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Beyond the sea that separates: francophone voices of Oceania

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Beyond the sea that separates: francophone voices of Oceania

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Content Copyright 2023 Katherine Hammitt BEYOND THE SEA THAT SEPARATES: FRANCOPHONE VOICES OF OCEANIA by Katherine Hammitt A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE) August 2023 ii To my mother, the storyteller. iii Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii List of Figures ..................................................................................................................................v Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi Preface........................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction – Oceanic Currents ..................................................................................................... 1 Oceanic in francophone, postcolonial, and transpacific studies ..........................................3 Chapter overview ............................................................................................................... 11 Chapter 1 – V oice: Transversion, Orality, Silence .........................................................................17 Language of the colonizer ..................................................................................................20 Transverse voice ................................................................................................................23 Orality and the written text ................................................................................................37 Silence as protest and power ..............................................................................................47 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................57 Chapter 2 – Form: Dire autrement .................................................................................................59 Dire autrement ...................................................................................................................59 Form, transversion .............................................................................................................61 Transversing genre: Chantal Spitz .....................................................................................65 The communal force of poetry: Déwé Gorodé ..................................................................74 Using fiction to “dire autrement”: Titaua Peu....................................................................82 Negotiating opacity through paratext.................................................................................89 Conclusion: form and performance ...................................................................................96 Chapter 3 – Community ................................................................................................................98 An Oceanic community ...................................................................................................100 Conference and salon .......................................................................................................103 Littéramā’ohi ................................................................................................................... 114 Conclusion: Our sea of writers ........................................................................................126 Chapter 4 – Circulation ...............................................................................................................128 Introduction ......................................................................................................................128 Publishing ........................................................................................................................131 Literature as va’a .............................................................................................................139 Translation .......................................................................................................................145 Circulation: Routes and roots...........................................................................................148 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................152 iv Conclusion – Writing as Resistance and Celebration ..................................................................153 Oceanic futures ................................................................................................................156 References ....................................................................................................................................158 Primary sources ................................................................................................................158 Secondary sources ............................................................................................................160 Appendices ...................................................................................................................................164 Appendix A: Book covers ................................................................................................164 Appendix B: Illustrations .................................................................................................169 Appendix C: Performance................................................................................................171 Appendix D: Event programs ..........................................................................................172 Appendix E: Additional resources ...................................................................................186 v List of Figures Figure 1: Mūtismes 2021 Au Vent des îles edition front and back cover .....................................164 Figure 2: Mutismes : E ‘ore te vāvā 2003 Haere Pō front and back covers.................................166 Figure 3: Littéramā’ohi number 25 front cover ...........................................................................168 Figure 4: “Marururoa” (pg. 12), Evrard Chaussoy in Littérama’ohi V ol. 25. .............................169 Figure 5: “… il est temps de rentrer,” “Tui iihi,” and “Venant de la mer” (pg. 187) by Evrard Chaussoy in Littérama’ohi V ol. 25. .................................................................................170 Figure 6: An original tārava performed by Université de la Polynésie française students at the Salon du Livre, November 17, 2022. .........................................................................171 Figure 7: Program to the conference “Littérature et Politique en Océanie” held at the Université de la Polynésie Française from November 14-16, 2022. ...............................172 Figure 8: Flyer and schedule for the 22 nd Salon du Livre, Lire en Polynésie ..............................181 vi Abstract In this dissertation, I engage with literature of French expression from Oceania, particularly from Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia, as well as with the literary communities of these spaces. I posit a framework for literary critique termed oceanic that privileges movement instead of site as its referent, drawing from the long history of exchange between peoples of Oceania within the fluid medium of the Pacific Ocean. The project is largely divided into two parts: the first two chapters focus on reading specific aspects of individual texts, and the third and fourth chapters interrogate the context of this corpus in a broader scope while mobilizing close readings of shorter pieces to illuminate connections between the content of texts and the context of their production. In the first two chapters, the main tool of critique is an expansive use of “transversion,” a term used in several disciplinary frameworks whose versatility I mobilize for multiple readings. In the final two chapters, I interrogate the oceanic more explicitly, drawing on theoretical texts from Oceanian scholars to situate my own intervention. In my short conclusion, I posit the importance of celebration to the corpus of literature I interrogate. Keywords: francophone literature, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Oceania, oceanic, orality, transpacific, transversal vii Preface I open this project by situating myself and some of the choices I have made in writing this exploration of literature of French expression from Oceania. As a scholar with no genealogical ties to this region, a region that has been historically underrepresented in francophone studies scholarship, I am keenly aware of my own position along the settler/indigenous dynamic and the role Western scholarship has played and often continues to play in marginalizing non-Western voices. My own history I trace back to Martinsville, Indiana, a small town where I grew up surrounded by cornfields, far from any ocean’s shore. But stories have always been important to my life. My mother, to whom I dedicate this dissertation, is an English teacher by trade and a storyteller by heart, and it is her passion (and that of those who came before her) that I hear echo in the works I will read in the following pages. My decision to pursue a dissertation centered on literature from francophone Oceania followed from my desire to use the project to amplify the voices that constitute these texts. Scholarship is never apolitical, and I state here my support of the independence movements that continue to galvanize both Mā’ohi Nui/French (occupied) Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia. I have made the decision, after much deliberation, to use the terms “French Polynesia” and “New Caledonia” throughout this work, though I recognize the problematic nature of both names. Ultimately, my decision was made for the sake of clarity for the broadest audience, but I affirm the perspective (shared by many of the authors to be read here) that both Mā’ohi Nui and Kanaky constitute colonized spaces that should have the right to autochthonous self-rule. Another decision of terminology I have made for this project is the use of autochthonous over indigenous. Autochthonous – or autochtone – is the term used by several authors of this corpus, and while it is a term used more frequently in French than its correlate is viii in English, my decision to follow the preferred terminology of the writers I am discussing is supported by the fraught history of the terms indigenous and indigene in French colonial discourse. On a final note, while I hope this project serves as a resource both for those unfamiliar with the region’s literature and those who specialize in its reading, my greater hope for this dissertation is that it makes space for voices other than my own. To this end, I include in the final appendix a list of web sources, created in Oceania, that provide further information. One aspect of the region’s continued exoticization in global imaginings is the impression of its complete opacity, but resources far beyond the short list I include here are available around the world. On the other hand, the relative unavailability of some of the texts I read here is an important aspect of their current circulation and consumption, and a crucial tool to expanding their reach is a broader expression of interest and the patronage of the bookstores and publishing houses that currently make the texts available. So I encourage all to seek these texts out, and in seeking them to make known their value far and wide. With many thanks to the innumerable individuals who have supported this project, I wish you good reading. 1 Introduction: Oceanic Currents On March 12, 1990, an interview was published in Nouvelles de Tahiti between Rai a Mai (Michou Chaze) and Henri Hiro, two Tahitian authors talking about Hiro’s poetry and his commitment to a renaissance of Polynesian culture. Hiro, a foundational figure to French Polynesia’s literary community and staunch advocate for the Tahitian language, had died just the day before the interview’s publication. In the brief discussion between the two authors, Hiro made the following prophetic pronouncement (translated to English by Jean Toyama as the interview was later published in Mānoa, a journal from University of Hawai’i Press): “Polynesians must write… It doesn’t matter what language they use, whether it’s reo mā’ohi, French, or English. The important thing is that they write, that they do it! And I think that in a short while we will have Tahitian authors – authors free of insecurities and able to express who we are!” 1 The next year, Tahitian author Chantal Spitz would publish her debut novel, L’île des rêves écrasés, and a true renaissance of Polynesian – and francophone Oceanian – literature would begin. This project engages with recent literature from the francophone spaces of Oceania, specifically Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia 2 , to develop a model of 1 Rai A. Mai, et al. “The Source: An Interview with Henri Hiro.” Manoa, vol. 17, no. 2, 2005, 70–81, 74. 2 In this project, I will refer to these spaces as French Polynesia and New Caledonia, though I acknowledge here the problematic nature of these labels, imposed by colonizing powers and not reflective of the cultural reality of these spaces. I use these terms as the most widely accepted terms in current scholarship but recognize the autochthonous and preferred nomenclature of these spaces as well: Mā’ohi Nui and Kanaky. Similarly, I will refer to Aotearoa/New Zealand as New Zealand, though I recognize the colonial history of this term and the importance of Aotearoa as it recognizes the precolonial history of the country. This choice is made for the sake of clarity in discussing an underrepresented corpus. 2 critique formulated along an oceanic framework. The contours of this framework are derived from the oceanic in two related ways. First, it is modeled after the physical reality of the sea as medium – a means of connection instead of isolation. It follows the fluid circulation of ocean currents, distinct but unbounded. The second referent for this model is the shared history of oceanic navigation that characterizes the autochthonous peoples of Oceania. From this, we see a model of fluid exchange: fluid in that it is predicated not on parallelism but instead emerging from the practicalities of intersection along routes determined by a common existence in oceanic space. While each community navigated their world according to specific customs and motivations, the reality of a shared medium of movement necessitated intersecting routes that in turn facilitated the cultural exchange that continues its long history into today. In addition to this shared history of oceanic navigation, the francophone spaces of Oceania have also been shaped by common situations of colonial domination, settlement, linguistic erasure, and fraught paths to independence. Because of their ultimate colonization by the same Western power, the francophone spaces of Oceania further share a current reality of linguistic isolation from the otherwise largely anglophone Oceanian region. What does this framework then look like? The oceanic framework I explore here is predicated on a fluid coming together, a community of diverse components intersecting and interacting according to the medium that unites them. The title of this work – beyond the sea that separates – situates “beyond” not geographically but epistemologically, specifically the epistemologies that underpin the dominant codification of the ocean as a vast divide, mainly derived from the accounts of Western explorers seeking to apprehend oceanic expanses ontologically, politically, and economically. “Beyond” this colonial conceptualization is a deep history of the Pacific Ocean as unifying medium: a matrix of connections that has shaped the 3 communities that inhabit its islands for millennia. The subtitle – francophone voices of Oceania – centers the literary corpus of this oceanic space as a generative representation of the fluid connectivity that characterizes it. By reading the texts that francophone Oceanian authors have produced, especially in the three decades since Hiro’s final interview, we see the generative connectivity facilitated by fluidity that runs through the corpus. In order to explore that fluidity, I propose a framework for reading these texts that highlights the corpus’s innovation, commitment to community, and ontological intervention. To do so, I explore several facets of the texts’ voice and form, reading each along a transversive model. I then turn to considering the context of this corpus and, in doing so, offer an oceanic reading of both the community that produces them as well as their practical circulation. I use “transversion” as a tool to unpack the Oceanic framework I propose on the scale of close reading the texts themselves. It functions to emphasize movement instead of ossification and the position of individual subjectivities as they come together for common cause. I read the term in several shades of meaning, drawing on its use in linguistic, political, and formalistic milieux, and ultimately honing it as a tool of multifaceted critique that illuminates the nature of an Oceanic framework. It is a framework predicated on a community cultivated through fluid exchange, navigating the currents of a unifying sea. Oceanic in francophone, postcolonial, and transpacific Studies The genesis of this project is situated firmly in francophone studies, a field with a rich history of critique generated in regional centers of the francophone world that has nonetheless largely elided francophone Oceania. The range of scholarly critique of literature in the region has seen an uptick only relatively recently, as the critical bibliography of this project demonstrates. 4 Both Julia Frengs and Anaïs Maurer have been central to critical engagement with the corpus in the US, and Natalie Edwards, Titaua Porcher, Raylene Ramsay, and Jean Anderson have cultivated its study in Oceania itself (Porcher in French Polynesia, Edwards in Australia, and Ramsay and Anderson in New Zealand). The corpus of literature from francophone Oceania as well as the Oceanic critique I propose with this project offers critical intervention in the fields of francophone, postcolonial, and transpacific studies – not the least in its formulation of the intersection of these three porous disciplines. Let us begin with la francophonie and its centers of post/colonial critique. In the years leading up to (and during) decolonization of the French Empire, an anticolonial canon emerged, primarily concerning the Caribbean (Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant) and North Africa (Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi). These texts, foundational as they are to postcolonial theory, remain central in intellectual consideration and prominence. In the first years of the twenty-first century, a new wave of postcolonial francophone studies emerged in anglophone scholarship, and with it a reconsideration of a French anticolonial canon. 3 The theoretical production from these original regions maintained their relevance, and concentrated regions of theoretical production and inquiry became evident in the expanding field; francophone North Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, and North America maintained historical prominence as places where theory and literature were produced and/or directed. For example, in the French and francophone postcolonial context, discussions of memory (and forgetting) often center on Algeria, the Algerian War, and the metropole’s struggle to reconcile their own national narrative 3 See, for brief example, edited volumes Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. (Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, eds. New York: Routledge, 2003), and Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. (H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey, eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), or the 2002 establishment of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies (http://sfps.org.uk/about/), formerly the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French. 5 with the brutalities of the war and the reality of a diverse and unequal population. Historical excavation and the centrality of memory in literature in both Algeria and France set the context for cultivating theories of commemoration and memorialization that reverberate across francophone (and other linguistic) spaces. The recent example of Postcolonial Realms of Memory 4 , an edited volume that takes up the gaps in Pierre Nora’s monumental project Lieux de mémoire is itself evidence of the importance memory studies, and the region that inspired the framework, holds for francophone studies. Another salient example is the concept of créolité, which inevitably draws on theorists from the Caribbean when considered in the francophone context (and often when considered from elsewhere). Créolité as a model for critical engagement has shaped not only francophone studies but many area studies disciplines as well as a certain epistemological porosity within those areas and corresponding disciplines. The critical volume The Creolization of Theory 5 marks the use of créolité to consider humanities scholarship as a whole, and the roots of the volume’s contributors in francophone studies attests to the epistemological debt owed to this “regional” model. We see how these sites retain their importance because of their centrality to theory even as it is used to engage with other regions. While postcolonial francophone scholarship expands to focus on ideas of intersection and comparison, the codification of these spaces in the canon remains foundational. And yet the emphasis accorded to these regional centers of epistemological generation presents the danger of obfuscating the diverse theoretical work being done there and elsewhere, not to mention the potential for exchange between regions, authors, or problematics. This is an issue for area studies in general, but the linguistic siloing of francophone studies as opposed to anglophone 4 Charles Forsdick, Lydie Moudileno. and Etienne Achille, eds. Postcolonial Realms of Memory. Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 2020. 5 Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds. The Creolization of Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 6 postcolonial studies makes the regionalist model particularly brittle. I do not propose the region from which our corpus emerges as a new center to continue the regional dissection of the francophone world, but rather a space whose history and present provide a model of literary critique that itself allows us to read the elisions that this regionalism has wrought. The colonial situation of both Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia continues to shape life in both territories. The expansive islands of Mā’ohi Nui were fully annexed as a French protectorate in 1889 after decades of war and broken agreements for the islands’ autonomy. This colony would contribute soldiers to the Allies in WWII, after which French Polynesia became a French overseas territory and its population French citizens. Kanaky was colonized earlier in 1853, serving as a penal colony from 1864 to 1897, during which time around 22,000 prisoners were sent to the islands. Further colonizing violence began in 1864 with the discovery of nickel and the commencement of an important economy of resource extraction from which autochthonous Kanak people were excluded – and confined to reservations. Two uprisings (in 1878 and 1917) resulted in significant Kanak losses. Kanaky also contributed troops to the Bataillon du Pacifique in WWII, and New Caledonia was established as a French overseas territory in 1946, with citizenship granted to the full population by 1953. In the postwar era, French Polynesia saw the advent of nuclear testing after Algerian independence in 1962 prohibited the French government from continuing its testing in North Africa. Despite regional and world-wide protests, this nuclear testing was renewed under Jacques Chirac’s government, and did not cease for good until January 1996. In 2023, the pro- independence party Tavini Huitraatira won a majority of seats in the territorial elections, and writer Moetai Brotherson was elected as president of French Polynesia. “Postwar” New Caledonia was rocked by significant agitation for full independence, culminating in the 7 Événements from 1981 to 1988 marked by periods of both political and armed conflict between independence fighters and representatives of the French government. In November 1988 the Matignon Accord was signed followed by the Nouméa Accord in 1998. These agreements set up a timeline for greater autonomy to be progressively transferred to New Caledonia along with holding referendums on full independence. While these referendums were held in 2018, 2020, and 2021, with results to remain with France each time, the margin of victory for France has decreased and support for independence continues to be a strong factor in regional politics. As French overseas territories continuously agitating for full independence, both French Polynesia and New Caledonia represent a wrench in the typical francophone postcolonial trajectory. They do not fit easily into a straightforward program of decolonization because they do not all follow the traditional decolonial narrative of occupation, colonization, independence, and final separation into a sovereign nation. Nor, of course, are they fully integrated into the metropole of this configuration: the Republic, where all identity is erased apart from French identity. As Françoise Vergès has argued, “En marge de l’histoire coloniale, absents de l’histoire nationale, absents de la problématique postcoloniale… les outre-mers demeurent un espace exclu de l’histoire tout en faisant partie de l’espace républicain” (“Utopie coloniale, 70). This offers a brief look at an explanation for francophone Oceania’s elision in francophone postcolonial scholarship. Central to the oceanic framework I propose is its focus on movement instead of static site as the space of critique. This model provides a fluid iteration of the transnationalism at the heart of such foundational works as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s Minor Transnationalisms. In their discussion of transnationalism, Lionnet and Shih conceptualize the relation between literatures (and those that produce them) not from the center to the periphery – vertically – but 8 horizontally, between spaces not defined through hierarchies established through colonial relationships and maintained to perpetuate the centrality of the metropole. Instead of maintaining an understanding of the nation as a bounded unit, a transnational framework sees cultures (and thus cultural productions) as always hybrid. Lionnet and Shih draw on Edouard Glissant’s ideas of relationality, a theory not predicated on exchange between cultures but an understanding that culture is necessarily cultivated in a space of exchange, a model of creolization. Glissant is also concerned with the erasure enacted by France as metropole, and his concept of “Relation” will inform how I understand the potential of an oceanic theoretical framework by serving as a model based on the movement of exchange instead of stasis. Regarding colonial erasure, Glissant states, “Imperialism does not conceive of anything universal but in every instance is a substitute for it” (117). He thus casts French Universalism as an imperialist tool, a reading supported by the historical connection between the French universalist paradigm and its mission civilisatrice. With any claims of “inclusion” from colonial powers therefore undermined, the colonizing configuration of center and periphery is equally unsustainable, and along with it its model for ontological control. The metropole is thus not necessary as a centralized mediator for exchange between the regions it has colonized, allowing Lionnet and Shih’s model of horizontal, transnational exchange possible. As Lionnet and Shih state, “the transnational can be conceived as a space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridization occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center” (5). Where this conceptualization of transnationalism interrogates hybridity as the model for relationality, the oceanic framework I propose instead sees this relation as fluid, a shift that emphasizes the continuous currents of relationality, perpetually circulating instead of finding even creole fixity. 9 From the structure of regional centers in francophone studies, we turn to geographic relationality in transpacific studies, a relatively nascent discipline that has nonetheless gained significant ground in recent years. From its beginnings according to the common trajectory of Western area studies (with Western scholars developing knowledge about non-Western subjects – an outside-in approach), the discipline of transpacific studies has taken a critical eye to Western knowledge creation. Current trends center indigenous epistemologies and site-specific knowledge – an approach that situates the Pacific region not as an object of study but a space from which ontologies themselves emerge. However, transpacific studies persists as an umbrella term that encompasses several critical approaches that center different subjects and concerns in their critique. In their 2014 anthology Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, editors Janet Alison Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen conceptualize the field as drawing from Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies. This formulation invests critical engagement in the “geopolitical struggle over the region.” This model of transpacific studies thus situates Pacific Island nations as strategic sites, reifying the lack of agency accomplished in the militarization the discipline seeks to critique. It further stratifies the oceanic region, dividing island nations according to their strategic value and historical (and generally colonially imposed) alliances. In contrast to this framework that casts the islands of the Pacific as isolated spaces separated by a vast expanse of sea, critical frameworks that center Oceania allow us to conceptualize the ocean as the medium of exchange it existed for people of the region long before European intervention. The very term “Oceania” was posited by Epeli Hau’ofa in his germinal essay “Our Sea of Islands” in 1994, where he cast the islands of the Pacific Ocean as interconnected spaces facilitated by their shared oceanic space: a sea of islands instead of islands 10 in a vast sea. The oceanic critique I propose aligns closely with this formulation, further positing the fluidity of the oceanic space as a model for analysis. Even within this field of transpacific studies, however, francophone Oceania has been historically marginalized in a discipline dominated by anglophone texts and theorizations. Its engagement with literature is similarly focused on tropes omnipresent in the anglophone corpus, such as interregional connection and migration. Separated by different colonially-imposed languages, francophone and anglophone Oceania continue to rebuild historic routes of exchange and community interrupted by colonial domination; the oceanic formulation I propose offers a generative model in that vein, tracing how texts from francophone Oceania engage with the language of the colonizer, how the structure of the literary community supports crossing the linguistic divide, and interrogating the multifaceted possibilities of translation and regional circulation of its texts. The oceanic turn is predicated on the ontological porosity of these spaces and mobilizes that porosity for generative critique. In each of these interconnected disciplines, then, an oceanic model not only allows for the ontological intersectionality that already exists but centers those intersections as foundational to regional identity and function. This model finds common cause with other models of critique predicated on oceanic milieux, most notably as concerns the Atlantic. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic stands as a foundational study along an oceanic perspective, and it brings into question the legacy of Enlightenment philosophy in a manner similar to the way Lionnet and Shih question the structure of center/periphery in the treatment of “minor” literature. Even as he engages with spaces about which extensive scholarship has been produced, Gilroy reorients our view of how to understand culture, historically represented and presently experienced. Though he explicitly sets himself in conversation (and disagreement) with cultural studies, particularly in 11 the English context, his critique remains relevant to my own investigation of the texts at hand. He elucidates “conceptual problems common to English and African-American versions of cultural studies which… share a nationalist focus that is antithetical to the rhizomorphic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation I call the black Atlantic” (4). The primacy of the nation is, again, undermined for a rhizomic understanding of cultural flows. The Black Atlantic addresses marginalized narratives within a dominant region of the world, but Higgins discussion (and rejection) of the “cultural insiderism” that results from centering the nation as model for critique is especially relevant here. (3) Where he has “settled on the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for [his] starting point,” I take the ocean itself to inspire the framework for my critique. In order to read literature along an oceanic framework, I interrogate how voice, form, community, and circulation come together in productive and innovative ways. How do these interconnecting aspects of literature and its consumption contribute to a fluid understanding of that literature’s intervention? I argue that these represent oceanic aspects of the texts to be considered here, and the chapters of this project reflect those specific analytical commitments. Chapter overview The first chapter, “V oice,” interrogates three aspects of how language appears in texts from Tahitian and Kanak authors. V oice is a critical component of contemporary Oceanian literature reflecting the long tradition of oral literary expression that underpins the current corpus. In this chapter, I consider how each of three texts mobilizes voice in a way that disrupts colonial dynamics of linguistic domination and repression. The texts under consideration – 12 Chantal Spitz’s L’île des rêves écrasés, Déwé Gorodé’s L’épave, and Isa Qala’s La tribu des veuves – all negotiate ownership of voice in the face of violence and tragedy. I engage with each piece along three facets: language, orality, and silence. Each of these I consider within the frame of transversion, a term I read in its historical and etymological multivalence. In terms of language, I use transversion to characterize the linguistic idiom of the texts as crossing over from French to the autochthonous languages that permeate the corpus. This crossing over (as opposed to moving between) I contrast with creole models of critique, arguing that the specific linguistic situations of both French Polynesia and New Caledonia require different models as the relationship between colonial and autochthonous language differs significantly from the interpenetration of créolité. I further look to transversion in terms of politics, reading Nira Yuval-Davis as she describes the dialogue of participants in transversal politics as one of advocacy instead of representation. This allows us to consider each text in its own specificity instead of reducing it to representative archetype. Finally, I read transversion in terms of performance studies, in which it informs our understanding of the oral aspects of these written texts. Instead of positing opposition between oral and written literature, we see how the oral texture of these works connects both aspects of “oraliture” by rejecting the dichotomy as artificial in itself. As the third aspect of voice in this chapter, silence is read as agency and prioritization of community, productively bringing separate communities into a communal space in a model that echoes the fluidity of the oceanic framework that underpins each reading. These diverse readings of transversion continue in my second chapter, which takes form as its central tenant. This chapter looks to the etymologically original use of transversion as the movement between prose and verse, another dichotomy that my reading of the Oceanian corpus 13 rejects as artificial. This chapter considers tenants of formalism in literary theory, arguing that the form of these texts allows them to “dire autrement,” critically intervening in the transmission of meaning through literary medium. In this chapter, I consider formalistic characteristics of several texts from the oeuvres of Chantal Spitz, Déwé Gorodé, and Titaua Peu as they navigate colonially imposed “mutismes” that have long undermined autochthonous literary creation. This chapter takes the oeuvre of each author to consider how its formal characteristics intervene alongside the context of the texts. For Spitz’s work, I read the transgeneric nature of her texts as they interrupt traditional Western categories of genre in a transversion of literary texture. I specifically read her collection of short stories, Cartes postales, in its poetic texture, arguing that her characteristic poetic prose supports a more conscientious reading of this text and of her work more generally. For Gorodé’s body of texts, I consider a transversion of authorial subjectivity, positing her poetry as deeply invested in communal creation. Her partnerships in creating poetry with fellow poets Nicolas Kurtovitch and Imasango present clear examples of shared authorship, but I trace this commitment to community to her early poetry as well, written while alone in prison but as a call to communal arms. In the final section of the chapter, I consider the formal choices made in Peu’s two novels, Mutismes and Pina, which I argue mobilize opacity as resistance to the violence they recount. In narrating stories that obfuscate violent experiences – be they the effects of French nuclear testing in French Polynesia or intimate family violence – Peu asserts agency over readerly understanding, taking back the stories by telling them “autrement.” The third chapter of this project zooms out from the macro lens of close reading to consider the literary community from which the corpus under consideration emerges. To do so, I explore how each of three different forums support the fluid exchange and commitment to 14 community that defines our oceanic model. These forums – an academic conference, a salon du livre, and a literary journal – all follow the path of literary renaissance that opened this introduction, and their structures support the oceanic community. I read both Hau’ofa’s “Our Sea of Islands” as well as Anaïs Maurer’s discussion of “Océanitude” to define the contours of an oceanic consciousness. It is a horizontal framework that seeks to restore routes of exchange interrupted by colonial divide, particularly linguistically. What each forum demonstrates is the community’s dedication to crossing that divide through literary media, finding mutual comprehensibility. Both conference and salon took place in Tahiti in November 2022, and this chapter follows my own experience at each event while simultaneously reading that experience as it reflects a community connected by this immense material medium of the ocean. The most significant divide in these contexts was indeed linguistic: scholars and writers from both francophone and anglophone spaces were present in significant number. Instead of expecting each participant to contribute regardless of linguistic limitations, speakers and audiences were brought together through live interpretation into both French and English, a shared experience of navigating comprehensibility that performatively connected these otherwise separate idioms. In the case of the literary journal, Littérama’ohi, the connection over potential division is inscribed in sections explicitly dedicated to authors from different Oceanian spaces as well as a special section recounting a recent event in which an outrigger canoe was sailed from French Polynesia to New Zealand using traditional navigation methods in order to participate in an anniversary celebration of contact between the two populations. Both the use of traditional methods of navigation (common across Oceanian cultures) and the celebration of a shared history of contact attest to the oceanic nature of the literary community. 15 Finally, a fourth chapter considers how the circulation of francophone texts from and within Oceania informs our reading of those texts and points towards a future of ever greater connection within the region. Here again I look to the francophone/anglophone divide in literary Oceania as a space of difficulty as well as possibility, considering the history and future of translation within the region. I also consider dynamics of publishing as it currently takes place in both French Polynesia and New Caledonia as well as the relationship between publishing in those spaces and the anglophone spaces of New Zealand and Australia. With a significant history of translation emerging from those spaces, and slowly making its way to the US and France as well, the circulation of Oceanian literature continues to expand. This chapter also considers two formulations of navigating oceanic space according to literary dynamics. In the first, I read Kareva Mateata-Allain’s discussion of literature as a metaphorical va’a (canoe) in traversing oceanic expanses and reestablishing historic routes of exchange in the region. What entities guide the trajectory of these routes, and what does literature convey in traversing them? I further read two recent publications from francophone Oceania to trace this trope in its contemporary manifestation. For the second formulation, I read Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s generative discussion of “routes and roots” guiding a tidalectic interrogation of literature from oceanic spaces. How does literature resolve the presumed tension between rootedness and the routes an oceanic model inspires? What possibilities does that imply for further iterations of oceanic critique? A final conclusion offers comments on the celebratory nature of Oceanian literature as well as possible avenues for its continued reading. Ultimately, the oceanic model I propose is itself fluid; it swirls and eddies, crashes and withdraws. Its intervention is an invitation to see the currents that underpin how we read and 16 know, a means of navigating across a vast expanse that is also a place of interaction. To know an ocean of possibilities, beyond the sea that separates. 