Ocean waves inhere multiple significations within themselves. From a scientific perspective, they are disturbances on the ocean surface enacted by an undulation of wind over water. Abetted, at times, by the gravitational pull of the sun, the moon and the earth, they not only sculpt coastlines but also influence and sustain a host of ecosystems, whether as gentle ripples or towering surges. Once set in motion and left undisturbed, these disturbances can flow for thousands of kilometers, traversing across many a man-made boundary, be it maritime, national or cultural, with nary a care, responding instead to geophysical beckoning and bowing only to ancient planetary rhythms that exceed and outscale the tiny, transient imprints of human histories.
Politically, waves emphasise agency. With histories of trade routes, migrations and navigations stretching back across millennia, they carry within and through them archives of the rise and fall of empires, the footprints of modern commercial enterprises and the circulatory flows of international relations. In this sense, waves are also conduits of stratagem and carriers of power.
Taken together, these sinusoidal structures echo what has come before and portend what is yet to be, pressing simultaneously against shores aplenty, shores composed of different particles and inhabited by different peoples, all caressed alike by the watery phalanges of the seas. Recognising this relational impulse of oceanic waves, Pacific writer Epeli Hau’ofa in his 1994 essay, “Our Sea of Islands”, discusses how the Pacific Ocean, intersected as it is with a jigsaw of more than 10,000 islands across vast watery stretches, departs from deterministic views of the region as an empty space bearing little consequence. Articulating a shift in lens from ‘islands in the sea’ to a ‘sea of islands’, Hau’ofa challenges the longstanding continental notion of the Pacific Islands as small and scattered, and develops
instead a holistic perspective that recognises a community of islands interconnected through the ocean as a networked expanse. Suʻifefiloi is borne out of this very perspective. It is a Samoan practice of sewing and stitching together various flowers to create an ula or a flower garland. It is a practice of weaving together disparate entities to forge something anew while preserving the singularity of its constituents. To think through suʻifefiloi, then, is to think through waves themselves, where fluid assemblages of water molecules combine, disperse and recombine, creating patterns that are both distinct and part of a larger continuum.
To think through suʻifefiloi, then, is to think through the Pacific itself, where inter-islandic movements of people, stories and histories interact with and inflect each other within an ever moving relational whole. In Pacific fiction, suʻifefiloi perhaps finds one of its most vivid reflection in the works of Samoan author Sia Figiel, particularly in Where We Once Belonged (1996), a coming-of-age narrative of a young protagonist whose autobiographical thread is interwoven with Samoan mythical and historical currents. Structurally held together through dreams, chants, letters, et al., the form of the narrative encompasses multiplicity without the fracas of fragmentation. Like waves that gather without erasing, Figiel’s text is modelled upon the entwining logic of suʻifefiloi, responding to Hau’ofa’s call for reimagining the Pacific as a living weave, braiding together meanings and memories.
– Swagata Chakraborty