A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Subramani discloses how the modern visitor is a subtle (and unsubtle) legatee of
an invented Pacific – invented by post-lapsarian man questing his holistic self in
the uncharted antipodes. 153
Mishra identifies the outsiders’ discourse correctly as “oceanism, an offshoot of the
broader falsifying discourse of orientalism.” 154 South Sea writers of this brand include
Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Warren Stoddard, Somerset
Maugham, and James Michener, all of whom one also encounters when dealing with
outsiders’ views of Hawai’i. In addition, explorers such as Cook and Bougainville, artists
like Paul Gauguin, and anthropologists like Margaret Mead have shaped the world’s
skewed image of the South Pacific, and the tourist industry draws heavily on the myths
they helped create.
The task for postcolonial writers, especially poets, is “finding authentic voices,” 155
voices which are essentially their own. The inherent problem in their quest is that there
can be no return to an alleged untainted authenticity, a pre-contact purity. Culture is
dynamic, and intercultural contact has taken place at all times. Acknowledging the havoc
that colonialism has wrought on various societies around the world need not entail an
automatic rejection of all the changes that have affected indigenous and migrants’ lives.
Cultural evolution is a historically conditioned process. Viewed from this perspective,
“there are aspects of colonial education which strongly favour literature, such as its strong
literary bias, and the access that it provides to English literature and Western intellectual
tradition. The most important writers in the region are products of colonial education.” 156
To return to Albert Wendt, his novels can be labeled epic, historiographic, and
ironic. He works with elements of the oral tradition such as didacticism, allegory,
digression, and vernacular speech patterns. His best known novel Leaves of the Banyan
Tree 157 is representative of all these aspects. Subramani assesses Wendt’s writings as
follows: “the two antithetical modes of mimesis (representation of reality) and fabulation
(tending towards allegory and reinterpretation of mythology) find a unique synthesis.” 158
153 Subramani 1992: 171.
154 Ibid.
155 Subramani 1992: 49.
156 Ibid.: 152-3.
157 Albert Wendt, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, Auckland 1979.
158 Subramani 1992: xv.
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