolutely mistaken. Tauilopepe's financial success and manipulation of the law in Sapepe lead him to disregard the importance of the superior Law which manifests itself in the form of a crushing fate. For Tauilopepe and for Pepesa, the limit of their power is marked by the forbidden satisfaction of their latent incestuous desires. In Les Structures Elémentaires de la Parenté [10], Claude Lévi-Strauss shows that the prohibition of incest (which may correspond to various definitions) is one of the basic mechanisms of any society in that it represents the necessity for man to entertain relations with other groups and thus acknowledge the power of Otherness. [11] In terms of power, this implies that a particular man's prestige and field of domination can never be totally unlimited. Whenever he goes beyond certain limits, society is bound to strike back, which is what happens to Tauilopepe. Where Wendt offers a particular interpretation of the process is when he picks out another schemer to replace the flawed leader. This suggests that the struggle for power inevitably engenders the same kind of men and that the cycle is virtually endless.
In this world of crooks, some characters seem to be totally uninterested in the power-game. Taifau - a name which means 'dog' in Samoan - is the best example of those people with a 'talent for being human' (p. 324). Yet this hides an extraordinary ability to flatter others and to live off anybody gullible enough to listen to his stories. Strangely enough, Taifau is an artist since he makes himself known by his guitar playing and his gift of composing songs for any occasion.
His gift... was his ability to change colour like a lizard to suit the people he happened to be living off at any particular moment. (p. 322)
His strength resides in being the anti-hero by Samoan standards which demand that a man be brave. Taifau prides himself on proving the greatest coward, which enables him to be considered as less than a man, leaving him free to transgress the law and go unpunished. In the land of courage and pride, cowardice is the main form of freedom. Ironically, Tauilopepe's estate owes much to Taifau who works tirelessly in Leaves of the Banyan Tree. When he has composed his song ridiculing Malo who has been cuckolded, Taifau completes his master's victory, making his adversary's position untenable in the village. The superiority of such people rests on their ability to understand all the mechanisms of power and to keep a sense of humour where Tauilopepe or Malo remain serious.
Pepe belongs to another class; he takes delight in transgressing all the essential rules followed by his father: he drinks, womanizes and becomes the associate of the worst rascals. He does not hesitate to cheat American tourists who, anyway, are seen as stupid exploiters. He even sets fire to the Protestant church-hall and breaks into Tauilopepe's store in town. When the police come to pick him up he refuses his father's protection and prefers to spoil Tauilopepe's reputation in court by admitting that he does not believe in God, a capital sin in Samoan society. Pepe belongs to the rebels who believe in nothing but themselves and therefore delight in exposing the futility of the ruling class. Their freedom of speech and of thinking also implies that they remain absolutely in the dark as far as the meaning of the universe is concerned. Pepe reminds the reader of Faleasa in Pouliuli, the matai who pretends to be mad in order to become freer and who finally succumbs to actual madness. When he begins to tell his tale, Pepe is dying from tuberculosis in a hospital ward. Yet he still enjoys narrating his rebellious acts because they are his only defence against death. Modelling himself on R.L. Stevenson, the local glory and tusitala (storyteller), Pepe introduces himself as the ill-fated artist who can only parody everyone and everything, including himself, to pretend that he still controls his fate to a certain extent.
