Samoan Language Week: Barbara Edmonds on navigating her own ...

Opinion:

Gagana Samoa is my first language.

I didn’t start to speak English fluently until I got to primary school and even today I struggle with English prepositions!

Like many who grew up in an English-speaking and educated world, I lost my mother-tongue the older I got; but I am grateful for those synapses that my brain hard-wired in my early years, that I can still fully understand Gagana Samoa.

So many of my earliest memories were saturated in Gagana Samoa and fa’asamoa.

After my parents crossed the Pacific Ocean in 1976, more of our aiga began to follow with eyes wide open for the opportunities that the land of milk and honey had to offer them.

Originally moving with the Pacific tide to South Auckland, we eventually settled on the North Shore and our fale became the transit lounge for the scores of family that needed a roof over their heads, including some of my cousins.

One day, my father asked my siblings and I to take on a new challenge: To teach our cousins English by speaking it more frequently and freely.

For as quickly as being a bilingual child had become for me, my cousins were becoming increasingly frustrated and began acting out in school. They started to give other kids hidings due to their frustration at being teased and not being able to speak English “properly”.

Just as they were struggling to understand the environment around them, they also couldn’t understand why their new community didn’t always sound or speak like them.

And so the loss of my speaking Gagana Samoa began.

When my mother Palepa died in 1986, we spent many of our school holidays at my Grandma Losa’s house in Māngere to give my father some reprieve.

Like many of our Māmās, some of my earliest memories are of my Grandma carrying her transistor radio around the house.

Blasting loud for all of Māngere to hear were the Samoan language programmes that we became accustomed to hearing as she tended to her garden, roasted her koko, made fa’apāpā and weaved fala or fixed ie toga (fine mats) that were brought to her by family to mend.

Often we’d wake to Radio Samoa and then go to bed with Radio Samoa.

Perhaps subconsciously as I slept and dreamed, this strengthened my understanding of Gagana Samoa. On reflection, it also gives me a chuckle of the many broken English/Samoan conversations I had with my Grandma, where she would speak to me in Samoan and I would respond in English.

Once holidays at Grandma’s became fewer, Gagana Samoa would leave my lips more and more and English became my default setting. It’s a story that I’ve heard many times over the years – families who immigrated and felt the pressure to fit in.

That decision though small and would seem insignificant to some, would lead me on a new journey as I entered into Parliament.

No sooner had I become a political candidate, the pull to outwardly convey my Samoan identity and be more steeped in fa’asamoa grew. At first, I felt uncomfortable. I was so used to being in the kitchen serving our elders and church ministers, and now I was seated at the table with them and being served by family.

I had to start conversing more and more in Gagana Samoa and I have been grateful for the gentleness our elders have shown me in understanding my struggle to reclaim our language.

I also started to understand the pride our Samoan community had in having another tamai’ta’i Samoa in Parliament, a new Samoan Minister and in the case of Hon Carmel Sepuloni, I have observed the immense pride from our wider Pacific community at having our first Pacific Deputy Prime Minister (of both Samoan and Tongan descent).

It makes me tear up almost every time I reference Carmel’s achievement in my speeches as the Pacific crowds cheer and applaud with pride.

For me, being able to reclaim my Gagana Samoa and having the confidence to speak it every day is but a step on my lifelong journey.

Barbara Edmonds is the Minister for Pacific Peoples