Chapter 28

My husband has a few complaints about me. One of them is that I don’t know how to whisper. My version of whispering, he says, could compete with a foghorn. It’s not just me, he concedes. My son (who my husband has cared for since he was six years old) is also afflicted with the handicap of a loud whisper. Over the years, our accursed inability to whisper has interrupted and marred my husband’s enjoyment of several of his favourite activities, such as watching plays and movies and – his most treasured activity of all – sleeping. He speculates that our inability to whisper must come from our shared backgrounds of growing up in Fiji. He, on the other hand, has grown up in New Zealand, and his Pacific point of reference and ancestral home is Samoa. So, he knows how to whisper, apparently.

It’s all a matter of perspective and perception, though, isn’t it? One person’s whisper is another person’s shout. In the sense in which Tui Atua uses the term taumusumusu, an inability to whisper could thus be construed as an inability to either demonstrate reverence or maintain an exclusive aura around a particular body of knowledge. In relation to taumusumusu, an inability to whisper would mean that any arrogance, jealousy or spite being communicated, will not be afforded shelter, cannot be disguised. If it’s true, I’m quite happy not knowing how to whisper – I’m quite happy not being able to hide even my most intimate of thoughts, to maintain an air of secrecy around family lore, or to construct exclusive boundaries around the indigenous and introduced knowledges I regularly explore with my students in Pacific Studies. While I’m not sure I agree with my husband’s affectionately uncharitable assessment of my lack of whispering skills … Tui Atua’s essay has prompted me to think about what a culture without whispers – at the intersection of Christianity and indigenous spirituality – might look like, sound like, signify.

I grew up in Fiji, where the whispers of children would probably be considered loud by observers from another culture. Sitting among the aerial roots of banyan trees, we exchanged stories of spirits and ghosts haunting the upper branches and leaves. Sitting on the seawall or jetty, we told tales of curses and calamities that had befallen neighbours or friends or distant relatives. With our hoarse whispers we traded in what our Roman Catholic school teachers would have described as ‘superstition’. This sort of dismissal helps to maintain the cachet of Christianity as an ‘organised religion’. Even though the introduced religion probably had less basis in rational thought than any indigenous religion, the substance of our whispers was considered less legitimate for an absence of coherence.

Of course, most of us growing up in post-independence Fiji were deliberately being spared ‘the old ways’. We were being groomed for a brand new post-colonial world. Many of us missed out on the whispered wisdom of our grandparents. I know I did.

My paternal grandparents had been relocated to Fiji as part of a post-war British colonial resettlement plan. My grandfather, Teaiwa, and my grandmother, Takeua, had both been born and raised on Tabiteuea in Kiribati. But because of Teaiwa’s descent from a Banaban grandmother, after whom I am named (Kieuea), he and his young family were given the option to join other Banabans on Rabi in Fiji after their island had suffered bombing and Japanese occupation during World War II.

Family legend holds that Teaiwa had used love magic to seduce Takeua, who was already betrothed to another. As a single mother many years later, I was tempted in desperation to use magic to try to prevent a lover from abandoning me. A relative, an age mate, helped me mix a potion that needed to be consumed over three consecutive days to take effect. On the second day, I baulked. The lover eventually left me. Initially, I was bereft. But in time, I recovered.

The good thing about superstitions is that they usually double as cautionary tales. The whispers I had heard about love magic from my relatives included the warning that once a lover had been secured with it, it would be impossible to terminate the relationship in this life, no matter how unhappy the union might be. My grandparents, sadly, though predictably, given the origins of their relationship, had a tumultuous and turbulent marriage. But as I have documented elsewhere, it was undoubtedly my grandmother who bore the brunt of my grandfather’s frustrations.342 I thank my Christian God, indigenous and adopted spirits and ancestors (maybe it was my grandmother’s will?), that I had the good sense not to finish the full course of the potion. Otherwise, I probably would never have met my husband. (The man who insists I don’t know how to whisper).

I did not have many occasions to interact with my paternal grandmother while growing up. She died when I was ten. I have two vivid memories of her, though: one is of my visiting our village of Tabiang, on the island of Rabi in northern Fiji, when I was about five years old. My grandmother prepared a warm glass bottle of sweetened milk for me to carry and sip from on the journey back to Savusavu where our nuclear family was living at the time. Milk – at least the bovine variety – is not indigenous to our adopted home in Fiji or our homelands of Banaba and Tabiteuea, Kiribati. Yet, it was an important medium for my grandmother to express her love and care for her grandchildren, especially this one strange, alienated, urban-dwelling, English-speaking grandchild. The second memory of my grandmother is of her pounding dried pandanus rolls in our garage in order to be able to shred them into manageable strips that she could then weave into a kie ni matu (sleeping mat) for my younger sisters. Other memories of my grandmother are less vivid – more fragmentary. I remember her with baby powder in a bony cleavage, wearing rosary beads around her wiry neck – a devout Christian with a particular reverence for Our Lady. And yet, according to my father and aunts, my grandmother was an experienced masseuse and expert medicine woman. She had come to Rabi from Tabiteuea, from low-lying, sparsely vegetated coral atolls in Kiribati to a high, volcanic and lush island of Fiji. She had to adapt to her new environment, reckon with the availability of new plants and material and compensate for the loss of the familiar.