The corollary of this freedom is a complete lack of references, which leads the hero to a sense of the absurdity of the universe. This feeling is articulated on Existentialist concepts which seem to bear similarities with those of Camus. Yet Wendt is no blind disciple of a foreign school of thinking. He merely succeeds in finding a set of ideas which help him to understand the specificity of his situation. Since the God of the L.M.S. is the unavoidable reference in present-day Samoa, Pepe decides that he is his own God and therefore must look in himself for moral bases. In the society which the novel explores, God seems to stand as the one who knows how people must behave and who chastises them when they transgress his rules. He is only a judge and an executioner. This perversion of the supernatural leaves out an essential role fulfilled by religion, that of the link between the material and the immaterial, bear een what one understands and what must remain obscure. If 'I am my God', as Pepe boasts, half-seriously, half-jokingly to his judges (p. 202), then I remain alone to find the meaning of darkness and silence. Writing serves the purpose of attempting 'to snare the void and give it word'. [12] The bold aim of the poet cannot be reached but the assertion in itself shows the vital importance which art represents for someone who can no longer count on traditional standards and has to rely on himself in an environment where the individual depends so much on the social structures around him. Only loneliness and darkness remain as certainties when all else has crumbled. Faced with this, the characters have a choice between exploring a world of their own and destroying the perverted laws and institutions which they loathe. The two solutions have equally deadly consequences as we see with Faleasa in Pouliuli who is taken in at his own game of pretending madness and with Pepe who exhausts his surprising vitality in his fight with institutions. One can even say that Tauilopepe is an equally tragic hero, even though he represents a perfect adaptation to the system. In spite of the wealth and power he has accumulated, he has no worthy descendants to prolong him and, as he believes in nothing profound, he too is faced with the void. Galupo pushes this logic to an extreme when he says:
To me, the whole-struggle to recreate one's self in order to be free of the Other-World is the meaning and the aim. I am a product of my own imagination. (p. 412)
Galupo represents the almost perfect trickster who has noticed all the weaknesses in the people who hold power and who knows the rules of the code. He pretends to pull the strings and actually succeeds, within the limits of the plot. The 'power and the glory' is his 'now', at the end of the novel. But we may wonder for how long, since he too cannot avoid the void and the darkness. Rather than a conclusion, this last sentence is a new problematic beginning which hardly places Galupo in a better position than Faleasa in Pouliuli. Becoming a creation of his own imagination he can either pretend complete mastery or realize the presence of the unknown which surrounds him. In both cases reality is bound to defeat him. The only freedom that is left to him is the possibility of challenging the void, like Maui in the Polynesian myth trying to penetrate Hine-Nui-Te-Po, the goddess of darkness. [13] When hopes to understand the forces at play in the world begin to fade, the only possibility left to man is to face defeat in style. The last power which the heroes use is therefore their ability to be good jesters, like Pepe at his trial: while conforming to the Samoan ideal of the clever joker, he ruins the falçade of responsibility which his father had spent so much time building up. Pepe's last revenge is his grin which Tauilopepe discovers with horror when he looks at his son in his coffin:
He would never know anything about Pepe. Nothing. The black face with the mocking smile, preserved especially for him, told him so. Another death-mask clogged his head - Toasa, the same mocking grin. (p. 237)
According to the code, mockery cannot be left unanswered. Even though Tauilopepe reassures himself with the idea that the future lies ahead of him and he can overcome this shame, the reader knows that Pepe has won his own victory, wearing on his face the only weapon that he could use, his ability to ridicule opponents. And this time the sardonic smile cannot be defeated.
The flying-fox becomes an essential metaphor in this context for it is a creature of two worlds, hairy like a fox and with wings like a bird. The narrator insists on this animal's speciality of stealing fruit in other people's gardens, a suggestion that Galupo belongs to the same family. Yet the flying-fox also soars up in the sky. So he is able to link the world of pettiness and the heights above where the ancestors live. The animal which gives its name to Flyinf-Fox in a Freedom Tree, a collection of short stories by Albert Wendt can probably be seen as a representation of the artist, an iconoclast in the religion of philistines but also a semi-divine trickster. His flight is that of the imagination which enables men to free themselves from the tyranny of perverted worldly powers. This force may only lead to darkness or death but it can still challenge the world with an overpowering grin. At least it makes men aware of their closeness to nature and to a tradition which dates back further than the time when European missionaries and settlers arrived. The forest is the refuge of spirits and the abode of the dead for people like Pepe or Toasa. For Tauilopepe, it is only an obstacle to be cut down so that exploitation may begin. The materialistic matai has lost the profound link which should make him part of the long tradition that can still be followed, in a symbolic way, by reciting genealogies. This break in the time continuum of the group goes together with Tauilopepe's failure to connect to his environment in other terms than those of material possession. His worldly power contrasts sharply with the powers of more rooted characters such as Toasa, or even Pepe.
