him sleep outside: ‘Sometimes I get a bucket of water and throw it on him, so my kids find it funny, yeah?’ Despite her assertiveness over his drinking, F knew she was expected to have dinner ready for him whenever he got home. ‘So we have to prepare good food for them. Never mind they go here and there, drinking, we have to be kind to them, yeah? Do everything as a housewife, yeah?’
She says that complying with family obligations to the vasu is now difficult because it is too expensive: ‘Before in [iTaukei] custom, you know the vasu … they are very important, yeah? So, like, for example, if they come home, they take anything from home, you can’t say anything. That’s their right, yeah? … But now it’s changing. I think … the custom changed because of the cost of living is very high, so …if you’ve got something in the pot, you make it for dinner, they just come and eat it, so it’s very hard for you to cook another meal because it’s very expensive. And the supper too is different now, eh?’ F places the problem on the fact that the brother’s wife does not share the natal family’s concerns and comes from somewhere else, and therefore does not want to share. Yet, the problem can equally be reframed in terms of an economy that has changed from gift exchange to a cash-based economy. Given that F lives in a peri-urban area in which the airport, agricultural land, and residential housing compete for space, it is not surprising to hear her say that the competition for resources is fiercest when it comes to land. Further, much of the land is tenanted and it is multicultural. Indeed, for F,
there are two major areas that cause violence in her area: the land and issues between husband and wife. First, arguments break out over boundaries when surveys are not done and there is no arbitration, which results in neighbours fighting: ‘Sometimes
they fight … and sometimes they
even run after each other with a
knife. That’s very bad. The land is one of the most major issues in the area. Mm-mm.’ F is suggesting here that the neighbours are Indo-Fijian because it is a common-place to say that iTaukei tend to use their fists while Indo-Fijians use knives (and, indeed, other traders interviewed also mentioned this).
Second, F talked of arguments between husband and wife, which arise from men wanting to control women and men’s expenditure on their own entertainment, particularly mistresses. F put it this way: ‘I experience it, yeah, this one… Husband got another wife [mistress], so he spend the money there so when he come to the real one [wife], the [wife] ask[s] for money. He didn’t want to give because no money there, so that’s how he starts swearing and fighting and speaking from there, eh?’
She noted that husbands and wives also argue about land, especially with regard to inheritance, and this time she talks clearly about iTaukei experiences. As iTaukei often avoid paperwork and bureaucracy, wills are often left unwritten. When the husband dies, the wife may assume that she owns the house but then discovers that it belongs to someone else because her husband never checked on the documentation: in fact, culturally, women have no right to their husband’s property after death. According to F, his family will come and take the house and everything in it. This point has led her to argue with her husband because she worries about her son’s future. Further, if F is widowed and is permitted to stay in the husband’s area with the children, she is obliged not to get married because this will nullify her right to stay.
Case Four
T, an iTaukei woman, is interviewed under the table, where she is preparing food to sell as packed lunches. Originally from Lakeba in Lau, T married a man from a village in Tailevu. Her first business was weaving and selling mats at home, but she found there was not the profit she needed from it, so she began coming to the market and selling food. T catches the bus at 5.20 in order to get to the market by 7.10 am from Monday to Friday and leaves at 4.30 pm to get home shortly after 6 pm. She does not work on Saturday because she belongs to the Seventh Day Adventists, who worship on Saturday. She now earns about $FJD50 a day. This helps her pay for her child still in school and helps her eldest son who is running a business with her auntie in Kadavu, planting yaqona and taro to sell in the market.
T lives with her husband, a 6 year old daughter and her husband’s mother. She has another 23 year old daughter living elsewhere. She has been married for 23 years, but she remembers arguments early in her marriage, particularly with her mother-in-law over the way she spoke to her sister-in- law about an affair with a married man in her village. The argument was heated enough that they called the village leader to arbitrate.
T’s husband had been a soldier in the Counter-Revolutionary Warfare unit (CRW) and was therefore involved in the mutiny in 2000. He was jailed initially for three years and then for two more periods before he was released, and he was moved between several different prisons. During this period, she was still receiving her husband’s salary from the military so she went back to school at the Fiji National University in Nadi, to learn baking and pastry- making. With the help of the social welfare and poverty education project funded under the SDL government, she got six certificates in business. She then applied for and got a licence, $FJD 6 800 seed money from the Fiji National Provident Fund, and money from Australian and New Zealand aid. In all, she raised $20 000 for her restaurant and opened it. However, she then got sick and hospitalized for one month and had to close the business down.
After a few months recuperation, she began a business selling food in a government building, which she maintained for nine years until her husband got out from prison and asked her to go to the village and look after his father, who was very sick. After a heated argument, she closed down the business and went back to the village to look after his father. She washed the clothes, cooked the food, and went fishing, prawning and crabbing to sell at the market and selling ‘stuff’ with the ANZ alongside her weaving business. Now, T says nobody can stop her from ‘doing business’. T says that living in the village means spending a lot of time doing community work without receiving any money for it, but, at the market, a person can arrive in the morning and have money by the afternoon: ‘When you come and sell something, get something out of it’. Now, her husband helps by scraping coconuts.
With regard to the rights of the vasu (of the children’s rights from their mother’s siblings), T says ‘Actually, in Fiji that is our own custom, we have to believe in that at all times.’ When asked if it’s central to being Fijian, she says, ‘Yes it’s something we have to keep, eh? We have to expect good things from our mother’s side, yeah? Oh, we need some live chicken, we need this, we need this. We can know what they can afford and what they can’t afford.’ She gives the example of when she took her son to her brother’s house. She says of her brother, ‘He got big lands … with a big house and everything, cousin everything, and then I took my son, my only son, and I took him there. And then he was asking for a big boat was outside… So, that same day, when we returned, the uncle put the boat in a big carrier with the engine, everything, for my son. Never pay any money because that’s the vasu.’ The fibre-glass boat was given to the brother from a Tongan friend at USP and the brother gave it straight to T’s son, who uses it for diving and fishing for fish, octopus and turtle.
T says that the hardest years were the seven years her husband was not around, when he was in prison. During that period, she had to find money so that she could bring him his daily needs such as fruit, shaving implements, and underwear which, in Fiji, are not supplied by the state. The state provides food but not fruit. She said that those 7 years were very tough as she had to do her best to save for her family.