Friday, October 19, 2012

Albert Wendt Interview - A poet in a Ponsonby garden


By Iain Sharp| Published NZ Listener on September 29, 2012 | Issue 3777

Writer Albert Wendt
Right - Albert Wendt, photo David White

Year after year, Reverend Loa’s faithful Samoan congregation drive in a convoy from Mangere across the Auckland Harbour Bridge to Long Bay for their New Year’s Day church picnic. Twenty-year-old Robo (nicknamed after the Robocop sci-fi movies he once loved) can barely endure the thought of it. “Apart from being boring, picnics are uncool and a lot of work for us, the ‘Au Talavou [Youth Group], serving our elders hand and foot and looking after the horde of little kids,” he moans. Still, Robo is a shrewd operator who has long since grasped the advantages of presenting a pious and dutiful front. As the only male child in his family, he has been singled out to go to university, even though his sisters got better grades at school. He uses the excuse of needing to devote time to his studies to wriggle out of the chores with which his siblings are lumbered.

His family believe he’s studying law, but entranced with the success story of The Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall, he has secretly switched to a business course. This year’s picnic is enlivened for him by the unexpected arrival of his cousins, the three gangsterish Makiva boys. At the risk of blowing his cover, Robo cannot resist smoking dope and hanging tough with them. The irony is that the Makiva boys, although unable to come up with any alternative to a life of crime, are sick of being social pariahs. They enjoy playing kilikiti and sharing the picnic with their relatives. Not that they are exactly welcome. Robo’s father and other elders won’t have a bar of them because of the shame they have brought to the community. An acute portrayal of the complexities of being Samoan in the 21st century that doesn’t settle for easy answers, Robocop in Long Bay is the opening story in Albert Wendt’s new collection, Ancestry. This is not the only September release by the 72-year-old Samoan author. He also has a new volume of poetry in the shops, From Manoa to a Ponsonby Garden.


In theory, Wendt now lives in quiet retirement with his long-time partner, Reina Whaitiri. In practice, he’s as busy and energetic as ever. All the poems and all but one of the stories were written since his return to New Zealand in 2008 after teaching for four years at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His two new publications follow hard on the heels of Mauri Ola, a hefty anthology of Polynesian poetry he compiled with Whaitiri and friend Robert Sullivan. Another novel – his seventh – is nearing completion and should appear next year. Besides all this literary activity, the walls of his Ponsonby home are lined with recent paintings he has done, many of them in response to the 2009 tsunami that devastated Samoa. Some incorporate direct quotes from interviews with survivors conducted by his niece Lani Wendt-Young. “The Robocop story is a bit unusual in being about a street gang,” Wendt points out. “What I’ve chiefly wanted to explore in my new stories is the successful middle class, both Samoan and European. In spite of all the years I’ve been involved in university work, I hadn’t written much before about academics and professional people.”

Read the full story/interview at NZ Listener

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