The oppositions and conflicts which characterize the world of Leaves of the Banyan Tree also apply to novel-writing. The world of fiction is a product of the imagination and, in this sense, the writer's power over the reader should be almost unlimited. Yet the narrator often refers to 'realistic' details which anchor his story in contemporary history: 1928 is the date of the death of Tauilo's father. [14] Some of the events are related to 1962, the year when Samoa became independent. [15] The autobiographical element plays a major part in the setting of the urban scenes when we know that the Vaipe was the area where the author spent much of his childhood. Although Sapepe is an imaginary village, Wendt belongs to the aiga Sa-Tuala in which his father holds the title Tuaopepe, a name which bears certain phonological resemblances to those of the heroes in Leaves. The writer's obvious desire to create a specifically fictional environment is nevertheless always situated in a referential framework which inevitably evokes Samoa in recent years. Several forces are at play within the work: the most obvious purpose of the volume is to reflect on the situation created by the superimposition of a European framework on Polynesian society. In this regard, Wendt's purpose is to criticize what he sees as a debasement of values. The heroes are divided up between those who possess material power and those who react against them. Characters of the second kind are nevertheless involved in a struggle for power, though of a less obvious kind; through their ability to talk or to make-believe, they gain, in a different field, what they lose in the money or political influence games. If the author cannot win over all the Tauilopepes in a direct way, he certainly does so in the fables [16] which he creates. Through them he takes possession of a historical and sociological situation, reorganizes it in a meaningful way and leads the reader to share his judgement on the situation. The group which Wendt describes is made up of several generations and forms an allegory of a whole nation which is going through the process of decolonization, moving on to the building up of a problematic identity. The typology of characters can, on the surface, reflect a division between 'goodies' and 'baddies', evoking in the reader's mind either the old moral fables or its more 'modern' form, the cow-boy stories which Galupo pretends to indulge in (see p. 380). The high society in Apia, the church and the new elite stand in a very unfavourable light. In this respect, Pepe, the 'goodie' makes fun of Tauilopepe the 'baddie'. But then, what does one make of Galupo, a most ambiguous figure? This simple dichotomy is just one of the levels on which one can perceive the organization of the novel. If one looks a little deeper, one realizes that Tauilopepe also enjoys many positive sides, such as his tremendous courage and initiative. He does not allow himself to abandon the struggle when the hurricane has ruined his property. Even if these qualities are sometimes made to serve dubious aims, they are features which he shares with his son who appears as a model of resistance and imagination. His pathetic loneliness also echoes Pepe's own sense of having no one to help him cope with the darkness and absurdity which he perceives everywhere.
The shifts in narrative voices between the three books of the novel underline in a formal manner the problematic judgement of the author on his characters. In the first section, the third-person narrator obviously makes a satire of Tauilopepe's shameless manipulations and intrigues. The technique here is much closer to the tradition of Fielding or even, to take a more modern example, of Naipaul, with whom Wendt shares many distinctive features such as his disillusionment with the state of the world. The titles of chapters - which follow one another in a serial fashion evoke, in their elliptic quality, the art of Dickens. Yet even these fairly referential passages can never be interpreted in isolation. Irony often tempers the caustic humour of the narrator. The third section which echoes the first in mood introduces a subtle shift to a slightly different relationship between the speaking voices and the reader who is placed closer to Tauilopepe's mind:
You sit in your study, afraid, remembering your only real son, who died unloved. Out of his ashes God has fashioned another son to destroy you. You switch on the main light to try to defeat the fearful gloom clogging your thoughts. You ache to the pores of your being for the fears to go but they cling to you like the cloying stench of mud seeping through the windows. (p. 370)
