“The land has eyes and teeth”: copra plantations, gothic fertility, and literary genealogies in Oceania

This essay examines literary representations of the Pacific copra frontier. Comparing R.L. Stevenson’s gothic novella about a “tabooed” copra trader, “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), to Albert Wendt’s multigenerational novel about a “cursed” plantation owner in Samoa, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979), it situates the texts’ shared gothic anxieties about paternity, fertility and genealogy within the context of the colonial plantation’s own threat to regenerative futures. By placing the two texts in dialogue, the essay also shows how Wendt actively confronts the “inheritance” left by Stevenson, who, as a plantation owner and a writer in Samoa, profited from both the extraction of tree crops and the commodification of Polynesian orature as a cultural resource. The space of the copra frontier, this essay argues, makes visible the historical entanglement of the plantation and literature as colonial institutions.