Elder Travel—Silver: The Fiji Kiss
by Patricia Page
Growing up, I believed my missionary grandparents had been eaten by cannibals. That was one story. Another was that my grandmother had been buried in the middle of the Fijian jungle in a hollowed-out tree trunk. That didn’t quite jibe with having been eaten but was a more appealing image. I’d also heard that my grandfather had been poisoned, that the family had been threatened by warriors in full battle gear, and that both grandparents had performed healing miracles. Facts or fictions? The question would haunt me well into my sixties, when I finally traveled to Fiji to find out.
My father had no answers; they died when he was only three. “I don’t remember them” was his reply whenever I asked him about his parents. His lips would tighten, which they very rarely did otherwise, he would look away, and I would know that the subject was closed. He had no interest in his Fijian past. He hated his Fijian middle name, Mania, even after he learned from his sister Olive, who had been doing some research, that it meant “love,” the given name of his mother (although she preferred to be called Lou). Once when a missionary who had known his parents in Fiji came to speak in a town near us, he refused to go.
So it was not my father who spoke to me of his parents but my mother. “They died young. Eaten by cannibals.”
It was not such a wild conjecture. The Fiji Islands were once known as the “Cannibal Isles,” an epithet not unearned. Well up into the 19th century, cannibalism in Fiji was vakavenua, the way of the land. Warfare was constant for the Fijians then, and captives were trussed like frogs and baked alive in earth ovens called lovos to be eaten by the men of the village. Sometimes a finger or a foot would be severed from the live victim, cooked and eaten in front of him with much smacking of lips and ridicule. Women and children were not spared. After a successful battle, war canoes returned home flying manumanu-mi-laka, children hung by their feet or hands from the sail yards. A newly built war canoe required a drenching in human blood, and more victims were killed with the setting of the mast. To launch the canoe, villagers pushed it out to sea over a row of lago, dead bodies called “logs.” Few Fijians lived to old age.
The beginning of the end of such practices came when the self-declared king of Fiji, Chief Cakobau, converted to Christianity and ordered his subjects to do likewise. Eventually, thousands of Fijians lotued along with him, so that when my grandparents arrived as missionaries in 1913, only a few exceptions held out in the remote highlands of the Sigatoka Valley.
This was the very region, as it happened, I most wanted to visit in Fiji. My grandparents had spent two years there. The highlands, however, were well off the tourist track. I had read that the rough road snaking up onto the mountainous ridge that separates the dry west side of Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island, from the wet east required a four-wheel drive vehicle, and even if I were able to commission such a vehicle, I would need someone familiar with the area and fluent in Fijian in order to locate my grandparents’ former home.
But luck was with me the moment I stepped off the plane. “Bula! ” boomed my ebullient friend Phylis, a retired schoolteacher who had relocated to Fiji to run a dive shop. Phylis is small person with a big voice. Dragging my wheeled duffel bag, I followed her outside as she explained to me at full volume that she needed to sign loan papers for the Rav4 she had just bought before heading home.
“Um . . . does it have four-wheel drive?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I mentioned my desire to see the Sigatoka Valley highlands.
“The Sigatoka Valley! I’ve never been there! We’ll take my friend Melike with us. She knows all about the Sigatoka Valley.”
“Does she speak English?”
“Sure.”
My travel-addled brain cleared as I realized that the Fijian gods had just delivered a four-wheel-drive vehicle and a translator before I’d taken a dozen breaths of this slightly floral, slightly musty, slightly breezy tropical air.
The next day the three of us, plus Phylis’s dog Rocky, headed west toward Sigatoka town. Melike, a handsome, middle-aged woman with a musical laugh, had proved game. “We can’t get lost,” she assured us. “There’s only one road.”
We headed west along the Queen’s Road toward Sigatoka town, skirting the coast. The water, pale turquoise in the shallows over the coral reef and deep blue beyond the reef’s edge, lapped at the shore, lightly capped in white by the trade wind. Edging the shore were the ubiquitous coconut palms so memorably dubbed “the giraffes of the vegetable world” by Robert Louis Stevenson. To our left, the mountains, clothed in more shades of green than I thought existed, grew increasingly higher and more jagged as they stretched to the north, while down lower, fragrant frangipani, flowering acacias, and flame trees bloomed against leafy hardwood, palm, and fruit trees.
