Albert Wendt is of the āiga Sa-Maualaivao of Malie, the āiga Sa-Su‘ā of Lefaga, the āiga Sa-Malietoā of Sapapaali‘i, and the āiga Sa-Pātū and Sa-Asī of Vaiala and Moata‘a, Sāmoa. Novelist, poet, short-story writer, playwright and academic, he has been an influential figure in the developments that have shaped New Zealand and Pacific literature since the 1970s. He is the author of seven novels, four books of short stories, four collections of poetry, three plays, a history of the early years of the Mau movement in Sāmoa, seminal essays and articles on Pacific writing and art, and the editor of four major anthologies of Pacific writing. His work has been translated into many languages and is taught around the world. He is now emeritus professor at the University of Auckland. He and his partner, Reina Whaitiri, have eight mokopuna.
Since we moved into Mānoa I’ve not wanted to escape
the Ko‘olau at the head of the valley
They rise as high as atua as profound as their bodies
They’ve been here since Pele fished these fecund islands
out of Her fire and gifted them the songs
of birth and lamentation
Every day I stand on our front veranda
and on acid-free paper try and catch their constant changing
as the sun tattoos its face across their backs
Some mornings they turn into tongue-
less mist my pencil can’t voice or map
Some afternoons they swallow the dark rain
and dare me to record that on the page
What happens to them on a still and cloudless day?
Will I be able to sight Pele Who made them?
If I reach up into the sky’s head will I be able
to pull out the Ko‘olau’s incendiary genealogy?
At night when I’m not alert they grow long limbs
and crawl down the slopes of my dreams and out
over the front veranda to the frightened stars
Yesterday Noel our neighbour’s nine-
year-old son came for the third day
and watched me drawing the Ko‘olau
Don’t you get bored doing that? he asked
Not if your life depended on it! I replied
And realised I meant it
There are other mountains in my life:
Vaea who turned to weeping stone as he waited
for his beloved Apaula to return and who now props
up the fading legend of Stevenson to his ‘wide and starry sky’
and reality-TV tourists hunting for treasure islands
Mauga-o-Fetu near the Fafā at Tufutafoe
at the end of the world where meticulous priests gathered
to unravel sunsets and the flights of stars that determine
our paths to Pulotu or into the unexplored
geography of the agaga
Taranaki Who witnessed Te Whiti’s fearless stand at Parihaka
against the settlers’ avaricious laws and guns
Who watched them being evicted and driven eventually
from their succulent lands but not from the defiant struggle
their descendants continue today forever until victory
The Ko‘olau watched the first people settle in the valley
The Kanaka Maoli planted their ancestor the Kalo
in the mud of the stream and swamps
and later in the terraced lo‘i they constructed
Their ancestor fed on the valley’s black blood
They fed on the ancestor
and flourished for generations
Recently their heiau on the western slopes was restored
The restorers tried to trace the peoples’ descendants in the valley
They found none to bless the heiau’s re-opening
On a Saturday morning as immaculate as Pele’s mana
we stood in the heiau in their welcoming presence that stretched
across the valley and up into their mountains
where their kapa-wrapped bones are hidden
The Ko‘olau has seen it all
I too will go eventually
with my mountains wrapped up
in acid-free drawings that sing
of these glorious mountains
and the first Kanaka Maoli who named
and loved them forever
I walk in her wake almost every morning and afternoon
along the Mānoa Valley
from home and back after work
In her slipstream shielded from the wind and the future
I walk in her perfume that changes from day to day
in the mornings with our backs to the Ko‘olau
in the afternoons heading into the last light as it slithers
across the range into the west
She struts at a pace my bad left knee
and inclination won’t allow me to keep up with
And when I complain she says You just hate a woman
walking ahead of you
No I hate talking to the back of your head
I’m the Atua of Thunder she reminds me
when my pretensions as a Sāmoan aristocrat get out of hand
So kill my enemies for me I demand
Okay I’ll send storms and lightning
to drown and cinderise them
Do it now I beg
I can’t I’ve got too much breeding to act like that
(How do you cure contradictions like hers?)
