Table of Contents
People continue to think of contemporary Fiji as belonging to natives who look and behave in anticipated ways. The popular notion of a Fijian thus becomes someone who is a considerably different creature to the rest of the people living in Fiji. In most peoples’ minds, a Fijian is someone who is friendly and lives in a village; whose menfolk play superb rugby and participate in kava ceremonies and tribal dances; whose womenfolk sing, dance and weave mats and baskets in their villages. Above all, a Fijian is someone who speaks the Fijian language and is a smiling, God-fearing Christian with big hair and dark skin.
As a light-skinned, English-speaking Fijian who does not fit this profile, it is my view that people inside and outside Fiji find it difficult to accept anyone claiming to be a Fijian who falls outside this strict ethno-biological profile. In Fiji, anyone who lives and looks like me is relegated to the realm of otherness and prompts those familiar questions, ‘what are you?’ and ‘to which side do you belong?’ I am certain that changing this mindset is a tall order in a land where colonial racial thinking is an inherited part of life that few have bothered to interrogate or challenge.
The antithesis to the ‘Fijian realm’ is the ‘Indian realm’, those folk whose ancestors arrived on our shores more than a century ago to work the sugarcane plantations as indentured labourers, and whose descendants must tolerate a reputation as land/money-hungry dissidents locked in perpetual turmoil with their ennobled landowning hosts, the indigenous Fijians. The landscape is thus dominated by two contrasting cultures that reinforce the image of Fiji as a xenophobic backwater, lacking in human diversity and cultural complexity. Persons born of this landscape who do not belong to the Fijian or Indian realms have a tough time getting a hearing and are doomed to irrelevance and invisibility.
Where do I begin to tell the story of an invisible people who simultaneously claim a European and Fijian heritage that gives an alternative history of Fiji? I shall begin by acknowledging invisibility and describing what it means to come from an invisible people. By invisible I do not mean that we are a ghostlike people with transparent skins. No. We are invisible by virtue of how others react to us. They do not accept our reality and act as though they do not see us—because the system we live in has been created this way.
Take for example Fijian kailoma—known also as ‘Part-Europeans’ or still in some circles ‘half-castes’, many who live in villages and towns across Fiji and whose presence and histories go mostly unnoticed owing to their ambiguous looks, language(s) and lifestyles that defy racial pigeonholing. This paper seeks to overcome a ‘culture of forgetting’ that many Fijian kailoma have learned to internalise in their own homeland.
In the colonial environment, the prevailing thinking was that Fijian mixed-bloods were a fragmented identity and therefore were neither authentic Fijians nor Europeans. Yet as the fine grain in my story reveals, Fijian mixed-bloods by virtue of their racially-mixed heritage have routinely crossed all barriers of their mixed heritage that were designed to determine race, culture and place of belonging. Nevertheless, in such an ecology one of the dilemmas for most Fijian mixed-bloods was that human diversity could not be comprehended by colonial administrators schooled in black/white thinking; so when they were confronted with the human evidence of the fusion of the European ‘within’ the native child, that truth was not easily grasped nor accepted.