We passed through several villages of concrete houses with rusted tin roofs, which sheltered some obviously poor people, although the abundance of trees and shrubs and neat yards softened the down-at-the-heels look. Lining the road were hitchhikers of all ages, who gave us big smiles and bounced one hand on the air, palm down, in a polite way of suggesting that we slow down and give them a ride, which we would have done but for our full car. We slowed for numerous speed bumps to let cows and dogs and mongeese cross the road and at one point, we came to a dead stop to wait for a mother pig with eight piglets to amble their way to the other side.
As we drove, I told my grandparents’ story to Phylis and Melike, a story that has always embarrassed me. You see, my grandparents were not just any missionaries but Pentecostal missionaries, the first in Fiji. Pentecostalsweren’t they the ones who spoke in tongues and rolled around on the floor? Who quivered and quaked under the force of the Holy Spirit? Who believed in the imminent apocalypse when only the “saints,” that is, those who had been cleansed of sin, would be taken up into heaven? Yes.
I’m not a very worthy descendant of saints. I’ve never understood faith, usually defined as belief without evidence. Hope, I understand. Hope is a kind of temporary belief that awaits evidence. But faith eludes me, in practice as well as in concept. It doesn’t seem to be something you can work on, like good deeds, or earn but more something simply bestowed.
Which is, more or less, what happened to my Australian grandfather in Los Angeles, where he had sailed from India in 1909 to meet his older brother Ernest, a performing hypnotist en route to a gig in London.
Ernest never arrived. As the days passed, then weeks, Albert could only assume his brother had drowned. In a daze of grief, he wandered the streets of Los Angeles, at one point wandering into a Pentecostal revival. He said later that he had walked in a scoffer and out a saint.
Albert not only converted to Pentecostalism, he decided to become a preacher, and he soon set off for the Rochester Institute of the Bible in New York State. On finishing his studies there, he headed for the little town of Protection in western New York to begin his ministry, and it was here that he met, converted, and married my grandmother.
He could not have chosen a better helpmate. While he traveled around the Fijian countryside, preaching to the heathen, my grandmother established and taught in three missionary schools, nursed the sick, and counseled the troubled. She bore four children in five years, and ran a household, or rather a grass hut-hold, with no resources beyond a vegetable garden and, on occasion, a cow. She took in sewing at times to earn a bit of cash, because they received none from any church. They were freelancers, determined to live off the land, like the people they were trying to convert. God would provide.
As we passed through the villages along the Queen’s Road, I saw that not much had changed from my grandparents’ descriptions. People still weeded and cultivated their subsistence plots with cane knives and digging forks. Fishing nets and poles rested against the sides of the houses.
I knew from letters that my grandparents’ home in the highlands was twenty miles inland, so when we reached the dirt road that would take us there, Phylis paused to set her odometer to zero. As we advanced, the narrow road quickly deteriorated, and we were soon bouncing and careening over rocks and potholes. At first, we attracted only moderate notice in the villages we passed, but as we penetrated more deeply into the valley, children began to chase after us, shouting and laughing. “Kaivalagi! Kaivalagi! ” “White people! White people!” Then they would laugh and add something else in Fijian.
“They think it’s very funny to see a dog riding in a car,” Melike explained. “That they’ve never seen before.”
We also passed some clusters of Indian homes, descendants of the indentured workers imported from India beginning in 1879, five years after Fiji became a British colony. The indenture program is an example of the good intentions that so often pave the road to hell. The good intentions belonged to the governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, who was determined that the Fijians not become virtual slaves in their own land, as had happened in Africa and the Caribbean. He therefore included in the Fijian Constitution a provision that only Fijians could own the land, with the exception of properties that had already been sold. Gordon not only wanted the Fijians to own their land permanently, he also did not want them to work as wage labor on the sugar plantations. Hoping to protect their cashless society and at the same time meet the demands of the plantation owners for workers, he decided to import men and women from India, thus setting the stage for the ethnic conflict that has fueled four coups in twenty years.
