SONS FOR THE RETURN HOME by Albert Wendt Longman Paul, $3.95

Te Ao Hou, March 1974, Page 62

SONS FOR THE RETURN HOME by Albert Wendt Longman Paul, $3.95 reviewed by Paul Katene In every respect this book is an achievement. It is about racialism—its conflicts within a society where there is entrenchment to maintain separateness—to preserve an inimitable way of life, allowing no room for outward growth, no compromise for dilution, enlargement or cross-pollenation. Wendt is concerned with these people—these racialists; he knows them—he was one of them. They are the hard liners, sheltering behind their pretentions, their vanities, their obsequious smiles; surveying all from their ivory towers—looking but not seeing; supported by their institutions, their taboos, their preciousness. Thankfully these do not constitute our total society. The point is nonetheless taken. Somewhere in every race are found the same prejudices, the same justifications, the same hypocrisies, the same vanities. They just differ in intensity between the groups. He sadly observes that animosities flare easily between the ethnic groups that crowd the bottom of the socio-economic ladder,

particularly between Samoan and Maori. The cause is obvious. ‘Like many other Samoans he thought himself superior to Maoris’. The Maoris have their vanities too. The most devastating comment on racialism is given by an African student who reluctantly avers that he had experienced the worst kind of discrimination from Islanders and Maoris. This intensity is further reflected in the act of racial hatred by the Samoan mother who advised the Palagi (Pakeha) girl whom her son loved, to go to Australia for an abortion. She had recoiled at the prospect of having half-caste grandchildren and saw abortion—murder—the crime for which she subsequently denounces the girl—as the means of preserving her own Samoan-ness, her ambitions and vanities. Twenty years of preparation for the grand return was not to be compromised at any cost. They will return pure and undefiled, enlarged by those virtues and resources that will assure them a place among the elite of the godfearing Samoan village society. Her son had betrayed his people by wanting to marry a Pakeha. ‘I curse the day you were born,’ she shouts. They had come over to educate their sons. Mission completed it was time to return. New Zealand was a cold, sinful transit camp. The younger falls in love with a Pakeha girl. Through her he comes to terms with the alien land and eventually breaks from his ivory tower of racialism. The racial issue is graphically told in the incident of the hawk. He relates to the hawk in his racial idealism. It is free, unfettered, undomesticated—opposing the Palagi farmer. he is angry when she kills it, for she destroys his idealism as the settlers had destroyed the pride of the Maori. Man's inhumanity to man is the danger that the hawk represents to the sheep. At this point he sees only the flight—not the danger. Structurally the book is beautifully balanced. The central love story is paralleled by the love life of his grandfather. The ingredients are the same: the all-encompassing involvement, the distrust, the abortion, the betrayal, the separation. Other characters balance one another. ‘Some day you will have to accept something that will break your heart,’ his father said to him. This aim in bringing each character to eventually accepting a compromise has both symbolic and structural relevance. This is not achieved without pain, but through it comes growth. ‘The abortion had been a crime, a sin,’ she writes. ‘The amoral, gay, permissive, funloving young are a creation of the mass media.’ Thus she rejects her former life. He had to be free to grow, Freedom was not encased in the shackles of racialism. He had to reject the life that produced him—the god-given Fa'a-Samoa. He stood at freedom's door. He could now see clearly. To pass through into the stunning sun required the severence of the umbilical cord that secured him to his past—his dead. His mother, the Hine-nui-te-po of the Maui myth had to be confronted. Maui's search for immortality is equated with his own search for freedom. The rejection of his mother, the striking—to the accompaniment of the horrified gasps of his watching relatives (fantails), exiles him for ever. He is free. ‘This was acceptance of death of a son gone mad’. The book ends with a hint of promise for the future. ‘He imagined Maui to have been happy in his death.’