E lelei le tofa e si’isi’i alafia.

A sound view is opportunistic.

Talofa lau Susuga Papalii Sia Figiel.

Google says you are an American contemporary Samoan novelist, poet, and painter, born in Apia in 1967.

You are the author of novels, plays and poetry, you have travelled extensively in Europe and the Pacific Islands, and have had residencies at the Univeristy of Technology in Sydney, the East-West Center in Hawaii, the Pacific Writing Forum at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and Logoipulotu College in Savai’i.

You are also known as a performance poet and have appeared at several international literary festivals. Your first novel, where we once belonged, won the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize Best First Book for the Southeast Asia/South Pacific region.

Where We Once Belonged also marks the first instance of a novel published in the United States that is written by a Samoan female. The novel was adapted into a play by Dave Armstrong, a 2008 production of the play winning the Chapman Tripp Theatre Award for best New Zealand play.

Your poetry won the Polynesian Literary Competition in 1994. Your works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Danish,Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Portuguese.

In 2000 you performed your Oceanic poetry at the University of Hawaii's twenty-fifth annual Pacific Island Studies conference.

Your performances with Teresia Teaiwa were recorded at this conference and subsequently released in a joint production with Hawai'i Dub Machine records and 'Elepaio Press. The album is titled Terenesia. You have also been a contributor to The Contemporary Pacific journal on multiple occasions, including publications in 1998 and 2010.

Selected poetry by yourself was included in UPU, a compilation of Pacific Island writers’ work which was first presented at the Silo Theatre as part of the Auckland Arts Festival in March 2020. UPU was remounted as part of the Kia Mau Festival in Wellington in June 2021.

Wow, very impressive. Congratulations.

Now that I know who you are, and what you’ve achieved, I take it that you are very proud of your success and fame. And so, you should.

But, with respect Ms Figiel, that fact does not give you the right to abuse me for what I did not say.

Your very words: I found Seuseu Fata Faalogo’s commentary on the Honorable Mulipola Anarosa Ale-Molio’o, Minister of Women Community and Social Development’s keynote address to commemorate and celebrate International Women’s Day to encapsulate hegemonic masculinity that is neanderthal at best, offensive at worse and downright rude to the occasion of which the minister spoke with such depth of knowledge and eloquence. (Emphasis added.)

It is also with such depth of knowledge and eloquence that you passed judgment on your own interpretation of what I said.  

I had no idea what hegemonic musculinity was until I googled it following your allegations.

As to the piece being cringe-worthy and frankly unnecessary, I find that rather surprising from someone who wrote: Sometimes, I cut my own finger and dripped blood into a self-made safe . . . When it was shower time in the evening, I would take the safe out and say, ‘Look! I got it! The moon remembered!’ Where we once belonged”

Does that go down well with our conservative women folk?  

Manuia le Sapati.