Books from Fiji

Peter Thomson's Kava in the Blood is a work of non-fiction that moves between two layers of Fiji. One layer is political: Thomson reports on the 1987 military coups that twice overthrew Fiji's elected government within a single year. The other layer is personal, drawing on his own memories of growing up in the islands. The book sets these two threads side by side, letting the political upheaval and the author's earlier life illuminate each other.

Thomson's autobiographical sections present everyday Fiji through concrete episodes: hurricanes, local stories of haunted houses, and long sessions of drinking kava, the mildly sedative beverage made from the root of the yaqona plant and central to Fijian social life. These details ground the book in specific places and customs rather than treating Fiji as a backdrop. The landscapes and cultural life of the islands come through in particular scenes rather than general summary.

The book won the EH McCormick Award for Best First Book of Non-Fiction at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards in 2000. The judges noted that the structure of placing coup reportage alongside personal history worked effectively, and described the writing as skillful in combining political and personal material.

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Oilei Bomboki wakes one morning with a severe and mysterious pain in an area of the body most people prefer not to discuss. What follows is a long, increasingly absurd search for relief. He visits healers and doctors of various kinds, none of whom can solve the problem. One treatment leads to an odd surgical procedure, and when that fails too, Oilei turns in desperation to Babu Vivekanand, a figure who presents himself as a sage and yogi but also operates as a confidence trickster.

Through Babu's unconventional guidance, Oilei is pushed toward an unexpected relationship with the very part of his body causing him trouble. The novel uses this premise to build a sustained comic satire in a tradition sometimes compared to Rabelais, the sixteenth-century French writer known for grotesque bodily humor and social criticism.

Epeli Hau'ofa sets the story in a small Pacific island community caught between older customs and newer ways of living. The comedy is often sharp and exaggerated, but it carries observations about authority, healing, modernity, and the uneasy coexistence of local and imported knowledge. This edition also includes an interview with Hau'ofa titled A Promise of Renewal.

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