Novelistic account, ethnographic accountability

Sugar: An Ethnographic Novel By Edward Narain and Tarryn Phillips. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024. 354 pp. Sugar: An Ethnographic Novel is a work of fiction based on the professional experience of political analyst Edward Narain and medical anthropologist Tarryn Phillips. It is set in present-day Suva, the multiethnic capital of Fiji, as seen through the eyes of three characters whose lives become intertwined by a murder. The book is advertised as a “crime novel,” and although a murder mystery is central to bringing the characters together, the crime offers a context for their social interactions rather than vice versa—this is not “crime fiction” but, as the subheading loudly states, an “ethnographic novel” grounded in fieldwork. The book's ethnographic and narrative focus is on the multiethnic composition of the Republic of Fiji. The story unfolds from the viewpoints of the three main characters, each representing one of Fiji's main ethnic divisions: Indigenous (iTaukei), Indo-Fijian, and European. Each inhabits a different social world, nested in the same physical environment yet hardly ever overlapping. Rishika is a middle-class Indo-Fijian housewife whose social circle consists mainly of extended family and some of her husband's colleagues. Isikeli is an iTaukei youth from a squatter settlement who occasionally sells coconuts by the roadside or engages in petty crime. Hannah is an Australian volunteer worker who inhabits a small bubble of young, transient expatriates whose social interactions are limited to the workplace and nightclubs. The murder of Rishika's husband sets in motion a series of events that forces the characters to see at least glimpses of one another's worlds. As the narrative develops, Sugar depicts and carefully expands the three characters’ viewpoints. In doing so, it fills a void in Fijian ethnography, which tends to follow the country's ethnic divisions quite consistently. And that is not to accuse the ethnographic literature of misrepresenting Fiji: as Sugar effectively illustrates, the dividing lines largely remain a social fact. Almost a century ago, the Fijian statesman Ratu Sir Lala Sukuna described Fiji as a “three-legged stool” held up by its Indigenous, Indo-Fijian, and European communities. His metaphor has retained its popularity to this day. Moreover, interethnic tensions and ethnonationalist politics have played a significant role in all three military coups that have racked Fiji since its independence in 1970. It is quite telling, then, that one needs a work of ethnographic fiction to describe how people overcome—even partially—the country's ethnic divides. Sugar calls attention to social disconnections by placing the main characters in unfamiliar contexts: visiting each other's homes, observing unfamiliar gestures, or feeling ill at ease in strange situations. These are fleeting, understated moments, but effective precisely for that reason. For a reader encountering Fiji for the first time, this is bound to paint a remarkably different picture from that of most the ethnographic literature on the country, because Sugar makes multiethnicity a central theme, not an external condition giving shape to isolated communities. Suva provides the background for such reflections. The three main characters are all familiar with the Fijian capital, but they all view it differently. The Australian volunteer, for example, takes note of the shabbiness and the physical discomforts of heat and humidity while being welcomed in privileged hotels and restaurants. This contrasts with the iTaukei youth's casual attitude to the squatter settlement he lives in and the rude indifference, suspicion, and even outright hostility he is met with in downtown shops. Such contrasts offer the reader a particular feel for the place: the climate, the smells, and the combination of shabbiness and entitlement that Suva can offer. At the same time, describing the main characters’ access to the Fijian capital also highlights the protagonists’ expected life trajectories. Dietary issues, another central theme in Sugar, evidence the same inequality of opportunity. The book pays attention to what people eat and drink, and particularly to the connected sensations of hunger and gratification. The book's title, Sugar, thus refers not just to Fiji's traditional sugar industry, which was largely responsible for the system of indentured labor that brought the ancestors of Fiji's Indo-Fijian population to the islands. It also references both the high occurrence of type 2 diabetes in Fiji and the islands’ high sugar consumption. The authors draw attention to both the familiar sense of comfort and nourishment that sugar can offer and the political give-and-take that maintains sugar as a health issue in Fiji. These foci correspond with the authors’ stated aim of displaying the glaring yet often unconsciously reproduced inequalities that characterize life in Fiji. The book closes with a supplementary background chapter, “Reading Sugar,” in which the authors expressly state their aim to foreground