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Gender and Globalization in Asian and the Pacific
Ferguson, Kathy E. & Monique Mironesco, eds.
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
Ferguson, Kathy E. & Monique Mironesco, eds.
Gender and Globalization in Asian and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory.
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
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C h a p t e r 2
Telling Tales Out of School
Sia Figiel and Indigenous Knowledge
in Pacific Islands Literature
Judith raiskin
S
iniva, the village fool and madwoman prophet of Sia Figiel’s 1996 novel, where we once belonged, having returned to Samoa with a Ba and Ma in history after ten years in New Zealand, sits in the marketplace yelling at the tourists: “Go back where you came from, you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead! There is no par- adise!” represented as the first student to leave Samoa on a scholarship, Siniva is expected by her family and village to use her palagi (white) education to secure a job in government or business. Instead, she returns, committed to reminding her village about Samoan cosmology and the traditions of the old religion, accusing the pastors and nuns of killing the Samoan gods. She is beaten by her father and brothers, ostracized by the women, and considered to suffer from ghost sickness. Siniva voices the fury of the intellectual who, educated by the colonial machine, sees beyond the advantages offered her as an administrator of that machine (as a teacher, bureaucrat, professional) and becomes instead a critic of colonialism on behalf of her people, who reject the criticism as madness. Siniva insists that the paradise the tourists seek is a dead fantasy of the last century, that they them- selves are ghostly apparitions who do not belong in the world of contemporary Samoa. Inappropriate as the tourists may be, Figiel recognizes the atavistic ele- ments of colonial mythmaking and the intransigence of the fantasies continuing to influence both the imaginations of americans and europeans and the lives of pacific Islanders. The novel focuses not on the visitors to Samoa and their diffi- culty of belonging, but on the social discomforts of Samoans themselves, who live between traditional and modern performances of identity and community. This is, of course, an experience not unique to pacific Island indigenous cultures since all social relations negotiate between historical and contemporary under- standings of responsibility, behavior, obligation, and so on. But the thematic core of many contemporary pacific Island novels is the tension among a number of competing interpretations of social place. Imported education systems compete with indigenous epistemologies, Christianity vies with local cosmologies, tV sit-
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objectification (r. Wilson 2000; edmonds 1997; Jolly 1997). More specifically, re- cent feminist theorists have examined what Margaret Jolly describes as the “sexu- ally saturated figure of the polynesian woman” (1997: 99), imagined and portrayed by europeans and americans for two and a half centuries. Through the metaphor of the bikini bathing suit, designed and named in 1946 for the Bikini atoll on which the United States dropped over twenty-five nuclear bombs, teresia teaiwa (1994) explores the way the sexualization of polynesian women both sustains and obfus- cates the military use and destruction of pacific Islands and their inhabitants. This sexualization is also analyzed as a repeating colonial trope in National Geographic Magazine by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, who describe the way the magazine reinscribes “preexisting, culturally tutored notions about the pacific,” often leaning heavily on the images of female sensuality and availability (1993: 133, 137; Nord- ström 1991: 272). perhaps the most challenging deconstruction of those images and associations is taking place in contemporary literature by pacific Islanders. Sia Fi- giel’s novel deftly undermines the classic representations of polynesia while explor- ing the ways they nevertheless influence the self-understandings of Samoan girls and women. where we once belonged is a novel that challenges western hegemonic representations of civilization, globalism, progress, and modernity by using tradi- tions of orality, adapting Samoan mythology, and remembering and redefining in- digenous ways of knowing the world (Subramani 2001: 157). Given her obvious delight in the raucous celebration of western popular cul- ture in the villages