When Eyes Feel

When Ruth’s house is gutted by fire and she takes up residence at an old abandoned beach house, she mistakenly receives a journal written by Fiawah, her husband’s illiterate mistress. Ruth hates Fiawah but little did she know that Fiawah’s journal would be the catalyst that would propel her to examine the fabric of her life, knitted by its scraps of memory. She reads the first journal entry triggering memories of her younger self, one who had, twenty years earlier, engineered a whirlwind romance between herself and South Pacific islander, Taumauosi, who was unaware that she had deliberately lured him to the altar with lies of her pregnancy.

With husband in tow, Ruth arrives in Malaugui, Taumauosi’s home country but she is unaware that a bride-to-be (Umani) had already been chosen for her husband. At the airport, as soon as the Mokatikula clan realizes that Taumauosi has shown up with a Western wife of his own choosing, that bride-to-be is abandoned and Ruth is hustled to Taumauosi’s traditional village.


In the village, Ruth discovers that the evolving stranger, her husband, has four mothers, he carves wooden figurines as a hobby, he harbours political ambitions and he cowers in his father’s shadow. She is deeply perplexed by the traditional South Pacific culture where food is cooked on hot stones buried underground, stories are told by elders under the moonlit sky, young boys are schooled in weaponry and hunting, arranged marriages are conducted, bride prices are negotiated and a clan’s children belongs to the entire community and can be given to childless couples within that clan community. That first night, Ruth also discovers that men stay apart from their women in their own “men’s hut” but when Taumauosi attempts to follow this traditional custom, Ruth demands that he stay with her in the hut to which she has been assigned. Taumauosi complies but from that moment, the tension between his father and himself intensifies and the Chief, Taumauosi’s father, unable to live down the scandal created by his son’s marital union, becomes Ruth’s most formidable opposition.

When Eyes Feel