the structures of privilege and power that too easily divert popular attention from real injustice. “We wanted to write a story that made people feel as angry about this double standard [of condemning local petty crime while normalizing sources of serious social harm] as we did” (p. 336), the authors write. In narrative terms, this unfolds as a whodunnit that follows stereotypical assumptions—assigning blame to the Indigenous unemployed youth as the obvious suspect—but then, as we get further, the authors increasingly call attention to the policymakers, the omnipresent soft drink industry, and the halfhearted public health interventions carried out in Fiji. Yet I was surprised by the authors’ declaration of anger, which does not seem to reach the narrative itself—or am I already too numb to Fiji's sociopolitical reality? To me, the book was more descriptive than provocative. I view this as a consequence of the book's literary style rather than its ethnographic content. It is a valid question to ask why, or even whether, as outsiders, we have the right to tell the story of these communities. This is an ethical dilemma faced by many ethnographers: giving voice to the marginalized “other” always carries with it the politics of representation. While we agonized over this dilemma at times, we also did not want to perpetuate the way in which these groups are often absent or silenced, and we wanted to give equal justice to them in the story. (p. 333) Sugar represents Fiji respectfully but also carefully. Indeed, the idea of doing “equal justice” to Fijian communities, as articulated by the authors, forms the book's basic structure. It consists of short sections, perhaps half a dozen pages each, that quite markedly give equal weight to each of the book's protagonists. Six pages for the Indo-Fijian woman, six for the Indigenous youth, and six for the Australian volunteer, repeated conscientiously throughout the book. At times, this gives the narration an almost mechanical feel. No character is supposed to outweigh the other, no community is overrepresented at the expense of another, and no viewpoint is allowed to take precedence. This cautious balancing is accompanied by a mode of respectfulness that leaves the Fijian characters a bit flat. They do not exaggerate or err, behave ridiculously, or have the idiosyncrasies or irrational impulses that would make them come alive as characters. Not so for the foreigner: the naively self-absorbed Australian volunteer is initially portrayed as shallow and utterly oblivious to her privileged position as a white person in Fiji. Yet it is precisely this naivete that makes her a character capable of personal growth. We start the novel looking down on her, even cringing as she makes her first fumbling attempt at interviewing people in the Paradise Estate squatter settlement. But by the end of the book, she emerges transformed as the story's heroine. The other two main characters, Rishika and Isikeli, also undergo life-changing events and expand their view on life. But they do not have room to undergo the kind of growth that the naive voluntourist does. It is as if the authors have neglected some of the novelist's most important tools—such as ridicule and caricature, along with the misinformed opinions, unreliable accounts, and other discreditable stuff that fictional characters get around to. And I understand why. Fiji, and the South Pacific more generally, have been frequented by so many Western anthropologists that Fiji maintains ongoing academic and administrative discourses on visiting foreign researchers. The portrayal is not always flattering. Often presented as insensitive, exploitative, and disinclined to sharing benefits, the figure of “the anthropologist” indexes Fiji's colonial past and the unequal present. Although real live anthropologists often rise above this conception, one is nonetheless inclined to tread carefully around Fiji for fear of evoking or reinforcing the negative stereotype. As the authors point out, one should be both circumspect and balanced when writing about Fiji. From a literary point of view, erring and unreliability can be understood as sociolinguistic features that characterize the novel as a genre. As Bakhtin (1981) argues, they make novelistic prose discursive, and the novel an unauthoritative genre. In short, we do not expect to read unconditional truths when we read novelistic prose. Indeed, Bakhtin's idea has been stretched to argue that literary realism, in the strictest sense, contradicts how we read novels: an author can describe every spot of rust on a Fijian corrugated iron house, yet readers will still reinterpret what they read. I do not think this poses any real challenge for ethnographic representation; we can safely let the 1980s keep that debate. It does, however, highlight where the “ethnographic” and the “novel” may pull Sugar in slightly different directions. This is why I have singled out the authors’ tiptoeing around the politics of representing the post-traumatic experiences of a multiethnic community. Of course, I could just as well have commended them for avoiding the