17 Chapter 1 Voice: Transversion, Orality, and Silence j’écris ce que j’ai envie d’écrire dans l’illusion d’écrire de ma propre voix dans une vaine tentative d’indépendance face à une société peureuse comme un constant exil — Chantal Spitz, Pensées insolentes et inutiles In the epigraph to her 2006 collection of essays and poetry, Pensées insolentes et inutiles, Tahitian writer Chantal Spitz describes her writing situation and its inherent contradiction. As a writer in French Polynesia, one of France’s collectivités d’outre-mer (COMs), Spitz occupies a liminal space in the literary francosphere, a postcolonial territory still largely under colonial control. She writes in French, the language imposed onto the people of French Polynesia by the French since their colonization of the islands in the nineteenth century. Like many writers from francophone Oceania, Spitz is estranged from writing in the language specific to her community, insufficiently fluent in Tahitian to establish it as her main language of expression and subject to the reality that texts in French are more easily published and more widely read. Spitz writes that her community more generally feels this pressure and estrangement of language, one source of a broader situation of fear alluded to in this epigraph. Caught between writing what she wants and the inaccessibility of her own voice, Spitz seeks independence even as she is faced with this community in fear. She is in a state of estrangement, of alienation and isolation even in this act of agency and resistance. And still, she writes. Following this auto-epigraph is a volume of work that attests to the social and political engagement that has defined her career as writer and public intellectual, dedicated to bringing attention to the continued colonial situation in her country and the metropole’s exploitation of its 18 residents. Spitz is a central figure in her literary community; from her position as the first Mā’ohi writer to publish a novel to her role in co-founding the literary magazine Littéramā’ohi, her work and advocacy amplifies Mā’ohi voices. The voice that comes through in her own work is distinctive and direct, and as a public intellectual she captures the immediacy of the issues she addresses. Spitz’s voice is foundational to the development of her literary community, and it is the work of this chapter to reconcile this tentpole of a voice with the “illusion” of ownership that Spitz articulates. I propose that through careful negotiation and strategic appropriation of languages in her work, Spitz reconfigures the dynamics of control inherent in using the colonizer’s language – writing “what she wants to write” even if in a voice, or language, over which she does not have ownership. This chapter will further explore two other writers from the francophone Pacific, Déwé Gorodé and Isa Qala, who similarly mobilize the voices in their work in a way that disrupts the colonial dynamics of linguistic domination and repression. Negotiating ownership over voice takes different forms for each of these authors. I will first discuss more fully the inherent tension of using an imposed, colonizer’s language to challenge that imposition and the broader violence of colonialism it represents. While each of these works is written primarily in French, central to the authors’ intervention is their manipulation of that language to assert a profoundly oceanic position, a challenge to the rigidity and exclusion that French literature and canon represent and an investment in fostering literary community and tradition across the francophone Pacific. In her essay “Traversées océaniennes,” Spitz writes of the particularity of the expansion of literature in Oceania, arguing that, “la solidarité entre auteurs est d’autant plus intense que beaucoup d’écrivains sont engagés dans une recherche d’écriture porteuse d’océanité non seulement dans le contenu mais aussi dans la 19 forme.” 6 She asserts this “oceanic” writing despite the multitude of colonial oppressions suffered across Oceania, particularly the francophone community, which, unlike its anglophone counterpart, remains largely under colonial control. Despite the disconnect enacted by European conquest and linguistic barriers, Spitz asserts “les peuples océaniens ont toujours su garder des liens culturels forts et de nombreux échanges ont sillonné le Pacifique.” (32) The expansion of the francophone Oceanian literary community in the early 2000s strengthened these ties, underpinning the connections between authors we will explore in this and subsequent chapters. In this chapter, I will engage with three forms of intervention in voice that appear in diverse forms in each of three novels. To begin, we will pick up with Spitz’s foundational work, L’île des rêves écrasés, where two idioms contribute to what I will term a “transversion” of voice across languages. For Spitz, this interaction between languages is one of irreconcilable opposition, though the movement between linguistic idioms looks different for each of the three authors to be discussed. Then, in a discussion of orality, I will look, for one, at La Tribu des veuves, a short novel by Kanak author Isa Qala that brings forth the oral texture crucial to telling the story of mysterious deaths and the young girl unknowingly connected to them. Qala, a native of the New Caledonian island Lifou and a language teacher as well as a writer, is a less well- established author than Spitz or Gorodé, but her work represents a growing group of younger authors that has emerged in the literary communities of francophone Oceania since the early 2000s. Gorodé and Spitz each treat the oral texture of their works in specific and performative interventions. Finally, I will turn to the motif of silence as it appears throughout these novels. One example occurs in the layered narratives of Déwé Gorodé, an author of similar prominence as Spitz. Gorodé is also known as the first indigenous author to publish a novel in her region, 6 Chantal Spitz, “Traversées océaniennes” Multitudes 30.3, 2007: 29-36, 33-34. 20 though her body of work and her prominence in her community has taken many forms. While Spitz has been a vocal activist and public intellectual, Gorodé’s trajectory has put her more directly in the political world, where she held the position of Minister of Culture as well as Vice President of New Caledonia. Her first novel, L’épave, is a story written in spiral whose use of storytelling reveals the power of a voice once it goes quiet. Silence is to be found in our other two novels as well, though the motive functions differently for each story. I give each of these texts as an example, but it is a crucial point of this project that engagement with these three concepts is present in and shaped by each of the texts in question, and many others besides. These works represent a state of literature that resists categorization and its character of exclusivity, allowing us space to imagine a fluid, oceanic process of literary creation and experience. This chapter explores how members of the literary community of both French Polynesia and New Caledonia manifest their own voice even through the language of the colonizer, telling their own stories in narrative and textually performative ways. Language of the colonizer A defining aspect of language for each text discussed here is their status as “francophone”; though that categorization is undeniably complicated in each case, French accounts for the majority language used in each text and serves here as the point of departure for considering the mobilization of language to resist colonial domination. Spitz has written of her relationship to French as the colonizer’s language in Pensées insolentes et inutiles in which she states, “Langue familière délibérément imposée dès la naissance… Langue de mon écrit non parce qu’élue mais parce que la seule maîtrisée… Langue de mon écrit non parce que je m’y reconnais pais [sic] parce que je m’y transcris” (36). French is a language of necessity for Spitz 21 and for many of her fellow authors of the region, a situation which reflects the linguistic reality of the broader population. French is the official language for both French Polynesia and New Caledonia as constituents of the DOM-TOM and thus part of the Republic, but autochthonous 7 languages continue to be an important part of daily life for many. In French Polynesia, Tahitian is spoken by roughly a quarter of the population, and, with French, serves as sort of common tongue. In New Caledonia, however, none of the twenty-eight Kanak languages is spoken widely enough to serve that role across the population. French was imposed as the sole language of instruction in New Caledonia until the 1980s when it began to enter progressively into the schools; in 2005 the primary school curriculum allowed for parents to choose for their children to be educated in a Kanak language for a few hours each week. In French Polynesia, French was imposed as the sole language of instruction until 1977, and in 1980 Tahitian was recognized by the Republic as a second official language of the territory. With the resonances of this historical domination continuing to shape the linguistic reality in their communities, writers from (post)colonial spaces must grapple with how to raise their own voices with an imperially imposed tool. As Marie Salaün has put it in regards to New Caledonia, “Comment peut-on dénoncer l’oppression française (car telle est bien la portée des textes publiés pendant et depuis les événements, 8 la littérature kanak étant une littérature résolument ‘engagée’) en le faisant dans la langue de l’oppresseur?” (144) One solution explored in these texts is a molding of that language to support the authors’ own projects. Reappropriation of the colonizer’s language has long been an important tool of the (post)colonial writer; Glissant’s theorization is of particular interest here, his discussions of 7 I use “autochthonous” here as a term to reflect languages and personal subjectivities connected to the Mā’ohi and Kanak communities, in echo of Spitz’s use of the term autochtone in her own writing. 8 “Les événéments” refers to a period of armed conflict between Kanak independence fighters and French armed forces from 1984-1988, culminating in the Matignon Accords. 22 créolité and relation articulating how language can be mobilized in the context of colonial suppression and cultural erasure. As Glissant explains, language is never a static entity and is thus profoundly connected to and influenced by its implementation, its experience. Creolization is the linguistic manifestation of his “poétique de la relation” which sees culture as in a perpetual state of exchange, rendering the dominating language – the language of the colonizer – porous to those who mobilize it. In Caribbean Discourse (Le discours antillais) Glissant asserts, “In the face of the numbed linguistic sterility imposed on Martinicans, the writer’s function is perhaps to propose language as shock, language as antidote, a nonneutral one, through which the problems of the community can be restated” (190). He continues later, “Within this possible framework, use of language would match the relationship with the wider community, without being alienated because of its contact with a distant culture” (193). This theory of porosity and exchange aligns with the manipulation of the colonizer’s language in the Pacific region as well as within the specificity of the Caribbean that characterizes Glissant’s theorization, but there are important divergences between the linguistic realities of the Caribbean and Pacific francophone spaces that inform how these interventions take shape. Central to the practical experience of porosity in Glissant’s formulation is the Creole linguistic idiom that underpins his broader reading of créolité and its mobilization. Creole exists in concrete and regionally ubiquitous ways outside its theorization, and, while its theorization as historical mobilization undoubtedly resonates across regional specificity, the lived linguistic experience in the francophone Pacific diverges significantly. Autochthonous languages in French Polynesia and New Caledonia have not interpenetrated with French to produce a full, current creole idiom; while there is limited influence between the languages on a syntactical level, their 23 lexical textures remain largely unchanged. 9 Because of this, autochthonous languages in Oceania have not shifted to develop a resonance with the French idiom; languages like Tahitian and Drehu (a language spoken mainly on the New Caledonian island of Lifou), for example, remain entirely unfamiliar to the monolingual francophone. The use of Pacific languages within the largely francophone writing in the texts to be discussed here creates a visual and aural contrast instead of connection. In her discussion of Tahitian, French, and “translanguaging” (a term we will return to below) in Spitz’s work, Natalie Edwards states, “The [Tahitian] words… have a different shape entirely from the French language prose… Tahitian… is in no way comprehensible to the Francophone reader… The text is predicated upon an aesthetic of incomprehensibility” (118). While each author treats this contrast differently, I will characterize the relationship between French and non-French idioms in these works as “transversal” and mobilize the idea of transversion to engage with the authors’ various methods. Transverse voice The historical and etymological content of the term “transverse” situates it well for a multivalent interpretation, and I will use the term transversal to characterize not just the language used in the novels discussed in this chapter but more broadly the engagement this corpus makes with conveying meaning across language, genre, subjectivity, and space. The term offers several productive shades of meaning from diverse fields. Most readily to mind for anglophones, “transverse” is both an adjective and verb referring to the relationship between objects or bodies where at least one lies across the other(s). Figuratively, it can mean to act or speak against, to 9 For a further linguistic exploration of language contact between Tahitian and French, see Susan Love, “Possessive constructions in a language contact situation: Tahitian French”. Monash University Linguistics Papers. Vol. 4 No. 1, 2005, 83-93, or her dissertation, The vernacular French of the Society Islands, French Polynesia: A study in language contact and variation. (March 2006). 24 thwart or even to transgress. It can also mean to transform. While several shades of meaning have fallen largely to disuse, the semiotic content preserved in the term serves us here as we consider a body of literature that is at once related and separate. In this chapter, we look most closely at how language is articulated in the three words introduced above. To do so, I situate my use of the term across its use in linguistics and critical theory. Linguistically, transversion refers to moving between languages. It is often contrasted with transference and convergence, linguistic processes in which languages become more like one another. Transversion is more akin to code-switching, and Michael Clyne identifies the utility of “transversion” as a theoretical term as, “it enables us to express ‘crossing over’ to the other language rather than alternating between languages” (76, emphasis original). There is a situatedness within a linguistic system inherent in the idea of linguistic transversion, a situatedness that aligns with my consideration of the relationship between autochthonous languages and French. Because of the relative lack of interpenetration between these idioms, transversion is an appropriate means of discussing their divergence from literature in other geographical nodes of francophone literature and theory where a creole idiom has emerged. In the realm of critical theory, transversal describes a coming together without sacrificing the individual. In terms of transversal politics, Nira Yuval-Davis uses the term to describe understanding across subjectivities while maintaining one’s own situatedness. “Transversal politics are dialogical politics in which all the participants in the dialogue see themselves not as representatives but as advocates of particular collectivities and social categories.” 10 Political agents are brought together through a shared core of values instead of specific political projects. I am particularly interested in this shade of transversion regarding the authors and their literary 10 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Recognition, Intersectionality and Transversal Politics”. Recognition as Key for Reconciliation. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017. 157-167. 163. 25 projects, each with its own intervention but motivated by common ground. In another shade of critical theory, Bryan Reynolds has written on transversality in terms of theatre and performance, categorizing “Transversal poetics” as “emphasiz[ing] positive formulations of consciousness, desire, subjectivity, identity, expression, meaning, and so on” (287). While we will explore this side of transversion more fully in a later chapter, this explanation aligns with the oceanic framework that forms the basis of my intervention with francophone literature from Oceania; this corpus of texts demonstrates a process of exchange resistant to the centrifugal system of colonial control. I further argue that the term offers up more tools to discuss the relationship between oral and written work – an exploration of continuation instead of opposition, which relates to these texts as emerging from long traditions of oral literature that continue to shape literary production in these spaces. Transversion in performance connects to the experience of the individual voice being subsumed in and taken up by the storyteller, a silence that is not silence but rather a becoming more than the singular. While the diverse application of “transverse” poses many potential paths of exploration, the intersection of linguistics, politics, and performance forms the basis for exploring a transverse voice. In later chapters, we will also consider transversion in the realm of genre as well as its resonance in postcolonial studies. For the moment, let us understand its importance as a means to bring together separate entities into a communal space. It is a process of communal creation without a reductive unification. It is across, it is horizontal, it is unbounded and nonhierarchical and can therefore serve as a useful framework for considering the distinct voices of the three authors at hand as well as the methods they employ to manifest the voices of their stories in performative and provocative ways. 26 For Chantal Spitz, the juxtaposition between Tahitian and French is foundational to her work from the first pages of L’île des rêves écrasés. While the majority of this novel is written in French, the first five pages of text are in Tahitian, and in verse. These pages are not translated anywhere, nor is their content summarized or referenced in the rest of the work, despite a glossary of Tahitian terms appended to the end of later editions. 11 The Tahitian text recounts the creation of the world according to Polynesian myth, establishing from the very beginning the interconnectedness of the Mā’ohi and the land they inhabit. This Tahitian text is followed by two pages of exclusively French prose retelling the creation of the world according to Christian mythology, a sequence which similarly positions as foundational the connection between French and colonization as well as the juxtaposition and even confrontation between Tahitian and French. The languages here act as proxies of the peoples they represent. The beginning of this confrontation plays out in the Prologue that follows these two initial interludes. The Prologue, which is written mostly in French but with italicized Tahitian words appearing throughout, recounts the prophesizing of the arrival of white outsiders and then the violent realization of that prophesy. Though the prophesy tells of how the colonizers will take over the land and overturn the established order, these words are forgotten, and the Mā’ohi offer their love to these newcomers, “Amour infini, devenu douleur et larmes” (18). The Prologue recounts the successive implementation of the colonizer’s religion and political domination on the fictive island of Ruahine, and both the land and animals shed tears of lament: “Ô mon peuple, la parole est devenue réalité, et nous pleurons” (18). Ta’aroa, god of creation, looks down on the devasted 11 As far as I have been able to find, there is no published translation of this section, nor is it easily translatable without some training in the language. The content has been briefly glossed in critical works addressing the novel, and explanations of the histories of the gods named in the passage can be found, in some cases, in either French or English, as can more general explanations of Polynesian origin mythos. My own access to the content of this passage has been limited to these avenues as well as the bilingual Tahitian-French dictionary available online through Fare Vāna’a, the Académie Tahitienne: http://www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php. 27 land and equally laments the loss: “’Auē quelle douleur! / Je regarde mes enfants orphelins / Je regarde mon peuple déchiré / Je regarde mon corps dévasté.” (24) Before the narrative of the novel is even begun, these three initial pieces thus set up a dichotomy of peace and violence enacted in the colonization of the islands. That colonization is illustrated linguistically as the autochthonous language and religion are supplanted in the recounting of Christian world creation. The two idioms meet in the Prologue as the two peoples they represent make first contact with one another, and, from the beginning, it is a relationship of domination and supplanting. The French and Tahitian words do not come together to form a new idiom, a creole entity, but remain visually and aurally separate, the Tahitian words marked by their italicized appearance and glottal stops: “vahine” and “tāne mā’ohi” contrasted with “dame” and “homme blanc(he).” The linguistic process here is one of transversion, not convergence. The linguistic movement is echoed in the form of the text, the Tahitian pages appearing in verse and the following French section as prose; this juxtaposition will be continued within the body of the novel as verses of Tahitian interludes interrupt the prosaic French text. From the outset, then, Spitz confronts the reader with this irreconcilability between reo Mā’ohi and French even as she recounts their initial contact, doomed to violence and domination. In her discussion of Spitz’s “translanguaging,” Edwards argues that, as the text sets up an “aesthetic of incomprehensibility,” these open pages, “become a performance of othering the non-Tahitian-speaking-reader, confronting them with their ignorance of at least this language and possibly also the culture from which it emanates” (118-119). Translanguaging, a term developed in the bilingual classroom to describe “the process of making meaning, shaping experiences, gaining understanding and knowledge through the use of two languages,” 12 here seeks to maintain opacity even as it 12 Gwyn Lewis, Bryn Jones, and Colin Baker, “Translanguaging: developing its conceptualization and contextualisation”. Educational Research and Evaluation. Vol. 18, No. 7, Oct. 2012, 655-670, 655. 28 produces new meaning. This method further alienates the reader from a Western romanticized version of the islands as a welcoming and accessible place; the fictional island of Ruahine is imbued with the language and culture of the historical space it represents, and its inhabitants are faced with the real violence of colonial invasion and repression. The opacity of the language affords its subjects some ontological protection. The juxtaposition set up in the initial pages of the novel echoes throughout the rest of the story, which follows the family of Tematua as they are wrenched from their ancestral land that is then used by the metropole for nuclear testing. The opposition between French and Tahitian plays out in the action of the story and the lives of its characters. The major conflict of the story, the occupation of Mā’ohi land by colonial settlers, chronicled in the prologue, is given modern specificity as Tematua’s family is displaced from their ancestral land to make way for a nuclear testing site. This is a violation beyond surface displacement, as the family’s rootedness to the land is established in the first pages after the Prologue with the planting of Tematua’s placenta in the earth: “Union de l’homme à la terre dans laquelle il plonge ses racines, union de la terre à l’homme qui fait jaillir de son ventre la nourriture de l’homme” (31). When the French nuclear testing takes over the land, then, it not only displaces the family and alienates them from their ancestral land but literally poisons the entity that is both synecdoche and symbiose for that family. Even after the testing is complete, the family is never able to return. The transverse quality of the novel goes beyond the juxtaposition of Tahitian and French idioms. As mentioned above, the contrasting texture of verse and prose is maintained throughout the novel in a continuation of its establishment alongside the two languages as they are used in the first pages of the text. This, too, represents a manipulation of largely Western rules of acceptable literary production, especially in regard to the privileged literary form of the novel. 29 The categorization of L’île des rêves écrasés as a novel has been important to its consumption as the “first Mā’ohi francophone novel,” but we have already seen how this novel is made up of frequent poetic interludes and staging pieces in the form of creation myth and prophecy. While the narrative of the main story is united under an omniscient third-person narrator, we hear the voices of many characters throughout the novel outside of typical dialogue. In fact, there is relatively little traditional dialogue in this story. We instead have access to the thoughts and interactions of the characters through letters, diary entries, poems, and soliloquies that appear often without framing. These non-prosaic interludes appear in various forms, sometimes italicized, sometimes not. Edwards suggests in her analysis that how these interludes appear is simply used to “def[y] the reader’s expectations, preventing any stable pattern of reading in this resolutely non-Western text” (127). While I certainly agree that the dizzying change of voice and form, represented so starkly on the page, furthers the alienation of the reader that begins from the first pages of the novel, I would argue that the presentation of these interludes does indeed follow a precise logic of contrasting the Mā’ohi voice with the non-Mā’ohi (and often French) voice. While the body of the work is written in French with the occasional Tahitian word or phrase highlighted with italics, the interludes in verse situate voices speaking for the Mā’ohi (la parole, as we will see in the next section of this chapter) in normal type while all other interludes (including the diary entries of a French nuclear worker, radio announcements, and a poem from an English paramour) are presented in italics. This distinction between Mā’ohi and non-Mā’ohi voices further upsets the primacy of French metropolitan writing even while employing French as its language of expression. It is a critical resolution for an author who has written “l’urgence de mon écrire-sinon-mourir s’aggravait de mon incapacité à suffisamment maîtriser le Tahitien pour composer des textes honorables” (Pensées, 155). 30 We move in our discussion of the transversal voice from L’île des rêves écrasés to Déwé Gorodé’s debut novel L’épave, where the transversal manifests as a fluidity in the subjectivity between characters. The comparison between the two novels is generative; L’épave was also marketed as the “first novel,” this time of a Kanak author in New Caledonia. Where Spitz is a titan of the literary sphere and public intellectual in French Polynesia, Gorodé has been a major player in the political world of New Caledonia (a founding member of a Kanak independence party in the 1970s, serving several years as the Vice President of the New Caledonian government, and the Minister of Culture of New Caledonia since 2009) as well as a dedicated writer. The two novels are both also among the very few to have been translated into English, which has contributed to their being two of the most read francophone literary texts from this region. The divergences between these texts are just as interesting, however, and we begin with how the autochthonous voices appear. Spitz unfurls a family saga, the progression of characters as linear as a family tree. While each member of Tematua’s family is related back to their forebearers upon their introduction, they all have distinct subjectivities that resonate in their own voices. Transversion between languages and voices occurs in the juxtaposition of these characters, especially as they align with circumstances on either line of the colonized/colonizer divide. In L’épave, the characters and their narratives unfurl and rewind in a spiral of muddled subjectivities and settings. While the main story of Spitz’s text follows a straight narrative path, the narrative of Gorodé’s text is layered. Homonymic characters across generations see their plot lines cross and blur, breaking down the integrity of individual personhood even as those characters are set into conflict with one another. The “wreck” of the title is itself at once a dream motif and mythological site as well as a literal crashed boat and a physical formation of black rock on the ocean’s shore. The result is 31 a novel in palimpsest, a narrative in echoes, with recurring nodes in which the layers align to reveal their multiplicity: “Issue d’ancêtres constructeurs de pirogues, maman Léna porte le nom de celles-ci dans sa langue. C’est aussi le nom d’un lieu, au bord de la mer, où coule une cascade. C’est le lien à la terre qui définit l’identité” (95). The names and places of the story manifest in the flow of the waterfall in this passage, the succession not just the descendants with shared names but the inheritance of sites of past violence. In terms of the transversal, we return to performance theory. As Reynolds explains, Whether consciously or not, when a subject becomes a transversal agent, she actively permeates and makes permeable the parameters of her subjective territory and generates a continuously shifting series of conditions that challenge the underlying structures of her individuality and social identity. (286) These “permeable parameters” manifest not just between characters but from the very spaces they inhabit, and the transversal nature of voice appears as a further porosity of subjecthood across characters. Léna – or, more appropriately, one of the Lénas – is the main character of the story, the one whose progression the reader follows. The narrative follows and swirls around her as we learn of those of her name who came before her and how she seems to come upon those events from the past as she hurtles towards the violence of her future. While she is the main character, a second character with multiple homonymic avatars is Tom, the voice that begins the novel and the entity that often appears as the agent of violence against Léna. A main thread of narrative follows a mystery as Léna slowly remembers (or comes to terms with) an episode of incestuous violation that occurred in her childhood, and the story ends with her killing a Tom avatar even as their children (also named Tom and Léna) play nearby. The family tree of this novel is decidedly less straightforward. This extraordinary porosity of subjecthood in L’épave allows the reader to trace the violence perpetrated not through individual incidence but through communal 32 experience. The violence of the story is almost entirely sexual in nature and perpetrated by men against women. Undoubtedly, the layering of several women’s experiences together strengthens the voice of the individual by lending her credibility, but stripping away the individual nature of the issue deprives the reader of the comfort of separation. The specificity of the narrative confines it to its particular setting, but both setting and subject blur together. Gorodé is thus able to highlight both while maintaining the communal voice central to her intervention. While L’île des rêves écrasés alienates the reader linguistically, L’épave leaves the reader radically exposed by the porous subjectivity of the voices and experiences of its characters. The porosity between voices echoes further in the texture of the writing of the novel. As in L’île des rêves écrasés, the text of L’épave is interspersed with non-prosaic interludes: dream sequences, recited stories, poems, rap lyrics, and even graffiti. The instances of non-French terms and phrases are glossed in footnotes and remain unitalicized in the text, but these textual interludes are italicized and take many forms that interrupt the appearance of the text itself, cultivating a kaleidoscopic visual idiom. Many of these interludes also embrace the multiplicity of voices; the first lines of the page-long graffiti read “J t m mi amour for ever. J TDR RBL signé JVS. T KIRO BLACK LOVE BLACK MAGIC WOMAN dixit SANTANA ABRAXAS. AMR rime avec TJR…” (44-45). Here we see a range of linguistic and writing styles, clearly marking this uninterrupted transcription as the work of several authors. It challenges our assumptions that writing (and language) is meant to convey meaning from the writer to the reader; the point of this graffiti is not to be widely understood but to make one’s mark, or (more accurately) to add one’s mark to the group. In incorporating this “transcription” into her novel, Gorodé reifies the intention of those who created the original graffiti, be they fictional or real. Not only is their 33 mark made on this specific space, but the community that is represented by that graffiti finds a much wider stage for their creation. The multivocal text also lends itself to multiple readings. When the storyteller Lila dies, several pages are taken up with various textual performances at her funeral, culminating in her epitaph as written by several of her friends. The first few lines alone demonstrate the fluidity of meaning, a manipulation of voice that echoes the transversal, porous subjectivity of the novel as a whole: Épitaphe pour Lila Ci-gît oralité oralité Lila féminine sans fin Surgie de femme pour le sort pour dire mal famée des mères l’oralité affamée de la terre (83) The words are unhooked from each other, unmooring them from a fixed sequence that would afford them linear sense. Instead, a constellation of words lends itself to being read in multiple directions, significations shifting, blurring, and reformulating. Reading the text by column centers Lila as the subject being mourned: “Ci-gît Lila, surgie pour dire l’oralité...” An epitaph about an unusual woman who dedicated herself to the spoken word. If the text is read horizontally, though, the epitaph shifts to express mourning for orality itself, enshrining the oral nature of the text in its repetition like a refrain: “Ci-gît oralité oralité Lila. Féminine sans fin, surgie de femme pour le sort…” This reading highlights orality as a feminine practice, a connection echoed not only in this novel – with the storytellers that guide Léna in her search – but more broadly by the strong community of women writers in francophone Oceania. Furthermore, the text could be read in any direction, the nouns and adjectives matched up in a multitude of meanings. Reading itself becomes a nonlinear activity, and once again the 34 separation between story and reader is muddled as the reader is made to participate in piecing together not just the story but the language of the novel itself. The novel may be written in French, but the language of the novel is destabilized from that fixed idiom. The language of the colonizer has been thoroughly bent to the will of the author. Where Spitz mobilizes linguistic transversion in a juxtaposition of voices, and Gorodé’s transversality of subject brings the layered voices of her characters into chorus, the third author considered here incorporates voices in her writing whose transversion occurs across the diegesis of the text. While Isa Qala’s short novel La Tribu des veuves contains text in both French and Drehu, the Kanak language spoken on the island of Lifou, the striking transversion of voice occurs not only between languages but within the diegetic status of the voices that appear. The story of the novel is told from the point of view of Amaris, a 14-year-old girl on the island of Lifou in New Caledonia as she grapples with the struggles of being a young woman whose voice doesn’t seem to count for much in her community. Her everyday troubles multiply when a vengeful spirit from her tribu’s past targets several men close to her, and Amaris is forced to contend with her own hidden history as the spirit pulls her into the contemporary reverberations of past violence. She has to come to terms with her place in the community in order to help both her tribu and the troubled spirits find peace. Though the story is told from Amaris’s point of view, the narration is largely in third-person; only at the beginning of every chapter do we hear Amaris through the first lines of her journal entries: “Cher journal, j’ai hâte de rejoindre ma mer… Cher journal, parfois le noir est si bizarre!” (15, 27) Amaris becomes the central actor in the conflict of the novel as she appears to be the only one situated to communicate with the vengeful spirits who perpetrate so much violence against her family. That conflict is ultimately 35 predicated on a lack of intergenerational communication, a community in which the young are not afforded a strong enough voice. Woven throughout the novel, however, are excerpts from songs, sometimes in French and sometimes in Drehu. These small interludes break up the page in verse and italics, each short stanza followed by song title and artist. In her dedication and forward, Qala writes, “Les parties en italique qui parcourent le roman sont extraites de chansons d’artistes de mon île, Lifou. Je voulais croiser leurs paroles à mes écrits ; ils se ressemblent tellement ! … C’est une volonté de ma part de ne pas les traduire, mais elles ont un lien étroit avec ce que j’ai écrit.” Nevertheless, the lyrical interludes occur outside the action of the story, and without that contextual grounding their content certainly needs interpretation. Once again, therefore, the linguistically non-initiated reader is unable to access the meaning of the interludes conveyed in the autochthonous language, especially as the songs they reference are nondiegetic. However, it is Qala’s intention that the reader find and listen to the songs online. 13 Not only does this make the tone of the songs available regardless of the reader’s linguistic abilities, the reader who tracks down the songs online becomes an active participant in the experience of the story. Even within the text, however, the songs multiply the voices present without introducing new characters, connecting the action of this supernatural tale more firmly to a real community and lived experience, even as the scope of the novel focuses on the experiences of a specific, fictional character. The inclusion of songs (and the voices that sing them) reflects a crucial aspect of Amaris’s characterization and evolution as well and lends power to her emerging voice. The songs are sometimes excerpts of music or verse that is important to the moment of the story being told (a prayer the story references as Amaris visits the graves of her ancestors, for 13 This is according to a conversation I had with her at the Salon du Livre in Paris, March 16, 2019, where she also performed a few of the songs excerpted in the novel. 36 instance), but they most often appear at moments of intense emotion for Amaris as she navigates frustration, new love, and loss within her community. In both cases, the songs imply voices that do not occur in the action of the novel but nevertheless support or inform the story being told from Amaris’s perspective. The progression of the story centers on Amaris’s strange connection to Oria, a young woman from the tribu who died by suicide many years before. The sprits of Oria and her grief-stricken father, Koa, haunt Amaris, unknowingly their descendant, and Amaris becomes both victim and unwitting accomplice of the violence enacted on her community by this “monde invisible.” The unseen voice captured in the musical references mirrors the unseen but keenly felt intervention of this ghostly presence, and the unresolved pain of Oria’s past haunts Amaris as she struggles with making space for her own voice in her community. The referenced songs are a textual counterpart to the echo of Oria’s subjectivity, doubling the tenor of Amaris’s affective response to her situation. As the story progresses, the songs reflect Amaris’s feelings of isolation: “À présent, voilà ce qui m’arrive / Je suis un radeau à la derive 14 ” (103). In the dénouement of the novel, once Amaris is able to explain what has happened to her and to her community during a meeting of the tribu (a scene we will return to in later sections), the tone of the songs shifts to one of community and celebration as the direction of the narrative shifts to one of reconciliation and acceptance. The nondiegetic songs haunt the novel in an echo of the unseen but keenly felt spectral forces that drive the action of the story. The reader is poised to observe these separate yet porous spaces, a text that unfolds between these distinct but connected voices. 