Sia Figiel's powerful, poetic skills weave together the voices of three generations of women from two Samoan families. Their dream worlds and realities intermingle, just as the histories of each generation run through the next. At the center of the novel is the Samoan woman's tattoo, the malu, believed to be brought from Fiji by Siamese twins. The ghosts of the twins watch over the women whose lives are stained by an unfinished tattoo. The shame and grief of not completing the tattoo ceremony go hand in hand with the shame and grief of illicit love and broken promises.
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About the Author
Born in Apia in 1967, Sia Figiel is the first contemporary woman novelist from Samoa. Her first book, "Where We Once Belonged", won the 1997 Commonwealth Writer's Best First Book Prize for Southeast Asia-South Pacific region, and has been translated into several languages. She is also the author of "The Girl in the Moon Circle" and a collection of prose poetry,"To a Young Artist in Contemplation". Also known as a performance poet, Sia is a frequent guest at literary festivals, women's prisons, universities, and high schools. She lives and works in Samoa.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Remarkably well written,
This review is from: Sia Figiel: They Who Do Not Grieve (Paperback)
I fell in love with this book. Figiel touches on so many topics and weaves them together incredibly. First and foremost she describes the shame associated with unfinished tattoos in more than words, but in lived situations, and in a way that is much more comprehensable than simply saying "shame." She touches on how the Pacific has been used as this "exotic ideal" and how we too face problems and struggles. Not only Pacific islands, but the women themselves are this exotic ideal. She portrays the beauty of Samoan women, and sometimes the curses associated with being beautiful. Certain chapters take place in New Zealand, and she also describes some of the struggles of being a foreigner, a Samoan in a foriegn country. I especially liked how she described the "community" dynamic, in which Samoans, try to live simultaneously for themselves, but yet have a large more communal role to play in society. She dives into sexuality and the role of Samoan women as well, with great depth. The way she weaves these aspects together is beautiful. I highly recommend this book.
~T. Solo
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Writer, Excellent Observer of Culture & Place,
By
This review is from: Sia Figiel: They Who Do Not Grieve (Paperback)
Sia Figel has once again done an outstanding job capturing the specifics of life in the transitioning cultures of Samoa in a way that is both artistic and illustrative. In doing so she has captured elements of the unversal that offer a message beyond the exotic South Pacific location into the challenges faced by families in modern life.
Excellently written, these stories are gems not only of Polynesian or ethnographic writing, but of Literature with a capial "L". Fiame
3.0 out of 5 stars
These Samoan women do not live in Margaret Mead's paradise,
By
This review is from: Sia Figiel: They Who Do Not Grieve (Paperback)
Sia Figiel is described as the first contemporary woman novelist from Samoa; so I wondered whether her unusual style (repetitive, staccato, verbless sentences, even paragraphs, sometime just a word or two long) reflects something of the way Samoans speak. But she uses that style not only in chapters where the narrator is Malu, a young Samoan girl, but also where the narrator is her employer, Mrs Winterson, a sad, bored, anorexic American expatriate woman.The title of the book is ambiguous. The women in the story certainly grieve; but they stoically accept and, for one reason or another, they never grieve aloud. Malu hardly ever speaks anyway. Malu's mother had died soon after Malu's birth. She is brought up by a vicious, violent and foul-mouthed grandmother, Lalolagi, who had violent feelings about Mary as she had about Malu. But Lalolagi also, we eventually discover, also bore a profound grief. Then there is Malu's aunt Ela, living unhappily with an abusive American and rejected by everyone in the village, who also grieves both when he beats her up and when he is drowned. The American is one of the several palagi - foreigners - in the novel who look down on or oppress Samoans.) One thing is clear: Sia Figiel has no truck with Margaret Mead's idyllic picture of Samoan society in which there is no conflict and everyone is happy. In one place (in a generalization I find it hard to accept though it is certainly true of the families that are the subject of this novel) one of her character says that it was common practice in Samoa for the only words spoken by mothers to daughters were "commands, accusations, curses," so the daughters retreat into an impenetrable shell in which they fantasize or have surrealistic dreams all mixed up with Samoan legends. Part II of the book seems at first sight to be about a totally different family, until we are told the link some way into this part: as a young woman, Lalolagi had a treacherous friend called Tausi; and Tausi with her granddaughter Alofa are the subject of the second part of the book. This Samoan family had emigrated to Giu Sila, which we will deduce is the Samoan name for New Zealand. The women in that family are every bit as grieving as those in the first part, sometimes for similar reasons (in one of Sia Figiel's extravaganzas she has Afula claim to have been conscious while still in her mother's womb that the mother hated her and had tried to abort her), but also because they do not really feel at home in New Zealand. It is helpful to know something about the importance of tattooing in Samoan society. It is required for status, and is a very painful procedure, usually taking five sessions spread out over ten days. If the process, for whatever reason, is not completed, that is taken to be the result of cowardice and means disgrace in the community. There are some characters in the novel who appear and disappear without us knowing who they are or what their function in the story is. I found the mannered style and the surrealist elements tiresome; but I realize that other readers will see a kind of poetry in them.
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