By Lizz Sayers
Sasha Kutabah Sarago is a proud Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Jirrbal and African-American woman with an important story to tell. Her refreshingly candid memoir, Gigorou, describes her lived experience of growing up Aboriginal in (1980s) Australia and how she has fought to reclaim her beauty ever since.
‘Gigorou’ (jig-goo-roo) means beauty in Jirrbal, the language of Sarago’s grandmother. Sarago tells the story of a defining moment in her youth when a white woman told her she was ‘too pretty to be Aboriginal’. This horribly racist and nonsensical comment cut deep and set off a chain reaction of life events for Sarago, including the desire to become an internationally recognised Black supermodel. In 2011, after spending her modelling career fighting to get recognition and the same opportunities as her white peers, Sarago founded Ascension – recognised as ‘Australia’s First Indigenous and Ethnic Women’s Lifestyle Magazine’ – where Black models could be guaranteed representation and women of colour could be guaranteed a magazine with images that looked like them. Then in 2020, Sarago appeared on stage at TedTalk Sydney to talk about the decolonisation of beauty and how she draws on the strength of her female ancestors to empower her everyday life.
The central theme of the memoir is an examination of the meaning of beauty and who gets to ‘be beautiful’. Throughout the book, we follow Sarago as she discovers that beauty is not about how we look but how we feel and how we portray ourselves to the world. It is also about representation and giving all people the opportunity to express their beauty. As a child, Sarago spends time in her mother’s beauty salon and experiences how her mother treats all customers the same, whether they are Indigenous Australians or not. Her mother’s focus is on making every woman feel beautiful. She understands they are there to treat themselves and for a sense of community. By the end of the book, Sarago has come full circle, rejecting Westernised concepts of beauty and reclaiming pride in her heritage.
The strength of this book is undoubtedly Sarago’s voice. It is commanding but friendly, intimate and upbeat. Her use of the vernacular gives us a sense of her personality and reminds us of her cultural identity – both her Aboriginal and African-American roots are celebrated through the language she chooses for the page.
While Sarago’s memoir does not dwell on the negative experiences in her life and chooses to showcase the positive, this is sometimes to the detriment of the narrative. Some events are glossed over that would be better untangled.
However, when Sarago does venture deeper into the bleaker times of her life, her writing is much more effective. In these moments she writes:
And they wonder why we are so angry?
Our anger comes from fighting the system for our children, men and communities.
If you ask me, we haven’t gotten angry enough. We don’t have the privilege to express anger in its raw form, not like we should. Our anger gets us abused, ignored, gaslit, ostracised and killed. When white people get angry and we can’t, it’s an injustice they will never know. When do Blak women gain the freedom to reveal their scars – their broken hearts?
It is precisely when Sarago allows herself the freedom to reveal these scars, that we see the real beauty of her spirit and her storytelling.
This book is more important now than ever in the aftermath of the Voice to Parliament referendum. Given the upsetting result, it is our responsibility to make the space for First Nations individuals to be heard. These are the voices we need to be listening to, the lived experiences we need to understand. Sarago’s story is inspirational. She draws on the strength of her forebears, on the powerful matriarchs that taught her the real meaning of beauty – the freedom to be as equally human as the person next to you.
Gigorou was first published by Pantera Press in 2023 and has an RRP of $34.99. It is available from most online and local retailers.
Lizz Sayers is a recent graduate of the Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing Masters at the University of Melbourne.
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