In season 2 of Like Us, Anna Yeon, Noè Harsel and Zione Walker-Nthenda are each inviting friends to the table for a chat about the important things in life. Then they share the interviews with each-other and regroup to unpack.
In this episode, Zione chats with Sasha Kutabah Sarago, a Yidinji, Jirrbal and African-American author, filmmaker and speaker.
Sasha is the founder of Ascension, a digital lifestyle platform for women of colour. Her debut memoir Gigorou: It’s time to reclaim beauty. First Nations wisdom and womanhood was published by Pantera Press in 2023. Her TEDx talk ‘The (De)colonising of Beauty’ was selected as TED.com 2021 Editor’s Choice. Sasha has appeared on NITV’s Awaken: Black Is Beautiful, SBS’s Insight and ABC’s The School that Tried to End Racism. She's also written and directed documentaries Too Pretty to Be Aboriginal and InsideOUT, and published articles in The Guardian, SBS Voices, Fashion Journal, Frankie, Peppermint and Marie Claire.
Sasha chats with Zione about her advocacy for increased diversity, equity, and inclusion in the fashion, beauty, and media sectors. She is also passionate about fostering Indigenous entrepreneurship in technology.
To be successful as a black model, they were looking for essentially a white model dipped in black. So the very fine features, close to European features... that led me to finding myself in a plastic surgeon's office wanting to alter my nose. I'm so glad that never happened because I would have been abolishing all the symbolisms of my tribes and where I come from and who I am.Sasha Kutabah Sarago
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Sasha Kutabah Sarago chats about challenging Eurocentric beauty standards
SBS Audio
11/09/202433:37
Transcript
We would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we are broadcasting from, the Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, we pay our respects to their Elders past and present. We would also like to acknowledge all Traditional Owners from all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands you are listening from.
[music]
Like Us is Anna Yeon, Zione Walker-Nthenda and me Noè Harsel: a Japanese Jewish woman, a Korean woman and a Nigerian-Malawian woman chatting about our relationship with Australia and Australia’s relationship with us.
Noè Hey everyone, how are we today?
Zione Very well, how are you both?
Anna Hello, hello, hello!
Noè Oh, love it - and a sing song because I'm super excited, Zione. This is, I'm super, I am super excited. Tell us all about her.
Zione Yeah, oh Sasha, fascinating, fascinating woman. She's a Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Jirrbal woman, also African-American, so she's mixed race as well. She's a formal model, she's got a really popular TED talk that she did in Sydney.
Noè Yeah, that was amazing.
Zione Yeah, yeah, she's a publisher. She calls herself an editor, but I'm like, I think you're a publisher too, if you start and launch a magazine. And the magazine, at the time, was all about First Nations women and women of colour.
Noè Wow.
Zione So she's a real pioneer, absolutely fantastic woman, obviously has just written a book called Gigorou, and you know, we can go into that in a little bit more detail. So I'm super excited to hear what resonated the most with both of you when you listen to our conversation.
Anna I can't wait. Let's do it.
Zione Let's go.
[Music]
Zione Sasha, thank you so much for honouring us with your presence. I'm so interested in hearing your thoughts on beauty and to also explore this amazing book that you've just written as well. Welcome.
Sasha Thank you so much for having me.
Zione So I might just dive right in, because obviously you've got your TEDx talk on decolonising beauty and also you've got your amazing book. And I'm really interested in knowing, you know, you're a young woman, what was your motivation for writing your memoir at this point in your life?
Sasha When I did the TED talk, I had just reached this really lovely point in my life, hitting 40. And it was 20 years of trying to find myself. And then another 20 years, really refining who I was. And a lot of my saving grace of finding my authenticity was going back to my culture, learning the stories of my matriarchs to redefine my beauty. And the TEDx talk is titled The (de)colonising of Beauty. And it really was about how to find my femininity on my own terms.
And it really was down to the wisdom and the beautiful creation stories that have been handed down to me from my matriarchs, for me to be able to start that process of decolonising and rebuilding what beauty means to me.
