The Literatures of the French Pacific: Reconfiguring Hybridity. The Case of Kanaky-New Caledonia [Web PDF ed.] 9781781385883

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1
Part 1
Appendix
Part 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Literatures of the French Pacific Reconfiguring Hybridity

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 32

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 1

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editors EDMUND SMYTH Manchester Metropolitan University

CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM University of Oxford

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

DAVID WALKER University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster: The Rhetoric of Image-Text 17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics 18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative 19 David H. Walker, Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature 20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel

24 Louise Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean 25 Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath 26 Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant 27 Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle, Contesting Views: The Visual Economy of France and Algeria 28 Rosemary Chapman, What is Québécois Literature?: Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada

21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

29 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, V. Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism

22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France

30 Andrew Asibong, Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition

23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History

31 Celia Britton, Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 2

12/03/2014 14:39:49

R AY L E N E R A M SAY

The Literatures of the French Pacific Reconfiguring Hybridity The Case of Kanaky-New Caledonia

The Literatures of the French Pacific

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 3

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Cover illustration: Reproduction of Le Masque [The Mask] by Kanak artist Micheline Néporon – by kind permission of the artist.

First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Raylene Ramsay The right of Raylene Ramsay to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-037-6 cased Web PDF eISBN 978-1-78138-588-3 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by BooksFactory.co.uk

To Max for his understanding To all those Pacific voices embedded in this book who as yet have little published voice

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 5

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 6

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Behind the Accounts of First Encounter and the Tales of Oral Tradition: Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest 28 Part 1: Behind the Accounts of First Encounter

28

Appendix: Extracts from the Accounts of the Early European Explorers

45

Part 2: Reading the Role of Gender through the Texts of Oral Tradition

52

2 Writing (in) the Language(s) of the Other: Translation as Third Space

83

3 Histories of Exile and Home: Strategic Hybridity

123

4 Locating the First Man in the (Hi)stories of Kanaky: Internal Kanak Hybridities

152

5 The Paradoxical Pathways of the First Kanak Woman Writer: Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

175

6 The Hybrid Within: The First Kanak Novel, L’Épave [The Wreck], and the Cannibal Ogre

209

7 Cross-cultural Readings of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of Koné]: Intertextuality as Hybridity

238

8 Writing Métissage in New Caledonian Non-Kanak Literatures: From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

265

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 7

12/03/2014 14:39:49

viii

The Literatures of the French Pacific

9 A Multicultural Future (Destin Commun) for New Caledonia?: From Métissage to Hybridities

307

10 Summing Up

344

Notes

350

Bibliography 353 Index

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 8

373

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

With grateful recognition of the work of all the dedicated scholars in this still limited and developing field, and with thanks to my own close colleagues, graduate students, and writers who have inspired aspects of this book. Among my many generous interlocutors, particular thanks go to Sylvie André, Peter Brown, Mounira Chatti, Sonia Faessel, Déwé Gorodé, Dominique Jouve, Nicolas Kurtovitch, Deborah WalkerMorrison, Diane Walton, Emma Sinclair-Reynolds, Serge Tcherkézoff, Bernard Rigo, and Stephanie Vigier. My semester developing some of the preliminary material on postcoloniality in the Francophone world at Harvard University, with a great graduate class in 2008, owed much to the good offices of Janet Beizer; the successful co-translation of Déwé Gorodé’s writing to the talent of Deborah Walker-Morrison. My excellent graduate students at the University of Auckland continue to be an encouragement; thanks particulary to Rafe Hampson, as our lecteur in France now on his way to Oxford, for his acute sense of style and accomplished assistance as first reader and editor. This book is also dedicated to the memory of Pacific scholars who left us too early and whose life and work, at least indirectly or briefly, touched my own: Professors Michel Aufray, Paul de Deccker, John Dunmore, and Michael Spencer. And to those with whom I had the great privilege of working for a year in the North of Kanaky-New Caledonia at Do-Néva, awakening to the specificity and richness of the indigenous Pacific world. With acknowledgement of kind permission to reproduce earlier versions of sections of text, ideas, or translations from the following publications: Raylene Ramsay, ‘Dire le vrai/To Tell the Truth: Poems of Déwé Gorodé’, in Déwé Gorodé and Nicolas Kurtovitch, Dire le vrai, with a preface by Dominique Jouve and illustrations by Mathieu Venon

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 9

12/03/2014 14:39:49

x

The Literatures of the French Pacific

(1999); ‘La Figure de l’incorporation: de la littérature orale aux écrits hybrides de Déwé Gorodé et Claudine Jacques’, in Sonia Lacabanne (ed.), Les Vivres et le vivre en Océanie, Actes du colloque CORAIL (2003); ‘“Terre violente” and “séjour paisible”: Reflections on the Role(s) of Intertextuality in Representations of Nature/Culture in New Caledonian Literature’, in Hamid Mokaddem (ed.), Approches autour de culture et nature dans le Pacifique Sud, Actes du XIIIe colloque CORAIL (2003); ‘Translation in New Caledonia’, in Sabine Fenton (ed.), For Better or for Worse: Translation as a Tool for Change in the Pacific (2003); ‘The Blind Dancing Woman, Hybridity in the Representations of the Female Body in the New Literatures of Kanaky/New Caledonia’, Hecate, 30:2 (2004); Sharing as Custom Provides: Selected Poems, trans. Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker (2004); ‘Déwé Gorodé: The Paradoxes of Being a Kanak Woman Writer’, Kunapipi, 27:2 (2005); Interview with Déwé Gorodé, 24 May 2006 (unpublished); ‘Exile in the Emerging Literature of New Caledonia: Strategic Hybridity’, in Nicholas Hewitt and Dick Geary (eds), Dispora(s) Movements and Culture (2007); ‘Pouvoir masculin, pouvoir féminin, violence sexuelle, et retour dans les littératures indigènes du Pacifique’, in Mounira Chatti, Nicolas Clinchamps, and Stéphanie Vigier (eds), Pouvoir(s) et politique(s) en Océanie (2007); ‘Sexual Violence and Return in Indigenous Francophone and Anglophone Pacific Literatures: The Case of Déwé Gorodé’s L’Épave’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 24:2 (2007); ‘Colonial/Postcolonial Hybridity in Camus’s Le Premier Homme and Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s Kanaké’, in Mark Orme, Lissa Lincoln, and Christine Margerrison (eds), Albert Camus in the 21st Century: A Reassessment of his Thinking at the Dawn of the New Millennium (2008); ‘In the Belly of the Canoe with Ihimaera, Hulme and Gorodé: The Waka as Locus of Hybridity’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11:4 (2009); Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (2010); ‘Déwé Gorodé: Cognitive Dissonance and the Re-negotiation of Values’, in Erika Fülöp and Adrienne Angelo (eds), Cherchez la Femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World (2011); ‘Indigenous Women Writers in the Pacific: Déwé Gorodé, Sia Figiel, Patricia Grace: Writing Violence as Counter Violence and the Role of Local Context’, Postcolonial Text, 6:3 (2011); ‘(Mis)Reading the Figure of the Cannibal Ogre/Incest through the European Fairy Tale: Narrative Techniques, Metamorphosis, and Meaning in the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 10

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Acknowledgements

xi

First Kanak Novel’, in Lost Oceans, Dalhousie French Studies, 94 (2011); ‘Indigenous Storytelling in the Pacific’, in J. Shaw (ed.), Selected Essays: Speaking through Story: Critical and Creative Approaches to Storytelling (2013); ‘Multiculturalisme, métissage, et hybridité dans les productions littéraires de la “Kanaky-Nouvelle-Calédonie”’, Littératures du Pacifique/Pacific Islands Literature (2013).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 11

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 12

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Introduction Introduction

Pacific literatures in French are little known. In French scholarship, as in French libraries and bookshops, this region of the world has tended to be tacked on to Asia (a category also referred to as Asia-Pacific) in a concession to what is largely absent or imagined as vast and empty. The colonial fracture of the Pacific region into French-speaking and English-speaking countries has continued into the present with the result that the literatures of the French-speaking Pacific that include the indigenous and settler literatures of New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and the now independent Vanuatu have also been virtually unstudied in the English-speaking world. Neither Wallis and Futuna nor Vanuatu has yet produced a significant body of written texts. There is growing attention being paid to French Polynesian/Tahitian writing in France (Tahiti is often used as a synecdoche for all of the Society Islands, if not for all of French Polynesia). This study focuses on the effects of contact between cultural groups of very different origins and traditions in the Pacific most particularly as these are mirrored in the emerging literatures of New Caledonia. (Emerging literature, a justifiably contested term, is used here to designate a body of texts that has its own history and roots but is only now becoming visible and competitive with literatures from Europe.) No group within the New Caledonian population of around a quarter of a million has a clear majority. Approximately 44 per cent is Melanesian, 34 per cent of European descent, 15 per cent Wallisian/ Polynesian, and 5 per cent Vietnamese and Indonesian. The singular character and intellectual interest of the many emerging literatures of this group of islands and the very particular light New Caledonia’s diverse populations shed on contemporary theories of contact, on hybridity theory in particular, motivates the focus on this part of the Pacific. New Caledonia, like French Polynesia, is one of the last Pacific countries to be struggling with issues of attaining (or rejecting) political

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 1

12/03/2014 14:39:49

2

The Literatures of the French Pacific

independence. An archipelago situated in the south-west Pacific, 20,000 km from Europe, of which it is currently an Overseas Country and Territory (OCT), it became a French colony in 1853 and a penal colony from 1864 to 1897. Colonization significantly displaced the indigenous population who had settled in the main island (Grande-Terre) and the three Loyalty Islands (Maré, Lifou, Ouvéa) 3,000 years earlier. Nineteen forty-six saw the end of the Code de l’Indigénat (the Native Law that had subjected Kanak to restrictions, and isolated many in reserves) and citizenship granted to Kanak in a country that rallied early to De Gaulle and that now attained the status of French Overseas Territory. From the 1970s, a radical pro-independence movement emerged, culminating in the violent clashes between pro- and anti-independence factions known euphemistically as Les Événements [the ‘Troubles’] in the mid-1980s. The 1988 Matignon Agreement brokered by France provided for greater recognition of what it recognized as ‘Kanak’ culture, and promised attention to the major socio-economic disparities between the groups. The nineteenth-century term Kanakae, used in Hawaiian society, that according to the explorer Durmont d’Urville was used for people who cultivated land they did not own, had become a pejorative term – canaque – used by the settlers for indigenous peoples in New Caledonia. The French spelling was altered to Kanak by the independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, without the agreements required by French grammar, to signify subversion and reversal, the transformation of the negative language of the past, and an affirmation of pride in being Kanak. There is still debate on the exact origin of the term, which also figured prominently in the name given to the independence party, the Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (FLNKS). The ethnographer Alban Bensa claims that it is purely fortuitous that the name of the hero of Tjibaou’s 1975 play-spectacle, Kanaké, and the word canaques, used throughout the colonial period to designate natives in the Pacific, turn out to be homonyms. The literary scholar Hamid Mokaddem argues that this choice, and the later adoption of the self-affirming identity-term Kanak, is a product of Tjibaou’s political genius (2005). This deliberate language use prefigures the adoption of the term Kanaky to designate the country, much as Tjibaou, in his now canonical cultural text Kanaké, takes a local story of the first ancestor and transforms him into an archetype, a past model for the future, and a national symbol for hitherto distinct groups. A decade after the Matignon Agreement, the preamble to the innovative Noumea Agreement of 1998 offers a dramatic change in language and in the representation of history, and again utilizes the term

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 2

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Introduction

3

Kanak. It acknowledges the ‘shadows’ of the colonial era: the ‘shock of civilisation’, the ‘confiscation of identity’ of ‘the Kanak peoples’, and their resulting ‘enduring trauma’. Constitutional change accompanied discursive innovation through the division of the country into three provinces (two of which – Province du Nord and Province des Îles – are controlled by Kanak), a planned progressive transfer of powers from France to a Collegial New Caledonian Government that included both Loyalist and Independence parties, and the establishment of a Kanak Senate. A progressive transfer of powers from France to a Collegial New Caledonian Government (which included Loyalist and Independence parties) and a Kanak Senate, whose role was to give advice on questions of custom, was agreed to. A vote on a referendum on independence was to take place before 2018. The French state itself now appears to be assisting the country to move towards a form of greater autonomy, or, at the least, to an orderly decision on a first referendum. From 2011, the Kanaky flag has been flying officially alongside the French flag, amidst agitation for a single flag that might correspond better to the ‘establishment of a new sovereignty to be shared in a common destiny’ articulated in the Noumea Agreement. The vote on a referendum on independence, initially announced by the French president Nicholas Sarkozy for 2014, will require a majority for the referendum to go forward. Given that the principle of independence might very well not secure a majority of votes, the different political factions are being encouraged to work together to give form to the principle of an inclusive Common Destiny, to continue ‘rebalancing’ resources and/or to work out solutions for autonomy, possibly in some form of partnership with France and/or Europe. In the meantime, the transfer of the remaining so-called régalien, or sovereign powers, such as foreign policy, law and order, justice, and defence, remains incomplete in a climate of political uncertainty and what Peter Brown sees in his study of ‘postcolonial sovereignty games’ as ‘the entanglement of past histories, present negotiations and posturing for the future’ (2012: 171). The country’s rich nickel deposits and high GDP (predicted by President Philippe Gomez in 2010 – as Brown comments (2012: 182 n. 3) – to reach 35,000 euros per capita within three years) are still very unevenly distributed across the populations and include major subsidies from France, further complicating both the modes of social interaction and the sovereignty question. The present political changes are occurring in global, postcolonial contexts, shared with New Caledonia’s Anglophone neighbours in the Pacific region, most of which became independent between the late

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 3

12/03/2014 14:39:49

4

The Literatures of the French Pacific

1960s and the early 1980s (Papua New Guinea in 1975 and Vanuatu in 1980 among the last), and with the wider world. The now independent countries of the Melanesian Arc: Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu, which formed the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) in the mid-1980s initially to support the decolonization of New Caledonia, still play a role in New Caledonia’s present attempts to increase regional integration. (The other ‘Melanesian’ province of West Papua remains under the colonial control of Indonesia.) In his small and rare volume of collected poems, published in 1988 by the University of the South Pacific’s centre in Vanuatu, with the assistance of the Australian Government’s ‘South Pacific’s Cultures’ fund, the young Ni-Vanuatu poet S. Ngwele speaks positively of re-finding the unity of the Melanesian archipelagos in his poem ‘Rewriting History’ (1998: 28): Colonial days: Our history discontinued. Now our historians must rewrite that:   Place Irian Barat on the chart   Maubere; Nuigini, Solomoni,   Vanuatu, Viti, Kanaky – ALL as one chain of archipelago.

Peter Brown points out the several ironies, however, of the present jockeying for political position and alliance within New Caledonia, noting that in 2010 Gomez, then anti-independence President of the Government, attempted to have New Caledonia accepted as a member of the MSG using the ‘decolonization’ category in order to justify this membership, hitherto restricted to the independence party, the FLNKS. Then, in 2012, the New Caledonian Congrès, lead by President Roch Wamytan, a former leader of the FLNKS, did succeed in signing an agreement in Vanuatu, one that provides for ‘financial support for the MSG which, in return, will promote French as one of its official languages’ (Brown, 2012: 174). In the meantime, the MSG has had to contend with a series of military coups in Fiji. If the term ‘canaque’ and what it designates has been appropriated and transformed to new and positive purposes, terms such as ‘decolonization’ are evidently being appropriated for many purposes. For its part, Jules Durmont d’Urville’s formal attempt in 1831 to divide up and classify the islands of the Pacific using the colonial labels of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia, according to his judgements of ‘ethnicity’ or of rank on the universal ladder of social organization/civilization, has been largely

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 4

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Introduction

5

integrated by the peoples it classified as enduring divisions. Consensus and ‘tradition’ maintain the continued use of these terms despite modern anthropological consensus that distinctions between Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia have no scientific basis.1 If hybridity, as it is argued, consists of borrowings and adaptations by resistant agents, then both adaptation and resistance, hybridity itself, take a variety of forms. More particularly, beyond its changing Melanesian affiliations, New Caledonia shares common legacies with other former French colonies, French Overseas départements, territories, regions, or countries, or independent states grouped loosely under the umbrella term of Francophonie or the Francophone world. However, alone among the French overseas Collectivités d’Outre-Mer within the French Republic, New Caledonia now carries the singular title, collectivité sui generis. Given its multi-ethnic culture, mixed status, and liminal position within the varying understandings of the Francophone world, the concept of hybridity appears to offer a promising theoretical framing for a study of the literatures of what many now designate as an emerging ‘Kanaky-New Caledonia’. In its turn, Kanaky-New Caledonia offers a testing ground for theories elaborated within more mainstream postcolonial frames. A Colonial History of Hybridity (Hybridization) as Miscegenation Until recently, the cultural history of New Caledonia has generally not figured cross-fertilization or hybridity as an advantage. The phenomenon of hybridization itself notoriously entered scientific discourse in the eighteenth-century debate on the number of human species. With Buffon arguing for a single species against Renan who insisted they were many, the debate was underpinned by hierarchical rankings of the ‘races’, and the question of the fertility of the offspring of a hybrid couple. It was argued that such mixing, like that of the horse and donkey, would lead to barrenness or the degeneration of the superior races. Taxonomies of race, the contest between polygenesists and mongenesists, and the debate on inter-racial fertility continued to be significant throughout the nineteenth century. These informed a colonization that largely used the negative term ‘miscegenation’ to designate the denigrated biological outcomes of mixing. For the colonial administration, miscegenation and the European ‘gone native’ represented contamination by the barbaric Other and the threat of a loss of cultural purity. Measures were taken either to assimilate or to dilute indigenous traits, and to limit or control

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 5

12/03/2014 14:39:49

6

The Literatures of the French Pacific

hybridity. As such, discussions of hybridization in New Caledonia have often been constituted against or in relation to this uneasy background of biological miscegenation. Bakhtinian Dialogism and Bhabha’s Ambivalent Hybridity The transposition of the biological concept of hybridity to the cultural field, and the concept’s omnipresence in the late twentieth century, have been attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and more particularly to Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. Bakhtin produced images of hybridity that functioned beyond the postcolonial frame, presenting it as a textual phenomenon, a multilingualism or plurality of voices detectible within a single text. A postcolonial theorist, product of the Indian Diaspora and later Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Harvard University, Homi Bhabha argues that the transnational diasporic communities and indigenous minorities existing as legacies of colonialism and globalization in most modern societies have created a common condition of inescapable cultural hybridity (1994). Bhabha seeks to remake the negative colonialist concept, to turn it inside out by a postcolonial reflection on the power of culture, but without concealing the racist underside of these cultures’ history. Imitation, ‘sly civility’, and appropriated ‘hybridity’ would constitute an inversion from the inside, a revenge against the classificatory systems of colonization and its preoccupations with purity and the fixed character of origins. Drawing on postmodern and postcolonial theorists such as Fanon, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, Bhabha’s project is to highlight the ambivalence at the heart of racialist and colonialist discourse that carries the seeds of its own destruction. This includes the ambivalence in the process of assimilation itself, with its elements of mimicry and its attempt to assimilate the Other, while simultaneously denying this other an equal status. As Avtar Brah and Annie E. Coombes (2000) explain this in the introduction to their volume of collected case studies of hybridity, Bhabha’s argument turns on the idea that because colonial culture can never faithfully reproduce itself in its own image, each replication, or act of mimesis, involves a slippage or gap wherein the colonial subject necessarily produces a hybridized version of the original. This act of mimesis is a masquerade that insists on the agency of resistance and thereby rescues colonial subjects from perpetual victimhood. In one chapter of their book, the example of traditional bark clothing and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 6

12/03/2014 14:39:49

Introduction

7

other textiles that emerged from the impact of missionary contact in the Pacific is used to show how the adapted forms provide an illustration of the borrowings and adaptations by resistant agents that make possible such new hybrid forms of embodiment and collectivity. Examples of this kind appear to confirm the potential value of placing the theoretical notion of hybridity at the centre of our investigation of Pacific cultures and literatures. Yet the array of applications of the term in the Brah and Coombes collection of articles already sounds a note of caution for our project. Although the use of Bhabha’s definition of hybridity to understand the adaptation of traditional clothing appears to be a productive example in its ascription of value to the new hybrid objects, and of creative agency to those who produce them, it is evident that not all cultural mixing is fruitful. Nor is it necessarily ambivalent and resistant as in Bhabha’s model. Can the same terms ‘hybridity’ or indeed ‘liberation’ and ‘decolonization’ serve to describe in exactly the same way the refusal by the Caldoche population of European descent of control over their lives by Metropolitan France? This population which contests Kanak claims to sovereignty or independence has always asserted its difference from France and to some extent espouses claims to its own local autonomy or self-determination. Peter Brown concludes that the signatories to the Matignon-Oudinot and Noumea Accords may in fact have been working off different ‘genealogies’, the functionalist approach of the European Court of Justice, Robert Shuman’s ‘let us create institutions to work together’, and the Pacific notion of consensus. In this perspective, the Noumea Accord, in which the colonizing nation acknowledges […] the illegitimacy of its own original presence, and announces a process of ‘decolonization’ could be seen as at once confirming and challenging the notion of ‘hybridity’ as used, for example, by Homi Bhabha, for whom it is a sign of the postmodern and post­ colonial condition, undoing essentialism and binary oppositions. (Brown, 2012: 172)

While the Noumea Accord could be considered ‘to be setting up a paradigm of constant negotiation and reinterpretation about the project of decolonization’, all the more in that the UN itself allows for a nuanced sense of the process and end result, including the (re-)integration of a territory previously decolonized, what, asks Brown, are the implications if different meanings are attached to the same terms: ‘independence’, as presented by the Kanak leadership to convince its supporters that they

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 7

12/03/2014 14:39:49

8

The Literatures of the French Pacific were successful in their negotiations; greater ‘autonomy’ with more financial support from France, as presented by the anti-independence leadership to convince its skeptical supporters; proof of its role as ‘arbiter’, as presented by the French State to convince both the groups and the international community of its ‘neutrality’? (Brown, 2012: 172)

Brown is concerned that in a country where, as he claims, ‘almost everyone, every group, is someone’s/some other’s “Other”’, the authority to be undermined or subverted ‘is not necessarily only that of the colonizer’. For, from the 1980s, ‘Caldoche claims followed Kanak identity claims’ in what Brown sees as ‘a form of reverse mimesis’ (2012: 172). Discord and protest over the recent project of the New Caledonian flag, for example, for Brown, did not bode well for a notion of Common Destiny that would transcend what Paul Gilroy denounced as ‘the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’ (1993: 19). The New Caledonian Congress may have passed a law in late 2010 making the official motto of the country, Terre de parole, Terre de partage (Land of the Word, Land of Sharing). The Noumea Accord is nonetheless still often referred to locally, sotto voce, as Le Désaccord de Nouméa (the Noumea Discord). (Brown, 2012: 173)

Our final chapter will return to a full discussion of the range of theoretical approaches to the concept(s) of hybridity or related terms such as métissage, many of which engage, as does this study, with the usefulness and the limitations of Bhabha’s theoretical framework for thinking about the zones of cultural contact. These are the zones of what postcolonial theorist Mary-Louise Pratt’s 1991 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation has analysed as zones of ‘transculturation’ in which subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other but often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. One of the central purposes of this book is to identify the numerous modes of cultural exchange or mixing that contact zones have produced in New Caledonian literatures: multiple modes that may constitute a challenge to the narrowness of Bhabha’s concept and the specificity of the contexts in which he produced it. Bhabha’s third space is useful for the Kanaky-New Caledonian case to the extent that it locates culture outside the binary divisions of periphery/centre and the French/Francophone or indigenous/settler divides that its emerging literatures seek to move beyond. Furthermore, the work of this postcolonial theorist, and the hybridity debates to which it has given rise, neatly shift ‘the cultural

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 8

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

9

as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site’ (Bhabha, 1994: 206). This third space of culture is characterized as a place of performative enunciation that challenges any fixed central authority and recognizes the creative vitality of all interstices and margins. It is a place of ‘dissemi-nation’, in-between self and Other, offering a conceptual tool to consider spaces of resistance and negotiation in the work of writers from Kanaky-New Caledonia who share, in their own particularly acute but distinctive form, the current preoccupation with the possibilities and stakes of forging bi- or multicultural societies. Moreover, the once pejorative concept of hybridity, as it is rehabilitated by Bhabha and overwritten in a palimpsest where its racist history is not erased but remains detectible as a kind of shadow or underbelly, is not unlike the indigenous choice of the names Kanak/Kanaky to overwrite the pejorative French colonial term, canaque. Our first chapter takes a fresh look at the texts of first encounters on beaches between European and natives (naturels) and detects similar palimpsests. Each of the chapters of this book will argue that there is in fact a diversity of hybrid texts or mixed cultural locations in New Caledonia, as there is in other former colonies and settler societies created in the Pacific by the nineteenth-century imperial powers. Each chapter identifies distinctive pathways within the various places of cultural mixing in emerging Kanak–New Caledonian literatures in order to consider the extent to which they do in fact constitute third spaces of the Bhabha kind, or whether this theoretical frame needs to be modified in the Caledonian cases of contact and defined more usefully in each case by other terms, such as palimpsest, that give the general concept of hybridity particular, local, explanatory power. Individual studies look closely at the accounts of first contact between the indigenous peoples and European explorers, the translation of the texts of oral tradition, the literary representations of canaques and Kanak, of colonization and of inter-cultural transfer as sites of mixing. They follow the tropes of exile and of home in the respective contemporary histories of Kanak, settler, and indentured labourer and the shared topoi of séjour paisible [peaceable kingdom] and terre violente [violent land], concluding with an examination of the literary treatment of biological and cultural métissage in colonial and contemporary novels by writers of European origin. Modes of resistance to the effects of French colonization and present globalization inform the chapters on Kanak literatures: these studies also take account of the internal differences within Kanak cultures, the multiple subjectivities that change over time and are

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 9

12/03/2014 14:39:50

10

The Literatures of the French Pacific

re-inflected by new gendered and generational perspectives in changing socio-political contexts. After the colonial notion of syncretism, predominantly concerned with the alteration of orthodox Christian doctrine by indigenous belief systems, the dominant model of mixing and of taking back voice and power in the Francophone literary world has been créolité, an intercultural mixing rooted in the experience of transportation. Créolité, like Bhabha’s hybridity (or indeed the hybridity of Hall or Canclini, or a host of other theorists discussed in the final chapter), is both resistant and transformative and, echoing Deconstruction, seeks to go beyond binary categories of analysis (black/white, resistance/hegemony, colonialist/anticolonialist) by reworking traditional distinctions such as master/slave, victim/victimizer, and periphery/centre. Deconstruction introduces the notion of ‘undecideability’, which is also of interest for our understanding of the ‘complementarity’ (in the sense of contradiction but not mutual exclusion) of these apparent binaries. Nonetheless, hybridity is different both from the métissage promoted initially by the Négritude movement led by Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, and from créolité, especially as this latter has been developed for the contexts of the French Antilles. Here the inheritance of transportation and slavery has created cultural mosaics, extended more recently by Glissant’s notion of a universal linguistic creolization or mixing, a Tout-monde, and by hotly debated theories of mondialisation or of world literature; that is, of a French language outside the French state, a French without borders. Bhabha’s theoretical third spaces of cultural interaction entail rather different kinds of absorption and transformation of dominant models, presenting colonial ‘mimicry’, for example, as a tool for unsettling and even reversing power relations and for producing complex and moving new local configurations beyond assimilation or resistance. The Pacific texts, this book will argue, do share a number of common features with hybrid cultural texts in the metropolitan centres of Europe or the US, where transnational migration, mostly by formerly colonized ethnic groups seeking to take advantage of First World prosperity, has foregrounded notions of exile and diaspora, and debates on assimilation versus irreducible cultural difference. The dissection of New Caledonian literatures, however, shows that the nature of the third spaces created by encounters of differently hybrid cultures in New Caledonia can be very different from Bhabha’s third space or at a further extreme again, from Salman Rushdie’s nomadic interculturalism. Rooted first and foremost in the land as ‘a place to stand’, indigenous culture in New

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 10

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

11

Caledonia is only subsequently open to the legends of the Star Waka as the title of a 1999 volume of poems by the Maori poet Robert Sullivan puts it, the stories of voyaging ancestors criss-crossing and connecting up communities in the Pacific in transnational cultural construction and double consciousness of the kind proposed by Paul Gilroy’s theory of the Black Atlantic. The creolization in this Pacific territory is also different in character from group to group and dynamic across time. In contemporary Oceanian imaginaries, routes are ultimately subordinated to the roots vital for claims to the lands from which indigenous peoples have often been dispossessed, although the two metaphors coexist and work together. For Emma Sinclair-Reynolds (2013), the linguist and anthropologist Michel Aufray articulates best the mobility, the interconnected pathways (the routes) that underlie the strong sense of place (the roots) in Melanesian communities: ‘the image of the route appears to be simultaneously the representation of the genealogy of the group, of networks of alliance and of the word which ensures the unity of the land’ (Aufray, 2000: 293). Ultimately, like the bringing together of the apparently contradictory, but in fact complementary, metaphors of roots and routes, the notion of mixing gives rise to the need for a whole taxonomy of hybridities. The third spaces that New Caledonian cultures create in their movements between Kanak self or Caldoche (settler) Other, or between New Caledonian and Oceanian (indigenous) self and French Other, are premised on an identity that is indeed under attack by alterity, incursion, fragmentation, and plurality, but that nevertheless holds to the continuity and wholeness that the indigenous writer Déwé Gorodé feels still to be alive ‘under the ashes of the conch shells’ (the title of her 1985 collection of poems), despite the destruction wrought by colonization, or to an ethos of an island ‘home’ created by the challenges of European expatriation, deportation, and settlement for Caledonians of European origin. The spaces created by cultural interactions in this Pacific writing reflect the centring effect of a particular and preferred orientation, Kanak, Caldoche, or Other ethnicity, and a transformational effect, and partake of both a poetics of identity construction and a poetics of liberation – from France, from colonial domination, from marginality. This latter includes a conscious appropriation of, or (dis) identification with, the Other’s culture(s). There may well be elements of disarticulation, displacement, ‘dissemi-nation’, and unevenness in the uncontrollable and deconstructive processes implied by the inhabiting of the kind of third space Bhabha’s theory postulates, but there is more evidently, in these literatures, a constructive interplay between very

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 11

12/03/2014 14:39:50

12

The Literatures of the French Pacific

specific group cultures (shaped historically predominantly by ethnicity and by class rather than by colour) that produces distinctive and, in the New Caledonian case, often self-aware and strategically controlled forms of mixing. Overview of Chapters Our close examination of a number of socio-historical and cultural instances of actual mixing – avatars of hybridity – begins with the earliest representations of cultural encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples on Pacific beaches. These turn out to be less a reflection of any external reality than a product of a shared understanding of the world between a situated European writer (scientific explorer, naturalist, ethnographer) and reader. James Cook and Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, like Johann and Georg Forster and Jacques La Billardière, encounter native ‘New Caledonians’ largely through the lens of eighteenthcentury Enlightenment preconceptions, discourses, preoccupations, and intellectual frames of perception, most notably the revival of classical mythology and the figure of the noble (and the ignoble) savage. Recent work suggests that what Europe encountered in its Oceanian Other was largely itself. The influence of the rhetorical and social conventions of their own societies of origin, and of their personal preoccupations, on the gaze the Europeans brought to bear on the ‘South Seas Savage’ had given rise, in 1767, to Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s remarkably personal and astonishingly enduring Polynesian Eden. This South Seas paradise of sexually free young maidens, secular society, and bountiful nature derived in part from Denis Diderot’s critique of a restricted European society and his call for unfettered population growth. Bougainville’s accounts of the noble savage, like those of Captain Samuel Wallis who preceded him in Tahiti by nine months, appear to have reinforced the questions posed within the same frame of scientific exploration by the first visitors to the lands of the Melanesian natives or naturels – a darkerskinned savage rapidly tending to the ignoble. In New Caledonia, we will argue, the question of the sexual availability of indigenous women was, as in Tahiti, a significant if not always explicit one. Although these early accounts proceed from the observations, as well as the experiences and dispositions, of the particular Englishmen or Germans (Cook and the Forsters) and Frenchmen (d’Entrecasteaux) who first encountered

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 12

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

13

New Caledonians on those foreign shores, prevalent European beliefs, interpretive practices, and agendas can be detected, for example, in explorers’ accounts of indigenous women apparently terrorized into refusal of contact by their less than civilized men folk. The Europeans gain in the comparison, as do docile Melanesian women, whose gentleness and eagerness to please are compared favourably by Georg Forster to the behaviour of their less obedient European counterparts. An examination of the magnifying defects in the observer’s ‘scientific’ eighteenth-century spyglass that occluded serious comparisons of gender inequality, the question of different codes of behaviours, or of the traces of totem and taboo in accounts of indigenous response, introduce a certain doubleness or multiplicity of perspective into the retroactive reading of these early texts. As Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds, a reinterpretation of texts of first encounter in early New Zealand, has suggested, the misreading of the traditional challenge laid down by the throwing of a spear on Captain Cook’s arrival in 1767 at a place he then called Poverty Bay may have been one of the factors leading to the Maori dead left behind when the explorers sailed away. Similarly, as Chapter 2 argues, the Melanesian women who indicated by drawing their hands across their throats that Forster and Anders Sparmann stayed around them at their peril may well have been tapu, isolated from the village in menstrual huts. A particular form of hybridity, then, derives from the many layers of meaning still decipherable in these early texts or added to the texts over the intervening centuries by new modes of analysis. These include nineteenth-century colonialism, present postcolonialism, greater knowledge of indigenous social systems and practices, or, indeed, recent new theoretical frames such as hybridity and feminism. In the case of the early writings of discovery, in the overlays of different meanings available to the contemporary reader, the hybridity produced by cultural contact comes close to the notion of the palimpsest. Such a palimpsestic reading casts light back on the revised and positive account that Cook wrote for Europe of the cultivated terraces, food, and water he found when, somewhat by chance, he became the first white man to weigh anchor in Balade in 1769. It does this also on d’Entrecasteaux’s conversely pessimistic account of the endemic misery encountered when the Frenchman’s ship arrived in the same bay less than two decades later. Reading the explorers’ accounts back(wards) and accessing other, including indigenous, perspectives requires the creation of a palimpsestic third space in which different versions or layers can coexist. This is a space that ultimately gives the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 13

12/03/2014 14:39:50

14

The Literatures of the French Pacific

‘scientific’ writings of the explorers, opened up to questioning from within by their own subjectivities and uncertainties, both about what they observed and about their own project, a place among the founding texts of New Caledonian literary history. The book’s first – and itself deliberately hybrid – chapter presents what can be read of the responses of the indigenous people of New Caledonia between the lines in the European explorers’ texts, alongside a second set of foundation stories: the texts of Kanak oral tradition, themselves inevitably in translation. Like the stories and readings of first encounter by the eighteenth-century explorers, the retellings of the tales of oral tradition are a combined product of the meanings of the original versions and of the translator’s or re-teller’s personal beliefs, contexts, and purposes. Gender, too, can be discovered to be a significant element in influencing both the original telling and the rewriting of oral (hi) stories. In a major study of early New Caledonian literatures, François Bogliolo’s HDR thesis (2000) observes that the Kanak subject of the oral texts translated by the missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt at the end of the nineteenth century is on a journey of the spirit, on the path to self-conquest and knowledge of his god(s) in a universe of mythical harmony, much like the missionary himself. The characters of Louise Michel’s canaque songs and legends (1886) are heroic or self-sacrificial and predominantly female and, like their late nineteenth-century author– cultural translator, on an idealized universalized quest for reciprocity, liberty, and justice. Alban Bensa’s many contemporary transcriptions and translations focus on the contingent socio-political structures of a particular tribe and time, their pathways of alliance, and the negotiating of power relations within and between them in the exchange of women as brides. The ethnographer draws on the sociological approaches of his discipline and his own political commitments to independence. These, in many ways exemplary, translations of oral literature from the languages of the Other into French are investigated in depth in Chapter 2, ‘Writing (in) the Language(s) of the Other: Translation as third space’. Again, these translations are inevitably forms of rewriting through and into European idioms: the three canonical translators of Kanak oral literature – the red virgin (Louise Michel), the missionaryethnographer (Maurice Leenhardt), and the contemporary ethnographer (Alban Bensa) – all construct spaces of cultural encounter that facilitate forms of capture and transfer into French culture. This transfer is a form both of preservation and of Europeanization and modernization.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 14

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

15

Michel, Leenhardt, and Bensa, however, present three very different examples of European translations of Melanesian texts of oral tradition. The particular character of the third space produced is determined by the translator’s historical and personal (gendered) translation contexts. Additionally, the different ways in which the position and gender of the teller and the listener, reader, or translator come to add themselves to the tale told create a distinctive form of socio-linguistic mixing, which we have labelled translational hybridity. From these forms of hybridity produced in palimpsestic accounts of first encounter and translations of oral tradition, Chapter 3 moves to consider the strategic or political spaces constructed in the histories of exile and of home shared across all New Caledonian cultures. The figuration of Kanak exile as the violence of the denial of history (and land) to Kanak peoples, by the Kanak writer Gabriel Poédi (1989) for example, doubles the Kanak claim for a recognized separate subjectivity and the recovery of a lost sovereignty and home. A corresponding trope of exile in the texts of New Caledonians of European origin carries a claim to be part of the community, a citizen of the country, precisely through similar ‘dark wanderings’ and suffering (as evoked in the Noumea Agreement) in the struggle of the settler group to make a place in an often harsh new homeland. Adoption of topoi of loss and struggle for home throughout the different literatures of New Caledonia, each with its own distinctive history of displacement or victimization, is not fully accounted for by rivalry for future resources or competing claims to singular essence and purity. It can also be seen to correspond, if in limited respects, to Stuart Hall’s conception of diasporic identity as ‘the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity’ (1990: 237). However, nostalgia for a past and/or present home, and the search to establish roots and legitimacy by reconstituting the layers of a New Caledonian history and the spaces of memory that guarantee their own cultural specificity, place, legitimacy, and centrality, constitute (hi)stories of encounter with consciously political ends. Telling the past in the new literatures of New Caledonia, I argue, is a form of identity construction and strategic negotiation for all New Caledonian groups. This (conscious or unconscious) political character, and the considerable disparities and a-symmetries in the definitions and content of the common themes of exile, history, and home in the writings of the different cultural groups, call into question the adequacy of the notion of identity as hybridity (heterogeneity) to describe, in all their complex

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 15

12/03/2014 14:39:50

16

The Literatures of the French Pacific

detail, the differences between the writing groups and the circulation of themes between them. Following this examination of the strategic spaces created in the construction of New Caledonian histories, by the shared themes of exile and home(land), Chapter 4, ‘Locating the First Man in the (Hi) stories of Kanaky: Internal Kanak Hybridities’, compares the modes of recovery, recontextualizing, and rewriting of the Kanak foundation myth of the first man, Téâ Kanaké. The versions contrasted include Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s play-spectacle for the 1975 festival of cultural revival, published in Kanaké – Mélanésien de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Tjibaou and Missotte, 1976), Déwé Gorodé’s woman-centred Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000 (2000), and Denis Pourawa’s 2003 illustrated version for children, Téâ Kanaké: téâ kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wâro kê/L’Homme aux cinq vies [Tein Kanaké, the Man with Five Lives] (Pourawa, Mouchonnière, and Néaoutyine, 2003). All three writers identify their story as an adaptation of the Paicî version of the originary foundation myth, transcribed and translated (at least partially) into French. The traditions of oral history, in particular their performance forms, dialogue with the audience, and socio-political (or didactic) character dramatically mark all of these stories and distinguish them from European models. The Kanak mythico-historical text is situated close to the natural world, in proximity to particular features of New Caledonian landscape. Its adaptations in all three versions point to the political uses of the cosmological-historical events depicted and the dynamic character of oral tradition. Kënâké is the mountain Déwé Gorodé can see from her garden, lying on his back, a hero fallen during a war over the valley of the Câba from where numerous Kanak groups originated: connection to this figure grants certain lineages claim to this land as founders. Notwithstanding the generational and political gaps between Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Déwé Gorodé, and the young Denis Pourawa, all three (hi)stories share a sense of the centrality and recurring presence of the ancestors, of spiralling Kanak time and place and, alongside a story of cultural loss, carry a message of Kanak guardianship of the land, agency, and self-affirmation, of new Kanak history in the making. All point to obligations to the ancestors and those not yet born, and to the pathways of tradition. All also indicate the need for change to accommodate contact, modernization, and a fast-evolving new political future. Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s play-spectacle enacts the traditional welcome of strangers and the metaphor of boenando, the sacred feast that seals the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 16

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

17

alliance between (and the respective place of) host and guests surrounded by the inalterable presence of the spirits, the génies familiers. Pourawa makes the Paicî creation story into an indigenous version of evolution: a magico-material process that stages the status of the Kanak as first inhabitant. Tjibaou’s syncretic re-invention of the powerful ancestor Kanaké, who survives the arrival of the colonizing soldier, the evangelizing priest, and the materialistic businessman to revive the ancient (and daringly cannibal) feast of boenando as the capacity to accept and very materially incorporate the Other, is also a strategic vehicle to accelerate the process of decolonization through political negotiation along with a claim to cultural sovereignty. Analysts of Tjibaou’s texts (Bensa, Wittersheim, and Tjibaou, 1996) observe that these already speak of a faith in reconciliation and the efficacy of a ‘third’ and pluralistic way – a future shared society moving from a bicephalic to a more fraternal and mixed but equal nation eschewing the worst violence. The cultural universe in Déwé Gorodé’s Kënâké (by 2000, Déwé was adopting new spellings which attempted better to reflect the pronunciation of indigenous names, including sometimes spelling her own name, Gorodey or Görödé) is, as in Tjibaou or Pourawa’s version, one where being can be communal: where ‘being with the Others’, with the ancestors or the First Men, is being close to the maternal blood of the earth mother that gives life. The shared culture of origin of these three Kanak texts is never in doubt. However, alongside substantial intertextuality and interdependence, a close analysis reveals significant differences and indeed oppositions. For instance, Gorodé’s ambivalent play with language in a dialogue between Woman and Duée or Spirit (a duée unusually gendered feminine) indirectly puts Tjibaou’s patriarchal, masculinized traditional Kanak universe and his politics of reconciliation into question by placing women’s lives and emotions at the centre. Contesting women’s passive, subordinate roles and the phallocratic character of Kanaké’s political arrangements, her enigmatic text can be read as a veiled partial critique of the assassinated independence leader’s position as himself a First Man, a deliberate and willing martyr for the foundational political reconciliation embodied in the Matignon Agreement with France. For its part, Gorodé’s play reminds the spectator of the unspoken incest and fratricide that underpin both the origin myth and Kanak society. The mythico-poetic and also didactic version of Pourawa, representing the younger generation of Kanak writers, partially sets its adaptation of the proud traditional tale of the Ancestor within an urban and ethnically mixed rainbow society of modern storytellers and kids on skateboards.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 17

12/03/2014 14:39:50

18

The Literatures of the French Pacific

The differences within an emerging Kanak writing that itself creates internal hybridities, inner spaces of cultural encounter, and contestation, are further anatomized in Chapter 5, ‘The Paradoxical Pathways of the First Kanak Woman Writer: Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity’, this time in an analysis of the curious internal splitting or apparent cognitive dissonance – concurrent avowal and disavowal – within the work of the most significant of the published indigenous writers. Déwé Gorodé’s singular poetry, short stories, and novels refract the many intertexts that constitute an evidently hybrid world: the legacy of her grandfathers and father, native pastors and informants for the missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt; university in France and introduction to Marx and to the French classics as well as to Césaire and the poets of Négritude. Her involvement in indigenous movements took her to the United Nations to participate in the political denunciation of an oppressive colonial past and the affirmation of the present struggle for decolonization, independence, and shared power. So, too, did her concern for Pacific women’s condition within tradition. Despite these heterogeneous influences and a certain appropriation of the universal discourses of rights, Gorodé’s critical, deconstructive texts are first and foremost centred in the fluid local (Kanak) vision of the universe that her work represents in a parti pris of indigeneity. Déwé Gorodé’s spaces ‘between’, foregrounding the quotidian lives of women and directly or indirectly confronting masculinist political positions, are thus marked by a series of paradoxes. The texts of this poet, novelist, and political activist look back in pain, anger, and with fierce commitment to remembering (and recovering) what is lost. Yet they also increasingly position themselves in a critical relation to her own Kanak group and, as layers of the past resurface and circulate in the present, they denounce a probable, shadowy, age-old oppression of young women within tradition, still present in a compromised, hybrid, contemporary society. Gorodé’s paradoxical form of hybridity thus begins with the will to relegate the colonial other and Western rights discourse to the background, foregrounding a multiplicity of Kanak voices and thereby altering established and naturalized unequal power relations. Yet, the first Kanak novel, Gorodé’s L’Épave, positions its critical narrator, Éva, between the tribu or customary village and Nouméa la Blanche, in a no-man’s land. It challenges the nature of the power relations between the groups it addresses, the nature of their intersections, and ready-made or idealized assumptions about Kanak community.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 18

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

19

The binary oppositions of colonial discourse and the hierarchies of white and black, individual and group identity, word and silence, and French and Kanak are disturbed by a relative absence of white characters replaced in a number of cases by characters of Vietnamese or Muslim origin, similarly resistant descendants of indentured labourers or political déportés. Gorodé’s work illustrates the gaps in Bhabha’s elaboration of hybridity, most notably his failure to take full account of differences of gender. Her daring and some would say shocking first novel reverses the masculine discourses that underpin Kanak tradition, ‘writing back’ (to use Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s expression in their now classic 1998 work, The Empire Writes Back), to the maternal uncles to whom nothing can be refused, to the domination over generations of very young women by older men. It stages non-mainstream sexualities, still a taboo topic in the church-controlled tribu. This critical politics of liberation, set alongside a feminine Kanak ethics with an empathetic and personal identification with the everyday lives and knowledge of women at its centre, is, as I have argued earlier (Ramsay, 2004a), neither bicephalic nor simply in-between. Like the solidified lava-flow of Black Stone that constitutes the resistant feminine ground of being for the Ni-Vanuatu poet Grace Mera Molisa, herself also a rare Oceanian voice denouncing violence against women, the ‘rock’ of custom continues to stand at the passionate heart of Gorodé’s work: a rock that is central but that in her novella Ûte Mûrûnû, petite fleur de cocotier women must find a way around rather than their way back to. However, as Gorodé explained to me, ‘each generation must resolve the return of the past in its own way’ (Ramsay 2006). L’Épave [The Wreck], her very daring first novel, published in 2004 and reprinted in 2005, and the subject of the Chapter 6, uncompromisingly stages the unspoken within Kanak society: issues of desire, sexual possession, revenge, and of an incestuous ‘cannibalism’ quite unlike the redemptive cannibalism of Tjibaou. In this curious first Kanak novel, the proliferating central metaphors are those of wreckage and sorcery, assimilated at moments to sado-masochistic sexual bondage and represented by the figures of the devouring ogre and ogress, the witch and the sorcerer. These constitute a major challenge to the European reader’s expectation of a liberatory postcolonial text either ‘writing back’ to the centre, or working against the colonial grain. While it also does this, the novel fails to provide the expected portrait of a fascinatingly different Melanesia emerging from domination, or indeed a smoothly readable story with a recognizably novelistic aesthetic. The gaps between the various reading

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 19

12/03/2014 14:39:50

20

The Literatures of the French Pacific

publics, Metropolitan French, Caledonian, the small Kanak middle class for the French version, and their respective reading formations, produce a further form of hybridity, as these different interpretive communities are inscribed to differing extents within the text itself to forestall universalizing and depoliticizing readings. The novel also pre-empts the metropolitan systems ‘that reward oppositional intellectual projects’ or the ‘marketing of the margins’ of which Graham Huggan speaks in his study of the ‘postcolonial exotic’, which, he argues, identifies difference as an increasingly ‘marketable product’ (2001: 7). In the final instance, the shifting positions in Gorodé’s novel create dissonance – a ‘case’ only apparently ‘closed’, as in her short story, Affaire classée (1996) or what the Pacific critic Paul Sharrad, categorizing Oceanian writing, calls ‘unfinished business’ (2007). Gorodé’s interwoven and often barely distinguishable Kanak voices, and her deconstruction of terms in common use such as tribu, ‘custom’, ‘palaver’, and ‘consensus’, denounced in her partially autobiographical novel Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! ou ‘No more baby’ (2012) as ready-made or catch-all phrases that she must still of necessity use, may be the best available vehicle for speaking about the complexities of a hybridized contemporary customary society engaged in identity (re)construction. For, the reinvented terms do nonetheless ‘represent cultures and civilisations that are the victims of swift or lingering destruction by colonization’ (31). Gorodé’s first novel is marked by deep internal splitting and by differing subject positions, as her critical voices range to and fro between Western (colonial) and Kanak (male) oppression and Kanak women’s complicity with, or refusal of, abuse. Both sexual violence against women and children, within and beyond her own family, and the need for the liberation of female sexuality from puritanical Christianity are addressed, sometimes astonishingly directly, sometimes in a carefully coded form. Her subsequent collection of autobiographical ‘fictioned’ fragments, Graines de pin colonnaire [Seeds of the Kanak Pine] (2009) tell, more circumspectly, the intimate stories of women’s daily lives and difficult loves and of her own battle against cancer. Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! moves between a rewriting of New Caledonian history from the perspective of a Kanak independence activist, a writing of Déwé’s own childhood, and a critique of the importance of reproduction for Kanak women, whose childlessness can make them marginal to the group and arouse ever-present fears of sorcery. Exchanges between Caldoche (Calédonien) and Kanak cultures in New Caledonia principally concern texts and images shared between

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 20

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

21

cultures, whether mimicked, borrowed, appropriated, re-configured, or re-possessed. The nature of these (inter)textual encounters is traced out in Chapter 7 through the mixed fortunes and rewritings of the well-known story from oral tradition of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of Koné] or, more generically, ‘The Chief and the Lizard’, as Emma Sinclair-Reynolds entitles it in her 2013 doctoral thesis, which follows the multiple pathways from oral tradition to written text of forty-seven versions of the legend. This story rewrites themes central to many of New Caledonia’s literatures across cultural groups. The trope of a culture deeply rooted in the natural world is borrowed strikingly, for example, in Louis-José Barbançon’s La Terre du lézard [The Land of the Lizard]. This memoir, written by a self-identified ‘Oceanian of European origin’ (‘Océanien[s] d’origine européenne’ (Barbançon, 1992a: 41) constructs a world where the Word and the Land are living, active, benevolent forces (séjour paisible) and offer the Calédonien an identity, but alongside a terre violente or violent land of European and Kanak conflict, unequal power, and land-loss: the land of the avenging lizard. The two themes (of the benevolent and violent forces within the land) are again present and extended in Barbançon’s subsequent account of a ferocious nineteenth-century deportation of Europeans to New Caledonia and their difficult lives in the penal colony that nonetheless also becomes their living land. The restitution and reconciliation expressed in the traditional final line of the oral story of punishment for violation of taboo by hunting on another chief’s land – ‘And both of them are there, each in his own place today’ – echoes the lesson Barbançon learns from his old Kanak friend, Jérémie, that the Whites aroused the lizard in chasing Kanak from their land but that the land does not belong to anyone, ‘we belong to the land’. The back cover of the book echoes this lesson: ‘In school books, pupils are still taught that a rear-admiral took possession of this land in the name of France. From my Elder friend, without him needing books, I learned that it was this land that has taken possession of me’ [Dans les livres d’école, on continuera d’enseigner aux élèves qu’un contre-amiral a pris possession de cette terre au nom de la France. Auprès du Vieux, sans qu’il ait eu besoin de livres, j’ai appris que c’est cette terre qui a pris possession de moi]. Sinclair-Reynolds notes Barbançon’s analogy between ‘the chief’s flight around the Grande Terre, chased by the terrifying lizard-man’, and ‘the Caledonians running from pillar to post, searching for outside assistance, mainly from Metropolitan France, to resolve the issues connected to who has a legitimate right to be in New Caledonia’. She

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 21

12/03/2014 14:39:50

22

The Literatures of the French Pacific

draws the conclusion that, for Barbançon, ‘the answer lies with the land, not outside it, and he sees the failure of the Caledonians to engage in meaningful dialogue with Kanak as the reason they are still lost in the wilderness’ (Sinclair-Reynolds, 2013: 240). Barbançon’s respectful adoption of the Other’s view of the universe strengthens the hypothesis that the Kanak texts of oral tradition have marked New Caledonian literature more than has been commonly accepted. The logic of his incorporations is dynamic and dialogic, and his writing identifies closely with Kanak spirit without losing sight of the difficult Caledonian experience and heritage. This teacher and historian’s postcolonial hybrid text seeks out the traces that the indigenous and the settler communities have left on the face of the land. He has appropriated the term Oceanian (which this book will reserve for indigenous populations of the Pacific), a borrowing, as identification intended as homage. On the other hand, where the literature of the colonial founding fathers, also considered in this chapter, has adopted the tropes of séjour paisible and terre violente, this has most often been largely within a binary logic; in this case intertextuality most often constitutes an appropriation that may be respectful but that turns the borrowed element to another, often quite different, purpose. Jean Mariotti, the so-called father of the New Caledonian novel, stages the loss of séjour paisible, of man’s harmony with the world or original transparency, as a fracture. The figure of the devouring lizard is a force of evil to be battled but in a heroic cosmic struggle, only partly of this world. Georges Baudoux, the second most significant colonial writer, presents violent cannibalism, the mysteries of the lizard, and its avatars as elements of the fascinating barbarity of non-civilized man. In the contemporary period, Catherine Régent’s Valesdir, a quintessential popular colonial novel of the trials and tribulations of settlement, represents the bush and its native inhabitants as a dark and even dangerous mass, and the séjour paisible is largely identified with a return to civilized Europe. In some of the novels of the colonial period, the feminized and racialized land (the dark continent) is presented as an unknown territory to be conquered and made fertile and benevolent, this possession justified by the threat of the vengeful and irrational lizard. Locusts, drought, cyclone and disease that destroy the coffee plants, plague, sorcery, the menace of native uprising, uncontrolled mining and industrial development, and self-interested contemporary politics combine to give Jacqueline Sénès’ epic contemporary history novel the title of Terre violente. However,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 22

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

23

the sweat and sacrifice of the small settler family, and the pioneering John Sutton’s body, buried in the soil for which he toiled, make at least portions of the land a séjour paisible or ‘peaceable abode’: a hard-won resting-place, not only for the spirits of the Kanak ancestors but also for those of the pioneer community. The re-staging of the old story of the Chief and the devouring Lizard figures the threat of the various modes of incorporation both within cultures, and of one culture by another. The cross-cultural examination of these tropes of food and sorcery reveals commonalities, increasing evidence of acceptance of mixing, but also, once again, assertion of separation and difference. Intertextuality, a form of this cultural mixing – indeed, a form of ‘mimicry’ or hybridity – demonstrates varying degrees of appropriation and different modes of incorporation from author to author and can be employed for a variety of agendas including those of self-distancing and differentiation. In Chapter 8, ‘Writing Métissage in Non-Kanak Literatures: From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities’, the grand colonial discourse of the civilizing mission for the glory of a sacred mother France, or the pioneer aesthetic of endurance and toughness, of the duty and energy required by the ambitious miner or settler (Banaré, 2010), is shown to underpin most of the New Caledonian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, the dream of Empire is also contrasted with this distinctive colony’s many difficulties on the ground, including Kanak uprisings, agricultural crises and financial problems, the taint of the presence of the convicts, escaped prisoners, and the challenges to the discourse of rehabilitation through the ethic of work that inspired the penitentiary system. As Eddy Banaré’s 2010 doctoral thesis on the literatures of the mine points out, the novels of George Baudoux, prospector and son of an administrator of the penitentiary, are categorized as colonial for their resonance with the discourse of the heroic adventures of the stockman or mining prospector, their exotic clichés of the savagery and trickery of the Kanak, and their mysterious romances with Kanak women. Yet, as Banaré demonstrates, the texts of Baudoux also exhibit a deep interest in Kanak tales and customs and an early awareness of the profanation of Kanak sacred places and lands: the prospector himself sees the wounds made in the sides of the mountains after Rothschild’s foundation of the company Le Nickel in 1888 develops nickel mining into a significant enterprise. In his earliest text, ‘Sauvages et civilisés’, written in 1922 and published in Les Blancs sont venus (1979), Baudoux asks whether the savages might not be the Europeans in this

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 23

12/03/2014 14:39:50

24

The Literatures of the French Pacific

respect. The other ‘father’ of New Caledonian literature, Jean Mariotti, himself the son of a convict and somewhat less persuaded of the march of civilization in New Caledonia than Baudoux, needed to return to Europe in order to be able to write about his homeland, like many early colonial writers such as Katherine Mansfield. Mariotti’s in-between texts express an almost exclusive and deep identification with the Pacific land and its mysteries as they recount the idealized legends of a Kanak hunter and his son Poindi to a Parisian audience. This cultural triangulation of exchange between France, settler community, and ‘Kanaky’ creates evident forms of hybridity but also a certain progression. Although Mariotti was the writer chosen to produce the Livre du centenaire in 1953 to celebrate a century of French history in the colony, the greedy, suspicious prospectors in his later novel Daphné succeed only in blowing themselves up and their island. Other writers embedded in the colonial system play similar roles of critic and conscience of New Caledonian society or of imperialism. In the late nineteenth century, the Socialist déportés from the Paris Commune produced a number of texts attacking the capitalist colonial system, including its ‘contracts of human flesh’ with indentured labourers from the New Hebrides and later with Indochina, Java, and, in a modified form, with Japan. Alin Laubreaux’s fiercely satirical novels from the 1930s illustrate the deeply stratified, rigid character of this colonial society, once again from the position of both insider and critical outsider. In these literary texts, it appears that the colonial grand récit is itself less grand, singular, or unequivocal than official discourse would have it appear: it is shown to be a discourse split by internal contradictions, interrogations, and doubts – moral ambiguities, fissured from within, as Bhabha might put it. Some colonial texts, then, carry within them the seeds of the postcolonial. Yet, as this chapter also demonstrates, the premises that racial or cultural Otherness is fatal to relationships and that colonial society lacks the capacity to embrace diversity are common to all these writers, who incorporate Kanak characters into their texts principally to show the ultimate impossibility of métissage (incorporation) and the need to choose one’s camp. The founding discourses of imperialism will not be fully challenged until the mid-1970s. The examination of the spaces of mixing in more contemporary novels by New Caledonians of European origin in the second section of Chapter 8, on the other hand, suggests that the focus of much of the present rewriting of the colonial era is on the (still difficult) movement towards just such a métissage, at least in the form of co-habitation as a mode of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 24

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

25

destin commun. These novels coming out of and after colonialism that we might tentatively postulate to be postcolonial are, however, again constructed around an experience of New Caledonia that oscillates between the difficulties of claiming and taming a physically harsh land, and the portrayal of this nature/culture as home. In the accounts of European origin, the ‘settling’ of the land lies in its domestication, pacification, and cultivation, often assuming, or attempting to negotiate, a harmonious coexistence with natives and nature. In Jacqueline Sénès’ Terre Violente (1987), for example, the ‘hybridity’ that takes the form of an increasing contemporary openness to difference and cross-cultural encounter could more justifiably be designated as a movement towards the recognition and acceptance of métissage. Like the autobiography of José-Louis Barbançon, the fiction of Claudine Jacques and Nicolas Kurtovitch is also in search of an inclusive Caledonian culture, but one that recognizes and respects its distinctive histories and components rather than setting up Bhaba’s restless, disseminating movements to and fro between cultures. Kurtovitch explicitly contests the relevance of the notion of cultural hybridity to New Caledonian society: he characterizes this society as requiring the individual, even within mixed marriage, to make a choice between two distinct ways of living, allowing the label ‘métisse’ to be applied only to literary creation. Frédéric Ohlen’s poetry similarly experiments with ‘speaking with’ Kanak and constructing a dialogical identity. However, attempts to achieve empathy or self-identification by donning the mask and seeing through the eyes of the monster can, as in Baudoux, continue to create somewhat problematic mixed identities, as in Kurtovitch’s first novel, Good Night Friend. The male author’s self-identification with the young female Kanak protagonist, witness to her mother’s possession by a sorcerer and to the subsequent chain of murderous Kanak revenge when the first peoples increasingly come to claim a place in the White city – Noumea – raises a number of questions for the reader and perhaps indeed for the writer. Identification in Kurtovitch has most often been effected through a further mediating or ‘third’ cultural space: the Caldoche writer’s meditative ‘Cold Mountain’ of mystical Eastern inspiration provides the possibility of a less troubling triangulation of the relation with Kanak. The protagonists in the recent work of the leading non-Kanak writer, Claudine Jacques, accept even physical incorporation (being cannibalized), and the sacrifice of self, in the hope of facilitating the preservation and the mixing of ancient knowledge and the deeper cultural values of all groups. Action in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 25

12/03/2014 14:39:50

26

The Literatures of the French Pacific

these novels takes place often against somewhat apocalyptic violent backgrounds. Such identification with the knowledge of the Other has a range of degrees and purposes; not all are so extreme, although sado-masochistic violence is a curiously common thread in New Caledonian writing. Settler writers like Hélène Savoie, for example, speak of a shared past, and a nostalgic one for this writer obliged to leave Vanuatu after independence in 1980, based on common memories, stories, everyday experiences (the General Store in the New Hebrides) and a spiritual connection to the land. This common past might constitute the beginning of an understanding that would bring the Melanesian and the Caledonian of European descent together in a Pacific space that would constitute a centre rather than a French periphery. By refusing French identities and adopting Kanak traditional mythologies – for example, motifs of the bao (god or spirit but also the dead body) and allegories of the descent into the Kanak afterworld, Savoie’s borrowings, her forms of métissage represent a quest for inclusion that can also be found in the work of writers of Metropolitan origin, some poignantly aware of their position as outsiders in ‘Kanaky-New Caledonia’. What have been called in New Caledonian political jargon the ‘other ethnicities’, the third group on the present political chessboard, have developed very different forms of métissage again. Jean Vanmai first came to notice with Chân dang, his fictional but historically researched account of the difficult lives of the ‘Tonkinois’ from French Indochina who came as indentured labourers to the mines and plantations or as domestic servants to the settlers in the late nineteenth century In Vanmai’s work the image of dignified respect, political reserve, and active economic participation brought to the nascent New Caledonian ‘collectivity’ by the group of indentured labourers from which he descends again foregrounds the distinctiveness and specificity of this group rather than its hybridity. Vanmai’s other vast historical novel, Pilou-Pilou: chapeaux de paille, based on the rigid categories and separations of the penitentiary regime and the hardships faced by its victims, similarly presents a social group with its own separate (hi)story of suffering and social contribution, its separate identity, but justifying its place in the new country. Chapter 9 reflects first on the implications of the array of forms of mixing found in New Caledonian literatures for the multicultural inclusive future set up by the Noumea Agreement as a blueprint for the new country. Writers have most generally depicted mixed-race relations

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 26

12/03/2014 14:39:50

Introduction

27

and cultural métissage less as a sign of renewal or inclusion than as a threat of cultural disintegration. The accounts of cultural encounter examined, however, provide some, albeit limited, evidence of growing interest in the creation of resistant, dynamic, and productive – if still ambivalent and sometimes ‘undecideable’ – third spaces. This chapter’s investigation of the way in which terms such as multiculturalism, syncretism, métissage, and hybridity can interface or work together leads to a deeper incursion into the theoretical debates around hybridity: the second part of the chapter returns to the question of whether this shifting and perhaps overused and over-generalized theoretical notion is indeed a productive framework within which to consider the emerging Pacific literatures of ‘Kanaky/New Caledonia’. This discussion brings together the conclusions of the earlier chapters to argue that Pacific literatures themselves, much as they modulate the political notion of, and response to, a multicultural future, point not only to the great variety but also the limitations of postcolonial literary theories of hybridity. The ‘unhomely’ character of many of the mixed spaces examined and the ‘edginess’ (Sharrad, 2007) of certain forms of cohabitation parallel a generalized reticence in relation to multicultural inclusion and transculturality. The study of New Caledonian literary texts reveals a variety of third spaces of great interest, some of which challenge original homogeneity as well as inequalities of power. But, despite an increasing willingness also to entertain the social and ideological project of a destin commun, what still emerges most distinctly is a sense of an identity formed by an enduring and distinctive local past – a sense of belonging to a distinctive group in a very particular way rather than to a collective imaginary.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 27

12/03/2014 14:39:51

1

Behind the Accounts of First Encounter and the Tales of Oral Tradition Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

Part 1: Behind the Accounts of First Encounter The earliest accounts of the ‘discovery’ of New Caledonia were published in Europe in 1777 from journals written by members of James Cook’s expedition and, later, from the French expedition led by Bruny d’Entrecasteaux.1 The first European to bear witness to contact with the indigenous peoples, Captain James Cook weighed anchor in Balade in September 1774 and remained in that north-east coast location for eight days. Some nineteen years later, d’Entrecasteaux’s ship used Cook’s accounts to navigate its way through the break in the reef into the same harbour, where his party was to spend three weeks. Like the English explorers before him, Jacques La Billardière mentions the surprisingly complex system of terraces and irrigation that suggest a certain technological sophistication. Nonetheless, the discrepancy between the relatively positive accounts by members of the first expedition (James Cook, Johann and Georg Forster, Anders Sparrman), who describe terraced yam plantations and friendly natives, reinforced by the representations of William Hodges, Cook’s painter, and the more jaundiced texts of the Frenchmen (Bruny d’Entrecasteaux and Jacques La Billardière), which speak of an arid and hungry land of thieves and cannibals apparently affected by recent warfare and food shortages, has given rise to considerable speculation.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 28

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

29

The Royal Society had sent Cook back on a second voyage toward Terra Australis Incognita, the fabled Southern Continent, to measure the transit of the planet Venus in order to obtain information on the earth’s distance from the sun. In a study of translations of Cook’s first encounters with indigenous peoples on the large island he named New Caledonia, Diane Walton (2004) suggests that the European’s discovery of this land was apparently something of an afterthought, but that he seems to have achieved his objectives: to reach a safe harbour by finding a pass through the dangerous reef and to replenish his ships’ supplies of food and water. He was able to continue his celestial observations and arrived on land in time to observe the solar eclipse of 6 September 1774. Cook’s judgement is a positive one, of a people who are amicable, honest, and helpful: ‘They are a strong, robust, active, well-made people, courteous and friendly, and not in the least addicted to pilfering, which is more than can be said of any other nation in this sea’ (Cook, 1997 [1777]): 258). D’Entrecasteaux’s accounts, on the other hand, reveal that he had enjoyed little success (Pisier, 1976). He had found no trace of La Pérouse, in search of whose lost expedition the new post-revolution French Republic had sent him. The natives of Balade had provided his men with little in the way of food and water, and he had had to bury his great friend Huon de Kermadec hastily at night for fear his body might be eaten by the ‘savages’. He himself would die not long after. The accounts of Cook’s and d’Entrecasteaux’s voyages reveal their own genesis in previous texts (the influence of Cook’s text on d’Entrecasteaux, for example) and provide the first and historically all-important portraits of pre-European Melanesian society in New Caledonia. They must be read, I argue, for their mixed character of referentiality and textuality – that is, for sources that are both circumstantial (outcomes of observation) and intertextual. The content of these narratives of encounter between civilized explorer and savage peoples is couched in a predominantly scientific language, but with aesthetical pretensions, despite, or rather thrown into relief by, Cook’s apology for lacking ‘the elegance of a fine writer’ (1777: 148). Their substance is an effect both of the particular events of the respective New Caledonian expeditions and of the idioms available to express them: in particular, the rhetoric of Enlightenment culture and modernity, still firmly rooted in classicism. Both the English and French texts reflect general eighteenth-century philosophical concepts of objective knowledge, reason, and universal humanity, although Rousseau’s noble savage is already somewhat less in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 29

12/03/2014 14:39:51

30

The Literatures of the French Pacific

evidence as a touchstone for the darker New Caledonian native than in accounts of landings in Tahiti. Both speak to a European reading public avid for narratives of voyages, romantic wilderness, and encounters with the ‘Other’ on exotic foreign beaches. Both texts are influenced by intellectual fashions and ethical codes in Europe, and conform to the reporting conventions for scientific knowledge acquired through expeditions such as Bougainville’s, based on the observation, collection, and classification of biological and natural evidence. A high-principled and respected naval officer, a gentleman who had waxed lyrical before the strange and grandiose wilderness of the harbour in Tasmania and its awe-inspiring if melancholy isolation, as well as the natural goodness of its natives, d’Entrecasteaux was influenced in his response to the New Caledonian environment by the published accounts of his respected predecessor, Cook. His own account of Balade is all the more disillusioned in that the waterholes mentioned by Cook turned out to be dry, and the honest natives or naturels that Cook’s expedition recorded seem to him ‘thieving savages’. D’Entrecasteaux’s accounts, like La Billardière’s, are obsessed with cannibalism and theft of property. From the accounts of Captain Cook and Mr Forster, I had attributed the mild and simple customs that I believed they possessed and the tranquillity I presumed that they enjoyed, to this truly unusual situation that seems to isolate these islanders from the rest of the world and must protect them from the invariably fatal visits of strangers. But from the time we became acquainted with this barbaric people, I discovered that the barrier surrounding them serves to contain them within their borders, and prevents others being eaten by them. That is the fate which must befall unfortunate navigators shipwrecked on such a perilous coastline, who would be forced to seek asylum amongst these ferocious savages. 2

D’Entrecasteaux hypothesizes that the struggle to defend the goods Cook had bestowed upon some natives against the covetousness of other groups who had received nothing had led to the skeletal forms and pitiful situation he was witnessing. We decided that the inhabitants were at war during our stay at Balade, or that hostilities had just ceased, because we saw a great number of men with recent wounds. Besides, the human flesh that we saw them eat, which could only be that of their enemies, suggested that the hostilities were fairly recent; we could not suppose that they would be so cruel as to keep their victims alive for long; the hunger which stalks them would not permit them this barbarous refinement, the very idea of which brings a shudder.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 30

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

31

I am inclined to believe that the goods left by Captain Cook at Balade had brought war upon the inhabitants of this area; and that this war had not gone well for them, since they retained nothing which they had received as presents or as barter. Our sojourn could be equally disastrous to them. Indeed, the various items that Europeans give to the people that they visit must excite jealousy and envy from those who have received nothing, and incite bloody wars. The spoils gained from these wars, whose single goal is to remove from a tribe goods to which the neighbouring tribe has no rights, cannot be considered as anything other than public theft perpetrated with violence. This must create the taste for private theft: perhaps this is one of the causes of the introduction of this vice among the inhabitants of New Caledonia, if they were really free of it when Cook visited them. A fairly large number of abandoned huts tended to confirm our belief that some scourge had afflicted this land; the signs of devastation, which were encountered at every turn, led me to believe that this affliction was that of war. Extremes of misery were particularly evident in the interior of the land; the women and children we met there were mere skeletons: it was a sight that aroused compassion […] The paucity of resources that this island offers, the surrounding reefs, the ferocity of the inhabitants, even the difficulty of finding water although it is fairly abundant there, all these serve to keep navigators away. (de Rossel, 1808: 354–5, 358)

D’Entrecasteaux’s hypothesis of misery and ferocity of course fits with Rousseau’s tenet that man was naturally good but that society or civilization had corrupted him. Not coincidentally, this grimmer picture would somewhat de-mythify the legend of d’Entrecasteaux’s more successful predecessor. Does d’Entrecasteaux’s mixed explanation, both textual and circumstantial, of why the two portraits of pre-European Kanak society were so astonishingly different satisfy a contemporary reader? To what extent was it the context of European Enlightenment that made Cook’s writing on the Other relatively non-judgemental and generally positive and benevolent? If this was due in part, for example, to his explicit instructions to show ‘civility and regard’ for any natives encountered, such general ‘philosophical’ contexts and ideas were shared by d’Entrecasteaux. Perhaps it was the personal factor, then, that lay behind Cook’s descriptions: his particular character and circumstances, prior voyages, interest in the Pacific region, and increasing acquaintance and empathy with its peoples. Yet Cook’s accounts were often written after the fact or later revised: it is evident that he was influenced, at least to some extent, by the expectations of his readers and his awareness

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 31

12/03/2014 14:39:51

32

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of the conventions of travel narratives of the time. His writings can of course be nuanced by comparison with other contemporaneous accounts. Cook’s praise of the inhabitants for friendliness, courtesy, and hospitality during a short excursion from Balade into the mountains of the interior from where they caught a glimpse of the sea at Nehoue Bay is echoed by Sparrman and Georg Forster. However, although Cook is able to find ‘a picture for Romance’ in the landscapes of the excursion, Georg Forster describes the sparsely populated north-east as ‘extremely dreary’ or again as ‘barren and unprofitable country’ (5 September 1774). In the case of the accounts of contact in New Zealand, Anne Salmond’s 2003 study, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, argues for a further overlay of textual meaning that derives directly from the influence of Polynesians on Cook and his crew, both of those who travelled with them such as his Tahitian interpreter, Tupaia, and of the natives who interacted with the ships’ crews on the beaches. Salmond illustrates this with her description of the mock trial and execution of a sacrificial animal the crew entitled ‘a cannibal dog’. This was an indirect lesson for Cook after the massacre of some of his crew at Ship’s Cove; an attempt to push the Captain to adopt the indigenous principles of utu or retribution he had hitherto refused. In this instance, his men perceived reprisal (reciprocity) to be necessary to preserve their captain’s mana or prestige and indigenous order. An old metaphor recently popularized within literary theory by Gérard Genette provides a tool for figuring the complex influences on these pre-colonial accounts in a postcolonial era. This is the figure of palimpsest, the idea that one text or one reading can conceal another; of layers of meanings (or readings) superposed on an original text that is itself almost effaced. In this figure, the meanings of the source text become multiple and mobile, traces that are not single or fixed but contextual and textual, and perhaps distorted. On one hand, the interpretive paradigm that seems to be filtering Cook’s resolutely positive account, despite some intimation of penury and sterility, is that of a Rousseauesque golden age of the noble savage, permitting an indirect critique of the materialism and economic inequalities of Cook’s own society. On the other hand, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of the non-European, for example: to read behind the lines of Cook’s narrative of the gift of what was perhaps a toadfish by his hosts on his arrival in Balade, consumed despite the warnings of some of the crew, and making many of the Europeans on board very ill. This event can be seen as a perfidious attempt on the lives of intruders, an act of duplicity

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 32

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

33

or savagery, or indeed of intelligent self-defence. One less Eurocentric interpretation has been advanced for understanding this ‘gift’: that the Kanak were testing their assumption that the white strangers were ancestors or spirits, analogous to what Anne Salmond has called goblins in the context of the New Zealand Maori reception of Cook’s ships from 1767. The possibility of such multiple readings is applicable to other early encounters in the Pacific. In Tahiti, too, in 1767, Salmond contends, the frighteningly destructive guns of Captain Samuel Wallis’s ship The Dolphin may well have been seen as producing bolts of lightning and great claps of thunder that linked this ‘canoe without an outrigger’ to Oro, the all-powerful deity of fertility and war. A reading of the attack on the boats later sent out from the ship might derive from an understanding of the prohibition that prevented craft from going out on the lagoon during periods of sacred ritual to the god. When Louis-Antoine de Bougainville arrived soon after, in 1768, the encounter was again between the very different concepts of the European Enlightenment and the cosmology and local politics of the Polynesians of Tahiti. Thus, despite the warring aristocratic ari’i or chiefs and the sacrificial rituals of the arioi, the priests, Philibert Commerson, one of the scientists on board, could still write: Born under the most beautiful of skies, fed on the fruits of a land that is fertile and requires no cultivation, ruled by the fathers of families rather than by kings, they know no other Gods than Love. Every day is dedicated to it, the entire island is its temple, every woman is its altar, every man its priest. And what sort of women? you will ask. The rivals of Georgian women in beauty, and the sisters of the unclothed Graces. (Dunmore, 2002b: 94)

The evidently gendered nature of the classically inspired interpretations of Commerson will be considered in greater detail later in this chapter. Georg Forster’s reflection on the attitude of the natives after the incident of the poisonous fish in Balade in his A Voyage Round the World (‘The temper of these people in general was indolent, and almost destitute of curiosity’) (Georg Forster, 2000: 1:580) could be read in conjunction with other later readings to show that once the natives discovered that the white men did not have the necessary magic to protect themselves against the effects of the poison fish, their initial interest in the visitors turned to the relative indifference postulated by Forster. Such a mix of overlaid readings can be described as palimpsestic.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 33

12/03/2014 14:39:51

34

The Literatures of the French Pacific

A further story of failed reciprocity can now be read alongside and into the Balade accounts, revealing the problems of different frames of reference and understanding in the earlier encounters. As he was preparing to leave, Cook followed his offering of dogs with a gift of a young boar and a sow to the chief, Teabooma, but was seemingly unable to prevail upon the ‘grave old man’ (1997: 257) he first encountered to accept his gift. The European finally succeeded in persuading the chief and ‘eight or ten middle-aged persons seated in a circle’ to accept the piglets. He reported that they had received him and his pigs with great courtesy. Two men left and fetched six yams, then presented them as a gift in return before Cook took leave and went on board. Georg Forster’s record of this saga of the pigs is quick to point out the moral of the gift, not as the reciprocity of gift-giving, later argued to be the fundamental principle of this Other society, but in terms more specific to his eighteenth-century European era and his own temperament. The pigs, he observed, were offered to ‘a nation whose good, inoffensive behaviour seemed highly to deserve such a present’. Forster applies Enlightenment reason and the values of his time to his observation that because these people were so deserving ‘we redoubled our efforts to convince them of their error, and at last prevailed upon them to keep the pigs’. The initial refusal of the gift is explained in the following comment: ‘The poor natives of New Caledonia had tasted no other animal food than fish and birds, and therefore the introduction of a quadruped into their economy, could not fail to surprise them’ (Georg Forster, 2000: 1:587). Two decades later, d’Entrecasteaux, the diligent reader of Cook and Forster, would note that there was no sign of the pigs Cook had offered, nor of the multiple offspring promised. Narratives of First Encounter as ‘Translation’ and Third Space These (pre-)colonial texts have been opened up to other readings again by contemporary work on the translation of difference informed by the cultural turn in postcolonial theory (Bassnett and Trivedi, 1999). This ‘turn’ sees cultural translations as closer to target texts than to source texts to the extent that they are self-reflexive: determined and explained by the conventions and constraints that produce and govern them. Production and reception of translations are argued to be dependent on systems within the larger cultural system of the target culture (Gentzler, 2002: 29). This shift in focus, from fidelity and respect for the source

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 34

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

35

text to analysis of the effects of the target text, or the constraints on the target text as part of a system, determining the translation’s receivability, has been accompanied by a rethinking of the relation between source and target texts through hybridity as a spatial metaphor. Hybridity, in this instance, is figured less as a graft than as a Venn diagram. Two intersecting cultural systems produce an overlap as in the translation theorist Anthony Pym’s ‘interculture’ (2003), or a ‘third space’ as in the theoretical writing of Homi Bhabha. Translations are always in the middle, and this interculture can connote either limitation or new creative possibilities. Bhabha, for example, sees this as a privileged Third place from which to renegotiate difference between colonizer and colonized. In-between spaces, for the postcolonial theorist, are those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. ‘These in-between spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of self-hood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself’, writes Bhabha (1994: 1–2). As Jonathan Rutherford puts this, ‘the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace original movements from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the “Third Space” which enables other positions to emerge’ (1990: 207). Identities in this frame are not monolithic – rather, there are multiple identifications. This figuring of hybridity as productive in-betweenness for translation has also been contested, and such liminal space denied pre-eminence or redefined. Maria Tymoczko, for example, argues that translators are always grounded in the politics of their place and time, and contemporary translators (readers) are grounded in the postcolonial era. She notes that for dominant centres of power, the problem with translators may not be that they have divided loyalties or that they stand between cultures but rather that they adopt a mobile and changing position, becoming involved in divergent ideologies and agendas of subversion (2003). However, Tymoczko too is figuring a nomadic to and fro movement not so different from Bhabha’s less than stable interstices. Lawrence Venuti, for his part, deplores the fact that translation, like ethnographic description, ‘rewrites the foreign text in domestic dialects and discourses’ (1998: 67). This postcolonial translation theorist makes a case for ‘foreignizing’ rather than ‘domesticating’ the translation, retaining the ‘strangeness’ of the source text and refusing to create a smooth and familiar text from difference. The shared project that seems to lie behind much of this theory is to get closer to difference, and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 35

12/03/2014 14:39:51

36

The Literatures of the French Pacific

express a fuller understanding of it within what Venuti labels an ‘ethics of difference’. At the level of the rhetoric, there are some indications of fault lines in what Venuti might describe as the ‘domesticating’ eighteenth-century narratives of first contact. The constant use of litotes and, alongside such understatement, the frequent attenuation of a statement or observation to give it the status of conjecture is most striking in Cook’s accounts. A lack of directness or of explicit analysis often leaves his apparently scientific text open to more than one reading. It is difficult, for example, to read the sentiment behind expressions of opinions such as: ‘The sterility of the country will apologise for the natives not contributing to the wants of the navigator’ (Cook, 1997: 263). Rhetorical indirectness, qualification, and irony are also features of the French writing. Nicholas Thomas’s study of the detail of Cook’s often fascinating logs and journals finds a principle of uncertainty at work behind the empiricism: ‘these sources are […] also replete with intriguing revisions, omissions, misunderstandings and small cover-ups’ and ‘the writing up of the voyage remains fractured and deeply ambiguous’ (Thomas, 2003: xxiv). Cook’s text itself explicitly points to a degree of uncertainty in his understanding of the meanings of the events he is witnessing. Here we found the same Chief who had been seen in one of the canoes in the morning. His name, we now learnt, was Teabooma, and we had not been on shore above ten minutes before he called for silence. Being instantly obeyed by every individual present, he made a short speech and soon after another Chief, having called for silence, made a speech also. It was pleasing to see with what attention they were heard. Their speeches were composed of short sentences, to each of which two or three old men answered by nodding their heads and giving a kind of grunt, significant, as I thought, of approbation. It was impossible for us to know the purport of these speeches but we had reason to think they were favourable to us, on whose account they doubtless were made. I kept my eyes fixed on the people all the time and saw nothing to induce me to think otherwise. (Cook, 1997: 250–1)

Cook’s self-recognized conjecture as to the purport of the speeches and body language of his interlocutors, and of the exact nature and purposes of the welcome he and his crew received, opens his text to more than one literary reading. Other information is inscribed, but often indirectly – to be discovered only by reading over, between, and behind the lines on the page and considering Cook’s own rewriting as a function of his project of publication and, as Jonathan Lamb has argued, as part of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 36

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

37

European struggle to ‘preserve the self’: ‘The uncertainties that troubled the stability of the European self were intensified in the South Pacific at the same moment they were being reflected in the Polynesian self’ (Lamb, 2001: 5). This situation calls for a reading back(wards), the creation of a third space of reading that attempts to recover an indigenous perspective. Such a reading from both sides would enable these empirical texts to be seen as founding texts of ‘Caledonian’ literature. 3 Like a translator of Cook, Forster, d’Entrecasteaux, or La Billardière’s texts of exploration, the reader bridges two periods and cultures (eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, English and French). How far can the postcolonial reader also position herself between European and non-European cultural spaces to see with Kanak eyes and hear with Kanak ears? Can we translate between colonial and post-colonial or indeed post-feminist understandings, burdened as we are with our own cultural baggage? In his Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (1778) Johann Reinhold Forster noted that ‘the females at Tanna, Mallicolo, and New Caledonia were […] obliged to carry burdens, and to take upon themselves every laborious and toilsome part of a toilsome business. This unhappy situation has nevertheless been productive of an advantage, which in our opinion, should rate them above their surly lords and oppressors’. Although ‘constant acts of indelicacy, oppression and inhumanity’ reduce the women to the ‘most wretched beings, this very oppression and the more delicate frame of their bodies together with the finer and more irritable texture of their nerves, have contributed more towards the improvement and perfection of their intellectual capacities, than those of the men’. Used to submitting to the will of their males, they have, Forster continues, ‘been early taught to suppress the flights of passion; cooler reflection, gentleness, and every method for obtaining the approbation, and for winning the good-will of others have taken their place’. Forster’s reasoning brings him to the conclusion that since subjugated indigenous women are docile, agreeable, and anxious to please, this must in time ‘naturally contribute to soften that harshness of manner, which is become habitual in the barbarous races of men; and all this may perhaps prepare them for the first dawnings of civilization’. Enlightenment rhetoric is at work here, as the ideals of improvement and progress are put forward, but in a curious inversion that reveals a certain misogyny. It is the docile and subservient Kanak woman who is the index of that civilization that Europeans, as represented by Forster, believe they are bringing to

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 37

12/03/2014 14:39:51

38

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the ‘savage and barbarous tribes of the South-Sea’ (Johann Reinhold Forster, 1778: 259) Cook’s apparently objective account of his arrival at Balade includes similar observations that seem to suggest the inferior status of women. I made presents to all those my friend pointed out, who were either old men or such as seemed to be of some note; but he took not the least notice of some women who stood behind the crowd, holding my hand when I was going to give them some beads and medals. (Cook, 1997: 250–1)

The published texts drawn from the observations of Johann and Georg Forster or indeed La Billardière’s French text nineteen years later, can be read as early ethnographic portraits of Melanesian women’s subordinate position in traditional society, at least as this existed at the time of the arrival of the European explorers. Yet Georg Forster’s reference to the ‘finer’ and more irritable texture of women’s nerves clearly owes much to a European culture that saw hysteria as a defining character of femininity (Georg Forster, 1778: 570–1). Cook’s observations on women, too, use the received value of female ‘chastity’ and the more ambivalent notion of female ‘coquetry’ as a yardstick and the earlier accounts of the New Cythera form the basis of his observations. The women of this country, and likewise those of Tanna, are, so far as I could judge, far more chaste than those of the more eastern islands. I never heard that one of our people obtained the least favour from any one of them. I have been told that the ladies here would frequently divert themselves by going a little aside with our gentlemen, as if they meant to be kind to them, and then would run away laughing at them. Whether this was chastity or coquetry, I shall not pretend to determine, nor is it material, since the consequences were the same. (Cook, 1997: 263–4)

Forster is manifestly unaware of any investment he might have personally in the qualities that keep women ‘gentle’ and anxious to please despite ‘oppression’ by their men, or of any link between the two patriarchal societies. A contemporary feminist analysis can peel back certain layers of the meanings underpinning his observations and (mis)understandings in this narrative of encounter. Forster’s text can be read in the light of postcolonial understandings of the ways colonial and patriarchal discourses justify inequalities of power. A second explorer account of meetings with indigenous women describes coming upon three of them, one middle-aged and the others somewhat younger, making a fire under ‘one of those [Tahitian] earthen pots’ in an enclosure outside a small isolated group of huts and of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 38

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

39

Forster’s ‘being desirous to see their method of cooking’. Pointing to the huts, and moving their fingers several times under their throat, recounts Forster, the women ‘made signs that I should leave them’. Forster then interprets the gesture: ‘if they were observed to be thus alone with a stranger, they would be choaked [sic] or killed’. The naturalist then meets his colleague, Dr Sparrman, in the bush, and the two decide to return together, ostensibly to see the cooking pots again (‘we went to the women again, in order to look at their work once more’) (Georg Forster, 2000: 1:577), with Forster noting this would sort out whether it was his person alone that was unwelcome or whether the women’s aversion was general. Evidently in the hope of encouraging a warmer reception, the two men offered the women beads, which were accepted with great expressions of joy, though these were again accompanied by signs and even entreaties that the men should leave. Sparrman’s narrative of the event differs somewhat from Forster’s. He begins his description of ‘a house where a couple of girls were at home, alone’ (leaving out the middle-aged woman), with the preamble, ‘On the subject of the modesty of the women here’. Sparrman thus implicitly opens up the question of Kanak women’s sexual availability, which, under the guise of objective scientific observation, was a significant theme in the writing of all the early explorers. He goes on to observe that ‘womenfolk with elderly men or other people […] received us without fear’, and his conclusion is the logical one that this incident demonstrates that women’s purity (modesty) exists ‘through the state of slavery and fear in which the men keep them’ (Sparrman, 1953: 165). European men, perhaps not incidentally, again gain an advantage in the comparison. A contemporary ethnographic reading might ascribe the women’s apparent fear and agitation just as readily to an internalized tapu, which required sacred restriction on access to the dangerous state of women during menstruation, childbirth, and lactation in indigenous Pacific cultures, as to the possessiveness of the men folk. A contemporary feminist reading might read the danger to men represented by powerful – sometimes tapu – female sexuality and its products through feminist theoretical frames, including what Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalysis has called ‘abjection’: bodily fluids, the dead body itself, or otherwise whatever disturbs systems and identities and does not respect borders, is excluded from the cultural for its uncanny and dangerous character (1982). If there is hybridity in these texts of littoral exchanges, this derives also from the fact of reading them in the present. Hybridity derives

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 39

12/03/2014 14:39:51

40

The Literatures of the French Pacific

both from intertextuality –from the values, texts, and the classical and eighteenth-century myths (like that of the Noble Savage) that initially went into the construction of these accounts – and from the overlays that two centuries of reflection, (re)translation, and current postcolonial theory have added to possible understandings of the text of first contact. However, even where these intertexts and textual layers can be identified and stripped away, no full original pre-colonial Kanak voice is discernable in these descriptions. Nor has any Oceanian or New Caledonian Rosetta stone been discovered. The observations remain close to the horizons of expectation of eighteenth-century European readers; whether presented as ‘poor’ or ‘noble’ savages, the indigenous men and women observed are ‘domesticated’ for these readers. In fact, these palimpsests may have relatively little to do with Bhabha’s privileged third space as a space from which to renegotiate difference between colonizer and colonized. These texts of encounter between European and Melanesian do not necessarily constitute that meeting place, hypothesized by the postcolonial theorists of hybridity, which enables other new positions to emerge. Nonetheless, Georg Forster himself would conclude with some historical notoriety, after the death of a number of natives who attempted to detain their landing boat at Eromunga (Vanuatu) and attacked with arrows after ‘the leveling of the musket at them, or rather at their chief’, that ‘it is much to be lamented that the voyages of the Europeans cannot be performed without being fatal to the nations whom they visit’ (Georg Forster, 2000: 1:505). The visitors were not unaware of the potentially negative consequences for others, nations and non-nations, of their mission. In these eighteenth-century texts, knowledge is created by different cultural groups for specific purposes. It is a product of the observer and his cultural habitus, his constructions, as much as it is a product of a physical or visual reality experienced. Nonetheless, both in the Ma’ohi example, where the fair and uninhibited South Seas maiden gracing a paradise on earth has remained a European (and even a Tahitian) myth to the present, and in the New Caledonian case, where the ignoble savage – the dark, threatening cannibal – ultimately gained the advantage, the reading of these early palimpsestic texts of ‘discovery’ is producing some contemporary insights into the contexts of the indigenous peoples and the way they looked back at the new arrivals. Anne Salmond has shown that where the European sailors read invitation, the sexually explicit Tahitian dances were in fact often challenge and bellicose provocation (2009; 2010). Re-reading behind the layers of received understandings

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 40

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

41

of gender roles in Bougainville’s accounts of sexually generous first encounter, behind the enthusiastic images of the blond Venuses of a new Cythera, Serge Tcherkézoff (2001; 2004), among others, has found only partially concealed images of very young women in tears under the control of older women and men. The rituals of defloration may well have been political acts to propitiate the disturbing and powerful strangers associated with the god Oro. If the girls at first seemed a little afraid but ‘soon turned better acquainted’ as Wallis’s ship’s Captain Robertson put it, Anne Salmond’s reading, too (2010), postulates a very understandable initial reluctance on the part of the young girls to approach the scurvy-ridden sailors. Pacific historian Kerry Howe has argued that ‘over the past two hundred years or so, Oceania has been a major ideological testing ground for Europe. Ideas about human civilizations, the relationship between nature and culture, racial classification and culture contact, cultural and biological survival […] have all been extensively tested using Pacific case studies’ (2000: 3). In the eighteenth century, the Pacific served as the Other against which Europe not only measured its superior civilization but critiqued its own institutions, including its gender relations, and ‘civilized society’ itself. When the chief Ahu-toru arrived in Paris in 1769 on Bougainville’s returning ship, the visitor was feted by the salon hostesses with both admiration and condescension and identified with Voltaire’s L’Ingénu. His short stay in the capital gave rise to an epistolary novel published by Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie, critiquing French institutions of the day and praising the healthy, natural, harmonious, and equal society of Tahiti in contrast. No mention was made of Tahiti’s hierarchical institutions, its savage human sacrifice, or the relative powerlessness of young women. The authorship of the book was attributed to the visiting ‘Noble Savage’ – Le Sauvage de Tahiti aux Français, avec un envoi aux philosophes ami des Sauvages (1770). There are striking similarities in the various contemporary descriptions of Omai, who returned with Cook to London from Tahiti to be similarly reduced to European preconceptions, a noble savage in person. Drawing on Eric McCormick’s study, Omai, Pacific Envoy, Laurence Simmons notes that, for Fanny Burney, ‘Mai’ was ‘a perfectly rational & intelligent man’ and had manners ‘far superior to the common race of us cultivated gentry’ (McCormick, 1977: 125), while Georg Forster, on the other hand, remained critical, complaining that because Omai was given no cultural instruction in England and ‘his judgement was in its infant

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 41

12/03/2014 14:39:51

42

The Literatures of the French Pacific

state’ (2000: 1:11–12), he had no way of seeing beyond the frivolous and ornamental in European society (Simmons, 2011: 24). Simmons makes the observation that Sir Joshua Reynolds painted Omai’s portrait in an exotic fiction of Arcadia in a hybrid dress somewhere between a Roman toga and oriental robes. Simmons account concludes with a very different understanding of Omai (also Mai’s own), who, it seems, was a boy when Raiatea was invaded in 1765–6 and taken prisoner when his father was killed by the neighbouring chief of Bora Bora. He was later among the women and children shot by the Europeans who arrived in The Dolphin in 1767. Mai himself, Simmons recounts, hoped his journey to Europe would give him ‘men and guns in a Ship’ and help him fulfil his desire to kill his enemy and ‘shoot the King of Bolobola [Bora Bora] who murdered his father’ (McCormick, 1977: 113). Omai/Mai thus serves as something of an aesthetical and philosophical object for a self-reflexive European gaze, while from his own perspective he is pursuing a personal agenda of reciprocal violence. For Laurence Simmons, in his book on Cook’s painter in the South Seas, the paintings of William Hodges succeed in intimating such gaps between modes of understanding and the ultimate unknowability of the indigene for the European. Analysing the sense of the uncanny and apartness of Hodges’ indigenous figures, who do not look back at the painter but gaze elsewhere within a sublime natural landscape, Simmons concludes of one of Hodges’ paintings what might be generalized to others: ‘What we have detected in this image is an ontological uncertainty or instability that in the end demands our attention […] a means of acknowledging the act of encounter with the Polynesian other’ (Simmons, 2011: 25). The painter, claims Simmons, attempts to assert the status of the gaze ‘but control is repeatedly punctured by the painting’s relay of gazes that inevitably leads back to a centre of unknowable sublimity’ (76). Working between context, theory, and close reading, Simmons arrives at the understanding that Hodges’ astonishingly detailed representation is at once ‘a fictive construct’ and ‘an actual resident of tropical space’; both ‘an object of representation and agent of resistance’ (26). Although the native does function as ‘an idealised metonymy of European repressions and projections’ (26), his image, for Simmons, is also a kind of catalyst and the modes of self-inscription include a faculty of projection. If Hodges’ portrait of Omai, for example, constitutes figurations of the artist himself, they are simultaneously acts of identification with a cultural Other and of self-division, a translation of himself into the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 42

12/03/2014 14:39:51

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

43

canvas, and a partial undoing of his English self. Notwithstanding the mechanisms of patronage, for Simmons, Hodges’ artistic practices function at the edges of eighteenth- century aesthetic categories – enumerated as landscape tradition, the genres of the sublime and the picturesque, history painting, and the interest in antiquities and ruins. There is an interplay between a neoclassical landscape genre and the registering and meticulous description of nature, but both ultimately critique the ideology of empire. Hodges’ paintings of his travels through the Pacific are a hybrid of romanticism and science for Simmons, and it is this ‘hybridity and flow of unequal exchange between taxonomy and fantasy that constitutes the colonial relation which marks the extension of European imperialism throughout the Pacific in the eighteenth century, advanced by way of its structures of seeing and imagining’ (47). This may simply start as ‘a foreign observer’s shock at being thrust into an unknown country’, adds Simmons, reminding his reader that, for Foucault, being a foreign spectator in an unknown country and the sovereign power of the empirical gaze constitute the two fundamental perceptual structures that mark the end of the century of Enlightenment. Simmons book analyses one of the artist’s representations of New Caledonia, A View of the Island of New Caledonia in the South, 1777–8, in detail, noting the importance of the portrayal of the rocks and soils, the country’s distinctive geology and unique fauna including what is perhaps the majestic Araucaria or Kanak pine. Is this, he asks, a reflection of the interest of the Empire to come – riches from the mineral earth and global trade? Again, however, a barely discernable figure apparently in a turban and carrying a spear, with his back to us, is gazing at something within the painting and directing our gaze, across a chasm, to two more small figures engaged in some indecipherable activity. For Simmons, it is not clear that what these characters are looking at is what we (Europeans) are observing – they designate in fact what cannot be seen – the otherness of a culture. Another Hodges painting of New Caledonia, View in the Isle of Pines, viewed in fact only by spyglass as the ship sailed by, similarly figures a lush and sublime landscape and fauna and a lone woman in the middle-ground, with an unusual wooden tray strapped to her back (a device used for carrying young children), gazing towards some indeterminate point (does she even see the watcher?). A traditional round thatched case (Kanak family or community?) rises in the background. The artist is not simply a monolithic point of view that orders and controls the other, claims Simmons, and these encounters

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 43

12/03/2014 14:39:52

44

The Literatures of the French Pacific

leave us ‘in a strange liminal space as spectators, on the threshold between two cultures, registering an unease’. The sublime (and there is already a lack of solution or resolution embodied in the adoption of the sublime, for Simmons) is threatened by discordant native figures – provoking something close to ‘the threatened “loss” of meaningfulness in cross-cultural interpretation’ of which Bhabha speaks (1994: 120). Bhabha’s contemporary theorization of hybridity as third space may well have something of interest to offer in understanding the underlying uncertainties in the discoverers’ discourse. We have argued in this chapter for the greater usefulness of the notion of palimpsest in accounting for the layers across time of understandings of early cultural encounters, and for allowing multiple readings, including readings backward from the present. Among the misreading or misrepresentations (of women, of Omai, or his fellow noble savages), we have also found intimations of their unknowability, as in Hodges’ paintings, but not always excluding an original indigenous gaze. Careful reading of original traces, between the lines, holds the promise of providing glimpses of indigenous perspectives and voices.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 44

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

45

Appendix: Extracts from the Accounts of the Early European Explorers

Cook’s Arrival at Balade We had hardly got to anchor before we were surrounded by a great number of the natives, in sixteen or eighteen canoes, the most of whom were without any sort of weapons. At first they were shy of coming near the ship but in a short time we prevailed on the people in one boat to get close enough to receive some presents. These we lowered down to them by a rope to which, in return, they tied two fish that stunk [sic] intolerably. These mutual exchanges bringing on a kind of confidence, two ventured on board the ship and presently after, she was filled with them and we had the company of several at dinner in the cabin. Our pease soup, salt beef, and pork, they had no curiosity to taste, but they ate of some yams which we happened to have left, calling them oobee. This name is not unlike oofee, as they are called at most of the islands except Mallicollo; nevertheless, we found these people spoke a language new to us. Like all the nations we had lately seen, the men were almost naked having hardly any other covering but such a wrapper as is used at Mallicollo. They were curious in examining every part of the ship, which they viewed with uncommon attention. They had not the least knowledge of goats, hogs, dogs, or cats, and had not even a name for one of them. They seemed fond of large spike-nails, and pieces of red cloth, or indeed of any other colour; but red was their favourite. After dinner I went on shore with two armed boats, having with us one of the natives who had attached himself to me. We landed on a sandy beach before a vast number of people who had got together with no other intent than to see us, for many of them had not a stick in their hands; consequently we were received with great courtesy, and with the surprise natural for people to express at seeing men and things so new to them as we must be. I made presents to all those my friend pointed out, who were either old men or such as seemed to be of some note; but he took not the least notice of some women who stood behind the crowd, holding my hand when I was going to give them some beads and medals. Captain Cook’s Voyages, 1768–1779, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Folio Society), pp. 250–1.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 45

12/03/2014 14:39:52

46

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Modesty of the Women The women of this country, and likewise those of Tanna, are, so far as I could judge, far more chaste than those of the more eastern islands. I never heard that one of our people obtained the least favour from any one of them. I have been told that the ladies here would frequently divert themselves by going a little aside with our gentlemen, as if they meant to be kind to them, and then would run away laughing at them. Whether this was chastity or coquetry, I shall not pretend to determine, nor is it material, since the consequences were the same. Captain Cook’s Voyages, 1768–1779, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Folio Society), pp. 263–4. Description of Women: Forster The women were in general of a dark chestnut, or sometimes mahogany brown colour; their stature was middle-sized, some being rather tall, and their whole form rather stout, and somewhat clumsy. Their dress was the most disfiguring that can be imagined, and gave them a thick squat shape. It was a short petticoat or fringe, consisting of filaments or little cords about eight inches long, which were fastened to a very long string, which they had tied several times round the waist. The filaments or little ropes therefore lay above each other in several layers, forming a kind of thick thatch all round the body, which did not cover above a third part of the thigh. These filaments were sometimes dyed black; but frequently those on the outside only were of that colour, whilst the rest had a dirty strawcolour. They wore shells, ear-rings and bits of nephritic stones, like the men; and some had three black lines longitudinally from the under-lip to the chin, which had been punctured by the same methods practiced at the Friendly and Society Islands. Their features were coarse, but expressed great good-nature. The forehead in general was high, the nose broad and flat at the root, and the eyes rather small. Their cheek-bones were very prominent, and the cheeks commonly plump. Their hair was frizzled, and often cut short, as among the natives of the Society and Friendly Islands. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), vol. 1, pp. 570–1.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 46

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

47

Temperament of the People: Forster But the character of the inhabitants, and their friendly, inoffensive behaviour towards us, gave us greater pleasure than all the rest […] They communicated a number of words of their language to us, which had no affinity with those we had learnt before in other islands; a circumstance sufficient to discourage the greatest and most indefatigable genealogist. Their temper seemed to be as indolent, as it was good-natured and harmless. It was very rare indeed, that one of them chose to follow us on our rambles; if we passed by their huts, and talked to them, they answered us, but if we went on without addressing them, they took no farther notice of us. The women were rather more curious, and sometimes strayed in the bushes to observe us, but would not venture to come near, except in the presence of the men. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), vol. 1, p. 573. Women: Forster Here I found three women, one middle-aged, and the others somewhat younger, who made a fire under one of those large earthen pots which I have already mentioned. As soon as they saw me, they made signs that I should leave them; however, being desirous to see their method of cooking, I came in, and saw that they had stuffed the pot full of dry grasses and green leaves, in which they had wrapped up a few small yams. These roots are therefore in a manner baked in this pot, or undergo the same operation which the natives of Taheitee perform by burying them under a heap of earth, among heated stones. It was with difficulty they would give me time to intrude so far; they repeated their signs that I should go away, and pointing to the huts, moved their fingers several times under their throat; which I interpreted, that if they were observed to be thus alone with a stranger, they would be choaked or killed. I left them after they had made this gesture and peeped into the huts, which I found quite empty. Returning into the wood, I met Dr Sparrman; and we went to the women again, in order to look at their work once more, and to be convinced whether I had properly interpreted their signs, or whether

