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Tatau and Malu: Vital Signs in Contemporary Samoan Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Juniper Ellis
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Abstract

In two contemporary Samoan works, Albert Wendt's short story “The Cross of Soot” (1974) and Sia Figiel's novel They Who Do Not Grieve (1999), tattooing produces and proclaims the psychological and social place of the tattoo bearer. The tattoo signals the splitting or doubling of subjectivity, a mechanism by which the individual human subject is produced continually and repeatedly. The Samoan tatau creates not only Samoan subjects but also the English word tattoo and the French tatouage. Wendt and Figiel treat the production and movement of the tattoo in the Pacific and the world; they thus invite a cross-cultural critique of Lacan's theories of subjectivity, which present the tattoo as constitutive of the subject. Whereas Lacan's tattoo is disembodied and nonlocalized, Wendt and Figiel account for the tattoo's material and corporeal effects, its origins in Oceania, and its function in inaugurating a collective Samoan subject. (JE)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 3 , May 2006 , pp. 687 - 701
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

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