ABSTRACT
Wendt’s subsequent novels and most of his poetry develop the themes of displacement and identity established in Sons, though there is a diversity of genre and style (including languages) in Wendt’s work: from timeless fables, through Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), which incorporates much of what
had gone before in a trilogy involving several generations of change in a Samoan family in and away from the village of Sapepe and, finally, Ola (1991), a more experimental postmodernist novel that takes hitherto primarily Samoan themes beyond the Pacific into a global realm. For all the changes in style and genre, Wendt has remained focused on the past and its diverse and intangible heritage. That past primarily concerns pouliuli (the time of darkness) and the changing role of fa ‘a Samoa (the Samoan culture and way of life) as Samoa became influenced by European intrusions, and later by extensive migration to and from New Zealand. These themes are combined in ‘a single oeuvre whose author is progressively mapping a fictional Samoa, rather as one of his acknowledged masters, William Faulkner, constructed his elaborate survey of Yoknapatawha county’3 to demarcate changes and continuities in social organisation, history and landscape. For Wendt, ‘Novels present the most complex histories that have been written.’4 At the core of all Wendt’s work are questions of identity and meaning, the diffusion and debasement of culture, the quest for modernity-in its various guises-and the changes in village institutions; neither culture nor village life are timeless. Migration emphasises change, yet change occurs without migration; very little is as it seems.
