Freelove book event
The School of Languages and Cultures was honoured to host an event on Thursday 24th May celebrating the launch of Freelove the new novel by Samoan author Sia Figiel.
It was a great honour and privilege to host Samoan author Sia Figiel reading from her third and latest novel Freelove, recently launched in Aotearoa New Zealand by Little Island Press. Written primarily in English, with some Samoan, Freelove is not yet published in translation. To highlight the potential cross-cultural reach of the book, Sia was joined in the Wan Solwara Pacific student space in Rankine Brown (Library) by invited lecturers from Samoan Studies (Niusila Faamanatu-Eteuati), French (Jean Anderson and Dr Charles Rice-Davis) and Spanish (Dr Carolina Miranda) who contributed by translating and reading excerpts from Freelove, giving the audience a chance to engage with the author, her novel, and the creative art of translation across multiple languages and cultures.
Sia Figiel’s debut novel where we once belonged won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (SE Asia/South Pacific). Now considered a classic of Pacific literature, it has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Catalan and Dutch. The late Associate Professor Teresia Teaiwa, of Va‘aomanū Pasifika, had high praise for Figiel's more recent work, Freelove: “With each of her novels, Sia Figiel has turned a page on Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman’s competing claims to represent Samoans to the world. With Freelove, Figiel has not just turned a page, she has shut the book resolutely on Mead/Freeman by reclaiming some crucial things that got lost in the overheated anthropological debate. Most importantly, Figiel has reclaimed Samoan agency over representing Samoan appetites. While Mead fixated on the sexual appetite of teenage girls and Freeman on a generalized appetite for violence…Figiel’s focus is on…an insatiable Samoan appetite for learning: learning about science, math, literature, history, nature…the self, the other.”
April Henderson, Programme Director of Va'aomanū Pasifika, was delighted with the event. "It was absolutely delicious to hear Figiel's work rendered so beautifully across multiple languages by our colleagues in SLC, and particularly touching to observe the author's reaction: Figiel, who is fluent in Samoan and conversant enough in Spanish and French to follow the translations, was clearly deeply moved by everyone's attentiveness to her writing and its layered meanings. And the discussion afterward about the nuances of translation was just fascinating!"