The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  But it was a mistake to think of the Fijians as angry.

  “Just because we’re not as intelligent as Indians,” Steve said, in a widely quoted observation, “doesn’t mean that Indians can take advantage of us.”

  “We have the land – you have the brains,” he said on another occasion, addressing Indians directly. “Why should you be richer just because you’ve got a bit more brains?”

  He was no more subtle when he came to write about the affair in his book, No Other Way. In it he described the Indians as “an immigrant race” who “wanted complete control of the government.” A coup d’ état was the only solution “for the survival of the Fijian race. As simple as that.”

  But wasn’t the coup racist? he was asked on a New Zealand news program. He cheerfully admitted that this was so. He said, “It is racist in the sense that it was in favor of one race.”

  The Indians were equal in numbers to the Fijians, who had only recently begun to worry about their being over-whelmed. And even now the Fijians’ spirits were not dampened. They laughed and numbed themselves with kava (they called it yanggona here) six days a week and spent the seventh in Methodist chapels – every village had one – singing deeply lugubrious hymns and generally condemning the behavior of the heathenish Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Zoroastrians who had, they said, hijacked their country by outbreeding them and voting Melanesians out of office.

  Then God spoke to the Fijian, who assembled his God-fearing commandos and led them masked into the Fiji Parliament, and marched the newly elected prime minister and most of his cabinet out at gunpoint. After this 1987 military coup in which Col. Rabuka took power (he had been alarmed by an election which had produced – in his view – the nightmarish prospect of a multiracial government), he immediately decreed that Sunday was a holy day which had to be observed by everyone – no commerce, no travel, no buses, no cane-cutting, no games, nothing but solemnity and Methodist hymns.

  Later he played himself in a starring role in a Fiji government video about the whole business. An early scene went like this:

  INT. – RABUKA HOUSE – MORNING:

  A room in the Fijian household of “STEVE” RABUKA. MRS RABUKA and little “SKIP” RABUKA are seated at the breakfast table, eating a traditional Fijian breakfast of tea and porridge.

  Enter STEVE RABUKA in military uniform.

  SKIP RABUKA. Where are you going, Daddy?

  STEVE RABUKA. I am on a mission from God.

  MRS RABUKA. What do you mean, husband?

  STEVE RABUKA. God has told me to overthrow the government.

  This was revenge on the worshipers of Allah and Hanuman the monkey god and gold calves and elephantine Ganapati with his snout and his smile. And for a time this decree gave Sundays in Fijian villages and towns the atmosphere of desertion you associate with cholera epidemics, or nuclear holocausts, or Welsh Sundays.

  “Fiji is a Christian country,” Rabuka said repeatedly, and he spoke of Fiji’s solemn traditions and strict morality – quite funny, really, when you thought how he had come to power by gun-toting commandos, declaring martial law and tossing out an elected government.

  Ethnic Fijians had gotten even with the Indians by shouting hymns at them – overwhelmingly fat Fijian women in Mother Hubbards, and enormous, skirt-wearing, bushy haired Fijian men with Bibles the size of paving stones stood there and bellowed Come to Jesus in A-flat at the top of their lungs. This of course terrified the Indians.

  I rented a car and put my kayak and camping equipment inside, so that I could drive around the island of Viti Levu (“Big Fiji”), looking for the best place to paddle.

  “Do you sell maps?” I asked the Fijian at the car rental agency in Nandi. I had nautical charts of Fiji but no road maps.

  “Why you are needing a map?”

  “So I’ll take the right road.”

  “You don’t need a map. There is only one road.”

  This was not strictly true, and anyway the idea that I might have needed it for other reasons had not occurred to him.

  “You American?” he asked. And then he marveled in a gloating way about the violence in the Gulf War, now in its second week looking more and more like a punitive mission of the most destructive kind. In the Solomons and Vanuatu the fear was that the war would come to their islands. The Fijians would have ridiculed that notion. But they had no political views. Theirs was a simple-minded fascination with the spectacle of it all – the pyrotechnics, planes taking off, bombs dropping, sirens wailing, bloody people trundled in stretchers through smoke and flames. News reports were like Rambo videos, and they seemed to give all Fijians pleasure.

