It's February and I Feel Free

"There is a lovely hill that runs out of Ixopo."- Alan Paton, 'Cry, the Beloved Country'

I've been busy, relaxed, anxious, and enjoying more peace than I have ever known in my working adult life. I got my hair done, invested my superannuation four percent start-of-year payout in getting a house renovated, resigned from my full-time teaching job, started my M.A in full-swing, started having two part-time jobs, became co-chair of a government advisory board, and did NOT finish reading 'DUNE' (Book 1). I'll get there. Book-wise.

I've moved up to Siusega, where I now live in a small but neat unit with Samkeyes (my cousin who is now my brother). It was a real fixer-upper when we first got it. I like to think I am learning patience. 

We live next door to our uncles Peni and Pastor Siona. Our uncle Siona's house is where we eat and hang out most of the time. He drives us to school early everyday. I am adjusting to being part of a family again. My own blood family, for once in a really long time.

I am tired and very energized. I feel better than I have felt since my dad passed away. Perhaps this is the right arrangement for me.

In 2025, I choose joy. My joy. For the first time in years.

I'm financially a lot more stable now. I sleep longer. Work more. Work harder- I've always worked hard, but this time, I do it very happily. Happiness is sparse in this climate, no?

Samkeyes is at Nursing School. He loves it. I am so proud of him! Everyone who comes into my brother's gentle and kind care in the healthcare system will be very blessed. Just as I have always been.

It's February and I'm wearing lots of makeup and my favorite jewelry again. I am free.

Happy New Year

We Live Here Now

(Even if we don't know where 'here' is)

"There is nothing that cannot happen today."

Unknown

One of the last and most beautiful sunsets of 2024. 

I will be twenty-eight this year. Next month, it'll be exactly one year since I last heard my mother's voice. My MA module website is opening in four days. How ready am I to be a proper student again? Very ready and also completely terrified about the prospect of having my effort be under the academic microscope again. I'm studying at O.U (Open University, U.K). It's the university that produces the highest number of CEO's in the United Kingdom, and one of only two U.K universities to have Middle States Commission Accreditation in the U.S. I'm also the first Samoan on this scholarship scheme (Commonwealth Distance Learning Scholarship), and second Pacific Islander ever. So, no, I'm definitely not under any pressure right now. 😂

Recently all kinds of excessively cool stuff has happened for me. I know. I'm still not halfway through telling the story of my U.S trip. Oh well. Life happens. Every interim is also a hectic precipice at which some other great thing is happening. We are just voyagers. We only come so far on our own skill. It's the waves, the tides, the winds that move and shake and shape our courses. And thank heavens for those! Sometimes going straight is going the wrong way. I'm a product of so many off-course journeys. Detours. We are all part of this great accidental plan. 

I'm a new Commonwealth Correspondent for the YourCommonwealth Youth blog. First Samoan to be in this space. I'm the official Samoan ambassador for Space Kidz India's all-female lunar satellite project, Mission ShakthiSAT. Another first for Samoa and Polynesia. We did CHOGM and the Commonwealth Youth Forum in October. I got to lead the drafting of the new youth declaration's opening pillar. 2024 was a year of firsts. Dark humor irony: the only thing that wasn't a first was losing an immediate family member. I've lost five so far! In order: my brother Gabriel, my sister AngelRose, my adopted brother Sabbath, my Dad, and now my mum. Also, because extended family tend to be just as close as nuclear ones in the Pacific,  I lost my grandma just after my dad, and that was VERY painful. VERY! All I can say now is this: being first is not easy. This is probably why we honor "firsts". Human culture is obsessed with initiation, with discovery, with pioneer-ism. 

This year my brother Daniel is finally getting his Bachelor's Degree from Monash University in Melbourne. He's going to be the first grandson on both sides of our families (our parents' siblings and first cousins) to graduate from an international university. I will never understand how he manages to be so resilient and also so composed. He never says too much. Never does too much. Some days I wish he was my older brother. He's calm. Cool. Ah, well. Perhaps my overly loud manner is good in its own way. It gets things done, and that's about ninety percent of what being an eldest/first child is about in the Pacific. The ten percent is about taking the blame when things don't happen. I'm still struggling with both. But who isn't? 

In this new year, I am hoping to see more miracles but also to be more kind- to others, and to myself. To say yes to blessings and also say "not now" when I simply can't take anything else on. I'm a chronic people- pleaser. And a workaholic. It'll take some time to learn to step back in that way. But as I inch closer to thirty (oh my Lord😳), I know that I need to start investing rest and peace in my mind and body if I want to live longer than my parents did. I owe it to myself to see sixty and seventy and beyond, and if I ever have children of my own, I'll owe it to them to make sure they don't end up orphaned like my brother and I did. 

Coming to America...or Am I? Part 2

I'M HERE!