trap of negative subject matter. Fifty years ago, Tongan anthropologist and novelist Epeli Hauʻofa (1975, p. 286) commented on the one-sided portrayal of Pacific peoples in the anthropology of the time, bluntly pointing out that “after decades of anthropological field research in Melanesia, we have come up only with pictures of people who fight, compete, trade, pay bride-prices, engage in rituals, invent cargo cults, copulate and sorcerize each other. There is hardly anything in our literature to indicate whether these people have any such sentiments as love, kindness, consideration, altruism and so on.” What Pacific peoples expect of anthropologists, Hauʻofa suspected, “is to be more of the novelist … and less of the scientist” (p. 284). Yet he did not unequivocally idealize favoring other people's assumptions, either, remarking that “probably they would like us to draw portraits of them” (p. 284). Excepting the occasional ritual, Sugar does not deal in the negative topics listed by Hauʻofa, which reflects a more general diversification of present-day ethnographic representation of Pacific peoples. But there is a bit of portrait drawing in Sugar: the authors are tailoring their writing to Fijian expectations. For reasons already noted, they pretty much have to. The grotesque and the absurd, for example—devices that characterize Hauʻofa's own literary portrayals of Oceanic life—are no tools for outsiders unsure of their right to tell the story of a Pacific community. Neither is it necessarily their task to highlight the unfavorable aspects of islander life. But it is important to understand that this is also a facet of ethnographic fiction—that we are bound by our ethical standards even when we turn to fiction. Accountability—both to the people we write about and to the truth—is, according to Narayan (1999, p. 141), “the most important difference between fiction and ethnography.” In this respect, she draws a sharp distinction between ethnographers, who are accountable to the world outside the text, and fiction writers, who are not and who are hence free to “play fast and loose with the known world, stirring up mischief” (p. 142). Fiction writers, Narayan claims, are primarily accountable to the texts themselves—their responsibility is to make their stories more convincing and attractive or to enhance them in other ways. Narayan uses “ethnography” and “fiction” as ideal types and admits that a range of works and styles can be situated along the continuum between the two poles. Her point, however, is valid: fiction and ethnography carry different expectations (accountabilities) that need to be acknowledged when we read works of ethnographic fiction such as Sugar. As I have already pointed out, Sugar deserves credit for drawing attention to the commonplace phenomena that affect but do not determine people's everyday lives in urban Fiji: the mundane discrimination, or the insecurities and awkwardness that characterize moments when people reach out across ethnic divisions. The book vivifies the dividing lines running through Fijian society, less as subject matter for “dark” anthropology and more as a lived social reality. The authors can do this because they do not have to wait until they have observed an Indigenous family presenting a whale tooth in apology to an Indo-Fijian widow, or the participants in the ceremony sipping tea in her living room afterward. They can also account for subjective viewpoints and sentiments that are hard to describe in objective academic prose. This is especially important because Sugar has a pedagogical emphasis: it was written in recognition that “academic scholarship is an elite register of writing that is often less accessible and engaging to those outside the academy and intimidating to undergraduate students” (p. 334). I assume, then, that this book may very well be many readers’ first ethnographic account of Fiji. This is important, given that Sugar provides its reader a first impression of multiethnic Fiji that differs from that of prevailing ethnographic accounts. That is, instead of portraying multiethnicity as a given that shapes the distinct communities we study, it zooms in on multiethnicity through everyday routines that guide but do not determine people's actions. This can change how one reads the rest of the ethnographic literature—it certainly makes me wish there had been a Sugar when I first started reading about Fiji. The flip side—for me, anyway—is that Sugar’s polite, equitable representations of Fijians are a little bit flat. Given the context, I understand why. But I have chosen to dwell on this because, once you stop to think about it, it is such an obvious concern, emerging from anthropology's core ethical values. I do not say that careful portraits are an inevitable outcome of ethnographic fiction—just as I do not fully agree that fiction writers inevitably “play fast and loose” with the world outside their texts. But this particular form of accountability is an important concern for ethnographic fiction, one worth keeping in mind when reading it.

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