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 47

12/03/2014 14:39:52

48

The Literatures of the French Pacific

they had only some particular objection to my appearance. We found them in the same place, and walking up to them, immediately made them a present of some beads, which they accepted with great expressions of joy; but at the same time they repeated the gestures which they had made when I came alone, and looked at us as if they would add entreaties to the signs, with which we immediately complied, and retired. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), vol. 1, p. 577. Leaving Balade: d’Entrecasteaux The paucity of resources that this island offers, the surrounding reefs, the ferocity of the inhabitants, even the difficulty of finding water although it is fairly abundant there, all these serve to keep navigators away. Had it not been for the attempt to discover some trace of M. de la Pérouse, I would not have returned a second time; but having been prevented from landing last year by the continuation of the reef westwards, it was necessary to return to assure ourselves that this was not the same reef on which M. de la Pérouse had been shipwrecked. From the accounts of Captain Cook and Mr. Forster, I had attributed the mild and simple customs that I believed they possessed and the tranquillity I presumed that they enjoyed, to this truly unusual situation that seems to isolate these islanders from the rest of the world and must protect them from the invariably fatal visits of strangers. But from the time we became acquainted with this barbaric people, I discovered that the barrier surrounding them serves to contain them within their borders, and prevents others being eaten by them. That is the fate which must befall unfortunate navigators shipwrecked on such a perilous coastline, who would be forced to seek asylum amongst these ferocious savages. Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel (ed.), Voyage de Dentrecasteaux, envoyé à la recherche de La Pérouse, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Imprimerie impériale, 1808), p. 358. Translation by Diane Walton.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 48

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

49

La Billardiere: Observations of a French Naturalist I have noticed with astonishment in the course of the various interactions which we have had with these Savages that the authority of the chiefs seemed virtually nonexistent; but I was less surprised to see them exercise sufficiently great power when their own interests were at stake; for most of the time they seized upon the articles which their subjects had received from us. Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798), p. 246. Translation by Diane Walton. Expedition’s Progress During our stay in New Caledonia we were not able to gather any information about the fate of the unfortunate navigators who were the object of our search. However it is not unreasonable to believe that this dangerous and almost inaccessible land has been fatal for them. It is known that La Pérouse was to have reconnoitered the western coast and a shudder of horror is felt when considering the fate that befalls unhappy voyagers who are forced by shipwreck to seek refuge amongst the cannibals living there. Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798), pp. 247–8. Translation by Diane Walton. Cannibalism When we were half way up the mountain, the natives who were following us urged us not to go any further and warned us that the inhabitants on the other side of this chain of mountains would eat us. However we continued to climb as far as the summit, for we were sufficiently well armed not to fear these cannibals.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 49

12/03/2014 14:39:52

50

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798), pp. 197–8. Translation by Diane Walton. Undoubtedly they wanted us to understand that they only devoured their enemies; how would it have been possible to meet so many inhabitants on these lands, if hunger were the only cause for their decision to eat each other. Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798), p. 195. Translation by Diane Walton. Theft On returning to our landing place, we found more than seven hundred natives who had gathered from every direction. They asked us for cloth and iron in exchange for their personal effects, and soon a number of them proved to be the cheekiest of thieves. Of their varied repertoire of ruses, I will describe just one that was played on me by two of these rogues. One offered to sell me a little bag worn at his waist containing some stones fashioned into oval shapes. No sooner had he untied it and made as if to give it to me with one hand while receiving our agreed price with the other, than at the same time, another Savage, who had positioned himself behind me, let out a loud cry making me turn my head towards him. Immediately the first rogue ran off with his bag and my things, trying to hide himself in the crowd. We did not wish to punish him, even though most of us carried firearms. However it was to be feared that these people would regard this act of benevolence as a sign of weakness and become more insolent still. What happened a little later seemed to confirm this. Several of them were so bold as to throw stones at an officer who was no more than two hundred paces from us. Once again, we did not wish to deal harshly with them; Forster’s account had painted them so favourably we needed still more factual evidence to destroy the good opinion that we had formed as to the mildness of their nature; however

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 50

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

51

we soon had incontestable proof of their savagery. One of them came up to Citizen Piron holding a freshly cooked bone and was in the process of devouring the remains of the flesh still attached. The Savage offered to share his meal; Piron, believing that he was being offered a piece of some quadruped, accepted the bone on which only some gristle remained. When he showed it to me, I recognised it as the pelvis of a fourteen or fifteen year old child. The natives who were gathering around us indicated the position of this bone on a child; they readily acknowledged that the flesh that had covered it had served as a meal for one of the islanders, and they even gave us to understand that they considered it a very tasty cut. This discovery gave us great concern for the crew members who were still in the woods; a little later, however, we were happy and relieved to find ourselves all assembled together in the same spot, no longer fearing that one of our crew had fallen victim to the barbarity of these islanders. Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798), p. 190–1. Translation by Diane Walton.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 51

12/03/2014 14:39:52

52

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Part 2: Reading the Role of Gender through the Texts of Oral Tradition To attempt to balance the Western conceptual shaping of the Pacific in these texts of sometimes uncertain ‘discovery’ of the other, and to continue to weigh up the usefulness of forms of hybridity theory in understanding the product of these encounters, a second set of texts can be drawn upon: these are the transcriptions and translations of stories from oral tradition. Over half the texts from Kanak oral tradition collected for publication exist only in French translation. The following chapter will consider the different kinds of hybridity in the translations of the texts of oral tradition by Louise Michel (the red virgin) in the late nineteenth century, the missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt in the early twentieth century, and Alban Bensa, a contemporary ethnographer. The present discussion will bear more generally on the questions of the nature of the cultural mixing that arises from reading these traditional Kanak texts, from unpacking their layers of meaning, and, in particular, from reading through the more selective frame of gender. The most significant feature of these oral tales is their performance character. Required to hold the attention and solicit the participation of a circle of listeners, they call on memory and play on familiarity, employing address and rhythm, using surprise and adaptation. Such storytelling engages the memory, knowledge, performance skills, and originality of the orator and requires responses from its listeners. Thematic elements and structural patterning from these texts of oral tradition, which often have a socio-political function, have increasingly found their way into, echoed through, and influenced the emerging written literatures of ‘Kanaky-New Caledonia’, 4 as the study of the three versions of the Paicî founding story Kanaké in Chapter 3 or of the adaptations of the story of ‘The Chief and the Lizard’ in Chapter 8 will demonstrate. Oral texts transmit social information and provide aesthetic pleasure. In the very extensive group of tales in which animal figures provide both moral fables and entertainment, patterned themes of rival brothers, of insults avenged, and of tricksters tricked or triumphant are prominent. Gender in these stories has appeared hardly relevant and in the French versions is often determined simply by the grammatical gender of the noun. The story of ‘Le rat, le poulpe, et la poule sultane’, the rat, the octopus, and the sultan hen, a tale of ‘false friends’, which originated

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 52

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

53

in the island of Tiga and was spread through the archipelago by the evangelists from the Loyalty Islands, provides a good example. It tells the story of a rat and a sultan hen who make a raft of sugarcane to go fishing on the reef. The subsequent dispute between the two animals, resulting in a stranded Rat’s appeal to Squid to carry him back to land, explains the present enmity between these two animals, the spots on the squid’s head, and indeed the common use of a lure that looks like a rat for very effective squid fishing. In Louise Michel’s version (transcribed in the 1880s), the rat eats the raft while the hen is gathering food. The hen then abandons him on the reef and leaves him to his fate for his greediness, although in the contemporary Paicî versions it is the hen that returns and eats the boat while the rat is gathering food before flying back to land. Hearing the rat weeping on the reef as the tide rises, a squid saves him by carrying him on his back, only to be insulted, once safe on land, by the animal he has rescued. In the more earthy Paicî version, the rat urinates and defecates on the head of the unwitting squid. The story has a sequel: Hen hears of Rat’s return and seeks him out to share his food. When Rat tries to conceal his food from her, Hen burns Rat’s house down. Rat has the last word by tricking Hen into believing he has survived the fire simply because he is an important person. When the sultan hen sets fire to her own house in imitation, she, alas, proves combustible and serves as a tasty browned morsel for the rat. In variant versions of the story the heron or hen is interchangeable with other birds such as the seagull, and the turtle with other sea-creatures such as the squid: they represent the food privileges reserved to the ‘totemic’ groups to which each class of animal belongs. Thus, in French, ‘le goéland’ and ‘la poule sultane’, the masculine seagull and the feminine sultan hen, are interchangeable variants with the same function in the story. Louise Michel’s version, however, may be seen by European readers to contain a more recognizable moral message as it appears to punish the greedy hen for eating the raft and flying back to the shore and leaving the rat stranded, exemplifying the common theme of the ‘false friend’ punished. What particularly catches and holds attention in these traditional tales are the aesthetic devices of reciprocity, repetition, and parallelism (Bogliolo, 1999). In one tale, for example, Payé tricks Le Nèe into believing the delicious fish liver he has eaten is in fact Payé’s wife’s liver, even though she is alive and present at the dinner. Le Nèe cuts out the liver of his own wife, and when she dies he seeks revenge. In a variant, it is the Sparrowhawk who similarly deceives the Swallow into eating his

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 53

12/03/2014 14:39:52

54

The Literatures of the French Pacific

mother’s liver. Although a wife (or mother) may constitute the stakes of the action, it is notable that the hero/trickster figure is predominantly male. A number of oral stories turn on the issue of status among males and their corresponding rights and obligations in a system based on reciprocity. François Bogliolo (2000) discovered a small number of very early stories in the Marist archives sent in 1853 by Father Gagnière from Balade to Paris in response to a request from his Superior. The good Father apologetically offers him these indigenous tales as the ‘fables and folk tales’ of a ‘pale’ and ‘defective’ literature (Bogliolo, 1994: 142–3). Among the stories sent, ‘Bigne and Jola’ tells the tale of a chief who refuses to share his food with his younger brother whose duty it is to prepare the food and serve him. The chief is punished for his failure to fulfil his obligation of reciprocity when his brother dies of hunger and, unable or unwilling to work to feed himself, he too slowly begins to starve. The old people, his ancestors, reserve a rather severe beating for him when he dies of hunger in his turn and makes the journey to Lolonn, the parallel other world. Revenge for slights to rank or status is characteristically masculine. In the story ‘Le Chef de Touho’ [The Chief of Touho], published in various versions by Father Lambert, first in Les Missions Catholiques in 1880 and later in his major ethnographic work in 1900, and again by Pastor Leenhardt as ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of Koné] in the seminal 1932 Documents néo-calédoniens, the genie who fastens himself around the neck of the Chief, whom he has pursued and punished for setting snares on the tapu land of a rival chief, is assumed to be male. The first published version of the story that followed the naval doctor Victor de Rochas’ research in New Caledonia for his doctorate (1862: 215–18), a version probably inspired by Père Lambert’s work, interprets the story as a song of war, inciting the listeners to rise up against the white invaders. In her doctoral thesis, ‘(Re)writing Pathways: Oral Tradition, Written Tradition and Identity Construction in Kanaky/New Caledonia’, completed in 2013, Emma Sinclair-Reynolds analyses the subsequent pathways from Kanak oral tradition to written text in over more than forty versions of ‘The Chief and the Lizard’ story. De Rochas, like Lambert, observes Sinclair-Reynolds, explains the ‘allegory’ as telling the story of the chief of the tribu of Balade punished for ‘various misdemeanours’ by having his authority and title taken away by the French authorities (‘the terrible, white, foreign, génie in human form’) (2013: 140). In De Rochas’ account, the Chief of Touo

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 54

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

55

is telling the tale among the tribus of the north where ‘racial sympathy and common interests’ had created supporters ‘to incite the hatred of the people against the foreign persecutors of a great indigenous lord’ (‘exciter la haine du peuple contre les persécuteurs étrangers d’un grand seigneur indigène’) (1862: 218–19). It seems possible to catch a glimpse of Kanak speaking or ‘writing back’ to colonialism in these oral stories. Lambert acknowledges the major role played by Ouaoulu Amabili, a Belep chief, in his collection and understanding of traditional material. Interpretation of genderpower is less evident or straightforward. Moreover, just as tradition itself can be dynamic, shaped by power and changing socio-political interests, as Sinclair-Reynolds notes, the tales of oral tradition can carry many layers of aesthetic, philosophical, and socio-political message. Lambert himself, she adds, citing that author, comes to concede that, far from being ‘defective’, the Kanak stories are characterized by ‘inventive and imaginative detours’ (‘écarts d’imagination inventive et vagabonde’) (Lambert, 1900: 65). In the now canonical story of transgression, flight, punishment, and redemption, as Sinclair-Reynolds identifies the basic structure of the tale, the chief is pursued from chiefdom to chiefdom around the island by a monster who blocks up the whole horizon, terrifying even the most valiant of the local chiefs who initially accept to give the victim shelter. In ‘Le Maître de Koné’, published in Documents néo-calédoniens, a collection of traditional texts gathered and transcribed for Maurice Leenhardt by Kanak informants and published in 1932, it is only when the pair finally arrive at Koné, the land from where the lizard-totem originates and where the Master of the Land wields the appropriate power, including the plants and incantations to get the genie off his victim’s back, that the lizard is sent slithering back to his home forest. There is a potentially negative reference to gender in the tale: the malevolent lizard had arrived in those parts with the sacred stones, both lizard-stones and yam stones, brought from outside by two sisters who had married into the group. Leenhardt’s Documents néo-calédoniens contains a number of rewritings of the story, one derived from Lambert and two from the oral traditions of the Ajië language area. Sinclair-Reynolds observes that ‘Le chef de Touho’ constitutes the fifth and last story in the opening section to which the book gives the title of the Cycle du Lézard and is the only one of Leenhardt’s documents to have come by way of Catholic printed text rather than from his indigenous ‘teachers’. Leenhardt, she

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 55

12/03/2014 14:39:52

56

The Literatures of the French Pacific

observes, added a note to his borrowing from Lambert’s text (itself probably recorded around the 1850s and coinciding with the arrival of the new French administrators) disagreeing with the priest’s assertion that the tale was an allegory involving the whites as the pursuing genie. Leenhardt sees the tale rather as an outcome of enmity between the chiefs of Touho and Tendo, inciting the people of Touho against the rival chief, a member of a different group of alliances. The pastor adds that the story was again played out historically in the insurrection in the north in 1917 in which the French, the chef de Hienghène, and the chef de Tendo were all protagonists and in which he himself had been involved as mediator. Sinclair-Reynolds (2013: 175) quotes Leenhardt to highlight the layers of meaning of these texts of oral tradition. ‘It is curious to see the totemic legend of the lizard become, by way of allegory, a war story, and contemporary history coming to confirm the meaning of this obscure folklore in a quite astonishing manner.’ (‘Il est curieux de voir tout à la fois la légende totémique du lézard devenir par allégorie un récit de guerre, et l’histoire contemporaine venir confirmer de façon étonnante la signification de ce folklore obscur’ (Leenhardt, 1932: 65). Leenhardt traces the ‘totemic lizard legend’ through changing historical contexts, arguing that the totem was initially a feminine principle. But, for the ethnographer, the femininity of the lizard as the animal protector of the clan has been gradually dissolved over time as this ‘totem’ came into contact with male ancestor-gods. (Lambert’s version of the story does not in fact speak of a lizard but rather of a ‘divinity’.) In a version of the story in Leenhardt’s ‘Lizard Cycle’, the ‘Lizard of Ourouro’ (1932: 54–9), the dangerous totem does not meet humans who share his group and have magic spells to placate him. The harmful Stone Age monster pursuing his victim, who has taken refuge on the top of a rock, can still be killed, observes Leenhardt, but this time with modern weapons: a hook of iron attached to the end of the rope that the lizard uses to pull himself up onto the rock is heated up by the children who are waiting for him and plunge it into his mouth. According to Leenhardt, the powerful primitive totem has here dissolved into a mere ‘legendary’ monster vulnerable to European technology. Another legend of Leenhardt’s ‘Lizard Cycle’, ‘Le Lézard de Windo’ [The Lizard of Windo] (46–53), curiously figures the lizard as a fiancé who is cut up and thrown into the oven by a young woman. This fiancé, who bears a close resemblance to the frog prince, and indeed to the whole European cycle of the ‘animal fiancé’, 5 then turns into her Prince Charming.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 56

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

57

In the note that attempts to explain one version of the story of the lizard animal fiancé, the gecko become man is handsome precisely because he is the totem. Later, he will take his wife to task because she has given her crying infant son a shrimp, the mother’s totem, to eat. The child who has the right only to the totem of the father has broken a taboo in eating ‘her life’ and thereby making it possible for the maternal uncles (who own the ‘breath of life’ they have given him at birth) to seek to harm her. In a further turn of the story, the wife takes revenge on the husband’s complaining by hanging herself in order to return as a spirit to haunt him. In the historically most recent example of the lizard story in Documents néo-calédoniens, when the parents have no one to take care of their child, the lizard in ‘The Ancestor from Nevou’ (‘L’Aïeul de Névou’) (35–45) merges with the forest to come and rock the infant. For Leenhardt, in this instance the lizard models the social role that should be played by grandparents. This legend imagines the lizard somewhere between the forest and his human group; an ancestor devoted to his descendants. When the child is presented to his maternal uncle’s clan, the lizard is there with the forest on his back offering a pile of food and a pile of presents. On a number of the stylized bamboo engravings that are a striking feature of Kanak art, the lizard who comes from the forest to fertilize the gardens also carries with him leaves and herbs that provide magic and healing powers. Like the lizard in Leenhardt’s stories, this totem can be both protective and dangerous. Jean Guiart, an anthropologist and disciple of Leenhardt, has noted that twenty-seven of the 126 clans of the Canala-Nakéty area claim to derive from this symbol of the protection of the harvest (Guiart, 1981), which, we have suggested, is largely connoted as male. To return briefly to the second thread underlying this chapter, reading backwards for an understanding of the way unequal relations of power inflect cultural encounters, Emma Sinclair-Reynolds elaborates an interesting hypothesis concerning the various re-editions by the Society for Historical Studies in New Caledonia (Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (SEHNC)) of Père Lambert’s Mœurs et superstitions, described by the Society’s President Bernard Brou in the introduction to the 1976 edition as ‘the essential document on former Caledonia’ (‘le document essentiel sur la Calédonie ancienne’), a description attributed by Brou to the historian Patrick O’Reilly (Sinclair-Reynolds, 2013: 162). The first of these re-editions (all published by the Imprimeries réunies de Nouméa) came out in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 57

12/03/2014 14:39:52

58

The Literatures of the French Pacific

1976, the year following the entry of Kanak culture into the public domain with the 1975 Melanesia 2000 festival and its revision and publication by Jean-Marie Tjibaou in Kanaké: Mélanésien de NouvelleCalédonie, later translated into English. The second reprint of Mœurs et superstitions in 1985 was published in the middle of the Événements, the virtual war of the 1980s, and followed the publication of the Kanak priest, Apollinaire Anova-Ataba’s D’Ataï à l’indépendance, in 1984. The third, in 1999, a year after the signing of the Noumea Agreement, followed an explosion of Kanak publications, the founding of the Centre Tjibaou and attached Agence de développement de la culture kanak (ADCK) – Agency for the Development of Kanak Culture, the first Kanak cultural review, Mwà Véé, and the completion of Chroniques du pays kanak, a four-volume encyclopaedia on Kanak patrimoine with many contributions from Kanak researchers and artists. Noting these apparent coincidences, Sinclair-Reynolds sees the re-editions by SEHNC as an attempt to compete with the new Kanak texts for control of New Caledonian cultural capital. ‘It could be argued that their timing appears to be in response to hitherto unheard Kanak voices explaining Kanak cultures and expressing Kanak perspectives […] the new Kanak voices that began to speak through the medium of the written word appear to have stimulated those who had spoken for them in the past to reassert their own narratives’ (2013: 169) For Sinclair-Reynolds, the creativity and innovative practice of individuals within tradition quickly breaks down the binary divide between oral traditional and written/ non-traditional societies. Alongside this, however, sits the recognition that the developments of tradition and traditional stories are shaped by relations of power and the interests of specific groups. Unequal power relations or struggles for dominance are also manifested in creation stories. These most generally star founding fathers. In the foundation story of the Paicî language area, told at Koné and transcribed by Jean Guiart (1992: 146), the ancestor draws a tooth that he presents to the rising moon. The tooth, placed on a rock, gives birth to three worms, Teâ Kanaké, Dui, and Bai, who fall into the sea. Their blood coagulates on the beach to produce the first man and the first woman in what can be seen as a Kanak version of evolution. In another variation on the story, ‘as the old people at Ponérihouen tell it’, the earth, rolled into a spiral, touched the moon. ‘The stone on the mountain was barely dry when the land on the mountain of Tyaumyê was divided.’ Once the sea left the first rock dry, the moon took a tooth from its mouth and placed it on a stone. The worms that emerged fell on

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 58

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

59

the land and changed into three eel-like creatures and later into lizards, who took on a human form as Teâ Kanaké, Dui, and Bai, the founders of tribal groupings. Contemporary ethnographic readings of this version of the myth such as those of Alban Bensa conclude that the birth on the primordial mountain of the founding ancestor is localized within the area of the two groups, Dui and Bai, to erase the memory of any earlier arrivals and establish for the storyteller’s group the more powerful status of first inhabitants rather than later ‘immigrants’. (The mountain and the ancestor are given local names, much as European settlers later allocated their own names, renaming the locations in which they set up house to establish their place and rights.) Sinclair-Reynolds cites Michel Naepels’ study of the region around Houailou that argues that only the clans with founding or ancestral connections can obtain the powers necessary for success in hunting, fishing, and agriculture from the ancestor spirits (Naepels, 1998). Mythico-genealogical stories link a Kanak child to the landscape by giving it the name of the place or landscape feature, as well as a name not currently occupied from a set stock of clan names. Through such toponyms and patronyms, Kanak children are identified with certain places and endowed with certain local and land rights. Déwé Gorodé’s claim that Kanak systematically ‘gave every single settler a name linked with the land he occupied, according to [your] custom’ provides an interesting example of the creation of a third space, with some resemblance to the unsettling possibilities of Bhabha’s third spaces, of reversal. ‘Right from the start you assimilated him into your world. He thought he owned it, but in reality it was the land that possessed him, body and soul.’ This information, put in Gorodé’s 2012 novel, Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! ou « no more baby », into the mouth of the wife of a bush settler who is described as ‘an open-minded person, a rarity in the narrow little world of the colony’ with pro-independence and pro-Kanak sentiments (32) projects a positive vision of a possible reconciliation and Common Destiny in a world where the primordial place of Kanak would be recognized. In the Paicî founding myth, man derives from the moon touching the earth: the primal rock produces life from the blood of the (feminine) earth, and of worms, lizards, or eels washed by the sea. Kanak women themselves appear to have a secondary place in this founding story and its constitution of genealogies. In her unpublished play, Kënaké 2000 ou KNK 2000, produced by Pierre Gope at the Theatre de Ville in 2000,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 59

12/03/2014 14:39:52

60

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Déwé Gorodé’s female-centred rewriting of the Paicî foundation story, which will be examined in detail in Chapter 4, that considers internal differences among Kanak response to contact with Europe, reminds the reader that this masculinist myth of creation and group foundation includes stories of violence, of incest and fratricide. Nonetheless, in one of the fragments of her 2009 work, Graines de pin colonnaire [Seeds of the Columnar Pine], during an early morning reverie in silent dialogue with her school-age granddaughter on the many competing stories of origins in circulation, the narrator, musing on where the truth lies today for Kanak, acknowledges the story of Adam and Eve, set alongside an even less convincing Darwinian theory of evolution from monkeys (where are the monkeys here?). She recalls the account of canoe-voyaging ancestors from Asia and concludes by affirming the pertinence of the ‘old’ story and of the grandmother as a figure of authority in such matters: Where is the land and the birds, snakes and lizards, the totems of our clans, who were there before us in all this? […] With their occult power and taboos over your real life … how do you get free of that? […] and how do you expect to hold onto anything if you must be all the time surfing the net, channel-hopping or zigzagging between two, three or I don’t know how many theories at the same time? […] And Grandma who says that she first came from her ancestors, Adam and Eve, yes, as the Bible says, and then came from the ancestral lizard, yes that too because our tee re âboro makes us really sick and only certain people can really cure us. […] So, be like the lizard, hang onto the rock, or like the giant clam in the story that stuck to a boulder and so survived. […] Just you tell your teacher that your grandmother says that we all come from the teeth of the moon. (Gorodé, 2009: 17)

Father Lambert (1900) and later Father Dubois (1984) gathered stories in the Loyalty Islands (evangelized early by the London Missionary Society (LMS), and part of French New Caledonia from 1860) that already represented an evident mixing of the European and the Melanesian traditions, such that it is possible to see these Mission stories of animal metamorphosing to human as adaptations of the European fairy story incorporating Melanesian cultural references. A monstrous serpent that sheds its skin at night to become a handsome husband carries echoes of ‘Cupid and Psyche’, the second-century myth told in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and of the classical European animal fiancé cycle that includes ‘Beauty and the Beast’, of which the story from Apuleius is a precursor. Another tale of loss through the fault of a woman who eats

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 60

12/03/2014 14:39:52

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

61

forbidden bananas and lies with the god-gardener recalls biblical myths. This curious version of the myth, in which the garden withers away to a desert and the woman’s white skin turns black, speaks of women’s lack of obedience, of incest, and of adulterous sex punished. In her novella Uté Mûrûnû Gorodé denounces such images of women (which she sees as inculcated by the Marist and the Protestant Missionary Societies) that portray women as Eve bitten by the serpent and female bodies as sites or ‘ruts’ of sinful pleasure and of shame [‘ornières de plaisir’] (1994: 21). A Kanak version of Cinderella told by the missionaries depicts the unhappy daughter of a non-birth mother who must gather food for the whole family on the reef, but may eat only the inedible foods while the blood-daughter is given the good food. Taken under the protection of a grandmother-ancestor, and transported to her thatched house on a magic flying béno (woven flax mat), Wanérené obeys this Kanak ‘godmother’s’ orders to make an oven in which she will be cooked. Because she is obedient, she is spared and is subsequently helped by her ancestor to marry the son of the chief. ‘My heart is yours’, declares the young chief, when the grass skirt he was carrying around his land in order to find the right bride fits Wanérené perfectly. The grandmother then spits into her granddaughter’s mouth, promising she will remain with her always as a protective spirit. Are such stories, like the many versions of the story of the flood, European or Kanak in origin, and what effects does the mixing produce? Sinclair-Reynolds discusses a story from the island of Lifou, translated into English by Captain Joseph Berkowitz, a medical officer stationed in New Caledonia during the war, as ‘The Lizard and the Cocks’ and following a version of the story in French of the chief and the lizard collected by his friend Jean Laville in Drehu language. ‘The Lizard and the Cocks’ (Laville and Berkowitz, 1944: 46–51) figures a High Chief, Oukenso, ‘vacationing in the country’, who decides he wants to eat some meat and sends out Sinelapa to trap some rats. After multiple fruitless visits to his line of traps, his manservant finally discovers a large green lizard with long nails and brings it back to his master to eat. But once revived by the fire the lizard clamps itself on Oukenso’s back and subsequently pursues his victim around the land as, chief by chief, his friends fail in their attempt to protect him with armed guards. Finally, an old woman saves him from this ‘devil’ by setting her hens and two cocks on the lizard when the latter appears at midnight and is torn apart by the birds. The story ends with the explanatory statement that, ever since that time all lizards flee at the sight of fowl, and the descendants

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 61

12/03/2014 14:39:53

62

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of those two brave cocks are born with a long spine on their legs to help them fight their enemies. Berkowitz’s version, echoing Aesop’s fables and placing the emphasis on the encounter between the animals of the story, is seen by SinclairReynolds as conforming to target readership expectations, including those of style (omitting the original repetitions and adding embellishments, for example). ‘The idea of the High Chief “vacationing in the country at Naweda with his manservant, Sinelapa”’, Sinclair-Reynolds adds, ‘brings to mind actions more familiar to the affluent classes in England or America’ (2013: 306) and the power relation between the chief and his servant is mistranslated given that the latter is not a ‘subject’ but a ‘brother’ of the ‘big brother’, as the chief is called. Discussing the conclusion of Laville and Berkowitz’s version (‘To this day the natives believe that the Lord sent the cocks to kill the devil which was hiding in the lizard’), Sinclair-Reynolds concludes that this abridged rewriting in English of the longer French version has produced ‘an image of native superstition’, and ultimately of a ‘naive and simple’ culture. In the French version, the text is seen as an explanation of the behaviour of the fighting cockerels today and as a remembering of ‘the historic battle of their great-great-grandfathers against the two-tailed lizard’ (316). Kanak tales abound in accounts of the inherent dangers and also satisfactions in tricking one’s enemy and indeed in circumventing the rules. There are many fables of those who do not pull their weight in communal food-gathering tasks and who are cruelly punished, or of those who take revenge for slights to honour, including the ultimate insult of (metaphorically) eating the body of the other. These stories are both conventional and overdetermined, and can include women characters with some power(s), such as the old woman in the story above. Their multiple messages, including sexual innuendo, often function obliquely through metaphor, and the same tale can be read differently by initiated adults and children: they range across universal truths about animal human and/or human psychology to very local and changing moral lessons pertaining to structures of land ownership, alliances, or hierarchical obligations, and, we might add, gender relations. As well as founding fathers, males are the orators and the protagonists of the chants of war, ceremonial speeches, and commemorative addresses for dead chiefs. One myth of foundation, transcribed by Éliane Metais some decades after Leenhardt’s and Guiart’s versions of Teâ Kanaké, does evoke a form of sexual contact in the origins of the first beings – in this case, from two houp trees rubbing together (Metais, 1988). After

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 62

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

63

meeting during a storm, these founding roots are later suckled by the first human infant. Other histories again do feature women who found dynasties, travelling to the Loyalty Islands in the bellies of whales. The daughter of the sun, the shimmering woman arrives from the Western regions. These venturous women can be spirits, the dangerous daughters of the North Wind, fickle wives, or, like the little eel-woman, an animal fiancée (perhaps signifying a possible misalliance). Many carry the negative associations of witches. Cainyo, for example, is a cunning and carnivorous witch who shares the knowledge of the master of the soil. The bird-woman with two mouths, Torlovich, goes to market with her friends, eats more than her fair share of the food, and covets the flesh of her companions: she is killed in revenge, her head caught in a giant clam mouth. Other flesh-eating witches, such as Tibo, with the long withered breasts, are burned in their holes along with their offspring before they can further trick or ravage (Brou, 1980). In one of the stories recorded by Alban Bensa, a witch transforms a pigeon floating down the river into a man, and then, as reward for his obedience to her command, changes the coconuts she orders him to bring to her into beautiful wives. A second pigeon who emulates the first in the hope of similarly finding wives is given coconut-women who are ugly and pockmarked: the witch’s orders had not been followed exactly. In a story told by Mme Näpéémâ, ‘The Brothers of the Red Taro’ (Bensa and Rivierre, 1994: 363–74), cultivated rather than wild taro are killed by a witch; only when this destructive female figure, negatively associated with uncultivated and ‘inedible’ food, is killed in her turn can the brothers be brought back from the dead. Male ogres such as Kawenga, whose speciality is devouring or carrying off wives, do make an appearance, but often it is an old woman who is lurking along the bush path, waiting to devour any little one who goes astray. Despite these often negative images of women and a certain repression of the miscreant female body, sex, at least as procreation, does play a role. Pregnant ancestors arrive in the bellies of eels, fish, or whales, or as daughters of the North Wind, and their arrival founds family groups. Procreation is nonetheless largely contained by male-controlled marital alliances along traditional pathways, symbolized by the power of the maternal uncle to give life by blowing into the ear of the newly born infant. The contemporary oral histories recorded by the ethnographer and linguist team of Bensa and Rivierre in the Cemuhi and Paicî tribal areas of the north, published in Les Chemins de l’alliance [The Pathways of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 63

12/03/2014 14:39:53

64

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Alliance] (1982) and Les Filles du rocher Até [The Daughters of Até Rock] (1994) and interpreted by Bensa as records of socio-political histories and customary rights and obligations, situate matrimonial alliances between clans and language groups at the centre of social functioning. Bensa’s collections of stories are notable for their female protagonists, most particularly the daughters or wives of chiefs. In Bensa’s contemporary stories, women can come to exceed their basic function as objects of exchange and matrimonial alliance. Bensa reads the tales of women’s adventures as both upholding and contesting the policy applied by the traditional authorities of the regions of the Cemuhi speaking people: Koné, Poinda, and Poindimié. Here, he explains, the authorities must maintain a balance between the restricted reciprocal exchange of brides between the clans that constitute the body politic, and a need for renewal from the outside. Spaces of historical competition for Kanak authority exist between individuals and between the groups they emblematize. In the border region of Koné, for example, Paicî custom, with its two intermarrying halves, Dui and Bai, allows marriage not only with cousins from the mother’s clan, as in contiguous groups, but with any of the clans from the mother’s half. This comes into conflict with Cemuhi custom. Bensa argues that the risks and stakes of matrimonial alliance and the search for wives is a particularly central theme in contiguous Cemuhi-speaking zones, where restricted reciprocal marital alliances are the norm. In representations, concludes Bensa, it is important to establish the superiority of the system of marital alliances practised by one’s own group and their more efficacious magic or greater matrimonial treasure of ceremonial shell money, or ‘monnaie’, that serves to seal an alliance or contract. In Bensa’s ethnographic reading of oral stories, then, symbolic production is a function of the situation of enunciation (the interests of the informant’s group and its attachment to a geographical space) and of a developing social system. Encounter and competition between different social systems have resulted in a frame where narrative representation is also political action: it describes the alliances by which the political body is perpetuated or enlarged and prescribes respective rights and obligations. The mythical-genealogical stories of marriage alliance that Bensa transcribes are to be understood particularly in relation to changing central narratives that establish the authority of the various chefferies as these chiefdoms compete, cooperate, shift, and change. The earlier versions of the Chief and the Lizard, ‘Le Chef de Touho’ and ‘Le Maître de Koné’, and changing interpretations of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 64

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

65

pursuing lizard or genie (the Whites, a rival chief, magic …), would also fit into such an interpretative framework as both political narratives and as (hi)stories. The hypothesis of the need to recall essential links and to maintain the established balance in the exchange of wives, alongside a certain more limited need to renew through misalliances or an escape from rules, enables Bensa to explain both successful atypical unions and those stories where such unions lead to problems. Most generally, the narratives he publishes demonstrate the dire outcome of an inappropriate marriage alliance. For example, Bensa reads ‘Les Deux Fruits de l’acajou’ [‘The Two Fruits of the Mahogany Tree’], narrated by Paabu Oï (Bensa and Rivierre, 1994: 238–331) as a tale of the impossibility of establishing a matrilineal lineage in a patrilineal society. Two single sisters out fishing find edible fruit from the arî (acajou) tree. One of the sisters eats the fruit (symbolizing a sexual encounter) and gives birth to a young son. He later kills an ogress, who turns out to be none other than his maternal grandmother. Chastised, the child is turned into a fruit and his two mothers die of sorrow. The meaning here for Bensa and Rivierre is that the maternal grandmother who founds a family is as incongruous and dangerous as an ogress. She must disappear, and her descendants with her. However, in the other set of stories recorded by Bensa where the rules of matrimonial alliance are broken, the clans with whom alliances can be made are extended by the agency of exceptional young women. ‘The Two Sisters of Moaxa’ (‘Les Deux Sœurs de Moaxa’), where the heroine refuses three prospective husbands, who have all put on their best finery of feathers and turban to woo her, and finally gives birth far from her tribe, may well also illustrate a productive refusal of the norm. In ‘Le Chef de Saouma’, when another woman ‘follows’ her husband, the wife of the chief of Saouma commits suicide in order to punish her errant spouse but is brought back to life by her mother and reunited with her partner. Meanwhile, the wife of the chief of Lerexou, in ‘Le Chef de Lerexou’, also disregarded in her marriage, pursues her husband as a spirit. Other young women, washing their hair with lime in the river, attract husbands through their renowned beauty. The latter appear in the form of fruit floating downstream from their homelands and are transformed into handsome men by the women’s attentions. When one husband grows homesick and attempts to leave his wife, she transforms him into the rock that still stands at the mouth of the river. As Bensa notes, some of the narratives appear to be making the modern case for

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 65

12/03/2014 14:39:53

66

The Literatures of the French Pacific

finding a husband in a virilocal society who will not require the wife to move away from her clan to his. One young Kaavo (the name given to the eldest daughter of a chief), the ‘Virgin of Nekliai’, refuses all suitors and dares to leave home to seek the right man. When she returns to obtain a blessing or breath of life for her son, the child is killed in revenge by her father. However, Kaavo succeeds in travelling to the underworld and bringing back her child. Kaapo Ciinyii is another such strong woman who plays an active part in initiating her own marriage in a story told by Kaehen (‘Martin’) Daulo, published by the ethnographer and linguist in 1982 and also translated into French (Bensa and Rivierre, 1982: 125–221). Kaapo Ciinyii cooks yams (a sign of her socialization and of civilized behaviour) and sets out with them on the path to find and marry Udodopwé and found a lineage. Kaapo Ciinyii Let me tell you the story of Kaapo Ciinyii, eldest daughter of the chief. She is weaving a mat. A shadow keeps creeping over her mat, and Kaapo wonders: ‘This shadow over my weaving … What can it be? […] First of all, she goes and digs up the tahînetöö yam plant and she cooks it. The yam is cooked, and she puts it in her basket. She makes some straps for the other basket – the ceremonial money basket – and slings it over her shoulder. She picks up her basket of food and sets off. She follows the Wéaga river, then she climbs the mountain, takes the path through the forest and comes out at a high place, a vantage point where she sits and gazes […] Udodopwé looks up towards her and sees her. He calls: ‘Who’s this, intruding on the vantage point? Usually there’s nothing up there to spoil the order of my domain!’ With these words, Udodopwé sinks to the ground. Then Kaapo Ciinyii says, ‘Stand up, since you are here with your kin and lineage, and I have come here with mine.’ Udodopwé gets up and asks her: ‘It’s the first time you’ve been seen in these parts, who are your people?’ ‘I am Kaapo Ciinyii’, she replies. ‘I see! Well, this house is my house, I am Udodopwé! But there is no woman to rule in this household. Come down, this role is yours.’6

When, later, Kaapo Ciinyii is carried off unlawfully, she has her ravisher pursued so that she might cook and then, in a supreme insult, eat his limbs and thus destroy the mana and the power of the group who might have sought revenge. In both collections of oral histories there are a striking number of stories in which the first wife, by committing suicide, revenges herself

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 66

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

67

on an unsympathetic or unfaithful husband who has taken another wife. For in death she can become a powerful and vengeful spirit. These women still fulfil their obligations to the community, such as the woman named Petite Anguille [Little Eel], who is perhaps seen as not fully human, or inferior in lineage (she may represent a misalliance with a partner from the Cemuhi speaking area, suggests Bensa in his version of the story, ‘Grand Waka’, narrated by Mme Göröwirijaa) (Bensa and Rivierre, 1994: 143–70). Petite Anguille assures her husband’s succession and fulfils her obligations by bringing a male child into the world. The new mother, now given the name ‘mother of great grandfather’ (‘mère de grand-père-grand’) to mark her increased status and her contribution to the replacement of one generation by the other, effected every fourth generation in Kanak society, waits until her husband returns with a new Paicî-speaking wife with whom he has been invited to ‘share yams’ while away at a pilou (a community dance and celebration, forbidden by the missionaries). Petite Anguille then flees the conjugal home, dismembering her child to slow her husband’s pursuit (recalling Medea, for the Western reader). While he is pursuing his first wife, the unfaithful husband is eaten by a shark-totem. Petite Anguille’s actions are clearly symbolic of refusal of the system and of her social obligations to husband and kin. Another mother and her three daughters, upbraided by the husband for eating the special ‘reserved’ taros during his absence because of famine, hang themselves, painted and adorned, and ready to go a-haunting. Their threatened revenge is powerful enough to cause the husband to set fire to the house and die in desperation. The story ends with a ritual formula: ‘The father of the children is dead. The two children and their mother are together’ reminding the reader of the circle of storytelling in the present into which the listener is drawn. Another pregnant wife commits suicide to punish an unfaithful husband, but returns as a material spirit to give birth to and suckle her child in fulfilment of her social obligations. In these contemporary revenge narratives collected by Bensa, might a feminist reading also find an indirect message of the need to maintain a better balance between the sexes? I would suggest that the very number of these stories of deviance involving or promoting a woman’s perspective constitutes a challenge to the patrifocal and male-dominated structures of society. Bensa’s reading does not account fully for the extent to which exceptional women transform the matrimonial codes to their own ends by choosing their partners, their place of residence, or by taking revenge on husbands who disregard them, thus contesting

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 67

12/03/2014 14:39:53

68

The Literatures of the French Pacific

aspects of their subordinate condition. It is true that they are most often high-ranking women, much like the Maori heroines who are daughters of chiefs (Rangatira) in the works of New Zealand Maori writers, such as Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider, Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, or Keri Hulme’s The Bone People. As daughters of an aristocratic class, they acquire their own mana. However, the ethnographer’s work demonstrates the ways in which the situation of enunciation and new developments in socio-political systems feed into and modify the stories recorded. Might it not also be significant, then, that the stories in which women play assertive or vengeful roles are most often told by female informants? Beyond his recognition that transgression of the law, as Michel Foucault has argued in his theory of the power–knowledge nexus, always remains within the law and is indeed necessary for the law’s definition (Foucault, 1980), the disciplinary boundaries of Bensa’s narratives of endogamy and exogamy and of politico-mythical genealogy do not encourage him to explore fully the mixed character – simultaneously within and critical of the system – of these deviant women’s stories. This kind of hybridity, which also characterizes the curious first Kanak novel, Déwé Gorodé’s 2004 L’Épave, and many of her short stories, will be particularly examined in Chapters 5 and 6. The Blind Dancing Woman One of the few book-length literary studies of Kanak mythology and indigenous oral/aural literature, written by Charles lllouz, contains an examination of a recently recorded and transcribed version of a story entitled ‘La Danseuse aveugle’ [The Blind Dancer]. A close analysis of this work suggests once again that the hybridity of such tales can be situated within the frames of intertextuality (the text’s own multiple textual sources) and of the particular spaces created by the listening or reading. The story, I suggest, can be read as a tale of a disorderly Kanak woman who has failed to respect her food-gathering obligations and her marital fidelity and of her husband’s consequent revenge. It can also be regarded as a story of a wilful woman who evokes the will to female pleasure and freedom. Illouz identifies the various narrative and symbolic segments from the mythology of the Loyalty Island of Maré that constitute both the story and the poetics of this text. He himself describes it as an assemblage of repeated and transformed stock

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 68

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

69

elements, including polysemous linguistic segments, that have a material resonance and force, and a narrative ‘voluptuousness’. These, for Illouz, are ‘paroles de roche’, words of stone, analogous to the stones that make up the physical landscape. The Blind Dancing Woman A husband and a wife go off, to tend their fields in the sky. When evening comes, they go back down to their home. Then the wife says ‘Cook us something to eat on the fire, after that, I’ll go and do a bit of torch fishing.’ ‘All right!’ says the husband. Then she goes and prepares a large torch and comes back to her husband’s side: ‘Well is the food cooked?’ ‘Yes, let’s eat!’ After this, she announces: ‘I’m going torch fishing.’ ‘All right,’ says the husband. Upon reaching the shore, she sets the torch alight then pulls out her eyes and walks, eyeless, towards the sea. There she begins to dance, throwing back her head and dancing along the beach, all the way to the end. She dances like this throwing back her head, rests a little, then starts dancing again, with her head thrown back. Soon she hears the cockcrow: ‘It will soon be day!’ she thinks. So she goes and picks up her eyes and puts them back in place. And so, she goes back towards the interior of the land, returns to her husband and lies down next to him. In the morning he asks: ‘How did your torch fishing go?’ ‘Nothing!’ she replies. And off they go again, soaring high into the sky to tend to their fields. They work until evening and come back down to their home. They cook some food then the wife says again: ‘I’m going to go back torch fishing again.’ She gathers some coconut leaves and returns to the house. ‘Come and eat now,’ her husband says to her. Once finished, she repeats ‘I’m going back torch fishing.’ Upon reaching the sea, she sets her fishing torch alight, goes down to the shore where she pulls out her eyes and begins to dance, throwing back her head and dancing along the beach. She dances like this, all the way to the end of the beach then back the other way, to the opposite end. She rests a while, then starts dancing again towards the other end, with her head thrown back. Soon, the cock crows. ‘Oh,’ she says to herself, ‘it will soon be day! I must get back.’ At once she makes her way back to find her eyes and put them back in place. She quickly goes back to the interior of the lands and just as day is breaking, she lies down next to her husband. Day arrives and he asks: ‘So, how did your torch fishing go?’

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 69

12/03/2014 14:39:53

70

The Literatures of the French Pacific ‘Nothing. Not a bite.’ Every day events repeat themselves in the same way, alternating between the couple’s daytime tending of their fields in the sky and the wife’s night-time dancing. But one evening the husband decides to follow her, to find out why she never catches anything. ‘What is she up to, that she never catches anything? I’ll follow her.’ He gets to the sea and sits himself down on a rise to watch. His wife, down below, is busy dancing with her head thrown back. ‘So that’s why she never brings anything back, he says to himself, she spends all her time dancing with her head thrown back.’ So the husband goes and picks up the eyes and throws them into the sea where a picot fish eats them. Then he goes off home. Now the cock starts to crow. ‘It will soon be day’ thinks the wife. At once she starts seeking out her eyes but they have disappeared. ‘My eyes!’ she cries.7

In variant versions, the stolen eyes of a person who fails to meet his/ her communal work obligations are cooked and fed to the unsuspecting miscreant. Another protagonist, a male bird who dallies instead of food gathering, swinging on vines all day long, falls into a pile of his own excrement when the vine is cut, and is punished. Although respect for place in the social hierarchy and communal obligations and punishment for their non-respect appear to be significant elements of this recurring topos, gender also plays an obvious role in the version that Illouz recorded. The late and much missed specialist in Kanak languages, the linguist Professor Michel Aufray, observed to me that the same story from Kanak oral tradition might well function on a number of different levels, each intended for different groups within the audience. A metaphor for the sexually free woman may well be observed in the dancing woman. The symbolism of removing one’s eyes refers most generally, he suggested, to the setting aside of social mores and/or moral conscience. In the woman who takes her eyes out, adult listeners would recognize a reference to adultery. It is not by chance that this Kanak tale also highlights social rules for the good wife: to be a good worker and food-provider, who otherwise returns home at night! As we noted above, Foucault’s work has argued that it is the identification of what breaks the law that makes the law exist. Nor is it chance that punishes the breaking of the gender rules and restores the social norms. This is a pattern in evidence well before the story of the wife of the European ogre Bluebeard, who was punished for disobedience and her desire for knowledge, or even before the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Dancing, too, has very often served as a form of expression for silenced women – in village women’s

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 70

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

71

festivals in Algeria, for example. In the evident sheer pleasure of her self-abandonment to the movement of the body as she dances, head thrown back, all the way along the beach and all the way back again, the wife’s transgression through dance is also open to a feminist reading of a liberation of female sexuality. Déwé Gorodé’s novel, L’Épave, again poses the problem of the body, and of female sexual pleasure, through her depiction of the power of passionate physical relationships forbidden by customary law and by the Church. The tales of oral literature, filtered and modified by colonialism and conversion to Christianity as well as by translation, most generally portray autonomous behaviour in women as exceptional. As we saw in the first section of this chapter, the earliest European representations of Kanak women by those who sailed on the ships of Cook and d’Entrecasteaux provide evidence not only of indigenous women’s subordinate public roles but also of the filters through which eighteenthcentury men, imbued with Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, posed their fascinated and scientifically authorized gaze on exotic and sexually seductive or compliant native women. The ‘Third Sex’ in Kanak Society By association with blood, the totem, and the earth, Kanak women appear to draw on the symbolic power of life that Leenhardt’s analysis claimed for them. In everyday life, however, this remains the limited and indirect power within the patriarchal family, the occult power that feminism has interrogated as responsible for keeping women in their place as the reproducing, working, and caring support persons. Any power conferred upon women by their sexual and reproductive functions leads to their characterization as dangerous seductresses, éminences grises, and witches. What status a woman has derives from her marital and reproductive itinerary, and associated domestic roles: bringing forth sons, food-gathering and feeding the family community, planting, serving her husband’s family, and preparing food for ceremonies. These community serving roles are celebrated in Déwé’s poetry. Under customary law, women still do not have the right to inherit property, or, indeed, to divorce, yet most elect to remain within this law. The fieldwork of the feminist sociologist Christine Salomon (2000a) established the first corpus from which to argue convincingly that the apparent symbolic complementarity and harmony of the ‘masculine’ and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 71

12/03/2014 14:39:53

72

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the ‘feminine’ elements postulated by Leenhardt in his early ethnographic work, the coleus and the cordyline plants that symbolize birth and death, the feminine coconut palm and the masculine columnar pine, the dry yam and the wet taro, does not stand up to contemporary investigation despite the valuing of the feminine by association with blood, earth, and totem. The sociologist exposed in particular the exclusions that persist around a feminine body feared as dangerous. The taboo around the blood of menstruation; the prohibition of sexual relations before war and fishing expeditions; the rites of the yam cultivation cycle, or during pregnancy and breastfeeding; the burying of the placenta; and the classifying of sexually transmitted diseases as feminine do not, for Salomon, constitute harmony and complementarity. Instead, they are perceived as aspects of a battle of the sexes. Women are, nonetheless, less docile than they may seem, although, as in oral literature, resistance is most often indirect and mitigated by women’s fear of exclusion from the group. According to Salomon, women today are refusing widespread drunken violence or adultery but in ways acceptable to custom; taking refuge with brothers until the husband comes to ask pardon; refusing to appear with the husband at celebrations and ceremonies; or shaming the husband by more generous gifts to his family than he can offer, procured by the wife’s participation in the market economy outside the tribu. Despite the self-abnegation and conformity still desirable in a female, Salomon also found behaviour that is socially disruptive and manifests overt dissent. This includes the increasing tendency of young women to lay complaints of rape and gang rape and to choose to be heard under French civil law, which allows them to divorce, inherit, or have rights over their children, rather than under customary law, which does not. It also includes the acquisition of economic independence by entering the European economy and starting small cooperatives and women’s associations, or, on rare occasions, assuming the persona of a leader or strong woman who directly refuses the feminine norms of silence, submission, and self-effacement. However, in spite of a few exceptions, most women’s action takes place under the umbrella of the many women’s associations, often framed by the Church, and within adherence to custom. Reference to Western feminism has been largely disavowed. A study by Christine Salomon and Christine Hamelin claims that the singular nature of the political context in New Caledonia nonetheless permitted, at least initially, the emergence of a radical feminist movement through the activism of young Kanak within the pro-independence

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 72

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

73

movement (Salomon and Hamelin, 2008). The dynamic was later redeployed under arrangements with the French government to reduce economic and social inequalities, resulting in the setting up of powerful women’s associations such as Marie-Claude Tjibaou’s SOS Violences Sexuelles in 1992, which condemned violence against children, and Femmes et Violences Conjugales, set up in 1998. The sociologists’ 2003 survey of New Caledonian women was made possible by the support of the associations and of Déwé Gorodé, and through her by the Government of New Caledonia – a strikingly feminized government from 2004. Along with the effects of the application of the 2002 French parity law (whereby each political party is required to include equal numbers of men and women on their lists), raising women’s participation rates in provincial government from 16.7 per cent to 46.3 per cent in 2004, conclude the researchers, a new concept of the person that is more individualistic and less dominated by the male ethos of clans and alliances is strengthening. In their view, these changes are largely an outcome of the feminist struggle initiated in the first world in the 1970s. In the Loyalty Islands, however, as Salomon and Hamelin themselves point out, the women’s groups seeking to confront issues of sexual violence nonetheless insist on the responsibility of colonialism and the process of cultural erosion rather than of longstanding gender norms, rejecting the universalist codes and conceptions of French law in favour of Kanak values. This indigenous feminism, the social scientists argue, has been influenced in turn by the International Indigenous Women’s Forum of 1999. Salomon’s sociological studies, which are the first to bring the understandings and categories of Western feminist theory into play in relation to Kanak women’s situation, would lend support to a reading of a number of the Paicî stories in Bensa’s Les Filles du rocher Até as at once an indirect call for the restoring of a certain justice through women’s disruptive actions and a reaffirmation of belonging to customary society. This, as Chapter 5 will contend, is the hybrid position also taken in the poetry, short stories, and novel of the major published Kanak writer Déwé Gorodé, whose texts reintroduce the Antigone-like figure of Kaavo as legendary princess and resistant heroine. The title of Gorodé’s most recent work, Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, refers to the initiation story of Tâdo, repeatedly visited by Crab who eats his food and ‘scratches’ him while his parents are off working in the fields. Tâdo finally gets rid of his predatory visitor by trapping Crab in the cooking-pot and the family

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 73

12/03/2014 14:39:53

74

The Literatures of the French Pacific

feast in their turn on Crab (Bensa and Rivierre, 1994: 416–25). Gorodé’s novels use the story of Crab to challenge sexual predation in L’Épave and negative attitudes to female sterility in Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! where Crab takes the forms of illness or a malevolent pursuing fate and subsequent marginalization by the group for this perceived malediction, and Tâdo, who turns the tables on her pursuer, is a woman. This double chapter has moved from European founding stories of discovery (and their hidden uncertainties), and the possible palimpsestic readings that allow glimpses into the hidden thinking and epistemologies of the Pacific Other, to Kanak stories of oral tradition and foundation. It has observed that the texts that characterize each of the groups present in the colonial encounter have much to tell us not only about the contexts of their writing and of their reading that make their meanings dynamic, but also about the significant role of gender in these processes of cultural translation and rewriting: about internal, gendered contestation as itself a form of hybridity. This is illustrated again in our final section by the case of the tales of oral tradition, mainly about Kanak women, rewritten by the late nineteenth-century revolutionary and universalist feminist, Louise Michel, in her singular 1875 Légendes et chansons de geste canaques. Writing Gender and Justice in Louise Michel’s Légendes et chansons de geste canaques [Kanak Legends and Epic Songs] The nineteenth-century revolutionary déportée Louise Michel was an early collector of New Caledonian vocabulary, tales, and legends, which she published in two successive editions: Légendes et chansons de geste canaques in 1875, addressed to ‘Friends in Europe’, and, once back in Paris in 1885, Légendes et chants de geste canaques. One of the fifteen women deported to l’Île Ducos in 1873 for their role on the barricades of the first proletarian revolutionary movement, the Paris Commune, Louise Michel had quickly become known to local Kanak communities. Kathleen Hart claims that Louise Michel’s interest in Kanak music and storytelling, which led her to use her friend and canaque chief Daoumi as an informant for the tales she would later publish, was a product of her utopian vision of a universal class struggle for freedom and equality, a new humanity (l’humanité nouvelle). It also arose from an ‘identification with pre-industrial peoples – be they the Kanaks or the oppressed people of France – for whom the spoken word was the primary mode

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 74

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

75

of communication’ (Hart, 2001: 20) Hart notes that the Gauls invoked by Michel are also constructed as representatives of a primitive oral culture and do not play the same role, for example, as the emblematic nationalistic Celts in the concurrent nineteenth-century work of the historian Henri Martin, where they are represented as founders of the modern French state and national character. In Hart’s analysis, written culture exemplified for Michel the modern centralized state based on a market economy. On the other hand, the oral culture of the peasants of the Haute-Marne of Louise’s girlhood epitomized the solidarity of the traditional artisan economy of the people – seen as a precious, threatened form of community. It is the knowledge from ‘before written history’ (‘avant les temps historiques’) of Marie Verdet, a patois-speaking centenarian, and the tradition of the écregnes – women’s sewing and storytelling sessions that mix economic production and play, evoked in Michel’s Mémoires – that inspires Michel’s 1875 translation of ‘Idara (of the heath) the prophetess’ (‘Idara (la bruyère) la prophétesse’), rewritten as ‘Idara, the Song of the Whites’ (Idara, la chanson des blancs’) in 1885. Idara is a takata, a traditional healer, sorcerer, or hypnotist; however, this text is clearly no mere transcription of a Kanak legend. Hart’s argument is supported by the manuscript for the 1885 Légendes, archived at the Institute for Social Research in Amsterdam, which shows a number of versions of the text, with material deleted, rearranged, and rewritten. In all versions, Idara sings an early anti-colonial, anti-racist song that is also a celebration of the beauty of oral tradition. However, as Kathleen Hart’s study concludes, Idara’s voice is also that of Louise Michel, a great woman orator who spoke eloquently of oppression to her people. Idara, the Prophetess She sits beneath the coconut palms, Idara, the prophetess. Idara is the daughter of the tribes, she has fought with the braves against the pale men. Idara is the mother of the heroes; it is she who binds their wounds with the chewed leaf of the vine cut by the light of the moon. It is she who gives them the warming bouis to drink; she again who sings them to sleep with the magic chant. Listen old men, Idara is about to speak!8 She [Idara] sings the song of the whites. When the whites came in their great canoes, we welcomed them as tayos, brothers, they cut down the great trees to attach the wings of their canoes, and we didn’t mind this.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 75

12/03/2014 14:39:53

76

The Literatures of the French Pacific They ate yams from the keulé, cooking-pot of the tribu and we were happy for them. But the whites began to take the good land, which produces without being turned over, they took away our young people and women to serve them, they possess everything that we possessed. The whites promised us the sky and the land, but they have given us nothing, nothing but misery.9

In her Mémoires (1886; 1983; 2002), Michel presents the tellers of oral tradition, the bardits, as linked to a tradition of rebellion, the heroic will of the Gauls or of the ancient Druids against the Romans. Her introduction ‘Aux amis d’Europe’ [To Friends in Europe] from the 1885 version of Légendes, reproduced in Bogliolo’s 1996 reconstruction and re-editing of the1875 and 1885 texts (Bogliolo, 1996: 62–3) conflates the war songs and sagas of resistance of heroic canaque bards with the myth of the Gauls and other savage or resistant and unassimilated peoples in a journey to the ‘roots of civilization’. The ‘canaque bards’ and ‘legends’, the ‘épopées’ of the ‘Stone Age’ and of the ‘childhood of humanity’ are compared with the great early sagas of the West: Edda, romancero, and Nibelungen. It is Michel’s personal reading, her own parti pris, that enables her to discover heroic women’s voices in Kanak stories, to construct a tradition of resistant heroines, and to exalt the power of women as storytellers, healers, and revolutionaries in touch with nature, song, life, and death. The text, ‘Idara, the Prophetess’, was quite significantly rewritten in 1885 to generalize the question of the low status of women and the gender wars in, but also beyond, Kanak society. Idara is a popinée (woman), a némo nothing, and the tribes still tell her stories while treating their women like animals; human illogicality is the same everywhere, it is nonetheless to their credit that they do not flatter women in order more easily to deceive them […]

A némo [nothing],10 adds the author with irony in the 1885 version, is a useful object for carrying everything, including the children and serving her lord and master. Further comment on women’s condition (of nothingness) reappears in the 1885 version of Michel’s ‘Nocturnal Stories’ (‘Récits nocturnes’), where a first-person narrator observes that on the death of her mother from carrying too many heavy loads her father took another wife who beat her every day, and that she regretted her dead mother, although ‘she was only a woman’ (Michel, 1885: 104). Michel’s reading of Idara is an early feminist rehabilitation of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 76

12/03/2014 14:39:53

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

77

figure of the witch, comparing Idara (the takata or healer) and her canaque magic with the spells of the Middle Ages that cause the victim to be eaten up by fear or remorse. A Gothic story like ‘The Bride of Corinth’, with its roots in antiquity and in medieval versions, retold in the nineteenth century by the well-known historian Michelet, for example, tells the story of a fiancée who dies to return as a form of ghost or vampire and causes her betrothed to waste away. Michel’s nineteenth-century rewriting of such stories in an indigenous version serves implicitly to affirm the similarities in the myths of women and women’s (unequal) condition across cultures. The dreaming of the old woman Nechewa goes back so far before the whites, before the time when the dead were put into the branches of trees, that language can’t tell it, writes Michel, insisting on the immemorial and un-recountable aspects of a poetic culture. In ‘The Bed of the Ancestors’ (‘Le Lit des aïeux’) (1996: 22–4), the genie of the story tells of a ‘Faust’ who is also a woman, the young and solitary Téi, who eats only wild fruit and berries and refuses the bark cloth mats or necklace of jade pearls, the indidio or shell money offered along with marriage by the son of the chief. Though wooed by a promise of privileges and delights – the mats of bark softer than the fabrics of the whites and the layers of fat reserved for those few well-served women who stay at home instead of carrying the axes and stones for the slings of the warriors – Téi, like Michel herself, chooses to remain single, flying back alone into the mountains to continue to sing to the dead, preferring the dream and the void to material power. ‘The Young Women of Owié’ (‘Les Jeunes Filles d’Owié’) (1996: 34–5) is a further hymn to the link between women, nature, magic or life force, and peacefulness in a text that seeks to reflect on the origins of war, cannibalism, and violence in relation both to Kanak society and to humankind in general. Ondoué, the genie, gives power to women. The women must stand on the banks of the river beating their bamboo sticks against the earth to call the fish into the men’s nets, a scene that appears etched on the remarkable nineteenth-century Kanak bamboo engravings reproduced, for example, in the splendid volume on Pacific artwork, De jade et de nacre (Musée territorial de Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1990). In Michel’s conclusion to one version of this poetic sketch, the daughters of Owié are brave but they prefer the growling of the waves to seeing the blood of their tayos [friends] flow on a battlefield. Women combatants do appear with Mika and Kouira, two beautiful black women who fought with the warriors of Paimé (the good chief)

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 77

12/03/2014 14:39:53

78

The Literatures of the French Pacific

against Techea (the bad chief) in order to stop cannibalism and exploitation. Techea takes the food of the women and children for his warriors. The weaker and less powerful disappear periodically into his native oven as ‘condiment’ to give taste to the diet of yams and taro. Mika and Kouira refuse to hide in caves with the treasure of bracelets of jade and roussette or flying fox feathers with the other women; instead, they choose to die alongside Paimé in heroic battle against Techea. ‘Their hatchets were red, their arms were red, and the red blood of the heart will flow today’ (Michel, 1885: 81). The song of the young women’s mother accompanied the battle like a trumpet. ‘Long was the battle, long and terrible, Mika and Kouira, the beautiful black girls fell like warrior women and their mother kept on singing’ (81). Earlier in this cycle, Kaméa (also a daughter of the brave, but this time a self-sacrificial heroine) had thrown herself onto the reef rather than allow Techea to take her from her husband, whom Techea has just killed and eaten. François Bogliolo suggests (2000) that the stories of the warrior princesses who resist these evils to the death illustrate Michel’s universal ideas of the values of human dignity and rights and the progress of humankind. The stories can thus be read both as early anthropology and as early feminism. Yet these texts also reflect the received social stratifications and understandings of nineteenth-century France and its romantic literary paradigm, which, for example, equated women’s true nobility with masochistic self-sacrifice. Some of Michel’s tales, then, do not fit well into the revolutionary frame of explanation but recall the dominant romantic modes of her socio-historical location that had also drawn other robust women writers like Georges Sand into their net. Daoumi’s version of the ‘Daughters of the Theama from Belep’ (‘Les Filles du Théama de Belep’), told by the old people of Sifou (Lifou) celebrating the pilou (festival and dance of the yam harvest), is the story of three women who are heroines despite the fact they lie to protect their father and their village. The daughters, one ‘as dark as night and as tall as a warrior’, the other ‘pale and small’, and the third ‘as light as the wind’, sing with a voice ‘as strong as a warrior’s’ to attract and waylay Baiek, a young chief who is invading their father’s territory. Two of the daughters tell him they have been cast out in anger because they know the secret of the father’s jade treasure and succeed in leading the warrior into an ambush. Baiek is killed but their father’s chiefdom is still taken. ‘The blood of the three daughters flowed’, and yet, as the story concludes, in an enigmatically poetic ending, the third daughter ‘had said nothing’ (Michel, 1996: 69).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 78

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

79

Another silent, apparently passive, self-sacrificial woman depicted in the story of ‘The Virgin of Neklai’ (‘La Vierge de Neklai’) is given to the dark waters of the sacred river by the local takata to ensure the favour of the god of traditional shell money. The spirit of her mother was not there to defend her, writes Michel. The wind rises and covers the cries of the victim. The story could be seen to derive from a universal myth – in this case, of the virgin sacrifice in the rites of spring. Such a mythology is close to the mystical quest and renewal of the kind that Joseph Campbell advances (1968 [1949]), or analogous to the propitiating sacrifice of a sacred scapegoat who breaks the cycle of violence and revenge of the sort that René Girard’s study of the violent and the sacred investigates (1973). The young virgin thrown as an offering to the sea-monster appears to mix mystic or mythical elements from more than one culture. However, behind the romantic story, a feminist reading might detect the suspect prerogatives of the priest (the sea monster) over the young virgin (Andromeda). Alongside these stories of sacrificial victims, Michel evokes the frequent phenomenon of female suicide. In ‘The Breezes’ (‘Les Souffles’), Kéa, Kéri, and Lira, called by the spirits of the breezes, jump from a cliff, without knowing why. In ‘Le Kouindio’, the smiling Marek, who seems to have no cares (‘do popinées [Kanak women] have time for cares?’, adds Michel), is called by the reef into its open mouth. Michel’s representations of Kanak female suicide, informed by her literary background and Romantic sensibility, and presented as the drama and mystery of the individual psyche, can be compared with Leenhardt’s translation of similar stories and subsequent analysis of this phenomenon four decades later. Suicide, in Leenhardt, takes place against the background of a mythico-social system in which death is not a void but a reversible passage from one state to another that gives access to a different kind of power. Leenhardt points out that in the story of the mother and her three daughters who commit suicide by hanging themselves with bark rope, the women first put on their best jewellery and adorn themselves with black powder like warriors – in preparation for their entry to the spirit world. Suicide appears to give the betrayed wife power, for, as we observed earlier, she destroys herself to enter another timeless state where, ubiquitous, she can haunt and punish her unfaithful husband. Leenhardt compares this female revenge from beyond the grave to the power of the Furies of Greek mythology (1932). A contemporary feminist reading might point rather to the fact that it is particularly the most powerless who must resort to such dramatic

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 79

12/03/2014 14:39:54

80

The Literatures of the French Pacific

expedients as placing themselves outside society or committing suicide to accede to any power. Michel’s thematic of warrior women, in any event, is much less common in later collections of translated oral stories, which include a number of tales of women killed by rejected suitors or jealous husbands, or of witches and ogresses holding special and dangerous powers who must be suppressed. Déwé Gorodé’s work will introduce further overlays, this time of contemporary Kanak ‘Womanism’, to use Alice Walker’s term (1983), to the oral topos. Her novella Ute Mûrûnû recovers and valorizes the figure of the resistant Kaavo, daughter of the chief and legendary princess. Her novel L’Épave, on the other hand, also depicts a complicit Ogress or witch, under the spell of an Ogre who devours little girls. The Ogress, herself conditioned by unequal gender power and early incestuous relationships to which she becomes enthralled, exercises power over the younger generation. As well as refusing their feminine condition to become warrior women, in a number of traditional tales women and wives often turn out to be spirits – for example, the dangerous and powerful daughters of the North Wind. Michel’s Légendes, Leenhardt’s Documents néo-calédoniens, and Bensa and Rivierre’s anthropological stories all choose stories that figure a number of women able to wield the powers (malevolent and protective) inherent in totemic magic or in being a spirit, but to their own ends. As we noted earlier, Bensa and Rivierre read such stories of women’s transformation into spirits less in terms of mythical depth and cosmology (as Leenhardt does), or in terms of women’s condition (as Michel does), than in terms of social systems. For the anthropologists (and their readers), these are tales in which, for example, the mother who dies and becomes a spirit continues to nourish her unborn child, or entrusts her child to another in order to continue fulfilling her social responsibilities to the group. Later chapters will follow Gorodé’s young heroines as figures of resistance in that writer’s sometimes surprisingly new retellings of old stories. But in these stories there is much that is ambivalent and not easily receivable or readable for Western readers. The Kanak woman writer is seeking recognition for gender issues in Kanak society on her own terms. Her work, as we have suggested, calls for a reading of the old stories in terms of a restoration of justice by women’s disruptive actions, but also as an affirmation of their belonging within Kanak society.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 80

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Reading Kanak-New Caledonian Texts as Palimpsest

81

Conclusion This chapter set out to look at what is constructed in the spaces of encounter between cultures in contact. The attempts to explain the differences between the portraits painted by Cook and the Forsters in 1774, and by d’Entrecasteaux and La Billardière only nineteen years later, reveal the extent to which these accounts of early exploration, far from being simply factual reports or scientific accounts, are in fact literary and rhetorical texts. A response to the curious ‘natural’ peoples described in detail, these texts are also, and at least as much, the product of the mindsets and circumstances of exploration, conventions of style, and of the expectations of particular readers. Apparent infractions of European law or morality, such as cannibalism and theft, are thus recurring topics, as are oblique references to the sexual availability of women. Moreover, Cook constantly rewrote his journal in the course of this second voyage and his text, written with publication in mind, was a mixture of first-hand impressions and frequent revisions. This is not to deny the careful observation that appears to give these early publications immediacy and veracity. Cook’s picture of the formal Kanak welcome of the strangers, for example, still appears to contain authentic detail today. In any event, the ritual exchange he sketches corresponds to the customary gestures still required to obtain local authorization to be admitted onto customary land. This argues for a certain historicity and for the possibility that Cook’s text captured various aspects of Kanak daily reality both in and between his lines. The accounts of the indigenous people of New Caledonia in the texts of the European explorers were set side by side with a second set of foundation stories, the texts of Kanak oral tradition, also ‘in translation’. Like the stories and readings of first encounter by the eighteenth-century explorers, the retelling of the tales of oral tradition by Louise Michel, Alban Bensa, Maurice Leenhardt, Déwé Gorodé, and others are a combined product of the meanings of the original oral texts, of the writer’s personal beliefs, contexts, and professional background, and of the reader’s contexts and understandings. Gender is an aspect of the telling, the writing, and the reading. This chapter has argued that the position and gender of the teller (and the listener) also come to add themselves to the tale told, thereby creating a significantly different form of mixing or hybridity to the textual palimpsest. Through a more detailed case study of translations, and in particular a comparison of the translations of Louise Michel and of Maurice Leenhardt, the following

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 81

12/03/2014 14:39:54

82

The Literatures of the French Pacific

chapter will develop this introduction to the different kinds of mixing effected and the palimpsestic hybridities created in the translations of encounter with Kanak and the texts of Kanak oral tradition.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 82

12/03/2014 14:39:54

2

Writing (In) the Language(s) of the Other Translation as Third Space Translation as Third Space

Separate Communities The sites of translation from indigenous to European languages, considered in this chapter as further and particular spaces of writing and reading hybridity between cultures, derive from different periods of New Caledonian post-contact history. They also come from different areas of an archipelago that includes the main island of Grande Terre, the Isle of Pines and Belep, to the south and to the north respectively, and the Loyalty Islands – Maré, Lifou, and Ouvéa. New Caledonian history is distinctive in that the main island’s geography has resulted in the division of the indigenous peoples into separate language groups, from valley to valley. Be it through pact or enmity, the Kanak groups were nonetheless connected – by marriage alliances, trade between the tribes of the shore and those of the interior, and war. Excluded from the European enterprise in the colonial period and pushed back into reserves, under the Code de l’Indigénat or Native Code in place from 1887 to 1946, they could not leave these areas without authorization and were largely isolated from the mainstream economy. The movements of the indentured labourers, predominantly from Indonesia and French Indochina, were similarly restricted, in their case to the mining and agricultural areas they served. Of the 22,000 convicts and deportees of European origin dependent on the all-powerful penitentiary authority, some 10 per cent eventually received small concessions of land to work under surveillance and constituted their own small rural communities. Assisted settlers were grouped in independent concessions of land such

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 83

12/03/2014 14:39:54

84

The Literatures of the French Pacific

as Koné or Voh, most often in areas inaccessible to one another by road and linked only through a distant Noumea. The free settlers, possessed of a small capital, who in the last decade of the nineteenth century had been solicited by Governor Feillet to develop coffee plantations, came to a country where the liberated convicts who roamed the colony, the import–export businessmen, and the larger landowners and administrators in Noumea constituted very separate groups. Any real mixing constituted by the translations that emerged for scientific, economic, and political purposes would thus go against the grain of the hierarchically structured and stratified groupings of the colonial period. In her history of colonial New Caledonia, Expériences coloniales [Colonial Experiences], Isabelle Merle concludes that this colony is quite unique in its absence of an intermediary caste between the cultural universes (Merle, 1995). In Tahiti or the French West Indies, for example, groups developed that laid claim to their identity as mixed-race métisse (called créole or demi respectively), an identity also marked by shades of skin colour. In New Caledonia, it was not skin colour that conferred identity but belonging to particular spaces or cultural worlds: Voh, Koné, and Sarraméa as isolated but governmentsponsored places of free settlement; Bourail, La Foa, and Pouembout as convict or liberated-convict farming settlements; the native reserves seldom penetrated by the Europeans; and Noumea, the town of colonial administration. Contemporary research (and some literary writing) is uncovering mixed relationships, partly hidden or disavowed, as well as the distinctive cultural heritages of other smaller groups: the traces left on the landscape of the valleys of Bourail and Nessadiou by the group of déportés for political rebellion from colonized North Africa, for example (Ouennoughi, 2005). Languages, Missionaries, Translation As well as an intrinsic part of the control inherent in the colonial project, the translation process has also been a major instrument of cultural transfer or mixing between some of these separate spaces, and central to the emergence of a contemporary New Caledonian literature. Moreover, as Alban Bensa’s work on the translation of the legends and stories of the Cemuhi- and Paicî-speaking areas shows, individual Melanesian languages and cultures themselves seek domination and produce hybrid situations in their negotiations between different Kanak languages and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 84

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

85

sets of cultural knowledge, particularly in border areas, between Cemuhi and Paicî in this instance. Yet, however internally mixed these separate European, Melanesian, and ‘Other’ New Caledonian identities may be, in the final analysis, hybridity turns out to require the notion of separate identities (or of specificity of contexts) for its construction. Despite a necessary degree of syncretism involved in writing in (or into) the language of the Other, what seems to make the difference in the third spaces created by literary translation is the translator’s own individual contexts, languages, and purposes as these filter and modify the culture transmitted. The reader is once again called upon to perform a form of palimpsestic reading. The socio-political stakes of language and translation in ‘Kanaky New Caledonia’ have always been high. Twenty-eight indigenous languages are still spoken in this Collectivité sui generis where French has been the official language since a colony was established in 1853. Work on the transcription and translation of these languages of Austronesian origin was begun by missionaries and continued by European linguists and ethnographers with the help of indigenous informants, and has proceeded rapidly in the new millennium with an increasing participation of Kanak researchers in the collection of oral stories en langue, that is, in local indigenous languages. It is nonetheless far from complete and must take account of the fact that Kanak languages and cultural knowledge are also themselves evolving and hybrid, in their negotiations between different sets of indigenous knowledge over time and their melding of Western modernity with local tradition(s). There is still some debate on the origins of Melanesian languages, which appear to have arrived from South East Asia (present-day Taiwan) with the first Austronesian ancestors in New Caledonia dating from around 3,000 BCE according to the work of archaeologist Christophe Sand (2010). For Françoise Ozanne-Rivièrre, there are four main language groups present in Oceania (1998). The original Australian and Papouan-New Guinean languages, the proto-Austronesian that spread from the coasts of Southern China across the Pacific as far as Rapanui/ Easter Island some time before the appearance of the distinctive Lapita pottery in 1600 BCE, the Indo-European languages, particularly French and English, that became important with settlement in the nineteenth century in the wake of the earlier trading voyages of the Spanish sea-captains Quiros and Torrès, the Dutch explorers Tasman, Le Maire, and Schouten, and the eighteenth-century scientific expeditions led by Cook, Wallis, Bougainville, La Pérouse, and d’Entrecasteaux. Finally,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 85

12/03/2014 14:39:54

86

The Literatures of the French Pacific

there are the pidgins that developed largely from English, including the Pacific trade pidgin, Bislama. The early evangelists were principally from the Loyalty Islands, which had previously received the attentions of the LMS. They did not themselves speak French but communicated in Bislama, used by the sandalwood traders and beachcombers present along the coast from the beginning of the century. In the introduction to their collection of legends in Paicî language in The Daughters of the Até Rock (Les Filles du rocher Até), Bensa and Rivierre note the continuing influence of pidgin on the names of European objects: ‘le sac’, for example, is baiki [bag] and ‘le savon’ is coopwo [soap] (Bensa and Rivierre, 1994). Kanak peoples have traditionally been multilingual, even on the islands of Maré and Lifou where a single language – Nengone and Drehu respectively – is spoken. Exchanges between language groups through multilingualism, translation, and the development of pidgins played a role in pre-colonial New Caledonia, and continued throughout the colonial era. Part of the early evangelization of all the New Caledonian islands was carried out by Polynesian ‘messengers’ from Samoa, Tonga, and the Isle of Pines. The Loyalty Island-based Society of Mary brought French to the mission established at Balade in the north-east of the main island in 1843, where the fathers transcribed and translated a small number of stories. The Marists were competing with the LMS who introduced English terms (horse, spoon, fork, etc.) to the languages of the Loyalty Islands. Samuel McFarlane, who served on Lifou from 1859 to 1871, incorporated a number of local tales into his LMS English language Story of the Lifou Mission (1873). A tale in which God is played by a chief who condemns malefactors to agricultural toil for having stolen one of his yams is, for Wenigo Ihage, a moralized explanation of the origin of human suffering and bears an obvious connection to the tale of Adam and Eve. Another story appears to parallel that of the tower of Babel. Ihage concludes (1991) that these early translations were used as a means to bring about conversion and were subordinated to the authority of the Bible. In fact, much of the north of the main island was not evangelized until the end of the nineteenth century when the Protestant missions converted a third of its population, largely by using native catechists. According to Ihage, Father Lambert’s translation of stories and in-depth study of customs at the turn of the century, published in Mœurs et superstitions des néo-calédoniens again serves to facilitate the introduction of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 86

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

87

Christian ideas by showing what Lambert describes as the ‘inanity of the pretended Melanesian religion’ and thereby preparing a place for ‘the truth’. In 1920, Emma Hadfield, the wife of an LMS missionary, published thirty-two tales in English literary form, including a valuable list of proverbs in the vernacular. Father Marie-Joseph Dubois produced transcriptions of oral texts in Nengone, collected on the island of Maré over more than a quarter of a century, with word-for-word translation and explanatory notes. His more recent observations on the island’s history and culture, collected in Gens de Maré (1984) and largely based on a literal translation of terms used in Nengone, insist on the outside influences (Tongan, Samoan, Fijian, Papua New Guinean, Australian aboriginal, English), and the particularly mixed character of the Loyalty Island’s cultural origins. English had exerted an influence on the territory since Cook’s 1774 visit. In 1858, the trader and adventurer James Paddon introduced 1,000 settlers of English- or German-speaking origin who had come via Australia to a settlement at Païta, outside Noumea. Patrick O’Reilly’s seminal biographical work documents a number of Scottish and Irish immigrants who similarly left Australia to try their luck as settlers in the new territory (O’Reilly, 1980). Up until modern times, the use of English has been perceived with suspicion as subversive of French political hegemony. In 1899, the Loyalty Islands’ missionary, Delord, recommended that the native pastors leaving to evangelize the Houailou area should not only be clean, well-dressed, polite to the whites, and cut their hair, but also that they should count in French and not in English to dispel the fears of the colonists that the Protestants, in league with the English, were conniving with the natives to drive out the French. In the 1980s, some more radical elements in the Kanak independence groups aligned themselves with Fiji or Australia; even, in some instances in the Loyalty Islands, replacing the teaching of French with English in the schools under their jurisdiction. Écoles Populaires Kanak (EPKs) – Kanak Popular Schools – set up by the FLNKS, used the local indigenous language as the language of instruction and sought to bring the elders and their oral knowledge into close contact with the schools in as many ways as possible. The experiment was not supported by the government and was quite rapidly abandoned; only one or two native schools remain in existence. Many considered that despite the fact that it was also the language of colonization and acculturation their children needed competence in French to be able to take their place in the wider world.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 87

12/03/2014 14:39:54

88

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Ethnographers and Linguists From the 1960s on, Maurice Leenhardt and Jean Guiart’s early ethnographic translations had been followed by the work of linguists such as Jean-Claude Rivierre, Jacqueline de la Fontenelle, and A.G. Haudricourt, including Françoise Ozanne- Rivièrre and Claire Moyse-Faurié’s 1980 Mythes et contes de la Grande-Terre et des Îles Loyauté. More recently, the team composing the Laboratoire des langues et civilisations à tradition orale (LACITO) of the French research institution the Centre national de la recherche scientifique has published a number of texts from oral tradition in bilingual versions. Some translations were also done by the South Pacific Commission with the expressed aim of giving readers ‘a better approach to the living history of Melanesians’, but this approach was criticized by Ihage for not giving attention to oral contexts of production and ‘erasing local details that give stories their real significance’(1991: 39). He was also critical of the publication of sixty or so Melanesian stories translated into French by SEHNC (Brou, 1980), which abandons the presentation of the vernacular text, literal translation, and gloss. The justification, as Ihage reports it (clearly without merit for him), is that ‘these days the indigenous people use more French anyway and it is impossible to locate an original text among the vagaries of oral transmission’ (1991: 38). In 1979, against this background of emerging Kanak critique of translations that ignore the social context and the telling of the tale, and reduce oral material to print culture, the Centre de langues vernaculaires was founded. The Director, and the first Kanak to complete a doctorate in linguistics, Wenigo Ihage, has been accelerating the collection and dissemination of oral material for educational purposes from an increasing number of the language groups of the archipelago. Maurice Lenormand’s doctoral thesis, defended in Noumea in 1995, established a lexicon for the Drehu language and ethnographic notes on customs, beliefs, daily life, and legends of Lifou. Its publication was contemporaneous with the offering of Drehu as a language that, along with three other indigenous languages (Paicî, Nengone, and Ajié), can be taken as a subject for the Baccalauréat exam. Nonetheless, it is the accompanying French translation that gives these dictionaries and transcribed oral documents an audience, particularly in Noumea where French has always been the lingua franca and where many Kanak children now speak the language(s) of their tribu or village area only imperfectly. Even in the tribu (now called ‘customary lands’

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 88

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

89

by the Administration), vocabulary relating to the older traditions and spiritual beliefs has been largely lost. Television and schooling that often involves children leaving their village have replaced oral storytelling, as Wanir Wélépane points out in his introduction to his collection of short texts in Drehu in Aux Vents des îles (1993). Even at the beginning of the century, Maurice Leenhardt had written in an early letter to his father (6 January 1904), researched by James Clifford, that the Canaques do not give up their secrets and that the younger generation no longer knows anything. Paradoxically, as Sinclair-Reynolds has pointed out (2013), the recovery of Kanak linguistic and cultural diversity through translation into French, still a major aspect of the present reconstruction and redefinition of New Caledonian identities against Metropolitan linguistic hegemony, may also reinforce the conventional thinking on the hierarchical nature of the relation between the languages. In this translation exercise, the medium of French – perceived as central, modern, mobile, written, universal, the language of the classics – may encourage a view of Melanesian languages as traditional/archaic, immobile, oral/ non-literary, and in all events local/particular, peripheral, or insular. Bogliolo’s research showed that Father Gagnière considered that his collection of ‘Fables et contes calédoniens’ (‘Caledonian fables and folk tales’) sent to France from Balade in 1853 would ‘hold no interest at all’ for the French. Emergent New Caledonia literature, Bogliolo continues, would be marked for a century and a half by similar processes of ‘transfer, translation, and dependency’ (2000: 32). There is evidence of European rewriting for the bourgeois France of Napoleon III from these very first transcriptions and translations of Kanak stories. Bogliolo documents the tale published in 1862 in La Nouvelle-Calédonie et ses habitans by Victor de Rochas, telling of a chief helped out by good spirits. Readers are led to assume, observes Bogliolo, these are friends of the Europeans assisted by missionaries. Along with the tale of the ‘Chef de Touho’, this early cultural mediator also reproduced the hoot or speech given in 1864 by the chief of Aramo and published by the prospector and explorer Jules Garnier in 1867. Garnier quite simply replaced the repetitions that characterize the oration, as well as the long list of names, with ‘etc.’. The translator here is an intermediary between two literary worlds, but evidently closer to his reader than to an indigenous interlocutor: such rhetorical repetitions and genealogies, apparently of little interest to the European, would be central to the meaning and the impact of the speech in the Kanak world.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 89

12/03/2014 14:39:54

90

The Literatures of the French Pacific

The LMS missionaries also produced English translations of oral literature as standard literary narratives largely conforming to European genre norms. As the first chapter noted, Louise Michel drew on European romantic and epic poetic traditions in her ‘translation’. In the 1950s, the ethnologist Jean Guiart still divides his Contes et légendes de la Grande Terre (1957) into the European genres of fables, folktales, legends, and myths, although it is not at all clear to the reader on what grounds the stories he (re)tells fit into these categories. Leenhardt in the 1930s, and later Bensa and Rivierre at the end of the century, do seek to focus on the indigenous texts themselves, providing a transcription in the vernacular, generally placed at the top of the page or in a central position, and then a word-for-word translation into French. In Bensa and Rivierre, this is followed by a line-by-line translation into the target language at the bottom of the page in the position of footnotes, in simple non-literary French observing standard order and syntax, and mostly in the present tense. Leenhardt’s work constructs a more literary reading, employing the full range of French tenses, usually also at the bottom of his page. As Emma Sinclair-Reynolds notes (2010), Leenhardt’s translations have largely received the endorsement of contemporary Kanak scholars. In the issue of Mwà Véé dedicated to the centenary of Maurice Leenhardt’s arrival in New Caledonia, Jean Euritéin, a specialist in the A’jië language and member of the Bâ tribu of the Houaïlou region, writes: ‘Maurice Leenhardt was able to translate not just the words, but also the spirit of the culture into our vernacular language and this work remains exceptional’ (‘Maurice Leenhardt a su traduire non seulement les mots, mais encore l’esprit de la culture en langue et ce travail reste exceptionnel’ (Euritéin, 2002: 37). Wenigo Ihage’s now significant body of work on oral tradition (1991; 1993; 2007) also presents Leenhardt as a precursor for his ‘scientific’, scholarly, and respectful translations. However, with their three levels – original text, word-for-word inter-text, and literary French target text – as scholars have pointed out, these may appear dense and difficult to many readers and have both a restricted market and a limited reading public. Kanak Contemporary Revival Often first appearing in Mwà Véé, published by the ADCK, texts of oral tradition written by Kanak are also increasingly being integrated into written literature in French. Led by Grain de sable, a number

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 90

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

91

of new local presses have set about publishing this work as well as re-editing classic ethnographic texts in inexpensive and reader-friendly pocket collections – for example, texts on le Pilou or on the danced ceremony of boenando by Maurice Leenhardt (1978) and by Jean-Marie Tjibaou on the founding figure of ‘Kanaké’, published as ‘La Case et le Sapin’ [The Chiefly House and the Pine Tree] (Tjibaou and Missotte, 1978a). The first Kanak literary texts began to appear in bookshops from the 1980s, including plays by Pierre Gope, poems and stories of the Loyalty Islands by Wanir Wélépane (Aux vents des îles), two volumes of short stories by Déwé Gorodé (L’Agenda and Utê Mûrûnû), and the collected speeches of Jean-Marie Tjibaou. Anthologies of New Caledonian writing, notably the ground-breaking comprehensive Bogliolo collection of Caledonian texts in Paroles et écritures, published in 1994, and still used in many New Caledonian high schools, reproduce a small number of Kanak texts in the vernacular alongside their French translations. A new manual for collèges, edited by Frédéric Ohlen in 2011, À la croisée des cultures: pages d’ici et d’ailleurs, however, does not include any texts en langue. In this collection, few Kanak literary texts are present: one poem by Gorodé (describing a vagrant Australian Aboriginal in Sydney and written in a collaborative project with the Caledonian writer Nicolas Kurtovitch) and one short dramatic text by Pierre Gope, also written with Kurtovitch. Although New Caledonian texts of many origins now sit in this pedagogical anthology in relative equality alongside Francophone and Metropolitan French texts grouped in thematic units – on the City, for example – this new manual, despite its very contemporary multicultural, Francophone, or indeed litératuremonde focus, despite its apparent ‘hybridity’, appears to constitute something of a regression. The late and slow cultural and linguistic revival in New Caledonia – which is nonetheless now also the home of major Pacific research institutions, such as the Institut français océanique, part of Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer (ORSTOM); the South Pacific Commission, now the South Pacific Foundation; and the University of New Caledonia, founded in 1989 – has intensified over the last three decades, partly as a result of the cultural politics of the Kanak Independence parties. The 1980s were characterized by violent political clashes, the Événements, when New Caledonia was on the brink of civil war, and later by changes in the territory’s political status with the Matignon and Noumea Agreements. It was Tjibaou’s political legacy in establishing the latter that led to the construction of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 91

12/03/2014 14:39:54

92

The Literatures of the French Pacific

architecturally remarkable Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou in the 1990s. Recorded and interpreted by many of the recent literary and historical texts, the Événements included: the assassination of independence sympathizer Pierre Declercq on 19 September 1981; the ambush and assassination by settlers of ten members of the Independence movement, including two of Tjibaou’s brothers, near Hienghène, in December 1984; the killing of militant independence leader Éloi Machoro by the French special forces on 12 January 1985; and the assault on the police post at Chepénehé on Ouvéa by radical young Kanak activists in 1988. The death of three French policemen and the taking of others as hostages brought down the wrath of French President Jacques Chirac and his Minister, Charles Pasqua. The decision made by the French special forces to storm the limestone caves where the hostages were being held, with little concern for ensuring that there were survivors to tell the tale, resulted in the deaths of most of the hostage takers. Almost no family on Ouvéa, on both sides of the political spectrum, Loyalist and pro-Independence, was left without a young relative to bury and mourn. Exactly one year later, on 4 May 1989, during the customary commemoration ceremony for the dead on Ouvéa, Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Yiewnéné Yiewiéné, leaders of the FLNKS, were assassinated by a Kanak independence extremist and pastor. These political struggles and subsequent political agreements, the Noumea Accords of March and August 1998, proposing a ‘common destiny’, have given rise to a major increase in literary production by all the major groups in an attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy and connection to the land that would ensure their group a place in the new society. The Kanak role in this present cultural battle for control of the country’s (hi)story, a struggle in which translation plays a significant part, is, of course, complicated by the decentralized nature of traditional culture. Authenticity was initially to be found in the local oral traditions in a geographical area assembling a particular language group into a chefferie. Beyond these large and powerful chiefdoms, a national culture, or even individual self-conscious identity, could be argued to be effects of assimilation and modernization. Kanak culture could itself be considered to be an invention of writing and modernity. However, since the Second World War, when national political groupings had developed to press for the abandonment of the oppressive Code de l’Indigénat [1884–1946] and the granting of citizenship to Melanesians, politics has been a major unifying factor. The Union Calédonienne,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 92

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

93

formed in the early 1950s, which brought together Protestant and Catholic Associations, gave way to the Front Indépendantiste and then, in 1984, to the National Socialist Kanak Liberation Front. Jean-Marie Tjibaou would seek to use cultural revival, particularly the organization of the Melanesia 2000 festival in 1975, as a political tool, inventing and revaluing the term Kanak and a shared Kanak culture by means of a partial translation of the Paicî origin story, Téâ Kanaké, in the form of a play-spectacle. This constructs a central metaphor for the unity of the Kanak people of New Caledonia that transcends the tale’s local specificity. From the first published versions of Téâ Kanaké in French (in the ethnographic texts in the 1960s, to the most recent bilingual rewriting of the jémàà for children), there has also been, as SinclairReynolds observes, a major shift in emphasis to stress the importance of the original language. This increased recognition of the value of the source text has been accompanied by greater Kanak involvement in the translation process, affording an opportunity to create new knowledge and contributing to the construction of present and future identity. As well as acting as a source of information for non-Kanak about Kanak culture, translation projects are reflecting contemporary images of themselves to Kanak (Sinclair-Reynolds, 2010). The FLNKS, led by Tjibaou, was opposed at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République (RPCR) under the leadership of the influential Jacques Lafleur, patriarch of a prominent early settler family. However, since 1989, Kanak political groupings with both national and local origins have played major roles in the Collegial and Regional governments. The country is moving towards a clarification of its identity (and indeed its name – Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie, Kanaky-NouvelleCalédonie, Kanaky, Nouvelle-Calédonie, or Kanaky-Calédonie), with the progressive transfer of all powers from France. As this is occurring, however, old pre-European group enmities, subsequent Catholic– Protestant village divisions, and, in a few cases, Loyalist–Independence conflicts, are re-emerging, exacerbated by contemporary land disputes. In 2011, the four people killed and sixty injured in the violence between two such groups on the island of Maré was a sobering reminder of the longstanding conflicts within the Kanak world itself. In these contexts, the language(s) used for writing becomes a critical political issue as well as a personal identity question. In his Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida investigated the use of French as the language of the Other in its widest sense. Interrogating the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 93

12/03/2014 14:39:54

94

The Literatures of the French Pacific

notion of identity as ‘ipseity’, sameness and singleness, he speaks of a language that is ‘my dwelling, that I live in and that lives in me’ and yet that ‘is not mine’. Possessing/speaking a language (‘posséder une langue’) is also to be possessed by it. Beyond the many different socio-linguistic contexts that decide the choice of French as a literary language outside of France, Derrida’s work begins to unravel the factors that invest the subject with the desire to recover a lost language of origin as well as with the ambition to master the language of the colonizer (Derrida, 1998). Michel Foucault’s work has advanced the general premise that language not only reflects the battle for dominance but is also the very site of the struggle. The use of the French language by New Caledonian writers such as Tjibaou and Gorodé or indeed their mixing of languages – the desire to translate the languages that inhabit them in ways that paradoxically give some space and value to traces of the language of origin – is not only a locus of their cultural exile but a significant site in the present battle between the communities, cultures, and identities of New Caledonia for rights to a (home)land or to cultural authority. The writings of Leenhardt’s informant, Waia Gorodé, and those of his daughter, the independence militant and poetess, Déwé Gorodé, examined in later chapters, lament the marginalization and potential loss of their mother tongue, Paicî. Both also situate the French language as a site of negotiation, a rich resource appropriated to their own purposes. Yet, as Julia Kristeva, who writes in French but is herself of Bulgarian origin, observed in Étrangers à nous-mêmes (1991), French educational institutions carry a long history of fusion between French language and French blood and soil (nation) that works against any such distancing or introduction of difference into the apparent universality of the French language Alban Bensa and Éric Wittersheim’s seminal study of Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s collected speeches in French, reproduced in La Présence kanak (1996), is nonetheless optimistic about the formation of positive third spaces in the independence leader’s work. It claims that Kanak tradition and sociability based on the force of prestige and respect on the one hand, and Western technical development, Christian values, and the concept of the state on the other, are brought together as elements of a possible new synthesis for the independent Kanaky of the future. Like Waia and Déwé Gorodé, Jean-Marie Tjibaou creates something close to a hybrid, non-derivative space of difference (close to Bhabha’s third space) in the translation, the speaking, and writing in the French language, that at once appropriates and questions the notion of its universality.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 94

12/03/2014 14:39:54

Translation as Third Space

95

The third or in-between spaces created are, however, highly differentiated. Each translator brings his/her own individual experiences, historico-cultural contexts and degree of movement between mother tongue(s) and French to their texts, as the following case studies of the translations of the red virgin, Louise Michel (1830–1905) and the missionary-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt (1878–1954) demonstrate. Louise Michel (the Red Virgin) as Translator: A First Case Study The concluding section of the first chapter considered Louise Michel’s various versions of Légendes et chants de geste canaques that give voice to Kanak women, and concluded that the European writer’s translation of legends and songs was a hybrid work, privileging her own utopian, revolutionary, and often romantic and increasingly womancentred vision. Addressed to ‘friends in Europe’, ideally of like mind, her texts nonetheless responded to the beliefs and interests of a particular European reading public at the height of the colonial enterprise. A brief look at the contexts of her literary production, the first texts of 1875 serialized in a Noumean newspaper, perhaps then lost on the boat back to France after the general amnesty, and recreated and republished in 1885 in Paris, provides some insight into the mixing that went into the cultural translations of this singular woman. Louise Michel’s contacts with Kanak were limited but real and controversial at the time. She recounts in the introduction to her translation of Légendes et chants de geste canaques that when the administration of the penitentiary demanded she close her school hut that was attended by twenty or so Kanak children on Sundays, she continued to teach ‘the principles of freedom and justice’ in the open air. Michel also attempted to put on a Kanak play and to train a Kanak orchestra during her time on the island of Ducos. Here, she had met Daoumi, described in her Mémoires as an exceptional and brave Melanesian from ‘Sifou’, good, and of great intelligence (‘une intelligence haute et ferme’) (Michel, 2002: 206), the son of a chief who has become ‘almost European’ through practising European life in his job at the canteen for the administration in order to take this new knowledge back to serve the tribu, and speaking French to better preserve his people. At Louise’s request, Daoumi sang a war song for her on their first meeting. Michel presents Daoumi’s acculturation as necessary and heroic. For the sake

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 95

12/03/2014 14:39:54

96

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of his race, she writes, ‘he assimilates foreign knowledge through a thousand difficulties’. Daoumi told her ‘les légendes des tribus’ and gave her lists of vocabulary and, in return, she ‘attempted to tell him what she thought he should know’ (205). Identifying with the oppressed Kanak, Michel’s preface to the Légendes speaks of ‘your country’ (France) as opposed to ‘us’ (the canaques). She espouses the Kanak political cause, presenting Ataï, head of the 1878 Kanak revolt, as a proud and betrayed leader. In her Mémoires, Michel claims to have sent a piece of her red Communard scarf to Ataï to encourage the ‘brave Chief who led the insurgents’. As Alban Bensa’s work on the events of 1878 shows, Michel is one of only a very few political déportés to have supported the Kanak cause (Bensa and Millet, 2004: 26). Kathleen Hart has argued that Michel may have embraced Ataï and an alternative identity because, ‘like savages’, women were victims of ‘a form of “othering” that represented them in terms of separate body parts’ (Hart, 2001: 108). Hart’s reference here is to the head and hand of Ataï, preserved in alcohol and displayed until quite recently in the Musée des sciences naturelles in Paris, and reported by James Cifford to have been described by the Anthropological society of the time as a ‘magnificent’ specimen, with ‘palm lines … similar to our own’ (Clifford, 1982: 124–5). The work of Louise Michel in the late nineteenth century, like the later writing of Roselène Dousset-Leenhardt and Déwé Gorodé towards the end of the twentieth, along with the texts of Anova-Ataba and Tjibaou, the two Kanak trained as Marist priests who studied in France, has been instrumental in making the figure of Ataï available as a hero and a figurehead for the independence movement. DoussetLeenhardt, for her part, brought to light a ‘buried’ historical report written by the French military leader Trintinian at the time, imputing the revolt to injustices experienced by the canaque, in particular the encroachment of cattle into their gardens and the confiscation of their land (1978; 1984). On her return from studies in France in 1972, Déwé Gorodé became a founding member of a radical independence group calling itself, in a gesture towards the first rebels, the ‘Groupe de 1878’. Describing the rebel’s death in 1878 and particularly the transfer of Ataï’s preserved head to Paris, Louise Michel asks her reader, ‘Who are the barbarians?’ Such a strategy of reversal of roles is not dissimilar to the postcolonial strategies used later, most notably by Aimé Césaire in his Caribbean rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where a misshapen

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 96

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

97

and monstrous Prospero (colonizer and master) is seen through the eyes of a new hero, Caliban (colonized and slave). To reinforce her identification with Kanak culture, Michel’s introduction and collection of short ‘legends’ or ‘songs’, the disappearing myths and folk-tales of local cultures, integrate a number of untranslated canaque expressions. The use of the metaphor of the cycle of the yam harvests attempts to place her reader within a different notion of time. ‘Even when the new yam harvest came round, we barely remembered to turn the hourglass over’ (‘C’est à peine si à l’igname nouvelle, nous songions à retourner le sablier’ (1996: 64). Like Michel herself, the work can be accused of emotional romanticism and excessive idealism but it also demonstrates genuine intellectual and emotional sympathy with, and interest in, canaque culture and a courageous political critique of injustice against a people presented in her Mémoires as ‘despised’ by the Administration. A series of wise women, like Idara, as Chapter 1 demonstrated, speak for the protection of a sacred relation to the land preserved by canaques that is endangered by the increasing power of the whites. However, despite her identification with the oppressed, and her categorization of European ‘civilization’ as poor and narrow, Michel’s work presents the ‘songs’ or ‘legends’ she had heard in New Caledonia to a French readership in relation to European literary traditions. In the short piece, ‘To Friends in Europe’, Michel writes: ‘Where Europe has its Edda, sagas, romancero and Nibelungen, here we have black bards singing the heroic story of the stone age’ (1996: 62), the tales ‘of the childhood of humanity’. The preface develops a series of contrasts, categorizing Kanak ‘song’ as in its infancy, and of limited vocabulary, from the era of the stone axe. Writing on the aptitudes of the canaques, their ‘ability to understand a generous idea more quickly than we can’, and citing successful cataract operations carried out with pieces of glass, Michel further renegotiates the old European myths of the noble/ignoble savage with her observation that that ‘these grown-up children of nature’ (‘ces grands enfants de la nature’) (19), doomed to disappear, have the qualities of children that include the emulation of Europeans (perhaps what Frantz Fanon would later represent as negative ‘mimicry’) as well as an unconscious cruelty, often as a result of violent feelings of anger and vengeance. In Bogliolo’s reading, this primitivism in Michel is not necessarily always pejorative. Influenced by Victor Hugo, Louise Michel is returning to a positively connoted Middle Ages or to the regional teller of old tales around the fire in order, claims Bogliolo, to recover what modern Europe had lost.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 97