And the book is titled Gigorou, which means beauty or beautiful in Jirrable, which is my grandmother's language. So even starting off of reclaiming language was starting that process of decolonising beauty. Because beauty for me, most of my life has been through the lens of a colonised or Western framework. And now taking it back, it's going back to what it was like, pre -colonisation in its purest divine form. And that's how I see Gigorou. Everything that comes from authenticity and you being raw and divine in your own form and how you present yourself to the world or how you choose to show up.
Zione That's really, really powerful. And especially for us as women of colour, that notion of a very, very, very tight, Eurocentric context of beauty and how we navigate that and still reclaim our own beauty within that context - or in fact outside of that context like totally disregarding it - and saying well good for you, it ain't mine and moving on, you know.
So I'm interested in a story or a key experience that you had at some point in your life that made you really that kind of really crystallises this point that you're trying to make in the book around decolonising beauty and how you sort of navigate that as a woman who is held as somebody who is beautiful. How have you navigated those two? Different contexts like what's different about both of them and how have you managed to thrive in both of those worlds?
Sasha Yeah, so I talk about it in one of the chapters and it's titled Perils of a Black model. And it talks about this striving to obtain a Eurocentric ideal of beauty and it was, you know, my journey of beauty trying to straighten my hair but bleach it wearing coloured contact lenses and ultimately trying to be the white model “dipped in black look” which was a phrase that was floating around the industry. To be successful as a black model, they were looking for essentially a white model dipped in black. So the very finer features, close to European features, and that led me to finding myself in a plastic surgeon's office wanting to alter my nose and get rhinoplasty.
And it made me reflect later on in life that I'm so glad that never happened because I would have been abolishing all the symbolisms of my tribes and where I come from and who I am and so just even retracing that journey of trying to obtain the certain look that I could never achieve. And it really was going back to reclaiming some of the I guess creation stories, but that angry black woman trope that has been casted on us. And that was one of the sort of panels that I went through. It was like this, I guess, when you stumble across a laneway and you've never been down that path before and you're like, oh my god, these are amazing places and destinations within this laneway. And so the creation stories were like that.
So all these, I guess, tropes that were hanging around being a black woman, the angry black woman, some of the creation stories really illustrated how you're in your power and your divine beauty through embracing your anger and that anger can be alchemised and turned into beauty. And so it was just this mixture of going through the past, how I showed up for beauty, how I examined beauty and then now getting into a space of, okay, beauty has always been within me, within my culture. And so that's how I kind of reconciled throughout that journey through the First Nations wisdom and that roadless travel, I guess you could say.
Zione That's really interesting that you talk about that description and that it's still floating around when I heard it. It was from Iman actually, like when she first started as a model in the 70s. So it's quite shocking to consider that it's still floating around after so long. And it was exactly the same thing. That's exactly how she was described and positioned and sold. Oh, here is a beautiful woman. She's black and she is basically a European woman dipped in chocolate. She was literally described like that. I think now people probably wouldn't describe a person that way, but like you said, that language and that context still permeates as a part of the discourse, unfortunately.
I really like what you said about alchemizing anger for beauty, right? Like really harnessing all of those different parts of ourselves and then putting it through this machine, as it were, of First Nations wisdom to turn it into something that was powerful and meaningful for yourself.
And I'm wondering, and there's so many examples of this littered throughout your amazing book, I wonder if there are certain moments or examples that you want to share with us about, you know, what you've learned from First Nations wisdom, First Nations women in particular and the wisdoms around how to use a woman who is multiracial navigate your beauty as a First Nations woman, as a woman who's also African-American. Has that been a thing or not necessarily?
Sasha There has been a lot of parallels in being biracial and falling upon the wisdom of First Nations culture and my African ancestry and, you know, we know the history of the transatlantic slave trade and, you know, my ancestors and myself are a part of that history.
And so for me, I fell onto my First Nations culture and wisdom to give me foundation because I didn't know a lot about my African ancestry. And so for me, that established a framework of divine beauty for me because in my African-American culture, we have our issues with colourism and we do have it in First Nations culture. It's something that we don't readily talk about it, but it's there.
And so I had experienced colorism, you know, the skin shade hierarchy. And it was funny because, you know, I was termed the light -skinned girl with the good hair in the States and then coming to Australia, it changed, you know. I was the brown girl and I felt both sides of the coin of colourism and where I sat in that spectrum. But in essence, First Nations culture and the wisdom from that brought me back to your beauty is in country. Your beauty is in the landscapes, the relationship that you have with country.
