Gigorou (Sasha Kutabah Sarago, Pantera)

As women our identity and self-worth is often defined and limited by our understanding of beauty. Gigorou is a reverent and awe-inspiring foray into memoir. It is the personal genre that Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Jirrbal and African American former model, Sasha Kutabah Sarago, uses in order to reclaim beauty and womanhood for Indigenous women and Black women. I slowly savoured the pages of this book because Sarago’s voice is unique, courageous, and powerful. As someone who finds the beauty and modelling industry problematic because of how it profits off of women’s insecurities, Sarago’s brutal honesty about the topic resonated deeply: ‘Modelling exacerbates weeping wounds. And before long, it becomes dysmorphia.’ Throughout Gigorou, which means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ in the Jirrbal language, Sarago kindly guides readers on the path of taking back agency by choosing how we see ourselves. Sarago’s narrative commits to this choice by confronting the pain of intergenerational trauma. When speaking to the women in her family about where shame comes from, Sarago says: ‘all the rape and abuse of our women had to have been passed down to us.’ With my own experience of finding beauty with and without a hijab, I found myself laughing, crying and writing down my favourite quotes to reference to myself later whenever I looked in a mirror. ‘When we acknowledge our anger and trauma it is alchemised to become gigorou.’ Sarago’s work is a reminder that humanity cannot be limited to socially-imposed beauty standards. When we speak out about our past, our genders, our cultures and our languages—we open the world to new and beautiful definitions.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Rayann Bekdache is a former journalist and subeditor who has written for outlets such as SBS Voices and the Sydney Morning Herald. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

Category: Reviews