12/03/2014 14:39:55

98

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Alban Bensa’s work has argued that the dominant colonial belief that the indigenous ‘race’ was doomed to extinction was a myth used to serve the purposes of the Administration (Bensa, 1995; 1998). Michel, on the other hand, speculates on a possible future blending of the intelligence of the ‘old race of Europe’ and the ‘strength’ of the canaque peoples in a universal progression of all peoples. Is this a kind of early utopian multiculturalism? Despite his major contribution to the valuing and conserving of canaque culture which he compared to that of the tribes of the Old Testament, Maurice Leenhardt, too, a half-century later, speaks similarly of the ‘neolithic’ poetry of ‘peoples of the late stone-age’ (Leenhardt, 1937: 56). The modern European paradigm of progress and Darwinian social evolution would not be put seriously into question until much later in the twentieth century, in particular by National Socialism and the Shoah. Courageous and open, resistant to the play and abuse of power in the colony, Michel’s sensibility, then, is idiosyncratically romantic and utopian, influenced by late nineteenth-century European theosophical forms of thinking, with all the limitations and expansions of mindset this entails. She seeks evidence for her own credo of the universality and brotherhood of all races in the tales she translates and the cultures she encounters. In her Mémoires, Michel assimilates the Kanak revolt of 1878 to that of the Communards with whom she had fought on the barricades, seeing the same hope for liberty and bread in the hearts of the ‘Kanakas’ who rebelled. In Légendes, noting the development in Bislama of a common language, Michel asks her reader rhetorically whether ‘one day, all the tribes across the oceans will mingle’(Michel, 1996: 34). In a less than rigorous linguistic analysis, in which she identifies the ‘35 dialects’ of the country, she lists words like ‘popinée’ – which recalls the French word poupée (doll) or piquinini from the Antilles, also used in the New Hebrides and itself similar to Italian – to substantiate her hypothesis of links between languages. The origin of Kanak language(s) themselves is assimilated to the notion of an original or universal language, not unlike Walter Benjamin’s theory of a pure or original language-vessel of which other languages are simply the broken pieces. In her study of the language of the Other, Michel not only encounters elements of the lost universal language but also of her own somewhat phantasmagorical cosmogony. She rewrites, for example, the legend of Andia, the ‘takala’, the blue-eyed dwarf and bard, killed alongside Ataï and perhaps representing a ‘lost’ early race of white, Indo-European,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 98

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

99

origin (Michel, 1996: 72). Jean Mariotti, the father of the ‘colonial’ novel in the 1930s, will also postulate the existence of the ‘Red Men’ considered to lie behind the carving of a series of petroglyphs, a mysterious prior race present in the land before the arrival of the canaques who are, perhaps not incidentally, thereby denied ‘first peoples’ status. Michel’s own ideological frames, gender, and moral and political ideology, her investments in equality, human rights, and dignity and the preoccupations of her time are reflected in the choice and content of the stories she translates or constructs. One of the central themes in her collection of ‘legends’ is the recurring question of cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, a long-standing topic of particular fascination for her European readers. These moral preoccupations, taboos, and curiosity around exotic Other practices help to inspire the several versions of ‘The First Meal of Human Flesh’ (‘Le Premier Repas de Chair Humaine’) (41–6). A second and closely associated topic is the origin of war and both of these themes also open up questions of social and political violence and human value and dignity (47–53). The bad brother who seeks power over his good brother and possession of his brother’s wife may be the instigator of war, but, concludes the tale of ‘Le Premier Ouainth’, without hunger and anger to tear them apart, men would not have been led to eat human flesh. Good triumphs when the tribe finally rises up against the bad chief and refuses exploitation (defined as depriving others of food or eating the women and children). After the bodies of those who resisted heroically but died are themselves not cut up and eaten but covered in green branches in a ritual of mourning, the text can come to the moral conclusion that great is a person’s gratitude when she/he is treated as a human being. The chief who wants to wage war merely for prestige and plunder is punished; famine is no longer an acceptable excuse for eating one’s fellow beings. Here, the writer is presenting stories permeated by a sense of Christian sin in relation to cannibalism. The Kanak stories she is being told, or is choosing to reconstruct in translation, have themselves been clearly influenced and transformed by European contact and missionary discourse. Her text abounds in Kanak names of persons, with details of their status and possessions, and features of the New Caledonian flora and culture – a ‘local colour’ or realism that also exercises the imagination of the reader and is often close to the exotic. Michel’s literary style may in part reflect devices of parallelism and repetition that characterize the aesthetic of Kanak oral story-telling and the writer herself analyses the materiality of vivid Kanak metaphors and the apparent

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 99

12/03/2014 14:39:55

100

The Literatures of the French Pacific

lack of order and continuity in the aesthetic of what she nonetheless labels ‘interminable’ stories (19). Yet, her work is also characterized by an evident and unexamined recasting of Daoumi’s stories into forms of French poetic writing accessible to her European readers. Her texts appear to have abstracted most references to physical bodily function and her writing bears little trace of the Kanak earthiness that Bensa and Guiart later foreground as a notable characteristic of the texts of oral tradition they encounter and translate. Using primarily the passé simple to mark the succession (as temporality and causality) of narrative events, Michel’s text calls on the full range of French tenses, and on the conventions of literary dialogue to create poetic but realistic effects. The language and style of her translation of the well-known Pacific fable, ‘Le Rat et le poulpe’ inspired by her fellow déporté, Mulato, for example, bears little resemblance to the translations of the versions in Paicî, one from the east and one from the west coast, that will appear in Bensa’s Les Filles du rocher Até more than a century later. As he was busy lamenting his fate, an octopus swam by and saw him. ‘What are you doing there, little one?’ he asked him. ‘I am waiting for death,’ the rat replied sadly. ‘Alas, in a short while the water will reach up this far and I will certainly die.1

Bensa and Rivierre, for their part, tell a story in the present in a more familiar register close to the vernacular, a story narrated by Henri Téa in 1973. (The rat) sits down and starts crying. The octopus hears him and asks, ‘Who’s that crying, you lot?’2

In conclusion, both the content and style of Michel’s translated texts appear to be at least as much a product of her own European background as of the canaque socio-mythical world. Bogliolo suggests that the linear movement of Michel’s stories through flood and origins, cannibalism, war, suicide, and the end of the world, is the story of humankind and an extension of Michel’s world vision as much as it is a portrait of the Other (2000). It would also be justifiable, however, despite the power inequalities that exist between Kanak and French languages as a result of New Caledonia’s colonial history, to postulate that these stories do reflect the influence of the informant Daoumi and his particular understandings and contexts in the late 1870s. Ataï’s death in 1878 has been seen as the last and failed attempt to challenge the increasing power of the colonial world by force of arms. Daoumi was partially acculturated

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 100

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

101

and seeking ways to help his people to accommodate to the new colonial situation. It may have been that stories of the flood, of original sin (the eating of human flesh), and of Cain murdering his brother at least partially reflected his assimilation of the knowledge of the new arrivals, of the stories brought by the missionaries, and of European taboos and preoccupations. In this sense, Michel’s translations produce a doubly hybrid interstice, a to and fro movement between two cultures, but a movement that is marked by the possibilities and limitations of its own time. It can be argued that her work creates a resistant third space of translation, one that shares some of the characteristics of a Bhabha’s third space but that is perhaps closer to a form of Bakhtinian dialogism. Maurice Leenhardt: The Missionary-Ethnographer as Translator. A Second Case Study The premise that the translation of oral literature involves a meeting and mixing of the translator’s background and the informants’ stories despite and, to some extent, because of a power differential between cultures in contact, holds not only for the work of Louise Michel but also for her better-known translator successor, pastor Maurice Leenhardt. Evangelization was the major catalyst for translation in New Caledonia, as it was for the rapid introduction of writing. The first printed document was the 1847 translation of Mark’s gospel in the Loyalty Islands by the LMS. On Grande Terre, the mainland, the native Protestant teacher, or nata, Joanné Nigoth had already produced a version of the Gospel of Mathew in A’jië, the language of the populous Houailou area, when Maurice Leenhardt arrived at Do-Néva in 1902 to establish a Protestant Mission. Leenhardt had been sent by the Société évangélique des missions de Paris that took over from the LMS. The natas, discouraged by their powerlessness in relation to unsympathetic settlers and the colonial administration, and the Kanak chiefs in the area interested in the new religion had asked for a Protestant missionary. Unlike Catholicism, Protestantism was not directly associated with the colonial administration and it seemed to have been relatively effective in the Loyalties in limiting the ongoing and dramatic decline of the indigenous populations. The translation of the remaining New Testament into A’jië, both a collective enterprise and a major focus for Leenhardt’s ethnolinguistic research over the next fifteen years, was finally printed in 1917. Some of the Acts of the Apostles were

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 101

12/03/2014 14:39:55

102

The Literatures of the French Pacific

also translated into neighbouring Paicî, although this tonal language continued to pose problems of transcription. Joanné Nigoth, who wrote in three languages, served at the same time as secretary to the Protestant chief of the Houailou valley, Mindia. One of the primary goals behind the first Marist missionaries’ interest in local tales was to use these as a means to disseminate Christian teaching. In her autobiography, Roselène Dousset-Leenhardt writes of the doubts that some of the early ‘Caledonian’ informants may themselves have had in regard to certain aspects of the exchanges of knowledge involved. She gives a voice to the anxieties of Tawa Manéo, who, in the early 1920s, came from New Caledonia to Fontfroide, the Leenhardt family estate in the south of France, to work with her father on the completion of the translation of the New Testament. Unsure about this sharing of the cultural texts that belonged to his group, Tawa asked the young girl whether it was really ‘a good thing’ that he was doing (Roselène Dousset-Leenhardt, 1976). Despite its often negative press in current postcolonial theory as Eurocentric and destructive of non-European cultures, or, at best, as patriarchal and condescending, missiology, or the work of evangelizing what Leenhardt still called ‘les paiens’ [the heathen], generally provided the earliest and most powerful motivation for the systematic transcription and study of oral languages. In his extensive and admiring examination of Leenhardt’s work, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (1982) (translated by Raymond Leenhardt as Maurice Leenhardt: personne et mythe en Nouvelle-Calédonie), the well-known ethnographer James Clifford points out that Maurice Leenhardt remained virtually the sole Protestant evangelist on the Grande Terre for over a quarter of a century. The natas, native pastors or ‘messengers’, who operated before Leenhardt arrived, first from the Loyalty Islands and later from the Grande Terre itself, principally did the teaching: reading/writing, arithmetic, and prayer. Trained in the Do-Néva and Béthany pastoral school, these ‘teachers’ and their diacres or ‘deacons’, who all lived with their wives at the mission, were also encouraged to keep notebooks and to record aspects of culture in their villages of origin. The work of Éleisha Nebayes, Tawa Manéo, and of the translator Joanné Nigoth, and more particularly the recently transcribed notebooks of Boésou Ërijisi (Aramiou and Euritéin, 2002), who has been given the title of ‘the first Kanak writer’ (Guiart, 1998), were acknowledged by Leenhardt to be indispensable to his work. The missionary-ethnographer has, however, come under some

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 102

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

103

recent criticism for limiting mention of his informants, for example, to the table of contents of his 1932 Documents néo-calédoniens. SinclairReynolds quotes the text of Aramiou and Euritéin, Pèci i Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi: Cahiers de Boesou Eurijisi (2002: 11), to argue that like the collaborative translations, a number of passages from the natas’ writings were also reproduced in their entirety in Leenhardt’s Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne and Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou without explicit acknowledgement, although the informants do get a brief mention in the preface, and Leenhardt does acknowledge that ‘there would be nothing without Boesou’ (Sinclair-Reynolds, 2013: 212 n. 1). A member of an influential lineage, organizer of pilous, and sculptor of masks, and the first nata to be ordained at Do-Néva, Boésou Ërijisi was Leenhardt’s pupil, his A’jië teacher, and his valued interlocutor over a period of twenty-five years. What occurred between the two men was, for Clifford, truly an exchange (1982: 141). The Kanak pastor’s writings from 1915 to 1925, published in 2003 by the ADCK in the original A’jië, include orations, legends, and sketches documenting both the customs and the spirit of his people. This chapter will argue that what is perhaps most significant about the Ërijisi–Leenhardt translations of tales from oral tradition as cultural documents is the degree to which they are still inhabited by the ghosts of their indigenous informants and increasingly trusting exchanges with the European pastor-ethnographer during a period of major cultural transformation. On the one hand, these texts incorporate material traces of Kanak movement between the traditional past and adaptation to ongoing social change within the frame of the religious conversion that will itself become an integral part of Kanak tradition. On the other hand, Leenhardt’s cultural translation can be seen as neither completely outside nor inside indigenous culture but quite originally in between. As Sinclair-Reynolds work points out, this in-betweenness is literally figured in Leenhardt’s interligne translation where French syntax is broken up, influenced by the origin vernacular it sits alongside, before being constructed into fluent literary French. James Clifford opens his compelling study of the missionary’s efforts to limit European influence, and bring an autonomous alliance of canaque churches into being using their own languages and traditions, with a citation from Leenhardt’s 1938 letters to his native pastors, written in the local language: ‘God speaks to a man’s heart in the language he has sucked from his mother’ (Clifford, 1982: 21). Speaking of the danger of Christianity as a simple add-on to a Kanak socio-religious system, the European pastor did battle against the theories of the many who

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 103

12/03/2014 14:39:55

104

The Literatures of the French Pacific

wished to suppress native languages and impose a European language, in the hope of ‘elevating an inferior people’. The canaque socio-religious system, as Leenhardt saw it, had valuable mythic depth but was no longer sufficient to deal with the new conditions created by the pressure posed by a technological, rational ideology that took itself to be universal and superior. The Pastor’s vision of what therefore could or should happen in the encounter between cultures was framed by the principles of his liberal French Protestant background, but, argues Clifford, also by an increasing emotional and intellectual self-investment in the language, culture, and the rhythms of the land and its villages in which he became immersed. ‘I greatly enjoyed chatting long into the night around the fire in the midst of tall sugar canes. Shame on those who speak of canaque life as bestial and who have never partaken’, he writes to his parents in 1903 (Clifford, 1982: 78). Leenhardt’s father was himself a well-respected pastor and significant scholar. As source of life and power, God could speak in the vernacular, Jesus could be reborn close to the earth, to the living stones, in relationships between people, and as an androgynous life-force and power. The encounter with Christ, however, would also require change on the part of the Melanesian, formulated by Leenhardt as a movement towards self-awareness and moral choice. His in-between ‘pagano-Protestants’ would come to develop their own new abstract concepts and general ideas through encounter with the second culture. Beyond traditional shared social consciousness, they would thus arrive at self-awareness as individuals, with the possibilities of choice that the new contexts in which they found themselves required. Clifford’s analysis of Leenhardt’s writings concludes that this ‘paganism’ was seen as a living culture rooted in a complex reality and not a kind of simple or ‘pre-logical’ natural state. The canaque ‘person’, moreover, should not abandon a mythic reality for rationality and individual choice, ‘becoming severed from passionate involvement with land and kin’. If conversion involved a process of separation and self-discrimination, it had to be based on translation, a knowing search for equivalents and mediations uniting the old and new, pagan and Christian, mythic and rational (Clifford, 1982: 79). Although the pastor’s principal goal and thought was couched in the language of the time (‘We must receive from the blacks, the means that correspond to the needs of their hearts, know how to use their pagan language and make of it the vehicle of the Bible’, as Leenhardt writes in his ‘Notes sur la traduction du nouveau testament en langue primitive’

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 104

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

105

(1922b)), his enlightened view of translation as a kind of third space worked most generally to counter the majority view which sought, as Leenhardt saw it, to use French or English to refashion (refaire) the thinking of the primitifs and prevent the potential blossoming and development of their own ‘primitive’ language. Leenhardt’s translation practice led him to claim, observes Clifford, that, as the ‘inventive interpenetration of two cultures’, translation should participate in the evocation of ‘living words’ and in the ‘liberation and revivification of meanings latent in each’ (Clifford, 1982: 85–6). In the translation of the Bible, the source language is itself reborn in the encounter with other target languages. The power to transform lies also on the Kanak side. Like Michel, Leenhardt was accused by those around him – his family, his Mission, and many of the settlers, who were very hostile to his influence – of being ‘encanaqué’ [going native], of being too impregnated by his new cultural contexts. He himself, as Clifford adds, was well aware of the dangers of religious heterodoxy. Clifford’s eulogistic study of Leenhardt presents the pastor’s translation work as implying the preservation of an endangered canaque expressivity through the transcription and translation of documents that were not to be static ethnological recordings but writings in which words were ‘acts of life inspired by experience’ (86). The missionary came to argue, writes Clifford, that the role of Christianity itself, like translation, was to recover a communal and affective Melanesian essence, a culture that was being lost. Although he never analyses the relations of inequality between source and target languages explicitly, in his later work, Gens de la Grande Terre (1937), Leenhardt again makes the argument for necessary cross fertilization and indeed for ‘inverse acculturation’ for all involved in the colonial situation, a reciprocity in which the European would indeed learn from the Melanesian in the encounter between cultures. Leenhardt’s language and his claim in ‘La Bible en mission’ (1934), cited in Clifford, that the translator’s role is to initiate thinking in his native-speaker informants and then to fix in writing, to transcribe ‘the words he has aroused, overheard, seized upon’ (Clifford, 1982: 86), may have a moralizing or paternalistic ring that no longer has much currency. However, the idea that translation from a dominant language (in this case, French) should proceed from the native speaker is a modern one. A prison translated into Houailou would thus give maison lier hommes [house to bind men], because ‘Houailou thinking would be translated in terms of emotion, represented by what was happening in one’s entrails’.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 105

12/03/2014 14:39:55

106

The Literatures of the French Pacific

To find a meaningful concrete rendition for a concept or practice in collaboration with Houailou-speakers, Leenhardt would read completed chapters of Bible translations to his students, and invite their reactions. Clifford’s study concludes that, for Leenhardt, translation was the location not of accurate but of meaningful expressions as these arose spontaneously in the speaker of the target language in a situation of dialogue. Is this the ‘dialogism’ we observed in Michel, the two voices in contact and exchange, or is it third space, a new reality constructed in a to and fro movement? Clifford gives a number of concrete examples: biblical demons could well be designated by the U or powerful spirits that dwelled in nature; propitiation by the name of the plant used to heal wounds, or redemption as the planting of a small tree on land cursed either by the blood of battle or calamity. The French expression faire la paix [to make peace] might best be rendered by the expression equivalent to donner le pays [give the land] to the maîtres du sol, the ‘masters of the land’ or those who had traditional responsibilities for it (Clifford, 1982: 84). For Clifford, Europeans also learn from the Melanesians in this process in an exchange. By the process of translating ‘us into them’, the missionary, he concludes, discovers from the Other what his Hebrew/ Latin and particularly French source texts fully mean. Leenhardt is evoking the theoretical ‘dynamic equivalences’, the ‘meaningful’ equivalences of Nida’s contemporary translation theory before the letter. ‘The translator inscribes a moment of intercultural “thinking” within a language’s perpetual process of rebirth in the encounter with other languages’ (86). Writing for his Mission readers, however, Leenhardt notes the difficulties in translation for the European: ‘our minds are not well adapted to those formulae where invariable terms can be verbs or nouns or neither one nor the other’. Abstract terms like passion and soul pose problems as do kinship terms that Gorodé’s texts will also put into play. ‘Brother’ must be specified as elder or younger, as must ‘sister’, for example. ‘Mother’ extends to all of the mother’s sisters. Even the native pastors have difficulty with the duels [dual pronouns] that signify a ‘we’ that is inclusive, writes the pastor. One wrote a catechism confusing plurals and duels such as maternal uncle nya and nephew, or homonyms from four generations back, for example (Leenhardt, 1935). Gorodé’s writing draws on these ‘dual’ pronouns to create a new conception of character – for instance, the continuities between maternal uncle and nephew, or four generations of Uté Mûrûnû, or three generations of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 106

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

107

Tâdo to represent the radical alterity and intrinsic untranslatability of her culture. Leenhardt, in Clifford’s evaluation, was thus among the first scholars to see urgency in the recording and study of what he found to be ancient, complex languages and cultures in rapid change. He sought ways of reading and rewriting rich cultural thinking and ways of being that had remained invisible to most Europeans. In the letters to his parents examined by Clifford, Leenhardt rejects received ideas of the canaque as an essential or natural savage waiting to be saved (or developed and made more rational), or as the invisible or doomed primitive Other, and denies being the representative of a civilization spreading ‘a gospel of the whites’. Rather, he claims to be seeking a gospel that, in translation, adapts itself to all people. Translation for Leenhardt required both speaking – and speaking in – ‘the language of the Other’, and identification with the Other’s mythical but also complex material culture. Unlike Michel, however, Leenhardt does maintain an apparently ‘scientific’ distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Speaking to French radio listeners in 1935, the ethnographer explains to the French public that they [the Melanesians] have sixty terms for longueur [length] and a separate verb for each food they eat – meat, vegetables, or fibres. His language, like Michel’s, continues to demonstrate many of the ready-made categories and dichotomies of his peers that are now challenged, such as the influence of the established abstract–material or civilized–uncivilized paradigms: ‘It is true the language of these non-civilised people lack the abstract terms that are familiar to us, but they have a concrete vocabulary of infinite richness’, he writes (1935b). According to Clifford, myth for Leenhardt was less an expression of the past or a story as charter legitimizing the present order, than a form of knowledge that came by means of emotional participation in what was at once a material and a mythical social and geographical space. It could not be grasped by a continuous story told by a central subject where past and future were distinct. Leenhardt notes that in A’jië, the language of the Houailou area, the particle that indicates duration does not clearly demarcate the past from the future. As contemporary Kanak writers and thinkers writing or translating into French themselves came to reflect on the particular identity of their own culture, many of Leenhardt’s analyses and discussions have been and are still being used as a point of departure for the elaboration of self-knowledge. Stuart Hall locates the roots of identity in the marginalized histories

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 107

12/03/2014 14:39:55

108

The Literatures of the French Pacific

which most often remain unwritten but notes that identity is what these allow people to produce. Like Tjibaou, he claims that identity is not in the past to be found, but ahead, in a future to be constructed (1998). Identity construction in this instance would appear to be taking place in the kind of complex to and fro, back and forward, and up and down of which Bhabha speaks between the unwritten and the written, the Melanesian and the Missionary. Drawing from the work of Talal Asad, Sinclair-Reynolds (2013) nonetheless reminds us of the issue of unequal power, the potential power of the representation of a culture connected to the authority of the ethnographer and the written word, which as a ‘scientific text’ acquires social authority and ‘eventually becomes a privileged element in the potential store of historical memory […] In modern and modernizing societies, inscribed records have a greater power to shape, to reform, selves and institutions than folk memories do. They even construct folk memories’ (Asad, 1986: 163). The colonial disruption of Kanak society and present attempts to recover suppressed or hidden elements of culture and history (along with the assertion of political and land rights) are making textual records of oral literature into significant sources of reference, concludes Sinclair-Reynolds. These evidently include translations in French, the lingua franca, and the language of education and administration. This creation of knowledge by translation projects images of Kanak oral literature and culture to Kanak as well as non-Kanak. In Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien [Do Kamo: Person and Myth in the Melanesian World], first published in 1947, Leenhardt produced a personal analysis of socio-mythical spaces that include both the living social being and the bao, the ancestor-spirit. The anthropologist traces a trajectory from what he calls ‘cosmo-morphism’, in which the substance of nature lives within and indeed ‘invades’ the person who is not distinct from the universe of the totem (lizard, eel, worm …), to ‘anthropomorphism’, where human attributes are projected onto nature, with no separation between self and the world, and then to an eventual mixing of mythic and rational thought in a new synthesis. Both these modes of participation – of mythico-religious experience of relationship to sources of life and more rational relationship to the cult of the ancestor – continue to exist together (Clifford, 1982: 174). Like the more original Documents néo-calédoniens, the thinking in Do Kamo remains an influential source of self-knowledge in the Kanak world where the ‘totem’ is also the real lizard, gecko, etc., encountered along the path.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 108

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

109

The continuing power of Leenhardt’s influential construction of Kanak identity can perhaps best be grasped in his translation of two essential terms for the missionary, ‘God’ and the ‘Word’. These are discussed at length by Clifford and indeed by Leenhardt himself, as central to Leenhardt’s theory and practice of translation. The European (name of) ‘God’ should not simply be imposed. Rather, the traditional name for gods and spirits, bao (spirit, ancestor, or corpse), had to be brought to ‘a new significance.’ Do Kamo describes a number of aspects of the bao, the god ancestor celebrated by an offering of the first yams, the spirit who brings revelation of a secret or vision of a victory, detected by his snoring or lack of a physical body. This god can take human form and trick a wife or husband into believing the divinity is the spouse; he can strike illness and fear into his victim, cause disappearances and drownings; and it is he who plunges his spear into the body of the corpse to make it poisonous. Leenhardt had translated another striking expression overheard in A’jië: ‘Tous les dieux à cause les hommes; d’autre part tous les totems à cause venir selon femmes’ [‘All the gods because of men; on the other hand, all the totems because come from women’]. As Clifford interprets Leenhardt’s translation (Leenhardt, 1930: 234), this meant that ‘Gods come from men, totems proceed from women’ (Clifford, 1982: 87). On the one hand, the authority of the Bao was masculine, associated with the chief, male lineage, and the ancestral heritage of the clan. It had the virtue of power and could refer to a magical spirit used in sorcery, an ancestor or very old person still alive, or, indeed, to a deity identified with an element of nature. On the other hand, Leenhardt discovered further that it could be associated with a totem which had become confused with an ancestor and was thus also a God. Even Chiefs had to give gifts to the kanya, members of the clan from whom they received their wives. These maternels or uterine uncles incarnated the principle of feminine totem (life force) and were called upon to give the breath of life to their nephews and nieces on birth. ‘The long God who stretches out’ from one named place to another, as God was described spontaneously by one of the natas, could thus also, for Leenhardt, be identified with the femininity of the sacredness of the features of the land, with the elemental flux and life-force ‘emanating from the totem and passing into the present generations through the blood of the maternal lineage’ (81). It is of interest that Grace Mera Molisa, working with Father Walter Lini to put the new independent Republic of Vanuatu in place in 1980, incorporated the same concept of the ‘Long God’ into a national motto for that country, ‘Long God Yumi

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 109

12/03/2014 14:39:55

110

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Stanap’, in Bislama. In Leenhardt’s thinking, feminine totemic language would also need to be annexed to the term bao in order to enable it to conjoin masculine power and the elemental life force emanating from the totem and passed on by the blood of the maternal lineage. The God Leenhardt was describing, concludes Clifford, would thus go on to take on unexpected androgynous forms, beyond the original Bao used by Leenhardt (with a capital letter) and seen, like all translations, as inherently provisional and incomplete. Based on dichotomies and the belief in the complementarity of opposites, Leenhardt’s analysis does not interrogate power inequalities or ask, for example, why the supposedly powerful feminine totem came to be represented and controlled by the maternal uncles. Later chapters will discuss the questioning in the work of Kanak women writers of the nature in the real world of the philosophical complementarity of Leenhardt’s masculine and feminine elements. Waia Gorodé’s writing, for its part, will struggle with issues raised by Leenhardt’s desire to conjoin the immanence of the localized, immediate experience of an attachment to land and habitat (the maciri or ‘peaceful abode’ or the bao as totem), a god present already in Melanesian everyday experience, and the European concept of the transcendent deity and the division between body and soul. Clifford’s studies of Leenhardt present his translation work as part of a personal quest for religious authenticity. Conversion itself, according to Leenhardt, was a complex and productive work of ‘reciprocal’ translation, a movement of self-awareness but also an enlightened search for mediation between the old and the new, the pagan and the Christian, the mythical and the rational, with European, like old Melanesian terms, taking on new meanings. It was the resistance of his pastors, observes the commentator, that caused an increasingly relativistic Leenhardt to recognize the living nature of the culture he was translating and to come to characterize conversion in terms of various tribes looking for prestige; a means of becoming actively involved in the white world, having a better explanation of and control over a changing environment, and being better able to react against the ‘deadly breath of civilization’. Louise Michel had made the same observation of her informant Daoumi. Moreover, continues Clifford, the natas’ message had been essentially ‘this-worldly, a promise of better explanation, prediction, and control of a changing environment’ (76). What interested Leenhardt in his own translation work, notes Clifford, was the idea of a cross-culturally translatable Christianity, God, and Word. Such a third

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 110

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

111

space participating both in the rational and in the mythic seemed to offer the best hope for a Kanak future as well as insight into what was missing in Europe (76). Like the Bao, Parole or Word in canaque culture also has a central function for Leenhardt and its translation again produces a movement to and fro, up and down, a third or in-between space. Apollinaire Anova-Ataba and Jean-Marie Tjibaou will develop Leenhardt’s work on the notion of Parole exploring the kinship, for example, between the word for speech or word, Greek logos or French parole, and the Houailou word no, which designates speech but also thoughts and action. An understanding of the biblical expression, the ‘Word made flesh’, the word as phenomenon, is thus improved, claims Leenhardt in his ‘Notes sur la traduction du nouveau testament en langue primitive’ (1922b: 212), by its ‘living’ Caledonian translation. The Chief, that is, the keeper of the genealogies and the legends, the orakau or ‘big son’, holds the Word for the kamöyari (in A’jië, the ‘little men’ or in English terms, ‘subjects’). Back in Europe, arguing for his philosophy of translation, Leenhardt rejects the Loyalty island missionaries’ use of more abstract Greek terms: in this case, of the word logos for Word. He believes a better and more practical understanding of the French word parole is given by the Houailou term, used in an expression such as ‘Il a commis une parole mauvaise’ [‘He has done an evil word’] to describe the act of adultery. ‘One may speak of a chief whose character is uncertain, who does not think, organize, or act correctly as – “His word is not good”’ (Clifford, 1982: 85), Clifford adds to the discussion by observing that on Lifou Leenhardt’s predecessors had translated the Bible as the ‘container of the Word [Bao]’ until they discovered that the islanders in a phallogocentric twist, also used this term (Bao) to describe their penis sheath. Leenhardt’s own work provides explanations of other similarly surprising aspects of Kanak language and behaviour. For example, in the chapter of Do Kamo that considers the lack of clear opposition between the living and the dead, the words for the attributes of the earliest Europeans, kara bao (‘skin of the god’, the term subsequently used for European clothing), add some weight to the argument, now contested by some indigenous Pacific writers, that Cook and his men may have been seen as bao or beings not of this world. More generally, however, words that pose problems of translation are seen by Leenhardt not so much as evidence for differences in cultural codes but as spaces of possible positive encounter and new creation. The New Testament in the language of Houailou thus claims to annex the original biblical texts (Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and French) to Kanak

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 111

12/03/2014 14:39:55

112

The Literatures of the French Pacific

thinking, asserting the power and action of the canaque Word. Thus the Melanesians allow the missionary, in his turn, better to understand the power of the Gospel or of God as life force, immanent and participatory. Clifford adds that social, ecological, and mythological attachment to the land, to the ancestor-god, could survive in this particular mixing of canaque thought and Christianity, beyond Manichean thinking. As Clifford’s chapter on Leenhardt’s cultural translation concludes, it is difficult to say to what extent the pastor’s vision inflects contemporary Protestantism, which is, like Catholicism, a powerful social and political force in contemporary Kanak society. In the course of a year teaching at Do-Néva in 1966, then a mission school still partly directed from Paris – although an autonomous Kanak Protestant Church was being established, I experienced the kind of exchange that Clifford argues to be the strength of Leenhardt’s contribution. Do-Néva had become a Protestant secondary Collège mainly for Melanesian children, many of whom came from the Loyalty Islands. The death of the infant son of one of the personnel responsible for preparing meals in the school’s communal kitchen had led to the accusation that a cook was possessed by a doki, a particular kind of spirit, a ‘red devil’ imported from Africa. This devil was forcing him to cast spells on others in order to ‘feed’ the god. The whole mission gathered to discuss whether the exorcist (médecin guérisseur) should be called in to carry out the collective ritual that would neutralize the magic of the bad spirit. In 1938, Leenhardt had set a precedent when he had accepted the increasingly charismatic jau [sage], Pwagach, as a traditional healer able to counter the imported new magic of the doki. For Leenhardt, the purifying power Pwagach exerted through the collective ritual and drinking of magic herbs derived from traditional spiritual authority and could thus be ‘translated’ into Christianity. Pwagach converted to Protestantism in complex ceremonies at Coulna in 1939 in which Leenhardt, revisiting New Caledonia in his role as ethnographer, was finally able to participate. On this occasion, Leenhardt visited the old sacred places and ancestral stones incorporated into a ritual to ‘fare-well’ paganism (or perhaps assimilate it to the new beliefs). Leenhardt and Pwagach also had political motivations for these events. The conversion of the jau defused some of the anxiety of the colonial authorities that the increasingly messianic leader was fomenting another native revolt. The meeting between Leenhardt and Pwagach, later exiled by the colonial authorities, of course did nothing to mitigate the deep suspicion the settlers harboured towards the missionary-ethnographer.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 112

12/03/2014 14:39:55

Translation as Third Space

113

In 1966, at Do-Néva, the decision to call in an exorcist was taken after a long collective deliberation during which the need for such a concrete action against the doki was argued for by the quoting of the biblical passages in which Christ casts out spirits into pigs or calls on bad spirits to depart. Such cultural translation is continuing in the present political contexts when, despite Church bans, the significance of the sacred stones and ancestral sites is being rediscovered, re-evaluated, and incorporated into cultural-political practices focused on the recovery of traditional lands. This ‘return’ is particularly in evidence among tribus who have suffered the greatest recent political agitation or trauma, on Ouvéa, for example. In his own introduction to the legends and songs in Documents néo-calédoniens, Leenhardt observes that in order to remain as faithful as possible to canaque thought, he has not produced a literary text but simply added the few words necessary for understanding the transcribed text and divided the continuous flow into ‘verses’. Yet the French translation at the bottom of the page attracts the immediate attention of the European reader as a polished and continuous literary narrative, quite different in its clarity and immediately accessible meaning from the ‘broken’ interlinear word-for-word translation. Leenhardt’s notes, too, are extensive and claim authority. Of Leenhardt’s other major published texts, Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne, and Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou, were written to provide information on the cultural contexts of the texts translated in Documents néo-calédoniens and Gens de la Grande Terre (1937), ‘Langues et dialectes de l’Austro-Mélanésie’ (1946), and Do Kamo (1947) are anthropological, influenced by his early mentor, Lévy-Bruhl. Like Michel’s writings, they reflect significant choices among, and structuring of, the mythical material Leenhardt has retranscribed and translated. This structuring includes grouping, classification, and logical organization: an interpretative frame that underlies the translating, ordering, and footnoting. Sinclair-Reynolds suggests that by comparing the Kanak legends (the cycle of the Lizard, for example) to the Arthurian or Scandinavian cycles, Leenhardt is not simply applying Eurocentric frames but seeking to give status to the Kanak texts, perhaps much as Louise Michel described Kanak epic songs as the old sagas of the Melanesian world. Although he never intentionally deprecates the culture he is transcribing or describing, Leenhardt speaks, nonetheless, to a number of constituencies, and often from the outside. An analysis of his use of language

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 113

12/03/2014 14:39:56

114

The Literatures of the French Pacific

– ‘surprising the secrets’, ‘penetrating’ the thinking – reveals an us/them split and reinforces the illusion of a separation between the observing (knowing) subject and the (unknowing) object of observation, thereby suggesting a certain unconscious taking of power. By ‘surprising the secrets of the native language … the pagans will let us see the obscure pages of their hearts which the missionary cannot yet read’ (1922b: 194). The interests of a particular evangelical message (of new life), moreover, cannot be compromised. ‘One must succeed in penetrating the indigenous language sufficiently in order not to betray the Bible in the translation’, a difficult task when what is in question is ‘a primitive language that does not lend itself to generalizations and is spoken by peoples from the stone-age’ (1922: 194). Leenhardt’s choice of words again reveals his split allegiances and the expectations of certain groups of readers when he writes earlier to his father in 1913 that the greatest demand made of the missionary is that of his own culture kept in reserve in order to acquire another culture, a native culture – one that the Sorbonne would call ‘pre-logical’. In another letter dated 1 September 1913, translated in Clifford’s Person and Myth, he remarks that the reason so little has been achieved is the lack of effort made to ‘penetrate their mentality, to recast the data of our concepts so as to obtain concepts fitted to theirs’ (1982: 54). The givens of European concepts must be purified so that only the legacy of humanity remains. As is the case for Michel, the measure of this attempt to translate another culture into one’s own, or vice versa, must ultimately remain its universal or humanist value as much as its particularity. Like Michel, Leenhardt seeks out the universal aspects of primitive thought to give it added value. For the missionary, if this thought has kept so much of its past in its very progress, it is because it retains within it ancient elements that are essential to man. To uncover these may be to find categories, even values, that Europeans have allowed to diminish or to be lost. But, as Clifford asks, who has the cultural authority to define what Leenhardt calls a ‘patrimoine de l’humanité’ [‘legacy of humanity’] and how far does cultural domination make suspect this kind of intercultural humanism and valuing of the non-European ‘primitive’? (63). In his favour, Leenhardt’s references to the ‘archaic’ or ‘primitive’ often resonate with the aliveness and dignity of the ancient world or of the Old Testament in which the Bible scholar was immersed. It is evident that however strong his identification with and valuing of the canaque in advance of the general public, however much he argued for the necessary evolution of indigenous customs on their own terms, Leenhardt’s language, like Michel’s thinking, is constrained both by his

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 114

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Translation as Third Space

115

time and by a readership whose assumptions strengthen ‘them and us’ identifications. It is an irony that one of the major difficulties posed by the Documents néo-calédoniens today is the number of archaisms in French that correspond in fact to his translation of Ajiê expressions that are no longer in common use. His difficulties with the settler population, the administration, and the Marists – for whom he often represented the devil himself – and with his own conservative Société des missions évangéliques reinforced a certain intellectual isolation. The pressure to recount the primitive or picturesque state of the natives or to tell sentimental stories of conversion, as well as the need to bring in funds for the mission, influence the tone of some of the missionary colonialist’s letters. Leenhardt can speak in the letters edited by Clifford of the brutal passions of the Kanak, of primitive beings or of ‘their still rudimentary feelings’. He observes that primitive immorality is characteristic of beings who do not have the long past of a life that dominates the senses which constitutes the strength of Christian peoples. ‘We have the family and its concomitant ideals; they have crude sexuality.’ Yet, he might also have found the equivalent of the ‘one flesh’ that defined Christian marriage in the dual pronouns of the Houailou language. Balancing the ledger, Leenhardt was a constant and fearless critic of the colonial administration: of its unjust expropriations, its requirement of compulsory labour that destroyed the life of the tribu, and the payments made in alcohol to the Kanak by the settlers. He presents liberated convicts (who often set up temporary residence in the tribus) as a danger both to the prestige of whites and to the moral health of the canaque. He did not, however, critique the colonial system itself (which would not, in fact, come under any significant attack in Europe until after the Second World War). Despite his suspect position as a Protestant with a Germanic name, he sent his pastors off to war in 1914, proud that two-thirds of the volunteers were Protestant and believing they would enhance their image by their heroic action. Leenhardt, himself, remained intensely patriotic: our spirit of free criticism and discipline come from France, and we are ambassadors of French culture at its most elevated. We suffer enormously in our colonies from the shameful things we see, but I never feel more French than when I’m bringing back into line a governor led astray on native matters. (Letter, 17 November 1914, translation: Clifford, 1982: 93)

Leenhardt is also sufficiently of his time to be unable to see clearly that his theology is political or, as some Kanak scholars are beginning to

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 115

12/03/2014 14:39:56

116

The Literatures of the French Pacific

argue, to separate out what the knowledge he produces owes both to the respected position of the researcher in socio-political, scientific, and religious fields, and to the marginalized position of the canaque in the social order of the time. Seeking to stop the spoliation of native lands, at least in his early letters to the Missions évangéliques, he recognized a simultaneous implication in both worlds, a certain solidarity with his colonial antagonists (Clifford, 1982: 67). Unlike Louise Michel, in 1922, in a letter to the Mission in Paris, Leenhardt denounces the 1878 (and also the 1917) revolt as rebellion, speaking of cruelty and treachery and noting the 200 whites killed by the canaque, ‘like the true savage he was’ [‘en vrai sauvage qu’il était’]. At the same time, he attacks the headhunting provoked by the bonuses offered by the administration for the denouncing of rebels – fifty francs per dead head and twenty-five francs for a prisoner. He was also part of a major campaign to clear the name of Protestant chiefs accused unjustly of fomenting the 1917 revolt by pointing to the true culprits. Leenhardt’s Third Space of Translation Like Louise Michel’s hybrid space of cultural mixing, Leenhardt’s construction of a third space in his translations is idiosyncratic. As her texts are influenced by her revolutionary positions and gender, Leenhardt’s are inflected by his early contexts; first as a solitary Protestant missionary in the field and later as an ethnologist at the École des hautes études, the Institut d’ethnologie, and the Musée de l’Homme. Following on from Malinowski, Leenhardt found mentors in Levy-Bruhl and Marcel Mauss, whose professorial chair would be taken over by the structuralist Lévi-Strauss. Leenhardt himself is a hybrid, and one of Leenhardt’s voices can hide or dominate the other. There is the voice, now disconcertingly of his own time, figuring the colonial expansion of France as a civilizing project of Empire and a transmission of French values; the hierarchy of the civilized and the primitive; the ethic of progress; the analysis of canaque culture from the outside in terms of apparently objective and universal categories. These include European understandings and definitions of the categories of masculine and the feminine. Then there is the voice that places his own knowledge systems empathetically and productively alongside canaque languages to create new and creative understandings, third spaces of interaction that have since become a significant basis for

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 116

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Translation as Third Space

117

contemporary Kanak knowledge and writing, or indeed reaction. The 2002 October–December issue of Mwà Véé, celebrating the centenary of Leenhardt’s mission, ‘Maurice Leenhardt, Cents ans plus tard’, is predominantly celebratory. Leenhardt’s non-Kanak biographers, his family, and the remarkable research of Clifford which largely informed our own study, have helped consolidate his positive, even glowing legacy. It is possible, however, that the relationship between Leenhardt, the translator, and his most important and learned informant and pastor, now represented as ‘the first Kanak writer’, is in the process of displacing the European pastor-ethnographer from his central position in Kanak cultural tradition. Boésou’s notebooks en langue, Pèci i Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi: Cahiers de Boesou Ëurijisi. Première série 1915–1920 (Aramiou and Euritéin, 2002) or recent reprintings of Boésou Ëurijisi’s original and Leenhardt’s translation by the ADCK in Les Cahiers de Mwà Véé may well be competing with the Documents néo-calédoniens as primary, authentic Kanak texts, especially as Leenhardt’s collection has, for some time now, been out of print. Translational Hybridities A number of the tenets that influence Leenhardt’s definition of the Kanak person are currently under challenge, not the least by Alban Bensa’s more sociologically based work which critiques any essentializing and idealizing of a Kanak communal being without an individual consciousness, and argues for a society that is less ‘mythical’ than materialist and evolving. In Bensa’s contemporary ethnographic reading of oral story, symbolic production is a function of the interests of the informant’s group, its attachment to a geographical space, and of a developing social system, not unlike Malinowski’s ‘charter’. Narrative representation describing the alliances by which the political body is perpetuated or enlarged and prescribing respective rights and obligations, is also political. The mythical-genealogical stories of marriage alliance described and translated by Bensa are to be understood particularly in relation to encounter and competition between changing central narratives that found the authority of the various chefferies, as these chiefdoms compete, cooperate, shift, and change. Bensa has also attacked Leenhardt’s evolutionist premise of a ‘primitive’ Kanak person evolving in a universe of mythic social relationships with a conception of self as without physical boundaries, of myth as emotional thinking that

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 117

12/03/2014 14:39:56

118

The Literatures of the French Pacific

did not class but juxtaposed, and of a journey from unconsciousness to self-awareness. The analysis in the previous chapter on the work of the contemporary ethnographer, committed to the Kanak independence movement and published in Paicî or Cemuhi as well as French, sees him as following Leenhardt’s objective to stand as close as possible to the original texts and their indigenous telling, providing a transcription of the original and a word-for-word translation (Bensa and Rivierre, 1982; 1995). The contemporary oral stories recorded by Bensa, however, as Bogliolo has seen, are ordered to create a picture of a rational social order constructing the history of its own origin and rights. As I argued earlier, the deviance depicted in these stories can as readily be read for their depictions of women challenging patriarchal and virilocal social organization as examples of the exception required to reaffirm or renew the norm. Rather than simply reinforcing the norm, these stories of misalliance offer a number of other resistant readings, including, I argued, liberating ‘womanist’ readings. Jean Guiart’s translations, as opposed to Bensa’s, can be read for their focus on the representation of social networks, the local alliances that provide a global picture of Melanesian society at a particular historical moment. Emerging collections held in the audio-visual library at the Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou or being published en langue as pedagogical resources for schools appear to be focusing on the didactic or entertainment aspects of indigenous stories or simply on goals of conservation. The postcolonial translation theorist Edwin Gentzler understands the creation of knowledge that takes place in the translation process as a powerful force that can have a number of purposes. Translation, he observes, does not simply offer a window onto some unified exotic Other but rather participates in its very construction. The process of staging translation, is one of gathering and creating new information that can be turned to powerful political ends that include resistance, self-determination, and rebellion (Gentzler, 2002). Our own study concludes that Leenhardt’s translations retain a dialogic character in the postcolonial Bakhtinian sense, and continue to be traversed by the voices of the Kanak Other he sought to capture. Despite the colonial settings of much of his work and of aspects of his thinking, his construction of the Other’s culture does, to an extent that makes his work still of use to contemporary Kanak scholars, create open and incomplete, ongoing, up-and-down, back-and-forth exchanges that prefigure forms

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 118

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Translation as Third Space

119

of ­postcolonial hybridity in that a degree of indigenous ‘writing back’ that transcends any project of capture is enabled. These first two chapters have begun to consider the nature of the hybridities in the texts that form the substratum of an emerging New Caledonian literature, emerging in the sense of coming to self-awareness. The postcolonial translation theorist Douglas Robinson points out that, for Homi Bhabha, culture is not untranslatable because each culture is unique but because, particularly in border areas, it is mixed and therefore overflows the artificial boundaries that nationalisms set up to contain it (Robinson, 1997: 27). Our present chapter has sought to determine whether the particular third spaces created through translation by Louise Michel and Maurice Leenhardt are able both to bridge the gaps and to take account of the power imbalances, to move the centre and begin to transcend the ‘nationalisms’ that contain them. It has suggested that their respective unique bodies of translation work might well move in the direction of creating what Bhabha theorized as a ‘split-space of enunciation with productive capacities’ (Bhabha, 1994: 38). Does their work, however, quite constitute the third space that ‘may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture’, one that is ‘based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription of culture’s hybridity’, which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity, as Hall puts it, describing diaspora (1990: 237), that is, the inter or in-between space that, for Bhabha, too, carries the burden of the meaning of culture? Perhaps both Michel and Leenhardt’s translations remain imperfect less because Kanak culture (or their own) is already mixed than because its particularity is not fully translatable. In both cases, translation of the other’s culture remains largely the product of the translators’ respective colonial contexts. François Bogliolo’s thesis, as we noted earlier, concludes that Leenhardt’s Kanak subject is on the path to self-conquest and to knowledge of his god(s) in a universe of mythical harmony, as is the missionary himself. Michel’s Kanak is a heroic or self-sacrificial predominantly female subject, idealized and in search of the same reciprocity, liberty, and justice, as her author. Bensa analyses the socio-political structures of a particular tribe and time, their pathways of alliance, and the negotiating of power relations within and between them, using the frames of the discipline which formed his work, and in line with his political commitments. Even these in many ways exemplary translations of oral literature from the language(s) of the Other are inevitably forms

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 119

12/03/2014 14:39:56

120

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of rewriting into European idioms. The red virgin, the missionaryethnographer, and the contemporary ethnographer all construct third spaces that operate forms of ‘capture’ of the Other, and forms of cultural transfer from French and the writers’ own contexts. The cultural translations of Michel, Leenhardt, and Bensa, however, construct three very different kinds of hybridity, determined by their particular historical and personal contexts as well as by the changing cultural contexts of the communities they set out to represent and by their readers. None of the translators can fully migrate from their own positions, including relative positions of power and knowledge. Does this mean that Bhabha’s particular formulation of hybridity is relevant only for the subaltern? The late twentieth century has given rise to sustained reflection on the question of cultural translation and our final chapter will engage more fully with the wide range of migrations, hybridities, and third spaces this has been producing. For the moment, we follow the 1989 autobiographical work, Lost in Translation, recounted from a less evidently subaltern position, in which Eva Hoffmann traces the separation between the word and the thing (le signifié and le signifiant) produced by her passage from Polish to English, when she emigrated to America as an adolescent with her family. For Hoffmann, such a movement from her own language to the language of the Other creates alienation, and hiatus and distance from the spontaneous self. The word, she discovers, the new language, no longer evokes accumulated ideas and sensations but merely words, and her inner language disappears. A number of years later, however, language once again takes on the texture of the world and the English language becomes a new dwelling for Hoffmann when, as a journalist for the New York Times, she comes to understand American beliefs in individual goal-setting, self-realization, conscious understanding of origins, effort, accumulation, independence, and success, from the inside. Hoffmann’s story of her own success in moving into, and writing in, the language of the Other, through which she can finally regain her sensitivity to the emotional textures of the world, is of course a story of an assimilation and, to some extent, of a matricide, as much as it is a creation of a third space of any kind. Language is an instrument of the constitution of psychological and cultural identity (ipséité or self-sameness in Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself as an Other) in the conceptual sphere but, as Hoffmann and, before her, Julia Kristeva sees, the mother tongue is also particularly closely linked to the maternal body, emotion, and the maternal origin (Kristeva, 1997). Leenhardt’s emphasis on the need for words that must express life if they

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 120

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Translation as Third Space

121

are to have meaning, and on the Word as life-force and power conjoined, bears some relation to this contemporary understanding of the sensory/ sensual quality of one’s mother tongue, difficult to recapture in another language in translation. Michel’s thematics and her rhythmic, poetic text seek to capture this feminized life-force in both cultures, but in French. Leenhardt’s work suggests that empathetic immersion in and written translation of the language of the Other can add to the life of the (his) spirit. He is clearly fascinated by the analysis of the set expressions and metaphors that construct natural indigenous languages. This is not, however, loss in (or assimilation to) the language of the Other as in Hoffmann. French remains the evident source language for Leenhardt. Nor is hybridity, here, ‘un monstre du carrefour’, a nomadic monster at the crossroads between national boundaries, of the kind exemplified in Julia Kristeva’s contemporary psychoanalytic and autobiographical writing (1982; 1988) as in her life as an immigrant from Bulgaria to France. Kristeva’s hybridity is also concerned with the strangeness of inner life, our strangeness to ourselves, as this is reflected in literary writing, or the strangeness of the Freudian ‘uncanny’, the ‘inquiétante étrangeté’ that Mallarmé, for example, experiences both through the memory and the ancient music carried in literary language, and through his feeling of being a stranger to his own language. It is possible, nonetheless, to find prefigurations of what will emerge in the contemporary period as postcolonial theories and practices of literary hybridity in Leenhardt’s translation and writing, as indeed in Michel’s early feminism. Leenhardt’s hybridity is, at the least, a recognition of the significance and indeed the value of the foreignness or strangeness of the Other(’s) language for a rethinking of one’s own – in some of Leenhardt’s writings, one might even detect a colonial precursor to Levinas. Western postmodern theory has discovered the multiple characters that lurk within a single subject, the central and formative role played by language, and the lieux communs (cultural places common to all) always pre-existing in the mother and the ‘other’ tongue. In its earliest biological sense, hybridity involves the grafting of one identity onto another, central, stock or identity. There are degrees of hybridization, differences, in the mix created. These first two chapters have suggested that despite a necessary degree of syncretism involved in writing in or translating the language of the Other, what seems to make the difference in the linguistic and cultural third spaces created by the translation

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 121

12/03/2014 14:39:56

122

The Literatures of the French Pacific

processes we have examined is the hidden presence, the mana or power of one’s own language and culture as this influences the reading or rewriting in translation of the second language. Later chapters will investigate the possibility that this is also true, in reverse, of the literary writing of Kanak writers, writing in French, which continues to carry traces of its indigenous socio-linguistic origins and their affective power. Conclusion The canonical translators of Kanak oral literature: the revolutionary, the missionary, and the ethnographer, construct particular hybrid forms through their translations. Although transfer from French, and from the writer’s individual contexts and project, are the principal marks of the process, in all three cases third spaces are also created by according a significant place and value to the Other’s language. Despite a possible overvaluing of Leenhardt’s capacity for producing hybrid texts in Clifford’s seminal, scholarly, but also personally admiring research on the missionary-ethnographer, studies on which my own study is largely based (Clifford, 2001; 1982) it could be argued that in Leenhardt’s third spaces, on occasions, in the Documents néo-calédoniens, for example, the stem is the Kanak expression and the graft its French translation. Michel’s reversal of terms and presentation of the colonial government as the ‘barbarians’; her denunciation of the dispossession of the indigenous people and celebration of Kanak language, culture, and practical capacities make it difficult to condemn her fourteen texts for their evidently Euro-centric framing. It is probable, as Bogliolo puts it, that her exile allowed her recognition rather than knowledge of the Other, or rather that her knowledge derived from a poetic intuition that Europe could find the missing part of itself in the Other. Nevertheless, as my own earlier article on translation in the Pacific (Ramsay, 2003c) and the first section of this book concluded, Louise Michel’s third space of empathy with the excluded group also goes some way to shifting the centre toward the Kanak periphery, and particularly to making the cause of Kanak women visible. Notwithstanding the colonial processes of collection and categorization that constituted these translations and that mask many living aspects of the original significance of the material, the power relationship, as we remarked earlier, might well have begun to shift in the to and fro translation processes.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 122

12/03/2014 14:39:56

3

Histories of Exile and Home Strategic Hybridity Strategic Hybridity

The previous chapters looked at two different kinds of hybrid texts that have resulted from European-Kanak contact: the texts of the European explorers in the eighteenth century and the translations into French of texts of oral tradition in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The present chapter extends the examination of the hybridity of New Caledonian culture(s), their mix of differences and commonalities, by considering the respective approaches to a trope present in the work of every group of writers, from the colonial period to the postcolonial present. This is the theme of exile, or living in-between the lost home, where one is not, and a home to come. The themes of exile and home have a second face in New Caledonian literatures, a staking out of claims for the periphery (the island) against the centre (the Continent or Europe). For both Settler and Kanak, remembering the condition of exile or of exilic hybridity is simultaneously a political positioning. The Pacific has been criss-crossed by major population movements for more than 3,000 years, from the earliest migrations of Austronesianspeaking peoples, later marked by the spread of distinctive Lapita pottery, to the Polynesian voyages from ‘Hawaiiki’ to New Zealand beginning around the tenth century. In a later chapter we will look again at the figure of the waka or great seafaring canoe of the voyaging ancestors that continues to construct the region imaginatively as a shared contemporary symbol of the foundation of indigenous Pacific identity. In Gens de pirogue et gens de la terre: les fondements géographiques d’une identité [Peoples of the Canoe and Peoples of the Land: The Geographical Foundations of an Identity], Joël Bonnemaison shows that in Vanuatu, for example, the population comes to see the land as ‘a segment of a route, an articulated system of trees and pirogues. The

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 123

12/03/2014 14:39:56

124

The Literatures of the French Pacific

tree is the metaphor for Man. The man-tree lives by the group-pirogue, which thanks to its journeys, gives him the openings and alliances necessary for his survival and his reproduction’. Quoting Bonnemaison (1996: 170), Terrier, Abong, and Tyron (2011) observe that ‘the container and the contained are linked in history, and the group, as if fossilized on the boat that carried it, is transposed to define a territory’. With the significance that attaches to it of a wealth of technical and cosmological knowledge, they conclude, the pirogue has become ‘a global cultural referent’. Movements of peoples from Europe to the Pacific over the last three centuries have, for their part, been characterized predominantly as exploration or ‘discovery’, pioneer settlement, deportation, emigration, and, more recently, as part of the phenomenon of global economic migration and diaspora in which ‘routes’ and ‘roots’ function dialectically with a focus on the former. While analysis of the stakes of the choice of terminology is not itself the topic of this book, it is evident that the terms selected by, and attributed to, communities significantly frame their identity constructions, or what Benedict Anderson has labelled (1983) their ‘imagined communities’. At the same time as a number of these migrations are being categorized as ‘diasporic’, the term diaspora has itself become closely connected to hybridity. In his ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, Stuart Hall describes diasporic identities as those which are ‘constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (1990: 223). Hall classifies two major ways of thinking about identity: ‘The first position defines “cultural identity” in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective “one true self”, hiding inside the many other, more superficially or artificially imposed “selves”, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common’ (223). The second position ‘recognizes that as well as the points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitutes “what we really are”, or rather – since history has intervened – what we have become’. This second variation, he observes, is about historical transformations rather than recovery of a past ‘waiting to be found’. Identities are thus ‘the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’ (225). Both positions can be found to varying degrees in all of the fictions considered in this book, in indigenous as well as settler literatures. The ‘one true self’, always already there, is, however, the most present and the most strategic figure in the indigenous Pacific. This is one of the reasons the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 124

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Strategic Hybridity

125

adequacy of the term ‘hybridity’ to describe what is taking place within the construction of these literatures remains so open to question. The frequency of use of another term again, that of ‘exile’ as this recurs throughout the literatures of Kanaky/New Caledonia, will be the particular focus of this study of essentialist (rooted) and or diasporic (routed) New Caledonian identities. The term ‘exile’ is used to characterize the historical movements of communities that bring about a mixing of distinct cultures and implies losses. Its adoption throughout the different literatures of New Caledonia may suggest caution in adapting a positive conception of diasporic identity, especially one which, as Hall puts it, ‘lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity’ (237). The topos of exile circulates through all the new bodies of New Caledonian literature, indigenous and settler. It privileges the often lost place of origin of each group and stages both the victim status of the writer’s community and the desire for a particular cultural or physical ‘return’. Its purposes are both cathartic and political. Kanak ‘Exile’ and the Cultural Politics of Return New Caledonia was annexed by France in 1853 and only fully opened to development and to modernizing influences after 1942. During the war in the Pacific the US army was based in the French colony, transforming its infrastructure and more than doubling the population. Indigenous peoples, who emerged from the reserves and the controls of the Code de l’indigénat in place from 1887 to 1946, to citizenship in 1945, slowly gained a political voice, most particularly under the leadership of Jean-Marie Tjibaou in the 1970s. The ‘Melanesian Way’ proposed by the former priest become independence activist was based on the recovery of a cultural memory. However, in Tjibaou’s formulation, this recovery of what had been lost was to occur through contemporary re-presentations. A further paradox of this cultural politics of return is that its vehicle is necessarily the French language, itself a synecdoche for the suppression of Kanak maternal languages. Since Tjibaou’s assassination in 1989, the task of constituting a national and ethnic identity has continued to be influenced by cultural politics, and the attempt simultaneously to demonstrate, and recover from, a Kanak cultural exile. A set of similar and founding paradoxes will be traced out in the literary work of Déwé Gorodé, the first published Kanak writer, in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 125

12/03/2014 14:39:56

126

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Chapters 5 and 6. To date, in fact, only a handful of Melanesian writers have published written literary texts. In Gorodé’s work, the condition of exile (loss of home, status of victim) is a hybrid situation in which radical agency, and the foregrounding and valuing of cultural difference in the present, remember the colonial past of domination and loss of inheritance carried within it. Despite this apparent contradiction, exile enables the writer to make a poetic and political claim to re-present the silenced past of her people, retelling history from an insider Kanak perspective, most particularly in her 2012 novel, Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!. At the same time, the suspicion of deep-rooted inequality between men and women within tradition, as well as within a hybrid colonized/modernized custom, makes the concept of return problematic. This independence militant’s literary texts nonetheless strategically recuperate the figure of exile to recontextualize a Kanak identity that asserts its losses and its contradictions alongside an affirmation of its longevity, value, meanings, and pre-eminence. The indigenous peoples, present on the Main Island, or Grande Terre, for 3,000 years, developed extensive exchanges with other valleys or islands around them through their customary matrimonial pathways and alliances. Internally, rivalries and wars also allowed for a circulation of languages and peoples – a frequent displacement largely attested to by the stories of oral tradition considered in Chapter 1. Although the lands and the customary pathways of mainland groups were dislocated from 1853 by white settlement, the Melanesian peoples remained for the most part on their own islands. A small group of chiefs, however, were sent into external exile by the Administration to the Isle of Pines and to other parts of the French Empire – to French Polynesia, or to French Indochina – particularly after the 1878 insurrection. Protestant (LMS) chiefs in exile for aggressive behaviours against Catholics during virtual ‘wars’ between Protestant and Catholic in the Loyalty Islands in the 1880s sent a series of letters back from French Indochina to their families and pastors on the island of Maré, some perhaps dictated to public scribes. These early documents of physical exile, often preserved for posterity by military censure and published by Bogliolo as Lettres de Maré, attest powerfully to the sense of loss experienced by Kanak separated from their tribus (Bogliolo, 1999). Déwé Gorodé’s autobiographical fragments, Graines de pin colonnaire [Seeds of the Kanak Pine] also indirectly evoke a family secret, the fate of one of her grandfathers, deported to the tiny Beautemps-Beaupré islands for killing a man who insulted him. The metaphor of exile could, however, also apply to the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 126

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Strategic Hybridity

127

French Administration’s exclusion of Kanak living on Grande Terre and the Loyalty Islands (declared French in 1860) from their most fertile customary lands. Moved into valleys that belonged to other language groups, they suffered materially, culturally, and psychologically from this displacement, enclosed in the reserves that Déwé’s Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! identifies with the spaces reserved for naked Kanak in huts in the zoological gardens of Paris, in the 1931 Universal Exhibition. Gorodé’s contemporary texts, like the earlier works of the independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, appropriate and subvert the settler topos of exile to represent the other face of French settlement as an internal indigenous expropriation bringing degradation and marginalization. The metaphor functions within a cultural politics of recovery and reversal: a claim to restoration of lost lands and cultural precedence, as well as to emancipatory new political rights. The experience of a half-century of isolation still constitutes much of living Kanak memory: many groups were parked in reserves, apart from the mainstream French economy and from their own ancestral pathways; fenced out of settler cattle stations; conscripted at intervals by their own chiefs (often appointed by the Administration) to harvest the coffee on settler farms in order to pay for a government head-tax; banned from Noumea without a permit, and subject to curfew. A central metaphor that Gorodé’s poems and short stories share with settler texts is the barbed-wire fence that, for her, both locks Kanak in (reserves) and locks them out (of their heritage). A well-known early poem by Jean-Marie Tjibaou, ‘The Homeland of our Fathers’, evokes the spirits of the ancestors who wander about the land seeking their sacred mounds and burial places, made unrecognizable by the settlers’ barbed-wire. It also speaks of a slow return to home from exile and the beginning of the period when the scattered bones of the ancestors would be reassembled. The homeland of our fathers The homeland of our fathers is no longer in our hands A foreign flag flies over our land […] Where are our altars, where are our ancestors? Blessed be the day that sees our return To the places chosen by you as your eternal dwelling place For an annual celebration Of our fraternal alliances During these times when your memory is evoked So that the territories of our clans may be restored

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 127

12/03/2014 14:39:56

128

The Literatures of the French Pacific Your skulls and your bones Scattered by the colonists and their horned cattle Slowly but surely come back to life… Incomplete skeletons wandering quietly Through the peaceful home, the séjour paisible you left us as inheritance. (Tjibaou, 1996: 123–6)

Exile, Identity Formations, and Political Claims A product of 3,000 years of Kanak traditions and 150 years of French colonization, New Caledonian society has been heavily engaged in the process of new identity formation, a process accelerated by the recent political agreements with France. At the end of the twentieth century, the country changed its status from an Overseas Territory (TOM) to an Overseas Country (POM) and was later restructured into three regions with considerable local autonomy as a collectivité sui generis. Kanak control the administrations in the northern region (Province du Nord) and in the Loyalty Islands (Province des Îles). The changing situation has encouraged new discourses and a greater openness in a society still largely polarized between fairly equal groups of Kanak (approximately 44 per cent) and of ‘European’ populations (approximately 38 per cent), with ‘Other’ ethnicities holding the political balance. Similar polarization exists between urban Noumea and ‘customary lands’ outside the capital and in the Loyalty Islands; between the Southern Province dominated by European Noumea and the Northern and Island Provinces; between persistent colonial modes of thinking and the recognition of the imbalance of power and privilege and will to construct a more equal multi-stranded society. This is the Common Destiny, envisioned by the 1998 Noumea Agreement, and which gives its name to a number of the political parties including Avenir Ensemble, which shared power in the new Collegial government from 2004 to 2007. The effects of the challenges posed by the independence movement include the recent surge of literary works that recover the repressed historical memories and buried or ‘fictioned’ memoirs of many of the groups that make up the present population of New Caledonia. Most have adopted the tropes of exilic origin and of victimatization by the colonial system to construct the stories that represent their past. Jean-Marie Tjibaou himself astutely represented colonial history

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 128

12/03/2014 14:39:56

Strategic Hybridity

129

as oppressive of most New Caledonian communities, including those deported from Europe to the penal colony; liberated convicts who were not permitted to return to France; small struggling white settlers; and descendants of indentured labourers from Indochina, Indonesia, and the New Hebrides, among others. Even the more recent, and often contested, economic migrants from the Polynesian territories of Wallis and Futuna were implicitly included. A recent historical memorial erected along the foreshore in Noumea to commemorate the country’s history includes all groups who participated in the construction of the country, with one notable, and for some, painful, exception: the Metropolitan French. In Caledonian (or non-Kanak) literary representations, the exile of both the French deportees and the indentured labourers from a variety of ethnic origins is presented as redemptive to the extent that it produces descendants who are rooted in the land. Although their role in the history of the country is being rediscovered and affirmed by historians and by the recovery of autobiographical texts, few of the political deportees (the Communards arrested in Paris in 1871) remained in the Colony after amnesty in 1888. Most of the so-called ‘Arabs’ from Kabylia, also exiled in the early 1870s for political opposition and the Berber revolt, had returned to their homeland by the end of the century. In September 2013, Déwé Gorodé, as Minister for Culture, was nonetheless invited to Alger to contribute to an exhibition on Algerian diaspora. Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! gives a minor role to Omar, the stockman, one of the descendants of the rebels Mokrani and Hadad still living at Nessadiou, who is learning to read the Koran in Arabic with old Abdul. This Muslim character, described with great respect, originally a political dissident from Bali, works with Tiapi, a fictionalized figure of Déwé’s own father as a metayer managing a settler station for the largely absentee white landowner in the Chaîne, the mountain chain that separates the West Coast from Houailou on the East Coast. In 2004, a historical retrospective organized by the Noumea City Council (la Ville de Nouméa) entitled ‘Île d’exil, terre d’exil’ [Island of Exile, Land of Exile], showcased the shared topos of exile. The exhibition brought together, under the same rubric, the (hi)stories of a very wide range of individuals and groups deported or exported as labour to the young colony. Such deportations included, for example, the Japanese immigrants exiled to Cowra or other prisoner of war camps in Australia, when New Caledonia rallied to De Gaulle’s Free France in refusal of Petain’s Vichy regime, hitherto largely absent from histories. Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, which is situated in the fifties and sixties in the period

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 129

12/03/2014 14:39:56

130

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of the death of Tâdo, the protagonist’s grandmother, and the coming of age of the young girl (also named Tâdo), also includes a couple of Japanese origin, Hiro and his wife Yoko. During the War, after New Caledonia had rallied to De Gaulle, Hiro had been first confined to the property where he worked illegally, then imprisoned, before being sent to a camp in Australia. From terre d’exil to terre d’accueil Catherine Régent’s very conventional historical romance Justine, ou un amour de chapeau de paille [Justine, In Love with a Straw Hat], published in 1995, addresses the deep gulfs in colonial society between convict and free settlers. Jean Vanmai’s 1998 historical saga, Pilou-Pilou: chapeaux de paille [Pilou-Pilou: Straw Hats], puts the reader into the skin of likeable or wronged convicts enduring the harshness of life and hard labour in the penitentiary system, unable ever to return to France. Both Régent and Vanmai focus on the deep sense of double exile experienced by all those deported – most often unjustly, according to many of these literary texts – and on their efforts to belong. This is in contrast to the silence and indeed anathema that attached itself to New Caledonia’s inglorious penal character well into the mid-twentieth century, in marked contrast to Australian identity construction. Despite the tenet of redemption by hard work and landownership, few of the déportés or convicts, once liberated, actually made it to autonomy on the small concessions granted by the Administration. Segregated from free-settler areas, many roamed wild and were feared throughout the colony and resented by Kanak. Waia Gorodé, for example, protests in his diary-writing cum memoirs, Mon école du silence, that ‘they’ take the tribe’s women ‘for free’, that is, without the payment of customary exchange. A number of the free colonists, encouraged to emigrate to New Caledonia at the end of the century by Governor Feillet, whose decision turned off the tap of what he labelled the ‘dirty water’ of convict immigration, chose to go back to France, blaming their unhappy return not only on plague, disease in their coffee plantations, and fear of native uprising but also on an ineffective Administration which failed to support their enterprise. A contemporary epistolary novel by Joëlle Wintrebert, La Colonie perdue (1998), refracts the earlier colonial ‘memoirs of a planter’, Dans la brousse calédonienne, souvenir d’un ancien planteur,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 130

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

131

1898–1904, by the Feillet settler, Marc Le Goupils, in 1928. Wintrebert tells the story of the hard work and idealism of the family struggling to develop a coffee plantation, with the help of indentured and convict labour, and of an exiled Kanak tribe, resettled locally. The account of their final defeat by an inept Administration, the death of Le Goupil’s brothers, and his family’s subsequent return to France is told from the perspective of Sophie, a young Parisian adolescent in exile from her friends, who is nonetheless slowly coming to see New Caledonia as her beloved home. Le Goupil’s own work suggests that for both convicts and free settlers New Caledonia was, initially, mainly a land of exile (terre d’exil) far from origins and family and confronted by Otherness that eventually, for many, came to show a second face as a host country (terre d’accueil). The title, Terre d’exil, terre d’accueil [Land of Exile, Home/Host Land], given to the 1976 (hi)story of New Caledonia by Roselène Dousset-Leenhardt, the daughter of Maurice Leenhardt, reuses a paradoxical nomenclature that has become commonplace in most New Caledonian historical narratives. And, of course, for the children of both voluntary and less than willing settlers, New Caledonia, terre d’exil and terre d’accueil, also became a terre natale, or land of birth. The concept of terre d’accueil, land of welcome, or ‘host country’, is rooted in both European and Kanak cultures, if somewhat differently. In a number of contemporary Kanak texts, the ‘first peoples’ either take their place alongside or displace the French Administration, the Penitentiary, or the state as ‘host’. In Tjibaou’s play Kanaké, produced for the festival celebrating Kanak cultural revival in 1975, the Chief of ‘The Clan of The Thunder’ speaks in a spirit of reconciliation while simultaneously staking a claim to the place of ‘first people’ and of traditional ‘host’. The sharing of the yam harvest (boenando) with the European guests ‘not as masters who impose themselves on us but as invited brothers’ marks the ending of a second 130-year period of mourning in a mutual and equal recognition of cultures. The centre-post of our house had fallen, the conch shells of the spire were buried in the mud. You helped us rebuild our house and place the household spirits who welcome visitors on the threshold. That is why, today, we have offered you these yams. (Dobbelaere, Tjibaou, and Tremewan, 1995: 16)

Déwé Gorodé, as an independence militant within the radical group the Foulards rouges [Red Scarves], later the PALIKA (Parti de libération kanak [Kanak Liberation Party]), had opposed the cultural festival

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 131

12/03/2014 14:39:57

132

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of reconciliation planned and carried through by Tjibaou in 1975. Two decades later, in a short fable entitled L’Oiseau migrateur [The Migratory Bird], co-authored by Gorodé and Wenigo Ihage (2002), the host bird, the indigenous roussette or flying fox, is content to teach a lesson of humility to the migratory bird from Europe. The latter is reminded of his obligation to make the appropriate ‘customary gesture’ (faire la coutume) or gift exchange and to acknowledge the welcome accorded him as guest by the traditional owners of the land. Like the other tales in the collection entitled Le Vol de la parole [The Theft/ Flight of Language], this moral tale is a hybrid, inspired by the fables of La Fontaine and a product of stories from Kanak oral tradition. It is an outcome of intertextuality, a circulation of themes from one text to another, and also of a developing political project. Writers of European Origin and Exile Unsurprisingly, the writing of the contexts and the characteristics of exile and home differ from group to group and from period to period. The children of the colonial settlers of European origin and their descendants experienced a very particular form of exile or doubleness, which is captured in the novels of Jean Mariotti, whose work appeared from the 1930s onward over more than two decades. In À bord de l’Incertaine [The Ship of Uncertainty], published in 1946, Mariotti portrayed a colonial education that relied upon textbooks describing European cities, lives, and values as the true reality and teaching New Caledonian children to deny reality and legitimacy to their own lived daily lives. The strange silences of the bush and a very hot January day remained unrecorded in the stories encountered in the classroom and therefore seemed to the children to have little reality or value, as the wife of the gendarme, Madame Boubignan, taught them to understand the real seasons which bring snow in January and chirping robins. Open your book and read it! You’ll find it in your geography textbook and your reader. When I talk about seasons, I’m talking about ‘ac-tu-al’ seasons, not what the weather is doing here! December is when it snows and July is sunny! And Madame Bougignan waxed lyrical. She divided the year into four distinct parts; like sharing a melon. She portrayed one part as having vibrant spring colours, the next the glorious colours of ‘golden harvests’, the third the copper and gold of fallen leaves in autumn, and the fourth

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 132

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

133

the soft whiteness of snow, with delicate pearls of hail and stars of frost. The children listened, enchanted, as they were carried away into a fairytale world depicting a wonderful country – the real one, the only one – where the year rotates like the patterns in a kaleidoscope […] And yet, deep-down inside, they were harbouring a burden of shame, the humiliation of not really belonging to the world spoken about in books. The real one: the big wide World! No text book had ever mentioned the season or time when coffee, ambreuvades greens or vanilla were harvested, instead everyone spoke about the ‘golden harvest’. Every child thought their father was making a serious mistake, a grave error, and that they were almost committing a crime by not growing wheat. However, everyone was hoping that one day their universe would become exactly as it should be, conforming to what was written and respecting the division of time. (Mariotti, 1982: 82–6)1

The work of two of the most prominent Caledonian writers, Nicolas Kurtovitch, whose family of Yugoslav origin has been in New Caledonia for over a century and a half, and of Claudine Jacques, a writer of Metropolitan origin who has made her home in New Caledonia since adolescence, cede the place of first occupant to the Kanak and proceed from the acknowledgement of their own welcome and subsequent obligations as ‘guests’. Jacques’ literary work, like a number of the recent works by writers of European descent, seeks a middle way between this recognition and a portrait of the ongoing and difficult exile of most of the non-Kanak (Caledonian/Caldoche) population, often equally attached to their hard-won patch of land and also largely dispossessed. Many of Jacques’ short stories tell of the battle for survival in what are often biologically mixed rural communities, or of the generations of small farmers on typical New Caledonian cattle stations that, she claims, are often closer to the Kanak world than their inhabitants recognize. Her first novel, Les Cœurs barbelés [Barbed-Wired Hearts], published in 1988 in Noumea, represents both this closeness and the often fierce denial of mixed-race relationships on the part of white bush settlers. When Marilou seeks to introduce her Kanak lover Séry to her rural settler family, she is met with rejection, and later physical violence. If one brother and his wife are sympathetic, it is because the couple are expecting a baby that might give away the unacceptable secret of the sister-in-law’s own mixed-race origins. Jacques’ novels and short stories also contain portraits of European settlers exiled from neighbouring Vanuatu, independent from France and Great Britain’s Condominium since 1980, crying for their beloved country and suffering, like many Pieds-Noirs forced to leave Algeria, from a sense of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 133

12/03/2014 14:39:57

134

The Literatures of the French Pacific

dispossession and betrayal. The French-speaking communities generally opposed independence and supported local secessionist movements, particularly on the islands of Santo and Tanna. Margaret Thatcher sent 200 British marines to the New Hebrides to calm the situation and counter the despatch of French gendarmes from Noumea. Finally, the French withdrew the gendarmes and accepted a joint operation on 24 June 1980 to regain control of Santo and the elected Vanua’aku Pati, under the leadership of Father Walter Lini, was able to raise the flag of the new Republic on 20 July. Subsequently, after Papua New Guinea troops had been brought in by Lini to quell fully the secessionist movement, the French colonists, seen as connected to the Nagriamel rebellion led by the charismatic Ni-Vanuatu Jimmy Stevens, were forced to leave Espritu Santo amidst general reprisal and retribution. L’Homme-lézard [The Lizard Man] (2002) also includes the stories of economic migrants from the small and isolated Polynesian Kingdoms of Wallis and Futuna. These French territories are welfare dependencies for the most part, and many migrants survive around Noumea in squats or shanty towns, sometimes in conflict for resources with Kanak. Exile is also a central theme of Jacqueline Sénès’ settler novel, Terre violente [Violent Land]. Written in the midst of the virtual civil war in the late 1980s, this saga follows the dramatic history of the colony through the fortunes of the pioneering Sutton family and their courageous battles against cyclone, drought, locusts, and menacing natives. However, despite these conventional topoi, this is more than a stereotypical colonial novel. John Sutton’s uneasy cohabitation with his Kanak neighbours, to whom he nonetheless gives his life when plague strikes their village, provides the personalized foreground to an in-depth reflection by the former Metropolitan journalist on the political history of the territory. At the heart of Sénès’ history of a ‘land of exile’ that becomes a ‘homeland’ for Europeans lies the claim of the centrality and the spiritual value of the land for both communities. The saga was later remade as a joint Australian and French télé-film and shown in France on the ARTE channel in May 1998 to celebrate the signing of the Accord de Nouméa by the FLNKS and RPCR party leaders and Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister. Both Terre Violente and Wintrebert’s La Colonie perdue [The Lost Colony], like a number of Jacques’ texts, create new spaces of European settler memory. This commemorated legacy of hardship and endeavour lays claim to a major contribution to the shaping of a land, to a place in the present in the new country, and eventually a share in the destin commun.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 134

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

135

Indentured Labour ‘Writing Back’ to Exile In 1873, Jules Garnier discovered nickel in several locations in New Caledonia. Meeting the mining industry’s increasing demand for labour – a problem partly resolved in the past by importing workers from the Reunion Islands or using convict labour – meant looking to Japan, China, Indonesia, and French Indochina. For the indentured labourers, brought in as manual workers to replace the unsatisfactory Kanak, the condition of exile was most particularly the experience of unrelenting work and difficult material conditions in the context of a most often undesired but economically necessary separation from their native land and cultural traditions. Jean Vanmai’s Centenaire de la présence vietnamienne en Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1891–1991 [Centenary of the Vietnamese Presence in New Caledonia, 1891–1991], traces the history of the first contingent of Indochinese workers, 791 men and fifty women, who disembarked in 1881. Only forty-one aboard the first boat had chosen freely to apply – the remainder were political prisoners of the French colonial rule in Indochina – but like all the imported labourers they had accepted contracts for five years. By the time the last boat from Vietnam arrived, in 1939, there were almost 4,000 Vietnamese workers in New Caledonia. The last wave, whose story is told in Vanmai’s 1980 novel Chân dang: les Tonkinois de Calédonie au temps colonial [Bound Feet: The Caledonian Tonkinois in Colonial Times], went on strike to demand fairer treatment. In 1945, all contracted workers were granted free residency and minimum working conditions. Vietnamese migrants could finally change jobs and move around the country. When many publicly celebrated victory over the French at Diên Biên Phu in 1954, the group became somewhat alienated: its wealth and predominance in the small business community was envied. Difficult diplomatic relations between Paris and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War meant that return had to be delayed, but repatriation was promoted on both sides, and between 1960 and 1964 nine convoys returned to Vietnam. The thousand or so who remained and took French citizenship, including Jean Vanmai himself, are ‘(Viet)-Caledonians’ who have largely created their more comfortable present situations using their own spirit of enterprise. Like the French convicts, the chân dang in Vanmai’s novel are presented as victims – suffering physical and mental isolation, unsanitary conditions, poor rations, harsh laws and cruel overseers. Chân dang (and the sequel Fils de Chân dang [Son of Chân dang]) set out to show that the New Caledonians of Vietnamese descent have played a part

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 135

12/03/2014 14:39:57

136

The Literatures of the French Pacific

in developing and creating the wealth of present-day New Caledonia. Through his Confucian and Vietnamese ethics of duty to superiors and humanity to inferiors, and his self-respect, loyalty, diligence, and magnanimity, Vanmai’s protagonist, Ming, exemplifies what the group has to offer to the New Caledonian community in a model minority discourse. More particularly, however, the Indochinese labourers are presented as victims of cultural exile. Although many of the Chân dang renewed their five-year contracts, the lives depicted continue to be sustained by the desire for return to their homeland, to be buried with their ancestors. It would take the sequel saga of the boat people, who included many of those who had ‘returned’ to their Vietnamese ‘homeland’ to modify the character of this often tragic duality. After completing a series of interviews with Vietnamese women in contemporary New Caledonia – women who, for cultural as much as linguistic reasons, could express themselves only through or alongside their husbands – the sociologist Helen Johnson concludes that this community now often presents itself as the product of a more contemporary Asia-Pacific diaspora (2005: 97–103). They are the victims of the often traumatic political experiences: wars and (as children of repatriated indentured labourers from French New Caledonia to Vietnam) unjust discriminations of the late twentieth century. Their accumulated family wealth often immediately confiscated on arrival in North Vietnam or rapidly eradicated by a Communist regime at war and unsympathetic to those returning from a French colony, their fate had been to become either boat people or refugee camp dwellers. Johnson’s interviews suggest, moreover, that women have rarely been agents in their own right in any of these histories. Those who had remained in New Caledonia, refusing repatriation to their homeland, did so in accordance with a father’s or husband’s decision – often because the family was Catholic. Others arrived later in New Caledonia, sent from refugee camps as a result of post-war kin reunion programmes. Historians have shown that 24 per cent of the 5,148 indentured labourers from the New Hebrides died working in New Caledonia. Although it is estimated that over 70,000 workers were ‘blackbirded’ from the New Hebridean islands to Queensland and other Pacific islands over the period of this trade in cheap human labour, no writer has yet told the story of those who finished up in New Caledonia. Following Vanmai’s breaking of silence, Les Sentiers de l’espoir, kanak et nippo-kanak [Paths of Hope, Kanak and Japanese-Kanak] (2003), a novel by the son of Kanak-Japanese parents, Dany Dalmayrac, presented

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 136

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

137

the Kanak-Japanese community’s very particular experience of victimization, exile, and hybridity. The 600 Japanese workers, all single men, who arrived in New Caledonia in 1892, were the only group of imported labourers considered to be free immigrants. In Dalmyrac’s novel, despite the fact that some of the Japanese small farmers had married local Kanak women, from 1920, a small clandestine organization in New Caledonia was also preparing the Japanese invasion of the South Pacific. This fifth column exacerbated the jealousies aroused by the success of certain small Japanese businesses. When most of the Japanese residents were required to report on 9 December 1941, and transported from detention to the infamous Île Nou or to prisoner of war camps in Australia, their mixed-race children remained behind, often stripped of their fathers’ possessions. Dalmyrac’s main character, Suzuka, who is motivated by nationalistic Shintoism to sign a contract in New Caledonia, is later returned to a devastated Japan after the shame of exile in Cowra, a harsh internment camp in Australia. Finally, in the 1950s, he chooses to go back to New Caledonia where, despite opposition, he acknowledges his feeling of belonging and of being formed by the land he will henceforth adopt. Suzuka then founds a Japan–New Caledonia association to link children with fathers separated by the war. A second Japanese character named Hurio, however, does not return to New Caledonia: he may either have been killed at Cowra or have started a second family in Japan. The wise old Kanak, Rick, the adoptive father of the abandoned daughters of Hurio, believes, for his part, that the ‘true France’ will eventually give the Kanak and their mixed-race children the same rights as Europeans. Dalmyrac’s saga has little literary merit but brings an interesting and hitherto unexpressed voice, and historico-political perspective, to the emerging stories of exile. Marc Bouan, born in Koné in 1946 and a descendant of the Indonesian indentured labourers who began arriving in 1895, has also published a first novel about the exilic experiences of his community. Like much of the current wave of publication of memoirs and fiction, the autobiographical L’Écharpe et le Kriss appeared in print in 2003 at the author’s own expense. Bouan explains the recent phenomenon of the emergence of histories by the minority ethnicities in New Caledonia as the result of a primary assimilation to French culture and language and a subsequent reconquest of identity and, in his case, of the search for ‘syncretism’ and harmony with the environment. He also notes a similar syncretism at work in the creation of the rural Caledonian, the broussard or

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 137

12/03/2014 14:39:57

138

The Literatures of the French Pacific

bushman, a mixing, among others, as Sonia Faessel puts it, of ‘the cattle farmer, the small miner, and the often wretchedly poor former convicts settled on the land’ (Faessel, 2003: 143), As in the writing of Claudine Jacques, the small farmer is a distinctively New Caledonian product of many diasporas or exiles, of an ethnic and cultural mixing in which the European has a dominant place, but where Kanak and other influences are also much stronger than has previously been admitted. Beyond their representations of loss of home and victimization, many of the New Caledonian representations of exile from the father/mother land(s) or mother tongue do appear to configure an unsettled state of mixed identity – in this case, characterized as the belonging to two places, most often of unequal power, and the impossibility or undesirability of completely writing out either pole. This chapter speaks, then, of the hybridity of exile: in its most general sense, the notion of cultural métissage or hybridity carries both a negative charge of loss and a positive potential, a self-projection at once back to the past and toward the future. Kanak Exile as Hybridity Kanak exile as a form of hybridity, an exile synonymous with loss, marginalization, and a desire for return, goes beyond the dialectic of lost home and return to mother earth. Even in the Loyalty Islands, where Europeans were not permitted by law to settle, the psychological condition of Kanak in the face of dominant, apparently universal, European values was one of dispossession, of being exiles within their own land. Exile took the indirect forms of punishment for speaking one’s mother tongue, subversion of traditional authority as new chiefs appointed by the administration were now accountable to it, and a general alienation from self brought about by the denial or denigration of Kanak culture and emulation of prestigious European models. The layers of ‘civilization’ and time superimposed on the Kanak ‘race’s’ supposedly childlike savagery and timelessness were also in part a product of the Othering gaze of Europe. From the period of discovery through the colonial period, as we saw in the first chapter, European explorers and missionaries had largely created the images of the indigenous peoples for other Europeans. The expeditions of Cook, d’Entrecasteaux, and La Billardière in the Pacific produced curious visual and written portraits of the natives or naturels as Greek colossi or

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 138

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

139

nubile classical maidens, with Kanak generally indistinguishable from representations of Maori or Tasmanians – although the Eastern Pacific rapidly became depicted as a ‘darker’ region. These early representations reveal what Bernard Rigo has defined as the asymmetrical relationship between Europe and the Pacific: a relationship between a world of archives and the written word, and a world of oral history largely silenced by contact. For what is known about pre-contact people and history is largely drawn from these first European texts and images whose topics, as Rigo and others observe, and as we observed in Chapter 1, are the questions posed by the European cultural adventure itself. Following Rousseau, the apparently natural state of the ‘naturels’ was understood in terms of what the European might have been if he did not have culture/civilization. He would be an overgrown child, living outside time in the present, versatile but superficial. ‘The West has possibly only put so much effort into trying to explain the Other in response to its own quest for identity, its ideology of knowledge, and its desire not to know the essential’, writes Rigo in Conscience occidentale et fables océaniens (2004: 380). For, in Polynesian discourses, ‘one would seek in vain for concepts of being, appearance, creation, free will, determinism, transcendence, nature, the absolute, the sacred and the profane’ (381). Pacific discourse is not impoverished but is ‘discourse rich in other questions, expressing other cultural stakes’ (381). The questions around the dichotomies of soul/body, nature/culture and appearance/being that have dominated European metaphysics may well be less pertinent to Oceanic peoples. It may in fact be the silences, Rigo concludes, the absence of questions that are the most revealing. In the nineteenth-century New Caledonian studio portraits by the Duffy brothers, Allan Hughan, or Charles Nething, colourful or poignant representatives of a ‘race’ presented scientifically as doomed to disappear by the fatal impact of industrialized European society gaze back at the camera with incomprehension and deep melancholy. This camera stages, rather than celebrates, primitive if dignified naked bodies wearing exotic ‘traditional’ objects. These accessories are recycled from image to image: women’s short grass skirts, men’s penis-sheaths, arm or belt amulets, head feathers and spears, clubs, and ceremonial adzes. The mindset of the early twentieth century saw the Kanak, sent by their chiefs at the request of the colonial authorities to participate in the 1931 colonial exhibition held in Paris, exhibited in huts and semi-naked in the botanical gardens, next to the zoo. As in the colonial representations of Jean Mariotti or Georges Baudoux’s novels, these exotic objects of a

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 139

12/03/2014 14:39:57

140

The Literatures of the French Pacific

sometimes sympathetic gaze do look back but, to a significant extent, in response to European expectations. The photograph reveals the physical traces of their presence, their existence as subjects, but it remains difficult to read them from within their own cultural frames. Beyond the unselfconscious primitive or naturel proposed by Western binaries of civilized and natural (uncivilized), further images of Kanak in puritanical French clothing, in nineteenth-century portraiture, for example, present a different variety of constructed presence-absence, a staging of loss that corresponds not only to the Western myth of the ‘fatal impact’, but also to a slight discomfort, a sense of the mimicry that accompanies assimilation, one that Bhabha sees as carrying within it an inherent challenge given its necessary difference from the original. What is captured by many of these early photographic representations is an absence within a hybridized culture. For a European observer, Segalen, or Gauguin, for example, this might be the absence or the destruction of the primitive and the sacred of the pre-modern in the modern era. For a Kanak observer, it is the loss, in translation, of an original culture. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, the descendants of the so-called naturels have come to point to the adoption and adaptation of the Western Other’s texts (including clothing) for their own purposes; less a mimicry than a conscious appropriation. The contemporary portrait entitled ‘Betty’, by the Kanak artist Micheline Néporon, recycles an earlier colonial photograph of a ‘doomed’ Kanak woman. In Néporon’s mixed media artwork, Betty still carries her Western name, wears a mission dress (or ‘mother-hubbard’), and gazes in deep grief at the camera. This colonial representation, however, is overwritten by textual fragments of the Kanak proverb – ‘the bark of the tree may be destroyed but the heart of the tree continues to beat’ and Betty is a figure not of transformation but resistance. In Déwé Gorodé s poem ‘Writing’, exile, in the contexts of decolonization, is an accusatory reappropriated presence-absence. For absence can itself speak of this loss of being, of a being silenced by the Other’s gaze and the imposition of a ‘single culture’ while simultaneously affirming its non-disappearance. writing an island a land where beings once were where being were without being where beings are without being

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 140

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

141

speechless lifeless without a path without a voice beneath the heavy cloak of silence and clear felled by the single way of thinking (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 10)

The paradoxical enterprise of looking back at two centuries of colonial history when ‘we were without being, when we were nothing’ is also actively to seek and politically to recover both the particular (Kanak Otherness) and the universal (Being) from within the borrowed tropes of cultural exile/being. Speaking of Grief Our grief is sharing as in exile the yam (igname) of the humiliated anchoring the event in the history of our struggles carrying the weight of the word mutilated organising the anger of despair reorienting the course of the river of monolithic singleness building a new house for a country that would be otherwise (Gorodé, 2004b: 97)

The concept of being, moreover, is redefined by Paicî language. ‘In my language, aboro is the human being is all he / she is’ (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 30). ‘Being alone is / being with / the u and duée / those whom we do not see / around us / and who are everywhere’ (34). In a reversal, it is the Other (French) who are without roots and community; in the exile of self, an Other whose negative (what the Kanak are not) is used to define who the Kanak are: people without roots […] or those alone in themselves who see themselves only to be brought out of the exile of alienation the prison house of self

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 141

12/03/2014 14:39:57

142

The Literatures of the French Pacific the solitude of ego to see to be with to live together with to share with those whom we do not see around us and who are everywhere (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 34)

Gorodé’s stories argue for agency in being together, sharing and sustaining traditional values across generations of the living and the dead; against exile, domination, and capitalist exploitation or the tyranny of the overweening present. ‘Writing Back’ to Exile as Hybridity At the end of the twentieth century, Kanak cultural identity was being constructed, at least in part, by means of a critical deconstruction or appropriation of European models. Gorodé has denied, for example, that her women-centred texts are simply feminist. The subjection of women to men in Kanak patriarchal tradition, characterized by arranged marriages and sexual violence by older men against young girls, is denounced fiercely in a number of texts, including Gorodé’s novella Utê Mûrûnû: petite fleur de cocotier and her novel L’Épave. However, while both texts follow the fortunes of heroines who attempt to resist the male domination inscribed in custom, both also foreground the value of women’s traditional communal roles. Independence, or return from exile, is strikingly described in a Gorodé poem (‘Indépendance’) as ‘a patch of land / land to work / like the woman / who tends everyday / her children / her taros and her yams / or fishes by night / … to feed the extended family / or for market-day … / giving to others / and fighting her own desires / in the face of silence / of violence / … in the face of the single way of thought’ (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 26). The recovery of a collective Kanak consciousness not in exile is itself a mixed enterprise. It takes form in writing back to European occupation (of land, cultural self-image, language, and concept) in a reversal that makes the islanders the centre, and French settlement and Europe to some extent a distant periphery (the war in Utê Mûrûnû, for example, is described as an irrelevance in a cold, far-off land against ‘the soldiers of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 142

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

143

William’). Reversal and/or appropriation do not escape the hybrid. The absent image behind what postcolonial theory has called ‘writing back’ to the master or ‘using the master’s tools’ nonetheless remains Europe. If personal revenge and ‘witchcraft’, for example, rewrite impersonal European justice in Gorodé’s short stories ‘Affaire classée’ [Case Closed] or ‘Où vas-tu Mûû?’ [Where Are You Going Mûû?], these models of indigenous justice are in part constructed to challenge or unsettle European models in an overwriting that is not a replacement. In L’Épave, as in her other texts, Gorodé recalls a colonized, humiliated history even as she depicts an idyllic childhood splashing in the river pools, catching eels, and sharing in the coffee harvest with members of the tribu. The desire for and the impossibility of a return to this sense of undivided being echoes the personal exile of the Kanak woman writer, standing alone where traditionally it is each local group that maintains the sole right to tell its own, often secret, stories. The theme of a number of Gorodé’s poems is writing in French, the language of the colonizing Other, in a constant corps-à-corps with this language, in ‘words of struggle’ captivated in both senses of the word, but refusing assimilation. Sorting words between the lines against the grain … Seizing sense stealthily … to live this writing in rags and tatters or as one dispossessed to live writing back against the wall and in foreign territory outside of myself or as an underdog outsider in this language that is not mine … (Gorodé, 2004b: 94–6)

In the poem entitled ‘To Tell the Truth’, the role of writing in exile is to ‘violently unpick / the stitches / of tight-lipped mouths’, ‘putting an end to the voice that speaks for you’ (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 66).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 143

12/03/2014 14:39:57

144

The Literatures of the French Pacific

But within Kanak tradition this is a rebellious position for a woman. Re-circulating and transforming a topos of breaking silence, also used by most non-Kanak writers and by Tjibaou before her, Gorodé is refusing both the non dit, the silences that characterize New Caledonian history, and a particular kind of hybridity, that of being grafted unresisting onto another stock. Her own exile is inevitably linked to her condition of living in an inextricably mixed world – one in which silence can be both positive (traditional complicity with Kanak women) and repressive. Not unlike her compatriots of all origins, for whom New Caledonia is at once a terre d’exil and a terre d’accueil, and in many cases a terre natale, the Kanak poet is using the trope of exile to articulate a set of contradictory relationships. Exile is the necessary living in-between a claim to compensation for, or recovery of, the pure lost home, where one is no longer, and a claim to the home to come where one can speak with an independent voice. Kanak exile conceals the claim to a recognized and legitimate, separate, if complex, subjectivity, but also the claim to the recovery of a lost sovereignty. The trope of exile in the texts of New Caledonians of European or Other origin, for its part, conceals its authors’ claim to be part of the community through their sufferings in the struggle to make a homeland. Once again, the question arises: does the adoption of such similar topoi of loss throughout the different literatures of New Caledonia, each with its own distinctive history of victimization, correspond in any way to Hall’s conception of identity ‘which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity’? (1990: 237). The internal differences and the different histories we have followed would appear to interrogate the (in)sufficiency of this notion of hybridity to describe in detail what is happening within the complexity of emerging New Caledonian literatures. European Settlement and the Construction of Home As recent autonomy statutes continue to redefine the old French Overseas Territories in the Pacific, 2 progressively returning the control of local government and law, employment, land tenure, and control of external relations from France to these new countries still within the French Republic, thinking or writing the ‘locations of culture’(s) and their possible spaces of overlap or connection has become a significant political instrument in the struggle for control of the future. Telling

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 144

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

145

the stories of the past thus most often derives from engagement with the hegemonic geo-political realities of the present relation with France and the desire to constitute a politically useful Caledonian identity. As we noted, most writers seek to establish their roots and legitimacy by re-enacting or reconstituting layers of a New Caledonian history that manifest and guarantee their own place and their cultural specificity. Although all of these accounts of the past are now increasingly engaging with issues of difference and mixedness, and with the possibilities and problems of the projected Common Destiny or multicultural society, the forms and functions of Kanak texts nonetheless remain different from those of texts by writers of European origin. Telling the past in the new literatures of New Caledonia is a form of identity construction; as we have claimed, these hybrid political identities remain multiple, distinctive, and shifting. Contemporary theory recognizes that histories have a limited life span (not more than a decade?) before they need to be rewritten. History and story share the same narrative conventions and, indeed, as the title of Nathalie Sarraute’s collection of critical essays puts it, in an ‘Age of Suspicion’ (L’Ère du soupçon), history/story have become tools for their own investigation, The stories/histories proliferating in the contemporary literary production of Kanaky-New Caledonia may be less fragmented and apparently self-reflexive than those of Sarraute, but they share elements of a new hybrid condition in which identity is built up from layers of collective and personal histories, and from an archaeology of memories of cultural contacts. The histories of European settlement in the work of the major writers of fiction of European origin contain, in a significant number of cases, a critique of the dispossession of natives within the colonial system. These histories also construct a settler past that reposes on great sacrifice and struggle against various combinations of obstacles: these same natives, designated as dangerous and often as cannibals or primitives; the penitentiary; the bush; cyclones; plague and disease; deprivation; the politics of the colony; the different and sometimes mixed-race character of the younger generation born on the island; and, more recently, the political agreements themselves. This is, as the previous section concluded, the story of the struggle of history’s victims to create a home out of physical or cultural exile, an exile or suffering shared by almost all communities and written explicitly into the Noumea Agreement. Home in settler societies, as the work of Stephen Turner on New Zealand argues (1995), is more than a house. It is a place ‘made-over

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 145

12/03/2014 14:39:57

146

The Literatures of the French Pacific

in a palimpsestic re-enactment’, a re-mediation of an idea of the place in the settler’s mind (2007). In the New Caledonian case, this might be the idea of a better France, a braver life, or brighter future, often closely linked to the ownership of a piece of land – an ownership, in many cases, denied the settler back in France. These stories/histories of home, as Turner points out, re-enact a scene where images of cannibalism and warfare are replaced by notions of peace and prosperity. The ideas of a ‘settling’ of an unsettled and dangerous environment are put on display and constituted as founding, that is, as somehow always already there and still in process. To the fetishist European obsession with images of cannibalism that, claims Turner, stands in the way of any objective understanding of the extent and function of the practice of anthropophagi in the Pacific could be added the images of indigenous women’s near-naked bodies that also continue to trouble (or ‘unsettle’) accounts of settlement. The examination of the earliest and very different accounts of contact at Balade that we considered earlier, in 1769 (Cook and the Forsters) and in 1793 (d’Entrecasteaux and La Billardière), revealed the centrality of these two prisms for viewing the ‘Natives’: fear of cannibalism and interest in the availability of women. This is the case despite the continued presence of the paradigm of the noble savage propagated by Bougainville’s accounts of the new paradise of Tahiti, with its generously welcoming and sexually uninhibited maidens. In the nineteenth century, these representations were significantly made over. The ideal classical figures of Piron’s largely undifferentiated eighteenthcentury portraits of athletic, noble, and perfectly proportioned Maori and Kanak were redrawn by the paradigms of romanticism (the dying race, for example) or of ethnographic realism. Unclothed or dusky bodies come to be read as images of potential sexual promiscuity, in contrast with the images of the chastity and decorum of fully clothed settler women. Extending Turner’s analysis of stories of New Zealand settlement to consider the New Caledonian case, the recent textual re-enactments are similarly presented as being stories of ‘us’, the New Caledonians, arriving from France but somehow always already there in New Caledonia. The slippage from the use of Néo-Calédoniens or Calédoniens to designate not the indigenous peoples but rather the settlers from Europe, for example, correlates closely with the change in the use of the term ‘New Zealanders’, initially used to speak of Maori and later adapted to designate the descendants of settlers. The naturels constitute the strange or foreign ‘Other’, as opposed to the Settler.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 146

12/03/2014 14:39:57

Strategic Hybridity

147

All of the new literatures of non-Kanak origin, however, conceal some anxiety of origin. The absent but implicit claim in the present reconstructions of the image of the homeland is the right to a place and privilege in a present or future Kanaky-New Caledonia. More importantly, this may be a claim to a very particular kind of ‘common future’: closer, for the majority of the population of European origin, to the post-revolutionary French tradition of the indivisible sovereignty of the state. In this case, this is a claim to Kanak for the state rather than Kanak for Kanak(y). Turner has argued that in New Zealand Tikanga Maori [Maori traditions] have simply been assimilated into the dominant New Zealand identity, law, and (single) political constitution. The historical logic of exclusion (ignored by a certain historiography) thus continues to apply, he argues, while the notion of Maori for Maori is superseded by the majority-held tenet of Maori for the indivisible state. The rhetoric, and indeed the official policy, of bi-culturalism arguably play a significant role in this assimilation. The literary reconstructions of the chronotypes of a ‘new frontier’, or the creation of the new ‘homeland’, offer different degrees of engagement with the Other’s presence. In her 1987 novel Terre violente, Jacqueline Sénès traces the country’s torturous and difficult political and socioeconomic journey to maturity and greater autonomy through the vicissitudes of a diasporic Irish-French settler family. At the heart of Terre violente, beyond the dangers and difficulties experienced by the pioneering farmers and their sacrifices, lies the discovery of John and Helena Sutton’s deep attachment to the farm they have created, their commitment to the ‘new’ Land, and simultaneous detachment from the Old Country. But there is also a deep empathy with their (unassimilated, non-hybrid) Kanak neighbours. Joëlle Wintrebert’s La Colonie perdue (1998), based on the reproduction of the early twentieth-century diaries of Marc Le Goupils and on Wintrebert’s own years of contemporary residence in New Caledonia, is a story about the increasing attachment to a new home by a reflective young woman, Sophie, growing up in the colony. The (hi)story of her free settler family, encouraged to emigrate under the scheme of Governor Feillet, is told through Sophie’s letters, written home to a France that is being replaced in her emotional life by the multicultural Caledonian plantation at Nassirah and her love for a young Kanak chief in exile in the area. Other literary texts recount the cruelties and injustices of deportation and the virtual impossibility for the convicts to return to a home in Europe. In Catherine Régent’s Justine, ou un amour de chapeau de paille

