Loimata, The Sweetest Tears dir. by Anna Marbrook

Abstract

Reviewed by: Loimata, The Sweetest Tears dir. by Anna Marbrook David Lipset Loimata, The Sweetest Tears. Documentary film, 94 minutes, color, 2020. Directed by Anna Marbrook; produced by Anna Marbrook, Jim Marbrook, Dr Tamasailau SuaaliiSauni, and Dame Gaylene Preston. Outrigger canoes and places are material objects that Pacific Islanders view as vehicles and customary property. They are also among the main, and most significant, metaphors in and of the region. The former vehicles have come to stand for nothing less than a collective and embodied capacity to continue to exist amid the vast space of the Pacific Ocean, independently of modernity. The latter locations signify not only home and the ancestors but also the self. In troubled contexts of colonial and postcolonial domination and coercion, both stand out perhaps as two parts of a single signifier of sovereignty, agency, and moral identity. Loimata follows the great lengths to which a working-class Samoan family in contemporary Auckland went not only to acknowledge the anger and pain that lingered among them but to support and love Ema, their leading light. Ema, we learn, was repeatedly abused as a girl by an anonymous, and now deceased, family member and then raped by a stranger in Sāmoa some years later. Now in middle age and living in the final stages of a cancer, she insists that her family—her elderly parents, several sisters, and a brother—confront and somehow become reconciled with the abiding hurt that their shame has muted. Watching her return to several houses where the family had lived and recall the very sites of her victimization is trying. But the earnest candor of its melancholy subjects arouses one's sympathies rather than making the video into an occasion of documentary voyeurism. This achievement is a measure of its quality. To a certain extent, the narrative is a kind of itinerary. At Ema's request, the family drives to an abandoned farm where their father and mother had spent years after they arrived from Sāmoa in 1960 and started the family. They next visit a house in Auckland where a senior family member repeatedly molested Ema. "I feel really small in this space," she tells her sisters, standing in the doorway of the room where it occurred. She fled as soon as she could, but "the abuse changed to self-abuse, substance abuse." Listening, her mother sobs silently as a brother and sister tell of the confusion and powerlessness that overwhelmed the household in those days while their parents soldiered on unaware. Now, the brother adds, "We are all [End Page 624] living in the same family, and we are all screaming silently and suffocating in our shame." By contrast to the image of a broken home, outrigger canoes appear in the narrative as figures of moral boundedness and personal integration. Ema invites her family to visit a well-known Māori workshop where she has spent some time learning traditional canoe building; there they meet coworkers whom she regards as "family," help bind a new double-hulled boat, and build trust among themselves. The family subsequently visits the National Canoe School, to which they sail together. There, Ema encounters her "lashing partner," who recites a canoe lashing chant that he explains is also meant to bind people together. As the sail is raised, Ema exalts that canoes "bring … every part of me together, wellness, mindfulness, ancestors." At a subsequent meeting, a sister asks Ema what else she wants the family to do. To return home to Sāmoa, she answers. We then follow visits to family estates on their father's and mother's sides, who lavishly welcome and formally receive them in grand style. Ema is fading and must rest, but she is happy. In between the two excursions, the family stops off in Apia. Standing on the sidewalk of a busy street, Ema recalls to her sister Rebekah that just after her arrival in town to enroll in boarding school, because she "had gone off the rails," she was raped. They then made their way to the very site of the rape—now an office building. How much she hated and blamed herself then, Ema goes...