Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan/Pacific Islander scholar, storyteller and community organizer. Her literary work, community service and academic research are all interconnected and they center issues of: climate and environmental justice, ending violence against women, prison abolition and restorative justice and the protection of Indigenous sacred sites here in the Bay Area such as the West Berkeley Shellmound. She graduated with her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Facilitator of the Oceania Research Working Group in the Department of Native American Studies at University of California, Davis. In Fall 2023, she became an Assistant Professor of Oceania: Pacific Islands Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Fui is working with Pacific Islander writers and artists at the University of Hawai’i to organize exchange programs and collaborations to create: public talks, symposiums and publications between the UH and UC Santa Cruz with goals to introduce and to expand Pacific Islander literature and arts to a wider audience that includes the Bay Area, California.
LA Story
the bright lights of the city
surround her like flies
she mumbles a prayer learned in Sunday school
and holds on tightly to the cold air
hope
funnels through her fingers
like the daughter her parents couldn’t keep
two weeks ago she fled her home in Utah
fleeing the grasp of the Mormon Church
and her parents’ shame,
freshly pickled
like the apricots church leaders taught her
to preserve every Autumn
a skill that promised
to make her into a good wife
tonight, on the corner of Sepulveda Boulevard,
bright lights expose the blue bruises on her body
disguising her as an older woman
she is her mother, her grandmother
lingering in dark corners
abandoning guests and
the tedium of polite conversations
3:00am
she telephones her mother
pleading for her life
for a cusp of warmth to quell the cold
she imagines that their shared silences
histories of bruised abdomen and
crushed collarbones
at the hands of men
were reasons enough
to reconnect them
bury the aching distance and
reunite them
but the silence on the other end
hangs and festers like a wound
she is reminded
that in her family,
there are
only
sons