of Samoa, Figiel does not idealize a notion of a static precon- tact Samoan way of life. She recognizes that 200 years of colonization and con- temporary globalization have made impossible any return to a purely locally rooted cosmology. Not only is it impossible, but for Figiel and the children of the novel, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in the music, fashion, food, and rerun sit-coms that are the enactment and by-products of globalization. While Figiel’s critique of colonization and globalization are expressed so clearly by Siniva, the novel does not allow the delights and desires of the children to be sim- ply dismissed as false consciousness, as it is in a number of postcolonial novels. While we could read the children’s relentless desire to consume american goods as the destruction of valuable indigenous values and products (as Siniva does), Fi- giel’s description of the ubiquitous beat of rock and roll, the t-shirts and towels that express the characters’ sense of their own power, and the children’s creative reworking of tV sit-com plots all suggest a more playful and complicated under- standing of how people react to and integrate the legacies of colonization and globalization. Both Siniva and Sugar Shirley attempt to offer alofa and her friends ways of accessing powerful ideas from traditional Samoan culture and adapting them to contemporary pressures. Figiel, herself both a transnational intellectual and performer, creates these two characters, the angry university graduate and
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the clown, the mythic heroes of this novel, who, while unable to successfully dis- pel the violence and poverty in their communities, suggest liberatory ways of ex- ploiting both western and Samoan ways of thinking, strategies that may be useful in this era of cultural and economic globalization and migration. Siniva’s incisive critique of colonialism in the 1970s, when she returns from New Zealand, is considered mad and, even worse, shameful by Siniva’s village and family, and she is banished from her community, deprived of any mutual communication, any human connections, until she takes her own life. Like the self-destructive Nyasha of tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions who, while starving herself, tears with her teeth the pages of the colonial history texts she distrusts, Siniva wrestles with the history she and her people have been taught. 2 her studies in New Zealand, although part of the colonial education project that selects only the brightest and most promising students for university education in the “mother country,” have, ironically, revealed to her the biases and inaccura- cies of the education dispensed in the villages. In vain she tries to contest the missionary-colonial tale of europeans and americans bringing light to the be- nighted savages of the pacific, a tale that continues to hold wide currency among both visitors and islanders:
“We are not living in Lightness,” she would say. “We are not. Lightness is dead. Lightness died that first day in 1830 when the breakers of the sky entered these shores, forcing us all to forget... to forget... to burn our gods... to kill our gods... to re-define everything, recording history in reverse. “Now,” says Siniva. “Is our turn to re-evaluate, re-define, re-member... if we dare. For this is Darkness.” (Figiel 1996b: 236–237)
While the villagers are vying for goods from their families living abroad, while the children memorize and reenact american television shows and collect amer- ican clothing, Siniva unsuccessfully challenges the paradigm that values colonial products and epistemologies over indigenous ones. But like epeli hau‘ofa’s anti- development spokesman Malu in Tales of the Tikongs, Siniva delivers a message that not only goes unheeded, but is ridiculed. although the villagers dismiss Siniva and her message, Figiel presents her as a prophet anointed by a legendary bird, who feeds her the stories and legends of the Samoan gods and orders her to share them with her people, who are benighted, not by native cosmologies, but by Christianity and the values of modernity. Yet before Siniva is sent back to share her vision, the bird blinds her. Like seers in many cultures who are blinded before they can see and are compensated for their blindness by being given supernatural understanding, Siniva spends her life on the edge of the village, sharing wisdom that is generally ignored. her suicide note is to her niece, alofa:
