Katherine Cummings

When I was twelve, newly returned to Fiji after World War II, I happened to see a brawl break out in a hotel bar. Two squads of police arrived at the double to break up the fracas, and I noticed that one was composed entirely of indigenous Fijians while the other was Indo-Fijian. When I asked why two squads were needed and why they were divided by race, I was told that if an Indo-Fijian policeman laid hands on an ethnic Fijian, or an ethnic Fijian tried to arrest an Indo-Fijian, the brawl would turn into a race riot. This was an example of the racial discrimination engendered by a system that looked back to the days of indentured labour, when Indian girmitiyas were brought to Fiji to work the canefields. As the Indo-Fijian population increased, pressure mounted for a share in government and the right to own land rather than leasing it. This pressure resulted in the coups of 1987 and 2000.

Jay Parini intended this collection of critical essays to be a Festschrift for Vidal’s sixty-fifth birthday in 1990. Its lateness may suggest he found some difficulty in obtaining suitable material, and account for the mixed quality of the essays. There is, however, so little available about Vidal that we must be grateful for this collection, which contains previously unpublished material and reprints some essays which would otherwise be difficult to trace.