Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture: Belonging, and Banishment from and in the Sea of Islands

Abstract

ABSTRACT This is a written version of the Inaugural Brij Lal Memorial Lecture delivered for the Pacific History Association (PHA) conference at Warrnambool on 4 November 2023. It is in memory of Brij V. Lal, who died on 25 December 2021. In November 2009 he, and later his wife Padma Narsey Lal, were banished by Fiji’s military regime from their birthplace. This address considers the troubled questions of belonging and banishment in Oceania. The first section explores this in relation to Brij’s life, as well as other examples of political exile. The second part considers how other Oceanians might not quite belong because of the circumstances of their parentage or gender, or through the different mental and embodied spaces they inhabited. The lecture concludes by posing questions about how the present is invested in the past, and what the future holds for Oceanians who may be forced, chosen, or persuaded to leave their islands.