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tion but as an adaptation that may allow for the preservation of Samoan culture and of Samoans themselves. a similar debate surrounded Maxine hong Kingston’s 1976 The Woman War- rior, in which Kingston reworks the Chinese tale of Fa Mu Lan, creating a superhe- roic swordswoman who avenges her village against a misogynist baron and tyran- nous emperor. In response to accusations by some asian-american critics that she was misrepresenting Chinese culture and writing “fake” Chinese legends to under- score american racist stereotypes of Chinese misogyny, Kingston responded, as Fi- giel might, that she was writing a memoir, not sociology or history. Literary works often offer the most nuanced cultural understandings, enriching and complicating ethnographic representations and providing their own theoretical perspectives. ad- ditionally, the formal structures of Figiel’s and Kingston’s works provide richly tex- tured analyses of cultural fragmentation and creative responses to rapidly changing cultural environments. Kingston’s revisions of classic legends and the interweaving of their themes with the stories of the narrator’s childhood reveal how Chinese cul- ture becomes refracted through the experience of a girl growing up in Stockton, Cal- ifornia. The memoir is her experience of the cultural history, her need for a sustain- ing tradition. Kingston has responded to the charge of transcribing myths inaccu- rately that “myths have to change, be useful or forgotten. Like the people who carry them across the oceans, the myths become american. The myths I write are new, american” (1991: 23–25). One can anticipate similar criticisms of Figiel’s novel, which, as a written document (in english, no less), revises the traditions of orality and fidelity to traditional legends. Yet Figiel composed both where we once belonged and The Girl in the Moon Circle (written nine months later) as performance pieces and says her goal is for “the reader to be able to experience the music of oral tradition in the way I write in english” (1996a: 122). The fact that the children in both works sing both the myth cycles and tV commercials “is a sign that culture is perpetually changing and that people adjust and adapt to the changes—and continue” (128). In Figiel’s pili story, aolele is also a superhero, one whose strength and dis- cernment is described in wholly polynesian metaphors:
aolele was incarnate beauty—her eyes darker than lama juice, her lips thick like oars from a war canoe, her breasts firm like the heart of a tanoa, her teeth whiter than virgin siapo, her nose noble, experienced, pre-conditioned for greeting... and to take in all of a stranger’s agaga... and to release it only if the stranger had hon- ourable intentions. (1996b: 145)
The story is told to alofa by Siniva, but alofa has also heard this tale (Figiel’s ver- sion) when she was in the womb; it is this version that motivates alofa as a fetus to will herself, against her mother’s efforts, to become female. In expressing her love of
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Samoan culture, Figiel does not simply juxtapose the colonial stories about Samoa and the damaging lessons of colonial education with “authentic” precontact Sa- moan legends to prove their cultural superiority. Far more subtly, she suggests that the originary legends, as they have been preserved, contribute to the degradation and misery of Samoan women and girls today. By changing the emphasis of these tales, remembering them differently, Figiel suggests a positive strategy for valuing Samoan culture as part of a contemporary feminist critique of both western colo- nialism and Samoan patriarchy, a patriarchy enforced by women as well as by men. Some Samoan educators are not as concerned with Figiel’s revision of the Sa- moan legend cycles as they are with her colloquial use of both english and Samoan; they would prefer her to write in standard forms of english to support what they and foreign educators are teaching in the schools. Figiel’s attention to sexuality (the desire of girls and the abuse they suffer) and her use of vernacular “K” Samoan (as opposed to the formal “t” Samoan) as well as her use of swear words and candid references to genitalia and breasts repel devout Christian Samoans, and she is often asked to censor her performances and readings from her novels when she is at home (Subramani 1996: 131). This local devotion to imported curricula and educational standards, as well as rigid ideas about true fa‘aSamoa, are at the heart of Figiel’s ex- ploration of the formal shaping of Samoan girls’ worlds and the alternative perspec- tives they are offered outside of school.