She loves Bob Dylan the Prophet of Bourgeois Doom
And this morning I swam in his lyrics as she marched ahead singing:
Sweet Melinda the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
And she invites you up into her room
And you’re so kind
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she steals your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon …
Yes for over a year I’ve cruised in her perfumed slipstream
utterly protected from threats
She’ll take the first shot or hit in an ambush
And if a car or bike runs headlong into us
my Atua of Thunder with the aristocratic breeding
will sacrifice her body to save me
By the way she nearly always wears her favourite red sandals
as she like Star Trek forges boldly ahead singing Dylan songs
and me wanting to howl at the Hawaiian moon
Nearly always she remembers her dreams vividly
At breakfast this morning she recalled how she was flying
through a noiseless storm across the Straits for Ruapuke and her father
who was sitting on his grave in their whānau urupā wearing a cloak of raindrops
and she looked down and back at her paddling feet
and saw she wasn’t wearing her favourite red sandals
She stopped in mid-flight in mid-storm and called Alapati get me my saviours!
Woke and didn’t understand why she’d called them that
It’s been about thirteen years and that makes you the man
I’ve stayed the longest with she declared unexpectedly
as we cleared the breakfast dishes
To her such declarations are so obvious and like raindrops
you can flick easily off a duck’s back
but for me it will stay a nit burrowing permanently into my skin
I won’t understand why
If I tell her that she’ll probably say You love guilt too much
You read too much into things and need someone to blame
So shall I blame her for staying thirteen years and plus?
For not wearing her saviours and reaching her dead father
who would have taken off his fabulous cloak of rain and draped it around her?
Shall I blame her for not having met me when we were young
and we could have been together much longer?
Or shall I as usual just let it pass
content that I am blessed to be with her
and in her dreams one day she and I will fly together
through the voiceless storm to Ruapuke and her waiting father?
She will be wearing her saviours
and we will arrive safely
We’re home Hone after four years in Hawai‘i
but the winter cold is driving out the delicious warmth
of those islands from my bones
La‘u uō our lifelong addiction has been to gambling
not with money but with words and though our winnings have been sparse
we’ve kept on playing
That’s probably why I thought of you when Reina and I were in Las Vegas
for the first time a few weeks back
and I recalled your winter pilgrimage many years ago with your son down
from the Head of Māui’s Ika to Wanganui and up to Jerusalem
to farewell ‘a tired old mate in a tent
laid out in a box
with no money in the pocket
no fancy halo, no thump left in the old
ticker’
Our trip though was not to a mate’s tangi
but simply to visit a cousin and meet the Beast that is Vegas
At Honolulu Airport beloved friends wished us well
and sent us on our way with their aloha
In summer America is cocooned in air-conditioning
so when we unpacked like blind sardines out of the air-conditioned plane
and the Vegas airport terminal into the morning the desert heat was
like raw buffalo hide tightening around us as it dried
and we blinked into thick bone-white air that smelled of dead fires and ash
Why had I expected Vegas to smell new and crisp?
And I remembered we agreed all our journeys are about other journeys
and through intricate layers of maps
Not just geographical/political/historical maps but those of
the moa and heart dream maps cinematic and literary maps
maps of pain and suffering arrogance and deliberate erasures
maps which are the total of our cultural baggage
and in which we are imprisoned
and through which we read our elusive reflections
This trip wasn’t any different
The luscious persuasive blonde at the Avis counter offered us
a GPS system and we took it – we’d not used one before
Out of all the maps I’d inherited of Vegas I’d come to imagine
it a supersized civilisation created by a movie special effects genius
hired by hip gangsters or conjured up by a gambler prophet hallucinating wildly
after fasting forty days and nights in the desert wilderness
But as our GPS with the Maureen O’Hara voice piloted us
through gigantic rows of Casino and hotel billboards with gorgeous
Colgate smiles inviting us to dance forever with chance
through supersized developments of new homes they couldn’t sell –
the bottom had fallen out of the housing market –
through oases of grubby pawnshops and other businesses that picked
at the desperate bones of addicts
the hip maps began to vanish
When we checked into our Holiday Inn well away from the Strip
we were told our room wouldn’t be ready until mid-afternoon
so in the blistering heat we went looking for food and found Sunset Station
and walked into all the clichés about Vegas casinos: cavernous palaces of perpetual
air-conditioned night without time peopled by exacting machines into
which mesmerised worshippers fed their adoration
