Albert Wendt and the Problem of History

Poet and fiction writer Albert Wendt has taken on the task of correcting colonialist representations of the Pacific from an insider perspective. This involves him in questions of historical record and modes of recording history. The role of memory becomes central to the artist transposing oral traditions into written forms. Trained as an historian, Wendt progressively blurs the boundaries between imaginative and factual, personal and public re/constructions, aware of the illusions of both nationalistic nostalgia for lost perfection and colonialist 'objective' encyclopaedism. History both liberates and traps; in the poem 'Inside Us the Dead' and novels Pouliuli and Black Rainbow , Wendt looks for a postcolonial dynamic between postmodern deconstruction and representational texts that can be seen in terms of de Certeau's ideas of tactics and strategies.