This Samoan Language Week, I remember my experience — the experience of many post-colonial Pasifika children — of being fined ten sene and added to a “Speaking Samoan List” during my primary school years.
I remember getting the duster, the faga’au (piece of rubber hose), stick, and broom on my palms and legs for whispering to my classmates “ua ka se fia?” (what time is it?) in the language my great-grandfather Koria preached the gospel in.
These were, at the time, the well-meaning methods of a system that outwardly sought to improve our English and thus give us the gifts of preparedness and fluency, for when we were thrown up against the harsh and brash coldness of a world that remains, literally and figuratively, Anglicised almost a hundred years after the first waves of imperialism.
The system meant to help us. It inadvertently — and very traumatically — contributed to the butchering of our language.
Not thirty years later, we — this same generation — are now called to answer for why we don’t speak our Gagana Samoa with more pride and better posture.
“Maybe it’s too much TikTok. Maybe it’s too much YouTube. Too much Instagram. Too much fiapalagi (wanting to be a foreigner—when we want to insult people, we other and dissociate them, I guess).”
The truth is, a lot of us are still afraid.
Afraid of what? I myself don’t even know sometimes.
There is a hesitancy. A pause. Some pauses last your whole lifetime.
No one told me that when I was looking for coins to pay for the sin of speaking a language of the navigators who forded the vastest geographic entity on Earth.
Last year I had one of the greatest opportunities anyone in the English-speaking world (and the world itself, really) could dream of.
I went into the White House and was given a few minutes to speak about Samoa. The night before, I went through my thesaurus.
My colonised brain had been well-trained:
When you go into ‘English’ spaces, you must wow them. Astound them with your knowledge of their language. The superior language.
I had five words in my head that I would weave into my address.
How I would introduce myself.
When I sat down, I saw my name on the card in front of me. “Jasmine Koria – Samoa.”
And… it hit me.
If I can say anything at all about my country, in those five short minutes that I don’t even deserve to have on behalf of my people,
Am I going to waste them by speaking as if the Union Jack is still high above Mulinu’u?
So, with what little courage an orphan from Savai‘i could muster,
I looked at the National Security Council Member whom I wanted to address my question to and said:
“TALOFA LE AFIOGA. O A‘U O JASMINE KORIA.”
