by Albert Wendt
Maualaivao Albert Wendt
Albert Wendt is one of New Zealand’s and the Pacific’s foremost writers, and he has been an influential figure since the 1970s in the development of New Zealand and Pacific literature. He has published numerous novels and collections of poetry and short stories, and he has edited several notable anthologies of Pacific writing. His work has been translated into many languages and is taught around the world.
He has been awarded many literary prizes, the most recent being the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the South East Asia and Pacific Region for his novel The Adventures of Vela and the 2012 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction. His many honours include the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit 2001, the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture 2004, and, in 2013, New Zealand’s highest honour, the Order of New Zealand, which is held by only twenty people at any one time.
In 2012, the Aiga Sā-Maualaivao of Malie conferred on him their highest ali‘i title, Maualaivao, in a ceremony in Samoa. He is also a member of the Aiga Sā-Su‘a of Lefaga, the Aiga Sā-Patu and Aiga Sā-Asi of Vaiala and Moata‘a.
Albert Wendt is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland, and lives with his partner, Reina Whaitiri, in Ponsonby, Auckland, where he continues to write and paint full-time. Together they have twelve mokopuna and a cat called Mānoa.
Also by Albert Wendt
Novels
Sons for the Return Home
Pouliuli
Leaves of the Banyan Tree
Ola
Black Rainbow
The Mango’s Kiss
The Adventures of Vela
Short Stories
Flying-fox in a Freedom Tree and Other Stories
The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man and Other Stories
The Best of Albert Wendt’s Short Stories
Ancestry
Poetry
Inside Us the Dead: Poems 1961–1974
Shaman of Visions
Photographs
The Book of the Black Star
Au fond de nous les mort – translated into French by Jean-Pierre Durix
From Mānoa to a Ponsonby Garden
Plays
The Songmaker’s Chair
Edited
Lali: A Pacific Anthology
Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980
Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Robert Sullivan and Reina Whaitiri
Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Reina Waitiri and Robert Sullivan
Autobiography
Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater
a novel
by
Albert Wendt
First published in 2015 by Huia Publishers
39 Pipitea Street, PO Box 12280
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
www.huia.co.nz
ISBN 978-1-77550-210-4
ISBN 978-1-77550-266-1 (mobi)
ISBN 978-1-77550-267-8 (epub)
Copyright © Albert Wendt 2015
Front cover image: © odor zsolt/Shutterstock
Back cover image: © FabrikaSimf/Shutterstock
Photograph of Albert Wendt © Fairfax NZ
On page 97, Te Rauparaha and the haka ‘Ka Mate’ are described. Te Rauparaha was a chief of Ngāti Toa Rangatira, and the composer of the haka ‘Ka Mate’.
This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the prior permission of the publisher.
Printed in China by Everbest Printing Co Ltd
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
Published with the assistance of
In memory of Max and Joseph, my beloved brothers
1
Surrounded by the Ko‘olau mountains, the Mānoa Valley is shaped like a gigantic footprint into which the dawn is now spilling, and, as the sun rises over the mountains to Daniel’s right and its spreading mellow light emphasises the massive heads and shoulders of the mountains, and the chilly cool of the dew on the vegetation prickles his skin, it’s his forty-seventh birthday, and he is alone for the first time of any of his birthdays but he doesn’t feel the need for company, for people he is familiar with, feels safe with; no, inexplicably though he is thousands of miles and memories away from ‘home’, he feels self-contained, complete, without a beginning or an end, just here, on the narrow front lānai of his apartment, two storeys up, in a sweat-stained canvas chair he bought at the Salvation Army store for $3, mug of hot coffee in his right hand, letting the sunrise slide down over the forested foothills and slopes and across the valley floor now covered with expensive homes and apartments into his eyes and head and, with its illuminating warmth, helping him finish the poem he has been writing over the past few weeks about these mountains and this valley:
… 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 …
The akua have been generous in helping him find this poem, anchoring him to this new location, this time, and this sunrise into the future and, he hopes, more lucid readings of who he is and where he has come from.
