TRAVERSE 196
into it was the occasional waft of tobacco smoke, and once or twice, the unmistakable scent of kava, earthy, rooty, like wet clay and dried hay in equal measure.
I paused at a stall where a group of men sat cross-legged behind sacks of yaqona root, kava in its raw, pre-pounded state. One of them, a wiry man with a full beard and an infectious grin, invited me over.
“ Want to see how we make it?” he asked. His name was Joeli, and he was a kava vendor by trade but, as I quickly learned, a storyteller by passion.
Joeli’ s kava was being prepared in a large plastic bowl under the shade of a frangipani tree behind the main stalls. He pulled out a small wooden pounder and began crushing the dried root with rhythmic thuds, each strike a deep thunk that seemed to echo from some deeper cultural wellspring. The powdered root was poured into a cloth, which he knotted tightly before plunging into water and kneading like dough.
The liquid that emerged was a milky greyish-brown. It looked, quite honestly, like dirty dishwater. But this was no mundane brew. This was grog, Fiji’ s ceremonial drink. Offered
TRAVERSE 196