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 147

12/03/2014 14:39:58

148

The Literatures of the French Pacific

(1993), or Jean Vanmai’s Pilou-Pilou (1998), the narrow and multiple class prejudices of the colony turn the implantation or the very survival of the deportee into merit, to be inherited by their descendants as a claim to belonging. Both historical novels thus depict the honourable struggle to make a home by déportés in degrading or difficult conditions where Kanak play a background role. Picking up the metaphor shared by many contemporary writers of the barbed-wire fence, Claudine Jacques, like Jacqueline Sénès, sets Les Cœurs barbelés (1998) in the political ‘Events’ of 1984–8 and tells a story of the difficulties of a love relationship between a Caledonian woman and a Kanak man. This first novel depicts the search for interracial understanding from both Caldoche and Kanak perspectives. Jacques weaves real historical documents or journalistic articles on the conflict through her fictional text: an interview with Naisseline on the formation of the radical independence party, Les Foulards Rouges; the press accounts of the assassination of a young settler, Yves Tual, or of the shooting of the Kanak leader Éloi Machoro, declared a ‘terrorist’ by the French special forces; the story of Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s brothers, assassinated in the North at Tiendanite in an ambush by local settlers who were subsequently found not guilty by a jury in Noumea; Tjibaou’s cultural revival festival in 1975. Her novel moves from a long-shared history of loss, exile, and violent inter-community relations to investigate the possibility of the creation of an affective and equal relationship between Kanak (male) and settler (female). Jacques’ literary texts are at once a realistic portrait and an imaginative reconstruction of the two distinct societies, and a somewhat pessimistic exploration and understanding of their possible cohabitation. In Les Cœurs barbelés, the principal obstacle to the love story between the young Kanak engineer Séry and the young educated Caldoche Marilou is, however, as much male machismo and egoism as any simple ethnic or cultural difference. Nicolas Kurtovitch’s 2006 novel, Good Night Friend, stretches identification to put himself into the head of a young Kanak discovering the importance of name, place, and ancestral belonging, but also confronting the malevolent possession of her mother by a sorcerer. The work of this leading Caledonian writer tells the story of Kurtovitch-Hagen family presence in New Caledonia since the first explorers, denying that they have ever been landowners, while attempting to mediate the Kanak world and empathetically recognize its cultural validity. Nonetheless, this writer also refuses any notion of hybridity and insists on the cultural separateness and difference of the two main groups.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 148

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Strategic Hybridity

149

A Hybrid Kanak History of Home The considerably smaller number of recently published contemporary Kanak histories or stories are less interested in the issues of biological métissage and shared home, and more concerned with the recovery and valuing of their own ‘place to stand’3 in the land. They too, however, echo the history project inscribed in the Preamble to the Noumea Agreement: ‘the destructive legacy of colonialism for indigenous societies’ derives from a history that ‘harmed the dignity of the Kanak people and deprived it of its identity. […] These difficult times must be remembered, the mistakes recognised and the Kanak people’s confiscated identity restored’. The 2003 collective work 1853–2003, Temps et mémoires du pays kanak: du malentendu original à la communauté de destin [1853–2003, Times and Memories of the Kanak Land: From Original Misunderstanding to the Community of Common Destiny] (2003), published by ‘the Committee for the 150th anniversary of the loss of Kanak sovereignty’, responds to the political message of the Agreements by writing a history from a Kanak point of view. Temps et mémoires du pays kanak consists of a conventional chronological list of French legislative actions, but singles out those that affect Kanak – their land and customs, responses to Kanak revolts, inter-tribal reprisals, and French military actions. More particularly, it is the significant moments of Kanak political and union organization and the major events marking the organization of independence activism and movements towards greater autonomy which are enumerated. In the prominence given to listing the names of leading individuals seen to have contributed to the historical and political evolution of the ‘Kanak country’, the reader might recognize a traditional Kanak element. The family name, in fact, not only links the person to a shared ancestor, or to the geographical characteristics of the place with which the group is intimately connected, but also shows that Kanak, too, are individuals, subjects, and agents, not, as Maurice Leenhardt’s Do Kamo had implied, dissolved in the community or in a mythical world. The introduction that frames the chronology, however, is characterized most notably by a recycling of lieux communs. These ‘commonplaces’ (that is, places circulating from text to text and, one assumes, from village to village) include: the destruction of the ancestral pays du séjour paisible [the peaceable home] by the white sails of the ‘ghost’ ships; Kanak soothsayers’ prophecy of times of misery and unimaginable

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 149

12/03/2014 14:39:58

150

The Literatures of the French Pacific

suffering for the ancestor, Teâ Kanaké; the enclosure of the indigenous people in reserves, and their spiritual resistance to those who have abused their hospitality; and a longstanding resistance rooted in the earth mother. The finale of this discourse on Kanak history is the decision to construct the future of the land in mutual respect, together. While it is possible to trace the origins and characteristics of most of these images of Kanak histories to ethnographic, historical, and literary writings of European origin, the perspectives, experiences, and sensibilities that differentiate Kanak stories from European can nonetheless be read between the lines, or in the choice among images and commonplaces, or in borrowings, and, perhaps even more particularly, in a certain indirectness and allusiveness, in the gaps and silences. As the Kanak thinker Gabriel Poédi articulates the paradox of subaltern identity construction, Kanak identity is the product of history, the history of an anti-colonial struggle, but it is also the product of the violence of denial of history to Kanak peoples (Poédi, 1989: 75–86). In its turn, Déwé Gorodé’s Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! weaves a Kanak history through the personal stories lived by her father’s generation and in her own coming of age. This novel, too, selects out the Kanak heroes of resistance and martyrdom, Atai in 1878 or Éloi Machoro during the ‘Events’, for example, and the development of indigenous political parties, to celebrate a history of defiant activism at the same time as it enumerates historical grievances: the Native Code, the reserves and loss of home, humiliations. Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, however, has extended the trope of exile, of a haunting by the past, by including the voices of groups other than Kanak. In the following extract, a somewhat didactic dialogue between Tiapi, a figure of Déwé’s father and the wife of a settler, presented as sympathetic to the Kanak cause, the enumeration of the abuses of colonization, from ‘the times of forced labour, exile for life and capital punishment for our chiefs and rebel warriors’ evoked by Tiapi is continued by the settler. – At M’bi Cove, near the Baie des Dames at Ducos, I saw the old wharf where they disembarked the convicts, recidivists, and political deportees, along with the guillotine. It was there, I believe, that its very first victims, from the New Hebridees, were executed. – Yes, an uncle of mine who had leprosy showed me that wharf when I visited him over at the leprosarium and we walked along the little stony beach. It was also at that wharf that the famous Louise Michel disembarked with her fellow revolutionaries deported after the Paris Commune.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 150

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Strategic Hybridity

151

– Yes, and so did the followers of Mokrani and Hadad, after the suppression of their revolt against Algerian colonisation. Their Arab and Kabyle descendants now live at Nêsajuu, where one of my aunts was married. […] There’s been so much suffering associated with this old wharf that, sometimes at night, according to my uncle, the wind makes noises like the sound of rattling chains, and even crying, moaning and sobbing. Yes that’s right, you still expect to meet the ghosts of the deportees there, just as you do in the Baie des Dames or on Ilôt Freycinet. It’s the same in the North at Balade, in the bay or on the beach, near the tomb of the murdered priest or the monument that commemorates the French annexation by Febvrier-Despointes on the 24th September in 1853. You feel that any minute you’ll hear canon fire shatter the intense silence of the bush. It’s incredible how sometimes history can leave its mark on places! – History is the story of people; they create history, as it too drags them along in its relentless march. It leaves an indelible mark on people and on their land. (Gorodé, 2012: 31)

The topos of exile (like that of home) turns out to be at the same time a locus of dialogue and borrowing, in a toing and froing between the communities, and a locus of (strategic political) competition. As the following chapter, which looks at the differences between three different contemporary Kanak rewritings of a story of origin, demonstrates, such complex internal tensions of dialogue and opposition also exist within the literature of any single New Caledonian group. If this next chapter delineates dynamic (and perhaps productive) third spaces of Kanak agency, these spaces are also very different one from other, as indeed are their socio-political contexts.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 151

12/03/2014 14:39:58

4

Locating the First Man in the (Hi)stories of Kanaky Internal Kanak Hybridities Internal Kanak Hybridities

The Three Versions of Kanaké Most of the histories examined in the last chapter reconstruct origins and memory with present socio-political ends in mind. All derive from nostalgia for a past and present home, and seek to establish roots and legitimacy by reconstituting a New Caledonian history that guarantees their community its own place, cultural specificity, and centrality. The dialectic between literature and history, between European and New Caledonian homes, refashions the sense of history in these texts: a (hi) story that is more about a distinctive (group), a political message, and an ethical vision of the future than a faithful reproduction of a past society and its relations of power. In their parallel explorations of the possibilities and problems of a Common Destiny, the gains and losses of a bi- or multicultural society, and inherent dissymmetry of such a society, contemporary literary texts increasingly engage with issues of difference. The shared hybrid condition of living between different worlds (Europe and New Caledonia), cultures (French and Kanak), or between story and history does seem to allow for the development of double alliances, critical perspectives, and new third spaces across the two main cultures. Telling the past in the literatures of New Caledonia is a form of identity construction, but these identities are themselves multiple and shifting, political, and personal. The depictions of the epic (and sometimes poor) settler – in early colonial novels as in Régent, Jacques, or even Kurtovitch’s work in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 152

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

153

the present – feature fictional protagonists increasingly in cultural interaction with Kanak characters. Three modern Kanak versions of the foundational story of Téâ Kanaké set up this First Ancestor in competition with the figure of the Explorer and the Pioneer for the place of First Man. These Kanak stories, from Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s first recreation of the founding figure of Kanaké to Déwé Gorodé’s or Denis Pourawa’s more recent versions, are characterized as different from European texts, marked dramatically by the aesthetic and performance forms of oral history. All three are also very different from one another. Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s Kanaké: Nationalism, Cannibalism, Reconciliation There has been debate on the origins of the Kanak cultural revival, with Jean Guiart arguing that this began with the writings of Boésou Ërijisi and Maurice Leenhardt in the early twentieth century. The general consensus, however, is that it dates from the Melanesian cultural festival that took place in 1975 under the direction of Jean-Marie Tjibaou on the site of the present Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou at the gateway to Noumea. The preface to the Kanak history examined in the previous chapter, Temps et mémoires du pays kanak, written by the political leader and tribal elder Roch Wamytan, for example, is clearly influenced by Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s first Kanak hi(story), a jeu-scénique or play-spectacle, performed at the Melanesia 2000 festival. This display of ceremony and dance incorporates a particular founding story at the same time as it introduces a nationalist (hi)story. The text in Paicî language was transcribed for the play by Mme Marie-Claude Tjibaou, with her father M. Doui Wetta. A written version of Téâ Kanaké existed in the story told by Firmin Dogo Gorouna to Jean Guiart and published in his thesis (Guiart, 1965: 146). Although interspersed with longish extracts in Paicî and indigenous expressions, the language of the play is predominantly French. The rhetoric is also internally mixed: the central voice or Caller is that of the traditional orator, yet the text has overtones of Tjibaou’s earlier biblical, liturgical, and moral training as a Marist priest. In the subsequent 1976 publication, Kanaké: Mélanésien de NouvelleCalédonie, the authors call on Kanak as a group to draw strength from their own stories: to establish cultural sovereignty. Téâ Kanaké, the first-born, the ancestor, is presented as a figure of the united Kanak

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 153

12/03/2014 14:39:58

154

The Literatures of the French Pacific

people of the future, of a unified ‘Melanesian Way’, despite the long history of separate cultural and linguistic traditions of the different Kanak communities. Tjibaou himself, as his earliest biographers, Bensa and Wittersheim, observe, recognized the contingent and hybrid nature of a discourse unifying different Kanak peoples and influenced by European models, observing with humour that when a Kanak claims his independence – his sovereignty – he cannot get much more French than that (Tjibaou, 1996). The origins of the festival are to be found in Tjibaou’s attempts to recover a silenced Kanak culture and in his increasingly political mission to lead others to the recognition of its dignity and value. Kanak peoples, he claimed, would no longer be ‘escapees from prehistory’ or ‘archeological remains’ but ‘men of flesh and blood’ (Tjibaou and Missotte, 1976: 5), represented in his play by the powerful figure of the first son, Téâ Kanaké. Translated into English for circulation in the Pacific in 1978, Kanaké, Melanesian of New Caledonian gives an illustrated account of the festival and of its grand finale, the jeu scénique that stages this founding myth of the Paicî-speaking group. Like the settler notion of home, Kanaké, the founder, does not come from elsewhere but is also, somehow, always already there. The 1975 festival marks a turning point in New Caledonian history and in Tjibaou’s own political evolution. His speeches, poems, and interviews collected by Bensa and Wittersheim in La Présence kanak in 1996, along with the text of the jeu scénique, Kanaké, in Kanaké – Mélanésien de Nouvelle-Calédonie (reproduced again twenty years after the festival in Mwà Véé, la revue culturelle kanak), have come to constitute the major part of the new leader’s parole or Word. These texts have played a vital role in the construction of the idea of Kanaky, a hybrid new entity accorded rights and a future distinct from those conferred by French citizenship. Tjibaou’s parole was instrumental in the process that led to the drawing up of the Accord de Matignon in 1989 and the recognition of the existence of the Kanak as a political entity by the Accord de Nouméa in 1998. These moral and political agreements have a goal of equality between former colonizer and colonized and use of language, forms of expression that are, according to Bensa, like the mechanisms they have set in motion, quite without precedent in French colonial history. Jean-Marie Tjibaou was himself a very particular hybrid. Born in 1936, son of Wenceslas Tjibaou of Hienghène, a moniteur or teacher for the Catholic mission, the young Jean-Marie was distanced from his tribu

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 154

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

155

and his mother tongue early to be educated in the seminary. In 1966, he became second vicar of the Cathédrale de Nouméa with the encouragement of the family mentor, the colourful Père Rouel, Marist priest of Hienghène and outspoken opponent of the exploitation of the Kanak. Hamid Mokaddem’s 2004 study of the authoritarian and strong-willed Father reveals in Rouel a sufficiently turbulent character to be packed forcibly off to Australia in 1944 by the colonial administration. Tjibaou was educated under the wing of the churches like many of the Pacific elites: sent to the Catholic Faculty of Lyons from 1968 to 1970. Later, in Paris, at the École pratique des hautes études, he began a doctorate in ethnography on Kanak identity under the direction of the Protestant anthropologist Jean Guiart, himself a disciple of Leenhardt. Tjibaou finally left the priesthood in 1971 and returned to New Caledonia in 1972. As is the case for Déwé Gorodé, Tjibaou’s life and work are characterized by a number of paradoxes. His biographers show the priest-scholar and later Kanak leader moving to and fro between European capitals and his extended family on the north-east coast of New Caledonia, constantly exchanging his manou for a suit. Like Gorodé, he declared that he was happiest at home, with his feet in the soil. The major monument to Tjibaou, the architecturally stunning Cultural Centre that bears his name at the entrance to Noumea, is a gift from France, Mitterrand’s response to Tjibaou’s earlier request. A monumental statue of the assassinated leader, somewhat in the Soviet realist mode, stands watch out over the mangrove from a hilltop beside the Centre. Despite his turn towards the legacy of Kanak tradition, 1853, the year of annexation of the main island by the French, is the reference point that Tjibaou establishes for land-ownership claims. ‘Our history lies before us. The return to tradition is a myth. No people has ever lived this’, the independence leader repeated. ‘The search for identity, the model, is in front of, not behind us’. The important day is thus not the referendum but the day after (Tjibaou, 1996: 185). Less impregnated by tradition than his father and grandfather, he must, he announces, ‘invent’ the new Kanak culture. ‘What is tradition? What others lived before us: but in a hundred years it will be what we are living today’ (296). In Kanaké, then, the colonial past is presented as European history overlapping tradition, and the foundation for the shared future. Much as the pejorative nineteenth-century term ‘canaque’ with a ‘c’ was transformed by Tjibaou’s hero Kanaké to Kanak (written with a ‘k’ and without traditional French grammatical agreements) to signify reversal,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 155

12/03/2014 14:39:58

156

The Literatures of the French Pacific

pride in being a Kanak, and the transformation of the negative language of the past, Tjibaou, as Bensa argues, sees himself constructing a written memory over his culture’s largely erased traces. This will produce an image of itself that, as Tjibaou puts it, is ‘rooted but new’, ‘gratifying and conquering’ (27) in a project of Kanak political primacy based on the revaluing of the cultural. Tjibaou’s resituating of the Paicî origin myth (told earlier in the century by Philippe Gorodé to the ethnographer Jean Guiart) is, the political leader claims, a staging of a unique Kanak identity. This, for him, is an identity construed within a collective gift economy marked by the taboo and totem of an intense relation with the living land, where prestige lies, as he put it, in giving, giving a lot, and giving everywhere. Such a relational identity is put forward in opposition, but also in apposition, to the European Self of material progress that has constituted the accepted socio-political model in New Caledonia. In Tjibaou’s project the Kanak must also play a full role in the economic development of the new provinces that they will control after the implementation of the political agreements. A documentary film, Les Esprits du Koniambo, made in the Northern Province by Bensa with a French filmmaker, screened in 2003 at the Centre Tjibaou in Noumea, on ARTE in 2004, and also at the Cinémathèque française in Paris (4 December 2004), shows the impact in contemporary political discourse of Tjibaou’s sophisticated understandings of the need to relate Kanak claims to a modern economy and future in a globalized world alongside the need for recovery of pride in the affirming of the Kanak tradition. The film has Kanak recount the processes of their decision to allow foreign firms to set up a major nickel mine at Koniambo to provide jobs for the younger generation, on the condition that the necessary respect is accorded the spirits of the ancestors up on the summits. This would involve reconstructing the summits after mining operations ceased. Within the mixed economies of the 1975 Kanaké, knowledge of self is to be recovered through a reconstruction and sharing with the Europeans of tradition, in particular of dances specific to (owned by) and gifted to the festival by individual tribus or villages. Knowledge of many of these dances had often been lost or become quiescent. The boenando, the traditional ceremony that opens the play, presented in many early European texts as the savage or licentious pilou-pilou, is now daringly presented as the ritual cannibalistic feast particular to the Kanak of New Caledonia. Here, though, it is rehabilitated by its resemblance to the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 156

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

157

Catholic Eucharist – ‘the sacred sacrifice that all cultures have evoked but we alone have dared accomplish’, claims Tjibaou in his introduction to Kanaké. The second boenando that brings the play to a close is the sharing of the new yams with the Europeans, now no longer masters but guests. For Bensa and Wittersheim, the proposal of a fraternal and foundational relationship between European and Kanak by means of the shared feast to celebrate the yam harvest takes the startling form of a symbolic rehabilitation of precisely that cannibalism of the First Man, Kanaké, that so haunted European writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tjibaou’s initial cultural project, as analysed by Bensa and Wittersheim, appears to be a response to the confusion and pain he experienced in his early encounters with rejection, a refusal of both shame and resentment, and a political reaction against the humiliation and decline of his people. In an interview with Marguerite Duras in 1986, Tjibaou declared that his claims were less ‘national’ than ‘Kanak’. The first need, he told the avant-garde writer, herself born in the colonies, was to be solid in one’s own culture, to be inventive in the absence of any ready-made models integrating modernity and traditional Word, or souffle [breath]. In another striking reversal of the connotations of the cannibal savage, Tjibaou foreshadows postcolonial theory in his understanding of self-othering, contending that the alienation in the colonial situation resided principally in the fact that to become a man you had to deny your own ‘savage culture’, becoming a stranger to yourself and to others (1996: 217–26). Opposition to Tjibaou’s double project of (self) knowledge and search for cultural recognition came from the right-wing party, Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République, the RPCR, who saw it as too political in intent (raising the still taboo question of the legitimacy of colonization), and also from the first contingent of post-1968 Kanak students, organizing into new political groups, the Foulards rouges and Le Mouvement de 1878, who attacked the festival as insufficiently political. The militants claimed the festival was folklore and would simply be read in the old frames, of the civilized and the savage (natives dancing naked). Supporters of the festival point out that the pragmatics of the situation did not permit Tjibaou to talk politics directly at the time. The cultural approach, they argued, at least allowed him to obtain the finance from the state that enabled the festival to go forward as a first step that would not otherwise have been possible. Marie-Claude Tjibaou, for her part, was prepared to lead the women’s groups dancing

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 157

12/03/2014 14:39:58

158

The Literatures of the French Pacific

bare-breasted, but this was in the face of considerable concern about lack of female modesty on the part of the Kanak Church leaders. Notwithstanding the criticism from the radical independence groups, including the young Déwé Gorodé, the three giant marionettes of the policeman, the administrator, and the priest, caricatures of the arrival of agents of colonization, constituted a bold political critique for the time. As the audience watches the self-important captain writing a falsely objective report of native aggression quelled by ‘our’ valiant soldiers, it sees the fearful natives simply withdraw quietly. It follows the Eurocentric misinterpretation of baskets of gifts offered by the natives as a sign of capitulation, or of the pagan savage taking white men for gods; it laughs at the merchant vaunting the merits of corsets for Kanak women and the priest’s curious homily on the value of civilization that includes the robe mission to cover women’s shameful bodies. As ‘weapons of Satan’, female bodies are imprisoned by bewildering giant cones and their movements are restricted. Although the festival organizers sought to make the representative of Christianity in the giant priest-puppet a little less ‘grimacing and carnavelesque’ out of respect for the older leaders and the importance religion had come to assume in tradition, the bare-breasted women met with the disapproval of many of the Catholic and Protestant elders for whom these uncovered female bodies did not conform to ‘our tradition’. It is of interest for our project of considering hybrid forms that Tjibaou’s critique of the mother-hubbard mission dress has not been taken up by other Kanak intellectuals, including the ‘womanist’ author, Déwé Gorodé. This mode of dress, which constitutes a colonial imposition, appears to have been largely appropriated as a distinctive badge of difference, of being a Kanak woman. Modesty comes to be a value that marks the indigenous churches in opposition to Western female immodesty. A perceptive literary critique of the text of Kanaké by Mounira Chatti (2004a), accuses the play of addressing only Europeans. Tjibaou’s text, however, ends with an explicit address to Kanak pride and the assertion that ‘we want to weave with both Europeans and with our children the fraternal Caledonia of tomorrow’. Beyond the conflicting political positions on cultural versus political action and the work’s own mixed purposes, revival and positive demonstration, Tjibaou’s text itself is a hybrid, but closer to the Kanak world than to the European. Its striking parallelisms and repetitions, like the rhythms of the spoken text, remain close to the performance aesthetic of oral tradition.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 158

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

159

The totems of thunder and of wind, the Doui shark, the whitebodied Palako hen, the lizard/yam of life, the kuni fruit of fertility, and the serpent that nourishes the dead and the fields, dance the mythic structure of the movement from death through travail to rebirth. The play opens with the ceremony of the sharing of yams among the clans at the end of a period of mourning and the initiation of the chief, Kanaké. This celebration of the return of light, as Kanaké’s planting of the Ti, the pole of life replaces the mât Karoti or pole of death, is interrupted in the second section by the arrival of the Europeans. The fear and fascination experienced by the natives is followed by the ‘dark wanderings’ (a term later picked up in the Noumea Agreement) of the colonial period, with the loss of Melanesian culture and spirituality. Kanaké challenges the new arrivals liberating Kavo from the robe de mission imposed by the missionary that weighs her down, and dancing a pas de deux before he is taken off to prison. When Kanaké returns, he finds Kavo, dressed like a prostitute, being passed from soldier to soldier, and rescues her a second time, but after this second dance together Kavo runs off in shame and he is unable to save her. Tjibaou’s choice of theme touches on a particular sensitivity of colonial and postcolonial literature, made explicit, for example, in the work of Franz Fanon: the struggle to reverse a history of what Gayatri Spivak has seen as white men saving brown women from brown men. On the other hand, it can be argued that Tjibaou’s play presents Kanak women somewhat stereotypically as passive beings, rather than as agents, needing to be rescued, in this instance, from the colonizer. As Anne Donadey concludes in her 2001 book, Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds, nationalisms are often founded on the figure of man saving woman from the invader, and ambivalence is found more commonly in the female postcolonial subject than in the male subject. Shortly after the festival in 1975, the 1878 Group formed the PALIKA and Tjibaou the Kanak député declared in favour of independence, and entered the political arena. Under the auspices of a movement he called Maxha [Hold up Your Head Again], he became mayor of Hienghène in 1977, and in 1979 joined the Front indépendantiste. From 1982 to 1984, Tjibaou was Vice-President of the government, and in 1983, at the political Round Table at Nainville-les-Roches, he helped produce the political theory of double legitimacy (‘one people, two flags’) that presented both major groups (déportés/transportés and indigenous peoples) as victims of history. In 1984, Tjibaou helped to create the FLNKS.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 159

12/03/2014 14:39:58

160

The Literatures of the French Pacific

For Tjibaou, the staging of Kanaké seeks to bring both European and Kanak publics closer to the Kanak experience of mythic time and encounter with the gods through the play’s structures and symbols. From the opening scene, however, it is clear that the choices of theme are both cultural and politically strategic. The link between the re-membering of a culture and a nationalist movement claiming back the land and affirming cultural primacy was made explicit later in an interview with Sarah Wells of the Sydney Morning Herald, translated by Éric Wittersheim in La Présence kanak (Tjibaou, 1996: 296). The génies familiers who welcome the visitors highlight the Kanak tradition of hospitality (the strategic absorption of strangers into the tribe, who are often given the role of ‘chief’, to prevent them from swelling the ranks of the enemy) and also the status of the Kanak as first inhabitant. In what is perhaps an oblique reference to his unsettling material metaphor of the boenando-Eucharistcannibal ceremony, the Kanak and former priest wonders whether the causes of the alcoholism destroying his people might not be traceable to the absence of the deep emotional bonding produced by collective ritual. Alban Bensa considers that Tjiboau thinks of decolonization as the payment of a debt – of blood, of land taken away, and of humiliation. For her part, Mounira Chatti argues that the 1975 text attenuates the evils of colonization, using the term colon or settler to describe the arrival of the Europeans, for example, rather than the more politically charged term, colonisateur or colonizer. Yet Kanaké constructs some striking metaphors of injustice and oppression – ‘our past shattered like a crushed eggshell’ – and a dramatic narrative of misunderstanding of culture difference. ‘We were black-skinned and looked terrifying, we weren’t noble savages. We ate human flesh. You said: They’re not men (1978: 23–4). It decries the violence of a colonial administration removing the Kanak from their ancestral lands, taking over this land for use by cattle, and abusing its mineral resources, while exploiting forced indigenous labour and repressing Melanesian language and culture. Kanaké, it is true, is not yet a militant for independence, but he is an archetypal figure of proud and peaceful resistance to injustice in contexts of unequal power, asking the foreigners, who have put the ‘chains of prisoners’ of forced work on those who welcomed them, and who have not reciprocated their host’s giving, to go back where they came from. A chief in a culture that respects chiefs, he protests, is nonetheless trussed up ignominiously and carried off to prison for his defiance like a hunted animal, showing the ignorance and indifference of the invaders to Kanak traditions and values.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 160

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

161

In his study ‘Melanesian Elites and Modern Politics in New Caledonia and Vanuatu’, Éric Wittersheim argues against Gayatri Spivak’s hypothesis that the subaltern cannot speak without assimilating to the class in power, claiming that, to the contrary, the charismatic leader who sought to develop and promote values common to all Melanesians was neither Westernized nor alienated from his own culture. It remains a moot point whether, as an early member of the new Kanak middle-class and intelligentsia, Tjibaou would really qualify to be called a subaltern, but the leader was deeply rooted in a particular traditional culture in the Hienghène area and in an indigenized Christianity. The first Kanak priest was not ordained until 1946 and, arguing against the narrowness and paternalism of religious institutions, Tjibaou had left the priesthood for political activity and marriage with Marie-Claude Wetta by 1972. Despite his political prominence, Tjibaou always remained wholly involved in the traditional network and obligations of custom in the life of his clan and tribu. If he did go off to Paris, in the steps of Leenhardt, to study anthropology, the aim, observes Wittersheim, was always to adopt European discourse in order to counter the ‘stilted image of the “primitive” developed in classical anthropology’ (1998: 7) and to reinforce Kanak cultural values and dignity through cultural translation. Tjibaou transformed the discourse of a progressive Christianity for political ends. Writing in the language of the other need not entail either acculturation or the kind of assimilation traced in Éva Hoffmann’s Lost in Translation in Chapter 2. Cultural translation can create a space and construct a subjectivity that is as much transactional and performative as it is a single and original identity. For Wittersheim, Tjibaou is able to draw new identity out of texts of a national literature already inhabited by change and plurality, and transform European texts to new Kanak purposes. In Wittersheim’s analysis, not unlike the political ‘third way’ envisaged by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Tjibaou’s voice is marked by the search for an original form of development and sociability that is neither a cult of goods and technology nor a forceful return to tradition. Tjibaou is thus seen by Wittersheim to have introduced a new relational conception to the practice of politics as cultural exchange: a politics played by a mixture of European and Kanak rules. Wittersheim concludes that the exact nature of the relationship between the traditional local diversity of clans and linguistic groups (with their ‘big sons’ (chiefs), ‘elders’ councils’, and ‘masters of the soil’ as authorities) and the unitary model of political parties in a Kanak state is not directly addressed in Tjibaou’s texts. The balance of power is still

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 161

12/03/2014 14:39:58

162

The Literatures of the French Pacific

too great on the side of European institutions and thinking. The danger of land becoming definitively private property or capital, alongside the threats of human endeavour being reduced to labour, the community to a set of separate individuals living independently in the present, food to a commodity, and the natural world to an exploitable or marketable resource, may still, as Tjibaou saw it, be real. And the translation of Kanak culture into French must somehow include such awareness. In 1988, Tjibaou asked the French government to build a cultural centre in Noumea. Not long after, he was shot by Wéa Djubelli at the ceremony of commemoration marking the end of the ritual period of mourning for the nineteen young Kanak ‘rebels’ and hostage-takers killed a year earlier on Ouvéa. Like the tableaux staged by Tjibaou’s play-spectacle, the Centre, too, is a hybrid building. In fact, as Bensa puts it, in his book-length presentation with Renzo Piano of the new Centre (2000), thanks in part to Tjibaou’s inspiration and in part to Mitterrand’s desire to leave grandiose traces of his own passage through the political world, a small minority culture came to possess an extraordinary piece of contemporary architecture, very much inspired by their past (2000). The Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou, looking back to tradition, however also looks forward to the future and stands in marked contrast to the architect Renzo Piano’s other postmodern constructions – for instance, the ultramodern Centre Culturel Pompidou in the old heart of Paris. This architectural construction is similarly hybrid in that it makes a cultural and political statement in respect of the value and place of Kanak culture. Like Wittersheim, Bensa sees Tjibaou’s vision as one of a hybrid independence figured as a management of interindependences, and a forgiving of colonialism that is not forgetting (the ‘peaceful rhythm of the boenando that effaces mourning and calms anger’). Such a vision is concomitant with his use of the origin story from oral tradition, itself perhaps influenced by Christian stories of the flood, of incest, and of Cain and Abel, foregrounding the figure of Kanaké as cultural hero and as a bridge between the communities. In the Kanak Pathway (Chemin kanak) that leads up through a garden to the Centre, opened in 1998, a decade after the independence leader’s assassination, the history of Téâ Kanaké is told on story boards in a series of five traditional gardens within the grounds of the spectacularly and inspiringly hybrid architecture to the analysis of which our text will later return. Basing his scenes on accounts in the work of Leenhardt published in the first quarter of the twentieth century, Tjibaou’s Kanaké stages two

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 162

12/03/2014 14:39:58

Internal Kanak Hybridities

163

traditional women’s dances that each makes claims to particular kinds of female power. Women’s traditional role in the transmission of the blood line is foregrounded in Tableau 11, in a dance where the Avni must pass under the unrolled fringed bands simulating women’s skirts and the path of conception to re-enter the world through the womb. Women transmit the blood, if under the authority of the maternal uncles; men the name and status. In a second dance, for the repose of the dead, the jedo, the women rush at the male group, tearing off their hats, feathers, and cloaks in a form of potlatch ceremony, therein asserting their blood rights over the dead man: their right to reclaim or to destroy all the material objects associated with him. In Tjibaou’s play, however, the coded message to women overall is one of the need for ethnic solidarity and fidelity in the face of the humiliating self-dispossession that Black women risk in contact with European men. The virile character of the culture is emphasized in Kanaké’s metaphors and repetitions: ‘que la lance de vos guerriers soit comme un sexe victorieux […] vos sexes libérés se dressent comme des mats indestructibles’ (Tjibaou and Missotte, 1976: 9) [may the lance of your warriors be like a victorious sexual organ … may your organs rise up like invincible poles]. Kanaké arrives on stage carrying a ceremonial axe to pull down the mât karoti, the pole of the Avni, mourners responsible for the rites of the mourning period, to replace it by the Ti, the pole of life that incites games of young male bravery. The phallus, like the pole, is the hybrid sign of life and of death, of the ancestor, of transmission, and of fertility in a circulation that brings together sexuality and the land, propagation and reproduction, and death and the sacred in a tissue of interconnections with nature, recalling the term of bao. This is the ‘long god who stretches out’, much discussed by the pastor-ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt as presenting a problem of translation, a sacred bao whose name also designates a penis-sheath. Following the women’s dances, which affirm traditional separation of gender roles but also specific realms of female power, the third section opens on the recognition of shared Kanak dispossession, and then dances the cultural return to its roots of an uprooted people in the new boenando (sharing of the yams) in a mutual and equal recognition of cultures and contributions, and the ending of a second 130-year period of mourning. Tjibaou’s nationalist and masculinist work will provide the point of departure for Gorodé’s later woman-centred text. Her play represents no such equality or clear resolution, and puts into question Tjibaou’s writing of a grand national History.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 163

12/03/2014 14:39:59

164

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Déwé Gorodé’s Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000: une adaptation du jèmââ de Téâ Kënâké: ‘Writing Back’ to Tjibaou This second Kanak play, by the poetess and writer Déwé Gorodé, this time with a modified title and updated conventions for the transcription of Paicî language, Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000: une adaptation du jèmââ de Téâ Kënâké, an unpublished manuscript held by the ADCK, was produced by Pierre Gope at the 8th Festival of Pacific Arts in Noumea almost a quarter of a century after the 1975 Melanesia 2000 festival. Gorodé’s rewriting constructs a woman-centred story that also indirectly reflects on contemporary Kanak history and politics through the memory of its major event, making the martyred Tjibaou himself a ‘First Man’. Téâ Kënâké replays in particular that part of the founding story in which the hero is killed by his brother in a fratricidal struggle, much as the character TK (Téâ Kënâké)/Tjibaou was assassinated on Ouvéa by his Kanak ‘brother’, the pastor Wéa Djubelli, on 5 May 1989. In the opening scene, TK is presented as a brother and a lover in dialogue with F (Femme), whom we will call W (Woman). She will become the central figure of the play. The ancestral past takes the form of the character of Duée, the bao, or spirit of the ancestors, ‘those who educate and raise us’. Bao, claims Gorodé’s text, is much more than the ‘skeletons’ or ‘bones’ that the term also designates. And, paradoxically, contrary to tradition, this bao is female. The story that unfolds is one of a TK who will not go back on a peace agreement to which he has ‘given his word’ (the Matignon Agreement?), although he is warned by W and Duée of the murderous intent and disarray of his second ‘brother’, B2. In dialogue with B1, B2 (the future assassin Wéa) accuses TK of having decided to sign the peace agreement on his own. He pursues the obsessive idea of taking revenge against TK in order to allow the fallen Ouvéa militants ‘to rest in peace’. Despite the pleading of W, the customary ‘sister’ of the two ‘brothers’ and the first love of TK, the curiously fatalistic independence leader remains unwilling to take steps to defend himself, perhaps, as Hamid Mokaddem has suggested in his (2005) Ce Souffle venu des Ancêtres: l’œuvre politique de Jean-Marie Tjibaou, 1936–1989, determined to enhance his image and to be ‘re-arranged like the bones of the dead’ in order to take on the status of ancestor and myth. When TK is shot by his frère ennemi, B(rother)2, B(rother)1 retaliates and shoots B2 in his turn, taking over the political leadership as he claimed TK had planned. ‘TK is dead.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 164

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Internal Kanak Hybridities

165

Long live Kënâké’. TK is given a hero’s state burial as a martyr, and the political myth is born.1 W insists on a customary burial for both the martyr and his assassinated assassin in the name of tradition, as on the right of the maternal uncles to claim back the body and blood of their relative through her (‘They are my brothers’). B1, always the consummate politician, sees that the body of B2, the assassin of TK, is secretly taken away for burial by night, thus masking or writing out the political significance of his act and strengthening the historical legend that Tjibaou will become. In 2011, Mathieu Kassowitz wrote, directed, and starred in a film drama entitled L’Ordre et la morale [Rebellion] recounting the events of Ouvéa to the wider world and strengthening the Tjibaou myth. Although Gorodé initially disavowed making any reference to Tjibaou’s assassination in her play, there are a number of evident allusions to historical events and intertextual borrowings. The expression, ‘le bourreau d’Ouvéa’ [the Ouvéa executioner], for example, expresses the playwright’s attitude to the director of the French Special Forces who attacked the caves where the hostage-takers were holed up with their captors. The commonplace saying, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, attributed to this ‘Ouvéa criminal’ in her play, recalls Tjibaou’s description of an indigenous people ‘crushed like an eggshell’. W also repeats a number of the resistant gestures of Gorodé’s earlier fictional heroines, the generations of independent-minded Utê Mûrûnû who refuse customary marriages at the same time as they assume the responsibilities of guardians of traditional knowledge and values. At the end of the play, Duée persuades a desperate W not to die from her sense of being abandoned by a big brother determined to become a martyr but to live as a woman in rebellion, accepting all the limitations and the possibilities that being a woman entails. Duée is a central figure in Gorodé’s history play. The text presents the ancestor spirit as the lizard-totem watching over W throughout childhood on the wall of the classrooms of the whites, or as the gecko inside the school lab jars, or again as infiltrating modernity in the chip in the computer card. Able to take on the physical appearance of W’s grandmother, she can foresee the imminent deaths of TK and B2 much as the grandmother can sense her own death or find a premonition in a wounded seabird in Gorodé’s short stories. Traditionally a genderless spirit, Gorodé’s Duée is here a mother or sister figure, an inner voice and an interlocutor. The Duée of the final scenes plays the role of grandmother, and confidant to W in her loss and despair, helping her as

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 165

12/03/2014 14:39:59

166

The Literatures of the French Pacific

both advisor and as a commonsense foil, not unlike the nurse in Romeo and Juliet. These scenes make the case for a more questioning role for women in Kanak society than Tjibaou’s Kanaké had them play. In a woman-centred and didactic ending to the otherwise very allusive and open text, woven by a number of often contradictory voices and memories, young rebellious women are invited to arm themselves with courage, hope, lucidity, and imagination and with lots of love in the name of sharing, respect, and dignity, as the vital minimum needed to construct the future Kanaky. This is a traditional conception of women’s freedom that continues to emphasize taking account and care of others, much as W had offered to die self-sacrificially in the place of TK. However, W also resembles such resistant classical heroines as Antigone, and the text constructs explicit parallels between the two figures. The love poem woven into the threads of the first scene between TK and W introduces a question that initially astonishes in Gorodé’s politically committed writing, and which will take even more extreme forms in Déwé Gorodé’s first novel, L’Épave (2005). This is the taboo topic of women’s sexuality and their subordination to men in Kanak society, in some cases as women in love, and in others as consenting victims, to incest and sexual domination. In this case, W, desperate to the point of suicide for attention from a man who appears to be as heedless of her as he is of death, recalls the waiting recorded by Lida in Gorodé’s short story ‘L’Agenda de Lida’ [Lida’s Diary] for the activist she loves to remember her existence. This story of personal relationships within an independence activist cell speaks of the mental cruelties imposed upon Lida by male jealousy, and of Lida’s final and self-sacrificial death in childbirth, alone, during one of the child’s father’s many absences on political business (1996a: 91–106). ‘J’use du temps’ [I weather time] similarly speaks of the male jealousy, pride, and infidelity that destroy a young love relationship (65–70). The omnipresence of the character of lutin or Joker in the 2009 autofictional fragments of Graines de pin colonnaire, as the narrator’s mischievous, lovable and unfaithful, will-o’the-wisp, former love and constant interlocutor, at once a spirit and a living presence, reinforces this personal preoccupation with intense but difficult male–female relationships. Duée also has a double role, including a formal dramatic function, as she enters into dialogue with each of the characters in turn, revealing their inner voice and motivations dialogically to an audience itself addressed directly at a number of points in the play. As a spirit, Duée can appear out of nowhere at moments of declining tension, often provoking ironic

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 166

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Internal Kanak Hybridities

167

counterpoint to, although not repudiating, her traditional supernatural character or advisory function. She is a figure of the distinctive forms of a materialized ‘magic realism’ or re-enchantment of the world that mark much Pacific fiction and theatre. If Duée is a confidante, sometimes assuming the didactic role of commonsense reasoning, the voices in Gorodé’s dialogue often become almost disembodied, interchangeable, carried by debate or dialectic and ironic counterpointing or by the play of the language itself. This is often a play with commonplace expressions, as in the following exchange. Characters self-consciously designate their nature as fictions, creatures of language not unlike the new hybrid dialogue novels of Duras and Beckett that appeared in France from the 1950s, mixing the genres of poetry, theatre, and the novel. W: An island *S: Treasure Island W: An island of Jade S: A strategic rock W: The island of light S: A postcard W: Rocked by the trade-winds S: Threatened by radio-activity W: An island of blue mountains W: Decapitated for their mineral wealth S: Of clear rivers W: Polluted by the mines *S designates Duée, translated as Spirit. Woman presents the counterarguments as she and Brother 1 argue out the possible futures for their children. B1: A country to be constructed. W: An undeveloped country? A developing country? An industrialized country? B1: The country of the land W: Nickel country B1: The land of the traditional house (la case) W: The land of urban slums B1: The land of the yam W: Between rape and incest B1: The land of the taro W: The whore of Old Nick B1: The land of the araucaria tree W: Burned by bush fires

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 167

12/03/2014 14:39:59

168

The Literatures of the French Pacific B1: The land of the coconut palm W: Which wants tinned coconut milk like Nestlé B1: The land of your fathers W: I have no father B1: The land of your brothers: W: My brothers are dead. And I too am going to die. It’s the land of the dead.

Gorodé sets out to use her own particular First Man to advance a strategic Kanak and womanist political consciousness that casts doubt on the construction of any heroic or single historical narrative, seeking a place for B2, her ‘second brother’ who also deserves the respect due in custom to the maternal uncles. The interest of this work lies also in its unusual literary qualities. Her work with tense, the repeating proper nouns with multiple referents, the nouns and pronouns that telescope or confuse generations create distinctive times and spaces. This writing conjoins popular speech or global youth forms such as rap poetry with very formal narrative in the literary passé simple tense. Dream and reality, past and present overlap and communicate, almost interchangeably. This Kanak author’s literary work is not a mere ludic and intertextual postmodern play but the construction of a complex and political postcolonial poetics, including an attempt to use and abuse the French language, to make its clichés and expressions yield all of their resources for her own purposes, as they reveal their limitations in portraying Kanak understandings of the world. In the double movement signalled by the title of her recent volume of short stories, collectively authored with Wenigo Ihage, Le Vol de la parole [The Theft of the Word/The Flight of the Word] (2002), French, the language of the dominant Other, is somewhat re-lexified by means of untranslated words from Paicî, and somewhat ‘de-territorialized’ by unfootnoted local references and unusual verb tenses that transform a mythic time to a strong sense of present place. Le Vol de la parole is thus both the ‘theft’ of the mother tongue, and what the literary theorist Deleuze calls ‘lines of flight’, the power of language interplay. The two sides of commonplace expressions, the common wisdom they embody, and the limitations they place on more complex understandings, the non-sense of these expressions as they bounce off each other and the sense they remake for Gorodé’s specific purposes, produce an original and hybrid language. Like Tjibaou’s play, Gorodé’s woman-centred Kënâké, then, is also a linguistic and historico-political hybrid. However, the mix contains

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 168

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Internal Kanak Hybridities

169

elements that make her version comparable to, and very different from, Tjibaou’s. Both refer to elements of founding (hi)stories: the subtitle on Gorodé’s front cover specifically identifies her story as another adaptation of the Paicî foundation myth. Gorodé will equate myth and Kanak history where Tjibaou will translate myth into Grand National History. Both have political messages, but these are nuanced in Gorodé’s play, which indirectly puts into question Tjibaou’s position in relation to France, and his heroic espousal of history and renunciation of the personal as martyr to this cause. Both also write of a Kanak culture situated close to the natural world and to the land: Kënâké is the mountain that Gorodé can see from her garden, lying on his back, a hero fallen during a war over this valley of the Câba from where numerous Kanak groups originated. Yet Jean-Marie Tjibaou and Déwé Gorodé have both produced Kanak (hi)stories that are influenced by their French education, the impact of Christian religion, and resistance politics. Gorodé’s family is as deeply marked by Protestantism as Tjibaou’s is by Catholicism, and both have assumed very different gender roles. Gorodé’s text alone makes reference to the more problematic presence of figures of fratricidal brothers and of incest in the founding story: figures of the personal, the emotional, the many positive and negative faces of tradition that open up or fissure single narratives of history. The brothers in enmity nonetheless remain Kanak brothers – Woman’s customary brothers. And her text is once again, curiously, a coded message of intense and perhaps unrequited love for a hero, apparently too busy with his heroic or male mission in life to take too much notice of the feelings of a woman. Yet, despite Tjibaou’s masculinized universe, his central principle is less the recovery of the (patriarchal) past and its authorities than the principle of permanent reformulation, and Gorodé’s woman-centred messages are subordinated to the affirming of the primacy of Kanak values. Notwithstanding the generation gap (Tjibaou was born in 1936 and Gorodé in 1949) and their different political contexts, both (hi) stories contain distinctively Kanak topoi and reflect similar epistemologies. Their texts work with similar traditional metaphors, the génies familiers and the status of the Kanak as first inhabitant. They share a similar sense of the centrality of the ancestor, of repeating Kanak time and place, and, alongside a story of loss, a message of Kanak agency and of a new history in the making. The (hi)stories of the younger generations of Kanak writers are similarly heavily influenced by French culture, explicitly different from European stories and grounded in custom or ‘tradition’, and distinctly different from one another.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 169

12/03/2014 14:39:59

170

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Denis Pourawa’s Téâ Kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wâro kê/L’Homme aux cinq vies [Tein Kanaké, the Man with Five Lives]: A Poetic-Mythological Heritage for a Modern Age The further re-rewriting of the founding story Tein Kanaké by the young poet Denis Pourawa produces a very different version again of the First Man. This bilingual children’s printed book, in French and in Paicî, features Téâ Kanaké, the man with five lives, as the hero. It was illustrated by the young Kanak artist Éric Mouchonnière and sponsored by the ADCK and the Centre Culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou. Mouchonnière’s illustrations, too, manifestly seek to bring together two very different worlds and times: the cartoon-like multicultural/Kanak kids on skateboards with whom urban children might identify, and the power of the traditional universe of Kanak creation myths. Image and colour and repeated address – the ‘Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Hear Ye’ that the caller uses to assemble the listening young people – replace the performance role of songs, gestures, and dance in Tjibaou’s play and the quick-fire dialogue and language play in Gorodé’s production of the traditional (hi)story. Pourawa’s text includes address to young urban Kanak who may have had little exposure to oral tradition or valuing of their heritage. It seeks to transmit the ritual poetry of an oral and oratorical tradition within a work that also features Pourawa’s own particular form of modern poetry. In an interview with Patrice Favaro in 2003, the writer stressed the traditional magic or sacred character of his reconstruction of tradition. With this myth I found myself face to face with a Word that I had to write. But this Word is sacred, it is so profound that you cannot master all aspects of it. I had to reinterpret a story that has been transmitted from generation to generation. A task which has at once the weight of a burden and of a feather. The weight of a burden as it is a sacred Word that I had to write down for young people. The weight of a feather as through this act of creativity, I am paying homage to a whole heritage that has made the Word a noble expression. (Favaro, 2003)

The themes of the Pourawa text, then, are the magic, power, and vigour of words that have not have lost their ‘breath’. This breath or spirit is what carries a Word where everything cannot be said but must be deciphered by the reader. From the tooth placed on the mountain facing the moon emerge first the eel, the lizard-man, and then Téâ Kanaké, the first-born, whose

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 170

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Internal Kanak Hybridities

171

voyages to the silent depths of the forest will bring back knowledge to his fellow men. This is a Kanak tale of the origin of species. Yet, the story of Pourawa’s hero also has a vaguely biblical and clearly didactic resonance: ‘He is strong / and will bring you victory / he is wise and knows his lineage’. The main tropes, however, are poetic, as the text, like Tjibaou’s and Gorodé’s, draws on parallelisms, sounds and rhythm, and metaphor for aesthetic effect – man is ‘a droplet of fire’ and woman ‘a flame of water’. Memory/history here takes the form of the reconstruction of the stories of oral tradition heard in the tribu, but also of those in print. Pourawa’s text is influenced by Tjibaou’s and Gorodé’s earlier recovery of versions of the founding stories and it has similar political purposes. This version of Téâ Kanaké echoes their shared use of literature as a defence against assimilation in (hi)stories that accept and integrate urban contexts while they centre on the irreducibility and primacy of Kanak tradition and life en tribu. As Gorodé puts this, ‘Les arts et les langues témoignent de la résistance esthétique et mémorial d’une civilisation face à toutes les morts possibles’ [Arts and languages bear witness to the memorial and aesthetic resistance of a civilization in the face of every possible kind of threat of death] (Gorodé and Kurtovitch, 1999: 11). Denis Pourawa’s later work, Entre voir: les mots des murs (2006) [Seeing through the Writings/The Hurts on the Walls], with its Xaraçûû–French bilingualism, is another kind of invitation into history again. This text is a celebration of a historical figure, Éloi Machoro, the Che Guevara-like Kanak hero of the ‘Events’ killed by the French special forces. Through the photographs by Tokiko (the pseudonym of the editor of the Grain de Sable press, Laurence Vieillard) of the shells of abandoned houses and the graffiti that cover them, including the markings that inscribe the name of the ‘martyred’ Éloi Machoro, Pourawa evokes the new Kanak heroes of the civil disobedience of the quasi civil war. This original form of testimonial seeks, as the double entendre of its title suggests, to reveal what is only partially visible, glimpsed behind scorched and burnt-out walls [‘les maux / mots’ [the hurts / the words on the walls] and the collective memory etched into them. Dominique Jouve notes the ‘un-readability’ of the un-translated passages in Xaraçûû language that make no concession to the reader, and the sense of the ancestral, the mysterious, or of irreducible otherness this text imparts. Word(s), seen as surrogates for rituals or chants, command respect and evoke emotion and, Jouve adds, insist on a present that is only fully present when it embraces the past (Jouve, 2006). The graffiti that figures alongside

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 171

12/03/2014 14:39:59

172

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Pourawa’s sparse text, is, of course, itself a hybrid style, the mode of expression of those who do not always have access to mainstream official communication. Pourawa’s contemporary rewriting of a founding myth infused with the sacred alongside a second text on the re-enactments by popular writings on the walls of history is not dissimilar to Déwé Gorodé’s hybrid mixing of styles as in the evocation of names and the ‘text message’ style love messages carved into the aloes or giant cactus leaves by young people in her novel L’Épave. Pourawa’s work also shares some common characteristics with, yet is quite different again from, the work of his contemporary, the charismatic and media-savvy young Kanak teacher and rap artist Paul Wamo. Wamo’s references are to European fairy tale, classical myth, and global youth culture as much as they are to Kanak tradition. In the poem ‘Traditional Amnesia’, rapping a history that is loss, this young poet’s soul claims to be wandering, lost, ‘through history’s abyss’. Speaking for his generation, Wamo laments losing touch with the traditional roots that would provide him with an identity. Traditional Amnesia A cry of rage Rips at my roots Encasing emptiness Hollow shell My soul wanders lost Through history’s abyss Memories crack In my skull full of crack Where I’m from Who I am, Sole master of my fate Lone rider at tomorrow’s gate … (Wamo, 2006: 38–9)

Where Pourawa claims to be rooted in the tribe and in tradition, Wamo can only be a citizen of a hybrid global world in the present, subject to inner division and a forgetting. Culture: Sleeping Beauty You left me a legacy Masses of treasure from our ancient history But I Flirted with the pirates of Chronos Phantom tomb raiders of my Paradise Lost

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 172

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Internal Kanak Hybridities

173

Culture Your child raises a voice from a desperado soul torn by choice Facing tomorrow armed only with my rhymes In this immanent present I shall defy time. 2

In ‘Amnésie Traditionnelle’ [Tradition(al) Amnesia], written in alexandrine rhymes, the poet is again excluded from so-called traditional society as a result of his positioning as critic and conscience of the modern mixed society around him: Lost in a jungle of urbanization Rocked by the lullaby songs of television Even inside my own clan I talk different, walk different. Endlessly torn apart from within Kicked in the guts from without…

Tjibaou, Gorodé, Pourawa/Wamo: Three Different Kanak Hybridities Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s syncretic re-invention of the powerful ancestor Kanaké, with its metaphor of boenando, the capacity to accept and integrate the Other, is also a claim to cultural sovereignty as a strategic vehicle to accelerate the process of decolonization through dialogue. Tjibaou’s texts speak of a faith in reconciliation, the efficacy of a third and pluralistic way, a future shared society moving from a bicephalic to a more fraternal and mixed but equal nation eschewing the worst elements of violence. This would be a society where the Kanak would recover their rightful place as descendants of Kanaké, the ancestor and the First Man. From the 1983 political Round Table at Nainville-les-Roches, Tjibaou had helped produce the political theory of double legitimacy (‘one people, two flags’), and of the two major groups as collective victims of history. In 1984, when he assisted in the creation of the FLNKS, his biographers note the appearance in the charter of the terms that characterized the founding values of the French Republic: self-determination and ‘inalienable rights’, including liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Charter thus grafted the recovery and valuing of the ‘Melanesian Way’, the land as an ‘archive’, and Kanak values reconstructed as custom and consensus, onto Republican or European notions of rights. Like the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 173

12/03/2014 14:39:59

174

The Literatures of the French Pacific

‘Pacific Way’, the ‘Melanesian Way’ is a reinvention of custom but one that carries within it a deep sense of an original difference. Gorodé’s Kënâké is also, like Tjibaou’s or Denis Pourawa’s version, the production of a cultural universe where being can also be communal; ‘being with the Others’, with the ancestors, with the First Men, the ancestors, close to the blood of the maternal relatives, of the earth, that gives life in an evolutionary magico-material process. Custom requires Woman to bury both of her brothers. However, Gorodé’s play is also constructed around a reading and a critique of Tjibaou as a deliberate and willing martyr (a First Man) for the foundational cause of political advancement through reconciliation. Her recreation of the First Man contests women’s passive roles and lack of voice, and the phallocratic character of Kënâké’s political power, by placing women’s lives at the centre, by trusting to memory and to (hi)stories rather than to History. Denis Pourawa draws the pre-modern, the traditional, and the modern urban scene together in a poetic celebration of Kanak heroes. Paul Wamo’s rap poems, many written in alexandrines (the classic twelvesyllable line of French verse), less rooted in Kanak mythology, add a new, young, urbanized, and nostalgic voice that laments its own lack of connection with a First Man in a history that could own him, and that he could own.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 174

12/03/2014 14:39:59

5

The Paradoxical Pathways of the First Kanak Woman Writer Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity REPLACE THIS

The two previous chapters have tracked the differences in the shared rewriting of history and of the importance of home in contemporary New Caledonian literatures, in settler literatures (to be considered more fully in later chapters), but most particularly in the three major Kanak versions of the story of the first ancestor, Kanaké/Kënâké. Very different perspectives – political, feminist, and mythico-poetical – are at work within the third spaces constructed by these Kanak rewritings of origin. Each writer, I argued, attempts to connect to a lost or buried Kanak cultural core through his/her exploration and reconstruction of history in necessary interaction with the other (European) language or voice. Yet, each writer approaches this core and this history from a different position. Gender and generation shape the third spaces created, and the particular nature of the connections with French language and culture. The present chapter looks in greater depth at the nature of the internal splitting in the third spaces within the work of one of these indigenous writers, Déwé Gorodé. It traces her life and her coming to writing, initially in her own words. Condemning the exile and marginalization of her people that resulted from colonization, her texts look back in pain, anger, and with fierce commitment to remembering what is lost. Yet they also increasingly position themselves critically in relation to her own Kanak group and, as layers of the past resurface and circulate in the present, denounce a probable, shadowy, and age-old oppression of women within tradition that is still occurring. In the mixed and contradictory realities evoked by her work, the hidden and unsaid, the barely

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 175

12/03/2014 14:39:59

176

The Literatures of the French Pacific

visible, the patterning of voices is perhaps as meaningful as what is said. However, the critical gaze remains that of an insider, and does not prevent Gorodé’s writing from being the evocation of a full and intense life within the Kanak community and world view where she centres her work. Nor from being ‘unfinished business’ – on-going discoveries through writing including those of the possibilities and challenges of the proposed ‘common destiny’. Indeed, in a further avatar of hybridity, Gorodé’s distinctive and strikingly different ‘spaces between’ are marked by a series of apparent contradictions. During an interview with me in December 2002 in Noumea, in the smallish government office of the then Minister for Youth and Culture, Déwé Gorodé disclaimed any personal authority and noted that she was merely the spokesperson for her group, elected and not appointed to a position of power (as the then Vice-President of the Collegial Government) to serve her party, the PALIKA. Despite her position of power and her activism, she did not disown the discreet, self-effacing attitude of service required of women in her community. Again in 2013, when I approached her with the project of an intergenerational biography of her family based on the texts of her two grandfathers, pastors who studied oral tradition with Maurice Leenhardt, of her father, Waia, who also worked with the ethnographer, and on her own writing, Déwé initially responded that her texts are not about herself but about others, about the group. In an extensive early interview in 1998 with Blandine Stefanson for a special volume of the journal Notre Librairie, the first published journal of essays and literary extracts devoted to a presentation of New Caledonian literature, the writer claimed she still had many stories lying unread and hidden away in a cardboard box: she herself had never initiated any move to be published, either as a spokesperson for her group or as an individual player on a public stage, and she remained somewhat reticent in relation to this undertaking. Her first collection, Sous les cendres des conques [Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells], poems written from the early 1970s onwards and published in 1985 by Édipop, was the outcome of a personal request made by Ismet Kurtovitch, the then Director of Collège de Do-Néva where Déwé was teaching Paicî and French. It took our own initiative in proposing to transcribe (from handwritten script in a notebook) and translate her first Kanak novel to push it towards publication in French in 2005 as L’Épave, and much later in English translation as The Wreck. Some reaction to the novel was covertly hostile and Déwé’s two subsequent publications made efforts to attenuate the internal criticism

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 176

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

177

and compensate for the telling of secrets that had created a position of insecurity for her within her own group. A portrait of a supportive and wise father, during Tâdo Tâdo’s happy childhood, growing up between the tribu and the station in the mountain chain (La Chaîne) where her father worked as a métayer, managing the property for a largely absent settler owner in Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, replaced the negative figure(s) of masculine power in L’Épave – the shape-shifting Ogre devouring his own children and the two-faced Orator-seducer of young girls. Early in the new millennium, in a documentary made on Kanak women for local New Caledonian television, Gorodé spoke in protest against women’s secondary place in their own society. In this public programme she again played down her individual role ‘as custom requires’. Paradoxically, the characters she invents in her short stories, and in her 1994 novella, Utê Mûrûnû: petite fleur de cocotier in particular, are called upon to be Kaavo, ‘our legendary kanak princess’ (21), women who refuse polygamous or arranged marriage and follow their own steep and difficult pathways, alone and off the beaten customary tracks. Like W in her play Kënâké (2000), Kaavo in oral tradition, or Gorodé herself, these are rebellious or resistant women who refuse compromise. Yet, like Gorodé, no Utê Mûrûnû and no counterpart of the legendary Kaavo sees herself as a completely autonomous subject, insists on her own absolute agency, or feels entitled to speak out in a personal voice other than to a small number of persons close to her. The subtitle of Utê Mûrûnû, ‘Little Coconut Flower’, is a gloss on the title’s meaning, symbolizing the positive unassuming service-to-others modesty and self-effacement characteristics of young Kanak women. Nonetheless, it is evident that Déwé Gorodé is not simply reiterating the enthusiasm of a male European such as Georg Forster for the docile, subservient Melanesian women: Kaavo as an Antigone, a resistant woman, is her primary model. Gorodé claims (1998: 83) to be tracing the story of her country politically and ‘from a Kanak point of view’ in the light of historical change. However, in Utê Mûrûnû, European history is presented as shadowy, masculine, and death-bearing, and grand male History is pushed into the distant background when it has no relevance to what her work presents as real. This is the immediate reality of the quotidian or small everyday events of women’s lives, of women’s practical ‘savoir faire’. Echoes of the 1878 and 1917 Kanak revolts and their repression by the colonial administration are filtered through the daily effects these insurrections have on women, notably on the great grandmother, Utê

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 177

12/03/2014 14:39:59

178

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Mûrûnû, in her Paicî-speaking valley where she becomes the war booty of the tribes who fought for the French. This first Kanak novella thus ‘writes back’ to the historical authority of grand narratives of colonization, wars, and politics by foregrounding the lives of five generations of women, all named Utê Mûrûnû, and whose stories overlap. Not unlike the prophetess Idara, or other far-seeing heroines of Louise Michel’s tales, these female protagonists who live close to the earth, transmit wisdom, life force, solidarity, and even heroism in their indirect resistance to colonial oppression, but also to patriarchal pressure from within their own traditional society. In Utê Mûrûnû the protagonists resist arranged marriages by running away or living alone for a period outside the clan. Knowledge of growing and healing with plants, of story and tradition passed from generation to generation, comes within their purview. Some commune with the duées or spirits, or possess powers of magic. In Kanak tradition, every fourth generation takes the name (homonym) and place (toponym) of the great great grandparent as their ‘little sister’ or ‘little brother’ – perhaps the Kanak way, Gorodé has observed, of denying time. All of the five generations of Utê Mûrûnû, at once grandmother and granddaughter, are intimately connected to the point of being almost interchangeable – as the final line of the novella makes explicit, ‘Utê Mûrûnû, but which one of us?’ (1994: 37). Difference in Gorodé’s writing is often elaborated in relation to the Word, a powerful, still deeply operative but largely male-centred concept in the Kanak world. The poems of a Kanak woman ‘snatched from ancestral taboos’ (‘raflée aux tabous ancestraux’) in Sous les cendres des conques (1985: 36) seek to break down female enclosure in ‘deadly silence’ (‘silence de morte’ (81)), ‘violently [to] unpick the stitches / of tight lips’ (‘en découdre avec les points de suture / des bouches cousues’ (110)). Speaking to Blandine Stefanson in her major published interview, predominantly in order to celebrate a sharing Kanak society and its survival, Gorodé also refers indirectly but not necessarily critically to the exclusions operated by her society. The writer points out that in Kanak culture what can be said is carefully prescribed by custom, ‘You can’t just say anything to everyone’ (Gorodé, 1998: 11). In this particular analysis, in a society where the Word remains too powerful to be accessible to all, the pilou or collective dance functions as a kind of compensation. The others don’t necessarily share verbally but they are accepted in the group as everyone is. Every person must do something of use to the group and you don’t have the time to worry about individual problems.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 178

12/03/2014 14:39:59

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

179

With the new generations, there are perhaps some women who are more preoccupied by their individual lives, but the young people are there, taking part in customary life, sharing in communal work. (Gorodé, 1998: 11)

Kanak society privileges the community over the individual. This does not necessarily mean, as Leenhardt believed, that the individual does not exist but is instead merged in a fusion with the group, or that evangelization brought indigenous people to self-awareness and the capacity for individual choice. However, this is a second paradox: Déwé Gorodé, as an individual, speaker and writer, and Kanak woman, walks a tightrope between her place in the clan and a personal writing/publishing praxis that deconstructs not only French discourse but also what lies behind the traditional Word. Her literary texts denounce colonial injustice and attempt to reconstruct the lost and treasured memory of the group. Writing as an individual, however, especially writing critically, politically, or publically, also places this Kanak woman outside her prescribed gender role and traditional community. Customarily, Kanak stories belong to the group. The Word calls things into being, and speaking directly in a small island community can be dangerous; silence is a protection and can indeed institute a communion with the natural world, allowing the voices of the earth to speak to women. However, as in the Western tradition, Gorodé’s writing will also stage the value of speaking out about violence and suffering as an exorcism. Her Father’s Daughter? Waia Gorodé’s Mon école du silence [My School of Silence] Philippe Gorodé, Déwé’s paternal grandfather, and her maternal grandfather Eleisha Nâbai were both orators and pastors who worked with Leenhardt recovering indigenous texts. Furthermore, a number of texts written by Déwé’s father Waia Gorodé (1913–81), who was also trained at Do-Néva, are presently being edited for publication under the title Mon école du silence by Bernard Gasser in collaboration with Déwé and other Kanak informants. This major incipient publication places Déwé’s work in a possible new light: as part of the creation of a Protestant East Coast, Paicî-language family tradition. As such, Déwé’s writing, and the power it brings, could be argued to derive at least partly from ‘paternal legitimization’. There may be a parallel to be drawn here with the contributions to Leenhardt’s Documents néo-calédoniens

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 179

12/03/2014 14:39:59

180

The Literatures of the French Pacific

strikingly made by a woman, Sisille Varho, whose situation remains to be researched. It was most probably as the wife of one of the Do-Néva pastors that Sisille’s stories gained legitimacy. On the other hand, Déwé’s writing also derives from a partial refusal of the significant authority of her father, the eldest child of the elder branch of the family. Waia Gorodé married the daughter of Eleisha Nâbai, Laura, in a customary marriage arranged by the Paicî-speaking grand chief and the Ajië-speaking pastor, in 1934. Waia and Laura had eleven children, including Déwé. Dominique Jouve shows that Waia’s wide-ranging writings, including a glowing homage to Leenhardt as great friend and protector of Kanak, a thirty-page text on Kanak cosmogony, and the autobiographical account, Mon école du silence, confided already to Roselène Dousset-Leenhardt in 1974, reveal not only a knowledge of French and a number of Kanak languages (Paicî, A’jië, and some Drehu) but also a deep familiarity with biblical texts, and some surprising acquaintance with classical French texts. Jouve’s study presents the Kanak’s multilingual and very mixed personal writings, written for a French ethno-botanist as a gesture of propitiation, and perhaps also for his recently deceased wife, Laura, as a gesture of memory and of homage, as a case study of indigenous negotiation of the fracture introduced by colonialism, evangelization, and writing. The text showcases the dynamic processes and re-appropriation that occur in the interstices between the two worlds (Jouve, 2010). For Jouve, Waia Gorodé’s texts demonstrate that, on the one hand, the paths of conversion in Houailou were in fact those of the traditional alliance, revived and reinforced by the new religion, and on the other, that writing is now more than a service to the collective: it is also a means of expressing an individual self in its singular emotions and thoughts. Thinking from the Kanak side of what is happening in the subtle new spaces opening up between the two universes in a period of conflict and of transition, the particular interest of Waia’s text lies also in the personal detail of the everyday experience of contact. Alongside the pain of the humiliations and aggressions of the colonial era, the internalizing of guilt for savagery and cannibalism, and the awareness of the de-structuring of his society by the expropriation of land as by the liberated convicts who ‘take our girls for nothing’ (that is, who do not offer the customary exchange gifts for brides), Waia Gorodé’s text speaks of a materially frugal life – little to eat at the mission school at Do-Néva, and no sheets for the bed. His text speaks of values, of hospitality, and of being cheerful, for example, but also of his refusals. Waia rejects

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 180

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

181

the exclusion of the ancestors from Christian redemption, and the Puritanism of the pastors, recalling ‘our first parents, tall and handsome in their savagery like their gods of nature. They were not ashamed of their naked bodies. Their genital organs are just like any other organs’ [nos premiers parents grands et beaux dans leur sauvagerie comme leurs dieux de la nature. Ils avaient point de la honte de leurs corps nus. Les organes génitaux sont comme les autres organes] (117). Speaking of the encounters between young people in the bush or on the beach at night, hidden from the missionaries and the elders, or evoking the letters where young girls wrote very frankly of their desire, or of his own preference for non-virgins, who, he claims, are less fixated on preserving their ‘prize organ’, Waia makes a surprisingly strong case for a full life of the (sexual) body as well as of the spirit. This concern will, in part, be followed up in his daughter’s writing. The first names entwined as anagrams engraved on the cellar walls under the mission school that Waia’s text describes find echoes in Déwé’s L’Épave, in the words of young love carved into a cactus in SMS form. In a form of possible continuity, in Denis Pourawa’s Entre voir: les mots des murs (2006), the ‘graffiti’ inscribed on the burned-out walls of the buildings abandoned during the Événements of the mid-1980s bear similar inscriptions alongside militant slogans and portraits of Éloi Machoro. In a case study of the role of writing in post-contact cultural syncretism, Beatrice Sudul (2010) analyses the reasons for an astonishing 50 per cent literacy rate by 1850 within French Polynesia. Foregrounding the pioneering and deeply transforming role of the LMS missionaries as speakers/writers and teachers of the vernacular, and their major work in initiating Polynesians (who were, not incidentally, also seeking salted pig and arms) to reading and writing, Sudul argues that this early and rapid appropriation of Western technology, despite the absence of an adequate supply of paper and writing materials – early writing was most often done on banana leaves rolled up and tied with a piece of bark – largely worked for the recording and advancement of the local culture. New Zealand Maori, too, were quick to adopt writing, carrying messages inscribed on leaves or wood from one chief to another, along the Wanganui river, for example. In Tahiti, by 1863, when French missionaries took over from the LMS, claims Sudul, the tradition of pututupuna, ‘books of the ancestors’, with their mix of genealogies, mythical stories, and information on Pre-European Tahitian society, but also their extensive biblical commentary, represented a certain acculturation of the elite. Yet, like the putufenua or book of the land (ownership), the pututupuna,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 181

12/03/2014 14:40:00

182

The Literatures of the French Pacific

although considered to constitute a loss in relation to the richness of recited oral history, were also seen as authentic. Like the early French Polynesian books, Waia’s much later Melanesian writings in French, his magnifying remembering of former ceremonies, the rites of mourning, for example, similarly show a mix of acculturation and evaluation of, resistance to, and appropriation of this influence. This constitutes, for Jouve, a dynamic reformulation of tradition in a fallen present, but within the contexts of the future glory promised by the Christian religion. Jouve’s reading of Waia Gorodé finds no trace of dualism in a text that integrates the ‘de-territorialized’ Christian God and the gods of nature, the Kanak bao: less, she claims, into a hierarchy than simply into different spaces. However, Jouve presents Waia as also attempting to displace the Western opposition between the sacred and the profane: Waia’s old angel-gods of nature who are alive as visible or felt presence – ‘the summits of mountains give life to invisible creatures that people this land of Kaledonia like the holy angels people the Heaven’ (Jouve, 2010: unpag.) – are immanent rather than transcendental. For Jouve, Waia’s dynamic interaction with the Christian notions of transcendence, the preference given to immanence, produces something distinctively Kanak yet significantly ‘in-between’. In this way, she observes, his text can link the term ‘school’ of his title (‘école du silence’), a Western institution with (evangelical) light, and the name of a Paicî vine signifying traditional knowledge (112). All oral literature, Jouve reminds us, like social relations themselves, is structured by pathways: marriage paths; journeys of initiation, of conquest, or for populating lands; sometimes crossings of the lands of dead. Not unlike the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera’s Rope of Man, always spinning, actualizing, and bringing into relationship, Waia’s lyric written text is, for Jouve, similarly a journey and an exchange, a fil vibe – a weaving and knotting together of important names, toponyms, and patronyms, organized horizontally. Déwé Gorodé’s militant texts that critique the hold of the Church are very different from her father’s continuing apology for the sin of cannibalism, and yet Jouve’s analysis of the structure of Waia’s writing is curiously pertinent to the work of both father and daughter. Waia situates himself as an outsider in relation to academic French language as a ‘vieux tayo’ [old Oceanian], on what he describes as an irregular ‘zig-zag’ writing path. Déwé writes of ‘Living writing / In a foreign land / Outside myself / Or as an outsider / In this language that is not mine’ in her poem ‘Writing’ (‘Écrire’) (2004b: 94–5), and her work, too, takes

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 182

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

183

its own distinctive directions. Writing in French nonetheless serves in both cases to recall the effaced connections to the past by reactivating lost links with the spirits, named as both bao and apieru, affirming the visibility of the ‘angel-gods’ of nature and the invisible force between the living and the dead. Déwé shares Waia’s cry against the degradation of nature – the polluted waters of the land, where the dames u or female spirits no longer sing and laugh in the waterfalls. Remaining himself, for Waia, is to protect the sacred in nature: the ‘Land of my ancestors. I must study their past, their culture, their cult of the adoration of the sun, of the moon, of the mountains, of rocks, of trees, of plants, and of animals as well as of minerals, etc., etc.’(Jouve, 2010: 113). Jouve’s study concludes that Waia Gorodé was a free spirit, his own ‘master’, as he himself puts it. Déwé, too, is a remarkably free spirit. Déwé Gorodé: Telling her Life Story as the Birth of a Writer and of a Militant For Jouve, Waia Gorodé’s use of writing to interrogate contradictory and incoherent or apparently incompatible thoughts and emotions is what makes his work ‘literature’. The diversity of knots in his linkages, in the net he casts, she claims, are not an addition or a synthesis but rather a syncretism of the kind adopted by Jean-Marie Tjibaou for the Melanesia 2000 festival (Jouve, 2010: 106). Jouve is drawing on metaphors deriving from Michel Naepal’s work, quoted in Julia Ogier-Guindo’s doctoral thesis on the traditional discursive form of the vivaa in the A’jië language: ‘The ceremonial space is the space of the knotting together of the truth in respect of the local organization and the history of the clans that constitute this and the vivaa is a central instrument in this tying together’ [‘L’espace cérémoniel est le lieu du nouage de la vérité quand à l’organisation locale et l’histoire des clans qui la composent, et les vivaa sont un instrument central de ce nouage’] (2005: 120). Déwé Gorodé’s literary work, I argue, is similarly informed by this traditional structure of ‘knotting together’. However, for the European reader the sometimes disparate threads create something closer to a kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’, in a productive sense of this concept. In a public lecture entitled ‘Écrire en femme Kanake aujourd’hui en Kanaky-Nouvelle Calédonie’ [Writing as a Kanak Woman Today in Kanaky-New Caledonia] given in March 2005 at the University of Auckland to mark the launch of the bilingual anthology of her translated

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 183

12/03/2014 14:40:00

184

The Literatures of the French Pacific

poetry, Sharing as Custom Provides, Déwé Gorodé recounted episodes of her life using on this occasion a rather more traditional ­autobiographical form, but tracing the pathway of a Kanak woman coming to be an activist and a writer; the knots that form this particular itinerary. This is a history of acculturation, but more particularly of the seeds of resistance flaring into life, and of Kanak knowledge and experience called upon to create alternative views of history. The political activist had begun the telling of her life-story earlier in her long interview with Blandine Stefanson, and had continued this process in a fragmentary way in a number of personal discussions with me to facilitate the translation of her poetry and later of her novel. In the 2005 public presentation, the listener follows what is close to an oral tale of her life and work, told in Gorodé’s own voice: yet this sketches out scenes of a partially idealized childhood, where both parental storytelling and story books hold a central place. Before she went to school, an event of some importance in her life, her father had already taught her the alphabet. Apart from being punished for speaking her own language, Paicî, school is predominantly a happy memory, as indeed is childhood. We used to count using sticks, play marbles with bancoul nuts, we would hang our little baskets of food on the coffee bushes, we’d go swimming in the sea before we went back into class after lunch and we would also go and help work in the field that belonged to our old school teacher. So I learn to read and I start to devour all the texts in our reader, Tales and Legends of Black Africa. (Gorodé, 2005)

Accompanying a desire to pass on the lessons of her own experience of harmony with the natural world is Gorodé’s evident pleasure in the sound of words and her constant awareness of political message. The titles of the readers she has apparently retained from a childhood more than thirty years earlier – ‘Masikasika, The Little Duck’ and ‘Yawatta, The Indian in his Canoe’, her first school prize – derive from the traditions of other indigenous peoples. Gorodé evokes the daily morning ceremony of raising the French flag and filing into school to the call of ‘à vos rangs fixes’, the military formula for falling into line, that she notes with humour returns in the Astérix the Gaul comic book series as a garbled formula, ‘Avoranfix’. This selection of memories of the colonial character of the ceremonies of the past – the children’s performances for the governor, the raising of the French flag – relate also, of course, to the socio-political contexts of the moment of speaking of the struggle for independence. Déwé Gorodé’s

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 184

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

185

narrative of her growing up evokes the losses involved in evangelization and assimilation to French norms much more critically than Waia. It takes account of both the negative effects of m ­ arginalization, first in reserves (denounced as reservations), then in tribus or in Mission schools, and of the positive effects of a certain conservation of Kanak ways of living and thinking in this separation of the cultures. The place where her stories most often begin, and to which, for the most part, they return, are Gorodé’s own customary lands, the tribu beside the sea at Ponérihouen (Pwârâiriwâ) on the East Coast of the Grande-Terre, the Main Island. However, the reader is largely in a women’s world. ‘As soon as a popwaalé’– a white, or, as Gorodé glosses the word, ‘a person who speaks by giving orders’ – ‘turned up, most of the time a farmer or a gendarme – all the women would run away and hide in the coffee bushes and we kids would go running away behind them’ (2005: unpag.). The time of Gorodé’s stories, as of the account of her life, as we noted, is double: the time of Kanak memory (subjective, emotional, and faithful) and of the history of colonialism (objective, rational, exact). ‘And in front, in the court yard between the coconut palms, there would sometimes be long meetings, palabres between the various clan chiefs and tribal elders, mainly to settle land disputes. And a gendarme would always be there to draw up the record of discussions and decisions, the procès verbal de palabre’. Hers, then, will be the story of a doubly excluded group. Yet it celebrates the roles of these women excluded from the palabres but presented as the origin of the writer’s later passion for storytelling. In the evening, the women, the big sisters, mothers, aunties and grandmothers would sit around in the hut and would tell us tagadée – stories, fables or fairy tales – around the communal fire. Sometimes, we would fall asleep before the all important last line. may this tale move your insides may it send you to sleep may it wake you so that you will invent the next line Or they would send us to sleep with ololo – lullabies like (puuka) sleep now (bua e utige) because he’s going to eat you up (I kau) the cow. (Gorodé 2005: unpag.)

Here the cow – the settler’s cattle – is synonymous with the devil, the bogeyman, or the evil giant, reminding us that the devastation of Kanak gardens by the settlers’ cattle, in a subsistence economy, was a major cause of the 1878 revolt.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 185

12/03/2014 14:40:00

186

The Literatures of the French Pacific

However, Kanak themselves came to work on the stations as stockmen and today run their own cattle and mining operations, opening up new environmental and ownership questions. If Déwé Gorodé writes fictional stories, to ‘rehabilitate the place of the Kanak in their own history’, it is also, she claims in her life-story, because ‘the political discourse that I used myself, colonizers/colonized, does not account for the perversity and ambiguity of the real relationship between the colonizers and the colonized in the past and in the present’ (2005: unpag.). When her mother took her to Noumea for the first time at the age of eight, Déwé asked her about the identity of the statue of Colonel Gally Passebosc, who was killed putting down the 1878 Kanak revolt. Her mother, the daughter remembers, simply told her that it was a monument to Ataï, the Kanak chief who had led the revolt. Here Gorodé may also be indirectly alluding to the principles behind her writing, the kind of subversive imitation, mimicry, and adaptation that allows for her own reworking and overturning of the colonial relations of power. Perversity here is somewhat analogous to the concept of ‘sly civility’ elaborated in Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture, the re-appropriation and re-definition of the dominant culture within the terms of the subaltern culture. Similarly, her passionate but critical images of Kanak culture deconstruct representations of the more recent forms of the ‘noble savage’ as deeply spiritual, non-violent, and unified: a sanitized image of contemporary Kanak. Indubitably the daughter of her resistant mother, able to reveal and contest the falseness of certain apparent truths by indirect subversion, Déwé’s public models and mentors were nonetheless necessarily male. They included her grandfathers, Philippe Gorodé or Eleisha Nâbai, or her father, Waia, since only men could be orators delegated by the group, with full authority to speak. The knowledge embedded in their stories has the status of a parallel and competing non-European history, geography, and science. My father, Waia Gorodé, like his father before him, whose name was Philippe, and his father in law, Elaisha Nâbai, all pastors trained by the missionary ethnologist Maurice Leenhardt, together with the ethnologist Jean Guiart, was at that time busy collecting the old stories from our oral tradition and the jemaa or foundational stories, generally translated as myths – a term I categorically refute because what we are talking about is the history of our ancestors. And if they were mythical we wouldn’t be here! … The most illustrious characters of our jemaa … are represented or situated in different geographical locations by rocks and mountains.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 186

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

187

[…] Some ten years ago, during a panel discussion at the Literary Expo organized by the Ministry for Overseas Territories in Paris, I had this to say: ‘When you popwaalé talk about the castle of Sleeping Beauty, one can truly say it’s mythical because no matter how hard you look, you’ll never find it. Whereas in our case, every day we can see the places mentioned in our tales and founding stories. (Gorodé, 2005: unpag.)

Elaisha Nâbai re-told the story of Kënâké, the founding ancestor of the group whom Tjibaou’s play, as we have seen, placed at the centre of an emergent Kanak nationalism. Tjibaou’s texts of unity and reconciliation are, as the previous chapter showed, put into question by Gorodé’s own play’s deconstruction of Kanaké as a virile founding father in a heroic masculine world where women remain hidden, watching from behind the coffee bushes. Nonetheless, Gorodé’s accounts of her life reaffirm the importance of the Word in Kanak tradition: Another story our father used to tell us was a very long speech about the speaking perch or ‘wood’ – spoken to a pilou or war dance rhythm – a speech he got from his father-in-law Elaisha Nabai who was a great traditional orator: I climb up on the wood (of the tree) and the supporting branch so that I can tell the word of my fathers the Bweé and the grandsons of Béalo who kill and throw in the oven the people in the house of the Bai Meedu I have recited the beginning of this speech (‘written’ by my maternal grand-father) so many times that once, I had to be woken up because I had been speaking it in a dream-state like a sleep walker. Our father also used to teach us other shorter texts – called pwarapwa – which were more poetic and could be linked to specific historical events … The notou, a symbolic bird, here represents a clan chief who was a soldier during the two world wars. Noutou, cooing wood-pigeon notoujéé notounatanurumoto where are you calling? I’m calling to over there In the direction of the German war. (Gorodé, 2005: unpag.)

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 187

12/03/2014 14:40:00

188

The Literatures of the French Pacific

In school, where only French was allowed to be spoken, stories of Tom Thumb, Red Riding Hood, Gavroche (the little hero of Victor Hugo on the barricades in Les Misérables), Old Testament tales, as well as legends from Black Africa further awakened the child’s imagination. Later Gorodé attended the school where her older sister taught in an A’jië-speaking area and learnt the A’jië language. At the age of thirteen, accompanied by her pastor grandfather Philippe Gorodé and her mother, Déwé left her village for the Jeanne d’Albret boarding establishment for young Protestant girls in Noumea and attended the Lycée La Pérouse. Déwé’s first French teacher wanted her rare and gifted Kanak pupil to take Latin and Greek to enable her to enter the prestigious classical stream. The adolescent preferred to stay in the general education stream with the other small group of Kanak. Then, refusing the advice of the careers advisor to settle for a safe career as a primary teacher, seen as the most suitable for her, she decided to go on to the University of Montpellier in France along with the handful of other Kanak holders of the Baccalauréat to become a secondary school teacher of French. Before her departure from Noumea for France on 2 September 1969, her cousin Elaisha Nabai invited her to a political meeting of young people with the son of the grand chef Naisseline from the Loyalty island of Maré, Nidoish Naisseline, who at the time was a sociology student at the Sorbonne. Discovering she was the only woman present, Déwé was on the point of leaving, as custom prescribed, when she was offered a chair by an old man from Maré. She stayed on for the meeting, which was followed by the arrest of Nidoish and subsequent riots, and became a convert to the independence cause. France proved to be a mixed experience of exile and liberation, a catalyst for both her writing and her activism. The young Kanak woman experienced post-1968 euphoria and social restructuring, including African national liberation actions, the anti-Vietnam War movement and protests in favour of women and minorities. She joined the newly formed Association of Kanak Students and young men doing their military service to debate the Kanak political situation. Marxist dialectics, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao Zedong and Che Guevara became familiar names, she claims, and the young student read the writers of the Négritude movement, Senghor, Damas, and Césaire, alongside the French symbolist poets, and Musset and Gênet. To complete her BA, the budding activist, now anxious to return to support the growing independence movement, had to pass traditional French academic subjects such as Latin, medieval French, grammar,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 188

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

189

linguistics, and two modern foreign languages – her choices, characteristically different from the mainstream, were Arabic and Romanian. It was against this background that Déwé wrote her own first poems. Adieu 1970 wild grass has taken over the ceremonial pathway beneath the coconut palms Straw and vines of the roof are rotting mud walls cracked and crumbling Grande case in ruins Close call, almost too late you are returning from afar long journey hundred plus years package tour into the labyrinthine wandering of a youth in tatters eyelids blinking at the sight of what has come and gone Eyes opening to see what was what is what will be It’s time to return start over Montpellier, September 1970 (Gorodé, 2004b: 2)

Back in New Caledonia, in 1973, Gorodé worked with the Foulards rouges, the Red Scarves group of Nidoish Naisseline, then with Le Groupe 1878 (in memory of Ataï’s revolt against colonization). She also cooperated with other young activists from the main island who formed the PALIKA in 1976. A number of the early poems of the independence activist were written from prison where she spent time twice: in 1974 after a protest against the celebrations of 24 September (the date of French annexation), and again in 1977. Inspired by a Marxist reading of history and by anti-colonial writers, Déwé Gorodé’s writing continued through the years she spent as full-time teacher and the subsequent decade engaged in full-time activism. The poems of this period, published in Sous les cendres des conques, denounce the pillaging and polluting of the land by ‘Madame Multinationale’ and by the contagion of white thinking and politics. At this early point of militant left-wing commitment, it seems

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 189

12/03/2014 14:40:00

190

The Literatures of the French Pacific

that the multinational can be gendered feminine in a scenario where the conch-shell that represents customary solidarity, assembly, and resistance to assimilation has been reduced to ashes. The collection of aphorisms in Par les temps qui courent [Signs of the Times], published in 1996, is a pithy, acerbic critique of the infiltration of custom by the profit motives and self-interest of modernity and the imperatives of capitalism. These poems, from the late 1960s and 70s on, like the short stories written at various moments during this period and collected in 1996 in L’Agenda, do not hesitate to adopt a politics of confrontation. Gorodé’s work already contains a number of poems that denounce Kanak women’s oppression. In 1975, Gorodé took part in the first conference for a nuclearfree Pacific at the University of the South Pacific in Suva (Fiji), then found herself in a delegation to the United Nations Committee for Decolonization and at the first World Conference of Women organized by the United Nations in Mexico. The militancy of her political activism is reflected in the language of her poem ‘Word of Struggle’, written from prison in 1974: the ‘linked syllables to cry out / the misery of our peoples / Chains of phrases / formed out of their long combat’ (2004b: 6). Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells also contains an early poem on solidarity against nuclear testing and political exploitation in the Pacific, written in Suva in April 1975: NFPC Faces unknown yesterday Comrades from all over Oceania and elsewhere to speak of the suffering of our people under the bomb multinationals spoliation racism to share the poverty of our peoples smiling and dancing on postcards only Aboriginal Land Maori Land Kanakland ‘the same enemy, the same struggle’ with all those who are oppressed linguistic barriers fall with the NFPC (Gorodé, 1985: 121)

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 190

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

191

In 1979, Gorodé decided to go back to her tribu and set up local sections of the PALIKA. The Independence Party became the FLNKS in 1984 and organized the boycott of the elections of 18 November 1984 which initiated the period of the ‘Events’ that lasted until the Matignon Agreement, signed in 1988. Gorodé took part in meetings of independence leaders in Paris, Algiers, in Canada and at the United Nations. It was, she claimed, the Melanesian countries of the Fer de Lance (the Spearhead Group) which supported the FLNKS at the Pacific Forum, and again Papua New Guinea and the newly independent Vanuatu of Father Walter Lini which supported the political movement at the United Nations. From 1985 to 1987, under the jurisdiction of the local branch of the FLNKS, the teacher returned to her tribu and set up an École Populaire Kanak or People’s School, where, she observes, ‘we learned our language again and where the elders handed on their knowledge to us’ (2005: unpag.). After the Matignon Agreement, Gorodé returned to the teaching of French and then her own language, Paicî, at the Collège de Do-Néva. She then became active in politics as an elected representative of the PALIKA (based in the new Kanak-controlled Province Nord), and was re-elected in 2001 and June 2004 as the Vice-President of the New Caledonian collegial Government, having successive responsibility for culture, women’s affairs, citizenship, and customary affairs (her first appointment was in 1999 when she was put in charge of culture, youth, and sport). It has been suggested by some that her political role in Noumea was calculated to keep her away from the centre of PALIKA politics. Gorodé made relatively little secret in our discussions of her abhorrence for the machinations, hypocrisy, and self-interest of the male-dominated political world, about which she remains at once determinedly optimistic and deeply suspicious. In 2006, the Manifesto for the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the founding of the PALIKA reinscribed the party’s work as a revolutionary political struggle for emancipation and social transformation by the people. It denounced the exploitation of man by man within the historical references of the 1984 boycott of elections, the provisional government of Kanaky in 1985, the assassinations (martyrdoms) of Éloi Machoro and Marcel Nonarro in the same year, the massacre of the Gossanah cave in 1988, and the liberation by the Noumea court of the assassins of Tiendanite (the assassins of Tjibaou’s ‘brothers’) (2006). If Gorodé has put some emphasis on ‘routes’ within a traditional Marxist-Socialist frame – her links to the outside – her work focuses on the need to recover one’s

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 191

12/03/2014 14:40:00

192

The Literatures of the French Pacific

own (hi)story and one’s local ‘roots’ in a world increasingly fragmented by globalization. She has continued to hold several portfolios into the present, including those of Minister for Culture and Solidarity. In her 2005 self-presentation at the University of Auckland, Gorodé also introduced her literary writing, principally through her own reading of its reception, that is, tellingly, through selections from other scholars’ interpretations of her work. She chose, for example, to paraphrase Tea Auru Mwateapoo’s preface to Sous les cendres des conques: ‘these poems are the attempt to interpret the emerging new culture of a people struggling to be subject of their own history’ but also to quote the conclusions of Laurence Viellard, the editor of the 1994 and 1996 collections of stories, Utê Mûrûnû and L’Agenda, that it is ‘through the characters of her stories that Gorodé transmits the perceptiveness of her reflections on women’s condition […] These stories inscribe the indissoluble link between the past and the present and the need to think a fraternal future offering readers the elements to understand the foundations of present Caledonian society through the sensibility of a woman’ (back cover of L’Agenda). What is selected from the volume of the journal Notre Librairie (1998) devoted to New Caledonian literature, is Marie-Ange Somdah’s statement in ‘Déwé Gorodé ou la recherche de la parole Kanak’ [Déwé Gorodé or the Search for Kanak Word] that although Kanak memory is essential and non-negotiable it is also the site of a social critique (Somdah, 1998). Gorodé, says Somdah, is herself a Kaapo – she who must break the rules or the imposed silences precisely to reveal what is unspeakable, what cannot be said. In her life-story telling, Gorodé becomes an indirect commentator on her own work, revealing the frames in which she would like it to be read, reiterating its woman-centred character, while also focusing on its literary character and on style, a form that is itself content. The answer to our own question, is Gorodé ‘her father’s daughter?’ must, of course, be both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. If Déwé’s work, like her father’s, is firmly centred in a Kanak world, this is a very different world, shaped by her different generation, gender, political positioning, and degree of appropriation of French culture. Gorodé’s parti pris of writing to denounce/improve women’s condition is also an indirect ‘writing back’ to aspects of the father’s power in his relationships with women.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 192

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

193

Déwé Gorodé’s Literary Texts: Writing the Kanak World through Women’s Lives Like the critical commentaries, the texts themselves highlight the multiple and apparently contradictory perspectives in Gorodé’s work: modernity and tradition, women’s liberation and custom, political claims and modes of fullness of being, silence and speech, for example, are all in play in Utê Mûrûnû. In its mises en abyme [interior duplications], its anticipation, and its repetitions, the novella appears to echo itself, to weave past and future one into the Other, in sometimes traditional, sometimes transgressive modes of writing. Yet postmodern play with the French language most often has critical postcolonial purposes: mixed genre and language forms reflect a different, Kanak, vision of a spiralling space-time and of communal identity. A series of verbs of dislocation and destruction – ‘mutilated’, ‘scattered’, and ‘in pieces’ – woven through Gorodé’s early poems speak of the material and cultural destruction wrought on the land and the indigenous people by 100 years of French dominance. Metaphors of bodily harm or physical destruction evoke the scars left on the land by nickel mining and the reification of New Caledonian society, first by capitalism and then by its later manifestations in capitalism’s postulated third stage, globalization. It is these very memories of damage and loss that will provide the ‘glue’ that, through persistence, will recreate the Kanak Word and reinforce the political function of art. Interestingly, however, this struggle is always, already, also against ‘betrayal’ from within. Day after Day We will try to glue back together the broken pieces of our dashed hopes reform the slaughtered images of our strangled speech rediscover the unity of the scattered word thrown to the four winds of solitude by the gunpowder of violence the poison bottle the bread smelling of small change the customary gesture by the false brother betrayed day after day second after second like the river hollowing out its bed the ant counting her dead

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 193

12/03/2014 14:40:00

194

The Literatures of the French Pacific the foam marking the shore recreate the ritual phrase that unmasks treachery reinvent the magical dance that ensures victory [my emphasis] Perlou, February 1975 (Gorodé, 1994: 14)

The theme of the betrayal of ‘the customary gesture by the false brother’ is counterbalanced by the theme of roots reaching deep into the earth. This is a maternal earth, creating an emotional attachment between itself and the person sending down roots into the earth’s belly, and returning his/her umbilical cord to the earth. Roots Roots stretching out into the day by day into time passing into sun wind rain passing hollowing out earth under stone further deeper always ever further deeper to tie the knot umbilical cord returned to earth on earth’s very belly like the chrysalis casing of cicada returned to earth on earth’s very belly … (Gorodé, 1994: 52)

Titaua Porcher has noted the references in Déwé’s literary texts to the earth as a vast green uterus, and the calming and enveloping materiality of the nourishing womb (2010: 141–52). This primordial mother bears the physical characteristics of the female body, the milk-giving breast, the many tiny placentas (Gorodé, 1985: 56). In the poem ‘attendre’ [waiting] (43), adds Porcher, the child, too, is described as a product of gestation, a bud that opens, the stem that pushes upwards, the shoot that emerges from the soil in a circulation between the human and the natural world.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 194

12/03/2014 14:40:00

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

195

From the recovery of these feminized roots, a reaching out to the Other in hospitality that recalls the thinking of the philosopher Levinas is made possible, as in the poem, ‘Being with the Other’: ‘In the footsteps / of my mother / towards the land /… with the other / who is knocking at your door (Gorodé, 1994: 90–1). At the end of the poem, once the umbilical cord lands on the roots, it is able to be born to the world before taking flight bending into the wind in flight toward a river ford or toward waters flowing to the sea and beyond toward a country … some foreign quay … railway station … airport … airwaves … a way a road a path

toward the Other. Kanak identity, ‘being’, in the last instance, is universal, ‘aboro, the human being in all that he is’ (Gorodé, 1994: 72). Independence is thus unexpectedly figured not just as a political struggle by a sovereign or self-determining people but as a piece of land a woman works for her extended family: Independence is a bit of garden bit of field a patch of dirt patch of land land to work like the woman tending her children her taro her yam day in day out fishing night or day both lagoon fish

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 195

12/03/2014 14:40:00

196

The Literatures of the French Pacific mangrove crab whether to feed the extended family or for market day whether working at her own pace or at the set hour in her rights and responsibilities for the child to come or the child at school sharing as custom prescribes giving to others fighting her own desires in the face of silence of violence of inaction of apathy and state dependence in the face of the single way of thinking doing speaking living in the everyday our aspirations of being together a free country a sovereign nation a people who share Sydney, 19 July 1997 (Gorodé, 1994: 68–9)

‘Independence’ was written during a shared tour of Australian universities in July 1997 when Déwé Gorodé and Nicolas Kurtovitch, a New Caledonian of European origin, each decided to write a daily poem on a selected theme. These eighteen poems were published in Dire le vrai and I translated them into English, with Brian McKay translating the Kurtovitch poems in the bilingual Dire le vrai/ To Tell the Truth (1998). This was the first major literary collaboration between the indigenous and Caledonian communities of New Caledonian writers. Gorodé herself had translated poems from the volume, Black Stone, by the ni-Vanuatu activist Grace Mera Molisa, from English into French, publishing these under the title of Pierre Noire. Not incidentally, Mera Molisa’s courageous poems denounced Vanuatu women’s position as colonized and physically abused peoples within their own post-independence

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 196

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

197

society, a critique of violence against women and children that is still very valid today. If Kanak community identity is initially constructed around the experience of oppression and of shared resistant values (the Word, the Land), a close reading of Gorodé’s work reveals that the perpetrators of violence have not always been from outside or ‘from elsewhere’. Explanations for violence are to be found, first and foremost, in the colonial/capitalist system and the exploitation of the land for profit, rather than in the settler community itself. As Stephanie Vigier points out, in Gorodé’s short story ‘The Kanak Apple Season’ (1994) it is the Kanak bride, who is from the ‘lands of red earth’ – that is, the areas of nickel mining – and who is perhaps ‘wounded’ ‘like the scraped away tops of the mountain’, who brings with her the jealousy, the boucan [the magic packet of spells] and the charlatan witch doctor accomplices that cause her sister-in-law to be falsely accused of sorcery and to waste away and die (Vigier, 2004: 59–80). Meanwhile, the apples from the Kanak apple tree that was planted to celebrate her customary marriage symbolically rot on the ground (72–83). But, perhaps, as Gorodé herself suggested in response to Vigier’s anti-colonial reading, the origin of this disaster is to be sought not only in the scraped red earth of the mining lands but also in the warlike and scornful reception by the future bride’s grandfather of his poorer kin decades earlier. Their leader, the narrator’s grandfather, had come to ask for the granddaughter’s hand in marriage for his grandson and had finally won acceptance through his arts of oratory. The meanings in Gorodé’s text are frequently left open: one truth may hide further layers of meaning again. Gorodé’s open text affirms the singularity of her Kanak identity and perspective, but also its universality. It dares to be a critical voice, ‘speaking truth’ in the face of ‘stitched-up mouths’ or abuses of power in a hybrid and rapidly transforming Kanak society, critiquing a custom seen as manipulated for personal power or gain. In particular, her work increases its focus on, and explicitly denounces, the negative consequences of violence against women and children: the incest, rape, or psychological violence (sorcery) that can result from abuse of privilege in a patriarchal society. Questions Fear at each bellowed liquor soaked taperas: [temperance hymns] anxious terror of beatings, blows sometimes fatal cooking pots thrown around under the coffee bushes […]

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 197

12/03/2014 14:40:01

198

The Literatures of the French Pacific tomorrow, again as if nothing were amiss at the meeting in front of everyone he will speak of oppression, of freedom whose freedom, whose oppression, who by who with who for ? so many questions our collective politics’ will have to answer to (Gorodé, 1994: 38)

Despite her own initial disavowal of the term, Gorodé’s work has become increasingly aligned with organized indigenous forms of feminism. In recent years, she has given speeches to Kanak women’s associations, reminding them of the earliest struggles by Western feminists to achieve votes and equality. Utê Mûrûnû responded to women’s oppression by recovering and foregrounding their stories/histories and the distinctive values of their lives, re-identifying women with the blood of the earth and the circulation of life, and fiercely denouncing their traditional lack of power within Kanak society: These voices of the earth, as my grandmother Utê Mûrûnû taught me, were none other than the voices of a mother, the voices of woman. And they spoke, especially, to us women, who, better than anyone, were able to understand them. Bearers of seed, we were bound and gagged by prohibitions, branded with taboos that were like rocks blocking the paths of life. From receptacles of pleasure, we became Eves bitten by the serpent invented by the priests of the new religion. Âdi, black pearls of customary marriage, we were exchanged like pieces of Lapita pottery to seal an alliance, in between two wars. Matrimonial pathways linking the clans, we survived as best we could a childhood and an entry into adolescence that was too often violated by the lecherous desires of old men. Prestige, virility, war – male concepts for the grande case of men, built on the broad backs of women! Sharing, solidarity, humility, the word of women, conceived, nourished, and carried in our entrails of beaten wives. (Gorodé, 1994: 2–21)

The Utê Mûrûnû who was taken as war booty in the reprisals against the groups which took part in the uprising of 1917 ultimately takes her revenge on her imposed husband and traitor to the Kanak cause, pushing him into ‘the shark hole’ one dark night as the couple are returning home by boat. The orator-rapist in L’Épave will also slip from the cliff to his death in ‘le trou aux requins’, the shark hole, a form of poetic justice as the male oppressor is drowned in the feminine element (the sea), and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 198