Because the creation stories tell stories of how the landscapes were designed, the spirit and the ancestors that still live within this landscape. So there is a continual life cycle that happens. And so your beauty is your character, your value, just as you would show up in your community or the role that you would have in your tribe. That's the honour, that's the beauty, that's divinity.
So First Nations based on the learning Indigenous knowledge really helped me to re-establish myself as a woman and to take in a new landscape of femininity that is untouched. It goes back 60,000 years and beyond. So that was my saving grace, I guess you can say, of being able to move from the US back onto country and be engaged in my Aboriginality to bring me to this point.
[Music]
Sasha What I would love to leave with listeners is Indigenous knowledge, wisdom and culture has so much beauty to it, because it really ultimately brings you back to your authenticity.
And everyone has an indigenous culture for going back and finding and tracing back their roots and where they come from because the answers are there. It's in your culture, it's in the stories of your matriarchs.
So I question, when was the last time you sat with an elder or a matriarch and had a yarn about their stories and life path? And there is such a divine gigorou beauty in that.
And so if we step away from the Western framework of beauty and come come to this pure Indigenous authentic way of looking at womanhood, femininity, and beauty it doesn't really have anything to do with the aesthetic way that we look at beauty and consume it. Because we're actually consuming beauty at this point if we look at the way of the world and there's nothing wrong with that.
I say to you know friends and family, I'm a contemporary black woman I love my beauty products - I don't use a lot - but I love fashion and beauty. That's been the basis of what I've known my mother owned a beauty salon on and I was a model and magazine editor so that has been my world. But I've had to really examine how I'm going to use that experience of being in these industries being told what the
trends are, “you're not enough”, this is how you need to shape yourself to fit in this box. It's no longer that it's going back to what I feel like and want to be and that's so organic to go, you know, what I don't care. Beauty is my own business and I say that in the book. It's nobody else's business but your own.
Zione I really really love that there's so many gems in that but just that notion of when you go back to country wherever you're originally from like - that everybody's inherent indigeneity that that's where the anchor is for defining whatever it is. I just just love that.
Because I can think about that too from the context of the first question you asked: when was the last time you sat with a matriarch in your family to hear her story and to kind of trace your gigorou as well? So I really really loved that, of course as you were saying that I realised that for me I'm disconnected from the matriarchs in my family because I'm not, you know, I wasn't born here and my mother passed away recently and my grandmother before that and my great -grandmother very recently. So it's like the matrix in my family are they're not here, although I have my mother -in -law who lives with us and I think I will go home and find out from her. And like you, she's a woman who is very, very rooted also in the aesthetic as well as the depth, you know? She navigates those two things very, very elegantly. So I've been inspired to do that.
Now I want to ask you one question and that I want to get you to read something for us. And it was a quote in your book that I thought, "Oh, this is interesting. It's a little bit out there." Not that the concept was out there, but I hadn't expected to see a quote from this particular person. So I'll read the quote really quickly and it says,
"If it doesn't bring you income, inspiration, or orgasms, it doesn't belong in your life," said by the great Ice-T. I thought, wow, okay, you are pulling gems and wisdom from everywhere you can find it. So please explain how do you utilise that wisdom in your life?
Sasha Yeah, I'm doing that as we speak. So I haven't been the best at relationships and dating. So that's kind of one of the areas that I apply that to. And it's about the choice of partners.
So I want to live what I call the soft life. So I know my history and that as a black woman, there's been a lot of struggle in my own journey. And I don't want to continue that struggle. So my partner has to be of a certain calibre and I know what I bring to the table, essentially. And he has to bring that as well. And so those are the three core principles. But if you're not elevating me beyond the work that I'm doing and providing inspiration or a new lens in which to look through or an experience or any evolution to my life, then you have no place there. It's as simple as that.
Income, I think it was income. But I take care of myself and I want to create generational wealth and it doesn't have to be financial, but what resources are you sharing with me so that we can both grow and build solid communities or a be of purpose to our community and really invest back into that community. So that's really important to me.
