IMAGINING FIJI
Professor Satendra Nandan
The University of Fiji

We live in islands and lagoons of many kinds: of culture, ethnicity, religion, professions, prejudices, institutions, definitions of each other, to name a few. But the islands, which make up the Fiji archipelago, are called Fiji. Fiji defines us in ways that no other word does or can. Significantly, it is a foreign–sounding word, given to us by explorers, colonialists and travelers.

Indus, the river after which a civilization, a nation and an ocean are named, is no longer in the land of modern India. This exilic naming, a kind of severing of the umbilical cord, gives us a special edge of awareness. Amputated, our quest for an identity becomes urgent and compulsive and the migratory, postcolonial note and accent demand to be heard and recognized.

Fiji for many has that kind of value and validity: its inventions and challenges are unique and universal.  It is both a geographical entity and an historical reality.

The minerals from the soil of Fijiland are in the marrow of our bones; the salt of the sea around us is in the air we breathe; the ashes of cremation and the dust of burial of all our ancestors is part of our inheritance. The food we consume grows through their bones. 

Fiji’s people live in many islands; they come from far and near. But they are not all ‘Fijians’.

Yet the land defines us in our dreams and nightmares. We belong to it before it belongs to us. Some of us may own it; there are millions of people in the world who do not own a piece of land, but they are no less Indians or Americans, or Australians;no less passionate in their patriotism. They all belong to a homeland, real and imagined.

Country of the mind, nations of narrations, are created above and beyond the land. These questions and quest are vital for Fiji. How does one give a sense of belonging, a sense of homeland, a place called home, to the citizens of Fiji?

A nation is built on many things, many structures, many peoples, many cultures, at many levels. The possibilities are infinite. And the geography of our imagination may turn out to be more important than history of our finite lives. 

In a universe shaped so deeply by migrant discourses, this idea of our identity has an immediacy about it.

It is especially vital for writers: because they create and challenge knowledge; they interpret it; and they know knowledge is power, for good and ill, and some attempt to write the wrongs. The page beneath our pen is constantly shifting: nothing is carved in stone, except perhaps epitaphs on tombstones.   

And I use the term ‘writing’ in its generic sense in a region where writing is a recent invention.  Writing gives a reflexive perspective to our daily lives, its sense of reality and justice.

Remember Jesus in John, chapter 8,verses 1-8, when he writes twice on the ground and only then comes up with the most compassionate judgment in human thought: He that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone at her. There are two further implications: he does not say, ‘cast the first stone’: because ‘first cast a stone’ implies other possibilities of forgiveness and justice remain; second, it is ‘him’ against ‘her’.

The domination of a patriarchal world is condemned with quiet conviction. One’s capacity to imagine the situation of someone different from oneself. To be concerned with the good and goodness of others whose lives are distant from our own. This is the ethics of imagining the Other.  This is the essence of writing in my colonial-postcolonial islands.

Writing had given Jesus time to think, to imagine the Other, to be self-reflexive. To make the journey into the self and, from resources within himself, he saw the accused in a new light. From the ethics of self-knowledge came the light of understanding. This inner integrity would not allow him to approve Moses’ edicts carved in stone, something from the past. Stoning would have been an easier option.

The past can only be possessed and interrogated by inquiry and scholarship, by intellectual pursuits with a moral imagination. The past has to be questioned or it can kill. Under the disguise of unquestioning culture, invented traditons so much oppression is perpetrated daily on the vulnerable of many races and religions, colours and creeds.

We know in our hearts that so many of these practices have nothing to do with our cultural identity or our evolving civilizational values. It is often about the power of the privileged on the powerless. We need to decolonize our imagination, too.

One can never underestimate the power and influence of ideas, especially when it comes from caring, independent, individual minds which are endeavoring to create a collective, critical consciousness in which we may live and grow, with an awareness of a shared humanity.  Writers have this awesome responsibility, but they are often most precocious in their responsiveness, too. Some explore with deepening intensity issues involving the poor, the landless and their loss.

And they have to decolonise other ideas too: ideas of colonialism, conquests, migration, capitalism, nationalism, traditions, and coups. Conquests and domination are perennial themes in writing.

Western imperialism, though brief, barely 500 years old, changed the contours of our world, and the configurations of our sense of reality. We communicate and create in a language most of our ancestors hadn’t heard of.

We are the product of that global movement which began almost accidentally in 1492; but the world was imagined long before that, on a piece of paper:  The idea of India, the Eden of the South Seas, the Southland, were first imagined. Then they became realities with all their brutalities and possibilities.

Because more than most, writers help us to recognize the fragmented aspect of our beginnings: they may enable us to accommodate and understand our painful past and yet accept it as an integral part of our being – this ceaseless process of remembering, reassessing in the light of new knowledge, indeed reconstituting an individual self deep in its home, history and heritage: to rediscover, what we may term, our tangled subjectivity.

Fiji is a classic case in point.

Where else do we get the idea of paradise so blatantly advertised overseas without a single FijiIndian face? Is it the failure of our imagination that we have not been able to imagine our community; we have never become an imagined community. 

Or is it a deliberate policy of making a community faceless?  Is it the demands of a tourist sensibility? Their flights to paradise: airport, hotels, island resorts, blue waves and flight back home of suburban comfort, and this is paradise enough.  

