An Ode to Salient and the Friends Who Believed in Me

by Jasmine Koria

As journalists, poets, coffee-fueled thesis draft writers…anyone who picks up a pen and dares the world to read their thoughts, I think we’ll all always have a special kind of love for the first platform that gave our work any kind of mainstream exposure.

For me, it was the Salient. The official magazine of the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

I went from Samoa, my home country, to New Zealand, halfway across the region, in 2015. It was a gift – a government scholarship for high academic achievement. But also, I was culture-shocked, homesick, flu sick, and harboring the impossible hope that someday, someone outside the 2,842 square kilometers of my country might actually read my writing.

I have to be real with everyone. I did all the right things the wrong way in my desperation to get published in New Zealand. Sent article pitches to e-mail addresses that had been defunct for six years already. Cold-emailed established editors and manuscript assessors who, honestly, were super nice to me and always sent links to the right people/places. Sometimes I read their old emails back and cringe at how glaringly obvious it is to me now that some of them felt sorry for me and others maybe thought I was just another one of many hopefuls bound for the paper coffin. I think both kinds of pity are better than annoyance, either way.

When I was bored waiting for replies to my emails, I started doing the only thing you can actually do for free when you’re eighteen and broke, living overseas: I started posting my writing on Facebook.

At the time, I was just beginning to learn more about my very complicated family history. I’ve written extensively about it now, but at the time, I was struggling under the weight of the very new knowledge of the many ways colonialism in both my parents’ countries (Samoa and Papua New Guinea) had impacted our family. From name changes and adoptions, to unrewarded military service in the World Wars, I was in utter disbelief that the world, for all its space, could hold this much displacement. I wrote pages and pages of poetry about the world wars and the ocean and loss…and posted them online.

The old saying is that when you least expect what you’re hoping for to happen, it finds you. My flatmate and longtime friend, Annetta Lakopo (naming her because she changed my writing career – GET FRIENDS WHO CHAMPION YOUR DREAMS, guys!) was a senior member of our Pacific Students Council at the university. This meant she was asked to write the Pasifika students’ column which the Salient had set aside just for Pacific-related news and discussions. While most university students would love the opportunity to stack up publications against their name, Annetta passed the writing opportunity on to me. And so, in May 2017, I got my first ever publication outside of Samoa.

I went on to write several full-length feature articles for the Salient, and even poetry. I had quite a good readership for a shy writer in a university newspaper. If I could describe that part of my life in one word, it would have to be, ‘SURPRISE.’ I remember when it was Pride Week and I had to do an article on that. I called my very religious parents in Samoa to explain that there is an article with my name- our family name- on it, that will appear online and in print. You may agree or disagree with it, but it is important to the magazine, to me, and to the young people whose lives and identities are constantly at risk in our region. It was a surprisingly open-minded discussion, and after reading it, they told me it was well-written and they had not read about Pacific LGBTQIA+ communities in such simple and easy-to-understand language before.

More surprises: the Salient pushed me to engage with my multicultural heritage more publicly, and with more compassion for the ways I had misunderstood both my cultures until that point. The first time I ever realized I was born on a politically and militarily divided landmass was when I was writing a piece about West Papua and Papua New Guinea. Growing up in Samoa, I never really had to engage with the social and psychological complexities of living behind a border. Of seeing fences and guards and guns. Those were things we saw in movies or in rap music videos. I was nineteen, showing him a draft of my article, when my father admitted that the increasing violence he witnessed in his years as a student on New Guinea island was the main reason he moved us back to Samoa as soon as he was able to find a teaching job and a house there.

New Zealand, like most first-world democratic countries, has a vastly liberal, ‘free’ student culture. Four letter words abbreviate conversations in ways that shocked me when I first arrived, but which I caught onto pretty quickly and which eventually found their way into my writing. One of the last feature articles I wrote had a pretty generous serving of the notorious ‘f’ word — much to my father’s chagrin and a skyrocket in my mother’s prayer life. Salient will always be that point for me: the sharp bend in the road at which the family portrait I’d always had as my profile picture on social media slowly morphed into just a selfie. The point at which I began to look for who I really was, or who I should be.

The year I started contributing to the Salient, we had a Samoan co-editor, Laura Toailoa, who spoke (and wrote) her mind in a way that challenged but also kind of scared me. I know now, that this is the true goal of any education worth having: to break out of the self-imposed four corners of what we think is possible and achievable. And come out greater than we had previously even imagined.

The biggest surprise came in October 2017. An email, so breathtaking that I honestly can only do it justice by quoting it directly:

“

“RE: RSV Simpson Salient Prize 2017

Hi Jasmine

I’m delighted to advise you have been awarded the above prize for 2017.   Details of this award will appear on your academic transcript and you can find information about it at: https://www.victoria.ac.nz/study/student-finance/scholarships/browse-prizes/prize-details?result_307328_result_page=225

The donor has asked for the following quote to be included in this notification email:   “Comment is free but facts are sacred”: C P Scott of the Manchester Guardian

The value of this award is $400. The full amount will be deposited into your New Zealand bank account…

…To show appreciation for the award’s donor, you are asked to write a letter of appreciation. Your thank you letter gives the donor an indication of the real difference their generosity is making to you, both financially and in terms of personal encouragement.  It also plays an important part in encouraging the donation of further scholarships and prizes for the benefit of future students.  Please email your thank you letter to ________________

Congratulations!”[1]

The RSV Simpson Salient Prize is awarded annually for the Best Feature Articles written by an undergraduate student enrolled at the Victoria University of Wellington. At the time, it was not a prize you could apply for – the editorial team had to recommend you.

And the rest, almost ten years and nearly fifty international publications later, is, as they say, history.

Thanks, Salient.

P.S. I gave my parents some of the prize money and after we all had a laugh, they said they were glad my profanity was at least commercially viable. But that’s an article for another time!

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[1] Email addresses removed for privacy of sender’s information