Every fortnight I write from far away, in England, from university. In my first two columns I tried to explain how I felt to be connected to Fiji but also far apart. This week, I will tell you more about what it is like to actually be a young Fijian woman studying at Oxford.
The University of Oxford is one of the top universities in the world, according to rankings that come out every year. Many key figures in history were educated there. Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara studied history at Wadham College, one of the Oxford colleges. Oxford has almost 50 colleges, and I go to Magdalen College.
These colleges have different traditions and habits and are known for being better at different things, for example you might say that St Edmund Hall is better at playing rugby whereas Merton College is better in exam performance.
I am biased, but of course I would say that Magdalen College is the best at everything. Just as Oxford has produced leaders throughout history like Fiji’s first Prime Minister, it often welcomes current world leaders.
Today the Taoiseach, the Head of State, of the Republic of Ireland came to Oxford to deliver a lecture. The Romanes Lecture is the university’s annual public lecture and has been delivered in the past by people like Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Theodore Roosevelt, former President of the United States. I work as a student journalist at the university newspaper, The Oxford Student.
In the summer, I also work at the county newspaper The Mayo News, and I was lucky to finish an internship at The Irish Times. I emailed to request a Press Pass and was lucky enough to be given one.
It was a huge honor to be four rows away from the leader of the country I live in, and to see and hear him in person. His lecture was on the threat of populism, so extreme antidemocratic values that have risen in prominence over recent years.
I was inspired by the way in which he spoke, and talked about people, and values such as tolerance and equality. Tomorrow, once I receive the images from the photographer, I will write up an article on his address so people that weren’t present can learn about it.
I am so lucky to be a young Fijian woman studying in a place like Oxford and to have these opportunities and to learn from other leaders of different nations. That is definitely not a normal event though, Oxford is magical, but it also essentially a very fancy school.
And, trust me, I still have to attend classes and lecture. Every morning I wake up at 7:55. It is not something that I always did but I have had to train my brain into doing. Otherwise, I find, that I lose a lot of the day.
I am writing this on Wednesday evening (Nov 2), so tomorrow I have to make sure I do not sleep in because I have class at 9AM. I study English Literature and Language, which broadly means looking at writing and stories from the past and looking at the language they are constructed from. My personal specialism has evolved into an interest in Medieval Literature.
I often joke that this means I won’t have a job in the future, as a lot of my friends do subjects like physics or engineering. I will be the first to admit that numbers are a language I struggle to speak.
At the moment, the module that I am doing is called Seeing through Texts. We meet at museums and libraries and reflect the way in which visual images and physical objects can help us understand texts better.
So, for example, in the Medieval period they would often go on pilgrimages to sacred sites and collect physical tokens to return home with. In this sense, physical objects helped them in their worship, just as nowadays we might hold palm crosses on Palm Sunday.
Every Oxford term has eight weeks. For our Week One session, the class met and every student was asked to bring an object, any object, and talk about it for a couple of minutes. I brought the salusalu that I mentioned I received from my aunt Ana last week.
I was a bit shy about talking about it, since it was so different to the other objects – like bookmarks- my classmates had brought in. I was really excited to talk about it though, and to mention how traditions of giftgiving operate in Fijian culture.
I was surprised by how interested my tutor was in the process and conditions in which you receive or gift objects, like a tabua. Later in the week, my tutor emailed me to ask more about the traditions of gift-giving in Fiji and to say he was putting on an exhibition within the university and whether I would mind meeting to discuss having my salusalu feature in it.
The exhibition would be centered on the Medieval practice of gift-giving, but would have a section talking about international cultures and customs that still feature these type of acts. I am in no way an expert in Fijian customs, I was only able to speak about what I know and what I had seen, received and experienced.
Hopefully, when we meet here again I would be able to tell you how that meeting went and to say I had undertaken my research and spoken to more Fijians about such traditions.
• KESAIA TOGANIVALU is an aspiring journalist and final year student at the University of Oxford’s Magdalene College, where she studies English literature and language. The views expressed by the author are hers and do not reflect the views of this newspaper.