As a consequence we could never imagine the Other who is really our brother, our neighbour, our co-worker, our colleague, our compatriot, indeed integral and essential to our larger humanity. We do not even hear the faint echoes of our past in the Pacific Solution so brutally, legally imposed on asylum seekers.

Our world is shaped by migration. That has become a non-negotiable reality – we’re surrounded by civilizations created by emigration of peoples. Even in Fiji all our ancestors came by boat – we’re all descendants of the boat people.

But it is not only people who migrate; more importantly, it is ideologies and institutions.

Christ was not born in London, or Marx in Beijing. Gandhi himself became a mahatma in South Africa. They changed the direction of human destiny in most profound and protean ways. They have become metaphors for our hope and life, our tragedies and triumphs. Many of their ideas and ideals are within us in our society, like salt in the sea. Or blood in the body, invisible but ubiquitous.

Most of us have never been to Jerusalem, Mecca, or Ayodhya, but they are, to many, as real as Suva, Labasa or Nadi. Why? Because they have been so deeply imagined by the myth makers, the wordsmiths.  Have we, as a people, as a community, failed to imagine Fiji in our ceremonies and rituals, in our songs and stories, in our daily conversations and daily bread, in our teaching and writing, in our search and research.

How do we narrate our stories of Fiji?  We do lead ritualized lives but the meanings escape us.  Protocol of all kinds abound in Fiji, but the philosophy seems missing. 

Both my maternal and paternal grandparents came from the land-locked villages of UP – then United Provinces.  For generations their ancestors had never walked beyond five miles from their place of birth.  They had never seen a sea-wave or a ship. 

Suddenly to be transplanted on the smallest islands in the largest ocean, 10,000 miles from home and hut, among Christians, is one of the longest cultural journeys in the world.  How they adapted and survived with their daily utensils should also be part of the epics we read and recite.

Fiji should be the defining word for our individual and collective identity. Many countries changed their colonial names to accommodate all their citizens with one national identity, the radical idea of moving from subject to citizenship. The adjective from Fiji has remained exclusive to only a section of our community.

I cannot think of a more distorted colonial thinking: that we defined more than half the population, at the time of independence in 1970, as Indians and General Electors. And in 2006 the country’s Prime Minister could still say, ‘Fiji cannot have an Indian Prime Minister?’

But if a person is a citizen of a country, he or she has every right, indeed it is their birthright and moral imperative to want to be elected to the highest office in the land. If we cannot give a child that dream, then the country for that child will always be alien. That is a much more fundamental reality of our existence than any political expediency.

If within that embracing reality, there are fears and anxieties, prejudices and moral ambivalence, then we should be able to discuss these fearlessly and frankly. Political pusillanimity has prevented us from doing this, and the price has been crippling.  And we continue to blame our colonial past for our present crisis.
 
Fiji was a small but dynamic democracy until 14th May 1987. Until then we didn’t have a single political prisoner – we were one of only 22 such countries in the world. Our Chief Minister had become a Prime Minister of free Fiji without even an election.

That fateful May morning  –  a cunningly chosen date – the 108 anniversary of the arrival of migrant Indians in Fiji waters; the date in 1948 when Israel was declared a state – the culture of violence and violations were introduced in Fiji’s political life. We’ve never recovered from it. 

The deed was done, the damage inflicted on the body politic of a small nation. We all have been diminished by the coups and what happened in their aftermath; our humanity has been distorted for a generation.

One electoral defeat and how easily the mask of multiracialism, the structures of democracy, the traditions of tolerance, the veneer of western education, collapsed. Elevation of some, dispossession of the others has been practised since pre-colonial days. .

The days of being second-class citizens should have been over long ago. If one section of our community is bullied into accepting it, it is far more insidious to those who bully us.

Democracy, in its true sense, may not exist anywhere but, like the idea of God, it is essential for our progress, survival and self-transformation, self-respect.

I think the intellectual courage, the human decency that is required to question the actualities of our existence need to be discussed and written. Ghettos of a rich, fearful people are the worst kind of ghettos.

The writer’s greatest gift to his/her community is to show with unsentimental honesty the complexity of our lives, separate and together, with his unshakable belief that on balance human beings are marginally more inclined to good than evil and on that slight imbalance we can build and survive and even may come to show a bit of love.

But the writer knows that there is no single truth, no single source of power.  Life may be singular, but the world is plural.  Or as an Irish wit put it: it’s like a pair of trousers: single on top, plural at the bottom.

Like a river we too come from many sources.

Nations are constantly reinvented, imagined, modelled, adapted and transformed. Changes in our social and political consciousness, the deepening of our conscience are part of a nation’s growth. It is true many nations are often rooted in ancient hatred and imagined fears of the Other – think of Jerusalem and you get a fair idea – but that would tell us only half the story.

The history of Fiji is far more positive despite our many man-made tragedies. A nation, fairly imagined, can inspire great love and selfless sacrifice. Writers can and must initiate new ways of thinking, seeing, talking.

There’s no human problem in Fiji that we cannot solve in humane ways. We’ve the great gift of a global language: it gives us a local habitation and a global name. We can use it to heal or hurt, unite or divide, to remember or to forget, to live and let live.

The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it is lighter than a gun.

And Fiji – a four-letter word – is just another word for Hope.