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

199

the devourer is himself devoured. The theme of women’s violent revenge recurs disconcertingly in a number of Gorodé’s other published stories. Perhaps the most strikingly different of these stories, ‘Case Closed’, in L’Agenda, opens with a farewell party for the sons of wealthy settlers on a grand colonial estate, on the eve of preparations for their departure to the First World War front. The young officer who falls in love under the banyan tree with a mysterious woman in white gloves, Marguerite, and bequeaths her his estate, will subsequently die from his burns at Verdun. Decades later, the young woman returns in the guise of Margaret, a doctor in the American Army, and a second enchantment results in the death at the Battle of Guadalcanal of her fiancé, the American army Captain and ethnographer who had been stationed with her in New Caledonia. The Captain had similarly bequeathed Margaret his wealth. The third metamorphosis, as a young Kanak woman, Maguy, during the virtual civil war of 1984–8, results in the death by burning of an enamoured Kanak soldier fighting with the French. On this occasion, Maguy tells the story of the origins of her metamorphoses, in one of Gorodé’s many stories within stories. During the 1878 Kanak insurrection, a French officer had obtained the guard of the young woman when certain members of her tribe joined the rebel chief Ataï. Initiated by her grandfather, an eel fisherman, into the secrets of nature and the land, the very young woman was taboo, the ‘priestess of fire’. However, under the lure of love, beneath the banyan tree, she succumbed to the French officer, who had promised her his wealth. The young priestess’s betrayal of her own role as guardian of nature subsequently produced ominous presages of natural disasters and death. Her lover then abandoned her to marry his French compatriot, named Marguerite. On the night of the couple’s celebration of their engagement, as the end of the 1878 revolt approached, the priestess set fire to the couple’s house. The officer and his fiancé Marguerite burned to death. The many reappearances of the priestess of fire taking the form of her rival, and her revenge across generations, reflect a singular perception of the fantastic: one that contrasts in its materiality with the echoes of the European fantastic evoked in the officer’s childhood memories of the banyan tree where he had imagined he was Aladdin on his magic carpet. Gorodé’s fantastic, like the themes of metamorphosis and revenge, remains at least partially unreadable or unreceivable for a European, according to Mounira Chatti (2004b). The European reader is nonetheless immersed in the Kanak imagination of the connections and the continuities between the phenomena of the cultural and the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 199

12/03/2014 14:40:01

200

The Literatures of the French Pacific

natural worlds, across generations, as across texts. In Chatti’s analysis, references to seeing (the figures, traced by the twisted roots of the banyan tree of the young girl in tears consoled by her grandfather), smelling (burned flesh), and hearing (sobbing) allow the story to slip between vision and apparition, the emotional and the rational. Marguerite, Margaret, Maguy, also nicknamed Burned Fingers, is most often figured by her face (white or black) and her white-gloved hands. Chatti cites the 2003 work of the Metropolitan French writer Francis Garnung, Contes et coutumes canaques au XIXème siècle [Canaque Stories and Customs in the Nineteenth Century] to show that the oral tradition of that period represented the dead appearing to the living at night, particularly as faces and limbs. Chatti concludes that the metamorphosis of humans from the dead to the living and the circulation between natural and human elements is presented as a lived and perceived reality in this Gorodé text. As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and its imitations and rewritings, metamorphosis can also be understood as a feature internal to the text, in relation to questions of continuity and change, and tensions between identity and difference. In Gorodé’s writing, the figure of metamorphosis replaces the notion of development. Indeed, the very notion of metamorphosis, Chatti contends, needs to be replaced by the Kanak idea of communication (between all beings, human and natural), and what the European reader will class as fantasy the Kanak will read as realism. Clear-cut categories of real and fictional, visible and invisible, no longer hold. In any event, the military officer sent to investigate the mysterious death of the Kanak soldier will find no rational frame of explanation for his death by fire, finally closing the insoluble case, the ‘Affaire classée’ [Case Closed] in defeat. Chatti argues that the textual construction of the secret taboo space of the banyan tree in ‘Case Closed’ represents a call for the restitution of all the taboo places of the land that have been violated: the penalty in Kanak tradition for incursion into these spaces is illness or death. The rational frame of the linear historical time of war gives way to the distinctively repeating and similar, overlapping, spiralling space-time of recurring and communicating events as described in Gabriel Poédi’s work on Kanak time (1989), and the time of magic and retribution. It is in the silences of dream, or in the voice of the wind, or a twig that falls at one’s feet, in the butterfly that alights on one’s hand, that we exist and learn, claims Gorodé, not merely through the male-transmitted Word. It is similarly in the restless heat of night that the Dooki or bad spirits make their presence felt. Commitment for Gorodé in this curious story of haunting and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 200

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

201

metamorphosis is rewriting history and putting indigenous inheritance (the legacies extorted from the soldiers in ‘Case Closed’) back at the centre. Sobbing and abused though she may be, the ‘priestess of fire’, like the modest ‘little coconut flowers’, turns out to have her own powers and agency in this tale of revenge and recovery of promised wealth. It is not the dominant language that imposes ideas in Gorodé’s work, concludes Mounira Chatti. Rather, the working out in her writing of themes of heritage and revenge rehabilitates the Kanak point of view and, at the same time, exposes the limitations of French language to understand and express this. Similarly, Gorodé’s short, two-page text ‘La Case’ [Grandfather’s House], a luminous description of her grandfather’s traditional round thatched hut with its ceremonial treasure and ancestor guardians, disavows the colonial or ethnographic point of view that presents Kanak as an object of study or curiosity, and reverses the perspective to present the material objects of her culture as a focus of love and a source of full being. The banyan tree in the colonial park in ‘Case Closed’, for its part, reveals its deeper roots in a Kanak past and soil. An Ambivalent Modernity If the priestess of fire resorts to counter-violence in her anger and shame, the infiltration of customary values by neo-colonialism, modernism, and dominant Western values is also presented as a major act of violence. Gorodé’s most recent poems, unpublished in French but translated into English in the final section of Sharing as Custom Provides, portray the drift from the tribu to urban life in French Noumea as a major influence in the destruction of traditional Kanak ways of life. ‘It’s a tropical town / with all the iron and concrete it takes / and a few coconut palms / to ensure that it is so / … we’re in France here / twenty thousand kilometres away’ (1994: 146–7). Globalization, the market, and mass communication are similarly targeted as foreign bodies, destroyers of tradition. Tropical Town I am cut off from my brothers of yesterday shattered in a thousand pieces […] [in] this endless mental prison

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 201

12/03/2014 14:40:01

202

The Literatures of the French Pacific before the TV screen that bashes my head in with its loin-like truncheon thrust that blows my brain with its global and virtual in total denial of my reality my everyday reality (Gorodé,1994: 142–3)

Migration to the European city can also be a catalyst of sexual abuse and moral disintegration, located in the shanty towns that have sprung up in the suburbs or around the swamps of Noumea. With back bowed […] children to feed going to school through the mangrove while the hurrying father slides a groping hand towards the daughter’s thigh on the floor of the shanty knocked out with booze and dope to forget her prostitute state of paternal rape (Gorodé, 1994: 148–9)

Yet, despite Gorodé’s critique of modernity and the city, Nouméa la blanche is nonetheless a setting where Kanak increasingly have their place and are even presented as counter-colonizers, taking back the city. The city in Gorodé can also constitute a place of freedom for women from the often harsh constraints of custom, a refuge from customary marriage and difficult or abusive mothers-in-law. Kanak Difference and Common Destiny In another striking Gorodé short story, ‘J’use du temps’ [I Weather Time/(Ab)using Time] (1996a), a distinctively Kanak construction of time and space ‘de-territorializes’ the French verb system, weaving time, place, and tense to wear away linear chronology. This enables the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 202

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

203

narrator of the short story, a ghost who has returned to haunt the places where he lost the woman he loved before going off to die ‘uselessly’ in war with the Pacific Battalion to propose ‘le chemin du pays, le long chemin de l’héritage’ [‘the path of return to our country, the long path of our heritage’] to young Kanak people of his grandson’s generation. This is a path both of return and of the way forward. Significantly, the young man, now the spirit of the waterhole, had driven away the girl he loved away with his jealous mistreatment. Gorodé’s work makes it clear that the ways in which Kanak and non-Kanak understand the world still continue to differ. The relationship with a time largely reduced to space through deictics inflects her use of French. The repeated use of expressions such as ‘up-there’, ‘down-there’, ‘over in that direction’, taken from Paicî, also inscribe the speaker’s position and gestures into the space-time of enunciation. Stephanie Vigier’s study of time in Kanak literatures (2008) speaks of the force of attraction of place and its capacity to attract and retain time, giving as examples the use of the imperfect throughout the text of ‘La Case’ and the surprising changes of tense in the final sentence. ‘The last ceremony to be held in this place will be to mark the end of the mourning period for grandfather during which a pilou, a dance ceremony, was held at night’ (1996a: 9). Grandfather’s house (‘La Case’), to be destroyed on the anniversary of his death, as is the custom, symbolizes the return to the earth and the rebirth of the dead person. Names of plants refer to their symbolic functions: the coleus offered to the maternal uncles to celebrate a birth; the cordyline branch taken to the relatives on the mother’s side to announce a period of mourning. Characters overlap along with the distinction between the dead and the living. However, this Kanak/New Caledonian literature is perhaps not quite the bi-cephalic animal that Hamid Mokaddem claims (1998b). All Kanak writers do not take the same position. ‘Our traditions are an unshakeable rock’, observes Gorodé’s Utê Mûrûnû. Yet this is a rock that women must ‘find a path around’. They must decide their own lives and bequeath ‘the right to responsible choice’ to their children (Gorodé, 1994: 16). In the collaborative play published in 2002 by the Kanak Pierre Gope and Nicolas Kurtovich, Les Dieux sont borgnes [The Gods are Blind], Princess Lotha chooses to marry the chief, her rapist (a way in custom of resolving the harm of such situations) to safeguard the descendants of the chefferie. For her part, Gorodé refuses any such self-abnegation. However, although her heroines denounce unhappy polygamous or arranged marriages, the power of the maternal uncles,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 203

12/03/2014 14:40:01

204

The Literatures of the French Pacific

and a situation of inferiority that encourages sexual violence against women, Gorodé neither writes out the traditional understanding of women as the blood of the earth nor takes away from the need for the ‘breath’ or gift of life from the maternal uncle, the force of the Word. Her work simply dares to lift the veil on the behaviours that can lie behind the (ab)uses of this Word. Similarly, in L’Épave, Éva, in her ‘no man’s land’ between Noumea and the tribu, insists that her right to choice does not eliminate her woman’s responsibilities to her clan. At the end of Le Vol de la parole, the flying fox (rousette), indigenous to New Caledonia, takes the migratory bird to task for settling down without first making the necessary customary gift gesture (la coutume) of the guest to his host. The final text of this book asserts the status of Kanak as first occupants of the land and the need for humility on the part of the immigrants from France. Its message is conciliatory, and appears to prescribe modes of being separate but together. The title, simultaneously evoking both ‘theft’ (vol) and ‘flight’ (vol) of the traditional Word, is again paradoxical, hybrid rather than double. Ambivalence in Women’s Postcolonial Writing This chapter’s consideration of Gorodé’s life-story and literary stories of Kanak culture giving voice to Kanak women has spoken constantly of paradox and ambivalence. A study in Les Écrivaines francophones en liberté by Martine Fernandes of the cognitive metaphors used or refused in a number of Francophone postcolonial novels by women writers finds such ambivalence to be the very essence of what is called their hybridity (Fernandes, 2007). In Georgette, Farida Belghoul writes of the culture shock produced in the Beur child by the conflict between the French education system, where she learns how to write from a woman teacher, and the world of her father’s authority. In En attendant le Bonheur, Maryse Condé tells of the failure of the return to an originary Africa in a Caribbean woman’s quest for a ‘true’ identity beyond the assimilated French culture she rejects. For her main character, Véronique, as for Gorodé’s female protagonists, a passionate liaison – with a powerful (but ruthless and corrupt) high-born African politician – is also servitude and possession. Condé’s strong woman, Tituba, in Moi Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem, is also, we recall, something of a prisoner of her desire for John Hanson. Possession or unexplainably self-dispossessing passion is again a characteristic of the love relationship in Condé’s Caribbean

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 204

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

205

adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in La Migration des cœurs or in her Traversée de la mangrove. Assia Djebar writes of her love–hate relationship with both France/French and Algeria and her solidarity with her sisters against military (French) and patriarchal (Algerian) violence in L’Amour, la fantasia. The enemy is both within a society where the women label their husbands ‘the enemy’ and must embody their desire in secret dances, and without – the French fleet anchoring in the bay of Algiers observed by the cloistered women on the roofs of their houses in an erotic play of imaginary conquest and resistance. The irresolvable dilemma is exemplified in the gap between the veiled Arabic-speaking mother who needs the child’s protection from men’s gaze in the street and the patriarchal French-speaking father who allows his daughter access to the French school but forbids her to ride a bicycle or go out with a young man. Finally, Calixthe Beyala shows the role of colonial, religious (Christian and Islamic), and also traditional African discourse in the physical enslavement of African women in Tu t’appelleras Tanga. For Martine Fernandes, these four texts show that the postcolonial condition is beyond any Manichean vision of history or culture, and is necessarily paradoxical for women. Other postcolonial writers, Anandi Devi in Mauritius, for example, similarly reject assimilation to French or European values but show that there is no simple path back to (in Devi’s case, indentured Indian) heritage. Interrogating the impossibilities and possibilities of the culturally hybrid contexts out of which they write, these women writers seek a new language of their own. For Martinez, this challenges conventional metaphorical concepts of the destiny of a woman from both cultures: a destiny presented traditionally, for instance, as a well-signposted road or ‘pathway’, or love presented as a ‘battle’. In the remarkable autobiographical work Vaste est la prison, by Djebar, a silenced central memory resurfaces in the striking metaphor of being literally cut in two by the train tracks as the train approaches, saved in extremis by a quick-thinking driver, a repressed memory of the young writer’s despairing attempted suicide in the face of the authoritarian and cloistering gaze of a disapproving fiancé and father. Ambivalence as Hybridity in Gorodé In order to confront cultural hybridity and the situation of gender inequality both outside and within the Kanak world, Gorodé, too, is developing her own distinctive metaphors and literary forms. Her

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 205

12/03/2014 14:40:01

206

The Literatures of the French Pacific

women characters are involved in an active weaving of new identities and pathways. Hybridity or cultural mixing in Gorodé’s texts is not the constant movement between two spaces: one of the two poles is given pre-eminence in a parti pris of indigeneity. Identity is only very partially the self constituted in the dancing encounter with the Other culture or language in the seduction and resistance to seduction described in the writings of Luce Irigaray or Assia Djebar. The ‘spacey emptiness between two named historical languages; the space of the cultural interface’ postulated by Gayatri Spivak (1992; 1999) does not describe the very distinctive, local, full ‘no-man’s land’ occupied by a resistant Éva who is also living in solidarity with her tribu and her customary obligations. Yet, L’Épave, like Graines de pin colonnaire and other texts, explores the topos of sexual passion within the frame of sexual possession recalling Irigaray’s masochistic loss of the subject and corresponding flowering of the expansive self in this self-loss, as in flow, back and forwards. There may be some aspects in the strangeness of L’Épave of a (Kanak rather than a cosmopolitan) Kristevan ‘monster at the crossroads’ and elements of Kristeva’s discovery that we are ‘strangers to ourselves’ (1988). Gorodé’s ambivalence, the paradoxes in her work, does bear some similarity to Derridean ‘undecideability’. However, in Derrida, undecideability is a product of différence and a lack of fixed identity, where identity is derived linguistically within the system, from the slippage between elements, the relation between signs. In Gorodé’s very material understanding of the Kanak world, and her socio-political or didactic messages, there is much that is perceived as ‘outside the sign’, much that is simply ‘different’ or ‘Other’. In the final instance, rather than the intercultural mosaic that Maryse Condé uses to depict contemporary society in Guadeloupe in her final image of Xantippe’s Creole garden in La Traversée de la mangrove, the pieces of the mosaic in Gorodé do not quite fit together, leaving gaps between; spaces of the unspoken, the unspeakable, forms of metamorphosis or of the uncanny, producing what I have called ‘cognitive dissonance’ (Ramsay, 2010). Conclusion Déwé Gorodé’s paradoxical form of hybridity begins with the will to relegate the colonial Other or Western rights discourse to the background while foregrounding the quotidian lives of women and thereby altering naturalized, unequal power relations. As a member of the emerging

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 206

12/03/2014 14:40:01

Déwé Gorodé’s Parti Pris of Indigeneity

207

middle class in Kanaky, educated in France and accustomed to travelling the world, her experience separates her from the women living within tradition in the tribu, confined to their island: her own position is a hybrid one. However, like her work, it resembles an ‘interculture’, as opposed to an ‘entre-deux’, allowing a glimpse of something else behind ‘the certainties of national cultures’ and changing both the nature of the power relations between the systems and the nature of their intersections, as Maria Tymoczko has put this notion for translation, in ‘Ideology and the Position of the Translator’ (2003). The binary oppositions of colonial discourse are challenged, as is, reciprocally, the masculinist discourse within Kanak tradition, but multiple positionality is admitted. However, to return to postmodernism and its argument that meanings exist only within the linguistic formulations that construct them, hybridity in Gorodé is in part also the spark, the exchange that is produced by cultural contact between two language systems, between the rhythms of Paicî and those of French. As we noted, ‘le vol’ is both the theft and the flight of the word (Gorodé and Ihage, 2002), or, again, to borrow an expression from Deleuze, its ‘lines of flight’. Déwé Gorodé’s struggle with the powerful Other that is the French language brings both pain and pleasure. In one of her poems, ‘Écrire’, she presents herself as an ‘outsider’ speaking in a language that is not hers (2004b: 94–5), again recalling Derrida, who speaks in Monolingualism of the Other of ‘this language that I live in and that lives in me but that is not mine’. In Par les temps qui courent and Kënâké, particularly, but also throughout her texts, the play of ready-made expressions colliding, of commonplaces bouncing off one another, is not gratuitous, but reveals their double meanings, polysemy, and the inadequacy of such expressions to express lived reality, including, for example, such key political leitmotifs, adopted by Tjibaou as a political programme, as ‘consensus’ or ‘custom’. These words are ‘mistreated’ or ‘jostled’, as in Marguerite Duras’s Emily L. (1987: 153–4), the stereotypes turned over and over as in Nathalie Sarraute or in the work of the Vanuatu poet Grace Molisa, not simply for the pleasure of word games but to force these French words to ‘speak the truth’, to show their limitations, or to reveal the absence of the maternal tongue of deepest affectivity. According to Jouve in her preface to Par les temps qui courent, the use of the aphorism by Gorodé transforms a stringent masculine genre in order to question what is happening in Gorodé’s own community from the outside. As we saw in Chapter 4, in Kënâké, Antigone and her fratricidal brothers, who come from Greek theatre, are doubled by the Kanak heroine Kaavo

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 207

12/03/2014 14:40:01

208

The Literatures of the French Pacific

and the enemy brothers of the Paicî-origin myth, as well as doubling the contemporary (hi)story of the assassination of Jean-Marie Tjibaou by a Kanak ‘brother’. Forms (parallelisms, theatrical dialogues, etc.) in Gorodé, as in Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, work on the ‘words of the tribe’ [les mots de la tribu] to create something new, albeit in a plunge into the abyss, as in L’Épave. This is the most important sense of Gorodé’s’ hybridity’ – which, as we noted, is too asymmetrical to be simply bicephalic or in-between. The reader is drawn inside a thought that takes its material from both worlds to think and refract this ‘otherwise’ differently, but largely within Kanak epistemologies. Yet, this is a thought that is also internally hybrid in its figures of revolutionary (Marxist-influenced) politics alongside a critical and affective Kanak feminine ethics. In a final paradox, if Déwé is in part ‘her father’s daughter’, the third spaces of cultural appropriation and contestation of French culture in Déwé’s texts are far more extensive than in her father’s attempt to bring Christian and Kanak gods into the same space – and this is evidence of the first published Kanak writer’s greater assimilation to Western thought.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 208

12/03/2014 14:40:01

6

The Hybrid Within The First Kanak Novel, L’Épave [The Wreck], and the Cannibal Ogre The Hybrid Within

Despite Gorodé’s resolute centring and valuing of an indigenous vision of the world, L’Épave [The Wreck] stands apart from the work of other Pacific writers, not the least for its mordant image of the ancestral canoe become a wreck. This canoe, solidified, metamorphosed into a black rock in the shape of a prow in the tribe’s canoe graveyard, a metonym of the wreckage that strews the novel, is the site of the violation of barely pubescent girls, over generations, by the cannibal ogre-ancestor. The functioning of the canoe and its proliferating avatars as a synecdoche for incest in Gorodé’s first published Kanak novel situates it at a critical edge in the current Pacific debates on the (im)possibilities of a return to indigenous Tradition. Contemporary writers Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Alan Duff from New Zealand, like the Samoan writers Albert Wendt and Sia Fiegel, or Titaua Peu from French Polynesia, among others, share Gorodé’s concern with a customary society compromised by sexual violence. Yet, for all these writers, as I argued earlier (Ramsay, 2009), the ancestral canoe, criss-crossing the Pacific, remains at the least a figure of navigation skills, courage, and proud heritage, and at the most the sacred canoe-stone, synonymous with the great spiritual power of the first ancestor and the living spirit of the land. However, Gorodé’s pervasive metaphors of wrecks, beginning with young Tom’s dream of the waka containing an old fisherman about to be dashed on the rocks, as an old man (old Tom) stretches out a sticky hand to the young man pursued by a shark, build a startling picture of a present custom, hybridized by colonization, Christianity, and late global modernity from the outside, but also divided from within. The ancestor, here, is

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 209

12/03/2014 14:40:01

210

The Literatures of the French Pacific

both the helping hand and the pursuing shark. One of the characters, Tom’s trainee-soldier cousin, gives a partial explanation of the image, understanding that the fisherman is the ‘god of canoes’, the ancestor ‘who sticks to the skin’ (8), warning Tom about the young man’s imminent death, from malevolence or possession, or in retaliation for age-old abuses or conflicts of which he has little conscious awareness. Like the clashing images of surrealism, this opening dream is characterized by its strangeness and by its cognitive dissonance. There is also something curiously suspended, unfinished, in Tom’s disturbing vision. In the general functioning of the novel, Gorodé’s ogre-ancestor figures a very particular negotiation of metamorphosis, moving to and fro across the line between the material and the symbolic meanings of tales of oral tradition and the traditional European (fairy) tale, stories with many faces and avatars whose meanings it appropriates and challenges. The metamorphosis of what we will call ‘material metaphors’ functions to confront the issues of the origins or authenticity of Kanak cultural heritage and of sexual violence at the deepest levels. L’Épave is the story of young Léna’s progressive movement to awareness of the childhood rape she has repressed: an event that haunts her love relation with young Tom. Léna’s early violation by a customary uncle and his adolescent nephew, on the black canoe-stone, has left her a slave to their wishes and to her own unconscious sexual ‘possession’. Her story, however, is one that echoes across generations of inter-related women. At the end of the novel, Léna will recognize the tribe’s Orator, to whom she is again in willing sexual bondage, as the nephew of her violator and one of her aggressors, and allow him to slip from the cliff to his death in the shark hole. This scene, however, echoes the long-delayed revenge finally taken in Gorodé’s earlier novella by Utê Mûrûnû, who had become the war-booty of the Kanak ‘traitor’ who killed her husband. It effects a similar aesthetically compelling reversal, with the poetic justice of the devouring devoured, and recalls the patterns of stories of oral tradition. As the previous chapter noted, Gorodé wrote in the rapidly changing political and cultural contexts of the Matignon Agreement (1988) and Noumea Agreement (1998) to unmask the dangers for Kanak society of hiding behind the image of an over-virtuous or idealized (or, as she put it, drawing on an English word in an interview with me, a ‘too-clean’) indigenous society (Gorodé, 2006). The uncertain or shocked critical reactions to L’Épave are a response not only to the thematic of abuse, or to the novel’s very explicit and proliferating descriptions of sexual

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 210

12/03/2014 14:40:01

The Hybrid Within

211

encounters, but also to its narrative techniques – in particular, its polyphony of different voices and lack of clear characterization. This creates the difficulty of knowing who exactly is speaking and to whom – paradoxically foregrounding the need to know ‘who is who’, as the text puts it. A number of the novel’s more clearly didactic ‘dialogues’ appear to derive from the political activity of the former Minister for youth and recreation herself, those that speak, for example, of the dangers of venereal disease or the need for recourse to protection against HIV by young Kanak (Gorodé, 2005: 59). However, to open up questions that Gorodé cannot articulate publicly and directly in a Puritanical society still heavily under the control of an indigenized Church, the taboo questions of incest and male sexual power, and – almost more fraught still – of female sexual pleasure (within and outside of abuse), the text most often addresses its different readers indirectly and metaphorically – for example, through storytelling. Alongside the allusive dialogue debates between often less than clearly differentiated characters, rap poems and tales from oral tradition reworked and retold by the street girl storyteller Dalila [Delila] (known as Lila) are incorporated in italic script into the narrative and function as modern coded messages. Meanings are also produced in verbal play, in the exploration of names and linguistic commonplaces that aid and abet the author both in creating meaning and in pirouetting away, like her character Old Tom, the ogre, who keeps appearing and disappearing (‘Des fois, on me voit. Des fois, on ne me voit pas’ [‘Now you see me, now you don’t’] (54). In the face of its protean genres, styles, and focus, and its oblique messages, how should this novel’s contradictory figures be read beyond its evidently didactic passages? The literary and political contexts in New Caledonia in which the writer was deeply involved, like those of the transcription of Gorodé’s manuscript in New Zealand from the notebook in which it was written and its publication in Noumea, complicate the question of the intended readership of these pirouetting narratives. This first published Kanak novel, however, inevitably speaks to very different groups of readers. As we saw in Chapter 4, the single heroic Kanak culture or ‘nation’ proposed by the masculinist play-spectacle of Jean-Marie Tjibaou and situated against the backdrop of a ‘Pacific Way’ or Pacific cultural specificity, is subjected by Gorodé to what, in The Location of Culture, Bhabha has called ‘dissemi-nation’, the internal differences and struggles for power that put the very ideology of nation in question. As the marginal status

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 211

12/03/2014 14:40:01

212

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of all of her Kanak characters in relation to white society suggests – women are maids or caretakers and men are gardeners, mineworkers, or unemployed – the number of educated middle-class Kanak readers is limited. Relatively few Kanak, in fact, share the depth of Gorodé’s own knowledge of the two worlds, Pacific and Kanak, French and European. The major issues of reception faced by a Salman Rushdie, deeply versed in Muslim learning and tradition, and in Postmodernism, may provide a plausible parallel for the problems of reading posed by this profoundly original critical insider-outsider work. One Kanak reader inscribed within the text, however, Lila, ‘the flower with a powerful scent’, observes that although she may be only a street woman, she is perfectly capable of understanding and supporting the work done by her educated activist ‘sista’. Another group of implied readers, those targeted by the text’s detailed ‘ethnographic’, yet also intensely emotional, insider, descriptions – of a marriage and the accompanying communal feast, for example – or, again, those readers seeking truer cultural understandings of both the richness and the acute problems of contemporary Kanak society, would logically be more European than Kanak. The ‘ethnographic’ portraits or the scenarios of cannibalizing possession, could be read as a form of what Huggan has called the ‘postcolonial exotic’, even as a ‘marketing of the margins’ (2001). However, the text insists explicitly on the hybrid character of the custom it stages and appears to celebrate. For example, Tom and Léna attend a wedding en tribu described at considerable length: this consists of a reception where ‘bubbly’ and a wedding cake made of choux à la crème accompany taperas (traditional Protestant hymns used as drinking songs or songs of celebration) and where customary Kanak gift exchanges are followed by a civil and then a church ceremony as in France. Elaborate dishes, both Kanak and French, are served along with a huge variety of French alcoholic beverages. The formal ceremonial oratory, the Word, ‘gift of the gods and invisible breath of the ancestors’, that, as an ironic narrator observes, has nothing at all to do with ‘what goes on in the grass, in the hay’ (156) coincide with and conceal a very crude (re)seduction of young Léna by the Orator. This skilled and outrageously sexual use of the Orator’s ‘big toe’ under the table, however, is very possibly also a parody of texts by Sarasin and other colonialist ethnographic writers whose ‘observations’ on the supposedly curved and multipurpose indigenous big toe provided ‘evidence’ for the primitive biology of the colonized peoples and justification for their colonization (Bensa, 1995: 109–11, 113–15). The voice or point of view of the narrator

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 212

12/03/2014 14:40:01

The Hybrid Within

213

in these scenes describing customary communal celebration appears to be multiple and shifting, and to oscillate between an empathetic insider point of view and a critical, ironic, or ludic outsider perspective. More generally, all readers of the novel are called upon to solve the puzzle presented on the text’s primary level, the detective story, by posing the question of ‘who is who’ (and, in particular, who killed the street girl storyteller, Lila) or by uncovering the psychological repressions and romantic mysteries also driving the plot. Young Léna’s feeling of searching for things buried somewhere deep within her consciousness, like the excitement of an investigator who senses he is about to discover the clue that will open the doors of truth [‘Comme l’excitation d’un enquêteur pressentant l’indice proche qui lui ouvrirait les portes de la vérité’], appears to create a programme for writer, character, and reader: ‘Naked, cruel, or even indecent, I must have that truth and I’ll sniff it out till it explodes in my face’ [‘Nue, cruelle, indécente, il me la faut, la vérité! Et je la traquerai jusqu’à ce qu’elle m’explose en pleine figure’] (61). The text thus functions, at moments, on a reflexive or meta-textual level, self-consciously modelling the writing and reading processes required. What, then, explains the complexity of the relations between her characters, for whom Gorodé and her New Caledonian editor Gilbert Bladinières are unwilling to provide a genealogical table (despite respectable French literary antecedents for such a practice, for example, Zola’s Rougon-Macquart family tree)? Or the difficulties for the reader in the parti pris of insularity and challenge to Western logocentrism, the different and ambivalent even contradictory knots in the uneven weaving of many voices and story threads? In the case of the translation of L’Épave, for example, the readers and editors from ISP Press in Suva (which was disbanded just before the translation was to appear) and from Little Island Press in Auckland (where the work was finally published in September 2011) sought to push the translators to clarify, cut, and smooth out Déwé Gorodé’s text. This included its mixed-tense narration, with dominance of the present tense alongside the use of the literary past historic, repetitions, overtly didactic and political passages or messages, word-play, quotes from the Bible and from the Koran, stories from Kanak oral literature, original poems, rap poetry, and abrupt changes in topic and register. Stories or elements of story are woven together, observed the co-translator, Deborah Walker, like the apparently disparate pieces of shell and flying fox fur, the beads or seeds that make up traditional monnaie or clan treasure. There was pressure on us as translators to create spatial markings to show the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 213

12/03/2014 14:40:02

214

The Literatures of the French Pacific

transitions between main and embedded stories, to spell out genealogical connections, and to change the apparently fatalistic ending produced by ‘return’ over generations instead of the progression of a ‘happy ending’: in short, to produce a fluent and conventional narrative based on a central plot, in a uniform literary register and a recognizable genre, and preferably an exotic or edifying/political story. The various expert readers’ requests for change brought home the issue of the text’s receivability or readerliness and provided glimpses of the implicit understandings of what an emerging indigenous Pacific novel should be (Walker-Morrison and Ramsay, 2010). There was, for example, an expectation of a political allegory: one Anglophone Pacific reader understood Old Tom, the incestuous cannibal ogre and a figure of the abusive power of the maternal uncle over young girls, to be necessarily a figure of the ‘new conquering masters’, an allegory of oppression by France. Misreading or partial appraisals are a recurrent feature of the few critical accounts of the novel: in the recent Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures, Amanda MacDonald describes L’Épave as ‘memorialis(ing) the independence struggle of the 1980s through a plurivocal novel of urban marginalisation’ (2008: 141). Difference in Gorodé, it might be argued, is also a literary difference, ultimately not dissimilar to the ‘minimal difference / where the meanings are’ that Marguerite Duras speaks of in her autobiographical fiction Emily L. Or, again, the image of the wreck could be likened to the absent and therefore ‘absolute’ image at the centre of that French writer’s autobiographical fictions. In Duras’s better-known autofiction L’Amant, the ‘minimal difference’ relates to the internal fissure or contradiction that derives from what is both the fullness and the loss inherent in a re-imagined and re-evoked childhood, and particularly of a very young girl’s forbidden sexual affair involving the exchange of a diamond with a wealthy older Chinese man. It is perhaps not without pertinence that Duras, too, found herself between two cultures in her childhood. Brought up in Indochina and identifying with that land in L’Amant de la Chine du nord, as one of its own ‘skinny little’ children, speaking fluent Vietnamese, she claimed to ‘detest’ France, remaining ‘inconsolable for the land of her birth’ and ‘spitting out the red steaks of the West’ (1991: 36). The return, aged eighteen, to the country of her parents’ birth is presented as a form of exile. Duras’s text is also a re-imagining and a writing back to, or a therapeutic rewriting of, the shame of her affair with an older wealthier ‘Chinese’ man (who, in the latest diaries to have come to light – the 2006 ‘Cahiers Rose Marbré’ – is in fact Vietnamese).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 214

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

215

Duras’s much-read fictions serve as transformational objects to explore and rewrite these difficult, intense family relations of her colonial childhood, including the shadows cast by incest and the domination of the household by the ‘older’ brother. The later autofiction, Emily L., for its part tells of a passionate self-sacrificial relationship between the writer and her mainstream ex sea-captain husband, ‘the Captain’, in which the poet’s continuing independent existence and her alternative and more acute vision are threatened by her willing sexual subservience. Although research into public records confirms the fact of Waia Gorodé’s condemnation to a year of hard labour in the Camp Est prison for incest and Déwé Gorodé’s own statement to me that the situations depicted in L’Épave do not derive from her own experience, a very close family member was indeed a victim of abuse by a parent and a paternal uncle, denounced by Laura Gorodé (who withdrew her complaint but too late to avoid a conviction). Writing for Déwé Gorodé, as for Marguerite Duras, is similarly literary and very similarly the art of simultaneous dissimulation and indirect literary revelation of secrets that are both personal and more generalized secrets of life. In the novel, this ‘writing back’ to the ‘hauntings’ of childhood shame or loss is also an acknowledgement of the power of female sexuality and the life of the body, at the same time as it is a reclaiming and exorcism of buried trauma and continuing abuse of male power. If L’Épave can be read as a variant on the theme of a magical enchantment by love – one that turns out to be also and at the same time a form of malevolent possession – this opens up a possible further reading of Gorodé’s ‘Case Closed’ (‘Affaire classée’), considered in the previous chapter. The young ‘priestess of fire’ could be seen to be not only under the protection but also under the sexual control of the old fisherman, the girl’s ‘grandfather’ and guardian. This text too would be a denunciation of colonial rape, or desecration of the tapu priestess, and also of Kanak men’s dispossession of the age-old sacred power that women should hold through their connection with new life and with the ‘blood of the earth’. One explicit European frame apparently evoked by the text of L’Épave itself for a reading of the complexities of this modern story of the power of the ogre (Bluebeard, Faust, Dr Jekyll, Jack the Ripper …) is that of the European fairy tale. Old Tom, the incestuous devourer of his own children, can be seen like the Orator, figure of the power of the father, to incorporate something of the animal magnetism of the legendary figure of the animal fiancé or Beast (Ramsay, 2011a). However, where Héléna goes after Éva into the alternative paradise of women [‘le paradis

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 215

12/03/2014 14:40:02

216

The Literatures of the French Pacific

des femmes’], as into ‘the new Eden’, or follows Éva into the mangrove of traditional crab-fishing, ‘as into an enchanted forest where her fairy godmother would wash away the bad memories of her past, and sluice them far away on the tide’ [‘comme dans une forêt enchantée où sa bonne fée la lavera de ses mauvais souvenirs qu’emportera la marée loin de son passé’] (107), the fairy story retold by the Kanak woman writer points most particularly to the literal source of the tale of the ogre, to the shadows or underbelly of her society: ‘For the stories of Prince Charming, of fairies and witches are only make-believe. At best, they end up with a little grandfatherly groping, at the worst, a little fatherly rape. Dads and granddads, they’re the true sorcerers and ogres of the fairy-stories’ [‘Car les histoires de prince charmant, de fées et de sorcières ne sont que des contes à dormir debout avec, au bout, au mieux les attouchements de Pépé et au pire le viol du papa. Les voilà, les vrais sorciers et autres ogres du conte!’] (130). Gorodé has insisted that myths in her own culture are not merely allegories but are, in fact, Kanak history. For her, then, the ogre, as old ‘cannibal’ father of many children, or ancestor, and his avatar, the incestuous maternal uncle-orator, have a basis in social reality. In her seminal study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers, Marina Warner also reacts against psychological universalizing interpretations that, as she puts it, leech the history out of the tales. Giving back an enhanced role to the depth of the knowledge held by women tellers of fairy tales across the centuries; to their mirroring of everyday life as structured by patrilineage, female exogamy, and arranged marriages; and to their transmission of knowledge of secrets, of intimate matters, including illicit information about sex, Warner goes on to discuss the virtual disappearance of stories such as ‘Donkeyskin’ from the fairy tale canon in the puritanical nineteenth century. She ascribes the erasing of this story of a young girl who disguises herself in a skin to run away and escape the attentions of her father to discomfort with an incest theme, deemed unsuitable for the nursery and too close to reality for comfort. Like the founding myths of Freudian Oedipal theory – for example, the story of the Savage Horde or of Oedipal incestuous desires in early childhood in Freud’s 1913 Totem and Taboo, the European fairy tale continues to be read on a symbolic level where a more literal or sociological reading might well be justified. In Gorodé’s anti-romantic, material novel, almost all of the female characters across the generations – the grandmother-ogress, (Hé)Léna, and Léna, or (Da)Lila, Éva, and Maria (their character or destiny are

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 216

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

217

inscribed in their names) – have children fathered by Old Tom or his avatar, the Orator. In Freud’s version of the Savage Horde, the sons kill the father to obtain possession of the father’s women. In Gorodé, the cunning violence of the ogre continues to be directed against his own sons for possession of his daughters and their offspring over generations. Indeed, the novel is almost as haunted by the unaccepted disappearance of young children – for example, the baby in Maria’s dream carried off in Old Tom’s canoe, awash with blood, as by the trauma of pubescent incest. Gorodé herself lost a young son to a sudden illness, a bout of influenza, and such personal experiences may flare into life in the imaginative world she creates in a quest for the sources of, and solutions to, her lifelong disturbance. As Old Tom’s pagan grandfather used to tell him, ‘nothing could make an ogre’s mouth water like fresh meat, as in the fairy tale’ [‘rien ne valait la chair fraîche pour donner l’eau à la bouche des ogres, comme dans les contes’] (39). Like Marina Warner, he offers a historical explanation, going on to tell his grandson that ‘the ogres and ogresses of fairy stories in an anthropophagic society were simply the cannibal warriors and their partners. And he was a direct descendant of the latter, since his own father had been a cannibal’ [‘les ogres et les ogresses des contes, dans une société anthropophage, n’étaient que les guerriers cannibales et leurs compagnes. Et lui en était directement issu, puisque son propre père en était un’] (39). Éva, too, indicates to Léna that, unlike Tâdo, the predatory crab of Kanak oral tradition, whom parents warn their children against when they go off to tend their fields, leaving them alone at home, Old Tom was too powerful to finish up in their cooking pot: ‘he was an ogre and even if the Church had put an end to the cannibalism of the ancestors, the latter had nonetheless taught their descendants how to continue to respect the original pact that links their descendants to them by adapting ritual practices’ [‘si l’église avait mis fin au cannibalisme des ancêtres, ceux-ci avaient aussi appris à leurs descendants comment continuer à respecter le pacte original qui les lie à eux, en adaptant les pratiques rituelles’]. This pact always required sacrifice, as it is ‘through blood that the ancestors transmit once and for all what we retain of them’. Éva concludes by explaining why sorcerers and their female counterparts still exist and ‘are duly practicing so many years after the Inquisition’ (108). Marina Warner’s study of the fairy tale identifies different historical and social avatars of metamorphosing beasts or ogres that constitute what Bettelheim describes as the ‘animal-groom’ (1977: 71) cycle. From

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 217

12/03/2014 14:40:02

218

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the classical myth of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ to Perrault’s ‘Riquet à la houppe’, or from Mme Leprince de Beaumont’s or Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast or Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the adaptations of these stories reflect the attempts of particular societies to regulate and contain sexuality within the institutions of marriage or determine the relation between the sexes, and between love and marriage. They tell of ogres/beasts outwitting their prey or outwitted, tamed, or transformed to handsome princes, sometimes by a young girl’s sense of duty and loving heart, as in the socially correct, preferred versions of Beauty and the Beast, and sometimes indeed by violence or female agency, as in tales such as ‘The Frog-Prince’. These stories also speak indirectly of young girls awakening to a consciousness of their female sexual body and its (animal) desires, as contemporary rewritings such as Angela Carter’s tales emphasize. Many of these allegorical narratives of the animal fiancé, played out in patriarchal societies where control over young women is exerted by father, brother, or husband, incorporate concerns in relation to Beauty’s over-attachment to the father, that is, to the incest ‘taboo’ or over-valuing of kinship relations. In his seminal work, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, Lévi-Strauss sees this taboo as deriving from both nature and culture (from a spontaneous and universal interdiction creating the original passage between natural and cultural structures). In Derrida’s work, which is concerned with investigating the conditions of possibility of the concepts of nature and culture, the incest prohibition escapes and precedes such concepts. In a study of L’Épave, Caroline Laurent asks whether, much as she seeks to go beyond European (colonial) historicity of culture, Gorodé, too, is seeking to determine what may lie beyond the nature–culture division (2008). Is Gorodé’s work perhaps putting to the question any such binary division of passage from nature to culture, or from myth to history? In the Kanak novel, as we noted, Old Tom the ogre is multiform – at once the animal bridegroom and the protective (grand)father, at once mythical/symbolic and real. And, as Marina Warner argues, in our age, it is the Beast, the animal bridegroom, who holds centre stage. Male animal magnetism has become the focus of a fascination with the wild thing in the self, a wild thing that might also have a correspondence in the more socially repressed female erotic impulse. Marina Warner’s reading of Cocteau’s 1946 film version of Beauty and the Beast sees Beauty, the Rose, as representing Cocteau’s Ideal: in this case, the Ideal of the in-between hermaphrodite artist. However, this ‘tale as old as time’, already adapted in Apuleius’ second-century version

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 218

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

219

of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ in his bawdy Metamorphoses;1 by Perrault in his seventeenth-century Mother Goose Tales; and by the eighteenth-century governess and moralist, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, has produced a number of twists in the Beast’s tail/tale. In these texts, Beauty can be ‘caught looking’: in Cocteau’s 1946 film, La Belle et la bête, she is secretly fascinated by the Beast’s animality – his hunting instincts, his literally smouldering passionate presence outside her bedroom door – and is moved by her own power over this rampant energy. Nor is this otherwise dutiful young lady beyond playing her own perverse games, telling the Prince who asks her whether she had been afraid of the now dead Beast that, in fact, she likes being frightened – adding coyly as an afterthought, ‘with you!’ According to Warner, Linda Wolverhampton’s 1991 scenario for Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast produces a very different Beauty: active, resourceful, and independent, a product of Gloria Steinem and of Women’s’ Liberation. Despite, or perhaps because of, Beauty’s evident agency, however, Marina Warner suggests that, once again, like the domesticated animal of the late nineteenth century or Roosevelt’s Teddy Bear in the early twentieth, it is the adolescent beast, the wild animal become lovable that is the real object of fascination in Disney’s film. In the climactic scene in the ballroom where the Beast swells up in a kind of tumescence coming to resemble the head of a giant buffalo, like the incredible Hulk or King Kong for Warner, or the older, more ‘romantic’ Quasimodo, the spectators are more interested in seeing the Beast than a Prince. The appearance of the Beast is anticipated with even greater pleasure than the spectacle of Beauty. Despite his many metamorphoses, from ancestor who ‘sticks to the skin’ in young Tom’s dream in the opening scene of the novel, to beach derelict, to seducer, and to ogre, for example, Old Tom, the suspected ‘beast’ in Gorodé’s tale, is also something of a dilettante. He is a virile lover, gifted musician, and great fisherman, a rebel-hero in the Don Juan or Casanova mode, challenging both Christian and traditional moral authority. Like Don Juan, he can be a potent character, whose presence makes young Éva, for example, ‘see life differently’. In Gorodé’s subsequent fragments of a woman’s diary in a number of voices, the 2009 Graines de pin colonnaire, the narrator constantly addresses just such a faithless but powerfully charismatic, absent/present former lover as ‘Lutin’ – elf, leprechaun, spirit, or joker. Like the omnipresence of the ogre, the powerful attraction of Lutin is far-reaching; pervading even his absence, as the narrator senses his mocking and mischievous presence

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 219

12/03/2014 14:40:02

220

The Literatures of the French Pacific

all around her in everyday objects and in the natural world as well as in sudden flashbacks of memory. He is the spirit of the neighbouring hill. Another short fragment entitled “La Directrice’ (33–4) tells the story of a severe and respected headmistress who lets herself be carried away by the charms of a young new male teacher. Although he happens to have a wife and children in a neighbouring town, the young man and the headmistress go off abroad together. She gives birth to his child around the same time as the school secretary and also another teaching colleague, the narrator, who had become the young man’s mistress. In this somewhat elliptical and circular tale, the secretary later reads of the death of the young teacher and his colleague-mistress in an accident: two of the sons of the teacher become excessively charming young teachers in their turn in a school run by a headmistress also ‘greatly respected for her work, her straight-speaking, and her pedagogical principles’ (35). Lila, the barefoot story-teller, the Bardessa ‘as free as the wind’, another of Old Tom’s ‘daughters’ and victims and, like the Directrice, also a figure of the strong woman, still defiant in her red dress and red scarf, will be found dead, raped and assassinated. The strong-willed headmistress, too, falls willing victim. Despite Éva’s rejection of the sexual bondage to Old Tom that she had lived as a partying young woman in Noumea, at the end of her story, even this figure of female liberation, of wisdom and closeness to nature, neither remains a resistant ‘Kaavo’ nor marries the Prince. Having used her powers of exorcism to free Léna from Old Tom’s control, and respected the responsibilities of customary solidarity while creating her own space of independence between the tribu and Noumea and developing a lesbian relationship with Léna, Éva goes on to join a sect out of fear of hell fire, falls under the sexual control of the pastor, another form of ogre, is cheated out of the donations she gives his church, and ends up in a psychiatric institution. Women, too, become ogresses. The ogress in Gorodé’s novel, however, is largely the ogre’s sexually captive woman. In L’Épave, Lila tells the story of the loss of her five-year-old son from a bad bout of influenza, recalling as she does so the cautionary lullaby that one of the grandmothers up in the tribu used to sing: ‘hush / for the ogre is there / listening to you / and waiting / under the stone of war’ [‘ne parle pas / car l’ogre est là / qui t’entend / et attend / sous la pierre / de la guerre’] (73). Héléna/Léna, also called Old Léna to distinguish her from the next generations of Léna, describes a childhood experience where her paternal grandmother, the clan’s storyteller, is telling stories to the children around the fire ‘as if

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 220

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

221

they were real’, (‘comme si elle les avaient vécues’) (96). When Héléna’s little cousin seems afraid of the grandmother and identifies her as Old Mother Tibo, the ogress of oral tradition, the grandmother announces in a ‘cavernous’ voice that she is not Mother Tibo but ‘the ogre from the canoe graveyard, looking for a little girl to carry off with me on a wreck far far away over the storm-tossed seas’ [‘l’ogre du cimetière des pirogues qui cherche une petite fille pour l’emmener avec moi sur une épave, loin, très loin sur la mer houleuse’ (96). Later in the night, Héléna sees the fire flare and a small scarlet dwarf emerges from the flame with a smell of something rotting, ordering an astonishingly submissive grandmother to do his bidding and to find him ‘a little one’. This figure takes on a human form, resembling the uncle-Orator whose form the child just makes out as he disappears into the darkness. The little cousin falls sick (has she, too, been violated?), and the following day it is the turn of Héléna, who is ordered to meet her ‘uncle’, the sick child’s father, at the black rock, where she is raped and threatened that if she says anything about what happened even worse things will happen. The sick child later dies. The grandmother, in this particular version of the fairy tale, is clearly the uncle-ogre’s accomplice, keeping the ogre in fresh meat. The dual character of the traditional ogress (potentially both bad and good witch as in, for example, the contemporary Kanak artist Paula Boi’s representation of the traditional ogress in a powerful but ambiguous painting ‘Triptych’) returns the reader to the question of who is who, and who is speaking. It is difficult not to recognize the voice of the author behind many of the denunciations in L’Épave, the voice daring to say ‘no’ to the rape of children and the violence done to women. Here, the writer appears to be renegotiating her own cultural traditions in reaction to apparently millenary and unspoken violence against women within her community, a violence present and understood in very culturally specific contexts and ways and in which women, too, are often complicit. Looking more closely into the ready-made notion of ‘double colonization’, Stephanie Vigier (2008) quotes one of Gorodé’s earliest published poems from 1975 that prefigures L’Épave’s concern with the fears aroused by this largely unknown but probably traumatic and inhibiting Kanak women’s past, asking: ‘how to weigh the yolk of the night of time / to get close to the boundaries of taboo spaces / to measure the length of habit / custom / the tutelage of customs’. For secret ‘un-avowed memories’, ‘un-satiated desires’, and ‘perverted dreams’ have ‘taken refuge in closed, sealed up, places’ and the writer has herself ‘touched only fragments of the veil’, captured only ‘rumours’ of ‘our imprisonment’, has merely

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 221

12/03/2014 14:40:02

222

The Literatures of the French Pacific

‘caught the scent’ of ‘all the misery of women / of this land and elsewhere / of today and tomorrow’ (Gorodé, 1985: 81–2). At the same time as she opens up the Kanak past, Gorodé situates the age-old problem alongside the contexts of colonial sexual exploitation. A Sea-Captain, heir to one of the best families of colonial society, sailing the wide seas, leaving his seed in the bellies of many young women and bruises on their bodies all around the Pacific, provides the text with a white equivalent of Old Tom. The impenitent masochist, Fleur de Corail [Coral Flower], the adolescent daughter of a white settler in the New Caledonian Bush, who marries the Captain, a man old enough to be her father, and falls under his boot, echoes Héléna’s and Léna’s obsessive attachment. The Captain’s latest very young mistress is rumoured, scandalously, to resemble him like a daughter. Sado-masochistic games of bondage and domination are played across all ethnic and gender boundaries in the novel, often in the comic mode – Léna’s white lesbian boss plays games of master and slave in the mud of the mangrove with Éva and Léna, mostly assuming the role of slave in a reversal that the text describes as play-acting rather than impacting on real power relations, but in scenes that link the mutual dependencies of the sadist and the masochist to the notions of sexual possession and pleasure. Speaking the truth(s) of the violence against women that derives from male dominance in Kanak society, and that leads to the defiant street-girl Lila/Delila’s rape and murder (the novel is dedicated to the victim of an actual rape and murder in the shanty town near the garrison) also takes the straightforward and explicit form of a strident generalized feminist critique of the globalized capitalist world’s commodification of women. The frozen peace of death had set Lila’s face in a serenity beyond life and its horrors. Its rapes and its abusive attacks. Its unpunished crimes. The abuse of children and violence against women. The unpunished crimes of travelling salesmen, dealers in arms and in illusions, who use women’s bodies like stud-mares, selling them on every corner, in advertisements, on billboards, TV ads […] And Lila was assassinated like so many sisters before and after her to keep her in her place as the whore who dared to touch a hair on the head of the strong man. (Gorodé, 2004a: 62)

Yet, Gorodé’s negotiation of the space between Kanak and European tale, between material and symbolic readings, also produces a very realistic and local portrait of the manner in which an innocent and very young girl can be seduced, subdued, groomed, and manipulated by an older man endowed with mana or the prestige of adult authority – figure

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 222

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

223

of the maternal uncle, Gorodé observed to me, ‘to whom nothing can be refused’ (2006). The mixture of force and fear used to obtain initial compliance, the young girl’s shame and need to obey and to please, the psychological and physical bond(age) that means that, some years later, she will again follow her seducer unquestioningly into the coffee bushes, the subsequent lifelong and physically intense attachment to her victimizer (who can also become her victim) that defines her as a wreck among wrecks, is a psychologically credible description. At the same time, (Hé)léna’s story is embedded in a recurring fatality, over generations, reworking Cartesian concepts of time and space, but also notions of individual agency. For example, Héléna’s grandmotherogress, and young Léna, her granddaughter and homonym, use exactly the same words – ‘ouioui’ – to submit to Old Tom or to his avatar, the Orator. Éva, Héléna (Old Léna), and Maria, like the murdered Lila, have all at one time shared a similarly excessive and destructive incestuous sexual attachment to Old Tom of the kind young Léna will have with his ‘nephew’, the Orator. The ogre’s woman may thus be a victim on several levels (genetic, biological, and social) of her own passionate subservience, her addiction to the ogre, the outcome of an incestuous relationship or rape that Gorodé’s text does not in any way condone, but suggests is not uncommon. The 2003 survey carried out by the social scientists Christine Salomon and Christine Hamelin among all New Caledonian women, with the support of Gorodé herself, showed that 12.5 per cent of Kanak women interviewed were willing to admit to experiencing forced first sexual intercourse (Salomon and Hamelin, 2008). Perhaps the subsequent attachments are also more complicated than people are prepared to think. Racine’s theatrical portrayals of an Andromaque or a Phèdre, torn between reason, duty, honour, reputation, or agency (gloire) and irrational passion and self-loss (flamme) in the seventeenth century, or the Princesse de Clèves, in the sixteenth, renouncing the man she loved to protect her honour, autonomy, and peace of mind (repos) from the tyranny of jealous desire but with a deadly outcome, had similarly suggested the complex character of what the seventeenth century saw as the fatal impact of love. Yet, paradoxically, as in Paula Boi’s painting ‘Triptych’, the ogress, who stands outside the social laws that regulate female behaviour, is most characteristically a Kanak figure of female power, not unlike Maryse Condé’s witch in Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem, or female protagonist in Histoire de la femme cannibale.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 223

12/03/2014 14:40:02

224

The Literatures of the French Pacific

To some extent, as I have suggested, this is also the case of the figure of the ogre, who, with his Machiavellian manoeuvres and hypocrisies, his responsibility for young deaths, but also his seductiveness as an animalfiancé who refuses to be transformed to a civilized prince, is similarly a vehicle for complex truths. Renegotiating her past and present Kanak identities through representations of wreckage, Déwé Gorodé is herself embedded in the Kanak power structures she critiques. It is resolutely from within Kanak cultural perspectives that the novel interrogates what is moving behind the contemporary indigenous mask, the secrets it continues to conceal, its silences (in what is called le pays du non-dit (Barbançon, 1992b)), and its major contradictions. This necessarily increases the ambivalence of her writing for multiple readerships. Masculine-Feminine: Sorcery/Sexual Possession and Sexual Liberation Gorodé’s play Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000 had challenged Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s version of the myth and cult of mana as male virility. The activist’s novel now goes beyond this woman-centred critique of a masculine ‘imagined community’ to begin to make an unprecedented case in Pacific indigenous writing for the rethinking of (female) sexuality, including the taboo subject of what the author calls in words that turn around the subject, ‘the paradise of women’ (Gorodé, 2004a: 119). It can be argued that alongside the text’s constant shifts of tone and levels of language, the detailed descriptions of physical encounters and the explicit accounts of female sexual pleasure also function on a meta-textual level, as a form of writing ‘experiment’ or Barthesian exercise in the pleasure, the jouissance of the text. Notwithstanding this meta-textual reading, the outlawed nocturnal ecstasy, shared playfully and mockingly by Maria and Éva in the hut on the beach as Old Tom and the fisherman/Orator sleep, or by Léna and Éva in Éva’s paradisiac Kanak garden of very physical romance, begins to make a detailed case for the same rights to pleasure for women that men enjoy. This pleasure that Éva claims is one that can be freely given, without constraint or possession, is presented as similar to the fluid, pragmatic savoir faire and intense closeness to the natural world shared by Maria and Éva in the garden. Éva argues for social freedom in love: ‘Grasp love when it comes towards you and let it go when it wants to rather than killing it off little by little in long-term relationships like

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 224

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

225

marriage or co-habitation, for reasons of saving face, appearances, the furniture or the children’(129). However, Éva’s wisdom, as we have seen, her arguments for female metamorphosis, will be partially discredited by her renewed sexual enslavement to the pastor of a sect who deceives her, and the tragic end in madness to her earlier quest for freedom and desire to stand between the two worlds. Some of Gorodé’s earlier short stories, ‘L’Agenda de Lida’ or ‘J’use du temps’ (1996a) had implied that, in a society where men dominate, sexual relations with women come to be lived in terms of the exercise of virility and competition between males (that is, through jealousy, possessiveness, and the exercise of control). Women become némo or ‘nothings’, and women’s feelings, like women’s pleasure, are of no account. The detailed descriptions of the operations of the promiscuous and potent but also hypocritical and devious ‘fishermen’, Old Tom and the Orator, the Maître de la Parole [Master of the Word] and possibly his natural son, particularly adept at gathering little girls in their net and, as Éva puts it, ‘attaching their bellies’ by violence on the black canoe stone, argue for a rethinking of the place of sexuality within custom as much as for women’s freedom, equality, or rights. Talking to young Léna and young Tom by the wreck on the beach, Old Tom attributes his upbringing in the early decades of the century to a polygamous pre-Christian grandfather, with whom he was left while his pastor parents were off evangelizing. He recounts his own story as very early initiation into games of love ‘up there’, in the tribu by his grandfather’s women. The young customary wife, chosen by the tribal elders, whom he had in fact already submitted to his will on the black stone of the canoe graveyard, dies giving birth to a child, and, as stories begin to circulate about him, he flees the wrath of her maternal uncles with another very young girl (Léna, his own incestuous ‘forbidden fruit’, a term repeated often) to live together on the margins of society, in the hut by a wreck, on the beach in Noumea. Léna, too, recounts the childhood experience on the black rock from her own perspective. An omniscient narrator helps complete her story. This includes flight from Old Tom to Éva and the refuge of the paradise of women, but a later return to a consuming illicit threesome with the Orator and Old Léna, ‘up there’ in the tribu, despite the Orator’s customary marriage to another woman. Other narrative voices speak of the gap between the elevated and male-dominated Word and the hierarchies and rites of tradition that bear it, and what goes on unseen and unspoken in the mud and in the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 225

12/03/2014 14:40:02

226

The Literatures of the French Pacific

hay. The text shows the hypocrisy behind the role played by the Orator as bearer of the Word by describing his recapture of young Léna, against a tree and on the floor of his own wife’s thatch house, despite the watching ancestors on the doorposts, as young Tom sleeps off the wine with which he has been plied. Éva, for her part, tells Léna that sexuality is natural and should not be a cause for guilt and anxiety but that it should nonetheless be kept in its place, in nature, there where it reigned triumphant (129). Gorodé’s earlier critique of custom in Utê Mûrûnû had included an attack on the imposition by the mission on Kanak women of the image of ‘Eve bitten by the serpent’. The case in L’Épave for women’s sexual liberation remains ambivalent: a text from Romans read at Lila’s funeral recalls that ‘the wages of sin are death’. A second text from the Koran suggests rather that both the option for libertine and for pious behaviour are given to man by God. Éva and Maria’s nightly trysts when the men were asleep are presented as a ‘quest for something sublime that must lie beyond the derisory illusions of orgasm’, a clandestine way for ‘Amazon’ women of escaping momentarily from the male ‘social pact’ (127) to subjugate women. However, the worm (or the snake), the novel appears to suggest, may be fatally hidden in the fruit – in this case, a serpent that has something to do with Old Tom’s ancestral eating of his ‘forbidden fruit’. Behind the novel’s interrogation of the ways in which the traditional mask has clearly been modified by evangelization, it is still the mask that continues to represent the Kanak way of thinking. The mask indicates the continuing and not always reassuring presence of the other world that characterizes Kanak life. Metamorphosis, which figures both conservation and transformation, may indeed represent the moment when the human most powerfully channels the divine or the demonic, as Manfred Schmeling suggests in his study of Rushdie (2006: 45–6). As Maurice Leenhardt had observed, this is a vision of the world, a continuing belief in the power of the sacred stones, that despite the acceptance of Christianity, despite cultural hybridity, has never been eradicated. Old Tom himself, who also possesses a didactic voice, speaks of mana, the ancestral power that the missionaries fought to eradicate, but that can never be erased and that allows some people to stand apart from the group. Mana, he observes, can be used for good or for evil. From the perspective of the cannibal monster’s victims, seeing with their eyes Gorodé offers her readers a double understanding of possession, moving between the body and the mind, the rational and the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 226

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

227

irrational. As Lila explains her capture by Old Tom to her interlocutor: ‘I had become his thing. Or rather the slave of my senses. A slave to pleasure’. Éva arrives at the understanding that passion is ‘an alienation comparable to the sorcerer’s control over his victim’ (Gorodé, 2004a: 75). Old Tom’s larger than life serial debauchery and mockery of anything sacred – threesomes in the wreck, sex at the entrance of the Church and in public places, including during Léna’s prison visits to him, the selling of Léna to other men for money, or while he watches on as a voyeur – has something of the monotony of Sade’s litany of ‘deviant’ acts, or of other libertine writing such as Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, with their preposterous serial acts of sex or violence, ultimately challenging the willing suspension of disbelief. Yet, as we observed earlier, in Gorodé’s description, the magnetism of the Orator is not without its real fascination and intense physical and emotional effects. The text’s evocation of Old Léna’s softened body and sense of physical well-being after love-making explains this older woman’s sacrifice of her social status, and ultimately of her life, to be close to the Orator, even though her transgression of social law (not only is the Orator married but her particular biological connections make relationships between them forbidden within custom) makes her the object of violent physical attack by the other women up in the tribu and of hospitalization. Young Léna’s feeling of plenitude, vertigo of the senses, and state of grace, her discovery of another self as she falls in love with young Tom counterpoint the description of the love-struck young woman as a rag-doll, rattled, shaken, and crushed in the hands of her ardent young lover. Even the profligate young Tom has the revelation of a double sleeping within his partying, promiscuous, and unfeeling self – a desire to be with a single woman, Léna, and to help her solve her problems. Sexuality is linked to the blood that symbolizes female transmission across generations in Kanak society. This maternal blood, associated with the earth, is traditionally a powerful image. Christine Salomon’s work has shown that like other female bodily fluids and functions, as in a number of societies, it is also associated with danger and pollution. The portrait of the life-force in sexuality between women, their desire to experiment with their wild side, outside the arbitrary restraints of society, is not merely a representation of a kind of beating men at their own game. Desire in Gorodé takes on the same double face as mana, depicted as a force more developed in some than in others, and as powerful for good as (in uncontrolled excess of domination or servitude) for evil.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 227

12/03/2014 14:40:02

228

The Literatures of the French Pacific

But, as the plot thickens, so too do major questions left open in a story where the more relationships are coercive rehearsals of possession the more intense is the sexual pleasure. The ‘attaching of the belly’, seen to result from childhood rape or early incestuous relationships (recognized or unrecognized by the conscious mind), gives rise to an early sexualization – of young Léna and of Lila, for example. When the fruit bitten into is forbidden, bondage appears to be stronger. The pleasure of being taken, used, shaken like a rattle, is equally a feature of non-coercive relationships – between young Tom and young Léna, or Éva and Maria and Éva and Léna, for example. Old Tom is a kind of shadow, the briefly glimpsed form in the canoe, his ‘true home’, on the lagoon in Noumea; the derelict voyeur watching Tom and Léna make love through a peephole in the old boat wreck drawn up on the beach; the grinning dwarf again ‘suddenly’ watching them from the back window of a bus as they leave Noumea for the wedding they are attending up in the tribu. His face reappears ‘suddenly’ in young Tom’s rear-view mirror, just before the young man’s car leaves the road and plunges to the bottom of a ravine as he crosses the mountain chain to return to Noumea immediately after the wedding, leaving Léna in the hands of the Orator. However, Old Tom’s metamorphoses and sudden reappearances also foreground the writer’s unexpectedly postmodern narrative strategies. Young Tom’s premonitory dreams of pursuit, at the beginning of the novel, constitute a mise en abyme of the thematic elements that subsequently morph and reorganize to construct the plot. Similarly, the shared experiences of childhood rape and resulting adult sexual possession by an avatar of the old fisherman cause the lives of Héléna’s grandmother (the ogress), Héléna/old Léna, young Léna, and little Léna to morph one into the Other as did the generations of Utê Mûrûnû in Gorodé’s novella. Their predilection for very young girls, rape, incestuous relations, profligacy, and powers of seduction cause the two fishermen, Old Tom and the Orator (his ‘nephew’ or his son), similarly to merge. The repetition of the language of possession (‘fouiller’, ‘se tortiller’, ‘jouir’) paints all of the novel’s detailed and repeated descriptions of games of love with the irony of stereotypical metaphor – a series of female characters thus wriggle like a worm on the ground, in submission and pleasure under the predatory boot or big toe respectively of Old Tom, the Orator, and Éva, but also of the white Sea-Captain. Waves rise and break thunderously, literally making their seminal offerings of fragile or broken shells; the young couple

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 228

12/03/2014 14:40:02

The Hybrid Within

229

sail away on ‘tormented seas’ or else to ‘island paradises’. Héléna, and her ‘homonym’ in custom, young Léna, retain the marks of their stereotyped namesake, Helen of Troy as do De(lila), Éva, or indeed (cannibal, peeping, uncle) Tom. Parallels and symmetries pattern the shared stories of Gorodé’s characters (incestuous or abused childhood, sexual bondage to the victimizer, older women who become complicit in the perpetration of violence against the next generation of children) in an intrigue that spirals back into the past and forward into the future across generations, marking a return of the indigenous past in the present, yet seeking through the revelations of and in the novel new pathways and a changing future. The metamorphoses of time, character, and story, like the coded languages and intertextual references that indicate the influence of the postmodern as well as of oral tradition, are not simply playfully self-referential. Despite the insistent presence of the theme of storytelling, reinforced by the narrative technique of proliferating story within story, accompanied by sometimes disconcerting flashbacks or flash-forwards, the characters, like the stories, have social referents. Lila’s modern re-inventions of traditional tales reveal the sexual readings already always implicit in the oft-told stories. An old fisherman struggles with a giant catch that has pulled his canoe into a big bay, opens up the fish and finds a great coconut plantation within. Here, a giant woman gives him the milk to drink from her coco breasts necessary to make him a man. In a second tale, a little girl pinched by a crab at night can’t stop herself fishing for crabs in the mangrove and suffers pain where she has been pinched every time she eats one. She decides not to return, but when a big crab comes right up to her case, she tricks him into pinching the hot embers and falling into the fire. An omniscient narrator recasts the tribe’s ‘founding story’ as the tale of the ship (canoe) wreck of a grandfather and a young girl: observing, cryptically, that, in the end, as in the common saying, ‘the sea reclaims its own from the land’ [‘le prix de la terre est de rendre à la mer ce qui lui appartient’] (96). The apparent instability and openness that Old Tom’s multiform and plural identities or reinterpreted Kanak stories and traditions introduce into the text are, we have argued, not only self-reflexive allegories of the text’s own creative processes, but more significantly a reflection on something that does pre-exist. In comparison, the postmodern texts of a Salman Rushdie are metaphors of a lack of any single origin and a neverending transformation. Discussing Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 229

12/03/2014 14:40:02

230

The Literatures of the French Pacific

its metamorphosing protagonist, Gibreel and Saladin, both archangel and demon, Manfred Schmeling observes that in this text one situation is simply a metaphor for another. Indeed, the ‘act of narration itself is as if contaminated by this struggle between good and evil, by the hybrid states that characterize the cosmos of the hero […] the authorial narrator lends his voice to this double role’ (2006: 23) Schmeling goes on to quote Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to show a Saladin struggling with his many stories and concluding a hybrid text with satirical allusions to (Western) archetypes of the mutant, and a ‘borrowing’ from fairy tale. This just happens (fortuitously?) to be Beauty and the Beast. Whether ‘the metamorphosis of Saladin Chamcha made him a kind of mutant or rather a devil-master, the fact is […] that the two daughters of Hadj Sufyan had taken him under their wing and were looking after him as only Beauties can look after the Beast’. Gorodé’s narrative strategies may be similarly contaminated by the hybrid states that characterize the cosmos of her reincarnating characters, but her text would seem to make the case that its chain of metamorphoses are neither never-ending transformation of words or intertexts, nor metaphors of a lack of any single origin: their choice is motivated by historical and present social and psychological contexts. The text itself provides an explanation of the power of the ogres of the fairy tale, Old Tom and the Orator, as embodying and deriving from the imbalance of gender power. ‘You belong to him because he took you when you were little, on the rock in the graveyard of canoes […] And then he let you grow up until the day he submitted you to his will again and made you his thing’ [‘Tu lui appartiens parce qu’il t’a prise toute petite sur leur pierre du cimetière des pirogues. […] Et il t’a laissée grandir jusqu’au jour où il t’a soumise à nouveau à sa volonté. Et il a fait de toi sa chose’] (Gorodé, 2004a: 106). Gorodé’s tableaux in L’Épave are closer to Franz Kafka’s material metaphors than to Rushdie’s phantasmagorical transformations. We recall Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s short story entitled ‘Metamorphosis’, an ordinary young man who wakes up one morning changed into a frightful but very real dung-beetle. The figure of Old Tom does, of course, echo back to a European (or universal) literary problematic of good and evil, recalling figures such as Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare’s Othello, Hesse’s Haller (Steppenwolfe), or indeed Beckett’s human wrecks. The allusions to Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and to Jack the Ripper, are explicit in Gorodé’s text. Similarly, Gorodé’s sustained exploration of concepts such as ‘la fête’ recalls Baudelaire’s rejection of the ‘fête servile’ in his poem

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 230

12/03/2014 14:40:03

The Hybrid Within

231

‘Recueillement’ in the Fleurs du mal and his reflection on the two sides to the life of the senses: Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile, Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci, Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile, Ma Douleur, donne-moi la main; viens par ici.

In Gorodé’s novel, ‘la fête’ evokes a sense of community and celebration, found in the sociability and sharing of Éva’s regular Sunday bougna, a meal prepared in a communal earth oven with her extended family; in Éva’s euphoric memories of the Kanak Popular School movement; or in the solidarity and purpose of the March for Independence in the opening pages of the narrative. However, this rally ends at, and blends into, the commercialism of the Saturday commercial fair or ‘fête’ on the Place des Cocotiers, and Saturday-night partying in the bars of Noumea, the scene of young Tom and young Léna’s first meeting. Like the commercial ‘fair’, the empty, only apparent, vivacity of buying and selling, parading the body, and imbibing (drugs, sex, and alcohol) in the false companionship of the night clubs and bars of Noumea reveals quite different faces of the same word, ‘fête’. The text’s devices of mise en abyme situate its metamorphosing elements between real, local, and historical contexts, and the world of the supernatural; between meta-text and narrative. In the small beach shop run by the now elderly son of the colonial Sea-Captain and his wife, a shop whose walls are covered by historical images of boats, from Roman galley to sailing ship, a canoe and a yacht of equal size (an ironically coded signifier for the Noumea Agreement) are encased in glass under the counter. These representations of history contrast both with the wreck of the ‘real’ colonial boat, Fleur de Corail [Coral Flower], whose overturned hull pulled up on the beach shelters the love-making of Old and young Tom, and with the black rock of the ancestors, in the canoe cemetery up in the customary lands. Similar figures of wreckage and degeneracy proliferate intrusively throughout the novel. Lila describes herself as ‘a heart of stone in a human body adrift for life. A wreck, Nanny. Adrift. A drifting wreck. That’s me. That’s Lila, big-mouth slut blabbing off her stories everywhere to hide her shame’ (‘un cœur de pierre dans un corps humain, en dérive pour la vie. Une épave, mamie. L’Épave. L’Épave en dérive. Oui, voilà ce qu’elle est, cette ordure de Lila qui ramène sa gueule partout avec ses histoires pour cacher sa honte’) (42). After floating like two twigs or ‘two wrecks’

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 231

12/03/2014 14:40:03

232

The Literatures of the French Pacific

in the unfathomable current of their storyteller friend’s tales that carries them, irresistibly drawn together, towards some ‘enchanted atoll’ or ‘tormented ocean’ (‘atoll enchanté’ or ‘océan tourmenté’) (15), Tom and Léna lie on the sand under the wrecked hull, watched through a spy hole by Old Tom, ‘lost children in a frail craft, forgotten in a shipwreck’ (28). These children have quite literally wandered into the ogre’s lair. These recurring images return us to the question of whether Gorodé’s characters are, in fact, deprived of agency by the presence of the ogre (or the web of language), caught in the net of Old Tom. The final scene of the novel remains ambiguous: little Tom (son of young Léna) and little Léna (daughter of the Orator) meet and make love on the black rock after the death of the Orator (whom young Léna refuses to save from falling into the shark hole once she recognizes him as her childhood oppressor) and of Old Léna/Héléna, who follows her lover over the cliff in her despair at his death. In Kanak kinship first cousins are brothers and sisters and little Tom and little Léna are in their turn engaging in a relationship forbidden by custom. There is also some possibility that the pair are half-brother and sister. However, their relationship is neither clearly incestuous in Kanak society, where a relationship between a male and female parallel or first cousin is regarded as a ‘forbidden’ relationship (i.e., incestuous) rather than an ‘illicit’ relationship (‘illicit’ meaning not permitted by the marrying rules of the group) (Salomon and Hamelin, 2008: 44), nor is it an act of coercion. There may be a ‘différance’ here within sameness and repetition, as in the final words of the novel this young couple returns ‘from the thicket of the wrecked waka where, on the black stone, they are learning to love’ (‘du bosquet de l’épave de la grande pirogue où, sur la pierre noire, ils s’apprennent à aimer’) (167). For Sonia Faessel, in Gorodé’s novel, where the central scene of women’s lives is an incestuous threesome in the case or domestic space of a respected man of the tribu, within a perverse and alienating sexuality (especially as this is seen by religion), the free Kanak woman does not yet exist: women are caught in net(work)s that imprison rather than bestow identity. Lila, Léna, and Éva, indeed almost all of the women characters, have all lost a young son (to the power of his father, the ogre), and thus, Faessel argues, have lost their power as women. For this critic, the very founding myth of the wrecked canoe which throws grandfather and granddaughter together, like the novel’s many dreams and premonitions, imprisons the generations of Léna in the net of the fisherman, in an inescapable relationship of domination (Faessel, 2010: 153–66).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 232

12/03/2014 14:40:03

The Hybrid Within

233

Yet, to attempt to sum up more inclusively, L’Épave is a complex text, spun with many competing points of view; a daring and outspoken first novel, but one whose deepest meanings must remain indirect and to some extent open, undecided, unfinished business. Written largely from inside Kanak culture, where the power of non-rational forces such as sorcery and shape-shifting, dream as prophecy, or vengeful return from generation to generation remain self-evident, it is troubling for the insider as well as the outside reader in its ‘speaking out’ of an unspoken or ‘unspeakable’ side of a simultaneously celebrated life within custom. The writing of women’s right to pleasure and sexual freedom encounters the difficult truth that, in the present contexts of power, this may also constitute self-loss or self-enslavement – like the power of the sorcerer over his victim, as Éva observes. In fact, a number of forms of violence exist simultaneously in these texts. The proliferation of stories of intense forbidden loves, or of sorcery across a social and historical spectrum, extends the scope of the book beyond confessional narrative into forms of indirect analysis of history. For example, Maria’s Kanak grandmother and the European settler who Maria discovers is actually her grandfather were prevented from marrying by what Gorodé’s text labels ‘colonial apartheid’. After the settler’s wife and children die in an unexplained car accident (another ‘wreck’), the secret love continues into old age, concealed in a relationship of housekeeper and widower. Gorodé’s novel is criticized by many readers, including Faessel, for its apparently fatalistic circling back to its point of departure. I would argue, however, that this is rather a spiralling movement – ‘at the same time the spiral is going out, it is returning’ – as Witi Ihimaera has often described Maori ways of thinking. This is a to and fro linking movement between different spaces in which thinking creates knots but does not settle, a movement marked by the possibility of continuing metamorphoses and of interlinked times. The novel opens with Tom’s dream in which a pursuing shark fin is at the same time the beckoning fisherman in a canoe close to the rock, the protective ancestor, and the devouring monster. Alongside the destruction of binary oppositions and the introduction of a principle of uncertainty, as we have noted, the text develops ‘postmodern’ techniques of parallelism and repetition as of cyclical or rather spiralling return where small details have changed the initial picture. In Gorodé’s text, the negative figure of the wreck, associated with the sexual violation of the child, and the positive dual figure of the waka stone (mauri or life-spirit) and canoe have become interchangeable, ambivalent, two different faces of custom that are not

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 233

12/03/2014 14:40:03

234

The Literatures of the French Pacific

mutually exclusive. On the other hand, Gorodé’s dialogic or hybrid novel might be read as a form of personal discursive therapy or as a ‘transitional object’ in the Winnicott sense: a tool that allows the writer to stage and confront her own and her society’s most obscure or unspeakable loves, hates, fears, and anxieties (Winnicott, 1971). Recent social science research has confirmed the prevalence of the issues of gender power imbalance her novel raises, and the increasing willingness of Kanak women to bring these into the open. Salomon and Hamelin’s 2003 survey on violence in New Caledonia, cited at the beginning of this chapter, interviewed 1,012 women across the general female population aged eighteen to fifty-four, including 441 Kanak women. The responses showed that it was Kanak women who were, by a considerable margin, most likely to suffer violence – 34 per cent had experienced physical assault and 17 per cent rape or attempted rape in the year preceding the survey. Predictably, there was a strong statistical link with this violence and access to material, social, and symbolic resources. The survey also documented 12.5 per cent of the Kanak women interviewed reporting forced first sexual intercourse: in this case, without any significant variation between generations. Nonetheless, the study showed that, somewhat unexpectedly, the vast majority of Kanak women, but particularly the younger women, disapprove of sexual violence and even ‘go so far as to challenge patriarchal control’ (2008: 37) For Salomon, this corroborates the increasing emergence of the idea of equality among a group her earlier work had argued to be excluded from the sphere of power on the grounds of biology – the impurity, assigned to the procreative and domestic spheres they inhabit, and subject to discipline by the husband, his mother, and the husband’s real and classificatory brothers (2000a). Yet Salomon and Hamelin also noted that, despite increasing convergence of representations of equality by Kanak and European women, only 2 per cent of those Kanak women reporting sexual violence in the survey went to the police. The issue of the gap between violation and reporting is explained by the interlocking nature of family and other social networks in an island community, and especially in rural areas. In the present transitional sui generis collectivity, two of the three Provinces created by the Noumea Agreement are controlled by Kanak still largely living in tribus, or ‘customary lands’, under customary structures. L’Épave can be seen both as a kind of writing with, and a writing back to, Salomon’s research. The survey was, in fact, made possible by the support of Déwe Gorodé and through her by the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 234

12/03/2014 14:40:03

The Hybrid Within

235

government of New Caledonia, a strikingly feminized government from 2004, and by the extensive women’s associations. The challenge to the rules of hierarchy and alliance that define possible marital partners, still chosen in some cases by the parents, remains largely indirect in Gorodé literary portraits. If her work shows what the social scientists document, that what is unacceptable in sexual relations in the tribu is non-compliance with the rules rather than violence or the absence of consent, her work also stages the difficult consequences for Kanak characters of not respecting social rules, or even of refusing violence, that place them outside their community. The social scientists make the argument that ‘the drop in the threshold of tolerated violence now distinguishes all women in New Caledonia from those of other countries in the Pacific region where comparable surveys have been performed, such as Samoa’ (Salomon and Hamelin, 2008: 42). In Vanuatu, the 2013 Citizen Access to Information study found that 79 per cent of Ni-Vanuatu women surveyed nationally felt they deserved to be beaten at times and 85 per cent believed they were duty bound to submit to their partners. In addition, 84 per cent of women said that physical violence between a couple was a private matter and should be kept within the family. Women’s crisis centres in Vanuatu, moreover, are run by externally funded agencies such as AusAid who also commissioned the above study (Toa and Wilson, 2013). Salomon and Hamelin attribute the difference between Pacific countries to the singular nature of the political context in New Caledonia, claiming that this permitted the emergence of a radical feminist movement, at least initially through young Kanak within the pro-independence movement. The dynamic, they contend, is later redeployed under arrangements with the French government to reduce economic and social inequalities, resulting in the establishment of powerful women’s associations such as Marie-Claude Tjibaou’s SOS Violences Sexuelles, in 1992, which condemned violence against children, and the more challenging Femmes et Violences Conjugales, in 1998, which also targeted violence against women. The effects of the application of the 2002 French parity law (where each political party is required to include equal numbers of men and women on their lists) were striking, raising women’s participation rates in Provincial government from 16.7 per cent to 46.3 per cent in 2004. The FLNKS executive committee had opposed parity on the grounds that it was a colonially imposed regime and the Customary Senate claimed it would have a destabilizing impact on Kanak society. Kanak women, for their part, largely refused ideological identity with feminism in favour

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 235

12/03/2014 14:40:03

236

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of pragmatic unity but supported the new place for women’s voices in decision making. Despite such initial resistance, the researchers conclude that a new concept of the person that is more individualistic and less dominated by the male ethos of clans and alliances is strengthening in New Caledonia. In their view, this is primarily an outcome of the largely disavowed feminist struggle initiated in the First World in the 1970s. In the Loyalty Islands, however, as Salomon and Hamelin themselves point out, some of the women’s groups seeking to confront sexual violence are insisting on the responsibility of colonialism and the process of cultural erosion rather than longstanding gender norms, rejecting the universalist codes and conceptions of French law in favour of Kanak values. This indigenous feminism, conclude the French social scientists, has been influenced in turn by the International Indigenous Women’s Forum of 1999. Conclusion The modes of literary counter-violence examined in Gorodé’s literary writing arise from deep inside indigenous contexts and from without (from the appropriation of feminist frames and from the process of constructing a distinctive Kanak womanist frame), and from the to and fro movement between these, to stage pressing questions of gender power imbalance and sexuality. Indeed, her work elides the distinction between outsider modes (critical, ethnographic, and detective) and insider modes (empathetic and autobiographical). Writing back to colonial violence, like speaking out against Kanak patriarchal violence and interrogating the customary frame, rewriting traditional myth and women’s position in it, while simultaneously borrowing from European myth, constitute forms of refusal but also forms of doubleness and apparent dissonance. Gorodé’s solutions to violence remain centred in Kanak heritage and ways of being, and yet attempt to counter the excesses of a warrior culture in which war, masculinity, and sexual domination are closely connected, and female sexuality largely occulted. Salomon and Hamelin note that in times past some clubs used for fighting were shaped to resemble the sexual organ of the male, designated as his ‘war’ in a Paicî expression, and thus likened to a weapon. Such language, they argue, demonstrates a certain male socialization towards sexual aggression or predation (2008: 34). However, we recall Gorodé’s admission that the political discourse that she herself used, colonizers/colonized, ‘does not

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 236

12/03/2014 14:40:03

The Hybrid Within

237

account for the perversity and ambiguity of the real relationship between the colonisers and the colonised in the past and in the present’ (2005: unpag.). Such ‘perversity’ is similarly present in the relation between men and women in her work, most clearly in its figures of sexual passion and sexual possession. Her courageous denunciation of internal violence against Kanak women (that could be turned against her by the ill-intentioned to weaken her own authority and the society she seeks to value) and her own use of writing out the seductions of sexual violence as a form of counter-violence may resonate at least partially with Homi Bhabha’s notion of a ‘sly’ appropriation and remaking of the dominant culture(s) by working on the interstices and the multiplicities within. However, as we have suggested earlier, the third spaces Gorodé creates in her parti pris of Melanesian ways of thinking to counter ‘the single way of thinking’ are not exactly the third space, the in-between space of Bhabha. In its particular forms of openness to multiple explorations, including the question of the liberation of the sexual female body and the pain/pleasure of sexual possession, Gorodé creates an Oceanian or Kanak hybridity, sui generis, in a novel marked dramatically by its own internal inconsistencies, plural hybridities, and dissonance.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 237

12/03/2014 14:40:03

7

Cross-cultural Readings of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of Koné] Intertextuality as Hybridity Intertextuality as Hybridity

The present chapter investigates in greater depth the nature and effects of the third spaces created in New Caledonia in the encounters between Kanak and Caldoche (Caledonian) cultures; a mixing given various labels including métissage and, to use the term coined by Nicolas Kurtovitch, ‘interfaces’. Principally concerned with ‘intertexts’, that is, texts shared between cultures, whether borrowed, mimicked, appropriated, re-configured or re-possessed, the chapter will follow the mixed fortunes of the sharing of the story of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ [The Master of [the Land of] Koné]. The consideration of ‘interfaces’ has been narrowed principally to two linked themes central to all of the literatures of New Caledonia: the themes of nature and culture. Both nature and culture, and the symbiotic relationship between them, are imaged variably in ‘Le Maître de Koné’ by the ‘violent earth’ (terre violente) and the ‘peaceful kingdom’ (séjour paisible) – tropes that were, not coincidentally, central to our earlier study of the topoi of exile and of home. Earlier chapters noted that the Other (that which the Self/Europe is not, and which allows the definition of the European Self) is either misrecognized as the ‘Barbarian’, the human lacking civilization or culture or the ignoble dark cannibal, or idealized as Pure Nature or Noble Savage. The trope of the noble savage derives from very early (classical) representations of a Golden Age of mankind: an Eden of moral goodness and sexual liberality, or a Utopia of equality in a primitive/ non-technological society. Almost all of the colonial and modern New Caledonian texts, including indigenous texts themselves, continue to stage, contest, or modify these early myths as the old naturel becomes

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 238

12/03/2014 14:40:03

Intertextuality as Hybridity

239

the new ‘indigenous’ or the ‘eco-savage’. Déwé Gorodé’s L’Épave, for its part, deconstructs this exoticized indigenous figure from within Kanak culture. Jean Guiart’s work outlines two tendencies present in European imaginative representations of non-technological societies: the first, a society dominated by the fear of the Other, by preparation for war, massacre, and institutionalized cannibalism; and the second, a culture based on consensus, will to harmony, and search for balance (Guiart, 1996). The ethnographer argues, however, that these representations are largely present in all human societies, and it is the particular (historical) need to adapt to the environment and historical event that makes one or other tendency predominant. Louis-José Barbançon’s La Terre du lézard [The Land of the Lizard] La Terre du lézard [The Land of the Lizard] (Barbançon, 1995) is an essai-mémoire by Louis-José Barbançon, great grandson of one Philipp-Marie Albani, who was deported from Corsica to hard labour in New Caledonia in 1876 for an honour killing and later settled on a farming lot in the isolated bush town of Pouembout. It was written in the context of Barbançon’s pressing quest to establish his identity as (like Tjibaou) a child of a ‘savage’ New Caledonian soil. The subject of Barbançon’s first-person narration sets out to incorporate, and demonstrate his identification with, a Kanak culture vitally connected with the earth, from which true autochthony is seen to spring. New Caledonia is thus represented in Barbançon’s title and text as the living ‘land of the lizard’. The original Kanak name of his provincial west coast town, meaning the ‘tail of the lizard’ and pronounced ‘Bu - Rhai’ in the local A’jië language, functions as a central textual generator to incorporate the largely Europeanized settler town, ‘Bourail’, into the living land as a single and connected unit. Barbançon’s text presents the ancient house of the chief, the moara or the blood of the ancestors, with its roof spear (flèche faîtière) pointing upwards like a lizard’s tail and indistinguishable from the nature with which it merges, as emblematic of New Caledonian culture in general. The writer explains that the conch shells attached to the flèche faîtière come from the reef and look back towards it, unifying earth, sea, and sky. Man is signified as meaningful precisely to the extent that he, too, is an integral part of this environment,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 239

12/03/2014 14:40:03

240

The Literatures of the French Pacific

in which the natural (earth, sky, and sea) and the social (the chiefly great house) come together. The properties of the coastal tribus (again in the word’s dual sense of ‘customary lands’ and of the social group who live on them) are said to stretch as far as the reef itself. Beyond this expanse lies the world of the outsider. Land Ownership Barbançon’s book, like much of New Caledonian writing, thus indirectly raises one of the hotly debated issues of land occupancy in many parts of the Pacific – the inclusion of the shoreline (and sea-bed) in indigenous land claims. The ownership of these zones has been a continually festering wound in race relations in Aoteoroa/New Zealand, for example, since the Labour government’s Foreshore and Seabed Act in 2004 vested these zones in the Crown. The National Government repealed the act in 2011, but the debate on ownership continues and has expanded to include the traditional taonga or treasure of water and all waterways. In an informal oral presentation during a conference at the Tjibaou Centre some years back, Fote Trolue explained traditional Kanak land tenure as situated somewhere between collective and private ownership and based on principles that take some but relatively little account of the private property of European common law. A Kanak, the first Kanak judge recounted, belongs to a clan identified with the living land. The elders give the male child a place in the clan and on the land by giving him his first name. Land may be ceded for a limited period to a user who has no land. Indeed, an owner, traditionally in need of any extra hands or fighting bodies for the group he could find, should not refuse a piece of land to anyone who asks for it. The clan, as the first holder of land, can also give land – temporarily or permanently – as part of a marriage agreement. In the grouping of family lineages that recognize a common ancestor, it is the elder branches (descended from the first occupants) that control land ownership and distribute parcels of land to the various younger lineages. The chiefs of each lineage then distribute usage rights to the families in their lineage. Customary owners may come into conflict with these customary holders over reciprocal obligations or with those who usurp land rights. Conflicts also arise because the borders of land owned are not recorded. In spite of this, an owner must ‘remain silent before the face of the land’, for if he lacks respect, the land which is the burial place of the ancestor – and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 240

12/03/2014 14:40:03

Intertextuality as Hybridity

241

consequently not for sale – will ‘swallow him up’. Our study will pursue this pervasive theme of incorporation through a consideration of the themes of sorcery, food, and intertextuality. Incorporation, we recall, was evoked in Gorodé’s L’Épave by the figures of the pursuing shark fin, the canoe stone, and the cannibal ogre and in the tale of Tâdo by Crab. As Fote Trolue acknowledged, however, traditional land tenure has been transformed in major ways by colonization, most particularly by the creation of indigenous reserves by the colonial administration. Various historical understandings of land tenure now coexist; the indivisible and inalienable land of the ‘reserves’ created by a colonial administration; the more recent notion of clan or common ownership (the Administration’s belief in collective Kanak ownership, Trolue notes, has sometimes suited Kanak purposes); and the ‘private property’ of French common law, characterized by the greater market value of land better adapted to development – in mining areas, for example. In contemporary New Caledonia, major redistributions between state-owned land, reservations (1,163,000 hectares), clan property, and private property are in process. As Trolue sees it, the Jacobin project of centralization and universality of values and institutions has failed. In all New Caledonian cultures, however, the land remains an element of respectability and of recognized value in the construction and establishment of a prestigious identity. It also continues to be a force, and a jealous, even savage, guardian of those it holds within it. In Barbançon’s text, the place name ‘Bu-rai’, through its closeness to the signifier ‘Bou’, or penis, is seen to refer to the notion of ‘genitor’, and to the lizard stones set along the mounds of the yam gardens that shelter these material symbols of fertility. This text, too, proceeds by means of word and sound associations, language play (repetitions, polysemy, sound effects, and earthiness), and the parallelisms that characterize much of Kanak oral literature. The networks and cycles of names, of both places and people, create what Guiart has seen as the dynamism of Kanak culture. He identifies this in his ‘Reflection on the concept of culture applied to the South Pacific’ [‘Réflexion sur le concept de culture appliqué au Pacifique Sud’] as the ‘splitting of houses’ (clans, tertres [house mounds], lineages) and the sending out of pseudopodia along well-signed tracks of privileged alliances, movement through geographical and symbolic spaces, and reciprocal visits between the tribes of the interior and of the coastal lands formalized by myth and kept alive by customary gesture. This culture, observes Guiart, has faculties of adaptation precisely in its capacity to assimilate strangers

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 241

12/03/2014 14:40:03

242

The Literatures of the French Pacific

into its verbal and territorial networks (1996). Barbançon’s identification with a harmonious nature/culture, with the local place, and with the Kanak place name and its associations lays claim to such an adoption, to his place as ‘guest’ within this largely non-European world. Official New Caledonian colonial administration, however, has been marked by a separation, if not always of biological bodies, then at least of the two cultures, leaving little shared space in-between. For most of its inhabitants as well as for its visitors, Bourail has taken on the consonance of a French word and is seen as a French place name. In Gorodé’s L’Épave, too, set higher up on the opposite coast, the canoe graveyard of the tribu is hidden away from the view of those Europeans (tourists) who come merely to walk on the white sandy beach or bathe in the sparkling blue lagoon. Many of the mutual influences of one group on the other, the ‘savage’ on the ‘civilized’, Bu-rai on Bourail, have not been widely recognized (much as the impact on Europe of the observations of the South Seas made by Cook, Forster, Bougainville, d’Entrecasteaux, and others, for example, has only just begun to be investigated). Déwé Gorodé’s texts imply, on the other hand, that Kanak knew almost everything about the lives and hidden secrets of the settlers, and Mariotti’s Kanak figures are silent but also perpetually, secretly, watching. Jean Guiart, too, has argued that extensive mutual influences have marked the two local cultures since colonization, at least as much on the white settler as on the Kanak side. Local specificity, claims Guiart, is the outcome of the memory of a Creole subculture dating from the last century and remaining verbal in origin. This largely derives from Kanak popular knowledge and practices in addition to what had been borrowed from the way of living of Australian ranchers from Queensland. According to Guiart, both material and symbolic cultural characteristics have long been transferred by means of language, between Canaques and Caldoches. This transfer, as he qualifies his statement, would be truer of the bush than of the rural towns, and barely valid for Noumea. Shared Tropes of Nature/Culture: Séjour paisible [Peaceable Home] and Terre violente [Violent Earth] Barbançon’s textual reference to ‘the peaceable kingdom’ is inspired by Maurice Leenhardt’s texts on the mwaciri or séjour paisible, a reference picked up again in the title of Jean Mariotti’s novel, La Conquête du

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 242

12/03/2014 14:40:03

Intertextuality as Hybridity

243

séjour paisible [The Conquest of the séjour paisible, the Peaceable Kingdom]. The term signifies the symbolic belonging of a social group to the blood of the mother and the bones of the father, to the land where the ancestors repose. Leenhardt’s text, for its part, has its own origins in the translations of the notebooks of Boésou Ërijisi. For the ethnographer, the authenticity of the Kanak person, Do Kamo, derives from a fusion with a natural world that is an intrinsic part of his social status and his spiritual being. This is both symbolized by and materialized in the mwaciri, the spatial organization of the pre-European village, with its hierarchical wide central ceremonial path of carefully tended grass bordered by ‘masculine’ colonial pines (araucarias) and ‘feminine’ coconut palms, leading up to the raised mound of earth on which the chief’s round grande case sat, and the narrower side paths where the women’s houses had their (secondary) place. The mwaciri is also the enveloping presence of the dead, together with and guiding the living, the place where, for Leenhardt, the (originally female) totems and the male gods live in harmony. However, according to a more modern critical understanding, for Alban Bensa, for example, such a realm is that of an essential and eternal nature/culture, of a cosmogony where metaphor is single in reference and the gap between observing subject and object has disappeared (2001). The contemporary ethnographer claims that this high myth of the universal, of Lévi-Straussian pensée mythique (the ‘fetish’ of a single and eternal culture or mythical thinking) is brought into question by his own fieldwork in the Northern Province. For Bensa, as we saw earlier, his own contemporary collections of tales from oral tradition demonstrate the historical dynamism of Kanak populations and their matrimonial pathways, and the historico-political contingency of myth. Similarly focusing on the vital importance of the socio-cultural and pragmatic contexts of the telling/retelling and reception of a story, Emma Sinclair-Reynolds cautions (2013) that the power relations between oral and written forms open up the potential for the written forms in French to take on an authority that might obscure and replace the earlier, local, memorized or recited texts. Whereas translations of Kanak oral literature introduced through the French education system in the present contexts of identity construction appear to have a decolonizing potential, preserving knowledge and creating spaces of shared heritage, this rewriting can also be a way of advancing particular political interests. Drawing on the theoretical equivalence articulated by translation theory between translation and rewriting, her doctoral

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 243

12/03/2014 14:40:03

244

The Literatures of the French Pacific

thesis considers the multiple layers of translation at work in Leenhardt’s founding compilation of oral texts, Documents néo-calédoniens, in the light of the possibility that even Leenhardt’s Kanak informants were in part writing for a European readership, concerned to record particular claims and increase the status of their own group, thereby elevating a local truth normally negotiated with a listening audience to the status of a general (written) truth. While Bensa’s critique of Leenhardt (and of his disciple, Guiart) evidently has some foundation, it is also the case that all of the contemporary Kanak writers, and many of their European counterparts, as we have seen with Louise Michel, pose the question of the part played by the universal in the particular – making claims in their work for what is shared as well as claims for the recognition of what makes them different. Participating in the universal, by definition the less dynamic face, does not disqualify or reduce the impact of the affirmation of the particular and historical face. The dynamic or particular face of the interface may be precisely the place of shifting encounters and renegotiations of the respective share of the ‘universal’ and the ‘particular’, their coexistence and alternation. In this respect, it could also be argued that Leenhardt’s own definitions, as we saw earlier, are not completely monolithic and static. His reformulation of the Kanak ‘Word’ as Bao, the ‘long god who stretches out’ from one place to another, the founding principle and equivalent of the biblical ‘Word made Flesh’, suggests once again that rather than being a fixed idea of an immobile, eternal nature/culture, his conception of the creation of man and society has a certain dynamism. (The colourful motto of a Christianized, independent Vanuatu in the national language, Bislama, ‘Long God youmi stanup’ reflects a similar dynamic hybridization.) Leenhardt’s selection and readings of what he names the ‘Cycle of the Lizard’, including the oral tale of the Maître de Koné, for example, provide an account of historical and social changes resulting in changing references and the decreasing value of the ‘feminine’ totem. Similarly, although individuals belonged symbolically to a moaro, a word designating both place and social group, the terminology has also changed to show the non-static and historically moving nature of this apparently ‘universal’ organization. In fact, the moaro has been renamed, first as the tribu, often simply translated as ‘Kanak village’ and, since the Noumea Agreement, as ‘customary lands.’ José Barbançon’s claim to belonging to the mountains of New Caledonia, of being possessed by them rather than possessing them, is put forward through his identification with the mwaciri both as

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 244

12/03/2014 14:40:03

Intertextuality as Hybridity

245

something single and eternal and as a product of the moves towards political and social reconciliation of the different New Caledonian communities in the 1990s. In the reported words of his old Kanak fellow Union Calédonienne party member and mentor, Jérémie, the earth recognizes the smell of those who have lived on it, black and white. The current vital debates in the Pacific go beyond the rehearsal of arguments of colonial spoliation and/or of economic development to engage with notions of reconciliation between competing but also increasingly common understandings of citizenship and land tenure, of the rights of first inhabitants and of colonizing or welcomed peoples, of European law and indigenous custom, and of European and indigenous languages. Scholars have reached increasing consensus with Bensa that Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s genius, for example, was to build from the local founding stories to create syncretic national myths, thereby marrying the eternal single culture (rural and customary) with a culture constantly reshaped by historico-political contingencies (urban/multicultural). Tjibaou, in his now canonical cultural text Kanaké, takes a local story of the first ancestor and transforms him into an archetype and national symbol, a past model for the future, through local metaphor. He is the ancestor, the first-born. He is the flèche faitière, the central mast, and the sanctuary of the grande case. He is the word that gives man existence. This same word establishes the system of organization that orders the relationship between men and their relations with the geographical and mythical surroundings (Tjibaou, 1996: 47–8). From a local hero, Tein Kanaké has become a traditional national figure, whose life now figures on storyboards in the presentation of a national mythology along the chemin des plantes, the extensively planted ceremonial Kanak pathway that winds its way (and guides tourists) through vegetation and traditional gardens up to the Centre Tjibaou. Modes of Incorporation and Metamorphosis: Food, Sorcery, Intertextuality The play-spectacle Kanaké, as we noted in Chapter 4, opens with an exchange of yams among Kanak, a ceremonial ingesting or incorporation and sharing. It then acts out the arrival of the whites and the fundamental dislocation of the old universe, organized visibly in space

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 245

12/03/2014 14:40:03

246

The Literatures of the French Pacific

by the ancient house mounds and the sacred fraternal societies these mounds are seen to have symbolized. The time then comes for a second ceremony of boenando, reconciliation with the whites through the sharing of the sacrificial yams, identified with the séjour paisible, the moaro, and social harmony. In the tales from oral tradition, the digestion or incorporation (or refusal) of certain foods signifies the passage between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors. In the short fragment entitled ‘Au vieux bois noir’ [Under the old Blackwood Tree] in Graines de pin colonnaire, the rather unusual young man encountered by the narrator in the shade under a Blackwood tree, who turns out to have been a victim of an accident on that very spot many years earlier, can be identified as not of the living by his refusal to touch the fruit that the narrator offers. The most sacred osmosis or exchange is symbolized by the yam, which continues to structure the material and symbolic life of the culture, both as everyday food, and, according to the species of yam, as food for the chiefs and the gods. The phallic yam is married to the feminine earth and in the traditional feast of the new yams, the first yams of the year bring blessings upon one’s descendants. The ceremony of the yams also precedes the marriage ceremony and the gift of monnaie made ‘pour manger le contenu de la marmite’ [‘in order to be entitled to eat the contents of the cooking-pot’]; women often being designated in popular language as l’eau or la marmite [water or the cooking-pot] (Douglas, 1979: 147). Tjibaou invented new forms from old in order, he said, to inscribe the clan within the city, although in his texts, in an inversion, the city is often a place where nature becomes dead and dirty. His invention takes its inspiration both from the old texts – the texts that influenced the former priest include Leenhardt’s Do Kamo and the Leenhardt–Boésou notion of the mwaciri/peaceful kingdom – and from opposition to the texts of Western capitalist materialism. For Tjibaou, reconciliation, the new third way or relationship, has its own exigencies. It reverses relations of precedence in the nature/culture relationship, placing, in first position, a recognition of Kanak values related more closely to a nature where séjour paisible dominates. Kanaky/Kanaké is then, first and foremost, the land. A clan which loses its land, its ancestral mounds, for Tjibaou, loses its points of reference and its identity. For the Kanak, time is the life of plants and the rhythm of nature; no longer the short time of European control but the long time of myth, of the rhythm of the cultivation of the yam, of youth and old age, or, as in Gorodé’s

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 246

12/03/2014 14:40:03

Intertextuality as Hybridity

247

‘J’use du temps’ or Graines de pin colonnaire, the all-importance of atmospheric conditions or weather. Similarly, the person is not an individual or a physical body, but the blood of the mother (earth) and the social position bestowed by the father. An entity’s prestige lies in the network of relations of which he/she is part and not necessarily, observes Tjibaou, in paid employment. The land links the person to the group and also to the cosmos. In this space, the Word is not a thesis, but passes, as a gesture or an action, through the whole body. Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s representations create a new syncretic ethics of transformation and metamorphosis, exemplified at its most extreme by the manducation of the heart of an enemy to seal an alliance, likened to the ingestion of the body and blood of Christ in the mass. In this particular ‘incorporation’, Christianity, like the French language, has been ‘adopted’ and then adapted within a Kanak tradition. It has also changed Kanak tradition. In Tjibaou’s texts, dominated by his speeches, collected in La Présence Kanak, intertextuality, here the repetition of the Leenhardt–Bwésou ‘peaceful kingdom’ and its avatar of the boenando or collective sharing of the yams, works to maintain the representation of a nurturing Caledonian nature with minimal space between the terms ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and a sense of timeless continuity and recurrence. But intertextuality, the incorporation of one text by another, also paradoxically foregrounds the linear time of history/culture as political action and change. As Charles Illouz claims for Kanak oral stories (2000), each new story needs to be read as interacting with and changing the other versions of the story to inscribe its own position and agenda. Intertextuality in Tjibaou, in fact, functions as mise en abyme, creating both repetition and self-reflexive and critical distance between the evolving multicultural political present and the eternal Kanak past. The nature of this connection is expressed, for example, in the metaphorical representation of political parties by Tjibaou as ‘crutches’ that allow ‘the belly of the earth’ to express itself. Déwé Gorodé’s stories similarly rewrite the nature/culture division to give it, in this instance, a Kanak and also a woman-centred focus. For example, the short story ‘Une Dame dans la nuit’ [A Night Visitor], published in L’Agenda, describes a tattered landscape where an old woman, visited the previous evening as a warning by an ancestor in rags and tatters, has been sitting out the ravages of a cyclone alone in her case. Only the old woman and the taros – that is, the feminine principles – have resisted the storm’s destruction.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 247

12/03/2014 14:40:03

248

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Food as Nature/Culture The repeated and lengthy descriptions of food signify the refinements and rites of a Kanak culture always close to the natural world. In ‘Utê Mûrûnû’ the young girls throw fruit to attract the attention of the boys. The visit of an older brother to Dui Nateï, announcing the marriage arranged for him, is accompanied by a gift of foods from the river and the garden prepared for him by his aunties. In ‘La Cordyline’, although there is a hint of irony in the description of the strong, black, and rather bitter hot coffee that marks the early-morning departure of the family group to work in the coffee plantations of the Europeans, the food carried with the group is also described in loving detail. ‘As an hors d’oeuvre, there were pieces of manioc cooked in an underground oven of heated stones, and green and pink sticks of sugar cane to nibble on. For the meal, the yams were accompanied by boiled green bananas with shrimp and pieces of eel’ (Gorodé, 1994: 46). If the short story in the same collection ‘La Saison des pommes kanakes’ [The Kanak Apple Season] also begins with early morning coffee, this is the ‘coffee drunk on grandmother’s lap’ (69) and the colonial product is thus assimilated and re-appropriated as typically Kanak, associated with the emotionally intense memories of maternal feeding, given that the grandmother is often the primary caregiver for young children. On the ceremonial visit to seek a matrimonial alliance, another grandmother who lives by herself in the bush offers the travellers hospitality in the form of coffee and manioc grated with coconut and cooked in the oven. To describe the following welcome in the allied clan, Gorodé uses verbs and adjectives that evoke the sensual pleasure of strong and varied tastes, colours and textures, and of a feeling of plenitude. The children are ‘stuffed full’ of ripe bananas, delicious pawpaws, and acidic mangoes. The women of the host tribu fill the visitors with intoxicating fresh green coconut, juicy sugar cane, and other passion fruits. ‘The midday meal united us around copious parcels of bougna made with chicken and an array of large dishes where bright red crab shells vied with the white fleshy trocas or the viscous grey of the dawas’ (73). The short text ‘On est déjà demain’ [It’s Tomorrow Already] describes the events of a day in the life of a busy woman and mother: morning coffee with a little bread for the numerous children, of whom three are adopted; sugar scraped from the bottom of the tin and more to be purchased – with what?; children to accompany across the ford

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 248

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

249

for the very early school bus; pigs to feed; followed by the collective preparation of the meal to be shared at the ceremony of mourning for a young relative, a young man killed in a car accident because he had been drinking. The narrator goes off to pick lettuces, dig up a long, fine yam, unearth some sweet potatoes, and pulls some manioc root to take to the ceremonial meal. The preparation of the feast is then described in minute detail – ovens prepared for the taros and the manioc and for the beef and pork, which are then wrapped in banana leaves softened over the flame and given flavour by a covering of branches from the native niaouli tree. The precise rules for the distribution of food are enumerated, spelling out the social hierarchies. The biggest share goes to the maternal uncles’ side, with the women and young people doing the serving. The narrator goes home to feed her own children before returning to help the other women serve the food. She will finish her day after midnight, giving the short text a title that is a literal staging of the concept of time in the French commonplace expression, ‘It’s tomorrow already’ [‘On est déjà demain’] (67). This text constitutes a valuing of women’s work and a description of women’s customary life in the ‘long time’ of the everyday. This is organized by the rhythm of preparations for, and performing of, all of the customary rituals of birth, marriage, and death. In ‘La Cordyline’, the branch of cordyline plant lying at the feet of the narrator in the furrow prepared for the yams, premonitory of a death, signifies modes of knowing that are distinctively based on the close Kanak relationship to nature, where everything signifies, provides cultural meanings. If Gorodé’s texts use food to characterize a society founded on reciprocity and service it is, however, through her knowledge of the poisonous or abortive properties of foods that Mûû’s grandmother is able to wreak her revenge on her granddaughter’s faithless white lover. In ‘Benjie, mon frère’ [My Brother, Benjie] (1996a: 71–89), on the other hand, it is the alcohol and drugs of modernity that constitute symbols of loss (vomiting) and the invasion of the body (AIDS). In fact, these foreign ‘foods’ are equated with the menacing forms of the lizard. Nonetheless, in L’Épave, Éva’s positive reuniting of the group around her Sunday bougna, prepared collectively in her ‘no-man’s land’, simply appears to go hand in hand, without too great a scandal, with illicit sex and the consumption of alcohol. Hybridity also characterizes the wedding en tribu attended by Léna and Tom, where a traditional feast and ceremony is followed by a Church wedding and then a celebration meal, washed down by an array of French alcohols. The European wedding rituals

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 249

12/03/2014 14:40:04

250

The Literatures of the French Pacific

are presented as having been assimilated into Kanak custom but this custom, in many of Gorodé’s texts, has itself become aberration: the noble speeches of the Orator are accompanied by the seduction of Léna, with whom relations are forbidden by custom. In ‘La Saison des pommes kanakes’ (1994: 69–78), the narrator weaves human links with his very young future sister-in-law symbolized by a gift to her of Kanak apple tree seeds during the customary visit with his grandfather and other members of his clan to propose a betrothal. These links will still be in place forty years later, but the apples from the Kanak apple tree are now rotting on the ground. The fact that the sister-in-law has remained infertile and the narrator, her brother-in-law, unmarried, has provided grounds for a trial for witchcraft and adultery. The outcome of the trial is that the narrator’s sister-in-law, although innocent, begins to waste away, the victim of a jealous sister-in-law and her ‘charlatan’ witch doctor accomplices. In this story, the lizard, malevolent sorcery, and decomposing food are motifs borrowed from the texts of oral tradition recalling the monstrous and forbidden food of the realm of the dead. In fact, the topos of incorporation as the passage from one state to another or, as in this instance, from life to death, is omnipresent and becomes a ‘material metaphor’ in the written as well as the oral texts. The first man emerges from the worms, the eels, and lizards, the life that evolves when the moon ‘takes a tooth from its mouth and places it on a rock’, its decomposition and a later coagulating of blood create the first man. Grandfather ‘is a shark’ on the ceremonial pathway, writes Waia Gorodé in a text of Mon école du silence that describes a central traditional mourning ceremony. Claudine Jacques’ adaptations of Kanak stories in Ce n’est pas la faute de la lune [It’s Not the Fault of the Moon] recount the transformation of a young man into a turtle and the metamorphosis of another into a tree, and the stories of the young white girl saved from drowning or the beautiful young Wallisian woman hitchhiking, who turn out to be bewitching spirits of the dead (Jacques, 1997). Barbançon’s text, for its part, draws significantly on the form of metamorphosis or incorporation represented by intertextuality, moving from the description of the roof-spear at Bu-Rhai as symbolic of a harmonious, traditional, and eternal group entity to incorporate the tale of ‘The Lizard of Boaxwé’, otherwise called ‘Le Maître de Koné’, as the structural backbone of his own text. This was the version of ‘Le Maître de Koné’ translated from Ajié in Maurice Leenhardt’s 1932 Documents néo-calédoniens, that appeared in a quite similar version published later

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 250

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

251

by Jean Guiart as ‘Le Chef de Touho’. The story is linked by Barbançon to a central feature of the Bu - rai landscape, the Pierced Rock, Roche Percée, and to the Kanak understanding of this site as the local entrance to the underwater land of the dead (Lolonn). The departed must jump from the cliff and follow the path of the dead in order to become spirits able to return again to the earth. For most Europeans, the Roche Percée generally represents a curious geological formation in an unspoiled natural site and a major tourist attraction. This is space as a topographical view, observes Barbançon, rather than the time-space of a network of human and spirit relations inscribing the ancestors of the Kanak vision. His text describes an evening meditation vigil on the beach opposite the Roche Percée as a means of identifying with the Kanak ‘spirit of the place’. To introduce the story of the lizard and the chief, Barbançon quotes Guiart, who reads the tale as a politico-historical description of the alliances that hold at the time of telling. The story, retold by Leenhardt, of the Master of Koné travelling right around the island to find a chief able to protect him against a vengeful lizard caught in a trap that he had set between Bourail and Houailou, and discovering that only chief Venarui, master of the entrance to the underground land of the dead at the Roche Percée, could help him, is an attempt to provide a full description of Melanesian society on Grande Terre. (Guiart, 1981: unpag.)

