Dr Lana Lopesi is an author, art critic and Editor in Chief of the Pacific Arts Legacy Project. She is also Interim Director of The Pantograph Punch, and a Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at AUT. Her new book Bloody Woman has just been released.
It is a collection of essays, and is a deeply personal exploration of her experience of being Samoan and a woman. Lopesi says writing the book was an attempt to break a silence, and feels "terrifying but right".
She explains to Kathryn Ryan that gender is discussed very often in the Samoan context and that many Samoan women are very influenced by Christianity.
Photo: supplied
“I was trying to find something else, Bloody Woman is very much that search for our stories, our ceremonies and our cultural references which can tell us our ancestral modes of gender which sit outside of this very idealised version that we’re given today.
“To even talk about these things is quite scary but it felt like the work I had to do.”
Lopesi says she continually got signs over the years that there was a story to tell and feels she was compelled to write the book.
“I confided to a friend that I went on a rant and said, ‘these bloody women are trying to tell me something and I don’t know how to read it’. She just looked at me and said ‘bloody women, that’s the title of your book’ and that’s guided me ever since.”
One issue she looks is a Samoan term used for a when a child is cheeky. Boys tend to grow out of the term after puberty but, for girls, it changes meaning to insinuate promiscuity and is even levelled against older women.
Lopesi makes the argument that the term should be reclaimed and empowered by women rather than being a pejorative put down which further entrenches patriarchal control. However, she finds writing such things quite confrontational and felt she needed a ‘permission’ to do so.
“I always really prided myself on what I used to call ‘good Samoan girl training’. What that really meant was that I never spoke up or that I would always defer to certain people in certain situations. While I think that has a value in some places, what I’m starting to realise is that sometimes those deference’s come from introduced dominant norms.
“It was really questioning some of these things which, in other situations, I would have only kept to the whispers of private rooms with my friends. Part of that permission is giving myself the permission to leave behind the treasures that I want my children to find.”
Lopesi says that growing up as a Samoan woman, you can find yourself inhabiting more than multiple worlds that you need to navigate.
“I feel really lucky in that my house was one that had a lot of Samoan culture but it wasn’t a place in which I ever felt as though I had identity issues. I felt very confident and I still feel very confident in the complexities that I have that make me up.
“I think that’s an absolute privilege to have but I also see my children moving even more seamlessly through the world than I do. I think we’re getting to a stage now where the Pacific experience is so much more than being stuck between here and there.”
The other issue for her is that Christianity and Samoan culture and now married together very tightly.
“I was someone who grew up outside of the church but very much inside of the culture and so I’m interested in pulling those things apart to find space for the rest of us who don’t fit within that confine.”
Some of the essays are deeply personal, one for instance is an essay on her experience with abortion.
“I always knew that I wanted to write about abortion, but I didn’t want it to be in a situation where I was wringing my trauma for [online] audiences very short term entertainment, for lack of a better word. I always knew that if I did do it, it would be in the book and, when I started conceiving Bloody Woman, it was the one chapter I definitely knew would be in there.
“Part of it is selfish, being able to write through and process my own feelings around abortion and the other part has been about the Me Too speak out, especially for those of us who have the privilege of being platformed and asking ourselves what our responsibility is, to normalise this stuff.
“I wanted to remind myself and others that we have the unalienable right to make decisions about our own bodies and those rights don’t need to be justified. I found myself, in that chapter, wanting to justify my own decisions and having to pull back and think, actually no, this is something I’ve done and there’s nothing to defend here. It is what it is.”
