Albert Wendt up for Commonwealth best book award.

Nafanua dead in Vela’s verse
By Tupuola Terry Tavita

What do you get when you run a salami western through the print machine?

A novel that has its moments.

Albert Wendt’s latest offering – the Adventures of Vela- has its moments. A precious few.

In all honesty, I didn’t like it.

It’s too dark and brooding for my taste. Too heavy on obscenities – palagi obscenities that is – the graphically obscene, the perversely sadistic and the profane.

Reading, well flipping through the pages of this verse novel, I was trying to figure out what sort of people would enjoy this sort of writing. Probably frustrated palagis struggling with their inner demons. The sort of people who hand out book awards.
In the back cover, Vela is described as a “Pacific epic…stretching from hundreds of years before the arrival of the Papalagi to the present day and fuses the great indigenous oral traditions of storytelling and Western poetry.”

I don’t know about Pacific epic, but Vela is certainly no Samoan epic. At least not the Samoa that I know of. And I can’t imagine your grandma telling you such stories. Vela more appropriately, is an Albert epic.

When the synopsis for Vela first came out, I was particularly interested in Wendt’s portrayal of the war princess Nafanua - a high point in Samoan ancient history.

My illusions were destroyed.

Wendt’s Nafanua is a seductive, scheming power-hungry wretch seething with penis-envy. From what I know, the ‘Tamaita’i’ (our Lady) only raised war to free the enslaved and only went to war when beseeched by paramount chiefs. She never kept any of the titles she won in battle.
The war at Lea’ea-i-Sisifo – which her chronicler Vela surprisingly fails to mention – best illustrates Nafanua’s quality.

“A pa’ia le pa i Fualaga sua le tuli aua le Alii-o-Aiga,” her mother Tilafaiga told the Lady before she set off for war. When you reach the pa at Fualaga, stop the killing in respect to my brother the Alii-o-Aiga who resides at Faiaai. The reference, not a title, to Sialiitu as the Alii-o-Aiga – which transliterates to ‘Prince of Families’ – is an indication of Sialiitu’s station in Nafanua’s family and the va tapuia between brother and sister.

Sure enough, Nafanua’s clubs were not wielded beyond Fualaga. But those of her companions Matuna and Matuna, with blood on their nostrils, did. So Nafanua turned her clubs on them.
“Ua ola i fale le laau a le Tamaitai.”

That even in the thick of battle, Nafanua stuck to her principles – in this case, respect for family.
I also seriously doubt seductress. Going by her heroics, she probably looked more Alafoti Faosiliva (no pun intended) than the reigning Miss Samoa. We all want our heroines to look like Xena Warrior Princess, but war – the bloody and brutal hand-to-hand face-to-club kind under the scorching sun Samoans engaged in in the distant past - is simply not good for the complexion.

And our Lady fought many wars.

Kidding aside. To be fair, Vela is a novel not a historical account. And I’m probably not the sort of person to comment on it. Though we all respect and appreciate his many achievements, admittedly, I am not a fan of much of Albert’s novels. And what you’re reading is not a book review. I lost interest and didn’t finish reading Vela’s verse. My feeble Christianized mind has developed an aversion - well, an abhorrence - for palagi, and Samoan, gutter language. Especially when used with such abandon. And from my Samoan perspective, I really don’t see the point in trying to intellectualize nor wax lyrical on Vela’s obscenity-laden vent, er, verse. I didn’t enjoy it. If anything, it’s very unSamoan.

Motivation and inspiration we all seek, is painfully lacking in Vela’s tortured soul eccentricity.

HOMER
I, like many, want to be entertained in my reading.

I love Homer’s Iliad. The prose, the heroics, the romance, the gallantry and the valor. Nothing wrong with that. Samoan ancient history, mind you, is peppered with the makings of classic epics. But I guess we’ll just have to wait for that next Samoan writer to write that Samoan epic we all been waiting for.

But back to Vela, I just don’t read to wallow in the mire of miserable characters and equally miserable plots. And all the characters in Vela – both human and non-human – are just plain miserable. Page after page they become predictably one-dimensionally miserable.
I like my poison to be heavy on the assumed and light on the narrative. Why I prefer Chinese cinema over diet Hollywood.

And if Samoan story-telling and oratory is anything to go by – a true novel in the Samoan vernacular is yet to be published – it would be along the same lines.

Rich in metaphor and allegory than the descriptive narrative. The colloquial less-is-more.
Ironically, the thrust of Vela’s verse perhaps best answers Albert’s riddle-in-the-cap (see interview on page 2). Of why so many quickly converted to Christianity when it arrived. Perhaps they were just fed up with wars, of incest, rape, animalism and all manners fetish Wendt so vividly describes.

Or perhaps they realized the futility of bowing down and paying homage to trees , rocks, insects, squiggly fish and the elements.

But most possibly, they’d come to identify more with the unassuming Jewish carpenter who championed the poor and the weak, healed the sick, raised the dead, turned the other cheek to his enemies and died on the cross for Vela and Auvaa’s sins.

Albert is correct in that you don’t have to be a Christian to know and practice love. But you also don’t have to be an edified ‘pagan’ to respect the environment. Those are universal values.
But Tagaloa and Nafanua still live. Not so much in Vela’s verse but in the traditions and culture of Samoa we practice every day. Every time you tip the ava cup, orate on the malae armed with staff and fue or a tufuga takes the au to virgin skin – they live.

Because they weren’t just deities we worshipped. They are part of our gafa, our aiga, our heritage. That part Wendt is spot-on right.

One of those few precious moments in Vela’s verse.

Oceangeles is proud to present the voice of Tupuola Terry Tavita. He is the editor in chief of the 'Savali' the official Government of Samoa publication. Find him on Facebook.