Profile
Sia Figiel: Writing With Mana
This Samoan Writer Brings A Woman’s Voice To Pacific Literature
Sia Figiel is a big, loud, left-handed writer who loves to shock her audiences. Like some of the best Pacific writers, she finds herself caught, shunting between two powerful cultures. That she is big is important. That she is loud is necessary and that she is left-handed is symbolic of the out-of-left-field way she chooses her subjects and uses language.
“It wasn’t until I went to Germany, where I spent four years, that I discovered the Pacific material culture they have in their museums. That’s where I discovered evidence that Samoan women had tattoos on their hands. The designs were a way of bringing nature on to the human body.” She points to two bird figures near the base of her thumb. “See the two love birds!” and she explodes in a loud laugh. “I think I need to add more love birds,” and she’s rolling her eyes at the double meaning and laughing even louder.
- ADVERTISEMENT -
 |
Raised in a village near Apia in Samoa, Figiel never thought of writing. Fighting back tears, she says, “I’ve got to give credit to my mother who got the money together to send me to Berlin. At that age, I just had to get out of Samoa.”
In Germany, she worked as a housecleaner and as an au pair. But while doing these menial jobs, she was also discovering a new world. She began to paint. She began to meet Caribbean and African writers—and successful women writers like Tony Morrison. She began to write.
After returning to the Pacific for a fellowship at the East-West Center in Honolulu, she met Samoan novelist Albert Wendt. “Albert was the real pioneer,” she says. “He was the soil from which I was able to shoot up and bloom. But there still wasn’t a woman’s voice and that was the hardest thing for me to do—to find the female voice.”
The voice she found was loud, sometimes raunchy and always poetic, mixing contemporary images with traditional Samoan legends and poetical sayings. Wendt and then-University of Hawaii Center for Pacific Islands Studies director, Bob Kiste got her first novel manuscript to New Zealand publisher Allister Campbell. Figiel had found her voice, but she hadn’t found a title for her manuscript. “Finally,” she says, “they called me from New Zealand and said they were going to the printer that day and they HAD to have a title. So I just yelled into the phone, ‘Where We Once Belonged!’”
This 1996 debut novel was a wild success, winning the Commonwealth Prize and launching an international career that has seen the publication of another novel that same year, The Girl in the Moon Circle, and the 1999 They Who Do Not Grieve, which was a sequel, to Where We Once Belonged.
Figiel credits other writers for her breakthrough work. “Women like Tony Morrison, Patricia Grace and Lois-Ann Yamanaka had the same struggle to find a female voice,” she says. “And other Pacific writers like Epeli Hau‘ofa, Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera are part of what makes me possible.”