14 “Le soleil se couche”, Nuqea 37 Orality and the written text The emphasis on voice as a medium to reconfigure and reappropriate language in the francophone Pacific novel goes beyond its relationship to idiom or characterization. This corpus of literature has a foundational relationship to literal, spoken voice in the long oral tradition that defines and shapes historical and continuing literary production in the region. The tradition of orality in both Mā’ohi and Kanak cultures is broader than the performance and passing of stories and is instead born of a profound investment in oral production and the power of sound. As Tahitian scholar Kareva Mateata-Allain explains, “Sensitivity to words and to sound vibration is essential in an Oceanic context. Once words are spoken, their energy is released into the atmosphere… Speaking and oration were highly privileged in pre-colonial Tahitian society, and this privilege is still entrenched in ancestral memory” (6). The importance of oral performance and tradition in Oceanic culture is pervasive, an encompassing disposition to the aural in both the everyday and the extraordinary. Its presence in written literature is therefore more than a continuation of a literary oral tradition; it is an investment in the broad cultural significance orality holds in shaping the stories these writers convey. Writer and Littéramā’ohi co-founder Flora Devatine employs the term “oraliture” to discuss this merging of oral and written tradition in the pursuit of communicating “an Oceanian consciousness.” 15 She treats the integration of the oral and written at length in her poetic work Tergiversation et Rêveries de l’Écriture Orale: Te Pahu a Hono’ura, a performative critical consideration of how these two forms meet in the literary community she has helped cultivate in French Polynesia. Western privileging of the written over the oral in literary production represents a profound colonial violence against the cultural production by indigenous artists and 15 As quoted in Julia Frengs Corporeal Archipelagos, (156). The term “oraliture” was first used by Guadeloupian poet Ernest Pépin at a round table discussion in May 2000 in the Ivory Coast. 38 has underpinned much of the marginalization of autochthonous literature in colonized spaces in general. This hierarchization sets the two forms in opposition, but their separation, Devatine argues, is artificial; orality provides the foundation for written literary production and informs its connection between past and present voices. “Ce que je tente en écrivant,” she writes, “Est-ce autant la reconquête / De la parole / Que l’apprivoisement / De l’écriture!” (37). She further explores how written production has contributed to her sense of “‘ma’ohitude’ / Ma polynésianité!” (143) Ultimately, “L’écriture m’a reliée à la parole!” (146) The written and the oral operate together, playing off each other, to produce a rich text. I quote Mateata-Allain’s explanation of this contrapuntal writing in the oceanic context here at some length: Writing, like land, is fixed within the margins of the page. Orality, on the other hand, is much like the Ocean, in that it provides a borderless space that is dynamic, energizing, and innovative. Should indigenous people recognize the validity of Orality, and engage in the blending of consciousness that Orality provides, they will transgress the confinement of emotional, stereotypical, psychological, colonial, social, linguistic and geo-political borders that stifle and inform the essence of their being. In essence, the fluidity of the sea is indicative of the infinite possibilities of the free flowing of ideas regardless of linguistic and stratifying histories. (6) If orality represents the ocean and writing the land, the promise of orality is that of the oceanic framework more generally: to break down the constructs of (Western) conventions in favor of a fluid conceptualization of literature, its production, and its consumption. Orality further represents a tool to resist the “confinement” of colonial repression in its many forms, a mobilization of indigenous tradition that furthers the project of contemporary cultural production and the cultivation of community. Orality does not appear as an additional attribute of the writing produced from Oceania but is instead at its foundation, and the writers discussed here mobilize it to create a diverse corpus of work. Orality takes various forms in our texts, the oral texture evident in several sections I have already explored. From the beginning, the opening interlude of L’île des rêves écrasés is 39 remarkable for several reasons beyond its use of untranslated Tahitian. This creation myth is written as if declaimed as a poem, recounted as a story, its oral nature emphasized by its appearance in verse as well as the ubiquitous apostrophes that indicate glottal stops in the pronunciation of the Tahitian words. From the very beginning, then, this “first indigenous novel,” as recognized by the metropolitan literary world, predicates itself on an oral form, which is at once deeply rooted and profoundly fluid. The oral texture of this section contrasts with the prosaic form of the Western creation myth that follows, furthering the demonstration that the essence of this work lies outside the colonizing conventions that have so significantly marginalized literary production in the region. The visual markers of this oral texture continue throughout the novel in many forms and almost immediately in the first of the soliloquies that interrupt the progression of the narrative. This first poetic interruption comes as the father of Tematu, Maevarua, prepares to plant his newborn son’s placenta in the ground, binding the child to the earth. Several years and a few pages later, Maevarua again offers words to connect his son to the land as Tematu prepares to leave: “Parce que depuis l’aube des temps, le Verbe a toujours été l’expression de son peuple, Maevarua puise au fond de son âme des paroles à offrir à son fils… Des paroles choisies parmi les innombrables de leur langue pour faire vivre en lui ce monde qu’il s’apprête à quitter pour un lointain ailleurs” (36). “Des paroles” offer more than their literal meaning or even connection through memory; they are a sensorial connection meant as a tie that will lead Tematua back to the land even as it offers him comfort while he is away. This emphasis on “parole” is significant throughout the novel and indeed in oral traditions throughout Oceania. As Michelle Keown explains in her discussion of the politics of translation in literature from the region, “In both Kanak and Mā’ohi cultures, the French term la Parole is used to refer not just to the spoken word, but more specifically to the oral traditions that 40 connect all facets of spiritual, material, and social life” (149). Indeed, Jean Anderson, the translator of the English edition of the novel, Island of Shattered Dreams, laments the impossibility of translating into English Spitz’s systematic differentiation between “the spoken word (‘parole’) in French and the written word (‘mot’)… The spoken word, ‘parole’, remains the domain of Mā’ohi, as part of the author’s highlighting of the power of ancient rhetorical tradition” (3). In Spitz’s work, we once again see the interaction between Mā’ohi and French linguistic signifiers as one of separation and opposition. The distinction between those characters with access to la parole and those without is highlighted in the typographical portrayal of their interludes outside the prose of the story, as mentioned above. Of the sections in the text that appear set apart from the prose of the novel, those that we understand within the story to be written and not spoken (the journal entries, poems, letters) are set in italics. But the sections of soliloquies, the poetic interludes that mark a taking up and sharing of la parole (always by a Mā’ohi character) are set in normal type. It is a distinction that occurs in the work of several authors of the region, though not perhaps as visually explicitly as it does in L’île des rêves écrasés. Another example of the treatment of oral and written text in this novel occurs with the character Tetiare, daughter of Tematua. As she and her brother, Terii, dig into the history of their culture (as it had been relayed to them by their parents but absent from their education at school), Terii encourages his sister to write their history “vue par nous-mêmes… Les paroles sont en toi, vivantes. Il faut juste leur donner une réalité écrite. Nous en avons besoin. C’est notre devenir.” Tetiare agrees that the history needs to be written, “les paroles de notre mémoire se sont envolées sur les ailes du temps, défigurées par des mots étrangers à nous-même,” and the idea begins to take root in her: “écrire. Se dépouiller pour se donner à l’autre, paroles du rêve pour faire renaître 41 le rêve. Nous rendre à nous-même en retrouvant l’éternité de notre âme” (145). There are clear echoes back to her grandfather as he prepares to share les paroles with his son, reaching into the soul to connect to la parole stored there in memories. This parole of memory is further contrasted with “les mots étrangers” that have so misrepresented the history of their culture to its descendants. Tetiare returns to the idea in the aftermath of the nuclear tests, and, after the death of her grandparents and father, as her community begins to agitate with more energy for independence from France, Tetiare writes their family history and shares it with her brother, who encourages her to publish it. “Le rêve transmis d’oralité se meurt faute de mémoire et nous devons lui redonner vie par l’écriture. D’autres après toi écriront une parcelle du rêve qui finira par devenir réalité” (182). This “rêve” is the one of memory, the one connected to la parole that is born again in its own invocation, communicated now in writing instead of orally. The importance of orality is not lost – it is tied up in “le rêve” that is being transmitted – but the rejuvenation of that dream is enacted in writing. And, while Tetiare’s writing is portrayed in italics (as follows the pattern of the text), on the final page of the novel her written history resonates with an earlier soliloquy that is repeated, an expression of la parole that speaks of hope for the future: “Reviens chez toi mon fils / Donne tes rêves à tes frères / Avec eux, fais naître ce monde / Où chaque homme, unique, / Se tient debout dans le soleil levant / Fort de l’amour de tous les fils de la Terre” (183). It is an echo of la parole passed to Terii by Tematua earlier in the novel, and a continuation of the transmission of memory and hope, a dedication to the connection between son and land and the hope for the future that connection brings. The written word thus serves to preserve and promote la parole. Despite the clear separation between the two that Spitz maintains throughout the novel, the use of orality in written text ultimately serves the 42 preservation and continuation of the oral tradition, even as it reconfigures what is possible within the written form. Where the connection between the oral and written in L’île des rêves écrasés is codified in a systematic way, the presence of orality in Gorodé’s L’épave swirls around the reader in a visual cacophony. Dialogue between characters makes up page upon page of text (where it is largely absent in L’île des rêves écrasés), and the conversations that take place between characters drives much of the story. As the mystery of Léna’s childhood trauma unfolds, it is her interaction with other characters that allows her to progress toward (and regress back to) her childhood memories. V oices already fill these pages. But the oral texture of the novel is woven through in other more and less obvious ways as well. Lila the storyteller is one such aspect of orality that nearly screams from the pages. Friend to Léna and Tom, victim of incestuous abuse and subsequent runaway, Lila fills the first 50 pages of the novel with her quick and curious stories, her political rap performances, and her knowing way of summing up a person with a quick observation and cutting remark. Her storytelling is the soundtrack to the evening Léna and Tom fall in love, and, when Lila is raped and murdered the morning after, her voice echoes in Léna’s nightmares. Tu es Lola l’agave Je suis Lila la grappe gavée de mots d’amour rivée aux maux de tête tu leur tournes la tête ils me tournent le dos ils te tournent autour je leur donne le tournis tu leur donne du plaisir ils s’en donnent à mourir tu es la messagère de l’amour je suis la messagère de la mort (47) Like the “Épitaphe pour Lila” cited above, this poem combines the strengths of both recited and written verse. Performed aloud, the verse benefits from the homophonic nature of “l’amour” and “la mort,” and its rhythm and rhyme lend themselves to a particular tone of performance. Read in its written form, however, the poem can be read by column or by line, its configuration and 43 appearance on the page underlining the parallels between Lila, the storyteller, and Léna, the subject of our story. Lila, whose history is revealed to us by the mysterious vagabond who seems to know everyone’s story, and Léna, disturbed by this same vagabond who seems to stir in her conflicting memories of revulsion and excitement. In this poem and other instances of poetry in the novel, the appearance of oral pieces in the text offers the reader the layers of meaning available to both the literary forms. With so much of the story recounted in conversations, the transcription of the orality as it appears in the action of the story fits well, the seams between verse and prose adding to the texture of this kaleidoscopic novel. The relationship between the explicitly oral interludes and the Kanaky independence movement is another thread woven into the tapestry of the story. As the novel begins, Tom and Léna meet as they accompany mutual friends to a march protesting exploitation of the Kanak people, headed up by political leaders of the movement. The sounds of family and friends finding each other, the leaders taking account of everyone, and kanéka music in the background foregrounds this setting of a first encounter. Customs of who can speak and when are considered; “D’aucuns se concertent sur le geste coutumier à faire aux clans kanak de l’endroit, avant de parler, de chanter et de marcher sur le sol. Dire le lien à la terre” (9). And in the evening, as the young settle into their weekend rituals, the group stops to listen to a rapper on the street. “Frère de lutte / frère kanak / kalédo / océanien / et rasta /… sœur kanak / océanienne / îlienne /… mes racines / dignité / liberté / justice / sur mon île / de lumière / rebelle / sur ma terre / mon pays / ma tribu / ma nation / ma patrie / Kanaky” (19). The rap occupies a whole page of text but is essentially background to the night out for blossoming lovers. Lila’s raps, too, address the exploitation of the Kanak people and Kanaky, the land. Her final rap, remembered after her death, she titles “La prière de la terre” and describes the destruction of the land of their ancestors 44 for its natural resources. After Lila’s death and funeral, the oral interludes cease, and the story turns more fully to the mystery of Léna’s past. The narrative rolls on without her voice, a silence that echoes in the gendered violence that plagues the rest of the story (and a silence I will return to in the next section). A more subtle aspect of the orality present in this novel of many voices is the resonance of genres of stories traditionally left unwritten. The novel opens with a dream Tom experiences and then recounts to his cousin. Nightmares plague Léna as she slips further back into past trauma. Motifs from fairytales quietly shape Léna’s understanding of what is going on around her, from monstrous characters like ogres to magical gardens, fairy godmothers, and miraculously revealed identities. Violence pervades the novel, but Léna’s conceptualization of that violence is constantly mitigated, by memory or miscomprehension. The enmeshed characters keep both Léna and the reader from a clear view of who she interacts with, losing Léna’s own subjectivity in the process. The symphony of voices, the confusion of narrative modes, the unreliable storytellers, and the spiral structure of the story all contribute to a reading experience that is never settled, in constant flux. It is a fluid reading experience, a story that shifts as it is told, taking the reader along for the ride of the telling. We can see here an aspect of Mateata- Allain’s explanation of the oceanic nature of orality, the “blending of consciousness” and “transgress[ing] confinement” that Gorodé accomplishes with her uncontainable text. Orality is there in the novel, even when its presence isn’t made explicitly known, a layered texture, both subtle and evident that releases the story from its novelistic confines. Where Gorodé’s novel presents the reader with a constant stream of voices, the presence of orality in Qala’s text appears more episodically, guiding the protagonist toward resolution and the reader to a more nuanced understanding of the story. The resolution that is ultimately reached 45 is one of communal harmony, and connection between orality and community is emphasized as the importance of the spoken word drives the narrative of the story. The major conflicts of the plot hinge on things being left unsaid, stories being left untold. The past suffering that instigates the violence Oria wreaks on the tribu is the result of a painful episode being repressed in the community’s past: a family left behind, mourning the loss of their only daughter, curses the tribu where now men are dying. This repression of the past echoes in Amaris’s own personal history, too, as it is revealed she was adopted from another tribu and that she is the descendant of this family, Koa having pronounced the curse while mourning Oria’s death. The violence is only resolved once Amaris learns this history from her grandmother. “Désormais, elle connaissait ses racines et son passé: de véritables armes pour mieux affronter le présent et l’avenir. Si la tribu… en faisait autant, elle était persuadée que la vie à la tribu allait prendre une autre tournure” (139). Determined to help her community reckon with its past, Amaris speaks to her tribu about what is to be done to appease the “monde invisible” that haunts them and break the curse. The scene of Amaris speaking to the assembled tribu demonstrates the significance that she “prend la parole,” especially in a setting where elders are present. The elders despair of ever being free of “la parole d’un vieillard en colère,” as, “On sait très bien que lorsqu’une parole est dite, elle ne peut plus être effacée ou enlevée!” (141) Unable to accept that her community do nothing, Amaris braves the possible censure she might incur by transgressing against custom, which dictates only men and elder members of the tribu be allowed to “prendre la parole.” Her behavior is portrayed as brave but entirely right, and she is careful to respect the gravity of her transgression. “Tout d’abord avant de parler, je tien à m’abaisser devant vous… Je ne suis qu’une faible enfant, qui n’a pas encore acquis l’âge de la maturité… Je me permets humblement de me tenir debout et de prétendre à la parole” (142-143). Her community accepts her ideas, and, as the conflicts of the 46 story begin to resolve, Amaris finds the beginnings of peace in her tribu and comfort in her own skin. Also connected to the importance of community, the most readily evident aspect of orality in La tribu des veuves is the incorporation of excerpts from songs represented textually on the page. The songs invoked throughout the novel share a connection to its setting in Lifou, a function of the author’s own rootedness in that community, and singing as performance is itself a communal experience. The specificity of the songs referenced further ties the story to a real setting, even in a fictional text. Whereas untranslated text in an autochthonous language in these novels is very difficult to glean meaning from without knowledge of the language itself, the songs convey meaning in many ways. Tahitian- or Drehu-to-French dictionaries are difficult to find, and it would take a decidedly dedicated reader to decipher more information from the text at the beginning of L’île des rêves écrasés, for example. With these excerpts, however, the reader can fairly easily find recordings of the songs online and, in doing so, they are almost certainly exposed to further context for the songs’ production and reception. One example appears with the song “Marie-Joe,” evoked in the story just after Amaris learns of her uncle having died the night before. The first stanza of the song is excerpted in the text, its first half in Drehu and the rest in French, which asks, “Personne ici-bas / Ne saura vraiment pourquoi / Pourquoi cette nuit tu nous as quittés?” (80) The song itself has a forlorn tone, a solo male voice and a backing chorus with typical pop/rock instruments and an acoustic guitar playing an accompanying melody. It is clearly a song written in tribute to an actual person, and the YouTube video where its recording can be found is filled with comments of sorrow and condolence for the woman who passed. This communal mourning fits with the tone of the novel in the moment it is introduced, especially with Amaris’s reaction to what is happening around 47 her. But the song resonates beyond the borders of the novel and even beyond the specific purpose for which it was clearly written. Other comments on the video dedicate the song to their own loved ones lost, to the nostalgia of the music as a connection to the island and language, and to an appreciation for New Caledonia in general. 16 In simply looking up the song, the reader is exposed to – and takes part in – this communal experience. The YouTube platform, and the commenting it encourages, allows the oral and the written to intersect again but with each element taking on some of the expected characteristics of the other: in this medium, it is the oral component that remains most unchanged as the written comments fluctuate through time. In multiple ways, then, Qala’s manner of including songs in her novel undermines expectations of oral and written texts, and it promotes a more fluid transmission of meaning, both around and through language. Silence as protest and power We have seen how the iteration of voice, both in choice of idiom and oral texture, operates as authorial intervention in these three novels, but the intervention of “voice” operates in these novels as an absence as well. Silence is an important aspect of how voice functions in these novels, especially in resistance to colonial ontological violence. Silence as forced upon the indigenous peoples by invading forces is, of course, a hallmark of colonialism; the erasure of indigenous identity begins with the silencing of autochthonous voices. The imposition of French at the expense of autochthonous languages has, as we saw above, defined much of the history of the islands since colonization. Even now, despite the increasing use of “vernacular” idioms as 16 “MELODIE DREHU… MJ’Y. ‘Marie joe ….ihnim lamel…’” YouTube, uploaded by Michelyse7070, 10 November 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN_0JhSGRkI. The song is cited in Qala’s novel as “Marie- Joe”, MJY. 48 languages of instruction in public schools, the use of Kanak and Tahitian languages decreases with each generation. 17 The imposition of French contributed to the broader repression of indigenous cultures, the undermining of indigenous voices, and a general devaluing of the colonized’s subjectivity. The repression of the colonized’s identity by the colonizer manifests in silence and is a foundational paradigm in decolonial texts. 18 This absence of voice as effected by colonization echoes loudly in postcolonial literature, and literature from the francophone Pacific demonstrates its own reverberations. In her discussion of the use of the body in literature from the region, scholar and writer Titaua Porcher-Wiart argues that, “Unlike the Western individual, the Oceanic person lives in a world where all things are interconnected; he is a being in a chain” (411). Consequently, the repression of a single autochthonous voice reverberates communally. “Silence, even that of a single individual, bears witness to the collective history of Polynesians, of contacts with outsiders who brought the ‘sign’ [written word] and the ensuing acculturation” (417). Colonial oppression of the individual is oppression of the group. In the case of these authors, the appearance of silence is diverse and multifaceted. While the silencing of voices as imposed from outside forces appears and is certainly a tool of repression and domination, it is not the predominant use of the trope in these texts. Silence is respected as a social expectation, mobilized as a form of protest, and wielded as an unexpected form of power. In the first case, just as the invocation of la parole holds social significance across francophone Oceania, so too does the holding of silence. One aspect of this “silence” is a prioritizing of the communal voice over the individual. As central Kanak political leader Jean- 17 Despite the decreasing use of these languages, they remain important to individual identity, as estimated by both parents and students. For a more complete overview, see Jacques Vernaudon, “Linguistic Ideologies: Teaching Oceanic Languages in French Polynesia and New Caledonia”. Decolonialization, Language, and Identity: The Francophone Islands of the Pacific, special issue of The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 27 No. 2. 2015: 434-462. 18 From Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), the silence of the colonized informs the discipline. 49 Marie Tjibaou has explained, “Nous ne sommes… je ne suis jamais moi. Moi, c’est lié à l’individu. Je suis toujours quelqu’un en référence à…” (107) 19 The voice of the community is privileged over that of the individual, and personal silence is not a void but an opening for the group to speak. The individual is strengthened by the community through which they speak: a chorus instead of a cacophony of solo voices. The hierarchization of certain voices over others within the community is another historical facet of oral tradition in the Oceanic communities these authors address, a structure which relegates certain voices to silence in certain settings. These situational silences are treated differently amongst the authors, as well shall see, but it remains significant that the history of that silence stems not from colonial suppression. As Julia Frengs sums up, “Silence has thus been a part of Oceanian island societies since well before the arrival of Europeans, and… cannot always be regarded in a negative context” (154). Gender plays a large role in the historical prioritizing of certain voices over others, specifically in the oral traditions explored here. The women writers represented here thus perform a certain resistance to that historical silencing in writing from the outset. But their interventions in the repression of women’s voices, both from within their communities as well as imposed from without, push beyond the dynamic of raising voices against those who would silence them and instead create a complex tool for imaging what “silence” means for their characters and their world. For the characters in L’île des rêves écrasés, silence is a double-edged sword. The protests mounted by Tematua and his family against being displaced by the nuclear testing go unheard, and the agitation for independence that grows throughout the novel is largely ignored in the metropole. But there is power in silence as well, both diegetically and performatively in the 19 As cited in Frengs, 153. 50 construction of the novel, and that “silence” often takes the form of withholding meaning instead of sound. In the case of the structure of the novel, we have already explored how Spitz’s use of untranslated Tahitian confronts the reader with their own estrangement from the setting of the story and sets up an opposition between French and Tahitian that remains irreconcilable. Instead of a compromise to accommodate a wider base of readership, Spitz transmits a certain semiotic lack to those without knowledge of the language. In fact, in the first publication of the novel, no glossary was given for the Tahitian words that appear throughout the rest of the story (though such a glossary was affixed to the end of the text upon its publication by Au Vent des Îles, purportedly without the knowledge of the author). A lack of meaning, a semiotic silence, was thus dotted throughout the book, a silence used to confront the non-Tahitian reader with their own lack. Within the story, too, silence and withholding meaning is used as a tool to draw attention to the value of la parole. The soliloquies that mark the taking up of la parole (those that appear in normal, non-italicized text, as described above) often occur, in fact, as monologues, lyrical expressions that the characters put forth into the world with no other person around to hear. In this way, the importance of la parole is highlighted beyond its use as a means to drive the story forward as an interaction between characters; the words are important for their own sake. Such is the case after Terii is born and Tematua expresses his love and concern for this first creation of his relationship with his wife, Emere. “Montent alors du fond de ses entrailles des paroles d’amour et d’espérance qu’il laisse s’envoler sur les ailes du vent au-dessus de l’océan” (69). Because this interlude is a moment of address within the space Tematua inhabits, the reader understands the importance of the instances in which la parole is shared between people, as occurs a few pages later in an exchange between Tematua to Terii before the latter leaves the 51 island. “Chaque geste, chaque parole étaient hérités des pères… longue oralité transmise d’amour, il transmet à son fils les paroles de leur monde, paroles d’hier et paroles de demain, pour que vive en lui le rêve… ” (79) La parole is given more substance, more gravity, because of its first use as self-expression instead of as a means of communication. Silence is also used as a means to contrast Terii with Laura, the woman come from France to work at the nuclear site and with whom he falls in love. Laura is housed on the missile complex on Ruahine, the island Terii and his family were forced from. Terii sidesteps Laura’s questions about where he comes from (more specifically, where he was born) because he knows telling Laura will cause pain between them. When he brings Laura to meet his family, Laura invites everyone over to her house for dinner, unaware of her role in displacing them. “Le silence s’étire et s’enroule autour de chacun pour mieux l’isoler des autres, lourd de mots que l’on ne peut dire, ces mots que l’on doit taire pour ne pas blesser” (137). Finally, Emere, mother of the family, explains the situation, leaving Laura stunned. The rest of the family leaves the dinner, searching out silent solace now that the truth is spoken: “Chacun se réfugie dans un rituel personnel pour continuer à vivre, incapable de faire un geste vers l’autre, prisonnier d’un chagrin opaque qui les rend insensible au monde.” Laura, ashamed of her role, sits with Emere in silence. “Laura comprend là que les grandes douleurs sont muettes” (139). When finally Laura and Terii find each other again, Terii stops her from revisiting the issue, in one of the short conversations typical of the novel. “Ne pose pas de questions. Ne dis rien. Il ne faut pas dire les mots pour ne pas faire naître la souffrance,” Terii says. “Il faut au contraire nommer la souffrance pour l’exorciser,” Laura responds, but Terii insists, “La souffrance est comme l’amour. C’est la réalité, et la réalité n’a pas besoin d’être dite. Il faut la vivre, c’est tout” (140). In a novel with limited dialogue, one of the few conversations confronts the divergence between a pivotal couple as they 52 grapple with silence and the pain of truth. The force words have in the world is tangible, as we saw above, and silence is preferable to words that, once said, can’t be taken back out of the world. This contrasts with Laura’s own certainty that pain must be addressed to be excised, a fundamentally opposed view of the role and power speech has. Spitz again confronts the reader with their relationship to language, meaning, and the absence of both. Where the story and structure of L’île des rêves écrasés emphasizes the power of speech and its withholding, L’épave explores what dynamics of power are hidden in silences. This exploration plays out around a cycle of stories and their gendered positionalities; the epigraph that begins the novel is from Sophocles and reads, “La parure des femmes, c’est le silence.” The women in the novel are certainly not traditionally silent, and the many pages of dialogue often take place between women as they recount their tales and advise their listeners how to act. The official role of orator is reserved for men, however, and only one woman is given the title of “storyteller” throughout the text: Lila, the runaway who lives on the street and is ultimately raped and murdered in the first half of the story. Before her death, though, her oral performances direct the action of the narrative, framing the first encounter of Léna and Tom, the couple at the center of the story. She also elaborates on the context of the Kanak independence movement, her final rap, “La prière à la terre,” articulating a lament of the exploitation of the land of her mother and ancestors. At her funeral, her friends are able to come together to read her epitaph for which each has written a stanza, a singular coming together of lyrical voices and the final poetic interlude of the text. In fact, Lila’s death, the silencing of her voice, is a turning point in the narrative of the novel, a point after which the direction of the story begins to loop back on itself, layering voices and plots onto each other to the point of confusion. Though Lila does not reappear for the remainder of the text, the silence left in her wake ripples across the story, a blow to its narrative 53 integrity after which the stories and characters appear to become increasingly porous to each other. Hers was a stabilizing force in a story poised to careen back in on itself. She was dismissed as “Lila au pays des merveilles” and “Lila, la fleur qui sent tellement fort qu’[elle] donne mal à la tête,” but the silencing of her voice is clearly a catalyst for the rest of the story. (30, 35) There is power in her voice that only becomes clear in its silence. Another, less-explicitly silent but powerful figure, is Léna. A pervasive conflict of the novel is that of sexual violence against women, a gendered dynamic of power that plays out in dramatic ways. Nary a woman or girl in the story does not have a story of past violation, and one of the consistent plots of the narrative is that of Léna rediscovering what trauma lies in her own past that she has blocked from her memory. She is dragged along on a whirlwind of sexual discovery and exploitation, the former always tied up in the latter, and vice versa. The plots and names of characters redouble on each other, the layers of stories crossing over through a perverse series of incestuous relationships that tangle the histories and subjectivities of the characters. Throughout these intersecting stories and characters, Léna remains the person to whom the stories are told; though she is a participant in the couplings and conversations, she is always the receiver of the tale. Used as a sexual plaything by a series of men and women – most bearing the name Tom or Léna – the protagonist-Léna comes to remember in flashes and shades elements of the history she is searching to remember. In the final pages of the novel, she remembers what happened to her as a child: being raped by two men on the rock that continues to flash in her memory. One of these men, Vieux Tom, is a figure of several incarnations who ensnares women as his sexual slaves. Léna has fallen victim to him, and it is with him – or is it his protegé of the same name and personality? – that she is walking along seaside cliffs when the memory finally strikes her. Tom slips on the edge, and in a first and final defiance of the man who has abused 54 and haunted her, Léna refuses to help him up and hears him fall to his death. The Vieille Léna, Maman Léna, jumps to her death after him, another victim and participant in his violent exploits. In the end it is our Léna, the protagonist and listener, who triumphs over her demons and escapes their fate. She is fully entrenched in the story being told to her, but she is never the one doing the telling. Her relative silence belies the power she ultimately has to defeat the fairytale villains that torment her all novel long. What the text makes clear, then, is that a silent woman is not a powerless woman, a voice once silenced is not ineffectual, and that listening to a story does not mean one cannot change it. The dynamic between silence and power is also explored in La tribu des veuves, again between two characters who mirror each other but emerge with differing fates. Amaris is undoubtedly the protagonist of the story; it is through her eyes that we experience the world, her affective responses to what happens in the story that engender the excerpts from songs, and even snippets of her journal that head each chapter. Hers is the voice most accessible to the reader, but a crucial element of the plot is that she is not heard by either her parents or the broader community, the former because they don’t pay enough attention to her and the latter because she does not have the right to speak in front of her assembled tribu. Only at the climax of the novel is she finally able to explain what has happened to her and suggest what can be done to end the curse. It is in this novel that we see most explicitly a demonstration of the rules restricting access to la parole within the oral tradition of New Caledonia, and, even in speaking up and defying expectation, Amaris is careful to respect the spirit of that tradition. The elder members of the tribu are expected to be the wisest advisers of the group, and it is their word that is sought, along with the “petit chef” of the community, who happens to be Amaris’s father. Amaris’s grandmother is the one who convinces her parents to listen to Amaris and believe what she tells 55 them happened to her. After a final confrontation with Oria and Koa, the tribu gathers to see Amaris returned, and they despair at ever fixing the curse that haunts their community. The grandmother Wéwé, “réputée pour sa grande sagesse,” is overcome, and her sadness begins to “contaminate” the other women. “Amaris ne pouvait pas se résigner à voir cette tristesse s’emparer de leurs visages. Au milieu de l’assemblée, où seuls les hommes et les personnes âgées avaient droit à la parole, elle se leva sans crainte. Son intention n’était pas de renverser les traditions” (142). After she has spoken and thanked them for listening, “plus rien. Ce fut un silence long et perturbant,” until finally, the oldest member of the community, vieux Joe speaks up, “Je tiens particulièrement à remercier Thaxanë 20 d’avoir osé prendre la parole. Je trouve regrettable que dans nos rassemblements, nos enfants n’aient pas le droit de s’exprimer” (143- 144). The silence of her generation has been noted, and when Amaris bravely breaks that silence, she is congratulated for doing so. The traditions of the community are not threatened; in fact, Amaris pleads with the group to remember their roots and take care of their ancestral graves as a solution to the curse. Previous silence has given her voice more weight in the present, and the community is able to evaluate what is considered acceptable behavior to better care for its people moving forward. Amaris is ultimately able to break her silence and find the support of her community, but her foil, the tragic and violent figure Oria, maintains her power in her silence. When Amaris first encounters the ghostly presence of Oria and her father, it is only as an uneasy feeling as she explores unmarked graves in an abandoned space where her tribu lived many years before. She is overcome with the scent of the boneriridr, a jasmine flower that usually perfumes the night and grows around the abandoned tombs. From that point on, Oria and Koa appear to Amaris in her 20 Amaris’s formal name 56 nightmares, and while Koa implores Amaris to return to the cliff where the tribu used to live, and ultimately demands that she stay with him, Oria remains silent, a spectral figure in tears, red hair blowing in the spray of the ocean into which she jumps. Amaris is drawn to her, but their nightly encounters become more and more aggressive. Oria begins pulling Amaris along with her when she jumps, and, when Amaris resists, Oria strangles her as the scent of the boneriridr overpowers Amaris’s senses. The connection between Oria and the flower is another element of the silence Oria maintains; its scent announces her presence for her. The odor haunts Amaris through her dreams, and the pages of the novel are haunted with it as well, as a small drawing of the bloom appears at the end of each chapter. Oria exercises an inescapable force over both Amaris and the reader, and she need not say a word to do so. After Amaris learns the truth of her heritage, she goes to the cliffs to confront Koa and Oria. As always, Koa demands of the distraught Amaris that she return to her “home,” but Oria whispers softly in her ear, “Viens! Viens! Tes cauchemars sont finis!” (137) With that, Oria invades Amaris’s senses and compels her to the edge of the cliff, convincing her to jump and end her pain. Only the swift intervention of Amaris’s father saves her from the death she does not truly want, the intervention that Koa could not achieve finally realized for his progeny. Oria’s ability to possess Amaris is made possible because of the affinity Amaris developed for the tragic figure, a draw made possible because she preyed on the girl’s subconscious, a tactic made more visible in its contrast to Koa’s verbal demands. Even in breaking her silence, Oria only whispers in Amaris’s ear, a continuation of her pull from the shadows. While Amaris ultimately speaks up for the good of her community, Oria does so only to further her own ends. For both characters, however, the maintenance of relative silence up to those climatic points lends the eventual emergence of their voices the gravity and surprise necessary to further their goals. The use of silence in each of these novels is a subtle tool, but in a 57 diverse combination of motif, subtext, and sometimes outright explanation, these three authors manipulate silence to the purposes of their stories, undermining the dynamic of repression it is often seen as. Conclusion V oice is a central tool for these authors, both the voices of their characters and their own voices as they appear in the texture of their writing. In L’île des rêves écrasés, L’épave, and La tribu des veuves, Chantal Spitz, Déwé Gorodé, and Isa Qala craft texts whose story and structure allow (and even force) us to reimagine the dynamics and possibilities of voice within literature. In treating French transversally across various linguistic and generic textures that define the spaces from which they are writing, these authors weave texts that transform the French language from one of repression into one of possibility. In discussing the presence of orality in these novels, we see how these authors transcend the false dichotomy between oral and written text to build upon the long literary traditions of the spaces in which they write, mobilizing their written forms as a continuation of that tradition (and resisting the restrictions imposed by Western writing conventions). Finally, we see silence emerge in each of these novels as it is diversely used to further the plot and performance of each text, challenging the dynamic of oppression that codifies silence in Western imagining. The relationship between these texts and authors as they are brought together in this project is grounded in their geographic position, but a common thread of fluid creation runs through their work, a transversal character that we have begun to explore in this chapter and that will continue to inform our understanding of how this corpus operates and how it fits together. In 58 the next chapter, I discuss how genre and form contribute to the intervention we have begun tracing here. 59 Chapter 2 Form: Dire autrement “Ceci est une fiction. Rien ne s’est passé et pourtant tout est vrai. Et quand bien même certains événements ne sauraient prêter à confusion, j’ai voulu les dire autrement.” −Titaua Peu, Mūtismes Dire autrement The above lines appear in the front matter of Tahitian author Titaua Peu’s first novel Mūtismes. First published in 2002, the story follows an unnamed young girl in French Polynesia during the political unrest of the 1990s that followed the announcement of renewed nuclear testing on the islands by Jacques Chirac’s government. It is a coming-of-age story interwoven with direct and allegorical political commentary about an often-overlooked decolonial struggle of one of France’s remaining overseas territories. 