Patterns of the Ancients: Fijian Tapa cloth
A traditional art form meets
20th Century economics

by Mara Jevera Fulmer
Assistant Professor/Program Coordinator in Graphic Design
C.S. Mott Community College, Flint, MI
(Formerly Art Director for The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji)

It is not the clear ringing sound of wood tapping wood. The sound seems dampened somehow. Resonant but curbed as a damper would mute the vibrating strings of a piano. It surrounds you and for a moment you are uncertain of where the tones originate. And then you come nearer to the source. Patterns of light filter through the canopy of palm fronds and leaves of the raintree.

And beneath the cool shade of a raintree sit three generations of women: daughter, mother, and grandmother each working casually in the warm afternoon air, chatting and laughing, serious yet lighthearted as they perform their mystical craft. Numerous children surround them alternately playing and fetching what is needed by the women at their work.

There is not a house to be seen for at least a mile around. Only fields of squash grow around them under the shade of the rows of coconut and banana trees providing other fruits of nature while protecting the plants below from the near equatorial sun. And yet the women work along, methodically pounding and turning, pounding and turning, as they work a coarse fiber into a softer cloth. There they sit in the middle of nowhere and everywhere, their presence in that space as much a part of the scenery as the fabric they create is a part of the trees from which it is taken.

The women take turns working the coarse natural fiber that they are making into masi, a fiber used for clothing, for decoration, for ritual. A few pieces of the pounded barkcloth hang from a makeshift clothesline tied between trees. Lunch and water await them in a nearby thermal plastic jug, a reminder of the incongruous mix of modern and ancient technologies.