An vivid personal account of the 2000 Fijian coup from the viewpoint of the Indo-Fijian community is being republished
this month to mark the coup’s 20th anniversary.
State of Suffering (Cornell University Press, 2008) by University of Auckland anthropologist Susanna Trnka focuses on
how ordinary people cope in extraordinary times, making it particularly relevant as we live through a global pandemic.
On 19 May a group of hardline Fijian nationalists led by George Speight, marched into the parliament buildings in Suva
and took elected Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and most of his cabinet hostage for 56 days, throwing the country into
chaos.
When a state of emergency was declared, Associate Professor Susanna Trnka, along with her husband and three-year-old
daughter, found themselves in the middle of a community plunged into fear and confusion.
“The country was in turmoil, schools were closed, a curfew was imposed and military roadblocks were installed,” she
says. “I found myself recording and analysing Indo-Fijians’ political concerns over the coup and their experiences of
ethnically-motivated political violence, including being physically beaten, having their houses and businesses set on
fire, being raped and being the victims of attempted rape.”
She had been in Fiji doing field research for her PhD, living in a predominantly Indo-Fijian community and actively
immersing herself in the daily rhythms of the culture, which included learning to speak Fiji Hindi, attending prayer
services at Hindu temples and cooking and eating with local families. But on that day in May, her research abruptly
changed direction.
The result was State of Suffering, an in-depth, on the ground perspective of how ordinary people come to understand and
cope with the turmoil of having their normal lives radically suspended.
While focused on the events of the Fiji coup, the book also addresses the broader question of how people respond to
dramatic social and political upheaval.
“One of the things I noticed was the widespread use of ‘gallows humour’ which not only allows people to let out tension,
but to feel (momentarily) in control,” she says. “Making jokes creates a new emotional space, however fleeting, and
joke-tellers become the ‘authors’ of an emotion and response (laughter) in their listeners, giving them a momentary
sense of mastery in an otherwise powerless situation.”
She also noticed that in the absence of a coherent narrative to explain what was happening to them, people resorted to
creating ‘inventories’ or lists of disjointed events culled from personal experience.
“There were lots of rumours and news headlines circulating which were similarly passed along as an attempt to make sense
of the circumstances, to pin down the truth amid the confusion," she says These included the collective scapegoating of
this or that ethnic group, which might in turn be made more complex by people’s eye witness accounts.
“People often repeated highly prejudicial points of view, but the stories of how they coped with the violence themselves
suggested a much more nuanced accountthat included inter-ethnic cooperation and support,” she says.
“For example, Indo-Fijians might blame “the Fijians” for causing the violence, and yet when they recounted actual
events, it was not unusual for them to talk of Fijian friends who helped them escape.”
Dr Trnka finished her PhD at Princeton University in 2002 and in 2003, took up a lectureship in the University’s Faculty
of Arts, where she drew on her experiences in Fiji to teach a popular graduate course, ‘Violence and Pain.’
She has since refocused her research on her medical anthropology interests, working on the politics of respiratory
health and more recently, youth mental health, as well as looking at how people make sense of life crises, a topic she
never thought she would be returning to, until Covid-19.
Making use of her Fijian research, she is currently looking at the social ramifications of Covid-19 in New Zealand in
terms of how we experience ‘home’ and ‘family’, as well as how citizens need to be reconsidered as active rather than
passive participants in states of emergency.