21 It articulates the trauma of colonial violence – and the repression of that articulation – alongside the experience of intergenerational struggle as our protagonist moves into adulthood. The novel was a quick success in French Polynesia, and the publishing house Haere Pō reprinted it thrice in the year following its first appearance. Despite its success on the islands, the novel was not widely distributed outside of Oceania until 2021, when Au Vent des Îles (the largest publishing house in French Polynesia) released a new edition, which has been more widely available thanks to a new partnership with distributors in metropolitan France. The reedition and greater circulation of this work, specifically, has special resonance for the corpus of autochthonous literature in Oceania, in which it is already a central 21 The push to decolonize “French” Polynesia (sometimes written as “French-occupied Polynesia” or, instead, Ma’ōhi Nui) remains a significant driving force of politics on the islands. Similarly, “New Caledonia” (Kanaky) continues to see its politics shaped by its independence parties, the largest of which (the FLNKS) has broad presentation in government and was the party of Déwé Gorodé. 60 text. The novel’s title as it appears on the Haere Pō edition 22 , Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā, plays on the simple French “mutismes” to evoke a silence full of words unspoken – and an impulse to break the reign of that silence. On this edition’s cover, “Mutismes” is separated into three lines, so it appears as “Mut – tism – mes” with the “s” appearing to fall precariously towards the author’s name and the novel’s subtitle. This Tahitian subtitle translates to “no more continuing muteness.” 23 Where the French title indicates a silence of one who can’t or won’t speak, the Tahitian title makes clear that it refers to an imposed silence that is about to break. While the Haere Pō editions of the novel feature the Tahitian subtitle, Au Vent des Îles’ new edition 24 highlights the possibility of Tahitian within “Mutismes” itself. On this cover, the word is divided into two lines, appearing “Mū – tismes,” with a diacritic over the “u” transforming the first two letters of the title into the Tahitian word “mū” meaning “silence de quelqu’un qui a quelque chose à dire mais qui se tait.” 25 This design, proposed in the process of designing the novel’s cover under the aegis of the publishing house, lends a linguistic subversion, dismantling the French title to uncover Tahitian meaning, though it eliminates the original Tahitian subtitle altogether. 26 While these decisions rest with the publishing house, not the author, the richness of the novel’s title reflects Peu’s intervention throughout the novel. These omissions and emphases function as paratextual demonstrations of the issue the title (and subsequent novel) raises. It is a novel of protest against what is unspoken and whose intervention, from the very first look, 22 See Appendix A, Figure 2. 23 Translation for the Tahitian subtitle is provided in Anaïs Maurer, “Snaring the Nuclear Sun: Decolonial Ecologies in Titaua Peu’s Mutismes: E ‘Ore te Vāvā”. The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 32 No. 2, 2020: 371-397, 375. 24 See Appendix A, Figure 1. 25 A translation for mū appears on the back cover of Au Vent des Îles’ edition. 26 The importance of Au Vent des îles being situated within Oceania is reflected in the cover designer’s linguistic knowledge allowing for the title’s shift. Christian Robert, the founder and editor in chief of the publishing house, recounted the development Mutisme’s design in an interview, published as Katherine Hammitt. “The Colibri of Pacific Publishing: Interview with Au vent des îles Founder Christian Robert,” The French Australian Review, no. 73, Summer 2022-2023, 125-140. 61 engages the reader in a complex understanding of what it means to say and be understood. As with the element of silence in chapter 1, here we interrogate the implication of muteness and its connection to agency. While Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously argues, the “subaltern cannot speak,” the authors discussed in this chapter explore creative means of intervention nonetheless. This chapter will consider works from Peu as well as Chantal Spitz and Déwé Gorodé that engage the reader by mobilizing meaning beyond what is said in a conventional way. Instead of the constriction formalistic convention nominally presents, these authors mobilize form as a medium of creative possibility, through which that which is “muted” emerges otherwise: “dire autrement” in telling without saying. In reading these texts, I will explore the following questions: How can a text, even beyond a conventional reading of its content, intervene in the transmission of meaning and challenge the reader to examine their own reading? How do specific texts from the francophone Oceanian context further function to challenge the ontological silences that derive from the colonial repression they represent? How is the situation of francophone Oceania represented in the shape of the literature produced there, and how does that shape allow us to engage with the texts differently? As before, the texts and authors we will discuss here engage with these issues in diverse ways, but this chapter will engage with the texts’ use of genre expectations, authorial position, and negotiation of opacity, to read them together. Form, transversion Like “transversion” (to which we will return shortly), “form” offers a flexible base of definition in literary analysis. It is form as shape, the physicality of the text in analogue or digital appearance, how text or other visual codes appear on the page: form as medium. In this definition we consider the effect a text’s physical format has on its conveyance of meaning. Does 62 the size of the book change our understanding of its importance? Does its appearance on a screen instead of paper we hold influence our readerly relation to the text? Western thought also embraces the concept of form in its Platonic iteration, as essence, representative of what unites all iterations of a concept. What does a novel, poem, short story mean as an idea, and how does that translate into their physical iteration? And, more fully situated within the discipline of literary analysis, form is formalism, a text divorced from the circumstances of its production. To this we add a focus on the formalization of literary evaluation and categorization, definitions of genre and the establishment of canons as they underpin dominant structures of understanding and consuming literature. In this chapter, form will be a place of departure, in the dual sense of commencing our discussion and a departure of the texts from conventions and expectations of form. In the introduction to her book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Caroline Levine challenges the historical separation between formalism and historicism, arguing that such a separation is both artificial and counterproductive. “The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere.” 27 The form of a text speaks not only to conditions of its production but to how its content is consumed by readers. A text’s form is as much a part of the experience of reading it as is the narrative it provides. While we will look more specifically at the context of literary production, and its political implications, in Chapter 4, it will be the work of this chapter to read form with narrative, and I turn again to the mechanism of transversion to begin. 27 Caroline Levine. “Introduction: The Affordances of Form” in Forms: Whole Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, Princeton UP, 2015. 1-23, pg. 2. 63 As we saw in the first chapter, “transversion” is made especially generative by its usage across several disciplines. I used it as a linguistic term describing the movement amongst languages as “crossing over to” a new idiom instead of a move “between” two idioms, highlighting a more substantial separation between the languages in question. This separation informs my understanding of how autochthonous languages and French relate to each other in these multilingual Oceanian works in a manner distinct from the interpenetration of languages in other francophone spaces. I also invoked transversion as an oceanic formulation, one based on communal creation without reductive unification, a flowing together of distinct voices, each with their own purpose but contributing to the same conversation. In this chapter, I will explore another aspect of transversion that follows the same oceanic movement. An early use of “transverse,” the employment that undergirds its etymology, is in literature, and it describes turning, translating, or rendering prose into verse (a pun, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, on “transverse” as in to cross). The change from prose, or what we expect to see as prose, into verse describes some of the texts we will discuss in this chapter, but I suggest that this shade of the term has more wide-ranging application as well. The relationship between prose and verse echoes the relationship between written and oral; in the same way opposing poetry and prose as separate media operates to reinforce an idea that each texture is more capable than the other of conveying different meaning, so too are written and oral literature formalistically opposed to highlight a divergence in their capacities. However, the total separation of the two categories is, in both cases, artificial and constrictive; it is the interplay, if not interpenetration, of each that informs the creative idiom of “oraliture” described by Flora Devatine. 64 This same interplay characterizes transversion in form. The formal texture of these works plays between poetry and prose, challenging the purpose towards which each is bent. They ferry us across the border between poetry and prose, upsetting readerly expectations and demanding a reconsideration of how each type of text is read, a reconsideration that strikes at the foundation of what meaning literature offers. This represents a significant intervention by the author. In his “Glossary of Transversal Terms,” Bryan Reynolds describes “transversal poetics” as “innovative and versatile… collective and collaborative as it acknowledges as much as possible the conditions of its emergent activities: its histories, sources, and conversations.” 28 Transversal writing, I argue, is a self-conscious manipulation of inflexible categorization, and, as Levine argues, this mobilization of form “[is] the stuff of politics.” 29 In the literary realm, formalistic expectations are largely defined by genre categorization. The physical form of the writing and its stylistic appearance both reside in the intersection of these terms, and the forms of these texts resist, in various ways, traditional Western categorization along these genre definitions. This categorization represents one facet of the centripetal colonial framework that has defined, and limited, French and Francophone literature. One major barrier to the cultivation of literary communities in francophone Oceania is the necessity of routing this literature through the metropole, the “tastemakers and gatekeepers” in “Western centers of knowledge” who maintain a “universalist definition of literature” and resist the “destabilization” of postcolonial literature, according to a 2016 paper by Françoise Lionnet and Emmanuel Bruno Jean-François. (1227) In resisting this categorization, the texts I engage with here represent a challenge to this “universalist” definition as well as the primacy of the 28 Bryan Reynolds, “Glossary of Transversal Terms” in Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 272-289, 287. 29 Levine, 3. 65 metropole in the circulation of francophone literature from outside its borders. I will discuss the currents of this circulation more fully in the final chapter, but here I look at how three authors explore the possibilities of form in literature, reconfiguring our expectations as readers and resisting the constriction of generic constructions that, in practice, limit literature’s possibilities to convey meaning. In considering diverse texts together, however, there is a danger of ossifying them as representative of their communities or of reducing their individual interventions and innovations to sameness. While the literary communities from which these texts emerge are interconnected and even self-referential, their strength derives from their multiplicity. In “Traversées océanienne,” Chantal Spitz says Oceanian literature “ressemble aux multitude d’îles piquetant le vaste océan, diverse, généreuse, créatrice.” (34) We seek here to trace these literary works in their interconnected multiplicity. Transversing genre: Chantal Spitz Chantal Spitz’s formalistic intervention is a defining aspect of her oeuvre, and her work in expanding the literary community of francophone Oceania has been germinal to the corpus as a whole. She has carved a space for her own voice in both her literary and political writing and has worked to carve space for other marginalized literary voices in her community through the cofounding of Littéramā’ohi (a literary magazine dedicated to autochthonous writers) and her continual involvement in events like the annual literary festival, Lire en Polynésie. The range of works she has published engages explicitly and continually with the idea of genre. While her first and most well-known work, L'île des rêves écrasés, was hailed as the first published novel to be written by a Tahitian author, the text escapes and exceeds the idea of what a novel can be. As we 66 saw in the previous chapter, Spitz situates the Ma’ohi voice and Tahitian language as foundational to her story by beginning with a poetic recounting of Polynesian creation myth in untranslated Tahitian. This she follows – and contrasts – with a more prosaic gloss of Christian creation myth and then a section of encounter between the two cultures relayed in the dual style of narrative and verse that characterizes the rest of her book. She thus contrasts not only the language of these opening sections but their form as well. Spitz uses the form of her language – its idiom, its texture, its presentation – to reflect and reinforce the substance of the conflict she portrays in her story. In the Tahitian section of the opening pages, the text appears in distinctly poetic form, with short lines broken up into stanzas and words that refrain: “Nā tamanui/ Nā tepaiaha/ Nā teuruari’i” (9). The French section opens with short paragraphs written in the passé simple that distinguish it from the body of the novel: “Lorsque Dieu commença la creation du ciel et de la terre…” (14). The difference in form is reinforced by how the languages themselves appear, with their contrasting diacritics. From her first published pages, then, Spitz establishes a focus on form that carries throughout her oeuvre. With this focus, it becomes equally clear that she will not be fettered by the constraints and expectations of genre. How, then, to talk about genre in Spitz’s work (or, indeed, the work of all three authors addressed in this chapter)? I propose a transversal consideration of genre (with its implication of turning poetry into prose) that echoes the same oceanic relationship of fluidity. Not an all- encompassing system of thought or process that defines in its entirety the work of each author, but rather a means to highlight the multiple approaches they take to engage with the potential of formalistic conventions. This first section gives consideration to genre. While aspects of genre categorization are less rigid in recent literary history than they were in their earliest conceptualization, genre remains a central concept in the practical realm of literary engagement. 67 Contrasting novel, poetry, short story, essay, biography, etc. underpins how texts are organized in the places we find them (libraries, bookstores) and how they are defined within the catalogues that contain them. The historical lines drawn between genres are crossed with increasing frequency, but the categories themselves continue to shape our understanding of how a work fits into its broader literary context. It is that persistent concept of category that I invoke in thinking about how Spitz, Gorodé, and Peu engage with and exceed genre in their texts. Interrogating genre categorization also has political resonance. Not only does Spitz’s transversing genre bring greater nuance to her work and the experience of the reader, it simultaneously rejects restrictions of convention imposed from a colonial space. Spitz weaves political defiance into the form of her work as well as the narratives that she tells. In an article on the challenges of translating the “transgeneric” text, Spitz’s translator Jean Anderson writes that Spitz’s linguistic innovations “situate her writing within a relatively recent extra-hexagonal resistance to metropolitan French linguistic and cultural hegemony, and reflect her strong commitment to expressing difference.” 30 Anderson codes this “difference” as explicitly in relation to the colonial power she evokes; Spitz’s commitment is to both portraying and employing forms of expression that reflect the space she describes. Anderson uses the term “transgeneric” regarding Spitz’s poetic prose, and she connects this style to what Spitz terms “écrire-parler” in her essay “l’écrire colonisé.” 31 This style connects to the importance of oral expression in Mā’ohi literary and cultural tradition and, Anderson argues, “also pertains specifically to the refusal of genre categorizations that seek to separate forms of expression in ways that are in conflict with local cultural practice.” 32 30 Anderson, Jean. “Translating Chantal Spitz: Challenges of the Transgeneric Text.” Australian Journal of French Studies. Liverpool Vol. 50 Iss. 2 (May-Aug 2013): 177-188, 177. 31 Spitz, “l’écrire colonisé.” pg. 57. As cited in Anderson, 183. 32 Anderson, “Transgeneric”, 183. 68 For Spitz, confronting categories of genre is implicit from the texture of her writing to the appearance of the text on the page. By texture, I mean how the qualities of the combination of words Spitz uses in her writing contribute to the way the language is perceived in terms of rhythm, sound, and appearance as well as how the melody of the language strikes the reader, especially in comparison to expected conventions of poetry or prose. Spitz draws attention to the texture of her language with her intervention in grammatical conventions like punctuation, capitalization, and sentence (de)structure. Her first published work, L'île des rêves écrasés (1991), is traced through with poetic interludes, from the myths that make up the first pages to the oral interludes recorded in lengthy stanzas of verse. Her second published work, Pensées insolentes et inutiles (2006) is a collection of texts that can be largely categorized as poems and essays, some of which were published individually in literary journals like Littérama’ohi. Each piece that appears more prosaic is framed by poetic texts, either in longer verses or short stanzas that are centered in an otherwise blank page and resemble the epigraphs that introduce most of Spitz’s volumes. Each “prosaic” piece mobilizes its own form, reinforcing its content, from the more conventional essay “l’ecrire colonisé” (sic) to the collection of poetic images and political slogans that make up “Hiroshima Santiago du Chili Hanoi nine eleven.” This latter text begins “pas de mot trop dur trop fort trop mal trop tout/ pas de mot.” (49) Her second “novel” 33 disavows that genre categorization in its very title. Hombo, transcription d’une biographie (2002) follows the life of a fictional character, Hombo, a term taken from the American term “hobo.” Though neither “transcription” nor “biography” are addressed in the work, the text emphasizes the spoken word by offsetting long sections of speech as well as poetic interludes (the latter in a style reminiscent of L'île des rêves écrasés). What sort of transcription might we 33 “Novel” (“roman”) as stated in the book’s description on the publisher’s (Au vent des îles) website as well as Spitz’s author page on informational website Île en île. 69 imagine, then, and how might oral storytelling play an otherwise invisible role in the creation of written literature? In 2011, Spitz published Elles, terre d’enfance, roman à deux encres, again a “novel” that rejects its formal conventions, this time in distinguishing the two distinct voices that make up the narrative of the story with two different type faces and font colors corresponding to two contrasting styles of writing. While one voice follows more closely to conventions of “correct” French literary style, the other embraces a creative engagement with those rules and a poetic style that resembles verse as it is laid out on the page. The contrasting of these two voices, or inks, makes up what might otherwise be seen as chapter separations, turning this “novel” into more of a conversation, reinforcing the presence of oral expression throughout Spitz’s written work. All of Spitz’s work offers creative play on genre expectations, but for our purposes here I will focus mainly on Spitz’s 2015 collection Cartes postales. This text is a series of seven vignettes that portray the violence, in its many iterations, that belies the colonizing image of French Polynesia’s Edenic capital on Tahiti. The book’s full title, Cartes postales: nouvelles, presents two conflicting genres of writing – postcards and short stories – neither of which fully characterize the writing contained in the text. In a style that permeates Spitz’s œuvre, the texture of the writing defies prosaic expectations. Here are the first few lines of the first vignette, “Joséphine,” as they appear on the page: un dernier coup d’œil dans le miroir Joséphine se trouve moins belle ce soir elle n’a pas le moral elle a fêté ses quarante ans la semaine dernière une magnifique fête au Coco d’Or avec les copines alcools et confetti rires et cris mais voilà depuis elle se sent fatiguée 34 34 Pg. 9. I have preserved the lines in their short form here, though the longest lines take up the length of the page in the published work. The first three lines might correctly be transposed here in the following way: 70 The different line lengths, lack of capitalization and punctuation, and unconventional indentations all persist throughout Cartes postales, though the overall appearance of the text shifts slightly between each section. As in each of Spitz’s preceding works, the form of the writing reflects and reinforces the content of the narrative. “Joséphine,” a story about a Tahitian woman trying to reconcile the idyllic life of love she had imagined with the experience of sexual abuse that she endures, is shot through with an aspect of stream of consciousness that is apparent in the excerpt above, and the line breaks reinforce the flowing nature of that telling. Within the story, appearance is a central theme, and Joséphine often finds herself looking into mirrors where the life she leads is reflected alongside her own figure. The story alternates between her remembrance of the dreams she once had and the stark reality that has interrupted them since. “elle se souvient/ images qui lacèrent ses mémoirs inachevées” (10). The abrupt line breaks coupled with the stream of consciousness narrative that defines the story gives the reader their own sensation of disconnect and instability that Joséphine describes as her reality. In the final lines of the story, we see Joséphine working as a prostitute in the week following her birthday, surrounded by men whose desperation and dissatisfaction she describes in sensorial detail: “les paumés aux odeurs de rance qui pleurnichent les puceaux aux odeurs de peur qui hésitent les maris aux odeurs d’ennui qui geignent” (17). Each category of client is described without line break or punctuation, emphasizing Joséphine’s experience as uninterrupted tedium. The story concludes with a final twist, in which we see her clients “qui aiment son sexe d’homme sur un corps de femme à la poitrine enflée au nez effilé au fesses renflouées / ceux qui savent qu’avant de s’appeler Joséphine elle s’appelle Lucien” (17). In the same passage the reader discovers that Joséphine is transgender, we also learn that her body is “un dernier coup d’œil dans le miroir Joséphine se trouve moins belle ce soir elle n’a pas le moral elle a fêté ses quarante ans la semaine dernière” 71 prized in parts, interrupted by the specific desires of her clients, in a rhythm that echoes not only the texture of the writing in this story, but the fractured structure of the volume itself. In this first piece, Spitz offers a glimpse of life, a postcard of misery. The following story, “Nadia,” is constructed in three distinct (if not obviously demarcated) voices that provide different perspectives about the events surrounding the murder of Nadia and her boyfriend at the hand of one of her sexual clients. Here, the abruptness of line breaks emphasizes the immediacy of the violence Nadia endures. The format of shifting perspectives, especially as it goes largely unidentified in the story itself, further highlights the unfeelingness of the police reporting on the crime of her death by shifting without signal from Nadia’s affective perspective to one of detached observation. The language of this section provides more imagery and background to its narrative, a more conventional storytelling that makes the lack of punctuation and capitalization even more apparent. From Nadia’s point of view: mes parents s’imaginent que je vis une vie de rêve je ne dis rien au téléphone je ne connais personne à Tahiti mon souffle s’essouffle 35 The short lines read like a list, but their cadence suggests a halting speech, essouflé – breathless. Nadia’s end is foreshadowed by this breathlessness as she is ultimately strangled by a client, but the form of Spitz’s narrative intervenes here as well. Before we see the affective telling of the murder (from the murderer’s perspective) in the final lines of the story, the detached third perspective describes finding Nadia’s body as well as the body of her boyfriend. The language used in this third perspective, though emotionally detached, emphasizes a sensorial experience of the murder scene that interrupts any detachment the reader might have: 35 Pg. 28 72 lui dans la salle de bains murs éclaboussés de sang[…] elle dans la mezzanine[…] un fil électrique liant son cou au pied du lit incrusté dans des chair noirâtres boursouflées suintantes corps sans vie rongés de pourriture épaisseurs nauséeuses puanteurs chancreuses laideurs boueuses qui saturent l’autour de pestilences méphitiques 36 Because Spitz’s writing texture is unconventional to the genres in which she ostensibly writes, the reader’s attention is drawn to this detail of her work from the beginning. She then mobilizes that texture and attention to connect the reader with greater immediacy to the story she tells. Spitz’s particular way of writing highlights how she transverses the limits of genre at each level of her work. Neither poetry nor prose according to convention, her language makes evident the false dichotomy between the two by embracing both at once. Furthermore, she mobilizes the creative possibilities afforded by the form of her work to layer meaning into its iteration – the reader flows along with Joséphine as her thoughts spiral outwards and experiences the breathlessness that Nadia describes. While these first two vignettes follow a similar structure of narrative and writing texture, the arc of Cartes postales moves further away from the genre conventions of short stories (and certainly of postcards). The final story, “Hina-ite-ra’ipō’ia,” breaks away most fully from the expected. It recounts the Tahitian myth of the birth of stars interspersed with the story of a man returning to his betrothed only to find she has died years before. The short story is threaded through with the Tahitian names of stars and constellations, recounting in epic style the love between Rua-tupu-a-nui and Atea-ta’o-nui, the myth of the creation of the stars that implicitly reflects the more terrestrial love story unfolding in the plot of the short story. Interposed with this retelling, the perspective changes to that of a man on his wedding day, excited to reunite with his 36 Pg. 24-25 73 bride-to-be. The two tales reflect each other in their depiction of yearning and of love, but the scope of each contrasts starkly with the other. The story is further fragmented by a section offset by its lack of line breaks in which the narrator makes reference to time he has spent in Brittany, the region in northwest France. This section is the closest we come to the spirit of a conventional postcard and reflects “mes nostalgies mes mémoires et les chemins creux” that are rendered “dérisoires” by the lovers’ story. (83) The postcard-like interlude doubly highlights Spitz’s reconfiguration of genre, creating greater distance with conventions of short stories as well as gesturing towards the genre expectations set up in the title of the volume itself. The form and content of the work come together, distancing the reader from the historical Western literary representations of Tahiti, and introducing a metaphorical approach to understanding its physical space. Furthermore, integrating an aspect of orality into the prose forms that are favored as more prestigious according to metropolitan literary gatekeepers undermines that vestige of colonial control. Jean Anderson argues, “Spitz has successfully removed the novel form from its European roots (deterritorialized it, cut it away from its usual meaning) and reterritorialized it into something that crosses genre boundaries.” 37 Anderson situates this de- and reterritorialization as “tak[ing] a cultural form and wrench[ing] it into a new context,” a reappropriation from the colonial situation of deterritorializing cultural forms from the context of their iteration for consumption in the metropole. 38 In reterritorializing literary forms from their European conventions to align with the literary traditions of French Polynesia, Spitz again invests in this genre reterritorialization in Cartes postales. The text’s full title, Cartes postales: 37 Ibid., 187. 38 Jean Anderson, “Inside Out or Outside In? Translating Margins, Marginalizing Translations. The Case of Francophone Pacific Writing”, TranscUtlurAl, 5: 1-2 (2013), 9-21 (p. 13). 74 nouvelles, presents two conflicting genres of writing – postcards and short stories – neither of which fully characterize the writing contained in the text. The implications of how Spitz transverses genre are thus both operational and performative. Her rejection of metropolitan grammatical and genre conventions serves most obviously as a protest against their colonizing constrictions. But Spitz isn’t using rejection for the sake of rejection, nor is the power of her language predicated on reference to the conventions she isn’t following. She asserts the “local cultural practice” of literary conventions by using them in her literary expression, giving depth and breathing life into the setting of her work. The text requires no colonial contextualization to be effective and powerful, but it also mobilizes its colonized position (in confronting Western readerly expectation) to reinforce the political message of its narrative. Not only, then, is Spitz’s intervention “transgeneric,” it is also, I argue, transversal in its scope and investments – not predicated on colonizing standards of literary form but rather mobilizing literary creation inspired by the space in which she is writing. The communal force of poetry: Déwé Gorodé As Spitz’s writing finds inspiration in Mā’ohi literary tradition and French Polynesia’s continued resistance to colonial control, our second author, Déwé Gorodé, also writes cultural support and political resistance into her work from New Caledonia’s own decolonial struggle. The political nature of Gorodé’s writing resonates with her own political engagement throughout her career. In 1974, Gorodé became active in the Foulards Rouges, a movement inspired by the May ’68 unrest in France and committed to protesting racist discrimination against Kanaks in New Caledonia. She soon became the president of the organization and was imprisoned thrice throughout the 1970s as a political agitator. She helped found in 1976 the Communist Kanak 75 independence party, PALIKA. When ten Kanak men were murdered in an ambush by Caldoche 39 farmers at the beginning of “Les Évènements 40 ” in 1984, Gorodé left her position as French teacher at Protestant mission school Do-Néva in Houaïlou and began teaching Paicî 41 at the nascent École Populaire kanak in Ponérihouen, her hometown. She was a founding member of the Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), the pro-independence party of which she served as representative as New Caledonian Vice President from 2001-2009 and as Minister of Culture from 1999 until her death in August 2022. She continually spoke out in favor of full independence from France. While she may be the most overtly political author discussed here, Gorodé’s work challenges a one-dimensional political interpretation. From the looping narrative of her first novel, Gorodé challenges any facile readings of the stories she tells. Nevertheless, a close look at the formal choices made in her texts sees a performance of her political investments, inscribing Kanak culture into her pieces in an echo of her dedication to its promotion throughout her career. Her first novel, L’épave (2005), is a text whose narrative is told in spiral; with several characters of the same names whose paths cross and diverge throughout the story, the separation between individual subjectivities becomes blurred and porous. These central aspects of the novel reflect both the naming traditions as well as the centrality of communal identity over the individual in Kanak culture. She further incorporates a variety of genres in the novel that reflect the fractured nature of both the narrative and the memory of its protagonist. From the “Épitaphe pour Lila” written by several of the novel’s characters to the interlude of transcribed graffiti, the “novel” contains multitudes. Her other novels follow a similar investment in multivocal articulation. The 39 Largely white population of European origin in New Caledonia 40 Period of armed conflict between Kanak independence fighters and French armed forces from 1984-1988 41 Most widely spoken of the 30 Kanak languages in New Caledonia, spoken mostly on la Grande Terre 76 2009 novel Graines de pin colonnaire is made up of poetry, short stories, diary entries, and conversations written by and recounting the life of a woman diagnosed with cancer. These myriad genres, the “seeds” that contribute to a work subtitled “Roman,” invite a similar multilayered reading of a story at once expansive and deeply personal. In 2012, Gorodé published her longest novel, Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! ou “No more baby,” an epic that addresses decades of Kanak history while focusing on the perspective of the young girl Tâdo. The novel includes several poems recited or sung by characters in the story and concludes with the contents of a notebook titled “Prélude” written by one of the characters. The final pages of the text are Gorodé identifying what real people correspond to the characters in the novel, along with a series of poems. She introduces them thusly: “L’histoire de Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé! que je viens de vous livrer, était dans le coffret, ainsi que de nombreux poèmes dont voici une brassée:” (344) The text weaves history into a fictive genre, a novel comprised of several textures, all of which reflects the Kanak coutume of genealogical recitation that preludes significant gatherings. Gorodé takes the prized Western form of the novel and expands its constrictions to make the form of her writing tell as much of the story as the novel’s contents. Her work draws on a deep investment in communal expression, a reflection of Kanak culture and a rejection of the violence of individual authority. This commitment to the communal finds further expansion in Gorodé’s poetry. While she was celebrated as the first Kanak novelist, her published oeuvre begins with poetry. Her first collection of poems, Sous les cendres des conques (1985), is perhaps her most overtly political work. Published at the beginning of the “Événements” (1984-1988) and composed over years of political engagement and repression, this collection exposes the myriad violences experienced by the Kanak people, particularly Kanak women, and expresses Gorodé’s dedication to fighting for 77 a better future. In “Parole de Lutte,” a poem written while serving time for her political activism in the Camp-Est prison in 1974, Gorodé traces the historical importance of the parole in Kanak culture and how it reemerges with the poet in this moment of political striving. As the poem begins “Parole offrande… polie par les eaux du pays,” and concludes with “Parole forgée au zénith de la souffrance,” the treatment of parole shifts with the needs of a colonized people. In the first line, parole is explored as a central tenet of Kanak coutume, but by the final stanza – offset from the rest of the poem – it has transformed into a “clé ouvrant la voie/ à la parole qui prend parti/ au poème qui défend/ à une poétique militant/ et avant tout/ à une pratique de lutte”. 42 The parole, the medium of expression that both describes and shapes community, has been mobilized from its historical roots as a tenet of Kanak cultural proceedings into a tool of political struggle. Parole, the specific form of “word” that is imbued with history, literary tradition, and agency for the Kanak people, takes part in the poetry of struggle that Gorodé is at once writing and promoting as a political tool. The “parole de lutte” is a poem as well as a militant poetics, a way for the author to transform the violence experienced under metropolitan repression into a form of combat against that violence: “une pratique de lutte”. While isolated and imprisoned, Gorodé constructs a text of singular authorship that nevertheless serves as a call to communal arms. Writing itself is resistance because it celebrates the culture the community is fighting to liberate from colonial control and obfuscation. This poem, written at the beginning of Gorodé’s literary career, articulates the author’s commitment to collective creation that would shape the form of her writing to come. In Gorodé’s following poetry collections, creating together finds more concrete iteration. Her second collection, Dire le vrai, was written in collaboration with fellow New Caledonian 42 Cited from Déwé Gorodé. Sharing as Custom Provides. Deborah Walker-Morrison and Raylene L. Ramsay, translators. Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004, 7. 