Notes

182 pages.
Contents: Tautalaitiiti girls need no fefence -- Teine Sā, my feminist icons -- Brown & Bougle -- Pacific cyberhunnies & digitisation of care -- Creative representations of joy & hyena laughs of resistance -- Swimming in circles -- Eighty-three mostly babies & children, 3.269 kilometres & three generations -- There is a vā between my thighs -- Becoming a bloody woman -- An open letter to my future adult children.
Summary: These essays by writer and critic Lana Lopesi explores the overlap of being a woman and Sāmoan. Writing on ancestral ideas of womanhood appears alongside contemporary reflections on women's experiences and the Pacific. These essays lead into the messy and the sticky, the whispered conversations and the unspoken. As Lopesi writes, 'Bloody Woman has been scary to write... In putting words to my years of thinking, following the blood and revealing the evidence board in my mind, I am breaking a silence to try to understand something. It feels terrifying, but right.' These acts of self-revelation ultimately seek to open up new spaces, to acknowledge the narratives not yet written, and the voices to come.