Colonial Education in the Pacific
Siniva’s critique of western education easily finds its place with those presented for the past fifty years by postcolonial theorists and writers the world over. Writ- ers from africa, asia, the americas, and the Caribbean have written movingly about the psychological and intellectual costs of colonial education; they under- stand the “colonization of the mind” as the goal and effect of an imported educa- tion system that teaches the racial, moral, and economic superiority of the colo- nizing settler population. The more recent attention to the colonization and mis- sionization of the pacific shifts the focus from european to american colonial- ism, with american culture identified as the central subject of critique, ambiva- lence, ridicule, and desire. even as the recent scholarship in pacific Island Cultural Studies seeks a non- western paradigm for understanding the pacific (Borofsky 2000; Diaz and Kauanui 2001), scholars of economic globalization make it increasingly clear that the sugges- tion that newly independent pacific nations such as Samoa are “post” colonial is easily refuted, given their ever-increasing dependence on multinational corpora- tions as well as on the governments of former colonial powers. This situation is par- ticularly clear in the pacific for those nations that have been wholly annexed by the
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barred from the classroom. rich in such local expressions, hereniko’s film The Land Has Eyes (the first indigenous film from rotuma or Fiji) juxtaposes indige- nous and colonial systems of justice and wisdom. The marginalization by school and church institutions of native ways of knowing is primary and intentional, in hereniko’s view, to the process of colonization. as these comments make clear, the history of colonial education in the pa- cific shares much with the British and French colonial education systems else- where, yet it also has its own peculiarities. Most pacific education systems began when missionaries created orthographies for pacific Island languages in order to translate and teach the Bible. rather than banning the local language or teaching only in the language of the colonizing country, the missionaries set up a system of biblical education taught in the local languages. In the nineteenth century the Christian day-schools were often conducted either in the church or the pastor’s home, often by a native village pastor trained by missionaries. Colonial adminis- trators who followed the missionaries often kept the religious schools in place, since they tended to support the colonial regimes; chiefs and high-status leaders were often rewarded for their support of the missionary schools with elite educa- tional opportunities for their children both at home and abroad. In Western Samoa the only educational change the Germans made to the missionary schools under their administration from 1900 to 1914 was to add German language to the religious curriculum (Thomas 1984: 220). after World War I, when New Zealand was awarded a trusteeship over West- ern Samoa, colonial authorities assumed the obligation of establishing a publicly supported, secular education system. This new curriculum was patterned closely after the syllabi from New Zealand (which were, in turn, patterned after the eng- lish curriculum), and after World War II the New Zealand scholarship scheme sent Samoan students to New Zealand for advanced education. even after Sa- moan independence in 1962, education continued in the same vein, and by the end of the 1960s only 1 percent of the entire school-age population entered higher education. Figiel’s character Siniva (and Figiel herself) is one of the few “lucky” students to be sent to New Zealand for high school or college. New Zealand ex- aminations continued to be used as criteria for determining the success of stu- dents through the 1980s (ibid.: 221). Mark Bray describes the way this colonial education system parallels that across the pacific. While curriculum development units “may devise new textbooks, prepare teaching guides and distribute visual aids... the overall structure and ori- entation of schools remains strongly Western” (1993: 338). all of the curricula of these countries are dominated by examinations designed for international recogni- tion. In addition, all nonsovereign territories continue to use examinations from the “mother countries”:
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Students in New Caledonia, French polynesia, and Wallis & Futuna sit the Bacca- laureat and other examinations set in France and their counterparts on american Samoa sit standardised achievement tests from the USa. Secondary school students in Niue and Cook Islands sit New Zealand examinations, though tokelau now op- erates its own form 5 examinations. (339)
Over the past twenty years, independent nations have moved to create their own regional exams, yet none were created until 1988. Bray argues that while there is little left of Japanese and German influence in pacific Island education, “the im- pact of american, australian, British, French and New Zealand colonialism is very clear” (344). Unlike Britain and New Zealand, the United States did not take its role as co- lonial administrator seriously. Given america’s economic and military use of the islands since World War II, the lack of financial and material investment in its trust territories is striking. Murray Thomas describes the shortcomings of leav- ing educational policy in american Samoa to the U.S. Naval administration. The stated goals of the administration were identical to those of the missionaries: to americanize the islanders and to teach them “a few simple truths” and english as a “world language” (Thomas 1984: 214, quoting Gray 1960). Thomas contends that until 1932, the curriculum was american “with only a slight island flavor in the form of plantation work in the upper grades” (1984: 215). By 1962, when Western Samoa won independence, the United States had done very little to fur- ther develop educational systems in american Samoa. Most of the curriculum there in the 1960s was delivered by educational television shows produced in the United States; by the end of the 1960s there were 180 hours of lessons telecast each week, with virtually no mention of Samoan culture or values. Konai helu Thaman, a tongan education specialist and poet, argues that there is very little qualitative difference between the education offered by Christian mis- sionaries, colonial administrators, or contemporary overseas-trained indigenous educators and foreign consultants. In her poetry, Thaman expresses the deep am- bivalence among pacific Island leaders regarding the value of indigenous knowl- edge in educational programs:
our director of education supports vernacular studies for other peoples’ children. (1993b: 55)
Funding and leadership from dominant countries, Thaman argues, continues to keep dominant ideologies and philosophies in the curriculum that displace and demean local values.