78 author Nicolas Kurtovitch. While on a speaking tour of Australia in 1997, the two authors decided on a list of 18 topics that would serve as themes for poems written each day. These topics organize the work, progressing chronologically and geographically throughout Australia, from July 15 to August 1, 1997, beginning and ending in Sydney. Poems alternate between Gorodé and Kurtovitch throughout the work, their authorship identified at the end of each poem and further codified in alternating the color of the pages on which the writing appears. This serves to underline the dual perspectives that contribute to a unified work. The position that each author occupies puts them in a number of contrasts. Gorodé, a Kanak woman carrying on a family legacy 43 of authorship and cultural exchange, leads with a poem that writes the situation of her island and her country. “écrire/ une île/ un pays/ où les êtres étaient/ où les êtres étaient sans être/ où les êtres sont sans être/ sans dire… sous la chape de/ silence” (10) Gorodé writes into the silence that has defined her land and the people who live there, highlighting the oppression under which they have lived. The above lines open the poem (and the collection), suggesting a place of departure where silence reigns and writing interrupts. Though the “êtres” are “sans voix,” later in the poem “la terre/ et/ la pierre/ parlent/ à la place de l’être/ à la place de l’homme/ à la place de la femme” (11). If it is the land that speaks, Gorodé is the one writing the land, not as its representative but as a facilitator, making space for “la place de l’enfant/ à/ naître” (11). Writing is both revelatory and intervening, a place to make room for voices to come, and Gorodé acts here as its instrument. In juxtaposition to Gorodé’s biographic and writerly position, Kurtovitch is descended from the first European families to settle in New Caledonia, a fact that opens his author bio at the 43 Gorodé’s father, Waia Gorodé, is the author of Mon École du Silence and Souvenirs d’un Neo-Calédonien ami de Maurice Leenhardt, and her maternal grandfather, pastor Elaïcha Nâbaï, wrote Discours de pilou as well as an autobiography and notes on the 1917 rebellion. 79 end of the text. His entry for “écrire” also engages with the idea of silence, but it is a physical silence which he uses to position the body as the space of enunciation. “Profitons du silence/ de l’absence/ à l’écoute de soi” (12). Later, “Je renifle/ à pleine main j’osculte je palpe/ j’appuie je cherche l’os/ cherche les muscles trouve/ nerfs viscères vaisseaux veines…” (12). Throughout the poem, Kurtovitch uses the “je” to explore his physical position and ultimately arrive at true inner self and “offrir alors ce qu’il y a de pur/ de silencieux d’attentif et patient” (13). For Kurtovitch, the silence is individual and productive, whereas for Gorodé the silence is shared and oppressive, but both authors find in the silence they describe possibilities for the future. It is a performative beginning to a collection predicated on productive contrasts. The opening topic, and the contrasting poems that ruminate on it, shows the reader how the collection is set up to reveal truth – dire le vrai – through apposition. Gorodé and Kurtovitch demonstrate the truth they seek to convey in the form of their writing as much as the content of that writing articulates it. A second pair of poems reinforces this reading of the collection’s performative nature. In their poems “être avec l’autre,” each author further situates their own positionality. Gorodé’s poem deals with the feelings of leaving one’s home to attend school elsewhere, a common experience across francophone Oceania as students conduct their university studies in metropolitan France. 44 “il faut partir/… vers les autres/ pour vivre/ et être/ soi avec/ les autres/ où que tu sois/ seul avec les u 45 / seul dans la foule/ seul avec soi” (50). In France, she will be alone as she never has been in New Caledonia, separated from her community and her homeland. Being with this other means being with oneself instead of being communally. The topic of the 44 In fact, Déwé Gorodé was among the first autochthonous women from New Caledonian to earn a university degree when she obtained her licence de lettres modernes from the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier in 1974. 45 “u: sprite, goddess” according to translators Raylene Ramsay and Deborah Walker in Sharing as Custom Provides, Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004, 91. 80 poem itself is also a gesture towards a communal experience as, even though Gorodé was remarkable in her time for traveling to the metropole to continue her education, it is a much more common experience today (and when she was writing in 1997). Kurtovitch’s poem, in contrast, concerns being with the disadvantaged other, those who have suffered generations of violence. “les morts des années de violence/ ont leur sang couleur terre/ accompagner ceux-là aujourd’hui/ dans larmes mêlées” (52). He urges “Sacrifions sacrifions/ la vie est riche/ dans l’oubli de soi réside le vrai ” (53). Being with the other, for Kurtovitch, means enduring together, offering support by moving towards communal experience. For each author, then, “being with the other” simultaneously reveals what being is otherwise and what the “other” means. The contrast between the two shifts illuminates the mindsets that underpin these different ways of existing in a shared world. The structure of contrast Dire le vrai uses to performatively convey meaning is made more evident by Gorodé’s most recent published volume of poetry, 2016’s Se donner le pays: Paroles jumelles, which she wrote in collaboration with New Caledonian author Imasango. According to her author bio, Imasango is from a family “dont l’arbre généalogique témoigne de la complexité historique et humaine de l’archipel.” In the volume’s preface, Murielle Szac dubs the authors “deux jardinières de lendemains possibles,” and their work is cultivated together as the text once again alternates poems between authors. In this text, though, the poems work towards a mutual understanding. Instead of each author’s work being offset from the work of the other through different colored pages, this volume is organized around four categories to which both authors contribute their own, intersecting interpretations: “Nous bouche en marche,” “Sous les ailes de l’oiseau bleu,” “Parole enracinée,” and “Dö névâ.” Here, the communal reveals 81 shared goals for the future in the face of generational 46 or genealogical divide. Szac states, “rien de ce qui souffre ne leur est étranger,” and the theme of the collection is an exploration of that suffering as well as where hope for its amelioration can be found. (11) Gorodé and Imasango appear as two authors writing a common vision, jumelles in the sense of instruments to see across distances but also in terms of their association to each other. In a two-page spread about halfway through the collection, a poem from each author appears, each facing the other. Imasango’s poem, “À l’écoute de ton ombre,” expresses a feeling of sorrow and helplessness in the face of need and violence experienced by her community. “je me sens seule et misérable quand je n’ai pas/ de solution à proposer à la souffrance des hommes” (74). In the end, it is her country, its very landscape, that lends the author succor and calm. “Le jour et son silence viennent à mon secours/ la nature les suit et m’offre sa silhouette.” Imasango finds comfort in the land, in communal space where she is able to recuperate in the shade of nature personified. On the facing page is Gorodé’s poem “Parole jumelle,” where she finds strength in more direct communion with another. She writes, “Autrui est notre jumeau/ Parole jumelle, parole duelle/ Parole paritaire, parole solidaire” (75). Gorodé’s poem explores togetherness as a celebration, “car nous sommes en paroles/ à oublier le temps/ partout dans la case et/ pour longtemps/ car nul ne peut vivre seul/ sur terre.” Where togetherness grants Imasango the refuge she seeks in the face of continued trials, Gorodé finds joy in togetherness after historical division. In placing these poems on facing pages, they read as two sides of the same coin of political struggle: gains and losses, sorrow and joy, the voices that appear here are twinned, a pair speaking from different positions towards a shared understanding in a relationship that characterizes the collection as a whole. Common to both collaborative 46 Gorodé was born in 1949 and Imasango in 1964. 82 collections, though, is their assertion of poetry’s potential for change, especially when created in conversation. This is the intervention in form that Gorodé puts forth. Where Spitz’s oeuvre reterritorializes Western genre categorization in the very fabric of her texts, Gorodé’s asserts poetry as a medium of communal creation. Though Gorodé certainly pushes against the constraints put on the prized form of the novel, it is poetry that she mobilizes as a “une pratique de lutte.” 47 In his introduction to Dire le vrai, Dominique Jouve writes, “Il se passe quelque chose de fort… un moment d’amitié et de partage transfiguré par le poème” (6). The act of poetry, writing it and putting into the world, is a political – even decolonizing – move that echoes Gorodé’s commitment throughout her life to the movement for Kanak independence, and an act that, for Gorodé, takes place as a part of a community. The final stanza of the poem that precedes “Parole jumelle ,” “La poésie,” sums this up: À ce prix la poésie qui n’a plus qu’un espoir n’a plus qu’un devoir RÉSISTER 48 Using fiction to “dire autrement”: Titaua Peu Community is important to the work of our final author as well. Titaua Peu became the youngest published Tahitian author in 2002 with Mūtismes at the age of 28. She represents a younger generation of authors in comparison to the foundational figures of Spitz and Gorodé and is arguably the current star of the literary community of French Polynesia: she is currently (2022- 2023) an artist in residence at the Cité international des arts in Paris and has been making 47 Gorodé, Sharing, 7. 48 Gorodé, Imasango. Paroles, 73. Emphasis original to text 83 promotional rounds in French media with the republication of Mūtismes in 2021 and with the translation into English of her second novel, Pina, which was released in July 2022. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Mūtismes was an instant success in French Polynesia upon its first publication in 2002. Moetai Brotherson, newly-elected (2023) President of French Polynesia, called the novel “un phare, qui montre le chemin à suivre pour des auteurs autochtones frustrés par les silences et les non-dits qui taisent les souffrances de leur peuple colonisé.” 49 The content of the novel, as it follows the political and personal awakening of its protagonist, certainly represents in itself an intervention in the “muteness” the novel seeks to address and redress, but its purpose is furthered by the form this intervention takes. As a novel, Peu’s story is made more easily consumed across not only her own community but within the very metropole she criticizes. The trajectory of this intervention continued in 2016 with the publication of her second novel, Pina, an intense look at familial violence as it is experienced by a young Tahitian girl. As Jean Anderson has written, “Si Mutismes a permis de lancer un défi à la vision idéaliste et finalement touristique qui perpétue la notion du paradis tropical, Pina, inspiré d’un fait réel, donne libre cours à la résistance par la représentation réaliste.” 50 The affective reverberation of the story’s visceral depiction of childhood sexual abuse and self-harm confronts the reader with an experience all too common across the islands. Both realist and fictional, Titaua Peu’s oeuvre asserts literature’s access to reality and mobilizes its capacity to raise voices long silenced. Peu turns fiction into a form of truth, a form of addressing reality that departs from more expected and accepted forms for its conveyance because those accepted forms have perpetuated the muteness against which Peu is writing. Dire autrement. 49 Jean Anderson, “Titaua Peu” author page, Île en Île. <ile-en-ile.org/peu/> 50 Ibid. 84 Mūtismes’s unnamed narrator engages with this form of address throughout the novel. The narrator’s identity resonates with Peu’s own situation: they share certain biographical aspects (born in New Caledonia but moved to French Polynesia as a child, experiences with familial trouble, and, ultimately, a preoccupation with telling the current story). Mūtismes should not be considered an autobiographical novel, but the affinities between its narrator and author lend further weight to the relationship between fiction and reality that the novel ultimately explores. Throughout the novel, the narrator contends with how to talk about things that have long been unsaid. This begins with how to talk about her country. “Je ne sais pas comment parler de mon pays, de mon île Tahiti… C’est presque comme une évidence. Je veux dire que mon île est en moi, bien assise en ma mémoire, en mes souvenirs. Et c’est tellement évident qu’il est difficile de l’en faire sortir” (30). This Tahiti, that one that exists in her and in her memory, is at odds with the other Tahiti that is “evident,” the one that appears on postcards and in the literature descended from Bougainville, reterritorialized in Spitz’s work and reclaimed with the narrator’s own resistance here. “Si je bloque sur d’éventuelles descriptions, c’est peut-être que mon île, après tant de pillage, de saccages déguisés, veut garder pour elle tout ce qu’on aurait pu dire d’à peu près véridique” (32). From her first musings, then, the narrator recognizes the potential silence holds for protecting her island against the exoticizing way it has been portrayed by others, especially from outside. In their imaginings (and writings), the Europeans who made of Polynesia 51 “‘la nouvelle Cythère’” portrayed Polynesians as “des êtres étonnamment gentils, doux, et, à la longue, défigurés,” transforming the reality of “cette gentillesse en naïveté puis en imbécillité.” The 51 Peu’s novel focuses on the experiences of autochthonous people on Tahiti, identifying them as Polynesian and situating their political struggle as one common across Polynesia (in contrast, for example, to Spitz who writes about Ma’ohi experiences). I follow the terms used in her work in my close reading. 85 Europeans who have colonized the island, both politically and ontologically, have saturated their own understanding of what Polynesia and its people are capable of and exported it into global knowledge. In the place of Polynesian voices, they have manufactured silence and tangled it with historical Polynesian practices. The concept of “taboo” is one example. In exploring why her home is “un pay qui ne se laisse pas raconter,” our narrator suggests that it is perhaps a taboo. “V oilà : un tabou. Plus fort encore que l’interdiction. L’Occident nous avait pris notre tapu, qui veut dire aussi sacré, et en a fait le tabou” (32). The concept of tapu is a tenet of Polynesian religion as it existed before the evangelism of Christian missionaries in the region. As an adjective, it conveys “sacré” or “consacré,” and as a noun refers to that which is restricted, untouchable because of its sacred nature. 52 From this strictly religious meaning, tapu has been transformed in European languages (notably French and English) to mean something off limits, unsayable, dangerous, or even distasteful. We see here, then, a colonization of meaning that echoes the political colonization of the country. Not only did Western colonization empty Polynesia of its own meaning and substitute an exoticized and reductive image in its place, but the same colonial forces also undermined the semiotic substance of Polynesian practices and, ultimately, the access Polynesians have to their own means of transmitting ideas. Historically central to this transmission is the tradition of orality. “Mon pays, il est autre, autrement fait. De son Histoire, on ne connaît que des bribes parce que les choses, la vie elle- même, étaient oralité. Naturellement, les mots se disaient, se léguaient, pas de support écrit en vue d’une postérité toujours éphémère” (33). Western privileging of written over oral literary traditions, of course, reifies this loss of the historical Polynesian perspective, and here Peu’s intervention in form takes concrete shape. Within the privileged form of written literature, even 52 According to Fare Vāna’a the Académie Tahitienne. 86 more privileged is the novel, a classification to which Mūtismes belongs as well. While Peu doesn’t take on genre conventions as overtly as does Spitz, her novel still defies certain expectations. The text isn’t organized into chapters, the narrative constructed around space between paragraphs, some of which are further offset with three stars to indicate time jumps or significant shifts in the telling of the story. The novel does read like a story being told, marked with pauses and revisions, the speaker aware of the story they are trying to tell but adding short asides as ideas occur to her. Some thoughts are left undone and lingering, ellipses at the end of paragraphs. The oral quality of the written work is clear throughout. In the face of the ontological violence wrought by Western colonization, our narrator remarks “Le plus étonnant, aujourd’hui, serait qu’un Tahitien prenne la plume. Que celle-ci devienne lance, flèche.” At this point early in the story, she concludes, “Mutismes… après tout, faut croire qu’on ne peut faire plus que nos prédécesseurs. On ne peut faire mieux que ces nouveaux arrivants qui auront toujours le privilège de venir en “découvreurs”. Mutismes. Malaise. Je ne pourrais faire mieux” (34). How to write against this sickness of silence? How to fill the void of Polynesian voices talking about their own country in the face of continued colonization? One answer to these questions is explored through the character Rori. Rori is a pro- independence activist with whom our narrator falls in love. Much older than the narrator, Rori came to his political activism after working in a cultural institution collecting stories from an older generation of Polynesians across the Pacific. With a shift in ruling political party, Rori’s job is transformed from collecting oral histories into developing cultural programs for tourist consumption. He is progressively phased out of his role, let go for his resistance to changing his work for the profit of tourism instead of the preservation of Polynesian culture. From there he becomes more active in the pro-independence movement in Tahiti as well as in protests against 87 the nuclear testing that resumed in French Polynesia in the 1990s. These historic protests swept across French Polynesia and captured international attention. Our narrator and Rori are separated by the narrator’s mother after she finds out about their relationship, and the narrator is sent to finish high school on another island hundreds of miles away. The two are later reunited by chance when Rori comes to the island on a speaking tour, and they return to Tahiti and take part in the 1995 protests together. Ultimately, Rori’s story ends tragically, and his experience represents in part the repression of Polynesian stories collected and presented through “official” or politically accepted channels. He was commissioned to collect “témoignages destinés à l’élaboration d’une grande et magnifique encyclopédie polynésienne,” but is ultimately reduced to injecting “native authenticity” into cultural events for tourists to enjoy, a new wave of “découvreurs” on Tahiti. (53) The way the story is told lends an air of naivety to the narrator’s understanding of Rori’s story in the beginning. The two pages in which these events are initially recounted are shot through with singular Tahitian words as well as single words in quotations, as if Rori’s voice bleeds through the narrator’s retelling. “Il avait réussi à persuader ces rū’au, comme il les appelait affectueusement, de lui parler… ” (52). “Rori sentait bien que ses conviction politiques gênaient… mais, il n’avait jamais su ‘la fermer’. Il continuait à assister à certains meetings, à certains sit-in…” (53). This is a story she has been told, not witnessed herself. The subtle signs of the bias of a young woman in love for the first time show Rori’s early story as one of youthful hope put down by irrepressible political and economic demands. His character brings to light how Polynesian stories as told by Polynesians are left to the side in favor of “cultural” representations made for tourist consumption. Either relegated to the sidelines or neglected entirely, Polynesian voices are not heard through the official channels Rori’s experience represents. 88 How, then, to make space for these stories, to break the mutismes their absence has left and allow the silenced not only to speak but be heard? The answer Peu provides throughout her work is “autrement.” This is her mobilization of form, not just in rejecting constraints of genre convention but in wielding the novel – a genre prized in Western literary canon – to speak unacknowledged historic experience through fiction. In an article about the ecocritical resonances of Peu’s novel, Anaïs Maurer considers how nuclear testing is portrayed in Mūtismes and argues that Peu addresses the indescribable power of nuclear explosions on a metanarrative level. She calls the novel “a powerful indictment against nuclear colonialism,” but states, “Describing these events constitutes one of the main representational challenges of Pacific antinuclear literature: how to describe energy levels that can only be compared to that of the sun…?” (376) Maurer traces how Peu refers to the bombs only in the latter half of the book and, when she does so, only describes them “indirectly through euphemisms… indirect speech… dead metaphors… and circumvolutions…” (377). This indirectness is a political move, Maurer argues, and represents an unwillingness to provide discourse to be appropriated by foreign/Western nongovernmental organizations. “When silence is more politicized than the most explicit images, mutism becomes a powerful strategy of resistance” (381). Instead, Peu provides descriptions of violence that echoes the violence of nuclear testing to other events in the novel. Maurer’s article reads an incident early in the novel of a mudslide in which two apartment buildings collapse as containing this displaced description (378-380). I further argue that the novel as a whole represents this displaced retelling, this slanted story, a means to dire autrement. Form is crucial to Peu’s intervention, not because she reimagines what the form of a novel can look like (though she pushes against those restrictions as well), but by mobilizing the expectations of the novel as form for other ends. This, too, represents a transversion of form. 89 Mūtismes reads as a bildungsroman set against an historical moment of political unrest, but it ultimately functions as a means to express the historical silences effected against nonfictive testimony of physical and ontological violence. The story crosses over, participating in a literary intervention without serving as singular representation. Peu’s “novel” is a tool for historical excavation, and the form of her work provides space to explore stories that have gone untold and to reach a wide audience. But the stories express more than their form otherwise suggests, and the audience is confronted with what goes unspoken as much as they are the story that is recounted throughout the novel’s pages. Negotiating opacity through paratext In a return to more concrete consideration of form and how it is mobilized in the work of these three authors, I turn now to a concluding consideration of paratextual matters. By matters, I mean specifically the front and back matter of the books themselves, spaces outside the body of the work but no less important to how the text is consumed. How do prefaces, epigraphs, glossaries, appendices, even maps further situate the content of the main body of the text? How does the matter of a text inform how it is read? In 1987, structuralist Gérard Genette explored these matters as “paratext,” tracing their development (and consistency) through a history of Western literature, committed to the rhetorical possibilities contained in these often-overlooked spaces. His study was not focused on situating literary works within the context of their consumption; nevertheless, as Levine’s discussion of formalism discussed above asserts, form is the stuff of politics. Richard Watts explores the politics of paratexts in literature from (post)colonial spaces in Packaging Post/coloniality, where he focuses on how paratexts, particularly prefaces, form part of a larger picture of the consumption of francophone literature 90 across eras of de- and post-colonization. While I will look more specifically at publishing and circulation practices across francophone Oceania in Chapter 4, in this section I seek to interrogate how the matter of the texts in question furthers the formalist interventions of the authors we have traced so far. While many decisions about paratextual matters are heavily influenced by the publishing houses that produce them (and thus not necessarily the result of the author’s agency over their work), they nonetheless have a significant effect on the intervention that the text is able to enact. We thus move more fully into the realm of formalism, but a formalism that is not only connected to the context of a text’s production but entirely invested in how the form and context intersect in readerly experience. The decision may not rest entirely with a text’s author, but the impact certainly still matters. A chief concern in our contemplation of the matter of texts is what effect the additional information provided in these spaces has on the reader’s access to the ideas the text conveys. This is of particular importance for these three authors, all of whom are concerned in one way or another with directing the attention of the reader through various forms of opacity. Whether through language, plot, or literary device, opacity serves as a tool to withhold knowability in a context where knowledge has historically been produced about Oceania from the outside. Glissant’s explanation of opacity is of particular use here, speaking from a similar space of historically denied epistemological agency. “Opaqueness is a positive value to be opposed to any pseudo-humanist attempt to reduce us to the scale of some universal model. The welcome opaqueness, through which the other escapes me, obliging me to be vigilant whenever I approach.” 53 The “universal model” is particularly resonant in the French colonial context, where “French universalism” continues to serve colonizing purposes. The opacity of the colonized other 53 Edouard Glissant. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. J. Michael Dash, trans. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989, 162. 91 is a form of protection against the “pseudo-humanist” impulse to reduce everything to similarity instead of engaging critically. For the texts we read here, opacity serves to distance the reader from the idea of easy apprehension; the stories conveyed contribute to a complex and multilayered depiction of the lives they portray, not a singular conceptualization to be read and immediately known. In Pensées insolentes et inutiles, Spitz offers this contemplation: “créer une forme d’écriture/ pour dire clairement/ une opacité fondamentale” (198). How, then, do the matters of these texts contribute to or reduce this opacity? I will trace different types of paratextual matters to explore how they function in the work of each author. The most obvious paratext involved in the opacity of a piece of literature is the glossary. Especially prominent in literature produced from spaces with a history of colonization, glossaries are most often added to texts that contain isolated usages of words foreign to the main idiom of the work. The glossary then serves to offer definition or explanation of the word’s meaning and/or common usage as it relates to the story. It is a particularly useful appendix for languages for which it can be difficult to find a reliable dictionary, another marker of the distance the typical reader is likely to sit from the topic of the work. The glossary appended to the edition of Spitz’s L’île des rêves écrasés published by Au Vent des Îles is especially informative in that regard, as, in addition to providing definitions to Tahitian words, it explains some points of pronunciation, transcription, and pluralization. It also provides contextualization for cultural figures like Henri Hiro (“personnalité polynésienne, poète engagé; s’est battu notamment pour l’indépendance ; le maintien des valeurs traditionnelles ; la protection de l’environment…”) (185) and Tū (“roi tahitien, aussi appelé Pōmare I”) (187). These figures are mentioned in the text, but the information provided goes beyond making sense of the story to give a more comprehensive idea of how the entries figure into Tahitian society. More telling than what is 92 included, though, is what is not, and conspicuously absent from the glossary are definitions for the words that make up the opening Tahitian interlude. The initial five pages of verse – arguably paratextual in themselves – remain untranslated, a jarring beginning to this “francophone novel.” Furthermore, none of Spitz’s other monographs contain glossaries. In the case of Cartes postales, the glossary appears unnecessary for much of the text, as very little non-French is used, up to the final short story. With “Hina-ite-ra’ipō’ia” however, the reader who doesn’t understand Tahitian is struck from the first page with their own missing knowledge. This lack reinforces the reterritorialization of Western genre expectations explored above – we are clearly quite separate, by this point in the text, from the glossy postcards conjured in the title. Gorodé’s oeuvre is similarly split in its inclusion of glossaries. While her novel Tâdo, Tâdo, wéé and poetry collections À l’orée du sable and Se donner le pays append glossaries, her first novel, L’épave, and poetry collection Dire le vrai do not. The absence of glossary in L’épave is particularly interesting; it holds the same position as L’île des rêves écrasés in that it is considered the first novel published by a native of her country, and it contains words and phrases from several languages as well as many cultural references. Opacity takes form beyond linguistic limitations in the text, too, as the spiral structure of the narrative and several characters of shared names make it a challenging read. The glossary for À l’orée du sable also offers an interesting example of functional opacity. It only has a dozen entries, and the words it defines aren’t offset in any way in the body of the text. The reader may be unaware of its existence until they reach the end of the work, or they will be confronted with their own idea of what “foreign” words are if they search for terms in the glossary that are not included. Not only is the reader made more careful but more self-aware. Opacity can be used to reveal as much as it limits access to understanding. 93 Peu’s work is also split: Pina contains a glossary while Mūtismes does not. 54 In contrast to the glossary in Spitz’s work, Pina’s glossary translates a few full phrases as they occur in the story. However, the translations seem to raise more questions about the original Tahitian than they might answer, as the language structures don’t quite line up. “E hi’o ānei tō’u mata it e mou’a ’āivi” is translated as “Je lève les yeux vers les montagnes, d’où le secours me viendra-t- il ? Le secours me vient du Seigneur, l’auteur des cieux et de la terre…” (369) The seeming disconnect between the phrases spoken by characters and their French translation prompts the careful reader to consider the limits and variability of translation. Is there something idiomatic in the original phrase that implies a question without actually posing one? What cultural significance is lost without understanding the quotes as they appear in the body of the text? The absence of glossary in Mūtismes can be read as performative of the narrator’s characterization of Tahitian throughout the novel. “Mutimes. Le Tahitien, c’est pas un grand bavard” (32), and “Mutismes, le Tahitien ne dit pas les choses, il semble avoir oublié” (33). Nonetheless, Tahitian words (and proper nouns of cultural significance) appear throughout the work. The unfamiliar reader is alerted to their own lack of understanding even as they are told language is missing more generally. Furthermore, though there is no glossary for the novel, the mū of its title is defined on the back cover of the 2021 Au Vent des îles edition. Again, the reader finds semiotic content “autrement.” Finally, I turn back to the beginning of our texts to look at epigraphs. Remarkably, only a few of the texts covered in this chapter don’t have epigraphs (many in addition to dedications – the front matter of these texts is intricate). Spitz’s work generally includes both dedication and epigraph as well, sometimes, as a few poetic lines by the author. Hombo has all three, and its 54 Of note, Pina’s 2022 English translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman does not include a glossary. 94 epigraph consists of a quotation from Jean-Marie Tjibaou (leader of the Kanak independence movement), song lyrics from French singer Michel Berger, and poetic lines from Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, each speaking to the experience of exile and dispossession. Hombo is curious in its subtitle of “transcription d’une biographie” while it might more conventionally be termed a novella, and the eclectic epigraph sets the reader up for the multiple textures of writing that make up the text. Elles, terre d’enfance begins with a short poem a page before its dedication that reads, “Elles qui sont parties/ Elles qui sont ici/ Elles qui m’ont donné vie/ Elles qui me donnent vie/ Elle à qui je donne vie”. These lines, situated before the dedication that includes the names of important women from Spitz’s life, set up the multiple feminine voices that structure the text that follows, a “roman à deux encres” and encourage a close reading of the intricate language that the text explores. These epigraphs invoke the presence of other figures or pieces of writing that speak to the same issues Spitz will address in her work, opening her story with community and preparing the reader for the body of text to come. Gorodé’s oeuvre is equally strategic in its choice of epigraphs. The epigraph to L’épave is situated on the same page as its dedication (in which she names “Tom et Léna,” the recurring names shared across characters in the novel). It is a quote from Sophocles’ Ajax: “La parure des femmes, c’est le silence”. Clearly a provocative quote, this epigraph opens a novel of provocation, in which the protagonists are at once victim and perpetrator and more distinction is given between genders than between the characters. The epigraph itself is a “parure” as much as it is a sign of the text to come. Dire le vrai opens with a quote from a Pablo Neruda poem, speaking to the love of one’s country. The excerpt is given first in Spanish then translated below in French, a fitting duality for a poetry collection not only with two authors but whose first edition included translations of each poem into English. Se donner le pays opens with another 95 epigraph of duality, but in this case it offers poetic excerpts from both authors in the collection. The first is excerpted from Gorodé’s entry for “écrire” in Dire le vrai, but it doesn’t maintain the line breaks present in the original poem. Instead, the stanza of originally 14 lines is condensed into 5, allowing the poem to be read more succinctly and mirroring more closely the following excerpt of Imasango’s work (taken from her collection Le baiser des pas de nos silences). This reformatting also more closely reflects the shape of Gorodé’s poems in the present collection, creating a sense of continuity throughout her work. On the other hand, À l’orée du sable contains neither epigraph nor dedication, opening onto Gorodé’s first poem immediately after the title page. This immediacy is reinforced by the size of the text on the page, which is much larger than the compact format of Dire le vrai. The front matter of each of these volumes prepares the reader for the work ahead, not as an extension of the body of the text but by establishing a corpus to which the text to follow contributes. Peu’s epigraphs operate slightly differently. I opened this chapter with the second half of the epigraph to Mūtismes; before Peu positions the work to follow as both fictional and true, something she wanted to “dire autrement,” she writes “Mutismes, pour tous ces silences qui ont miné l’âme polynésienne…” Not only does this situate the text within a historical framework, it makes clear from the beginning the tone of the story to follow. Mūtismes is a text of intervention, making noise into the silences imposed from without that have grown within, and the epigraph begins that work. Pina’s use of epigraphs is a different story altogether. The epigraph that opens the novel describes a body: “Un petit corps balance. Plutôt, il tournoie à demi./ Calmement, c’est excessif ce calme. Il laisse entendre que/ le dernier sursaut a eu lieu, c’est plus la peine.” It is an ominous beginning to a story filled with violence, and the epigraph returns throughout. Six more times throughout the body of the text, this epigraph appears in the space between sections (larger 96 separations than between chapters), each time adding another line or two to an increasingly violent and desperate image. As the story progresses and we become more familiar with its characters, the identity of the body creeps into the reader’s consciousness with increasing horror. Halfway through the progression of epigraphs, which occurs just before a longer section of the body of the text interrupts its unveiling, the lines, “Les cheveux longs crépus sont libres, pour une fois. Il n’y a pas d’autres lamentation que celle d’une rivière pas loin,” make clear that the hanging body belongs to Pina, titular character and young girl whose point of view has served as our lens into the violent world she inhabits. (83) The narrative of the story catches up to the scene of this attempted suicide after the last epigraph, this time from the point of view of Pina’s family who finds her body. They are able to get her to help in time to save her, and the story ends with her decision to record the events of the novel we’ve just read, presumably revealing herself as its author. A relatively happy ending like this might otherwise wash away some of the affective impact of the scene of Pina’s self-harm, but the epigraphs serve to keep the reader with the feelings of anticipation, dread, and eventually sorrow and hopelessness that come with the slow discovery of the scene they have been repeatedly returned to. The impact of the text breaks free of the borders of its body, directing and maneuvering the reader through an experience of the story that would be difficult or overbearing to achieve otherwise. The front matter affects the material of the rest of the book, showing itself to be a crucial element of its impact instead of relegated to simple adornment. Conclusion: form and performance From a consideration of form as authorial intervention to a broader understanding of formalism firmly rooted in the context of production, I have traced the multiple methods three 97 authors of francophone Oceania mobilize expectations of literary forms to interrupt a history of ontological violence and epistemological erasure by asserting their own interventions in conveying their stories. Though each text, let alone each author, uses form in unique ways, the overall formalistic interventions explored in these texts is a crucial aspect of this corpus as a whole. Literature produced in francophone Oceania demonstrates diverse methods of artistic expression, but the region as whole is faced with the challenge of working against historical and continued invisibility both within its borders and around the world more generally. The texts discussed in this chapter invest in making space for themselves in a Western-centric literary industry while simultaneously using the conventions of that industry as mechanisms to further the intervention of their work. With particular attention to expectations of genre, authorial position, and direct representation, these texts mobilize opacity to resist the continued exoticization of a region long subject to literary representation as a paradise at the end of the world. 98 Chapter 3: Community “Il n’y a pas d’erreurs. There aren’t mistakes, only variations. La langue, c’est la vôtre. This is your language, too… Use it.” - Jean Anderson, Salon du Livre 2022 On a rainy afternoon in November, two writers, a translator, and a publisher met for a conversation. It was the second day of the 2022 Salon du Livre in Papeete, Tahiti, and as the rain echoed through the space, literature enthusiasts of all sorts came together to hear two participants in Mā’ohi Nui’s Writer’s Residency talk about their work. For this second year of the residency, a Polynesian author – the prominent Chantal Spitz – and an author from greater Oceania – the prolific Russell Soaba, an artist and writer from Papua New Guinea – were both sponsored to spend time working on new projects and inspiring youth in Mā’ohi Nui to become future writers themselves. This talk was a chance for each writer to discuss their current projects in conversation with each other as well as with Jean Anderson – scholar-translator of Oceanian literature – and Christian Robert – founder of Éditions Au Vent des îles, president of Tahiti’s Association of Editors, and organizer of the Salon. As with much of the 4-day festival of books, as well as the entire academic conference that preceded it, this talk was bilingual, and live interpretation was available in both French and English. In a festival full of remarkable presentations by prominent actors in Oceanian literature, this conversation stood out. 55 Soaba, who represents a towering figure in his community, nevertheless expressed his surprise at being selected as a writing fellow for the residency, as he applied not because he thought he would succeed, but because he knew many authors from Papua New Guinea had 55 For the Salon’s full schedule, see Appendix D, Figure 8. 99 applied though they did not meet the qualification of having previously published work. He applied to encourage other, less-established authors from his country. In fact, Soaba expressed feeling estranged from his idiom of expression – English – as a language foreign to him, in which he is constantly cognizant of his own mistakes. To this, Jean Anderson responded with the above quote: “Il n’y a pas d’erreurs. There aren’t mistakes, only variations. La langue, c’est la vôtre. This is your language, too. Just take your language and do what you want to do with it. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to get 2/10 or 10/10. Just use it. It’s a tool. Please.” 