What followed Gordon’s decision was the “narak,” or hell, of “girmit,” as the Indians called their indenture. Their “girmit,” which is what the English word “agreement” sounded like to them, stipulated that in exchange for passage to Paradise, as the recruiters called Fiji, the Indians would work five and a half nine-hour days a week for one shilling a day (about twenty-five cents) for five years. The word “girmit” also combined “gir” (fallen) and “mit” (totally effaced), and many girmitayas felt it accurately described what happened to them after their arrival.
Their living and working conditions under indenture were abominable. The “coolies,” as they were called, lived in long, low wooden dormitories called “lines.” Single men lived three to a room measuring ten feet by seven, and a husband, wife, and children lived within the same dimensions. There was no privacy; the walls separating the rooms did not reach the ceiling. Workers had to buy their own food and clothing out of their one-shilling-a-day wages, and many suffered from malnutrition. The plantation owners did not consider hygiene a priority, and diseases, some of them fatal, were rampant. It was to this population, not the indigenous Fijians, that my grandparents addressed their efforts.
We had been steadily climbing as we drove further and further into the interior, and the nose of Phylis’ SUV was pointing upward at a very steep angle. I have a mild fear of heights, and the nearly vertical slopes dropping off on both sides of the narrow road had me hanging on to my seat and reminding myself to breathe. I should have been reassured by Phylis’ insouciance, her fingertips barely touching the wheel, but her unconcern only left me more anxious.
In my grandparents’ day, the trackfor the road didn’t existwas even more dangerous. “In some places,” wrote my grandfather, “there is just enough room for the horse to pass . . . and if he fell it would mean a sheer fall of hundreds of feet into the river. Lou gets awfully giddy walking along holding on to the side of the cliff. In some places there are only six inches to spare.”
We leveled off atop a knife-edge ridge, and Phylis stopped so that we could admire the view. Far below to our left meandered the capacious Sigatoka River, Viti Levu’s second largest, fringed with coconut palms. Green cultivated field after green cultivated field stretched in all directions, broken up here and there by a thatched roof, or several. Vast sugar cane fields crept up the steep slopes of the mountains.
Moving on, we descended again for a mile or so to cross a small bridge over a creek rippling along beneath a canopy of tree branches and vines. On the other side of the bridge, Phylis stopped again and announced that we had gone exactly twenty miles. To the left and through the trees we could see the river about one-quarter mile away, as my grandmother had written. To the right I was startled to see a cluster of bamboo trees just as my grandfather had described them. “These trees are beautiful things,” he wrote, “they rise to say 40 or 50 feet and look like gigantic plumes waving in the breeze.”
Proceeding slowly, we took a long driveway to our right only yards from the bridge. The land had been cleared here, and we could see the line of trees marking the creek at the edge of a grassy field.
“This has to be it,” said Phylis.
“They had a garden,” said Melike, her imagination leaping ahead. “They brought water from the creek.”
I recalled a bit more of my grandmother’s description”there are mountains on every side,” she wroteand, yes, here they were, lending grandeur to tranquility. I had found what I was looking for.
It was something of an anti-climax. Phylis and Melike were standing aside, quietly allowing me my Big Moment. But I wasn’t really feeling anything Big. I just stood there dumbly until after a while, Phylis asked if I was ready to go back. I nodded.
“We can’t go back yet,” Melike objected. “We need to talk to people. Someone might remember your grandparents.”
“But that would be impossible,” I said. “No one who knew them would be alive.”
She fixed me with a stern eye. “It’s history.” I was nonplussed. “History,” she repeated, going on to explain that every Fijian child learns village history from his or her elders, and that knowledge becomes part of daily life.
