Word: kavas
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...sugar district that first elected Chaudhry to Parliament. Lodging with cane grower Dharmen Kumar, Connew followed him and his neighbors as they cut cane; hauled it to the mill on old Ford trucks; tended cows, goats and grandchildren; made puja devotions; watched Hindu movies; and drank kava, the traditional Fijian narcotic. The result is Stopover, whose 60 superbly printed black-and-white photographs are on show in Wellington until...
...though that doesn't stop a tourist character in a new movie that's set there from asking, "Where is Mount Doom?" Rather than ring-seeking hobgoblins and hobbits, No. 2-about an ageing Fijian matriarch's gathering of the clan to name her successor-is filled with her kava-swigging, tree-chainsawing, pig-slaughtering grandchildren, who surf a volcano of emotions over one night and a day. It's all part of the shifting nature of New Zealand film. As Nanna Maria (Ruby Dee) says of the Fijian feast taking shape outside her suburban window, "Look at all that...
...stage, there would seem to be no better guide: in the islands, time doesn't run to a clock, but rather follows the lunar pull of the tides. And in Vula, at the Sydney Opera House until June 25, the moon watches over the gentle unfolding of life, from kava ceremony to funeral song. In many Pacific cultures, the moon is also seen as a female deity, and in Vula womanhood is worshiped just as fully, from the languorous flick of a maiden's hair to the ribald jokes of a group of washerwomen, whose laughter becomes...
...Tanna's brushes with the outside world have not always been happy. Explorers, whalers, traders and blackbirders snatching laborers for the canefields of Queensland all figure in the island's memory. Missionaries arrived in the 1840s; the sterner among them tried to stamp out the arranged marriages, kava drinking and other rituals that underpin Tannese kastom life. Today, a jumble of Christian groups still jostle for believers. But the history of contact is brief enough that the first local person to fly in a plane - a young woman sent because the chiefs were suspicious of the strange craft - is still...
...converted, we were in a dim light," he says, looking over the glistening sea. "But after John Frum came we knew our kastom should not be destroyed, that you can be Christian but know your culture as well." Which is perhaps why on Tanna, you will find pastors drinking kava, and kastom men flying foreign flags...