Once the angry young man of Pacific literature, Albert Wendt talks to Joanna Wane about what it’s cost him and the legacy he leaves behind
It’s been more than two years since I first came knocking on the door of Michael Joseph Savage’s old house. This Ponsonby street wasn’t so posh in the early 1900s, when New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister moved in. Probably not when another famous occupant, former All Black Bryan Williams, lived here either.
“It was one of the worst slums in Auckland; now it’s one of the most expensive,” says the man I’ve come to see: Samoan author, poet and painter Maualaivao Albert Wendt, who liked Williams’ rugby even more than he liked Savage’s politics.
The irony isn’t lost on Wendt, of course. Once described as the angry young man of Pacific literature, he spent much of his career as a rare brown face at the elite level of academia in Aotearoa, railing against racism and the impact of colonisation. The first Pacific Islander to be appointed Professor of English at the University of Auckland, in 1987, his decision to run tutorials specifically for Pacific students was considered radical at the time.
It’s fair to say his approach wasn’t met with universal approval, but his debut novel, Sons for the Return Home — the semi-autobiographical story of a cross-racial romance between a palagi woman and a young Samoan immigrant — remains a staple text today. Published five decades ago, it was later made into a feature film. So were two of his short stories for Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree, which is set in Samoa.
Wendt may no longer be the firebrand du jour, a position now occupied by some of his former students and younger talent he’s mentored, including The Savage Coloniser’s Tusiata Avia, with her incendiary poem about James Cook. But racism and “anything to do with people being stupid deliberately” still make his blood pressure rise. “I’m now the angry old man!” he says, with a bark of laughter. “Actually, I’m no longer that angry. What middle-class society does is make us self-satisfied and accept things we should question. Comfort turns us into who we should not really be.”
Change, and the relentless passage of time, is something Wendt has been spending a lot of time contemplating lately. At 84, he’s confronting his own mortality without the comfort of faith or a belief in the afterlife, despite being raised by a staunchly religious family, and questioning the value of his legacy.
He’s proud of some of his books and poems, and only occasionally regrets refusing a knighthood, instead being awarded the Order of New Zealand (the country’s highest honour) in 2013. But the world has never sat easily on his shoulders and writing, he says, can lead to some very dark places.
“It’s the fear that there is no meaning in any of it. And as you get older, it’s more frightening because you’re getting closer to the end. Kaput! A lot of the literature in the world, it doesn’t matter which culture, is trying to answer this predicament. What do we do in the face of death?”
This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about the doubts that plague Wendt in the early hours of the morning when he can’t sleep. Our first conversations back in August 2021 had been cut short in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, after the first Delta wave sent the country back into lockdown.
A few months before, he’d been among a panel of honoured writers at the Auckland Writers Festival, alongside Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Fiona Kidman, Vincent O’Sullivan, CK Stead and Brian Turner. It was a rare public appearance for Wendt, who later told me he’d felt nervous about coming face-to-face with Stead, with whom he’s had a fractious relationship. But the two men shook hands before taking their seats on the stage.
Wendt struck a melancholy note, talking openly about his inability to write a novel or any significant work for the past two to three years, other than a few poems. “Maybe at my age now the game is coming to an end,” he said. “I don’t want it to end. There’s a question at this late stage of my life. You ask yourself, is it all worth it? Did I spend 50 years writing for nothing?”
Sitting in the audience that night, I have to confess I was shocked. At high school, my English class had studied Sons for the Return Home. In the early 90s, I’d interviewed Wendt about his new novel, Ola, the story of a Samoan woman caught between two cultures when she’s sent — as Wendt himself was as a young boy — to boarding school in New Zealand.
I still have a clipping of that story and in one of the photographs he’s holding his baby granddaughter, Isabella. She’s now an opera singer and fashion model based in London. At the time, he was struggling with the break-up of his marriage after 26 years. Re-reading the article now, I can see the black dog nipping at his heels.
In truth, crippling anxiety and waves of depression have dogged Wendt since his youth. For a man of his status and generation, he’s remarkably candid about the toll that’s taken on him. Looking back, he suspects his father struggled with depression, too, although men rarely spoke about such things in those days. “You were the toughie,” he says. “You had to show your sons, especially, how to work hard and take the pain.”
A few years ago, when the nightmares got so bad he’d wake up screaming, Wendt saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed anti-depressants. They’ve helped but it’s his longtime partner, Reina Whaitiri, who brings him back from the brink when she sees him becoming distressed.
“Reina is tremendous. She’s very straight with me, which is good. I get angry and start sweating and she says, ‘Al, just try to calm down. Stop talking about yourself. Stop thinking about yourself.’ She’s dead right. And it seems to work.”
