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| Series: BWB Texts
In this BWB Text, Manualaivao Albert Wendt offers his readers a short but tantalising tour of his early life – and the influences that shaped him as a novelist and poet. The context and contours, the sights and sounds, the myths and memories of his Samoan upbringing, in the swampy Vaipe of Apia’s back
In this BWB Text, Manualaivao Albert Wendt offers his readers a short but tantalising tour of his early life – and the influences that shaped him as a novelist and poet. The context and contours, the sights and sounds, the myths and memories of his Samoan upbringing, in the swampy Vaipe of Apia’s backstreets, are conjured with grace and charm to impart a rare and affecting intimacy; the dislocations and cultural culs-de-sac of his arrival at a New Zealand provincial boarding school in the 1950s are by turns poignant and arresting.
But there is guile and the story-teller’s art at work, too, as Wendt himself offers: ‘… we are what we remember or want to remember, the rope that stretches across the abyss of all that we’ve forgotten’. In this memoirist’s hands, the effect, compelling in its insights and vulnerability, and deceptively plain in the manner of its telling, enthrals.
It is the story of Wendt embracing his Samoan roots and customs and, equally, his engagement with a colonising culture’s education system, one that would, nonetheless, burnish his writer’s skills. It is also a fond and frank portrait of the artist as a boy – and as a reflective elder literary statesman. Albert Wendt’s career and published work traverse both the geography and the imaginative soul of the Pacific: he has taught in Samoa, Hawai‘i and New Zealand, recently retiring as Professor of English at Auckland University; his novels include Leaves of the Banyan Tree, Ola, The Mango’s Kiss, The Adventures of Vela and Sons for the Return Home. He is also a widely published poet and short story writer. In advance of a major new novel, Breaking Connections (to be published in November by Huia), this original and revealing Text is a rich addition to the BWB catalogue, a generous and irresistible meditation on writing and belonging.
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