Where We Once Belonged

The first novel by Sia Figiel, Where We Once Belonged draws on the author’s own experiences to paint a coming-of-age work about a Samoan teenager learning to navigate the complex rules of behavior expected of her as she matures into adulthood. First published in 1997 in New Zealand, where it won the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, the novel later became the first work by a Samoan woman to be published in the United States.

Figiel uses an unconventional structure in her work by blending more conventional novelistic techniques with the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su’ifefiloi (a word that means “a woven garland of flowers” and describes a way of stringing together loosely related stories or episodes into a cohesive fiction). Some of the episodes are written in prose, and some in poetry. The writing also uses dialect and Samoan language extensively, and not all the words are glossed in the small dictionary included in the book. All of this works to create a feeling of immersion in the reader.

Figiel also uses her writing to answer the most famous works written about Samoan culture – the anthropological studies of Western researchers like Margaret Mead who described the islands as a kind of prelapsarian paradise of unrestricted sexuality and freedom. After the encroachment of Western values, especially in the guise of very strict Christianity, the Samoa Figiel portrays is a deeply restricted, violently patriarchal panopticon.



Our heroine is Alofa Filiga, whom we observe in a variety of situations between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Growing up in the village of Malaefou on Tonga, Alofa quickly runs up against the repressive mores of the world around her. The older she gets, the more aware she becomes of how much her life isn’t her own – and the more she strains to get some measure of independence and selfhood.

The stories in the novel explore a variety of narrative threads. One is the domestic violence that is a completely unremarked on part of daily life. Alofa is subjected to frequent beatings for a variety of things she has ostensibly done wrong – beatings that are supposed to function as “lessons” that she learns better behavior from. Not only is this a regular part of her childhood, but it is apparently an expectation of an involved parent. At one point, Alofa’s mother demands that her father show his authority over his daughter by beating her. Within the world of the novel, this request makes sense, given that Alofa’s mother is herself often beaten by her husband.

Another thread that the stories explore is the onset of adolescent sexuality. We see the standard school drama, shifting friendships, teenage crushes, the pop culture obsessions that are part of any coming-of-age story. There are subplots about the fact that Alofa is a menstrual late bloomer, wondering when she will get the “moon sickness” that all her friends have already succumbed to. She and her best friends play Charlie’s Angels, with Alofa always taking on the role of Jill, while Lilli patterns herself after Kelly and Moa after Sabrina.



But these playful ventures towards adulthood are always tinged with a darker edge. When older and younger men start paying attention to Alofa and her friends, it is exciting – but it is also dangerous in a society where the oppressive influence of the church means women are blamed for all interactions. When someone winks at Alofa at church, her father loses his temper and beats her for impropriety. In a world where men are free to discard wives on a whim, but unmarried pregnant women are shunned, any deviation from enforced gender dynamics is met with violent consequences.

Still, Figiel injects a lot of humor into this sometimes brutal depiction. Sometimes it’s simply through Alofa’s snarky reactions to events, as when she describes her friend Elisa’s experience at the gynecologist’s office. The girl had “remained pure, until her first check-up at the hospital when a metal instrument injured her hymen...All these years and she was saving it for a piece of metal,” Alofa quips. Other times the humor comes through other characters, like Alofa’s cousin who goes to school in New Zealand and comes back an anti-colonialist. Newly up in arms, she yells at white tourists, “Go back to where you came from…Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!” But the tendency to want to make light of her surroundings doesn’t always end well. In another story, Alofa tells us about a prank she and her friends decide to play on a prissy classmate that they dislike. Their idea is to put a mildly pornographic magazine into her school bag, assuming that she will discover it and be shocked by its contents. But the prank goes awry when the magazine is discovered by a teacher instead. When the girl’s family is told, she is severely beaten.

As we watch Alofa’s adolescence, what we realize along with her is just how observed she and her peers are. Independence can never really happen for young women who are never allowed to be alone – and the community is so small and close-knit that there is always somebody watching their every move. Conversely, almost never in the beginning of the novel does Alofa use the word “I” to describe an action. Instead, she is always part of a group, doing something together with others. As she eventually explains to a white teacher, “You were always with someone,” she explains, “…Nothing was witnessed alone. Nothing was witnessed in the ‘I’ form…‘I’ does not exist, Miss Cunningham. ‘I’ is ‘we’…always.” In a way, the arc of Alofa’s character is to move away from this ever-present “we” into a sense of herself as an individual being. At one point, she leaves her family home to live with an aunt who allows her to continue her education – two decisions that allow her to finally assert her own thoughts and will on the world, to become an “I.”