Fijian change portrayed in art

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Larry Thomas' work flows from journalistic filmmaking to fictional screenplays and back again in an arc that grows out of his love and concern for his home country, Fiji.

Larry Thomas, a visiting artist with the Center for Pacific Studies at the UH-Manoa, screens one of his films tonight. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

His art grows from his observations of the rapidly changing and often dramatic social, cultural, economic and political landscape in Fiji. There have been two coups in his lifetime, racial tensions have led to unrest and even violence; the sugar-based economy is failing and the small island nation is experiencing the same "brain drain" as has been observed in Hawai'i.

As a teenager, Thomas began acting as an unofficial research assistant for a cultural anthropologist, collecting stories he heard in the densely populated housing area where he lived.

Years later, another friend would suggest that he make a documentary film about Makogai Island, where Fijian Hansen's disease patients were quarantined from 1911 to 1969. With a grant from the University of the South Pacific, he took several surviving patients back to the island, now an agricultural research station.

Unlike Kalaupapa, Makogai was built for its purpose before the patients arrived, and had adequate funding. The Catholic nuns who were invited to run it were empathetic and efficient; former residents in the film wished they could return there.

Making the documentary, which Thomas will show on campus today, was a profound experience.

"I won't say it changed my life, but it did something to me," he said. "These people, there was a goodness about them and a faith and a strength, unbelievable strength. When you are 13 years old and you hear your family planning your funeral, they are getting ready to send you away and they are planning for your death, the mats and the tapa. ... To survive that, they came away with a sense of self that I admire."

No less intense in a different way was the process of documenting Fiji's May 2000 coup in the words of everyday citizens, in "Race for Rights." Thomas blames power-greedy "ethnonationalist" politicians for playing on prejudices and jealousies rooted in the country's multi-ethnic history, resulting in violence and political unrest.

Fiji's history parallels that of Hawai'i in significant ways, but their contemporary situations differ radically, sometimes puzzlingly, Thomas said. Fiji's economy also was based on sugar (though in the form of a network of small farms, not large plantations), and foreigners were imported to work in the sugar cane fields.

But in Fiji, most of the workers came from India. And while Fijians retain ownership of 90 percent of the land through communal family groups called mataqali, many of those who leased land for farming were ethnic Indians. Indo-Fijians form the core of the nation's shopkeepers, civil servants and business people, while many indigenous Fijians have been shut out by a lack of education or background in Western-style commerce.

Racial fires have been fueled by remnants of stereotypes from the divide-and-rule British colonial era, a marked racial divide in economic well-being and a difference in cultural values. Today's Indo-Fijians are third- and fourth-generation citizens, but are still called, along with Chinese and other non-natives, "vulagi," meaning "visitors."

Thomas aches equally for Fijians who feel shut out in their ancestral home and Indians who feel unwelcome in the only place they have ever called home. His film includes the voices of some who feel the same, and others who, while they aren't necessarily comfortable with the other culture, manage to live peaceably side by side with their neighbors.

He's hopeful that a younger generation more inclined to form friendships and marry across racial lines will put this conflict behind them.