Albert Wendt
Paul Sharrad is one of Oceania’s pioneer and most influential researchers, scholars, and teachers of Pacific literature in English especially by indigenous writers. To understand and unpack that literature he had to study the colonial literatures and histories and the cultures of our region. A huge, difficult and tricky undertaking. From the late 1970s to now, he has observed, studied, added to, and promoted the growth, development and understanding of that literature and through it our understanding of Oceania.
Over the years Paul has produced a very impressive body of essays, lectures, papers and books about our literature: publications which have fundamentally changed the ways we look at and teach that literature and look at the cultures out of which that literature has come.
Every literature needs a critical commentary to go hand in hand with the creative body of fiction, poetry, drama, and so forth. Paul was one of the first to teach courses in Pacific literature and used them to promote the study, writing, and teaching of that literature. Many of his post-graduate students went on to research and teach that literature in high schools and tertiary institutions. And expand the literary criticism of it.
I will always be grateful to Paul for researching and writing the major book about my literary life and work: Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void, published in 2003.1 It looks at my life and writing up to 1999. Normally I am resistant/hesitant about critical examinations of my work. But over the years of reading his views on my writing and knowing him I have come to hold great respect for him. The book is thorough, caring and careful, insightful and original, and offered me other interpretations and ways of looking at my own work, ways which opened up other ways for me to look at the work of other Pacific writers, and literature in general.
The authors of the essays and papers in this book openly admit that their work, research, and teaching have been greatly influenced/informed and inspired by Paul Sharrad’s scholarship, teaching and publications. The essays cover a wide range of topics and research interests. I find them fascinating, stimulating, and they have expanded and deepened my knowledge of Oceania and literature, and other ways of reading those.
I thank Paul, profoundly, for his work, example, and friendship all these years.
Ia alolofa atili mai pea atua o le Pasefika ia Paul Sharrad ma tusitala ma faiaoga o le Pasefika.
Maualaivao Albert Wendt