Whaitiri (Ngāi Tahu) met Wendt when they were both teaching in the English department at the University of Auckland and they later spent four years working together at the University of Hawaii in Manoa, immersing themselves in the culture and politics there.
As far as she’s concerned, there’s no question that the lonely, isolated years he spent pushing back against the establishment left him damaged. “All the leaders of the resistance in the Pacific have ended up like Al. And here, among Māori.”
It must be hard on her, I say, to see him like that. “Well, it’s hard seeing inside his head and thinking, ‘I’m glad I don’t have to live in there.’ Eh, Al?”
‘Yes, darling,” he says.
Born in Apia, Wendt is “afakasi” (half-caste), a term he’s never liked although younger generations embrace it now. His great-grandfather came from Cambridge in the UK and was the British consul in Samoa; his grandfather was German. Having mixed heritage meant he was allowed to attend a school for the children of officials because he was considered European.
In 1952, he won a scholarship to New Zealand and ended up boarding at New Plymouth Boys’ High. When his mother, Luisa, died of cancer at the age of 35, he couldn’t go home for her tangi. He still feels her absence deeply and says much of what he’s achieved has been driven by the desire to earn her admiration and love. His father was a plumber who had five wives and 24 children, but the most influential figure in Wendt’s life was his grandmother, Mele, “the keeper of knowledge in our family”, who lived to 95.
At Victoria University, he did his master’s thesis on the Mau, Samoa’s early independence movement. By the time he graduated, he’d already begun publishing short stories and poems, and continued to write throughout his teaching career — inspiring generations of tagata talavou (young Pasifika) to find their own voice.
Tusiata Avia, whose father was among the first waves of migration from Samoa in the 1950s, remembers seeing the film of Sons for the Return Home when she was 11 or 12, then came across Wendt’s novel in the library at Canterbury University. She became so engrossed, she didn’t notice the checkout desk had closed and tossed the book off the balcony into a bush so she could keep reading. That copy is still on her bookshelf today.
Years later, she crossed paths with Wendt and Whaitiri in Hawaii, where she was on a Fulbright Fellowship and writing her collection of poetry, Blood Clot. Wendt, who gave her some robust feedback on that story, is a great admirer of Avia’s work despite (or perhaps because) she once challenged him over the sexist portrayal of some of his female characters. ”I was extremely angry at the time,”
Avia recently found a painting Wendt had given her. “I was like, oh, my God. I just adore him and I have massive respect for him. I love that he talks about real stuff. So many artists suffer from anxiety. And the struggle he had to be taken seriously as an academic at that level because he was Samoan . . . I remember him talking about the person on reception [at the University of Auckland, where he’d been appointed as Professor of English] assuming he was a tradie or the cleaner.”
Future poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh, the first Pacific Islander to graduate from the University of Auckland with a PhD in English, formed a close mentorship relationship with Wendt and followed him into academia. AUT vice-chancellor Damon Salesa (the first Pacific person to hold that position in a New Zealand university) is another former student who acknowledges Wendt’s seminal influence on his career. The first Rhodes Scholar of Pacific descent, he did his PhD at Oxford. Wendt, who was one of his referees, was the first Pacific teacher he’d ever had.
“That speaks to just how much the composition of education has changed and also just how much he was both a pioneer and a vanguard. For me, the support I received from Albert was around his strength and staunchness to be in those spaces where he was alone.”
Wendt is not only a great writer and artist but one of the Pacific’s great minds, says Salesa, who quotes some of his thinking in a new collection of essays, An Indigenous Ocean, which is due for release next month.
“Here’s someone who, within his lifetime, has lived through the decolonisation of Samoa in a formal sense, and then the decolonisation in a cultural sense, of which he was one of the leaders. I know this is something young Pacific people now deeply respond to and in some sense take for granted, but that argument had to be powerfully made. We owe a debt to the people who won it and one of them was Albert Wendt.”
On my final visit to the Michael Joseph Savage house, Wendt’s creative muse is still eluding him, but his mood is more upbeat. On the doorstep is a courier package containing a preview copy of a gorgeously illustrated hardback book, Pacific Arts Aotearoa, which features more than 120 contributors, including Wendt and an impressive number of his former students.
He and Whaitiri sit at their table, marvelling over it. When I ask Wendt what has made him most proud, the answer he gives is more an expression of gratitude — for his friends and family, for living in a country where he has been able to paint and write and be published. “Being free to think what I want to think and free to talk openly about the deepest things,” he says.
“There are certain stages in your life when you think what you’ve done is important. Well, it’s not that important to me anymore. As long as I know some people are still reading [my work] or someone is studying it, that’s a good feeling.”
- Pacific Arts Aotearoa, edited by Lana Lopesi (Penguin) is out now.