56 This conversation featured authors who represent the most prominent literary figures in their communities, whose work and advocacy continues to inspire a next generation of writers. While neither Spitz nor Soaba are currently read as widely as each of their oeuvres merit (based on the quality of their writing and the contribution each makes to the literary corpus of their region), this line from translator to writer struck me as significant to the breadth of Oceanian literature. For these authors, and any critical engagement with their work, language represents a horizon of possibilities instead of strictures to be followed. It is a dynamic reflective of the oceanic framework I have asserted throughout this project: fluid creation and resistance to imposed stagnation. As the first two chapters of this project explored voice as a medium of resistance and the conventions of form as a space of creative possibility instead of restriction, this third chapter expands its scope to the literary community from which these texts emerge. This chapter explores the dynamics of the community that supports literary production across francophone Oceania, tracing how an oceanic framework of fluidity underpins three forums in which this literature is made available and/or engaged with critically. To do so, I draw on my experience at the aforementioned Salon du Livre and conference “Littérature et politique 56 Anderson, Jean, Christian Robert, Russell Saoba, and Chantal T. Spitz. “Conversation Résidence d’Écriture.” 22 e Salon du livre: Lire en Polynésie . 18 Nov. 2022. https://fb.watch/i82WVuIIiV/ 100 en Océanie” that took place on Tahiti in November 2022. The participants and attendees of these two events were witness to a crucial moment of coming together, revealing and facilitating exchanges that shape the literary sphere across regional and linguistic boundaries. The contact facilitated by these events puts individual names and faces to the fluid framework I explore. In discussing community, I also engage the 2021 issue of Littéramā’ohi, the literary journal founded in 2002 by seven Polynesian writers. This periodical – which was featured at both the Salon and in several presentations made at the conference – gets to the heart of literary creation across Oceania with its focus on promoting autochthonous voices and stories. I argue that a careful consideration of each of these forums reinforces the oceanic reading performed on specific texts in the preceding two chapters. Where “transversion” describes writing that emerges from this Oceanian space, “oceanic” describes these community dynamics. This community takes strength and inspiration from its culture of exchange, predicated on inclusion according to shared oceanic experiences instead of exclusive separation to regional definition; the ocean unites instead of divides. An Oceanian community To frame the oceanic nature of the community explored in this chapter, let us return briefly to the concept of “Oceanian” and its relationship with transversion as it has been used in this project so far. In his 1993 essay “Our Sea of Islands,” Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa advocates for replacing the then-current term “Pacific Islands” with “Oceania” to reflect the connected nature of the region in question. “There is a world of difference,” he writes, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.” 57 This latter emphasizes the 57 Epeli Hau’ofa. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008, 31. 101 historical links between islands and within the oceanic space: “The world of our ancestors… a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled, unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers” (32-33). Beyond the shift that this text precipitated in scholarly nomenclature, Hau’ofa’s work has been foundational to an Oceanian consciousness across scholarly and extra-scholarly milieux. The text ends with a call to action: We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces that we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed places and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom. (39) Several island nations in the Pacific gained independence from colonizing powers in the late 20 th century; Tonga became an independent nation in the British Commonwealth in 1970. In contrast, current French overseas territories (like Ma’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Kanaky/New Caledonia) continue to fight for their independence. Hau’ofa’s call to collective consciousness underpins a uniting political force across the region. In the realm of scholarly engagement, it also serves as a foundational text for the ever-expanding and intersecting humanistic disciplines that engage with the region. Especially important to the development of these disciplines is the text’s intervention in centering the region as a space from which critique emerges instead of the colonizing “outside-looking-in” dynamic of authority so prevalent in the historical development of area studies in general. As the discipline develops, a focus on indigenous epistemologies and empowerment also finds support in the content and use of Hau’ofa’s thought. While “Our Sea of Islands” presents a certain call to action, the Oceanian consciousness I trace here is not necessarily a political movement predicated on national or even regional identity; instead, this Oceanian consciousness presents an identity based on relationships of exchange and movement. In her article on “Océanitude,” Anaïs Maurer describes the genealogy 102 of this latter term as “un mouvement dans le Pacifique francophone qui allie nationalisme et ouverture sur le monde.” 58 She traces the relatively recent emergence of the term in 2015 to Ni- Vanuatu writer Paul Tavo’s novel Quand le cannibal ricane. Instead of an exclusory nationalism based on “la valorisation d’une origine donnée [ou] sur une esthétique particulière,” Océanitude is founded on “la valorisation de la mobilité interinsulaire et la conscience écologique de partager une interface transnationale”: the ocean. (109) This definition offers insight into how the Oceanian community conceives of itself as well as how individuals within that community conceive of their relationship to others across oceanic expanses. Océanitude centers “relation” as identity that distinguishes itself from “la pensée archipélagique” because it is “un nationalisme ouvert, non assujetti au nomadisme prescriptif” (118). The Oceanian consciousness described here is one of shared history and future, with roots in the land as well as ties to the sea and its circulation, “un réseau horizontal de relations communes.” (123). To Hau’ofa’s theorization of “islands in a vast sea,” Océanitude as read by Maurer adds recognition of shared destiny and responsibility based on the sea as a unifying entity. “Il ne s’agit pas ici d’une tactique politique, d’une réappropriation faite plus ou moins à contrecœur d’une catégorie épistémologique inventée par l’oppresseur pour les besoins de la lutte. Il s’agit de perpétuellement désirer et réinventer l’Océanie” (124). Neither Oceania nor Océanitude is an unchanging monolith, but rather both are fluid concepts based in currents of relationality. Crucially, this framework is not reliant on an oppressive outside theorization of the region to resist and reject but rather a conceptualization of the region (including the land, people, and sea) in a long view of constant movement. These underpinning conceptualizations of the Oceanian community find significant resonance in the framework of transversion I have explored so far in close reading texts from the 58 Anaïs Maurer, “Océanitude: Repenser le tribalisme occidental au prisme des nationalismes océaniens.” Francosphères. Vol. 8 no. 2, 2018, 109-125, 109. 103 region. I have used transversion to describe an interconnected multiplicity, a relationality that respects difference and conceptualizes unity. It is the interplay, the innovation, of both that characterizes the Oceanian texts we have seen so far. In language and form, these texts demonstrate this rooted relationality as a medium of intervention. Maurer offers a reading of this relationality through the image of an outrigger canoe: À l’image de la pirogue océanienne traditionnelle, qui ne peut se maintenir à flot sans son balancier, les valeurs migratoires océaniennes et les valeurs d’enracinement continentales se complètent l’une l’autre, sans rapport de supériorité. La philosophie de l’Océanitude ne propose pas de hiérarchisation entre les cultures. Elle note simplement la contribution locale d’un particularisme au banquet de l’universel. (118) A horizontal instead of vertical framework, Oceanian identity underpins a community dynamic deeply invested in collaboration and support. I have used the concept of “transversion” to read individual texts from the Oceanian canon and proposed it as reflective of a broader oceanic framework. Here we see the other side of the individual/community relationship; while an explicitly Oceanian consciousness is not necessarily evident in a close reading of individual texts (though the concept certainly appears in the work of several authors of the region), it is abundantly clear in the forums of community discussed in this chapter. What the conference, Salon, and literary journal each demonstrate is how the literary community of “francophone” Oceania comes together to create collaboratively, fluidly, and with a view to the future. Conference and salon From November 14-20, 2022, the Université de la Polynésie française (UPF) and Te Fare Tauhiti Nui - Maison de la Culture played host to a week of critical engagement and joyous discovery. The international conference “Littérature et politique en Océanie,” which took place before the Salon, brought together scholars and writers from across the world to speak on “les 104 rapports de domination, d’intégration, d’appropriation, de soumission qui occupent une place centrale dans les littératures océaniennes en contexte colonial et postcolonial.” 59 The conference itself was born of a special issue of the New Zealand Journal of French Studies, published in 2019 on the same topic. Many, though not all, of the authors who contributed to that special issue presented at the conference, in a continuation of the articles they had written or speaking to developments in the field since the journal’s publication. Where in 2019 Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega wrote about an 1891 short story from Robert Louis Stevenson, for the conference she presented an ecocritical reading of Craig Santos Perez’s 2016 multimedia poem “Praise song for Oceania.” Titaua Porcher, an organizer of the conference as well as an editor on the special issue, presented on dis/utopia in Méridien zéro, a novel by Tahitian-born author Mourareau published in 2020, a contrast to her article on “l’autre histoire” in Oceanian literature. Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) scholar and writer ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui expanded on her article on nationalism and ‘Ōiwi poetry by women with a presentation more broadly exploring ‘Ōiwi literary politics. Far from simply a continuation of the journal’s special issue, however, the conference served as a concrete moment of encounter and exchange, a coming together of a diffuse community. While the conference traces roots to 2019, the Salon itself was established much earlier, in 2000, and has grown each year in scope and reach. According to Christian Robert, founder of publishing house Au vent des îles and president of the Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles, the Salon serves to “[permettre]… à la fois aux autres éditeurs, mais également aux auteurs, de réaliser … qu'on était partie intégrante d'un bloc océanien important.” 60 Indeed, the Salon du Livre de Tahiti grew in collaboration with the Salon International du Livre Océanien (SILO), 59 According to the description on UPF’s website: https://www.upf.pf/fr/actualites/colloque-litterature-et-politique- en-oceanie. 60 Katherine Hammitt, “Colibri of Pacific publishing: An Interview of Au vent des îles founder Christian Robert.” French Australian Review. Forthcoming 2023. 105 held in Kanaky/New Caledonia since 2003. As the Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles was formed, in part, to support the staging of the annual book festival, SILO was established under the administration of Déwé Gorodé as Minister of Culture and central figure of the Kanak literary community. Authors and editors from across Oceania are invited to both Salons, held in autumn each year (apart from interruptions due to Covid-related travel restrictions). Their staging represents a significant intervention in the centrifugal system of literary production between the metropole and other francophone spaces; where Paris has historically served as the point of literary production and dissemination, the literary salons in Ma’ohi Nui and Kanaky center the point of production within their own borders. Furthermore, the salons promote literature from across the region, cultivating a wider community predicated on shared history and continued exchange instead of colonial administration. This reflects positioning Oceania as a site of ontological emergence instead of object for outside study, as articulated by Hau’ofa and reiterated in Maurer’s reading of Océanitude. The sites of both the conference and salon on Tahiti are significant. The disconnect between the imagined space of Oceania and the reality of sites within the region has for centuries contributed to the exoticization of Oceania and its peoples. Many have in the past written about these spaces without concrete experience of existing in them, so situating the site of the conference in the heart of the region under consideration bridges an important gap. The conference and Salon brought together presenters and attendees from across great distances to propose their interventions and perform their work within the context of the region under question, centering the Université de la Polynésie française, its scholars and students, and Te Fare Tauhiti Nui-la Maison de la Culture. Ultimately, this represents a reterritorialization, not just of literary production but of scholarly intervention as well. In the first issue of Littérama’ohi, 106 discussed at greater length in the next section, Daniel Margueron’s article “Écrire c’est se reterritorialiser” appears, casting the Deleuzian concept of reterritorialization within the specificity of Polynesian writers reclaiming their space from ontological colonization. Margueron expands later, “Reprendre pied sur son propre sol, c’est d’une certaine manière revivre, réensemencer sa vie et celle de ses lecteurs, à partir d’un nouveau protocole […] l’autre face de l’appropriation géographique, nominative, voire politique.” 61 Holding the conference on Tahiti, at one of the premier universities in Oceania, situates the university and island as sites of ontological production and, consequently, prestige. It is not just that eminent figures in Oceanian literature came together to talk about their work; it’s that they did so within the region itself. 62 The sites in which both events took place played tangible part in their proceedings. The conference was staged on UPF campus, overlooking the bay and Vaira’i Park. The campus, situated at the top of a hill, provides a panoramic view of the sea and Moorea, Tahiti’s closest neighboring island. The event opened with a maeva 63 of flower necklaces as presenters and attendees gathered to watch an ‘orero 64 , ‘aparima 65 , and song each performed by UPF students. Each piece of this welcome set the tone for a conference rooted in Oceanian custom without the exoticization inherent in a touristic context. Several aspects of this performance ensured that its staging was a demonstration of customary welcome and not a reductive show prepared for the tourist’s gaze. The directors and performers all belonged to the university and participated in these events as practitioners of Mā’ohi cultural traditions. Each piece of the event’s opening 61 Daniel Margueron, Flots d’encre sur Tahiti: 250 ans de littérature francophone en Polynésie française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015), p. 259. 62 While celebrations of shared Oceanian culture emerged concurrently with widespread decolonization in the 1970s, the staging within Oceania of 20 th and 21 st -century cultural manifestations focused on literature and on francophone Oceania owe much to the establishment of annual events like the SILO. 63 “Welcome”; I’ve maintained the Tahitian words here as they appeared in the conference program without gloss. See Appendix D, Figure 7. 64 Oration performed to open significant events, usually recounting genealogy, history, and geography 65 Dance with a focus on hand movements to tell a story 107 celebrated the space in which the conference took place, honoring the land and its people while welcoming newcomers and acknowledging their position and intention. These performances demonstrated a commitment to preserving the long tradition of artistic expression and storytelling – both crucial to the ever-expanding corpus of written literature from the region. In featuring these acts at the beginning of the conference, its organizers affirmed the link between the literature that was the conference’s focus and the multivalent artistic traditions that represent that literature’s context. In the lecture hall where most of the conference took place, each seating was decorated with flowers that perfumed the room for the length of the event. Even as the conference itself unfolded along familiar lines – scholars with PowerPoints presenting close readings and theoretical interventions – the site of its staging reinforced this Oceanian location as one of artistic and intellectual vibrancy. Not solely a space to be analyzed but a place in which analysis occurs. Nor was the common structure of scholarly presentation the sole form of intellectual intervention. Māori writer Selena Marsh’s talk “Led by Line” unfolded along a poetically rhythmic exploration of the role drawn lines play in the creation of meaning within an Oceanian context. Celebrated Kanak slam poet Paul Wamo performed a series of poems accompanied by prerecorded rhythmic vocals. Both these performances further explored the deep connection between the oral and written in Oceanian literary production, affirming their connection instead of reifying any artificial separation between written and oral. La parole was central to the critical engagement enacted throughout the conference. The site of the conference revealed a central tenant of the literary corpus it was meant to critique: the vibrancy of literary creation in Oceania draws from a long legacy of oral literary performance and creation. 108 The Salon, staged in the gardens of Te Fare Tauhiti Nui-La Maison de la Culture, was perhaps even more impacted by its site. In his editorial note in the Salon’s program, French Polynesia’s Minister of Culture and Environment Heremoana Maamaatuaiahutapu wrote, “Une synergie s’exerce entre le Salon du livre de Tahiti et son écrin… Ces jardins au milieu desquels se dresse le paepae a Hiro, plateforme traditionnelle construite en hommage à l’un des plus grands poètes polynésiens: Henri Hiro. À l’ombre du mythique banian. Y avait-il meilleur écrin pour un Salon qui fait la part belle au livre, lui-même issu de l’arbre et diffusant la connaissance de la vie? ” 66 Hiro, a poet and political activist active from the 1970s to his early death in 1990, inspired generations of Mā’ohi writers to take up the pen and tell their own stories. His influence echoes through the work of Chantal Spitz, Flora Devatine, and all those after them. By staging the discussions and celebrations of books and reading that take place during the Salon each year on this platform, the organizers and performers affirm the Salon’s connection to the region’s literary history. With the banyan tree at its center, the Salon was staged in booths and tents organized by publisher with various programs scheduled throughout the four-day event. When rain came unrelentingly on the second day, the meetings and presentations scheduled to take place on the paepae a Hiro were moved to an adjacent open-air hall where the rain and voices of the presenters both echoed through the space. On the evening of the first day, a welcome ceremony was held on the paepae, where speakers and then attendees were invited to take part in a kava ceremony (more on which momentarily). As harmonizing roosters perched in the banyan tree, the discussions held below were tangibly connected to the space in which they were held. While the site of the salon played a clear role in situating the regional specificity that was promoted during the Salon, it was also itself one manifestation of a broader intervention affected 66 Heremoana Maamaatuaiahutapu, “Éditos.” Le Journal du salon. Salon du Livre de Tahiti, November 2022, 3. 109 throughout both the Salon and conference: dedication to a profoundly Oceanian literary community. This Salon, which was cultivated in partnership with its correlate in Kanaky/New Caledonia, organized by local publishing houses, and featuring voices from the sea of islands, centers Oceania as a place of extensive literary production and value. It celebrates aesthetic forms that are valued across the region, many of which are not similarly valued in the historically powerful centers of literary production. The very first event of the Salon was a “conte du Vanuatu” performed by Myriam Malao for groups of school children. Malao is the president of the women’s association at Vanuatu’s famed Port-Vila Market where she also serves as director and cook. Her work in advocacy has focused on access to healthy food and combating violence against women in collaboration with NGOs like Oxfam. She has further established a women’s theatre troupe, Aelan Gel, that has performed at the Port-Vila Market. Malao’s involvement in several aspects of cultural life in Vanuatu is characteristic of many of Oceania’s authors and more specifically several of the authors invited to the Salon. While Malao’s presence at this year’s Salon stemmed from her connection to 2022’s theme of “Mā’a: nourritures,” her involvement in the Salon spanned several forms, from cooking demonstrations to thematic talks promoting Aelan Gel and a roundtable on “‘À la recherche du Nous dans le Pacifique?’” with Chantal Spitz, Kanaka maoli (Hawaiian) author Kristina Kahakauwila, and Māori author Becky Manawatu. Her first performance, however, was as a storyteller. As fidgety schoolchildren gathered on the paepae and editors’ booths were set up all around, Malao commanded everyone’s attention as she began her story, channeling the children’s’ energy into a call and response as the festival awoke around them. Standing in the back, I watched as she wove her story of shared Oceanian history and myth, pulling together strands from across the region. 110 After the official “cérémonie d’ouverture,” which included a welcome and introduction from Christian Robert, the first “presentation” of the Salon featured Flora Devatine discussing the newly published Maruao: les ailes de l’infini. This text, a multivalent exploration of the author’s œuvre and contribution to promoting Tahitian literature, represents a remarkable collaboration between Oceanian authors and scholars and across Oceanian spaces. It presents many of Devatine’s poems and essays that had been previously published and unites them with English translations in following pages (and, in the case of her Tahitian language work, with “traductions libres” in French). Set alongside a comprehensive preface by the project’s director Estelle Castro-Koshy, Devatine’s oeuvre is accompanied as well by critical engagement with her work (also translated into either English or French, according to need) as well as a section devoted to tributes (“hommages”) to the “doyenne de la littérature tahitienne en langue française et en langue tahitienne” (24). These tributes come from several prominent writers and scholars from across the Pacific: Tahitian writers Chantal Spitz and Chantal Teraimateata Millaud, Papuan writer Russell Soaba, and Littéramā’ohi’s current director Mareva Leu. Blurbs on the back cover continue to reach across the francophone/anglophone divide of Oceania, with comments from Australian indigenous scholar Romaine Moreton, Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez, and Māori author Witi Ihimaera. In her preface, Castro-Koshy casts Devatine’s œuvre as one that “compte parmi ces grandes œuvres de l'humanité qui inspirent et élèvent, ancrent et transportent, et sont sources de questionnement autant que d’enseignement” (23). Devatine’s work was honored not just by the great and established names of Pacific literature, however; on that first morning of the Salon, a group of university students performed a tārava 67 written to honor the author. As a 67 “variété de chant traditionnel” according to Fare Vana’a – Académie tahitienne. See Appendix C Figure 6 for a short clip. The song form itself reflects the “Océanitude” of the community: polyvocal and harmonic, relational and full of movement. 111 founding member of Fare Vāna’a l’Académie tahitienne, Devatine has been a vocal champion of Tahitian language education, and it is under her auspices that a program in Tahitian literature – which includes a component of Tahitian language instruction – was recently established at UPF. Devatine’s work has engaged extensively with the importance of orality in Mā’ohi literature, and it was fitting that the performance of the students’ tārava open a program dedicated to her body of work. In fact, the performance of homage repeated throughout both conference and Salon. This dedication to honoring those figures who have been central to the cultivation of today’s literary community merits exploration on two fronts. First, these demonstrations of deference echo the importance of genealogical recognition at the heart of Oceanian oral performance. As orators opened significant cultural events by situating participants according to familial lines, so too is the lineage of literary greats highlighted in these culturally significant events. This further demonstrates the commitment of participants and organizers to promote the vibrancy of the current literary community by collectively celebrating its history. Secondly, the emphasis placed on homage at the conference and Salon, especially regarding the recently deceased Déwé Gorodé (discussed at greater length below), demonstrates the exceptional nature of these events. Both Salon and conference are forums that are staged at most annually, so they both allow space for communal interaction and customary performance that might not otherwise find appropriate settings. In variously honoring Hiro, Devatine, Gorodé, we see the context of those homages themselves reified as culturally important events. At the end of the first day of the Salon, a “cérémonie d’accueil” took place, again on the paepae a Hiro, under the banyan tree. Here, those invited to the Salon were introduced by orator 112 and drums then led through a kava 68 ceremony. A formal gift was given between representatives of Mā’ohi Nui and Kanaky, a presentation meant to strengthen ties and thank hosts. After, other guests were invited to participate in drinking the (watered down) kava, kneeling in the sand of the paepae. These events underline the overall objective of celebrating Oceanian traditions in their multiplicity and, especially, in their intersection. While, as we have seen, the platform on which these events occurred is codified under the figure of Henri Hiro, the banyan tree itself is an important figure in Oceanian mythology and culture and represents a space of interconnection (between peoples, between the world of the living and that of the dead) as echoed in its interconnected roots. The history of oration and traditional drums also resonate across Oceanian cultures, and the ceremony of drinking kava (as noted below) is a Tongan tradition that is now found throughout the region. Each aspect of the welcoming ceremony reinforced connections across islands and cultures, welcoming those from outside while valorizing traditions specific to the region. We see again a commitment to finding connection without reducing the multiplicity of Oceanian experience. In a conversation entitled “À la recherche du Nous dans le Pacifique?” on the third day of the Salon, Chantal Spitz spoke about Tahitian culture being minoritized even in the spaces where Tahitian people represent the majority. What the welcoming ceremony, and the Salon as a whole, effected was placing this oft-minoritized culture at its center and respecting the performance of its traditions without exoticizing them. These ceremonies of encounter continue the crucial exchange between island nations of the Pacific that was significantly interrupted by European colonization (a history discussed at greater length in the following chapter). Throughout the Salon, readers and writers of Oceania remained central to its unfolding, the community served, both performers and audience. 68 Drink derived from the root of the Piper methysticum plant; historically used in Tongan kava ceremonies that are today found throughout Polynesia and Oceania more broadly. 113 The concluding events of both the conference and Salon mark a bittersweet commonality that demonstrates the emphasis each forum put on an Oceanian community: an homage to the great Déwé Gorodé, who had passed away three months prior. Gorodé had been a germinal force for the literary community of Oceania as a writer, politician, and organizer. Her absence echoed throughout the conference and Salon. At the conference, Kanak slam poet Paul Wamo included a section of his performance dedicated to Gorodé, “Hommage à Madame Déwé.” 69 In it, he included references not just to her work (“sous les cendres des conques,” the title of her first collection of poetry) but also to other great works of literature from Oceania (“Là où les rêves ne s’écrasent plus,” a clear reference to Spitz’s first novel). 70 In introducing his piece, Wamo recounted meeting Gorodé years in the past, at a moment when the political environment in Kanaky “brûlait.” To his question about what to do when writing didn’t feel like enough, he recounted that she responded “Fais ce que tu sais le mieux faire.” The conclusion to Wamo’s homage includes the lines “tant que ton coeur battra petit pays/ résiste comme tu peux avec tout ce que tu as… et même si le temps est long jusque-là/ le soleil lui se lèvera toujours/ alors petit pays/ crois.” In an homage to one who fought for half a century for independence, Wamo – a great writer in his own right – appeals to those left behind, to a country that continues to “brûler.” Gorodé’s legacy is one of community. In an article theorizing festivals promoting Oceanian literature and art, Estelle Castro- Koshy asserts “axiopraxis” as a framework to interrogate how these manifestations reify the value of artistic production across the region. She writes, “L’axiopraxis est l’application ou la manifestation d’une cohérence entre des valeurs-principes et des actions concrètes. Je soutiens 69 Paul Wamo. “Hommage à Madame Déwé”. Littérature et politique en Océanie. Université de la Polynésie française, Nov. 14-16, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/live/d-NEMRrIoGk?feature=share&t=33134 9:12:14- 9:21:16. 70 Quotes taken from my own transcription of the video cited above. 114 que les performances festivalières et les festivals autochtones sont et participent d’une axiopraxis permettant de donner naissance, lieu, et force vitale, à de multiples formes de reconnaissance.” 71 The festivals further serve as a site and precipitating event for cultivating inter-oceanic collaboration and community. “Si les festivals ou autres événements culturels mettant en valeur les arts et savoirs autochtones permettent que ceux-ci soient connus d’un plus grand public… [ils] permettent aussi que des réseaux inter-autochtones, inter-artistes, ou… inter-océaniens, se tissent, se renforcent, puis viennent nourrir à nouveau l’espace culturel et politique” (224). Not only are these manifestations a locale that permits the meeting of the minds, but their staging is also itself a means of valorizing the literary community that thrives under the opportunity for exchange they permit. Littéramā’ohi Having so far described two events in which those invested in literature from across Oceania found the support and celebration of community on Tahiti in fall 2022, I turn now to a different though no less vibrant forum in which an Oceanian literary community is cultivated and supported: the literary journal Littéramā’ohi. In the first pages of each year’s volume, a summary of the review’s founding and mission appears. Now in its 26 th volume, the periodical was founded in 2002 by “un groupe d’écrivains autochtones de la Polynésie française associés librement.” 72 Each volume further lists the journal’s objectives: to form connections between writers from French Polynesia, to introduce the range of those writers’ literary expression, and to 71 Estelle Castro-Koshy, “Axiopraxis en mouvement. Festivals et production artistique autochtone océanienne comme lieux de production politique du culturel.” Les sciences humaines et sociales dans le Pacifique Sud. Marie Salaūn, Barbara Glowczewski, and Laurent Dousset, eds. Marseille : pacific-credo Publications, 2014, 207-228, 210. 72 Littéramā’ohi : Ramée de Littérature Polynésienne Te Hotu Mā’ohi. No. 26, Nov. 2022, 9. This is how the line reads since the 21 st volume of the journal in 2012, though earlier volumes read “un groupe apolitique d’écrivains polynésiens associés librement.” While the exact reasoning for the change is unclear, several founding members (including Spitz and Devatine) have been active in the promotion of Mā’ohi culture and Polynesian independence. 115 make space for each writer to publish their work. “Et pour en revenir au premier objectif, c’est avant tout de créer un mouvement entre écrivains polynésiens” (10). There is clear emphasis on situating authority on Polynesian writers. The journal’s main title is a portmanteau (littérature and mā’ohi) and its subtitles reinforce this connection: “Ramée” refers both to a ream of paper and the paddle of a canoe, and “Te Hotu Mā’ohi” could be roughly translated from Tahitian to “the fruit of Mā’ohi.” Despite this emphasis on Polynesia, from the very first volume authors from across Oceania and around the world have contributed significantly to the journal. In her presentation of the periodical in its first issue, Flora Devatine addresses that potential concern in characteristic style: La présence, dans ce premier numéro de LITTERAMA’OHI, d’auteurs, d’artistes venant d'autres domaines de la culture et n’ayant qu’un lien lointain avec la littérature polynésienne, Peut donner à penser qu’il y règne une certaine confusion. Il n’en est rien ! C’est que la littérature polynésienne ne peut être abordée sans l’étayer sur ses assises humaines, sociales, culturelles, historiques. 73 In this we see again the Oceanian: a recognition of community and exchange balanced by the specificity of the individual. The duality of French and Tahitian in the title of the journal is joined by Chinese characters, reflecting the significant population of Hakka Chinese that have lived in Ma’ohi Nui/French Polynesia for generations. 74 These characters, which translate into English as “art,” are defined at the start of each volume: “Fécondité originelle renforcée par le ginseng des caractères chinois intercalés entre le titre en français et celui en tahitien.” From its inception, Littéramā’ohi: Ramée de Littérature Polynésienne Te Hotu Mā’ohi has been dedicated to an Oceanian community, presented in a broad conceptualization of “Polynésie” in all its diversity. 73 Flora Devatine, “Présentation de la revue.” Littéramā’ohi, no. 1 May 2002, 5-10, 5. 74 See Appendix A, Figure 3 for an example of the journal’s cover with this multilingual title. 116 As the call for contributions in each volume reads, “Ecrivains et artistes polynésiens, cette revue est la vôtre : tout article bio et biblio-graphique vous concernant… est attendu.” Historically, each volume was constructed around a theme. V olume 4 was organized around the idea “Quelles langues d’écritures.” V olume 12 was dedicated to the Salon du Livre Lire en Polynésie and V olume 15 to “Littérature et politique. ” In 2018, V olume 24 had for its topic “Et Demain” and was the final volume published before a 3-year hiatus. In 2021, a new volume was published, this time without an overarching theme beyond the perpetual push to promote Mā’ohi, Polynesian, and Oceanian voices. With this new volume, the journal introduced its new director Mareva Leu. In Leu’s editorial piece to open the volume, she traces the genealogy of that position, from Flora Devatine in its beginnings, passed to Chantal Spitz in 2010, and now to her. In this piece, a poem titled “Depuis le début,” Leu gestures towards the gap in publications of the journal, asking if this absence was the result of health, economic, and political issues that have defined the region since 2020. “Ou bien peut-être est-elle due à/ l’indiscipline de nos plumes/ l’évanescence de nos encres ou/ l’immensité de nos feuilles de papier ?/ L’avenir nous le dira… ” 75 Though this new trajectory will become clearer in the coming years, a 26 th volume was published in 2022. This 25 th volume, however, Leu characterizes as “un renouveau” 76 in the association of Littéramā’ohi, which, from its inception as a literary journal has grown to encompass publishing other texts (like Devatine’s Maruoa in 2022). This renewal has taken on a more open conceptualization of how the journal is organized, evidenced in the publication of its two most recent volumes “laissés libres.” Both volumes demonstrate a renewed commitment to a broad view of Oceanian voices as well, “attenti[f] et 75 Mareva Leu, “Depuis le début”. Littéramā’ohi : Ramée de Littérature Polynésienne Te Hotu Mā’ohi. No. 25, Nov. 2021, 11. Ellipsis included in original text. 76 Ibid., 11. When I spoke with her at the Salon, Leu told me the 25 th volume was a sort of “renaissance” for the publication. 117 bienveillan[t]… à défendre nos/idéaux communautaires/ à mener/ flamboyants/ nos combats dans/ nos arènes/ toujours avec conviction, respect et/ dignité.” 77 Oceanian representation in V olume 25 is clear from the first pages. This volume is organized into three sections. The first, “Créations autochtones,” organizes poems, short stories, and essays from twenty-four Ma’ohi writers. Then follows a section on “Fa’afaite i te ao mā’ohi” with contributions from twelve members of the crew that piloted the replica Tahitian canoe Fa’afaite from Tahiti and around the islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand from October to December of 2019 in a commemoration of 250 years since Tahitian navigator Tupaia arrived there with Cook’s crew. Lastly, a section titled “Pensées océaniennes” with contributions from four authors from Kanaky/New Caledonia, including a series of poems from Paul Wamo, rounds out the volume. Interspersed throughout is work from Polynesian painter Evrard Chaussoy depicting both historical and everyday moments in Mā’ohi Nui. The first of these pieces, Morururoa, shows a mushroom cloud situated over island and sea, exploding in vapor that ultimately turns to paper money as it floats down from the sky in a clear critique of France’s nuclear testing in Mā’ohi and Moana Nui 78 . In content, texture, and organization, this text centers an Oceanian perspective as well as an Oceanian approach to literary creation. The first section, “Créations autochtones,” is organized not thematically but alphabetically by author. This commitment to suspending hierarchy sees former editor Spitz’s essay on the ravages of crystal meth in Mā’ohi Nui and current editor Leu’s poem about the inequity of medical access across islands presented without further contextualization in their respective alphabetical orders. Endowing each piece with equal value aligns with the overall project of the journal: to make space for autochthonous writers to share their work. There is no 77 Ibid., 11. 78 See Appendix B, Figure 4. 118 committee for evaluating submissions, as is the case in most other – read Western – literary journals; every submission, as long as it abides by the guidelines set out in the first pages of the journal, is accepted, be it from the most established writer or an 8-year-old schoolboy (as is the case in this volume). 79 Furthermore, this organization suspends any artificial separation between texts of varying genre, format, and language. Instead, poetry sits beside short story, essay beside translation, and the boundaries between each become more fluid. Take, for example, contributions made by Albert Hugues. Hugues, a doctoral candidate at UPF and translator of reo tahiti (Tahitian) and reo magareva (Mangarevan 80 ), contributed seven pieces to this volume. These pieces reflect Hugues’s commitment to the plurilinguistic nature of Mā’ohi Nui as it is reflected in his own heritage. He “incarne un certain profil polynésien,” according to an article on his work presented on the cultural website Homme de Polynésie. 81 “Issu d’un melting pot… entouré par des locuteurs français, chinois hakka, tahitiens et mangaréviens,” Hugues has developed his passion for languages alongside a journey to reconnect with family across the islands. Hugues’s contributions to the twenty-fifth volume of Littéramā’ohi reflect this commitment, not only to writing in a language infrequently represented in literary journals but also to promoting a community-based – even collaborative – approach to literary creation. His first piece is a poetic call to action titled “E génie koe”. First represented in Mangarevan and then translated into French on the next page, the piece calls the “peuple du 79 This is outlined in the first minutes of the presentation of this volume at the 2021 Salon in Tahiti, a recording of which can be found in a special series of the podcast Encres bleues, l’océanie entre les lignes. https://podcast.ausha.co/encres-bleues-l-oceanie-entre-les-lignes/12-rencontre-au-pied-de-banian-presentation-de-la- revue-25-de-litterama-ohi 80 Mangarevan is a language spoken on the largest island (Mangareva) in the Gambier Island archipelago of French Polynesia, southeast of Tahiti. 81 Vaea Deplat, “Albert Hugues, un linguiste boulimique de sa culture,” Hommes de la Polynésie. 