gaming tables surrounded by narrow-eyed players totally in the zone
of the spinning wheel or the flip of the card and the throw of the dice
The huge craziness of it was enthralling
Later as we sampled the Strip’s mega megaresorts
with names straight out of Hollywood and the dream of gigantism
The Mirage
Wynn Las Vegas
The Sands
Treasure Island
The Golden Nugget
The Luxor
The MGM Grand
Caesar’s Palace
The Venetian
I recognised the Beast was indeed a creature
as magnificent as the Sphinx and the pyramids born out
of the Pharaohs’ addiction to immortality
But this Beast was feeding off the insatiable American Dream
of limitless credit choice and size
one press of the button one spin of the wheel one throw of the dice
and you’re out of the desert forever
Every night the porcelain moon over the city wore the Joker’s cynical face
but a rescuing Batman wasn’t anywhere in sight
as our cousin showed us how to play the machines
He played as if he was playing the piano and we tried to copy him
as we slotted in our money and lost and lost but I didn’t care
because I kept hoping for that buzz that radiates through
my veins when I’m gambling with words that shape
fabulous beasts out of the deserts of ourselves
But auē Hone the buzz never came
and I found gambling for money sadly sadly boring
Definitely not my choice of addiction
The tangata whenua have been written out of Vegas’ history
On our last night as we and our cousin and other relatives gorged
on a lush buffet at a Japanese restaurant they told us of Hawaiian friends
who’d just walked off a building site because three of their mates
had been killed there in terrible accidents
When they’d started bulldozing the site one of the Hawaiians a kahuna
had sensed the enormous disquiet of the spirits of the tangata whenua
who he believed were buried there
and had asked their white bosses to stop the project
and let him perform the rituals of appeasement and cleansing
They’d refused and within three days their friends were dead
The next morning in light as brittle as salt Reina my beloved tautai
drove us out of Vegas and we headed for the Grand Canyon and Santa Fe
in the arid heart of America
But that’s another story Hone for another winter day
in memory of Epeli Hau‘ofa
In Kyoto many years ago I discovered there are no shadows in traditional Japanese paintings
In this midday light the bare rotary clothesline in our backyard can’t cast a shadow
Our house was rented out for four years and in July we returned from Hawai‘i to winter
and an overgrown backyard hedge garden lawn and wet clayey soil that stank
In front of the lanai someone had planted a small patch of strawberries
Locked in the suffocating shadows of the border trees my mandarin tree was dying
With gifted hands and devotion Reina pruned weeded and planted
Now the new garden is thriving in the summer wet and heat
and honeybees hum as they feed on the nectar of the rainbow flowers
as if this lush growing and harvest will last forever
My daughter Mele emailed this morning to say Epeli had died in Suva
Last year he and Ngũgĩ and I were to give a joint reading in Honolulu
He couldn’t make it because he had to come to Auckland for cancer treatment
Amuia le masina e alu ma toe sau …
for Caleb Alualu
Every time Caleb our 8-year-old mokopuna stays with us
he tries to win Manoa’s affection but she won’t have any of it
For the last two days his father has pruned and cut down some of
our overgrown trees while three teenage mokopuna and I piled up
the cut trunks branches and foliage into large mazes Manoa explored
oblivious to the pungent smell of drying timber and leaves
and Caleb’s desperate attempts to befriend her
My daughter Sina came for morning tea on the lanai: coffee crispies
and fruit mince pies while Caleb tracked the heartless Manoa through the mazes
The sun hid behind a mattress of milk-white cloud that stretched over
the city and up to Waitakere and refused to help Caleb
Reina keeps telling him the next time he comes Manoa won’t spurn
his alofa: cats are cats and you just have to wait for them to trust you
Unlike humans they’re very honest about their feelings
in memory of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell
While we were having breakfast this morning National Radio
announced that Alistair had died after a long illness
We visited him last year in his house which is perched above Pukerua Bay
defying the storms as it gazes out at Kapiti – Te Rauparaha’s fortress now bird
sanctuary which Alistair loved and turned into the haunting songs of ‘Sanctuary of Spirits’
Meg had died a few months before so he was still in mourning
moving gingerly round his house as if even the air was hurting
He made us tea and wanted to know about the years we’d spent in Hawai‘i
He reciprocated by telling us about Meg’s death and how he missed her
Later he took us into his study and gave us copies of his collections
to select from for our anthology Mauri Ola
As we were leaving he led us into the fierce wind and his garden at the edge
of the precipice and pulled out three young aloe vera plants for us to take home
Today despite the winter those plants thrive in our garden