(Who Am I?)

"It's not magic, it's knowing."

Anon.

 

One of the first and most thought-provoking things I learned in Hawaii was the idea of the 'translated self'. In theory, it is the notion that we as indigenous people exist in colonial spaces as 'Caucasian-friendly', 'understandable', 'presentable' versions of ourselves. This - how we speak English everyday and wear 'appropriate' professional attire to corporate jobs, is not us. We are other, and so we are striving, generation upon generation, to Anglicize, Romanize, Westernize, Christianize and basically completely revise who we are. As our languages get translated and lose their mana to become mere shell caricatures of the original oratory, so we become, as Albert Wendt once wrote, "caricatures of ourselves."

I've had a very interesting time trying to deconstruct this whole concept. It's deeply important to my worldview now, but I've had to contextualize it (as one must- there is no homogeneous 'Pasifika' identity!) so that I can fully appreciate the ways in which it applies to me. For one thing, I am linguistically NOT, in fact, a translated 'version' of me. The 'English me' is the original me 😬. Adding an emoji there because, WOW, identities are super complex! Let me explain this, though: my first language is English. My initial consciousness and its first sprouts of comprehension were all based in the English language. Mentally, I have always had a very consistent, coherent, fast-running dialogue via which my thoughts flow. My internal voice is, and always has been, me hearing my speaking voice talk in English or (once I learned to write), me seeing myself writing or typing in English. The fact that I've had to face up to is, my Gagana Samoa self is a translated self. My acquisition of Samoan came in short leaps and great but disconnected bounds throughout the first seventeen years of my life. I initially learned to speak colloquial Samoan from my peers at school and my extended Samoan aiga. On its own, informal Samoan is very unlike 'common English'. Informal Samoan cannot, for example, be spoken up the front in church or at village gatherings. If you spoke simple, understandable English at a church service, on the other hand, you'd definitely be appreciated and maybe even thanked. Gagana Samoa is as complex to navigate as a very bony fish is to eat (that's a translated saying! See how strange it looks out of its proper context?). 

I have another translated self. My Melanesian self is also a caricature. It is very different from my 'Samoan' translation of me, but I hold it close nonetheless. Only in my twenties have I really been able to think in Pidgin English, and build daily narratives in both a Melanesia language and context. My mother always spoke to my brother and I in Pidgin when we were growing up, but in the way that some people don't fully identify with things such as religion until they're old enough to reason with it on their own terms, I was unable to be me in a Pidgin 'headspace' until very recently. I have spent incomparably longer in Samoa than P.N.G, so I give myself a small bit of grace for my slower progress on this particular translation. But. It's something I work hard on. I attend and participate in P.N.G community gatherings. Until the busyness of recent months, I was a senior executive member of the registered association incorporated which represents P.N.G citizens in Samoa. It was a high honor to serve in that capacity, and it gave to that part of my 'self' a fluency, agency and self-assurance that I have never claimed before. I've had to bring into my everyday world the music, movies and even social media channels of P.N.G in order to really immerse myself in the sense of 'being' that constitutes who I want to 'be' as a Papua New Guinean. I know that I will always be more Samoan than Papua New Guinean in my manner, in my thinking, in my linguistic capacity, and most definitely in my cultural practice. In the same vein, I have accepted that I will also always be more 'English-y' than Samoan or Papua New Guinean. I am part of this 'somewhere in the middle' crust of Oceania. We know who we are culturally and historically, but we also understand that our first thoughts of the day and even most of our immediate subconscious reasoning happens by default in a language that many of our great-grandparents learned late, if at all. 

I've come to this conclusion: there is nothing inherently wrong with translation, or translated selves. In a globalized world, they allow us to interact with our fellow human beings in important and beautiful ways. My parents were of two very different cultures. Each committed to putting forth, daily, a translated self so as to live in harmony and most of all, love, with the other. My father's internal monologue, I know, was always in Gagana Samoa. He only just learned proper English in his late teens. Looking back, I am now able to appreciate how greatly he strove to hold together our multicultural family. He presented and lived as his translated self not only during his relationship with our mother, but also for the final twenty-one years of his life during which he was a father. His choice to live as a caricature allowed us to access and therefore love as well as cherish the brilliant person he was. 

Some days, when I sit in my classroom reading or at my study table drinking coffee, I wonder. How many wonderful people have I met whilst in translated mode? How many people have come into my life and met only the Samoan me, or the P.N.G me? Are they out there remembering me in a way that is vastly different from what my inner person knows me to be?

Other days, when I miss my parents, I wonder who they were. They were the most lyrical translations I have ever seen. And as with all translations ever, that is of course only a fraction of the original's power. 

Coming to America...or Am I? Part 1

I'M HERE!

(Where exactly is here?) 

If we could edit each other's dreams, what would we change?

