A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Although all Pacific archipelagic countries have been colonized, none has
experienced such a vast and varied influx of indentured laborers and other immigrants as
Hawai’i, which can account for the fact that the similarities and affinities with Caribbean
culture are more apparent than those with other Polynesian cultures. Nevertheless, all
Oceania has had to deal with the pressures of foreign influence, such as missionaries,
traders, planters, colonial government officials, tourists, and the Indian indentured labor
force, the girmit, in Fiji. Various factors determined whether and which indigenous
languages and cultural practices were upheld, condemned, or neglected. As in most
postcolonial regions of the world, (higher) education was a central colonizing agent at
first, but has subsequently become an avenue for cultural renewal and for the emergence
of regional or national literatures. All Polynesian cultures had been oral societies of kin-
based subsistence farming communities. All of them experienced colonization and
Christianization, and the introduction of writing and the English language only in the 19 th
century. After World War II, school and college magazines became an outlet for the first
indigenous attempts at poetry, essay and short story writing in English, and with the
establishment of the University of Papua New Guinea in 1966 and the Fiji-based
University of the South Pacific in 1968, a regional intelligentsia emerged, often merging
with the governing or political elites, much like writer-politicians as Aimé Césaire of
Martinique. Subramani describes these writers as occupying positions between the rural
and the urban:
They owe their independence to education. Their education in the imperial culture
and values and their multi-cultural, in some cases multi-ethnic, backgrounds make
them atypical and marginal like writers and artists elsewhere. The effective access
they have to multiple cultures provides them with levels of perception that are
often not available to mono-cultural writers. 146
The region’s most prominent author is German-Samoan Albert Wendt, who had already
published some early writings in New Zealand in the 1960s, before he came back to
Samoa to teach at USP. 147 He was the first to formulate the idea of a new cultural
consciousness and a common regional direction in his 1976 essay “Towards a New
Oceania.” Its objectives were to free the islands from their Western tutelage and to assert
146 Subramani 1992: 19.
147 As of today, he is professor of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
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