Can You Waka? A Navigator’s Life
By GL Harris
Loimata: The Sweetest Tears is a story of discovery, yearning, healing, forgiveness, and redemption.
The documentary feature film opens with Ema – Lilo – Fadi Siope receiving good news about an ongoing health crisis. She has received what must feel like a miracle after a number of treatments and health crises, she is cancer- free.
“I’ve been gifted life,” she says. “There’s no time to stop and think. Make sure every moment counts,” Ema said.
We follow Ema in a car on an open beach. As she rides along the road seems to stretch towards forever. The beauty of Te Aurere, Northland, New Zealand is captured frame by frame by Director Anna Marbrook.
“Firstly, there was the reality that one of the pre-eminent female voyagers of the Pacific was dying and being such a modest, ‘behind the scenes’ person, very little had been shared about her extraordinary achievements. Ema was never one to rest on her laurels nor was she interested in being put on a pedestal. She instead wanted to use every bit of her strength to lead her family on a powerful path of healing, said Marbrook.
A waka is a canoe or large seafaring boat of the peoples of the Pacific islands and New Zealand. Building these beautiful vessels by hand and having the skills to captain these vessels is significant.
“Don’t pray for fair weather, pray for courage”
"So, the film touches on the greatness of her as a voyaging captain and waka builder and at the same time follows her navigate her family back to Samoa in a kind of reverse migration as diaspora,” Marbrook said.
Early in the film, a ceremony at the Sir Hekenukumai Puhipi Busby’s Waka Wanaga workshop establishes Ema’s connection to the waka community and Māori people.
“We could see this heaviness around her,” says Jolene Busby. She recalled how one day she took her Auntie Fadi, Ema, for a walk and pushed her in the ocean. Siope laughed as she remembered the day.
“Let the water flow through you and make you strong again,” Jolene said.
Watching the Siope family embrace their Samoan heritage and each other is powerful. They show what is possible to audiences of the New York African Diaspora International Film Festival.
“ADIFF’s audience is diverse and curious. The festival exposed them to films about First Nation peoples and they supported that endeavor. The festival continues to explore those stories as there are many common points between Africans and people of African descent and First Nation peoples. The loss of land, the demonization of Non-Western culture and the dislocation of the family to name a few. As the generations in the family search for healing they teach viewers how to engage in a healing process in a community,” said Dr. Spech.
As the family comes together, they are remembering and learning long-held secrets, and it seems the parents are learning of unspeakable acts their children endured.
“The great Pacific navigator Papa Mau Piailug said, ‘don’t pray for fair weather, pray for courage.’ Ema did not see herself as a victim. She knew that she had healing to do in her life, but this was something she had taken hold of. She wanted the same for her family, so she knew they had to face their past together. So, while this story deals with difficult things it does so from the point of strength. Making that decision to walk towards the difficulties,” Marbrook said.
If karma is something we might address in this or other lifetimes, one senses a generational curse may finally be lifted as Ema finally excavates, literally, the root of her family’s pain—their scars and secrets are all laid bare.
In the bright beautiful sun light of their ancestral home, an unmarked grave of their grandmother and mother is uncovered and ritualistically cleansed, in a fire ceremony.
Ema insists she must be returned to this place, the place of origin, when it is her turn to reunite with the ancestors.
She takes her family back through the trauma that lives generationally in them but like a great voyager there is a sense that the horizon is a place of hope. I think this kind of story is very important at the moment. To engage wholeheartedly with trauma yet hold unity is an extraordinary thing to see in a family no matter where they are from.
In the early 1960s, there was a big influx of Pacific Islanders to New Zealand. The immigrants faced “racism, misunderstanding and hardship” according to Marbrook. Their heritage was not understood or accepted.
“When the parents came to New Zealand their Samoan culture was not valued nor recognized… from an early age (she) felt that this culture was precious, and she never let it go. She found herself being welcomed into Māori (indigenous) communities in particular the voyaging family.
“Ema was at home in this place because her ancestors were builders of waka (sailing catamarans) and sailors. Her immersion in the world of waka woke something in her and she wanted this to awaken in her family. She wanted to build back that connection to Samoa in her family. That is the context within which Loimata was made,” said Marbrook.
The friendship between the director and crew, unseen yet present as the vehicle of the storytelling, is palpable. There is an intimacy and trust that is raw but never too much. We bear witness to pain and healing and, ultimately, their joy.
“Ema and I were friends for a number of years before this film was made. And my brother had a long connection with the Siope family. Ema chose us to make this film as did the family. Before, during and after the filming we discussed things at each step of the way. It was always clear that if Ema and the family didn’t want things included then we would not include them. So, when we were filming, they could be completely present and honest. That is why you feel that intimacy because it is built on trust. Ema was so courageous!
“She believed that to stop the cycle of systemic abuse one needs also to shine the light on our own lives. And that means addressing the capacity we all have to hurt others especially when we don’t know how to deal with deep pain inside ourselves that comes from trauma. It’s such a compassionate act from her,” Marbrook said.
Directed by Anna Marbrook, New Zealand/Samoa, 2021, 94 minutes, documentary, English and Samoan with English subtitles