In Leenhardt’s understanding of the story, the desperate Master of Koné can be saved from the lizard clinging painfully to his neck, and rescued from being ‘a dead thing’ in its mouth, only because the Master belongs to a known human group and this member of the lizard’s group has the power to placate the vengeful spirit. The pursuing lizard (revenging infringement on another’s taboo hunting lands) is both nature and culture, in a system of oppositions that is dynamic and dialogic – that is, where balances exist and harmony can be restored. Leenhardt interprets later stories in his Cycle du lézard stories in Documents néo-calédoniens as stories of particular social moments and conflicts. The gecko’s death by hot metal (a blade), for example, in a later story, is read as totemic malevolence defeated by Western technology. On the other hand, in a further version, the gecko’s alliance with the forest to come and taking care of children in their parents’ absence can be seen as lessons in kinship obligations that are being forgotten. Guiart argues that the litany of place names, and particularly the places the Maître de Koné does not name and visit, which form a map revealing

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 251

12/03/2014 14:40:04

252

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the groups of alliances and the rivalry for prestige between two chiefs, are the most significant references in the story he translates. For his part, Barbançon borrows the words of Venarui, Master of the Land of the region from which the scourging lizard comes, to construct his own political message: ‘Well look, if you had run this way, to us, when he sat on your head, you would have got back home pretty quickly’. That is, in the light of the difficult political confrontations of the mid-1980s (the lizard around their necks of a virtual civil war), the Caldoches must identify with the nature/culture of the island on which they live rather than with Metropolitan France. They must address themselves to the Master of the Land, to whom, unlike the pursued chief, they have omitted to send a token part of their treasure to redress grievance and express gratitude, as the Master of Koné did to bring his story to a happy conclusion. One of Gorodé’s fragments in Graines de pin colonnaire, entitled ‘Un don pour un pardon’ (2009: 26–8), brings these notions of offence, punishment, and pardon together within the theme of metamorphosis. The narrator describes coming across the lizard at the outlet to the creek one day, his lovely coat split apart by ‘some angry being’ (26). She recalls the fear and attachment of her relationship with this creature. Swimming at twilight in the waters of the mangrove swamp in his territory had brought on a ‘raging fever that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before’ (27) and she had not repeated the experience. Sometimes she saw him in her dreams ‘in other forms. Or in other clothes. I also used to growl at him when he got too drunk’ (26). Although that particular morning, she ‘couldn’t do anything more for the sectioned trunk of the long brown lizard in his beautiful coat with green flecks’ (28), a bag of mangoes later appears on her table left, the children tell her, by one of their ‘grandfathers’, the one she scolded ‘when he had drunk too much’ (28). The last line of the story re-incorporates the fragment’s opening title; ‘An offering wipes out the offence, they say. A gift in exchange for forgiveness as custom provides’ [‘Un don pour un pardon comme le veut la coutume’] (28). As opposed to this insider daily experience of the cycle of transgression and forgiveness through the lizard and his coat of beautiful colours, a lizard recognizable by the traces he leaves on plants that the old people had taught her to recognize, and interchangeable with the human being, the syncretic or shared myth that Barbançon’s text creates is one of a potential harmony between the two communities faced with common enemies – the cruel masters of colonizing France and of Capital.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 252

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

253

Barbançon’s incorporation of Kanak oral texts signals identification but also a political reading, requiring reparation for all the groups who are victims of imposed suffering and dispossession. For this descendant of convicts, the enemies are the rigid system of the right-wing administrations and the stranglehold of the député (Jacques Lafleur) on power, intensified by the nickel boom in the 1970s. Sylvie André has argued that this kind of political analysis, seeking the peaceful coexistence of the little communities crushed by the Administration and by Capital, also adopted to some extent by the FLNKS and by Déwé Gorodé, is based on pre-established Marxist premises. For André, Déwé Gorodé’s texts move from the denunciation of colonialism – ‘my pillaged Pacific country, my colonized Oceanian people’ in Sous les cendres des conques – to a denunciation of neo-colonialism (‘Madame Multinationale’). In this way, the pain of alienation is not imputed to the ‘petits blancs’, the libérés, nor to the Wallisian immigrants, but to an abstraction: Capitalism (André, 2008). In Leenhardt’s mythical reading, the gecko taking revenge for the incursion of the chief of a particular area (Koné) into the hunting land of another (Venarui) can be placated by sacrificial rites. Balances exist and can be restored; from transgression and pursuit to redress. But ‘Le Maître de Koné’, as Leenhardt himself would surely concede to Guiart, is also a story of particular conflict, of competition for land, prestige, and political power. It is also a social history. In oral literature, oppositions between culture and nature are evident in the terms of the distinction between cultivated foods and wild (bush) foods, the cooking of the yam, the careful working of shell money for sealing alliances, and in the distinction between the social space of the tribu (where sexuality must follow the prescribed rules) and the spaces beyond, in the bush, on the beach, where the anti-social or illicit is more tolerated. In all of the versions of the story, the lizard as culture is not just peaceful and constituting. Nor, indeed, is nature always a ‘séjour paisible’, or peaceable kingdom. In a study of nature in Kanak tradition, Béniéla Houmbouy describes its potentially violent and vengeful as well as nurturing aspects (1998). The two facets exist in a dynamic complementary system, and not as mutually exclusive binary opposites. Houmbouy claims that as all-powerful creator Nature elicits the feeling that everything is working to provide the small and vulnerable human being with a peaceful and rich existence. The Kanak role in life is to be the guardian and the priest of Nature; to respect her strict taboos and complex prescriptions, for example, growing certain foods only in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 253

12/03/2014 14:40:04

254

The Literatures of the French Pacific

particular places or performing the necessary cleansing rituals before a fishing expedition, or building. But Nature has the power of life and of death over the life that grows from her blood and body. Where survival depends on vigilance in observing the rules, and understanding what these are from Nature’s slightest signs, fear and the anxiety of protective propitiation become an important aspect of the culture. The fear of arousing the violence of the earth, provoking flood, drought, famine, illness, and death as retaliation or punishment by the gods and ancestors that dwell in her, are part of the relation to nature. Jean Giono’s stories set in the small isolated villages of a ‘paganized’ Upper Provence, haunted by Pan and companion classical spirits, evoke a similar dread of the vengeful underside to the celebration of ‘the song of the world’ of an all-powerful nature. In Colline, written in the 1930s, it is the killing of the lizard by man that sets off the mountain’s vengeance. Boésou Ërijisi’s own first name is that of a place in nature, and means the smooth surface of the bare rock at the top of the waterfall. The name recalls the cultural reunion of his family groups at his birth to select a name among the available stock connoting position in the family, social status within a particular lineage or family branch, and actual or potential land ownership or land usage rights. The name evokes the benediction of the maternal uncle blowing breath and blessing in the three-day-old infant’s ear, which makes him a social being and part of the mwaciri. But Bwésou is also the victim of a malediction, perhaps the curse following an incest that falls indiscriminately on his lineage, to the very extinction of its names, suggests Guiart in his book on the first Kanak writer (1998). Through his writings for Leenhardt, as he notes, he is also guilty of telling stories that are not his to tell because they go beyond that part of knowledge allocated to his lineage. As part of the land, Boésou Ërijisi is all the more readily vulnerable to the lizard and from wasting away from fear and anxiety, not unlike the witch doctor Miskannah or the taboo-breaking Poindi (who had put up an ­inappropriate flèche faîtière) in Mariotti’s novels. In her study of the sources of illness and the still authoritative therapies that treat such problems in Kanak society, Christine Salomon investigates a Kanak world, which she, like Jean Guiart, argues is still strongly marked by internal conflict and competition: a social and spiritual world in which health and fertility are a sign of victory over one’s weakened enemies (Salomon, 2000b). A logic of communication between the body and the natural world, the interior and the exterior, as permanent exchange in a seamless space, or as exchange between

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 254

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

255

the ancestors and the living from one generation to the next, constructs health or sickness within networks of correspondences that have the potential to create harmony but also to wreak violence. Nomenclature associates bodily organs with the plant world. Ancestral connections include links with spirits who have lived and with those who have not, with the earliest men, with the gods and the totems, with the U who can take human form, and with the newer ‘red gods’ or Dooki introduced from the Congo – a host of beings with powers for both good and evil. Many illnesses fall into the group of ailments visited by the ancestors upon those who break taboos. In Salomon’s reading of the ‘Maître de Koné’, then, it is as a consequence of a social conflict that the Man from Koné is visited by illness in the form of the lizard who sets up house around the neck of the guilty party defecating and urinating on his skin in an image of ulceration. The lizard of Boaxwé is the ‘revenge’ sent by the person whose territorial rights have been infringed. That person alone can talk to the lizard, grant pardon, and alleviate the state of illness – a state between life and death. In Salomon’s analysis of language, the sending of the serpent (plague, illness), which can also be activated by the ill will of an enemy, is simply a continuation of war by other means. The vocabulary of warfare, Salomon notes, dominates Kanak medical terminologies. So, too, does the return of the evil upon the perpetrator in this cycle of violence. Earlier, in Déwé Gorodé’s ‘Affaire classée’, we noted the terrible revenge of a seduced and abandoned young woman taken across three generations of young men. In the short story ‘Où vas-tu Mûû?’ (1996)a, the son of a wealthy white settler is poisoned by ingestion of the bougna prepared at his wedding by the grandmother of a young Kanak girl he had impregnated then abandoned to marry the daughter of a white settler. The grandmother holds the ancient knowledge both of the abortifacient herbs and the rituals that rid her granddaughter of the unwanted foetus and of the poisons that make the bougna lethal. A curse can be returned; counter-attack and defensive systems are activated. Salomon quotes Père Lambert, who noted at the turn of the century that those suspected of possessing harmful magic powers seldom died a natural death. The ancestral forces which attack the equilibrium of the person, and the enemies, who through jealousy or rivalry send intentional illnesses against their fellows, can be aggressed in their turn – at the very least by verbal invective. They can be denigrated, for example, as ‘assassins’ who ‘eat human beings.’ Salomon assumes that the ‘spirit of the words proffered’ is itself a weapon, the spear of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 255

12/03/2014 14:40:04

256

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the ancestor, equivalent to a declaration of war. Guiart has suggested, controversially, that the cannibalism staged in so many fascinated European representations did not in fact exist as a material reality but was a function of the Word. The supreme insult, he claims, would be to treat one’s enemy as a potential source of food. However, Salomon observes that hearts are still needed ‘to nourish’ the pierre de guerre [the war stone] and Guiart himself concurs that the symbolic manducation of the heart of an enemy to seal a pact (of war) was a real practice. Because of the power of the Word, the status of metaphor – figurative or real practice – in Kanak texts remains contested. Salomon reads Le Maître de Koné and its pattern of transgression, punishment, flight, and redemption as an analogy for illness arising from social discord (the outcome of transgression) and of cure. The sociologist re-uses the text of the lizard for her particular purposes: to construct the thesis that both natural causes and social causes (ancestors and rivals, nature and culture) are understood to lie behind illness, understood to attack and enter the body in a possession creating an intermediary state between life and death. These physical and psychological illnesses that strike because of the withdrawal of the protection of the ancestors (the bao or duée) for faults committed, transmitted from generation to generation, can be eradicated by the masculine therapies of breath or fire associated with warfare. Possession by the totem, on the other hand, can be treated by liquid potions (water being a feminine element). In Kanak culture, then, Salomon’s work suggests, where malediction is less a question of misfortune than of the guilty who must be unmasked, where historical rivalries are presently exacerbated by paid labour, concrete block houses, and education, the ‘peaceful kingdom’ of a nature–culture fusion is far from the only reality. The goal of any medical intervention must nonetheless be the restoration of equilibrium between the benevolent and malevolent forces of nature–culture. In the literary texts we have considered, malevolent sorcery is often presented as a form of potential disequilibrium, inherent in the ‘violent earth’ of the Kanak world. History also plays a part in modifying what might be understood as one of the faces of Nature. The ‘Yarrick’ that eats up the witch doctor Miskannah in Mariotti’s Takata D’Aimos is argued to be a form brought to New Caledonia from the outside, along with its various magic parcels. Although sorcery is used by Kanak against Kanak, it can be combated, perhaps precisely because it is seen as an import – like those illnesses considered to come from the whites,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 256

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

257

claims Salomon. For Guiart, the Dooki or ‘red gods’ arrived in the Pacific from the Congo, probably carried by sailors expelled by the Jesuit missionaries, on the very Portuguese ships that carried the missionaries to the Pacific. According to the historian Dorothy Shineberg (1995), indentured workers from Vanuatu may also have disseminated the ‘dooki’ in the mines of the north. Guiart, for his part, describes the purges operated by the seer, Paagwatch, at the turn of the century to combat the new gods and their boucans, and the cycle of deaths in reprisal that they had provoked within the Kanak world. However, to borrow Salomon’s conclusion, in nature as in the cultural phenomenon of the witch doctor or ‘guérisseur, the relations between good and evil, the benevolent and malevolent, are not Manichean. They do not constitute a binary opposition between two forces in a cosmic battle to the death, but a dynamic relationship between two complementary entities that are permanently mobile. Gorodé’s L’Épave and in particular Graines de pin colonnaire, an autobiographical fiction which deals with women’s bodies wounded and mutilated by breast cancer and surgery, contain cogent illustrations of the doubleness of the relation with a beneficent– malevolent nature–culture. In Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, malevolence is most particularly manifest in women in childlessness and takes the form of Tâdo the crab. In Barbançon’s autobiographical story, however, the violence of the earth is presented as historical rather than natural and dynamic. The disappearance of whole groups of Melanesians from the region of Bourail, dispossessed of their lands to make way for resettlement of convicts or free settlement after Governor Feillet instigated a new wave of immigration, characterizes this colonial form of violent incorporation. Even the Nekou group, allied with the French against insurgent Kanak groups, did not survive the aftermath of the 1878 uprising. The gesture of the revolutionary Éloi Machoro in breaking open the ballot boxes with a war axe in 1984, seen as a symbol of savagery in the European world and marking the beginning of a civil war, is for Barbançon again a sign of the desperate need of the Kanak to be recognized as a people. Barbançon similarly observes that, in a turning of violence inwards, many of Éloi’s Kanak admirers have considered that, to have died at the hands of an elite marksman of the French special services, Éloi Machoro must have aroused the wrath of the double-tailed Lézard de Nakety. He must have offended Nature/the Ancestors by not accepting the gifts of his maternal relatives or by disturbing the spirits of the old people. Barbançon organizes this part of his message to make a binary distinction between

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 257

12/03/2014 14:40:04

258

The Literatures of the French Pacific

nature and culture, with Kanak nature as séjour paisible and terre violente identified rather with colonial settlement. The failure of any dialogic or dynamic movement here may well constitute something of a fault-line in his text and his position. In a universalizing cultural move, Barbançon’s own version of the Maître de Koné’s flight around the island serves as a modern geographical/ cultural map recalling the networks of alliances between the different customary regions. It is compared to the tale of Ulysses’ flight from the anger of Poseidon around the Mediterranean that reminds the classically educated European listener of the geography/cultures of the regions under Greek influence. At the same time, Barbançon’s lyrical and personal evocations of the places named in the story also assert their filiations with the colonial texts of Georges Baudoux, often identified by Caldoches as the first Caledonian writer. Barbançon’s Terre du lézard, then, has developed representations of a world where the Word and the Land is living and benevolent (séjour paisible) and offers the author an identity alongside representations of the terre violente of the malevolent lizard, European and Kanak conflict, unequal power, and land-loss. The two themes are present in the account in his first chapter of a ferocious nineteenth-century deportation of Europeans to New Caledonia. Their transgressions are punished by the Administration figured as the lizard crouching on men’s shoulders, giving them straw hats and identity numbers and the ‘LizardContempt’ that pursues them. From being ‘dead things in the mouth of the lizard’ (1995: 16), many of them have nonetheless become the founders of the Bourail of today Barbançon’s historical research in the colonial archives of Aix-enProvence and in Corsica enabled him to trace his lineage back to the Corsican Philipp-Marie Albani. In New Caledonia, the déporté married the orphaned Marie-Thérèse Bureau, herself the daughter of a marriage between convicts arranged by the sisters of Saint Joseph de Cluny at Bourail in one of the most curious social experiments produced by the colonial ideology of social redemption by work and family. (The sisters oversaw the propriety of brief courtships and organized the mass marriage ceremonies.) Albani was assassinated at Pouembout, apparently by a suspicious or jealous husband. José’s ‘ancestor’, a Bureau by name, had obtained a concession, and the writer is at pains to point out that he, too, has left a name on the landscape, a place called ‘Le Marais de Bureau’ [Bureau’s Marsh]. Barbançon makes the further strategic assertion that nature still conserves, inscribed in the contours

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 258

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

259

of its valleys and ridges, in its relief and in the furrows of its creeks, traces of the former convict land concessions La Terre du lézard includes many examples of the mutual interactions and borrowings, and of the distinctions between the Caldoche and the Kanak communities. Old Jérémie, comrade of the days of the Union Calédonienne party, whose language appears to be composed of Kanak concepts and Latin quotations, exemplifies this mixing. It is from an empathetic participation in complementary visions of the quiet earth, the Roche Percée as animated both by Kanak mythology and by the cattle in their runs, and the violent earth of colonization and particularly deportation, that Barbançon draws the conviction of being, as a Caledonian, an integral part of the land. His account of his experience of his (sacred) place in a Caledonia which is certainly not ‘New’ (Caledonia), is given its fullest meaning by the incorporation of the ritual final phrase of the story of the man from Koné: ‘And both of them are there, each in his own place today’. His own final lesson that the Whites aroused the lizard in chasing us from our land but the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land is borrowed from Jérémie. Postcolonial theory claims that identity is dependent on identifications or differences established with a series of desired or rejected Others. The Other, it has been argued, is necessary as a negative to establish the self. The colonized are the Other of the colonizer; woman is the Other of man; and desire itself the desire of the Other’s desire. In Barbançon’s respectful appropriation of the Other’s view of the universe and recognition of the violence of land dispossession (of infringement of taboo by Europeans) and the need to seek pardon or offer redress to break the cycle of revenge, the retribution of the lizard, is there a conciliatory way forward? And what role does strategic political advantage play in such recognition? Barbançon adds the further reading of the flight of the transgressive chief from protector to protector as the Caledonians seeking outside assistance from France to resolve the questions around their rights to the land. Barbançon’s autobiographical incorporation of the Man from Koné story reinforces the argument that Kanak texts (oral literature) have marked New Caledonian literature more than has been commonly accepted. The logic of his incorporations, we have suggested, is dynamic and dialogic, and he identifies closely with Kanak spirit while not losing sight of the difficult Caledonian experience and its heritage. On the other hand, where the literature of the colonial founding fathers has adopted the tropes of séjour paisible and terre violente to describe relationships

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 259

12/03/2014 14:40:04

260

The Literatures of the French Pacific

between nature and culture, this has often been largely within a binary logic. The trope of the terre violente has also been associated, within the alienations of colonial society, with the impossibility of cultural mixing. The hybridity in Alin Laubreaux’s colonial novels is an illustration of the premise that racial or culture Otherness is fatal to relationships, and that colonial society lacks the capacity to embrace diversity. Jean Mariotti investigates the loss of séjour paisible, man’s harmony with the world or ‘original transparency’, as a metaphysical fracture, and the lizard as the force of evil to be battled, in a heroic cosmic struggle. Valesdir (1993), by Catherine Régent, the quintessential ‘popular’ colonial novel, represents the bush and its native inhabitants as a dark and even dangerous mass, and the séjour paisible is identified with civilizing Europe. As in many of the novels of the colonial period, the feminized land (dark continent) is an unknown territory to be conquered and made fertile, made culture. through a justified possession. Locusts, drought, cyclone, and disease that destroy the coffee plants combine with plague, sorcery, the threat of native uprising, uncontrolled mining and industrial development, and politics to justify the title of Jacqueline Sénès’ novel, Terre violente. But the sweat and sacrifice of the small settler family of John Sutton, his body buried in the soil for which he laboured so hard, make at least portions of the land a hard-won resting-place, a séjour paisible for the pioneer community as well. The title of Claudine Jacques’ second novel, L’Homme-lézard, published in 2002, borrows directly from the Kanak myth to explore the possibilities of relationships between young people of different ethnic groups (Kanak, Wallisian, Caldoche, Ni-Vanuatu, Métis) and the problems faced by contemporary Caledonian society. In her work, this figure of the avenging lizard is both emblematic of a founding New Caledonian myth, and a universal symbol of man’s struggle against the demons within and without. Whereas Barbançon’s lizard represents a shared land and the deep connections between Kanak and Caledonian, in Jacques’ novel it is above all a figure of the struggle for good, for understanding and love, against evil – self-centred, violent, or addictive and self-destructive behaviour. Both of these writers, however, have explored the deep veins of New Caledonian rural existence to discover a life close to the Caledonian earth, commitment to the land, and a certain wisdom shared between the communities outside Noumea. Claudine Jacques’ literary texts, which first explored contemporary métissage in the form of a relationship between a Kanak man and a

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 260

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

261

Caledonian woman in Les Cœurs barbelés, have moved a long way from Laubreaux and colonial binaries. But in this first novel barbed wire is still the central and highly charged metaphor of oppression and division. The figure of the lizard that structures Jacques’ second novel, L’Hommelézard manifests itself as the beast that is tracking Énok, a young Kanak sculptor who has come from the tribu to live in Noumea. In his case, fall takes the modern form of loss of belief in himself and commitment to his art in the drug- and alcohol-fuelled scene he becomes part of in the capital. A sculptor of talent, accused unjustly of murder, Énok expresses his own inner drama in the form of a great statue where man and the lizard are inextricably intertwined in a struggle to the death. The man is being devoured by the lizard in what is an evident reference to the Lifou sculptor, Dick Bone’s dramatic work in the Centre Tjibaou, ‘Isa trotrohnine ju’ [Understand Me if You Can] with its human face, clawed hands, and fully erect penis. In Jacques’ novel, the lizard represents the occupation of the body by humiliation, shame, remorse, and despair, and the threat of the destruction of the human. Her tale in many ways echoes the universal story of the monster redeemed by the love and sacrifice of a pure young maiden, in a Manichean universe where her beast can be read as the duality of man. The lizard will finally loosen his grip on Énok, but only to attach himself to another prey – the half-caste Ni-Van and Kanak, Lewis-Siwel-Tash, the real murderer of the abusive father of the young girl Nassirah – through the medium of the spirit of the self-sacrificial Mandela, Énok’s sister. Seeking to save her brother Énok, Mandela had become the victim of the violent historical-political confrontations (these took place in the 1990s) between Wallisian and Kanak groups at the Saint-Louis mission. Haunted by Mandela’s spirit, Lewis will finally hang himself, another victim of the lizard. Redemption in Jacques takes a number of forms, predominantly feminine. Mandela’s sacrifice of herself to save her brother is preceded by her work with women’s associations; Lusia, a strong Wallisian woman left to raise her children when their father, a gendarme, returns to France, takes Énok under the wing of her loving nature, and bears his child. Énok is also supported by his memories of the tribu. Emma Sinclair-Reynolds observes that the two quotes on the page following the dedication, the first from Barbançon’s memoir (‘In the beginning of this book, there is myth, the lizard’) and the second from Leenhardt’s ‘Le Maître de Koné’, signal from the outset the borrowed nature of the story and the shared structure of ‘transgressionpunishment-flight-redemption’ in Jacques’ novel (2013: 46). Quotations

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 261

12/03/2014 14:40:04

262

The Literatures of the French Pacific

from many other New Caledonian writers figure in the final instance the shared pressures on all communities to survive and to forge a common future. Barbançon’s use of food to describe a cultural métissage in New Caledonia is analogous to the forms of intertextual mixing present in Jacques’ novel. Caledonian culture is like its culinary arts. Take a typically local dish, steak, rice and Chinese cabbage served with pickles and to which soy sauce and hot spices/peppers can be added. Each of these ingredients is of a different origin, the steak is European, rice and cabbage is Vietnamese, pickles are from Reunion, soy is Japanese; and every ingredient adds its own flavour. You can’t speak of a melting-pot where the fusion of several elements gives a metal but rather what the Americans call a tossed salad, I think, where you can make a single dish, mixed salad, for example without there necessarily being a fusion of the separate elements. (Barbançon, 1992, repr. in Bensa, 1990: 65)

In Jacques’ earlier short story ‘La Station de Boghen’ in the collection Ce ne sont que des histories d’amour [These are Not Only Love Stories], the husband insists that his wife prepare a bushman’s stew for him and his employees on the farm every day, a stew made from a base of salted bacon bone, with meat, and cooked vegetables that he pours over rice moistened with fatty stock. The old Melanesian stockman adds cooked bananas (poingos) and the Javanese station hand discreetly adds his own green onions, ginger root, and oiseau spices. In the shanty town for the thousands of squatters of different origins who have set up house on the outskirts of Noumea, Énok plants manioc and rows of potatoes and maize, and Mandela keeps several hens. Tiarina, a Wallisian woman who saved Énok’s life when she found him in a drunken stupor, has planted yams, bananas, and manioc, and also set up a hen run, while her husband dreams of having a pig as they did back in their village. What Europeans see as a slum is the attempt to recreate the village in Noumea, but society in this novel is also a mosaic of different Oceanian traditions and modernities from which the young people must select to construct their own identities. Jacques’ use of the vengeful Kanak lizard, set against the topos of redemption through the sacrificial love of a young woman and perhaps through art, is a major ingredient of just such a ‘mixed salad’.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 262

12/03/2014 14:40:04

Intertextuality as Hybridity

263

Conclusion A literary text marks its own belonging to, or incorporation into, the body of the literatures of Kanaky/New Caledonia by its particular Caledonian contexts and thematics, and its relationship to other texts from Kanaky-New Caledonia. In Kanak writing, sorcery, incorporation, or the permeability of worlds, the materiality of metamorphosis, can be situated in the humble face of the local: the lizard from the neighbouring forest, the sea-snake, a local grass that moves in the breeze, making the earth a living body with its secret zones and shadows. Like the restless continuous movement to and fro between nature and culture, this permeability is also an ethic and an aesthetic, the refusal of total incorporation by rationalism, and a resistance to Western thinking. Despite the differences between the origins of the non-Kanak writers considered and the nature of their understandings of permeability and metamorphosis, the topoi of a shared history (of exile) and also of closeness to the land (séjour paisible and terre violente), like the incorporation of shared food(s), including the yams of boenando, and the understandings of the ‘lizard’ in its many forms, create what can be designated a common New Caledonian literature. It is in this very particular hybridity, with its similarities and differences in the conception of the nature–culture divide and the functions of the lizard, that the defining features of this common literature are constituted, and evolve. To sum up, this chapter has attempted a close reading of the conceptions of nature and culture, and the spaces or lack of space between them in New Caledonian literatures, by considering various modes of incorporation within cultures, and of one culture by another. The examination of representations of food and of sorcery, of a metamorphosis that can either sustain or waste away the human person alongside the re-stagings of the story of the lizard, Le Maître de Koné, reveal commonality but also differing degrees and kinds of mixing. Hybridity in this instance is the to and fro movement between Western and Kanak conceptions. The extent of the movement and the mix once again change with individual writers and over time, within Kanak writing and also in literary settler texts. The following chapter will develop the analysis, touched on briefly in this chapter (Barbançon, Jacques), of literatures of non-Kanak origin, especially of their movement from separate development to métissage, and from colonial to(wards) postcolonial literatures marked by greater

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 263

12/03/2014 14:40:04

264

The Literatures of the French Pacific

degrees of mixing, by different modes, and indeed tones, of hybridity. It will also return to an analysis of the nature of mixing, and of the postcolonial, in collaborative texts of writers from different communities and in Kanak literary writing.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 264

12/03/2014 14:40:04

8

Writing Métissage in New Caledonian Non-Kanak Literatures From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

Colonial Literature and Impossible Métissage In the nineteenth-century novels set in New Caledonia, métissage, as the process and outcome of racial mixing, was most particularly associated with women characters, and largely characterized by sexual permissiveness and biological degeneration. The earliest written literature in New Caledonia was, for the most part, produced by Metropolitan French people passing through. Louise Michel, considered in Chapters 1 and 2, spent eight years in the country’s penitentiary system, leaving New Caledonia after the general amnesty to rejoin her ailing mother in France. Jacques and Marie Nervat came to the colony a decade later, where they lived from 1898 to 1902. Like Louise Michel, Marie Nervat, under the pseudonym of Marie Causse, constitutes something of an exception with her volume of poems Les Rêves unis and a colonial novel, Célina Landrot. This love story and portrait of colonial social life, which she published in 1904 in collaboration with her husband, is largely constructed by stereotypes of women of the time, both romantic and realist ready-made clichés of the feminine. Célina Landrot tells the story of Victorine, a young peasant girl, condemned to twenty years’ imprisonment for the infanticide of a child born shamefully after her seduction by the middle-aged husband of her employer. This detail is a realistic one, as infanticide was one of the most commonly listed crimes for transported convict women. Victorine had jumped at the opportunity to commute her sentence by volunteering to leave her French prison for New Caledonia where, under the surveillance of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 265

12/03/2014 14:40:04

266

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Order of St Joseph’s Little Sisters of Cluny at Bourail, she becomes the wife of a liberated convict. This man, François Landrot, is an unruly young brawler from a peasant family in Lorraine who had inevitably finished up killing a man, and found himself deported. The couple’s installation on a small land-grant at Pouembout, as part of the colony’s attempts at the social regeneration of its convict population unable to return to France, provides the foreground to a portrait of the social distinctions and gender roles in rural colonial society. This theme also frames the love story between their daughter Lina and a Corsican libéré, Bastiani. Despite her husband’s violence and alcoholic rages that burn and disfigure her body or send her fleeing to spend the night with her children under the banyan tree, and despite the ‘double servitude of the female’, Victorine brings up her children more or less happily. The pretty and generous-hearted Lina is similarly a figure of the negative stereotypes of the feminine of her time, characteristics again presented implicitly as a consequence of her birth and inferior social status. Unlike her mistress, Lina is a daughter of the new land and does not pine for France. She does, however, emulate her first employer, an administrator’s wife from France, in her indolence, coquetterie, greediness, lack of moral courage, and dependence on a man. In fact, while this novel, largely a portrait of raw life or ‘low’ society, appears to set out to demonstrate the heavy burden of hereditary traits and convict origins borne by the country, its portraits of both women and men of all social origins are largely ironic and critical. Kanak women appear only briefly as lazy servants when white girls are not available, and, when they are visible, are inevitably treated with scorn. Animal metaphors characterize all women’s bodies. Victorine Landrot, who had a child regularly every year, was the female whom the male enslaved, without ever receiving a caress or a kindly word, and was like an animal who resigns itself to abuse, writes Nervat. After her elopement to Noumea with Bastiani, the libéré – her father had wanted her to marry a free land-holder rather than a libéré like himself – who had attempted to kill his rival, the free stockman Ferrier, Lina, too, lives the life of a lazy animal, gazing out at the world often forbidden to her by her husband’s jealousy, we are told, with the eyes of a peaceful heifer. This is a novel of its time, reinforcing the belief in the inevitability of social difference and the difficulties of crossing boundaries of social origin and class. Biological and cultural mixing is a central theme throughout the century of New Caledonian writing by writers of European origin. In a study of what he calls the ‘historically highly contentious issue

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 266

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

267

of biological and cultural interaction that results from the dialectics of displacement in the literature of New Caledonia’, Peter Brown has tracked the centrality of the figure of the métis in colonial texts, noting its literary mistreatment and the largely failed attempts at his/ her rehabilitation (2005: 305). In Les filles de la Néama, published in 1920 by Paul Bloc, for example, the characters of the tuberculosis-prone métisses continue to constitute a warning against the debilitating effects of miscegenation. In the work of Georges Baudoux, and notably in Les Blancs sont venus, mixed-race relations, like mixed-race characters, again evoke degeneration: ‘Her mother was a native woman from the islands. Her father an adventurer of the very worst kind, one of those cast up from time to time on the silent shores of the Pacific islands’ [‘Sa mère était une femme indigène des îles. Son père un aventurier de la première heure, une épave de la civilisation apportée par la houle, ainsi qu’il en échoue parfois sur les plages silencieuses des îles de l’Océanie’] (Baudoux, 1972: 131). This metaphor of the wreck will later structure Déwé Gorodé’s first Kanak novel, L’Épave. In Gorodé’s case, it is an incestuous grandfather and his young granddaughter who are cast up on the silent shore, in an echo of a Kanak myth of foundation. The figure of the wreck is also at the structural centre of Mariotti’s autobiographical novel À Bord de l’Incertaine. Jean Mariotti: A Father of New Caledonian Writing between Worlds The son of a liberated convict deported from Corsica for an honour killing, and born and brought up in the small bush settlement of Farino, Jean Mariotti (1901–75), considered, like Baudoux, to be a founding father of a New Caledonian literature, claimed to have garnered his stories at the knee of an adoptive canaque mother by the name of Watchouma (also called Mandarine). It was not until he was an adult and in France that Mariotti felt able to write about the lessons of his life, and it was in the old Europe ‘of the great lacey cathedrals’, outside the narrow constraints of the colonial Pacific setting, that Mariotti incorporated the material of canaque tradition into a considerable body of literary work, largely for a European readership. Mariotti’s novels are constituted by the bringing together of what he presented as his adoptive ‘mother’s’ Kanak culture and his father’s Mediterranean origins in a psychological movement between New Caledonia and France, between

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 267

12/03/2014 14:40:05

268

The Literatures of the French Pacific

home and exile. At its heart, his work is concerned both with the separation between Metropolitan French and New Caledonian cultures and with internal differences in New Caledonia, and also with the human aspirations that unite them. The new editions of his novels by the Société des amis de Jean Mariotti at the end of the twentieth century, with scholarly prefaces by leading New Caledonian intellectuals, is a visible public sign of the contemporary literary effervescence in New Caledonia and a reflection of the political stakes of Mariotti’s mixing of the local and the European, the particular and the universal in the constitution of a canonical Caledonian literature. Mary McKendrick’s Master’s thesis has examined the representations of the Kanak that dominate more than half of the eight novels published by Mariotti, to argue for a progressive reversal of perspective in his work. From an initial unilateral observation of a savage non-European Other, the Kanak characters come to look back at the European settlers until, in the final instance, she argues, either of the groups under observation could be argued to be the ‘Other’ theorized by postcolonial theory. The omniscient narrator of Takata d’Aimos [The Sorceror of Aimos] observes scenes of mythic primitivism, describing natives with great jaws and bloody teeth. The novel follows the story of a cunning sorcerer, himself being eaten away by illness or the avenging lizard, his enemy’s greater magic. Les Contes de Poindi [The Tales of Poindi] and Les Nouveaux Contes de Poindi [The New Tales of Poindi] mix ancient European and Mediterranean heroes and myths with the oral stories supposedly told to Mariotti by his adoptive mother, whom the writer characterizes as the unconscious voice of her ‘race’. The adventuring characters, Poindi and Aïni, constitute at the same time a canaque hunter and his son and their legendary adventures in the great forest and a universal father and child pair, not unlike classical heroes, moving through trials and dangers. The backdrop remains the mystery of the universe and the guiding thematic the universal human quest. La Conquête du séjour paisible [The Conquest of the Peaceable Abode] situates the reader once again in Poindi’s mythological and pagan universe, where Nature’s relentless revenge for unrecognized violation of taboo is doubled by notions of metaphysical fault. The goal of the quest is formulated in terms of the Kanak notion of séjour paisible examined in Chapter 5, the return of the lost fin of the fish so that the body becomes whole again and can finally enter Lolonn, the realm of the dead. In the autobiographical À Bord de l’Incertaine, Mariotti tells the story of his own childhood at Farino, including the now classic scene

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 268

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

269

in which Madame Boubignan, the schoolmistress and wife of the local gendarme, teaches the children the seasons. She persuades them that the torrid heat of January they are experiencing is less real than the snow of the written descriptions of January in their French text books, making them feel guiltily uneasy about the occupations of their fathers, which are apparently non-existent in the real world of Europe. By this novel, however, the observed canaques have become omnipresent eyes, observers in their turn. The hero of this autobiographical fiction, the figure of Darne, the larger-than-life settler cowboy in search of the great red bull, is constantly spied on by the bush-wise indigenes, silent witnesses to the comings and goings of the settler community. Mariotti’s writing, resembling Michel’s work, transmits an overriding sense of loss – loss of the oral, the heroic, the epic, and the universal – as it seeks to retrace its steps back to the immediacy, intensity, and mysteries of the world of childhood. Fascinated with the primitive, like Ségalen, Mariotti seeks to discover the authentic in a modern world guilty of destroying the ancient harmonies. The figure of home as exile, the land where one cannot be, or as the hybrid to and fro between terre d’exil and terre d’accueil, creates a sense of insecurity and metaphysical pursuit, of a dream-like quest symbolized by the mysterious sailing ship, L’Incertaine, wrecked on the reef and visible from the shore. Borrowings from Kanak oral tradition, and his writing location in France, make Mariotti’s quest more lyrical and less harsh than the struggle of the ‘man alone’ in a forbidding or challenging primeval land, which marks many other colonial literatures. If being postcolonial rather than colonial requires the critique of the discourses of the colonial and their construction of privilege and power, of imperial mission and sacred motherland, it is, however, not evident that Mariotti’s fictions merit that label. Yet, in his later novel Daphné, the fanatical (colonial?) quest of the mad prospectors results simply in the destruction of the island, blown up by their greed. Not unlike the empathetic adoption of the anti-colonial voice of the prophetess Idara in Michel’s Kanak ‘songs’, Mariotti clearly stands between worlds; his literary writing is an early attempt to create forms of hybridity beyond the limitations of the colonial contexts his work eventually comes to critique. Like the paintings of Hodges, consciously or unconsciously, his texts open up questions of knowability and of separation. It can be argued that his success in constituting a New Caledonian culture from (in) exile comes partly from his borrowings from Kanak culture and development of forms of cultural metissage.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 269

12/03/2014 14:40:05

270

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Postmodern exile can be voluntary, a result of the conflict between the desire to be located in a specific culture, and the attraction of a global culture and the Western metropolises; it can result from the impossibility of living or achieving one’s goals in the culture of origin. There is something of this constant movement between cultures, the pleasure and the sense of loss in re-collecting the stories of his origins, that underlies Mariotti’s writing; nonetheless, it would appear difficult to argue that the hybridities in this colonial work are postcolonial in any sense other than in the sense of ‘coming out of’, and perhaps to some degree ‘after’, the colonial. A PhD study by Diana Jones of the contemporaneous colonial novels of Alin Laubreaux (published between 1928 and 1944), however, chooses to present that writer’s fictional strategies through the lens of the theory of hybridity as produced by Homi Bhabha. Métissage, as encounter with the exotic Other in foreign settings, finds itself placed under this heading of hybridity. Jones identifies the staging of all the stereotypical tropes of colonial literature as constituting the core of Laubreaux’s writing. In this sense, included in the list of the standard tropes along with travel, destiny, adventure, and exile, hybridity as a theme is identified by Jones as colonial. The six novels that she considers, however, provide not only an account of the beliefs and practices that characterized the colonial societies of the period but also illuminate their contradictions and constitute a form of (post-modern) critique. Herein, for Jones lies the postcolonial hybridity. In her analysis, whereas traditional exile is represented as banishment, deprivation, loss, largely the prerogative of the white male, with its other face seen as the conquest of spirituality and identity through solitude and self-reliance, post-modern exile is often the result of the pull between the desire to be located in a specific (often indigenous) culture, and the pull of the West. It follows, argues Jones, that hybridity and post-modern exile have much in common. White males in popular colonial literature generally become strong in the face of the deprivations of exile (the ‘man alone’ syndrome that characterizes New Zealand settler literature, for example). Laubreaux, for his part, creates a universe marked by a predominant sense of perpetual exile, unfulfilled relationships, the failure to make a new home, and the sheer difficulty of ‘settling’ or domesticating the colonies. He paints a negative portrait of a hierarchical and fragmented colonial New Caledonian community; its marginalized inhabitants exist in a segregated and prejudice-ridden society dominated by competition for land, employment, and the favours of the administration. However,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 270

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

271

exile in Laubreaux’s work does not lead to attempts to integrate Kanak material as in Mariotti’s writing. Rather, an inevitable state of exile, either from New Caledonia or from France, is figured as an unsettled state of a less than desirable hybridity in the form of the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of both places, and the impossibility of writing out either pole. At the heart of Laubreaux’s work, relationships that could have diminished the space between the cultures or the social categories are the victims of discrimination, violence, and/or assimilation. In the final instance, then, his work is a demonstration that as a strategy for structuring the space in-between in his novels, métissage or biological mixing fails. Wara (1932), then, is the story of the impossibility of a future for the relationship on the Isle of Pines between the eponymous métisse and her white lover, Pascal. Later in the novel, recounting Wara’s subsequent voyage to Paris and her transformation to become Élise, Wara’s European husband informs Pascal that his wife has renounced her tribal name for the name given to her by her European gendarme father. The young woman’s assimilation – her acquisition of European and Parisian respectability – is portrayed by Laubreaux as a failure of the two societies to create the kind of third space where Wara could also retain her ‘canaque’ identity. In Yan-le-Métis (1928), in fact a plagiarized version of Baudoux’s novel Jean M’Baraï, le pêcheur de trépangs (1920), Laubreaux again stages the impossibility of being accepted as mixed-race, or indeed of creating an identity in-between cultures. The titles of Laubreaux’s books, like Wara or Jean M’Baraï, may signify subjects, notes Jones, yet Yan is only ever seen as an object by others or by the narrator. It is his evident strength and good health that transforms Yan, captured from a blackbirding ship where he is working as a sailor, into an unwitting breeder of babies for consumption in the cannibal New Hebrides, where he is held captive, but well-supplied with women. Later, Yan becomes a boxer – an object of popular entertainment – in white Australia, where he is ironically renamed ‘Johnny Blackie, the Maori’. Yan, observes Jones, is marginal in all so-called pure societies, and, despite his attempt to follow the wishes of his Breton father and become French, at the end of the novel he has no option but to strip off his European clothes and return to his mother’s tribe. In an ironic twist, another Kanak, Gabriel, given a Christian name through the influence of a missionary education, must sign his ‘tribal’ name in order to become a tirailleur canaque (a member of the Kanak army corps) in the French army. Indeed, most of the hybrid characters in Laubreaux’s work are

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 271

12/03/2014 14:40:05

272

The Literatures of the French Pacific

killed off, illustrating the premises that society is unable to embrace diversity and that racial or cultural Otherness destroys relationships and identities. Laubreaux’s conclusions that hybridity (biological métissage) in colonial societies, like exoticism, travel, destiny, or adventure, cannot in fact fulfil its promises, constitute an early bitter critique of the society of which he was also a part, particularly in relation to the possibilities of cultural mixing. Despite the critical aspects to Laubreaux’s work (a writer who was in fact executed for his right-wing sympathies at the end of the war in France) and the triangulation of cultural exchange between France, settler community, and ‘Kanaky’ in Mariotti, it seems difficult to see these early forms of métissage or hybridity in either colonial writer as truly postcolonial. It is only from the late 1980s that métissage, if with difficulty, inches towards the possibility of signifying choice, inclusion, and positive effects Contemporary New Caledonian Writers: The Difficult Movement towards Métissage Like Célina Landrot, Catherine Régent’s neo-colonial historical romance, Justine, ou un amour de chapeau de paille [Justine: in Love with a ‘Straw-Hat’], published almost a century later, in 1995, once again speaks of the social segregation and the entrenched attitudes that prevailed in the rural communities of free settlers, liberated convicts, Kanak, and engagés at the end of the nineteenth century. The historian Isabelle Merle has suggested that this fierce hierarchy of class (or origin) and race in the early colony, the refusal of mixing, may explain the depth of racism and class distinctions that persist in the country into the present (2005). Unlike peasants in France, the free settlers had access to servants – assigned indentured labour, convict labour, or Kanak completing their annual work obligations (prestations) – and the status that lay in their refusal to mix as equals with liberated prisoners. Régent’s contemporary work makes a case for the injustice of transportation and these class distinctions in the early colony. Her novel is a love story, but this time one that is relatively sympathetic to the heroine and her projects as indeed to the male protagonist, victim of transportation. The writer recounts an impossible and passionate affair between the daughter of a colonial dignitary and a ‘straw-hat’, her father’s house servant, deported for unjustly murdering the man who raped his sister. This is a story

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 272

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

273

rehabilitating the déportés, and, like Régent’s earlier neo-colonial novel, Valesdir, exalting women’s devotion. Set in the Anglo-French condominium of the New Hebrides archipelago (now Vanuatu) and Noumea, Valesdir tells the story of the sacrifices made by the Catholic family of Charles Trenal and his Swiss wife. Courageous in the face of disillusionment and the broken promises of the French Society for the New Hebrides, they battle a violent natural world at Épi, and struggle against the odds to make that small island in the French colony home. The impossibility of being accepted as in-between a social category or class or of marrying outside one’s station that lies at the heart of Un amour de chapeau de paille is replaced by the potential decadence of marrying outside white culture. Valesdir, which derives in part from the nostalgia and bitterness of a white French settler and business community exiled from Santo and Tanna after independence in the New Hebrides in 1980, continues to stage many of the old colonialist clichés. Against a background where the ‘natives’ remain a largely indistinguishable mass, often menacing or under the influence of hostile Presbyterian (English) missionaries, and acting as a more or less unreliable workforce, the great dread of the pioneer mothers in the novel remains the inevitable racial mixing resulting from the absence of young white women as wives for their sons. The only mixed unions even imaginable, of course, are between white men and native women. The story, once again, serves to establish the rights of the descendants of these co-victims of the colonial system, telling of the hardships and sacrifices made by the early colonists in the New Hebrides who had succeeded in making that French colony and later British-French Condominium home, even as they continually waited for news from Europe. The themes of double allegiance (to old Europe at war and to their new adopted land); of the support role of the tender, hardworking pioneer wife; and of subaltern natives, emerge as standard tropes of the colonial novel. However, although Régent’s novels can be classed as traditional neo-colonial romances, their themes can nonetheless be read against the grain to show a certain necessity or inevitability of the breaking down of the barriers of class and race. As Blandine Stefanson puts it (1998), consciously or unconsciously, Régent’s work inscribes scenes of the contribution of the Melanesians to the development of their own lands confiscated by colonization. Her women are stereotypical, but they are also quiet and capable heroines. Intermarriage is shown to be inevitable. Régent’s novel is part of a very small body of literary work on the former New Hebrides and present

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 273

12/03/2014 14:40:05

274

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Vanuatu and does reflect the major difficulties encountered by the relatively small numbers of white settlers who managed to establish themselves in that late British-French colony (the Condominium was established in 1906) and the significant links between the Frenchspeaking population and Noumea. Alongside Régent’s novel, as the number of small presses in Noumea has proliferated, a substantial body of largely self-financed testimonial writing, family albums, and epistolary essays refusing guilt and demonstrating a certain resistance to the ethos of the recent political agreements has also featured in the bookshops. Most of these texts present culture, both Kanak and European, as a single, closed, and unchanging space of inheritance. Neither biculturalism nor interculturalism emerges from the many inadvertent and only semi-acknowledged cases of biological métissage present in this body of literature as hitherto unspoken ‘family secrets’. A much more significant pioneer family saga, Jacqueline Sénès’, Terre violente, published not in Noumea but by Hachette in France in 1987, in the contexts of the Événements, and inspired by Sénès’ many years spent working as a journalist in New Caledonia, again sketches out the lives of a family of courageous small settlers. This novel, however, constructs the first full socio-political history of New Caledonia for sophisticated French readers and was later made into a film for television. Arriving in the new land, the would-be settler parents of the heroine Helena are assassinated by natives whose tapu burial places they have unwittingly violated. The novel narrates both the exile of the settlers in a foreign land and their progressive journey to oneness with this new country through plague, drought, isolation, cyclone, and locusts, by sweat, blood, and tears. The Irish-Australian small farmer John Sutton becomes a hero when he attempts to help the neighbouring tribu stricken by the plague, and is buried on the land he fought to develop. If the mediating term between terre violente and séjour paisible is once again the constant movement between them, the experience of hybridity for the Suttons is complex and very different from the mixing in Mariotti and Laubreaux as those writers moved between New Caledonia and Europe. In Terre violente, hybridity is less moving from one world to another, or even standing with one foot in each camp or taking up a position somewhere in between both terms. It is already a restless mixing, if very partial and still difficult, in uneven contacts between two worlds, European and Kanak, that coexist and influence each other, but are not equal.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 274

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

275

Biological and cultural métissage still retain connotations of scandal and impossibility. Against the backdrop of the history of the young colony, Wanatcha, the mixed-race son of a shipwrecked Breton sailor and Clarice, a Kanak woman who works for the Suttons, embodies alienation and eventually regression and degeneracy. Rather than see the farm revert to the ‘backward’ tribu, Wanatcha will end up by setting fire to the property that he comes to inherit. Dark-skinned, but brought up and seeing himself as European, the young man finds himself rejected by the white community. On the other hand, Jean-Chrétien, the adopted Kanak son of John Sutton, discovers a different kind of exile and hybridity in the situation Franz Fanon has famously described as ‘black skin, white masks’ (Fanon, 1968). Jean-Chrétien eventually changes his name and his clothes, and seeks to recover his Kanak identity. Not unlike Alin Laubreaux’s demonstration of the sheer difficulty of settling in the colony, Jacqueline Sénès’ work is as much about surviving failure as about success and going on. The story is told predominantly through the struggle and resilience of a woman of French origin, Hélène Sutton, who becomes the surrogate head of the family after the death of her husband, and must face up to cyclone, black magic, work in the mines for survival, the loss of the farm, and finally rape and disfigurement in a further battle against male dominance in Caledonian society. The exoticism and adventure that cannot fulfil its promise in the critical Laubreaux, or indeed in Régent, come into their own in New Caledonia’s own brand of popular romance, notably in the long novels of Arlette Peirano. Peirano is herself a métisse, born in France to parents from Madagascar and self-identifying as both from Reunion and as a citizen of the world. Nonetheless, this writer has spent more than thirty years in New Caledonia, where she claims to have put down roots and to be seeking answers to the country’s future in 900-page fictions that predominantly explore cross-cultural love relationships. As she herself defined her work in an interview reproduced in Jeunes littératures du Pacifique Sud, the invention of characters and ‘writing with the heart’ permit her to live a double life, ‘beyond conventional morality’. Peirano’s novels, Kanak blanc (2000) [White Kanak], Tabou suprême (2001) [Ultimate Taboo], Métis de toi (2003) [Half-Caste], and Le Gardien de l’Île Noire (2005) [The Guardian of the Black Island], exploit the novelty, shock value, ‘depravity’, and sexual excitement of mixed-race romantic encounters in Oceania with rather less reserve than Bougainville. The young Caledonian heroine of Tabou suprême, trapped by a broken leg, finds herself imprisoned in a cave on the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 275

12/03/2014 14:40:05

276

The Literatures of the French Pacific

island of Maré with a ­magnificently proportioned young tattooed chief, who is living in self-exile from his chiefdom in the Marquesan islands to expiate a crime. Peirano’s fictions mine postcolonial and feminist tropes (inter-race relationships and the independent modern woman) principally to produce titillating romances of passion and adventure. These include the discovery of a hidden cultural treasure in the Maré caves; the young wife’s accounts of life in the narcissistic prison-palace of luxury after her subsequent marriage to the exile, who turns out to be an all-important, but very fully occupied Polynesian high chief on his Marquesan island; and the heroine’s belated discovery of her almost incestuous love for her white Caledonian half-brother who is, in fact, adopted. Yet, like the Mills and Boon romantic novels they emulate, these sagas serve not only to stage but also ultimately to naturalize the tropes they draw upon, particularly those of mixed-race marriage or sexual relationships, now permissible between a black (or preferably brown) man and a white woman. A number of popular detective novels published by Hachette in its Série noire series, notably by A.D.G. (Joujoux sur le caillou [Joujoux on the Caledonian Rock], C’est le bagne! [The Penal Colony!]) and Baudoin Chailley (Kanaky point zero [Kanaky Ground Zero], Nouméa, ville ouverte [Noumea, Open City]), also cash in on such popular interest in exotic Oceania, and attempt, to use the title of Graham Huggan’s study, to ‘market the margins’. If Peirano’s popular novels relay the issue of mixed-race relationships from within the genre of exotic romance, to once again conclude on the difficulties of such relationships for women, Ismet Kurtovitch’s Une Pastorale calédonienne explores similar issues in a serious politicalpedagogical play (published in English as A Caledonian Pastoral). In 2002, the historian and then Director of the Territorial Archives, of French and Yugoslav origins, brother of the writer Nicolas Kurtovitch, and descendant of a very early settler family, produced Une Pastorale calédonienne, a play reflecting the events of 12 January 1985. This was the date when independence groups boycotted the elections and set up roadblocks around the country, and the militant leader Éloi Machoro appeared on the local and international news publicly smashing the ballot box with an axe in a gesture calculated to attract maximum attention to the cause. In the play, the final ‘neutralizing’ of the ‘terrorist’ by the French army is presented as the outcome of machistic responses and the enflaming of fears of terrorist takeover by the mayor and farm owner, Marcel, and his men, overheard throughout the play on CB radio. The radio also gives a voice to Noël (Machoro the rebel – given

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 276

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

277

the same name here as the chief of the 1917 Kanak insurrection) who justifies his actions of occupying the polling station, hostage-taking, and potentially of killing, to his fellow militant, Mary: Mary: So what are we doing here then? Noël: You know very well. Up till now we’ve had to play the monkey or live under a reign of terror. Tomorrow we will be free. We want our dignity back.

The text also gives a voice to a pacifist settler, Charley (Marcel’s brother), in love with Mary, the Kanak woman who is secretly Noël’s radio operator. The play includes a scene in which Charley and Mary make a satirical presentation of the city of Noumea to tourists, street name by street name. These are inevitably the names of generals, war-heroes, and businessmen reflecting, variously, colonization and military victory, French administration, and capital. Names and titles, like the act of naming itself (signifying appropriation or assigning of strategic meaning), are shown to have heightened significance in the New Caledonian context. A Caledonian Pastoral is itself a South Seas version of André Gide’s classic and similarly double-edged Pastoral Symphony (Une Symphonie Pastorale), as French literature, history, and names necessarily permeate New Caledonian writing. The goal of a fraternal mixed society is spelled out in the play, but the relationship between Mary and Charley (who is later killed at a roadblock) seems, as yet, to have little chance of the tolerant and happy mixed outcome they seek. Mary: Will we find another country to go to? Charley: Once upon a time in a far-off country, there was a Princess called Snow White. Mary: Not again! Charley: A completely black country then! Mary: No Charley. A colourless country, inhabited by men and women of every colour, who will never, ever again … All together: be strangers to one another.

A decade after Terre violente raises the acute questions created by New Caledonia’s historical lack of mixing, a Metropolitan novel, La Colonie perdue (1998), written by Joëlle Wintrebert, adapts the historical diary of the colon Feillet, coffee planter, Marc Le Goupils, again predominantly for a French readership and from a greater distance than Ismet Kurtovitch’s insider and political dramatization of recent political events. Wintrebert’s fiction sets out to focus on the good-will

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 277

12/03/2014 14:40:05

278

The Literatures of the French Pacific

and co-operation that did exist between communities in the period of the development of free settlement and to write a modern, readable story. This is now narrated by a young girl, Sophie Le Goupils, writing her impressions to her childhood friend in Paris. Sophie comes of age growing up on the station at Nassirah, a property managed by the Goupils family, who live side by side with fifty or so indentured and convict labourers and Kanak recruits. The story of the failure of the pioneer enterprise and the family’s return to Europe in both the original diary and its adaptation constitute a critique of the colonial administration’s inability satisfactorily to plan for the free settlers encouraged to emigrate to New Caledonia at the end of the nineteenth century. It was intended that the newcomers, les colons Feillet, would establish coffee plantations and replace the penal institution as the motor of the economy. Many, however, were brought to ruin or returned to France through the Administration’s inefficiency and incompetence, recalling Régent’s story of the settler-victims in Valesdir. The novel takes the form of a personal letter-diary in which Sophie, a modern young girl, tells of falling in love with the country and with a young local Kanak chief of a group exiled from their original lands as a punishment by the Administration. However, he is promised to a woman of the clan and dedicated to restoring his community, and a now more mature Sophie must renounce her love(s) and her new country and return to France with her disillusioned family. Sophie’s diary creates portraits of resourceful, hardworking, and intelligent pioneer-farmers, such as Le Goupil’s brother, a doctor who gives his life treating those suffering from an outbreak of disease in the capital. Others help Kanak against the Administration or the colonists who mistreat their Melanesian workers. It again tells the story of the injustices and hardships, and also the joys experienced by the many different groups who work on the station: the déportés, the indentured labourers, free settlers, and Kanak from the neighbouring village. However, it also describes a very contemporary openness to difference and the bonds that can be created between all men and women of good-will living and working together. In its rewriting of history, La Colonie perdue stands between the early twentieth-century consciousness of the inter-text that it at once draws upon and transforms, and modern, even postcolonial understandings. Its acceptance of difference is foregrounded by its young protagonist endowed with a feminist consciousness and an awareness of social justice. Postcolonial sensibilities and Metropolitan origin allow Wintrebert to rewrite this period of history backwards, and largely from

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 278

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

279

the outside, going well beyond her source text (Le Goupils), in bringing forth from his experience constrained by its time significant openness to difference and possibilities of cross-cultural exchange. Emma SinclairReynolds points out that the name of Le Goupil’s plantation, Nassirah, where Le Goupil’s two brothers to whom he dedicated his book died, was the name of the Caldoche family farm where the teenager Yves Tual was killed during the Événements. Nassirah was also the name given by Claudine Jacques to one of her female characters in L’Homme-lézard. Intertextuality, as we noted, is increasingly a central feature of the hybridity of New Caledonian literatures. Wintrebert reconstructs settler history from Le Goupil’s diary, retelling the stories of enlightened free settlers struggling against an ineffective and prejudiced administration and in sympathy with their exploited Kanak neighbours, empathetically demonstrating postcolonial sensibilities to rehabilitate French settlement from France. The bricolage of personal and family memories of the landscapes of New Caledonia and Vanuatu, structured by a mixing of Kanak and European myths, creates a distinctively insider settler voice in Hélène Savoie’s short texts in Les Terres de la demi-lune [The Land of Half-Moon Sheds]. Savoie’s narrative, initially describing colonial life in the New Hebrides (her title refers to the dome-shaped corrugated-iron constructions built during the Second World War by the American forces who left a significant mark on the Pacific countries where they were based), is driven by the overriding fear of exile from a Pacific home that is not at all a paradise; heat, mosquitoes, dangers from the isolation of the bush, poverty, fear of the mysteries of the Other, an unpredictable neighbour with a penchant for cannibalism. It is also characterized by nostalgia for pioneering institutions and experiences, as in the fragment ‘General Store’ that recounts the happy encounters in shared play in the dirt in front of that social institution that sells everything for basic living, between black piquinini and white children, initially curious and shy about each other’s difference. Savoie shares with Kanak writers, and with Bloc, Mariotti, and Baudoux (whose inter-texts echo within her own writing), the denunciation of the wounding of the land by mining in the name of progress, and, with Gorodé, a critique of the unbridled sexuality of the colonial patriarchs on their vast stations. Proud of their numerous progeny, skin ‘darkened as a result of multiple métissages – Melanesian, Asian or Polynesian – depending on where their travels took them’ [‘colorée de multiples métissages mélanésiens, asiatiques ou polynésiens, selon que leurs voyages les menaient ici ou là’], writes Savoie (2005: 43),

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 279

12/03/2014 14:40:05

280

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the patriarchs would gather their children together on their properties during the holidays so that the plantations of the New Hebrides were populated with flocks of mixed-race children. Savoie’s work also engages with the insider–outsider question, particularly in relation to the Métropolitains from France and repatriated French settlers from Algeria relocating to other French Territories after independence, seen as outsiders and castigated for their ignorance of the local, including Kanak. The collection of short stories of this self-identified fifth generation calédonienne mixes the legends of the Ancient Greeks, Arthurian legend, and figures from Kanak oral tradition, explicated in the modes of the sacred and the fantastic. For Savoie, as Karin Speedy observes in her study entitled ‘Memories, Myths and Métissage as Means of Negotiating Identity in Hélène Savoie’s Les Terres de la demi-lune’ (2010), the Kanak sacred – in the form of totems such as lizards and snakes or in the shape of baos – is always ambiguous: the contrast between the beneficent sacred (sacré bénéfique) and the malevolent sacred (sacré maléfique) is linked to their respective association with the living (kamo) or with the dead (bao), and forces that are connected to the conservation of life and are in harmony with nature are opposed to forces related to death, destruction, epidemics, crimes, illness, and everything that corrupts and decomposes. The sky and all that is above ground is opposed to the underworld – under the land or sea – and light and dryness are opposed to darkness and wet. The short text, ‘Le Jardin sous la mer’ [The Garden Under the Sea], in which Savoie conjures up the inverted vision of ‘a bleak, beautiful garden drowned under the sky’s tears’ [‘un beau jardin désolé noyé sous l’eau du ciel’], portrays the arrival of Autumn as a lizard-god with a lidless gaze rippling under the dead and rotting leaves. The onset of evening will see the sudden emergence of the departed, rising up in a silent circular dance (‘la ronde silencieuse des absents’) (58). This text, translated into English by Speedy, evokes for her the shift from kamo to bao, the shadows and the half-light of the ambiguous in-between realm to which Savoie’s text so often refers. In the long central story of the collection, the female narrator, unable to accept the death of her close friend Thomas, feels his presence, or at least the presence of his bao, and goes on a quest (with references to King Arthur, the Holy Grail, and Avalon) to Sydney’s King’s Cross in an attempt to bring him back to the other side of the river ‘to rediscover the fragrant smells of life’ [‘pour y retrouver la fragrance des parfums de la vie’] (104). Speedy reconstructs Savoie’s network of references to the odours, colours, and wetness of a decadent rotting urban landscape

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 280

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

281

(Sydney’s King’s Cross, the Pigalle of the South Seas, a place of human destruction and debauchery and a land of exile for Thomas) that evokes the bao and the land of the dead. The bright, clear luminosity of the islands appears to represent kamo, the land of the living. According to Kanak oral tradition, the frontier between life and death is not final and the defunct person, become bao, can make journeys back to the land of the living (kamo) (Leenhardt, 1979: 31–5). In ‘La Grotte d’Adio’, notes Speedy, Savoie mentions the prince of the underworld (a figure common to both European and Kanak mythology) who goes wandering at night in the land of the living. This motif – the passing between this world and the next, and the ambiguity of life and death – is also central to the rest of the stories in the collection. In Speedy’s reading, the narrator’s description of her monorail ride in Sydney evokes the kind of turbulent, whirlwind trip one imagines the Kanak defunct taking as he or she dives off the cliff, plunges into the sea, and spins down to the underwater entry to the land of the dead at the Roche Perçée at Bourail. The themes of exile as of transformation and metamorphosis, and of death and rebirth, are again explored in ‘Pacific Sky’. The Caledonian writer’s intricate métissage of cultural and mythical world views argues for a shared postcolonial Oceanian identity marked by physical and spiritual connection to the land portrayed as a living, breathing Garden of Eden. Like Barbançon’s La Terre du lézard, it establishes the Pacific as centre rather than as a periphery of France. The stories in Les Terres de la demi-lune appear to testify to an emerging postcolonial Oceanic identity, that of the European ‘victims of history’, to use Barbançon’s words (1992a: 62), who are no longer French; rather, their sense of self is firmly rooted in the Pacific soil of their adopted land, with a past based on shared memories, stories, experiences of the land, and borrowed myths, as well as a shared claim to spiritual connection with the land. Savoie’s textual negotiation of identity from inside the Pacific, the biological and cultural crossings woven into her narrative, provide a further example of strategic but distinctive métissage that reopens the debate on the purposes and outcomes of settler appropriation of Kanak myth. Is this hybridity, and if so, is it postcolonial? This chapter has pointed to the tendency to elide the distinction between métissage and hybridity and the need to categorize the contexts of hybridity. Some new theoretical elaborations of the concept of métissage, defined as a praxis by Françoise Lionnet, for example, in relation to her analysis of women’s texts in Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture, are very close to elaborations of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 281

12/03/2014 14:40:05

282

The Literatures of the French Pacific

concept of hybridity particularly in terms of the undecideability and indeterminacy that can mark the latter. We have to articulate new visions of ourselves, new concepts that allow us to think otherwise … Métissage is such a concept and a practice; it is the site of undecideability and indeterminacy, where solidarity becomes the fundamental principle of political action against hegemonic languages … Métissage is a form of bricolage […] that demystifies all essentialist glorifications of unitary origins … It is a form of savoir-faire which resists symbolization within a coherent or homogeneous conceptual system since it is also the power to undo the logic and clarity of concepts. (Lionnet, 1989: 327–8)

However, as Roger Toumson points out in his rebuttal study, Mythologie du métissage, such a universal theoretical concept takes no account of the very different relations of power and hierarchies between and within francophone worlds. Once the ‘lyrical illusion of the reconciliation of opposites and universal miscegenation is dissipated only a vague notion remains’ (Toumson, 1998: 62). Nor is it possible to state categorically that ‘Métissage is a form of bricolage … that demystifies all essentialist glorifications of unitary origins’ even in the contemporary works we are studying. It is evident that Savoie’s appropriation of Kanak myth, not unlike that of Baudoux or Mariotti before her, functions to give voice to the particular origins, position, and political investments of the self-identified Caledonian writer. As our earlier chapter observed, the consequences of degrees of social and biological in-betweenness, and the possibilities of métissage, biological and cultural, similarly dominate the literary texts of the most recognized contemporary ‘Caledonian’ writer, Claudine Jacques (who has spent her life in New Caledonia since adolescence). Jacques is a more extensively published writer than Savoie, with a wider social and literary range and an acute and empathetic understanding of the many Others in Caledonian society. In her 1997 volume of short stories, Nos silences sont si fragiles [Our Silences are so Fragile], she depicts a Caldoche population, itself often dispossessed and barely eking out a living in harsh rural conditions with no real connection to Metropolitan France. This dominant group is in fact more mixed racially and socioculturally than its racist ideology has allowed it to admit. An interview in the 1908s with a west-coast settler inserted into Jacques’ first novel, Les Cœurs barbelés, introduces the reader to his shack of corrugated iron on a mosquito-infested island known familiarly as ‘Le Caillou’ [The Rock], a home sheltering his own ‘clan’ who live in close proximity to its

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 282

12/03/2014 14:40:05

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

283

Kanak counterparts. This small farmer tells of his hard labour to make the land productive, and of the appreciation of the local natives who come to work for him from time to time when they find themselves in need of money. The interview concludes with the settler claiming that, despite the feeling of still having French blood in his veins, ‘We exist. We have our place here.’ Being French, for this New Caledonian, comes after belonging to the island. His identity is again ambivalent, neither native nor French. A settler from the French countryside that is already so different from the general white world, writes Jacques, he is also a Caledonian settler close to the black world. Her colonist, a ‘settler métis without knowing it’ poignantly deplores the destructive anxiety of being at once in one’s own country and an outsider, of living with a suitcase ready to leave if the independence movement forces the departure of the family. Déwé Gorodé’s most recent portrait of the Kanak world in Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! incorporates two white characters she labels colons to whom her text similarly gives legitimacy. Jeanne and Albert, for whom the local Kanak have affectionate nicknames, own a little store, relay phone messages, and keep the tribu in basic necessities, allowing them credit and making a very modest living from selling the fish they catch and from growing coffee. Gorodé’s text is at pains to point out that, like the other white neighbours who attend the feast in the tribu to commemorate the death of Tâdo, the grandmother of the young protagonist, the old couple are supporters of the first Kanak political party and of a new Kanak-centred politics. It is this that gives them legitimacy in their rural area for Gorodé. Jacques’ stories constitute similarly detailed sociological portraits. These highlight the mixed biological origins of the New Caledonian population rather than their distinctness. The characters who open ‘Le Carré de voyageurs’ in her collection of short pieces in Ce n’est pas la faute de la lune, for example, are a ‘stockman canaque’ who is ‘the eldest son of an Arab from Nessadiou and a popinée from Bakouya’(1997: 103). Most of the stories in the collections, Nos silences sont si fragiles and Ce ne sont que des histoires d’amour stage the dramas of mixed race couples. In ‘Des vies de chemin de croix’, Anna, a young Kanak, is rejected by the ‘old people’ for bringing a daughter into the world born of an ephemeral youthful encounter with a young Frenchman. In New Caledonia for his military service, the young man had since returned to France. ‘There’s nothing good in that kind of child’, say the old people. When Anna becomes involved with Louis, a Wallisian, a member of the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 283

12/03/2014 14:40:06

284

The Literatures of the French Pacific

6 per cent Polynesian minority in the country enters New Caledonian literature for the first time. However, when her daughter Lydia, now a beautiful adolescent, allows herself to be seduced by Louis, Anna remembers the commonplace wisdom of her clan: ‘Lydia the white child had betrayed her. What else could be expected of a girl of mixed blood?’ (1996: 16) Although Anna turns the guilty pair out of her house, Lydia will return just before her sixteenth birthday, pregnant like her mother before her. On the night of a violent cyclone, after a fierce confrontation with her daughter, Anna decides to go beyond the stereotype and the taboo and to accept both Lydia and the new life she is carrying. Even though he/she will be of mixed race, Lydia’s child, she determines, will be part of a loving family. Social prejudice against mixed-race children is again attacked in the same volume, in ‘Lies’, when a young girl, Alicia, discovers that her absent mother, Kaléa, is black, and that this mother is in fact Maria, the nanny who had brought her up before leaving the family and returning home to the Loyalty islands. Alicia decides to leave her white father, who had kept his relationship with her mother a secret, and sets out in search of her Kanak mother Claudine Jacques, who herself lived in a close relationship with a young Kanak intellectual, places the theme of mixed-race relationships, sexuality, love, and marriage at the heart of these early stories. In ‘Nagar’, despite the passionate love affair between Julia, from white Noumea, and Mathew, a Melanesian who lives in Vanuatu, the Caledonian woman feels that a permanent relationship is impossible. Deciding that she would always be the outsider, ‘the white woman’, and unwilling to give up her own cultural world, Julia refuses Mathew’s offer to speak to the customary authorities about a possible marriage. In a drunken and possessive rage, Mathew beats her severely and abandons her for dead. The women of the village come to Julia’s aid and she recovers, but Mathew, consumed by passion and regret in the face of her continuing refusal, jumps from the rocks to his death. Gorodé does not have a monopoly on the theme of the power, possession, and jealousy that can accompany passion. ‘Secrets amers’ [Bitter Secrets], again ‘not a love story’, speaks of the violence that can be engendered by the different needs and cultural perspectives that come into conflict in black–white sexual relationships. A young Melanesian woman living on a small island, pregnant to a French sailor for whose promised return she is anxiously waiting, learns the secret of the terrible death of her mother. Dragged by her hair up

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 284

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

285

the mountain, she had been thrown into the volcano by her enraged and desperate husband because she wanted to leave the island with the white sailor with whom she had fallen in love. When the French ship sails back into the harbour to fetch her, the young girl has decided to remain on the island with her father and her child, to ensure the survival of the family group. In ‘La Jument noire’ [The Black Mare], Karl comes out of prison after a period of incarceration for drunken violence and assault, arriving almost too late to help his struggling white father to beat the drought that is threatening the very survival of their cattle station. It is the sudden reappearance of Karl’s Kanak mother, who had disappeared after her son’s birth, quietly sitting on the ground, waiting, that brings the angry and regretful young man an unexpected peace and makes him decide against the superstitious sacrifice of the family’s black mare to bring the desperately needed rain. Karl gives his mother the mare in foal as a present and is then able to engage in an emotional relationship with a young journalist who had come up from Noumea to report on the drought. ‘L’Homme qui venait d’ailleurs’ [The Man Who Came From Elsewhere], on the other hand, stages a rare successful mixed relationship between an aging white Caledonian and his wise and gentle Kanak wife who has given him a large family. Nonetheless, the patriarch had suffered for a time from the fact that none of his children resembles him, preventing him from leaving a strong physical trace of himself. Jacques’ first novel, Les Cœurs barbelés, follows a more clearly socially transgressive love relationship between a young Caledonian woman and a young Kanak man, set against the background of the virtual civil war of the 1980s. Marilou is only accepted by Séry/ Dominique’s Kanak family once she brings a child to the group. Her own rural Caledonian family, on the other hand, is violently opposed to her relationship with the young engineer. This is, notes the text, as much because of the closeness of the communities as because of the cultural distance between them. Marilou’s ‘settler’ father, Clément, had grown up to respect Kanak knowledge and powers. Her brother had married Rose-May, whose mother was a popinée and the daughter of a Javanese father, a mixed-race origin kept carefully hidden from the family. Marilou’s attempt to make her relationship with Séry work is also beset by his infidelity and the machistic attitudes engendered in part by the prerogatives accorded males in his own society. Séry’s earlier infatuation with blonde-haired Aurélie – who had rejected him because

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 285

12/03/2014 14:40:06

286

The Literatures of the French Pacific

he was a Kanak, wounding Séry’s pride and creating a desire for revenge and for control in a relationship – is a further complicating factor. Barbed-wired hearts, pride, and prejudice continue to stand, like fences, in the way of intimate long-term relationships between mixed couples and communities. In Ce n’est pas la faute de la lune, Jacques’ ‘little Caledonian stories’, as she calls them, combine fairy story, horror story, and Kanak tales from oral tradition to craft a mixed new narrative. Inspired both by empathy with a Kanak vision of the universe and a European literary tradition that goes back to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in the second century, Jacques tells tales of metamorphosis: fantastic dramas of a terrified young man, Jean-Christ, transforming into a fish-turtle or, in ‘Céleste’, of two happily widowed sisters, Wapata and Wahaja, who become apprentice witches, making the trip to Noumea and around the Place des Cocotiers on their broomsticks (and incidentally discovering Jacques’ own work in the window of the Montaigne Bookshop). A young man who does not respect a taboo disappears, transformed into a tree, and can only be liberated by the intervention of a maternal uncle. A beautiful young Wallisian girl picked up hitchhiking turns out to have died and been buried ten years earlier. ‘Myriapode’ recounts the horror and anguish felt by a butcher in Noumea, a premonition that leads to the discovery of a giant centipede in the house. In his preface to this collection, the Kanak pastor Béniéla Houmbouy describes Jacques as an interpreter of the Kanak world, from a position of ‘charity’ and of ‘moderation’. As we saw in the previous chapter, Jacques explores the relationships between a number of communities in her next novel L’Hommelézard, which describes the violent clashes between the Kanak tribu of Saint-Louis and the Wallisian community of Ave Maria, resulting in the paralysis of her main character, the young Kanak sculptor Énok, and the death of his sister Mandela. Luisa, abandoned with four children in the shanty town by her Metropolitan policeman husband who returns to France, becomes Énok’s new partner. This Wallisian woman embodies a selfless grace similar to that showed by Mandela: women provide some hope of redemption from the violence and deprivation of their social environment. Indeed, only the pure Mandela or the loving Luisa can exorcize the ‘lizard’ of a violent history, or of Énok’s demons of alcoholic self-hatred. Nassirah, an incest victim; Lewis, who kills Nassirah’s blackmailing father; and a white witch doctor-healer from Vanuatu are similarly characters who embody the pluri-ethnic community.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 286

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

287

However, as Tran, who is of Vietnamese origin, points out to his friends in the Snack Bar in Noumea, the value of cultural distinctiveness nonetheless remains the bottom line: ‘Chacun sa culture, chacun aussi sa langue’ [Each group its own culture. Each group its own language]. If L’Homme-lézard points to the relative harmony and solidarity among the impoverished mixed communities living in the shanty town at the entrance to Noumea, these positive aspects are counterpointed by a number of threats, including the deadly confrontations at the nearby mission of St Louis between Kanak and Polynesian immigrants from the French Territory of Wallis and Futuna. Many of Jacques’ characters are torn by exclusion or the search for belonging, and are a prey to the demons (the lizard) of alcoholism and violence. In Jacques’ next work, L’Âge du perroquet-banane: parabole païenne [The Age of the Multi-Coloured Parakeet: a Pagan Parable], the small group of protagonists, survivors of a major ecological catastrophe, is made up of Polynesian, Melanesian, Asian, and European sages and readers of signs. This apocalyptic novel is set in a mist-shrouded 2028, ten years after ‘the great disorder’ (not, coincidentally perhaps, ten years after 2018, the original date of the third and final referendum on independence), against a background of ecological catastrophe, social breakdown and coercion including disputes for power between rival groups, the rape of young girls, and the crucifixion of the Ecclesiastic. One of the meanings Dominique Jouve reads into the title is that the novel speaks of the age of the parroted word: ‘The age of empty repetitive speech, without meaning, in regimes that are corrupt and anti-democratic’ (2002: 97–104). But, as Jouve points out, there is a second inverse movement in the novel effected by the tales told by the story-teller Melanëng, which constitute a return to the origins of the world, with its incest, quarrels, light and darkness, and the delimiting of land from the sea. L’Âge du perroquet-banane portrays a new age of multiculturalism but one that emerges only out of the mists and ruins of a major disaster. Ultimately, the Council of Sages from many cultures and races cannot hold the line against encroaching barbarity and superstition, and the last remaining books are destroyed. The pessimism of the violent crucifixion of the Ecclesiastic, of defection to the apparently ‘ecological’ but irrational and prejudiced realm of the Obese Matriarch, or the corruption by power of some of the remaining sages, is counterbalanced only by the librarian-heroine’s self-sacrifice. She accepts ingestion by the cannibal chief of the fierce mountain tribe to become quite literally hybrid. In a metaphorical and literal sense,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 287

12/03/2014 14:40:06

288

The Literatures of the French Pacific

exceptional women are willing to be devoured so that their mana, their spirit of love and accumulated knowledge, might survive and be passed on in some form. In Jacques’ most recent and similarly apocalyptic detective novel, Nouméa Mangrove, the spectres of global eco-terrorist plots or global organizations disguised as ecologists come to haunt and magnify the current social and economic-ecological questions of the development of nickel mining in the Southern and the Northern Provinces. Noumea becomes a Deleuzian ‘rhizome’, a mangrove-city of entanglement of destinies, a purgatory where crime is generated by passion and by greed for money and status, and where the boundaries between the material and the otherworld merge and blend. The characters again represent a number of ethnicities: a Kanak police inspector works alongside and shares ecological sympathies with a young woman of Javanese origin, and the tyrannical womanizer and station owner, Samy Tyres, from an old New Caledonian family (who recalls Gorodé’s philandering colonial Sea-Captain) enthrals Emma Salvatore, a blonde New Caledonian. On the book’s dust jacket, Liza Kharoubi describes what she calls Jacques’ ‘ethics of the flesh’, the materiality of bodies which may be burned, scarified, wounded, and sucked down into the tangled mangrove, but that again incarnate an immemorial past and an infinite love. These characters, observes Kharoubi, are not simply individuals suspended in the present. This sense of transformation recalls Gorodé’s work. Nouméa Mangrove similarly contains many echoes of Kanak mythical elements and repeats the thematic of sexual possession central to Gorodé’s first novel. Marina Warner’s work on myths, magic, and metamorphosis argues that cultures are differentiated by their conception of what makes a person human; of what animates the statue or the machine. As Déwé Gorodé observes: ‘As for us, we don’t say “the dead.” We can say the others (that’s my translation) or those who raise us … they are everywhere, they are here, here where I am sitting, perhaps they are over there, listening to me’ (2005). Stories by Jacques, or indeed Savoie, emulate those of Gorodé in their challenge to European rationalism, staging material metamorphosis, premonition, and magic powers, modes of metamorphosis that do not completely fit European categories such as the fantastic or magic realism. Does this constitute ‘reverse acculturation’, métissage, or postcolonial hybridity? As Sylvie André’s study of the quest for identity in the literatures of the French-speaking Pacific observes, in postcolonial societies such as

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 288

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

289

Tahiti and New Caledonia which are seeking a path between political autonomy and independence, all writers are managing the fall out from the colonial period and constructing reasons and means to live together in their own distinctive way (2002: 408). Writers elaborate collective myths and stories to legitimate particular forms of political action in the community imaginary, drawing on similar symbols and texts. There are, however, major cultural and individual differences in the ways these collective myths are inscribed, mixed, or renegotiated. The borrowing and mixing of elements that relate to the question of violence against women offers a useful case study of such differences. Within the Kanak world, this has been particularly manifest in the development of women’s associations, the creation of the GFKEL (Groupe de femmes kanakes exploitées en lutte [Exploited Kanak Women’s Activist Group]) in 1982, and in women’s contribution to the independence struggle. The GFKEL, however, met significant resistance and was dissolved in 1986, after its representative was insulted and struck. Gorodé’s strong denunciation of the sexual exploitation of women, who are circulated like so many pieces of pottery or, barely pubescent, fall victim to the lust of old men along customary pathways, which is voiced in Uté Mûrûnû and L’Épave (2005), is echoed in and echoes texts by women from all communities. The play, V, ou, Portraits de famille au couteau de cuisine [V. or Portraits of the Family with the Kitchen Knife] by the writer of French origin, Anne Bihan, a tragi-comic poetic text for the theatre, was performed in 2003 by Pacifique et Compagnie in the Mont-Dore Cultural Centre, In 2005, Bernadette H, a Caledonian author, published an anonymous autobiographic narrative entitled Mon soleil noir [My Black Sun], recounting her subjection over many years to incestuous abuse, her grooming by, and addiction to, her abuser. These Caledonian texts raise the issue of domestic violence and its origins in personal childhood abuse, the dramas of reconstituted families, and the bruises of parental abandonment within their own communities. As Anne Bihan observes in her short preface, her text also seeks to go further in the quest for a language ‘that is able to speak of the body, its violence and its desires, that have most often remained silent, the passions and the defeats for which it constitutes the theatre, … the cries of crucified love’ (2004). Like Gorodé’s L’Épave, Bihan’s texts also explore the intensity and contradictions of those bonds that keep a couple together despite abuse and the mechanisms of domestic warfare. Her work constitutes a critique of all communities in respect to their failure to consider their own internally mixed character and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 289

12/03/2014 14:40:06

290

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the long-silenced issues raised by unequal gender power. It is evident that Jacques, Bihan, Bernadette H, and Gorodé are interacting with one another’s texts, producing and reflecting the preoccupations in the cultural air and across the various groups. In his 1997 play, Où est le droit ? Okorentit ? [Where is Justice? Okorentit?], Pierre Gope, too, had staged the story of the rape of a young woman, Corilène, and her search for justice, denouncing the fact that the customary authorities defend precisely those aspects of traditional structures that maintain male control over the behaviour of women. Played throughout the tribus of New Caledonia by a troupe of largely amateur actors, the aim is first and foremost didactic: to open up the problem of alcohol and sexual violence within the Kanak community. Corilène’s aggressor, Sérétac, who pleads inebriation, is imprisoned for eight years by the French justice system to which the young girl in distress decides to have recourse when the tribal elders fail to inflict any significant penalty on the young offender. Instead, Corilène has been left by Cango, her alcoholic father and customary chief, to carry the shame and a good measure of the blame. Justice, however, is not seen to be fully served by a hegemonic white law of distributive justice, and Corilène’s rejection of her duty of filial obedience and the weakening of her father’s Word isolates her from her community. This leads finally to her suicide on the tomb of her mother. Gope is staging the flaws in the administration of Kanak customary law created by often less than wise or legitimate chiefs, who operate a kind of old boys’ club that closes ranks around apparently disruptive women. At the same time, he presents the problems for Kanak in simply adopting European systems. It is for want of a solution that Corilène is driven into the position of opposing the rights of the individual to the rights of the group, or women’s rights to customary rights. As her father warns Corilène, echoing Utê Mûrûnû’s admonishment to her granddaughter when the latter decides to refuse a customary marriage planned by her elders, this is a ‘perilous path’. In Cango’s words that close the play, the customary roads that seem twisting and tortuous to his daughter are also those that will best maintain the integrity of her soul. Gope’s play, then, like Gorodé’s work, approaches the contemporary issue of forced sexual relations from a particular indigenous perspective that apparently cannot simply be reduced to the question of human rights (for women) over customary rights. Rather, it opens up custom to interrogation from within but without denying its legitimacy. His play also confirms universal understandings that welfare-dependence and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 290

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

291

alcohol within a repetitive culture of neglect or abuse from mother/father to son (the case of the rapist, Sérétac) create pathological behaviours and distortions of tradition. Corilène reminds her audience of an older traditional culture that was also dominated by a male gerontocracy, but where behaviour was tightly regulated by prescriptions, ritual, and cruel proscription, and where rape was severely punished. The question that might well be asked by a European researcher of whether endemic violence against women is a result of modern dispossession and alienation, or of a traditional misogynist culture of arranged marriages which has always permitted violence against those women who had no male protectors, is not posed in these terms. Moreover, Pierre Gope has elsewhere been critical of Western politics for having unquestioningly imposed its own colours (white), its ideologies and its justice, on Kanak, often with negative results. In the final instance, the play suggests that there is inevitably a gap between any single Droit [Law/Right] and true Justice; something like a remainder between the rights of the individual and the cohesion of the group. Justice, in Gope, is sought through the instigation of a new kind of power, law, and equilibrium within the chefferie, within custom, as this is explored in his most recent play, La Fuite de l’igname [The Flight of the Yam]. Pierre Wakaw Gope was born in 1966 on Maré, discovering the theatre as an instrument for his didactic mission through the visit of an African company, Koteba, directed by Suleiman Koly, with whom he spent a period of time in Abidjan. Plays allow Gope to stage serious social questions as interactive performance primarily for Kanak audiences. After working with Peter Walker in Vanuatu and Peter Brook in Rennes, Gope founded his own small company, Cebue (signifying ‘memory’ in Nengone, the language of Maré). Despite the difficulties and jealousies provoked both by his prominence and his sometimes critical approach to his own society, the actor, producer, and playwright remains, like Tjibaou and Gorodé, a ‘man’ of the soil, rooted in his village on the small Loyalty island. His first play, Wamirat, le fils du chef de Pénélo [Wamirat, the Son of the Chief of Pénélo], produced in 1992, draws on the oral resources of both French and Nengone, but particularly on the performance traditions and distinctive humour of Oceanian cultures. Set largely outside Noumea, most of his plays contain a critique of society in contemporary ‘customary lands’ where power is shown to be often corrupting, usurped, or misused. The conflict between individual and group rights and abuse of power are central themes of Gope’s Le Dernier Crépuscule (1999), set in a village in the north of Grande Terre whose

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 291

12/03/2014 14:40:06

292

The Literatures of the French Pacific

inhabitants are asked to relocate so that the government can use the land, which contains a valuable nickel deposit. The play was performed again on 18 November 2007 on Radio New Zealand, the final event in the New Caledonian Week of feature readings, children’s stories, and drama, set within the broader frame of a year-long New Caledonian Season designed to create artistic links between New Zealand and its closest neighbour. As Lynn Freeman, a Radio New Zealand critic, described the play, with some surprise: It’s not as simple as having the colonial authorities oppress the indigenous Kanaks. As is usual in his work, Gope asks some hard questions about how the Kanak people deal with one another, what it is they value and what they are prepared to give away to get what they want. (Freeman, 2007)

A second unidentified critic provides an insight into the Anglophone Pacific perspective on New Caledonia in his reading of the play as addressing ‘the particular problems and concerns that arise from New Caledonia’s position as a French Territory’ and the continuing ‘coloniality’ of New Caledonia. The critic concedes, however, that, ‘as the play suggests, it is not just a matter of “us and them” – it’s about the effects of money, power and opportunity on the locals’. The adaptation by Dean Parker, directed by Jason Te Kare, claims to recognize the particular character of the play and attempt to adapt it accordingly: We have tried to preserve the very communal, collaborative, storytelling style of the original stage production in our radio version by keeping all the actors present for the two days recording. The idea is that the actors ‘commune’ – get to know one another, get to watch one another work and get to share a sense of ‘out there’ storytelling. The hope is that they are infected by one another’s energy. The scenes were recorded in sequence in order to avoid too many stops in the process. Recording in sequence and with all actors present is something we rarely do. Most often we run a recording out of sequence and much more like a film shoot. If you’re wondering how many Nengone speakers we found to help us out with the bits of Nengone still in the text – one. Graphic artist and sometime writer Luc Tutugoro Benjamin was brought down from Waiheke Island for the recording and plays a small part in the story. Luc is not actually Nengone but understands it because, and we can only take his word for it, ‘My first serious girlfriend was Nengone and I thought I’d better try to understand what she was saying sometimes.’ (Freeman, 2007)

In this Anglophone Pacific interpretive community, where indigenous writing is read as necessarily postcolonial in the sense of a ‘writing

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 292

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

293

back’ to colonial status, what is left out of the critical discussions and reviews of Gope’s work are his more troubling references, as in The Last Nightfall to the role of the blackmailing spirits and practices of sorcery – in particular, to the implicit acceptance by the chief of the sacrifice of his newborn son to the waters to ensure the success of his development project. The cultural mix in Gope’s plays is a very particular one in its search to give meaning and value to both tradition and modernity, but within the autodidact’s own still rural and customary society. His writing is first and foremost rooted in what appear to be quite conservative Kanak values, and yet his work is also interactive and intertextual, particularly his staging of the issue of sexual violence, although Gope was certainly influenced by the work of Déwé Gorodé. Asked about his ‘dream’ for his country, Pierre Gope does not speak of either separatism or return but appears rather to espouse the project of Common Destiny, dreaming that one day his country will be a boat with everyone aboard setting sail together towards the right port. Gope has been included in this section on Caledonian writing not only to show the themes circulating between Caledonian and Kanak writers, female and male, but also because of Gope’s co-authored work, Les Dieux sont borgnes [The Gods are One-Eyed], produced during a shared residency in 2001 with Nicolas Kurtovitch at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. This play centres around a humorous imagined encounter between the earliest ship of Captain James Cook and the inhabitants of the country that the explorers labelled New Caledonia: an encounter presented as resulting in Cook’s death. If Cook did ‘discover’ New Caledonia, or at least discovered New Caledonia for Europe, he was subsequently killed in Hawaii, perhaps mistaken for Lono, the god of fertility, as the anthropologist Sahlins has suggested. As Nicole Kurtovitch notes in her preface to Les Dieux sont borgnes, the one-eyed Gods in this play are not only gods of nature like Lono, but also chiefs, kings, and ambitious men who take themselves for gods or become greedy for the new god, money. Les Dieux sont borgnes is a hybrid play to which Pierre Gope again brings his preoccupations with justice and the use and abuse of power, and linguistic terms from Nengone, and Nicolas Kurtovitch an apology for colonial spoliation, this time out of the mouth of Cook himself. The staging includes slapstick humour and farce: with its ghosts and drunken, fearful, or inept sailors, this is popular Kanak entertainment. There is also comic slippage between centuries and between languages and accents (English, Metropolitan French, New Caledonian, and a number of indigenous languages that many of the local spectators would

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 293

12/03/2014 14:40:06

294

The Literatures of the French Pacific

recognize). Largely debunking history and full of deliberate anachronisms and reversals (black actors play white characters, including Captain Cook, and vice versa), the play is a product of a performance aesthetic as much as of ideas, and calls upon local audience participation. For Micaela Fenoglio, ‘New Caledonia thus plays the role of pioneer in the world of Oceanic theatre. Its theatrical production is increasingly syncretic, called upon to express the different souls that make up the Caledonian mosaic, and to bring oral tradition and writing, aesthetics and identity claims together’ (2004: 53). However, the play also deals with serious contemporary questions. The beautiful and smart Princess Lotha is a figure of a modern Kaavo, and she is more than a match for the uninvited, lost visitors. Thus, the portrait of Pacific women in the early texts of Bougainville, Cook, and their successors is turned upon its head. As we noted in our first chapter, in these texts, the writers applied the notions of femininity with which the eighteenth century was acquainted and speculated on whether the Pacific women were chaste or simply coquettish (appearing to refuse, noted Bougainville, what they are really soliciting). In fact, the idea of Cook being taken for a god of fertility may be the clue to another reading of first encounter, one that Bougainville missed when he considered the very young but strangely uneasy Tahitian maidens offered to his crew, to be generous gifts in a sexual Eden. Later readers have noted that seed was in fact taken (perhaps from gods or perhaps from a new genetic pool) in this ritual ‘exchange’ in which the young virgins appeared to be rather less willing vessels than Bougainville had deduced. Control of the proceedings of ‘regeneration’, as Chapter 1 noted, was clearly in the hands of the elders, and the young virgins themselves were often in tears. In Gope and Kurtovitch’s play, Princess Lotha accepts marriage to her rapist, the Chief, in order to assure the continuation of the chiefdom. Gorodé and Gope link questions of sexual violence with a critique of a custom that they simultaneously defend against the outside but in very different kinds of text. Alongside Claudine Jacques’ experiments in métissage, and her incorporating of elements of Kanak culture, the second major contemporary Caledonian writer, the poet and playwright Nicolas Kurtovitch, too, adopts a comparable yet very different mixed ‘outsider–insider’ position. Putting himself in the skin of Kanak preoccupations, he too borrows and adapts Kanak texts while also experimenting with other poetic or literary forms, most particularly, haiku, shih, and haibun from Chinese and Japanese traditions.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 294