And then orgasms, I mean, when you get to a place of confidence within your own body and self, it's a crime to let anyone have access to your body and they're not glorifying, participating in the sensuality, the
Zione Pleasure!
Sasha Celebration of your body, absolutely- pleasure. That's the key word, pleasure. Do we know what that is? And pleasure is not gonna be the same for another person and it's quite unique to you.
So even as a young woman coming into womanhood and this new stage in my 40s, my sex is different than it was in my 20s. I don't need to go into detail, but we all know that I think in some way as a woman and embracing our sexuality. That's the biggest thing. Because we've been through so much with the patriarchy and the expectations of women.
So orgasms are an essential part of that. And a lot of us are missing out in secret and that's just a crime and that's not right. So those two, well, those three principles, I thought, wow, go Ice-T.
Zione Go Ice-T.
Sasha I wouldn't have picked it, but that stayed in the back of my head and I thought, you know, it is a man, but it's spot on. There's no lies told there. So that's really important to me. I think it's really important to other women as well.
Zione Absolutely. And our learning comes from everybody, right? Male, female, and so on. And there was another part in your book, I think it was chapter, somewhere in the middle, like maybe chapter seven or something. And it was spot on because I've always used this chapter in my life. So I'm not particularly religious, but I went through a period in my life where I was religiously, staunchly, Christian. And I used to use First Corinthians chapter 13 as my filtration process. Every time I was dating a guy and it was feeling a bit off, I would just go back to it. And if I read through it and everything was not ticked, that was it. There was no negotiation, no matter how intensely I felt about you. That was sorry, it's breakup time. And I literally called it my “breakup filtration process”.
And so when I saw it in your book, I was like, yes, you go. And now that you're talking about wanting to pull that into your world, I supremely encourage you to keep using that. It has never failed me. And even in contexts where I felt so strongly attached to someone and I used that to filter that person out of my life and I still hankered for them. I tell you, years later, I looked back and I thought, oh my goodness, I dodged a bullet. I didn't even know how profound that was at the time, but thank god.
So if you don't mind, I might get you to, we might end on this: it's on page 300. I don't know if you have your version, your copy of the book: Gigorou. I think it's the bit that talks about never forgetting where you're from. If you don't mind just reading that last paragraph, that would be a really lovely way to send our audience members off to the rest of their day.
Sasha I'd be delighted to.
Never forget where you come from, where you are going and where you belong.
If you happen to forget, you belong where the rainforest grows, all like skyscrapers, where the red dust stretches for days, reaching white sandy beaches, skylines that kiss the rough to calm sapphire seas, pristine sanctuaries from north and south, east to west, where untold stories are yet to be discovered, captivating dawns that rise, promising new beginnings, if you dare to believe, and an enchanting place where mindless worries disappear like sunsets.
You are a fresh water and saltwater girl, a young, Jirrabal, Wadjanbarra Yidinji, seven river, badoo, arrow, island woman.
You are royalty, the descendant of suffering queens. You are a brackenage, Serago, and Kendrick.
Zione Beautiful. And on that note, Queen Sasha Sarago, thank you. I'm so honoured to have spoken to you. Really, really, really, really adore this experience. Thank you so much.
Sasha Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[Music]
Noè Wow.
Anna Amazing.
Noè That was incredible. I loved, loved all of that, I'm sure. Yeah, right?
Zione Yeah, totally.
Noè I mean, there's so much to unpack, so much to unpack in all of the things that Sasha talks about. But let me just, let me just start with the first thought, okay? Because I know there's a million thoughts that we want to get into. But the first thing that came to me was I just loved her idea of “finding femininity on her own terms”.
I mean, coming from her perspective, that multifaceted perspective that you took us through about, you know, as a speaker, as a feminist, as a writer, as an editor,
as a model, “finding femininity on her own terms”. I mean, let's go. What does that mean for us?
Anna I mean, I was listening to sorry, Zione, I'm like jumping 'cause I'm like…
Zione Jump in, jump in. We're all super excited. Go in there.
Noè She was super keen.
Anna Because [well] she's just everything. She's done so much, but in that conversation, I think there's something you said Zione, like the way it was articulated in the most humorous way for me was: if it doesn't bring you income, inspiration or orgasm, you don't need it in your life.