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of a new generation who refuse to attend school, who refuse to send their chil- dren to school, or who use western education to fight back against the encroach- ment of westerners on their land or their rights as indigenous people. For those children not strong enough to withstand the violence of an imposed epistemol- ogy, for those who “fall through the cracks of the school room floor,” the adults in Grace’s 1986 novel Potiki find alternatives and look back at traditional ways of ed- ucating children in their cultural values and skills. roimata, a mother of five, keeps two of the children home and contemplates what they need to grow and thrive. roimata begins to tell her children “own-centered” stories of her child- hood, those of her parents, and then older stories of her people. This process leads them all to relearn a Maori way of knowing, a knowledge set in a concept of cycli- cal time radically different from the western idea of linear time. educated in their own traditions, the children become able to evaluate the west- ern view that sees them as marginal, on the periphery. Like Figiel, Grace takes on the western developers and educators to reclaim the definition of what is the center, what is the periphery, what is sacred, what is debased. In Potiki, Grace introduces the white character Mr. Dolman (renamed “Dollarman” by the Maori characters), who has come to negotiate the use of their land for the development of a tourist leisure area and a sea park. he has come to pressure them to allow developers access to the sea and to encourage them to participate in the project for their own economic develop- ment: the plans “were to do with excursions and water sports, the underwater zoo and the animal circus, the clapping seals, the man putting his head in the mouth of a whale... a letter came telling us how we could be involved, and how we could dress up and dance and sing twice a day and cook food in the ground” (Grace 1986: 97). When Dollarman suggests their house be shifted to a more central location nearer to town, “everybody had laughed then, because the man had not understood that the house was central already and could not be more central.... [Dollarman] had a sur- prised look when the people laughed and looked down at his clothing as though he could suddenly be dressed strangely” (100). toko, the narrator of this scene, who is the boy-ancestor, the son-father whose body is not long for this world, suddenly un- derstands how the white man sees his beloved family:
I pulled myself up on my sticks.... right then I saw what the man saw as he turned and looked at the three of us and as my eyes met his eyes. I saw what he saw. What he saw was brokenness, a broken race. he saw in my Granny, my Mary and me, a whole people, decrepit, deranged, deformed. (102)
The novel turns away from such debasing western values to explore a model of teaching the children the sacredness of their environment, apprenticing them to carving, fishing, performing traditional funeral rights, and growing crops.