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

295

Born in Noumea in 1955 (a descendant on his mother’s side of the very early pioneer family, Hagen), Nicolas Kurtovitch has genealogical connections to the earliest French contacts with the island via the sailor Jean Taragnat, who becomes a character in his play L’Autre. His father, a Yugoslav of Serbian and Muslim descent who emigrated from Sarajevo in 1945, disappeared early from his life. At the Collège de Sacré Cœur at Bourail, the young student shared his studies en pension with the four main constituencies that he identifies as making up New Caledonian society: the group of European origin, the Kanak groups, Wallisians, and the children of Metropolitan origin from the nearby military base (Mokaddem, 2007: 141). This long-time principal of Do Kamo, the Protestant Alliance Scolaire’s high school for Kanak in Noumea, later overseeing the running of the Protestant education system, but always also a writer, has been described as a figure out of Jack Kerouac, seeking to form an eclectic universal tradition made up from pieces of the world’s cultures through poetic voyaging. In Kurtovitch, this universal tradition is formulated by a journeying consciousness that, recalling the philosophical reflections of his New Caledonian predecessor, Jean Mariotti, elects to take up a meditative principal residence on what he calls ‘Cold Mountain’, seeking a form of detachment and mental freedom in aesthetic self-distancing. Much of the interest of Kurtovitch’s work lies in the understandings and non-excluding balance his work seeks to create between the various traditions he attempts to connect. His texts are a tightrope act between the valuing and the critique of Kanak and settler tradition, and between adding value to another’s (Kanak) culture and appropriation of it for his own purposes. They oblige the reader to consider the relations between so-called colonizer and colonized from the inside, in all their complexity. As in Gorodé, the logic of binary oppositions is undermined and oppositions may be contradictory but not mutually exclusive. Like Gorodé, the Caledonian poet also works with different voices, with simultaneous or overlapping times and spaces, with both the existential moment and the flux of life. Many of their thematic preoccupations are shared, including the question of revenge. In the 1998 play, Kaawenya, le sentier [Kaawenya, The Pathway], for example, the range of present Kanak responses to past colonial wrongs is presented through multiple voices in dialogue, reacting to the indiscriminate capture of a young white woman as hostage. Some characters argue that this violence is justified as collective revenge against present and future generations of those who are the descendants of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 295

12/03/2014 14:40:06

296

The Literatures of the French Pacific

exploitative settlers. Others put the case for humanity and understanding of the young woman’s predicament on an individual basis and argue for the power of love (the chief’s son is secretly the woman’s lover) or for female solidarity (between the chief’s wife and the white woman). The question central to this play is the powerful one of whether the sins of dead fathers should indeed be visited upon the children, and it raises the question of significant points of difference in the understanding of justice, responsibility, and revenge between cultures. In Kurtovitch’s following play, L’Autre [The Other] the dialogues between Jean Taragnat and the Kanak chief Bourate, who visits the ship and later historically accompanies it on its return voyage, represent both the encounters on beaches from the beginning of colonial settlement, and a kind of Levinassian encounter with the ‘Other’. Bourate tells the sailor that ‘We will never leave one another again. Neither you nor me, neither your people nor mine […] I will never disappear from your mind’. However, as Micaela Fenoglio points out, the stranger whom one must know and welcome as the world opens up turns out to be something like a projection of an intimate or hidden part of Taragnat himself. For Kurtovitch, the Great Chief Bourate’s departure to Australia and to New York represents a persistent concern of the island dweller: the desire, indeed need, to leave one’s island and to explore other cultures. Kurtovitch’s collections of poems similarly speak of a rediscovery of New Caledonian history, Kanak tradition, and shared human relationships with nature that echo Gorodé’s themes but move from the particular and local to explore the universal. This search for transcendence, however, is represented by what has become a central topos or shared and powerful local cliché of emerging New Caledonian literature: a piece of land to work. In one story in the collection, Forêt, terre et tabac [Forest, Land, Tobacco], in the section entitled ‘Au bord de l’eau’ [At the Water’s Edge] (1992: 47–54), the garden or patch of land discovered by the narrator once again functions as a space of meeting between colonizer and colonized. The European narrator is impulsively attracted to a path in an area outside the centre of Noumea that he follows to discover a hidden Kanak garden, where he finds harmony and joy in simply being. Initially, the narrator avoids the owner of the land, an old Melanesian woman. When the two do finally meet, it becomes clear that she had been aware of his visits and had in fact left him a signal that he should join her. After the initial discomfort of the narrator, the two come to share the space in a similar way. The old Kanak woman comes to this particular garden not to produce food but to think, to let herself

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 296

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

297

simply ‘be’ in nature. This vital being with nature, suggests Kurtovitch, is something available to both Kanak and European. This short story can be read as a fable designed to show that ‘desire and love are more powerful than fear of the other’ (1997b: 43). It also introduces the theme of Kanak reoccupation or reverse colonization of Noumea that will be developed in Good Night Friend: the old woman is bringing her Kanak world to occupy hidden areas of Noumea. In another short story in ‘Au bord de l’eau’, the protagonist, perhaps the writer’s alter ego, Jacques (recalling the principal character of Mariotti’s later novel, Tout est peut-être inutile), struggles to achieve inner peace through working the land, finding this only once he has followed the advice of an old man. By his constant effort, he goes beyond himself and his initial dissatisfaction and pain, and, as his movements intuitively conform to tradition, the distinction between the garden and the gardener disappears. This transcendence, which would seem to reflect Zen Buddhism as much as Kanak tradition, not only produces a well-designed garden but provides Jacques with a deep contentment. Aside from the old man, who represents ancestral tradition (or may have been imagined), Jacques is alone. The land here functions as a meeting place of the conscious and unconscious minds, of the individual and Nature, suggesting they are not in fact separate. The Other is, however, present by implication, as the protagonist, Jacques, can be read as a Kanak or as a European. The ambiguity indicates once again that the harmony that Jacques finally finds is available to all, not just those with a particular relationship to tradition. Like Louise Michel before him, or Jacques, or indeed Savoie, to a much lesser degree, Kurtovitch attempts to enter into the Kanak universe by empathy, threading Kanak stories from oral tradition together as in ‘Veillée’ [Stories around the Fire] (1992: 17–31) or bringing a nocturnal pilou (dance) with the ancestors to vivid life in ‘L’Invité d’un jour’[Guest for a Day] (108–12). Like Michel or Mariotti, he transforms these particular identifications with local events into a search for their universal significance. In ‘Veillée’, Kurtovitch creates an ‘interface’ between several traditions in a form of bricolage, reusing fragments of diverse oral stories, including Aboriginal dreaming and European fairy tale and folk tale, but basing his stories in particular upon foundational Kanak narratives, mostly taken from Leenhardt’s translations in Documents néo-calédoniens. The narrator adopts a form similar to a stream of consciousness but also imitates the repetitions, parallelisms, motifs, and rhythmic patterns of Oceanian story-telling. An old Kanak teller

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 297

12/03/2014 14:40:06

298

The Literatures of the French Pacific

frames the narrative which is centred on a Kaavo figure, who inhabits a far-off island and is waiting for the man she desires, ‘the Man from Néawé’. Kaavo is a woman strong enough to refuse a series of proposed prospective husbands. This compilation of tales then incorporates the ‘dreaming’ of the well-known Pacific story ‘Le Rat, le poulpe et la poulesultane’ [The Rat, the Octopus and the Sultan-Hen] before returning to the journey of the chief of Néawé who, despite trials and tribulations including Kaavo’s capture by another man and her bloody revenge, will finally win and settle down with the young woman. The story returns to, and ends with, the old Kanak orator pacing around the fire. In ‘L’Invité d’un jour’ [The Special Guest], Kurtovitch again puts himself in the place of a neophyte who follows his Kanak friend Wakolo Pouye into the forest to observe the circular dance of Wakolo’s returning ancestors, a different and mysterious world. As the work of Stephanie Vigier on commonplaces argues, like the field or garden, this place in the forest indicated by the banyan tree, the space of the ceremonial dance or pilou, constitutes a lieu commun. However, these commonplaces of language (places common to all) also correspond to a shared re-construction of identity and, in this case, the lieu commun has a useful role. Whereas colonial descriptions of the pilou create a highly romanticized and sexualized picture of a savage and primitive dance verging on the orgiastic, Kurtovitch writes over and remakes the exotic colonial cliché as a reflection on different (more spiritual) modes of being in the world that might link the communities. As the writer puts this, his work Lieux [Places] (1994) is about places of belonging and the refusal to be a prisoner of self-interest. If he is able to write and publish collaboratively with Déwé Gorodé (Dire le vrai [To tell the Truth]) and with Pierre Gope (Les Dieux sont borgnes [The Gods are One-Eyed]), this is, he claims, because he recognizes that ‘Caledonia is a Kanak land’. This does not mean, he adds, that only Kanak can live there. It is also a land of shared experiences. ‘I believe that writing in two voices in this way is possible because there are paths we have travelled together’ (Mokaddem, 2007: 164). This recognition creates problems and anxieties; it is productive and liberating. In the volume of the French periodical Notre Librairie devoted in late 1998 to New Caledonian fiction and representing the country’s literary coming of age, Kurtovitch speaks of his identifications with the Kanak world. As Micaela Fenoglio (2004: 68–9) understands this Caledonian-born writer, despite the theme of being a guest in an adopted land that is not ‘the land of my ancestors’ (Kurtovitch, 1985: 61), Nicolas

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 298

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

299

Kurtovitch declares to this ‘wild land / red land / land of black sand’ that ‘I draw my strength and my skill / from your belly’ (Kurtovitch, 1998: 43). The poet accepts the Other as host in a land whose beaches have welcomed settler ships, a land that has become for him, a descendant of these ships, ‘a place for living, for being reborn, and for dying’. In his dialogue with the Other, and acknowledgement of the land as Kanak blood and soul, yet still a source of his own ‘breath of life’ and site of his death – that is, in the adoption of Kanak terms of reference – Kurtovitch becomes an advocate for what he describes as the shared, timeless, life-force of the earth still present beneath the paved streets of the French city of Noumea. This philosophical quest for spaces of full being in harmony with the Other, and the desire to articulate colonialist shame and begin the process of truth in reconciliation, has been critiqued as a very restricted version of a literature of struggle. Andrew McCully’s 2005 Masters thesis on the work of Kurtovitch argues that Third World nationalism is replaced here by a struggle for a personal, existential independence, presented as a necessary first step to the creation of a more equal society and replacing considerations of socio-economic or political inequality. Kurtovitch’s apparent writing with the Other raises more urgent issues. He chooses to set his first novel Good Night Friend (2006) in Noumea and to put himself largely into the minds of a Kanak family living in the capital. The novel tells the story of the quest to recover the family name by returning to the place of its origin, thereby making possible the recovery of identity and of full spiritual force. This quest, however, is entwined with a primary and more disturbing story of sorcery (boucan) and a cycle of retribution. The mother of Léa, one of the young narrators, had been wasting away, the victim of a sorcerer, a man with special powers whose advances she had rejected. Léa’s father, subsequently incarcerated on L’Île Nou for the murder of the sorcerer, confides his fears that his victim’s son is seeking revenge. When Léa seeks help from her older brother, whom she finds living alone in the solitude of a garden, she narrowly escapes the clutches of a group of young would-be rapists in the Nakamal of the shanty town on the town’s outskirts. In the meantime, her father has been stabbed to death: the sorcerer’s son had succeeded in entering the prison by trickery as a new prisoner. Curiously, despite this cycle of violence, the novel ends with a kind of epiphany as Léa finally discovers the place of her family name. Although this is a first and somewhat awkwardly constructed novel, its attempts to articulate the fears around the future of urban life in

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 299

12/03/2014 14:40:06

300

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Noumea through the dramatization of the malevolent and beneficent forces that mark Kanak life is of interest in the present socio-political contexts. Kanak have been arriving to find work in Noumea since the 1960s, as dock-workers or in the Doniambo nickel refinery, or as maids, living in the cellars of white Faubourg Blanchot, as does one young Utê Mûrûnû in Gorodé’s eponymous story. The city, suggests Kurtovitch’s work, has developed pockets closer to Kanak culture than to European. Good Night Friend appears to raise the question of the possession of the rational city and mind by the boucan (magic), much as this text also raises the spectre of pervasive and naturalized sexual violence against women. Our analysis of the work of Kurtovitch has shown it to be an investigation of the power of empathetic exchange between cultures to produce something new, mixed, and yet true to self. Kurtovitch, for example, argues explicitly against what he calls the fickle, presently fashionable ‘hybridity of the chameleon’ (2004: 63–73), but also for the freedom to espouse visions other than one’s own, outside the established order, through cultural interfaces. His novel, Good Night Friend, can be seen as an example of this experiment. Yet Kurtovitch’s tale of magic spells, murder, and revenge can also be understood as subjective or even hostile, representing fears (or rather a warning?) of the takeover of white Noumea by the irrational Kanak Other. Aspects of Kurtovitch’s writing thus raise the question of the extent to which this writing with the Other can in fact be understood as postcolonial (other than in the broadest sense of coming out of, and after, the colonial) in the same sense as work by his Kanak collaborators. There is a certain meeting of minds, and perhaps even of social projects, in the work of the Caledonian and his Kanak collaborator, as there is between Jacques and Gorodé, but ‘each one in his own place’. The Caldoche is born in part, observes Hamid Mokaddem, from a rebellion against the French Administration, and is a Caledonian who has become a hybrid, or an Oceanian who defines himself by what he no longer is – that is, a ‘Zoreille’ [Frenchman from France] ‘who knows everything’ (Mokaddem, 1998a). He is the descendant of Jean Mariotti, of convict origin, who defined himself as a savage who had received the education of the civilized. He is equally the descendant of the free settler from Koné or Voh who did not mix with the liberated convicts of Pouembout. Quoting the Caldoche Jean-Pierre Devillers, he emphasizes the continuing cultural separation: It is important to remember that biological métissage is significant but cultural mixing is inexistent. I have black cousins who say, and they often

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 300

12/03/2014 14:40:06

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

301

make people laugh, without good cause, ‘us, the Whites,’ but they are right to say that because they have been brought up only in a European environment, they reason like Europeans, they have European interests. They are absolutely not canaques. (Devillers, 1992: 236)

Children’s literature, too, mirrors attempts to provide narratives of origins that differentiate the different cultures even as they show their shared heritage. Claudine Jacques’ Les Sentiers de l’ouest calédonien [The Tales of the Caledonian West] tells of the annual round-up of cattle, when young people (of many ethnicities) from all over New Caledonia drive their herds to the market in Noumea. This tale of challenge, comradeship, and heroic discovery gives the role of principal protagonist to a young broussard from a farm outside Noumea. He is a distant descendant of the Indians who arrived from Bourbon Island with Louis Nas de Touris to work in the sugar-cane fields on the banks of the Ouaménie river; his companion on the road in his arduous adventure is a young Kanak. Jacques stages the social project of the Common Destiny, in terms of a heroic shared rural history and a present construction of new mixed identities. On the other hand, bilingual picture-books for children published in Noumea with the aid of the ADCK such as Méyènô by Réséda Ponga in 2004 and L’Enfant Kaori, written by Maléta Houmbouy in 2005, portray Kanak characters only and seek to promote Kanak languages (Méyènô in A’jië and L’Enfant Kaori in Iaai). These are old traditional stories, the first telling the story of a mother constrained to give up her new baby to a Kaori tree in order to free her husband imprisoned by the tree for infringing a taboo (perhaps an indirect warning in respect to the fate of children of illicit relationships) and the other of a spirit who leads a child joyfully to the sea (to drown) to join the spirits of loved ones. Jacques’ stories are of human trials, but metamorphosis is always possible and struggle can have positive outcomes. The Kanak stories make little concession to the more individualistic, happy-ending mainstream of European children’s literature. However, the texts of José-Louis Barbançon, Claudine Jacques, Frédéric Ohlen, and Nicolas Kurtovich, among others, are illustrations of the varied attempts of a number of contemporary Caledonian writers to put on the mask of the Kanak Other, to see with his eyes and share his or her world, as the title of Kurtovitch’s Avec le Masque [Speaking with the Mask] puts it, while looking critically at the colonial legacy. Jean-Marie Tjibaou, Déwé Gorodé, and Pierre Gope, on the other hand, look behind the mask at the unspoken in their own Kanak societies, as

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 301

12/03/2014 14:40:07

302

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the latter have been transformed by contact and address the issues of living in a hybrid and changing society. Writers of ‘Other’ Ethnicity There are, of course, other significant ethnic groups now writing in New Caledonia. Jean Vanmai, author of the vast historical novel, Pilou-Pilou, based on the categories and separations of the penitentiary regime and the respective hardships faced by its victims, had first come to notice with his fictional account of the difficult lives of the ‘Tonkinois’ from French Indochina, indentured labourers for the mines and plantations or domestic servants to the settlers. In Chân dang, Vanmai represents this hard-working community as victims of harsh laws and cruel overseers. Although many renew their five-year contracts, their collective imaginary life appears to be sustained by the desire for return to their homeland, and to respect their filial and patriotic duty to be buried with their ancestors. Some of Vanmai’s younger characters, on the other hand, have come to New Caledonia to escape traditional arranged marriages. In Vanmai’s account, the children of those who resisted the long-awaited repatriation after the war and remained behind in New Caledonia maintain a dual allegiance both to the country of their birth and to their community of origin and its cultural traditions. Today it appears that few of these contemporary New Caledonian French of Vietnamese origin favour independence. Their dialogue is mainly with French citizens(hip) and with Vietnamese tradition in what is still a patriarchal community, rather than with Kanak. A series of interviews in which Helen Johnson collected oral histories and analysed the common identity motifs employed similarly shows contemporary Vietnamese New Caledonian identity as largely shaped by the memory of the migration of voluntary contract labourers (2005: 85–103). The researcher documents the rupture within the community created by the repatriation of the majority of workers in the 1950s, the Indochinese war with France, and the pressure from visiting Vietnamese to persuade the community to return to their homeland with their wealth. Johnson goes further than Vanmai, to show the extent to which concern with the colonial past is being overtaken by the sense of belonging to a postcolonial diasporic community. Her contemporary interviews include stories of families who once back in North Vietnam were considered unpatriotic for having chosen French over Vietnamese nationality and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 302

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

303

obliged to re-emigrate as boat refugees, waiting for repatriation for long periods in Hong Kong’s camps. Younger Vietnamese-New Caledonians are also constituting their sense of community in relation to their host country; as a community of trans-nationals whose relatives are scattered through the former French Empire and the United States. Their identity lies in the hybrid relation between the local and the global Vietnamese communities, between processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, as much as in the image of dignified respect, political reserve, and active economic participation they have brought since the late nineteenth century to the New Caledonian country taking shape. For Johnson, this community, victim of often traumatic lived experiences of the twentieth century and of the Asia-Pacific diaspora, situates itself among a mosaic of peoples and cultures of the twenty-first century, constructing a society ‘that shares the benefits of unsettled trans-national community with a more inclusive, localized, sociality.’(19). In his 2003 Nippo-Kanak novel Les Sentiers de l’espoir, Dany Dalmyrac opens up unexplored Japanese-Kanak historical connections by following the fortunes of the mixed-race daughters of Kanak mothers and of Japanese immigrants interned during the war. These young girls are initially taken under the wing of the tribu and assimilated into the Kanak world. However, they decide to leave to avoid the patriarchal control exerted through traditional arranged marriages and work as maids in Noumea where the mixed-race young women inevitably find themselves at the bottom of the social pile. Conclusion Despite a number of such common themes, the different contexts of these writers and groups of writers result in texts that remain quite different from one another. Tjibaou has his origins in the north east, as does Gorodé; Gope is distinctively from the Island Provinces and, more specifically again, from Maré; Kurtovitch, Barbançon, Jacques, and Vanmai predominantly represent Noumea and the Southern province. Each writer speaks for a particular time and constituency. More than a century after the arrival of indentured labourers or contract workers from Indochina and Indonesia, and after the arrivals of the group of ‘Pieds-Noir’ following the independence of Algeria in 1962 and the immigrants from Vanuatu in 1980, Europe is enlarging, and circulation within the Francophone world is increasing against the background

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 303

12/03/2014 14:40:07

304

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of diaspora and the globalizing of the world workforce. In these new contexts, New Caledonia is welcoming new writers from a number of diverse French-speaking origins beyond Metropolitan France. This chapter has shown that contemporary New Caledonian literatures are plural, made up of what could be labelled predominantly French, Francophone, Caledonian, and Kanak strands. They nonetheless share a common language and French cultural heritage, and a deep concern for the issues posed by a Common Destiny. Most contain a reflection on the possibility of a multicultural future, yet each text carries a local and particular portrait of life in New Caledonia, in the bush or in the city, from a gendered or group perspective. Colonial literature, which already contained within it diverse degrees of self-critique, has been supplanted by texts which have shifted their focus from exile and the impossibility of métissage to the possibilities of mixing and a critique of, or reaction to, colonial separations. Can the outcomes of this movement toward métissage be described as postcolonial hybridity in all, or, at least, in most cases? To paraphrase Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture, all identities are ineluctably ambivalent and hybrid in the end. This chapter has discussed movements and examples that show that this is broadly the case for New Caledonian literatures. However, despite the universal fact of mongrelization, no two hybrid texts/mongrels are alike: different degrees and kinds of mixing shape different texts. A generalized theory of hybridity does not take account of the nature and origins of the distinctiveness of identity groupings and texts, nor indeed of their similarities of themes and shared adoption of (degrees of) mixing. Hybridity in Bhabha is not only a third term that resolves the tensions between two cultures in a dialectical play of cultural claim and critical recognition of the other’s culture and influence, but also the strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal, a process which ‘splits dominant discourse’ and identifies Bhabha’s hybridity as postcolonial. In this perspective, Tjibaou, Gorodé, and Gope can be seen as thinking the bicephalic nation, necessarily using French, from different indigenous perspectives and contexts, but in a common enterprise of disavowal through relexification (a form of splitting of dominant discourse) that is also a claim to a recognized and even primary place to stand. Whereas the early ‘colonial’ Caledonian writers used standard literary French to stage scenarios of separation and of the impossibilities of biological and cultural mixing or of failed or flawed métissage, the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 304

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Colonial to Postcolonial Hybridities

305

difficult movement towards métissage in Jaqueline Sénès’ and Claudine Jacques’ contemporary work, or even to a more limited extent the rewriting of history as postcolonial openness to difference and crosscultural encounter in Wintrebert’s novel, illustrate a movement from the ‘domestication’ to a certain ‘foreignizing’ of the texts of the Other, both a greater acceptance of difference and a greater recognition of difference as irreducible. Kurtovitch and Barbançon’s rethinking of Frenchness through empathetic identification with Kanak and insistence on Caledonian shame appears to point the way to greater mutual understanding and more equal community relations. However, Kurtovitch also grapples with aspects of irreducible difference that appear to him to be a potential threat to the Common Future. Jacques’ exploration of cultural métissage and inclusivity as a possible way of living and loving (and dying) similarly takes Caledonian writings in the direction of a relexification of Metropolitan French and a certain pessimism in relation to the forces of cultural exclusion and various forms of violence. Anne-Bénedicte André’s 2014 comparative study of the representations of the lived experience of the cultural and emotional geographies of three island groups characterizes the work of Gisèle Pineau (Guadeloupe) as deriving from ‘intranquility’, of Axel Gauvin (Reunion Island) from ‘incommensurability’, and of Claudine Jacques (New Caledonia) from ‘potentiality’. In André’s thesis on ‘islandness’ as liminality, Jacques’ work on the ‘interval’ between appearance and reality, on repression (the non-dit) and the potentiality of what is concealed in this silence or on the margins of the word produces numerous resonances that subvert isolation, re-voice silence and model the kind of intercultural encounter that is a necessary stage of destin commun (185). Jacques’ use of the figure of the oxymoron confirms that each term implies the other and that the contrast between them is not an impasse but an invitation to go beyond appearances, polarities and cultural divisions without denying the lived experience of rupture – geographical, historical, or felt. Similarly, the shared difficult destinies and effects of ‘postmemory’ can surmount divisions and make ‘alterity’ into productive ‘otherness’. This is defined in Jacques as being aware of the nature of the relationship with the collectivity and its outcomes so that this relationship does not become alienation: as knowing how to remain close to the other without losing one’s own self. Ultimately, though, ‘each one remains in his or her own place’. Neither the local nor the national (the tribu and Noumea), nor the

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 305

12/03/2014 14:40:07

306

The Literatures of the French Pacific

universal (European Enlightenment rationality and human rights) and the indigenous have been replaced by a third space of recombinant hybridity; the global has barely displaced the local. Rather, as in Baudrillard’s model, the local and the universal continue to coexist like two plates sliding over one another: for Baudrillard, in our postmodern modern world, the local, the global, and the universal coexist and alternate as in the game of scissors, paper, stone (Baudrillard, 2003). In the course of the analysis of the work of a number of different writers in this chapter there has been a certain slippage of language. The term ‘métissage’, initially used to speak of the thematic of mixed-race sexual relationships, first represented as impossible by the fathers of the New Caledonian novel and later cautiously explored and negotiated by a number of contemporary writers, has given ground to an almost synonymous term ‘hybridity’, with both terms used to suggest movement away from a distancing colonial hybridity to a subversive postcolonial hybridity. The diverse approaches to métissage, determined by the particular historical contexts and dispositions of individual Caledonian and Metropolitan writers, participate in the movement of métissage from biological mixing to a quasi-hybridity, in the gradual reversal of the negative connotations of métissage and its re-emergence as something close to the theoretical concept of postcolonial hybridity.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 306

12/03/2014 14:40:07

9

A Multicultural Future (Destin Commun) for New Caledonia? From Métissage to Hybridities From Métissage to Hybridities REPLACE THIS

In a reflection on the manifestations of multiculturalism in postcolonial literature, Sylvie André presents the phenomenon of cultural mixing as a victory over both the colonial will to assimilate and an inevitably unequal separate development. However, as she asks, to what degree must its constitutive elements be fused for a mixed society to consider itself multicultural? Does this require a shared ideological foundation, or is the acceptance of difference or so-called ‘diversity’ sufficient? (2002: 5). English-speaking Canada might consider itself a multicultural country but Quebec, despite thirty years of political coexistence, might well not. Laurence Cros expresses these differences in terms of the possibilities of ‘limited’ or ‘multiple’ hybridity for Canada. After thirty years of multiculturalism, it is, of course, too early to know whether one can speak of multiple hybridity: the question is one of knowing whether the contributions of all the peoples presently in Canada will merge to create a true national identity or whether Canada will remain at the level of communities living side by side, united only by a vague political allegiance. In the case of limited hybridity between the French- and English-speaking Canadian groups, the answer seems clear  … it is less a question in Canada of hybridity than of antithesis. (Cros, 2001: 62)

It seems that multiculturalism, like hybridity, comes in weak and strong varieties, with only the latter (like postcolonial hybridity) substantively changing or overriding original identity formations. Multiculturalism, the subject of considerable debate and varied in its forms, is, like hybridity, the product of the interactions (commerce, wars, occupations,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 307

12/03/2014 14:40:07

308

The Literatures of the French Pacific

matrimonial alliances) and the colonizations that have marked the movements of peoples since the beginning of history. In our era, the phenomenon has accelerated and acquired a distinctive character through the legacy of nineteenth-century European imperialisms and the later processes of globalization with its flows of capital, goods, and peoples. It is the speed and density of these interconnections, the changes that take place through means such as mimicry, modification, recombination, and creation that allow the mixing of things initially considered to be different to become hybridity. In the now canonical text, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, it is hybridity, designating the inevitable impact of colonization, that is quite simply put forward as the theoretical model for all postcolonial literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 1989: 89). Similarly, hybridity becomes a general ethics for diasporic writing. Marwan Kraidy does not hesitate to promote hybridity as a metonym for ‘the cultural logic of globalization’ at the heart of an accelerating world transculturalism (2005: vi–vii). Following the historical trajectory of the vocabulary of cultural mixing and considering contemporary writing on globalization, Kraidy goes so far as to argue that this corresponds to the demise of the modern notion of a universal culture. For him, both the utopian French Enlightenment vision of a universal civilization predicated on human rights, scientific rationalism, and material progress, and the dystopian Romantic German notion of an authentic national culture threatened by the spread of soulless global forms, are outdated. They have been replaced, he argues, by ‘a growing consensus that global culture is hybrid, mixing heterogeneous elements into recombinant forms’ (45). National or universal culture is presented in this frame as the opposite, the antithesis of hybridity. Historically, however, encounters between cultures have often been accompanied by the paradoxical counter-affirmation of separate and authentic identities, exemplified in such varied outcomes as German romanticism, nationalistic movements of liberation and decolonization, and movements of affirmation of distinctive rights by ‘first Nations’ seeking sovereignty within other nations – for example, in North America, South America, New Zealand, or Hawaii. Projects of unification within diversity, like the Union that is dissolving frontiers in Europe or the Common Destiny proposed in New Caledonia by the 1998 Noumea Agreement, might be expected to give rise to a resurgence of regional and local claims and identities. The concluding section of this chapter will return to such general

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 308

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

309

issues as pure versus recombinant cultures, or identity as single origin or multiple becoming, or local versus global. This first section will be concerned, first and foremost, with the question of what the various forms of mixing or hybridities we have found in New Caledonian literatures, both between the major communities and internally within cultural groups, have to say with respect to the multicultural future set up as a political solution for the new country. Can these hybridities indeed be seen as a ‘victory’ over the colonial will to assimilation? What differences are made by different contexts – socio-economic, gendered, and generational – to the answers given for all the communities in place as they grapple with the implications of the various terms that make up the present politico-cultural debate (autonomy, independence, and sovereignty), as well as the notions of multiculturalism, postcoloniality, and hybridity? This first section of the chapter also begins to address the question of the way in which terms used throughout the book such as multiculturalism, métissage, and hybridity interface, or work together. The principal focus of the second part of the chapter is the theoretical debate around the notion of hybridity itself, and the light the mixing analysed in New Caledonian literatures might throw on the questions this debate raises. Despite the fact that hybridity theory, like postcolonial theory in general, has had relatively little hearing in France – Homi Bhabha’s seminal work, The Location of Culture, has only recently been translated into French – this theoretical notion produced largely from contemporary diaspora or economic migration has been seen to provide a productive frame through which to consider emerging Pacific literatures, if only to highlight what is not happening within them; the ways in which they stand apart. The third section will synthesize the conclusions foreshadowed in the various studies in our preceding eight chapters, to argue that Pacific literatures themselves interrogate, modify, and extend the postcolonial literary theory of hybridity as they modulate the political notion of multiculturalism. At least in respect to Kanak writing, Gorodé’s cry against the ‘clearfelling’ of indigenous cultures and the imposition of the ‘single way of thinking’, along with the simultaneous calls for a writing back to change stereotypical perceptions of indigenous peoples and reconstruct the value(s) of an ancient tradition, has only very recently begun to make itself heard. What is taking shape in her work is something that is closer to a separate coexistence of distinctively different groups – albeit with the possibilities of ‘hospitality’, in both the Derridean and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 309

12/03/2014 14:40:07

310

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the Kanak senses of communicating and exchanging in the spaces between them – than to one single yet mixed Caledonian culture for all. Paradoxically, this observation does not preclude the acknowledgement of the already intrinsically mixed character of all the major culture blocks in place, internal differences that go back both to Kanak and settler origins. Early Syncretisms: ‘Each One in his Own Place’ In the first decades of the twentieth century, Maurice Leenhardt was very aware that Melanesians were taking from Christianity, as well as from the new white society, what they needed to sustain and strengthen Kanak knowledge and power. He commented at length on what the Church then disparagingly called the syncretism of the religion adopted by the Kanak. Leenhardt’s published ethnographic texts, for their part, and in particular, the Documents néo-calédoniens (1932), transcribed by or translated from the writings brought back to him by the indigenous ‘teachers’ trained at Béthany, have remained the foundational texts for the present reconstructions of Kanak oral tradition. It is the influence of these texts of oral tradition that have largely constituted New Caledonian literatures as distinctive from French literature. Nicolas Kurtovitch’s Veillée, as we observed in the previous chapter, is woven from fragments of these oral stories, in a recombinant text that foregrounds their similarities with other Pacific oral literatures, including Aboriginal ‘dreamtime’, but ultimately produces a story that is quite ‘receivable’ in terms of the expectations of a European reader. Claudine Jacques, Hélène Savoie, and Frédéric Ohlen, among other contemporary writers, also borrow heavily from Melanesian motif, myth, and vision, following in the footsteps of the ‘pioneers’ – from Jules Garnier and Georges Baudoux to Jean Mariotti and Paul Bloc – but continue to write of Kanak culture largely from European and outsider perspectives. The only significant published Kanak texts of the early twentieth century, written by the two Marist priests Apollinaire Anova-Ataba (1929–66) and Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1936–89), and drawing on oral tradition (and on Leenhardt) to validate traditional notions of the Kanak person, were produced from within the frames of the Catholic Church and Western schools of ethnography. As Bensa notes, to make the leader of the 1878 insurrection, Ataï, an emblematic figure of resistance, Anova-Ataba borrows from a messianic Western discourse and from the discourses of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 310

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

311

liberation struggles (Bensa and Millet, 2004: 9–46). Yet, like Gorodé’s texts, their very raison d’être is to assert Kanak distinctiveness. In these early exchanges, there is both borrowing and appropriation, sometimes in empathy, and even identification with the Other. As in the common formulaic ending to oral tales, however, the cultures nonetheless remain ‘each one in his own place’. Peter Brown points out that it took more than half a century after these early publications for Madame Thémereau, President of the collegial government that ended the long reign of Jacques Lafleur and his RPCR party, to use the terms ‘multiculturelle’ and ‘multiraciale’ as she offered her best wishes for the New Year to her fellow citizens in 2005 and expressed her confidence in the shared future of the destin commun (2005). As we observed in earlier chapters, literary texts of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century portray the two cultures as remaining very separate, and mixed-race characters such as Alin Laubreaux’s Wara or Baudoux’s Jean M’Barai have no solution other than to join one camp or the other, or at the least the group that will accept them. In Jean Mariotti’s novels, too, the rigid social hierarchies and the distances between the ever-watching Kanak and the ‘pioneer’, in the figure of Darne in his mythical search on horseback for the great red bull, remain paramount. There are passages in all of these earlier ‘evolutionist’ texts situating Kanak difference in the Stone Age alongside a modern West characterized by its advanced technology that draw dramatic and exotic effects from the Other’s barbarous ‘mœurs et superstitions’. Yet, as we noted, many of the so-called colonial writers also manifest opposition to colonialist programmes and conceptions – including the civilizing mission, development, and the sacred Motherland – and focus a good part of their writing on Kanak influences. In Bloc’s Confidences d’un cannibale, for example, the text serves as an instrument for looking back at least apparently through the eyes of an old Kanak and, in this case, ridiculing the customs, superstitions, and hypocrisies of both cultures. Mariotti’s work is permeated by the fascination exerted by the silences and mysteries of the Kanak world, figured in one instance by the dangers of the taboo Kanak burial grounds. As Karin Speedy’s 2007 book on Creolization shows, Baudoux can be read for his relatively accurate descriptions of the customs and languages of a number of New Caledonian communities, including, for example, the Creole spoken by his character, Socrate, the former slave who arrived from La Réunion with the owners of the plantation where he had worked. There is, however, no unified or homogeneous image of the Other, and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 311

12/03/2014 14:40:07

312

The Literatures of the French Pacific

unevenness in the degrees or character of mixing (there are both positive and negative aspects to the portrayals of hybrid characters) throughout the texts of these different colonial writers. Métissage and the Caledonian Search for an Inclusive Culture (Sénès, Jacques, Kurtovitch, Savoie) Nonetheless, in Jacqueline Sénès’ more recent historical drama Terre violente, written as New Caledonia emerged from the Événements, it is again Wanatcha, the mixed-race son of a shipwrecked Breton sailor and a Melanesian woman, who occupies the cultural no-man’s land and plays the role of tormented villain. John’s adopted son, on the other hand, the Kanak Jean-Chrétien/Kahahéné, ultimately decides to take off his white clothes and rediscover his black skin to pursue his Kanak heritage. Peter Brown observes that Sénès shifts ‘the historical disputes of the island away from the axis settler-Kanak – these two showing that they can get on very well together, at least in their separate and parallel ways – to the situation of the métis who were rejected by both worlds, and, to quote Sénès, ‘ballottés dans le vide’ [‘swept to and fro in the current’] (Sénès, 1987: 311). He concludes that, ‘despite her ambivalences, Sénès seems to be trying to tell us that it is only by recognizing métissage as doubly inclusive rather than an exclusive category, seeing it as a possibility for enrichment … that New Caledonia will be able to find its way forward into the future’ (Brown, 2005: 138). Claudine Jacques also explores the possibilities of the body, of sexuality and resulting métissage, for the construction of a Common Destiny, by staging a rare Kanak male and Caledonian female relationship that might begin to go beyond the biological, and inflect the cultural dimension. Although her characters in Les Cœurs barbelés do not withstand the pressures that a patriarchal and machistic Kanak culture and a racist New Caledonian rural mentality exert on their relationship, the birth of their son offers a glimmer of hope for the next generation. In Jacques, only a self-sacrificial feminine dedication to a less violent future may offer a way forward. The previous chapter also traced a similar search for inclusivity in the work of Nicolas Kurtovitch, following his identifications with the Kanak world view and surprising cultural migrations into the realms both of séjour paisible (a patch of land to work, the dance of the ancestors with the living) and terre violente (revenge and boucan). Kurtovitch’s

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 312

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

313

writing together with Déwé Gorodé (Pour dire le vrai) and Pierre Gope (Les Dieux sont borgnes) are exemplary instances of an early Common Destiny project, with each culture seen as different but living and working alongside the other. However, the starting positions of the two writers are different, and, where Gorodé largely ignores any analysis or foregrounding of the dominant culture (beyond the attempt to reverse its dominance), Kurtovitch, like Jacques, focuses on the empathetic but lucid identification with the Other’s cultural and spiritual world vision. There is no even meeting of cultures in this third space, but often asymmetry and difficult even dangerous entanglement. To speak of third spaces of communion and exchange, much of Kurtovitch’s work must take a detour through Eastern philosophies via the metaphors of Cold Mountain, a place of universal meditation/being, self-dispossession, and self-reconstruction. For Kurtovitch, the third space that he redefines as an ‘interface’ appears to offer, like the shared metaphor of the ‘patch of land’ to be worked in communion, something akin to a universal place of understanding and potential resolution of differences, a place that partakes of more than one cultural space. In his novella, Good Night Friend, however, as we saw, Kurtovitch’s work offers a curious challenge – the principal ‘interfaces’ he creates between the two major cultures in place in this work are highly coloured by the Kanak world view, but these interfaces are constituted by regressive practices of witchcraft, and sexual violence against women also lurks in the novel’s shadows. The prevalence of violence – the attempted rape of the young Kanak heroine, for example, not unlike the young Wallisian girl killed resisting rape by two young Wallisian men in Jacques’ 2009 Nouméa Mangrove, and perhaps legitimated by the intergenerational sexual violence in Gorodé’s L’Épave– is not exactly the ‘reverse acculturation’ of which Leenhardt had spoken much earlier, exemplified in his case by Kanak teaching Europeans the true sense of the scriptures. Is Kurtovitch’s knowledge of the Other sought in order to critique, manage, or praise him, a derivative of the colonial paradigm? Or is such knowledge a sign of the capacity for accepting even incommensurable difference, of transference, of entering the Other’s desire? In any event, the writer’s identifications do not immediately appear consistent with his own theoretical writing where he rejects ‘hybridity’ as a frame for identity formation presenting the two communities as connected but separate and refusing the writer ‘as chameleon’ (2004). A number of his Kanak characters, like the son of a chief in love with a white woman (the hostage) in Kawenya, remain torn between competing cultural, political, and personal imperatives. There

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 313

12/03/2014 14:40:07

314

The Literatures of the French Pacific

is a suggestion that the threat posed by difference might be played out at least partially beyond the control of the subject. Alongside the novels of Claudine Jacques and Nicolas Kurtovitch that are also accounts of rapid social change, we noted a range of other New Caledonian novels and stories that incorporate elements of Kanak culture to claim a Pacific or Caledonian identity and place. Hélène Savoie’s Les Terres de la demi-lune (2005) writes of the intensity and happiness of memories of early childhood in Vanuatu and New Caledonia in order to affirm her belonging and exorcize the fear of exile. Savoie’s short stories mix the Kanak concepts of bao and the journey to the underworld of the spirits seeking metamorphosis or return from the dead, and the Celtic legend of the quest for the Grail in an exploration of evil, illness, and death (Speedy, 2010) that recalls similar themes in Jacques’ evocation of the mangrove or in Déwé Gorodé’s novels. Her borrowings are an affirmation of a non-French, specifically Pacific culture of kinship relations, harmony with nature, and a conception of a re-enchanted universe. Yet, there remains a question mark over the authenticity of her understandings and uses of Kanak mythology. Métissage as Cultural Threat in Indigenous Pacific Writing Cultural métissage remains open to this charge of misunderstanding or betrayal and mixed-race relations have been depicted less as a sign of renewal or inclusion than as the threat of cultural disintegration, not only by colonial European novelists but more particularly and generally by contemporary indigenous Pacific writers. In the Samoan writer Albert Wendt’s first novel, Sons for the Return Home (1973), the mixed marriage of a white New Zealand girl and a Samoan is doomed to failure as much because of the Samoan mother’s wish for a Samoan daughter-in-law who will respect Samoan tradition (and her duties to her mother-in-law) as because of white New Zealand racism. The saga of the history of Samoa, presented in Wendt’s The Mango’s Kiss (2003), places the ambiguous figure of Barker, an atheist English beachcomber thrown out of England and living as a Samoan with a Samoan wife, close to the centre of this history. The main protagonist, the young daughter of a Samoan pastor, Pele, marries Barker’s mixed-race son, Tavita, against her parents’ wishes and against tradition. Pele is not only pursuing a love marriage but seeks to be a force behind a new society competing on equal terms with the occupiers. The novel ends

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 314

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

315

with the separation of the couple and the fall of the strong woman when, ironically, the afakasi [half-caste] Tavita demonstrates all the machismo of the Samoan male, striking Pele because she has accused him openly of his infidelity, and thus trampled on his mana. In her first novel, Mutuwhenua, the Maori writer Patricia Grace tells the story of a mixed-race couple acceptable to the family only because there are no suitable young Maori men left in the rural area. The Pakeha New Zealander Graeme is required to accept Maori beliefs and to gift his first son to the widowed grandmother to continue the family farm and maintain the community. However, traditions are in fact being irrevocably diluted, a loss illustrated in small details such as food preferences, the protagonist’s relief at the potatoes and meat on the menu and recognition that grandmother’s ‘smelly’ preserved fish might be too much for Graeme to accept. Keri Hulme’s protagonists, Kerewin and Joe, both of mixed-race origins, are torn between their heritages and their respective struggles against social isolation and impulses to violence in the Booker Prize winning novel, The Bone People (1985). In Larry Thomas’s Fijian plays, The Anniversary Present, or Outsiders, for example, his mixed-race characters represent a marginalized and struggling part of society. Vilsoni Hereniko also stages a difficult interracial love story in his play Sera’s Choice. Throughout the rest of the Pacific, then, métissage is presented, if not wholly negatively, then at least as often fraught with potentially destructive cultural difficulties. Kanak Writing and Métissage In the small body of New Caledonian indigenous writing, however, mainly preoccupied with revaluing a recovered Kanak culture, there have been very few figures of cultural métissage. In L’Épave, Maria finds out by chance that she is the biological daughter of a métis and the granddaughter of a mixed Kanak-settler couple separated by what the novel labels ‘colonial apartheid’ until the death of the settler’s wife. However this discovery of silence and hypocrisy around mixed-race sexual relations seems in no way to change Maria’s Kanak affiliations and cultural world. Gorodé’s text suggests, moreover, that the Kanak grandmother had found hidden, violent, solutions to the interdiction of her love for the white settler and landowner with the result that the settler’s wife and children disappeared in an inexplicable car crash. Gorodé’s early work presents few developed figures of Europeans. In

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 315

12/03/2014 14:40:07

316

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Graines de pin colonnaire, however, the story told by Tella’s adoptive ‘Aunty’ to soothe her adoptive daughter’s suffering from unrequited love, recounts the French woman’s first love in France, where as an adolescent she fell in love with a resistance fighter and became a member of the Resistance. Her heroic young maquisard, who has eyes only for the cause, is shot against the execution post with his comrades, ‘against the wall of the Just’. In Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, the couple of bush settler shop owners are accepted by the tribu because they accept the justice of the Kanak cause. Nonetheless, most of her empathetic non-Kanak figures come from the communities of indentured labourers, Javanese, Indochinese, or ‘Arab’ Others who are also victims of colonialism. With the exclusion of the very developed portrait of Abdul, the Muslim from Bali in Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, who runs the Station in the mountain chain with the narrator’s father in the absence of the white owner, these Others are deprived of their own names, known for example as le Javanais [the Javanese] or the ‘boy’ of such and such a settler family in L’Épave. In contemporary New Caledonia, however, it is generally the case that Asian immigrants tend to meld more easily with white culture. Patterns of political voting too suggest that those of Vietnamese, Indonesian, or Asian parentage are not in favour of independence. Nonetheless, Gorodé writes intimately of early Indonesian (Javanese) indentured labourers who are most often described as close friends, part of the family, or political activists for freedom in origin. Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! tells the full story of Abdul’s resistance against the Dutch colonial occupation of Indonesia and his flight to New Caledonia hiding among a contingent of indentured labourers, and elaborates at length on the values of Abdul’s quiet hard work in the coffee plantation in harmony with nature and the Koranic traditions that he shares with Tiapi and with Omar, the stockman, and seeks to pass on to his children. In fact, on Abdul’s death, his children are taken care of by Tiapi, Tâdo’s father and his extended family, positive autobiographical figures of Déwé Gorodé’s father and immediate relatives depicted as open to the ‘adoption’ of those who respect their culture. Déwé’s earlier short story ‘Le Passeur’ [The Ferryman] frames the history of the Houailou valley with the mysterious disappearance into the river of its last ferryman and a young Vietnamese woman waiting to be repatriated and suffering from leukaemia. In his boyhood, the narrator had listened to stories of the old days told by the ferryman, as well as stories of the valley told to him by his Kanak grandmother. The ferryman’s tales included the autobiographical account of his own defection from the French army

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 316

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

317

in French Indochina in 1956, and his sympathy, since that discovery of oppression, with all anti-colonial causes. The omniscient narrator, for her part, takes this resistant character and the mysteries that surround him, very much to her heart. The answer to the vital cultural questions around who gets to be written into history and how – who, in fact, gets to be on board the waka – currently facing all of the communities in New Caledonia, is left open in Peter Brown’s study ‘From Exclusion and Alienation to a “Multi-Racial Community”?’ (2005) by the question mark following his title. The literary scholar’s uncertainty as to whether the trajectory of the formerly excluded and despised figure of the métis to a form of pre-eminence is truly an image of the future rooted in common aspirations echoes the historian Frédéric Angleviel’s observation (2004) that although métis are increasingly present in literature no unified group identified as métis has yet emerged in New Caledonia. Hybrid Architectures: A Tenacious Kanak Word The construction of the Centre Tjibaou points to an analogous desire to affirm difference and separation while acknowledging the existence of mixing. Alban Bensa has described at length the complex deliberations between the architect, Renzo Piano, and the Kanak ‘masters of the land’. On the one hand, he notes, Piano constructed his three great postmodern mémoires de cases [memories of homes], the three Great Houses that are the public face of the Centre, the face on show. On the other hand, the ‘old people’ had asked for a hidden customary space concealed in nature, where everyday life would go on. ‘And so the voices of the masters of the land come and ring out at the gateway to Noumea, to remind us … that beneath the bridge of French jurisdiction flows the river of a tenacious Kanak word that controls the links to the land’ (2002). Bensa’s rhetorical words here recall Déwé Gorodé’s story ‘Case Closed’ and her palimpsestic figure where, beneath the green lawns and garden parties of the colonial estate, and concealed in the twisted forms of the Baobab tree, ancient Kanak worlds continue to exist, and to deepen – but also to distort and challenge – the surface meanings. If there is still a strong will to separation (and sovereignty?), or if, as Brown suggests, idealized hybridity lies in ‘desire’ or in ‘rhetoric’ rather than in ‘concrete social development’ (2005: 319), this may not completely undermine the principle of the Common Destiny as a blueprint for

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 317

12/03/2014 14:40:07

318

The Literatures of the French Pacific

relations between the diverse populations. Like Gope, Gorodé makes reference to the destin commun principle, rapped out in L’Épave by the young people on their March for justice and equality, as a future for a Kanaky/New Caledonia: ‘Stand tall / children of the motherland / kanak / kalédo / oceanian /island man / island woman / hand in hand / and step by step / looking forward / all together / toward / the future / to construct / all together / the country / of tomorrow / Kanaky / New Caledonia, citizens / citizenesses / Kanaky / New Caledonia’ (Gorodé, 2004a: 25). Gorodé does not, then, refuse the concept, but what are the precise meanings carried by the bracketed name of Kanaky/New Caledonia she uses? It is evident that speaking of this activist’s writing in terms of cultural hybridity must be undertaken with caution, as Gorodé has always been more involved with valuing Melanesian identity than with cultural mixing. Her work has been particularly concerned to foreground the negative effects of various forms of syncretism and assimilation on tradition, and continues to draw attention to the socio-economic and status gap between the two communities. If her Kanak women characters work, they are usually domestic employees in the homes of white families. Her male characters are derelicts like Old Tom, unemployed, or workers in the mines. The reality behind all the handshaking and agreements signed on paper, claims L’Épave, is that Kanak are still considered as less than nothing in their own land, in ‘Kanaky’. However, in her latest novel, Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé!, behind the characters that give voice to both a public and a personal history, and denounce once again the injustices and losses of colonial oppression, there is also another perspective: a critical and relativizing voice that points out the rigidities in traditional Kanak social systems and interdictions. Tiapi, the respected and admired father figure, a figure of customary authority who nonetheless plays an ambivalent coded role in some of Gorodé’s texts, rehearses the power of the taboo that he may perhaps himself have infringed. Car il sait aussi qu’avant lui, bien avant la colonisation, il n’y avait guère d’échappatoire pour la personne ayant bravé un interdit, l’infraction la plus grave face au groupe, au culte des ancêtres, au pouvoir de l’aîné. A l’emprise du prêtre ou à l’ordre du guerrier. C’était affronter une hiérarchie millénaire inscrite en soi au fil de la vie par le pouvoir de l’invisible, de l’ancêtre, de l’oncle maternel et de la parole qui fixe ainsi le destin de chacun dans le respect absolu du groupe. (Gorodé, 2012: 52) [For he knows, too, that before him, well before colonization, there was no way out for anyone who failed to respect an interdiction, the most

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 318

12/03/2014 14:40:07

From Métissage to Hybridities

319

serious crime in relation to the group, the cult of the ancestors, the power of the eldest sons; to the control of the priest, or the warrior order. This was to challenge a millennial hierarchy, inscribed in the self day by day over a lifetime by the power of the invisible, of the ancestor, the maternal uncle and the word that fixes the destiny of every person within absolute respect for the group.]

This description of a millennial order controlled by the dark consequences of infringed taboo is followed by the account of the breaking of this order by the even more devastating weapons, evangelization, forced labour, schooling, and ‘proletariatization’ that accompanied colonization. Tiapi ends his account of colonial history with the acceptance of both its ‘violent castration’ and its ‘emancipatory knowledge’ in order ‘to advance his people in his own time’ (52). The political discourse and positioning has shifted and there is perhaps a small window left open here for a definition of a Common Destiny that might include France/the EU as a partner alongside the acknowledging of the shadows of the past and the assertion of Kanak sovereignty. The jury seems to be still out on the multicultural future of New Caledonia or of a possible political entity of Kanaky/New Caledonia, although there is an evident movement within Caledonian literatures of European origin and, to some extent, within Kanak literatures, as we saw above, towards greater inclusivity. Features of a past dynamic of syncretism are being reconstructed and foregrounded, and new ­postcolonial hybridizing tendencies are emerging. Theory: The Hybridity Debates Peter Brown’s article slips imperceptibly from the word métissage to the term hybridity, also pulling multiracialism in alongside as if these words were more or less equivalent. It is the case that the terms hybrid, hybridity, and hybridization are currently used in a wide range of very different domains, including among others: popular music (world music); religion (world religions); communications; migratory movements; and a range of social sciences (ethnography, sociology, social and cultural history, and literary history). From the late twentieth century, the biological hybridization process has most often been seen as positive and to have brought major benefits to humankind. For instance, in the introduction to her edited collection of essays, L’Hybridité, Evelyne Hanquart-Turner draws on examples such as the hybridization of grasses

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 319

12/03/2014 14:40:08

320

The Literatures of the French Pacific

that produced the first wheat and thus the first agriculture, concluding that a h ­ ybridization that allows the simultaneous coexistence of the three species (the parents and the crossed species) no longer denotes bastardization. Like the enlargement of the gene pool, seeking new species is useful to society and humans will continue to imitate the now positively connoted process. However, despite Brown’s approximation and the rehabilitation of the terminology, hybridity, métissage, and multiculturalism are not quite interchangeable. Each term has its own distinctive historical itinerary and set of present meanings, and has set its own theoretical debates in motion. Gilroy’s Hybridity as Journeys beyond Ethnic Essentialism The Black Atlantic, by Paul Gilroy (1993), tells the history of the movements of ideas and people between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, including the Caribbean diaspora, and its influence on the metropolitan centres engendered by the slave trade as ‘an essay about the inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas’ (Kraidy, 2005: 58). Gilroy’s writing is designed particularly to combat ethnic essentialism and what he calls ‘cultural insiderism’. The sociologist argues for the theorization of creolization, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity, which he sees as (albeit somewhat unsatisfactory) ways of naming the processes of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity that exceed racial discourse. All of these terms are identified with the image of the ship, with a liminal in-between space symbolizing the route or the journey to and fro between worlds in motion. Gilroy’s idealized sailing ship crisscrossing new third or hybrid spaces, however, is strikingly in contrast with Gorodé’s wrecked traditional canoe and philandering colonial Sea-Captain. And, if ‘restless discontinuity’ can be seen as one aspect of Gorodé’s ‘deconstructive’ novel, and the ‘intermixture of ideas’ a feature of her literary universe, this universe nonetheless seeks to remain resolutely Kanak in its epistemologies, and her work is indeed that of a ‘cultural insider’. Hybridity as a Site of Negotiation of Identity What emerges from this theory, as indeed from Kanak texts, is the awareness that the interdependency of the hybrid relationship is not a simple binary opposition that derives from subjectivities constituted by interaction, the ‘antithesis’ constituted by the case of Quebec with which this chapter began, but an opposition that allows strategies of resistance while making hybridity a site of political negotiation and shifting

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 320

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

321

cultural identity. Homi Bhabha’s influential development of the term, for its part, presents hybridity as a liminal space imaged by the metaphors of a stairwell or connective tissue or as spaces that allow ‘a restless passage’, a spatio-temporal movement ‘hither and thither’ preventing the identities at either end from settling into primordial polarities. Such an interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that might, for Bhabha, ‘entertain difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy’ (1994: 4). For Alistair Fox, by basing his approach on Derrida’s notion of différance (meanings constructed through the system of differences between signs) and the mechanisms of discursive enunciation, Bhabha ‘has recoded hybridity as a symptom of the fluidity and porosity of the postmodern, postcolonial, postnationalist moment itself’ (Fox, 2010: 275–86). This hybrid identity is an ongoing construction, a becoming – much as Tjibaou or Gorodé’s texts also articulate identity at its deepest level – rather than a unifying and homogenizing originary power. Yet, as our various studies have shown, it is not the case that Tjibaou and Gorodé, among many other writers including writers of European and Other origin, renounce an origin, a founding story, or originary cultural force even although recourse to the latter is also strategic. The writing of first peoples in the Pacific still derives, at least in part, from an imperative of resistance and of commitment to their own people, from recovery of what has been lost, rather than from postcolonial, postnational, or globalized contexts. Hybridity as Recognition of Internal Differences and Multiple Subjectivities For Néstor Garcia Canclini, a Mexican-Argentinean who adapts the concept of hybridity to speak of political culture in South America, hybridity would also constitute the recognition of the multiple subjectivities – nationality, class, gender, ethnic group, generation – that have influenced colonial and postcolonial history (2005). Canclini’s work argues that modernization has not replaced tradition but rather created a mixed reality, and that the notion of hybrid cultures better explains the predominance of pastiche and bricolage in Latin American history and culture than other theories of originality, of imitation, of dependency, or of magic realism. The shape-shifting goblin or lutin of Graines de pin colonnaire and the ogre of L’Épave who incorporate both aspects of traditional Kanak society and the sociological detail that gives their contemporary doubles or ‘homonyms’ an appearance of realism, serve

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 321

12/03/2014 14:40:08

322

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Déwé Gorodé’s indirect political critique of customary male authority and carry a distinctively Kanak vision of the world. At once pastiche and bricolage, these figures of doubleness and of connection between generations, who bring together a very material form of magic realism and a form of conventional Western social realism, construct something different again; something hybrid in the Canclini sense of a mixture between tradition and modernity and the recognition of the multiple subjectivities – nationality, class, gender, ethnic group, generation – that have influenced colonial and postcolonial history. Older notions that framed cultural encounters and imitation or borrowing such as syncretism (used negatively by the Church to speak of the local indigenized mixtures added to the metropolitan doctrines spread by evangelization: voodoo being the most striking example) or creolization (particularly associated with the outcomes of the African slave trade) find themselves in competition with this contemporary multiform and shifting concept that now carries a strong political charge. Similar terms that displace mixture from race to culture include the term mestizaje, which serves the ideology of nation building in South America through the integration of indigenous populations. For Canclini, these terms need to be turned inside out like a glove to show their other sides of subversion and, following Bakhtin, include the concept of transculturation. This concept addresses the contradiction between the communal identities that muticulturalism implies, and deconstruction’s concern with the internal differences within identity. Transculturalism signifies a kind of give-and-take brokerage creating a new socio-cultural mix that contests all ideologies of cultural purity (Werbner and Modood, 1997: 21). In contrast to many of the notions it displaces, hybridity has most often been presented as a democratic and participatory discourse of multiple affiliations. Once again, although such a form of give-and-take brokerage can be found in the empathetic interaction with the Kanak world in the texts of writers such as Kurtovitch and Jacques, the notion that ‘each one remains in’ or returns to ‘his own place’ found in the rewriting of the texts of oral tradition suggests that New Caledonian literatures may partake of aspects of transculturality (multiple ­affiliations and bricolage, for example) but are not yet fully transcultural. Multiple Affiliations and Bricolage in New Caledonian Texts Our earlier chapter noted the eclectic influences of biblical and classical French texts on Waia Gorodé’s free thinking in Mon école du silence.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 322

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

323

As Dominique Jouve shows (2007b), Waia knew the gospels and was able to use them in his turn to critique the pastors for their lack of joy, and for their fear of living fully in the body. In his personal writing this ‘teacher’ chose faith in redemption and joy over the law, and challenged the constraints that life at Béthany imposed and the great losses being brought about by the European ways of being. Waia’s texts also provide detailed accounts of traditional ceremonies, preservation of genealogical memories for his group, reflection on his personal life, and constitute a gift in reciprocity to a long-time European researcher on Kanak plants. Such bricolage, as we saw in our consideration of the incorporation of Kanak stories in the texts of Jacques, Kurtovitch, and Savoie, is a structural principle in New Caledonian writing across the ethnic divide. It is not by chance that Déwé Gorodé’s L’Épave draws on parallel passages from the Bible and from the Koran for her own ambivalent messages. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is read at the murdered street girl Lila’s funeral (‘The wages of sin are death: but the gift of God, freely given, is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord’; Romans, 6:19 –23) as is Surah 91. In the name of God Who is merciful (…) Of the soul! How well he has fashioned it! Giving it its libertinage and its piety (…) (Gorodé, 2004a: 81)

In this case, Déwé Gorodé appears to put biblical and Koranic texts on the same footing and to use the Islamic text to interrogate, complement, and perhaps reverse the Christian notions of the sinful sexual body. In fact, all of these contradictory possibilities are simply put into play together in her text, creating what European readers might well see as a certain cognitive dissonance. Many of the tropes that appear in her writing are generated from the ‘outside’ and only in some cases are they ‘turned inside out like a glove’ to show their other side of subversion. In other cases, they are appropriated, transformed for her own purposes. These intertexts of diverse origins and functions include, for example, the flotsam and jetsam thrown up from colonial literature from Baudoux, Mariotti, or Bloc; the woman-centred recasting of Tjibaou’s revivalist nationalistic and masculinist myth; references to internal social critique in the plays of Pierre Gope that denounce rape and chiefly corruption in the tribu; and allusions to the resistant poetry of Baudelaire or Victor Hugo. Like Anova-Ataba, Gorodé also appropriates elements of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 323

12/03/2014 14:40:08

324

The Literatures of the French Pacific

the left-wing Marxist discourse of liberation struggles. These external references sit alongside the structural or thematic replay of elements from Gorodé’s own earlier fiction: the repetition of names across generations that makes identification of individual characters or of their status as living or dead difficult, the themes of reciprocity that can also be revenge, or of the path back (and forward) to heritage, for example. The death of the duplicitous orator-seducer who falls to his death in the shark hole in L’Épave echoes and explains the suspicious drowning in the shark hole of the Kanak ‘traitor’ to whom one of the Utê Mûrûnû had been given as spoils of war in the eponymous novella. The rewriting of Kanak history as loss, oppression, and resistance sits alongside a more personal, daily, writing deriving from the body, of the experience of oneness with the signs of the natural world and the vastness of Kanak knowledge. Scenes of growing up within the extended family of childhood, the power, pleasure, and jealousy of passion of her experience as a young woman, the pain of the loss of a child as a mother or of living with treatments for breast cancer replace scenes from the male-dominated customary world. Déwé Gorodé’s texts work through often carefully coded personal and communal trauma, using the literary text as a way of dealing with fears, doubt, pain, illness, or conflict. This is fiction that sets about unmaking the distinctions between empathetic committed insider and critical outsider writing, and whose borders are no longer contained by a single genre or style. Play with the multiple meanings, the resonance of French words and expressions is foregrounded as the potential, and the limitations of the borrowed language or the writer’s mastery of it are staged. Although bricolage works against any ideology of cultural purity, it is not, however, the case that the assimilated or borrowed language and references outweigh or override the deep parti pris of Kanak centeredness. Nor that the pleasure of the resistant, creative text outweighs its political commitment and pedagogical purpose. This is despite the concern in Gorodé’s work to address internal differences within Kanak society and its own multiple and sometimes warring subjectivities; in particular, gendered subjectivities. The borrowed elements point both to loss and degradation (‘wreckage’) and to poetic or creative forms of embodiment and ‘collectivity’, where women might cease to be doubly colonized and come to own their sexual bodies but, first and foremost, as Kanak women.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 324

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

325

New Caledonian Literatures as Transcultural Forms: Contact Zones as Double Inspiration? Not unlike the work of Canclini, postcolonial criticism – that is, criticism born from the existence of colonialism and invested in a discourse of opposition and reconstruction – gives the term hybridity its most general meaning as the creation of new transcultural forms. For Helen Tiffin, in The Empire Writes Back (2002), all postcolonial literature is necessarily hybrid because it incorporates a dialogue between European knowledge/ power and the recreation of its own identity. In Mary-Louise Pratt’s also seminal Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (2008), the ‘contact zone’ between the dominant culture and the (local) culture considered to be dominated constitutes the space of a search for identity beyond these binary concepts, a definition of self that is often recreated from a double inspiration and system of values. The writer of hybridity is one who attempts to understand and examine this positioning. Such a description of a hybrid contact zone of double inspiration, as we noted, could well apply to the empathetic reversals of perspective in the work of Barbançon and Kurtovitch, and characterize the representations of diversity from poor bush farmer living alongside Kanak to mixed-race shanty town dweller in Claudine Jacques. However, this movement to and fro from self to Other does not entail taking residence in restless transculturality; as Kurtovitch might put it, he is not a chameleon. Nor is Gorodé’s writing focused on examining what exists in the contact zone but rather on the attempt to re-site her text in another (Kanak) place. Hybridity in Gorodé’s writing is nonetheless in part the undecideability of an open, often allusive, sometimes deconstructive text that can also be read for its ‘double inspiration’; in her case, both for its postmodern textual frames and for the traditional frames that allow a referential reading. The text is sufficiently engaged with work on language, word and sound associations, play with genre, tenses (most often electing the present), intertextuality, and the dialogism of multiple voices, and also sufficiently referential, simultaneously to offer language-focused postmodern interpretation and resistant or ethnographic readings. Although her novels are also sufficiently strange or ‘unhomely’ to raise questions of receivability, their appearance of conformity to European narrative conventions, a detective or psychological plot, an autobiographical history, with a beginning, middle, and end, a semblance of linear progression, believable characters, and ethnographic/realist descriptions, make her stories relatively accessible to the general reading public. This double inspiration, like the portrait

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 325

12/03/2014 14:40:08

326

The Literatures of the French Pacific

of Kanak traditions and the exotic thematics in Gorodé’s work – the occult powers that her text affirms are still operative, the mana that can also be used for the seduction and possession of another’s body, the intergenerational transmission of secrets and of transgressions, the violent acts of revenge for humiliations and violations, certain conceptions of illness – nonetheless make the reading of her work a challenge to the European reader. The presence of the ancestors in the buzzing of a fly or in the touch of a butterfly, in the physical appearance by the side of the road of a young man killed many years earlier in a car crash, in dreams, or the power of the lizard lying across her path, can, of course, also be found in the texts of the New Caledonian writers of European origin. For example, Kurtovitch’s first novel recognizes the spiritual importance and the difficulty of finding the place of origin of the lost (Kanak) family name across complex intergenerational filiations. Similarly, in Gorodé’s work, the refusal of the sacrifice of women or children to patriarchal power and authority, or the defence of childless women often ostracized as barren by the group, can be read as feminist (European) preoccupations. Yet, Kurtovitch does not succeed in writing as an insider, and Gorodé’s woman-centred vision of the world remains distinctively Kanak at the same time as it is mobile, daring, and critical. Like the aspects of the ludic pirouetting provocations of The Satanic Verses that so deeply disturbed communities with limited or traditional reading horizons, who (mis)took the word for the world, fiction for a mirror of reality, and the simulacra of the prophet’s wives as a blasphemy, the references to sorcery and incest in Gorodé’s texts also risk being misread. Those seeking the postcolonial exotic, or expecting anti-colonial protest and a testimony to indigenous suffering or a manifesto for the Kanak independence cause, might well find what they set out to seek. However, this would be at the risk of a partial reading of the text. The distinctive character of the double inspiration in this inside–outsider perspective, and the text’s creation of new forms, keep Gorodé’s literary works open to shifting readings. The fantasmatic and real figure of the ogre as both history and myth serves Gorodé’s indirect critique of customary authority; the everyday detail that gives Old Tom an appearance of sociological realism makes her critique all the more telling. Nonetheless, the coded character of many of Gorodé’s stories make identification of their real referents difficult. The ogre is also an intertextual figure that, by allowing a to and fro between cultures, attenuates the focus on critique of Kanak society.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 326

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

327

Bhabha’s Hybridity as an ‘Upfront Syncretism to Unsettle the Inheritance of Europe’ Hybridity, as conceived of by Bhabha, does not represent a synthesis of cultures, but rather an ambivalence and a resistance that seeks to sap the authority of the dominant discourse. ‘Hybridity is a problematic of the colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that the other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition’ (Rosello, 1995b: 1). This authority is turned inside out and its ambiguities revealed as it is subverted, or reinterpreted. Bhabha’s reproduction of Fanon’s image of the colonized as ‘black skins, white masks’ does not represent a simple division but rather a doubling, a being occupying two places at once, a dissembling being. Gorodé, too, speaks of ‘perversity’, of the Kanak who gave European settlers the ancient name of the place they ‘settled’, for example. Her texts, however, show some reticence in respect to biculturalism and modernity and the spaces that they bring together, in apposition, without reconciliation (Rosello, 1995b). ‘Your life is a trap / a between-the-two-worlds / a to-and-fro-ing / […] / You go out of the tribal hut / to go into a hypermodern building’ [‘Ta vie est un guet-apens/ un entre-les-deux/ un va-et-vient / […] / Tu sors de la case pour entrer dans un building dernier cri’] (Gorodé, 1985: 35). The writer-politician is very aware that multiculturalism risks being constructed in the interest of dominant societal sectors and that tradition is accepted and used by institutions (or writers) strategically and selectively. Yet, if Gorodé refuses to inhabit an ‘entre-deux’, her literary universe is nonetheless created from a constant negotiation between Kanak (or creolized) and European texts; the influence of her grandfathers and father, the former pastors working with Leenhardt, and all three, in their own way, tellers of tales and writers; the transmission of texts of oral tradition from her aunties and grandmothers; her education in mission schools then in Noumea’s most prestigious High School and the University of Montpellier (contact with Marxist and Liberation ideologies, Negritude and Symbolist poetry); activism within the pro-independence parties; motherhood; and everyday life of a Kanak woman in the ‘tribu’; representation to United Nations committees and political power. It is precisely her movement across interstitial spaces that allows her to make the courageous case for protection for very young girls from sexual predation by more powerful men while, at the same time, situating her woman-centred vision firmly in a Kanak

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 327

12/03/2014 14:40:08

328

The Literatures of the French Pacific

cultural universe and her own experiences as a Kanak woman. This movement across interstices allows the cancer sufferer to see treatment by X-rays as a burning and surgery as a mutilation of the body without rejecting modern medicine altogether, and to understand the cause of illness as the result of the fault or malevolence of others or the outcome of unresolved personal trauma. Her literary vision is communally and personally rooted, mixed and moving, yet often close to the Freudian Unheimlich or what Bhabha has called the ‘unhomely’. In L’Épave, this ‘unhomely’ takes the form, in an extreme theatricalization, of the ritual absorption or enslavement of literally spell-bound women to abusive, sexually potent men, often also involving the unexplained death of their children, from influenza, for example. We recall Bhabha’s image of being in at least two places at once, of colonial authority fractured by a culture that will always accept this authority differently from how it is given. However, such a double dissembling image, in Gorodé’s case, seems also to be applicable to the inner divisions, multiple subjectivities – to the unhomely – not only in colonial society but within her own Kanak identity itself. As earlier chapters have noted, Gorodé produces a womanist cultural text and, like Claudine Jacques, a counter-ethics of the body. It is not merely modernity, nor even the jagged juxtapositions of modernity and tradition that are put into contention in her work. The question is raised of whether the canoe of tradition carried only women whose stories depicted themselves as consenting victims of the powerful male, of the ‘cannibal’ warrior. Or can Kaavo, once carried in the belly of a whale to found a chefferie, in fact find the agency to paddle her own canoe? If there is indeed an ‘upfront syncretism to unsettle the inheritance of Europe’ in Gorodé’s third spaces of negotiation, certain indigenous inheritances are also unsettled. The De-listing Imperative: Sites of Trouble and Dis-identification In fact, the thematics of Gorodé’s novel situate that writer where she is least expected, taking her beyond established categories. Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes explore such ‘unexpected and contingent results of lived experience’, the fact that individuals are not inevitably contained by that which seeks to produce them as bounded subjects (2000: 14). The preface of Mireille Rosello’s edited collection of empirical studies of hybridity similarly focuses on the ‘de-listing imperative’, the need to disperse the logic of lists that was the logic of the camp and of the Holocaust. In the case of Spielberg’s rewriting of Schindler’s List,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 328

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

329

which, for Rosello, became a list of ‘exceptional inclusion’, the listing imperative was reversed by clever recuperation of the enemy’s own logic. Rosello also quotes Judith Butler’s 1993 Bodies that Matter, where physical identities are seen as ‘sites of necessary trouble’ to demonstrate the necessity for such de-listing or ‘dis-identification’. In her definition, this is ‘a form of intellectual work, a mental vigilance that constantly requires us to let ourselves be displaced from a function, a stereotype, to slip away from a place of expectation … to rearticulate the place of one’s belonging … for there is no unique way of belonging, to a nation, to a culture, to a community’ (Rosello, 1995b: 3). The emergence of various practices of hybridity for Rosello foregrounds the challenge to the myth of supposedly original cultural homogeneity: ‘Hybridity as a practice would privilege encounters between discourses that imagine themselves to be contained and separate’ (7). It is not that immigrants have produced a hybrid culture by acting like a foreign element added to a coherent whole; it is, concludes Rosello, rather that ‘the suddenly acute perception of “foreignness” and “otherness” within imaginary boundaries reveals the fractal, opaque, fragmented structure of what originally appeared as a cohesive whole’ (4). Critique of Multicultural Inclusion and Challenges to Original Homogeneity Such an analysis helps illuminate the ‘trouble’ that the hybrid elements, the interstitial spaces that appear within singular New Caledonian societies in contact with ‘otherness’, provoke in all societies as well as what New Caledonia is rediscovering as its ‘amnesiac creolity’ (Rosello, 1995b: 5). As Rosello points out in general terms, probably very few school children did not experience some clash between home and school, or between differently creolized individuals. Hybridity would thus be less a ‘third-sex’ of identity than a reinvention of forms of belonging: a belonging as an included or excluded member, or sometimes simultaneously as both. Rosello’s definition of shifting forms of belonging, dis-identifications, work well to describe writing such as Claudine Jacques’ or perhaps even Déwé Gorodé’s. Rosello’s questioning of a multiculturalism that would erase the nature of the links between the representatives of artificially united different cultures is equally pertinent. For this literary critic, this is an inclusive multiculturalism that ‘includes’ without verifying the effects produced by its own paradigm of inclusion versus exclusion. As an example, Rosello gives the apparent inclusivity of a (post)modern Los Angeles, seen as a

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 329

12/03/2014 14:40:08

330

The Literatures of the French Pacific

city of liminality and of a cohabitation but that in itself does not put an end to discrimination and ‘self-destructive competition between ethnic communities’ (10). Here, once again, hybridity is used to designate the flaws and inequalities within multiculturalism. Gorodé’s work, like Kurtovitch’s or Jacques’, does challenge the effects of potential and actual inclusion that does not first insist on the definition and affirmation of a cultural self, on a place to stand. However, hybridity, too, is marked by similar internal fissures. Like the tapéras in Déwé Gorodé that pose problems for the translator – Christian temperance hymns become popular and drinking songs that are a characteristic of Kanak specificity – the traditional Word (like custom or the tribu), once synonymous with sacred-social connection, is represented as doubled and also as fractured. L’Épave stages a Word used to conceal the orator’s crude seductions and repossession of young Léna, under the unseeing eyes of the ancestors and the clan, a Word also heavily inflected by Christianity. There is no attempt in Gorodé’s work artificially to unite the different faces or to make them inclusive and mutually compatible. The affirming of the need for resistance by women and children, by the oppressed across cultures, moreover, is made through references both to the brave little Gavroche on Victor Hugo’s revolutionary barricades in Les Misérables and its pop-opera avatars, and to Kaavo, Gorodé’s own legendary Princess, also in the explicit role of a defiant Antigone. As in Bhabha, hybridity in Gorodé saps authority. This is the authority of (multicultural) inclusion and of masculine power but also of a single authoritarian Tradition in the contemporary period. To the extent that Gorodé’s hybrid work is a critique of the power relations between men and women in tradition, as well as a critique of both colonial and global socio-cultural and economic domination, it sets up a number of dialogues without answer, a kind of to and fro with the writer as both insider and outsider, character and narrator. Rebelling against patriarchy (both colonial and traditional) and the customary relation between the sexes, or consenting to serve as slaves of the ogre who devours little girls, the feminine figures of L’Épave also play contradictory, non-homogenous and unequal roles. For neither the power of individual dissent, embodied by Éva’s separation from the world of the tribu in a woman’s no-man’s land, nor her counter-powers that enable her to release Helena’s body from possession at least for a time, allow her to escape the condition of female servitude to sexual desire. Lila’s affirmation of the freedom of the female body in defiance of all moral

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 330

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

331

codes and social norms, and her retelling of the old stories to elicit a woman-centred message, do not save her from rape and murder. Even Old (He)Léna’s active possession, her complicity with the ogre as a partner in predation, is similarly, and quite literally, a masochistic dead end. Like Rosello’s, Gorodé’s work refuses a multiculturalism that would erase the nature of the links between the representatives of artificially united cultures, or indeed a Kanak culture that is single and apparently non-embodied, that would erase the nature of the links between men and women. This is at a time when many other Oceanian and particularly Melanesian communities are proposing solutions for their peoples that involve a return to an often unexamined tradition. In Vanuatu, for example, the ‘Green’ Party came to power in March 2013 in a governmental realignment with a platform of a return to (male-controlled) Kastom, to subsistence living, self-sufficiency in the country and the fields of one’s own man ples, the Bislama expression for one’s place of home or home island, and a turn away from cities and Western culture. As we noted in our introduction, Vanuatu has very little written literature. The Jouissance of the National Imaginary Can the competing voices in Gorodé, this dialogic movement that challenges any idealization of an authentic single origin or single truth, be seen, like her fluid positioning against women’s exploitation, as a particular form of Gilroy’s ‘fluidities of race and place that emerge from the dialectics of displacement’? (De Souza and Murdoch, 2005: 133–45). Does her work occupy the kind of third space postulated by Hall to be ‘the theoretical recognition of the split space of enunciation [that] may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the articulation of culture’s hybridity?’ (1990: 237). Is it, indeed, as Bhabha claims, ‘the inter – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (1994: 38–9)? The centrality of the in-between or double figures of cultural and sexual wreckage under the hull of a colonial ship or on the prow-shaped rock of custom that women must find a way round in Gorodé’s aesthetic, the ancestor who is at once the black fin of the pursuing shark and the old fisherman near a rock stretching out his hand in the protagonist’s opening dream in L’Épave, must contribute to a complex rethinking of the gains and losses of contact that any Common

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 331

12/03/2014 14:40:08

332

The Literatures of the French Pacific

Destiny project will need to take account of. At the least, Gorodé’s hybridity, ‘belonging to both “here” and “there” simultaneously, yet differently’ (De Souza and Murdoch, 2005: 133) embedded in Oceanian epistemologies of being with the Other, the ancestor or child not yet born, and of knowing through dialogue, yet decentred from the ethnocultural and the ‘nationalistic’ by its local and ‘womanist’ perspective, comes close to the critical ‘double consciousness’ of which Bhabha’s theory writes – even though her culture may not in fact be willing to identify itself as based on ‘the articulation of culture’s hybridity’. Mireille Rosello has also spoken of the reluctance generated by the ‘opacity and fog’ produced by de-listing and hybridity, noting the pleasure, fear, and strength invested in the use of identities, the jouissance of belonging to a national or group imaginary. An ethnic community, claims Rosello, plays a role that Žižek compares to the Lacanian ‘Thing’ present in that elusive entity called ‘our way of life’. The ‘Thing’ consists of the disconnected fragments of the way a social group organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies that constitute the unique way a given community makes its ‘organization of enjoyment’ visible. As our earlier chapters showed, the jouissance of identifying with a group, reconstituting its history and sets of rituals, its famines but more especially its feasts, defines the ‘emergence’ in the 1980s of a flourishing literature. Despite increasing efforts to write towards the Other, Gilroy’s insistence on a community that ‘can be defined, on one level, through desire to transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’ (Gilroy, 1993: 19), does not seem to be fully operative, at least as yet, either in settler or indigenous texts. Nor does his claim that diaspora ‘disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness’ (Gilroy, 2000: 123) ring true for most of the New Caledonian writers. The ‘naïve invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity’ that Gilroy sees as dissipating in new hybrid communities still continues to be a strong thread in the texts of all New Caledonian communities, despite some growing awareness of ‘the contingent political dynamics of ­commemoration’ (123). The national identity sought in Gorodé and Kurtovitch, as we noted, takes quite different forms. Attempting to go beyond what Gilroy decries as ‘cultural insiderism’, Kurtovitch creates ‘interfaces’, spaces of encounter of the two cultures beyond the French heritage. For her part, Gorodé, like Tjibaou or Gope, uncovers a (Pacific) indigenous trans-

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 332

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

333

nationality, even as she focuses intently on Kanak culture. She translates the anti-colonial poems of the Vanuatu poet and activist Grace Mera Molisa, but more particularly those poems in the post-independence collection, Colonised People, in which Grace enumerates and fiercely denounces violence against the women and children who figure on the cover under the title. Kurtovitch and Gorodé may write together, but they produce very differently hybrid celebratory and critical texts, admitting forms both of new local and ethnic particularity (the jouissance of the national imaginary) and of an old universalism while ‘each stays in his/ her own place’. Critiques of Hybridity: Hegemonic Hybridity Criticisms of the discourses of hybridity and its avatars have been manifold. Beyond Young’s disquiet in his Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995) with the colonialist echoes of the term itself – the sterility and artificiality evoked by the original hybrid as cross-bred or grafted species – we note particularly the repeated charge of neglecting the psychological losses and the pain of real or lived difference (difference experienced as forced migration, exile, diaspora, dispossession, humiliation). These remain at the core of all of Gorodé’s work. Also stressed are the generally unequal contexts in which intercultural relations are decided, as opposed to the utopian equality Bhabha posits. For some, hybridity resembles the unacceptable re-use of the pejorative colonial term canaque transformed to Kanak with a new spelling, and (only) hypothetically turned inside out like a sleeve to bear positive connotations. Others have wondered whether Bhabha’s hybridity was a specifically ‘migrant’ Indian intellectual phenomenon, and relevant only to the intelligentsia whose subjects were diaspora or emigration to the more economically prosperous Metropolitan cities. For the sociologist Aijaz Ahmad in his Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), transcultural hybridity simply endorses the claims of transnational capitalism within the processes of globalization. However, despite the accusations of neo-colonialism and concern over hybridity’s possible hegemonic aspects, even Ahmad concedes that the crossfertilization of cultures has been an endemic aspect of all movements of people and cultures (Ahmad, 1992: 18). Critics also argue that the mestizaje has been an element of the narration of the South American nation since the colonial period in Latin America and can be seen as ‘a

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 333

12/03/2014 14:40:08

334

The Literatures of the French Pacific

deeply racialized discourse whose progressive surface has a reactionary underbelly’ (53), because it imposed Spanish language, political organizations, and Catholicism on pre-Hispanic natives, while integrating only non-threatening traditional rituals. Some ask whether hybridity really opens a subversive space or rather conceals power relations by failing to indicate the directions of influence; hybridity can represent not just subversive imitation but also the assimilation Déwé Gorodé berates. Gayatri Spivak’s concerns in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason are that those lower on the circuits of global power have no access to the contemporary celebration of Robert Young’s mobile and multiple identities. For those who experience hybridity as migration and dispossession, or who experience life as conflict, Paul Sharrad writes, citing Spivak and Bhabha, that ‘postcolonial experience is felt and represented as “catachresis,” “rupture,” and “crisis,” [Spivak] or conflicting “incommensurate” pluralities of difference that relate to each other not as a harmonious developmental aggregation, but as discontinuities in which the hybrid marks a splitting rather than/as well as, a joining [Bhabha]’ (Sharrad, 2007: 102). Pointing to these ruptures and crises, the incommensurable pluralities of difference in the postcolonial experience, Spivak castigates what she calls the ‘triumphalist self-declared hybrid’ (1999: 102 and 361). Noting the numerous modalities of hybridity, ‘translation’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘fusion’, etc. in his 2003 Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Robert Young, too, has spoken of the nervous condition of ambivalence, the disquiet occasioned by being two people at once, a disquiet that many of the New Caledonian texts evoke. Bhabha has been accused of drawing uncritically and almost exclusively on contemporary Western thinkers. It has been argued that his use of Barthes, for example, results in a binary division. On one side, the West is associated with writing, the symbol, and pedagogy; with monological and authoritarian forms and a culture seen as epistemological or a museum object, divorced from the everyday. On the other, an Eastern or ‘postcolonial’ world is identified with the voice, the sign and performance, denoting mobile, dialogical, democratic, and sensual modes of apprehension, and a present, active culture. The mutually transformative texts of Claudine Jacques and Nicolas Kurtovitch (New Caledonians of European descent), Pierre Gope and Déwé Gorodé (of Kanak descent), would appear, in fact, to exhibit both Western and Eastern characteristics. It is the case, however, that the texts of Gope and Gorodé, like those of Tjibaou, are dialogical, performative

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 334

12/03/2014 14:40:08

From Métissage to Hybridities

335

(influenced by oral tradition), and didactic to an extent not approached in Kurtovitch’s and Jacques’ work. Hybridity: Conscious or Unconscious? This asymmetry is a concern for other critics, such as Robert Stam, who in ‘Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage’, in May Joseph and Jennifer Fink’s Performing Hybridity (1999), asks whether Bhabha’s ‘mimicry’ and a hybridity that is ‘power-laden and a-symmetrical’ are really resistant strategies, and, furthermore, whether they are unconscious as Bhabha hypothesized. In indigenous New Caledonian texts, the hybridizing of the biblical message of the kind the reader finds in Waia Gorodé’s Mon école du silence, with its syncretism of the Christian God and the Kanak bao and refusal of the sinfulness of the body, or the body/spirit dichotomy, or again in the (con)fusion of the Eucharist and the sacred Melanesian cannibal sacrifice in Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s Kanaké – appear to be purposefully resistant acts. In White Mythologies, Robert Young suggests that it is not clear that the colonized subject’s inhabiting of in-between positions where he eludes the colonizer’s demand for recognition, above all in psychodynamic and discursive domains, functions in a similar way for both colonizer and colonized. For example, it seems that, beyond intellectual interest, tolerance, and a certain accommodation of Kanak beliefs within Christianity, Leenhardt did not allow the culture of the Other substantially to modify his own religious beliefs and practice. Kurtovitch’s interest in constructing a Pacific identity outside of France does not have the same purposes as Gorodé’s parti pris of Oceanian indigeneity. The New Caledonian play Les Dieux sont borgnes, produced by the culturally mixed team of Nicolas Kurtovitch and Pierre Gope, and argued by Peter Brown (2009) to be both popular in its appeal and comically subversive in its representations and reversals of first encounters with Captain Cook, would also seem to fall on the side of a hybridity of intentional postcolonial innovation drawing both from Westernization and from its contestation. With its Black Captain Cook and its superimposition of layers of time, myth, and languages, The Gods are Blind incorporates postcolonial resistance to hegemony while clearly constructing itself from fragments of other texts, and from diverse founding characters and forces (Captain Cook, the explorer, the indigenous Chief, and the Warrior Princess), including European figures. Déwé Gorodé borrows quite consciously from Western myth,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 335

12/03/2014 14:40:08

336

The Literatures of the French Pacific

appropriating the resistant figure of Antigone, for example, to double and support her Kanak women characters, or recalling Dr Jekyll (and Mr Hyde) as an avatar of Old Tom. It seems to be the case that many New Caledonian writers are less than ready to disavow the French language they use (subversively but also competitively with their Metropolitan French counterparts) to give their texts a wider readership. Unconsciously eluding the colonizer’s demand for recognition does not appear to be the principal function of moving to and fro between Kanak and European worlds, inhabiting the space-between. Competing Hybridities In addition to these various asymmetries in position, origin, and borrowing, the multiple referents and shifts in meaning of the word have been considered to be too confusing for the term hybridity to be theoretically useful. John Kranaiauskas sees the notion as the site of a battle of definitions and, indeed, of a politics of theory between Homi Bhabha, representing the psychoanalytic and literary strand, and Garcia Canclini, representing the anthropological and political strand. Both theorists, for this critic, nonetheless produce disjunctive postcolonial time and space as the constitutive inside of contemporary geopolitics (Kranaiauskas, 2000). In Hybridity and its Discontents, Brah and Coombes echo other critical voices in their questioning of any ‘uncritical celebration of the traces of cultural syncretism which assumes a symbiotic relationship without paying adequate attention to economic, political and social inequalities’ (2000: 1). Some hybrid interactions, in the music industry, for example, are indissociably both cultural exchange and commoditization. Questions must be asked about the particular structures of any hybridization process – what is mixed; how, by whom and with what intentions; which elements are chosen, and for what reason. Prina Werbner’s introduction to Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism sets the hybridity question in the context of a need to differentiate between ‘a politics that proceeds from the legitimacy of difference … and a policy that rests on coercive unity’ while explaining why ‘cultural hybrids are still able to disturb and shock despite a postmodern culture that celebrates difference’ and a ‘consumer market that offers a seemingly endless choice of unique subcultures and styles’ (Werbner and Modood, 1997: 21). We recall Déwé’s description of the Saturday consumer fair on the Place des Cocotiers in Noumea. These hybridity debates, engaged by a number of other critics such as Jan

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 336

12/03/2014 14:40:09

From Métissage to Hybridities

337

Nederveen Pieterse, for example, in ‘Globalization as Hybridization’ (in Featherstone, Lash, and Robertson, Global Modernities) or ‘Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition’, or Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange, pit national and cultural uniqueness or difference between cultures against the kind of heterogeneous world where multiple cultures coexist and influence each other as always already hybrid entities. Conclusion Distinctive Pacific Hybridities: Modifying Hybridity Theory The first section of this discussion concluded that the fraught history of métissage, in a colony, overseas territory, and then country largely organized by the principle of separate development, left the question of a multicultural future for New Caledonia open. Nonetheless, the literary evidence collected in this book indicates an increasing intertextuality and interculturality. The hybridity debates discussed in this chapter’s second section opened up the network of notions of difference and diaspora that constitute contemporary hybridity to examination. The scene has been set for a final discussion of the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an understanding of the cultural mixing we have found in New Caledonian literary texts. In fact, returning to the texts of the colonial past in the light of contemporary theory, might we not conclude simply – as Edward Saïd himself did in Culture and Imperialism – that ‘All cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic’? (1994: xxiv). Saïd’s conclusion was of course a corrective reaction to the critique of his earlier work that had argued for a monolithic ‘Orientalism’ practised by the West in their dealings with the Other. Imperial History itself has begun to rethink the European Empire(s) as networks of unequal power relationships that nonetheless brought previously unconnected regions, communities, and indeed bodies into contact in a constant to and fro of people, goods, and ideas. Obliged to take account of local agendas in relation to new commodities, imperial contacts transfigured, and were in turn transfigured by, the ways in which both colonizer and colonized thought operated. In the light of these interactive networks, and Bhabha’s hypothesis that colonial discourse itself is never wholly in the control of the colonizer, might the line of demarcation between colonial and postcolonial, hybrid

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 337

12/03/2014 14:40:09

338

The Literatures of the French Pacific

and homogeneous, be less clear than has been assumed? The literary texts we have considered reveal that, to varying degrees of transformation, the authority of the dominant discourse is often syncretized, reinflected, or challenged by its confrontation with its object, or by its object’s ‘writing back’ in the form of appropriation, reversal, reinvention, etc. Pacific Critics: Paul Sharrad’s Pluralistic Hybridity and Pacific Syncretic Counterpointing For Paul Sharrad, quoting Robert Young, hybridity has come to stand for the interrogative languages of minority cultures and the syncretism that characterizes postcolonial cultures. This is a pluralistic hybridity that arises out of modernity’s transformation of both colonial and metropolitan societies. The project of hybridity theory for this leading Pacific critic in his ‘Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory’, published in Kuorti and Nyman’s Reconstructing Hybridity, is to ‘undermine the foundations of fundamentalist separatisms – be they racial, religious, linguistic or to do with sexual identity – and to open up equal spaces of mixing that neither assimilate everything into one global melting pot nor deny the right of special recognition to indigenous peoples’ (2007: 106). There are many types of hybridity, claims Sharrad, with each doing different cultural work. A sliding scale of hybridizations can be set up, from assimilation at one pole to local resistance at another. In Sharrad’s critical ‘take’ on Pacific literatures, hybridity is not a solution to the major material disparities exemplified in the statistics of a hybridity critic, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, but rather a symptom of them. Sharrad reaches conclusions on the particularity of Pacific hybridity from his analysis of contemporary stories from Papua New Guinea. Written with little or no international audience in mind, these produce what he sees as a ‘free-floating blend of witch doctors and Princesses, crocodiles and magnates, local creation myths and Australian folklore’ (110). The picture of textual and social culture these elements hint at, for Sharrad, is ‘not one of interbreeding such that a new amalgam is created; it is more a case of juxtaposed elements that jostle and kick against each other – neither a melting pot nor a mosaic, nor even a multiculturalism so much as a single cultural space in which disparate elements cohabit edgily, what I would call syncretism’ (111). As Sharrad’s analysis continues: ‘it is not that this Pacific literature works to abrogate or re-vision some other cultural formation so much as it consists in the unconcerned assertion of the validity of its own day-to-day experience, independent of either nationalist resistance models of “the Pacific Way” or a “black

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 338

12/03/2014 14:40:09

From Métissage to Hybridities

339

aesthetic” on the one hand and subversive anti-colonialist hybridity on the other’ (111). Sharrad’s Pacific-based critique of the ‘uninspected use of hybridity as a concept/textual practice of subversion’ uses examples from modern Anglophone writing in the Pacific region to argue instead for a ‘situated dynamic of juxtaposed elements’ that he defines as ‘syncretic counterpoint’. This ‘conflictual mix’ resists the amalgamation suggested by the concept of hybridity while it asserts an indigenous difference that also allows for ‘modern globalized complexity’ (111). Our own analyses concur with Sharrad’s argument that for indigenous groups, especially those in the cultural minority within their national spaces, what is immediately at stake is first the claim to an essential originality from which to assert rights and restitution, rejecting hybridity, and, only secondarily, a right to hybridity in order to ‘confuse stereotyping’ (104). This is the case, to a lesser or greater degree, for all New Caledonian literatures. Nonetheless, all of the modes of resistance set aside in Sharrad’s analysis – nationalistic models (the Pacific Way), a black aesthetic, and subversive hybridity or ‘writing back’ to challenge or reverse stereotypes – are present in the Kanak writings we have considered, perhaps ‘jostling’ one another ‘edgily’, as Sharrad puts it, but not necessarily ‘free-floating’. Hybridity here consists of a strategic claim of resilient localism and, as Kraidy puts it, also an attempt ‘to reconcile universalist ideas of equality with relativistic manifestations of identity’ (2005: 54). Indeed, Sharrad’s own study of the borrowings and mixed styles in Witi Ihimaera’s Maori-New Zealand novels, illustrated by the Ratana religion founded by the prophet Te Kooti Rikirangi as ‘a mix of Old Testament narrative and Maori belief structures’, and the painted church at Rongopai, can only characterize this ‘translation of [European] art-forms and conventions in order to preserve and honour ancestral legacies’ as ‘hybrid’ (Sharrad, 2007: 115). Canclini’s notion of hybrid modernization, as we noted, is not the substitution of tradition, or even a new element jostling alongside it, ‘but rather [as] mutual transformation, a project of multi-directional renovation from inside’ (2005: 13). A few of the texts we studied were tentatively investigating the beginnings of a mutual transformation. Brah and Coombes’ tiempos mistos or multi-temporal heterogeneity similarly understands hybridity as a reflection of ‘mixed times’, the continuing relevance of the indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial cultural sediments; that is, the complex articulation of both traditions and modernities. This concept is not dissimilar to the notion of the palimpsest drawn on in the first chapter to describe possible re-readings of accounts of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 339

12/03/2014 14:40:09

340

The Literatures of the French Pacific

first encounters, for example, through the later prism of feminism, or translations of texts of oral tradition that produce something of the original text and something of the new contexts of its rewriting. The accounts of the European explorers are becoming increasingly of interest for reading traces of early Kanak society behind or between the lines as much as for understanding European thinking of the time. For Sharrad, the implication of the ‘edgy’ set of juxtaposed complexities is not one of mutual transformation but rather of ‘unfinished business’ and ‘fundamentally unresolvable difference’: of a ‘shuttling between incompatible knowledge systems that is more like syncretic counter pointing than anything usefully understood in terms of hybridity’ (2007: 116). Yet, in the Pacific texts we have examined there is a shifting, antagonistic, or dialogic relationship rather than a complementary relationship, or juxtaposition, even an ‘edgy’ one, between their hybrid elements. Like the notion of ‘unfinished business’, the idea of ‘syncretic counterpointing’ does offer a useful model for the particularity of resistant Pacific cultural interfaces. It accounts less well for internal splitting, for the work of ‘settler’ writing, for example, as it puts on the mask of the (Kanak) monster and attempts to see through its eyes. Syncretic counterpointing may fail to account well for the mutual transformations, the complex articulations of traditions and modernities beyond the false binary of tradition and modernity. Moreover, most of the writers we have considered also suggest the potential of certain kinds of unequal ‘mixed’ or ‘jostling’ cultural elements for destruction. The spectres raised by the strong link between ‘love’ and possessive or retributive violence, or male sexual domination, in so many Pacific novels, or the portrait of the chefferie progressively being deserted or internally corrupted in response to the solicitations of Western modernity, are the spectres both of a lost tradition (what smoulders still ‘under the ashes of the conch shells’) and of a corrupted custom that arrogates Western rights to itself only selectively. The centrality of the figures of cultural and sexual wreckage contributes to a complex rethinking of the mix produced by contact, and of what should be recovered or reworked. It is clear, as we concluded earlier, that hybrid figures of infiltrated custom like Gorodé’s ‘graveyard of canoes’ and cannibal ogre, or Kurtovitch’s boucan, or even Jacques’ lizard of irrational violence, will need to be accommodated in any working out of New Caledonia’s Common Destiny. Despite their deconstruction of custom or of the types of mixed society to which it can give rise, many of the writers we considered

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 340

12/03/2014 14:40:09

From Métissage to Hybridities

341

oppose any multiculturalism that would displace traditional culture to one (already mixed) culture among others. Rather than displacing tradition, modernity in these texts clearly remains inextricably bound up with customary practices and with a certain separation of cultures. As the first section of this chapter concluded, it is not at all clear that the hybrid status of all (differently hybrid) cultural groups or even shared investment in a Common Destiny as yet makes the case for a multicultural future. Few Pacific novelists, however, finally validate the option of a full ‘return’. In the Anglophone novels of Sia Fiegel, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, and Alan Duff, only an exceptional woman, or the daughter of a Rangatira who has mana within her tribe, can even partially return to the old marae. In Duff’s Once Were Warriors, this can be done only by integrating the best of the old values into the lives of modern Maori urban dwellers. In Ihimaera’s Whale Rider it is the courageous non-traditional intervention by a young girl that both saves and changes tradition. Ihimaera’s 2009 novel, The Trowenna Sea, recovering a ‘buried’ history from the archives of a heroic Maori chief who dies in exile in Tasmania, is simultaneously an ecological and humanist reworking of the Enlightenment myth of the Noble Savage. In Albert Wendt’s work, where surviving ancient cultural practices such as tattooing can be revived with pride, the return to Pouliuli, the characterization of originary Void, is inextricably interwoven with Albert Camus’s existential néant. In Kanak writing, the traditional image of the ‘cannibal feast’, long used to elicit notions of indigenous savagery, violence, and alterity, and to confer ‘shame’ on the evangelized natives, as Waia Gorodé’s writings confirm, is given a different and ‘resistant’ life in a mixing that is also an attempt strategically to reverse both Western and Kanak traditional understandings. Compared to Christian religious ritual (in Tjibaou) or to incestuous patriarchal power and sexual possession (in Gorodé), this figure of the cannibal, both ‘Host’ and ‘Ogre’, is reworked in both writers to take on universal dimensions. If this is indeed an ‘upfront syncretism to unsettle the inheritances of Europe’, it is not part of a message of simple indigenous ‘return’. Strategic New Caledonian Hybridities New Caledonian contexts and choices are not those of a diasporic United States. The marks on the landscapes inscribed in the old Kanak stories are still largely present. In particular, the adaptation and survival of all New Caledonian cultures in exile, as Chapter 4 demonstrated,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 341

12/03/2014 14:40:09

342

The Literatures of the French Pacific

required at least a partial return to cultural roots, to a pre-colonial or pre-deportation scene, however compromised, by means of a recovery of foundational myths and legends or the restoration of pride in a ‘home’. Despite the recognition that much of the material and impulse for this ‘return’ or reconstitution may well come from European colonization, religion, ethnography, and indigenous-centred cultural politics, Kanak texts, like other indigenous Pacific work, claim a mix of essential and strategic origin(ality). Resistance in Apollinaire Anova-Ataba’s writing, as in Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s texts, thus takes the form of cultural revival and self-affirmation: the dramatic staging of an origin, trampled on by colonization, and of historical resistance to oppression, as a ground from which to claim restitution. The myth of Tein Kanaké, the ancestor, the first man and the central pole of the Chiefly House, takes its place at the centre of a written Kanak literature in Tjibaou, Gorodé, and Pourawa. Tjibaou brings a national Kanak identity both to rebirth and to life through the often secret dances and dramatic texts revived by the different groups for the festivals, and the totems to which the dancers belonged, but also through provocative acts of ‘national’ syncretism. As a means of inscribing native agency, local struggle, and political agenda, this is more than Sharrad’s ‘thick assemblage of jostling pieces’, and more again than the superficial bricolage or eclectic borrowing of postmodernity. Sharrad’s claim that the final message in Ihimaera is ‘one of fundamental difference grounded in essential place and identity’ would hold for one facet of most New Caledonian texts, which similarly constitute an ethics and a politics of difference. Tjibaou’s Kanaké bears out the critique of Bhabha’s third space as overvaluing un-belonging, and undervaluing the aspiration to a distinct identity – and, to a lesser extent, the undervaluing of a master narrative of ‘national liberation’. Yet, Tjibaou’s texts are also clear that Kanak identity lies ahead, and not behind him. A co-authored play like Les Dieux sont borgnes, for its part, draws its ethics and politics from an intentional and humorous display of difference and bricolage. The subject may be characterized as split, unfixed, and disseminated in textual and linguistic play (or, again, as a stereotyped agglomeration of ready-made characteristics) but although no single transcendent explorer or native self emerges, each person shares aspects of communal subjectivity that give him/her evident distinctiveness and, ultimately, social and political purpose. Examining the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Nancy, Christopher Watkin has shown

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 342

12/03/2014 14:40:09

From Métissage to Hybridities

343

how a broadened phenomenological tradition can take account of Derrida’s critique of ontology and yet still maintain a commitment to the ontological. This reading of being and presence together in a new hybrid frame of ‘deconstructive phenomenology’ constitutes a certain rethinking of the understanding of the relation between deconstruction and phenomenology that might allow a space for the existence of ‘core’, if not primary, elements disseminating through New Caledonian identity(ies); a space for hybridity (as play of difference) and ontology (as origin) to coexist. Sharrad’s work interrogates the claim for hybridity as a textual practice of subversion by analysing the differences in the work of Pacific writers. Beyond cultural pluralism and the universalism of Western academic liberalism or humanism, in Tjibaou, Gope, or Gorodé, there is, in the final instance, untranslatable cultural difference. Although it may also be this, this work is not simply a sapping or subtle alteration of dominant Western discourse through Bhabha-like ‘mimicry’.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 343

12/03/2014 14:40:09

10

Summing Up Summing Up

The various studies of this book have revealed the presence of multiple and shifting hybridities, at all levels of the work of recovery and reconstruction underway in all communities, if to varying degrees of transculturality. Accounts of first contacts on beaches with savages were shown to be largely a product of European Enlightenment thinking, the circulation of European ships and texts. Translation of the texts of oral tradition was an early locus of production of a hybrid new cultural entity, different nonetheless in degrees of transformation in the publications of the red virgin, the missionary-ethnographer, and the contemporary ethnographer. To these palimpsestic and translational hybridities, the (hi)stories of settlement added what we have designated as strategic hybridity. The tropes of exile and of home, emblematic of a quest for identity and instruments of a political strategy, and staking claims to a belonging to the Caledonian earth, circulate across the literatures of all communities. Three different literary reproductions of the story of the founding father, Kanaké, by Tjibaou, Gorodé, and Pourawa – respectively nationalistic, woman-centred, and mythicopoetic – illustrated the different reconstructions of history and the different kinds of hybridity within a single and evolving (Kanak) writing community. And again within Déwé Gorodé’s own texts, alongside the revaluing and re-centring of a lost Kanak culture, there is inner splitting, the returning spectre of the ghosts of abusive sexual power, a ‘haunting’ return to tradition, to the Other within. Such a doubling is materialized in the proliferating image of the canoe, in its simultaneous representation of idealized and essentialized voyaging ancestors, and the hidden problems within Kanak tradition. The intertextual hybridity that was the subject of the subsequent study of the shared motif of the avenging lizard revealed the range of purposes of cultural borrowings and exchanges between European and