Well, that was a pretty ominous epigraph. It's making me want to write some kind of poem. 

Alright, so...I caught my first ever flight to Honolulu on a hot Friday afternoon. Sweat was in my hair, on my neck, even on my memory-deprived OPPO A3 phone. I had no time to reflect too deeply on anything. To appreciate that I was going somewhere I had never been before. I had a few moments whilst packing. I slipped my mum, dad and grandma's memorial pins into my makeup case. One can't be too sentimental when one has a big trip to the Free World coming up. 

The six hour flight from Samoa to Hawaii was by no means the longest or most stressful I have ever experienced. Remember, I endured the world's fourth longest flight (17 hours, whew!) twice in the space of, like, five days last year. But...I was still a little anxious when the cloud pockets started moving us around as we approached the Northern Pacific. One thing I immediately figured out is that there's a lot of turbulence around the Hawaiian archipelago. I would experience heaps more of it, flying out to D.C, and even leaving, towards Fiji. 

On the flight, I was seated next to one of my soon-to-be RPIL colleagues from Fiji. Ironically, she would end up being my roommate during our D.C field immersion. Life is cool like that, I reckon. Halfway through the plane ride, she asked if we could switch seats. This gave me her window seat, and I was so so soooo excited because I could now take a video of us landing in Hawaii. The beautiful ocean, The tops of palm trees. The...people. 

Ah, but all dreams must die. Mine did, quickly and quite hilariously. As we touched down in Honolulu, it was drizzling, the turbulence had made us tired, and...I could not see a THING! Just, nil. There were the usual orangey-red lights on the wings of the airplane as we descended, and I could just about make out the shapes of buildings in the nighttime haze. But that was it! I'm ashamed to admit (but I have to- won't learn if I don't) that I had for so, SO long ascribed to the colonizer's gaze. You know, Pina Coladas and alo'a shirts...It's pretty stupid, really. I'm Samoan, for heaven's sake. We have so many of the same darn problems. In the first week of our fellowship, we learned that any person from a colony or former colony inherits a colonial legacy. That often includes the colonizer's worldview, wherein native people are "subjects and objects" (a former boss of mine once gave us that wording as she tried to describe this phenomenon). We allow ourselves to be subjected and objectified, before (sometimes unknowingly) subjecting other indigenous people to this brand of objectification. 

Very quickly, I established that neither Hawaii nor this fellowship was here to play. Someone once wrote that when she was getting her malu tattoo, she wanted to look at the tufuga before the actual process started. She wanted to ascertain that he meant her "pain". That he was going to test her physical endurance and mental fortitude. I took one look at the graffiti in the last tunnel we passed through as we drove to Manoa Valley, and knew that this place and its people had weathered centuries of pain and suffering. I knew I would not leave here without having seen and felt it too, even in the smallest possible measure. 

READING RECOMMENDATIONS :)

💭 Every few blog entries, I'll recommend two books from my reading list. I'm a very eccentric reader, so I'll post everything from historical fiction to homicidal manifestos.  

1.

"...the minority must posses their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression."-  Thomas Jefferson

I know, I know...why ON EARTH am I promoting a collation of speeches by dead American presidents?❓ 

Well: why on Earth NOT? 

I'll say of my decision to promote this, only this: give the men in this book, the founders of what can still be a beacon of democracy and economic growth, a chance. American politics is currently at a strange and interesting crux: it makes us nervous but also it's our favorite joke on TikTok and Instagram. I was never really keen on it myself, no thanks to tRuMp and his...just everything he does, really! HOWEVER, after my Capitol Hill meetings and tour in May, I wandered into the Visitor's Center gift shop where I stumbled upon this gem of a book.  In its pages, and in words that are older than my great-grandfather from whom my surname comes, I have found so much wisdom, hope, and encouragement that I can't help but be inspired. Maybe, just maybe, you will too. 

P.S. read it slowly. The syntax in here is something else!

2. 

"...how can you be a teenager when you is only 12?"- Bette Greene

Oh, man! Where do I even begin? 

I myself was only about twelve when I read this and if I can be really honest with all you random strangers on the internet, I found it kinda romantic. This sounds like a scenario straight out of one of my final year Lit papers, 'Awkward Books', where we talked about censorship and 'morality'. It was one of those courses that would just answer all your questions with more questions. 

If you're into historical fiction that's more on the Y/A forbidden romance side, this might be for you. Be warned, though: the age gap between the protagonists is about ten years. You do the math, and you figure out what works for your own moral compass. 

Note: This book is a challenged/ banned list one. Take up the challenge of reading it, and see why. 

in the interim

in the interim: what happens here? 

"It's the in-between..(where) you can become invisible."- K.W

That's Chicago, from several thousand feet in the air, on a United Airlines flight from the mainland to Hawaii.

