A few years later would come the civil disturbances of the coup culture that led straight to today’s militaristic authoritarian government. For in that late colonial era, although Fiji was a melting pot it also simmered with ethnic tensions and socioeconomic resentments that sometimes erupted into riots and violence. And in the end, I clung to English as if to a life raft on a stormy ocean. Although my mother and her extended family spoke Fijian, Rotuman and Tongan, as well as English, we were encouraged to concentrate on learning ‘Pālangi’ English. My brothers and sister and I were kailoma. The kailoma are the ones of mixed heritage, descended from the Indigenous people and foreigners – Europeans and others. There was a babble of languages all around, but the default tongue was a kind of dialect pidgin English that included Fijian and Hindi words. ‘Kailoma’ is a Fijian word meaning ‘in-between’. Besides the throbbing of drums – for example, the Cabin Bread biscuit tins played by buskers in the market place – there were the rhythmic handclaps of the kava-drinking schools and what seemed like spontaneous singalongs in villages with strummed guitars and ukuleles always on hand.Īlmost as primal was the swishing rhythm of the ubiquitous machete, used for everything from trimming sugarcane stalks, to cutting open coconuts, to slicing up taro, to slashing down bush to make plantation gardens, to chopping up tree branches for open fires.Īs a child I absorbed this hubbub instinctively. Suva in those days was alive with rhythms.

That gave me an enduring interest in the transcendental, in the sound of the human voice lifted in praise-song. I remember going to church with my mother, and the glorious singing of the congregation. Likewise, I recall the thudding of the lali, the big hollow log drum, calling Fijian worshippers to Christian prayer on Sundays. I still have vivid memories, too, of the wailing and chanting and the relentless day and night drumming from a nearby Hindu temple during religious festivals, when they practiced fire-walking, self-flagellation, piercing and other forms of holy torture. (Rotuman people are of Polynesian ethnicity the remote island of Rotuma was ceded to the British to become part of the Fiji Islands in 1881.)Įven as a child I was aware there was a strong sense of the carnivalesque about everyday life: a tropical hubbub culminating in the annual Suva Hibiscus Festival. It truly was a melting-pot culture: Fijians (the iTaukei, people of the land), Rotumans, Tongans, Indians – Hindu, Sikh, Muslim – Chinese, as well as Europeans and part-Europeans. Fiji in my childhood was a fantastical place, a British Crown colony in the years before it gained independence from Britain in 1970. When I dig down into my early sense of identity, I find colonial relics made of fine white mats, braided sennit, tapa cloth, starched khaki uniforms and brass buttons. My father was an airman, orphaned young, who fell from the sky at Lauthala Bay on Viti Levu and was nursed back to good health by my mother. Usenia had twelve children, and my mother was her youngest. Eventually she went to live in Levuka on Ovalau, Fiji, overlooking the sea.

She swam and dived and sailed between the islands of Tonga and Rotuma and Fiji. My grandmother, Usenia, my kui fefine, was from Ma‘ufanga, near Nuku‘alofa in Tonga. My Rotuman grandfather, my ma‘piag fa, Tonu Sitiveni, was a canoe maker, a carpenter, a boat builder from the village of Motusa. Fa‘iakse‘ea. On my mother's side, I come from an ocean people. Now the seaweed grows in her floating hair. From her, the sea, I received my life source. I was born in a double-hulled canoe during a storm. Curated by Lana Lopesi as project Editor-in-Chief, it’s a foundational history of Pacific arts in Aotearoa as told from the perspective of the artists who were there. We’re collaborating with Creative New Zealand to bring you the groundbreaking Pacific Arts Legacy Project.

Punk rock moku hanga