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 344

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Summing Up

345

non-European traditions, but also the emergence of distinctively New Caledonian emblems, common to all communities. The subsequent overview of Caledonian texts of European and other origin argued for the centrality of themes of biological and cultural métissage in Caledonian literatures and for difference between colonial and postcolonial hybridities and the slow and difficult progression towards the latter. In all of these studies, questions of ontology and the need to work through the values and dangers of mixing were crucial. Stuart Hall affirmed the concept of ‘oneness’ for his own ‘diasporic’ culture, declaring that ‘This, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence, of “Caribbeanness”, of black experience […] We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of the act of imaginative rediscovery which this conception of a rediscovered, essential identity entails’ (1993: 393). The importance of this underlying sense of oneness, of identity, is paradoxically not negated by its fictive characteristics and strategic purposes, the importance of the inventive act of recovery and re-appropriation of an appropriated identity in a becoming. Oneness is also accompanied by the necessary heterogeneity of identity. The apparent essentialism of both settler and indigenous literatures might then be seen as one face of a strategic oneness; the other face being the circulation of difference, internal and external, and the critical construction of new possibilities. For Hall, Caribbean identities can be seen as ‘framed by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture’ (395), and thought of in terms of the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one provides some grounding in the past. The other refers to historical experiences of a profound discontinuity. Cultural identities, in this perspective, are not an essence but an unstable historical positioning. In contemporary New Caledonian writing, it could be argued that there is a similar coexistence of continuity and difference, in dialogic relationship, within the various writing formations. Hall’s theory of cultural hybridity, elaborated as a defence against the otherness imposed from the metropolitan centres and in a working relation with the creolization, racial mixture, and internal differences within the different groups and islands of the Caribbean, clearly shares some elements with the New Caledonian cultural situation. His ethics of dynamic and Creolizing diasporic identities, disarticulating signs

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 345

12/03/2014 14:40:09

346

The Literatures of the French Pacific

and re-­articulating their symbolic meaning, constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew ‘through transformation and difference’ (1990: 236), however, is not fully applicable to the different New Caledonian communities and their literary productions, although it does suggest possible orientations. Kanak are ‘first peoples’, not an outcome of the slave trade, and New Caledonians are the children of very particular forms of diaspora (deportation, indenture, and settlement). The histories and stories of Kanak and non-Kanak origin have remained strongly marked by separation and difference into the present. Whereas Antillean, African, or Asian novels written in French find Metropolitan publishers and a European readership, Kanak texts appear less receivable – too local, too didactic, or too strange – and are published, if they succeed in finding a publisher, by small Pacific presses. Even Jacques’ texts, some of which were published in France, are very difficult to find outside New Caledonia. There is an emerging awareness in all of the New Caledonian literary texts that identity is not fully closed; that identities must be negotiated. All of our New Caledonian writers stage in-between or ‘becoming’ identities, with their concomitant problems. Hybridity works to prevent the stereotyping, the settling, or freezing of any particular identity – as oppressor or victim, colonizer, or colonized. As we noted, this does not prevent writers from resisting any notion of hybridity that does not allow them to negotiate their own complex but local identity as victim, their ‘sovereignty’, or their belonging to a particular place. Beyond their various identity constructions, including those of a condition of exile and those of resistant, self-affirming, non-Metropolitan Pacific identities constructed through mythological or natural emblems such as the lizard or the mangrove, literary New Caledonian texts also function as ‘transformative’ objects, providing images of what is desired and what is feared, and seeking, as Alistair Fox puts it (2010), to make the environment symmetrical to human need. Bringing Old Tom, the cannibal ogre or incestuous maternal uncle, to the light of textual play, for example, may well constitute a form of exorcism. Gorodé’s exploration of women’s agency, her avatars of the classical Antigone, are fissured from within by the power of the text’s own complex engagement with themes of sexual possession, sorcery, and revenge spiralling across generations. Hybridity might provide a frame from within which to consider this incommensurability, the concerns carried by these deeply embedded or absolute/’absent’ (in the Durassian sense) images of identity, indirectly signposted within the text by recurrence and by

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 346

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Summing Up

347

­ etamorphosis, or signalled in the gaps between the characters, the m narrator, and the writer. Hybridity could serve similarly to account for the dynamic oscillation in Gorodé’s writing, for her to and fro movement between external activism for independence, and the internal, indirect revelation of trauma (incest, possession, illness, the death of a child, or the betrayal of a love). Going beyond Tjibaou’s politico-nationalistic creation of bicultural boenando, a return through ceremonial (cannibal) feasting to the original roles of Kanak as host and European as welcomed and integrated guest, Gorodé’s work denounces the ambiguities of all dominant discourses, including those of custom. The mixed spaces in New Caledonian literatures in which elements of both cultures coexist uneasily, ‘edgily’ as Sharrad puts it, remain as yet, for the most part, ‘unhomely’. Despite intertextuality, the many textual borrowings, there is, as yet, little possibility of a fusion of cultures and literatures. The third spaces derive only in part from a movement ‘hither and thither’ or up and down the ‘stairwell’, like the restless, uneven, unequal, movements evoked by Bhabha’s metaphors. In our studies, encounters on beaches between explorer and Melanesian produced a third space predominantly occupied by the European writer’s own sociopolitical contexts. We preferred to label the contemporary readings of these texts ‘palimpsestic’. The tales of oral tradition, on the other hand, revealed an often respectful and major degree of mixing of Melanesian informant and European intermediary. Translation, as a privileged and manoeuvrable locus of forms of cultural meeting and exchange, was exemplified here, however, by the very different in-between places created by the nineteenth-century utopian feminist and revolutionary, the missionary, and the ethnographer. If these European translations do demonstrate features of Bhabha’s third space, the question remains as to what extent Bhabha’s frame is applicable to specific Western writers and translators who are claiming to enter empathetically into the culture of the Other. Who or what is appropriated or liberated in each translation? Is it the case as Emma Sinclair-Reynolds argues in her thesis that the clearer and more present the original voice of the Kanak informant, the more respectful the approach, the more authentic and successful the translation? The uses of the spaces created by the recurrent topoi of exile and of home to make strategic claims to a place in the future new land derive from the to and fro between communities, between the shared and the contested character of these spaces. There are, however, significant internal differences between the construction of (hi)stories by Kanak,

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 347

12/03/2014 14:40:09

348

The Literatures of the French Pacific

European, and Other ethnicities. It seems that, like multiculturalism, hybridity comes in weak and strong varieties, with only the latter changing ‘original’ identity formations. Despite the paradoxical or even dissonant character of much of Déwé Gorodé’s writing, the epistemology at its heart remains resolutely Kanak. If gender and generation shape the mixed internal spaces created in the three Kanak versions of the founding myth Kënâké, rewritten from very different political, feminist, and mythico-poetical perspectives, these texts still share the profoundly oral and performance forms of Kanak tradition. The emerging literatures of Kanaky/New Caledonia do carry echoes of the emergence of a certain politics of difference, considered by Hall to be most apparent at the level of language itself – decentring, destabilizing, and carnivalizing the linguistic domination of French – but not at the expense of a legacy of what Ricoeur called ‘ipseity’, of an enduring self. Literatures of European and Other origin continue to construct their own essentialist foundation stories of settling and of being, at the same time as they are engaging in more equal and empathetic ways with the Kanak motifs and stories they are making their own – stories increasingly entering a shared New Caledonian cultural consciousness. For Rachel Killick, ‘Bhabha crucially locates identity not as a fixed, immutable and centrally determined given, but as a shifting and continual negotiation carried out, on equal terms, by a de-centred self with a similarly de-centred “other”’ (2005: 10–11). If this study has put the ‘de-centred self’ and the ‘equal terms’ under suspicion in relation to New Caledonian literatures, it is also the case that the open, heterogeneous, dynamic aspects of such an unhomely, hybrid space do offer a way of moving beyond the fixed binary divisions of Kanak-Caldoche bi-culturalism, and beyond the periphery/centre divide that the French/ Francophone distinction continues to imply. And as Baudrillard (2003) and others have argued, the global does not eliminate the local, which waits its turn, biding its time, suddenly to re-emerge. The local cannot escape the global, yet New Caledonian literatures maintain, if not a self-identical irreducible identity, then at the least a sense of enduring – if also engendering – Pacific cores that continue distinctively to reconfigure the hybridities they produce. The outcome of our efforts to circumscribe the particular forms of Pacific hybridity in New Caledonian literatures is ultimately, then, to contest and to supplement the notion of hybridity itself. Cultural metamorphosis and transformation are not unbounded or free floating in these texts; in the third spaces they create, the spiral going forward

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 348

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Summing Up

349

continually remembers and cycles back to an enduring core. As new literary aesthetics develop alongside ‘custodial responsibilities’ and socio-political commitment, these may increasingly include, but are not limited to, the creative dissemi-nation, or restless to and fro or up and down movements of Bhabha’s hybrid third space, or of Hall’s politics of difference: living with incommensurability through increasingly ethical and democratic frameworks. Hybridity theory has provided a number of notions that have fruitfully opened up our understanding of what may have taken place (or what might yet be produced) in spaces of cultural contact in the literatures of New Caledonia. In the final instance, though, New Caledonian literatures, neither Francophone nor French, produce a tiempos mixtos: their own Pacific and indigenous Oceanian hybridities that are particular to their own changing historical contexts and positioning.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 349

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Notes Notes

Introduction 1 Nonetheless, new work in 2010 on the human genome, by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, has discovered traces of Denisovan DNA (found in a finger bone fragment in a cave in Denisova) in modern-day inhabitants of Melanesia in Papua New Guinea that suggest that the group of hitherto unknown ancient humans living in Eurasia may have interbred in the very distant past with the ancestors of Melanesians and of Australian Aboriginals, with whom they share small amounts of DNA (https:// genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan). Chapter One 1 James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Performed in His Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and the Adventure in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777); [Jacques Cook], Voyage dans l’hémisphère austral, et autour du monde fait sur les vaisseaux du roi l’Aventure et la Resolution en 1772, 1773, 1774, & 1775; The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 4 vols (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967–9); Captain Cook’s Voyages, 1768–1779, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Folio Society, 1997); Jacques-Julien de la Billardière [Jacques La Billardière], Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les annees 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen, 1798); Bruny d’Entrecasteaux [Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni chevalier d’Entrecasteaux], Voyage to Australia and the Pacific, 1791–1793, ed. and trans. Edward Duyker and Maryse Duyker (Melbourne University Press, 2001). 2 Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard de Rossel (ed.), Voyage de Dentrecasteaux, envoyé à la recherche de La Pérouse, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Imprimerie impériale, 1808), p. 358. Translation by Diane Walton. 3 Much like the term ‘New Zealander’, the word Calédonien [Caledonian]

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 350

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Notes

351

was first employed to designate indigenous peoples, but during colonization the term was appropriated to identify the white settler population, giving this group the status of principal inhabitants of New Caledonia. It is sometimes used in the present to distinguish between Metropolitan French and all inhabitants of New Caledonia, although the term is also a preferred alternative to the somewhat negatively perceived Caldoche. 4 Although the official name remains New Caledonia, independence groups use the term Kanaky to designate their country and to challenge French sovereignty, and New Caledonians of settler origin often prefer the term Caledonian to New Caledonian to insist on their difference from France. We use the term ‘Kanaky-New Caledonia’ where we wish to indicate the presence or involvement of Kanak in the phenomenon we are discussing. 5 The figure of the animal fiancé has traditionally most often been male – from Eros as a monstrous snake in Apuleius’ second-century myth of Cupid and Psyche in the Metamorphoses, to the Beast of Beauty and the Beast (Perrault, Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, Cocteau, Disney, etc.), by way of the Frog Prince and a host of metamorphosing bears, snakes, wolves, pigs, and other animals. 6 Translation by Emma Sinclair-Reynolds, in Stéphanie Vigier and Raylene Ramsay, ‘Women Writers in New Caledonia’, Kunapipi, 27:2 (2005), pp. 46–7. 7 Charles Illouz, De Chair et de pierre: essai de mythologie kanak (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2000), pp. 12–13. Translation by Emma Sinclair-Reynolds, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky/New Caledonia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011), pp. 55–7. 8 Louise Michel, Aux amis d’Europe: légendes et chansons de gestes canaques, ed. F. Bogliolo (Nouméa: Éditions Grain de Sable, 1996), pp. 32–3. Translation by Emma Sinclair-Reynolds, in Ramsay, Nights of Storytelling, pp. 80–1. 9 Aux amis d’Europe, pp. 32–3. Louise Michel’s Légendes et chansons de gestes canaques (1875) and Légendes et chants de geste canaques (1885) were both used to construct Francois Bogliolo’s 1996 edition, Aux amis d’Europe: légendes et chansons de gestes canaques (Nouméa: Éditions Grain de Sable). 10 One ethnological explanation for this apparently abusive term is that such negativity is used to detract attention away from a man’s wife. A comparison can be made with the Greek use of Eumenides (the peaceful ones) to placate unpeaceful and vengeful spirits. Chapter Two 1 Aux amis d’Europe: légendes et chansons de gestes canaques, ed. F. Bogliolo (Nouméa: Éditions Grain de Sable, 1996), p. 122.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 351

12/03/2014 14:40:09

352

Notes

2 Bensa, Alban, and Jean-Claude Rivierre, Les Filles du rocher Até: contes et récits paicî (Paris: Geuthner/Agence de développement de la culture kanak, 1994), p. 336. Chapter Three 1 Translation in Ramsay, Nights of Storytelling, pp. 157–9. 2 The autonomy statute, which was passed in July 2003 by French Polynesia’s Assembly and which completed its passage through the Senate and the National Assembly in France on 18 February 2004, allows the local government to protect the rights of its own citizens and to ignore French laws that encroach on local jurisdictions (including laws regarding civil aviation, external relations, land, employment, and the right to establish delegations and trade relations directly with other countries). 3 This term reflects a shared Oceanian preoccupation with land and autonomy. The name adopted for an independent New Hebrides was Vanuatu (vanua meaning ‘place or land’ and tu ‘to stand’). The Maori term, Turangawaiwai, has the same meaning of ‘a place to stand’ and the vast marae at Turangawaiwai near Hamilton in New Zealand continues to serve as a centre for a distinctive and resistant Maori culture. Chapter Four 1 The Protestant pastor Wéa Djubelli shot Tjibaou and his Vice-President Yeiwené Yeiwené at point-blank range as he was taking leave of his hosts at the ceremony marking the end of the mourning period of one year for the nineteen young militant hostage-takers who died when the French Special Forces stormed the Watetö caves at Gossanah in the north of Ouvéa. Wéa was killed in his turn by Daniel Fisdiepas from Hienghène, an officer in the national police force responsible for the President’s safety. 2 Paul Wamo, ‘Culture’ – oral performance of an unpublished poem, recorded and filmed by Deborah Walker-Morrison and N. Morrison for the DVD La Nuit des contes accompanying Ramsay, Nights of Storytelling. Chapter Six 1 ‘Cupid and Psyche’, in Apuleius’ version, is the story told by an old woman to a captive bride of the feared beastly serpent who visits Psyché in her undersea palace and turns out to be the beautiful God of Love himself. Psyché is required to pass through a series of impossible trials as punishment for disobeying the injunction not to look at her nightly male visitor and to know who he really is; but ultimately she is permitted to redeem her fault to be reunited with Eros and give birth to a daughter named Pleasure.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 352

12/03/2014 14:40:09

Bibliography Bibliography

‘Accord sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie signé à Nouméa le 5 mai 1998’, Journal officiel de la République française, 27 May 1998. (accessed 2 Sept. 2010). A.D.G. (1987), Joujoux sur le caillou (Paris: Gallimard, Série noire). —— (1988), C’est le bagne! (Paris: Gallimard, Série noire). Adler-Nissen, Rebecca, and Ulrik Gad (eds) (2012), European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games: The EU Overseas Countries and Territories (London: Routledge). Ahmad, Aijaz (1992), Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso). Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). André, Anne-Bénédicte (2014), ‘Vers une géographie littéraire et émotionnelle de l’ile postcoloniale francophone. Iléité, liminalité et vécu sensible chez Gisèle Pineau, Axel Gauvin et Claudine Jacques,’ thesis, University of Western Australia. André, Sylvie (2002), ‘La Quête identitaire dans les littératures polynésienne et néo-calédonienne’, Revue Hermès, La France et les Outre-mers. L’enjeu multiculturel, 32–3, pp. 403–11. —— (2004), Littératures du Pacifique: voix francophones contemporaines, textes réunis par Sylvie André (Rimini: Éditions Panozzo). —— (2008), Le Roman autochtone dans le Pacifique Sud: penser la continuité (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan). Angleviel, Frédéric (ed.) (2004), La Nouvelle-Calédonie: terre de métissage (Paris: Les Indes savantes). Anova-Ataba, Apollinaire, and François Burck (1984), D’Ataï à l’indépendance (Noumea: Édipop). Aramiou, Sylvain, and Jean Euritéin (2002), Pèci i Bwêêyöuu Ërijiyi: Cahiers de Boesou Ëurijisi. Première série 1915–1920. Collection Bwêwêyê no. 7 (Noumea: Fédération de l’Enseignement Libre Protestant). Asad, Talal (1986), ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press), pp. 141–64.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 353

12/03/2014 14:40:09

354

Bibliography

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds) (1995), The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge). —— (2002) [1989], The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, 2nd edn (London, Routledge). Aufray, Michel (2000), ‘Les Littératures océaniennes: approche syntaxique et stylistique. Le rat et le poulpe: communiquer, parler, raconter en Océanie’, doctoral thesis, Paris III. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981), The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Banaré, Eddy (2010), ‘Littérature de la mine en Nouvelle-Calédonie: 1853–1953’, doctoral thesis, Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Barbançon, Louis-José (1992a), Bourail entre mer et montagne (Canada: Éditions Delroisse; Mairie de Bourail). —— (1992b), Le Pays du non-dit: regards sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie (Noumea: Offset Cinq Édition). Also reproduced in Alban Bensa, Nouvelle-Calédonie: un paradis dans la tourmente (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1990). —— (1995), La Terre du lézard (Noumea: Éditions Île de Lumière). Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi (1999), Postcolonial Translation (London and New York: Routledge). Baudoux, Georges (1920), Jean M’Baraï, le pécheur de trépangs, serialized in Le Messager, 33–55, Noumea, 13 Aug. 1919–14 Jan. 1920. —— (1972), Les Blancs sont venus (Noumea: Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie). —— (1996), Kaavo (histoire canaque) [suivie de Caroudis, le lecteur passionné ou l’homicide Kaavo de Camimoufle] (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Baudrillard, Jean (2003), ‘The Global and the Universal’, trans. Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker, in Victoria Grace, Heather Worth, and Laurence Simmons (eds), Baudrillard, West of the Dateline (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press), pp. 23–36. Beaglehole, J. (ed.) (1999), The Journals of Captain Cook (London: Penguin). Bensa, Alban (1995), Chroniques kanak: l’ethnologie en marche (Paris: Peuples autochtones et développement). —— (1998), Nouvelle-Calédonie: vers l’émancipation (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard); originally published as Nouvelle-Calédonie: un paradis dans la tourmente (Paris: Découvertes Gallimard, 1990). —— (2001), ‘À quoi sert la notion de culture?’, public lecture, Thursday, 11 Oct. 2001, Bibliothèque Bernheim, Noumea. —— (2002), La Tradition et l’État (Paris: L’Harmattan), pp. 187–91. Bensa, Alban, and Jean-Claude Rivierre (1982), Les Chemins de l’alliance: l’organisation sociale et ses représentations en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: Selaf). —— (1994), Les Filles du rocher Até: contes et récits paicî (Paris: Geuthner/Agence de développement de la culture kanak). —— (1998), Le Pacifique: un monde épars (Paris: L’Harmattan). Bensa, Alban, and Jean-Louis Comolli (dir.) (2004), Les Esprits du Koniambo, documentary film (Entre Chien et Loup/Archipel 33 (Fr.)).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 354

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

355

Bensa, Alban, and Michel Millet (2004), 1878: Carnets de campagne en NouvelleCalédonie (Toulouse: Anarcharsis). Variant title: 1878: Carnets de campagne en Nouvelle-Calédonie; précédés de La guerre d’Ataï, récit kanak, Michel Millet, présentation par Alban Bensa. Bensa, Alban, and Renzo Piano (2000), Ethnologie et architecture: Nouméa, Nouvelle-Calédonie: le Centre Culturel Tjibaou (Paris: A. Biro). Bessière1878: carnets de campagne en Nouvelle-Calédonie, précédés de La guerre d’Ataï, récit kanak, Michel Millet, présentation par Alban Bensa, Jean, and Sylvie André (eds) (2002), Multiculturalisme et identité en littérature et en art (Paris: L’Harmattan). —— (2013), La Littérature des îles du Pacifique/Pacific Islands Literature (Paris: Éditions Champion). Bettelheim, Bruno (1977), The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books). Beyala, Calixthe (2005), Tu t’appelleras Tanga (Paris: L’Harmattan). Bhabha, Homi K. (1994), The Location of Culture (London: Routledge; 2nd edn, 2004). Extract reprinted in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (eds), The Postcolonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 206–9. Bihan, Anne (2004), V, ou, Portraits de famille au couteau de cuisine: théâtre (Noumea: Traversées). Bogliolo, François (ed.) (1994), Paroles et écritures: anthologie de la littérature néo-calédonienne (Noumea: Éditions du Cagou). —— (ed.) (1996), Aux amis d’Europe: légendes et chansons de gestes canaques (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1999), ‘Développements de la littérature orale kanak à la littérature calédonienne’, in O. Filippi and Frédéric Angleviel (eds), Chroniques du pays kanak, 3 (Noumea: Éditions Planète, Némo), pp. 144–69. —— (2000), ‘Entre langue et terre: émergence de la littérature néo-calédonienne (écriture et identité d’une île) 1774–1909’, thesis, Paris III. Bogliolo, François, Karine Bopp Du Pont, and Laurence Idoux (1999), Lettres de Maré (Noumea: Éditions Île de Lumière). Bonnemaison, Joël (1996), Gens de pirogue et gens de la terre: les fondements géographiques d’une identité (Paris: Éditions de l’Orstom). Bouan, Marc (2003), L’Écharpe et le Kriss (Paris: Publibook). Bougainville, Louis-Antoine, Comte de (1767), Voyage autour du monde, par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse, et La Flûte L’Étoile: en 1766, 1768 & 1769 (Paris, Imprimerie de Le Breton, 1771). Brah, Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes (2000), Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (London: Routledge). Brou, Bernard (ed.) (1980), Littérature orale: 60 contes mélanésiens, Publications de la Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, no. 21 (Noumea). Brown, Peter (1975–2000), ‘Récit fondateur et culture politique en NouvelleCalédonie “Tea Kanake”, de Mélanesia 2000 au Festival des arts du Pacifique’, in Pascale de Souza and Adlai Murdoch (eds), Oceanic Routes: Migrations

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 355

12/03/2014 14:40:10

356

Bibliography

and Métissages in South Pacific Literatures and Travelogues, special issue of International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11:4 (2008), pp. 539–57. —— (2005), ‘From Exclusion and Alienation to a “Multi-Racial Community”? The Image of the Métis in New Caledonian Literature’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 8:3, pp. 305–20. —— (ed. and trans.) (2006), The Kanak Apple Season: Selected Short Fiction of Déwé Gorodé (Canberra: Pandanus Books/Australian National University). —— (2009), unpublished paper on contemporary New Caledonian theatre, Collaborative European Research Conference (CERC), ‘Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific’, University of Auckland, November 2009. —— (2012), ‘New Caledonia: Negotiating Postcolonial Identities in the Shadow of the European Union’, in Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ulrik Gad (eds), European Integration and Postcolonial Sovereignty Games: The EU Overseas Countries and Territories (London: Routledge), pp. 169–86. . —— (2013), ‘La Société mise en scène (Nouvelle-Calédonie)’, in Jean Bessière and Svlvie André (eds), La Littérature des îles du Pacifique/Pacific Islands Literature (Paris: Éditions Champion), pp. 331–46. Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge). Campbell, Joseph (1968) [1949], The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edn (Princeton University Press). Canclini, Néstor Garcia (2005), Hybrid Cultures (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press). Chailley, Baudoin (1988), Kanaky point zéro (Paris: Fleuve noir). —— (1989), Nouméa, ville ouverte (Paris: Stock). Chatti, Mounira (2004a), ‘Culture et politique dans Kanaké: le schisme?’, in Sylvie André (ed.), Littératures du Pacifique (Rimini: Panozzo Éditore), pp. 81–96. —— (2004b), ‘Recit de métamorphose: le point de vue kanak’, IRIS: Les Cahiers du Gerf, 26, pp. 39–53. Clifford, James (1982), Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press); translated as Maurice Leenhardt: personne et mythe en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1987). —— (2001), ‘Indigenous Articulations’, Contemporary Pacific, 13:2, pp. 468–90. Comité du 150ième (2003), 1853–2003, Temps et mémoires du pays kanak: du malentendu original à la communauté de destin, ed. Roch Wamytan (Noumea). Condé, Maryse (1986), Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem (Paris: Mercure de France). —— (c.1995), La Migration des cœurs (Paris: Laffont). —— (1995), Traversée de la mangrove (Paris: Mercure de France). —— (2003), Histoire de la femme cannibale (Paris: Mercure de France). —— (2005) [1997], En attendant le Bonheur: Heremakhonon (Paris: Laffont).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 356

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

357

Cook, James (1777), A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Performed in His Majesty’s Ships the Resolution and the Adventure in the Years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell), vol. 1. —— [Jacques Cook] (1778), Voyage dans l’hémisphère austral, et autour du monde fait sur les vaisseaux du roi l’Aventure et la Resolution en 1772, 1773, 1774, & 1775, trans. anon., 4 vols (Paris: Hôtel de Thou), vol. 3. —— (1967–9), The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 4 vols (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society). —— (1997) [1777], Captain Cook’s Voyages, 1768–1779, ed. Glyndwr Williams (London: Folio Society). Cros, Laurence (2001), ‘Le Canada, état hybride? de la binationalité au multiculturalisme dans la représentation historique canadienne’, in Evelyn Hanquart-Turner (ed.), L’Hybridité (Paris: Éditions A3). d’Entrecasteaux, Bruny [Antoine Raymond Joseph de Bruni chevalier d’Entrecasteaux] (2001), Voyage to Australia and the Pacific, 1791–1793, ed. and trans. Edward Duyker and Maryse Duyker (Melbourne University Press). Dalmayrac, Dany (2003), Les Sentiers de l’espoir, kanak et nippo-kanak (Noumea: Éditions Écume du Pacifique). de la Billardière, Jacques-Julien [Jacques La Billardière] (1798), Relation du voyage à la recherche de La Pérouse, fait par l’ordre de l’Assemblée constituante, pendant les années 1791, 1792, vol. 1 (Paris: H.J. Jansen). de Rochas, Victor (1862), ‘Conte allégorique’, La Nouvelle-Calédonie et ses habitants: productions, mœurs, cannibalisme (Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius). de Rossel, Élisabeth-Paul-Édouard (ed.) (1808), Voyage de Dentrecasteaux, envoyé à la recherche de La Pérouse, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Imprimerie impériale). De Souza, Pascale, and H. Adlai Murdoch (2005), ‘Editorial Introduction Oceanic Dialogues: From the Black Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 8:3, pp. 255–68. Derrida, Jacques (1998), Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press). Des Rosiers, Joelle (2006), keynote paper, ‘Colloque sur la diversité culturelle en Francophonie’, Université de la Polynésie Française, Papeete, 18–21 May 2006. Devillers, Jean-Pierre (1992), ‘Existe-t-il une culture caldoche?’, in Être caldoche aujourd’hui (Noumea: Éditions Île de Lumière), p. 236. Djebar, Assia (1985), L’Amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel). —— (1995), Vaste est la prison (Paris: Albin Michel). Dobbelaere, Georges, Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and Tanya Tremewan (1995), Kanaké: A Three-Act Play, reprinted in Mwà Véé, la revue culturelle kanak, 10, pp. 9–19. Donadey, Anne (2001), Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann). Douglas, Mary (1979), ‘Les Structures du culinaire’, Communications, 31 (Paris: Seuil).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 357

12/03/2014 14:40:10

358

Bibliography

Dousset-Leenhardt, Roselène (1976), Terre natale, terre d’exil (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose). —— (1978), Colonialisme et contradictions: Nouvelle-Calédonie 1878–1978: les causes de l’insurrection de 1878 (Paris: L’Harmattan). —— (1984), A Fleur de terre: Maurice Leenhardt en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: L’Harmattan). Dubois, (Father) Marie-Joseph (1984), Gens de Maré (Paris: Anthropos). Duff, Alan (1990), Once Were Warriors (Auckland: NZ Tandem Press). Dunmore, John (ed. and trans.) (2002a), The Pacific Journal of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, 1767–1768 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society). —— (2002b), Monsieur Baret : The First Woman Around the World, 1766–1768 (Auckland: Heritage Press). Duras, Marguerite (1984), L’Amant (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). —— (1987), Emily L. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit). —— (1991), L’Amant de la Chine du nord (Paris: Gallimard). —— (2006), ‘Cahier Rose Marbré’, in Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes (Paris: POL/Imec). Euritéin, Jean (2002), ‘La Dimension écrite – la dimension linguistique’, Mwà Véé (Oct.–Dec.). Faessel, Sonia (ed.) (2003), Jeunes Littératures du Pacifique Sud (Noumea: Groupe de Recherche en Histoire Océanienne Contemporaine). —— (2010), ‘La Construction de l’identité dans L’Épave de Déwé Gorodé et Le Baiser de la mangue (Mango’s Kiss) d’Albert Wendt: entre mythes, cultures et histoire’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 153–66. Fanon, Franz (1968), Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: MacGibbon & Kee). Favaro, Patrice (2003), ‘L’Imaginaire est une intelligence’, interview with Denis Pourawa, Noumea, Citrouille, site des librairies spécialisées jeunesse. (accessed Dec. 2013). Fenoglio, Micaela (2004), Des Racines et des ailes: la littérature francophone de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (Paris: L’Harmattan). Fernandes, Martine (2007), Les Écrivaines francophones en liberté. Farida Belghoul, Maryse Condé, Assia Djebar, Calixthe Beyala: écritures de l’hybridité postcoloniale et métaphores cognitives (Paris: L’Harmattan). Forster, Georg (2000), A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Forster, Johann Reinhold (1772), A Voyage Round the World Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769 (London: J. Nourse). —— (1778), Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (London: G. Robinson).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 358

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

359

Foucault, Michel (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977, trans. C. Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf Press). Fox, Alistair (2010), ‘Cultural Hybridity in Contemporary New Zealand Fiction: A Theoretical Intervention’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 275–86. Freeman, Lynn (2007), The Last Nightfall, by Pierre Gope, The Arts on Sunday with Lynn Freeman. Radio New Zealand, 18 Nov. 2007. . Freud, Sigmund (2001) [1913], Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge). Garnung, Francis (2003), Contes et coutumes canaques au XIXème siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan). Genette, Gérard (1997), Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Gentzler, Edwin (2002), ‘Translation, Poststructuralism, and Power,’ in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (eds), Translation and Power (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press), pp. 195–218. Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). —— (2000), Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap). Giono, Jean (1991), Colline (Paris: Nathan). Girard, René (1973), La Violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset). Glissant, Édouard (1997), Traité du tout-monde (Poétique IV) (Paris: Gallimard). Gope, Pierre (1999), Le Dernier Crépuscule (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable); translated as The Last Nightfall by Baineo-Boenengkih and Penelope S. Keable (Noumea and Suva, Fiji: Éditions Grain de Sable/Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 2002). —— (2005), Où est le droit ? Okorentit ? (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (2013), Interview with Alexandre Rosada for ‘Carakteres’, Radio NouvelleCalédonie, 9 Oct. 2013. . Gope, Pierre, and Nicolas Kurtovitch (2002), Les Dieux sont borgnes (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Gorodé, Déwé (1985), Sous les cendres des conques (Noumea: Édipop). —— (1994), Utê Mûrûnû: petite fleur de cocotier (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable): ‘Utê Mûrûnû: petite fleur de cocotier’, pp. 5–37; ‘La Cordyline’, pp. 39–55; ‘On est déjà demain’, pp. 57–67; ‘La Saison des pommes kanakes, pp. 69–78; ‘Dos Montes’, pp. 79–89. —— (1996a), L’Agenda (Nouvelles) (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable: ‘La Case’, pp. 7–10; ‘Où vas-tu Mûû?’, pp. 11–14; ‘Une Dame dans la nuit’, pp. 15–21; ‘Affaire classée’, pp. 23–44; ‘Le Passeur’, pp. 45–55; ‘Rencontres’, pp. 57–64; ‘J’use du temps’, pp. 65–70; ‘Benjie, mon frère …’, pp. 71–89; ‘L’Agenda de Lida’, pp. 91–106.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 359

12/03/2014 14:40:10

360

Bibliography

—— (1996b), Par les temps qui courent (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1998), ‘Entretien avec Blandine Stefanson’, Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud, 134 (May–Aug.), pp. 75–86. —— (2000), Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000: une adaptation du jèmââ de Téâ Kënâké (Noumea: Agence de développement de la culture kanak). —— (2004a), L’Épave (Noumea: Madrépores); translated as The Wreck by Deborah Walker-Morrison and Raylene Ramsay (Auckland: Little Island Press, 2011). —— (2004b), Sharing as Custom Provides: Selected Poems, trans. Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker (Canberra: Pandanus Books/Australian National University). —— (2005), ‘Écrire en femme kanake aujourd’hui en Kanaky-Nouvelle Calédonie’, public lecture at the University of Auckland. Text communicated by the author. —— (2006), Interview with Raylene Ramsay, 24 May 2006 (unpublished). —— (2009), Graines de pin colonnaire (Noumea: Madrépores). —— (2012), Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! ou ‘No more baby’ (Papeete: Au vent des îles). Gorodé, Déwé, and Nicolas Kurtovitch (1999), Dire le vrai/To Tell the Truth: poésies en dix-huit thèmes (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Gorodé, Déwé, and Wenigo Ihage (2002), Le Vol de la parole (Noumea: Édipop). Gorodé, Waia (n.d.), ‘Mon école du silence’, unpublished manuscript. Text being edited for publication by Bernard Gasser (personal communication). Grace, Patricia (1978), Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (Auckland: Longman Paul). Guiart, Jean (1957), Contes et légendes de la Grande Terre (Noumea: Éditions des Études Mélanésiennes). —— (1965), ‘La Chefferie en Mélanésie du Sud’, thesis, Paris, Musée de l’Homme. —— (1981), ‘Clans autochtones: situation précoloniale’, Atlas de la NouvelleCalédonie et dépendances (Paris: Éditions de l’Orstom). —— (1992), Structure de la chefferie en Mélanésie du Sud (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie). —— (1996), ‘Réflexion sur le concept de culture appliqué au Pacifique Sud’, Études Mélanésiennes, 30 Mar., pp. 33–59. —— (1998), Bwésou Ëurijisi: le premier écrivain canaque (Noumea: Rocher à la Voile). H., Bernadette (2005), Mon Soleil noir (Noumea: Édimag). Hadfield, Emma (1920), Among the Natives of the Loyalty Group (London: Macmillan). Hall, Stuart (1990), ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London, Lawrence & Wishart), pp. 223–37. —— (1992), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Stuart Hall, David Held, and Anthony McGrew (eds), Modernity and Its Futures (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 274–316. —— (1993), ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Patrick Williams and Laura

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 360

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

361

Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf), pp. 392–402. Hamelin, Christine, and Éric Wittersheim (2002), ‘Résistances et innovations kanak’, in Alban Bensa, La Tradition et l’État (Paris: L’Harmattan), pp. 187–91. Hanquart-Turner, Evelyne (ed.) (2001), L’Hybridité (Paris: Éditions A3). Hart, Kathleen (2001), ‘Oral Culture and Anti Colonialism in Louise Michel’s Mémoires (1886) and Légendes et chants de gestes canaques (1885)’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 30:1–2, pp. 107–20. Hereniko, Vilsoni (1987), Two Plays: A Child for Iva and Sera’s Choice (Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications). Hewitt, Nicholas, and Dick Geary (eds) (2007), Diaspora(s): Movements and Cultures (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press). Hoffmann, Eva (1989), Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (New York: Penguin Books). Houmbouy, Béniéla (1997), Preface, in Claudine Jacques, Ce n’est pas la faute de la lune (Noumea, Éditions du Cagou). —— (1998), ‘Le Kanak vu par lui-même’, Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud, 134, pp. 46–51. Howe, Kerry R. (2000), Nature, Culture, and History: The ‘Knowing’ of Oceania (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). Huggan, Graham (2001), The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge). Hulme, Keri (1985), The Bone People (Auckland: Spiral/Hodder & Stoughton). Ihage, Wenigo (1991), ‘The Current Condition: Texts on Orality in New Caledonia’, New Literatures Review, 22 (winter), pp. 35–9. —— (1993), ‘Le Chemin initiatique à travers le conte’, Pourquoi pas?, 28, pp. 27–33. —— (2007), Le Tissage de nos silences (Noumea: Édipop). Ihimaera, Witi (2002), The Whale Rider (Auckland: Reed Books). Illouz, Charles (2000), De Chair et de pierre: essai de mythologie kanak (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme). Jacques, Claudine (1995), Nos silences sont si fragiles (Noumea: Éditions du Cagou; Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable, 2000). —— (1996), Ce ne sont que des histoires d’amour (Noumea: Éditions du Cagou). —— (1997), Ce n’est pas la faute de la lune: petites histoires calédoniennes (Noumea: Éditions du Cagou). —— (1998), Les Cœurs barbelés (Noumea: Éditions du Niaouli; Paris: La Table ronde, 1999). —— (2002), L’Homme-lézard (Aigues-Vives (Gard): HB éditions). —— (2003), L’Âge du perroquet-banane: parabole païenne (Noumea: L’Herbier de Feu). —— (2009), Nouméa Mangrove (Noumea: Épisodes). Johnson, Helen (2005), ‘A Fugitive Moment of Grace: Life Story, Migration and Vietnamese-Caledonian Women’, Hecate, 31.1, pp. 87–103. Jones, Diana (2001), ‘Postcolonial Concerns: Gender, Race and the Dynamics of

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 361

12/03/2014 14:40:10

362

Bibliography

Representation in Six Novels by Alin Laubreaux’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland. Jouve, Dominique (1996a), Preface to Déwé Gorodé, Par les temps qui courent (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1996b), Preface to Jean Mariotti, Les Contes de Poindi (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (2005), ‘L’Hybridité à l’épreuve du roman de Claudine Jacques, L’Âge du perroquet-banane (2003)’, in Métissages littéraires: actes du XXXIIe congrès de la Société française de littérature générale et comparée, Saint-Étienne, 8–10 septembre 2004 (Saint-Étienne: Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne), pp. 163–75. —— (2006), ‘Politique et mémoire dans Entre voir: les mots des murs de Tokiko et Denis Pourawa’, in Actes du XIXième colloque CORAIL, ‘Pouvoir(s) et politique(s) en Océanie’, ed. Mounira Chatti, Nicolas Clinchamps, and Stéphanie Vigier (Paris: L’Harmattan), pp. 223–40. —— (2007a), ‘L’Inscription de l’histoire dans le roman calédonien: le cas de Claudine Jacques’, in Histoire de la Nouvelle-Calédonie – approches croisées, Nouméa-Koné (Koohnê) 6–10 décembre 2004, vol. 1, Actes de la 16e conférence de l’Association des Historiens du Pacifique (France: Indes Savantes), pp. 97–104. —— (2007b), oral communication, ‘Sur un texte de Waia Gorodé, Mon École du Silence’, Journée d’Études, ‘Les Littératures Autochtones du Pacifique Insulaire: Réalisations et Enjeux’, Paris III, 5 Oct. 2007. —— (2010), ‘Négociation de la fracture coloniale, le cas des textes multilingues de Waia Görödé’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 101–18. Killick, Rachel (ed.) (2005), Uncertain Relations: Some Configurations of the ‘Third Space’ in Francophone Writings of the Americas and of Europe (Oxford: Peter Lang). Kraidy, Marwan K. (2005), Hybridity or The Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press). Kranaiauskas, John (2000), ‘Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies’, Nepantla: Views from South, 1:1, pp. 111–37. Kristeva, Julia (1982), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press). —— (1988), Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard), translated as Strangers to Ourselves by Leon S. Roudiez (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). —— (1997), ‘L’Autre langue ou traduire le sensible’, Écrire dans la langue d’autrui, Textuel, 32, pp. 157–70. Kurtovitch, Ismet (2002), A Caledonian Pastoral (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 362

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

363

Kurtovitch, Nicolas (1985), Souffles de la Nuit (Paris: Éditions Saint-GermainPrés). —— (1992), Forêt, terre et tabac (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable): ‘Veillée’, pp. 17–31; ‘Au bord de l’eau’, pp. 47–54; ‘L’Invité d’un jour’, pp. 108–12. —— (1994), Lieux: Sur le quai, Dans la cour, L’Autre: nouvelles (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1997a), ‘L’Invité d’un jour,’ in Totem (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable), pp. 108–12. —— (1997b), Avec le masque (Noumea, Pont sous l’eau). —— (1998), Le Sentier Kawenya/L’Autre (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (2004), ‘Tentation Caméléon et métissage culturel’, in Sonia Faessel (ed.), Jeunes littératures du Pacifique Sud: réflexion et création (Noumea: Groupe de recherche en histoire océanienne contemporaine), pp. 63–73. —— (2006), Good Night Friend (Papeete: Au vent des îles). Kurtovitch, Nicolas, and Pierre Gope (2002), Les Dieux sont borgnes (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Lamb, Jonathan (2001), Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (University of Chicago Press). Lambert, (Father) Pierre (1880), ‘Littérature Néo-calédonienne’, Les Missions Catholiques: bulletin hebdomadaire illustré de l’œuvre de la propagation de la foi (Lyons): ‘Anla Touo’, pp. 319–25; ‘Le chef de Touho’, pp. 422–9. —— (1900), Mœurs et superstitions des néo-calédoniens (Noumea: Nouvelle Imprimerie Nouméenne). —— (1976, 1985, 1999), Mœurs et superstitions des néo-calédoniens (Noumea, Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, Imprimeries réunies de Nouméa). Laubreaux, Alin (1928), Yan-le-Métis (Paris: Albin Michel). —— (1932), Wara (Paris: Albin Michel). Laurent, Caroline (2008), ‘(Dé)Génération, temporalité et appropriation: l’inceste dans L’Épave de Déwé Gorodé’, unpublished final paper, Harvard University. Laurent, Catherine (1999), Le Cœur tranquille (Noumea: L’Herbier de feu). Laville, Jean, and (Captain) Joseph Berkowitz (1944), Pacific Island Legends: Life and Legends in the South Pacific Islands (Noumea: Librairie Pentecost). Leenhardt, Maurice (1922a), ‘De la mort à la vie: l’évangile en Nouvelle-Calédonie’ (Paris: Société des missions évangéliques). —— (1922b), ‘Notes sur la traduction du nouveau testament en langue primitive’, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 3 (May–June), pp. 193–218. —— (1930), Notes d’ethnologie néo-calédonienne (Paris). —— (1932), Documents néo-calédoniens (Paris: Travaux et mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie). —— (1934), ‘La Bible en mission’, Évangile et liberté, 21 Oct. 1934. —— (1935a), ‘La Bible en mission’, 2, ‘La Traduction de la Bible’, lecture, 23 May 1935, Poste national Radio-Paris. —— (1935b), Vocabulaire et grammaire de la langue houaïlou (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 363

12/03/2014 14:40:10

364

Bibliography

—— (1937), Gens de la Grande Terre (Paris: Gallimard). —— (1946), Langues et dialectes de l’Austro-Mélanésie (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie). —— (1979) [1947], Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien (Paris: Gallimard). —— (1998), Le Pilou (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Le Goupils, Marc (1910), Comment on cesse d’être colon: six années en Nouvelle Calédonie (Paris: Grasset). —— (1928), Dans la brousse calédonienne, souvenir d’un ancien planteur, 1898–1904 (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin et compagnie). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1967), Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Mouton et Co.). Lionnet, Françoise (1989), Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). ‘Littérature de Nouvelle-Calédonie’ (1998), Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud, 134 (May–Aug.). ‘Littérature orale, 60 contes mélanésiens’ (1980), Bulletin de la Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 21 (Noumea). McCormick, Eric (1977), Omai, Pacific Envoy (Auckland University Press). McCully, Andrew (2005), ‘Which Way? The Role of Taoist and Buddhist Thought in the Work of Nicolas Kurtovitch’, MA thesis, University of Auckland. Macdonald, Amanda (2008), ‘France in the South Pacific’, in Prem Podar, Rajeev S. Patke, and Lars Jensen (eds), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and Its Empires (Edinburgh University Press), pp. 131–41. McFarlane, Samuel (1873), Story of the Lifou Mission (London : James Nisbet & Co.). McKendrick, Mary (2003), ‘Who is “the Other” in Colonial Literature? A Study of the Representation of the “Other” in the Work of Jean Mariotti’, MA thesis, University of Auckland. Mariotti, Jean (1945), Nouveaux contes de Poindi (Paris: Stock). —— (1981) [1943], À bord de l’Incertaine (Papeete: Les Editions du Pacifique). Mariotti, Jean, and B. Gasser (1996), Les Contes de Poindi (Noumea: Association pour l’édition des œuvres de Jean Mariotti/Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1999), Takata d’Aïmos (Noumea: Association pour l’édition des œuvres de Jean Mariotti/Éditions Grain de Sable). Reprint of the original and preface. —— (2003), La Conquête du séjour paisible (Noumea: Association pour l’édition des œuvres de Jean Mariotti/Éditions Grain de Sable). Reprint of the original and preface. Mariotti, Jean, and D. Jouve (1999), Daphné (Noumea: Association pour l’édition des œuvres de Jean Mariotti/Éditions Grain de Sable). Reprint of the original and preface. Mariotti, Jean, and S. Faessel (1999) [1929], Tout est peut-être inutile (Noumea: Association pour l’édition des œuvres de Jean Mariotti/Éditions Grain de Sable).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 364

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

365

Merle, Isabelle (1995), Expériences coloniales: la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1853–1920 (Paris: Belin). —— (2005), ‘The Foundation of Voh 1892–1895: French Migrants on the West Coast of New Caledonia’, in A. Foucrier (ed.), The French and the Pacific World (Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate/Variorum), pp. 234–44. Metais, Éliane (1988), Au commencement était la terre: ré-flections sur un mythe canaque d’origine (Talence: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux). Michel, Louise (1875), Légendes et chansons de gestes canaques (Paris: Kéva et compagnie) —— (1885), Légendes et chants de geste canaques (Paris: Kéva et compagnie). —— (1886), Mémoires de Louise Michel écrites par elle-même (Paris: F. Roy). —— (1983), Souvenirs et aventures de ma vie (Paris: Maspero). —— (1996), Aux amis d’Europe: légendes et chansons de gestes canaques, ed. F. Bogliolo (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (2002), Mémoires: documents et témoignages (Paris: La Découverte). Millet, Michel (2004), 1878, carnets de campagne en Nouvelle-Calédonie (Toulouse: Anarcharsis). Missotte, Philippe, and Jean-Marie Tjibaou (1976), Kanaké – Mélanésien de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Tahiti: Éditions du Pacifique). Mokaddem, Hamid (1998a), Le Lien sociétal calédonien: essai de compréhension anthropologique de la complexité calédonienne (Noumea: Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, mémoire de DEA). —— (1998b), ‘Par les temps qui courent de Déwé Gorodé ou l’exigence de la pensée dans la parole kanak’, Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud, 134, pp. 95–102. —— (2004), L’Œil du Père Rouel (Noumea: Éditions Expressions). —— (2005), Ce Souffle venu des Ancêtres: l’œuvre politique de Jean-Marie Tjibaou, 1936–1989 (Province Nord: Éditions Expressions). —— (2007), Œuvres et trajectoires d’écrivains de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Noumea: Éditions Expressions). Molisa, Grace Mera (1983), Black Stone (Suva, Fiji: Mana Publications). —— (1987), Colonised People (Port Vila: Black Stone Publications). Musée territorial de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Noumea) and Musée national des arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (Paris) (1990), De jade et de nacre (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux). Naepels, Michel (1996), ‘Conflits fonciers et rapports sociaux dans la région de Houaïlou, Nouvelle-Calédonie’, doctoral thesis, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. —— (1998), Histoires de terres kanakes: conflits fonciers et rapports sociaux dans la région de Houaïlou (Nouvelle-Calédonie) (Paris: Belin). Nederveen Pieterse, Jan (1995), ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (eds), Global Modernities (London: Sage). —— (2001), ‘Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition’, Theory, Culture and Society, 18:2–3, pp. 219–45.

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 365

12/03/2014 14:40:10

366

Bibliography

—— (2004), Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham, Mass.: Rowman & Littlefield). Nervat, Marie, and Jacques Nervat (1987) [1904], Célina Landrot: fille de Pouembout, roman calédonien (Noumea: Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie). Ngwele, S. (1989), Bamboo Leaves (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific). Noumea Accord, Preamble. . Noumea Agreement, Accord sur la Nouvelle-Calédonie signé à Nouméa le 5 mai 1998. . O’Reilly, Patrick (1980), Calédonien: répertoire bio-bibliographique de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2nd edn (Paris: Société des Océanistes). Ogier-Guindo, Julia (2005), ‘Les Chemins de l’imaginaire poétique dans le vivaa, discours traditionnel a’jië’, doctoral thesis, Université de Savoie. Ohlen, Frédéric (ed.) (2011), À la croisée des cultures: pages d’ici et d’ailleurs (ouvrage collectif) (Noumea: Centre de documentation pédagogique de Nouvelle-Calédonie). Ouennoughi, Mélica (2005), Les Déportés maghrébins en Nouvelle-Calédonie et la culture du palmier dattier (1864 à nos jours) (Paris: L’Harmattan). Ozanne-Rivièrre, Françoise (1998), ‘Langues d’Océanie et Histoire’, in Alban Bensa and Jean-Claude Rivierre (eds), Le Pacifique: un monde épars (Paris: L’Harmattan). Ozanne-Rivièrre, Françoise, and Claire Moyse-Faurié (1980), Mythes et contes de la Grande-Terre et des Îles Loyauté (Nouvelle-Calédonie) (Paris: Société d’études linguistiques et anthropologiques de France). Peirano, Arlette (2001), Kanak blanc (Noumea: Pearl). —— (2002), Tabou suprême (Noumea: Pearl). —— (2003), Métis de toi (Noumea: Pearl). —— (2005), Le Gardien de l’Île Noire (Noumea: Pearl). Pérez, María Calzada (ed.) (2003), Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing). Pisier, Georges (1974), La Découverte de La Nouvelle Calédonie, Publications de la Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 5. —— (1976), D’Entrecasteaux en Nouvelle-Calédonie, Publications de la Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 13. Poédi, Gabriel (1989), ‘Le Concept du temps en milieu kanak’, L’Homme et le temps, actes du deuxième colloque CORAIL (Noumea: Éditions Coordination pour l’Océanie des recherches sur les arts, les idées et les littératures), pp. 75–86. Porcher, Titaua (2010), ‘La Terre et les mots dans la négociation des identités’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 366

12/03/2014 14:40:10

Bibliography

367

des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 141–52. Pourawa, Denis (2006), Entre voir: les mots des murs/Photographies de Tokiko, poèmes de Pourawa (Noumea: L’Herbier de feu; Éditions Grain de Sable). Pourawa, Denis, Éric Mouchonnière, and Solange Néaoutyine (2003), Téâ Kanaké: Téâ Kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wâro kê/L’Homme aux cinq vies (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). Pratt, Mary-Louise (2008) [1992], Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge). Pym, Anthony (2003), ‘Indeterminism and the Role of Intercultures in Translation’: no longer available; cf. ‘Intercultures and the Interface with Nationalist Culture’ . Ramsay, Raylene (1999a), ‘Dire le vrai/To Tell the Truth: Poems of Déwé Gorodé’, in Déwé Gorodé and Nicolas Kurtovitch, Dire le vrai, with a preface by Dominique Jouve and illustrations by Mathieu Venon (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1999b), ‘Speaking from her I-sland. The Parti-pris of Insularity and Ethnicity in Déwé Gorodé’s Utê Mûrûnû’, in Dominique Jouve (ed.), écrire à la croisée des îles, des langues: Otherness in Island Writing, Meeting the Other, Understanding the Others (Paris: L’Harmattan), pp. 161–85. —— (2003a), ‘“Terre violente” and “séjour paisible”: Reflections on the Role(s) of Intertextuality in Representations of Nature/Culture in New Caledonian Literature’, in Hamid Mokaddem (ed.), Approches autour de culture et nature dans le Pacifique Sud, Actes du XIIIe colloque CORAIL (Noumea: Expressions; Coordination pour l’Océanie des recherches sur les arts, les idées et les littératures in partnership with the Northern Province, Secretariat of the Pacific Community, and the University of New Caledonia), pp. 296–318. —— (2003b), ‘La Figure de l’incorporation: de la littérature orale aux écrits hybrides de Déwé Gorodé et Claudine Jacques’, in Sonia Lacabanne (ed.), Les Vivres et le vivre en Océanie, Actes du colloque CORAIL (Noumea: Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie: Coordination pour l’Océanie des recherches sur les arts, les idées et les littératures), pp. 97–112. —— (2003c), ‘Translation in New Caledonia’, in Sabine Fenton (ed.), For Better or for Worse: Translation as a Tool for Change in the Pacific (Manchester and Northampton: St Jerome Publishers), pp. 134–70. —— (2004a), ‘L’Hybridité dans l’œuvre de Déwé Gorodé: ni bicéphale, ni entre-deux’, in Sonia Faessel and Michel Pérez (eds), Littératures d’émergence et mondialisation (Paris: In Press). —— (2004b), ‘The Blind Dancing Woman, Hybridity in the Representations of the Female Body in the New Literatures of Kanaky/New Caledonia’, Hecate, 30.2, pp. 178–88. —— (2004c), Selected Poems of Déwé Gorodé: Sharing as Custom Provides, trans. Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker, bilingual anthology of the poems of Déwé Gorodé (Canberra: Pandanus Books/Australian National University).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 367

12/03/2014 14:40:11

368

Bibliography

—— (2005), ‘Déwé Gorodé: The Paradoxes of Being a Kanak Woman Writer’, Kunapipi, 27:2, pp. 23–42. —— (2006), Interview with Déwé Gorodé, 24 May 2006 (unpublished). —— (2007a), ‘Exile in the Emerging Literature of New Caledonia: Strategic Hybridity’, in Nicholas Hewitt and Dick Geary (eds), Dispora(s) Movements and Culture (Nottingham: Critical Culture and Communication Press), pp. 97–113. —— (2007b), ‘Pouvoir masculin, pouvoir féminin, violence sexuelle, et retour dans les littératures indigènes du Pacifique’, in Mounira Chatti, Nicolas Clinchamps, and Stéphanie Vigier (eds), Pouvoir(s) et politique(s) en Océanie (Paris, L’Harmattan), pp. 307–25. —— (2008), ‘Colonial/Postcolonial Hybridity in Camus’s Le Premier Homme and Jean-Marie Tjibaou’s Kanaké’, in Mark Orme, Lissa Lincoln, and Christine Margerrison (eds), Albert Camus in the 21st Century: A Reassessment of his Thinking at the Dawn of the New Millennium (Amsterdam: Rodopi), pp. 73–86. —— (2009), ‘In the Belly of the Canoe with Ihimaera, Hulme and Gorodé: The Waka as Locus of Hybridity’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11:4, pp. 559–79. —— (ed.) (2010), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang). —— (2011a), ‘Déwé Gorodé: Cognitive Dissonance and the Re-negotiation of Values’, in Erika Fülöp and Adrienne Angelo (eds), Cherchez la Femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 56–69. —— (ed.) (2011b), Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky/New Caledonia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). —— (2011c), ‘(Mis)Reading the Figure of the Cannibal Ogre/Incest through the European Fairy Tale: Narrative Techniques, Metamorphosis, and Meaning in the First Kanak Novel’, in Lost Oceans, Dalhousie French Studies, 94, pp. 56 –69. Régent, Catherine (1993), Valesdir (Noumea: Éditions du Cagou). —— (1995), Justine, ou un amour de chapeau de paille (Noumea: Éditions du Belvédère). Ricœur, Paul (1992), Oneself as Another (Soi-même comme un autre), trans. Kathleen Blamey (University of Chicago Press). Rigo, Bernard (2004), Conscience occidentale et fables océaniens: la dynamique de la contradiction (Paris: L’Harmattan). Rivierre, Jean-Claude, Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre, and Claire Moyse-Faurié (1980), Mythes et contes de la Grande-Terre et des Îles Loyauté (Nouvelle-Calédonie) (Paris: Société d’études linguistiques et anthropologiques de France). Robinson, Douglas (1997), Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester: St Jerome).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 368

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Bibliography

369

Rosello, Mireille (ed.) (1995a), ‘Case bidonville et building’, in Practices of Hybridity; special issue of Paragraphs, 18:1, p. 35. —— (ed.) (1995b), Introduction to Practices of Hybridity; special issue of Paragraphs, 18:1. Rushdie, Salman (1999), Les Versets sataniques, trans. A. Nasier (Paris: Plon). Rutherford, Jonathan (1990), ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity, Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart), pp. 207–21. Saïd, Edward (1994), Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage). Salmond, Anne (1991), Two Worlds (Auckland: Viking). —— (2003), The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (London: Allen Lane). —— (2009), Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press). —— (2010), ‘Sacrifices from Afar: Tahiti and Europe’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 25–46. Salomon, Christine (2000a), ‘Hommes et femmes: harmonie d’ensemble ou antagonisme sourd? In Alban Bensa and Isabelle Leblic (eds), En pays kanak (Paris: Éditions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, mission du patrimoine ethnologique), pp. 311–38. —— (2000b), Savoirs et pouvoirs thérapeutiques kanaks (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Salomon, Christine, and Christine Hamelin (2008), ‘Challenging Violence: Kanak Women Renegotiating Gender Relations in New Caledonia’, The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 9:1, pp. 29–46. Sand, Christophe (2010), Lapita calédonien: archéologie d’un premier peuplement insulaire océanien (Paris: Société des Océanistes). Sarraute, Nathalie (1956), L’Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard). Savoie, Hélène (2005), Les Terres de la demi-lune (Paris: L’Harmattan). Schmeling, Manfred (2006), ‘La Métamorphose: mythe, mémoire, intertexte’, Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research, 23, pp. 1–30. Sénès, Jacqueline (1987), Terre violente (Paris: Hachette). Sharrad, Paul (2007), ‘Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory’, in Joel Kuorti and Jopi Nyman (eds), Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi). Shineberg, Dorothy (1995), ‘“The New Hebridean is Everywhere”: The Oceanian Labor Trade to New Caledonia, 1865–1930’, Pacific Studies, 18:2, pp. 1–22. Simon, Sherry (1996), Gender in Translation (New York and London, Routledge). Simmons, Laurence (2011), Tuhituhi: William Hodges, Cook’s Painter in the South Pacific (Dunedin: Otago University Press). Sinclair-Reynolds, Emma (2010), ‘Pathways between Traditions: (Re)writing and Identity Construction in Kanaky/Nouvelle-Calédonie’, in Raylene Ramsay

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 369

12/03/2014 14:40:11

370

Bibliography

(ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 119–40. —— (2014), ‘(Re)writing Pathways: Oral Tradition, Written Tradition and Identity Construction in Kanaky/New Caledonia – Les Chemins de la ré-écriture: tradition orale, tradition écrite et construction identitaire en KanakyNouvelle-Calédonie’, PhD thesis, University of Auckland and Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. Somdah, Marie-Ange (1998), ‘Déwé Gorodé ou la recherche de la parole kanak’, Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud, 134, pp. 87–94. Sparrman, Anders (1953), A Voyage around the World with Captain Cook in HMS Resolution, trans. Huldine Beamish and Averil Mackenzie-Grieve (London: Robert Hale). Speedy, Karin (2007), Colons, Créoles et Coolies (Paris: L’Harmattan). —— (2010), ‘Memories, Myths and Métissage as Means of Negotiating Identity in Hélène Savoie’s Les terres de la demi-lune’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 181–96. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1992), ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds), Destabilizing Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp. 177–200. —— (1999), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Stam, Robert (1999), ‘Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage’, in May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (eds), Performing Hybridity (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota), pp. 59–78. Stefanson, Blandine (1998), ‘Entretien avec Déwé Gorodé’, Notre Librairie, Revue des Littératures du Sud Paris, 134, pp. 75–86. Sudul, Beatrice (2010), ‘Aux sources de l’écriture polynésienne: essai d’interprétation historique de la littérature contemporaine’, in Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Cultural Crossings: Negotiating Identities in the Literatures of the Anglophone and Francophone Pacific/De la négociation des identités dans les littératures du Pacifique anglophone et francophone (Brussels: Peter Lang), pp. 83–100. Sullivan, Robert (1999), Star Waka (Auckland University Press). Tcherkézoff, Serge (2001), Le Mythe occidental de la sexualité polynésienne, 1928–1999: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman et Samoa (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). —— (2004), Tahiti, 1768: Jeune filles en pleurs: la face cachée des premiers contacts et la naissance du mythe occidental (Papeete: Au vent des îles, Éditions Tahiti). Terrier, Christiane, Marcellin Abong, and D.T. Tyron (2011), 101 mots pour comprendre le Vanuatu, Groupe de recherche en histoire océanienne contemporaine (Noumea, Éditions du GRHOC).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 370

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Bibliography

371

Thomas, Larry (2002), The Anniversary Present and Outsiders, in To Let You Know & Other Plays (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific). Thomas, Nicholas (2003), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (London: Allen lane). Tjibaou, Jean-Marie (1996), La Présence kanak, ed. Alban Bensa and Éric Wittersheim (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob). Tjibaou, Jean-Marie, and Philippe Missotte (1976), Kanaké – Mélanésien de Nouvelle-Calédonie (Papeete: Éditions du Pacifique). —— (1978a), La Case et le Sapin (Noumea: Éditions Grain de Sable). —— (1978b), Kanaké: The Melanesian Way, trans. Christopher Plant (Papeete: Éditions du Pacifique). Toa, Evelyn, and Tony Wilson (2013), ‘Violence Survey Dismal’, in Vanuatu Independent/L’Indépendant du Vanuatu, 11–17 May, pp. 1–2. Toumson, Roger (1998), Mythologie du métissage (Paris: Presses universitaires de France). Turner, Stephen (1995), ‘Cultural Encounter, Aesthetics and the Limits of Anthropology: Captain Cook and the Maori’, thesis, Cornell University. —— (2007), ‘The Concept of Home in Settler Societies’, oral presentation, School of European Languages and Literatures (SELL) seminar, University of Auckland, 17 May. Tymoczko, Maria (2003), ‘Ideology and the Position of the Translator – In What Sense is a Translator “in between”?’, in Maria Calzada Perez (ed.), Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology – Ideologies in Translation Studies (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing), pp. 181–202. Tymoczko, Maria, and Edwin Gentzler (eds) (2002), Translation and Power (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press). Vanmai, Jean (1980), Chân dang: les Tonkinois de Calédonie au temps colonial (Noumea: Société d’Études Historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie). —— (1991), Centenaire de la présence vietnamienne en Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1891–1991 (Noumea: Centre territorial de recherche et de documentation). —— (1998), Pilou-Pilou: chapeaux de paille (Noumea: Éditions de l’Océanie). Venuti, Lawrence (1998), The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge). Vigier, Stéphanie (2004), ‘Le Chemin du pays, le long chemin de l’héritage: espace, histoire et identité dans les nouvelles de Déwé Gorodé’, in Sylvie André and Adriano Marchetti (eds), Littératures du Pacifique: voix francophones contemporaines (Rimini: Panozzo Editore), pp. 59–80. —— (2008), ‘La Fiction face au passé: histoire, mémoire et espace-temps dans la fiction littéraire océanienne contemporaine’, PhD thesis, University of Auckland/Université de Nouvelle-Calédonie. Vigier, Stéphanie, and Raylene Ramsay (2005), ‘Women Writers in New Caledonia’, Kunapipi, 27:2, pp. 43–52. Walker-Morrison, Deborah, and N. Morrison (2011), La Nuit des contes, DVD accompanying Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 371

12/03/2014 14:40:11

372

Bibliography

Walker-Morrison, Deborah, and Raylene Ramsay (trans.) (2010), ‘Translating Hybridity: The Curious Case of the First Kanak Novel (Déwé Gorodé’s L’Épave)’, AALITRA Review, A Journal of Literary Translation, 1, pp. 36–51. —— (2011a), ‘Translations as Instruments of Literary and Cultural Analysis: Dialogues on Translating and Reading Pacific Texts with Michel Viel’, in Pierres gravées: chiffres d’une voix; mélanges in memoriam Michel Viel (Paris: Éditions du Relief), pp. 359–74. —— (2011b), The Wreck (Déwé Gorodé, L’Épave) (Auckland: Little Island Press). Walepane, Wanir (1993), Aux Vents des îles (Noumea: Agence de Développement de la Culture Kanak, ADCK). Walker, Alice (1983), In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: The Women’s Press). Walton, Diane (2004), ‘Translating the Colonial Encounter in Post-Colonial Contexts’, MA thesis, University of Auckland. Wamo, Paul (2006), Le Pleurnicheur (Noumea: L’Herbier de feu). —— (2011), ‘Culture’ – oral performance of an unpublished poem, recorded and filmed by Deborah Walker-Morrison and N. Morrison for the DVD La Nuit des contes accompanying Raylene Ramsay (ed.), Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii). Warner, Marina (1995), From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage). Watkin, Christopher (2009), Phenomenology or Deconstruction? The Question of Ontology in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy (Edinburgh University Press). Wendt, Albert (1973), Sons for the Return Home (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press). —— (2003), The Mango’s Kiss (Auckland: Random House). Werbner, Prina, and Tariq Modood (1997), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed Books). Winnicott, Donald Woods (1971), Playing and Reality (London: Routledge). Wintrebert, Joëlle (1998), La Colonie perdue (Paris: Seuil). Wittersheim, Éric (1998), ‘Melanesian Elites and Modern Politics in New Caledonia and Vanuatu’, State, Society and Governance in Melanesia (SSGM) discussion papers, 98/3 (Canberra: Australian National University). Woolverton, Linda (1991), Beauty and the Beast (screenplay); Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale (dir.) (Walt Disney). Young, Robert (1995), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge). —— (2003), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press).

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 372

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Index Index

abjection 39, 362 Accord(s) de Nouméa 8, 134, 154, 353 see also Noumea Agreement(s) ADCK 58, 90, 103, 117 Agence de développement de la culture kanak 58, 352n2, 354, 360, 370 see also ADCK Ahmad, Aijaz 333, 353 Ahu-toru 41 Amabili, Ouaoulu 55 ambivalence 6, 159, 224, 312, 327, 334 in women’s postcolonial writing 204–5, 206 see also cognitive dissonance, hybridity as ambivalence André, Anne-Bénédicte 305, 353 André, Sylvie ix, 253, 288–9, 307, 353, 355, 356, 371 Anova-Ataba, Apollinaire 58, 96, 111, 310, 323, 342, 353 Antigone 73, 166, 177, 207, 330, 336, 346 Apuleius 60, 218–19, 286, 351, 352n Asad, Talal 108, 353 Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 19, 60, 218–19, 286, 308, 354, 355 assimilation 6, 10, 92, 101, 120, 121, 137, 140, 143, 147, 161, 171, 185, 190, 205, 208, 271, 309, 318, 334, 338 Aufray, Michel ix, 11, 70, 354 Bakhtin, Mikhail 6, 101, 118, 322, 354 see also hybridity

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 373

Banaré, Eddy 23, 254 Barbançon, Louis-José, 21–2, 25, 224, 239–402, 244, 250, 251–3, 257–60, 261–2, 263, 281, 301, 303, 305, 325, 354 Bassnett and Trivedi, 34, 354 Baudoux, Georges 22–3, 24, 25, 139, 258, 267, 271, 279, 282, 310, 311, 323, 354 Baudrillard, Jean 306, 348, 354 Beauty and the Beast, 60, 218–19, 230, 351n5, 372 Belghoul, Farida 204 Benjamin, Walter 98 Bensa, Alban 2, 17, 84, 86, 94, 98, 154, 212, 243, 244, 245, 262, 317, 352n2, 354–5, 361, 366, 369, 371 Les Esprits du Koniambo 156 on the Centre Jean-Marie Tjibaou, 317 on Tjibaou, 157–8, 160, 162, reading oral tales 59, 63–8, 73–4, 80–1 translation of tales of oral tradition 14–15, 51–2, 100, 117–18, 119, 120 Bensa, Alban and Michel Millet 96, 310–11, 355, 365 Bensa, Alban and Jean-Claude Rivierre 63–4, 65, 66, 67, 74, 80, 86, 90, 100, 118 Berkowitz, Joseph 61–2, 363 Beyala, Calixthe 205

12/03/2014 14:40:11

374

Index

Bhabha, Homi 6–7, 8–11, 19, 24, 35, 40, 59, 94, 101, 108, 119–20, 140, 186, 211, 237, 270, 304, 309, 321, 327–8, 330–7, 342, 343, 347–9, 355, 369 Bihan, Anne 289–90, 355 La Billardière, Jacques 12, 28, 30, 37, 38, 49–51, 81, 138, 146, 350, 357 on cannibalism 49–51 on chiefs 49 on theft 49–50 Black Stone 19, 196, 365 see also Mera Molisa, Grace boenando 16, 17, 91, 131, 156, 157, 160, 162, 163, 173, 246, 263, 347 Bogliolo, François 14, 53, 54, 76, 78, 89, 91, 97, 100, 118, 119, 122, 126, 351n9, 355, 365 Bouan, Marc 137–8, 355 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de 12, 30, 33, 41, 85, 146, 242, 275, 294, 355, 358 Brah Avtar, and Annie E. Coombes 6, 7, 328, 336, 339, 355 Bricaire de la Dixmerie, Nicolas 41 Brown, Peter x, 4, 7–8, 267, 311–12, 317, 319, 320, 335, 355 Caldoche 7, 8, 11, 20, 25, 133, 148, 238, 242, 251, 258, 259, 260, 272, 279, 282, 348, 351, 357 definitions of 300–1, 350–1n3 Campbell, Joseph 79 Canaque(s), 14, 76, 77, 97–8, 99, 100, 103–4, 105, 200, 242, 267, 268, 269, 271, 283, 301, 354, 355, 359, 360, 361, 365 Leenhardt on 111–16 use of term 2, 4, 9, 96, 155–6, 333 see also Kanak Canclini, Néstor Garcia 10, 321, 322, 325, 336, 339, 356 cannibalism 19, 22, 30, 49, 77–8, 81, 99, 100, 146, 153, 157, 180, 182, 217, 239, 256, 279, 357 canoe x, 33, 36, 45, 60, 75, 184, 328, 368 symbolism of 123, 209

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 374

symbolism in L’Épave 210, 217, 221, 225, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 241–2, 320, 340 see also pirogue, waka Centre culturel Jean-Marie Tjibaou 92, 118, 153, 170, 355 as hybrid architecture 317 origins of 162–3 see also Centre Tjibaou Centre de langues vernaculaires 88 Centre Tjibaou 58, 156, 245, 261, 317 Césaire, Aimé 10, 18, 96, 188, 366 ‘The Chief and the Lizard’ 21, 52, 54, 61, 64 see also tales of oral tradition Chatti, Mounira ix, x, 104, 158, 160, 199–200, 201, 356, 362, 368 Chirac, Jacques 92 Chroniques du pays kanak 58, 355 Clifford, James 89, 96, 102, 353, 356 on Leenhardt 103–17 Code de l’Indigénat 2, 83, 92, 125 see also Native Code cognitive dissonance x, 18, 183, 206, 323, 368 Collectivité d’outre-mer 5 Collectivité sui generis 5, 85, 128 colonial exhibition 139 Commerson, Philibert 33 Common Destiny 3, 8, 59, 92, 128, 145, 149, 152, 176, 202, 293, 301, 304, 308, 312, 313, 317, 319, 340, 341 see also destin commun, Common Future Common Future 147, 262, 305 Condé, Maryse 204 convict settlement 23–4, 83–4, 115, 129, 130–1, 135, 138, 147–8, 150, 180, 253, 257, 258–9, 265–6, 267, 272–4, 278, 300 Cook, James 12, 28, 32, 81 arrival at Balade, 45 conjecture 36 on the modesty of Kanak women 46 rhetorical figures: litotes 38

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Index Créolité 10 cultural turn 34 Cycle du lézard 55–58 see also Leenhardt, tales from oral tradition Dalmayrac, Dany 136–7 Declercq, Pierre 92 Déportés (deportees) 19, 24, 74, 83, 84, 96, 100, 126, 129–30, 148, 150–1, 278. 366 in Barbançon 258 in Gorodé 150–1 in Mariotti 267 in Nervat 260 in Régent 272–3 Derrida, Jacques 6, 93–4, 206, 207, 218, 321, 343, 357 De Souza and Murdoch 331, 332, 357 destin commun viii, 25, 27, 134, 305, 307, 311, 318 see also Common Destiny, Common Future Devi, Anandi 205 diaspora 6, 10, 119, 124, 129, 136, 138, 304, 309, 320, 332, 333, 337, 340, 360, 361 Diderot, Denis 12 Djebar, Assia 205, 206, 357, 358 Documents néo-calédoniens 54, 55, 57, 80, 103, 108, 113, 115, 117, 122, 179, 244, 250, 251, 297, 310, 363 Do-Néva xi, 101, 102, 103, 112, 113, 176, 179, 180, 191 Dousset-Leenhardt, Roselène 96, 102, 131, 180, 358 Dubois (Le Père/ Father) 60, 87, 358 Duff, Alan 68, 139, 209, 341, 358 see also Leenhardt Duras, Marguerite 157, 167, 207, 214–15, 346, 358 Durmont d’Urville 2, 4 emerging literatures 1, 8, 348 D’Entrecasteaux, Bruny 12, 13, 34, 37, 71, 81, 85, 138, 146, 242, 350, 357, 366

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 375

375

comparison of Cook and D’Entrecasteaux’s accounts 28–9 description of Balade 30–2 leaving Balade 48 Ërijisi, Boésou 102, 103, 117, 153, 243, 246, 254, 353 Les Événements 2, 58, 91–2,181, 274, 279, 312 see also ‘Events’, Troubles The Events 148, 150, 171, 191 exile vii, 9, 10, 15–16, 94, 112, 122, 123, 151, 175, 188, 214, 238, 263, 268, 273–4, 281, 304, 314, 333, 341, 344, 346, 347, 368 Gorodé on writing in exile 140–2, 150 home as exile 269–70 indentured labour and exile 129, 135–8 Jacques on exile 148 Kanak exile 125–8 Kanak exile as hybridity 138–40 writers of European origin and exile 129, 130, 131, 132–4, 138 Faessel, Sonia ix, 138, 232, 233, 258, 363, 367 ‘fatal impact’ 140 Feillet colonists, 84, 130–1, 147, 257, 277–8 see also Le Goupils, Wintrebert, Feminism 13, 71, 72–3, 78, 121, 198, 235–6, 340 Femmes et Violences Conjugales 73, 235 Fernandes, Martine 204–5 Fiegel, Sia 209 ‘First Man’ vii, 16, 17, 58, 152–3, 173–4, 250, 342 in Kanaké (Jean-Marie Tjibaou) 153–63 in Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000: une adaptation du jèmââ de Téâ Kënâké (Déwé Gorodé) 164–70 in Téâ Kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wârokê/L’Homme aux cinq vies (Denis Pourawa) 170–2

12/03/2014 14:40:11

376

Index

FLNKS 2, 4, 87, 92, 134, 159, 173, 191, 235, 253 see also Front de liberation nationale kanak et socialiste [National Socialist Kanak Liberation Front] Forster, Georg 12–13, 28, 30, 32, 33, 34, 81, 177, 242, 358 Eromunga and the ‘fatal’ impact of European voyages 40 on Kanak women 38–40, 46, 47–8, 50 on Omai 41 on the’ temperament of the Kanak people’ 47–8 Forster, Johann Reinhold 12, 32, 81 observations on Melanesian women 37–8 Foucault, Michel 6, 43, 68, 70, 94, 359 Les Foulards Rouges 131, 148, 157, 189 Fox, Alistair 321, 346, 359 French Polynesia 1, 126, 181, 182, 209, 352n2 see also Tahiti Front Indépendantiste 93, 159 Gagnière, (le Père/ Father) 54, 89 Garnier, Jules 89, 135, 310 Genette, Gérard 32, 359 Gentzler, Edwin 34, 118–19, 359, 371 Gilroy, Paul 8, 11, 320–1, 332, 359 Girard, René 79, 359 Glissant, Edouard 10, 359 Gope, Pierre 59–60, 91, 164, 203, 290–4, 298, 301, 303, 304, 313, 318, 323, 332, 334, 335, 343, 359, 363 Gorodé, Déwé ix, 11, 16, 17, 18–20, 59–60, 61, 68, 71, 73–4, 80, 81, 91, 94, 96, 106, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131–2, 140–4, 150–1, 153, 155, 158, 163, 170, 171, 172,173, 174 ambivalence and hybridity 205–8 counter-violence 236–7 ‘Ecrire en femme Kanake aujourd’hui’ 182–92 Kanak history 150–1

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 376

Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000 164–9 life and writing 175–9 sexual possession 224 womanism 79–80 writing back to sexual violence 209–37, 223–4 see also history, Gorodé, Déwé texts, sexual possession, sorcery, violence Gorodé, Déwé texts 193–204 ‘Affaire classée’ (Case Closed) 143, 199–201, 215, 255, 317, 359 L’Agenda 91, 166, 190, 192, 199 see also ‘Affaire classée’ Dire le vrai/ To Tell the Truth 196, 298, 313, 360, 367 L’Épave ix, 18, 19, 68, 71, 74, 80, 142, 143, 166, 172, 176–7, 181, 198, 204, 206, 208, 209–37, 241, 242, 249, 257, 267, 289, 313, 315–16, 318, 321, 323–4, 328, 330–1, 358, 360, 363, 372 Graines de pin colonnaire 20, 60, 126, 146, 206, 219–20, 246–7, 252–3, 257, 316, 321, 360 Par les temps qui courent 190, 207, 360, 362, 365 Sharing as Custom Provides (Selected Poems) x, 184, 201, 360, 367 Sous les cendres des conques 176, 178, 189, 192, 253, 359 Tâdo Tâdo, wee! ou « no more baby » 20, 59, 73–4, 106, 126, 127, 129–30, 150–1, 177, 257, 283, 316, 318 Uté Mûrûnû 19, 61, 80, 91, 61, 80, 91, 106, 142–3, 165, 177–8, 192–3, 198, 203, 210, 226, 228, 248, 289, 290, 300, 324, 359, 367 Gorodé, Philippe 156, 179, 186, 188 Gorodé, Waia 94, 110, 130, 179–83, 185, 186–7, 215, 250, 322–3, 335, 341, 360, 362 Le Goupils, Marc 131, 147, 277–9, 364

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Index Grace, Patricia 315, 360 Grain de Sable (Éditions) 90, 171, 351, 354, 355, 359, 360, 361, 362, 363, 264, 365, 367, 371 Guiart, Jean 57, 58, 62, 88, 90, 100, 102, 118, 153, 155, 156, 186, 239, 241, 242, 244, 257, 253, 254, 256–7, 360 Hall, Stuart 10, 107–8, 119, 124–5, 144, 331, 338, 345–6, 348–9, 360–1 Hart, Kathleen 74–6, 96, 361 History 351, 361 and French language 94 and hybrid identity 144 and nature-culture 263 and politics 2, 145, 149, 317, 319, 337 and story 145, 152, 216–18, 233, 253 colonial history 4, 24, 84, 134, 274–80, 296, 301, 305 cultural identity and history 124 cultural representation and colonial history 128–9 dialectic between history and literature 152 Dubois (Père) on the history of Maré 87 in Pacific writers Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt 341 Kanak history 15, 20, 126, 141, 143, 144, 171–3 Kanak history in Déwé Gorodé 150–1, 164–5, 169, 174, 175–8, 184–6, 189, 201, 231, 316–17, 318–19, 324–6, 334 of hybridity 5–7 of New Caledonia 15, 22–3, 24, 83–4, 148, 175 of the déportés and engagés 129–30, 135–8 of the pirogue 123–4 oral histories/stories 16–17, 56–7, 75, 88, 108, 118, 139, 153, 156–7, 182–3, 247 ‘telling the past’ as identity construction and political strategy 14, 145, 152, 159

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 377

377

Tjibaou on history 128–9, 153–4, 155–6, 163, 169 victims of history 159, 174, 281 see also Temps et mémoires du pays kanak Hodges, William 28, 42–3, 44, 269, 369 Hoffmann, Eva 120–2, 361 home vii, 9, 11, 15, 16, 25, 27, 94, 123, 144–6, 148, 151, 152, 155, 175, 238, 242–3, 252, 268, 269, 270, 273, 279, 282, 302, 317, 329, 371, 372 see also unhomely, terre violente/ séjour paisible Howe, Kerry 41 Huggan Graham, 20, 212, 276, 361 Hulme, Kerry x, 68, 209, 315, 341, 361, 368 Hybridity i, iii, vii, 1, 5–6, 7–9, 10–12, 13, 45, 52, 68, 83, 85, 91, 119–22, 125, 138, 144 and critique of métissage 282–306 and Noumea Agreement/Common Destiny 317–18 and multiculturalism 307–8 and postcoloniality 325 as ambivalence 204–5 as Bakhtinian dialogism 6, 101, 118, 322, 354 as ‘cognitive dissonance’ in Déwé Gorodé 144–76, 205, 237 as (un)desirable métissage 265, 272–82 as ‘double inspiration’ 325 as gendered contestation 74, 81, as ‘inquiétante étrangeté’in Mallarmé 121 as intertextuality 238–63 as miscegenation 5–6, 267, 282, 334 as ‘nomadic monster’ in Kristeva 121 as to-and-fro between Kanak and French conceptions 263, 318 as translation in Hoffmann 120–1 forms of (palimpsestic, translational, intertextual) 20, 344 in Déwé Gorodé 205–8 in Gope 335

12/03/2014 14:40:11

378

Index

in Kurtovitch (rejection of hybridity as chameleon) 300, 313 in Laubreaux 260–2 in Mariotti 269 internal Kanak hybridities 152 May, Joseph and Jennifer Fink’s Performing Hybridity 335, 370 origins of term 5–6, 10 strategic exilic hybridity 123–44, 149 theoretical critiques of hybridity in see also Ahmad, Bhabha, Brah and Coombes, Canclini, Gilroy, Kraidy, Kranaiauskas Rosello, Sharrad, Werbner and Monod, Young; Jacques Ihage, Wenigo 86, 88, 90, 132, 168, 207, 360 Ihimaera, Witi 68, 86, 182, 209, 333, 339, 341–2, 361, 368 Illouz, Charles 68–70, 247, 351, 361 incorporation 22, 23, 24, 25, 241, 245–7, 250, 253, 257, 259, 263, 323, 367 see also intertextuality, metamorphosis indentured labour 9, 19, 24, 26, 83, 129–30, 135–7, 272, 278, 302–3, 316 see also engagés intertextuality v11, 22, 23, 40, 68, 132, 247, 337, 347, 238–63, 367 as hybridity 238–63 as incorporation 241–2, 245 in Barbançon 250–1 in Gorodé 325 in Jacques, 279 in Tjibaou 247 Irigaray, Luce 24, 206 Jacques, Claudine 152–3, 250, 263, 279, 290, 297, 303, 314, 334, 335, 340, 346 and hybridity 25, 133–4, 138, 148, 250, 260, 261–2, 279, 282–6, 288, 294, 301, 305, 310, 312–13, 322–3, 325, 328, 329, 330, 344–5

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 378

Javanese 262, 285, 288, 316 see also indentured labour, engagés Johnson, Helen 136, 302–3, 361 Jouve, Dominique ix, x, 182–3, 207, 362, 364, 367 on Jacques’ L’Âge du perroquetbanane 287–8 on Waia Gorodé 171, 180–1, 323 Kanak vii, 9 and Empire 23–4 and exile 123, 125–8, 138–44 and first encounters 31, 33, 37, 39, 43, 45–52 and hybridity 309–10, 310–15 and métissage 315–17 and other ethnicities 19, 129–30, 134, 135, 136–8 First Man 16–17, 152–74 history and politics 15, 15, 20, 126, 141, 143, 144, 147, 149–51, 171–3 in colonial literatures 148, 268–72 in contemporary Caledonian literatures 272–306 intertextuality as indicator of Kanak-Calédonien relationship 238–64 Kanak-caldoche/Calédonien relations 7, 11, 20–2, 57–8, 81–2, 133, languages 85–6, 87, 88, 89 Leenhardt on the Kanak subject and oral tradition 14, 101–22 Michel on Kanak tradition 95–101 names 59 non-dit 19 oral tradition 52–74, 132 origin of term 2 ‘place to stand’149 Poédi on the Kanak subject 15 sense of place 59 society 83–5 translation of Kanak texts of oral tradition 88–9, 90, 93 women and questions of gender power 59–60, 71–4, 266

12/03/2014 14:40:11

Index writers and parti pris of indigeneity 58, 91, 175–204, 206–8 see also ADCK, Annova-Ataba, canaque, Bensa, Centre Tjibaou, Cook, D’Entrecasteaux, Ërijisi, Les Événements, exile, FLNKS, Forster, history, intertextuality, tales of oral tradition, translation, Gorodé, Jacques, Leenhardt, Michel, Tjibaou Kanakae 2 Kanaké / Kënâké 2, 16–17, 18, 58–9, 91, 150, 153–4, 157, 159, 160–2, 170–1, 175, 187, 246, 342, 344, 345 see also Téâ Kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wârokê/L’Homme aux cinq vies Kanaké: [Mélanésien de NouvelleCalédonie] 2, 16, 52, 62, 93, 131, 152, 153–4, 155–6, 157, 158, 160, 162–3, 166, 173, 245, 335, 342, 344, 356, 357, 365, 368, 371 see also Tjibaou, Melanesia 2000 Kanaky vii, 2, 3, 4, 9, 16, 24, 93, 94, 152, 154, 166, 191, 207, 246, 272, 276, 318, 351 Kanaky-New Caledonia iii, xi, 5, 8, 9, 26, 52, 54, 145, 147, 183, 263, 351, 355 as terre d’accueil 131 debate on the use of the hyphenated term 93–4 Kënâké 2000 ou KNK 2000: une adaptation du jèmââ de Téâ Kënâké 16, 59, 164–9, 224, 360 Killick, Rachel 348, 362 Kraidy, Marwan 308, 320, 339, 362 Kranaiauskas, John 336, 362 Kristeva, Julia 39, 94, 120–1, 206, 362 Kurtovitch, Ismet 276–7, 362 Kurtovitch, Nicholas 25, 91, 133, 141, 148, 152, 171, 176, 196, 238, 293–305, 310, 312–13, 314, 322, 323, 325, 326, 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 340, 359, 360, 363, 364, 367

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 379

379

Lamb, Jonathan 36–7, 363 ‘preserving the European self’ 37 Lambert (le Père) 54–7, 60, 86–7, 255, 363 languages 4, 14, 70, 83, 84–9, 94, 98, 100, 102–5, 106, 107, 116, 121, 125, 126, 171, 180, 245, 293, 301, 311, 335 see also Kanak languages Laville, Jean 61–2, 363 Leenhardt Maurice, 14, 15, 80, 81, 98 Do Kamo: la personne et le mythe dans le monde mélanésien 108, 159 Documents néo-calédoniens 103 translation of texts of oral tradition 101–17 ‘Cycle du lézard’ 55, 56, 57 Légendes et chansons de geste canaques 74, 96, 351n8,n1 Légendes et chants de geste canaques 74, 95, 351n9, 365 Le Nickel 23 Lenormand, Maurice 88 Leprince de Beaumont, Madame 219 lieux communs (commonplaces) 121, 149 Lionnet, Françoise 281–2, 364 see also métissage London Missionary Society (LMS) 60 MacDonald, Amanda 214, 364 McCormick, Eric 41–2, 364 McCully, Andrew 299, 364 McKendrick, Mary 268, 364 Machoro, Éloi 92, 148, 150, 171, 181, 191, 257–8, 276–7 Le Maître de Koné ‘(Master of Koné’) vii, 21–2, 54, 55, 64, 238–63 Mansfield, Katherine 24 Maré (Loyalty Island) 93 Mariotti, Jean 22, 24, 99, 132 masculinist history 159 May, Joseph and Jennifer Fink’s Performing Hybridity335, 370

12/03/2014 14:40:11

380

Index

Melanesia(n) 1, 11, 12, 13, 15, 19, 26, 29, 38, 60, 84, 92, 95, 104–6, 108, 110, 112, 113, 118, 126, 159, 160, 161, 191, 237, 251, 257, 262, 273, 278, 279, 284, 287, 296, 310, 312, 318, 331, 335, 347, 350n1 Melanesian Arc 3–4 Melanesian languages 85–6, 89 Melanesian Way 125, 154, 173, 174, 371 origin of division into Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia 4–5 see also Kanak, indigenous Melanesia 2000 58, 93, 153, 164, 183 Mera Molisa, Grace 19, 109, 196, 333, 365 Merle, Isabelle 84, 272, 365 Métais, Éliane 62–3, 365 metamorphosis x, 199–200, 225, 226, 230, 245, 247, 250, 252, 263, 281, 286, 288, 301, 314, 347, 348, 368 métissage 8, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25–6, 27, 138, 149, 238, 260, 262, 263, 269, 270–2, 300–1, 304–5, 306, 307, 309, 312, 314, 317, 345, 353, 356, 362, 363, 370, 371 as cultural threat in indigenous literature 314–15 in Jacques, 282–3, 294 Lionnet on 281–2 negative effects of in colonial texts 265–72 terminology debate 319–20 theory 320, 337 Toumson’s critique of Lionnet 282 towards positive effects in contemporary writing 272–81 Michel, Louise 14–15, 52, 53, 74–9, 80, 81, 90, 95–101, 105, 106, 107, 110, 113, 114, 116, 120, 121, 122, 140, 150, 178. 244, 265, 269, 297, 351n8,9, 361, 365 Mémoires 95, 98 see also tales from oral tradition, Hart mimesis 6, 8

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 380

miscegenation 5, 6, 267, 282, 334 missionaries 61, 67, 84, 85, 89, 90, 101, 102, 111, 138, 181–2, 226, 257, 273 MSG [Melanesian Spearhead Group] 4 Moeurs et superstitions 57–8, 86, 311, 363 see also Lambert Mokaddem, Hamid x, 2, 155, 164, 203, 295, 298, 300, 365, 367 Mouchonnière, Eric 170, 367 MwàVée 58, 90, 117, 154, 357, 358 Naepels, Michel 59, 365 Naisseline, Nidoish 148, 188, 189 natas (teachers) 101, 102, 103, 109, 110 National Socialist Kanak Liberation Front 93 see also FLNKS Native Code 83, 150 Néaoutyine, Paul 16 Négritude 10, 18, 188, 327 Néporon, Micheline 4, 140 Nigoth, Joanné 101, 102 Ngwele, S. 4 Noble Savage 12, 29, 32, 40–1, 44, 97, 146, 160, 186, 238, 241 nomadic 10, 35, 121 Nouméa la Blanche 18, 202 Noumea Agreement(s) 2, 3–4, 15, 26, 58, 91, 128, 145, 149, 159, 210, 231, 234, 244, 308, 366 see also Accord(s) de Nouméa Oceanian 11, 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 40, 182, 237, 253, 262, 281, 291, 297, 300, 318, 331, 332, 335, 349, 352n3, 369 Oceanian Other 12 Office de la recherche scientifique et technique outre-mer (ORSTOM) 91, 355, 360 Ohlen, Frédéric 25, 91, 301, 310, 366 Omai (Mai) 41–3, 44, 364

12/03/2014 14:40:12

Index oral tradition vii, 9, 14–16, 21, 22, 88, 90, 92, 100, 103, 123, 126, 132, 158, 162, 170, 171, 176, 177, 186, 200, 210, 211, 217, 221, 229, 243, 246, 250, 269, 280, 281, 286, 294, 297, 310, 322, 327, 335, 340, 344, 347, 370 as shaped by relations of power 52–83 see also Bensa, Leenhardt, Michel, tales from oral tradition ‘othering’ gaze 12, 42–3, 44, 71, 138–9, 140, 176, 205 palimpsest vii, 28, 32, 44, 74, 81, 82, 85, 146, 339, 344, 347, 359, 370 and hybridity 9 and third space 13, 40 definition of 32–3, 335 in accounts of first encounter, 15 palimpsest in Gorodé 317 Pasqua, Charles 92 pays du séjour paisible ix, 21, 22–3, 128, 149, 238, 242–3, 246, 253, 258, 259, 260, 263, 268, 274, 312, 364, 367 Peirano, Arlette 275–6, 366 penal colony 2 21, 129, 276 representations of 130 see also Régent,Vanmai Perrault, Charles 218, 219, 351 Peu, Titaua 209 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen 336–7, 338, 365 pirogue 221, 230, 232, 355 symbolism of 123–4 see also canoe, waka Piron (Citizen) 51, 146 Poédi, Gabriel 15, 150, 200, 366 a ‘place to stand’ 10, 149, 304, 330, 352 postcolonial exotic 20, 212, 326, 361 see also Huggan Pourawa, Denis 16–17, 358, 367 Pourawa, Mouchonnière, and Néaoutyine 16 Pratt, Mary-Louise 325, 367 transculturation 8

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 381

381

Pym, Anthony i, 369 interculture 35 Ramsay, Raylene ix, x, 19, 122, 206, 209, 214, 215, 351n6,7,8, 352n1,2, 354, 358, 359, 360, 362, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372 Rassemblement pour la Calédonie dans la République (RPCR) 93, 157 Régent, Catherine 22, 130, 147, 152, 260, 272–3, 273–4, 275, 278, 368 Ricoeur, Paul 120, 342, 348, 368, 372 Rigo, Bernard x, 139, 368 Robinson, Douglas 119, 368 Rochas, Victor de 54, 89, 357 roots 1, 11, 15, 47, 63, 76, 107–8, 124, 141–2, 145, 152, 163, 172, 192, 194–5, 200, 201, 342 Rosello, Mireille 327 328–30, 331, 332, 369 ‘routes and roots’ 11, 124, 191, 355 Rushdie, Salman 10, 212, 226, 229–30, 369 Saïd, Edward 337,369 Salomon, Christine 71–3, 227, 254, 255–7, 369 Salomon Christine and Christine Hamelin 71–3, 223, 232, 234, 235–6, 369 Salmond, Anne 13, 32, 33, 40–1, 369 Savoie, Hélène 26, 279, 280, 281, 282, 288, 297, 310, 212, 314, 323, 366, 369, 370 séjour paisible x, 21, 22–3, 128, 149, 238, 242–3, 246, 253, 258, 259, 260, 263, 268, 274, 312, 364, 367 Sénès, Jacqueline 22, 25, 134, 147, 148, 186, 220, 224, 241, 260, 263, 274–5, 305, 312, 369 Senghor, Léopold 10, 188 settlement 11, 22, 84, 85, 87, 124, 126, 127, 142, 144, 145–6, 257–8, 267, 278, 279, 296 sexual possession 19, 206, 222, 224, 228, 237, 288, 341, 346

12/03/2014 14:40:12

382

Index

Sharrad, Paul 20, 27, 334, 338–40, 342, 343, 347, 369 Shineberg, Dorothy 257, 369 Simmons, Lawrence 41, 42–3, 44, 222, 354, 369 Sinclair-Reynolds ix, 89, 108, 347 on Boésou 103 on ‘The Chief and the Lizard’ 21–2, 54–62, 261, 279, 351n, 369 on Leenhardt 90, 113 on ‘The Lizard and the Cocks’ 62 on ‘The Master of Koné’, 11, 21–2, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58 on re-publication of Lambert’s work by the SHENC 57–8 on routes and roots 243 on Téâ Kanaké 59, 93 on translation 93 Société évangélique des missions de Paris 101 Société d’études historiques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (SEHNC) 57–8, 88, 354, 355, 363, 364, 366, 371 sorcery 19, 20, 22, 23, 109, 197, 224, 233, 241, 245, 250, 256, 269, 263, 293, 299, 326, 346 SOS Violences Sexuelles 73, 235 see also violence South Pacific Commission 88, 91 Sparrman, Anders 28, 32, 47 on Kanak women 39 Spivak, Gayatri 159, 161, 206, 334, 370 Stam Robert 335, 370 Star Waka 11, 370 Stefanson, Blandine 176, 178, 184, 273, 360, 370 Sullivan, Robert 11, 334, 370 syncretism 10, 27, 85, 121, 137, 181, 183, 310, 318, 319, 322, 327, 328, 335, 336, 338, 341, 342 Tahiti, 1, 12, 30, 32, 33, 38, 40, 41, 84, 146, 181–2, 289, 294, 365, 369, 370 see also French Polynesia tales from oral tradition:

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 382

‘L’Aïeul de Névou’ 57 Beauty and the Beast Kanak version 60–1 ‘Bigne et Jola’ 54 ‘The Blind Dancing Woman’ 69–71 ‘The Brothers of the Red Taro’ 63 ‘Le chef de Lerexou’ 65 ‘Le chef de Saouma’ 65 ‘Le chef de Touho’ (Touo) 54–5, 64, 251, 363 ‘The Chief and the Lizard’ 21, 52, 54, 61, 64 ‘Les Deux Soeurs de Moaxa’ 65 ‘Grand Waka’ 67 ‘Kaapo Ciinyii’ 66 ‘Le Lézard de Windo’56 ‘The Lizard and the Cocks’ 61 ‘Le rat, le poulpe, et la poule sultane’ 52–3 Tâdo, Tâdo, the Crab 23 ‘The Virgin of Nekliai’ 66 Tcherkézoff, Serge ix, 41, 370 Téa, Henri 100 Teâ Kanaké 16, 58–9, 62, 93, 150, 153–4, 162, 170–1, 355, 367 Téâ Kanaké, i pwi âboro nä caa kärä î-jè wârokê/L’Homme aux cinq vies Pourawa’s poetic-mythological Kanak heritage tale 170–4 see also Kanaké Temps et mémoires du pays kanak 149–50, 153, 159 terre violente 9, 21, 22, 238, 242, 258–60, 263, 367 in Sénès 22–3, 25, 134–5, 147, 260, 274–5, 277, 312–13, 369 The Troubles 2 see also The Events, Les Événements third space vii, 8, 9, 35, 95, 110–11, 151, 152, 362, 369 as ambivalence 27 as dialogism 101, 106 as intertextual borrowing 238 as palimpsest 13–14 in Bensa 120

12/03/2014 14:40:12

Index in Bhabha vii, 8, 35, 40, 44, 94, 101, 342, 347, 349 in contemporary Caledonian writing 313 in colonial writing 271 in Gorodé 59, 208, 237, 328 in Kanak rewriting of origins 151–2, 175 in Leenhardt 105–6, 116–17, 122 in Michel 101, 122 in theory 306, 331 in Tjibaou, 94 of reading 44 of translation 14–15, 34–119, 120–2 shaped by gender and generation 208, 175 Tjibaou, Jean-Marie 2, 16, 17, 19, 58, 91, 96, 108, 144, 148, 183, 187, 191, 239, 291, 301, 303, 304, 310, 317, 321, 332, 334, 335, 352n1, 355, 357, 365, 368, 371 comparison of Tjibaou’s Kanaké with other versions 170–1, 173–4, 207, 208, 211, 224, 344, 347 Kanaké and the Kanak cultural revival 153–63, 245–7 Kanak as First Peoples and ‘host’ 131–2 The Melanesian Way 125 on cultural difference 341–2, 343 political contexts of Matignon Agreement 91–3 trope of exile 127–9 use of language (parole) 94, 111, 118 Gorodé writes back to Tjibaou 164–8 Tjibaou, Marie-Claude 73 Tout-monde 10 translation in Eva Hoffmann in New Caledonia 84–7, linguists and ethnographers 88–90 Leenhardt and translation 101–17 Michel and translation 95–101

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 383

383

see also Tymoczko, Venuti, Bassnett and Trivedi, Hoffmann Tupaia 32 Turner, Stephen 145–7 Tymoczko, Maria 35, 207 unhomely 27, 325, 328, 347, 348 Union Calédonienne, 92, 245, 259 Vanmai, Jean 26, 130, 135–6, 148, 302–3, 371 Vanuatu 1, 4–5, 19, 26, 40, 109–10, 123, 133–4, 161, 191, 196–7, 207, 235, 244, 257, 260, 273–4, 279, 284, 286, 291, 303, 314, 331, 333, 352, 370, 371, 372 Venuti, Lawrence 371 foreignisation and domestication in translation 35 ethics of difference 35–6 Vietnamese presence in New Caledonian literatures 1, 19, 135–6, 262, 287, 362–3, 316, 361 violence against women 19, 20, 26, 72–3, 196–8, 204–5, 209, 221–3, 234–7 as ‘counter-violence’ 201–2, 236–7 as ‘reciprocal’ 42 colonial violence 15, 142, 150, 160, 179, 193, 196 in Caledonian society 133 in contemporary Kanak society 93 in fairy-tales 218 in Gorodé’s L’Épave 210, 217, 221, 222, 225, 227, 229, 233 in Michel 79, 99 in Pacific writers 209 in the texts of first encounters 31 in Tjibaou 173 in women’s post-colonial texts 204–5 of the Kanak ‘First Man’ 60 see also S.O.S. Violences Sexuelles, Femmes et Violences Sexuelles waka 67, 209, 232, 233, 317, 368, 370

12/03/2014 14:40:12

384

Index

symbolism of 123–4 see also canoe, pirogue Walker-Morrison, Deborah x, 214, 252n2, 360, 371, 372 Wallis, Samuel (Captain) 12, 33, 85 Wallisian 1, 250, 260, 261, 262, 283, 286, 295, 313 Wallis and Futuna 1, 129, 134, 287 Walton, Diane 29, 48, 49, 50, 51, 350, 372 Wanérené Kanak Cinderella 61 Warner, Marina 216–19, 288, 372 Watkin, Christopher 442–3, 373

Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific.indd 384

Wélépane, Wanir 89 Wendt, Albert 209, 314, 341, 358, 372 Werbner and Modood 336 Wittersheim, Éric 17, 94, 154, 157, 160–1, 162, 361, 371, 372 Wintrebert, Joëlle 130–1, 134, 147, 277, 305, 372 ‘writing back’ 19, 55, 119, 135, 142–3, 164, 192, 214, 215, 234, 236, 309, 338–9 Yiewnéné, Yiewiéné 92 Young, Robert, 334, 335, 358, 372

12/03/2014 14:40:12