  I had a slight problem. I had picked up a fungal infection in Vanuatu – I blamed it on unwashed sheets. It could hardly have been anything else. I was nearly always a model of rectitude. Oceania was full of AIDS posters, and an AIDS poster in Pidgin was an explicit and frightening warning.

  “Do you have the name of a doctor?” I asked at my hotel, the Regent, in Nandi.

  “What’s the problem?” the desk clerk asked – impertinently, I felt.

  “Fungal infection,” I said. “Nothing serious. It’s on my foot.”

  This was a lie, of course. But I did not have it in me to say It’s on my willy to a Fijian woman who was a Methodist.

  “Athlete’s foot. You can get some powder for that at the chemist shop.”

  The next day was Sunday. Nothing is more pacific than a Pacific Sunday, I wrote in my notebook later. I suspected from the first that it was a deliberate Fijian ploy to make the non-Christians feel like heathens and aliens. The attitude was one of Shut up and let us pray as the uncompromising Fijians beat the non-Fijians over the head with the Bible.

  Nandi was full of doctors’ offices, but none were open – and by the way, every one of them had an Indian name on the door.

  The very settled, messy and domesticated look of Viti Levu was an effect of the fields of sugar cane, the floppiest and most ragged crop imaginable, and one which becomes floppier as it matures. And when it is harvest-time the cane is shaggy and peeling, yielding a very messy harvest. All over coastal Fiji the trees have been cut down to make room for the crop, and so the slopes were either bare or else they supported ill-assorted pines and scrubby bushes. The roads were also in a state of decay, some of them falling apart. I had been used to the underdevelopment and jungle of western Melanesia. But this was a heavily populated and prosperous place that was desperate to attract tourists. Altogether it was a landscape under stress, and many of the hills looked denuded, their muscles showing just beneath the grass.

  On Queen’s Road, the main street of Nandi, were rows of Indian shops, with signs saying Prices Slashed and Stock Close-Out and Sale. This was not cynical salesmen’s hyperbole. The Indian merchants really wanted to sell their inventory and emigrate – to Canada, to Australia, to New Zealand, to wherever they could buy land and start again. There was a hint of panic in most Indian signs, and though some shopkeepers professed to be optimistic no one sounded more desperate than an Indian protesting that things were rosy.

  The fact was that under the newly rewritten Fiji constitution – proposed, but so far unratified – ethnic Fijians would not only be guaranteed control of the government for ever, but also all the old leases and land deals would be renegotiated, so that no land would be in non-Fijian hands. Even the leases were being rejigged – an Indian with a 100-year lease would end up with a twenty-year lease and a Fijian partner. It made no difference that the Indian had Fijian citizenship.

  This seemed laughable but the Fijians were in deadly earnest.

  “We see what has happened to our Maori and Hawaiian brothers elsewhere in the Pacific,” ran a letter in the Fiji Times while I was there. “Second-class citizens in their own islands.”

  “I understand the Indians are experiencing difficulties,” I said to Vishnu Prasad, a Nandi storekeeper airing his guard-dog.

  Vishnu went silent, and when I pressed him he giggled in terror.
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  “I am knowing nothing about politics. Hee! Hee!”

  At the time of the coup in 1987, indigenous Fijians rioted in the streets of Nandi and Suva, attacking Indian shops and looting them. A number of shops were burned. After a caretaker government was installed, Steve lost patience again and staged a second coup four months later.

  An Indian yanggona seller said to me, “This was a happy and good place before the coup, but they spoiled it.”

  “But the money has been devalued and business is terrible and the future looks bleak, so the Fijians are worried, aren’t they?”

  “No. They are looking backward. This is a return to the chiefly system.”

  “But who wants the chiefly system?”

  “The chiefs,” he said.

  That dead Sunday I drove east from Nandi to Singatoka, a largely Indian town, where I was told a doctor’s office might be open. This was not the case, but when I asked for a vegetarian restaurant – one of the great attractions of any Hindu town – I was directed to “Go Kool Hot Snax,” where I met Subhash, who stuffed a curry puff into his mouth and told me he disliked Fijians.

