Review of Evadne Kelly, Dancing spirit, love, and war: Performing the translocal realities of contemporary Fiji, studies in dance history. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

The background to this book is as follows. The author's Australian grandfather, Frank White, served as government mining engineer and Inspector of Mines in Fiji from 1937 to 1945. The author's mother, Hilary, was born during their stay in Fiji, and was looked after by a Fijian nanny by the name of Valeriana Qumia, Anna for short. Around 1968 the family moved to Canada, and paused in Fiji where they looked up Anna and had a photograph taken of her with the now adult Hilary. The author grew up in Canada surrounded by mementos of her grandparents' and mother's time in Fiji, including artefacts, newspaper clippings and a written account by her grandmother, and her mother would take her to see performances of Pacific dances and sing her to sleep with a Fijian song. This prompted the author, as a performance ethnographer, to reach out to the considerable Fiji community in Vancouver and environs and apply her interest in dance to meke, the traditional dance-cum-song of Fiji, applying the methods of the ethnographer Dwight Conquergood. As the author puts it: ‘as a dancer politically invested in the knowledge of the moving body and embodied legacies of colonialism, I took his [Conquergood's] call for methods “grounded in active, intimate, hands-on participation and personal connection” seriously’ (p. 181). It was also her intention to make a ‘gift of return’ out of respect for her late mother's loving memories of Fiji and her nanny (pp. 22, 145). So in 2012 the author spent 5 months in Fiji, from June to December, with her husband and two young children, researching various facets of contemporary meke by conducting interviews, observation and rehearsal interactions. She made contact with the government's Institute of Fijian Language and Culture (incidentally founded by a Canadian, the actor Raymond Burr), the Ministry of Education, and the University of the South Pacific's Oceania Centre. She then decided to focus on three meke performances in order to ‘explore how meke expressions unsettle and reify the predominant and competing narratives Fijians and Fiji's governing bodies espoused’ (p. 80). She also arranged for a meke to be specially composed for her by renowned composer Damiano Logaivau. On returning to Vancouver, the author presented video footage of this specially composed meke at two conferences, as well as showing it to Pacific Islanders; she gives an interesting account of the varied reactions to the meke and to her performing in it (pp. 179–82). In assessing this book, let me start by stating what it is not. Despite being in a series titled Studies in Dance History, it is not in any sense—nor is it intended to be—a history of meke. Nevertheless, historical works are referred to and historical claims are made, and many of them appear to be based more on hearsay than research. To list a few examples, which space does not allow me to elaborate on, it is falsely claimed that land ownership has always been confined to ethnic Fijians (p. 13); that liku, the traditional women's skirts, were made of grass and only worn for dancing (p. 38); that the ankle-length isulu worn by women was a sign of their acceptance of Christianity and the colonial government (p. 61); that people are not allowed to perform in dances of different ethnic groups (p. 81); and that the modern men's tailored isulu is only worn by Methodists (p. 202). The author is on firmer ground with more recent history and makes some pertinent observations on the government's attitude towards meke in colonial times and today, the modern prohibition on meke by some evangelical churches, UNESCO's involvement in meke, and tensions between Fiji's two major ethnic groups in Fiji and Vancouver. Nor is it a description or analysis of contemporary meke. There is no dance notation—though the prose descriptions are detailed and vivid—little discussion of types of meke, their structure or other features or geographical distribution, and a truly lamentable list of scholarly references. So, if it is not a history of meke, or a description and analysis of contemporary meke, what is it? On one level, it is a well-written, honest and, in parts, interesting story of someone who set out on a laudable mission but encountered many unexpected problems and ultimately failed in at least some objectives. This is largely because it is not possible to make any serious contribution to scholarship in so short a time, with no competency in the local language and little background research. Much of what is asserted is not to be trusted, in large part because the author simply repeats, sometimes badly translated, what people said to her, which is often what they believed she wanted to hear. This is particularly noticeable in her many references to the word mana which, in many years of field research in Fiji, I have rarely heard used, and never with reference to meke. Here is not the place to go into a detailed discussion of what mana does mean in Fijian, suffice to say that it is very different from—though related to—its purported meaning in East Polynesia which has become standard fare in anthropology and popular writing. Yet because Fijians know, or quickly realize, that visiting researchers want them to use the word, they will oblige. However, they were clearly not obliging enough for the author, so she inserted it herself twice into a translation of the words of mekes (pp. 155, 169) when the Fijian either does not mention it at all, or uses the word sautū, meaning ‘peace, prosperity’. There is carelessness unexpected in a scholarly work. The author, for instance, tells of her meeting with ‘Dr Sekove Bigitibau, former Director of the iTaukei Institute of Language and Culture’ (p. 71). Sekove is not a doctor, nor was he Director of the Institute of Fijian Language and Culture; he was a researcher there. Another informant, Lai Veikoso, is said to be from the province of Bau (p. 97); he is not from Bau, and Bau is not a province. Unwarranted conclusions are rife. The author claims that a meke group performing on a small stage was ‘the result of colonial constructions of native Others intruding on the present’ (p. 132) when it is more likely that the hotel did not have a bigger stage. She notes that Logaivau ‘uses Kajal (or Kohl) … as black face paint instead of face paint made from charcoal’ (p. 218). Correct, but she then goes on to conclude that ‘Using Kajal, a South Asian cosmetic, creates a link between meke and Fijians of Indian descent that blurs the geographical and spiritual boundaries of Fijian mana. Thus, the meke is, in a sense also enriched with the spirit and energy of a South Asian cosmetic’ (p. 218). Fine thoughts but simply not true: most urban meke groups use kajal because it's convenient—you just buy it from the shop and do not need to worry about obtaining and mixing charcoal and coconut oil. As part of understanding power and politics in relation to bodies performing meke, this book focuses on examples of meke that generate power between bodies through expressions of spirit, love and war. Spirit, love, and war, as the primary affective through lines to this book, are actively and socially distributing and disrupting Fijian normative values, and are expressions by which power locally and translocally organizes and governs. (p. 16). I must confess that this is all very opaque to me, and the book has much more in a similar vein, of which these are only a small sample: ‘These meke … unsettle and reify governing discourses and produce unstable and contradictory expressions of Fijian belonging’ (p. 69); ‘By performing this aggressive masculinity, they were in some ways generating secured bodies—bodies based on past significations’ (p. 87); ‘His choreography also constructed efficacy by dedicating a pathway between the body's movements and the land’ (p. 163); ‘the rhythms are resilient, resistant, and capable of moving with and beyond the rhythmic impacts of British colonialism’ (p. 167); ‘rhythms collided, slicing and destroying the time-space in/between bodies, and exposing the violence of colonial and neoliberal mentalities—to turn intangible actant into passive thing—reducing the power of movements through space-time’ (p. 168). Such clairvoyance reaches its zenith in the final discussion of the new meke composed for the author: ‘Logaivau was conducting an ontological recentering based on iTaukei knowledge of a responsive and relational, or transcorporeal, body that emerges as it moves and integrates with other human and nonhuman bodies and ephemeral realities’ (p. 181); and further, ‘Logaivau created an expressive force full of countervailing pressures built from our bodies that became contact zones for negotiating colonial legacies and postcolonial legacies of identity’ (p. 183). I am sure Logaivau would be very surprised to hear this—he thought he was just composing a meke. As I have mentioned, I find this meaningless, but will readily admit that it may be my fault. If you do find such discourse meaningful then this book may have more value for you than it did for me. Still, my enquiring mind would like to know how exactly the author determined, for example, that the composer was ‘conducting an ontological recentering’ and, equally important, how it would be possible for another observer to disprove it. To be honest, I did not learn anything about meke from this book that I did not know before—but maybe that wasn't the author's intention. The book is on the whole well produced and well proofread, with just a handful of typos, but Fijian words are a disaster area. Apart from the lack of marking of long vowels, which is de rigueur in modern scholarship, there are numerous clangers throughout the book, such as meke wau for meke iwau, ‘club dance’; Voreque for Voreqe, a personal name; meke mata for matanimeke, ‘dance (as opposed to music)’; orei for ore ‘punish’; and curumi konaio ni meke, ‘let the true spirit of meke come in you’, which is meaningless but I guess could have been curumi iko na yalo ni meke. On page 155, the author becomes confused and tries to relate the word isau, ‘return gift’, to the totally unrelated sau, ‘have spiritual power’: ‘By adding the word “sau,” Logaivau [the composer] incorporates spiritual agency that, in this case, suggested that Qumia [Anna] used her own spiritual agency to give loloma [love]’. Well, no he does not, he simply says in the words of the meke that ‘my love is in return for the love given to me’. Perhaps the most hilarious mistranslation is the purported English ‘translation’ of the well-known farewell song Isa Lei (p. 176, ‘Isa, Isa you are my only treasure …’), which is frequently seen printed on tea-towels sold to tourists, but bears little relation to the Fijian words. The author expresses the hope ‘that the writing up of my experiences serves to open more opportunities to expose and negotiate the complexities of contemporary meke in Fiji and abroad’ (p. 184). I truly hope it does, but I also hope that future studies in this field will be a little more factual and better researched, and not so replete with meaningless jargon.

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