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rather than school, the true learning in the novel takes place “at the elbow” of an elder who passes down indigenous skills and values. Similarly, in alan Duff’s 1990 Once Were Warriors, the salvation for the neglected and abused children is found in learning traditional rituals, haka, chants, and learning about the history of the Maori people from the perspective of Maori elders. Thaman’s concerns about the effect of inculcating western ideas of individual- ity, learning to see oneself as a “free market agent,” and learning to desire all things western, mostly american, are expressed with great poignancy in Sia Figiel’s novel. alofa’s repeated question, “What is that supposed to mean?” is a basic question of epistemology as Solomon Islanders David Welchman Gegeo and Karen ann Wat- son-Gegeo define it: “who can be a knower, what can be known, what constitutes knowledge, sources of evidence for constructing knowledge, what constitutes truth, how truth is to be verified, how evidence becomes truth, how valid inferences are to be drawn, [and] the role of belief in evidence” (2001: 57). alofa lives in a community where a multitude of beliefs and practices from both indigenous and colonial world- views are intertwined; because they are called simply fa‘aSamoa and are given the status of cultural imperative, alofa finds it difficult to interpret, appraise, or recon- cile them. alofa suspects that the simultaneous referral to supposedly indigenous and Christian social structures in the schools and church meetings—values that support the violently enforced and violated sexual purity of the girls—is an overde- termined defense of patriarchal authority, power, and freedom. her ability to sur- vive (when many of her friends do not) comes from the lessons she learns outside of school and church from Siniva and Sugar Shirley, both surprising traditionalists in their own ways who, pointedly, do not themselves survive. alofa struggles throughout the novel between two competing but inter- twined epistemologies regarding her understanding of herself as an individual. The western-style education that is imported from New Zealand and is taught by peace Corps volunteers from the United States demands an individualized iden- tity, separate from that of the village or family. This is an identity that is mystify- ing, potentially nullifying for a girl who has been raised to measure her wealth, prestige, and place in the world through the recitation of her genealogy and cur- rent family relations. The peace Corps volunteers who teach in the schools con- sider it one of their primary educational responsibilities to develop in their stu- dents a sense of individual identity, a self separate from that of their families and village, a private “soul” that is simultaneously deplorable and enticing to the chil- dren. Miss Cunningham, a teacher from Oregon who is as perplexed by her stu- dents as they are by her, gives them essay assignments to encourage their sense of personal ownership and perceptions. She has them choose among the topics “My Village,” “My pet,” and “On my way to school today I saw a.. .” The essays she re- ceives from the students continually disappoint her by their generalizations and
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Never pray for yourself—you should pray for the whole village and for the whole of Samoa. “We” were taught to mimic Jesus Christ in all that he was, so that “we” too could be good examples of his life. “We” were young ladies, and “we” should handle ourselves as such. Therefore: “I” am “we.” “I” does not exist. (140–141)
While the girls are taught that this negation of individual selfhood is “the Samoan Way,” there is, Siniva teaches her, access to a powerful sense of self that is rooted in Samoan culture. at the conclusion of a series of Samoan legends told by Siniva and the narrator, alofa identifies herself and her Samoan “soul” as central to that tradi- tion. While she finds a place of identification in pre-Christian Samoan cosmology, it remains a tenuous and somewhat threatening place where she is vulnerable to spirit sickness. alofa’s willingness to listen to Siniva exposes her to the danger of losing herself completely, but it also gives her freedom from the constrictions of modern Samoan-Christian beliefs that insist on her debasement. alofa’s soul separates from the trappings of global commerce and enters a world that is distinctly Samoan:
agaga is the soul that each man and woman has. agaga lives in peoples’ bodies. and leaves the body only when one faints, loses consciousness or dies.... When my body dies [at night], agaga leaves the “Made in taiwan” cotton sheets (all floral and colourful), the “Made in China” blue or green or red panties, the white polyester brassiere, and the watch also.... This is when ghosts are born again and again. They roam the village looking for a waking baby, looking for a waking cat. Ghosts eat baby eyes and cat eyes... and dreams, too. Ghosts do. and “I”? “I” become a god... “I” am... “I” exist. (194)
although she is terrified of Siniva, alofa can find a recognizable sense of self only through the Samoan myths imparted to her by her aunt. alofa recognizes that Siniva is not just a village fool but a warrior of great strength and power (192). alofa interprets Siniva’s battle against colonialism in traditional Samoan epic terms and, through her aunt’s struggles, she celebrates herself:
Nafanua gathers the invisible people of Samoa and leads them to war, covering her breasts with coconut leaves to disguise the fact that she is a woman warrior. She
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leads Samoa into war and overthrows the oppressive power... cutting their heads off one by one... cooling the hot earth with blood. “I am a warrior,” sings Nafanua. “I am a warrior.” “I am,” sings alofa. (193–194, 197)
Like Maxine hong Kingston’s adolescent girl in The Woman Warrior, alofa finds a model of independent selfhood and womanhood in modified versions of her com- munity’s legends. These new heroines allow the girls to claim individual identities without having to deny their communities or be cut off, as are their suicidal aunts.
