Word: samoa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Wendt, the first Polynesian professor of New Zealand literature, believes will last. "As I write these words ? the sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears," writes Stevenson in A Footnote to History (1892), his journalistic account of the cultural friction that greeted his 1889 arrival in Apia. Samoa was shaping up as the site of a naval conflict between Germany and the U.S., backed by Britain, but war was averted when a hurricane sank several battleships in Apia's harbor. Stevenson prophetically saw the disaster - which led to the signing of the Berlin Treaty - as a historical turning...
...Stevenson's biggest legacy was to build a path toward Pacific literature. While printing presses were established as early as 1817 in Tahiti, books were slow to take hold in an oral society. In the early 1970s, when he returned to Apia to teach, Wendt concluded: "Samoa has no need of writers. It is waiting for tourists." But the writer persevered - and became one of the Pacific's best-known novelists. Wendt's 2003 epic The Mango's Kiss dramatizes the encounter between a village girl, Pele, loosely based on Wendt's grandmother, and a Scottish novelist called Leonard Roland...
...homeland would become grist for their art. In many ways, these souls are still in transit. The rhymes of Bill Urale, the Auckland rap star also known as King Kapisi, echo out across the Pacific: "You are immersed in a vision cultivated by this Samoan / Strong is my brethren Samoa mo Samoa?" And as a filmmaker, his sister Sima projects an image of her homeland just as fixed and fervent. "You can never lose that bond," she says...
...surfing's Tongan revival? It all began with a love affair. In 1977, a 21-year-old chef from Sydney, Steve Burling, embarked on a holiday with some mates. Their plan was to surf Indonesia's best spots, then check out the less popular destinations of Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. But Burling's holiday ended on Tongatapu, where on his first day he met a local beauty called Sesika. Burling had never had a girlfriend before; never been in love. Sesika knocked him sideways. "It was her femininity," he says. "And she was slamming attractive." She followed him back...
...surface, is the signature of the people - believed to be ancestors of today's Polynesians - who began moving east of the Solomon Islands about 3,200 years ago. Their pottery, found in fragments at numerous occupation sites scattered from New Guinea's Bismarck Archipelago in the west, to Samoa in the east, is like a trail of breadcrumbs across the Pacific, left by these colonizing explorers as they moved with their retinue of plants and animals through the islands. Though evidence of its country's founding culture has been discovered in Vanuatu before, the story is far from complete...