Artfully subjective,

Literature

Contemporary, cultural and confessional

Figiel’s novel marks new generation of Pacific writers

By Nicolas

Rothwell

Artfully subjective,

relentlessly innovative, by turns charming and disquieting, but never failing in freshness and strength of observation, Where We Once Belonged announces the appearance on the world fiction stage of the first major representative of the Pacific’s new generation of writers.

Sia Figiel, a 30-year-old performance poet, Western Samoa bom, has produced an appropriately hybrid first novel, com bining an open-eyed appreciation of Samoan culture with the unconstrained narrative style of Western writing in the confessional 90s.

In fact, like all substantial fiction, this is not a reductive work of political con sciousness. Indeed, it’s a-coming-of-age novel, intimate in tone, startlingly well handled, with all the force and immediacy of lived experience. The reader travels with Sia Figiel’s central character, a young Samoan girl named Alofa, through the time of adolescence, when the senses are most keen in their exploring of the world, when the set-up of life, the way things work, still seems strange and one’s perception of it can still ring true.

Sex, menstruation, attraction - these are the building bricks of the book.

Sia Figiel is a knowing writer. Her style is well honed. Her performance poetry has evidently embraced some of this text,, which includes fragments of verses and of Samoan-language pieces. It’s a defiantly modem book - broken, pulled together from a smash of kaleidoscopic shards; composed of oblique glances and record

ings, yet profoundly unified. There’s a con stant, bold passage between the individual, the specific and the general, indeed the moral: “Is there more than one surface to a human being?” wonders the narrator early in the tale, and the quest to answer this

question reverberates throughout her

pages, as she strips away layers of motiva tion, of belief, of cultural formation.

So, far from being a simple lament for the passing of Samoan culture, Where We Once Belonged can also be read as a kind of backhanded celebration of the persis tence of Polynesian patterns of life: in the jingle-jangle of its words, the shifts of attention, the loose narration, the constant darting between traditional references and the galaxies of American television stars’ names and Western consumer brands.

Sometimes one feels one’s in a conven tional contemporary novel, then, abruptly, the order of myth and story makes its tri umphant return: “The fish took the girl by the hair, between his teeth and flew into the sea...and her body was never found

again.”

And so the mosaic builds up. School; family; the anticipation of sexual encoun ters; their harsh fruition. Modem Apia; vil lage life; the world of newspaper head lines; the resonance of Christian religion.

Lists and episodes of common life are at the centre of this mazy, unconsidered seeming but consummately well made book. Not to give away the movement of the plot, Alofa, comes to a shattering dis covery of the role of sex, and power, at the heart of her own family. She is furiously punished for a brief sexual indiscretion: “Fists blew in my eyes and mouth and cheeks and blood flowed out on to the cement floor” - and yet the relationship between Alofa and her father is changed forever by what she has seen, and learned, and what he has done - “as if I was the punisher and he the punished ... and he knew it ... and I knew it.” All this is achieved, in the story, with boundless sub tlety, through almost subterranean

expression. Close to the end of the account, the enigmatic figure of Alofa’s aunt comes into focus. This character, Siniva, the dera cinated and troubled intellectual “fool” and precursor heroine, articulates the critical, conscious vision of the modem Pacific.

“Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!”

Siniva used to call out to Western tourists, who “were confused when they heard such words - most of them were shocked, shocked that someone recognised them

doing what they usually did: Peeping-

Tomming for a past, an illusion long dead, long buried in museums of their own

making.”

In a slightly over-neat conclusion, which nevertheless makes a striking coda, Siniva takes her own life: “Suicide - it is the only way. For isn’t that what we’re all slowly doing anyway? Each time a child cries for Coca-Cola instead of coconut juice the waves close into our lungs. Each time we choose one car, two cars, three cars over canoes and our own feet, the waves close in further... but tell me this once, my little dreamer, did I have a choice? Do you have a choice now that your own eyes are opened to the darkness?”

This boundlessly assured and elegant book, brimming with the intermingled feel of modem and traditional, is clearly in some sense Sia Figiel’s answer. The author has already published a second book, The Girl In The Moon Circle, which focuses once more on the circumstances of a young

girl’s growing up in Samoan society.

In March this year, Where We Once Belonged won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the best first book in the South East Asian and South Pacific region, upon the recommendation of three judges from New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia. The award is significant recognition, and fully deserved. This is exactly the kind of syn thetic, boundary-crossing fiction an inter cultural world under construction most needs.

One feels, though, that Sia Figiel stands now at a crossroads. Either she can repeat her first book’s touching formula and explore the same terrain further - or rein vent her art and her personality. She faces the dilemma that awaits all writers of auto biographical fiction - the need to transcend herself. ■ • Where We Once Belonged, published October 1996 by Pasifika Press, RRP, NZ. • An English version of Arts of Vanuatu, which was reviewed last month, is available from Crawford House Publishing, P O Box 1484, Bathurst, NSW 2795, Australia.