'In love with books': Victor Rodger and Pasifika Books 2025

I’ve been in love for fifty years.

With books.

They‘re my longest and still on-going love affair.

How did the love affair start? Was it in the womb, when Mum read War and Peace while waiting to give birth?  

Perhaps it was all those intriguing covers on the books that Uncle John stored in the old, abandoned bus out in the backyard.

Or was it all those mysterious names on the spines of Mum’s books in the bookcase:

Updike. Goodman. Wendt.

As in Albert.  As in the godfather of Pacific Lit.  As in the O.G.  Whenever we talk about Pacific lit from this neck of the woods, Albert is an important, essential part of the conversation, our South Pacific North Star.

Back in the day, I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss. My feelings towards my Samoan heritage were tightly wrapped up in my feelings towards my Samoan father i.e. dark and dismissive. I was very ZFG in terms of reading one of Albert’s books. After all, I was a Kiwi, mate, who just happened to have a Samoan father.

But that all changed in my final year of high school when I began to investigate what having Samoan heritage meant to me. And a pivotal part of that investigation involved finally taking down from the bookshelf Albert’s first novel, Sons For the Return Home. I opened it and began to read: 

'He was bored with the lecture.'

Sons for the Return Home is the story of an ill-fated love affair between a Samoan man and a Palagi woman. It’s a variation on my own parents’ story.

Even though the book was a revelation to me, I still realised that it was the story told of an outsider in a new land; not my own story of a culturally uncertain New Zealand-born afakasi. I wrote that specific story almost a decade later with my first play Sons which I gladly named in homage to Albert’s book.

This May as part of Featherston’s Booktown Festival I’ll be part of an all-star  Pasifika line-up (Avia! Kightley! Dreaver!) celebrating Albert’s work and his influence on our own writing.

Sons For the Return Home is over 50 years old now. Since then the numbers of Pasifika writers have continued to swell, particularly in terms of poetry.

I recently returned to Aotearoa after three months abroad to discover waiting for me a copy of Black Sugarcane, the debut poetry collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Nafanua is a former student of mine at the Maori and Pasifika creative writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

Also waiting upon my return was a copy of the recent reprint of John Pule’s epic 1985 love poem The Bond of Time, written when he was only 21. This is poetry that is furious, florid and fecund and just about all the other f’s you might like to throw into the mix.

Casting my eye over the books stacked up on my table in my Wellington apartment there is Manuali’i, the debut poetry collection by another former student, Rex Letoa Paget, shortlisted for the 2025 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

And there’s also one of my absolute faves: the short story, The Death of Vae by American Samoan artist and writer Dan Taulapapa McMullin (who co-edited the popular Samoan Queer Lives  book with Shigeyuki Kihara.) It’s a deliciously Almodovar-ian tale of queer lust set in Samoa and it gives me life.

I love that I’ve been asked to guest edit Kete for the next couple of weeks in celebration of Pasifika writing. It’s a fantastic opportunity to shoulder tap writers I know such as award-winning fiction-ista Gina Cole who reviews Black Sugarcane and Dawn Raid author Pauline Vaeluaga Smith who responds to A Niu Dawn: Creative Responses to the Dawn Raids.

It’s also a chance to train a spotlight on up-and-coming talent such as Katalaina Polaivao-Saute (an award-winner for her performance in Tusiata Avia’s The Savage Coloniser Show and a published poet) who gives her opinion on Tusitala by newcomer Danielle Kionasina Dilys Thomson, and Siniva Bennett (an Oregon-based aspiring writer whom I met almost twenty years ago when I was the Creative New Zealand-Fulbright Pacific Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i) who casts an eye over Damon Salesa’s An Indigenous Ocean, winner of the General Non Fiction Award at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

The first person I approached was, of course, my much-garlanded cousin, Tusiata Avia. In the space of just five poetry collections, she has become one of the most celebrated Pasifika poets both nationally and internationally.  She has also deservedly won just about every poetry gong going in Aotearoa, like the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (where she was the first female Pasifika winner) and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature (another first for Pasifika women).

But even though I am a huge fan of Tusiata’s often hard-hitting work which is fearless, raw and highly political (Exhibit A: 'Hey, David' - her hugely droll take down of notorious publicity whore D---- S---- of The A—P----), I personally doubt that she will ever write as fine a line as 'Pages as dry as my pussy' (from her latest collection Big Fat Brown Bitch).

Why do I like that line so much?  Because it’s naughty and provocative. Because it makes me laugh. And, perhaps most of all, because it feels honest in a wonderfully squirmy kind of way.

I love me a good squirm. I’m all about it. And as the content of Pasifika literature continues to broaden and expand and represent the full spectrum of who we are as Pasifika people  – from devout Christians to committed atheists, from MAGA-loving conservatives to liberal freethinkers, from Shepherds Reign devotees to Sole Mio completists, I say: bring it on.