Where We Once Belonged, by Sia Figiel

This book pulls off telling the timeless them of a coming of age story with the freshness of setting it in Samoa but using the ancient structure of the oral tradition to lay out the story- in short, it is new, old and timeless all at once. It is about a young girl in Samoa growing up as her island and culture are split between the traditions of the island’s history and things like the television and apple scented shampoo.
Figiel has a knack for the details that mean so much more than at first glance, telling a whole story in the first few pages about that shampoo- she begins with her narrator, Alofa, talking about the boys and men of the village are in love with one young girl, that many of them will even pay her just to sniff her panties, but that Alofa and her friends have no idea why anyone would like to be anywhere close to her as she doesn’t shower or clean herself and she wears the same dresses, unwashed, as her sister does. 

The boys say that she and her friends, who call themselves Charlie’s Angels, are too clean for the boys to like them- too clean in the sense that they have abandoned the ways of the island, that they have fallen too in love with the world that brought them Charlie’s Angels and do not smell, feel or think any more like a woman who island men love.  

And this is just the first 3 or 4 pages. From there Figiel explores dozens of issues, from the influence of television on the way people spend their time to the secrets of sexual abuse to finding and losing pride in the island- and maybe even finding it again. Between all of that Alofa takes us deep into the lore of the island and the depths of meaning behind her name, Samoa and the traditional take on everything from existence to why she became a girl. It’s like reading a story and then dreaming a song in between- it’s a beautiful back and forth between the spiritual side of storytelling and the rhythms of everyday speech in a culture tugged between tradition and, well, the American way.  

One of the core issues that the book explores is the island’s traditional view of the “I” versus the “we,” and how this concept plays out. In traditional Samoan culture the “I” does not exist- the individual exists as a piece/ part of the community, the island. This does not fit well with the American view of independence, where there is hardly any concept of we. Alofa struggles on surface and deep levels to find an understanding of and her truth in this among many other battles.

On top of being a beautiful and moving story, the book is the first novel by a Samoan woman has ever been published in the United States. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking and it is a gut-wrenching journey to undertake. I highly, highly recommend it.