  He had just come from church. Yes, on Sunday. He was an Indian Christian.

  “I go to Church of Christ,” he said.

  He wasn’t married, he said, so I asked him whether he would want to marry a Christian or a Hindu.

  “When I get married it will be to an Indian or a European – never to a Fijian,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they have no morals,” he said, practically exploding. And then he spoke with the single-minded conviction you hear in the monologues of bigots. “Even the schoolgirls behave like prostitutes, taking men to the beach and sometimes robbing them. Ha! A Fijian wife would commit adultery with other men while you are away. They go with anyone. They don’t care. Even though they are Christians they still behave like heathens. I would never marry one. Never!”

  The Indians were hardly conservative-looking, though. The girls wore dresses and cut their hair, they had loud liberated-sounding laughter, and they stared at me. Staring at men was something that women in India never did. I was told that marriages between Muslims and Hindus were common, though there were few Fijian–Indian marriages. This was nothing new. A turn-of-the-century English writer observed, “The Fijians show no disposition to intermarry with the Indian coolies.”

  Driving onward from Singatoka, I picked up a hitch-hiker named Akiwila. He was Fijian, a Methodist. Like Subhash, he too had just come from church. He carried his Bible. The Sunday roadsides were crowded with these Bible-carrying men, and I imagined they seemed rather menacing to an unbeliever.

  He was black, his head surmounted by a bush of thick kinky hair. He had a snub nose and a heavy jaw – the classic virile mask that was a Melanesian face” He was like many male Fijians I met, a big breezy specimen, all smiles, with a mustache that made him look older, and more serious and somewhat formidable. Yet he was friendly – and respectful rather than shy. He wore the gabardine skirt Fijians call a sulu, a white shirt and tie – you were not considered well dressed in Fiji unless you wore that gabardine skirt and a necktie.

  Akiwila was on his way to his brother’s house for a meal, before the next church service. No, he said, they were not allowed to cook on Sundays, but the food had been prepared yesterday. I tried and failed to imagine a Deity that would be deeply offended by someone’s cooking. But of course Methodism in the Pacific was stuck pretty much in the nineteenth century, when fat furious hypocrites from England and America laid down the law – no cooking, no dancing, no games, and two church services on Sunday.

  After a little while I said, “Akiwila, what is your opinion of the military coup?”

  “It was very good,” he said, smoothing the leather cover of his Bible.

  “But it was against the Indians, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.” And he smiled. “You see, they are now almost half the population.”

  “You have to keep the Indians in their place, is that what you mean?”

  “Yes. Very much so.”

  He went on smiling and nodding his head and tugging his sulu modestly over his knees.

  After I dropped him, I drove on. I gave a ride to Joe and Helen, two homeward-bound Fijians who worked at a local hotel. They were so pleasant, I was seized with uncharacteristic reticence and did not ask them how much they earned. Of Americans, New Zealanders and Australians, I asked, who were the most obnoxious guests? “They are all nice,” Joe said, mildly, and when they got out Helen offered me a dollar for the ride. A mile farther on, I was flagged down by some boys who were also headed home after a Sunday service. They were teenagers – Moses, Yakobi and Kamwela (Fijian for Samuel). They agreed that everything ought to be closed on Sunday, especially Indian shops.

  “Sunday is for church,” Moses said.

  This sanctimonious insistence on de-secularizing Sundays was expressed with the greatest friendliness. The Fijians were calmly assertive, while the Indians either falsely claimed to be unworried or frankly expressed their hysteria. Both sides seemed to be equally bigoted, and each dismally ignorant of the other’s culture.

  The most sustained vilification of Indians in Fiji was that of James Michener in Return to Paradise. It is a rehash of his Tales of the South Pacific, and it is superficial and dated and rather poorly written. But his attack on Indians (this was in 1951) has a definite horror-interest:

  “It is almost impossible to like the Indians of Fiji. They are suspicious, vengeful, whining, unassimilated, provocative aliens in a land where they have lived for more than seventy years. They hate everything: black natives, white Englishmen, brown Polynesians and friendly Americans. They will not marry with Fijians, whom they despise. They avoid English ways, which they abhor. They cannot be depended upon to support necessary government policies. Above all, they are surly and unpleasant. It is possible for a traveler to spend a week in Fiji without ever seeing an Indian smile.”