I learned later that this was true. In most of my extended conversations with Fijians, they at some point would talk about their family history, their village’s history, their country’s history, or all three. Their past is vital to their present. Land titles, for example, are part of a village’s oral history, as important to them as our courthouse records are to us. Village history is also a record of the relationships among sub-clans and families. It sums up a village’s definition of itself, a collective portrait of who they are and what they have done.
The Indo-Fijians treasure their history, too. One of their leading writers, Satendra Nanden, writes, “Remembering and not forgetting is the true art of living. We make so many journeys and like a river or even a rivulet our own identities are shaped and nourished by a myriad of individuals, moments, narratives, imaginings and movements.”
So on Melike’s insistence we returned to the road and stopped at the first house we came to. She got out, approached the house, and stood in the driveway with folded hands, courteously waiting in the Fijian way for someone to notice her. After a few minutes, two young boys came out of the house and exchanged words with her.
“Their parents are in the field,” she said, getting back in the car, and we inched another quarter-mile or so down the road until we caught sight of them: a robust couple in their thirties, harvesting greens. Melike went to talk to them, while Phylis and I occupied ourselves, admiring the fields and the river until she called to us to join them.
Fijians are beautiful people, and Tom and Naomi were no exception. Tom was tall and muscular and handsome, and statuesque Naomi had a lovely plump face and brown eyes that could melt a snowdrift. I became aware, however, that those eyes, trained on me, looked suspiciously moist. I was confused.
Melike noticed and explained. “She is so happy to meet the granddaughter of the missionaries who lived on her land.”
I was amazed. I had expected resentment, or at least disapproval. Weren’t missionaries the people who barged into a culture, knowing nothing of it and feeling superior to the need to learn? Weren’t missionaries the people who imposed a rigid religious agenda contemptuous of traditional beliefs? Who taught native people to be ashamed of their bodies and to cover them up in shapeless clothing? Yes.
But in Fiji the missionaries sabotaged something else, as well: cannibalism. And for that alone, yesterday’s missionaries are revered today by ordinary Fijian villagers. I might find attitudes to match my expectations in the city or in the university but not in the rural villages, not in the remote highlands. Fijians, Melike explained to me later, call the days of cannibalism “the dark times,” a phrase they may have learned from the missionaries but no less sincere for that. It’s well to remember that the victims of cannibalism in Fiji were mostly Fijians and other Pacific Islanders, not white people. A few criminally inclined beach bums (generally sailors who had deserted) and a white trader or two met that fate, but only one missionary was ever killed and eaten in Fiji.
I didn’t know what to say to Naomi. Her regard for me was entirely unmerited. I was not even a Christian, let alone a proper granddaughter of missionaries. I wanted to respond in a way respectful of Naomi’s feelings but at the same time true to my own.
I’m afraid I didn’t come up with anything to match the moment. I simply smiled and reached for her hand and told her I was very glad to be here, that I had wanted for many years to come. True enough. Then I showed her a photograph of my grandparents and my father and his siblings, seated on chairs in front of a mass of greenery.
She gasped. She knew exactly where that was. Gasau reeds like those in the photograph still grew there. Could I return in a day or two? I must speak with the elders. They would want to know I was here. They might know something about my grandparents. She would arrange for us to meet with the chief.
It was not the sort of invitation one could turn down.
So two days later, Phylis, Melike, and I started out for Raiwaqua, Naomi’s village. On the way, we stopped at Melike’s village to pick up her friend Joanna, who, in a lucky coincidence, was Naomi’s sister. She had married a man from Melike’s village, where she now lived.
We arrived at Raiwaqua, around 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon. A strand of barbed wire served as a gate, which Melike got out to unhook, and we drove into a village of twenty or so houses, most of them made of concrete blocks, others traditional bures of woven grass walls with thatched roofs. Flowers grew all around the houses, and the grass of the rara, the village green, was neatly mowed.
Joanna led the way to a house at the top of a slight rise. She carried two yaqona plants I had purchased at the market, our sevusevu, or gift, to the chief. After removing our shoes, we entered to see that people were already seated in a semi-circle on the floor, the women back against the wall. But Joanna indicated to me that I was to sit toward the front, which I did, and she and Melike and Phylis sat with me.
