Abstract
Banaba is a tiny island in the South Pacific, whose 300 souls live between a strip-mined crater and the shore, supported by remittances from Fiji. This book is worth reading carefully for two reasons. First, the author underscores the importance of soil (Banaban and otherwise) to modern, globalized agribusiness. Second, by seamlessly weaving organic chemistry, imperial trade, administration, and resettlement, indigenous culture, agriculture, memory, and her own situation, the author comes as close as any to a coherent account of the interplay between place and people, across time and space.
Contemporary Banaba (formerly Ocean Island) is a unique case. Although under the sovereignty of the state of Kiribati, it is largely administered by the Rabi Island Council, located on Rabi Island, Fiji, where most Banabans now live, after their grandparents relocated there (under more or less duress) following the Second World War. The key to all this, and to the 20th-century explosion of agricultural yields, is phosphate.
Teaiwa begins and ends her monograph with phosphate. She details its chemical composition; competing theories (held by mid-century technicians of the British Phosphate Commissioners) of its accumulation, in highly concentrated form, on this Pacific island; and how it was mined, crushed, and bathed in acid to produce that fine, white power (‘superphosphate’) that, when crop-dusted across the grazing lands of New Zealand and Australia, lead to thick turf and well-fed sheep. But phosphate was not simply extracted: mining rights had to be settled with locals, who had a complex system of land exchange and ownership, with its own vocabulary and ties to personal and collective identity and obligation. Labor had to be imported; rail lines, conveyor belts, processing stations, and a stormproof dock had to be built.
Not to mention shepherding the human capital. Banabans had their huts in traditional sites (while the ground underneath them slowly disappeared), but laborers from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, and Chinese cooks and assistants from Hong Kong, were given their own areas. Technicians, the school teacher, the pharmacist, administrators, plumbers, and others of European stock (plus families) required lodgings separate from the above; all needed food and drink. Over the course of the 20th century, the island was increasingly incorporated into the British Empire, gaining representatives of the Crown, a church, movie theatre, tennis lawn, and rifle club.
By presenting company archives, memoirs of former (European) workers, and conversations with now-grandfatherly Gilbertese laborers side by side, the author reveals how phosphate and people, money and memory, were mutually constituted in the process of digging up, managing, and renting/selling the earth. Teaiwa makes her position clear: Banaban, Gilbertese, and African American by descent, raised in Fiji, working in Australia, daughter of an esteemed member of the Banaban community, and outraged at the injustice visited upon the Ocean Islanders. And yet by including and discussing grainy pictures of European employees’ children among the mined moonscape of Banaba, paintings from contemporary Banaban artists, and pendants of Banaban phosphate, the author makes it clear that the land and memory of 20th-century Banaba was never monopolized by native Banabans. Ownership and primacy were and are negotiated, usually on uneven terms.
Visuality, movement, and grounded persons are well treated by Teaiwa, who is also a scholar of dance. Her ability to convey family pictures, corporate films, and politicized choreography in the written word, while keeping these anchored in the phosphate-rich soil as it is shipped around the world, highlights this monograph’s golden thread: the ontological connection between land and people. Can Banabans claim refugee status in New Zealand, given that much of their land now lies in its pastures and waters? Rabi Island, Fiji, where most Banabans now live, was originally populated by ethnic Fijians, whose descendants, though currently living elsewhere, still have tombs and ties to Rabi – the relations can be awkward. And the term for phosphate-rich soils has for centuries been the ‘bone bed.’
The author could easily have written a story of big British exploiting unaware Banabans. Administrators, businesses, and subjects of Empire were often big, self-serving, and condescending. Still, the Banabans were always involved in land negotiations with foreign agents, consistently receiving compensation, and they still have de jure and de facto control over their (now strip-mined) island; these relationships have rarely been equal. The Banaban phosphate fund has been misused by British and Banabans in power alike, and the Kiribati government may reopen the island for mining. Teaiwa’s achievement is to map the transition from a culture in which a long-standing system of connections to land and people made sense of terms such as ‘land for adopted children’ and ‘land for bonesetting,’ to one in which Banabans live in Fiji, can no longer count on dividends from their depleted phosphate fund, and are subject to cycles of Fijian political nativism. The author shows, above all, how a people’s history, much like the increased crop yields from phosphate fertilizer, had to be made.
There is only one (not too great) flaw in this work, and that is its lack of explanation for the patchiness of the chronology. Teaiwa most carefully traces people, flows, and contexts from the turn of the 20th century to the Second World War. She discusses the Banabans’ lawsuits (in the 1960s and 1970s) to force the British government to provide greater compensation and rehabilitate their island – the Banabans lost. We are also presented with evolving kinship patterns and dance traditions, mid-century to the present, and with Teaiwa’s fieldwork in the 1990s and 2000s. But detail on other decades (the 1940s, 1950s, and 1980s, for example) is scarce, and the 19th century seems homogeneous. A drought in the 1870s killed a large part of Banaba’s population: how did this set the stage for European mining? We are told that the Japanese occupation of Banaba was extremely harsh, that all the islanders were forcibly evacuated, and that one British ship picked up the remnants and dropped them off on Rabi in the middle of a tropical storm. Teaiwa wisely focuses on her strengths, narrative, archival, and ethnographic. But the hastiness with which she glosses over certain periods sits poorly with her consistent and subtle insistence on space and time.
The back cover provides such terms as ‘anthropology,’ ‘environmental studies,’ and ‘globalization,’ but because this monograph succeeds in presenting Banaba as a negotiation, it makes keywords feel even more constricting that usual. Generalization emerges organically: the Banaban term Te aba (simultaneously meaning ‘land’ and ‘people’) helped me better understand the groundedness of Romanian peasants – and Teaiwa admirably resists turning such terms into career-enhancing buzzwords.
Ultimately, the bone bed and personhood of Ocean Island has, with and without Banaban aid and acquiescence, been spread around the soils and waters of our globe. Teaiwa’s achievement in tracing this process is to produce a rare work of elegance and relevance.