SummaryIndo-Fijian craft and social practitioner, researcher, writer and critical theorist Quishile Charan approaches craft as a science-fiction practice of building new worlds from the seeds of reality.
As a descendent of Girmit (indentured labour)—part of a history and present in which autonomy was/continues to be denied to her people—Quishile holds close a core set of anarchist—anti-colonial, anti-institution, anti-authority—values.
In her experimental, relational pursuits, Quishile expresses these values while seeking to form different visions of home with her own hands. Melted into Indo-Fijian gardening, cooking and living, it’s a family effort that prioritises the anti-colonial work of nurturing and caring for each other outside of Western hegemony. Quishile’s practice cannot function without the people in her life. A lot of her work lies in these relationships—choosing her family, holding them in the fabric of community and moving beyond historical systems of harm.
Quishile has an MVA from Auckland University of Technology, where she also completed a PhD in visual arts. She has exhibited at institutions including Artspace Aotearoa, Tāmaki Makaurau; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; and Kunsthalle Wien Museum. You can find Quishile working at her whare/ghar, which she shares with her chosen family in Aotearoa, making tarkari for loved ones, deep in talanoa while tending to her dye pots and sewing in the garage.
During the Fale-ship, Quishile will be mapping the histories of plantation resistance, rebellion and protest led by Girmitiyas women onto an eco-dyed and embroidered protest banner.
(Image: it takes the love of the living and dead (work in progress), 2024, photo: Matavai Taulangaū)
In my Fale-ship residency I unpacked and expanded upon my decade-long journey towards developing languaging and critical theory frameworks for Indo-Fijians. These frameworks relocate our self-determination at the intersections of anarchist, decolonial, anti-colonial, queer and feminist theory.
Specifically, the Fale-ship period picked up where my recently completed practice-led PhD, ‘It takes the love of the living and the dead: Indo-Fijian craft as embodied knowledge and anarchism’, left off. During the four-year period of the PhD, I sharpened my ganna churi (machete) through examining how the historical and academic understanding of Indo-Fijians has been used and weaponised against us in the formation of our identities solely through deficit or pain narratives, framing our existence only through our colonial subjugation and oppression.
Over time, this mythology turned into an immovable truth, and our sense of belonging solidified in dis-belongings. This project, as with my wider practice, has been an ongoing site of resistance, in which I advocate for my community’s sense of belonging to Fiji. This sense of belonging is achieved neither through the lens of colonialism nor deficit narratives, but through relational choices: by leaving the boundaries of colonialism to create relationships to Vanua, iTaukei (Indigenous Fijians) and other Pasifika communities.
“This act of separation from our history, oversimplified categorisation, and homogenisation is made easier by the fact that we are continually rendered disposable in our own stories while being denied our resistance movements, anti-colonial and decolonial struggles, and even our place in history as the agitators towards and instigators of the end of Girmit. The scientific nature of the archives has placed us in an ongoing intellectual debate, moving us from voiceless labourer to voiceless academic subject, wherein we are picked apart and reconstructed into identity binaries without our consent. How, then, do we determine ourselves, our identities, and communities? Even in the very histories that would not exist without us, we are denied our autonomy. The Girmitiyas women who led our anti-colonial and decolonial struggles are replaced by elite nationalist Indian men and their counterparts (white missionaries and middle-class, upper-caste women). We were never afforded the leading role in our own histories, instead outsourced into the passive and subservient racial identity constructed of us, but not for us or by us.”
- Quishile Charan, It Takes the Love of the Living and the Dead: Indo-Fijian Craft as Embodied Knowledge and Anarchism, p. 25
Photographer Credit: Matavai Taulangaū
In considering what it means to come from a community that exists in a precarious relationship to their histories, I am intensely aware of how that relationship is continually put in further jeopardy by the acceleration of state control over these histories and the rise of mis- and dis-information in how our histories are retold. I look at the role of cultural practitioner as taking on the responsibility of repairing that damage; of enacting the care work that should have been afforded to my people many generations ago; of generating many sites of access, ancestral knowledge, a place of grief, of remembrance and love; and of placing our women back at the centre of their own resistance movements and the foundations from which to continue to build our many belongings. Craft is the work of my elders and my ancestors, weaving many threads of cultural practice together, wherein Indo-Fijian women create and visualise their worlds through sewing, quilting, embroidery, natural dye work, tailoring and dress-making, darning and crocheting, tatting and lacing. My visual language continues their work through drawing together these many creative practices to produce textiles that are a text of themselves, designed for my people to read, embedded and coded with language and stories that are created with autonomy and agency, that continue the resistance of Girmitiyas women.
