"reading around the world one book at a time 2024: samoa

They Who Do Not Grieve sure is a book. A tale of three generations of women, belonging to two different families tied by a fateful past, who navigate life in Samoa in the second half of the twentieth century.

These women’s tales are told in a deeply lyrical language, and explore their strife to create and determine their choices within the constrictions of the mysoginy and violence embedded in their lives.

The main fil rouge that ties all these women together is how none of them lives a “traditional� life, following strict rules and expectations; most of them are unmarried and had children out of wedlock, and while this state gives them grief and puts them in a situation where they will be hated and scorned by their communities, their independence is envied by many, and in more than one occasion this independence is strictly tied to the Independence of Samoa.

The novel also touches on the constant denigration of Samoan people (but also Tongans, Fijians, Papua New Guineans, Indians and all the Islanders of Oceania) in New Zealand, in America and in Samoa itself by the white tourists that dream of the perfect life in the Pacific ocean. It’s as heartbreaking to read as the rest of the book.

The lyrical and poetic style is what holds me back from giving the book a higher rating, because despite clearly being a skilled writer, Sia Figiel is not the one for me. She is lauded in her country and abroad as both a poet and a novelist and that becomes very clear in her prose. I found the timelines to be a bit confusing and the voices of the women a bit too similar one to the other, to the point where I was confused about who was speaking sometimes � the fact that all the point of views are in first person didn’t help. With this I don’t mean to say the characters didn’t have their own idiosyncracies, but that in the long run some recurring stylistic choices flattened their voices.
Add to that the dream sequences and the metaphors and they symbolic images and you’ll see why I was so discombobulated.

Among all this there’s some really beautiful passages, and a heavy stress on the importance of names and language, which I really appreciated.

It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I would still recommend it to people who love poetry and generational stories rooted in folklore."