He is where, a few years ago, he never intended to be, but he is not afraid any more; well, not now, not today, as the refreshing breeze that is following the spreading light curls around his bare chest and arms, reassuring him that he is safe with himself, by himself, in the healing presences of these mountains and akua and the Kanaka Maoli who gave language to the air he is breathing: air scented with the fecund mud of the stream that flows through the valley and behind his apartment.
The sun continues rising, its inventive lifting starting in his belly and surging up his moa into his lungs and heart and up through his astounded gullet into his questing mouth. Soon he will release it full-bodied up into the sky, free of the range’s grip.
It’s been almost two years since he shifted from Aotearoa/New Zealand to Hawai‘i and this valley.
2
He is lying on his back in bed. Everything is phosphorescent white: even the pile of pillows at the bottom of the bed behind which the woman, in white silk pajamas, is standing. Again the fear is churning in his belly; he can see his naked stomach rippling with it, and he wants it all to be a dream as he gazes up into the woman’s slim face, into her unmoving blue-green eyes, which are as frighteningly deep as the Pacific, and then from her face down to her right shoulder and down her arm to her hand that is pointing down at him, with a black pistol gripped in her long-fingers. On each finger, glittering, are rings he recognises. He tries swallowing back the liquid fear that has surged up from his stomach, while he turns onto his side, his body curling into a foetus position, his arms wrapped around his head protecting it from the shots he knows she is going to fire. It’s a dream, he keeps hoping, a dream. He isn’t going to die! And he still refuses to recognise the woman. No, it can’t be her! No. But when he peers through his arms, he knows it is, and she is now smiling that incandescent loving smile she used to give him in the mornings of their early life together. Yes, Laura … Please! Please! With both hands, he reaches up for the gun, and screams into her
smile as her finger pulls once, twice, three times. Thud, thud, thud! Sharp, metallic, calculated, unforgiving … And as usual he hears his own jagged screaming and he observes himself waking to his trembling body and bed drenched with sweat, and for a long while he just lies there staring into the darkness, struggling to calm his bundle of fears, regrets, guilt and remorse, as the wet sheets turn cold around his body.
This dream has recurred once a week, usually during the early hours of Friday morning, since he left New Zealand and shifted in to Mānoa. Why Fridays? He has pondered that endless times, and though that pondering comes with excrutiating remorse, he persists, welcoming the detailed pain as deserved punishment for what he has done to Laura.
They married on a wet and cold Friday afternoon in the registry office, with Paul as their best man and witness – he can’t recall why the rest of their ‘tribe’ and his father weren’t at that miserable ceremony. Their daughter Cheryl had been born on Friday at dawn, after a long, agonising process, during which a desperate Laura had kept shouting, ‘It’s turning me inside out!’ His mother, since the day he first understood what she was saying to him, ruled that Fridays should be banned because she detested fish and chips, his dad’s and most kiwis’ favourite Friday night takeaways. Most accusing and undeniable of all is the truth that he slapped Laura for the first time – and he’ll never forget the sharp echoing sound and feel of that unforgivable slap – after they got home from a drunken Friday night party and she again accused him of trying to make it with another woman. And so, as always, he continues to punish himself pondering the significance of Friday.
He is refusing to accept that one of the reasons he agreed to accept the writer’s fellowship in Hawai‘i was to try and escape this dream, and the killing break-up of his marriage. True, it is a recurring dream, but each time it happens it is a new and frightening tide that envelopes him and he has to struggle, like a drowning swimmer, to surface from it, and, through his relieved mouth, suck in the lung-reviving breath of life, again. At least he now has a routine to cope with its after-effects.