7 December 2019. https://hommesdepolynesie.com/art-culture/albert-hugues-un-linguiste-boulimique-de-sa-culture/ 119 Grand Océan des ‘Iva, autrement dit les uniques colonisateurs océaniens” to take up their history as voyagers and make space for their historical positions in a world reconceived according to Western constructs. “Adapte donc tes compétences ancestrales à celles-ci… Excelle donc, persévère, continue de naviguer.” (58) Even as the directives are addressed to a singular “tu,” the work as a whole is explicitly addressed to a wide Oceanic community, unbounded by borders but conscientious of different identities: in the opening lines of the piece, the author names islands across the Pacific as possible origins for the addressee. This conscientiousness finds further elaboration in Hugues’s second piece, a poem titled “Jasons peu!” in which the author uses a kaleidoscope of languages to again address an Oceanian community of readers. The poem alternates lines of Mangarevan, Tahitian, and French, with Chinese characters as well as Latin transliterations of Chinese words appearing in italics. This variety of untranslated languages means that, for most readers, not every word will be understood. The opacity created in employing such a dense variety of languages for a short text makes clear the relative inaccessibility of idioms like Mangarevan. However, because of this same variety, a wide swath of readers across Oceania will have access to understanding at least some of the poem. The content of the poem speaks to Polynesian identity, unity, and language. The title itself is translingual, as “peu” can serve as noun or adjective meaning “little” in French or as a noun meaning “object,” “habit,” or “revenant” in Tahitian 82 . The next three pieces include a short address in French, a two-page story in Mangarevan, and a Mangarevan translation of the lyrics to “E fano ai au – How far I’ll go” from the 2016 Disney movie Moana/Vaiana, la légende du bout du monde. 83 Following these texts is a short 82 Fare Vāna’a, the Acadêmie Tahitienne: http://www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php. 83 This film also represents an investment in Oceanian languages (if not the Oceanian consciousness explored in this chapter). The film was translated into both Tahitian and Māori upon its release and shown for free in theaters in both Mā’ohi Nui/French Polynesia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. For a discussion of the treatment of Oceanian culture and 120 poetic piece, “Tariga!”, which appears first in Mangarevan, then in an English translation by Vehia Wheeler, and finally in French. “Tariga,” as footnoted in each iteration of the text, is a Mangarevan term of endearment between same-sex couples. The piece opens by asserting the historical presence of queer Mangarevans as a reality of history as certain as the presence of primordial water, “dans cette culture océanienne autochtone” (66). It then addresses individual islands in the Gambier archipelago (where Mangarevan is spoken) by interrogating the absence or invisibility of its present-day queer community: “Où se trouvent-ils donc vos queers?” (66) The poem situates responsibility for this shift on colonial conquest and Christian conversion: “les croyances ancestrales se sont agenouillées face au monothéisme” (67). Ultimately, the poem ends on a hopeful note, asserting the historical presence and importance of queer figures in precolonial society as an avenue of possibility moving forward: “nous devons anticiper tout en jetant un coup d’œil vers notre passé qui pèse/sur le présent afin de mangarévianiser notre destin commun/Longue vie à la Queernesie! 84 ” (67) These final lines assert the same relationship between individual and communal, particular and regional that characterizes the oceanic framework outlined above; by drawing on a history before colonization, the poem explores how the “mots maux” of antiqueer rhetoric may be codified as antithetical to Mangarevan culture, which ultimately mobilizes that culture as a tool towards an empowered queer community across Polynesia (“Queernesie”). This project is furthered by the effort to make the poem’s content accessible to a wide linguistic community while still centering Mangarevan as medium of cultural production by presenting that version first. The poem’s critique is thus illustrated first as the involvement of Oceanian individuals in the making of Moana, see A Mārata Ketekiri Tamaira and Dionne Fonoti, “Beyond Paradise? Retelling Pacific Stories in Disney’s Moana” The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 30 No. 2, 2018. 297-327. 84 Indeed, more critical work is needed on the representation of queerness and the Pacific queer community in Oceanian literature. At the 2022 Salon, Serge Tcherkézoff presented on book Vous avez dit 3 e sexe? Les transgenres polynésiens et le mythe occidental de l’homosexualité, published in 2022 by Au Vent des îles. 121 emerging from the place in question instead of implemented from the outside in. Finally, by presenting the poem in three languages – and including another individual from Ma’ohi Nui in its translation – Hugues asserts a communal approach to effecting the change advocated in his work. Nor is Hugues’s final piece the only one in this volume that looks to precolonial history to assert the importance of an oceanic community. The whole of the second section covers the Polynesian contingent of sailors, navigators, writers, and historians who participated in Tuia 250: a celebration of Oceanian navigation on the 250 th anniversary of Cook’s arrival on Aotearoa/New Zealand. The event, which took place at the end of 2019, was originally conceived of as a commemoration of Cook’s arrival, a framework immediately rejected by the Māori community whose ancestors faced great violence on their encounter with Cook’s crew and which today continues to suffer the reverberations of British colonialism heralded by Cook’s arrival. Instead, the event was reimagined as “une célébration de l’héritage de la navigation dans le Pacifique de la Nouvelle-Zélande, l’occasion de tenir des conversations honnêtes à propos du passé et du présent afin de voguer ensemble vers un futur partagé.” 85 To that end, a team (‘ihitai) from Mā’ohi Nui was invited to navigate the Fa’afaite – a canoe built according to traditional Mā’ohi design – from Tahiti to Aotearoa, around the North Island and part of the South Island to take part in formal welcomes (powhiri) from officials at marae 86 and finally navigate back to Mā’ohi Nui. Such an expedition was invited because of the historical figure Tupaia, a navigator, 85 Littéramā’ohi, no. 26, 154. This event is one of several examples of recodifying commemorations of colonial history, not just in Oceania but across formerly colonized spaces globally. See, for example, Genevieve Grieves and Amy Spier’s webinar “Counter-monuments: Challenging distorted colonial histories through contemporary art and memorial practices” from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Center’s 2022 Critical Public Conversation series on “Undoing Australia.” https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/australiancentre/critical-public-conversations/undoing- australia-2022/counter-monuments-challenging-distorted-colonial-histories-through-contemporary-art-and- memorial-practices. 86 Traditional meeting place; “plate-forme construite en pierres sèches et où se déroulait le culte ancien, associé souvent à des cérémonies à caractère social ou politique,” according to Fare vāna’a, the Académie tahitienne. 122 diplomat, and translator who joined Cook’s crew from Tahiti to Aotearoa and beyond. Tupaia was recognized by the Māori who encountered Cook’s crew as a person of high status in Polynesian communities and was welcomed as a representative from a long-ago homeland. 87 The voyage of the Fa’afaite was also accomplished without instruments, navigating by stars and other natural guideposts according to traditional methods, and its reception in Aotearoa precipitated a meeting with descendants of Chief Te Koukou who had been nursed back to health Tupaia. For Littérama’ohi, Fa’afaite’s crew was asked to contribute short texts recounting memories from the voyage, a reciprocal gesture of Oceanian inclusion by a Polynesian forum for this commemoration of Aotearoa’s Māori history. When this volume of Littérama’ohi was presented at the 2021 Salon du livre, Karine Taea – a frequent contributor to the journal – read an excerpt from one piece included in this section. The piece was written by Titaua Teipoarii in Tahitian, and Taea remarked in her presentation of the text that it struck her as reflective of what the Tahitian ancestors might have thought upon their own arrival on Aotearoa centuries ago. Moana Tehei’ura (another contributor to Littérama’ohi and its chief presenter at the Salon) characterized these pieces as meant for future generations, “pour qu’il y ait une sorte de transmission pour que nos enfants sachent qu’au moment donné cet évènement a existé.” 88 However, the testimonials themselves show how Tuia 250 and the voyage of the Fa’afaite was also an experience of connection with the past for the members of the ‘ihitai. In her piece “Sortir du passé,” Tepoe Tahiata recalls her experience watching the Fa’afaite as if it was emerging from the past. The 23-year-old writes about witnessing the canoe while aboard a replica of the Endeavour during one of the events in Waitohi 87 As recounted in Joan Druett. “Tupaia,” Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. 2017. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6t2/tupaia. Tupaia had been an honored priest and wayfinder (star navigator) on his birth island of Raiatea. 88 “#12 Rencontre” 123 (a bay on the South Island). “Je fus la seule à avoir eu cette vision de Fa’afaite paraissant sortir du passé… Les voiles montaient et gonflaient, poussant ainsi avec fluidité le va’a 89 … Cette vision m’est presque irréelle” (175). She concludes, “À cette instant-là, j’ai compris que l’histoire écrite par nos ancêtres est devenue notre culture qui demeure dans notre « nous » le plus profond, dans notre ‘ā’au 90 . Nos décisions d’aujourd’hui, sont l’héritage de demain.” 91 Tahiata finds herself playing a role in the genealogy of navigators that created the Oceanian community as it exists today and, one hopes, as it will persist into the future. Another contribution from the ‘ihitai, this time from India Vehiatua Tabellini, recounts an experience in Opoutama when she felt the reverberations of the past carrying the present forward. From a description of the haka performed for the crew’s arrival, Tabellini expresses the sentiment of connection she felt the land. “La terre vibrait… Elle vibrait au rythme des pieds nus qui battaient le sol… Elle vibrait de l’intérieur, comme si elle s’était réveillée…” (171). From that moment, Tabellini writes about her experience listening to stories told in the same cave where “les gens venaient écouter Tupaia parler de Hawaiki, la terre de leurs ancêtres. D’une génération à l’autre les vieux avaient gardé vivantes les histoires de cette terre au-delà de l’horizon, que les waka 92 avaient quittée pour arriver à Aotearoa” (172). Tabellini’s experience – one that parallels that of her correlate from 250 in the past – highlights the deep connection between the Tahitian and Māori peoples. Hawaiki, the semi-mythological place of origin for both Polynesians and Māori, serves as a common point of ancestry and, according to myth, a future destination for souls at rest. 93 The connections explored in this piece are, then, manifold: 89 Canoe 90 “siège des idées, des sentiments, des émotions,” according to Fare vāna’a, the Académie tahitienne. 91 Emphasis original to text. 92 “ancestors” in Māori 93 For an overview of Hawaiki’s mythical and historical importance, see, for example, Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal, “Hawaiki”, Te ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 2015, https://teara.govt.nz/en/hawaiki. 124 connections between generations exemplified in the parallel of Tupaia and the ‘ihitai of the Fa’afaite, regional connections between the Mā’ohi and Māori peoples, and the cycle represented in the stories of Hawaiki that is the land of both birth and death. Tabellini concludes her piece by acknowledging the role she understood she occupied after her experiences in Opoutama, and the responsibility that role encompassed. “La responsabilité, que nos tupuna 94 avaient déjà si bien comprise, de garder le feu vivant pour ceux qui chercheraient aussi un jour à entendre ce que le passé a à nous raconter et à nous apprendre” (173). Tuia 250 was an event staged to celebrate the long history of Oceanian voyage, navigation, and encounter – an occasion to recognize the shared past of the profoundly connected region. The term “tuia” itself refers to weaving, both in the sails of the vessels that were represented and the communities that encountered one another historically and during 2019’s event. By chronicling the experiences of Tahiti’s participants in the event, Littéramā’ohi preserves their thoughts for present dissemination as well as for the generations to come. The final section of Littéramā’ohi’s 25 th volume sees contributions from Kanaky/New Caledonia. The commitment to regional representation is, thus, clear from the outset of this section and is further codified in the section’s title, “Pensées océaniennes.” While that section title appears in the table of contents at the start of the volume, the only indication of separation between the second and third sections in the body of the work (that is, between “Fa’afaite i tea o ma’ohi” and “Pensées océaniennes”) is a page dedicated to three paintings by this volume’s artist, Evrard Chaussoy. 95 These paintings, which depict fishing, have no clear connection between the two sections apart from the clear centrality of the ocean to all three. The paintings represented depict two figures pulling in a fishing net (subtitled “… il est temps de rentrer”), 94 “ancestors” in Tahitian 95 See Appendix B, Figure 5. 125 strings of red fish (“Tui iihi,” which literally translates to “strings of red fish” in Tahitian), and another tableau of strings of caught fish interspersed with human trash found in the ocean (“Venant de la mer”). The oceanic nature of the paintings renders their subject matter and geographic setting at once specific and general: we are clearly in a seascape, preoccupied with concerns specific to fishing, but that setting and those preoccupations could belong to communities across Oceania. It is a clear, if subtle, method of uniting the volume’s sections together. At once specific and shared. The contributions to “Pensées océaniennes” come from four Kanak authors. The first is a short prose piece in homage to the author’s (René Kaudre’s) mother. Similarly, Jim Saïpo writes a prose piece to honor his father. There are also poetry contributions from two authors. The section ends with Paul Wamo, the Kanak slam-poet discussed above, but I look here to work from Hamid Mokaddem. Mokaddem, a philosophy teacher and publisher who has written extensively on the literature and politics of Kanaky/New Caledonia, wrote his contributions to this volume of Littéramā’ohi while enduring quarantine during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frustrated with being stuck in a hotel room in Nouméa, he decided to apply himself to writing poetry to express his experience: “À écrire, autrement dit, à tresser le Monde,” he writes in his introduction his work. (193) A poem a day during his 14-day quarantine precipitated this short collection, simply titled “Quatorzaine” in the volume. The penultimate of these 14 pieces is titled “Vie,” and resonates with the oceanic framework discussed here. This poem speaks to unification without homogenization and draws heavily on the weaving/braiding imagery articulated in the author’s introduction. The poem argues that with “Paniers Nattes Paroles” a collective we “Tissons Ensemble Ce Monde/Avec des Arts de Dire/De Faire/Qui proches de la Parole Sacrée” (211). Speaking and making are deeply 126 linked in this configuration. Weaving their words together into baskets, the community creates the world. Importantly, the author cautions against the impulse to “Dire la Mêmeté du Même Monde” and instead argues “Nous tisserons la Diversité/Pour l’Unité/L’Unité différenciée” (212). From the opening word of “Océanie,” the poem goes on to mention other continents and their influence on this world created with woven words, but it again cautions “Tressons Notre Monde/Avec les Divers Comme/Les Divergences/Kanaky” (212). We see that the space of this world is situated in Oceania and that the specificity of the world being woven rests with a diversity cultivated in Kanaky. “Où la Grande Case du Pays/Reste Ouverte/S’enrichit avec et des autres” (212). Kanaky is the site of this possible world, one that supports the author’s commitment to unity in diversity. This echoes the framework described above, where the community is predicated not on sameness but togetherness. “Tissons Tressons/Mais ne Mélangeons pas/Combinons nos arts de tresser/Pour Tapisser/Notre Monde” (212). From a community with a long history of both woven arts and oral literature, this poem begins the work it advocates: constructing a world of unity in diversity through words. Mokaddem begins to write this world into existence, even at a moment when separation and isolation dominate globally. Stuck in his hotel room, Mokaddem weaves his words to encourage his others in cultivating the community he envisions. Conclusion: Our sea of writers The three forums discussed here are, at their core, constructed by and for Polynesia and Polynesians. The conference at the Université de la Polynésie française; the Salon in the Maison de la culture, organized by the Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles; the journal Littéramā’ohi, which centers an autochthonous community of Polynesia and continuously 127 addresses Polynesian writers and Polynesian identity and history. Even so, with deep commitments to a Polynesian purview, all three forums put great effort into including participants and perspectives from across Oceania. Further, recognizing shared history and making space for both casual and formal exchange between Polynesians and other Oceanians formed a crucial aspect of each forum. For all three forums and at each stage of their execution, there is a clear commitment to the Oceanian community, and that commitment unfolds along an oceanic framework. Throughout, the work and collaboration explored in this chapter remains committed to fostering a community fortified in unity and blossoming in variation. The Oceanian literary community is also an oceanic community: a sea of writers, singers, dancers, publishers, artists, orators, and creators working in diverse media, individually and together. If nothing else is made evident in this chapter, it must at least be clear that the literary community that stretches across Oceania is vibrant, innovative, profound, and growing. It remains now to consider how the extraordinary work cultivated in Oceania circulates within and beyond this borderless space, a topic to which we now turn in a final chapter. 128 Chapter 4: Circulation “Te souviens-tu des temps glorieux où nous sillonnions notre océan d’îles encore inconnues ? Sans peur, sans heurts, juste chevillée à l’âme cette soif des horizons avec tout à explorer, tout à relier, tous à rallier…” -Mareva Leu, “La mélancolie des pirogues” 96 Introduction This poem, which appears in the 2022 edition of Littéramā’ohi and is written by the journal’s current editor, evokes the long history of oceanic exploration that characterized Oceania for millennia. It speaks of “des temps mystérieux où nous étions les porteuses / d’une civilisation entière et de ses valeurs” when “À bout de voile, nous avons porté les ‘ōfa’i faoa des marae /les plantes pour soigner, / les bêtes à manger, / les histoires à passer… ” This history of exploration is shared across Oceania, a history of exploration that brought entire cultures across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike the European explorers who would cross the region thousands of years later, those who originally traversed moana nui did so with all they would need to establish life in new places: “les plantes… les bêtes… les histoires.” Nor, of course, was it solely men who made such journeys. The poem evokes “nos mères, solides piliers de nos clans jadis” as bearers of “des convictions les plus fermes ”. “Que diraient-elles, ” the poem asks in its final stanza, “si elles nous voyaient aujourd’hui ? ” With that, Leu sketches the current state of those mothers’ descendants, the author’s own “nous,” in “notre addiction maladive à la chose de l’autre…/ notre mépris ordinaire pour nous-même… ” What, Leu asks, would these historical 96 Mareva Leu, “La mélancolie des pirogues” Littéramā’ohi Te hotu Mā’ohi : Ramées de littérature polynésienne. No. 6, Nov. 2022, 66-67, 66. 129 pillars of an ever-expanding society say about today’s “piétinement consciencieux de nos mémoires… des insultes assumées à nos intelligences?” (67) Leu has already given the reader an idea of what they would think with her title: “La mélancolie des pirogues,” the sailing canoes that made possible the long history of exploration the poem recounts, no longer used to explore unknown places and form connections across the expanse of the Pacific. The “mélancholie” of Leu’s poem expresses sorrow for the contemporary marginalization of Mā’ohi culture under the forces of continued cultural colonization, contrasting this current situation with the age of Oceanian navigation and exploration. But, if the sailing vessels of yore no longer circulate across the great ocean, how might literature function as a current vessel of Mā’ohi cultural representation and exchange? What dynamics of circulation might we find in the production, dissemination, and consumption of literature from this same oceanic space? How does the movement of these texts both within Oceania and outside its fluid borders allow us to consider the literature within the context of this expansive oceanic history? As we have moved from “oceanic” and “transversal” and back, I use this final chapter to argue for conceptualizing the fluid nature of Oceanian literature: in its voice, in its form, in the community that produces and promotes it, and finally in circulation – the way it moves through the world, the connections it forges, the routes it navigates and reestablishes. Here the metaphor of fluidity finds concrete expression in the oceanic paths these works tread; Oceanian literature circulates alongside the medium from which it takes its name. Circulation elucidates several aspects of how we conceive of literature from Oceania; with its echoes of the circulation of tides and the vessels that cross seas as well as how we speak of the circulation of texts in libraries and between individuals, the concept of circulation allows us to trace the movement of literature outside hierarchal and static models. What insight does this circulation provide to how we have 130 conceptualized this corpus to this point? How do the dynamics of this literature’s dissemination and consumption inform its intervention and what structures inhibit it? What futures can we imagine from current currents of literary exchange and how does this influence the impact of the texts discussed here? This chapter begins by interrogating how publishing has developed within Oceania in a shift away from historic European centers of knowledge and cultural production. In situating the production of texts within the geographic region of their conceptualization, publishing in Oceania establishes its own framework for literary consumption and evaluation – from which texts to publish to annual literary prizes, the publishing communities in French Polynesia and New Caledonia have extensive influence over how the literary corpus of the region has and continues to develop and disseminate throughout the world. Despite this influence, publishing in francophone Oceania is limited by its linguistic isolation, a vestige of colonial repression that continues to interrupt historic routes of exchange throughout the region. The next section of this chapter therefore interrogates possibilities in bridging the divide between the francophone and anglophone communities through literature. With Tahitian scholar Kareva Mateata-Allain’s discussion of literature as va’a – the traditional outrigger canoe – as point of departure, this section discusses the history, potential, and pitfalls of literary translation. Finally, I turn to the concept of “routes” in considering the oceanic framework this project posits. With Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s discussion of “routes and roots” guiding a tidalectic interrogation of literature from oceanic spaces, I offer conclusions about the potential of oceanic reading and the possibilities of literary circulation. 131 Publishing To interrogate what the circulation of these texts looks like, let us begin by exploring how the texts in question are published. The first texts published regarding francophone Oceania were published about the region instead of from the region or authors of the region. A prepositional shift would begin in the 1980s. Before that time, publishing about francophone Oceania was conducted in the metropole (especially Paris) by associations like La Société des Océanistes and La Société des Etudes Océaniennes whose focus was on publishing texts like historical accounts of European voyagers, encyclopedic descriptions of local flora, and new editions of European literature set on Pacific islands like Le mariage de Loti. In the first volume of the Journal de la Société des Océanistes published in 1945, for instance, an article by two French military doctors and anthropologists (Léon Pales and Claude Chippaux) appeared on “Morphologie des Néo- Calédoniens: Contribution à l’étude des muscles jumeaux de la jambe et du muscle petit palmaire chez les Néo-Calédoniens.” The presence of the Pacific Battalion in Paris at the end of World War II afforded the doctors the opportunity to “examiner dans un lot de Néo-Calédoniens les caractères myologiques que nous venons d’énoncer.” 97 These texts were meant for consumption in the metropole and fed the exoticizing view of Oceanian islands as earthly paradises. In this way, the first texts published about Oceania reified imaginings produced in and circulated around the metropole, cutting out the peoples described in these texts altogether. In fact, the first texts published by autochthonous authors of the region were indeed published (and financed) by the authors themselves (notably Flora Devatine’s Humeurs, which she published in 1980 under the name Vaitiare). In 1982, a collection of poetry by Hubert Brémond, Henri Hiro, and Charles 97 L. Pales and Chippaux Claude. “Morphologie des Néo-Calédoniens. Contribution à l'étude des muscles jumeaux de la jambe et du muscle petit palmaire chez les Néo-Calédoniens” Journal de la Société des océanistes, tome 1, 1945, 43-50, 43. 132 Manutahi was published in Fiji in Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature in Tahitian, English, and French. In his comprehensive work on literature from francophone Oceania, Daniel Margueron notes that Hiro’s oeuvre – a foundational text in the canon of Oceanian literature from a central figure in the mobilization of writers from across francophone Oceania – would only be published in his home country after his death in 1990. “C’est dire comme, en 1982, l’œuvre de Hiro était déjà en grande partie accomplie, mais non disponible à Tahiti!” 98 Margueron further explores possible explanations for the disparity between when autochthonous literature appeared in this region as opposed to other francophone colonial spaces (like the Caribbean, West Africa, and Asia). One explanation, explored here in Chapter 1 with Spitz’s discussion of estrangement from her language of expression, sees the colonial school as medium of repression for potential authors. The public school under colonial rule forbade students from using autochthonous languages across francophone Oceania and physically punished those who did not comply. Hand-in-hand with this linguistic colonization, the colonial school was also a tool used to impose metropolitan standards of literary critique and valuation: the same dynamics that underpin the historical position of “tastemaker” in literary production with Paris at its center alienated students from their first encounters with a literature that held little resemblance to their own lives. The colonial school denied autochthonous students the opportunity to use languages other than the dominant idiom of the metropole (here, French) and further asserted metropolitan standards of literature and who could produce it, leaving its students estranged from autochthonous language and literature. This history has had long 98 Daniel Margueron. Flots d’encre sur Tahiti: 250 ans de littérature francophone en Polynésie française. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015, 274. Unlike the nations of francophone Oceania, Fiji is politically independent and has been since its separation from Britain in 1970. 133 consequences for developing a community of young writers and has been the subject of concern for the literary community more generally. To this explanation, Margueron explores half a dozen other possibilities, one of which has particular resonance with our discussion of an oceanic community and communal creation. Margueron writes, “La communication littéraire écrite consiste en une communication différée entre le temps de l’écriture et celui de la lecture. L’écriture suppose un moment d’isolement du groupe, un moment de solitude, la lecture, quant à elle, est silencieuse, intériorisée, phénomènes non reconnus par la traditionnelle culture polynésienne” (270). To this isolated experience of reading and writing, Margueron contrasts the “tradition orale prégnante” in which “la littérature orale exprimée à travers la danse, les discours rituels ou de circonstance, la poésie des lieux, la récitation des légendes, etc. a prévalu sur l’écrit” (270-1). From these two explanations, the advent of publishing literature from francophone Oceania must certainly have been distilled from significant social shifts or external pressure, but for a final possible explanation offered both by Margueron and corroborated by the experience of the authors who would indeed one day publish: the absence of published literature does not mean that such literature wasn’t being written. Both texts that would eventually be published as “first native novels” in French Polynesia and New Caledonia (Spitz’s L’île des rêves écrasés and Gorodé’s L’épave) were pulled from drawers where they had been saved for years between when they were written and when they were published. 99 The creation of written literature in francophone Oceania by autochthonous authors begins quite a bit before it is reflected in the timing of widespread publishing in the region, but having that literature published by organizations based in the region marks a significant shift away from the historical centers of (exoticizing) knowledge production. 99 According to my personal communications with Christian Robert, publisher of Spitz’s novel, and Raylene Ramsay, translator of Gorodé’s novel. 134 It is significant both that literature existed in the region before it was published there and that publishing that literature also found an outlet within the region. Today, publishing in francophone Oceania looks quite different. In both French Polynesia and New Caledonia, associations have been established to support editors and writers as they transform the dynamics of how literature from and about the region is produced. The Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles was established in 2001 to “promouvoir, développer et défendre les droits et libertés de l’édition et des éditeurs de Polynésie française qui sont ses membres. ” 100 It is comprised of eight member publishing houses and is the entity charged with organizing the annual Salon du Livre: Lire en Polynésie as well as several other cultural salons both in French Polynesia and abroad. Christian Robert, president of the association and founder of the publishing house Au Vent des îles, is quoted on the assocation’s website as arguing, “Le patrimoine littéraire est un bien collectif et un témoignage essentiel de la pensée d’un présent que nous avons le devoir de transmettre aux générations futures. Une transmission dont aucun peuple ne peut être privé.” The references in this featured quote as well as the association’s mission statement clearly gesture towards a commitment to defending present and future generations against a historical deprivation of literary heritage as a common good. Similarly, the Maison du livre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie was established in 2007 and in 2009 became the organizing force for “l’ensemble des acteurs de l’écosystème du livre.” 101 The MLNC also puts on the annual Salon du livre océanien (SILO) and serves as umbrella organization to four publishing houses situated in New Caledonia. On MLNC’s website, one such publisher, Plume de notou, articulates its commitment to promoting historically silenced voices. “Parce que la Nouvelle-Calédonie est un archipel immense de cultures, de langues, 100 “L’association” The Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles. https://lireenpolynesie.fr/lassociation/ 101 “L’association” Maison du livre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. https://maisondulivre.nc/ 135 d’originalité, d’universalité, de voix, et parce que ces voix ont été tues pendant une longue période, Plume de notou œuvre à les faire découvrir, notamment par les plus jeunes.” 102 This commitment to promoting literature among younger groups echoes across both French Polynesia and New Caledonia, marking a shared acknowledgement of the historical estrangement of students from reading and writing, as well as a shared commitment to redressing this colonial history. While both associations serve to support the work done by their members, they do themselves also influence how texts circulate in the world. Beyond their roles in organizing annual literary festivals (whose impact on the literary community is discussed in the previous chapter), both organizations are charged with bestowing literary prizes as well as awarding writing residencies to support regional authors. Though the culture of literary prizes, especially in France, has a fraught history with francophone literature, the influence wielded by prize committees is significant. 103 Beyond the immediate financial impact of prize money, the authors of winning texts can expect increased visibility and opportunity because of that recognition, and the publishers of those texts can expect similar returns in financial and cultural capital. The influence wielded by these literary associations merits further scrutiny, then. As Stevie Marsden concludes in an article on “Literary Prize Culture,” selection committees for literary prizes become proxies for the general reading public, and “in placing trust in judges’ taste-making processes, readers engage in the generation of cultural and social capital which sustains a literary prize’s impact within the literary marketplace.” 104 In the case of prizes awarded by associations 102 “Plume de notou” Maison du livre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. https://maisondulivre.nc/blog/plume-de-notou/ Plume de notou specializes in children’s and young adult literature. 103 One need only look to the precipitation of the “Littérature-monde” manifesto in 2007 after 2006’s literary prizes were largely awarded to texts from outside the metropole. 104 Stevie Marsden, “Literary Prize Culture” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Literature. 31 March 2020. Oxford University Press. https://oxfordre.com/literature/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore- 9780190201098-e-1030?rskey=Pw8qNf&result=69 136 whose members are comprised of the very publishing houses who stand to profit from the selection of one of their authors, the selection process must surely account for the potential conflict of interest. Furthermore, Marsden argues, “[Literary prizes] are structured upon imperfect processes of judgement and selection… As a result, far from providing broad surveys of particular areas of literature, literary prizes can only ever offer snapshots of ‘the best’ within a small range of literature.” In valorizing a selection of texts chosen in part because of their adherence to certain criteria to be included for consideration, awarding literary prizes can lead to an ossification of the canon, resistant to innovation and new writers. However, when wielded conscientiously, this same influence can have the effect of promoting texts that represent historically silenced subjectivities and rewarding creativity. Or even, in the case of 2005’s Salon International du Livre Océanien in Poindimié, New Caledonia, performing a sort of reconciliation. According to Peter Brown’s recounting of this second staging of the Salon, the prize given to encourage young writers under 35 that year represented a “wheel turning full circle” in the project of reconciliation at the heart of the Nouméa Accords. The recipient, Maléta (Jocelyne) Houboy, won the prize for her work L’Enfant kaori, published by the Centre Culturel Tjibaou. The cultural center is named for politician and activist Jean-Marie Tjibaou who was assassinated in 1989 by Djubelly Wéa for what he saw as Tjibaou’s “betrayal” of the cause for independence in signing the Matignon Accords that ended “les événements.” The staging of the Salon situates it geographically near the home tribu of Tjibaou’s widow who is also the customary grandmother of Déwé Gorodé, then-Minister of Culture who presided over the award ceremony. Furthermore, Houboy is herself the maternal niece of Wéa, and her story “can be read as a kind of expiation of mourning, not just for the tragic event that immediately inspired it, for which the author needed to ‘faire le deuil’, but also for the deaths of Jean-Marie 137 Tjibaou, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné and Djubelly Wéa that underlie its conception.” 105 Each aspect of this prize’s awarding represented a facet of honoring the work done by those left in the wake of the violence 16 years prior, bestowing cultural value to a layered performance of reconciliation and its celebration. It is also important to note, in our exploration of publishing in francophone Oceania, that though publishing houses across the islands find common ground in their supporting associations, they are by no means governed by a dynamic of parity. In French Polynesia, for example, Au Vent des îles is far and away the largest and most influential publishing house. Its founder, Christian Robert, is the current president of the Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles and thus in charge of staging the annual Salon du Livre: Lire en Polynésie. It is also the sole for-profit publishing house in French Polynesia, and a reading of its comparison to and interaction with another publishing house, Haere Pō, illuminates their respective positions. Established in 1981 by Robert and Denis Koenig, Haere Pō is run by volunteer workers and specializes in publishing works “consacrés à la Polynésie française en général et au Pacifique en particulier” as well as “des ouvrages anciens sur l’Océanie, qui méritent d’être redécouverts.” 106 Their books are produced entirely in Tahiti, which represents “des contraintes économiques terribles,” according to an interview with three major publishers from French Polynesia published in 2015. 107 In the interview, which also includes contributions from Au Vent des îles and Mers Australes (which specializes in children’s literature), Robert Koenig points out that, “nous n’arrivons pas à avoir la qualité de la couverture à un prix abordable comme si c’était 105 Peter Brown, “Books, writing and cultural politics in the Pacific: the New Caledonian Salon du livre, October 2003-October 2005” International Journal of Francophone Studies, Vol. 9 no. 2, 2006, 239-256, 256. 106 “Histoire” Editions Haere Pō. http://www.haerepo.com/histoire.html 107 “Mieux comprendre le métier d’éditeur: le livre, une passion qui se partage. ” Tahiti-infos. 12 Jan. 2015. https://www.tahiti-infos.com/Mieux-comprendre-le-metier-d-editeur-le-livre-une-passion-qui-se- partage_a142967.html 138 imprimé en Chine. ” For his part, Christian Robert of Au Vent des îles explains, “ Nous n’avons pas un fonctionnement ‘polynasio-centré’, on travaille en Asie mais aussi en Europe de l’Est, ” concluding, “C’est pour ça qu’il y a qu’une seule maison d’édition sous forme d’entreprise en Polynésie car c’est très complexe.” It was between Haere Pō and Au Vent des îles that Titaua Peu’s first novel, Mutismes, was published, originally at the former with a new edition at the latter in 2021. Robert explained, “Malheureusement, chez Haere Po, qui sont des gens formidables mais qui n’ont pas la même dimension qu’Au vent des îles, ce texte est resté très confidentiel, c’étaient de tout petits tirages.” 108 The author, Titaua Peu, would go to Au Vent des îles with her second novel, Pina, published thirteen years later, at which point the larger publishing house also sought and gained the rights to republish her first novel. 109 What the example of Au Vent des îles and Haere Pō demonstrates is the different scales of publishing practices current in francophone Oceania as well as the consequent dynamics of dissemination and influence held by individual publishers. While periodical events like the Salon du Livre and editorial associations bring the francophone Oceanian publishing community together with shared objectives, every publisher is still subject to their own situation of financial and cultural capital. It is further worth noting the dynamics of identity that characterize the individuals that make up the publishing world. For instance, the founders of both Haere Pō and Au Vent des îles came from metropolitan France to settle in French Polynesia, as the founder and honorary president of the New Caledonian association Écrire en Océanie, Claudine Jacques did in New Caledonia. Each of these actors has continually demonstrated their commitment to elevating autochthonous writers and stories throughout their careers. However, as the history of 108 Katherine Hammitt, “The Colibri of Pacific Publishing: Interview with Au vent des îles Founder Chrsitian Robert,” The French Australian Review, no. 73, Summer 2022-2023, 125-140, 136. 