Fa’afafine arts icon Lindah Lepou: ‘It’s none of your business what anyone does to define who they are’

Lindah Lepou is the country’s inaugural queer arts laureate. Photo / Supplied
For more than 30 years, Lindah Lepou has been one of New Zealand’s top creative forces. Beginning as a fashion designer and performance artist with Pure Funk, Lepou is these days described as a ‘multidimensional artist’.
Earlier this year, Lepou was named the inaugural queer arts laureate, recognising her lengthy career that has seen her work exhibited alongside Christian Dior and Vivienne Westwood and held in London’s V&A Museum.
However, speaking to the Herald’s Straight Up podcast, hosted by Niva Retimanu and Beatrice Faumuina, 49-year-old Lepou insisted a legacy award does not mean
“So many people go, ‘Wow, you’ve achieved so much’, and I’m thinking, ‘No, bitch, what I’ve achieved is just created the foundation for the dream. That was not the dream. This is the moment.’
“The passing of my grandmother, two years ago, the passing of my [cat, Tinky] this year, they were signals to me that I was now free. There’s no inhibition. Now I can take the next step because the foundation that I’ve built is solid. It’s solid enough for me to take the step, and timing is right.”
Lepou is moving back to Wellington where she was born and grew up until age 9, and was sent alongside her aunt to live with her grandmother in Samoa. Lepou recalls watching the elevator doors closing at Wellington Airport and screaming for her mother, confused as to why she was going there.
Upon arriving in Samoa, and immediately starting in the wrong year group at school, Lepou said she quickly had to learn to adapt to her new environment, which included parents encouraging teachers to physically discipline their kids if they misbehaved.
While she describes it as a difficult time, Lepou insists that she would never change her experiences.
“It taught me how to adapt. It taught me how to protect myself. I mean, my grandfather, who was my father figure at the time – god forbid if I came home crying to him that I got a hiding or was in a fight or was bullied or anything like that.
“He would take me to that boy’s house and let me fight that boy again in front of his family. And I was just devastated, and my grandmother hated him for that. But I remember coming back to New Zealand, 1992, totally new environment, I’m a teenager now and it was a different type of bullying, it was a different type of violence that was now coming to me. I tell you those, it was my grandfather, he was the reason I was able to survive as a young fa’afafine.”
After first feeling different while living in Wellington – and facing bullying as a result – Lepou began to identify as fa’afafine – which she describes as being “like a woman” or effeminate male in Samoan – after moving to Samoa and meeting other fa’afafine sisters while there.
“They weren’t your transgender sisters who were just fighting to be the most dominant woman in town. They wouldn’t shy away from having a brawl – good luck to any guy that would try to touch a sister. She would handstand on your face if you were lucky to stay alive.
“When I grew up there, I learned that you really do have to fend for yourself. If you didn’t know how to fend for yourself, you will be buried under the ground.”
One of the common stereotypes and misunderstandings that surround fa’afafine is that the family pushes a son into acting like a girl to do housework when there are not enough daughters – a misconception Lepou believes undermines the mother.
“It undermines the mother’s ability to know her instincts. She knows what her children are about. She knows what their weaknesses and strengths are right from the get go.
“And so I guess my belief is that if she has a son who is feminine and is naturally drawn to doing what her sisters or her mother is doing, she naturally just leaves them there to do that.
“There’s this Western dictionary of definitions of what you should be as a woman and what you should be as a man and what you shouldn’t be, and it’s so one dimensional. And I find that the reason why I have identified as fa’afafine is because it’s such a multidimensional term that encompasses my masculinity, my femininity, my inity, all the inities that I want – and no one else has the right to define who I am.”
Lepou said there is too much of an obsession about people’s genitals when it comes to discussions about gender.
“I find that all this political talk, this rhetoric that we hear in all these circles about what is a woman and what is a man. I tell you, it’s just this obsession with what’s between a person’s legs. And it’s none of your fricking business what anyone does to define who they are and what they are.”
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