You’re alone, you’ve been alone for almost two years. If you suffer any serious illness there is no one here in your apartment to help you. And this dream, this execution, you’ve coped with all that time, so get out of bed, carefully. Left leg out first; plant it on the floor. Then your other leg. Stand up straight, steady your shaking. Okay? Now left foot forward, then your right; good. Repeat that. You’re doing fine. Open the bathroom door. Right, now turn on the cold tap. Keep your head up; you don’t want the nausea to start again. Good. Now cup your hands and fill them with cold water. Now dash the cold water against your face. Repeat it, and again. Good. Very good. Now turn, strip off your ‘ie lavalava, drop it into the wash basket. Towel? Got it? Now dry your body with it … Yes, isn’t it sweet to be alive; to have overcome your weekly death? So sweet, you can taste it in your saliva. And once again it reconfirms Aaron’s claim, when he was recovering in hospital from his first violent ‘accident’, that living at the edge along the precarious line between dying and living makes you acutely aware of the addictive sweetness of being alive.
3
If it isn’t raining heavily, he walks to and from work; he’s been doing it for almost all the time he’s been in Honolulu at the University of Hawai‘i. Because of his high cholesterol and blood pressure his doctor has recommended that he exercise regularly – a brisk thirty-minute walk or jog each day would be ideal. He also enjoys the route down Woodlawn Drive, then across the sports field of Noelani Elementary School, round the back streets and through Saint Francis School and the Newman Center and into the campus. The route is lushly rich in fruit and flowering trees and plants and their aromas – mangos, avocados, bananas, vi, papaya, ginger and frangipani. Most fascinating for him is the inescapable presence of the Ko‘olau Range. If he is walking away from the Ko‘olau, he sometimes plays games with it, unexpectedly looking back over his shoulder and catching it observing him – yah, gotcha! – and smiling to himself, knowing it is always going to be there. Most fascinating though is his return, his walking up towards the range, and watching the light and clouds and shadows changing constantly on the mountains. When the range is still blazing with light, he feels it is disappearing into the heavens, and he has to look at his arms and reaffirm he isn’t disappearing with it. When swift winds are driving large clouds across it, outracing their immense shadows, which swim in and out of the ravines and valleys on its slopes, he races with them, letting his heart and belly sing with the speed.
Once – and the memory of it still awes and frightens him – he stopped in the middle of the Noelani School field as evening was happening, his feet deep in the dry grass, and had gazed up at the Ko‘olau. With mounting fear, he had watched the last rays of the setting sun contracting into one quickly reducing sliver of brilliant light, which, as it slid and slipped across the massive contours of the mountains, as if someone was pulling it towards the west, looked as if it was never returning. That night, he tried recording the experience in a poem, and managed only one worthwhile line: The light is pulling out.
The back of his aloha shirt and armpits are soaking wet by the time he reaches his office, and he doesn’t have the time to let his air conditioning cool him and dry off the sweat. His first class that day – 303: Writing of Poetry – is five minutes away, and, as usual, that tight dry starting-to-churn-up feeling of anxiety is again at the dead centre of his stomach. Though he has been teaching American students since he arrived at the University of Hawai‘i, and finds most of them – especially the Asians and Hawaiians – welcoming, considerate and respectful, he still considers himself ignorant of their ways, finding even the ways they speak difficult to understand.
As he hurries down the corridor, he recalls that when, during his first year as a lecturer at Auckland University, he first told his mother about his dread, she laughed and repeated her core philosophy: ‘Daniel, you in the lion’s den; get out of it. Just act; be an actor like Marlon Brando. That’s what they want, a performance like On the Waterfront! All through my schooling, I wanted for to see acting, but my bloody ignorant Hamo teachers were not John Wayne or Bogart’. Another time, when she caught him spewing in the toilet before his lecture, she said ‘Hey, Daniel-in-the lion’s den, why you sick with worry? They only bloody Palagi. You, beloved, you the brown Brando. Yes, you be like me: act through your life, act, act, act; that’s the only way you going to get somewhere.’
