Indigenous Women Writers in the Pacific: Déwé Gorodé, Sia Figiel, Patricia Grace

Abstract

The first kanak novel, L'Epave [The Wreck, 2005], by Déwé Gorodé, an independence militant, left readers perplexed. Traditional society, recovered from "Under the Ashes of the Conch Shells," - the title of her first volume of poems - fore grounded, and valued in her earliest writing, was now represented as deeply flawed by incest and violence against very young women. This was a violence in which women themselves sometimes played ogress to the flesh-devouring ogre. At the same time, Gorodé's novel was attempting to lift the heavy cloak of silence that concealed the repression of the female body and sexual pleasure by a patriarchal kanak establishment influenced by Christian evangelization but also by customary gender relations. Elsewhere in indigenous women's writing in the Pacific, the central trope as in Gorodé, remains that of colonial violence and dispossession but this is similarly set alongside the trope of internal (often sexual) violence. Cultural authority in both of the bi-cultural worlds female protagonists inhabit is under question. This shared literary interest in indigenous characters as perpetrators as well as victims of sexual violence is effecting a deeper examining and repositioning of the group's identity in relation both to its past and its present than is permitted within the present socio-political discourses. This study looks at the hybrid character and purposes of the transnational representations of violence produced in indigenous reworking of an often disavowed Western feminism or rights discourse. It seeks to understand how individually experienced gender violence, conflated with community memories of violence, is inflecting the present construction of identities and the underlying, often half unspoken, political positions in these literary texts. I will argue that in the complex and powerful interweaving of stories and their fictioning of violence, in Gorodé's plurivocal, unclassifiable writing in L'Epave, for example, single-voiced foundational narratives of violence against the Other have a curious way of doubling, splitting while also proliferating across generations. "At the same time as the spiral is going forth, it is returning" (Ihimaera): the past continually irrupts into the present. Yet the cycle may well be dynamic as well as recursive. It is most particularly in its increasing engagement with its own hybrid character, albeit in different literary modes, that this indigenous Pacific writing is constituting new forms of counter-violence.