The You draws the reader into Tauilopepe's discourse and makes him share the suffering of an old man who, up to then, had been presented mostly as a villain. The identification which ensues contradicts the satirical purpose clearly expressed earlier on. The shift takes place when Tauilopepe's selfconfidence has reached its lowest point. His loss of power over himself which heralds his material and physical dispossession - brings him closer to the characters who have a 'gift for being human'. He no longer asserts his will in a peremptory tone but expresses himself in the form of questions or unfinished sentences. When Galupo appears, the narrator leaves the reader in the dark as to what he should feel towards the new hero. Galupo blackmails Tauilopepe with the story of his youth only to conclude that 'for all you know, I may have been spending the last few hours lying to you: I may not be your son' (p. 369). Galupo then tells the old man that he has fabricated the whole story, leaving only the question of his filiation on Moa's side intact. He professes to be in search of his own roots and to 'force his parents to acknowledge him as their son' (pp. 374-375). At that point the reader no longer knows whom he should trust and begins to doubt the details which had been given as truths by the narrator before. Book Two adds to the retrospective confusion in that it starts as a long confession made in many different modes: the styles shift from 'English style' to 'Vaipe style' to finally become 'my style' (p. 160). The variations correspond to an intricate strategy of make-believe which constantly aims at seducing and deceiving the readers who believe they can gain a firm hold on the reality of the novel. The character is writing a novel and his story is mediated through an author who is himself a creator of fiction. Pepe pretends to be completely frank with those who listen to his story but he warns them to take his statements with 'fifteen grains of Epsom salts' (p. 159). Although Pepe proclaims that 'there will be no God in my novel (p. 160), he then admits that 'I pray to God, tell Him to look after me' (p. 165). Thus the readers know that they have to trust no one but their own judgement. Yet the work is organized to draw them into a prearranged role, only to suddenly expose the naïvety of their excessive faith. Wendt's attitude witnesses to a profound desire to find a genuine moral basis for action. Yet, in the absence of any authentic reference available, the only position left seems to be that of the clever trickster who can master the world of language and symbols better than others. This power is exercised over style rather than over meaning, since that second level remains highly problematic. In its most successful passages, the novel weaves a pattern of profound interrogations around the silent core of the unknown.
In the world of Albert Wendt, most people are defined by their closeness or opposition to the source of material or political power. Even when they seem most liberated from this desire to dominate, they actually compensate, though in a different field, for the 'weakness' that cripples them in regard to that ruling value. The heroes of Leaves of the Banyan Tree all seek to play a major part in the game and those who master symbols best are most likely to win. Thus those with a gift for finding the right words and manipulating others will overcome the obstacle of poverty, a major blemish in a society where a person is particularly judged on what he can give others. But this form of power cannot completely mask the anguish which most of the important characters feel towards the absence of moral values or of metaphysical justification in a world where the law is confiscated by those in charge of leading the community. Pepe exposes the shallow basis of his father's authority; but it seems that no one else is prepared to follow him in his fight for purity and principles because it pays more to flatter the leaders. The basic contract which seals the solidity of a social institution rests only on material benefits and seems entirely cut off from any legitimate origin or explanation. Pepe, like Faleasa, is left alone to torment himself with his awareness of Pouliuli, the anguishing darkness behind the power-game. Pepe remains the only real creator in this meaningless environment: he can fashion new worlds in his imagination and contribute to dramatizing the dilemma of his fellow-countrymen, like Wendt himself. Yet he alone has the possibility of organizing chaos through his art since he can perceive the flicker of a minute flower of life challenging the lava-like darkness around. The writer expresses the hopelessness of human relationships and the terror of the void but he can also perceive signs of hope and possible fertility in the heart of apparent sterility. In its oscillation between different forms of mastery and the acceptance of its limits the narration captivates the readers, then suddenly discloses its own tricks in a supreme attempt to conceal its power of make-believe. The readers are left bewildered and forced to step back, wondering whom they should trust, since 'omniscience' and apparent candour on the part of the narrator are only veils aimed at covering the futility of his impassioned denunciation or the craftiness of his studied confessions. From the point of view of narration, the novel starts with pretended certainty, moves on to a cynical form of Existentialist agnosticism, then concludes on an invitation for the reader to identify with characters whose moral principles have been most violently attacked in the first part. No single stage can be chosen in isolation. The significance of the novel appears as the crossroads of conflicting tendencies and forces which cannot be finally resolved. Perhaps the power of the writer resides in his ability to express in a most sophisticated structure his brave though doomed attempt at mastering the void.
Jean-Pierre Durix,
Université de Dijon
NOTES
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