Zione I know. Said by the very wise, Ice-T, right? I just loved that. She pulled that quote from him, right?
Noè You can find that inspiration everywhere, but I mean, are we not gonna all write that on a post -it?
Zione I know! I'm like, how have I not heard this before? You know, like I'm a student of hip hop, right? And somehow I've missed this wisdom. So yes, very grateful to have it.
Noè I thought that that was incredible as well, because what that really does show us is that we should be prioritising things in our life that actually do all of that for us. I mean, how she broke that down. How it should be bringing us the things that are meaningful in all aspects of who we are: as powerful, intelligent and sexual beings, right?
Zione And that pleasure is up there too, right?
Noè We don't cut that out of our existence and however pleasure is defined for you.
Zione Absolutely.
Noè It's all about who we are as a totality. And I think that so often as women,
but also as migrant women, as ethnic women, as people of colour, we have forced ourselves into a mold and a mold of how other people are choosing to see us,
define us. And so therefore we have defined ourselves within that mold.
Zione Absolutely.
Noè In that Eurocentric ideal of beauty, which is I think what you guys were talking about, that's so profoundly in this interview.
Zione Absolutely. I mean, let's open up that Pandora's box, right? Like, it's a thing. It absolutely is a thing, you know? And she talked about being a black model and, you know, European features and black skin and all the different things she did to conform, right? And we know that colourism exists. Like there's a hierarchy in whiteness, right? The whiter you are, the straighter your hair, the smaller your features are, the prettier you are. Automatically. And it's so easy for us to buy into that if we're living in those cultural spaces.
And so she helped us understand how she pulled herself from that in terms of that's not ugly. That is absolutely fine. But it's not how I define myself. I don't want to cut myself away from my own cultural heritage, right? And so for her doing rhinoplasty was actually cutting herself off from the markers, you know, and she's a mixed race person, right? So she has markers of her cultural heritage to become really important to her. So to take that away was a real disservice and a disconnection to her culture. And I thought that that was a really powerful way to express that.
Noè I thought that was really, really quite moving, really painful to hear. And also something that no matter who you are, you have to listen to that and take that on board. So wherever your perspective comes from. So for example, it's easy to understand. I mean, from even from my point of view, you know, I can go, when you go to Japan, for example, you can see products that will lighten your skin.
And I remember, you know, I mean, I can get quite dark. And I remember being told, you know, stay out of the sun, don't get so dark, because that's not a thing of beauty. And I remember, you know, being told you should lighten your skin. You’re super dark. And it's, you know, those sorts of things that get into your head. When you're growing up. And you subconsciously take that on as a notion of what beauty actually is.
Zione Absolutely. In terms of how you define yourself and then what you project and expect from other people, right? Like who you accept is beautiful as well becomes limited by that conditioning.
So I've travelled around the world where I've seen bleaching products advertised so obviously and so blatantly. And I'm like, oh my goodness, I can't, I can't believe this is out there.
Like I know the products exist, but when I lived in Nigeria, for instance, even though they had bleaching products, there were no ads per se. It was almost like, oh, it's not spoken about. It's not spoken about, you know, black is beautiful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, but I've seen that thing in the store. It's not hidden in a corner. It's obvious, but it's not advertised. And yet I've been to other parts of the world where it's full on. It's advertised. It's telling you if you bleach your skin and your lighter, you will get the job. You will get the man. You will get the that, whatever, right? So it's just interesting to see how colourism was was playing out in different parts of the world that had experienced colonisation, sometimes, sometimes not, right?
Because if you're outdoors, it shows that you're working hard. And therefore you're poorer, right? So it has those other connotations as well.
Noè I love how she brought it back as well to say, you know, even if you're being told or you're hearing that narrative that you are not enough, for her bringing it back to heritage and culture and country was her anchor.
And that was enabling her to understand that beauty is your own business. I love that word. That idea that, you know, you see yourself outside of all those other structural contexts.
Zione Yeah. That they exist. It's incredibly powerful. That's fine. But this is my business, my beauty business. I will craft it.
Noè I wonder what you think, because it made me wonder, like, is it, is it harder or easier? Or does it not matter so much in this time of Instagram?