As David Gegeo might put it, my grandmother’s ‘indigenous’ knowledge incorporated both new and introduced knowledges.343 And, it is hard to dispute that indigenous pharmacological knowledges produced out of centuries of intense engagements with changing environments and ecologies are at once both spiritual and scientific. These knowledges are necessarily empirical, demanding high levels of observation, reasoning, rigour and discipline. One can’t help feeling that if the primary evidence base for Marshall Sahlins’ assertion that pre-contact Pacific people were unable to engage in rational thought was Hawaiian and other processes of myth-making, then he had selected too narrow a base.344 The origin stories and creation myths collected from across Polynesia and thoughtfully analysed by Robert Williamson in the 1930s contain enough empirically verifiable detail – that is consistent with western traditions of geology, climatology and zoology – to suggest that it is worth holding a space for indigenous rationality and scientific thought.345 In a move that presaged post-colonial critiques by several decades, Williamson acknowledged that a key problem with extrapolating generalisations about indigenous Pacific people’s worldviews, from oral traditions transcribed (and often translated into English) by explorers and missionaries, was that the analyst could not be confident that the transcribers’ prejudices and cultural biases had not seeped into the texts.346 Scholars of today may therefore want to approach descriptions of pre-contact monotheistic religions in the Pacific, for example, with a healthy skepticism; at the same time, assuming that Christianity is solely responsible for introducing the concepts of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ to the Pacific is highly problematic. But most indigenous Pacific people today find Christianity’s abstractions harder to test and question than their own indigenous oral traditions; they find it much easier to just meekly follow Christian tenets than to actively seek out the sorts of indigenous knowledges that have been relegated to whispers of both the reverential and disparaging types. To be fair, though, oral traditions that have been detached from practical concerns and elevated in religious or aesthetic terms, need to be seen as occupying a different order of knowledge than those with material and behavioural expressions. The spiritual discipline and scientific rigour demanded in the practice of Pacific Island navigation347 is similar to that required in the practice of indigenous medicine.

Building up a formidable repertoire of healing remedies, my grandmother’s skills were widely sought after, amongst others, in her village and on Rabi. Some of her daughters picked up on her more basic cures and concoctions, but according to family legend my grandmother felt that there was not one among her four daughters (she never considered her five sons as candidates) who was worthy of the potent botanical, pharmacological and therapeutic knowledge she had developed in Fiji. She took these secrets to her grave. There would be no solemn whispers to heirs. There would be no whispers reverentially imparting exclusive knowledge. There would be no whispers.

Indeed, my grandmother’s passing meant that three years later, I missed out on having my passage into womanhood marked by I-Kiribati and Banaban customary rituals. Catholicism’s silence and taboos around discussing sexuality were not strong enough to prevent me from straying down a path of sexual precociousness and promiscuity and I can’t help wondering whether the ancient practice of having a girl’s body oiled down and sequestered on the occasion of her first menses might have saved me from an unnecessarily tortuous fate. Not being privy to the whispers of indigenous sexual wisdom from my grandmother and aunts on Rabi while I was going through adolescence in Suva, led to my foolhardy abuse of the sexual freedoms I inherited as a modern post-colonial subject.

After my first son was born, and with the family wondering what to do with me as an unwed mother – albeit a highly educated one – my grandfather clearly felt a sense of responsibility to impart some of the knowledge he thought my grandmother might have if she was still alive. One morning, over breakfast at my aunt’s house, and in the company of several cousins of both genders, he announced that if I wanted to regain the body of a marriageable woman, for several weeks I would need to bind my waist tightly with a sulu or beu (Fijian and Kiribati respectively for lavalava or sarong). Embarrassed by the attention drawn not just to my socially stigmatised state, but also to the corporeality of my body, I resolved not to follow his instructions. If he had only whispered this advice to me in private, I might have acceded. Only in hindsight do I realise that proprieties of gender prevented him from that sort of whispering … that with my grandmother gone, the only way he could pass on the wisdom was loudly, publicly. At the time, I was too stubborn, too proud to listen – and it was to my peril. It’s possible that I would never have had to resort to that desperate flirtation with love magic if I had just bound my waist tightly after I’d given birth to my first son!

