Samoan author Albert Wendt creates vivid,
dream-like tales that paint a rich picture of island life

When Albert Wendt speaks about the creative process his hands reach into the air, shaping it, forming it, working it over. His eyes focus with intensity on a spot just beyond his hands where his thoughts meet an imaginary space, a zone of concentration. “When I get into the zone, it’s very hard to get out of it,” says the Samoa-born author. “It’s the most enjoyable feeling you can ever have. Your imagination is just ticking away and nothing else is important.” Wendt is one of the most prominent and prolific writers in the Pacific.

His prose exquisitely captures the rhythms of life and language in Samoa and other parts of the region. He tackles racism, sexism, materialism, and other controversial topics as viewed through the prism of South Pacific islanders forced to deal with Western influences and rapid changes in the world around them. The inherent contradictions of life in the South Pacific make rich fodder for his varied narratives.

Wendt was born in Apia, Western Samoa, of German and Polynesian ancestry. As a child he soaked up the intricate stories, myths and legends about the Samoan people spun by his grandmother Mele. He attended high school in New Plymouth, New Zealand, on a government scholarship and decided to become a writer. After university studies he began a career as a teacher and academic administrator. Starting in 1973 with his first novel, Sons of the Return Home, an autobiographical novel about a cross-racial romance, Wendt began a productive stint of writing that continues today.

He has penned six novels, three collections of short stories, four volumes of poetry and a play, The Songmaker’s Chair. Wendt has also edited eight volumes of poetry and fiction. In 1980 he received the prestigious Wattie Book of the Year Award in New Zealand for Leaves of the Banyan Tree, an epic saga of Samoan life now considered a South Pacific classic. Wendt occupied the first chair for literature at the University of the South Pacific and taught Pacific studies at the University of Auckland. In September, 2004, Wendt took the position of Citizen’s Chair at the UH Mānoa Department of English. “Albert Wendt has not only theorized the cultural plenitude and political entanglements of Oceania – a term he helped to reclaim and reinvent – he has summoned, invoked, and enacted this fate of Oceania into world-literary circulation,” says Robert Wilson, a professor of literature at University of California Santa Cruz.

The volume and quality of his work is particularly impressive, considering that throughout his career he has held academic and administrative positions at colleges and arts organizations across the Pacific region. “Most people don’t realize that I’ve never written fulltime,” Wendt says. “I’ve always done my writing in my own time. That’s why it’s good to be an academic, because you get a lot of time to do your own work.” Wendt originally intended to teach art, not writing, but found that writing came easier. He doesn’t have a routine he follows. He works in bursts. And when he works, “it’s total immersion. When the poetry comes, I just sit down and write it,” he says. “Sometimes it comes easy, most of the time, it doesn’t. Poetry is still my favorite writing because it’s right in front of you, one page. And you can see it all. And then you fiddle around with it.” For Wendt, making a painting is similar in process to constructing a poem and in the past five years he’s taken up the brush again. When he’s not writing or teaching, you can find him at his easel, in the zone, staring into that space where his imagination soars.

Want to read his work? check these out;

- Leaves of the Banyan Tree

- The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man: Short Stories

- Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree

- Black Rainbow

- Sons for the Return Home (my personal favourite)

- Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980

- Inside Us the Dead : Poems 1961 to 1974