Are we finding it easier because of more diverse media to be able to see more diverse aspects and ideas of beauty?
Anna Well, for me, what Sasha's conversation really reminded me was, the power of beauty and how we need to keep talking about this. Even though it gets talked about so much, it's not ever overdone because there is just such strong innate desire for anyone, anywhere, any culture, country or colour skin, to be considered beautiful and to feel themselves to be beautiful. I think it's such a strong human desire to have that, that we shouldn't shy away from it. That we haven't moved beyond that very basic human...
Zione Yeah, I know. That very superficial thing, that's right.
Anna It's not just superficial, it's a thing.
Zione I agree.
Anna Let's just acknowledge. It is a thing. It's a thing. And when something like Instagram comes along, it just shows how much of a thing it is, because it amplifies it.
Zione And how universal it is, right? Like every culture, every culture values beauty, whatever they define beauty as.
Anna Yeah, and I'm in Korea right now, like the mecca of the K beauty, everything. And like there's, it just has triggered this desire within me to just buy so much of the products. I'm like, who am I becoming? I'm letting myself succumb to this very vain desire to get comments, like positive compliments about the way my skin looks that day or whatever it is, you know?
And it's an industry, it's power, it's how individual women claim it as, and she just said it so perfectly, as our business. Because of the power, the potency of beauty, unless individual women claim it and make it work for her, it is really easy to be dominated by it. My credit card bill will tell you.
Zione That's a really powerful sort of feminist unpacking of beauty, right? That notion of owning it, it's your own business, otherwise the society will make an industry of it and profit from it, basically, right?
So you can see that and you can let it do what it does, but still own your own part of it and craft your own notion of what beauty is.
Anna Yeah, because I went through like a phase, I hang out with white feminists, nothing against white feminists, love the white feminists. But there was this kind of like code about how, yeah, like being into the beauty stuff wasn't really the code,
you know? That being beyond it was sort of the thing more.
Noè But that's a form of beauty in itself. So that's also a form of, you know, facadism of, you know, that's also a type of uniform. So I think a lot of this is also looking at the community that you're within and how you identify within that, which is sort of what she's talking about in itself, isn't it?
What you're saying is beauty is literally a business, your business. So it's your business in terms of your own soul business, but it's also the business of who you are, where you locate yourself, and literally the commercial-ness of the business, also that you're within. So there's so many factors in terms of the identification of yourself as the facade, how you project yourself, how you paint yourself, and who you want to be.
Zione Who you want to be, right? You can own that presentation. Yeah, totally.
Noè And I think that's what she [Sasha] brings us into so well in terms of talking about it as soul food. The listening back to country, they're listening to who you are, listening to the ancestral song, and using that to help define herself.
Zione Yeah, I've found that incredibly meaningful.
Anna And that's sort of what I think gets talked about as, quote unquote, inner beauty in a more Korean context. And I was actually surprised, and I'm currently personally trying to embrace more, like health is skincare. And I think in this context in Korea, like that's more naturally talked about than maybe compared to Australia,
where it's not the creams you put on your skin, it's actually like your blood circulation. Like women are obsessed with–
Zione What you're putting in your body…
Anna …making sure you have like, you don't have the bloating because you have the blood circulation or this massage and these pressure points, it's like that is very well considered part of “beauty practice”, but it's also good for your health.
Zione And your self care.
Anna And your self care and all of that is an inclusive part of beauty practice,
right? Which kind of goes back to like what Sasha is saying about, it's about claiming that and bringing all of that wisdom out and incorporating that into the modern way of life.
Zione I love that. That's a perfect, perfect summation.
Noè - Yeah, amazing. Well, I thought that was a beautiful, beautiful interview, so thank you so very much.
Anna Yeah, thank you, Zione.
Zione Oh, thank you. Thank you for your wisdom and your insights too.
Thanks for listening to Like Us and SBS Audio Podcast. You can find more episodes at sbs .com .au /likeus and follow us in the SBS Audio app or wherever you get your podcast. Your hosts are me, Noè Harsel, Anna Yeon, Zione Walker-Nthenda. We are produced and engineered by Michael Burrows at Tomato Studios with support from the podcast team at SBS Audio.