109 See Chapter 2: Form for a longer discussion of the editorial choices made for each edition of the novel. 139 settler colonialism continues to shape politics in both overseas territories, these dynamics maintain their relevance. A significant aspect of the continued fight for independence through referendum in New Caledonia, for example, hinges on the dominant population of Caldoches (white European settlers and their descendants). Those dynamics of demographic control provide the context in which publishing organizations operate and should inform our understanding of their position in the current discussion about circulating cultural knowledge. 110 These organizations might then be contrasted with Littéramā’ohi, founded as a literary journal by autochthonous writers of Mā’ohi Nui and now operating as a publisher in its own right. The isolated nature of francophone literature in Oceania situates its publishers in parallel to their anglophone counterparts, fostering a community predicated on a small number of actors and thus vulnerable to operating along the same centripetal paths they have sought to displace from Paris. The next section will look at how navigating this regional linguistic divide opens up possibilities to reimagine this structure in parallel to the oceanic framework explored throughout this project. Literature as va’a While the scope of this project situates its corpus as “francophone,” such framing perpetuates a colonial divide that continues to disrupt historical routes of exchange and community across the Pacific oceanic region. The divide between francophone and anglophone spaces in Oceania that is the result of linguistic colonialism across the region has deeply impacted historic routes of circulation that long shaped the cultures of Oceania. How can that divide be productively crossed while the linguistic separation – which largely parallels the continued divide between those Pacific Island nations who have achieved independence and 110 I recognize my own positionality in the settler/indigenous dynamic in writing this scholarly intervention, as well. 140 those still administered by a Western power – persists? Many theorists, including Tahitian scholar Kareva Mateata-Allain, discuss spatial metaphors for conceptualizing an Oceanian consciousness that bridge that colonizing divide, each predicated on resistance to colonial domination and spatially static: de/recentering and de/reterritorialization, for instance. Mateata- Allain argues, “Colonized nations have been shaped by generations of colonized education that has forever transformed their world-views… In response, there exists a call for a decentering in which a decentering of dominant discourses and a recentering of indigenous selfhood and epistemologies is a definite possibility.” 111 Similarly, Jean Anderson characterizes Spitz’s genre- defying prose as having “deterritorialized” the novel from its “European roots” and “reterritorialized it into something that crosses genre boundaries.” 112 While both concepts do the important work of situating knowledge production within Oceania, they are also themselves derived from a hegemonic centering of the West. In these formulations, the production of knowledge about Oceania is still derived according to how Western centers of knowledge understand it. Furthermore, their static nature undermines the importance of a shared history of movement across the region. It is therefore a different metaphor that Mateata-Allain evokes that finds greatest resonance here: the va’a, the outrigger canoe that was an essential tool for the history of maritime travel across the Pacific. She writes, “Ideally, an intellectual cross-fertilization of ideas in Oceania through the metaphor of the va’a, should bridge the sea of Oceanic islands through fomenting an intra-Oceanic exchange of literary and cultural production through the metaphor of 111 Kareva Mateata-Allain, “Métissage and migration through the metaphor of the va’a, or canoe: intellectual cross- fertilization of Ma’ohi literature within an Oceanic context.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, Vol. 11 no. 4, 2008, 601-621, 606. 112 Jean Anderson, “Translating Chantal Spitz: Challenges of the Transgeneric Text.” Australian Journal of French Studies. Liverpool Vol. 50 Iss. 2 (May-Aug 2013): 177-188, 187. 141 the va’a, or canoe.” 113 With the metaphor of the canoe, the navigation of an Oceanian consciousness is accomplished through movement and without colonizing ontologies as a point of departure. In positioning Oceanian literature as a metaphorical va’a, Mateata-Allain further asserts the oceanic space as a place in which community is formed, instead of a vast expanse that divides terrestrial communities. This trope – literature as a vehicle of connection set upon an oceanic geography – is certainly present in literary texts produced in the region. In her 2014 collection of poetry À l’orée du sable, Déwé Gorodé’s poem “L’appel de la mer” appears. In it, she writes of “les versets de la foi/ face à l’océan/ des maux du jour/ ceux des aïeux d’autrefois/ du temps des pirogues”. 114 The speaker of the poem, she is witness to the sun rising in the morning “À l’appel du coq/… en odeur particulière/ en souvenir incrusté/ passant en ma mémoire/ d’enfant du voyage”. This matinal experience activates an inherited memory through a particular scent, “avec toujours au fond de moi/ le chant du coq/ l’odeur du feu/ l’appel de la mer”. She is the descendant of voyagers, ancestors from the time of canoes, experiencing her world – and her identity – in the echoes of their prayers. This connection, to both history and present, is codified by the ever- present call of the sea. Later in the same collection, Gorodé celebrates the eleventh Festival des arts du Pacifique with a poem of the same name. The festival, which occurs every four years hosted by a different country, took place in 2012 in Honiara in the Solomon Islands. In the poem, Gorodé recounts the path she followed “le long de l’avenue Mendana/ suivant le front de mer sur la route/ des pirogues du lapita pour l’ouverture/ du onzième festival des arts du Pacifique.” 115 Lapita is the name given to the very first people to occupy many of the islands across Oceania 113 Kareva Mateata-Allain, “Métissage and migration,” 619. 114 Déwé Gorodé. “L’appel de la mer.” À l’orée du sable. La Roque-d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs, 2014, 10-11. 115 Déwé Gorodé. “Onzième festival des arts du Pacifiaque.” À l’orée du sable. La Roque-d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs, 2014, 87. 142 and the common ancestor to the region’s autochthonous populations today. The word is taken from the site where evidence of the culture’s pottery was unearthed, in New Caledonia. In naming these places and peoples, Gorodé makes explicit the connection between the cultures represented at the festival, not just in their present representations but also in the way their shared history has been codified. The poem concludes with “l’inoubliable cérémonie d’ouverture/ avec l’arrivée des pirogues polynésiennes/ et mélanésiennes salomonaises». The canoe, then, is more than a symbol of a shared history of voyaging but rather a material vehicle that facilitates coming together in celebration of that history. We can see further exploration of this trope in another recent publication from a prominent writer. Chantal Spitz’s 2022 collection of short stories, Et la mer pour demeure, evokes the centrality of the sea in its very title. The story from which the collection gets its name is told from the perspective of a young man drowning in the shallows as his brother desperately searches for him. From the first line, the story situates the speaker as a descendent of Oceanian voyagers: “je suis du peuple de Moana Nui a Hiva qui depuis l’antan berce nourrit lie les îles pacifiques”. 116 But the speaker, Pai, laments his distance from that ancestral knowledge: “me voici fils de navigateurs mais j’ai égaré l’encyclopédie mentale maritime de mes ancêtres” (29). In the wake of time, “nous avons démembré les voiles dépecé les pahi 117 déserté les cieux dans des omissions des distractions des élisions” (29). It is in this context that he rides out on his surfboard to catch the waves between the reefs with his brother. The second section of the story is told from the perspective of Pai’s younger brother, Teri’i, whose relationship to the sea appears less frought: “j’aime ces moments à l’abri des dernières étoiles que la folle lumière du soleil n’a 116 Chantal Spitz, Et la mer pour demeure. Au Vent des îles: Pirae, 2022, 29. 117 I believe this is a slight misspelling of “pahī” which Fare vāna’a the Académie tahitienne defines as “(autrefois) les priogues doubles des Pa’umotu.” 143 pas encore éteintes quand les vagues s’offrent dans toute leur impétuosité/ monumental privilège immense présent fondamentale présence/ et plus rien n’existe en dehors de ces vagues que nous dégustons l’une après l’autre entièrement tendus dans une harmonie intégrale souveraine absolue” (30). Instead of situating himself as heir to knowledge now lost, Teri’i sees himself as participant in a foundational harmony with the waves. At this moment, the story shifts back to Pai’s perspective as a moment of inattention sends him spinning off his board, ground against the reef, watching his life’s blood pour out, “baigné dans le liquide amniotique de la matrice originelle” (30-31). As he drowns, the sea becomes a repository for his personhood, a place for his memories to reside as he goes through the transformation of death and rebirth: “c’est ici que se terminera cette existence que j’aurais voulu continuer… il me faut accepter cette fin… garder en moi les flamboyantes mémoires qui continueront d’habiter les oublis de mes prochaines vies/ et la mer pour demeure de cette vie présente” (31). As Teri’i searches frantically for his brother in the water made opaque with blood, Pai returns to his lament of lost knowledge that has led to his current position: “les anciens nous ont appris quand éviter la mer mais nous avons fait fi de leur sagesse leur savoir” (32). I suggest this story can be read as a literary representation of a more general present estrangement from ancestral knowledge centered on oceanic navigation, a loss echoed in the poem that opens this chapter. Having lost this crucial understanding of the oceanic environment, the representative subject is vulnerable to intense violence and ultimate loss of subjectivity – a subjectivity that the ocean will in turn house, keeping it, perhaps, for future generations. 118 The sea is the repository for Pai’s present existence as he is no longer able to hold onto it, an analogue to the loss of agency over Mā’ohi culture that we see in Leu’s poem. However, unlike 118 In his recent translation of this story, Jeffrey Zuckerman translates the title (and its appearance in the story) as “And the Sea as Keep” (after my own suggestion). 144 in Leu’s poem, the end of the story is hopeful, as Teri’i is able to save Pai in time. Once again in Pai’s voice, with the last lines of the story Spitz writes, “comment ai-je pu croire que mon dernier frère vivant ne m’a pas entendu” (34). With these lines we see hope for continued existence even in the face of the threat of loss: hope that comes from the community – the brother – that is able to save the speaker in time. This suggests the power of kinship across estranged communities to persevere even in the face of imminent erasure. Spitz’s own intervention to preserve that hope is her writing: the vehicle that “through breaking silences and finding a voice… re-enact[s] this exchange of cultural knowledge and experiences through the transmission of bodies of literature.” 119 Returning to the original context of Mateata-Allain’s intervention, however, how can literary voice re-enact cultural exchange across the anglophone-francophone divide that characterizes so much of the region’s population? Mateata-Allain’s solution relies on the engagement of scholars and translators to make the literature available to both language communities as well as to open up critical engagement with the region’s literature in the West, particularly the United States and Europe. “A move,” she writes, “that will serve to subvert current myths and stereotypes about French Polynesians and Tahiti established through western lenses” (604). This is the same aim articulated by the current publishing community across francophone Oceania, but the reality of translating texts from the region is itself a complicated venture. 119 Mateata-Allain, 605. 145 Translation As linguistic divide constitutes one of the main barriers to circulating literature from francophone Oceania, one clear solution to that barrier is translation. A brief look at canonical literature from the region that has been translated to English gives an idea of the work still to be done. Several of the canon’s works have indeed been translated, notably both first novels from Chantal Spitz – L’île des rêves écrasés, published in French in 1991 and translated to Island of Shattered Dreams in 2007 by Jean Anderson – and Déwé Gorodé – L’épave, published in French in 2005 and translated as The Wreck in 2011 by Deborah Walker-Morrison and Raylene Ramsay. Anderson has also translated Moetai Brotherson’s chef d’oeuvre Le Roi Absent (2007) as the The Missing King (2012) and was the principal translator for the 2022 collection of Flora Devatine’s poems and essays Maruao: les ailes de l’infini. Walker-Morrison and Ramsay have also collaborated on a collection of Gorodé’s poetry, The Kanak Apple Season, published in 2004. Furthermore, prominent Kanak playwright Pierre Gope’s 1999 work Le dernier crépuscule was translated in 2001 as The Last Nightfall by Baineo-Boengkih and Penelope S. Keable. While these translations have been crucial for the circulation of the canon to this point, relatively few translators and publishers have so far been engaged in expanding this list of texts. Another important facet of making literature from francophone Oceania available to anglophone readers has been in producing anthologies of translated literature. In 2006, fifteen years after the publication of L’île des rêves écrasés marked a renaissance in the francophone Polynesian canon, an anthology of excerpted literature translated into English was published by the University of Hawaii Press. This anthology, Varua Tupu: New Writing and Art from French Polynesia was marketed as a volume to “[strengthen] the ancient ties between Hawai’i and the islands of French Polynesia by translating the voices of an emerging Mā’ohi (Polynesian) literary 146 community into English and showcasing the cultural arts of the region in general.” 120 The volume features work by French Polynesian artists as well as writers, and was meant as an introduction to Mā’ohi Nui artistic production as part of the art of Oceania more generally. While the volume was clearly situated as demonstrative of an “emerging” corpus of literature, it also includes new translations of some of Henri Hiro’s poetry from earlier in the 20 th century. 121 Similarly in 2011, Raylene Ramsay collaborated with several other translators to publish Nights of Storytelling, an anthology of literature from New Caledonia newly translated into English. Unlike Varua Tupu, Nights of Storytelling presents the corpus as representative of two cultures in New Caledonia – the autochthonous and European – and includes excerpts from ethnographic works and traditional myths alongside literary translations. Only in its final section does the volume “[focus] on the literary effervescence of the contemporary period and its revisiting of colonial histories in the difficult movement toward a national identity.” 122 In a series of references demonstrative of the community and connections they interrogate, Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez cites Māori poet and scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville in arguing that “Pacific anthologies become waka [canoes]: taking on things and travelers, dropping them off in new places, accruing value and meaning from the diversity of their cargoes.” 123 Not only does this demonstrate the shared culture of oceanic connection and its facilitation by the literal and figurative canoe, Te Punga Somerville brings this circulation full circle by citing Varua Tupu 120 According to the book’s description on the publisher’s website: https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/varua-tupu-new- writing-from-french-polynesia/. 121 A special issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies entitled “Mā’ohi Futures” will soon appear, celebrating 15 years since the anthology’s publication and the third decade of the current era of publishing Mā’ohi literature. 122 Raylene Ramsay, ed. Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of Kanaky-New Caledonia. University of Hawai’i Press, 2011. 123 Alice Te Punga Somerville, Once Were Pacific: Māori Connections to Oceania. University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 28. As cited in Craig Santos Perez, “‘Towards a New Oceania’: On Contemporary Pacific Islander Poetry Networks.” College Literature, Vol. 47 No. 1, Winter 2020, 240-247, 240. 147 and then-French Polynesian President Oscar Temaru, writing “‘We all belong to the Pacific, as brothers, sisters, and cousins, and it is significant that we are able to travel freely across the reef, physically and through the imaginations of our artists, and get to know one another again’” (Te Punga Sommerville, 28). If literature is a va’a and waka in the push to make cultural connections across Oceania, anthologies are vessels whose navigation has already been charted. Despite these crucial anthologies translating literary excerpts for an anglophone audience, the issue of linguistic divide continues to hinder the movement of the literary va’a. While Mateata-Allain participated as an editor and translator on Varua Tupu in 2006, her 2008 article on “intellectual cross-fertilization” makes clear her continued concern for the availability of literature across linguistic divide: “Scholarship and production of Oceanic literature is a fledgling undertaking, but if Oceanic scholars and translators work together to facilitate exchanges between Oceania and the world, Oceanic literature, including Mā’ohi literature, will become more commonly anthologized on the global literary landscape” (606). Fifteen years later, the landscape of translation in Oceania remains somewhat uneven. According to Christian Robert, “Dans [le sens monde francophone vers le monde anglophone], c’est beaucoup plus compliqué, peut-être parce qu’on n’a pas encore eu un éditeur en Nouvelle-Zélande ou en Australie qui ait eu cette vision [to make the corpus available in Oceania as well as in Europe].” 124 Where Au Vent des îles, as a singular entity, has made concerted efforts to make anglophone Pacific literature available to a francophone audience, no such publishing house has taken the complementary interest in francophone literature to the same scale. Interestingly, publishing in the US has begun to play a role in this space, notably with Restless Book’s 2022 publication of an English translation of Titaua Peu’s second novel Pina, for which translator Jeffrey Zuckerman won the 124 Hammitt, 134. 148 French V oices Grand Prize (thereby endowing the text with certain cultural capital in the juggernaut of American publishing). Zuckerman and I are currently pitching Spitz’s two short story collections in English translation to publishers in both the US and UK. Though it seems the diffuse nature of anglophone spaces in Oceania has been a determining factor in how few francophone texts have been published in translation, as the more monolithic nature of francophone publishing has not allowed its anglophone counterpart to be overlooked, we can also see in this multivalence a field of possibility. As Mateata-Allain argues in a footnote of her 2008 article, “Although English may be considered another colonial language that is a threat to indigenous languages, the reality is that English is an empowering language that can strengthen inter-island ties within predominantly anglophone Oceania…English should be approached as a language of mediation” (607). As the English language presents a possibility for decolonial exchange, we might imagine the multiple routes of anglophone publishing as avenues of possibility for the future of francophone Oceanian literature in translation. Circulation: Routes and roots What discussions of publishing, language, and translation make clear is the persistent model of circulation that informs how Oceanian literature is produced, perceived, and consumed. With the literary text as a canoe on the great Ocean, we can see the text as part of a larger, decentralized, circulation that follows historic routes of exchange between Pacific communities and opening onto the globe more generally. In her influential 2007 work on “routes and roots,” Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey demonstrates a comparative reading of literature from Caribbean and Pacific islands. In doing so, she draws upon Kamau Brathwaite’s theory of “tidalectics,” a 149 critical framework that displaces static conceptualizations of geographic space in favor of a model based on movement and a certain porosity between land and sea. While Brathwaite’s theoretical intervention is based in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, his performative method of poetry as critical engagement as well as the way he privileges the materiality of oceanic spaces over human conceptualizations (read, delineations) of that space make his framework particularly resonant with the oceanic framework I trace here. In his 1973 work The Arrivants, Brathwaite situates his site of critique in a series of poems that explores a fluid model of storytelling, tracing voices through his own literary writing. The sea becomes a respository for these stories, a material space where these immaterial texts reside, even demeurent. The stories Brathwaite unfurls trace the forced migration of men and women from Africa to Caribbean islands during the Atlantic slave trade, and the materiality of the ocean for keeping their stories resonates as a tragic repository for the erasure of their subjectivities and often lives along this route of extreme violence. The specificity of Brathwaite’s intervention is crucial to his overall theory; however, the model of fluid movement translated from material reality to literary representation resonates within our own discussion of Pacific oceanic currents. In her engagement with Brathwaite’s theory, DeLoughrey writes, “This ‘tidal dialectic’ resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean.” 125 The model of cycle and movement echoes the concept of circulation as we have explored it in this chapter, and DeLoughrey’s reading of Brathwaite’s model presents further opportunity for critical engagement with this corpus. As DeLoughrey explains, “Attention to movement offers a paradigm of rooted routes, of a mobile, flexible, and voyaging subject who is not physically or culturally circumscribed by the terrestrial 125 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, 2. 150 boundaries of island space” (3). Indeed, though the texts we have read so far in this chapter conceive of oceanic routes within the fluid boundaries of the Pacific, a major strength of francophone Oceanian literature is its ability to establish routes – and roots – outside of Oceania while maintaining Oceanic subjectivity. This is particularly important in the francophone case where, as we have seen, linguistic isolation and the monolith of the metropole threaten to stymie the circulation of literature along a centripetal model. One such route connects islands in francophone Oceania to a maritime space in the Hexagon: Brittany. Several authors that have helped shape the literary communities of francophone Oceania trace their roots to Brittany, among them Anne Bihan. On the jacket cover of her 2011 volume of poetry Ton ventre est l’océan, Bihan is described as having two subjectivities in one. “La première est née en Bretagne, une enfance de grand vent vécue entre l’estuaire de la Loire et les îles du Morbihan. La seconde atteint les rivages de la Nouvelle- Calédonie en 1989 et s’y racine.” 126 In this collection, Bihan explores her subjectivity as “femme entre à jamais,” situating her writing as the vehicle of that in-betweenness: “écrire comme traverser la mer les murs… Océanie océanienne, femme entre à jamais… entre la mer et le sable, femme entre à jamais” (64). Where the work we have explored so far in this chapter seeks to mobilize literature as a va’a to convey cultural connection across oceanic spaces, Bihan’s exploration of the trope ostensibly centers the author herself as that which is being conveyed through oceanic spaces, her own subjectivity taking on the sea’s fluidity. It bears consideration if Bihan’s movement deprived of oceanic conveyance might suffer the same difficulty of navigating across oceans as the legacy of colonial violence has hindered the cultural exchange represented in other texts from the corpus. Bihan’s work has taken her between the metropole 126 Anne Bihan, Ton ventre est l’océan. Paris: Éditions Bruno Doucey, 2011. 151 and Kanaky, settling in Nouméa for many years and returning to the metropole and Paris as administrator for the Maison de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. She nevertheless remains a member of the Association des Écrivains de la Nouvelle-Calédonie and an influential figure in the literary community. For other authors, the routes that return them to their roots serve as much needed assurance while making lives outside Oceania. In her novel Je reviendrai à Tahiti, Ariirau maintains her connection to Oceania and home through a diffuse network of friends and family. As she struggles with her identity, which she terms métisse 127 , the protagonist of the semi- autobiographic text ultimately reaffirms her connection to Tahiti. “Mon corps c’est mon pays, mon pays c’est mon île.” 128 While this commitment to return is broadcast from the novel’s title, the novel itself demonstrates the tension and uncertainty involved in arriving there. This is circulation, not a voyage there and back – a current of continuous movement, resistant to stagnation. In a critical essay about place in Polynesian writing, Ariirau writes, “Le conteur, la conteuse, aujourd’hui, l’écrivain, est un explorateur du pō, c’est-à-dire de ‘cet espace magique’ où l’imagination et le savoir se rencontrent.” 129 While rootedness to a geographical specificity continues to underpin individual identity, it is movement – circulation – that informs Oceanian literature in its oceanic nature. Neither disconnected nor enclosed, oceanic writing forges routes even as they are swallowed by the sea. 127 Ariirau uses the term métisse in her novel, and the back cover explains further, “Ariirau est ‘Quarteronne’. Fille de Demie (demi-Tahitienne, demi-Française) et de père Français, elle est née à Tahiti en 1972 et grandit en Mayenne [a region in northwestern France].” 128 Ariirau. Je reviendrai à Tahiti. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2005. 129 Ariirau. “L’espace dans l’écriture polynésienne”. Littéramā’ohi. No. 11, 2006, 92-96, 93. 152 Conclusion Throughout this chapter, we have traced how Oceanian literature, particularly in the francophone context, has shifted only relatively recently to finding publication within the region of its iteration. As publishers, translators, and writers work to make the literature accessible across colonial boundaries, the literature itself serves as a vehicle of exchange across historically connected communities. The circulation of these literary works is echoed by increasing interest in cultural exchange and ever-expanding routes of dissemination. Ultimately, though, this circulation maintains a model that rejects centripetal ossification, predicated on constant movement and return. In her 2007 essay “Traversées océaniennes,” Chantal Spitz writes, “Le XXIe siècle semble être le temps pour les Océaniens de reprendre le voyage et de refaire les traversées entre les bouts de terre du vaste océan et de retisser les réseaux qui les ont nattés depuis l’immémoire qui les rattache à Hawai’i Sava’i, l’origine.” 130 In the sixteen years since that essay’s publication, Oceania has indeed expanded its crossings, establishing new connections and reviving old ones. As these mutual crossings – this circulation – continues to expand, connecting communities within Oceania and finding currents outside its fluid borders, the future of oceanic literature grows ever brighter. 130 Chantal T. Spitz, “Traversées océaniennes”, Multitudes No. 30, 2007, 29-36, 36. 153 Conclusion: Writing as Resistance and Celebration In this project, I assert francophone Oceanian literature as an oceanic corpus, one from which an oceanic critique predicated on fluidity and community can be modeled. I explore how voice and form, community and circulation contribute to the oceanic nature of this literature, its production, and its consumption, and the reading articulated about the texts in these pages followed the principles of exchange and communion without reduction to sameness, which underpins the oceanic. In chapter one, I discussed the many valences of voice as they appear in my corpus. For this chapter, I honed the oceanic into the tool of transversion in order to interrogate how Spitz, Gorodé, and Qala mobilize voice in various ways. Through creative representations of linguistic diversity and opacity, the authors morph the language of the colonizer into a language of self- expression. I then looked at the critical aspect of orality that permeates literature from all across Oceania in a continuation of the region’s long history of oral literary production. Finally, I explored how these authors use silence as a means of protest and investment in the power of community. While each of the texts read here lend themselves to reading along these specific critical investments, it is a central point of this project that they not be representative of the corpus of which they are a part. In putting these specific texts into conversation, I sought to highlight differences between their treatment of these critical aspects: what do these engagements look like between texts from prominent figures of the literary community, like Spitz and Gorodé, and a relative novice, like Qala? The specificity of these close readings lend extensive room for further application to the oceanic as a theoretical framework. Such is the case in questions of form, as well. In chapter two, I show how formalistic investments are themselves 154 the stuff of politics in the corpus, mobilizing conventions as sites of possible innovation instead of restriction. I again follow texts from Spitz and Gorodé with the addition of another younger writer, Peu. Here, though, we see how Peu’s work has already catapulted her into the literary community’s spotlight, and as we trace the interventions offered by Spitz and Gorodé, we are also made to wonder how Peu’s oeuvre will ultimately trace its own path of formalistic innovation. Form, too, is used to diverse ends in the work of these three authors. Spitz’s writing challenges restrictions of genre categorization, transversing literary texture and asserting the oral as integral to the literature she creates. Gorodé’s intervention suspends the singularity of authorial subjectivity, instead writing with others as a performative expression of her commitment to fostering community in the face of ontological (and physical) violence. Finally, I trace Peu’s determination to express meaning “autrement,” telling stories long subject to “mutismes” by intervening in readerly expectations of novelist form. The various interventions performed by these authors construct space for literary innovation not just in their own oeuvres but for writers across their communities and even more broadly. From these chapters zoomed into the texts themselves, I moved to a broader consideration of the community that fosters the works we have interrogated. As community is central to an oceanic critique as I have outlined it here, how might we trace those commitments to fluid exchange within the material context of Oceania itself? I looked to three different forums in which this literary community is cultivated, tracing the oceanic currents that guided the events of conference and salon as well as the literary journal Littéramā’ohi. I traced how each of these forums have contributed to the cultivation of an oceanic community, predicated on an océanitude that privileges the sea as a space and means of connection instead of separation. In a continuation of this line of interrogation, I then explored circulation as a frame for reading how this corpus is 155 produced and consumed in material ways. A brief discussion of the history of publishing in and about francophone Oceania demonstrated how publishing houses in French Polynesia and New Caledonia are reestablishing historical routes of exchange across the region and the anglophone/francophone divide that has led to significant isolation of the francophone Oceanian community. Finally, I turned to the canoe as metaphor and medium, connecting the circulation of literary texts to the history of oceanic navigation that defined the fluid community of Oceania before colonial separation. Though these routes have been variously interrupted, particularly because of the linguistic colonization of the region, through literary exchange and translation the long tradition of oceanic exchange finds new life. I have argued that the oceanic corpus of literature I read represents interventions on the part of the authors: interventions in a context of epistemological erasure through colonial violence, in the continued marginalization of autochthonous culture and identity, and in literary expectations of a gatekeeping metropole. These interventions are themselves acts of resistance to marginalization, exoticization, and a general devaluation of autochthonous artistic production. The critical work performed by the francophone Oceanian literary community, in texts written, work circulated, and spaces for connection made is testament to the commitment of that community to prendre la parole on their own culture, resisting further colonial domination. But these interventions are also innovations, creative expressions of artistic inspiration. As the oceanic framework traced here seeks to focus critique alongside the geographical situation of the corpus it interrogates, so too should we recognize the work of these authors and the literary community that supports them as meriting critical engagement beyond a framework of resistance. Though these texts often convey tragedy and even hopelessness, their existence is a celebration of the stories they convey and the real-life figures they honor. Even as the literary 156 community recounts histories of pain and violence, they come together to celebrate their shared histories and hopeful futures, full of possibilities. Oceanic futures The theoretical framework put forth in this project has diverse possibilities for future engagement. While I have been in conversation with other theoretical approaches modeled after oceanic spaces or materials, a more concentrated analysis between the oceanic framework I propose and corresponding frameworks from other spaces or with divergent investments could be both productive and interesting. While texts that engage with the Atlantic and Caribbean have been germinal to the developing critical engagement with literary Oceania, how might the framework asserted in these pages be productively returned to oceanic considerations centered on the Atlantic world, the Indian Ocean, or indeed any oceanic space regardless of geographic framing? To take a more specific example, what might a comparative approach to the poetic texture of Kamau Brathwaite’s work The Arrivants and Flora Devatine’s work Tergiversations et Rêveries de l’Écriture Orale look like? What would an oceanic study of sound or movement allow us to read? In this project, I perform a close reading of voice and form to interrogate the texts circulated in the context of the francophone Oceanian community, centering the importance of orality to the texts considered. Future projects could productively interrogate other literary elements to center different framings for this diverse corpus. And, of course, the vibrancy of the literary community of francophone Oceania means that the corpus is ever-expanding, creating new material for critical consideration. Nor is the critical framework I propose here limited to the field of literary studies. The shape of the oceanic framework lends itself as a productive tool to consider how other texts 157 broadly defined can be put into conversation without reducing them to one-dimensional representation. This is particularly important as the field of transpacific studies continues to expand; an oceanic reading of the diverse spaces transpacific studies takes as its purview would allow us to hone the discipline as a precise tool instead of a flattening theorization of comparative focus. Alongside these avenues of possibilities, there is more work to be done developing this theoretical perspective. Though this project looks primarily at francophone texts and spaces from which they emerge, as we saw in chapter four, anglophone Oceania is not only the dominant correlate but a correlate well-suited to the framework of multivalence that I propose. The metropole’s insistence on equality through sameness supports a monolithic approach to French critique that is in direct conflict with the oceanic as it is discussed here. Further work is also required in translating the texts of this corpus, particularly into English as a dominant language of the region. Finally, support is needed to ensure that autochthonous scholars can lead these paths of interrogation in their own spaces, instead of perpetuating the “outside-in” framework that has historically defined epistemologies levied at artistic production from the region. My hope for this project and the framework it proposes is that both will help make room for more voices from francophone Oceania, resisting continued colonial erasure and celebrating the possibilities of futures to come. 158 References Primary Sources Ariirau. Je reviendrai à Tahiti. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2005. ——. “L’espace dans l’écriture polynésienne”. Littéramā’ohi. No. 11, 2006, 92-96. “L’association” Maison du livre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie. https://maisondulivre.nc/ “L’association” The Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles. https://lireenpolynesie.fr/lassociation/. Bihan, Anne.Ton ventre est l’océan. Paris: Éditions Bruno Doucey, 2011. Devatine, Flora. 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Ramsay, Raylene and Deborah Walker. “Translating Hybridity: The Curious Case of the first Kanak novel (Déwé Gorodé’s L’épave).” The AALITRA Review: A Journal of Literary Translation No.1, 2010: 44-57. Reynolds, Bryan. Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Royal, Te Ahukaramū Charles, “Hawaiki”, Te ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 2015, https://teara.govt.nz/en/hawaiki. Salaün, Marie. “À la Limite des theories de l’impérialisme : le français en Nouvelle Calédonie/Kanaky, langue d’oppression et d’expression”. Littératures autochtones, Under direction of Maurizio Gatti and Louis-Jacques Dorais. Montréal: Éditions Mémoire d'encrier, 2010: 135-150. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. London: Macmillan, 1988. Tamaira, A Mārata Ketekiri and Dionne Fonoti, “Beyond Paradise? 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Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017. 157-167. 164 Appendices Appendix A: Book covers Figure 1: Mūtismes 2021 Au Vent des îles edition front and back cover 165 166 Figure 2: Mutismes : E ‘ore te vāvā 2003 Haere Pō front and back covers 167 168 Figure 3: Littéramā’ohi number 25 front cover 169 Appendix B: Illustrations Figure 4: “Marururoa” (pg. 12), Evrard Chaussoy in Littérama’ohi V ol. 25. 170 Figure 5: “… il est temps de rentrer,” “Tui iihi,” and “Venant de la mer” (pg. 187) by Evrard Chaussoy in Littérama’ohi V ol. 25. 171 Appendix C: Performance Figure 6: Video clip of an original tārava performed by Université de la Polynésie française students at the Salon du Livre, November 17, 2022. 172 Appendix D: Event programs Figure 7: Program to the conference “Littérature et Politique en Océanie » held at the Université de la Polynésie Française from November 14-16, 2022. 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 Figure 8: Flyer and schedule for the 22 nd Salon du Livre, Lire en Polynésie 182 183 184 185 186 Appendix E: Additional resources https://anaite.upf.pf/collections/show/27: scanned versions of Littéramā’ohi, numbers 1-24, housed in Ana’ite (La bibliothèque scientifique numérique polynésienne of the Université de la Polynésie Française) http://www.farevanaa.pf/dictionnaire.php: Bilingual Tahitian-French dictionary made available by Fare Vāna’a, the Acadêmie Tahitienne http://ile-en-ile.org/index.html: author biographies, list of cultural texts and practices for francophone spaces around the world https://lireenpolynesie.fr/: Association des Éditeurs de Tahiti et des îles official website https://maisondulivre.nc/: Maison du livre de la Nouvelle-Calédonie official website https://podcast.ausha.co/encres-bleues-l-oceanie-entre-les-lignes: Encre bleues, l’Océanie entre les lignes podcast (Le podcast des littératures du Pacifiques)

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Creator Hammitt, Katherine (author)

Core Title Beyond the sea that separates: francophone voices of Oceania

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Degree Conferral Date 2023-08

Publication Date 06/06/2023

Defense Date 05/30/2023

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag francophone literature,French Polynesia,New Caledonia,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oceania,oceanic,orality,transpacific,transversal

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Language English

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Advisor Harrison, Olivia (committee chair), Frengs, Julia (committee member), Moudileno, Lydie (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email khammitt@usc.edu,kthammitt@gmail.com

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