Why Albert Wendt Deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature

Scott Hamilton

Last summer the Guardian published a list of the hundred best novels of all time. There was not a single book from Oceania on the list. To combat the ongoing neglect of our region's writing we need to nominate one of our great writers for a Nobel, and campaign for that writer.

Of course, literature is not a sport, and all lists of best books and prizes have to be taken with a grain of salt. But the Nobel gets a lot of attention, and nominating and campaigning for a writer can raise awareness and change perceptions. Abert Wendt deserves to be nominated for the Prize—and to win.

I'm not suggesting that he's the only writer from our region that is worthy of a Nobel. But the range of genres he has worked in, the quality of his work, the rarity and intensity of his vision, and his relationship to Europe as well as Oceania makes him outstanding.

Wendt has produced poetry, short stories, novels, novellas, essays, historical studies, fiction for children, and uncategorisable books that mix text and image. Over the decades he has done for Upolu and Savai'i what Joyce did for Dublin and Faulkner did for Mississippi.

Decolonisation is one of the great themes of twentieth century history and literature, and Wendt treats it with the same complexity as Rushdie or Soyinka. He exposes colonial myths, but also provides an unparalleled picture of contradiction and conflict in a newly independent society.

But Wendt's writing does not just have an historical and sociological richness—it deals with the personal and existential with an intensity reminiscent of Kafka and Camus. Very few writers have been able to work so effectively at both a large and small scale.

At a time when xenophobic nationalism is ascendant, Wendt's work affirms the truth of Futa Helu's maxim that the ocean of humanity is fed by the rivers of many cultures. His writing is a triumph of eclecticism, bringing influences from Oceania, Europe, Africa, and more.

Albert Camus and other French existentialists helped inspire Wendt to write, and his novella Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree could be taught alongside Camus' The Outsider and Sartre's Nausea as an existentialist masterpiece.

Estranged from both his Samoan heritage and from the avarice of palagi colonisers, the anti-hero of Flying Fox improvises his own identity, politics, and religion, and makes his own stand against the world. Wendt's existentialism collides with Polynesian collectivism in Pouliuli.

The hero of the book is a Pacific Lear, a matai who is suddenly sickened by the village he dominates and decides to give up power. Feigning madness, he carefully observes life in the power vacuum he has created, and sees how the masks of family members and friends fall.

Wendt's short stories show his mastery of almost all the modes of the genre. 'The Life and Death of the Miracle Man' is an eerie Polynesian echo of Gogol's 'Diary of a Madman', while 'I Will Be Our Saviour From the Bad Smell' begins realistically and becomes a postmodern extravaganza.

Wendt's poems use the formal innovations of modernism and postmodernism, but are imbued with a post-religious spirituality that is largely absent from contemporary Western literature. What Western poet would dare a title like Shaman of Visions?

In his non-fiction Wendt has plotted a path for Oceania and its creatives that is fiercely idiosyncratic. He is alert to the presence of colonialism in Oceania, but rejects the bourgeois nationalism and Christianity that dominate the rhetoric of Pacific politicians.

The Nobel rules state that a nomination must come from the head of a university literature department, or from the head of a national organisation of writers. We should lobby the heads of English departments in Aotearoa to put Wendt's name forward, and also try to get nominations from outside Oceania.

The case of Gerald Murnane shows how a nomination for the Nobel can change perspectives. Murnane is a brilliant but demanding Australian writer and a near-recluse. He's been repeatedly nominated by supporters in Sweden, which has raised awareness of his work and of Australian avant-garde literature.

A nomination for Wendt would be an opportunity for supporters to promote and celebrate his oeuvre, & also to remind the world of the other remarkable literature that our region has produced.

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