“Girl” Lessons
alofa’s other mentor and protector is her cousin Fa‘afetai (Sugar Shirley), who is the village fa‘afafine, a man who lives “in the way of a woman.” In village lore, Shirley is born at the time that alofa’s aunt commits suicide. alofa, named after her beautiful and tragic aunt, struggles to find a way to become a woman who lives and continues to be respected and embraced by her family. Shirley helps the teenage girls of the village negotiate the rules that govern their domestic duties, their grooming, their speech, and their relationships—each of which is seen to reflect their sexual status, particularly as they enter adolescence. Shirley teaches them “girl lessons” that, while they do not overtly contradict the expectations of fa‘aSamoa, expose those expectations as cultural choices that have changed over time—and therefore can and will change again. If the dictates of fa‘aSamoa de- rive from traditional cultural practices of communal selfhood as shaped by Christian restrictions of female sexuality, Shirley challenges that particular con- flation by performing a traditional role that elicits expressions of value for “fe- maleness,” both female labor and female sexual autonomy. When she can, Shirley protects the girls from adult brutality and maintains for the community a perfor- mance of female sexual levity, which was traditionally the role of unmarried girls but was prohibited after the arrival of Christianity. 6 alofa’s skepticism about the education she receives in church and in school is due in part to her lack of understanding and in part to her sensitivity to the hypoc- risy of her elders. While she is taught with violence to suppress her sexual curiosity, the girls are regularly peeped at by neighbors, impregnated by teachers, courted and sometimes raped by male family members. Girls who become pregnant are badly beaten and are held solely responsible for the sexual transgression, whether they wished it or not. alofa is searching for a way to interpret her experiences and her encounters with friends, family members, and teachers. Whom can she believe and what perspective is dictating the conflicting expectations? The chapter called “The Centre” explicitly raises this epistemological problem: “There is no consensus
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tions that the girls experience as hypocrisy: “In the transvestite body... one finds an intercalation of opposites that places the figure of the virginal girl in ironic quo- tation…. [t]ransvestites make a mockery of virginity itself and the Samoan-Chris- tian ideal for which it stands” (Mageo 1998: 211). Mageo suggests that the fa‘afafine, not mentioned in nineteenth-century reports or missionary journals, 8 is a role of increasing importance, given the decline of tradi- tional ways of performing gender roles of being a girl and being a woman. For the girls of this story, the transition from teine to fafine is fraught not only with sexual violence, but with generational changes concerning permissible behavior. accord- ing to Mageo, the fa‘afafine “represents a novel cultural stratagem for assisting real girls to play idealized roles and for defusing an increased pressure toward violence in public gatherings,” where boys and men must challenge any defamation of categori- cal sisters (Mageo 1992: 444). Because Shirley is performing girlhood, her behavior underscores the expectations of girls while exposing, to the girls as well as to their el- ders, girlhood as a performance. It may be argued that when only designated mem- bers of communities are allowed to cross boundaries, their transgressions are at the cost of more widespread freedoms. hereniko suggests that the performances of fa‘afafine, like other licensed clowning performances, serve a conservative role in maintaining gender roles and sexual norms that are under great pressure in contem- porary Samoa (1999: 24). Sugar Shirley’s performance, however, operates on two lev- els that might appeal to the imaginations of some members of her community, like alofa, who is actively searching for ways to express her own agaga and not lose her social place. even though she acts in ways that real girls must not, Shirley opens a gap between gender expectations and behavior that may allow for broader understand- ings of what is appropriate masculine and feminine expression. her