Making it Niu: Blacking Out Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way

Abstract

Niu, the Malayo-Polynesian cognate word for coconut (nut and palm), is known as the tree of life in Oceania. With over a thousand uses (as food, shelter, garment, and utensil) and a pan-Pacific mythological presence, the niu is a beloved and powerful symbol for island sustenance and identity. By “making it niu” I connect Pound’s western metropolitan modernist cry for innovation and interrogation with Pacific literary activism. I apply a black out poetry technique to a first edition copy of a canonical Pacific novel Pouliuli (1977) by the hailed forefather of Pacific literature, Samoan writer Albert Wendt (Sharrad 244; Marsh, “Body”). The book-length black out poem combines avant-garde poetics with a Pacificinfused reading strategy—the Tusitala Way—in order to “make it niu.” But what happens when a text is revisited four decades later by a protégé of Wendt’s—a New Zealand-born, second generation, afakasi Samoan woman poet-scholar feminist—seeking to make it niu for a new generation? Given the novel’s reputed misogyny (Griffen), is it possible to use the Tusitala Way to give light to a feminist perspective that keeps the Va (a Samoan philosophy concerning the nurturing of interrelational spaces among people and between people and the environment) between mentor and mentee, first and second generation, men and women, island-based Pacific and diasporic Pasifika scholars and writers intact?