Pacific Ghost Stories: John Kneubuhl and Oral History

Abstract

This paper considers the American Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl’s work in the context of oral history. Kneubuhl, who died in Pago Pago in 1992 at the age of 72, has been recognized as “the spiritual father of Pacific Island theatre” (Balme 194), a legendary figure in part because of his reluctance to see any of his creative works published in print during his lifetime, famously burning his Hollywood scripts upon his return to Samoa in 1968. Only his last three plays have been published so far, posthumously in the trilogy Think of a Garden and Other Plays (1997). Kneubuhl’s legacy, then, is based on remembrance and a lifelong investment in oral history, beginning with his immersion as a child in the oral culture of his mother, from which he gained a sense of theatricality alive in the ‘house of spirits’, the Samoan fale aitu. While Kneubuhl’s plays, written over a period of fifty years, dramatize a growing sense of personal and cultural loss in stories of spirit possession, his studies of Polynesian cultures and their pasts also led him to oral history in the form of extended series of radio talks and public lectures, as well as long interviews. Based on archival recordings of this oral history, the paper will look at Kneubuhl’s performance as a storyteller, a role that in his plays often appears as a ghost, and discuss his rhetorical and narrative strategies and efforts to keep alive the cultural memory that sustains an island community and keeps it from becoming stranded in history.