I love to travel but hate traveling. Planes are a hassle, you know? All this notwithstanding, I got on a six hour flight from Upolu to O'ahu a few weeks after my mum's funeral. Zero time was spent processing anything - I just went for it. 

Back in January, I was selected for the Resilient Pacific Islands Leaders Fellowship. It's an initiative of the East-West Center, implemented by the Pacific Islands Development Program and hosted at the University of Hawaii. It was a lot of luck, I think, but also good timing. My mum was so excited when I told her, and I'm very glad she at least knew I was about to embark on my first fellowship, before she passed on. She knew I was going to be okay. Mostly. Hah. 

I haven't written anything in here for about five months. What can I say? I've been living and doing and being. It's kind of ridiculous that half a year has already flown by. I've been feeling as though l've been living in some sort of transitional, interim period. I've developed a whole new routine. My house has transformed into a new space altogether - one absent of my mother's mince pasta on Sundays and her sun-dried laundry on Tuesdays. My cousin Samkeyes has come to live with me. According to our Samoan culture, it would be negligent of my extended family to let me live alone (a.k.a independently 😂). I've always had a very great sense of self-sufficiency. I've had to- I took care of both my parents and have paid all the bills since I turned twenty-one. BUT, and I never thought I'd say this, it's been the BEST thing ever having my cousin over. He's got my dad's amazing cooking skills, my mum's love of clean clothes, and our grandmother's storytelling (☕ tea-spilling?) propensity. Having family members is actually wonderful. It's one of those things we don't often take time to truly marvel at. In this chapter of my story I AM (finally) GRATEFUL to be part of a big extended family. Of course, as with all extended families, there'll always be specific people I gel better with than others. And yes- there are some that I still don't see eye -to-eye with. But that's life. A family is essentially a basic social unit. Probably the most basic one there is. Social units are comprised of humans and humans have flaws. Right now, I'm just trying to live the happiest way I know how: simply, honestly, and kindly. What have I learned in this interim? That first and foremost, it's important to be kind to myself. I can show up better for my loved ones, and love them better too, if I love myself. 

I've started reading again- this month's task is to complete Kevin Kwan's sugar-sweet Sex and Vanity. It's my first time reading a contemporary rom-com. I'm both proud and ashamed of that. My reading list is so vast and I've only just found the...COURAGE to venture into this gem of a genre. I'm very pragmatic. And cynical. BUT THIS- wow! It's turning out to be just what I need right now. 

I'll write more about Manoa Valley, all the cute guys I saw, and all the amazing food I had in Hawaii, in my next post. Did that sentence sound vapid? I'm glad. I'm learning, also, to stop taking myself so seriously these days. 

What Do We Say to These Things?

When All Is Said and Done

"Oh Lord, You Know, I'm tired."

This is a blog post full of recycled sentiments. Studded memories. Sentences that don't start. Or end. 

Last week I lost my mum. 

It feels so weird typing that out. She was just here a few days ago, listening to me read some of my old entries out loud. Telling me even the lackluster ones were great. Just being a mum. 

I'm not a caregiver anymore. Caregiving has been a definitive part of my life for so many years. Hospital pharmacy. ER. Ward. Operating Theater. Outpatient clinic. Back and forth, over and over. One of my favorite poets once wrote that repeated things become welts. It's the friction on your knees from too much praying. Or your back hurts from sitting on a cold floor for too many days. 

I'm using for this entry the same quote I used for the previous one. I am tired but I don't know what of. I was tired when there was so much to do and now I am tired when there is nothing to do. No one to wake up every two hours and check on. What am I going to do with all this freedom?

Here's a list of stuff I've been considering:

1. Turn into a mermaid

2. Finish my MA Thesis

3. Go on a blind date. Or any date at all, really. I couldn't date much when I was in the hospital half the time and in my office the other half of that time. 

4. Become a TikToker. Someone told me I should do makeup tutorials or something. In this heat? I have NO tips for ya'll. Just use Matte, please. Only thing that doesn't start running like water off your face after three seconds in the sun. 

5. Enter a beauty pageant...lol. Fat chance. Those are fricken scary if you have anxiety!

6. Get married. Again, another difficult proposition. My finances aren't consenting to THAT right now. Probably won't for the next ten or fifteen years. 

The funeral is in two days and I am trying to tie myself together. Like shoe laces, I think I'll finally master the art of BEING amidst this loss, when all is said and done, and everything has folded back into some kind of normality. Did I tell you guys I only learned to tie my own laces at seventeen? And quite by accident, whilst recalling a Spongebob song called, "Loop-dee-loop and pull"? Yeah. But you never forget those kinds of life skills. Walk in your new shoes a few days, months, years, and you'll get to where you're supposed to be next. It just may hurt a little in the adjustment phase.