Though they have a considerable body of traditional poetry, the Fijians cannot be said to have much literary taste. The mekes are mythological and historical, and in the latter the fiction of exaggeration is freely mingled with fact. Without a native commentator they are difficult to translate, being often cast in the form of a dialogue without any indication of a change of speaker. In descriptions of the deaths of heroes the dirge is put into the mouth of the dead hero himself. Boating songs, lullabies, love songs and descriptions of scenery are not to be found in the native poem. In their indifference to the beauty of nature they are in sharp contrast to the Tongans, whose songs are full of admiration for flowers, running water and lovely scenery.
HISTORICAL POETRY
They judge the merit of a poem by the uniformity of metre and the regularity with which every line in a stanza ends with the same vowel or diphthong. This is secured by a plentiful use of expletives, by abbreviating or prolonging
words, by omitting articles, and other poetic licence, but in very few is this kind of rhyme carried out consistently. Some bards profess to be inspired. Others make no such pretensions, but set about their business in the prosaic manner of a literary hack. They teach their compositions to bands of youths who master every detail of the poem in a single evening. It is then as permanent and unalterable as if it had been set up in type. I had a curious instance of the remarkable verbal memory of Fijians in a long poem taken down from the lips of an old woman in 1893. The poem had been published by Waterhouse twenty-seven years earlier, and on comparison only one verbal discrepancy between the two versions was found. Repeated from mouth to mouth, a popular poem will travel far beyond the district in which its dialect is spoken, and thus one may often hear mekes whose meaning is not understood by the singers. English popular songs, heard once or twice, will thus run through the group corrupted into Fijian words that have the nearest sound to the English ones. The common yankona meke conveys no meaning whatever to the modern Fijian, but it is not necessarily very ancient, for it may be the corruption of a poem composed in a local dialect.
The popularity of an historical meke is not often more than sixty years; those that are older survive only in fragments. The Mission schools have enormously increased the output of trivial and ephemeral poetry; at every annual school feast the children perform mekes, celebrating petty incidents of village life, composed by their native teacher, and the old tragic historical poetry has fallen upon evil days and may soon be heard no more.
FOOTNOTES:
[103] The Indiscretions of Lady Asenath.