The chief entered, a tall, white-haired man who looked as if he had been lifting weights. I learned later he was seventy-six years old, but he carried himself with an ageless bearing I would learn to recognize as aristocratic. Although breaking down under the impact of modern influences, indigenous Fiji remains a chiefly society. Contemporary chiefs are descendants of royal lines. Like the other villagers, he was dressed in worn clothing: a pair of shorts with many patches and a threadbare shirt. He had an aloof and slightly intimidating air but greeted us politely, sitting down at the head of our circle, where he was joined by another older man, Joanna and Naomi’s father.
Joanna led the yaqona ceremony of welcome. Yaqona, a mildly narcotic drink better known as kava, was once the sacred prerogative of chiefs and priests, but today everyone drinks it, informally and formally, a practice that has given rise to the saying, “Yaqona is a good friend but a bad master.” Yaqona ceremonies are even held now for tourists, but that is the sort of for-hire ritual I avoid.
Joanna opened the ceremony by chanting something in Fijian and the others responded in kind. A young man then filled a thin, orange cloth with the powdered root, tied it securely, and poured water over it into a six-legged, carved wooden bowl called a tanoa. He repeated the process several times until the bowl was half full.
“Sa qai lose oti yaqona, he announced. The yaqona is ready to be served. Joanna chanted some more, everyone clapped three times, and the young man filled a coconut half-shell, called a bilo, which another young man, this one in a San Diego t-shirt, brought to me. Phylis had told me that I should drink it in a single gulp, which I did. It tasted faintly medicinal: not too bad, not too good. As the inside of my mouth went numb, the young man refilled the bilo and offered it to the chief and then everyone else in turn.
Meanwhile, everyone was talking in Fijian, comparing information about my grandparents. The palaver continued for about an hour, along with several rounds of yaqona. Finally, Joanna declared a last round. Once again the young man in the San Diego t-shirt handed me the bilo. “One for the road,” he said to me in English, grinning to let me know that his village was not as removed from modern life as I might have thought.
Phylis and I said our goodbyes, crawling on our hands and knees to ensure that our heads never rose higher than the chief’s, a taboo not much observed these days on the coast, but here in the highlands, customs were more tenacious.
Outside, Joanna’s father joined us. With Melike translating, he said he would show us exactly where my grandparents’ bure had stood. “After your grandmother got sick, and your grandparents went back to Sigatoka town, an Indian family moved into the bure.” Spoken as if this had happened yesterday. I was impressed.
We left the village and drove to a spot on the opposite side of the road, where Joanna’s father led us along a path into the rainforest. Green bananas were growing on the banana trees, breadfruit and papaya hung from their respective trees, and bamboo, banyan, vesi (considered Fiji’s national tree and its most prized carving wood), and raintrees towered above us. Vines, some of them as thick as my arm, twisted around the branches. I almost missed the wild orchids, because most of the blossoms were pale green and obscured by the green confusion of the luxuriant growth. I could barely make out the path beneath the thick grass, silky on my sandaled feet. I was careful not to trip on the serpentine vines.
This was the old track, Joanna’s father told us. The track, I think to myself, my grandparents walked.
It’s uncanny how the dead manage to be present on occasion, how they arrive unbidden to insist on themselves. Walking along the track my grandparents had walked, I did not see their ghosts or hear their voices. I would not claim any supernatural presence. Yet with my feet in their footsteps, I became aware of them as people in a way I had not before. For the first time, they were more than frozen faces in a photograph, more than elegant scripts in black ink. They had legs that walked, eyes that saw, and ears that heard.
A surprise awaited us a little farther down the trackNaomi. She had been clearing brush. Seeing me, she set her cane knife aside and reached out to hug me, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Can you come with us?” I asked, and she said yes.
The track was now following the creek, which was flowing but not full. Joanna’s father told us that in the old days the creek was higher and used to flood during heavy rains. The bank was now about fifty feet above the creek, and Naomi took my arm whenever we reached a spot of risky footing. I was touched by her solicitude.
