the fijian peregrine falcon's cry

(na tagi ni ga-ni-vatu)

A long rambling poem.....

The lali beat lulls and drones on

Battles against wild sea sprays that dances to age-old rhythm

The peregrine falcon circles in motion in perfect control above me

Calculating its next swooping dive while scanning the horizon

Nau's bed lay empty

But this falcon's speed and agility is too distracting

Raikoro's soulful gospel tunes permeate these gasau wooden walls

Plaintive notes in balletic movement danced in harmony

My soul is strangely satiated

My Nau is the wisdom of the ages and

Though she has flaws and divulged less, her love and compassion remain

I learned to pick morsels from her tapestries of stories

And listened for the silences behind her words

I learned to observe life the way this falcon zeroes in on its prey

Single-minded and unswerving like a lion's bloody intent on a doe-eyed gazelle

Tenacious as life itself.

Her stories teem with monochrome colonial days

How she met Bubu in old Metropole, codenamed Bruce

I decided not to peek at black and white photos ancient memories

For Nau's stories though lovely are at painful odds with my fantasy

Reality always cancels and demystifies fluffy dreams

Creaky dusty wooden towns punctuated with distinct players

A native sat on grassy pavement barefoot with clothes ill-fitting

His master stands aloof afar off in sharp starched suits and black shiny shoes

As if standing on the sandy isles was all a bad dream

Demarcation in my early days seeps into my consciousness

Just by studying hazy histories and trivia photos stilled in time

Creeps to my skin like a child at play scraping broken glass on rough cement

She tells of heydays of exclusion and elitism in the colonial era

Of white inclusion privileges that expand from East to West

For what do we, the ignorant brownies (as they say) possess

Who occupy Pacific loloma with their generous hearts (and land) on their sleeves

The reason why we don't humour ourselves on first world problems

Beset with worry of acquisitions for definitions

This glossy rat-race world of individuation

A discordant theme to our communal philosophy

While white pasty men of old beguile sold their wobbly integrity

In seductive muskets and worthless tobacco for vast virgin lands

The local blue blood and strategic connection pave prosperity for some

Or the fact our brothers sailed over the torturous seven seas

Toil and labor for a bittersweet destiny

Fight blood and sing dissonant voices still for a shared identity

We have not recovered from these sealed deals.

But that's all right, she says

They come from stars yonder that burns bright

Those whose minds she can't fathom

Or of a strange tongue, she has yet to master

After all wisdom perches herself on this ancient Pacific shorelines

Native to pandanus and coconut trees waving

Isaisa vulagi lasa dina, the proverbial song reverberates the skies

I hear of woven stories scattered in wrestled histories

She gathers hope in the nurturing arms of the vanua

Now the tripod identity in chaos from Napoleon's chess move

But she looks at me her granddaughter, her maku

Whose eyes twinkle at the deeper mysteries

A space to conquer like Cooks to Aussies terra nullius

She stares in full wonders of a world of possibilities and inclusions

Perhaps this illusion of limitations be shattered

As she plunges herself further into the white world

Adapts it to her needs for her destined calling

No more invisible lines of exclusivity culturally and personally

Her maku thought the glass ceiling is shatter-able

She intends to subvert this narrative

Eventually.

So, her maku sailed the tortuous seas to the land of the unexpected

Where she finds inclusion and exclusion inhabits both sides of the coin

A blessing and a curse- a paradox

She knows her mind is welcomed by her kins, an admired trophy

It is also where her place-ness is constantly reminded

In village meetings where boundary lines are distinctly drawn

Where women caters for feasts and men don full patriarchal regalia

Like the heron on village greens, she treads safely hoping

She doesn't disappoint the vanua or inadvertently sully her family name

For nobody dares besmear one's home and ideal genesis of old

The boldest of all women, a spinster, was told to know her place

And reminded to add to progeny for withered eggs cannot waste tavioka

Or so she heard from grapevines insistently, from women mostly

That alone shuts the woman's fire with cold ice

Reconstructs her destiny into impotent ash

So her maku clarifies her voice for the slandered woman was her favourite bubu

She pours all her anguish elsewhere keeping the fire alive with fine taut lines

Of what she found to be remnants of live embers

The falcon with fist-like clenched talons in clean and fatal dive

Knocked out innocent pigeons and smaller ducks oblivious with foraging.

So, she wrote and wrote of blacks, whites and greys

It feels like it's the monochrome days once again

She wrote what inhabits and breathes through these bloody pithy lines

She scrawls stories of blood, terror and pain from military camps terrors

She inks lines and imprints voices to those, whose stories remain in the shadows

She contemplates on those whose stories preferred to be in the shadows

She journals collective perpetuated silences we allow to ourselves

The kind that make you hide your face due to its sordidness

Of how familial vines turn ice on one another

Of how perfect strangers from alien wombs turn families

Whose descendants sailed a lifetime fighting their own battles still

Of undefined and wrestled space She discerns the dissonant voice from her own people And the gifted space that is now usurped and decreed by another

But wait there's more....

