ABSTRACT
Sia Figiel’s most recent novel, Freelove (2016), shows that Indigenous cultures, too often associated with the anti-modern, the traditional, or the past, have long enacted and reflected upon their own modernity. Indeed, from the perspective of the Indigenous avant-garde Figiel helps create, Western patterns of modernity themselves might be belated, always trying to catch up to the Indigenous now. In the process, Figiel challenges a longstanding assumption that, as Simon During writes, ‘the West is modern, the modern is the West. By this logic, other societies can enter history, grasp the future, only at the price of their destruction’. This chapter argues that Freelove is committed to providing a new way forward for our engagement with both Indigenous and modernist frameworks of knowing and being. In Freelove, Figiel explores the agency of Samoan girls and women, and Samoan and Pacific cultures, revealing that they have already entered history and grasped the future in a manner that extends our understanding of the West, modernity, and modernism.
This chapter argues that Figiel deliberately does not mystify literature and writing as alien to the Pacific, imported by European missionaries and flowering only relatively recently into the publication of novels by Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt. Instead, she shows that Samoan literatures and science are already present, long predating European alphabets, in carving and tattoo, weaving and stories, genealogies and spirituality. In this foregrounding of Samoan ways of knowing, Figiel responds to and performs Subramani’s call for an ‘Oceanic Imaginary’, but takes it even further to write out an Oceanian sensorium, an Oceanian universe. As such, the novel’s reverent and irreverent engagement with a sexual union that is respectful, sacred, and taboo opens up a space in which the aesthetic, the sensory, the theoretical come together to embody the theories of Oceanian epistemology and ontology presented by writers such as Epeli Hau‘ofa and Vincente Diaz. In this way, European and North American modernism is deemed secondary to ancestral knowledge and a radical, transformatory Indigenous modernism.
