Seeds and Jahaji

Farming and craft are two practices that share deep cultural relationships to each other and encompass a knowledge around movement—each informing the other—that is essential to my own understanding of how I need to move in my own making. When we were starved on the coolie lines, given rations below a human standard for survival, we planted on those coolie lines the seeds we brought with us. That would have been the first Indo-Fijian garden. We continued to deepen our relationships to plants when plantations withheld any form of payment for work completed—though the wages were barely enough to subsist on anyway—and we sold or gave away plants for others to sustain themselves. Others who left the plantation would come back to visit, bringing khaana with them. These practices continued again under the tenant farm scheme—we grew and nurtured ourselves from what our hands sowed into the Vanua. The action of planting and growing one’s own khaana may seem small, insignificant, and mundane, but, within the Indo-Fijian context, building relationships to plants is the act of reclamation and resistance—an extension of self, our ghar.

Quishile Charan, It Takes the Love of the Living and the Dead: Indo-Fijian Craft as Embodied Knowledge and Anarchism. (2024, p 96)

There is a cotton tree at the back of my family’s ganna khet (sugarcane farm), once a shrub planted in rows, hundreds, maybe thousands, this monocrop would have consumed the landscape, reducing Vanua to fertile soil reserved for colonial plantations. This cotton tree is a surviving memory and reminder that before sugar plantations, Fiji was occupied by a succession of frontier societies that brutally carved up both lands and people to violently pursue colonialism and capitalist expansion. Plucking the white fluff for stuffing pillows and cushions inside our ghare (home) is one of my many chores when I am back home. A repetitive task that always reminds me that before my family were here, our khet was a plot of land that was subdivided down by one of our colonisers, the Colonial Sugar Refinery Company (CSR), who operated and ran the plantations in which my ancestors were indentured to. Cotton and sugar are two monocrops intimately bound to one another.

This tree lingers in my memories constantly.  A long time ago a friend in Suva was recalling how he has aunties and elders who also have rouge cotton trees growing, sprawling into family life and farms, sometimes lonely and quiet where it stands. Yet, there is something familiar to me, a sense of kinship with these cotton trees. Just like ganna, just like my ancestors, these seeds, people, and the relationships to one another, created a means to leave the boundaries of colonialism. Seeds drifting in the wind, maybe Girmitiyas dropped seeds in random places within the plantations, or these seeds, or shrubs, survived the monocrop planting cycle, existing by oneself as the landscape was carved up once again for new forms of colonial violence. These cotton trees now are part of our homes and lives. 

Other seeds were planted during Girmit, ones not intended for the plantations or monocrops. Seeds of fruits, of vegetables and of flowers, seeds that sustained us and our communities, seeds we continue to create expanded and liberated futures with. Self-determination within the Indo-Fijian context begins with my ancestors lovingly hiding into the folds of head wraps and fabric those very seeds. Smuggling them onto the Girmit ships that brought them to Fiji’s plantations. These seeds, brought over for survival, have created a thread from past to present. My own textile and craft practice, inherited and embodied knowledge of my elders and ancestors, weaves hibiscus and genda into the many threads of my making. These plants are vessels, where I re-narrate, re-story and restore our own histories, sense of belonging, the cultural knowledge our ancestors have gifted us and continue to grow the world building of my dead. Much of my craft has been functional forms to advocate and make visible my community’s sense of belonging to Fiji not through colonialism but through relational choices, by leaving the boundaries of colonialism to create relationships to Vanua, iTaukei (Indigenous Fijians) and other Pasifika communities. The movement of seeds, from Girmit ships, to plantation, tenant farms, compounds, to migration, is the continuing of ancestral ways, existing and resisting colonialism through my ancestors’ legacies of relationship-building, that Jahaji is also the relationships to these many seeds.

These embroidery samplers of red hibiscus and genda (marigolds) are the sprouting of futurities and the narrating of these stories through textile world-building. Each work is the continuation of these stories and an unfolding to the depths of our relationships, the planting and waiting for these seeds to bloom, then imprint, dye, embroider, sew, and quilt fabrics with these and other collective memories.