How to forgive a murderer

2026-02-02 - 16:09

Yesterday I sent my publisher the book I’ve been working on since 2006. FETŪ: 20 First Pacific Women Poets. Fetū means stars. I am the star charter, and the star chanter. The book is dedicated to Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, and her lines begin it: as we “toast our starry confluence across the galaxy of this moment”. The galaxy of this moment. The day after I hand in the book, I am on a train across France – from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic, heading to Jonzac – when I hear the news. Sia is dead. Found in her cell at Tanumalala Prison. Twenty days before her sentencing. I am here on the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, another woman writer in another kind of exile, and I think about constellations. About the stars I’ve spent 30 years charting. About the spaces between them. About blackholes. * I met both women in 1996. Vilsoni Hereniko hosted an international conference on Pacific Literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and there they were: Sinavaiana and Sia. Two Samoan poets. Two stars in the same sky. Sinavaiana, with her Buddha beads and her frankincense oil and her raspish voice saying “Come, darling, come” as she rubbed my pulse points. And Sia—girl-ish then, still uncertain of herself even as she knew she was writing the Halley’s comet of Pacific literature. I liked her more then. In my poem written after Sinavaiana’s murder, I wrote: Comparatively speaking There’s not that many of us In the world Pacific Women Poets And now There’s one less I meant Sinavaiana. Now there are two less. * Our relationship over the years—mine and Sia’s—required careful navigation. I chose carefully how much of myself I would make available to her whenever we met. She had a propensity to stomp over your boundaries. Whether that was her personality, or her illness I cannot say. But I think I speak for many of us who knew her. In the same poem, I wrote about Sinavaiana: When we spoke of our mutual friend likewise she said “I’ll keep her at arm’s length to save my strength” yet months later I saw she was helping run creative writing workshops in Samoa I wrote her “Be careful” The mutual friend was Sia. * When I wrote my poem in the aftermath of Sinavaiana’s death, I wrote what no one else would say: Yet the killer Was among us One Of Us I sat with my blue grief and my black rage. I could not see past the image: Her hand Plunging a knife Into the body Of my beloved friend Again Again Again Again Again Again Again I built a throne of judgment from the stones of my own pain, and I sat on it. But then the Moon fell. Kimberlee Bassford’s documentary portrait of Sia, Before the Moon Falls, had been eight years in the making. A portrait of brilliance and destruction held in one frame. And something in me shifted. I came down from that throne, and I found myself flooded. With compassion. Not for the act. But for Sia, the poet. Sia, the person. Sia, the one in pain. She was clearly suffering from something that had its claws deep in her mind. She had medication. She stopped taking it. I don’t know what state of mind she was in when she made that decision. I don’t know many things. * I forgave her. I wrote her a letter. I never sent it. Forgiveness is strange. It doesn’t wrap things up. It doesn’t make the ambivalence go away. I forgave her, and I still cannot teach her poems again. I forgave her, and I still see the knife, the hammer, my beloved friend’s body crumpled in that locked bathroom. In my poem, I wrote: I do know That the killer Is haunted In her own mind Forever That I will never Teach her poems again That someday I will be Pulled out of this By the lines of the beloved But for now These are all the lines I have. Then Kim gave me some more. Lines. From Sia’s poem ‘That is how it is’: When you stump into silence Fearing the day mostly in those months of solitude Alone Surrounded by brothersistermotherfathercousinsfriends aiga What’s wrong with you? they ask concerned what’s wrong? They ask the stranger The one with the dark eyes The mute one The one without a will And later: The stranger does not answer Sits in a room rocking Against the wall Fearing the flap of birds * I’m staring into the galaxy of this moment, staring at the stars. I am thinking that even dead stars keep shining for thousands of years, their light still travelling toward us. That blackholes were once stars too – collapsed in on themselves, their gravity so dense that nothing escapes, not even light. That they pull everything around them into their darkness. Comparatively speaking, there’s not that many of us in the world. Pacific women poets. We are constellations, not crowds. And now there are two less. One taken. One collapsed. I’m still being pulled.