Samoa - Where We Once Belonged

Country: Samoa               
Book: Where We Once Belonged
Author: Sia Figiel
Publication Year: 1996
Genre: Fiction

Sia Figel’s 1996 novel, Where We Once Belonged, holds the distinct honour of being the first book published in the United States written by a female Samoan author. The honour is also somewhat dubious. Rather like Octavia E Butler being the first American women of colour to publish a work of speculative fiction (1977’s Patternmaster), it is depressing how recently it happened.

Where We Once Belonged is on one level a simple coming of age tale. It uses a traditional Samoan storytelling technique, su'ifefiloi, which, as I understand it, involves sewing or weaving together different parts (the word derives from the weaving together of a garland of flowers). In employing this technique, Figiel attempts to counter the lazy stereotypes of western anthropological studies of Samoa and the sexualisation and fetishisation of Pacific island women n general (“Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!’”).

In another sense, the novel conforms to storytelling techniques found throughout the world, some of which we have already discussed in this project. In following the story of thirteen year old Alofa Filiga, as she navigates the pitfalls of puberty and village life within Samoan society, we are harking back to other tales of village and small town living. In A Grain of Wheat in particular (see: Kenya), Ngugi Wa Thiong'o weaves together the parallel narratives of his villagers to give a comprehensive overview of events during and in the years following the Mau-Mau Rebellion.

Ngugi’s, however, is a simple act of narrative prose storytelling. Figiel weaves poetry into the various tales that hang together on a central stem (though there are various examples of prose/verse mixtures used in western literature, of which Dante’s Vita Nuova is perhaps the best example).

But this is also a form of expression seemingly more widely used in Pacific island writing than would perhaps be allowed in other parts of the world. In considering the academic work of Epeli Hauʻofa (see: Tonga) and Teresia Kieuea Teaiwa (see: Fiji), we have read collections of essays that include pauses for poetry between the weightier academia in a way that one wouldn’t find in the work of Noam Chomsky, say. Indeed, Figiel and Teaiwa released an audiobook together of poetry and song (Terenesia) in 2000. Another link in the chain that takes us from Hauʻofa to Teaiwa and on to Figiel.

Other universal themes rear their heads. Sexual awakening. The male gaze. Christianity and its scapegoating of women for being the objects of male lust. The cruel and cliquey nature of adolescent children and young women. The ghost of colonialism that casts a long shadow, as it does everywhere, with the fetishisation of the Pacific called out in its references to Gauguin, but also Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent time living on Samoa during his three year voyage among the islands of the Pacific.

There is an irony that western travellers saw the Pacific islands as some kind of prelapsarian idyll, full of dusky maidens, unaware and unashamed of their nakedness. Then the missionaries arrived, bringing with them Christianity and concepts of original sin that destroyed Eden in the process. 

 We see its toxic after-effects throughout Where We Once Belonged. Alofa being ostracised because a man looks lustfully at her in church: Idle gossip: Demonisation of those on the fringes of village society: People casting the first stone left, right and centre. Like the inhabitants of Salem, Massachusetts, sin and satanic influence are conjured in the collective imagination and punished with the shaving of Alofa’s head. Yet the usual male indiscretions take place, powered by patriarchal rule, with no repercussions (see: Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia and most of the rest of the Reading the World project for further examples).

All in all, Where We Once Belonged is a decent enough novel. Unique yet universal. Employing stylised local narrative techniques, but weaving in themes and methods that are used the world over and which have probably been in development since the birth of oral storytelling.

This is not the last Samoan book we shall encounter in this journey, I am sure. There is the work of Albert Wendt, for a start, whose name floats above these Pacific island entries like a shearwater flitting from island to island. And as we return to these places in future journeys, we are bound to find Samoa in the backwash of other Pacific island shores.

Sia Figiel