At a bend in the creek, the track ended and we stopped. “This is where the footbridge used to be. Your grandparents lived over there,” said our guide, pointing.
An emotional rush surged up in me, despite the fact that I never knew these grandparents and, in fact, had always been embarrassed to acknowledge them. Standing here so close to what was, after all, part of my heritage, put to flight that shame. “Venaka,” I murmured. Thank you. “Venaka.” It is good.
We could go no further; the footbridge was long gone. I assumed this was the end of our pilgrimage, but no, Melike insisted we drive to the other side of the creek to the site of the bure where my grandparents had lived. At this point, Joanna and Naomi’s father said goodbye, but we women piled into Phylis’ SUV for the short ride across the bridge to the grassy field we had visited two days before. We walked through the field to the bend in the creek, where we sat down.
“We kids used to find tin cans here,” said Naomi, Melike translating. “They probably belonged to your grandparents.”
I sat quietly for a moment, letting the Page family take shape for me. I saw the children first. My three-month-old father lies in a cart next to my grandmother as she harvests dalo leaves for a salad, stopping to slap at mosquitoes from time to time. Nearby three-year-old Lloyd chatters in Hindustani with an Indian playmate, while two-year-old Olive makes dirt pies. My grandfather sits on the ground, his back against a vesi tree, knees propped up, writing a letter, one of many from which I drew these details. Everyone is barefoot, their clothes, rotten with wear, hang in streamers.
Phylis suggested a prayer, and Joanna obliged, a long one in Fijian. Then Phylis asked if I would like to add something. I hesitated, wondering what I could say. Not a prayer, that would feel false, yet something was required of me here.
I glanced around at the women’s expectant expressions, opened my mouth and heard myself begin the story of the Page family’s sea journey to Sigatoka from Suva in a storm that had Lou so seasick she hardly cared when the cutter nearly capsized. I don’t know why I told that particular story. I could have told about the time my grandfather was poisoned. Or the time that warriors showed up in full battle gear. Or the time an eye disease temporarily blinded the entire family, except for Olive, who had to lead everyone around by the hand for three months. But it probably didn’t matter what story I told, so long as it was true, so long as it was history.
“I am so happy,” said Naomi in careful English when I had finished my story.
“I am, too,” I said, looking around at the bamboo and raintrees, the gasau reeds that formed the background of the photo I had shown her. “My father was a small child here,” I added. “He was only three when my grandparents died of the Great Influenza.”
The mention of death silences everyone for a moment.
“Did your father ever come back here?” Naomi asked finally.
“No. His brother and sister did, but he did not.”
Naomi, Joanna, and Melike look at me uncomprehending, and I realize they would never understand my father’s deliberate detachment from his history. But my father had grown up in America, where self-invention is a source of pride, and he began inventing himself at a very early age. As he grew into adolescence, he understood that as an orphan, he alone was responsible for his own destiny, and I think he saw the past, especially the tragic part, as an impediment. There is freedom, as well as loss, in being an orphan.
I wonder what my father, who died in 2002, would have thought about my trip. I don’t think he would have disapproved, but he probably would have been puzzled at my interest in the past. Yet at the end of my ten-hour flight to Fiji, days before the events I have described here took place, a funny thing happened. As my plane descended to the Nadi Airport, I looked out my window at the hills taking shape in the smoky red light of the pre-dawn, and what popped into my head was the memory of the Fiji kiss.
The Fiji kiss goes like this: you rub noses. Up and down, side to side. My father taught it to me when I was a small child. I’ve learned since that other people know it as the Eskimo kiss, but for me it was the Fiji kiss, an oddity, a link to his exotic birthplace. He never kissed me in the regular way, not even on the cheek. That would have been a breach of decorum. The Fiji kiss, however, was enough of a curiosity, a little silly even, to be acceptable and still express tenderness. I had not thought of this Fiji kiss for many, many years, if ever. I am still taken aback that the memory would surface as our wheels touched down on the soil of his birth.