The textile banner created during this Fale-ship is the embroidering of oral resistance histories of Fiji’s women's gang, expanding my frameworks of leveraging the resources of galleries to create textile works that exist beyond and outside of the exhibition model. This will be the first iteration of this new textile landscape, working in much wider communal and collective networks of community members, knowledge-holders and creatives- as it takes the hands of many and the love of both the living and the dead, to create work such as this. This textile is created in the hopes that it will live a big life across many community members' houses, back home in Fiji and with our many diasporic hubs, to be passed down generationally.
This banner starts with one simple intention: to pull apart and dismantle the dichotomy of the good and bad woman that was cemented into the plantation era. The character Girmitiyas women have been continually cast into and debated over by our various colonisers swings between these two categories.
As the bad woman, the Girmitiya woman is a woman who spawns evil through both her gender and race, where girmitiyas men found their demise seeking the sexual favours of these heathenistic animals. White overseers were to follow, these poor men succumbed to the wills of women.
The characterisation of the good woman entered centre stage when girmitiyas women were recast solely as dutiful, passive, and victimised women. Women who were beaten, murdered, raped and, at times, would rather sacrifice their lives in the name of honour. Reformists who believed they were fashioning themselves as abolitionists took on the task of moving girmitiyas into the category of civilised subjects, further exasperated by the expansion of academia into post-colonial and subaltern studies, wherein for the first time, descendants were engaging in writing and recording history. But the field only expanded so much, and women’s histories became authored by Indo-Fijian men who saw this passive figure as a platform from which to justify and continue to build gendered violence.
For a long time, these were the only realities afforded to these ancestors. This oscillation between two strict binaries of existence led to the Marriage Ordinance Act: a piece of law-making framed as a revolutionary reform. The Act codified and bound our women to stricter ideals of “womanhood” and entrapped us to the role of wife and mother—a form of punishment for their ongoing defiance to the colonial order.
Video Credit: Matavai Taulangaū
Over the many years of hearing our oral stories, the ones that always stuck with me are the ones of women pushing overseers off horses; kicking and hitting overseers; throwing rocks and sticks; abandoning their tools; spitting, pissing, and throwing shit at their colonisers; trying to sneak off plantations in the dead of the night. There are always emotions and tears when elders talanoa—these are stories that are not meant to be easy to sit with but there is something in their voices you can never find in academic pages, never find in archives. There is rage, there is a cheeky laugh at times, there is a knowing in Girmityas women’s strength and an acknowledgement that they lived through unthinkable violence. The textile banner I have created holds the many stories of these women who used weaponised abjection as strategic modes of resistance. I situate and identify Indo-Fijian self-determination starting with these women who were deemed bad women, women who defied, using the labouring system of ganging to target and encircle violent and abusive men in the plantation hierarchy.
Vinaka vakalevu to Katorangi Mauger for sitting with me in deep talanoa as I recounted the many stories of my elders and ancestors. At the whare going over images, references and older works to understand how this khissa (story) would unfold. It has been an emotional journey seeing these stories come to life through your drawings. Your time, dedication and care to this project is something that has supported me immensely across these months. It is a true blessing that your presence and your drawings will have a home here on this textile as we move into the next stages of continuing to tell this story.
Read more about Quishile’s research, writing and critical theory here:
Quishile Charan ‘It Takes the Love of the Living and the Dead: Indo-Fijian Craft as Embodied Knowledge and Anarchism’, PhD exegesis, 2024.
https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/items/05bfcf6d-6313-4e69-8b4a-03c9a065b5ea
Quishile Charan and Esha Pillay. "Coolie Cut Cane: The Sugar Empire of the South Pacific." https://coolie-cut-cane.badfijigyals.com/
Quishile Charan and Esha Pillay. Undoing History’s Spell on Bad Women: Counter-colonial Narratives of the Female Girmit Role in the 1920 Labour Strike. https://cdn.sanity.io/files/tj5lg93h/production/7389bbec1fa08b05f653c75feb9ce98eb2082b9b.pdf