Just before he turns the handle of the door into the lecture room, the tight ball of stress in his stomach begins easing away. His mother had certainly been the most accomplished, unrelenting and devious actor he’d ever known. It isn’t lying, no, she insisted when his father discovered in her payslip from her first job at the hospital laundry that her name was now Emerald Malaetau. She repeated that denial when he later accused her of conning her way into a secretarial job in the Social Welfare Department under the name Janine Elizabeth Wiley. Then later, when he was at university studying Shakespeare and she persisted in walking round him, while he was trying to analyse Macbeth, reciting Lady Macbeth’s lines and claiming that she’d first read the work of Bill – as she always referred to Shakespeare – in Samoan in her village, and, exasperated, he accused her of lying about that. She’d continued repeating the denial whenever he or anyone else, including the police, had accused her of lying. Even if you’re caught red-handed, never admit that you’re guilty. Why? Because the so-called ‘truth’ comes in many forms and guises. Isn’t that what Albert Einstein meant in his theory of relativity? After Albert, her favourite philosopher, every thing was relative, depending on your individual perspective and viewpoint. ‘What about agasala, sin? You know, doing wrong?’ his father insisted. After Albert, there was no such vicious creature, she argued, only illness, and lack of certain chemicals in the brain. ‘Where you learn all that lapisi from?’ he countered. ‘Look around you’, she pointed out; ‘look at all your extremely poko
and brainy son’s books. Go into his computer and up into the space, into the internet. Listen to his very clever talking, to him and his godless and intellect-whatever-that-word-is friends! And go to the movies, Lemu, then you no longer be slow but become fast in your brain and learn as fast as the computer in 2001 Space Something-or-Other.
He doesn’t look at his students as he walks self-consciously across the room in front of the blackboard, feeling their heavy scrutiny, places his folio of lecture notes and a copy of their only class text on the desk, stands with head bowed, hands gripping the front corners of the moveable lectern for a deeply silent moment, and then, letting his shoulders sag as if he is now ready to relax and get into it, gazes up and into the expanse that is filled with their curiosity and expectations of who he is and what he is like, this Samoan/Polynesian professor from New Zealand, a country they know little about and care even less about. With his mother’s absolutely winning Joan Crawford smile, he extends his arms in the manner of Miss Baystall when she’d first welcomed them to school, and, in Brando’s voice as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, says, ‘Aloha, talofa, hi!’ He feels them lift instantly. ‘As I’ve said before, it is wonderful to be in a class in which most of you look like me … Apart from the fact we’re all handsome, most of us have one other thing in common.’ He waits, and they are dying for it. ‘We are all permanently suntanned!’
His dread has vanished; gone without him observing it, worrying about it. He has them, in the cool of his acting. Like his mother always said, it’s all acting; give them your best Brando performance.
It is going to be another good day in Paradise, he feels.
4
Will you ever enjoy travelling, or, at least be free of stress and worry and fear, as you do it? You’ve done a lot of it, attending meetings, giving lectures, papers and readings all around the world. You’ve also lived for varying lengths of time in countries such as Samoa, where your parents took you for three of your long Christmas holidays and where, on your MA graduation, you took Laura for her first visit, and where, after you completed your doctorate, you lived with your father and stepmother and taught at Samoa College for a year. Later you took Laura on your first sabbatical, and you rented a spacious house on the slopes of Mount Vaea and completed your first novel, The Final Return. After your two children were born, you took them to Samoa for holidays and hoped they’d connect with their relatives and being Samoan. And you went to Fiji, where the University of the South Pacific offered you a writer’s residency; you took your family there and spent three unbelievably productive years writing your second novel, Pogisā, and your first collection of poetry, Inside Us the Light, and left reluctantly in 1987 after the two military coups. After all that travelling and having to adjust to other countries and cultures, have you grown adept and used to doing it? For instance, how have you found your shift to Hawai‘i (and America) and your attempts to settle into it?