Turning Samoan

In our North American society, women generally strive to look like the super-thin, "perfect" models and actresses presented in fashion magazines and by Hollywood. However, the character of Maria in Dennis Chute's novel, Turning Samoan, would rather look like a member of a culture where the people are very tall, full-figured, and physically powerful.

Chute, a Sherwood Park, Alberta-based writer, credits his wife for his initial inspiration for the novel. "My wife Janet and I were in Long Beach, California, where there are many Samoans. We were walking on the boardwalk at Long Beach and she saw some young Samoan women. These were very large, very powerful looking women and my wife is quite slender and she thought it would be really nice if she could just turn Samoan," Chute explains.

"She got up on a stool and tried to see what it is like being that tall and she really liked the view. She kept saying again and again that she wanted to turn Samoan and I started playing with story ideas about turning Samoan."

Unlike Chute's wife, however, Maria has deep-rooted motives for wanting to turn Samoan. A beautiful, shapely Romany woman sold off in marriage to three Hungarian brothers, she is continually subject to their brutal abuse. It is only when she encounters Willie Jakes, a partly-Samoan man enormous in size and in intellect, does she feel safe, and in turn, wants to turn Samoan so that she can defend herself. This is a radical concept in a society where in many cases, at least when it comes to women, thinner is better.

"Over the years I have had both personal and professional experiences with women with eating disorders and once I started writing the novel I realized that there may be a valuable message in the fact that everyone in the novel accepts that Marie turning Samoan doesn't affect whether she is beautiful or not," says Chute, who writes fulltime and makes custom-made drums.

Chute had to research both Samoan and Romany cultures. "These are two areas that are hard to research because it is kind of a culture clash. To write it and have any idea what I was writing about I had to do a lot of research about the Romany in Canada, their history, their cultural behavior and also about Samoans. There is not a lot of written material, and a lot of what is written about them is wildly distorted by the fact that what the two cultures share in common is they are tellers of tall tales."

Go To Page: 1 2