  Now he set his overwhelming dislike of Indians beside his jolly acceptance of Fijians: “It is doubtful if anyone but an Indian can dislike Fijians. They are immense Negroes modified by Polynesian blood. They wear their hair frizzed straight out from the head … They are one of the happiest peoples on earth and laugh constantly.”

  These judgments are much too silly to discuss. Michener is just another in the long parade of explorers and travelers and tourists who felt a need to invent the Pacific and to make it a paradise. How misleading it all is. The very name of the Pacific is a misnomer. But I should say that the fact that so much written about the Pacific is inaccurate – indeed, most of it is utter crap – intensifies the pleasure of traveling there and gives it so much unexpectedness.

  My visit to the doctor became urgent – I had run out of fungal cream – and so on Monday I hurried back to Singatoka where I chose a doctor at random – Dr S. K. Naidoo, near the market. It was a hot, dusty office, with a calendar showing Hanuman, the monkey god, and advertising an Indian electrical goods shop in Suva.

  The receptionist was Fijian. She broke off an animated conversation with a girl who was sitting next to her and asked me why I wanted to see the doctor.

  “Infection,” I said. “Sore foot.”

  She leaned over and looked at my feet.

  “Which one?”

  “Right one,” I said, wagging it.

  I took a seat and picked up an old tattered Australian Cosmopolitan magazine, and became engrossed in a quiz entitled How Good is your Sex Life? The preface said, Work your way through the four-part questionnaire and you’ll learn a great deal about yourself, but it seemed to me that the further I read the more I learned about the sort of people who made up these titillating quizzes. Do you find sex boring? was a question in Part One, and in Part Two, Rating your partner’s sexual skills, I had to evaluate my partner’s “ability to see the funny side and laugh about it” on a scale of one to five, and I thought Funny side of what? Part Three asked me whether I had �
�anxiety about the size and shape of a particular part of my body,” and though it didn’t specify I thought only of my nose. Part Four was blunt: Do you ever go to sex orgies? and Do you take part in sex photo sessions? and Do you make love with other people watching?

  Ha! I could just imagine what these puritanical Fijians would make of this, and how they would whisper about the sexual savagery of Australians in much the same way as Australians whispered about Fijian cannibalism.

  “The doctor will see you now.”

  I entered the next room, pushed a greasy curtain aside, and found myself face to face with Dr Naidoo, a small and rather young Hindu woman in a sari, fingering a clipboard.

  “You are having a problem with your foot, Mr Thorax?”

  “A slight problem,” I said, moistening my mouth. “My main problem is a fungal infection on my, urn, genital area.”

  Dr Naidoo did not blink.

  “I caught it – or rather got it – in Vanuatu. Strange sheets, I think. It wasn’t from sexual contact.”

  “Though it can be transmitted that way,” the doctor said – pedantically, I thought. Hadn’t I just told her how I’d got it?

  ‘‘I’ll have to have a look at you,” she said. “Step behind the screen, please.”

  I did so. She joined me. With trembling fingers, I exposed my weepy member, and she crouched and squinted at it. Though she was thoroughly professional – or perhaps that was the reason – we seemed for a split second to be enacting exhibitionistic Position Forty-five (“Admiring the Lingam”) from the Kama Sutra.

  As she prescribed a cure, scribbling on a pad, I asked her where she had gone to medical school. I had asked her the question nervously, simply to fill the silence, but I must have sounded skeptical, because she seemed defensive when she replied, “In Suva. It is a highly respected medical faculty.”

  Ten dollars for her, two dollars for ointment. Then I. bought a tape for my Walkman, the sound-track from The Big Chill, which an obliging Indian at the music store copied from a master tape, an act of piracy that .did not worry anyone in Fiji (video cassettes were similarly pirated). It was yet another Fijian bargain.