She inscribes:

of how women endure loveless marriages with men

who scorn their holy offerings

of how families preserve maggots of family secrets

nestled amongst trophy stories

of a Tutu, who can't resist his maku's divine curls

and cherubic face in depraved perverted need

of a distant uncle who plundered his niece's

most expensive innermost trusted secrets

of how another close uncle chides and blames the devil

for lewd indecent exposure on another niece

of how all these are swept under the exquisite ibe of status quo

staining the family name is the unforgivable sin

of how a son screech the F-word to his Tata

his elderly and ancient sacred root

of how a daughter's bold tongue doth wag at her mama

to shut up and listen to her

of how increasing young flowers lay curdled in blood over some vicious jealous fiends

of how scantily clad ladies are credible reasons enough for violations

where rape sentencing are short enough to be worn as mini-skirts

Violators with no remorse celebrate and swag their way to jail

The silences of these stories are deafening

More peregrine falcons screech and shriek over the grey willowy clouds.

And it is as if the whole world has gone mad

Waves lap our island doorsteps and melting heat immerses us all into catastrophe

The harbingers of our shared island woes

The world ignores as usual because eyes and conscience are not pricked

Our polarized destinies marginalizes us further from the Centre

We, who dwell on these insignificant sands of scattered atolls

We are the infinitesimal islands from the periphery with no money

Our leaders and their clockwork rounds of aid begging are almost predictable

Or who can forget the latest political freak show for our island theatre

Napoleon and Snowball plotting multiple schemes rescuing their sinking empires

Or the scuffle and decorated swears outside parliament enslaving our sanity

Or who could forget those salusalu of vulgarities shouted back at him in Sydney

Or those same vulgarities scribbled on a dusty old bus

Unprecedented theatrics overwhelming us all

Matches the mounting ice on Suva streets

The wavering script is losing its potent magic now

We tolerate more woven lies from Squealer and his band of zealots

Whose cursed propaganda call white black and black white

Whose privileged ink slant and skew in brazen falsity at every turn

And gone mad the world did

At least in this Sandy isle, 'tis a distracted universe

With three tripods of identity: vanua, lotu and matanitu,

A shard illusory glance of unity and nobility, a mirage perhaps

All in shambles in this twisted script

We live in a fragmented reality

Juxtaposed with bula island smiles and malua fever

The cheers echo loudly from rugby stadiums world over

And this is a thin thread that unites us all in this crowded sandy isle

The latest radio hits lull us for a second in sugary love and heartbroken ballads

The ballads that seemed to be the only poetic lines soothing the wounded nation

Life goes on in our divided tropical universe

No one dares breathes a word in insolence and rebellion

All it takes an innocent memo follow a regimental journey around all sections

Or a termination letter swiftly penned ending a dream

Our smiley resilience, our default commodity that others corrupt

As the whole nation wallows in this writhing madness

For sanity some turn to faith and identity on the Cross

Or some others explore rootedness in the yaqona bowl

As we wait for divine redemption, a desperate antidote

Perhaps China will rush to our aid- who knows?

No one messes with the Silk Road and their boomeranged gifts

She sees now other falcons join her peregrine falcon on the village rara.

But perhaps it is time to find a cause to this malady

The great divide continues to widen in wealth and privelege

But here in this sacred space of Nau's house

The woven mats of love plaited so intricate and so fine

So woven and stable as life itself

There is hope as sure as the sunrise

She hears the words:

How shall you re-define yourself?

How shall you address the banal of your existence?

Her maku now lost in her reverie

Here in the hot sun glistening on this fertile land

The peregrine falcon dismembers its spoils happily,

Dice and mince raw meat

Fresh blood spill to the ground

Entrails strewn everywhere

The falcon raises her head

And gazed straight into her soul

-a deadpan expression.

Copyright_ Kelera Tuvou Ganivatu

Kelera Tuvou Ganivatu was born and raised in Suva, the Fiji Islands. She is a teacher by profession, lover of good heart-warming fiction and non-fiction, traveler and free-lance writer. She and her husband live and work abroad. They love to discover the archeological ruins and raw beauty of South America apart from their other travels. Her writings tend to explore issues of the ordinary person in Fiji; responsibility, alienation, racism, politics, corruption and education. Her new Collection of Fijian short-stories "Beyond the Sand and Smiles" will be released soon.