Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, 2012. xi, 321 pp. A$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-922-144347-9.
Brij Lal remarks that this anthology of 21 recent essays on Fiji “is principally for readers in Fiji, offered in the hope that it might prompt them to commit their own experience and thoughts to paper for future generations” (307). While those of us beyond Fiji will equally benefit from Lal’s insightful commentary on the land of his birth, this quotation emphasizes that his writings have become an intensely personal “participant history” (39). He is as much a protagonist as the author of these histories, and the essays deftly weave between autobiographical narrative, social history and political analysis. Lal defines writing as an act of “giving concreteness and form to reality” (2); his stellar career has almost single-handedly written the Indo-Fijians into historical existence, and this new anthology amounts to a substantial part of that concretion, and much more besides.
Chapters 2 through 7 survey (with great clarity) Fiji’s troubled political history and ethnic tensions since independence in 1970. “Heartbreak Islands” summarizes the changes to Fiji’s political landscape over the last forty-five years, emphasizing how the foreign-educated, and paramount-chiefly titled statesmen of the mid-twentieth century (Lala Sukuna, Kamisese Mara and others) have been replaced by opportunistic leaders coming to power on a provincialist platform or through military promotion. Lal observes that Fiji is quietly reeling from four military coups in less than twenty years. Open racism is tolerated in parliament itself, and discriminatory property inheritance laws have driven more than 80,000 Indo-Fijians to emigrate since the racially motivated coup of 1987. Those 300,000 who remain are classified as vulagi (“visitors”) in their own country. Chapter 3 details Lal’s involvement with the drafting of the 1997 Fijian constitution, and its self-motivated rejection by indigenous Fijian politicians on the grounds that constitutional democracy is a “foreign flower” unsuitable for Fiji. Lal analyzes how the Indo-Fijians have been scapegoated by indigenous politicians representing them as a controlling force in the country, while Indo-Fijian land leases have been revoked on racial grounds and democratic representatives ousted by force. “While the Gun is Still Smoking” compares the constitutional status of indigenous and Indo-Fijian citizenship in relation to the state’s key legal documents, and concludes that the outgoing British administration shirked its commitment to the equal rights of the Indo-Fijian population during the transition to independence. Chapters 5 and 6 explore different aspects of modern party politics: the difficulties of power-sharing between the SDL’s Laisenia Qarase and the Labour Party’s Mahendra Choudhry; the underlying causes of Frank Bainimarama’s 2006 coup; the vibrancy of Fijian political campaigning portrayed through a pastiche of memories. The first third of the anthology concludes with “Ungiven Speech,” where Lal critically analyzes the international community’s reaction to Fiji’s recent political convulsions and democratic failures.
“The Road from Laucala Bay” and “Coombs 4240” initiate a lighter tone, and provide autobiographical insight on Lal’s academic career as a historian. In the former, he evokes the unique character of the University of the South Pacific, which he witnessed in its early life. In the latter, he considers the changing nature of academia over the span of his years at the ANU. Chapters 10 through 12 explore the postcolonial cultures which the indenture system has created around the world. Lal frames indenture as a principal motor of the Indian global diaspora, and shows that the post-indenture Indian cultures of Fiji, Uganda and Central America differ significantly from those cultures formed by recent Indian migration to Britain or North America. Although Lal recognizes the ex-patriot Indo-Fijians resettled in Australia and New Zealand to possess the same “twice-banished” (156) status as the formerly Ugandan, Trinidadian, Guyanese or Surinam Indians scattered to the four winds, he emphasizes the cultural specificity of these Indianisms, which are (he observes) more actual than superficially apparent to outsiders. In this vein, the cultural uniqueness of Indo-Fijian identity comes into sharper focus in chapter 13, where Lal reflects on his changing linguistic relationship to spoken English, Hindi and Fijian as a function of his biography. “Primary Texts” develops the same theme through a discussion of his Anglocentric school books, dissecting the ideological mechanisms of British late imperial education.
Chapter 15 marks another thematic shift, with four diverse chapters of biographical vignettes. Chapter 15 examines his cousin’s political career in Fiji over the last twenty years, while chapter 16 follows the fates of three Labasa schoolmates as their families build new lives in Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Chapter 17 is autobiographical, and documents Lal’s shifting identity and confounded expectations as he finds himself a Labasa man in the Rewa delta, a Fijian in Chuuk and Bougainville, and a not-quite-fellow Indian in Trinidad, Guyana, London and South Africa. Chapter 18 presents four obituaries, two of minor characters in Fiji’s recent history, and two of his fellow commissioners on the Fiji Constitution Review Commission. These latter biographies lead neatly on to “Caught in the Web,” where Lal answers the internet critics who have (bizarrely) vilified him for causing the race-based political system he unsuccessfully called on the government to abandon. Chapter 20 transcribes an interview of Lal conducted in 2000 by the Rotuman scholar Vilsoni Hereniko, which ranges over many of the foregoing themes, and highlights how complex the politics of ethnicity have become in modern Fiji. Lal’s epilogue “Speaking to Power” describes his interrogation by the Fijian military in 2009, following his public criticism of the Australian High Commissioner’s expulsion. An Australian citizen, Lal was released after three hours of physical abuse, and given 24 hours to leave the country and never return. This is a moving, intelligent, even-handed and skilfully written anthology. An insightful history of modern Fijian politics and an admirable work of postcolonial social analysis, it should be indispensable reading for anyone concerned with Fiji, politics, race relations or the Indian diaspora.
Andy Mills
University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
pp. 908-910