behavior also calls attention to what is considered appropriate “Samoan” behavior. Because she is not a real girl, Sugar Shirley is permitted to perform the sexual expressiveness of girls and women that were part of traditional Samoan culture before the missionaries’ ar- rival. Because she is not a boy, she is not held accountable for her sexual clowning in front of girls. The village agreement not to prosecute Shirley for her behavior is a powerful undercutting of the Christian strictures of the past century and a tacit ac- knowledgment of a Samoan way that could allow girls more freedom. Niko Besnier explores the ways transgender performances in tonga rest upon tensions between local and “translocal” identities central to a society where so many tongans and their children live in metropolitan cities in the United States, New Zealand, and australia. Like the fakaleiti Besnier describes, Sugar Shirley has taken an english name that signals the existence of and connection with alternative social constructs while she simultaneously performs local Samoanness as a fa‘afafine (Besnier 2002). Unlike western drag, which can easily be read as a negative model to shore up male heterosexuality, Samoan fa‘afafine can be read additionally as a warning for
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virginal young women not to flaunt their sexuality: “The inversion serves to remind sisters of how they are not supposed to behave” (Mageo 1993: 454). traditional fa‘afafine occupy a liminal position diffusing the tensions of gender performance and protocol in a community where gender relations have changed rather rapidly. Figiel provides a sympathetic portrayal of such a fa‘afafine from the point of view of the entire village, particularly of the girls who benefit from Shirley’s enactment of ideal girlhood and its limitations. When she is taunted at a cricket match by a wife new to the village, Shirley knocks her down and is defended by all the men of the village, including the husband of the newcomer. Figiel delivers Shirley from ridi- cule and makes her a hero, in fact much like the mythical girls of the Samoan stories who die by the will of the gods. When she dies by drowning, she is mourned by the whole village for weeks. It is Shirley, not the schools or the prayer meetings, who helps the girls negotiate the conflicting expectations of tradition and modernity. She is well loved because she affirms traditional cultural practices and protects the girls by delineating, through her transgression, the boundaries they must respect: “‘Don’t do what I would,’ she would say to us girls whenever we left the house for the aufaipese [choir] at nights” (Figiel 1996b: 52–53). her exaggeration of both the sis- ter-role and the woman-role help idealize and stabilize the girls’ gender roles while opening up the possibility, for those who see it, of imagining other ways of being (Mageo 1992: 454). While the fa‘afafine is a traditional role in Samoan society, Shir- ley’s concern for the girls that she expresses through her own set of “girl lessons” ex- hibits the recent pressure on girls in modern Samoan society. although Siniva and Shirley both perish, alofa, representing a younger generation of the pacific Islands, learns from each of them ways that indigenous cultural practices as forms of knowl- edge can be life-saving. Standing at Siniva’s grave, alofa can now also hear the cry of the legendary tuli bird and decides that she, unlike her aunt, will not die; she will not despair, but will return to a “new gathering place where ‘we’ once belonged” (Fi- giel 1996b: 239). Who will gather here and who will feel they belong are questions Figiel’s novel provocatively leaves open.
Notes
I am grateful to the rockefeller Foundation and the Women’s Studies program at the University of hawai‘i at Mānoa. I appreciate the careful readings of this analysis by other Fellows, Women’s Studies faculty, and anonymous readers, as well as the helpful com- ments on earlier versions by participants of the International Cultural Studies program at the University of hawai‘i and the faculty of hawai‘i pacific University. I am also grateful for support from the University of Oregon humanities Center and the Center for the Study of Women and Society.
- tiffany (2001) argues that the “sexual life of savages” has been the ruling discourse