Without the advantage of consistently receiving my own rich indigenous oral traditions to guide my journey through the multicultural societies I have ended up living in, my limited insights into indigenous Kiribati and Banaban spirituality and science have come in sporadic encounters with relatives and friends, and more frequently through reading historical and ethnographic texts. I do not apologise for my book learning. Neither do I hold it up on a pedestal as if it were somehow superior to the knowledge that comes out of conversations and stories – what is described in Kiribati as karaki. However, I do consider it a pernicious sort of arrogance – akin to the whispering of taumusumusu – to eschew the archival records and scholarship of Europeans as if it were possible to retrieve a more pure version of our past indigenous practices out of the mouths of our living elders or peers. (And, why do we never consult children for indigenous wisdom …?)

To close this reflection and response to Tui Atua’s worthy provocations, I find it appropriate to consider a history that has been recorded in European archives and oral tradition, but whose telling has yet to achieve mythological proportions.

In northern Tabiteuea – in Eita and Utiroa, which happen to be the ancestral villages of my grandparents – Hawaiians were to thank for the brutal enforcement of Christianity in the 1880s. Two Protestant missionaries, Hawaiians named WB Kapu and HB Nalimu, zealously pursued the extinction of a syncretic indigenous movement worshipping ‘Tioba’ (which would have been the transliteration of the Christians’ ‘Jehovah’). Their efforts, combined with those of their converts in and around my grandparents’ ancestral villages, resulted in a massacre of close to a thousand southern Tabiteueans, according to some accounts.348 When the Catholics arrived in 1891, the lingering acrimony (and guilt?) surrounding the massacre made northern Tabiteueans eager to abandon the version of Christianity they had been subjected to, in exchange for the new denomination. By virtue of coming late – and some would say, by virtue of its own papist proclivities – Catholicism was in many parts of the Pacific more amenable to a syncretic approach that made space for indigenous symbolism and practices such as dancing (as in Kiribati) and tattooing (as in Samoa, for example). While the Protestants had hoped to beat the indigenous spirits of Tabiteuea, the Catholics chose to enjoin them. Thus my Tabiteuean ancestors converted to Catholicism, and my grandparents brought their faith with them, in a journey of almost 2000 kilometres, to Fiji.

Whether the specific anti and powerful spirits of their homeland were able to make that journey with them is not clear. My grandmother was certainly willing to adapt. If she did not commune with the mythological spirits of indigenous Fijians in her new home, she most definitely made communion with the plant life and minerals of her adopted land.

However, as if one displacement and resettlement wasn’t enough, my sisters and some of our cousins and I have added further relocations to our family’s historical trajectory – with some of us in New Zealand, others in Australia and others still in the United States. Given my history of serial resettlements, I have only marginally benefitted from the wisdom of my elders. The enduring knowledge I retain at the intersection of indigenous Pacific spirituality and Christianity, however, is irrevocably marked by my childhood in Fiji.

In loudly whispered lessons imparted to me by other children in the various government compounds I lived in around Fiji as a child, I learned, among other things, not to whistle at night or shower after midnight, for fear of attracting dark forces and the possession of my body by evil. In the early years I spent outside of Fiji for my education, I scrupulously tried to maintain these beliefs – call it superstition, or call it respect for my adopted cultural inheritance and my childhood peers. After one too many times crossing the international dateline, and numerous time zones, though, I came to the conclusion that each land has its own spirits and codes. The spirits of Fiji don’t care if I whistle at night or have a shower after midnight in Australia, the United States or Aotearoa. The spirits of Aotearoa – whether mythological, botanical, climatological or zoological – establish their own codes of behaviour; they have other lessons in store for me. If the spirits and indigenous knowledges of any Pacific island require that they are spoken about only in hushed whispers of reverence … I will do my very best not to sound like a foghorn. For my ever-dubious husband, it will be a case of not hearing is believing!

342 Teaiwa, T. (1995). Nei Nana. In Searching for Nei Nim’anoa (p.67). Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications, South Pacific Creative Arts Society; Teaiwa, T. (2007). Spitting images…or luck, accident and truth: Breaking the cycle of domestic violence. In M. Ochoa and B.K. Ige (Eds.). Shout out: Women of Color respond to violence (pp.323–328). Emeryville, California: Seal Press.

343 Gegeo, D. (2000). Indigenous Knowledge and Empowerment: Rural Development Examined from Within. In D. Hanlon and G.M. White (Eds.), Voyaging through the Contemporary Pacific (pp.64–90). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

344 Sahlins, M. (1996). How ‘Natives’ think: About Captain Cook, for example. Chicago, U.S.A.: Chicago University Press.

345 Williamson, R.W. (1933). Religious and cosmic beliefs of central Polynesia. New York, U.S.A.: AMS Press Inc.

347 Finney, B. (1979). Hokule`a: the Way to Tahiti. New York, U.S.A.: Dodd Mead and Company; See also, Diaz, V. (1997). Sacred Vessels: Navigating Tradition and Modernity in Micronesia. (1 videocassette, 29 minutes).

348 Sabatier, E. (1977). Astride the equator: An account of the Gilbert Islands. Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press, p.132.